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If Martin were a better poet, he’d have a more novel metaphor to describe Jon’s incessant pacing.
As it was, “caged tiger” would have to do.
He was prowling around the breakroom with his brows furrowed, making frequent huffing noises punctuated liberally with snarls. It probably said something about how sleep deprived Martin was that he began to wonder vaguely if a hollowed-out pumpkin filled with raw mince might calm him down.
Probably not, all the meat statements considered.
The soles of Jon’s shoes slapping on the linoleum floor provided Martin’s soundtrack, alongside the tapping of Sasha’s fingernails on her phone screen, and the residual sounds of squirming worms that echoed in his mind. The shoes shone richly, meticulously buffed, but were scuffed and fraying around the toes, and again – a less sleep deprived Martin would probably be able to find a metaphor in there.
Like –
You preen and polish your hard exterior with such vigour that you unwillingly break the surface, exposing the raw imperfect substance beneath. It is those imperfections, those cracks in the veneer, that expose the painful curve of your spine as you bend backward trying to protect something undefined and unnecessary. Flay the hard leather, let the seams come undone, yield your spine some comfort. It is the you that you expose which is the goodness of the whole, it is the flakes left on the ground that lay a path of where you have come from.
Or something.
Eventually Tim broke the silence.
“Statement of Jane Prentiss.” He’d acquired a tennis ball seemingly from thin air and was throwing and catching it with one hand. “Would you still love me if I was a worm?”
Sasha, tapping on her phone, snorted.
“Jane Prentiss herself is not a worm,” Jon told his shoes gravely, “She is a hive for many, many twisting, turning, gnawing, biting, macabre exaggerations of what we know as worms, all out for blood, all out to mark, all out to bite.”
“It’s a –“
“You can’t go making meme references to poor Jon,” Sasha scolded. “You’ll give him an anxiety attack.”
“Poor Jon has been having an anxiety attack since the year 1995,” Jon muttered, bringing his thumb to his lips to gnaw at the nail.
“What?”
“Nothing. And I know it’s a meme. Came across it after that dead-end statement about the supposedly haunted Twitter account.” That had been a harrowing week. Not supernatural in the end, but nonetheless disturbing. The poor statement-giver had accidentally followed Jedward.
“I remember,” Tim shuddered, and threw and caught the ball one more time. Then, he pointed to the table. “What’s that?”
“Putting me firmly on edge is what it is,” Jon said bitterly. He made another tiger snarl and pivoted to loom over it. “It was delivered this morning. By Breekon and Hope Deliveries.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Oh, shit,” Sasha agreed grimly, still tapping incessantly on her phone. These youths and their devices Jon – five years Sasha’s junior – thought exasperatedly. The sound was giving him a headache.
“What are you even doing on that thing?” he snapped.
“Brushing up on Aztec architecture,” she replied, a mere 5000 points from her Temple Run high score. Without looking, she crushed a worm underfoot, and grimaced.
“Oh.” Jon briefly leafed through the Rolodex of statements he kept in his mind, at the expense of information such as how to operate a microwave oven. “For the… Rifkind statement, 0054609? With the pottery?”
“Sure. Why not,” she smiled, as a small burst of confetti exploded across her screen.
Jon consistently admired Sasha’s diligence.
“Breekon and Hope? They’re the evil Chuckle Brothers, right?” Martin asked, standing to peer at the brown package on the table.
Jon rolled his eyes.
“If you mean that they consistently appear in statements pertaining to very wrong objects, then yes Martin, they’re the evil Chuckle Brothers.”
“To me, to you,” Martin said quietly, poking the bunched-up paper.
“To artefact storage, to artefact storage,” Sasha advised, swiftly sweeping the object away from Martin’s curious fingers. “Creepy parcels not to be messed with.”
“Fuck that,” Tim scoffed, appearing from thin air to elbow past her and rip the paper off.
“Tim –“ she began to protest, but it died quickly in her throat. She put her fingertips to her temple.
Beneath the paper were two mockeries of the human form, bulbous and disfigured as though amalgamated from a thousand half-formed things. Their surfaces were rough and mottled, in places sharp and jagged and in others swollen and round. Ink-black shiny protrusions gave the impression of eyes, but not of eyes that wished to see anything so frivolous as the tangible world.
Jon regarded them, deeply unsettled.
