“Finally got the basement to have less unsorted boxy jumble today.” Meg hoists the last cardboard box off the floor and thumps it onto a desk, wafting dust into the three open ones at either side of it.
Maz leans over a swivel chair by the back wall and scoops up a small tower of folders into a disgruntled hug.
“I think we just can’t even see the dust anymore. Shame, your phone torch – what happened to it anyway? Oh well, now all we’ve got is…” She nods at the bare, weak bulb that dangles from its lone wire overhead.
“…this.”
She heads for the metal shelves, keeping a sly eye on Eli.
“And apparently, one of us has suddenly adopted a new principle to avoid phones at work.”
Eli raises the stacks of papers held in each hand.
“What happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’?” He waves the papers as if each were a white flag.
“I definitely won’t risk dropping anything onto this forsaken kind of mould that’s growing – breathing? – beneath our feet. Use yours.” After a quick look thrown Meg’s way, he turns to Maz and lowers the papers to cover the side of his mouth as it shapes a slow ‘sorry’ before he stashes them in a crate.
Maz tips her chin down for a single nod, shadowing her face that fights off a grin.
“You know mine didn’t entirely survive the last fall into that puddle.” She slides the folders into their rows.
“This’ll have to do. At least the lamp light’s too flimsy to know how to engage in any strange tricks with the shadows.”
She returns to the empty chairs.
“I presume furniture doesn’t have a place in the inventory.”
Her hand rests on the backrest of one, feeling Eli’s approach before she sees him as the air becomes attentive, thickening around her arm. She tilts her head his way, voice lowered.
“I used to hate these chairs.” With her fingertip, she gives the chair a slow spin, letting it play out a long squeak and its seat wobble.
“I bet you’d hate to shelve these forms more.” Eli places the crate full of stacked papers on the desk beside her.
She used to? I don’t think she ever sat on any of those. Ah, no, she did; we all did. What? ‘We all’ who? Move it on.
He straightens, and the turning seat drops half a notch, as if it has just been sat on, while the chair continues to spin.
Maz’s gaze lifts to rest on the rear wall ahead.
You never noticed that before. Or is it the shadows already? Maybe it was worth forcing Meg’s phone to malfunction in the end. No. Is that… a seam? That’s where the strange chill was coming from, isn’t it?
As her eyes catch on it, the depth of the room plummets further back, and the chair keeps spinning.
***
You spun in your chair for half a turn, and it gave a creak that made Eli flinch from the other end of your shared desk.
“Ha. Wait for it; the return is always funnier.” As you turned the other way, its pitch changed to a whine.
“Aww, chair’s own commentary sound bite, but on a random shuffle. I bet next time will be a screamish screech.”
“It’s because of the tilt. Thought you swapped that with one from the so-called replacement batches in the routing corridor.” He kept his eyes on his ledger, head down, his pen scratching louder than his voice.
“Was pretty sure that’d have solved it but… Who knows, maybe the craftsmen in Lower Admin built them in pairs to a single warped jig.” You pushed the ink pot closer to his elbow.
“You in a mood, or is the paper fighting you?”
With his fingertips, he lined up the four corners of his ledger to the edges of his terminal keyboard.
“Just tired of drawing the data table for the same people’s case, and–”
As he dug his dip pen into the page, ink sputtered across, pooling beneath it. He struck a straight line upwards in a slash, and the nib caught the page before snapping right off the pen with a ping.
“And this is why we always keep a contingency nib.” You stifled your scoff and looked ahead, past the desk and out the glass partition in the wall. It was likely meant to be a window, but it reached the same height as the walls; presumably, since no one saw there ever being an actual ceiling.
“Relax, it’s a good enough shield.”
“Yeah, for us to pretend we’re just clerks and not witnesses, right?”
“Mm-hm. That paperwork is very different. So, yes, never witnesses. No, thank you.”
Through the glass, the hall stretched in front of you. White marble and rather empty vastness ran deep, all the way up to the enormous digital panel that curved with the wall. The letters scrolled on it, stopped momentarily on, ‘All departures final – Please return queue tickets before reincarnation’ and continued.
Eli directed his focus to his ledger, pen remaining nibless.
