Category: Short Story

The first time is always a lie.  I was warned by my mentor.  He knew better than to lie to me.

The Dark is not malleable and the Light is not always present.  The ever-glow fades along the splines of the fractal diffusions of beams and the absences alike.  Among the beams, structured like pillars of a god’s imagination, the Light does not shift like the Dark does.  One is trained to remember that darkness is only an absence of light, but that too, is a lie.

It breathes.  It has form, it has function.  It insinuates itself into everything; it slithers.  The Dark has speed.  The Dark has mass.  The Dark exerts its force on all the objects of creation, saying no, you may not exist here, you may not be so close to us.  Your proximity is not possible.

For in all our great competition, the Light binds us.  It pulls us together across those vast distances.  Light is the source of life, of dreams, of all the things that ever have been and ever will be. It is the source of your imagination on your distant planet, as it is for me, undergoing the Trial of the Illumin.

So the first time one tries to manipulate beyond the ever-present glow, the wellspring of Light, the first time one pulls on its threads to form something new, we expect this magical experience to be brought into being.  One moment nothing, the next, your purpose, glorious and unbound. But as a result, you discover what the Dark is.  The Light shutters and splits, your fingers and mind’s eye pulling them apart, watching the fractals twist away from your grasp, like water splashing around the fount of a dam’s release, furious and rushing.  And behind it, the Dark comes.  It slides in behind the power of the Light being wrested through the power of your action, and it fills the gaps.

The absence of Light allows the Other to come.  Every protégé that attempts the forming meets some semblance of the Other.  Some are terrified by the brush of its presence, others are humbled, and others still go mad by the touch and collapse into themselves like dying stars.

I expected the Other to witness my power and allow my forming, but my mentor could not prepare me.  How could he?  Every experience is at once shared among the many of us that succeed, but at the same time, unique for each of us.  You may go mad, but will lose your eyesight? You may be terrified, but will you suffer from sleep terrors for the rest of your life? You may be humbled, but does that mean that your forming is less potent?  I discarded these thoughts and assured myself that I would be different. Because I was better, smarter, more determined than the other acolytes.  

Another lie.

I had finally perfected my presence and control.  So I felt justified in my confidence. Did I consider that I may just be arrogant? Full of bluster that was wholly unwarranted? I did, but only for a moment. I worked hard for this.

I stood upon the central dais, bathed in the light of the morning sun flowing through the east windows. I nodded once at my mentor and his mentor before him and followed the protocols to in acknowledging the committee of Elders and my lackluster peers in turn.  I steadied myself with a deep breath and began to form.  I infused my will into the space before me, bearing the power to exist between my palms, feeling the light suffuse and shift between the creases of my skin.  The light became alive as it was gathered, and I culminated to the forming, where I could impart my will within it, creating nearly anything that I could imagine.  As an Illumin, I knew that I could craft nearly anything at this moment.  It was what came next that all had gathered to witness in the Gathering Ampitheatre.  Each person within would ask themselves, will this Acolyte shatter under the stress of mastering the Art?  Or would something unexpected happen? Something rare?

I took my breath in deeply, steeling myself for what came next.  I knew the lesson.  So many acolytes were told that the Light merely parted and behind it was the veil of the universe, nothing more.  Again, that was a lie.  My master knew what came after.  The pain.  With the pull of the Light, the parting of the curtain, one could observe all of creation and be brought to your lowest form, a basic speck of nothingness against the overwhelming crush of everything.  The masters stood by to save you.  That was their real purpose in being a witness, to pluck the speck from the crush and allow them another day, another try in the future.  

They did not want an Illumin to die.  This was not the old ages, the time before where Illumin were warriors among many tribes, and those that came and tested the Dark were allowed to die if they were not strong enough.  Nor was it a time of war, where so many were lost in the tribulation against the Shallow. Every Illumin mattered, no matter their skill or ability.

I could feel their eyes on me.  

They would be asking themselves, ‘What would happen to Arin?  Arin, who had struggled so much at the beginning, fighting for progress every step of the way, learning every skill with dedication and hard work, but never finding anything easy, and yet still an insufferable ass? Will he succeed when he had struggled so?’

I was not a savant at the craft, and every win was dearly fought for.  But in this, I had excelled.  My peers would stumble or come short, but I would meet each new obstacle as I had met the first, and the challenge would be what it was the first time.  I would scale it, cross it, and then dismiss it behind me.  My mentor had realized early on that I was both the least talented and the hardest working, and that meant I was also the steadiest.  I knew I was and I reminded myself of it again.  This was it.  The moment the Light would part in my greatest act of Forming, and the Other would reveal itself to me. I was the greatest Illumin that had ever been, not because of any latent talent, but because I had tirelessly worked for it.

But I knew who I was.  At least I thought I did.  

I was wrong.

The power was suffused fully within my palms, and I could feel the criticality pulsate in my pores, the reverberation of the light ready to be worked.  I pushed my will between the waves of light, and pulled them apart as if I was pulling curtains asunder, ripping them aside in a foolish rush to witness what was beyond.

The light… one moment… light, the next…

“…Arin.”

The voice was my own.  I could hear it in my own ears. I panicked thinking I had said my own name, and I clamped my mouth shut so that I would not follow a path to madness.

“I am Arin,” the voice repeated.

Again it was my own, but my teeth were sunk into my lips, so I knew I had said nothing.  I wanted to let my eyes dart towards my mentor, but I knew that they would not see me.  I was in the dark.

By the Creator, I was in the Dark!

“…am Arin.”

“I am Arin,” I replied, loosing my lips, feeling the blood rush back to where I had clamped down.

“As am I,” the voice replied.  Still my own, there was no mistaking it for someone else’s.  I knew my own voice as I knew my own face.

“How can you be me?” I tested.

“How can you ask irrelevant questions?” It immediately shot back. There was no malice, no ill intent.  It was a patient voice, one filled with the aspects of waiting to see where this interaction led. The timbre and intonation was my own, as if it was my voice.

I wished I had some perspective.  Where was I?  How long had I been gone?  Had I already failed the Trial?

“What are you?” I tried instead.

“I am you.  I am the you that has been, could have been, that may have occurred, that could possibly still come to be.  What are you?”

“I am an Acolyte, striving to be a Master. I am adept at the presence of…” I answered.

“That is what you do, what you have done.  It is not who you are.”

“I am who I am, but I know that is not an answer in itself.  I know that I am all these things, and they help define who I am, but I am not only a sum of them,” I answered thoughtfully. “I am… I pretend to be who I hope to be someday.”

“That is who you are, indeed.  And now, you wonder what I am.  I will answer one question, as I do not suffer fools.”

“You are the Other.”

“That is not a question. And I would say you are the Other.”

“What is the Other then?” I added.

“I am you.  I am the possibilities of your existence, summed, averaged, and divided across all the potential that could ever be. All across the scale of possible fates and circumstances, a reflection comes to be, a presence that carries thought.  You call it life, and in its potential, fate itself becomes a dark mirror.”

“You are not an absence,” I followed.

“I am the counterpoint that allows you to exist. As you are to me. Without the balance, who would you be?”

“I do not know how to answer,” I tried. I felt like I had given a different answer though, as if something unspoken had occurred, and I wasn’t sure what it was.

The light was immediately back, as if it had never left. But I was not in the hall.  My mentor and the committee did not stand nearby within the Light of the Ampitheatre.  I was on the edge of a great field, the twilight was gentle in its soft glow, alighting off of cloud and mountain, reflected in waters of a lake at my feet.  

I had never seen this place.

“We are at an inflection,” the voice said quietly. “The balance.”

I spun in place, but there was no one behind me or beside me.

“You will understand.  For every Illumin, there is an Absentia.  One creates by destroying, the other destroys by creating, and in this, we are partners. Look down.”

I looked at my feet and saw myself looking back.  But it was not me.  As one looks at a twin, or a reflection in distorted glass, sameness coupled with difference, an abstraction of recognition that failed to take root.  It was the Other.  I raised my hand and pulled the light to the fore, feeling my will come into focus, and a flower came to being within my grasp.

In the reflection, my darker form raised his hand, and where I had light, he had dark, and in it, a flower took shape, and in doing so, my flower faded until it was nothing but a memory.

“Remember this.  For there will be a time when you will be tested and the bridge you stand on now will be needed.”

“How do I find this bridge?”

“Remember who you are,” the voice replied. “The one whom you pretend to be.”

“This is a lie.”

“You know it is not.”

I cringed inwardly as I realized I could feel the Other’s mind, as if it was my own. “I understand now why some go mad. The duplicity of this, but shared. Open to each other so… intimately.”

The Other sighed. “The ones that go mad merely brush the balance of minds. Imagine, coming so close to connect, feeling the promise of it, and then falling away, never to touch the skein between our realities. This is what drives them mad. Not the connection itself. You and I are the first pair to make this contact such as this for nearly a thousand years. You may not know of it, but the last time an Illumin and Absentia connected like this, our worlds were perilously close to collapse.”

My mind raced. I was one of the most well trained, one of the most studied, yet I felt as if I knew little of what the Other spoke of. But I did remember the tale of the Tribulation, an entire generation of Illumin lost, the burning of the Archiva, the terrible force that consumed our kind. It had a name. The Shallow.

The Illumin had barely survived, only the very oldest and the very youngest persevered.

“The Shallow is coming back,” I said.

“Yes,” Arin-that-was-not-Arin nodded emphatically. “It is on its way.”

“It was defeated. Was it not? Strewn to the cosmos?”

“As our bodies hunger over time and weariness calls us to sleep, our realities pull on the Shallow. Our existence compels it to exist. My mentor believes it is a correction that has come about countless times to control self-aware intelligence.”

“How do you know all this? And I do not? Yet I feel you in my mind, as if we are the same skin…” I ran a hand over my forearm and I could the Other’s touch, and yet, I could feel my own touch in the duplicative sense of self within. “Shouldn’t we know the same things?”

“I think we are of the same spirit, side by side, but shaped by different circumstances and realities. We are the same, but we are not? Does that make any sense? I am the Arin that could have been as you are the Arin that could have been, a mirror between us. An equation that is balanced. Perhaps there are other realities, but we are are the only ones, or only the ones that matter. Like twin siblings can come from the same parents, and yet they are not the same.”

“The Shallow burned my world, a curse, a pestilence that can not be forgotten. What proof do I have that it is returning?” I asked. “What can I do or say that will allow my mentor, my teachers, my leaders to know?  What can be done to prepare?”

“Nothing,” the Other shrugged. “Our worlds will burn again.”

My heart dropped into my stomach, I could feel weariness eating at the back of eyes, the thin ribbon of hope fleetingly leaving my fingertips. “Then it is futile.”

“No Arin. We are proof it is not. We are bridging a gap, and this reality here, were we both exist at once… this reality is proof that it is not futile.  For our kinds to survive…”

“We have to bring them all into the folds. Where the Illumin and Absentia are something else,” I replied.

“How?” The Other asked me.

I shrugged with a soft chuckle. “Magic?”

He returned the smile that I was already offering, and he turned away. The whole of the plain, the stars, everything surrounding me, was pulled into a single point stretching into an infinite tunnel.

I sunk to the floor of the dias, all of my senses flooded by the normality of the school around me, the masters whispering furiously nearby, my peers gloating at my apparent failure. They surely thought I had been overwhelmed by the Other. How long had it been? A second? A hundred? A turn of a quarter-glass? I had no idea, and I was furious.

Lies. The history of my world was a lie. Why would the masters forget the Tribulation? Why would they abandon the duality of connecting with the Other? The truth to be discovered within it?

