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Aug. 2nd, 2011 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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eerieindianaHere is a little bit more of the EI thingie I wrote earlier.
Part One
“How did you get in here? And who said you could look through my files?”
Even with Dash keeping his back to him, Mars could tell Dash had just rolled his eyes.
“You don’t have ‘files’, Teller,” he said, not even bothering to turn around. “You have a single composition book that your mom bought you from the bargain bin at the World o’ Stuff.”
“So you figured you’d just let yourself in and go through it?”
Dash turned a page, managing to make the tiny movement into a calculated insult.
“Actually your sister let me in, but other than that? Yeah, pretty much.”
Marshall made a wild grab for the notebook, but Dash somehow contrived to shoulder-block him and kept it out of his clutching hands.
Simon, watching the little tableau from the top of the stairwell that lead up to the Secret Spot, (not, he thought, that it could really be called that if Syndi was giving access to anyone who asked) tried to decide whether it was worth trying to head off a full-fledged brawl before it developed or if he’d be better off giving up and downstairs to eat cookies and watch WERD TV with the rest of the Tellers. As the level of noise and invective increased, he came to the conclusion that friendship should come first over homemade baked goodies, but it was a close-won thing.
“What are you looking for, Dash?”
Dash looked over at him, and Mars took advantage of the momentary distraction to snatch his notebook back. Dash sneered at him, but quickly turned his attention back to Simon.
“You two write down all your little “weirdness investigating” adventures in there, right?”
“Right,” said Simon, then immediately wished he hadn’t when Mars shot him a poisonous glare.
“What’s it to you?” Mars demanded.
Dash slouched back against the Evidence Locker, accidently-on-purpose knocking over a neat row of painstakingly-labelled artefacts from various afore-mentioned “adventures”. Marshal bristled.
“Okay, Einstein, try to follow along. When Ned left, the Loyal Order of Corn became just a bunch of old guys in stupid hats drinking Cornade behind the backs of their wives and bitching about their asshole bosses. The tachyon portal is just a busted TV now and the cupboard with my marks disappeared, probably right when he did.”
“So?”
“So, it’s a dead end. Meanwhile, you two Goonie rejects are wandering around Eerie taking photographs of all kinds of random crap and writing it all down and who knows what any of it really means? Not you two jokers, that’s for damn sure.”
“But you do?” Marshall didn’t even try to hide the undertone of hostility in his voice.
“Well, no, but-” They waited, but Dash seemed unwilling or unable to finish his sentence. The silence grew longer, and profoundly uncomfortable, until finally, grudgingly, Marshall gave ground.
“You can’t take our records.” Dash opened his mouth, and Mars knew that whatever came out would be some snide comment about “records” and “notebook” and would quite possibly involve the phrase “delusions of grandeur” at some point, and rushed on. “But we’ll photocopy them for you. Everything we have. And you can take those.”
“Fine,” said Dash, and Mars felt like ripping the pages out and throwing them out of the window, making the ungrateful bastard chase them down the street. Unfortunately, the attic window had been painted shut years before the Tellers had moved to Eerie, so he had to settle for a sarcastic “You’re welcome” instead.
“We can use the photocopier at the library,” said Simon. “They’re open late tonight, and I need to return those books on the Bermuda Triangle soon anyway.”
After they’d all said goodbye to Marshall’s parents and Mars had promised to be home “no later than nine,” the three of them walked to the library in near-silence. Mars clutched the reassuring shape of his notebook inside his jacket pocket, and promised himself that the next time, he would be in charge of the stationary shopping and then he would have a whole stack of files, probably with little plastic file tags, colour-coded according to different kinds of monsters and assorted weirdness.
At the library, Simon and Marshall went inside, where a harridan with two inch-long talons painted candy-floss pink walked them through the intricacies of an out-dated photocopier only marginally more decrepit than she was herself. By the time they emerged, dusk had fallen and the streetlights were slowly coming to life.
Dash X stood where they had left him, leaning against the wrought-iron balustrade by the library steps, looking as sullen and black-clad as any other small-town teenager with a name and a home and a family. He straightened a little as they approached, and his eyes were fixed on the sheaf of neatly collated sheets of A4 in Marshall’s hand.
Mars handed them over with an obvious and ill-concealed reluctance and Dash responded in kind with one of his best condescending sneers, but he folded them in half carefully and zipped them into an inner pocket of his oversized greatcoat.
“So,” said Mars.
“See you in the next life,” said Dash, and he was ‘round the corner and out of sight before Mars could think of a suitable response.
“What does that mean?” asked Simon.
“What?”
“See you in the next life. What’s it mean?”
Mars shrugged. “I guess it’s just a thing people say.”
“Oh. Mars?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think it’ll help? Our notes, I mean.”
Mars shrugged.
“’Cause Dash seemed to think it would. You know. Help.”
“I guess.”
“I guess it wouldn’t hurt, anyway.”