Tim, on the other hand, picked them up immediately without an ounce of trepidation on his face.
“What do you think they’re meant to be?” He touched the two headlike protrusions together. “And do you think they explored each other’s bodies?”
Sasha let out an upset whine.
“I think they’re meant to be in artefact storage in a nice lead lined box,” Jon replied flatly, pointedly ignoring the second half of the question. As though handling a live bomb, he gently removed the statues from Tim’s hands and laid them back in the paper. “I’ll take them up now.”
“Ooh, can I come? I hate artefact storage, but it’d be the most travelling I’ve done in about a month.” Sasha’s voice was a mass of glum, painted with a spattering of desperate, desperate optimism.
“It’s hardly a road-trip, I’m not going to leave the building,” Jon murmured with a roll of his eyes, uneasily nestling one of the statue’s leg-like appendages in paper. “And there won’t be any fewer worms there than here, if the bollocking I got from Sonja last week is anything to go by. As though I’m breeding them.”
“I’ll come too,” Tim said, raising his hand like a schoolboy. “I went to Big Tesco on Tuesday and it was the highlight of my week.”
“To be fair, that is a treat,” Martin piped up.
Jon - whose sustenance came mostly from Tim stuffing chocolate Hobnobs into his mouth when he felt he needed to be efficiently shut up and thus did not tend to frequent supermarkets - furrowed his brow questioningly.
“It has a travellator,” Martin clarified.
Tim clicked his fingers and pointed at Martin, nodding in confirmation.
“I didn’t actually say yes to Sasha –“
“Martin’s coming too. I harbour dreams of us becoming the Scooby Doo Mystery Gang. I’m Daphne,” Tim proclaimed, jutting out a hip. “Jon’s Velma, secretly sexy.”
Martin went very red, which Sasha dutifully ignored and proested, “The Mystery Gang always split up.”
“And how did that work out for them?”
She shrugged, conceding.
“I got snacks at Big Tesco by the way,” Tim announced, bounding over to the cupboard over the sink and retrieving a bag, which he rattled tantalisingly. “To make this a proper road-trip.”
“You don’t need snacks, we’ll be quarter of an hour at most.”
Tim didn’t comment on the progression to “we” and “will” but felt a smug glow expand in his chest.
“Jon, you are going to be begging for my snacks in five minutes and I shall not be sharing.”
“I will definitively not. Trail mix, really. Artefact storage isn’t a trail, Tim.”
Sasha put her head in her hands, and wondered for the 672nd time how Jon apparently hadn’t ever been instructed to mime brushing his teeth for a man in a white coat.
“I don’t even know why I’m entertaining this. It does not take four people to carry a small parcel up two flights of stairs. How will it look to Elias if it apparently takes the entire archival staff to –“
“I’ve slept seven hours this entire week and my shoes are full of worms. Frankly boss, I am clean out of fucks to give,” Tim replied cheerfully. For reasons beyond Jon’s comprehension, he had also begun to do the macarena.
Jon sighed, and glared at a worm that was performing a tantalising dance out of the bottom of the fridge.
“I must say I sympathise with that. But the truth of the matter is – Tim, I know the macarena requires turning, but I’d appreciate not talking to the back of your head – the truth of the matter is that we are still on his payroll. It is not in our best interest to give him any opportunity to discipline us, especially if we might eventually need leverage to make more… extreme demands.”
“Extreme..?”
“If we need to set fire to any worms.”
“Ah.”
“Elias doesn’t have eyes everywhere Jon,” Martin commented. “And it’d be a bit of a dick move even for him to write us up for all having a slightly unnecessary change of scene.”
He chose not to comment on quite how much of the archives he specifically was seeing at that time. He was still feeling a bit woozy from the dizzying kindness of Jon’s offer to let him stay there, and didn’t want to make it sound like he was in any way ungrateful. But he was beginning to think in shaking cursive and his mouth tasted a bit like paperclips. Breathing some less papery air would be very welcome indeed.
Jon sighed.
“Come on then. If you’re all coming.”
Tim made a noise not unlike one receiving a power up in Mario Kart. Which Jon had never played drunk in his pants at four in the morning after stealing the cardboard policeman from Poundland with Georgie. Never.
“We’re all going on a… summer holiday!” Tim sang, linking arms with Sasha and Martin as Jon carefully picked up the parcel.
The Mystery Gang did not split up to look for clues.