It had been an Oth Meathate original this time, the night watchman heard. ‘The Birds Are Eating Grapes,’ depicting snakenecked hoosers—a chimera of an ibis and a cobra, native to Hell, endemic on Mars—eating human eyeballs out of floating, disembodied hands on the backdrop of a beach. The night watchman had seen a screenshot of it. It didn’t look very good. The appeal, apparently, was that it had been painted with human blood. 

It was worth VOMS in the hundred millions. It vanished right out of the private collection of Davide Justicar—the CEO of Seattle Toothpick and Plasticworks Co—and nobody even saw a thing, but for the security camera that caught the little black cat skulking around the corner, where it couldn’t have possibly gotten. And the card. 

Or so it went. Actually, the night watchman didn’t believe in the card thing; it sounded like something the other watchmen cooked up. Night watchmen loved lying to each other. A keen ability to make shit up was important to the job. The human mind, unattended for eight hours, within those liminal periods, ten to six, traverses strange places. It digs to the depths of boredom and finds, eventually, madness. Unless you just make shit up. He did it frequently himself.

The card had been left inside the glass case, apparently, right where the painting had been. There had been no signs of tampering at all. It had been untouched. The watchman that night didn’t notice its disappearance for almost ten minutes. 

The night watchman spun around to check the glass case behind him. Just in case. 

It was still there. He exhaled. He had never met Lord Sachie Hart, and he had no intention to. The guy was supposed to be a real fuckhead. This was the pinnacle of his collection: a sculpture of a small brass apple, encased in glass, with little concrete worms wrapping all around it. ‘Worm in Apple’ by Dustin Porphyry, some shaman from New York who got his ideas from ghosts. It represented ennui or entropy or something, the night watchman figured. He didn’t care. 

He cared a little about the fact that ‘Worm in Apple’ was alone worth more than his paycheck would ever add up to in over eight-hundred years, but not that much. Can’t dwell on that sort of thing on night shift. Too much time to grow bitter. 

He heard—though this one had a smaller spread, on account of its plain unbelievability, even among night watchmen—that it was one thief, alone. No gang, no group, no nothing. And they actually left two cards, one in Sachie’s own office, announcing their intent to rob him. 

The lights flickered. He sniffed, then sneezed. He turned around once more—instinct, still just instinct. 

It was gone. The case, untouched. 

A tiny red card laid where the sculpture had been. 

The night watchman was standing dead. Dry throat and wide eyes, whole body white. Shaky hands, so shaky he didn’t dare touch the case, for fear he’d knock it over, shatter it. 

He stared into the case, at the card. Red, gold framed. A simple winky face with tiny bat wings for ears. 

I’m sorry but you’ve been GOT by

COUNTESS DRACULA XV

(yes, THAT Dracula <3)

Keep up the good work!

or

Blackcats

Guildenstern could not find it in herself to hate animals. He had a series of fundamental principles that simply disallowed it. They must be respected, he thought, on their own terms, under their own implicit value as living, breathing things, just as he was. They could not be judged by anthropocentric ideas of ethics, or morality, or cruelty. To do so was both unfair and disrespectful. 

But she really did hate the fox. 

‘You fucking dickhead! Why me!’ She clutched the broom and waved it in the air. He had no intent, of course, of actually ever hitting the fox with it; it just seemed important to hold something to wave as he ranted. The fox was already gone, anyhow—she had seen nothing of it but a glimpse of a great red tail vanishing over her fence. ‘I barely have a yard, why don’t you get the fuckin neighbours or something?!’ 

Guildenstern’s yard was a sliver of sad dirt, a table and a plastic chair, and a planter box full of dead vegetation and an ever gaping hole. It was, by mass, more fence than yard. Its true purpose seemed to be to store the household water heater that went out whenever there was a heavy wind. There was barely space back there to lie down.

Nevertheless, Guildenstern had dreams of gardening. Calamansi trees, potatoes, strawberries, spinach, carrots. He had no real experience with gardening, and the fox didn’t help.

It was a huge fox. Guildenstern didn’t realise just how huge of a fox it was. She hadn’t seen that many foxes before. And its eyes would glint yellow in the shadows. It seemed intelligent, and faintly smug; even malicious. 

The doorbell rang. Guildenstern dropped the broom onto the table and rushed into the kitchen, into the office. 

Bill Fearey was a Stumpie with curly brown hair and thick eyebrows and wide, hard eyes she’d stare at you with, until she realised she was staring, at which point they’d dart away. She was from Idaho. 

‘I think it can heal cuts, youknow. Bruises, colds. But I really want it because it’s my grandpa’s head.’ 