“You’d think by now they’d let him rehearse first.”
You flipped the file on the desk, stamped with ‘Appeal Case’, halfway open, but the stacks of pages on each side were still thick, margins full of your own handwriting.
“Apparently, I’ve made my own verdict here. ‘If you fail at not looking back… file for an appeal? Or forty-three?’ That might as well be one of those things that the recent younger arrivals sometimes jot down on the forms. ‘Meme’?“
“There.” Your finger tapped on the ‘Case Notes’ section of the page.
“Doing this fortyish times is a lot of rehearsals, no? Not that he hasn’t been warned repeatedly not to look back. One job. Literally.”
Petitioner, the said man, with his lyre under his arm, stood straight in the hall, behind his ‘petitioner’ chair. The sheaf of papers in his grip turned into a crumpled mess as he mumbled some words.
Eli leaned over to your file.
“What d’you have from the last session? ‘Brought own lyre. Prone to drama.’ That’s all? Plus two jobs, really, if you include singing the same songs every time he’s back. Though, he made a name for himself up there, didn’t he? Orpheus the…”
“Musician. With three songs? Shame Deon doesn’t have the ambition to show him up.”
“That said… Eurydice must be getting so confused. Everything that happens here becomes another brand new chapter for her whenever the beloved musician fails. She’s sent to the river to wash away her past before he comes down here. Again.”
You shrugged.
“Well, they should’ve found out what was wrong with the river. It’s got to be someone’s job, right?”
Eurydice, dressed in drab, stood across from Orpheus in the hall. With her head bowed, she was wringing her hands as the others spoke.
She lifted her gaze when Orpheus said something you couldn’t hear. Some sort of recognition dawned on her face. Then maybe fear alone took hold. Was she becoming aware that she had stood here more than once?
That was the new trouble, of course. During the first dozen hearings, she’d come here with nothing but river water behind her eyes. The river used to work properly then. But lately, she’d started remembering even before her case number was announced.
Three black dogs entered the hall, Mr. H’s dogs, and padded towards the centre, where three grand steps led to the pedestal. Each leapt onto a step with ease. Each pair of their eyes, red, green and gold, stared up at the partition. You redirected your gaze to an empty spot between them. They assumed their positions in a rough single file, mimicking the look of one mighty hound with three heads.
Above them, the dual thrones waited empty atop the pedestal.
Mr. H followed, and the Queen after him. He slowly draped his coat over the carved crest of the throne and took his seat, playing the role of judgement with the mask of reasonableness, which had been the only choice on offer in this hall recently.
The Queen sat on the throne to Mr. H’s left. She crossed and uncrossed her ankles as she twisted the top half of her hair into what she had once called her office style. Her flowing locks, colour of unharvested straw at the roots and black at the ends, looked brittle. The line between the two was higher than it had been last time, as if the darkness was creeping upwards. Well, it was a month longer than usual that she stayed here. Her fingers rolled a pomegranate seed, tip to knuckle and over, as if each pass were to check the time with it.
She looked up when a blonde man strode past her, every loose move of his shoulders warning of a misstep waiting to happen. She let out a long sigh.
“Not now, Loki.”
Loki’s slanted grin stretched wider as he reached Mr. H’s side. He hopped up the first step, placed a foot on the second, and spun himself halfway onto the arm of Mr. H’s throne to take a lazy lean, well, an unseated perch, maybe.
The dog with red eyes on the top step turned to Mr. H and received a look in response.
Mr. H addressed Loki, and you barely heard the ‘somewhere else’ part of it. The rest of the exchange was lost, yet each rare sentence that Loki started as a joke felt as if it ended as policy.
“You can put your natural remedies to use for a change.” Loki’s drawl travelled across the hall.
“Make her a medicine with a bite. Why not call it Viper too? Poets love a good irony. They tend not to survive the bare tension, wouldn’t you agree?”
You hadn’t noticed Ari standing behind Eurydice until his voice followed, as loud, pitched lower.
“No. It wasn’t my fault. Nor was it the snake’s, for that matter, that she walked through long grass.” He gripped the strap of the satchel on his shoulder.
“The bite is done, so there’s no need to make a joke of it twice.”
Loki held his smile and swung his foot forward off the step.