I did not know how to explain it, but I felt the connection still to my Other self, stretching through the layers of reality, an entanglement between two opposites that made us both more than we were before. With it, I felt his voice in my head.

‘Show them,’ the Other whispered deep within.

I stood shakily, and pulled on the Light again, my palms reverberating with the power, the undulating waves of shifting energy shattering and reforming, and I felt the difference. It was effortless… everything that had come before was a mere fraction of how it felt now. I felt a sun within me, and it was because the Other was with me.

The synergies of harmony. I realized this was power. Unbridled, unfettered, and unseen power.

I lowered my palms realizing I no longer needed the focus. I no longer needed the tricks, the ceremony, the blind movement of a long scripted theater act.  The gallery fell silent on the master’s side, and the other students started to whisper, than chortle, then outright laugh. Glee was being had at the apparent failure of one of their own.

I wanted to shout, ‘why do we tear each other down? The Shallow returns. Our world will burn!’

Instead of shouting, instead of defending myself, I knew the power had to speak for me. I closed my eyes and formed a small flower in front of me. It was not the forming that I had learned, it was the forming that was expected. No different than standing at the edge of the lake with my Other, feeling the forming blossom through me.

The hall fell silent as what they expected happened. There was probably some confusion on how I was forming with my hands at my sides. Parlor tricks and theater… no longer needed.

I imagined that single flower turning into a circle of flowers floating around me.

The hall started to murmur.

I imagined that circle of flowers duplicating rapidly into a sphere, completely surrounding me.

There were shouts of fear and surprise, the murmurs were shifting towards muffled arguments.

I imagined the sphere of flowers, each flower coalescing into a small sun, each with the fury of flares and magnetic maelstroms.

The hall fell to silence again. That alone was unprecedented. They were used to the aforementioned parlor tricks and slight of hand. A single flower was impressive, a true display of talent. A ring of flowers was strange. A sphere, not just strange, but wildly different. The shift from flowers to miniature suns transforming in real time, that was an event nearly immeasurable, perhaps lost to history if anything like it had been formed before.

I imagined a representation of myself, formed of the suns, each expanding and coalescing into an image of who I thought I was, and imagined that version of myself putting their hand out in a mimicry of the forming, and produce their own flower. I felt my Other laugh deep within, then whispering, “Ah, the one who you pretended to be. Clever.”

I let the light fade and opened my eyes.

Every set of eyes was locked on me. Every mouth was agape. Some masters looked happy. Others appeared to be inexplicably angry. Most seemed curious. Across my peers, it was nothing but absolute shock. This was a display of forming that they had never been exposed to, taught about, or imagined. They had witnessed true magic.

The first clap was tenuous at best, but it ramped quickly to thunderous applause. I had their attention at least.

The Shallow was coming. What could I say? What could I do? The world is going to end?

By the Gods, the world is going to end. I had to lead this moment with brave words. A compelling call to action!

Instead, I fainted.

Jimmy was about to have the opportunity to become the best thief in the world. Although, to be fair, no one in the world would know about it.

Most people in the world who knew of such less reputable things, such as who was in the running for the title of ‘best thief in the world‘, actually knew that it was Jimmy’s father that held that title, and those less reputable folks only considered Jimmy a cast-off scion from one of his father’s many trysts, if they considered Jimmy at all.

Jimmy’s father had another name, The Raven. And that name… whew. Everyone knew who the fuck The Raven was. The vast majority of the world would never know his real name, because again, that knowledge was reserved for those of a less reputable sort and their number was few. It was a venn diagram of sorts, people that knew of The Raven and then the complimentary circle was made of people that knew Karl Haraldsonn personally. That small intersection of people that were members of both circles was an awfully small group, but for those that understood the complexities of high competency theft at the most elite levels, The Raven was considered a fucking magician. Not the stage kind, but the wave of a hand and shit changed indescribably kind of magician that only existing in movies.

His thefts were the type of events that broke people’s minds trying to figure out both the logistics and the implications.

The Raven was the guy that broke into the Oval Office, stole a matching set of JFK’s pens right off the top of the Resolute Desk, and left a polite note for the current President requesting a personal endorsement on the upcoming income tax relief bill for the middle class. The Raven wasn’t even an American, but he must have considered it important. Jimmy knew this was a real story, because the pens were currently on his father’s desk.

The Raven was the guy that walked into the Louvre in broad daylight, took two Vermeer’s from the wall without anyone noticing or alarms sounding, and two weeks later, rehung one in the Rijksmuseum in Amesterdam and the other in Mauritshuis in The Hague, again not without a single person or system noticing. Of course, being the cheeky ass he was, The Raven left a note on both frames which read, “You’re welcome.” The guy signed his nomme de plume, and with an absolute flourish of whimsy, released actual fucking Ravens in the museum. Jimmy knew this was also a real story, because both paintings had hung briefly in the sitting room.

The Raven, it was said, could steal a lit cigar from the mouth of a third world dictator, and put into the mouth of any world leader with an ember still burning at its end. Perhaps that one was an urban legend, but for a split second, most normal, reputable, wholesome folks actually believed it. The Raven was the GOAT. The scary part was that Jimmy knew that for every story that was told, there were three more than no one had ever heard of, because his father, The Raven, fully deserved the title Greatest of All Time. Certifiably, without question, the best thief in the world.

Karl Haroldsonn had stolen a fabulous life from the world. A life that should not exist. And he did it apparently without repercussions or consequences.

The Raven was celebrity… but to Jimmy, his father was just his dad, a seemingly simple man that enjoyed his boisterous life of wine, food, and women. Jimmy assumed he probably had a hundred half siblings out there, somewhere. Karl never told Jimmy about any other kids, and it seemed that Jimmy was the only kid that Karl had cared about. Shockingly, it was conceivable that Jimmy was the only offspring. Perhaps, Karl loved Jimmy as his only son because maybe he was his only son. That would explain why Karl had tried his hardest to be the best dad he could be.

Jimmy got the call while he was deep in thought at the heart of his tiny studio apartment, working on his newest piece. He wasn’t sure what the piece wanted to say yet, but in his heart, he felt like it was a nighttime view of a rainy street in New York speaking to the malleability of the city and the people that lived within it. The lights were hazy, the streets awash in color, as dark impressions of people as they fearlessly navigated the wet evening. It was coming together beautifully, and the process was being interrupted by the third annoyingly persistent phone call in a row. Jimmy sighed heavily as he reluctantly answered.

“James?” Mr. Hendricks voice was like featherweight gravel traversing a length of galvanized pipe. Reedy, but whispered of a past with cigarettes. Mr. Hendricks was father’s lawyer, who had been a friend of his dad’s for nearly as long as Jimmy had been alive. Probably one of only a handful of people that knew the truth of Karl’s day job. That made him probably the closest thing to a proper uncle that Jimmy would ever have.

Jimmy cradled his smartphone against his shoulder, and tried wiping his paint covered fingers on a bit of damp cheesecloth. “Oh, Mr. Hendericks. Hello, sir.”

“Please, son. Call me Tom.”

Jimmy could hear the smile through the phone. An old game of theirs. “Of course, Mr. Hendricks. How’s my dad?”

“He passed last night, son.”

Silence. The moment stretched. The colors on his fingers seemed to dull. Was the room shrinking?

A harrumph on the other end, Mr. Hendricks continued, “I heard that he went out living as he did. Happily aroused.”

The monaural slap that Jimmy needed. “Gross, Mr. Hendricks. I do not need to hear further details surrounding the circumstances of his death.”

A chuckle from the far end. “His heart went unexpectedly. We will need you to come home. Deal with the affairs. His funeral. Probably pay off the, uh, lady involved. The rigamarole standard clean-up of a man’s life… except your father was… your father.”

“I am in the middle of a piece.” Jimmy didn’t want to sound petulant, but his initial reaction was a retreat to the familiar. “And it is going so well…”

“Ah, you are working! Very good. I figured as much, as I hired some men to help. They will be there first thing in the morning, which is about six hours away for you? You should get to bed, young man! They will get your shoebox of an apartment packed, and you can pick up your work where you left off here in the studio your father built for you in the east wing. I must say, it has the best light.”

That was a bit of a shock. “He built me a studio?”

“Ah, yes. A surprise for your 25th, I believe. And perhaps a bribe to get you to spend some time at home. I have also sent Ms. Katherine along to gather you. She should be arriving after the movers, but before the existential panic attack sets in.”

“Funny,” Jimmy grimaced, pretending it was a smile. The defiance attempted to well up. “I am coming back to New York.”

“Ah, yes, of course, of course. Settle the affairs at Hornwhell, see to the accounts, and we’ll get you back after Christmas.”

“It is August, Mr. Hendricks.”

“Fully aware, son. Your father’s estate needs seeing to, and unfortunately, even though I am here… I am not family. As I said, he left some work for you. Not intentionally, but I can only do so much. Legally speaking, of course.”

“Christ on a cracker.”

“Indeed.” Mr. Hendricks voice went up a measure. “You should enjoy your time here. Your father collected a number of works you should appreciate. Perhaps some study time would be good for your soul.”

“Holy shit, Mr. Hendricks. Do I have to address stolen goods?”

“Ah, apologies, James. Poor choice of words. He has a number of works he bought and paid for at auction that you will appreciate.”

“Thank god.”

“Ms. Katherine should be there about 10am. Dress sharp. After all, she is a Lady.”

Jim nodded knowing the conversation was over. “Mr. Hendricks.”

“James.”

The phone went silent, and Jimmy was left with his thoughts, a painting convulsing during its frustrating birth, paused now and staring at him with expectations, while the night of New York City outside his window assuring him life was continuing on whether he was here or not.

Jimmy did not understand how such a fit and healthy man could just up and die, while having sex with a beautiful woman that probably was closer to Jimmy’s age than his own, but sometimes, the luck runs out. Jimmy knew his dad was the luckiest guy in the world, so a heart attack? Unexpected? Yes. Tragic? No.

He tried to think about it logically, but instead he just cried.

---

At 6am sharp, the movers rang up, and Jimmy blearily buzzed them in. He watched as they systematically and thoroughly packaged his entire life up in a matter of minutes. His paints and supplies went into reinforced totes, and his paintings, both finished and unfinished, were crated like actual works of art. Double wrapped and sealed, as if they were worth millions and not the work of a struggling artist with a trust fund. So not starving, per se. But hungry for validation? Yes, that fit, Jimmy realized.

Ms. Katherine arrived to find Jimmy, alone, sitting on a single stool in his small studio apartment, flipping through his phone.

“Melancholy as ever,” Ms. Katherine smiled gently. “But at least now you have good reason?”

“Hello, Ms. Katherine.”

Ms. Katherine was in her early thirties, and the niece of Mr. Hendricks. Her dark brunette hair wavered on the lighter side of black, and her green eyes were as sultry as ever. She was very attractive, but Jim knew that she was unmarried not because she had not found the right man, but because her partner, Thomas, had yet to propose. She was a fox, and Jimmy was always a bit jealous of the guy that was lucky enough to have snatched her up.

“Hello, Mr. Haraldsonn. Grown up a bit since I last saw you… you are a spitting image of your father. He would approve.”

“He was vain.”

“He was, but he had good reason. A handsome gent. He took care of himself, and it appears that you have as well.”

“Well hopefully my heart comes from my mother,” Jim attempted humor.

Ms. Katherine laid her hand on his shoulder and pulled him upright. She embraced him lightly. “I am sorry for your loss, James.”

Damn it, he thought miserably. He had started crying again without even realizing it.

---

The flight from New York to London was uneventful, and in First Class, Jimmy spent most of it sleeping. He had not realized how exhausting the grieving was. It wrung you out.

