Work Text:
“If nothing else,” Tim mutters, as the riot van rumbles beneath his feet, “We have established that Jon is the idiot white girl in our horror movie.”
“We’re not in a horror movie,” Sasha mutters back, hands clasped in her lap, eyes on her shoes. “Nobody’s dying at all, let alone first.”
Tim hums, picking at a hangnail.
Perhaps she’s right, he thinks. At least in horror movies, you can see what’s going on.
Even if you don’t like it.
“If you say so,” he shrugs.
The van hits a bump.
He thinks of skin.
The van hits another.
He thinks of brothers.
It hits one more.
He thinks of hitting things.
He tips his head back, closes his eyes, and breathes.
“…audio-drama, maybe?”
***
James.
Blackwood.
Stoker.
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ, how stupid does he think she is?
Look, she – she knows that her look isn’t exactly intellectual. It isn’t meant to be, is it? Exactly how lucrative would it be to look like you know the way round Dewey-bloody-Decimalised shelves, when the day job is more along the lines of mortuary shelves?
Ooh, nothing inspires fear like specs on a chain.
Alright, that’s not fair, maybe for certain groups of people – socioeconomic attainment disparity, systemic class divide, educational justice gap, yadda yadda, yadda yadda, but –
James.
Blackwood.
Stoker.
And good old generic Jonathan Sims.
Whatever spy ring it is the spooks have dancing round the maypole of their Dracula mansion – it must be bent right out of shape.
“Why didn’t you all co-ordinate properly then?” Detective Alice Tonner asks, tapping her biro lackadaisically on the name encased in dubious inverted commas at the top of her notebook.
“I uh… what?” ‘Sims’ asks, squinting at her in that odd, hunched way of his. His arms have migrated to cross over his torso and he’s gripping the folds of his coat (Bear-Grylls-up-Everest-style, pathetic, it’s April for Christ’s sake), like he’s cold. Maybe he is. Since, after all –
Not a meal not a snack barely a bite hardly any blood skinny fingers pathetic toes not worth it not worth it not worth it -
It isn’t right.
She wants him hot under the collar. Sweating. Itching.
“You and your Scooby gang. The rest of them got the classics, your fella’s just about got a Wikipedia page. Lovecraft too problematic? Poe too obvious? Could have got away with Jackson dead easy, but was the alliteration not doing it for you? Creep boss not one for championing female authors?”
“I… I don’t…”
“Thought you liked skulking about in bookshops, or are you changing that bit of the story too? Come on, ‘Sims’, don’t insult me. James. Blackwood. Stoker. MR James. Algernon Blackwood. Bram Stoker. I might not exactly be breaking any Goodreads servers with gold medal speed-reading, but I did go to school and -”
and
and
“next year i’m choosing on your behalf”
“that’s not how birthdays work, daisy”
“rage room? axe throwing? shooting range?”
“busman’s holiday, mate.”
“mate? mate? after what we just did in the cookbooks, you’re going for mate?”
“yeah, alright, alright. you’re the one that wanted to keep this quiet -”
“we agreed -”
“yeah, yeah, i know. but point stands. adrenaline sports are a busman’s holiday. bookshop crawl, on the other hand. serene. wholesome. bloodless.”
“hm. wrong line of work if blood bothers you.”
“…depends whose hands it’s on, i guess.”
“Good lord.”
Okay. Okay, if this bloke does turn out to be real, if he actually talks like that and actually looks like that, Detective Alice Tonner will throw every hat she owns into a great big pot with masses of sugar and reduce them down nice and sticky, slather them on a slice of freshly baked bara brith, no skimping on the sultanas –
“Good lord what, Jeeves?”
“I have never noticed that before…” He barks a strange approximation of a laugh. “There goes the Only Connect application, I suppose.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
He unclenches from his coat to waft a dismissive hand, then wisely and visibly remembers he should probably be scared and returns it to its post.
“Doesn’t matter,” he mumbles, “Just – yes, okay, I grant you. That is indeed an… amusing coincidence. But I swear to you, that is all it is, or at least if it isn’t, I’m every bit as in the dark about it as you are. The universe takes perverse joy in setting up amusement centred around me, I’ll tell you that for nothing, so I really wouldn’t think too hard on it, Detective. Just business as usual if it’s heightening your enthusiasm to kindly relieve me of a tooth or ten.”
He huffs into his defensive armadillo pose, with a juvenile pout that jars against his greying hair. She takes that oxymoronic detail in for the first time and wrinkles her nose. Jesus. He’s just about out of nappies. Puts her weirdly in mind of -
Fitzgerald, there’s another he could have gone for. Benjamin Button isn’t quite horror, but it freaked her out plenty.