Stumpies were folks from the People’s Syncretised Church of the Blood of the Riven Head. It was, as the name suggests, a syncretisation of multiple religious practices (the overly long name came from all the Catholics in it). Foremost in its belief system, however, was Decapitationism. 

Guildenstern knew Decapitationists well. His aunty had been one, though of a variety she had never known specifically. It was a philosophy and magical form with its basis in MD theory. They believed that the human soul was a mass of gases and sugary vapours and that the real seat of the individual ego rested within the Manifold Distinguishment Field produced by a manifold distinguishment gland. It formed a thin film around the consciousness, keeping it from being subsumed into the general noosphere, stopping your ego from melding with your neighbour, with their neighbour, with a goatherd in Tibet. So on. 

The MD gland rested in an obscure nook in the brain, near the brainstem. It was nearly impossible to find, and more impossible to cut out, dissect, without ruining it. Decapitationists found numinous power in the removal of the human head. 

The idea had been bigger on the moon, and was even bigger on Mars. People on Earth were squeamish with that sort of thing. Guildenstern recalled the rubbish vaporiser folk with the shrivelled, pale heads mounted on the tops of their sublimation tanks, their own faces grim and bored, zapping red light from hoselike nozzles that turned piles of garbage into chemical-stinking masses of cut flowers; the huge private offworld shuttles with their heads in clusters under clear globes where the dashboard would have been, morosely chatting to themselves as their collective ego piloted and powered the entire vehicle.

‘Granddad was a saint,’ Guildenstern said, raising his eyebrows. 

Bill grinned and nodded. She had a pleasant smile, though the hard staring made it all come off as somewhat uncanny. 

‘Sick.’ Guildenstern dug through a small pile of Bionicles on her desk (she collected them) for something or other, suddenly realising that he had forgotten what she was looking for in the first place. ‘Ever thought’ve doing it yourself eventually?’ 

‘Oh! Oh. I don’t know. I don’t know if I have the cleanliness for it, youknow? And MD runs thin in our family… I might just dissipate!’ She chuckled to herself. ‘That’s why he was such a surprise!’ 

‘Okay, okay, alright.’ Guildenstern dug her notebook out of the Bionicles. She scratched away in it. ‘So you tracked it all to here, this area, these counties… lost track.’ 

She nodded. 

‘Mind if I ask how you lost it?’ He peered at her over the notebook. 

She shifted in the Ikea chair Guildenstern never figured out how to properly put together (it cre-eeeeked for her). She glared at a spot on the ceiling. 

‘We had a, a fire. Big one. We had to evacuate. And nobody got the head in time. And we knew it wouldn’t be destroyed…’ 

Guildenstern nodded. ‘Take more than a fuckin fire to kill a saint.’ 

‘Yeah. We think someone snatched it from the wreckage. Or—or,’ she leant in and spoke low. ‘We were in a bad spot, youknow? So some’ve us think—my sister thinks—my uncle took it, sold it. To a collector. To put us back on our feet.’ 

Guildenstern’s lips pursed. He shut his eyes and tapped his forehead and was quiet for some time. 

‘Is that bad?’ Bill asked, rapping her knuckles together. 

Guildenstern mumbled and searched for words. ‘It’s fine, itsfine. I was thinking of the, fuckin, nature of it, is all. Sell an object, you’ve done a rite. Exchangement. It’s a simple rite, but it has power, nevertheless, magically, I mean, apophenically. I mean, pattern-wise. The narrativia changes. The whole object is recontextualised. Objects can be many things. You do the rite, it becomes their object, and it isn’t lost, not to them. Can’t find it if it’s not lost…’ 

Bill stared and blinked. 

‘But it’s lost. Well, to you. Objects can be many things. I couldn’t do this for your uncle. But for you… yeah, yeah, no, it’ll be fine.’ 

Guildenstern did not say this aloud; he did not think the client would find it interesting: objects are amorphous. Like humans. Shifting, birthing themselves, endlessly. Existing in an endless queue, with its origins at the very front of the queue (the embalming of the head; the scenting in the flower water, delicately wrapping in treated bandages), to its present at the end (Guildenstern dreamt it vaguely—dark, dusty. No air). The head contained infinite heads; it was all heads simultaneously. Present was made of endless pasts. 

Guildenstern followed the queue. The invisible line. Apophenia directed her. He did not notice the little black cat sitting on the edge of the planter box, peering through the back window, standing up, turning around, slipping over the fence. 

---

The winefields were spreading again, that was the terror. Vine News brought an expert in, a theoretical ethanurgist, a wiry, droopy woman, built like a bunch of clothes drying on a line. She researched the odd, gleaming ethanol of the winefields, what it did to the cells of animals that drank it in their water, what it did to ecosystems. She was quiet and morose. She sat still in her chair. 