Mars looked at his friend from the corner of his eye. Six months on, he still hadn’t figured out what to tell Simon about the day they’d gone to see Revenge of the Corn Critters with his family. Werewolves and mummies and ghosts were all well and good, but explaining to a nine-year-old that a collision between two conflicting realities had almost resulted in his best friend being gruesomely murdered in order to boost ratings on a failing TV show? That was a little outside Marshall’s area of expertise.
Part Two
“Teller.”
On the steps of BF Skinner Junior High, Mars watched his classmates pile into yellow buses that would carry them away from school and deposit them safely outside the relative freedom of ‘home’.
“What.”
If Dash heard the gritted teeth behind the word, he didn’t let it show.
“Where’s your sidekick?”
“Probably already on the bus.” He gestured, and as if responding to his cue, the long line of buses in front of the school started to pull away.
Mars ground his teeth. Trapped with bored students in a stuffy classroom with windows that refused to open more than a couple of inches, Miss Lee had retaliated by torturing her class under the guise of teaching them the many and varied joys of Shakespearean “comedy” Much Ado About Nothing. The agony had lasted two hours, seven long minutes of which had been after the bell had rung to signal the end of the school day. Mars couldn’t prove it, but he was pretty sure that the entire nineteenth century had passed faster than those seven minutes.
“Looks like it’s leaving without you.”
Mars debated making a run for it, balanced the possibility that he would make it against the chance that he wouldn’t, and on factoring in the absolute certainty that if he ran and failed to make it, Dash would take the opportunity to mock him for however long it took to walk the four-and-a-quarter miles back home, decided to give it up as a lost cause.
“What do you want, Dash?”
“Aren’t you going to run after it?”
“What do you want.”
“I bet you could make it.”
“What do you want.”
“Quick, run or you’ll be too l-”
“What. Do. You. Want. Dash.”
Dash threw up his hands in mock-surrender. “Fine, just trying to help. I need to talk to your little buddy.”
“He isn’t here.”
“I can see that. Where can I find him?”
“At home.”
Dash sighed. “Which is where, Slick?”
“Next to my house.” Mars gave him a disbelieving stare. “How is it you can find my house and talk your way past my sister but you don’t know where Simon lives even though his family shares a property line with mine?”
“I don’t know, Boy Genius, I guess he rudely forgot to invite me in for a round of Parcheesi with him and his folks. Maybe your lovely sister could talk to him about being a more gracious host.”
Mars swung his backpack over both shoulders and set off towards home. A moment later and the crunch of heavy boot treads on gravel told him that yes, Dash was following him.
“What do you want Simon for anyway?”
“To show me how the Eeriemat works.”
“You put in coins, you get out clean clothes. Even you should be able to figure that out.”
“Comedy genius, Teller. Really. I want to get into the Bureau of the Lost.”
“I could show you that,” Mars said, and then immediately wished he could rephrase it so it sounded more like, “I don’t trust you around a little kid because you’re a selfish, amoral bastard who would leave him hanging if you thought it would help you get away clean” and less like “Why do you want Simon along with you and not me?”
“Well, if either of you child prodigies had thought to include a map, or even directions, in your oh-so-detailed accounts of boldly going where only the homeless insane have gone before, I wouldn’t need a guide, but since you didn’t, I do, and I want the one who’s gone down and come up the same way to show me.” Dash paused, and hen, with an off-handedness so perfectly executed that it could only have been the result of long hours practicing the art of the off-the-cuff insult, added, “But I guess you could tag along with us, if you wanted.”
Mars ground his teeth, wishing for the first time since the mysterious disappearance of Steve Konkolewski that he had a tape player like his sisters’. He could always leave the batteries out, so as to convince the dogs that he was harmless, and it would give him the perfect excuse to avoid talking to people who showed up outside his school with the sole purpose of annoying him.
Part Three
“Mars?” Marilyn Teller frowned at her son across the dinner table. “Honey?”
“Sorry Mom, what did you say?”
“I just asked if you were feeling okay. You’ve been so quiet tonight. Something you want to talk about?”
Growing up, there are a lot of things it’s uncomfortable to discuss with your parents. It’s practically impossible, for example, to ask their advice on something when even a brief précis of the problem involves massive reality warps, firearms, labyrinthine tunnels under your hometown that terminate in tumble-dryers, and a massive underground warehouse where the misappropriated bric-a-brac for the entire United States of America is catalogued, tagged, and stacked away for no purpose other than to keep the economy running. In fact, doing so is likely to result in them throwing around words like “straitjacket”, “padded cell” and “syringe”, and really the situation can only deteriorate from there.
“I’m fine,” said Mars, forcing a smile. “Just some tough homework, that’s all.”
“Can we help?” Edgar chimed in from the head of the table. Even Syndi was feigning mild concern at him over the condiments tray.
“I’m going to give it a go on my own,” Mars said. “But maybe you guys could take a look at it after?”
Great, he thought as his parents exchanged proud looks. Now not only do I have to suffer through Miss Lee’s homework assignment, I get to relive the nightmare in front of Mom and Dad too.
