“…yeah, but you don’t have to worry about him, Ron. Just because Merx’s running all over the place doesn’t mean that he’s slapdash in his job.” Meg stands beside the open trapdoor, trying to balance the crate under her arm against her hip.
Ron’s hand reaching for the radio behind him stops on its shelf.
“I’m not perturbed by Merx.” He gives Meg a backward glance.
“Perhaps I merely got the feeling that I should be back to… work.”
“Of course–” Meg’s ponytail whips over her shoulder when she turns and snaps her gaze to the staff room door as Maz and Eli come through.
“You two! Ready to meet the dust’s ugly cousin?”
“Met him yesterday.” Eli steps closer to the hatch, his attention snagged by Meg’s crate, where stapled stacks of papers slump and jut out at all different angles.
“Those clearly need…” He looks at Ron.
“…work. Unless the boss has shared with you a trade secret, or simply, a more efficient way to put these types of things in order.”
Meg rolls her eyes as her crate slides and tilts outward. She hitches it up into place, the motion twisting the edge of her leather notebook to stick out of her back pocket with a hiss.
Eli nods at the sound and makes his way through the basement throat, Maz following close behind.
The air leading downstairs seems to have softened its bite of cold and lightened its added gravity while they descend. As if Meg’s boots have hoarded all the harshness, they still thump the stone steps behind them. She swings the hatch shut. It comes down with a solid thud above their heads without giving the hinges time to creak. Her phone torchlight joins in with the impatience as it slices through the shadows between them.
When they arrive at the bottom, Maz heads towards the metal shelves.
“Might as well carry on with yesterday’s folders of gibberish.” She picks up a folder from a desk opposite the rows and turns to the shelves. Her eyes search for the right alphabetical gap for its label in the row marked ‘Routing’.
Meg’s torch points at the desk ahead, making the weak bulb overhead seem pointless as it fades to black and returns with its sickly glow. She thrusts her crate on top of a desk and pushes the boxes, all stacked on one another to shape a small tower, along behind it.
She steps back and shakes her torch at the crate.
“Here you go, Eli. Work on them as much as you like.”
Eli’s bottom lip folds over his lower teeth as if to bite it before he begins sorting the crate of haphazard papers.
“Would it have hurt if they’d put titles on these? Where’s that box of new labels?”
She shines the light in his direction.
“They’re for hard covers. Or shelves. Or whatever. You’re not sticking those on any paper.”
Eli’s lifting shoulders never complete their way to a shrug. He carries on arranging the stapled pile by thickness.
A draught stirs near the stairs before a scritching comes from the edge of the steps and grows louder.
Eli turns towards the sound as a fuzzy blur of russet shoots across the stone with clicks and scratches. A squirrel, as real as the papers creasing in Eli’s hand, skids to a halt in front of him. A folded scrap of paper from its teeth drops to the floor. It looks up at him with either recognition or shock in its eyes and scampers into the deeper dark past the stairs, scurrying tickety-ticks of its nails fading away with it.
The slip flutters in the squirrel’s wake, as if it would rather flaunt its simple table of letters and numbers printed in black ink:
‘Q-A-17
Q-B-1003
Q-V-07
Q-R-22
Q-Ω-1012496′
Maz watches the squirrel go.
“Oh, was that–?”
Eli nods without turning as his gaze stays glued to the list.
Right, I know this… sequence. ‘V’ in the middle, omega at the end. What’s ‘R’? Ah, obviously ‘Rerouting’. Yeah, of course, Aspho-whatchamacallit, Bardo, Valhalla, Rerouting, Overflow…
He frowns at his own thinking.
I kind of know it’s those, but how do they even make sense to me? Unless I’ve seen them in a book and am already halfway to madness.
His hand reaches for the paper as he bends, but Meg snatches it up quicker than he can catch it.
She looks at his boots and crumples the paper in her fist.
“Please tell me that wasn’t a rat.”