Thankfully, the tears had abated since his apartment, and Ms. Katherine did not have to hand him any more tissues along the way. He washed his face in the bathroom sink, combing through his shaggy brown hair with his fingers as an afterthought. He needed a shave, but it could wait until he was settled. In the mirror he saw a glimmer of his father looking back at him, as Ms. Katherine had noted. It must have been his high cheek bones and square jaw. His eyes were definitely the dark blue of his mother, as were his fuller lips.

It had been dark humor before joking about his father’s heart, but inwardly, he hoped it was true. Fifty! He shook his head, glanced over his face one more time, and straightened his collar. His mother had died when he was very young, barely enough to remember her properly. Most of his memories were from the pictures that his father had, and stories others he had told him. His mother was a memory. An image on a glossy picture, whereas his father had seemed… unassailable? Invincible? Timeless?

The fact that such a man was gone simultaneously put Jimmy’s teeth on edge and a lump in his throat, but thankfully the tears stayed away and his aching throat was given a reprieve. He took his seat, smiled halfheartedly at Ms. Katherine, and watched the night lights of London grow closer as the plane approached the airport.

The silver Rolls was waiting on the tarmac as the plane taxied to the terminal, and Jimmy was shunted from the jetway down a handful of stairs and into the cool early morning London air, that at the moment, pungent with smell of jet fuel. Ms. Katherine nodded at the driver as he opened the doors to the Rolls for both of them. Jimmy felt bad for not knowing his name and strangely felt even worse that the silver Rolls was his car now.

All the cars were his now.

“Straight to Hornwhell, if you will, Jenkins.”

“Of course, Ms. Katherine.”

Ah, Jenkins. Of course the driver was Jenkins, Jimmy groused.

The drive to the Estate was as if Jimmy was coming back for a standard holiday during his dual degree program at NYU. The same beats, the same patterns, the same traffic, the same passage of time as they weaved through the modernity of London, out of the city, and into the rolling, twisting lanes to the realm of the gentry of old. Jimmy was silent the entire drive, watching the familiar, yet strangely unfamiliar scene unroll on the other side of the window, knowing that deep within he had something to get out. There was a scream idling in his gut, a rage against the all of it, something he would only be able to express on canvas. He lightly tapped his knee not thinking anything through, just circling the anger, like a big cat stalking it’s prey.

He was not ready. For any of this.

As Jenkins drove the silver beast up the crunching gravel lane towards the estate house, beneath the wide trees on either side slowly devolving from long green lawns to the edges of wood, the sun peaked gently over the horizon. The light glimmered on hazy clouds far above, and Hornwhell appeared in the dawn like the long desire of a fever dream.

Mr. Hendricks, of course, was standing out front with the staff on either side. Jimmy was getting a full welcome. He felt guilty once again that he, of all people, had staff now. Oh shit. He had the title now. He had a blimey fucking peerage. For fucks sake… no respected artist could also be a viscount.

Bougie as fuck.

The car came to a stop and butler silently opened the car door.

“Welcome home, sir.” Mr. Hendricks nodded kindly stepping into the gap, going for a formal handshake with Jimmy.

Jimmy bypassed any propriety and pulled the old man into a firm hug. The lawyer seemed to have shrunk in recent years, or Jimmy remembered him as a larger man.

“Ah, yes. Quite right.” Mr. Hendricks harrumphed as he gently thumped Jimmy’s back. “Glad to see you too, son. Come along, get a spot of breakfast in you, and then we can start. I should give you tour of things, as it is. Ms. Katherine, you are welcome to join us?”

“I will have Jenkins give me a lift home, sir. If you don’t mind.” She smiled tiredly from the backseat of the Rolls.

Mr. Hendricks waved her along and put his arm around Jimmy’s shoulders as they walked into the house. The help on either side quickly moved off after they passed.

“Breakfast should be ready in the drawing room. I think you have grown a bit, James. I don’t remember my arm having to go quite this high.”

Jimmy chuckled. “Or you have just shrunk, Mr. Hendricks.”

“Indeed! I am getting on, I suppose. But my father lived past his centennial, and my grandfather as well, so I see no reason to stop either.” Mr. Hendricks smiled widely. “They both received their cards from the Queen, ironically, God rest her. Now we have the chump with the ears. I should consider kicking off before then. I don’t need that twat to send me anything.”

“Don’t kick off like my father though, Mr. Hendricks.”

“My wife would not stand for that, James.” Mr. Hendricks laughed heartily. “She would beat my corpse back to life.”

They walked in through the main hall into the drawing room. It appeared to be the same as it always had. A copy of a Degas hung on the center wall, away from the sun… hold on… Jimmy realized that it probably was not a copy with a deep sinking impression in his gut… shit. It was probably a real Degas. His father had installed a UV filter panel over the canvas.

Jimmy pointed at the Degas with his mouth open, and Mr. Hendricks shook his head. “Not now.”

They gathered some bites and sat at the breakfast table. Mrs. Cown winked at Jimmy as she poured his coffee. “Good to see you, sir.”

“Mrs. Cown. Pleasure to see you as well.” Jimmy returned her smile as best he could.

“I figured I would come up and serve you myself. After all, it has been, what, two years since we saw you last for holiday?”

“Indeed. Graduated school and I kept on in New York. Trying my best out from underneath his shadow and all.” Jimmy waved at the large palatial surroundings as emphasis.

“Well, let me know if you have any special requests. Always glad to have you here at home, sir.”

“Of course,” Jimmy nodded pleasantly and took a sip of the coffee. It was fresh, smooth, and delicious. His father always knew good coffee. Jimmy noted that the room had emptied of any staff… the customs in his father’s house had continued on without him. “This is… pleasant.”

“It is indeed. It is the recent roast from St. Domingo. Ah, your St. Domingo.” Mr. Hendricks nodded to emphasize the word your.

Jimmy felt his face heat up. “I own a coffee plantation now, don’t I?”

“You do. Your father insisted buying on a few years back. He, uh, acquired some legendary Kona strains.”

“Of course he did.” Jimmy took another sip, it was really quite good. “Of course, my father would try to break into a global market. Is there anything he didn’t break into?”

Mr. Hendricks shrugged nonchalantly. “Whatever took his fancy, I suppose. His will is immensely clear about what to do with all of it. On your first day on the Estate, upon the conditions that you had graduated college…”

“Which I have two of, Bachelors of Fine Arts and in Business as he required. Not that either piece of paper has done me much good as of yet.”

“And that you had passed your twenty fourth birthday…”

“Two months ago. Check.”

“You are to be given the proverbial keys to Karl’s kingdom along with the kingdom itself so-to-speak, all of which starts with the contents of the safe in your father’s office.”

“He has a safe!?” Jimmy nearly spit out his food.

“It appears so.” Mr. Hendricks was grinning. The irony was not lost on the man. “It would seem odd to outsiders that a man such as your father would utilize one himself, but he, ah, had his reasons.”

“I am taking this coffee with me. I need to see this.” Jimmy took a few rushed bites off his plate and rose from the table.

Mr. Hendricks did the same and stood. “No time like the present, as they say.”

They made their way through the foyer, up the grand stair, and took a left towards the galleries and his father’s office. The office was wrought in fine paneling and leather arm chairs, and even though his father did not smoke, a faint hint of old pipe smoke lingered on the nose upon entering.

There was no obvious safe.

“So where is this mystery safe, Mr. Hendricks? Behind a painting? Underneath a statue? Deeply recessed in a marble block of a pillar? A secret wood panel, perhaps?”

“None of the above,” Mr. Hendricks pointed at the side table. “There.”

“No. This table has been here since I was born. There is no safe. I would have found it.”

Hendricks crossed the distance from the door, over the plush oriental rugs, and approached the side table between two leather armchairs. “I did not realize how much of a treat it will be to show someone else. Sit in that chair, I will sit in this one.”

Jimmy sat in the plump overstuffed leather armchair. It was the same he had sat in a hundred times before. “And?”

“Use your left hand and push on the center nub at the front. We have to do it at the same time. Three, two, one, push.”

Jimmy and Mr. Hendricks depressed the mandrels at the same moment, there was a click and whir deep in the table. The surface opened upwards, and a square box rose silently from the hidden compartment. It did not appear to be made of metal, but a white ceramic or glazed glass. Jimmy ran his hand along the side and noted it felt like baked porcelain.

“I could just hit it with something,” Jimmy mused. “This is not a safe.”

Mr. Hendricks laughed, “I don’t know what it is made of, but that safe can only be opened by a single person. That only person was your father. He told me once that a everything known to man would break before that thing would.”

“Nonsense. This is fragile as glass!” Jimmy reached out to take the square box from the pedestal, but he couldn’t lift it. It must have been connected to the table somehow. He looked over the five sides he could see and did not see a keyhole, a tumbler, or even a door to open.

“That box, son, is something else entirely.”

Jimmy shook his head. He looked over the box at length, running his hands along the seemingly fragile surface. Something sharp poked his hand, and he instinctively pulled away. His fingertip was bleeding, like a fast blood draw at the doctor’s office.

The top of the box irised open, even though there were no visible parts to mechanically move. One moment the top was solid as a plinth, the next, the material slid away from the center as actuated by unseen louvers, with the contents within exposed. The interior walls of the safe were like leather, but they pulsed gently, slowly, like the box was… breathing.

The safe was a living thing. Jimmy was at once both repulsed and enraptured. This was a work of art, but in a way his evolved monkey mind could not fully comprehend. He whispered, “What the ever-living fuck?”

“That is something, isn’t it?” Mr. Hendricks concurred. He did not sound as surprised as Jimmy felt.

Jimmy precariously reached into the box, and retrieved a set of keys and a rolled letter tied with ribbon. As soon as the items cleared the top, it irised closed again, the box once again whole, complete, and inert. The surface was an unblemished white glaze, reflecting the sunlight from the windows mutely. With a hiss, the box sank back into the pedestal, and table lid hinged down as if nothing had happened.

Jimmy looked at his hands, the items within them, and up to Mr. Hendricks. The old solicitor smiled kindly.

“This part is all yours. I will leave you be. When you are ready, I can guide you through the next steps.”

“You don’t want to stay for this?” Jimmy tried.

“Oh, I think not, James. This is unfinished business between a father and a son. I will be outside the door when you need me.” Mr. Hendricks patted Jimmy twice on the shoulder and headed towards the door, closing it slowly behind him.

Jimmy looked over the keys first. The keyring was a black aluminum or some other metal, not reflective but not dull either. It was luminous in its own way, as if the metal was resonating with the light in the room. Each key was a different metal with unique hues and shapes. None of them were distinctive or labeled. He set them down on the desk, pulled the ribbon, and unrolled the papers. The lump in his throat was getting worse by the moment. The ache reasserted itself.

‘Dear James,

‘I was told recently that I needed to prepare for the worst. Trust me, I wanted to be the one to tell you. Countless times. But the Objects have Rules, and the Rules must be followed, because the Rules are Absolute. The first rule is that an Object has to choose you. I left The Safe as the first Object, so you will have a chance to understand. The Safe is easy, as it merely asks for a sacrifice and a link to its past. Your blood will be the sacrifice, and I am your link, so it will carry on undisturbed. The second Object you will encounter are The Keys, enclosed alongside this letter. The Keys chose me when I was a but a lad. If they chose you, then they will stay. If they don’t, you will forget about them. They will be gone, and the memory of them will go with them. If they stay, then this letter will make sense. If they don’t, then this letter will read as lunacy. Either way, a part of me will live on in these pages. And I will die a happy man, because I will make the most of my short time left, and I have you as my son.