Part Four
Saturday morning found Marshall leaning against the plate-glass windows of the Eeriemat, trying unsuccessfully to find a spot beneath the awning that wasn’t designed deliberately to concentrate the thin drizzle into a heavy splatter and then drop it down his neck.
“Morning, Mars.”
“Hi,” he waved at Simon and scooted over to make room under the malevolent awning. “Did Dash-”
“Why are you two sitting outside?” The glass door opened, and a gust of warm, detergent-scented air swirled out into the rainy morning to be instantly swallowed by the grey drizzle. Dash propped the door open with one arm and make impatient hurry-up gestures with the other. “And who said you were coming anyway, Teller?”
“Who said you get a vote?” Marshall countered. “You’re not even on the team, we’re just bringing you along as a favour.”
“A favour, right. Picking me over all your many other friends who you would otherwise be hanging out with.”
Looking away, watching the groups of early-morning launderers, Simon permitted himself a small, almost silent sigh before slipping between Old Elvis (picking up his dry-clean-only white bell-bottoms) and an elderly but remarkably spry woman dropping off a pile of somewhat dated aviation jumpsuits to be pressed. The two older boys followed him, keeping up a barrage of sotto voce insults that lasted until they reached the chattering crowd of Foreverware ladies, whose noise made any sniping not done by semaphore fairly pointless.
At last they rounded the corner and passed Washers Six, 6 and Seis, where the Strait Jacket Lady stood adding cup after cup of high-grade stain remover to her laundry in complete silence. There was the dusty magazine rack with its stock of yellowing, tape-repaired comic books and behind that, their drums empty and their doors hanging slightly ajar, were Dryers Seven and Eight. The harsh orange florescent bulb overhead flickered, sending jagged shards of sickly light rolling across the greasy sheen of the tiled floor.
“Take these,” said Simon, pulling two shapeless bundles of indeterminate colour from his backpack and handing them over. On closer inspection, they revealed themselves as oversized sweatshirts onto which a great many mismatched socks had been inexpertly stitched. “It helps you get through the tunnels without coming out the “Reject” chute next to the front desk,” he explained. “The Eeriemat is designed to suck up odd socks from the machines and funnel them down to the Bureau, so this way we just get carried along with them.”
It made sense, in an only-in-Eerie kind of way, thought Marshall, as they came to rest ten harrowing minutes later in what appeared to be an Olympic-sized swimming pool two-thirds full with various types of hosiery.
“That’s why there’s no map,” said Simon, emerging from beneath a pile of hockey socks. “It’s basically an enclosed helter-skelter once you make that first left inside the dryers.”
“At least everything’s freshly washed before it ends up here,” said Mars, and the two of them shared a brief, horrified shudder at the image of falling face-down into a pile of unwashed lost socks.
“Your little Hardy Boys Adventure Diary never said anything about this place.” Dash’s voice was slightly muffled as he pulled his sock-appliquéd sweatshirt off over his head. He tossed it to Simon, who shoved it back into his backpack for safekeeping. “How many times have you two been here?”
“Just the once,” said Mars, while at the same time Simon said, “Seventeen.” When Mars looked at him, he flushed and glanced away.
“You were in New Jersey over the summer,” he said quietly.
“Oh,” said Mars. He cast about desperately for a better response, but came up blank.
There was an acutely uncomfortable silence, during which a shower of pastel-coloured baby socks fell from the opening in the ceiling and landed with a soft patter in the centre of the pool.
“There’s a ladder over by the far wall,” said Simon, and head down, he surged forward with long, gliding steps. The other two followed with rather more difficulty, stumbling when their feet snagged on particularly mischievous nylon stockings lurking beneath the surface of the sock mountain.
Part Five
As well as the sock-shirts, as Simon insisted on calling them, the boys had brought a Polaroid camera, several spare rolls of film, the half-filled notebook that would someday very soon evolve into a filing cabinet filled with official-looking files containing Vital Scientific Discoveries, various sandwiches although definitely not bologna, sticking plasters, (Marshall’s mother had been insistent on this point) various pens and pencils, and a large blank sketchpad. Next time someone decided to snoop through their files (which they would definitely have, next time, probably in a filing cabinet with a lock purely to frustrate any potential nosy parkers), there would be no jeering comments about the lack of maps to hidden underground storage depots.
Marshall examined his handiwork. After the Pool of the Lost Socks had been the Cavern of Missing Pieces From Silver Dinner Sets Given As Wedding Presents (DO NOT FALL DOWN!!! was written in black felt pen across this section, slightly smudged where he’d bled even after the application of three band-aids) and further on was the unbelievably creepy Island of Forgotten Childhood Toys (“It’s not even an island,” Dash had said, apparently ignorant of the time-honoured tradition of the map-maker getting to Choose Place Names and everyone along for the ride getting to Shut Their Traps). There were shelves that went higher than you could see, stacked with mismatched shoes and huge glass jars full of ballpoint pen caps and row after row of taxidermy animals, which strangely still didn’t manage to be as creepy as their cuddly, child-friendly counterparts three rooms over.