“Enthusiasm was high enough already, thanks, but I reckon I’ll go for a softer bit before the teeth. Talking was our agreement remember, and it’ll be far less efficient if you’re spitting out molars.” She glances at the door. “Time to bring Poet’s Corner in, I think. If you move a muscle, I’ll come good on the soft bits.”
“Right…”
“Tongue’s a muscle,” she warns.
His jaw clenches and she smiles, feeling the expression flatten itself shark-like on her face as her hand closes on the door handle.
“…eight muscles actually,” comes a very quiet voice. Her head whips around and Sims is already wincing, but can’t seem to stop himself from blurting, “It’s a muscular hydrostat.”
kill kill kill kill kill kill –
“Lucky you. In that case when you’re done yapping I’ll slice them one by one, all systematic, like. Academic types must love systems.”
Sims’ wince adopts its own wince.
“Thanks for the advice,” she smiles.
He and his reinforced wince nod, flushing red.
She steps out into the corridor and turns to the small waiting area, where Detective Kirk is babysitting the rest of the Scooby gang. At the opening of the door, Blackwood (Yeti) rises from his seat like a jack-in-the-box, James (Owl-Mouse) snaps her head up and Stoker (Curtains) reclined in his chair, opens one eye. Very very slowly.
Huh.
Blackwood, stood to attention with a thunderous frown puncturing his soft face, does a weird little heft of his shoulders, manatee hands in highly unintimidating fists by his thighs.
“What have you done with him?” he demands, in a voice straining valiantly against a stutter.
Beside him, Stoker rises, still languid, still slow. His hands are not in fists, but are somehow far closer to intimidating. His gaze is trapped beneath drooping eyelids, and Detective Tonner is shiveringly, all at once, reminded of fire-safety training. The bit about not going for a handle when you know there’s a fire behind the door. The video plays in sharp contrast in her mind - the glow of the flames at the bottom, licking the underside of the wood. Slow and calm and dangerous.
Again.
Huh.
She forces herself to blink out of her reverie, and sinks into her default smirking demeanour.
“Cool it, big guy,” she addresses Blackwood. Stoker’s hands twitch, but still do not become fists. “Taxi service and a friendly chat, even when it looked for a minute like he might decorate my interiors.”
“Static?” James asks with a frown, rising to join the boys.
“Hm. Which you lot are all going to explain, among other things. File in,” she points at the door, “And you’ll see your pet street-cat without a mark on him. Well. Without a new mark on him.”
They all grimace identically. Ugh. Uncanny. Weird. Uncanny.
James leads the way, and Detective Tonner hears Sims demand, “Are you alright?” before the door is even ajar.
“No complaints whatsoever, except for Jeremy Vine on the radio.” James confirms. “More to the point –”
Blackwood surges forward and cups a hand across Sims’s cheek.
“Are you alright?”
“Fine,” Sims’ raises a hand to squeeze Yeti’s wrist with a soft smile ew ew ew kill kill ew, then guides it down and huffs, “But admittedly pleased of the joyous reunion.”
Silently, Stoker squeezes Sims’s shoulder, just once. Then, he drops into the chair beside him and folds his arms, kicking out his feet and glaring at the chair that Detective Tonner hasn’t even sat in yet. James folds her hands into her lap beside him and Blackwood takes up his place beside Sims, looking for all the world like he wants to scoop him into his lap and squeeze until his eyes pop out. It’d save her a job, she supposes – she did promise about the soft bits.
She moves to the other side of the desk, and settles in beneath Stoker’s roiling gaze. Then, she begins.
“Right. Down to business. This fraying bit of rope here that you lot call a friend, he knew something about me. Something that not many people know, and certainly not something a stranger would know. Not something guessable, not something deducible, not something that the pers – not something that anyone would let slip.” She taps her pen on her notebook to let them digest, then continues. “Happened again in the car. Something else, something specific, something private. Then something confusing. I don’t like confusing. Granted, some of it was the sort of confusing that reminds me why I’ve got the loony bin on speed-dial, but a great deal more was the sort of confusing that – well. Let’s just say I’m not best pleased. And when I’m not best pleased, people in the vicinity who know what’s good for them start turning their heads away. Unless I want them to talk. I want you to talk. So - crack on, unless you’d like to hear about what happens to people who don’t know what’s good for them.”
They don’t crack on.
Blackwood squirms. James squeezes her hands together. Stoker glares.
Finally, tentatively, James says, “…Jon?”
Sims nods slowly, and lifts his gaze to meet Detective Tonner’s.
“You’ve… had dealings with the Magnus Institute, yes?”
Detective Tonner narrows her eyes.
“It’s me doing the questions.”
“I need to know how much context to give. If you’d like me to begin with the year is 1818 I most certainly can, but I get the impression that might not end terribly well.”
Kill kill kill.
She sighs.