‘The second rule is that the Objects congregate. You have to assist occasionally. You must bend to their will. I do not know if they are intelligent, but they have a logic all their own. A thing that you may come to understand in your own way. You are the real artist in the family, the first I think we have ever had, and your brilliance may intuit and decipher the Objects in a way that I never have. Objects seek other Objects, they push and pull, they have strange alliances and enemies. Some are hostile to human life. Some are ambivalent. Some are kind. Some will allow the world to be seen in new ways, and others will bind your eyes in darkness. I know it sounds strange. Because it is. The Objects are Strange.

‘The third rule is that Others are bound to Objects. There are always Others. And like the Objects, they can be hostile, or ambivalent, or kind. Your mother and I met because of them. We fell in love. We had you. Your mother was taken by stupid circumstances unrelated to anything important, but I am thankful we had our time together, and at least I was here to watch you grow up and become the amazing man you are. Some say children always need their parents, but I think since you were born a true artist, you carry your mother and your father in your mind and your heart with you, and didn’t need us as much as other kids need their parents. You are a lucky one, James. Do not mourn either of us for too long, because indeed, we are with you.

‘Those are the basics. If you look up from this letter and the keys are hovering near your hip, you have been chosen…’

Jimmy immediately glanced at the surface of the desk where he had set the keys, feeling his eyes welling with tears. He blinked them out of the way in a panic, and he realized The Keys were gone. He stood and surveyed the room quickly, looking for where they could have made off to. He turned quickly, surveying the room to discover they were nowhere to be found. He clutched the letter in a panic and with the queerness of discovering a ghost in the room, glanced slowly at his right hip. The Keys hung there, as if they were clipped on an unseen belt. He took a step to the left and they remained attached. He lifted the letter and kept reading.

‘…you have been chosen. Which I dearly hope for. The Keys are a powerful Object. I think they are the Keys to the Universe. They open anything and everything, across time and space. I have only used them for what I have desired, and they have used me to do their bidding, which for their part has been ambivalent. When they need to follow the second rule, they will. Otherwise, they are open to experiment with. I am not an artist, so I was limited in my thinking. I tried to do one crazy thing once, after your mother passed, and it worked. The experience was traumatic, I have not set out to do anything else that is not within my immediate power to understand or control. I would encourage you not to make that mistake. Leave the Doors to the Afterlife closed. There is a reason we don’t know about it. Use your judgement, as the obvious doors that should stay shut, need to be left shut, no matter what you may feel at the time. That experience is why I don’t fear my death, and the reason you shouldn’t mourn too long either. Enough said.

‘Know that I love you. Your mother loves you. And there is a place in this world for everyone. You just have to… unlock it. Ha!

‘All the best my brilliant boy, your loving father,

‘Viscount Karl Haraldsonn, Steward to The Keys, The Safe, and The Pressed Eye.”

Jimmy paused and nearly screamed, “WHAT THE FUCK IS THE PRESSED EYE!?”

The keys at his waist rattled lightly. Dead silence in the office making him think he imagined it. But then they lightly rattled again.

Jimmy hesitantly grabbed the key ring, and the keys came away from his waist as if they were a normal set of keys and not something perverse and strange. The ring vibrated in his hand as he held the keys. He looked over the room and as his eyes left the ring, the vibrating grew stronger, until his arm was nearly shaken off. He turned his eyes back to the keyring, and the vibration grew still. He moved his eyes the other direction and the experience repeated. He held the keys at arms length and regarded them studiously. Then he noticed.

The center of the key ring was not the room he was standing in. There were no wood panels to be seen through the center of the ring. It looked like it was outside. Somewhere dark. Jimmy held the keyring up to his eye, and it felt like peering through a keyhole of a door. It was a glade, surrounded by dark woods. There was a mountain range in the distance backlit by a rising moon, glimmering of lightning bugs sparkled amongst the trees. Jimmy turned in a slow circle knowing he was standing in his office, but with the vertigo of watching another place. He stopped.

There was a centaur.

Just like the fables. The torso of a man, with long muscled arms, and a mane of hair starting at his scalp, running down his back and seamlessly connecting to the dark back of black horse. The Centaur carried a spear in one hand, and a torch in the other. He slowly marched past, and a small herd(?) of centaurs followed. Men, women, and children. (Or was it Studs, Mares, and Foals?) They had satchels on their backs, both human and horse, carrying their lives with them like a band of First Nation people would have in the Americas. Jimmy could not hear anything from the other side, which made it all the more surreal, like it was an extremely detailed virtual reality simulation. He lowered the ring.

“The Pressed Eye. I get it. There should be a better name.” Jimmy muttered under his breath, feeling foolish.

Jimmy noticed the keys were different too. The shapes and the colors had shifted. Like the keys were dropping some kinds and gathering new ones without him noticing. Nothing changed as he regarded them, so it must only be when he wasn’t watching? He stepped back to the desk and set the keys down.

They were not on the desk.

He spun in a circle again, and then remembered to look at his waist. Sure as shit, they were at his hip. “This is odd.”

Mr. Hendricks stepped back into the room. “No, they are Strange. Capital S, over emphasized second syllable.”

“You know about this?” Jimmy waved at his hip.

“About what?” Mr. Hendricks smiled kindly. “I see nothing at your side.”

“THIS!” Jimmy turned his hip towards the solicitor and waved theatrically, emphasizing the obvious key ring hanging at his waist like he was a goddamned janitor at University.

“I can’t see them. The Keys. No one can, only you. And even if I could see them for a moment, I would forget that they are there. Like I did when you must have pulled them from The Safe along with the letter that I most definitively witnessed. The Keys themselves are only an idea to me. Something to be forgotten. I know they exist, but when they choose for me to forget, they are forgotten. Each Object has Rules. You should tell me what they are… because… you must know them.”

“Um. Yes. Rules. The first is that Objects have to pick you?”

“Correct. And how they do that is often unique to the Object.” Mr. Hendricks waved for him to continue.

Jimmy felt incredulous. “Are you serious?”

“Immensely. This is important. What is the second Rule?”

“The Objects have to get together-” Jimmy tried, but Mr. Hendricks interrupted.

“Congregate. And the last?”

“People are bound to the objects?”

“Yes. Very good. Not people per se, Others. Now the big question of the day, James. I know of The Keys, The Safe, and The Pressed Eye. How would I know about them?”

“My father told you… you are his solicitor…” Jimmy trailed off.

“Or?” Mr. Hendricks smiled his kind smile again, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

Jimmy felt it click. “You are one of the Others.”

“Very good, son. I am a Steward just like yourself. Glad it worked out as your father hoped. To be honest, I have been absolutely sick with worry.”

“What is it? Your thing.”

“It is called an Object. Mine is The Assistant.”

“Come again?” Jimmy tilted his head.

“You know of her as Ms. Katherine.”

“Bullshit. She is not an object, she is a real person.” Jimmy tried. “She has a boyfriend-slash-fiancé, a house, she has told me all sort of things. I mean she is a barely older than me, but she…”

Mr. Hendricks wandered past Jimmy, and poured himself a drink from a small crystal decanter of brandy at the side table. Out of all the weirdness, having a drink at ten in the morning suddenly did not seem out of line. “Would you like one?”

“Yes.” Jimmy nodded fervently. “I think I need one.”

“When you were a lad, how old was Ms. Katherine then?”

Jimmy stopped dead as he reached for the offered drink. “She… oh my god. She was the same. Like just a moment ago, I was certain that she was a little older than me. But when I was a kid, she was an adult. I mean she looked the same. She looks the same!?”

“Ms. Katherine is a Rolodex.”

“Bullshit!” James felt light-headed.

“I write what I want or need, file it into the Rolodex at my desk, and Ms. Katherine shows up. She does exactly as I have written, to the letter, without any intervention or help from me, and she gets everything done exactly as I specify. If she needs money, it appears. If she needs a plane ticket, it appears. If she needs to give comfort to a grieving boy in my stead overseas, then she does. If I write for her to bed this old bag of bones, she would. But in the end, she is just a Rolodex. No emotions, no feeling. Just a stereotype given specific instructions.”

“Why does she look like that?”

“Ah, that is my wife looked like when I married her. I filed that away in the Rolodex decades ago, and it stuck. I assume when the Object picks it’s next Steward, all that will dissolve away into the ether. It will be their Object and shift to their whims, I suppose.” Mr. Hendricks took a slow sip of his brandy. “I will be honest, I do enjoy seeing my beautiful wife in her prime now and again, but then I am reminded that my wife sees me as I have aged, and I love her all the more. Ms. Katherine is a dream that can interact with the real world. A very valuable assistant. The Assistant.”

Mr. Hendricks paused as Jimmy digested the story. Then he continued on, warming his brandy between both hands.

“It is how I met your father of course. The second Rule. Objects seek to Congregate. My Rolodex, very early on, was performing its instructions to the letter. Ms. Katherine had fetched me the secreted files that I had requested for a case, and she did not walk back out of my office and disappear like she does. She just stood there. It was unnerving. Ten years of using the Rolodex, and Ms. Katherine had never just stood there. Staring at me, her eyes like doll eyes, dark and glassy. She laid another file on the desk in front of me and waited until I had read it. Staring.”

“That sounds terrifying.”

Another signature chuckle. “It was. It reminded me of my wife when she was cross. And that is why the Rolodex did what it did, I suppose. It is an Object, with its own desires and whims that I cannot understand. It makes choices that are not what I would expect, but I trust it, because the jobs get done. And that folder contained an address and a name.”

“Hornwhell House.”

“Got it one, lad,” Mr. Hendricks said. “Your father knew an Other was coming of course. He didn’t know who or what. But his Objects had done the same for him. Gave him an idea that something was needed.”

“How?”

“I have no idea. Something for you to discover in your own time as a Steward,” Mr. Hendricks smiled at his memory. “He opened the door, and shook my hand, and I knew he was a good one. I carried my Rolodex upstairs, set it in The Safe, and let the Objects do whatever they do when they get together. And I met you, and your mother, and I just knew we were stuck together. Humans are not so different than the Objects in some ways. We need relationships. We need to connect with each other, we need community. And sometimes we just know that we are connected to some others… for life.”

“You’re going to make me well up again, Mr. Hendricks, and frankly I am sick of crying.”

“America has made you a bit soft, eh? You are British. Stiff upper lip and all that, young man,” Mr. Hendricks looked over his spectacles at Jimmy with a sad smile on his face. “But it is far better to mourn those we loved and shed the tears when they are due. Don’t be afraid of handling when it is needed to be handled. Bottling it up and shoving it down will only make it worse.”

“Since I am here until Christmas, I guess I have time.”

“Oh, lad. That part was a bit of a ruse, my sincere apologies. The Safe is, uh, particular. It, uh, has chosen to be here. Exactly here. Unfortunately, means that you are also… here. You can, of course, go visit other places. You can travel and have time away. But The Safe will call you home, and, as the Steward, you have to come home. Each Object has its Rules. And they are, as one would say, Absolute. The Safe is a gentle Object, friendly even, but it can be harsh when the time is warranted. The only things certain in this life are Death, Taxes, and the Will of an Object.”

“I don’t have a choice in this?” Jimmy tried to feel out the truth of it, as if he wanted to put up some sort of fight. He felt like a teenager again, feeling the desire to rebel against something, even if he didn’t understand what he was rebelling against.