Guildenstern did not recall the names of the Vine News reporters. They were identical to her, tiny and bright on Lilah’s phone screen. Man in suit, woman in suit, cleanly cut, well dressed, pressed, fitted, sculpted. 

‘Will this have any effect on the populations of feral dronecows that have been harassing communities around the winefields?’ 

‘Do you foresee this affecting agriculture? Or tourism, even?’ 

‘Do you have any safety suggestions for people in affected areas? Is it true that only a shearing suit’s coldfire can put down a dronecow?’ 

‘Do you think an introduction of military CAOs might be necessary to keep this under control?’ 

‘I know I can’t imagine living near a place like that… ah-hah!’ 

‘And the wine isn’t even all that good!’ 

Roy Butz sipped at a sugary mass of froth that contained, somewhere beneath, a cappuccino. He was fat and pretty, with dark curly hair and bright eyes and soft lashes. His lips looked soft, too. His smile had won small local awards; that he almost never smiled added an aura of mystique to it. He wore a dark green sweater even though it was midday, and quite warm.

‘They’re unbearable.’ 

‘I knowww!’ Lilah exclaimed. ‘Let her friggin talk!’ 

‘Your turn, Butz!’ Bobby Mosek said cheerfully, patting Roy’s shoulder from behind and leaning over the phone, squinting. 

Roy nodded, then quietly shifted back to their table, on which laid their yet ongoing game of Chess 2: The Sequel to Chess. He sat down at it, gazed at Bobby’s side of the board, resting his face on his fists. 

Bobby Mosek was a cackling old man with wrinkles around his eyes and mouth that tightened when he smiled and a crest of strawlike grey hair rising off his head like sublimating gas. His body was all hard angles—his jawline, his knobby elbows—but for his ever-softening belly. He lived peacefully; he was fond of food and drink. His skin was brown but for three fingers along his left hand, which were faintly purple; they were made of CBSF, a kind of algae grown for use in prosthetics. They had a round, soft, grublike quality. He had a gentle air about him, and a soft voice. When he laughed, however, he sounded like a predatory bird. 

He laughed when he saw the Vine News reporters. He laughed frequently. It went like this: 

‘Eaaaa-Ha! Ah-ha! Ah-ha!’ 

He would then wheeze, and continue:

‘Ah-ha! Ah-ha! Why are they harassing this poor woman?’ 

‘Nothing to do with us,’ Guildenstern said quickly. 

‘They found a new ethanol lake in Coltrane County,’ Milkwood said, slapping Bobby’s hot chocolate onto the table. 

‘Just last week! And—weren’t you guys in Coltrane last week, actually?’ Lilah asked. 

‘Nope,’ Guildenstern said. 

‘We saw it,’ Milkwood said, leaning back and puffing smoke into the air. 

Guildenstern ran a hand slowly down his face. 

‘Nothing like a fresh ethanol lake,’ Bobby said fondly. ‘So clean, so sour. You’d almost want to go swimming in it!’ 

‘The alcohol swimming’s poisoned your brain, old man,’ Roy said, tapping Bobby on the back and pointing his thumb at the chessboard. His face was stoic, unmoving. 

Bobby cackled and danced back to their table. 

‘You saw the new lake?’ Roy asked Guildenstern. 

‘We’ve got this new job looking for a shrunken head,’ Guildenstern said. 

Roy’s eyes, for a brief moment, narrowed. ‘So we’re not going to discuss you seeing the new lake?’ 

‘It wasn’t very interesting,’ Guildenstern murmured, trailing off. 

‘One second it wasn’t there, the next it was.’ Milkwood rapped the coffee filter by the handle against the lid of the bin under her counter until the soggy, used coffee grounds fell out. She lifted it back up to the coffee machine, pressed a button to run hot water over it, swirling it around until it was clean. ‘Thinking of it now, well. There really isn’t much to say.’ 

‘It just. Appeared?’ Roy asked, leaning back in his chair. 

Milkwood shrugged. ‘Yeah. Close to the car too. That could’ve been bad. It’s not supposed to use ethanol.’ 

‘But that’s terrifying. They can just do that? You need to… you need to tell someone!’ 

‘Who? Vine News?’ Milkwood said, grinning sardonically. On Lilah’s phone, the snappy-dressed homunculi had moved onto discussing a new facial cream that contained the conceptual essence of a devastating fire that reduced a townhouse to ashes and left a family homeless in Montana in 2215 and was now being sold as a miracle cure for acne, pimples, and other cosmetic flaws, under the guise of presenting news. 

‘Tell us about the head!’ Bobby yelled, suddenly. 