Simon was taking pictures as they went, each one carefully labelled when fully dry to correspond with Mars’ map. Dash wandered aimlessly between the shelves, staring up at all the misappropriated detritus of humanity and most likely pocketing anything that took his fancy. While Mars and Simon sketched and photographed, he walked on ahead, pausing occasionally to glance at a label or the contents of a display before moving away again.
“Teller.”
Mars was lying flat on his back staring at the ceiling – or rather where he knew the ceiling must be, high above him. He was trying to find an outline of the room, something that would help him map out the maze of shelving and crates at ground level.
“Teller.”
“What?”
“How big is this place?”
Marshall sat up. The strange half-light that seemed to emanate from around eight feet up the walls messed with his sense of perspective and cast everything more than two feet above his head into indistinct shadows.
“I don’t know. Maybe as big as all of Indiana.”
Dash sat on the ground next to him. At some point he’d picked up a stuffed Jackalope head, and he turned it restlessly in his hands, staring at it as if it contained some great secret it refused to divulge. Which, thought Mars, was not completely outside the realm of possibility.
Simon joined them, spreading a fresh set of Polaroids on the ground before him, the first vague shapes starting to appear through the grey film.
“Why did you want to come down here?” Mars asked.
Dash shrugged. “It’s the Bureau of the Lost, right? I lost my whole past. Seemed like a good place to start.”
“But this stuff here, it’s junk. It’s just tchotchkes. People lose stuff, they replace it by buying more stuff, and the economy keeps going. Memories, your family, your name – you’re not going to find it in a giant mason jar on some warehouse shelf.”
“What about the card catalogue?” said Simon.
“What about it?”
“Like you said, we have no way of knowing how big this place is. We could wander around here for years and not find anything useful. But if we use the card catalogue, we could just look up what we need and head straight for it.”
“Yeah,” Dash brightened. “Yeah! In fact, didn’t you say there were claws that retrieved whatever you were looking for? That’s how that old guy got your old man’s briefcase back.”
“Yeah, there was a code at the bottom of the card. He typed it in and one of those claws just dropped it right on the desk in front of him.”
“Alright.” Dash was already on his feet, impatient to be moving again. “So where is it?”
“It’s, um.” Simon looked crestfallen. “It’s by the front desk.”
“Which is manned.”
“Yeah.”
Dash shrugged. “You said it was just the one old guy, right? So when we get there, you two distract him while I look around.”
Mars and Simon exchanged dubious looks.
“How about you distract him while we look around?” suggested Mars.
“Because I don’t trust you not to screw it up.”
“You don’t… we never… when have we ever screwed up anything? If anything, you’re the one screwing things up for us!”
“The first time I met you, I got tied up and heckled by some crazy Wild West ghost.”
“Who you set free!”
“And then I had to save you from a life of crime.”
“Which was forced on me. By a ghost. That you set free!”
“I helped out when The Donald wanted to steal everyone’s soul.”
“You helped him get them in the first place!”
“I stopped that ninja grandma from scrambling your brains.”
“We wouldn’t have been anywhere near her if it wasn’t for you!”
“I helped save Simon from freezing to death on an alien planet.”
“You were the reason he got stuck there in the first place! And afterwards you didn’t even help, my dad had to rescue him with a giant remote control.”
“I…” there was a slight hesitation, then: “I stopped you from getting eaten by a werewolf!”
“...okay, fine, that one time you did actually help.” And didn’t it figure, thought Mars, that Dash would look guiltier over that one good deed than he had over any of his troublemaking.
“Good.”
“Okay then.”
“Do either of you know how to use a card catalogue?” asked Simon. When the chagrined
looks on both faces gave him the answer, he sighed. “Then maybe you two should do the distracting and I’ll do the looking.” He tore two blank pages out of the notebook and held them out. “Write down any search terms you think I should be using.”
Part Six
The reception area for the Bureau of the Lost looked deserted. The old-fashioned radio microphone lay on its side, half-buried beneath a sheaf of computer print-outs showing what looked like piecharts. There were moisture rings all over the glossy wooden surface of the front counter, and instead of the comfortable high-backed chair that had sat behind it the last time Mars had been there, there were three cheap office chairs in utilitarian grey jumbled haphazardly in the corner. Drifts of fast food wrappers and discarded paper cups occupied the corners of the room, and there was a fine layer of dust on everything.
“You two keep watch,” said Simon, and dragged the kick stool over to the nearest cabinet full of tiny wooden drawers. Marshall regarded them enviously. One day, he thought, I will have a cabinet like this, full of tiny little drawers containing thousands of tiny little cards that will relate to all the many and respected articles I’ll have written about my research into the Parabelievable.
At which point, the Reject alarm started shrieking.