“Dealings with is a bit of a strong way to put it. Tangentially. Some of the more metaphysically creative cases I’ve worked on have brushed shoulders with the place. There was talk for a bit of wrapping it up in policy to refer people who had… odd experiences there for a bit of catharsis, but that fell by the wayside after someone ran some numbers and started tallying up pathways from us, to you, to disappearance. Came back high. It was strictly back to the good old NHS after that, off you pop to spill your guts to a chatbot.”
Blackwood grimaces knowingly.
“But you are aware of the work that is done there?”
“The ‘work’” she smirks, hoping there isn’t any sort of ration on inverted commas. “Yes, I’m aware of the Goosebumps monologues and the Ghostbusters excursions and the red string boards. You got one of those? You look like you should have.”
“He doesn’t,” James mutters miserably.
“Well,” Sims swallows. “One of the… Goosebumps monologues… the statements… that the Institute holds, concerns an experience I had as a child. It’s not my statement; it’s the account of somebody who witnessed the event. I didn’t even know it existed until – I’ll get to that. But essentially, the experience described left me significantly incapacitated in ways that nobody was quite sure how to deal with. How I was eventually dealt with was, shall we say, heavy-handedly. I was consequently left with some substantial gaps in my memory. But – it was fine, I was doing fine. I’d managed to carve out something like a life for myself, where it didn’t matter if I didn’t remember or understand. Until… I started work at the Magnus Institute.”
He draws that great big coat impossibly tighter around himself.
“Something started rushing in to fill the gaps. At first, I thought it was just migraines, this sort of… crackling fuzziness that would come and go, but then I realised –” His gaze darts to James for just a second and shit, what an expression – is that grief? It smooths away quickly and he coughs a very small cough in the back of his throat. “There was a consistency to it. People… places… there were things that I… expected to happen for no reason, no reason at all, I – I found myself assigning reactions to people pre-emptively, based on some sort of context that I knew I had, but not from memory, from something carved deeper than –” he takes a breath. “It was in the…”
“The static?” Detective Tonner asks, sceptical and grave.
He nods.
“It’s not… I can’t see things in it, not exactly. It’s déjà vu. It’s not déjà vu. It’s information. It’s useless. It hurts. It’s nonsense. It’s –”
“It told you about me?” she raises her eyebrows.
“Yes. But not just told me, it… my body… remembered something, I -” he groans, and tangles his fingers through his bird’s nest hair. “You hurt me, Detective Tonner. Past and present tense. I can feel it in the static and I can feel it right now, but the way you hurt me was not straightforward. The pain of whatever you did is searing but so much worse, so much worse is that there was so much dirt in my hair and you got it out.”
Kill kill kill don’t understand kill kill kill kill –
Detective Tonner takes a steadying breath.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t – literally. I mean it literally. I’m no poet, Detective, quite the opposite in fact. There’s no metaphor being employed here. I don’t remember it, I don’t remember you, but the bathroom should have been too small. It was a single stall bathroom, probably a cupboard at some point, and it should have been too small. I do not remember this. I do not remember you. The bathroom should have been too small, but it wasn’t because we were too small. Both of us were just reams of skin hanging off skeletons and we both fit, and we didn’t mind how close we had to be, because we were used to things closing in on us and at least we were not alone. I do not remember this, but my hair was clogged with dirt, unsalvageable, and the thought made me sick. I had lost enough already, that I do not remember, and the thought of losing one more thing almost made me break, but it didn’t because you did the impossible. You could barely lift your arms but it didn’t matter because I could barely lift my head, and we were on the floor of a cupboard like things abandoned and left to rot and you got the dirt out of my hair. I do not remember this, but you were silent while you did it, you were silent while you salvaged the unsalvageable. You were not silent while you did the thing that makes my leg hurt and you were not silent while you slit my throat and – oh -”
His hand flies up to his neck, where a thin white line cuts a bleach-burn creek across his throat.
Detective Tonner is silent, and still.
Jonathan Sims’ face screws up in pain and he laughs.
“Oh, that one was you, was it? That’s –” he sits up ramrod straight and grasps Blackwood’s forearm, eyes blazing, “An answer, Martin a… well it’s not, it’s nothing like an answer but… that’s a… a specific, that’s the first… it was…”
“It was her?” Stoker asks, flat as a scalpel.
Sims whips around to face Stoker.
“She did that? She hurt you?”
“I…” Sims shakes his head slowly. “No. No, not… not this one. Not… I don’t… Tim… we don’t know what any of this means, we don’t -”
“I’ll just say it, shall I? Since we all appear to be beating around the bush?” James pipes up, nonchalantly placing a placating hand on Stoker’s thigh. Nobody answers. “Parallel universe. Parallel universe Detective Tonner hurt him.”
Sims blinks.