‘It’s this lady’s granddad’s head,’ Guildenstern said. ‘Decapitationist saint. I think it’s in the museum. Or, well, it’s not. But.’ He stopped, and thought, and the Secret Eyes in his guts peered and unfurled, and the more she thought of it (she looked at the knives dangling on strings over the coffee grinder, their distance from one another; she gazed out the window at the pine trees, the angle the sunlight fell onto them, the way it was eaten up and dispersed among their needles) the more she knew she needed to visit the museum. 

‘What museum? One of the ones in the Megasphere?’ Lilah asked, closing the video and perking up. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to the Museum of Pop Culture. It’s so big I hear people live in it. Does anyone here wanna take me to the Museum of Pop Culture? I don’t wanna motorbike there.’ 

‘No-one’s taking you to the Museum of Pop Culture,’ Roy said. 

‘I’ll take you to the Museum of Pop Culture,’ Bobby spoke up. 

‘You don’t have a car, Bobby.’ 

‘I thought you would appreciate the thought.’ 

‘I do,’ Lilah sighed, leaning on the counter. 

‘Um,’ Guildenstern said. ‘Just the Bunk Falls Historical Museum.’ 

Lilah fully deflated, sinking down and resting her head on the wood. Even Roy seemed disappointed, slouching faintly. 

‘Why there?’ Roy asked. ‘What’s in there?’ 

‘No shittalking the Bunk Historical Museum,’ Milkwood hissed, pointing into the cafe. ‘I love that place.’ 

‘That’s cause you’re a hoarder. And that place is just a hoard.’ 

Bobby swayed up to the counter and tapped Roy on the shoulder. They swapped seats once more. 

‘It used to be an SIB facility, you know,’ Bobby said. 

‘No shit?’ Guildenstern said, leaning in. 

‘Oh, oh yes. But they shut it down back when all the big companies moved out.’ Bobby leant in and hushed his voice for effect. ‘But I hear they still have things set up in there. To spy on folks. And people hear SIB operatives walking around there at night…’ 

‘Bull!’ Roy exclaimed. ‘That’s all bull. Everyone knows it’s haunted by a family who were serial killed.’ 

‘Why would a family be serial killed in an SIB facility?’ Bobby demanded to know, turning around, a hard eyebrow raised. 

‘They lived there before it became an SIB facility. It’s an old building.’ 

‘Isn’t it a Bigfoot mating spot?’ Lilah said, suddenly, causing Roy, Bobby, and Milkwood to all erupt into theorising and arguing. The Bunk Historical Museum, Guildenstern determined, was home to a secret SIB operation spying on Bunk Falls; to a series of ghosts and their killer; to a Bigfoot nest; to a lost Bunk Hyperiridescence Dynamics experiment; to a crashed alien spacecraft hidden in the basement. It was home to indefinite, infinite things, amorphic and multicoloured.

---

What the Bunk Historical Museum physically was, was a big hollow brickwork facility in the part of town that had been called, without irony at the time, New Bunk. New Bunk was born in those days when the nearby industrial district thrummed with machinery and the gleaming cars of the company people who moved in solely for the employment, when the rotting chrome husk of the New Bunk spaceport bristled with cranes and crawled with construction workers like little ants and glimmered in the sun and was empty of verdigris and abandoned cars and the huge, dead Brahe ALBTRS23 interorbital superfast company-carrier the local kids slathered in graffiti and hung old shoes from. 

The museum was on the coastwards end of New Bunk on 3rd Street off New Coal Road; you could see the cold beaches and the empty docks encrusted with moss and bird shit past barren prefab houses with broken windows and identical, black, triangle roofs. It was the only facility of that kind in that part of New Bunk. The rest of them bundled up, like penguins, around the Industrial District. It was flat there, like all of Bunk Falls, with low houses and strained wooden telephone lines and Peak Surrender rearing slowly up to the south through an impenetrable band of green fir trees. The sky was wide, blue, clear. 

You could see the main spire of the spaceport from there, metal plates hanging from rusted old supports like meat sloughing off splintered bones, all draped in dark vines. It marked where New Bunk met the Industrial District and the outer buildings of Bunk University, tall and square and organised, incongruous with the shorter residential buildings around them, though most of them were used for housing nowadays, too, or simply left empty. 

It was also only a block away from Our Father of the Laying Down of Arms, the looming Michanikist awareness with the low, flat, practical central roof and the twin spires on either side, twisting upwards, built like steps, depicting chimeric machinery: still chromium meeting round elephantine forms, serpents with slim monitors for heads, trees with fibreglass wiring for leaves, saint-engineers with raised fingers from several arms of steel-infused calcrete, positioned, one by one, on each step. An ingenstor atop a large steel ladder polished each form, one by one, pausing to wipe their hands on oil stained overalls. It was the only Fingercolonialist structure in the entirety of Bunk Falls that gleamed like it did when it had been established. 