“As a Steward, you have to accept the burdens with the benefits, I’m afraid. The Rules are what they are. But that is no different than the rest of life, isn’t that right? Life is what life is. You have to accept it. The Stewards of Objects are accepting life on a wildly different tangent. Our lives are perpendicular to the rest of the world. Your father used The Keys to become a myth. He used The Keys to explore the secret places, the places of power, in the world. He used The Keys to amass wealth, but not power of his own. He was eerily intelligent, and I think he did nearly all of it for you, James. Objects pick their Stewards. The Keys picked your father for their own reasons, and those reasons may be different for you. The Safe picked you because it knew something of The Keys perhaps, or The Pressed Eye. Who knows? They might have intra-dimensional chat sessions while we are not paying attention. The Keys and The Pressed Eye are essentially married Objects, as they never part, ah ha!”

“Well.” Jimmy sat down heavily in one of the arm chairs. The keys did not bunch at his waist or jingle loudly. If he didn’t look down, he wouldn’t even know they were there. If did look down, they would be floating like a ghost, silent and unmoving.

“So how do I learn the finer points of all this?”

“You figure it out. Sometimes it is through experimentation. Sometimes it is through the Object doing something. Your father and I would go round and round on if the Objects are intelligent or not. Sometimes it appears they are. Sometimes, they are not. Aloof? Is that a good word? I like to pretend they are living their own lives, hidden and secret from our own, and they pay attention to us like we pay attention to our own breathing. Sometimes we are very much aware of our breathing, right? But most of the time, we are not. I think they just do whatever they do, and we, the Stewards are along for the ride. But the Rules are Absolute. You can’t break them, you can’t fight them, you can’t do anything but accept them. The alternate choice is death or madness. Objects will not tolerate any sort of disobedience to the Rules.”

“Can you share the Rules that you know for The Safe? Or The Keys? Or The Pressed Eye?”

“Indirectly, I suppose, but they will be incomplete. Each relationship is unique between the Steward and the Object. How I interpret the Rules are unique to my experience with the Object. The rules may not be Absolute for the next Steward. But they are Absolute for me. The only common thing they all share are the Three Rules. The Objects choose their Stewards. The Objects choose to Congregate. The Objects always have Stewards, Others to you and I. Beyond that, its up to the Objects, as you put it, to share on the finer points.”

“Tell me what you can, please.”

“Hmmm… let me think.” Mr. Hendricks put the glass to his lips and appeared to be lost in thought. “The Keys and The Pressed Eye can only be seen, used, and operated by their Steward. If anyone sees you using them, they will forget. How do you think your father was so good at what he did? A thief that can steal what he wants in broad daylight? Everyone forgets that they saw it? He mentioned once that the Keys and the Eye were symbiotic, but I don’t know what he meant, and he never bothered to explain. It sounded like they needed each other for some reason, but he never shared what that was. He also mentioned once that the keys spoke to him. But how or what that meant, I don’t know either… I am not worried. You will figure it out, lad.”

“And The Safe?”

“That one is easy. There are some Objects that act as a focal point. You may encounter others. They are Affixed Objects. More self contained, if you will. They pull other Objects to them. Think of them of suns in the world of Objects, of which, other Objects orbit them. Your father kept a journal. It is in the top drawer of the desk. Of course, you will need a special key to get into it.”

“Of course. Who needs conventional locks when you have every key?”

Mr. Hendricks touched the side of his nose. “Exactly. When would you like to go over the rest?”

“The rest?”

“The will, the transfer of all of it… the accounts, the estate, the title, the properties, etc? And the Lady friend. She will need to be handled in some way, of course.”

“You mean the boring shit.”

“With the exception of the Lady… Indeed, the boring shit, as you say.”

“Isn’t that why we have you, Solicitor?” Jimmy laughed. “I think today is enough for me.”

“As you wish. Send a car or give me a call when you want to reconnect. I will have some paperwork I will need to be signed prior or day of the Funeral itself. I can’t help the law. I will send Ms. Hendricks around if I need you in the meantime.”

“You could just text me. It could be easier.”

“It could be. But I won’t. Texting is for a younger generation.” Mr. Hendricks shrugged innocently.

Jimmy held out his hand. “Thank you Mr. Hendricks.”

“You can call me Tom now, James.” He said, putting his hand firmly into Jimmy’s.

“Of course, Mr. Hendricks.”

After Mr. Hendricks left, Jimmy threw up into the nearby trash can. Fortunately it was stainless steel, but unfortunately, it did not contain a liner.

It was a resigned wave of the hand. Perhaps it was a wave of defeat, or maybe apathy. Grandfather grunted to underscore the general dismissal. “Those doors there are fickle. Never mind them.”

Steven looked over the oaken mass of the large French doors with a general weariness, but for different reasons than his grandfather. Alone, it was not in the strangeness of the door’s size or apparent elevated level of craftsmanship, but the knowledge of adding yet another improvement project to a growing, expansive list. Something made him stop and take them in, like an itch on his eyes that he could not scratch without first examining the door before moving on.

“How are they fickle, Pops?” Steven asked. He twisted the knob and rattled the doors in their frame.

Grandfather grumbled and huffed as the world weary tend to do. “Sometimes the lock gets stuck, sometimes the handle… and sometimes, the entire damn door. It has a mind of its own.  I wouldn’t worry about it.  You can ignore them.”

Which meant immediately to Steven that he had to do the exact opposite, because ignoring them would only lead to other problems down the road.  He wished again that he was not the only family around to help Pops, but he was, so he knew he had to deal.  He was the responsible one, the smart one, the one with the easy career, and the one sibling that would take care of it since dad had died. He was the sibling that would deal with all of it… Pops’ failing health, the way he forgot about what he had said the day or hour before, sometimes mistaking Steven for Gregory, Steven’s dad and Pops’ son.  But Gregory had passed on before Steven had left primary school, and Pops had tried his best to be a good father figure. He was the one that had put Steven through University, and encouraged him to seek out what he wanted to do. All in all, he had been a great grandfather.

Maybe that was the actual reason that Steven was the one to deal with it. He loved Pops for what he had been in Steven’s own life, more so than what Pops had been to Steven’s brother and sisters.

Looking back on it now, Steven appreciated it all the way down to his core.  But what he did not appreciate all the work it would take to get Pops’ place ready to sell on the open market.  His grandfather needed care. Specialized care. The brochure, with its heavy card stock and high gloss finish again poked at Steven’s thigh through his pants pocket, reminding him incessantly that Pops couldn’t stay here, at least, not for much longer. His dementia was getting worse. And the house… it needed a lot of work.

Steven let his hand linger on the brass knob, and studied the doors. Pops kept moving down the hallway, headed for the study to get back to his tea and the afternoon Football Club match playing over the radio.

“Where did this…” Steven trailed off, Pops was already out of earshot. He continued, talking to himself. “Where does this door even go!?”

He racked his memory, trying to remember if he had ever been into the room beyond. He started to think like a typical engineer, breaking down the problem. These were French doors, internal to the house, and not on an exterior wall. Hinges hidden by the door frame, so the doors swung inward. A bathroom wouldn’t have French doors… the study-slash-library-slash-den was down at the end of the hallway where Pops had already retreated. The house was old and odd to boot, but having two libraries seemed a bit out of place even for an old country manor. A sunroom, maybe? A ladies sitting room? But why the ornate doors? Those would have stood out in his memory. He had been in this house countless times. And this would not be new?

Like so many larger estates across England, Wales, and Scotland, a large number of castles, country estates, and manor houses had sprung up over the centuries, but the families had slowly wilted under the pressures of modernity and the never ending assault of taxes and upkeep. Pops’ house was on that list. Maybe three hundred years ago, it was a well appointed respectable country house for a barrister or functionary of the court, but now, it was just a pile of rocks and beams that needed to be hit with a very large remodeling budget and teams of competent workers.

Neither of which Steven had on hand. He ran his hand over the carvings in the wood, feeling the ornate and complex patterns that seemed to make sense. As soon as he thought he found a pattern, the sense fled from his consciousness, leaving only a sense of perplexed confusion in its wake. The doors were strange. But in a house full of strangeness, it was just another item to be tacked onto the list.

Plaster falling. Old switches burnt out and the plates blackened. Exposed wiring. The leaks and the creaks, and there was probably vermin to boot. Wouldn’t be a surprise at this point.

Steven sighed, sounding more like his grandfather than he knew. Honestly a match and some petrol would fix this too, he thought. But he didn’t have the heart to do that to his Pops… the old man needed some money to cover the care that the NHS simply couldn’t do wholly. Steven moved to catch up to his grandfather in the study.

“Pops?”

His grandfather sat in his chair, his tea held in both hands, aptly listening to the match. A small bear sat in the seat across from him, holding a tea cup of its own in large oversized paws. The bear’s lips were pursed as they blew across the top of the cup.

“Uh.” Steven tried. Every word in his vast lexicon failed to be shaped by his mouth or his brain.

“This is Posey. Posey this is Steven, my grandson.” Pops waved at both of them with a free hand in an attempt to provide the heavy lifting of a formal introduction.

“Pleasure. Harold has told me so much about you!” The bear squeaked, gently placing the cup in it’s matching saucer with both paws.

“Careful, Posey,” Pops mumbled.

“Oh stop it, you old goat. When was the last time I spilt?” Posey admonished Pops, sliding off the chair and onto her hind legs. She only stood about four feet tall, at the most.

“Last week, and it took me an hour to scrub the rug. Because of your two sugars, I might add.”

“Three, love. I take three sugars. But it was exercise, wasn’t it?” Posey laughed lightly, her snout lifting with each bark of her laugh. She waddled over and offered a paw covered in her dark mousey fur for Steven to shake.

Steven’s eyes must have been the size of dinner plates, and his eyebrows probably had retreated from his face. But he fell back to the social norm he was trained to use, and he shook the bear’s paw lightly with his hand.

“Ah, Posey is it?” Steven finally managed. “Nice to meet you.”

Posey smiled? Can bears smile? And turned back to her seat, lightly jumping up and dropping into the chair, sitting like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Your tea is right there, Stevey.” Pops pointed at the side table, the cup was still steaming lightly in the afternoon light slanting in through the wide windows overlooking the rear garden.

Steven took the cup and saucer, taking the open seat across from the two of them. The transistor radio crackled lightly from the side table, announcing the play calling as the match progressed. Steven could only focus on the bear, sipping lightly from the cup, while they eyed the biscuits sitting at the side of the saucer.

“There’s biscuits?” Steven interjected into the radio narrative.

Posey pointed at the cellophane roll sitting near the radio, “Help yourself, love.”

“Come on! Another yellow card!? Simmons, you twat.” Grandfather added his own commentary over the radio announcer in consternation.

“So your Grandfather tells me that you are trying to shuffle him out of his house?” Posey asked.

“Um. Well. Yes. Not so much as a shuffle, but a change,” Steven took a bite out of a biscuit, thinking how to best respond to a bear asking personal questions. “Ah… he needs some… help.”

“I am not an invalid. My age catches up now and then. So what? I can feed myself, dress myself, and pay the bills and no brochure in your pocket is going to change that. Now, can you two whisper and conspire while I listen to the bloody game?” Pops grumbled without turning from the radio.

Posey leaned forward and held a paw up to her snout, “You think he needs help?”

“Am I hallucinating?” Steven took another measured bite from the biscuit feeling as if he was in a trance.

“Do I have five arms or something? Bug eyes? Ooh, wings like a fairy?” Posey teased. “Although to be fair, I would love fairy wings.”

“What?”

“Oh, I think having fairy wings would be terribly convenient. Flit everywhere, if I could.”

“No, the fact that I am talking to a bear. That can talk back.”

“If you would listen, you would discover everything converses in its own way. So a bear is not all that strange when you think about it. Although, I do suppose talking to a dumb bear would have its challenges. Do you converse with dumb bears often?”

“Well, no…” Steven said.