“Not a rat.” His focus jumps to her.
Rat… rat-ish? There’s something about that word, though. It’s not far off, somehow.
“Squirrel.”
“In a basement.” Meg’s raised eyebrow tries to distract from her throat clearing.
“Where else would the shop keep its messenger rodents?” Eli gives a hollow scoff, wandering towards the spot the squirrel scampered off to.
“Alright, squirrel-man.” Meg leans an elbow on the staircase railing, watching his face as he passes, her hand hanging near her notebook.
He turns around to check the empty stone where the paper has landed. His brows bunch in a buckled sort of concentration.
“That note struck me as a list for… I don’t know, queue tickets? Something like that.”
“How very specific.” Meg’s fingers, fidgeting over her back pocket, pinch the edge of her notebook.
Maz diverts her gaze from them to the folder in her hand, already open to a page that has the look of an unfinished form with its lines filled out and the signature box at the bottom still waiting empty.
What are you doing with this?
The hatch creaks overhead before she can try to read in the dim light. Ron’s footsteps scrape down the stairs as he lets the tray of mugs in his hands, held out as if a diplomatic gesture, lead his way into the basement.
He looks at each of their faces.
“We’re not forming a cult without me.”
“We have the squirrel bringing receipts now.” Meg keeps her voice low, but the stone pings back every crisp consonant as she passes him the crumpled scrap.
Ron balances the tray on one hand and picks up the paper, his thumb teasing the wrinkles until the writing reveals itself. He turns and places the tray down on a desk. With a quick sidelong look towards Maz and Eli, he slips the note into his pocket. He straightens when he feels the neat fold of the receipt from earlier in there.
“Speaking of which…” he whispers.
“I should have shown you this.” His head tips towards the side wall about five steps from Maz and Eli.
As the steam from the mugs on the desk twists upwards, Meg and Ron step towards the wall.
Eli directs his feigned attention back to the crate, turning the same stack of papers over and over, this side to that and upside down, a good enough excuse to avoid looking their way. Maz closes the covers of the folder in her grip and pretends to study the label, almost definitely not listening.
Ron pulls out the receipt that the till spat out three days ago from his pocket and hands it to Meg.
Meg unfolds it, the words ‘Owed: One return journey’ still looking pale, and snorts.
“Oh, charming.” Her face tightens before she tones down her voice a notch.
“You think it’s time, then?”
Ron’s gaze strays past her to Maz, who still seems to read the same label, then to Eli as he turns over yet another stapled stack, before Ron leans closer to Meg.
“The basement is awake. The gate is starting to remember what they were meant to forget.”
“Oh, for… Can we save the fancy talk for the tribunals?” Meg throws him a look and passes the slip back.
“You think that’s supposed to be an answer, how?”
His smile manages to lift slightly, forming nothing more than a crooked one.
“It must be a warning.” He folds the receipt, and again, until it becomes a tiny square.
“Time will come later.”
“Must be? Do you even know who has sent the memo?”
“It has the handwriting of one of the higher ranks, but not Mr. H’s.”
“Very helpful, as usual, Ron. Look, if we’re supposed to carry them back, say it. I can’t put these shadows that keep popping up in my pocket. They’re eventually going to…” She flicks a glance at the rear wall.
“…figure a thing or two out.”
“It’s the darkness in here. Keep the torch–”
As Maz slides the folder into the row across from them, Ron stashes the slip into his pocket.
Meg watches him, keeping a calm face, before her hands rise and come together in an abrupt clap that sends a few spiders scuttling away.
“Alright, you two, less slacking, more sorting. These boxes won’t judge themselves.”
Eli flips the same stack of papers once more and looks over at Maz.
Obviously, this one belongs to ‘things Ron says when he thinks we’re not listening’, though I have a problem with a ‘gate’ that knows more than we do.
Maz takes another folder from the desk behind her.
‘Time will come later’, huh? Sounds like your ambition to remember has got a countdown now… to what?
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