Not much traffic midday, mid-week in Bunk Falls. People either took Railroad Street, past the trees and the exposed gravel and the fields of yellow grass with the jutting metal skeletons of old CAOs who still weren’t quite dead yet, faintly glistening with regenerating flesh that promptly rotted away or was eaten by birds, down onto the I-90, and worked jobs in bigger neighbouring towns like Ensign or Kitbird, or all the way down to the Seattle Megasphere. Or they walked, or they sat in the lone public bus in Bunk Falls, a heaving, rattling thing that worked on nothing but community spirit and the raw passion of Bunk Fall’s lone bus driver, Red Rosie. 

Guildenstern and Milkwood sat in silence, rumbling in the car, waiting for the bus to round a corner. It belched smoke. 

For all the comforts added to it—the green benches at its front, the Usonian flag lazily hanging on a pole by its side, the chalkboard sign that detailed visiting times, special events, prices for adults and children—the Bunk Historical Museum still clearly resembled an old factory. It had all the space in the world for treadmills to carry along sardine tins or can openers or servomotors for war machinery or whatever it was the place had been used for. 

It was staffed by overeager elderly people and undereager high school graduates. It was an undereager high school graduate who sold them their tickets in the bright office with the faintly moist red carpet that clung to their shoes: 

‘Yuhuh. And did you want a year pass? Only twenty dollars.’ 

‘Are you gonna come here again, Em?’ Guildenstern asked. 

‘Huh? Oh, I already have a year pass. And, yes.’ Tiny local museums comforted Milkwood. She enjoyed being surrounded by dusty incongruities; she felt snuggled amongst them. She had done the kid’s scavenger hunt three times by this point, and was considering taking it up again.

Guildenstern gazed into his wallet. It was very thin. ‘I just don’t know if I could justify it.’

‘Well, don’t get one, darling.’ 

‘I don’t even know if I have time to come here again. I’m busy all next month… I gotta check—’ Guildenstern locked eyes with the high school graduate. A silent dialogue passed between them. Guildenstern felt crushed between waves of loathing. 

They both purchased a year pass and were greeted by an overeager elderly woman. 

‘We have so few visitors of late! You know, we even do weddings here. We’ve had them before. Do either of you intend on being married anytime soon?’ She looked excitedly between Guildenstern and Milkwood. 

‘Wasn’t, uh. Planning on it?’ Guildenstern murmured. 

‘But with an offer like that,’ Milkwood continued. 

Her name was Roslyn Cisse. She was a pleasant, talkative presence who followed them through small brick rooms with huge, dark roofs and scattered accoutrements and rusted old miscellanies and did not recognise Guildenstern and Milkwood’s attempts to disengage from conversation until the bell at the front door tinkled. 

‘Oh, oh god! I must get back to my duties!’

The exhibits were organised, vaguely, into eras. The smallest one was Pre-Shattering. There was a snapped pickaxe hanging on a board, a mammoth tooth, a mining lamp coated in verdigris, an electric desk fan held together with tape. Bright electric lights; heavy dust in the corners, white and illuminated. It smelled like old wood. The floorboards were strangely hard, and difficult to get comfortable on. They were lacquered darkly; light curled and twisted on them. 

The stuff in there all looked like junk, in the way that real artefacts—real objects once used by real people—looked. Human memory was etched onto the face of the planet in garbage, Guildenstern thought. 

Many other exhibits were dedicated to the Golden Age of the town, that period in the 2120s when BUNK DIGGING CO was bought out by the Durand Corporation (thinking the name made Guildenstern feel dirty; she crossed herself) and revived as Bunk Hyperiridescence Dynamics, whose rotting old facilities still haunted the Industrial District and atop Peak Surrender, aspens through the shattered windows, glinting pale in the moonlight. 

There was the battered chassis of a miningdog, one of the smaller tunnel digging machines, a lanky steel quadruped with a series of mining drills for heads and dark holes in the spaces between its joints, at its gut, where its artificial sinews had rotted away. There were sublimatorguns with thin nozzles and fat packs and the hood of a flying car with the Bunk Hyperiridescence Dynamics logo (the letters BHD depicted in sharp, sci-fiey font) at its front. 

At the end of one room, shoulders low, hunched like a thief, was the torso of a mining exoskeleton, its innards removed, wires exposed. It gleamed dully, like it was tired. It was from one of the 77. The 77 lost, eaten by the mines, in the Meteor Fires, on that dark day in 2187. 