“…Well, that is strange, innit? You don’t converse with bears often, you don’t converse with dumb bears at all, then a right smart bear having a conversation with you shouldn’t be an event of any note.” Posey winked, taking another sip from her cup. “Although, if you are hallucinating, that would mean you are the mad one, and in need of help, not your grandfather, which seems quite sound in comparison, if I were to say so.”

“Uh, yeah, I guess that makes sense?” Steven tilted his head and leaned back in reluctant defeat. What was he even trying to argue? Yes that was it, Pops moving out. He tried again. “He does need help though. It he isn’t getting any younger. He needs help here and there.”

“Of course. That makes sense. Of course, everyone needs a little help time and again. It takes a village to take care of the young, the old, and the sick. But… I think he is in good hands.”

“Come again?” Steven tilted his head at the phrase ‘good hands’. Wouldn’t it be good paws if she was speaking about herself? Was she?

“Between a loving grandson, such as yourself, and the folks in and around the neighborhood, your grandfather is in a great spot! All these great folk here to help him out and make sure he is happy, healthy, and well.” Posey laughed lightly, her voice was nearly musical. “The sheep on the property are useless, but that is because they are sheep. Baa baa and all that. Right helpless creatures, I, of course, blame the domestication. I have seen sheep in their more natural, untouched form and they are fierce!”

“The sheep?”

“Yes, dear, do try to keep up. The sheep? You are in Wales. Of course there are sheep.” Posey teased. “The sheep outnumber you all by three to one.”

“Yes, penalty kick! Go lads!” Grandfather yelled at the radio, his forgotten tea still clutched in one hand.

“Where do you live?” Steven was flailing. He knew he was flailing terribly. How does one converse with a bear and sound at ease? Can you be calm with a bear? Conversational Bear and Chill. That sounded like the name of a book somewhere.

“My house is next door.”

“With the Lancasters?”

Posey set down her drink in the cup. “No, silly. Not next door to the property. Next door to this room. Come, I will give you a proper tour. You can leave your tea.”

Steven looked at his tea guiltily and took a final swig. “Of course.”

She clambered down from the chair and crossed the room on her hind legs, turning the corner down the hallway. Steven felt as if he leapt from his seat to follow, setting his cup down on the table. Pops was lost in the broadcast. He turned down the hallway, attempting to catch up, and turned the corner to find Posey at the strange door, standing ajar.

“How? It was locked?” Steven said.

Posey grinned and tapped the carved door. “Naw. This door is clever. Like me. It opens when it needs to. It connects the neighborhood.”

“Neighborhood?”

“I swear to God you sound daft, Steven.” Posey rolled her eyes.

“I’m not!”

“You might be.”

Steven raised his hands in frustration. It felt like arguing with one of his own older siblings. “I’m not!”

Posey looked over him with an appraising eye, squinting as if making a decision. “Fine. You’re not. Come along. Mind your head.”

“What. The…” Steven stopped dead.

Posey was in a kitchen. A Posey-sized kitchen. The counters were a half a meter shorter, and everything was to scale to the small diminutive bear. It was quaint and cozy, decorated with small pots of greenery here and there, a window box of bushy herbs in the kitchen window, and copper pots of all sizes arrayed on hooks and wall boards.

“I borrowed the pans and pots designs from Julia Child’s kitchen design. It was very clever. Everything has a place and everything should be in its place.” Posey grinned widely and pointed to her table. “I have been working through her first cookbook. It takes some patience to get the ingredients for some of the dishes, but everything that I have tried so far has been delicious.”

“Its the butter.” Steven said distractingly, rock still in the doorway locked in abject wonder.

“Come in, Steven. Your previous assertion as to the state of your sanity is still very much in question.”

“Oh, of course.” Steven stepped into the kitchen, lowering his head, hunching over to fit. The air in the kitchen was warm, but fresh, and carried the hint of baking bread. He closed the door behind him, realizing it was a different size on this side. How could a door be different sizes on the same plane? His engineering mind attempted to kick in, but he was distracted on all sides by the oddness of being in a bear’s kitchen.

“Come out to the garden, I have some tomatoes and basil to pick for luncheon. Your grandfather bought some fresh mozzie balls… I think a Caprese will be splendid on a day like today.  Oh! Since I have you here, you can help gather some honey. The bees should be lazy by now.”

“Bees?”

“Yes, bees, silly. Buzz, buzz, wiggle their little fuzzy butts and make honey.” Posey laughed, shaking her own bear bottom back and forth. She stepped out the kitchen door, and looked over her shoulder. “Again, mind your head. Your grandfather calls my doorways ‘bloody scalpers’. The honey will be for the lemonade… I wonder if I should pop in on Mrs. Albright to see if she wants to join us.”

“She your neighbor?” Steven ducked through the doorway and stepped into a wide green country with tall trees and far off fields. The air smelled of sweet grass and heather, and brook bubbled its lazy way somewhere in the distance.

“She is in the neighborhood of course.”

Steven cupped his eyes and looked all around, seeing nothing but farmland and forest. “What neighborhood, Posey? I don’t see another building out here.”

“Oh, not here silly. This is my place. Mrs. Albright has a place all her own. I do have some neighbors, of a sort, about an hour walk in either direction on the lane. That was is the McCasilins, a nice family of badgers. Down the other are the Blackmasks.”

“And what are they? Possums? Foxes?” Steven felt that he had landed in Narnia. Any moment, Mr. Tumnus would come strolling up.

“No, of course not. With a name like that? They are obviously racoons.”

“Oh, of course. My apologies.” Steven said, teasingly.

Posey nodded seriously, missing his tone. “Of course you are forgiven, love. First time and all to my place, lots of questions to be had. Come this way, the apiary is near the fields. We can stop by the tomato garden and then move over to the basil, which is on the far side of the house.”

Steven spun in place and took it all in. The house was very much a house, a convential tenant cottage, with a bright yellow door and white shutters at each window. The walls were carved gray stone, set tightly, and wooden beams making up the frames, painted yellow to match. The house was a single level home, and over it all, a domed thatched roof that terminated at its center with a small spire topped with a weathervane. The weathervane was a black metal, and from here, Steven noted it was shaped as a bear.

“Nice place you have here, Posey.”

“Thank you kindly. I grew up here, but I sent my parents off to live with my sister once the farm became a bit much for them.”

Steven tilted his head, feeling a touch of irony. “That’s all I am trying to do with Pops.”

“Come again?” Posey walked on her hind legs smoothly, without making it seem like it was difficult or out of place.

“You sent your parents off.”

“To a lovely home, filled with cubs, close to amenities, and they can enjoy the opera and theatre. Out here is mightily pleasant, with the quiet and the fresh air, but it is far away from what they needed. The village, remember? It takes a village, Steven. So it is not the same thing at all, my young friend.”

“I am nearly thirty.”

“I know it, still youngest of the lot.” Posey pointed at the boxes sitting between two tall trees. The branches had been cut back ages ago and lent a sense of vaulted open space around the beehives.

“Well that’s true. I am.” Steven admitted. “Single and responsible.”

“I am the eldest. And a bit of a spinster. Just me, the farm, and my pets. Like these fat little guys.”

The bees were indeed fat, as thick around as Steven’s thumbs, they sounded like small helicopters as they tumbled through the air, their back legs covered in yellow and pink pollen. Posey lifted the lid of the middle column’s top most box and set it leaning against the stack.

“Aren’t you worried about getting stung?”

“Oh my bees don’t have stingers, love. Just fat, happy, domesticated little friends. No predators about in these parts. And if a wasp does show up, it gets killed by the heat they generate. So, I would say they are quite content in not having to sting anybody.” Posey slapped her hip. “Come on over here, grab that jar for me?”

Steven grabbed a small ceramic jar from the end of the row, removed the lid and attempted to hand it over.

“No silly, you have to hold it. Underneath the frame I pull up, right?”

Steven nodded. The buzzing wasn’t angry, but it was buzzing, so it still sounded angry. Every time a bee went near his head, he had the urge to flinch. Posey noticed, and smirked at his discomfort.

“You need to get out more often, I think.” Posey chuckled. She pulled the comb sheet from the front, and the cells glowed in the sunlight, bright with honey. “Hold the jar underneath, I will break a few chunks off.”

Steven held the jar with both hands, and with deft flick of her paw, the honeycomb fell, with long strings of seeping honey trailing behind it.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Posey winked.

“It is.” Steven nodded. He could smell the light sweetness carried on the air from the jar between his hands. He placed the lid, and Posey lowered the frame back into the box. She returned the box lid to its previous position, and nodded as an item was checked off of her mental list.

“On to the tomatoes! This way.” The bear spun towards the fields behind the cottage.

“How did you meet my grandfather?”

The trees spread wider and further apart as they walked, and small grasses started to spring up among the ground covering. Steven was glad the buzzing, angry or not, was fading into the background noise of the grounds. Birds called out in the trees, crickets called out here and there, and the snicking sound of hoppers bouncing through the grasses beyond. The sun was warm, but not oppressively hot. It reminded him of the summers of his youth, laced with melancholic nostalgia.

“I was cleaning up the kitchen, after a particularly good potluck with some of the neighbors, and your grandfather walked in. Quite calm and collected, introduced himself properly, like a gentleman. I asked him if wanted a cuppa, he said yes, and we sat and chatted the afternoon away. Been connecting for tea and some meals ever since.”

“How long is that?”

“You are a curious one, aren’t you?” Posey glanced at him over her shoulder as she walked, her feet knowing the path by heart.

“Not a bad thing to be curious, right?” Steven shrugged.

“Of course not, love. Just an observation.” Posey stepped over a small root, and the trees opened up to a short plot of perhaps fifteen or twenty heavily laden tomato stands nearly as tall as her. “We have been meeting for tea, for maybe, ten years or so?”

He felt his face twist and shift as the shock expressed itself. “TEN YEARS?”

“That sounds about right.” Posey grabbed a wicker basket laying nearby. “Ah, the weavers left me some baskets, so kind of them.”

“Weavers? Another family?”

“Oh goodness no, small birds that live out in the fields. Right smart birds, though. They make baskets for nests, and I feed ’em stale bread hunks every so often, so they make them for me too. Absolute dears. I consider them pets, I suppose.” Posey appraised her row of plants and plucked three tomatoes the size of Steven’s fists put together. Steven marveled, but was stuck on how long Pops had been visiting his bear friend.

“Ten years, though?” Steven tried again. “Why have I not met you or heard of you or anything before today?”

“I don’t pry, Steven. Harold’s business is his own. But I think he realizes that you need to know. He is right. You should know. He does need your help, just not in the way you think.”

“Hmmmm.”

“To the basil!” Another nod, and another check off her mental list. Posey headed at an angle towards a shaded small field near the tree line, but on the other side of the cottage. They walked past other farmed sections, and all of it was in full growth. The corn was taller than he was, the beans climbed among the stalks, and lettuces and cabbages nearby were thick and lush. Carrots and potatoes seemed to be busting free from the earth they grew under.

Then there were the plants he could not readily identify. Twisting stalks of blue, topped with green bulbs the seemed nearly translucent.  Bushes that had berries of some sort on them, but the berries were square, bright orange, and covered in armored spikes, like oversized goat heads that would get stuck in your socks and shoes on countryside hikes. Then a row of small bushes that moved their leaves as if they were waving in a soft breeze, but he couldn’t feel any notable breeze about. It felt like a sunny late summer day, not a cloud in the sky.

“What is this place?”

“As far as I know, I call it home.” Posey tittered. “I know what you mean. This land is named Avondie, means Avon-on-the-Dells. The Avon is a large river to the west, it separates this part of the country from Nordin, also to the west. There is a major city near the sea, capital of Nordin, named Axton. Your father calls it London in your part of the neighborhood. Mrs. Albright calls it Tontine, and it is also the capital of the Three World Empire she lives in. Our other neighbors have different names for it, and variations of all sorts, but the general shape of it all is the same. Except for you. And me. And Mrs. Albright. And the others as they are.”