I might carry on with this, in which case I'm going to need a beta to tell me when I start to suck beyond all reason and generally do all the hard work while I take all the credit. Volunteers? Anyone? Bueller?
“How did you get in here? And who said you could look through my files?”
Even with Dash keeping his back to him, Mars could tell Dash had just rolled his eyes.
“You don’t have ‘files’, Teller,” he said, not even bothering to turn around. “You have a single composition book that your mom bought you from the bargain bin at the World o’ Stuff.”
“So you figured you’d just let yourself in and go through it?”
Dash turned a page, managing to make the tiny movement into a calculated insult.
“Actually your sister let me in, but other than that? Yeah, pretty much.”
Marshall made a wild grab for the notebook, but Dash somehow contrived to shoulder-block him and kept it out of his clutching hands.
Simon, watching the little tableau from the top of the stairwell that lead up to the Secret Spot, (not, he thought, that it could really be called that if Syndi was giving access to anyone who asked) tried to decide whether it was worth trying to head off a full-fledged brawl before it developed or if he’d be better off giving up and downstairs to eat cookies and watch WERD TV with the rest of the Tellers. As the level of noise and invective increased, he came to the conclusion that friendship should come first over homemade baked goodies, but it was a close-won thing.
“What are you looking for, Dash?”
Dash looked over at him, and Mars took advantage of the momentary distraction to snatch his notebook back. Dash sneered at him, but quickly turned his attention back to Simon.
“You two write down all your little “weirdness investigating” adventures in there, right?”
“Right,” said Simon, then immediately wished he hadn’t when Mars shot him a poisonous glare.
“What’s it to you?” Mars demanded.
Dash slouched back against the Evidence Locker, accidently-on-purpose knocking over a neat row of painstakingly-labelled artefacts from various afore-mentioned “adventures”. Marshal bristled.
“Okay, Einstein, try to follow along. When Ned left, the Loyal Order of Corn became just a bunch of old guys in stupid hats drinking Cornade behind the backs of their wives and bitching about their asshole bosses. The tachyon portal is just a busted TV now and the cupboard with my marks disappeared, probably right when he did.”
“So?”
“So, it’s a dead end. Meanwhile, you two Goonie rejects are wandering around Eerie taking photographs of all kinds of random crap and writing it all down and who knows what any of it really means? Not you two jokers, that’s for damn sure.”
“But you do?” Marshall didn’t even try to hide the undertone of hostility in his voice.
“Well, no, but-” They waited, but Dash seemed unwilling or unable to finish his sentence. The silence grew longer, and profoundly uncomfortable, until finally, grudgingly, Marshall gave ground.
“You can’t take our records.” Dash opened his mouth, and Mars knew that whatever came out would be some snide comment about “records” and “notebook” and would quite possibly involve the phrase “delusions of grandeur” at some point, and rushed on. “But we’ll photocopy them for you. Everything we have. And you can take those.”
“Fine,” said Dash, and Mars felt like ripping the pages out and throwing them out of the window, making the ungrateful bastard chase them down the street. Unfortunately, the attic window had been painted shut years before the Tellers had moved to Eerie, so he had to settle for a sarcastic “You’re welcome” instead.
“We can use the photocopier at the library,” said Simon. “They’re open late tonight, and I need to return those books on the Bermuda Triangle soon anyway.”
After they’d all said goodbye to Marshall’s parents and Mars had promised to be home “no later than nine,” the three of them walked to the library in near-silence. Mars clutched the reassuring shape of his notebook inside his jacket pocket, and promised himself that the next time, he would be in charge of the stationary shopping and then he would have a whole stack of files, probably with little plastic file tags, colour-coded according to different kinds of monsters and assorted weirdness.
At the library, Simon and Marshall went inside, where a harridan with two inch-long talons painted candy-floss pink walked them through the intricacies of an out-dated photocopier only marginally more decrepit than she was herself. By the time they emerged, dusk had fallen and the streetlights were slowly coming to life.
Dash X stood where they had left him, leaning against the wrought-iron balustrade by the library steps, looking as sullen and black-clad as any other small-town teenager with a name and a home and a family. He straightened a little as they approached, and his eyes were fixed on the sheaf of neatly collated sheets of A4 in Marshall’s hand.
Mars handed them over with an obvious and ill-concealed reluctance and Dash responded in kind with one of his best condescending sneers, but he folded them in half carefully and zipped them into an inner pocket of his oversized greatcoat.
“So,” said Mars.
“See you in the next life,” said Dash, and he was ‘round the corner and out of sight before Mars could think of a suitable response.
“What does that mean?” asked Simon.
“What?”
“See you in the next life. What’s it mean?”
Mars shrugged. “I guess it’s just a thing people say.”
“Oh. Mars?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think it’ll help? Our notes, I mean.”
Mars shrugged.
“’Cause Dash seemed to think it would. You know. Help.”
“I guess.”
“I guess it wouldn’t hurt, anyway.”