‘Who did the seventy-seven die for?’ the mining unionists chanted, before Durand brought the CAOs in to shoot them all up. The museum had no exhibits on that. It was a kid friendly attraction.

You felt it in there, nevertheless. Heard not the words echoing, but the rumble of the echo, the uncertain air. 

‘Gotta hurry,’ Guildenstern murmured. ‘Almost fuckin time.’ 

‘Time for what?’ 

Guildenstern held up his phone. ‘Three thirty three. It’s a perfect time. All nice and balanced… Hum.’ At the end of the third and final room of the museum, next to the door to the cramped toilet, was a pile of ropes and an empty crate. Guildenstern checked to be sure it wasn’t some kind of historical rope and crate exhibit; it wasn’t. 

She pulled the rope away, dumping it on the other side of the room.

‘It’s here?’ Milkwood said, hauling the crate to the side. ‘Under all this?’ 

‘Yes. Well. The basement access is,’ Guildenstern said, pointing at where the crate had just been. A trapdoor had been revealed, slathered in dust and a pair of dead cockroaches. She crouched, took it by the latch, forced it open. ‘And in the basement is…’

In the basement was more dust, and grey bricks, and old wood supports with cobwebs at their corners. All suffused with that wet earthy smell unique to basements. They clambered down into it and stood on the concrete floor in the thin corona from Guildenstern’s phone’s flashlight. The darkness crept into the corners of their eyes. The weight down there magnified terror, made sweat bead on your forehead in response to every minor creak from above. Even the idea of harmless old Roslyn Cisse stumbling onto them and politely asking them to come out terrified Guildenstern.

There were boxes, ropes, dead bugs, a big grey machine in the corner of ineffable purpose but probably for heating or cooling water or air. At the far back end of the room was a great tarp. 

‘I wonder if they’ll take our year passes if they find us in here,’ Milkwood wondered, reclining atop a huge old dresser. 

‘That’d be sad,’ Guildenstern said. He pulled the tarp aside, a hand over his mouth, quietly watching the dust settle through the air. Beneath the tarp was a boxy old monitor built into the wall. Dark dead screen gleaming. In little red text: 3C ATCC. 

‘Three C,’ Guildenstern murmured. ‘Fuck me.’ 

‘Three C?’ Milkwood asked, sitting up. 

‘Three chapters. This’s an autoconceivisistic circuit. A three chapter autoconceivisistic circuit is fuckin… seventy-seven thousand, seven hundred and seventy-seven minds.’ He stepped away from it and gazed at it from a distance. There was a sense about it, a cool melancholy, like a shrine, or a cemetery. Dead in that faintly awake sense, dead in a fading, grieving mist of former life. Dead like the soft winds blowing in the grass by old crooked stones. The sensation of distant, gentle eyes watching. 

Conceivisistry was the raw magic of the mind; of willpower. Conceivisists thought that every god was born from collective ego, and also every atom, and also the sky, and the stars in it. And also Bigfoot. Twenty conceivisists in a single room, meditating on and dreaming about the idea of fire, could set a small dry bundle of sticks alight at range. Sixty conceivisists could do that with a bundle of damp sticks. There were classes on it at every major thaumatological university, mostly theoretical, regarding its history, its use in understanding other magics, so on. It wasn’t very practical, when it came down to it. 

Autoconceivisistry, then, was the next modern step of conceivisistry. Positronic Philosopher Minds by the hundreds, bred, replicated, grown, just smart enough to dream. Lined up in rows, designated with numbers, in computers as big as trucks (your portable autoconceivisist circuit was 1C; it had 77 minds. It was an unfathomably heavy backpack capable of manifesting little baubles of light, or conjuring faint perfume scents). Directed dreaming. Magic at a keyboard. 

Guildenstern reached out carefully. Tapped its screen. Cold. She drew a line in the dust. ‘This isn’t legal for public use. Oh, wow. I know fellas who’ll kill for just a shred of this.’ 

‘I guess they’re all dead, huh? How grim.’ 

‘Huh?’ 

‘All the minds. Flashing in that thing. Blipping out all at once when the power goes off.’ She rapped her fingers against the dresser. ‘Must be like running out of air in there. Or, hummmm. The heat death of the universe. Methek-um.’ 

‘That’s fucking dark, Em,’ Guildenstern said. She remembered how cramped it was in there, how dark the corners, how heavy the bricks. He had no sense for spacetime. He moved, sometimes, as if within a bubble, where all that existed was what she was observing, and herself, observing. The movement of the cockroach under the crate; a spider repairing its web in the supports. The light of his phone on the white pipe that crept up the wall, up the ceiling, vanishing into a hole. That sort of thing.

Guildenstern thought it was time to go. ‘Aaaaah fuck it. I think I fucked it.’ She turned back towards the ladder. 