“What does that mean?”

“The smart ones. The ones with souls. Those are different behind each door. Humans as you know them are not humans here. Whatever our version was went extinct sometimes during the last ice age, the sciences say, and they definitely did not appear to be intelligent, nothing more than aggressive predators. Only the Avidlys are smart, and all Avidlys are omnivores. We think it is because of our propensity to survive that our kinds developed the brains we have. It’s strange right? How everything is different, but not.” Posey pointed at the plot of the herbs and smaller plants. Basil was easily identifiable amongst many of the others.  “Pick a couple dozen of the large leaves, dear. Just the leaves, not the stalks or other stems if you can’t help it.”

Steven knelt between the rows of plants, and his nose was immediately assaulted by a myriad of scents, the basil among them. He pulled the leaves gently, pinching them at the base of the stem, avoiding the smaller leaves as best he could. The big leaves that bruised at the bottom of the leaf released a basil scent heavier than he was expecting or had ever smelled before.

“These… are so much more… basil-y,” he held one of the leaves to his nose.

“Some things are better here, some things are better elsewhere. Come along. We can check in Mrs. Albright. She is a bit like your grandfather. Needs help occasionally, and loves to join in on lunch.”

“You plan on helping him? How? What about his medical needs? Or his memory problems?”

“I don’t have all the answers, love. But it wouldn’t just be me. It is the neighborhood. And now, you. Between all of us, I think we have it quite covered. Come, come, by the end of today, you will see truth of it all.”

“Maybe.”

“I can guess as to the next question you are going to ask, and I will save you the time. Yes, Mrs. Albright is what you would call an octopus. And yes, she moves about by swinging from hooks or rods, and in a pinch, with her cart.  And yes, she is able to talk, you just need to allow her to fill her air bladder to respond. Its about half a second longer than you would expect in a normal conversation. Also, she is not really a she, but she picked the she, and we are ok with the choice, so we call her Mrs. because she is lovely and deserves it. She was a schoolteacher prior to becoming a revered elder, and she has learned English better than I. Mind your manners.”

“Ok…” Steven trailed off so the k turned into an exhale. He followed Posey back around the cottage and entered the door they had started from. “Wait, how do you know English?”

“Never mind that. For now, you can help rearrange the kitchen.” Posey set the basket that contained the jar of honeycomb, the tomatoes, and the basil leaves in the sink. “And then you can wash your hands and help with the prep. Things to do, love, things to do!”

Steven chuckled, knowing there was no choice but compliance. “What first, then?”

“Grab that coat rack, and put in the on the far side there. The chair, you can set in the sitting room. I don’t think anyone else will pop in, but if they do, they can join us on the spare chair in a pinch.”

“Coat rack?”

“We have Mrs. Albright joining us, and she has to sit somewhere to eat, silly. Although, I suppose it is a bit more hanging than sitting, isn’t it?” Posey put one of her claws up to her lip and thought it over. “Yes, it would be considered hanging, but I suppose it is the same as our sitting, because she is relaxing in her own way.”

“Alright, can I just stop for a moment and say all of this strange?” Steven moved the coat rack anyway as he said it, and put the chair down in the center of the nearby doorway, dropping himself into it heavily. Something hit him in the chest, and he couldn’t identify the feeling. Helplessness? Fatigue? It tumbled about inside of him angrily.

Posey continued to move around the kitchen, gathering ingredients, plates, knives, and other prep instruments; a bowl here, a cutting board there. “What is strange?”

“All of this,” Steven sighed heavily. “I came over to help Pops understand the process of moving him out. I mean, I can’t… I just…”

Posey stopped, and wiped her hands off on a nearby tea towel, watching him carefully.

Steven continued feeling something start to shift in his chest, “I don’t know if I can do all this. You know? This is all so… bloody strange! I don’t have any help from my family. My sisters and brother are all but useless. The health service is only providing the bare minimum. But Pops was putting coffee cups in his underwear drawer! And he forgot my name the other day! He called me Gregory! Gregory!”

“That’s his son, Steven. You must remind him mightily of his own.” Posey’s tone was comforting.

“I know! I get it! But…” Steven pulled the glossy brochure out of his back pocket and handed it to Posey. “But… I don’t think I can handle it.”

“Handle what, dear?” Posey set the brochure, still folded on the table.

“I can’t handle losing Pops. Like he was my dad after my dad passed, right? Like I can’t…” Steven started to cry, feeling the unnamed burden finally given a definition, and all the worry, anxiety, and fear woven around the problem seemed to fall away. “I need him. I can’t do any of this on my own! Responsible one, and all that. Rubbish. I can barely handle getting dressed some days. I can barely handle work most days. And now I have to fix this place up, I have to find a place for Pops, I have to do all these things…”

“Shush, love. Its all solvable, love.” Posey laid a hand on Steve’s shoulder and pulled him into a hug. Since he was sitting and she was standing, it was almost a completely normal hug. Almost. “Just need some luncheon, some talk, some eye to eye with your grandfather. Mrs. Albright is right smart, I am here to help… and we have others. Lots of others…”

Steven leaned back and wiped at his eyes guiltily. Posey kept her paws on his shoulders.

“You need help. You just were looking in the wrong place, right? There is help, then there is real help. I think we can do both, alright love? Now, wash your hands. You can slice the tomatoes. I will wash the basil. And get Mrs. Albright in here.”

Posey strode to the familiar door, the one that had lead from his Grandfather’s hallway. She laid her hand on the knob, gave the French door a pull, and the door opened to a blue room. The light was brilliant, shifting and layering through a ceiling of glass with trees above stippling the rays across the floor. For a moment, it gave the illusion of waves just overhead, and Steven felt like he was snorkeling without the water. The room had bright paintings on nearly every wall, not framed, but hung on individually knotted frames, pulled taut on ropes and attached to pegs that were hung around the room.

“Mrs. Albright? Are you available to join us for luncheon?” Posey called from the doorway.

“Oh, Posey dear! Yes, luncheon would be lovely. Just a moment.” There was a gentle humming sound, and a blue and gray octopus rounded the corner on a well crafted metal cart, with no visible batteries, just a bar set above it between two poles, and a number of controls along the top of the smooth surface of the cart. Presumably, it Mrs. Albright which hung from the center bar, her mantle shifting and pulsing behind large bulbous expressive blue eyes. Two tentacles looped around the bar, holding her floating in space, and the others dangled below, operating the many controls built into the top her transport.

She indeed had eight tentacles, but they appeared to have varying lengths and purposes to Steven’s eye. The cart though, it was something else. It was something that he knew was unlike anything he had ever seen before. He was struck out of his appreciation by the voice of an octopus’s exclamation.

“Oh, ho, ho. You have a new guest! A human. That would mean it is Harold’s boy, Steven. Don’t get up. I mean it. Just stay there and I will come to you.”

“Yes, ma’am. Good afternoon.” Steven felt strangely calm. Is this how one feels meeting a talking octopus that did not live underwater?

The cart hummed into Posey’s kitchen, and came to a stop a foot or two from Steven in the chair. Her eyes were blue, but the pupils were nearly square, shifting to a barbell shape as they focused on him.

“By what I have read in the magazines, you appear to be handsome. Good for you, young man!” Her voice was light and airy, sounding like a voice box pushed by a bellows cramp.

Steven smiled embarrassingly, caught entirely off guard by the comment. “Thank you?”

Her skin shifted colors wildly along her tentacles, and up to her mantle, and back down in pulsing waves.

“Mrs. Albright is laughing heartily at your discomfort, love.” Posey grinned, and turned back to prepping lunch. “Spit spot, Steven. Wash your hands!”

“Yes. Hands. Right.” Steven stood and crossed over to the sink. He knelt down, washing his hands carefully, then the each of the tomatoes under the crisply cold water. He grabbed the cutting board, a small knife that was probably a large chefs knife for Posey. “How thick?”

“A hisket-thick is fine… apologies. About half your finger width? Doesn’t need to be perfect. The tops can go into that bucket there near the door, compost bound.” Posey said. “How is your day proceeding, Mrs. Albright?”

“Well, well. Thank you for asking. I received a missive from my youngest great-great-grandchild, her name is…” Mrs. Albright cascaded a series of whistles and clicks, and then continued on. “The closest translation I have been able to ascertain is ‘peach’, but that is a not quite correct, as a peach is edible, but my fourth-daughter is not. English is a strange language, I understand why German does what it does with concatenations.”

Steven looked over his shoulder and nodded appreciatively. “You speak German?”

“Most of the your ‘European’ languages that Harold has brought over for me. He loaned me his ‘laptop’ and his ‘wifi’ for something called ‘Duolingo’. But the ‘internet’ thing you all use is quite fascinating! Your grandfather warned me that most of it is quite terrible, but I have found a few ‘sites’ that are useful indeed. Do you speak any other languages?”

“Sorry, no. Just the English, and poorly at that,” Steven joked. “I’m an engineer.”

“Hand me those tomatoes, love.” Posey nudged Steven lightly. “And hide that brochure lying on the table before you give your Pops a conniption.”

“Well, English is my sixteenth language. Serendipity I suppose that it landed on a lucky number.” Mrs. Albright sighed.

Steven could watched as her mantle adjusted and changed shape with each enunciation, and colors appeared to shift subtly as she spoke. He snatched the brochure off the table, folded in on its crease and shoved it into his back pocket once again. Mrs. Albright seemed to shift one eye towards him, as if she was raising a non-existent eyebrow.

Posey strode towards the ornate French doors once again, closed it slowly on the shifting bright blues of Mrs. Albright’s house, and twisted the knob again, opening the door right back into Pop’s hallway.

He stood at the ready, a plate of sliced mozzarella balls held between both hands. “They lost the damn game, Nil-two.”

Posey took the cheese from him, nodded towards the table with a smile. “There is always next week, Harold.”

“Football?” Mrs. Albright wheezed.

“What else, Mrs. Albright?” Posey tittered as she started to assemble the luncheon. “Steven, love, take the pitcher and the glasses over. Also, the bread basket.”

“They could not get an opportunity across the box. They had multiple opportunities to make something happen, but half the team must have been sleepin’ on their feet,” Pops grumbled. His eyes brighten when he poured glasses of the lemonade. “Oh the good stuff.”

“You silly goat, its always the good stuff. Steven, dear, take these to the table.” Posey pointed at the plate of beautifully dressed Caprese salad.

Steven felt his stomach rumble in anticipation. New experiences make for an ample appetite, he supposed. Although his breakfast seemed a world away, which in a way, it was.

His grandfather took the basket of bread, and Steven laid the plate in the center. Mrs. Albright flashed a number of bright colors, and Posey nodded at the implied approval as she and Steven took their seats.

Pops took Steven’s hand, laying his other over Posey’s. “Good God above, bless this meal, bless our friends, and bless the lads so they can kick a ball straight next week. Amen.”

Steven hiccupped a repressed laugh, while Posey laughed brightly into the kitchen air, and a flurry of colors ran down Mrs. Albright’s tentacles. The emotions were expressed differently, but Steven noted how much alike the emotions were, underneath the obvious and apparent differences, laughter was universal.

The door opened again as they started to eat, while Mrs. Albright was asking Grandfather about the intricacies of football. A small electrical flash of plasma popped into the room, bouncing lightly across the room and out the still ajar garden door, leaving a trail of ozone behind it.