Mars looked at his friend from the corner of his eye. Six months on, he still hadn’t figured out what to tell Simon about the day they’d gone to see Revenge of the Corn Critters with his family. Werewolves and mummies and ghosts were all well and good, but explaining to a nine-year-old that a collision between two conflicting realities had almost resulted in his best friend being gruesomely murdered in order to boost ratings on a failing TV show? That was a little outside Marshall’s area of expertise.
“Teller.”
On the steps of BF Skinner Junior High, Mars watched his classmates pile into yellow buses that would carry them away from school and deposit them safely outside the relative freedom of ‘home’.
“What.”
If Dash heard the gritted teeth behind the word, he didn’t let it show.
“Where’s your sidekick?”
“Probably already on the bus.” He gestured, and as if responding to his cue, the long line of buses in front of the school started to pull away.
Mars ground his teeth. Trapped with bored students in a stuffy classroom with windows that refused to open more than a couple of inches, Miss Lee had retaliated by torturing her class under the guise of teaching them the many and varied joys of Shakespearean “comedy” Much Ado About Nothing. The agony had lasted two hours, seven long minutes of which had been after the bell had rung to signal the end of the school day. Mars couldn’t prove it, but he was pretty sure that the entire nineteenth century had passed faster than those seven minutes.
“Looks like it’s leaving without you.”
Mars debated making a run for it, balanced the possibility that he would make it against the chance that he wouldn’t, and on factoring in the absolute certainty that if he ran and failed to make it, Dash would take the opportunity to mock him for however long it took to walk the four-and-a-quarter miles back home, decided to give it up as a lost cause.
“What do you want, Dash?”
“Aren’t you going to run after it?”
“What do you want.”
“I bet you could make it.”
“What do you want.”
“Quick, run or you’ll be too l-”
“What. Do. You. Want. Dash.”
Dash threw up his hands in mock-surrender. “Fine, just trying to help. I need to talk to your little buddy.”
“He isn’t here.”
“I can see that. Where can I find him?”
“At home.”
Dash sighed. “Which is where, Slick?”
“Next to my house.” Mars gave him a disbelieving stare. “How is it you can find my house and talk your way past my sister but you don’t know where Simon lives even though his family shares a property line with mine?”
“I don’t know, Boy Genius, I guess he rudely forgot to invite me in for a round of Parcheesi with him and his folks. Maybe your lovely sister could talk to him about being a more gracious host.”
Mars swung his backpack over both shoulders and set off towards home. A moment later and the crunch of heavy boot treads on gravel told him that yes, Dash was following him.
“What do you want Simon for anyway?”
“To show me how the Eeriemat works.”
“You put in coins, you get out clean clothes. Even you should be able to figure that out.”
“Comedy genius, Teller. Really. I want to get into the Bureau of the Lost.”
“I could show you that,” Mars said, and then immediately wished he could rephrase it so it sounded more like, “I don’t trust you around a little kid because you’re a selfish, amoral bastard who would leave him hanging if you thought it would help you get away clean” and less like “Why do you want Simon along with you and not me?”
“Well, if either of you child prodigies had thought to include a map, or even directions, in your oh-so-detailed accounts of boldly going where only the homeless insane have gone before, I wouldn’t need a guide, but since you didn’t, I do, and I want the one who’s gone down and come up the same way to show me.” Dash paused, and hen, with an off-handedness so perfectly executed that it could only have been the result of long hours practicing the art of the off-the-cuff insult, added, “But I guess you could tag along with us, if you wanted.”
Mars ground his teeth, wishing for the first time since the mysterious disappearance of Steve Konkolewski that he had a tape player like his sisters’. He could always leave the batteries out, so as to convince the dogs that he was harmless, and it would give him the perfect excuse to avoid talking to people who showed up outside his school with the sole purpose of annoying him.
“Mars?” Marilyn Teller frowned at her son across the dinner table. “Honey?”
“Sorry Mom, what did you say?”
“I just asked if you were feeling okay. You’ve been so quiet tonight. Something you want to talk about?”
Growing up, there are a lot of things it’s uncomfortable to discuss with your parents. It’s practically impossible, for example, to ask their advice on something when even a brief précis of the problem involves massive reality warps, firearms, labyrinthine tunnels under your hometown that terminate in tumble-dryers, and a massive underground warehouse where the misappropriated bric-a-brac for the entire United States of America is catalogued, tagged, and stacked away for no purpose other than to keep the economy running. In fact, doing so is likely to result in them throwing around words like “straitjacket”, “padded cell” and “syringe”, and really the situation can only deteriorate from there.
“I’m fine,” said Mars, forcing a smile. “Just some tough homework, that’s all.”
“Can we help?” Edgar chimed in from the head of the table. Even Syndi was feigning mild concern at him over the condiments tray.
“I’m going to give it a go on my own,” Mars said. “But maybe you guys could take a look at it after?”
Great, he thought as his parents exchanged proud looks. Now not only do I have to suffer through Miss Lee’s homework assignment, I get to relive the nightmare in front of Mom and Dad too.