Milkwood glanced around, dropped off the dresser, kicked a coil of rope. ‘Suuure you don’t want to dig through some of this stuff? Really quick?’ 

Guildenstern shook his head, reaching up to the trapdoor. ‘No way it’s here. Oh, fuck. Oh fucking. Uh.’ 

It was locked. Guildenstern fumbled at it, sweating quietly. No budging. The walls were very thick; the air was musty and weighty, like it was clogging up your mouth and nose, getting stuck in there like wet paper. Gotta breathe a little less, breathe slower. It had felt like this inside that old computer. Turn the power off. Shut down your life support while you’re dreaming. The air heavy as lead; the darkness impenetrable, constantly growing. No budging, however hard he worked at it. No budging, no moving, no movement, no nothing, no air. 

She felt a tap on her shoulder. ‘Light, G?’ Milkwood asked, holding out a cigarette. Her smile was steady and casual.

Guildenstern stopped scrabbling at the trapdoor. He breathed. The air was too warm and close and dusty; it was air nonetheless. He took his lighter from his pocket. 

‘Right, right. Fuckin…’ 

‘I have no patience for closed spaces either, darling,’ Milkwood said, grinning. She tapped her horns. ‘Always bumping around.’ 

Guildenstern lit the cigarette, held the lighter up, gazed at it. Took the flame in, passed it through her chest, felt heat bloom in his veins. Pointed at the trapdoor until, vrrrrchhhh, the latch peeled itself open. 

They emerged from a cleaner’s closet, stinking of ammonia and old water, nearly bumping into a group of chattering tourists who split apart like a school of fish and walked away. Their footsteps echoed. 

The Bunk Historical Museum was all great and gleaming with marble floors and mile high roofs with huge arched windows that let white light in that permeated the rows of exhibits, the smoothly cut pillars, the benches and the interactive maps at the centre of a long hall. It was a reflective, refracting place, like an echoing cavern exposed to sunlight.

‘Huh. Never been this lost before,’ Milkwood said.

‘I don’t know—I don’t know where this is,’ Guildenstern mumbled. He put his hand on his head and pondered. She looked up through a high sunroof, through one of those huge arched windows, but the light was too pale and foggy and distant to make out anything through. 

The exhibits in the Bunk Historical Museum were organised by country of origin, and then by era. The smallest was Pre-Shattering. A crown from a priest of the Sultanate of Doggerland of verdigrised copper and four curling goat horns. A barber’s brass scissors from Poslantis. A large black doorknob from sunken Larisse (Larrise, where the cool fires still dance), carved with flowers, cats, and serpents. A plastic rotary phone from Taured with the numbers rubbed off. The skull of a sabre-toothed cat from Hyperborea, with marks on its teeth from saddling. A broken xiphos of black iron from Old Lost Mu, ash hilt inscribed with a dedication to its Dead and Faceless King, unspoken be his name.

In the Post-Shattering exhibits was a glass-blown crocodile from New Ixs with painted eyes and red spirals on its flanks; a labourer’s frogskin cloak from Oth Killteeth hanging on a wooden stand; a replica corkscrew gun from the Demi-Vortis’ revolutionary war against the Capitol of Agonaea; a condensation-measuring machine from Survey Station 13XA on the edge of the Sea of Ummat, on the dark side of the moon. 

The warning signs were nearly as notable as the exhibits themselves. They were plastered everywhere, on walls, above doors, on the glass of the exhibits, on pedestals, even printed on the backs of the shirts of the security guards. 

NO GAZE

A depiction of an open eye, crossed out. 

The visitors were enthralled. They chattered in hushed tones, moved slowly, reading informational plaques and lingering. Kids laughed down the hall. An elderly couple with wispy hair grasped hands and gazed at a taxidermied hugag. Everybody stared brazenly, utterly absorbed. 

Guildenstern bumped a group of chattering students. 

‘Ohfuck, uh, sorry—’ 

‘It’s okay!’ said one, steadying Guildenstern by the shoulder, smiling, turning, and walking off. 

No forehead. Cleanly, smoothly, a slab of flesh had been taken, leaving only the top of the nose, the top of the head. There was skin. It was perfectly clean. She laughed at something her friend said; slapped them lightly on the shoulder. Guildenstern’s breath was caught in his throat. 

Milkwood gently took Guildenstern by the upper arm. ‘Leeeeet’s keep moving,’ she said, cheerily. ‘They seem lovely. Was the head around here, did you think?’ 

‘Uh, uhh, easily, yeah.’ Guildenstern rubbed his face, ran his fingers through her hair. 