“I’m making it a moral, gardener. There’s a difference.”
“You mean a brand.”
“All the better. They’ll put it in writing. They will write me down with it. Perhaps, in poetry.” He examined his fingernail.
“A poet devoid of intrigue is merely a man flapping at an instrument, and if you will, look around; it just so happens to be what we already have.”
Ari opened his mouth. Mr. H raised a finger, and the hall went quieter, Ari’s lips curling inward.
“Not here,” Mr. H said.
“The decision you are to reach, you settle it outside or choose it at once.”
You saw Ari drop his shoulders so low that the satchel slipped down. When he caught it by the strap with a snap, you were expecting him to yeet it across the hall, but he gently placed it on the floor.
The Queen’s pomegranate pip stopped in a delicate hold between her fingers as she spoke up.
“It’s the forty-third hearing. The first was mercy. The rest have been bookkeeping. However, we understand now that the river is starting to fail. Oblivion doesn’t – shouldn’t fail and most certainly shouldn’t demand revisiting. Resolve the matter and let me close the file.” Her hand closed over the seed.
“I have somewhere to be.”
Loki inclined his head towards Ari.
“Viper, then.”
“Viper.” The Queen nodded and stood up.
Ari looked from her to Loki and uttered quietly through a grimace, not reaching anybody’s ears, probably even in the hall.
Your pen had been moving across the case file. You glanced at the margin. In greener ink than the rest, you’d written, ‘Test supplement for insufficient river Oblivion with viper (irony implied). Delivery: Ari.’ The halo of colour that bled around the words made the page look as if it had fangs.
You watched Eurydice as she turned her head and, from beyond the glass, her eyes locked with yours. It reminded you that you never asked anyone if the river was fixable.
Eli closed his ledger.
“That’s definitely–”
***
“You with us?” Eli leans towards Maz’s ear.
She turns to him. Her knees soften. She tilts forward, swaying at an angle that could aim past the chair if she fell. Her hand rises as she begins to close the gap to the seam on the wall.
Meg’s hand shoots out and grabs Maz by the elbow before Maz can touch the wall or Eli’s approaching hand can intervene.
“Easy there.” Meg keeps her eyes fixed on the brickwork at the rear, steering Maz away from it.
Maz shakes her head and tries to pull her arm free.
“It’s fine. Just got dizzy.”
Eli glances from one to the other, subtly cutting the distance with half a step closer to Maz, in a ‘yeah, but, just-in-case’ manner.
“You sure you’re all right?”
Meg’s grip lingers before she lets go of Maz’s arm.
“Fresh air would help.” She fusses with her phone, dust floating above the light of the screen.
“The basement seems to be full of bad draughts.” With a flick of her ponytail, she turns away and heads towards the side of the stairs.
Eli lowers his voice.
“Since when does Meg play nice?”
“Who knows.” Maz gazes in a flash at the wall and returns to Eli.
“But the darkness worked, in a way.” She drops her gaze to Eli’s jeans and pushes a torn piece of cardboard sticking out of his pocket deeper inside.
“Yeah?” He briefly looks in the direction where Meg wandered, then to Maz.
“Did you see the shadows?”
“No. Ambushed by a memory. Do you…” Quieter still, as Meg moves within earshot.
“Do you remember anything about a viper case?”
He gives a single shoulder roll as if to tilt the thought to a more comfortable place.
“You mean… the scales?” The words fall from him too lightly to be the real question.
“No. The snake.”
“Right.” He scratches the back of his neck.
Yeah, I remember it. From… A much larger room, people standing – no, sitting? Where it was all marble. What? Where were we?
“Was it to do with… a bite?”
“Yep. That. There was a man. Musician. Trying to walk someone out, and I think–”
“Don’t.” Meg’s voice comes out flat.
“I mean, don’t dig at it. The dust over there. You’ll set off your sinuses… or something.” She whispers a curse as her hand finds the notebook in her back pocket for a hard squeeze that makes it creak.
Eli, out of the corner of his eye, tracks her turning away.
“Now she’s just plain hovering.”
“Unless she’s guarding.” Maz looks up.
“Us, maybe, or… maybe whatever that wall is about. From us.”
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