Saturday morning found Marshall leaning against the plate-glass windows of the Eeriemat, trying unsuccessfully to find a spot beneath the awning that wasn’t designed deliberately to concentrate the thin drizzle into a heavy splatter and then drop it down his neck.
“Morning, Mars.”
“Hi,” he waved at Simon and scooted over to make room under the malevolent awning. “Did Dash-”
“Why are you two sitting outside?” The glass door opened, and a gust of warm, detergent-scented air swirled out into the rainy morning to be instantly swallowed by the grey drizzle. Dash propped the door open with one arm and make impatient hurry-up gestures with the other. “And who said you were coming anyway, Teller?”
“Who said you get a vote?” Marshall countered. “You’re not even on the team, we’re just bringing you along as a favour.”
“A favour, right. Picking me over all your many other friends who you would otherwise be hanging out with.”
Looking away, watching the groups of early-morning launderers, Simon permitted himself a small, almost silent sigh before slipping between Old Elvis (picking up his dry-clean-only white bell-bottoms) and an elderly but remarkably spry woman dropping off a pile of somewhat dated aviation jumpsuits to be pressed. The two older boys followed him, keeping up a barrage of sotto voce insults that lasted until they reached the chattering crowd of Foreverware ladies, whose noise made any sniping not done by semaphore fairly pointless.
At last they rounded the corner and passed Washers Six, 6 and Seis, where the Strait Jacket Lady stood adding cup after cup of high-grade stain remover to her laundry in complete silence. There was the dusty magazine rack with its stock of yellowing, tape-repaired comic books and behind that, their drums empty and their doors hanging slightly ajar, were Dryers Seven and Eight. The harsh orange florescent bulb overhead flickered, sending jagged shards of sickly light rolling across the greasy sheen of the tiled floor.
“Take these,” said Simon, pulling two shapeless bundles of indeterminate colour from his backpack and handing them over. On closer inspection, they revealed themselves as oversized sweatshirts onto which a great many mismatched socks had been inexpertly stitched. “It helps you get through the tunnels without coming out the “Reject” chute next to the front desk,” he explained. “The Eeriemat is designed to suck up odd socks from the machines and funnel them down to the Bureau, so this way we just get carried along with them.”
It made sense, in an only-in-Eerie kind of way, thought Marshall, as they came to rest ten harrowing minutes later in what appeared to be an Olympic-sized swimming pool two-thirds full with various types of hosiery.
“That’s why there’s no map,” said Simon, emerging from beneath a pile of hockey socks. “It’s basically an enclosed helter-skelter once you make that first left inside the dryers.”
“At least everything’s freshly washed before it ends up here,” said Mars, and the two of them shared a brief, horrified shudder at the image of falling face-down into a pile of unwashed lost socks.
“Your little Hardy Boys Adventure Diary never said anything about this place.” Dash’s voice was slightly muffled as he pulled his sock-appliquéd sweatshirt off over his head. He tossed it to Simon, who shoved it back into his backpack for safekeeping. “How many times have you two been here?”
“Just the once,” said Mars, while at the same time Simon said, “Seventeen.” When Mars looked at him, he flushed and glanced away.
“You were in New Jersey over the summer,” he said quietly.
“Oh,” said Mars. He cast about desperately for a better response, but came up blank.
There was an acutely uncomfortable silence, during which a shower of pastel-coloured baby socks fell from the opening in the ceiling and landed with a soft patter in the centre of the pool.
“There’s a ladder over by the far wall,” said Simon, and head down, he surged forward with long, gliding steps. The other two followed with rather more difficulty, stumbling when their feet snagged on particularly mischievous nylon stockings lurking beneath the surface of the sock mountain.
As well as the sock-shirts, as Simon insisted on calling them, the boys had brought a Polaroid camera, several spare rolls of film, the half-filled notebook that would someday very soon evolve into a filing cabinet filled with official-looking files containing Vital Scientific Discoveries, various sandwiches although definitely not bologna, sticking plasters, (Marshall’s mother had been insistent on this point) various pens and pencils, and a large blank sketchpad. Next time someone decided to snoop through their files (which they would definitely have, next time, probably in a filing cabinet with a lock purely to frustrate any potential nosy parkers), there would be no jeering comments about the lack of maps to hidden underground storage depots.
Marshall examined his handiwork. After the Pool of the Lost Socks had been the Cavern of Missing Pieces From Silver Dinner Sets Given As Wedding Presents (DO NOT FALL DOWN!!! was written in black felt pen across this section, slightly smudged where he’d bled even after the application of three band-aids) and further on was the unbelievably creepy Island of Forgotten Childhood Toys (“It’s not even an island,” Dash had said, apparently ignorant of the time-honoured tradition of the map-maker getting to Choose Place Names and everyone along for the ride getting to Shut Their Traps). There were shelves that went higher than you could see, stacked with mismatched shoes and huge glass jars full of ballpoint pen caps and row after row of taxidermy animals, which strangely still didn’t manage to be as creepy as their cuddly, child-friendly counterparts three rooms over.
