Hill took the card. It was blank. He turned it over twice to make sure. “Um…how?”
Despite everything there was something bizarrely, infectiously compelling about the big, toothy smile that Seb directed at Hill. He winked at him.
“Think about it,” he said. Then he twitched his head around sharply. It took a second, but then the insistent, shrill tone of a fire alarm cut through the air of the room. Seb’s head twisted, lip curled, and he physically grabbed his muzzle in one hand to pull it back down. Between his fingers, he said, “Well, I think that’s our cue, Mr. Rosen. Give my best to Arms.”
It was hard enough to think with the fire alarm scrambling Hill’s brain. The abrupt dismissal left him even more flat-footed, and he gawped at Seb. A snarl pulled Seb’s muzzle tight, and he slapped his hand on the desk.
“Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!” he snapped. The crack of flesh on wood made Hill flinch, but didn’t help him pull together the disparate threads needed tomove.There was too much going on, and itrattledthrough him as he— Mid-panic, Seb suddenly switched to affable as he pushed the plate of cookies forward. “And do feel free to help yourself.”
Hill stared at him. He wished it was that easy, but he was locked down. Locked in. His brain wouldn’t stopscreaming, and his body was stuck in sleep mode. He couldn’t even breathe easily; every breath squeezed through the tight grip on his throat.
Then he realized he already had a cookie in his hand. He could feel the dry, crumbly texture against his fingers and smell the sweetness of it as he pulled it back. It didn’t smell like heartbreak or grief or anything but a cookie.
For a second his jaw ached with the urge to take a bite, just to confirm the content of the confection. He managed to squelch it and grab a napkin to wrap it in as he stood up.
“I’ll think about what you said, but…” Hill stumbled over his own tongue, then looked past Seb’s shoulder at the window.Dudley-in-Death spread out behind the glass, ramshackle and stitched together. It was bigger than the real one…the living world’s one. “My dad. Is he out there?”
Seb just tapped a finger against his wet nose.
“You know how to find out.”
Hill supposed he did. His hand tightened around his contraband, and he felt it break within the flimsy wrapper. Crumbs spilled between his fingers onto the floor. Still on autopilot, he shoved the napkin in his pocket and turned to leave.
“If I were you, I’d not tell Arms about my offer,” Seb said to the tense spot between Hill’s shoulders. “He was bad when he died, and he ain’t got no better.”
Hill nodded his acknowledgement of that without looking around. It was true. Davy was self-interested and amoral, and possibly a contract killer. He hadn’t claimed otherwise, though. That was more than Hill could say of most people in his life.
He let himself out.
The receptionist was on her break.
A jack from the board was plugged into her ear, and she stared with placid amusement at nothing while she ate a sandwich. The fleck of mayo on her painted red lip made Hill’s hand move to his confection-stuffed pocket to check it was still there.
It was safe to assume that all food in the Beyond shared the same quality, as far as being a medium for memory went. That just unlocked a cascade of other questions in Hill’s mind.
Did the memory adhere to the whole food, or could something layered like a sandwich retain different qualities with each slice?
What if someone ate something and halfway through the meal something happened, bad or good? Would the “taste” here change halfway through?
Did someone need toeatthe food in order for it to manifest in the Beyond, or did some of it have the memory of it being made inside?
He was so engrossed in his thoughts, he tripped over something on the ground.
Before he could measure the length of himself, a loop of something warm and firm caught his elbow. He steadied himself and gave the tentacle a distracted pat…until he looked around to see what he’d tripped on and saw another tentacle pull sheepishly out of view. Another rose up in front of him and offered the hoodie he’d lost earlier back, the black fabric slung over the end of the tentacle by the hood.
“They like you,” Davy said from the low-slung steel and leather chair he sprawled in. The lengths of his tentacles were tangled around his feet, some lazily draped over his thigh like a favored pet, while others picked and poked boredly at the carpet or a discarded pen. He pulled a chewed paper stick out of his mouth and tossed it to the tentacles. They tried to catch it, but it fell right through them and landed on the carpet. “They’d have let most people fall.”
One foot was braced on an old, battered-looking duffel on the floor. The other was propped up on the low coffee table, dirt smudged over the December edition of theThings to Do in Dudleymagazine from the Dudley Commerce and Visitors Bureau.
It had a list of local graveyards in it, along with a curated selection of historical untimely deaths in case anyone wanted to risk trying to raise the spirits.
For the first time, Hill wondered if the dead got fed up with that.
“Then why trip me to start with?” he asked as he took his hoodie and shrugged it back on.
Davy reached down to give the tentacle slung over his knee an affectionate slap. “That’s ’cause they’re assholes,” he said. “They are sins, remember?”
He lifted his foot off the table and grabbed the duffel with one hand. It got slung easily over his shoulder as he stood up, with the sort of careless grace Hill was, again, vaguely irritated to realize, came from his body.