“I mean, I… I suppose that’s looking like the shape of it.”
Five deeply exhausted bodies sit and breathe with that for a moment. Then Sims whispers, “She also cut dirt out of my hair.”
“I didn’t…” Detective Tonner whispers back, “I didn’t but you… you knew my name, and you knew… other stuff, and there’s no way -”
She shakes her head violently, then in a jerky movement, gestures to his neck.
“You must know how you got it. Or was that one of the bits that was…”
“Cut out…” he finishes faintly. Then, he shakes his head, scattered cognition gathering itself into a knot in the centre of his forehead. “No. No not exactly, not… The thing that happened to me. The thing that’s in the statement. It concerns the scars. It concerns how I got them. And how I got them, is fully formed, fully healed, and all at once. So the injuries that caused them, must have happened…”
“Somewhere else?”
He flinches like he’s been struck, and his gaze snaps back to Blackwood.
“Yes,” he breathes, eyes suddenly glassing over. Blackwood stares back, reverent and worried. “Somewhere else…”
“Jon?”
“Somewhere else…”
Christ.
Detective Tonner has had enough of this. After this she’s going to park up by some woodland, not that woodland, some other woodland, some woodland that does not know her name, and she’s going to run and run and run until her lungs bleed, and she’s going to scream and scream and scream until the wind itself knows she’s fucking coming for it -
“So the statement?” she blurts. “You said you’d get back to that.”
Sims is still looking at Blackwood. He’s slipping, getting lost somewhere. Detective Tonner slaps the desk and he flinches out of his trance.
“Oi. Sims. Statement.”
He swallows thickly and nods, letting go of Blackwood’s arm. Blackwood’s fingers drift after the lost contact helplessly, then fall into his lap.
“I decided I was tired of fumbling around in the dark,” Sims says, voice sounding a lot more like it’s been dragged over rocks. “I wanted to investigate and to understand what was happening to me, what had happened to me. And as soon as I made that decision, the statement arrived on my doorstep. Statement of PC Lillian Westbrook, regarding the sudden manifestation of injuries on a young witness, and his subsequent admittance to the Royal Bournemouth Hospital. Statement given November 15th, 1995.”
“How do you remember that word-for-word?”
“Probably highly suspicious and metaphysically creative reasons, Detective Tonner. Do keep up.”
Kill kill.
He sighs heavily and pinches his forehead.
“So someone at the Institute knows what you’re doing and wants to, what? Help?”
“Help, frighten, intimidate, lead up the garden path – take your pick. We’re not optimistic, frankly.” Sims’s eyes darken. “But someone is watching. Someone knows things. Something is wrong.”
Detective Tonner nods slowly.
“It your spook boss?”
“That is the current working hypothesis, yes,” Sims nods wearily, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“But you don’t know?”
Sims shakes his head. “And let me tell you, not knowing what you don’t know is a horribly recursive loop.”
Silence falls again.
As almost against her will, Detective Tonner makes a decision.
“Okay. The parallel universe stuff is clearly bullshit. But my tangential dealings with the Magnus Institute have taught me something. Bullshit can be dangerous sometimes. Bullshit can be true sometimes. And you know what else can happen with bullshit? You can drown in it, and it’s a fucking grim way to go. So I want in. If there’s some sort of eye-in-the-sky that nebulously knows things, and I’m caught up in those things, I want to know what that means. You lot are going to help with that. I want access. Updates. Intel on spook boss. Information. The works.”
“And if we refuse?” James asks, owl eyes probing beneath thick frames.
Detective Tonner shrugs.
“I kill you. Eye-in-the-sky knows one more thing and I go about it my own way. Which at a guess, has a lot more collateral than your way. Not so much about paperwork me, beyond the fact that in a pinch, paper can cut.”
Christ, Blackwood’s gonna mess himself.
“How visceral,” Stoker glowers dryly.
“What’s it to be?” Detective Tonner asks, raising her eyebrows.
Sims sighs heavily. He looks between his companions. Nobody offers anything. Everyone looks deeply uncomfortable.
Detective Tonner is put in mind of the trolley problem. There stands Sims, gnarled little hands curled around the lever. He pulls it, away from the collateral.
“Well Detective Tonner,” he sighs, “I suppose we are exchanging contact details.”
Detective Tonner nods, mouth flat in the way that merely acknowledges an inevitable conclusion.
“Smart.” She shifts to work her phone out of her pocket. “You got a mobile or does that jar too much with the whole Victorianna aesthetic you’ve got going on?”
He doesn’t respond for a moment, then his eyes do something strange. They go…
Somewhere else.
“There is something to be said for analogue,” he intones, in a voice not entirely his own.
It’s not funny.
It’s not funny at all.
But Sims tips his head back.
And laughs, and laughs, and laughs.