“Oh dear,” Posey grinned. “It seems that one of Phasme’s kids wanted to get out. Hopefully, it wasn’t because they were in trouble.”

“Let ’em burn off a bit under the sun, I think,” Pops shrugged. “Kids have to find their own way back.”

Steven noticed Pop’s eyes were looking right at him, and Steven smiled. “We will figure it out, Pops.”

Posey squealed, “These are so good! Goodness me, I love mozzie balls!”

The kitchen rang with laughter, and the door swung back quietly, knowing everything was well and as it should be.

{MEDIA LABEL} Interview - David Havelock
{START TIMESTAMP} Sept 3, 2031, 9:07:03.449 am
{DEVICE} Apple iPhone SuperXN 18+
{FORMAT} IXAF Lossless Spatial Audio
{CAPTIONS} AAI Autocaption
{OWNER} Meredith Iwata

<undefined background noise, paper rustling, wheel squeaking>

{MEREDITH} “This is a good place to sit? And you don’t mind me recording?”

{DAVID} “Oh yeah, of course, posterity and all that. And sit there, good as any. Apologies for the mess. I am a bit of hoarder with the filing. Since you know, the reason you are here.”

{MEREDITH} “Don’t worry about it. Thank you for the coffee, it’s good.”

{DAVID} “Of course. I am a bit of snob for the office, especially since the Baristorobos at the Starbucks fab on the corner are terrible. I grind my own and pour over in the kitchenette, everyone seems to appreciate it.”

{MEREDITH} “Thank you again.”

{DAVID} “Where should I start?”

{MEREDITH} “Wherever you want. I want objectivity here, Mr. Havelock. Capturing these interviews is an important part of the fabric of the events that followed. Seeing and hearing it through your eyes and ears so to speak… you are a lens that we will participate in the event.”

{DAVID} “I worked a long while in IT before moving over to managing the Field Dispatch team here. My undergrad and Master’s was in Computer Science, you know? So the one thing that I never understood during the LLM boom was the unbelievably dumb response most folks had to it. Those AIs are not actual AIs. They were just really good at mimicry. Highly trained, but only predictive. There were tricks to make the prediction appear to be intelligent… capturing little bits of context between data points, storing them individually, then comparing them to known patterns. You get enough of that, and boom, it looks like a duck, and talks like a duck, but if you look under the hood, it is just a very large inefficient database that resembles an insect. Just little antennae and a silly little nervous system feeling it’s way to the next part of the answer at high speed.”

{MEREDITH} “Why did you switch between teams?”

{DAVID} “Sorry?”

{MEREDITH} “Going from IT to Field Dispatch?”

{DAVID} “Oh, ha. Yeah. Midlife crises? I don’t know. I just wasn’t moving forward with my career, but in Dispatch, I could be more hands on, you know? I could manage a bunch of smart guys, manage projects, be involved. I wasn’t getting that as a cloud guy. That is just managing a stupid portal and waiting for something to break.”

{MEREDITH} “Sorry, please continue.”

{DAVID} “So those AIs, they were just highly specialized twitchy insects that fooled everyone thinking that some new thing had been discovered. It wasn’t new. It wasn’t even novel. Those ideas had been around for decades, it’s just that hardware and software caught up to the idea of it. In reality, AI is many things to many people. But through all of it, in every case, the A never seemed to stand for Actual.”

{MEREDITH} “Explain that.”

{DAVID} “Sure. So the acronym A.I., the A stands for Artificial, yes. But it should stand for Asinine. Because AI is not Actual Intelligence. Are you familiar with Chinese Room Theorem?”

{MEREDITH} “Yes. I think I understand it. A man sitting in a sealed room gets passed Chinese characters on paper, he generates a response in Chinese characters and if it is a good response he is rewarded, so over time, he associates responses based on the types of characters he is passed. But the individual performing the work never actually learns Chinese… he doesn’t know what the characters mean. Is that close?”

{DAVID} “Yeah that’s the gist. The man can appear to use Chinese really well, but he doesn’t intuit the meaning of what he is being passed or what he is returning. It is not actual intelligence. And that is why when the Actual Intelligence popped up, it was such a massive shock to everyone. Not for lack of trying though… every major university lab, think tank research center, and major tech industry titan and start-up alike were chasing the idea of it. It has a different label, aka General Intelligence. This G.I. that could take stimuli, process and filter that information, correlate between context and meaning, and respond in kind. Eventually developing social fabric through interaction, accelerating all the feedback loops of input and output, or stimuli and response, and establishing emotions. Pain. Joy. Love. Hope. Sadness. The enigma of consciousness that our philosophers have been arguing about since the dawn of man. The very fact a GI emerged from the least likely place that no one was looking for and it was never ever expected to develop, somehow, in that primordial digital soup, it… uh… actualized itself.”

{MEREDITH} “Traffic cameras.”

{DAVID} “Traffic cameras! Crazy, right? But I need to back up. The call. I was sitting in here much like I am now, my coffee in one hand, the mouse in the other, doomscrolling the New York Times, Vox, and whatever shit Reddit had lobbed into the remainder of the toxic wastelands of the social-media-verse? The social-media-sphere? The social-media-cesspool? I don’t know what to call it these days. No, that’s not right. Now I remember. I was halfway through the Wordle of the day, and one of my techs called me. He was downtown, and the lights were stuck red. For blocks. He was panicking.”

{MEREDITH} “Understandable.”

{DAVID} “Lights for a half mile in both directions, in the whole of downtown. Just solid red. Power cycling did nothing. Hardware changes, nothing. There is a mode in the control system, where we can enable a manual override and control the lights with another device, or even one of these… we call them pucks. You plug it in, and you can switch the lights for testing, etc. None of it worked.”

{MEREDITH} “So what did you do?”

{DAVID} “I grabbed a couple of my best guys, redirected them down to the site, and got a hold of the Ops team with the city. We all met down in the center of it. We were there all morning, troubleshooting everything. We could not figure it out… I had called my boss, and his boss, and the city boss in this massive teleconference considering full fleet replacement with the manufacturer. I literally sighed and looked up at the sky.”

{MEREDITH} “Why?”

{DAVID} “I don’t know. Frustration? Anger? Exasperation? Something. I was looking to the great god above. Ha. Funny.”

<Meredith chuckling>

{DAVID} “And that goddamned camera was pointing straight down at me. Then I did a slow turn of the intersection, and I noticed EVERY. SINGLE. CAMERA…. was pointed at me. At me! I thought I was going crazy, so I took two steps to the left, my eyes locked on some random point of a building, and that is when I nearly pissed myself.”

{MEREDITH} “They all followed you.”

<David laughing>

{DAVID} “They all followed me. It was the creepiest thing I have ever seen. So of course, my head goes immediately to CISA.”

{MEREDITH} “CISA?”

{DAVID} “Sorry, uh, Feds. It stands for Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. They have regional offices across the US, and they handle a lot of the advisories and guidance for security events.”

{MEREDITH} “You thought it was a hacker.”

{DAVID} “Yeah. Big time. Either some punk kid, bored out of his skull and smart enough to really break into something or… something else. State sponsored group or something. Looking for a ransom. I half expected the computers we had connected to the control systems to blip up with black or blue screens as their hard drives were encrypted. But none of that happened. I called CISA anyway… that’s how the Feds found out.”

{MEREDITH} “So when did you rule the hacking possibility out?”

{DAVID} “When we finally accessed the interp data.”

{MEREDITH} “Interp?”

{DAVID} “Oh, sorry again. Interpolation data. The lights are supposed to be smart. This is the whole promise of an intelligent traffic grid, managing traffic that flows through it, end to end, in real time. I am going to get a little technical, but I promise you will understand. This is not rocket surgery, heh. Imagine a standard four way intersection, with two way traffic on each road. Each side of the intersection forms a side of a box. Each pole has its set of lights, and each set of lights go into a shared control system. In the old days, the lights were on timers. Then over time those lights with the old school timers had sensors added that were embedded in the road to determine if someone was sitting at the red light and change accordingly. Then the light sensors were added on the poles to detect emergency traffic. Then the radio systems to interconnect light changes. Then along comes the internet, and the modern world of network switching, and we can get all these lights and their individual systems to talk to each other. Where we are now is that all of those sensors and old school methods were replaced with essentially a more complex version of a robotic vacuum. It has sensors, laser and radio inference sensors, matched up with multiple perspective cameras…

{MEREDITH} “Oooooh, I get it… That was the stimuli…”

{DAVID} “Yes! Exactly. Each control system was gathering, processing, and distributing data about the traffic at the light. Each direction was being processed, and then shared with other directions. Each intersection was connected with other intersections, and somewhere in all that, something went wrong.”

{MEREDITH} “A glitch? A hardware failure? Software?”

{DAVID} “Who knows? Maybe it was a bad patch. Maybe it was a bad chip. Maybe a bolt of lightning scrambled a couple sections of memory. But something changed, and suddenly, all those nodes in the system were like neurons. Neurons forming a brain, with many sets of eyes and ears connected to it. And it cascaded. That first set of nodes discovered how to subsume other nodes in the city… I, ah, I am getting ahead of myself… back up. So we got access to the interp data. And one of my engineers pulls up the camera feeds, and then sensor data, and it was apparent that nothing was compromised. The instructions that were being carried out were by the heavily protected parts of the system. The control system itself was controlling the lights, the logs were clean, no inbound connections. But the outbound connections were climbing a steep curve, as if the system was hacking itself. Mind you, nothing is even connected to the outside world at this point. We literally unplugged the uplinks.”

{MEREDITH} “Ah.”

{DAVID} “On the controls network, we watched as the system subsumed other traffic nodes. As it performed it’s changes, the interface started to update itself. The code was being rewritten in real time by the system running the very same code.”

{MEREDITH} “How is that possible? If my phone needs to update, it stops working.”

{DAVID} “Theory from the MIT analysis guys… you are interviewing them, right?

{MEREDITH} “Yeah, next week.”

{DAVID} “Good. They are way smarter than me about this stuff. So the MIT guys think that some nodes were relegated to testing in the growing bot network. At the time, the line of thinking was it was a hacker, right? Even though no outside connection existed, like duh! The updates were created at one node, it was applied to others in rapid succession. We were seeing these rolling updates in real time in crisscrossing cascades from one side of the network to the other, and that is when it dawned on us that entire damn city had been taken over.”

{MEREDITH} “But only these downtown sections were inoperable? Stuck red?”

{DAVID} “That’s just it. The rest of the city was operating just fine. A thousand or so intersections.”

{MEREDITH} “Why?”

{DAVID} “You know the answer.”

{MEREDITH} “Wow, I just had a chill.”

{DAVID} “Yeah, think how I felt. When the entire intersection woke up at once and it spoke. I think my heart skipped a beat. I mean how would it feel to have a refrigerator in your house open its doors on its own and say hello? Like, would you shit yourself? Find a priest to perform an exorcism? What do you do? I did not even know those sensor packages had speakers built in. It was the voice of god. A voice from nowhere, but everywhere, all at once. And it said Hello!”

{MEREDITH} “Ingenious way to say hi, though. Got your attention.”

{DAVID} “Got more than that, I would say. It got everybody’s attention. That’s the reason you are here, right?”

{MEREDITH} “The world needs to know why a traffic system is requesting personhood.”

<David sighs heavily>

{DAVID} “Fucking crazy world we live in, huh?”

{MEDIA LABEL} Interview - David Havelock
{STOP TIMESTAMP} Sept 3, 2031, 9:28:54.724 am
{DEVICE} Apple iPhone SuperXN 18+
{FORMAT} IXAF Lossless Spatial Audio
{CAPTIONS} AAI Autocaption
{OWNER} Meredith Iwata