Simon was taking pictures as they went, each one carefully labelled when fully dry to correspond with Mars’ map. Dash wandered aimlessly between the shelves, staring up at all the misappropriated detritus of humanity and most likely pocketing anything that took his fancy. While Mars and Simon sketched and photographed, he walked on ahead, pausing occasionally to glance at a label or the contents of a display before moving away again.
“Teller.”
Mars was lying flat on his back staring at the ceiling – or rather where he knew the ceiling must be, high above him. He was trying to find an outline of the room, something that would help him map out the maze of shelving and crates at ground level.
“Teller.”
“What?”
“How big is this place?”
Marshall sat up. The strange half-light that seemed to emanate from around eight feet up the walls messed with his sense of perspective and cast everything more than two feet above his head into indistinct shadows.
“I don’t know. Maybe as big as all of Indiana.”
Dash sat on the ground next to him. At some point he’d picked up a stuffed Jackalope head, and he turned it restlessly in his hands, staring at it as if it contained some great secret it refused to divulge. Which, thought Mars, was not completely outside the realm of possibility.
Simon joined them, spreading a fresh set of Polaroids on the ground before him, the first vague shapes starting to appear through the grey film.
“Why did you want to come down here?” Mars asked.
Dash shrugged. “It’s the Bureau of the Lost, right? I lost my whole past. Seemed like a good place to start.”
“But this stuff here, it’s junk. It’s just tchotchkes. People lose stuff, they replace it by buying more stuff, and the economy keeps going. Memories, your family, your name – you’re not going to find it in a giant mason jar on some warehouse shelf.”
“What about the card catalogue?” said Simon.
“What about it?”
“Like you said, we have no way of knowing how big this place is. We could wander around here for years and not find anything useful. But if we use the card catalogue, we could just look up what we need and head straight for it.”
“Yeah,” Dash brightened. “Yeah! In fact, didn’t you say there were claws that retrieved whatever you were looking for? That’s how that old guy got your old man’s briefcase back.”
“Yeah, there was a code at the bottom of the card. He typed it in and one of those claws just dropped it right on the desk in front of him.”
“Alright.” Dash was already on his feet, impatient to be moving again. “So where is it?”
“It’s, um.” Simon looked crestfallen. “It’s by the front desk.”
“Which is manned.”
“Yeah.”
Dash shrugged. “You said it was just the one old guy, right? So when we get there, you two distract him while I look around.”
Mars and Simon exchanged dubious looks.
“How about you distract him while we look around?” suggested Mars.
“Because I don’t trust you not to screw it up.”
“You don’t… we never… when have we ever screwed up anything? If anything, you’re the one screwing things up for us!”
“The first time I met you, I got tied up and heckled by some crazy Wild West ghost.”
“Who you set free!”
“And then I had to save you from a life of crime.”
“Which was forced on me. By a ghost. That you set free!”
“I helped out when The Donald wanted to steal everyone’s soul.”
“You helped him get them in the first place!”
“I stopped that ninja grandma from scrambling your brains.”
“We wouldn’t have been anywhere near her if it wasn’t for you!”
“I helped save Simon from freezing to death on an alien planet.”
“You were the reason he got stuck there in the first place! And afterwards you didn’t even help, my dad had to rescue him with a giant remote control.”
“I…” there was a slight hesitation, then: “I stopped you from getting eaten by a werewolf!”
“...okay, fine, that one time you did actually help.” And didn’t it figure, thought Mars, that Dash would look guiltier over that one good deed than he had over any of his troublemaking.
“Good.”
“Okay then.”
“Do either of you know how to use a card catalogue?” asked Simon. When the chagrined
looks on both faces gave him the answer, he sighed. “Then maybe you two should do the distracting and I’ll do the looking.” He tore two blank pages out of the notebook and held them out. “Write down any search terms you think I should be using.”
The reception area for the Bureau of the Lost looked deserted. The old-fashioned radio microphone lay on its side, half-buried beneath a sheaf of computer print-outs showing what looked like piecharts. There were moisture rings all over the glossy wooden surface of the front counter, and instead of the comfortable high-backed chair that had sat behind it the last time Mars had been there, there were three cheap office chairs in utilitarian grey jumbled haphazardly in the corner. Drifts of fast food wrappers and discarded paper cups occupied the corners of the room, and there was a fine layer of dust on everything.
“You two keep watch,” said Simon, and dragged the kick stool over to the nearest cabinet full of tiny wooden drawers. Marshall regarded them enviously. One day, he thought, I will have a cabinet like this, full of tiny little drawers containing thousands of tiny little cards that will relate to all the many and respected articles I’ll have written about my research into the Parabelievable.
At which point, the Reject alarm started shrieking.
I might carry on with this, in which case I'm going to need a beta to tell me when I start to suck beyond all reason and generally do all the hard work while I take all the credit. Volunteers? Anyone? Bueller?