They passed through white halls of exhibits (to the left, a cutlery set carved from the horns of a jackalope, to the right, Monsoon in Red by Claude Monet), by the gift store with bustling displays of mugs, stuffed animals, t-shirts, tiny glass sculptures, beginner painting supplies. They passed by a cafe that smelled of fried egg and coffee and rumbled with chatter. They glanced through its windows, squinted in the warm, pale light. 

Cars queued in the streets. There were storefronts with bright glass displays, large screens rotating new shoes or gardening implements or electric scooters. Automatic doors slid open on clean, grand apartment buildings. Trees in white pots, spaced exactly two and a half metres away from each other, lined the roads. Somebody yelled and honked their horn. The wide clear sky was crowded with gleaming skyscrapers. 

They turned further into the museum, past more groups of quietly chatting tourists, past a great room with its entrance crisscrossed with safety tape that Guildenstern couldn’t help quickly peering into. Bright like the rest of the museum, light refracting from polished walls off polished pillars. But with an incongruous mass of trash, of scattered wrappers and garbage bags piled up in a corner, a tired janitor leaning against a wall and smoking. 

Guildenstern wondered just whose trash it all was, and why it was in there, why it was slathered all over what seemed for all intents to be another exhibit room. 

They moved along, searching carefully, doubling back occasionally to ensure they had checked every hall, every end. Guildenstern paused in one hall, in a spot of sunlight. The exhibit had drawn him the moment he saw it. An obsidian sewing machine from the city of Saint Chromatophore, on Pluto. Almost cartoonishly small in its glass case, positioned against a clean white board. A dainty, beautiful thing, ghoulishly sharp. She walked up and leant around the man who was taking photos of it to read the informational placard. 

Saint Chromatophore’s obsidian needles were famous for their use in centipede-sinew textiles. They were sculpted by masters, ever carefully, and passed down along family lines. A textile-maker, even centuries after their passing, was not entirely dead. Not until their needle had broken, had gotten caught in a too-thick square of sinew, been crushed under the thick boot of an unobservant apprentice. 

‘Having an art moment, darling?’ Milkwood asked. ‘Connection to the creative heritage of the human race sort of thing?’ 

‘I swear I’ve seen this thing before, is all,’ Guildenstern said. ‘But it’s from Pluto. Nobody fuckin lives on Pluto. Or ever lived. Isn’t it Admiralty territory?’

Milkwood puffed smoke and shrugged. She tapped his shoulder, and pointed at the next room down. 

It was visible, thinly, through the crowds. They rushed forwards for a closer look, and there it was. The head was kept inside of a clear glass case in the far corner of a big square room filled with religious artefacts (a tarnished brass candelabra covered in melted wax; a tiny mechanical spider with a clay chassis and wires visible at its joints; a cross of gleaming LEDs that smelled of ozone and incense), and the clear glass case was kept inside of a swirling vortex of dark-shirted security guards and what Guildenstern took for some kind of huge ceramic statue until it leant down and argued with a tall, fat woman who Guildenstern figured to be some kind of curator.

The statue drew the eye more than anything else. Guildenstern knew her by name when he looked at her:

Urcurator. 

This was self-evident, as all good art was. She could have gone by no other title. The light on the curvature of her shoulders and elbows; the form of her head, which was an urn of some sort, with a long lipped neck and a pair of tall handles; the placement of the painted eyes (bright blue, dark purple, perfect ellipses) over her body, wrapping around her chest, her limbs, her head. The reddish brown horses, the men riding the horses; the green suns with the curling rays at her torso; the fish with the swirling tails at her pelvis. The proportions of her eight arms; their placement along her elongated body, four she used as legs, four for hands. Even the manner in which she moved—smoothly, like liquid. Viewer, artwork, curator; she was a museum within herself. NO GAZE signs were plastered across her, over her torso, on each arm, her legs, her head. 

The other curator shrugged and stepped away from the display, letting the security guards come forward, unlocking the display and taking the head. They marched out of the room, pushing past visitors who shied aside and looked away as the Urcurator passed. 

Guildenstern and Milkwood shied back too, watching, wide-eyed, as they went by.

The Urcurator stopped. 

Guildenstern stopped breathing. The Urcurator began to turn. Guildenstern tried squeezing deeper into the crowd. 

The Urcurator peered at them. Painted eyes swam, like mercury, coming to rest on Milkwood, then Guildenstern. She watched, coldly. 

‘NO GAZE. DON’T YOU READ THE SIGNS? NO. GAZE.’ 

Her voice was booming, hollow, stony. It filled the museum’s halls, reverberated out, back in, back out. It was layered several times. Milkwood covered Guildenstern’s eyes and Guildenstern frantically reached up and covered Milkwood’s eyes. 

‘NO HEADSCULPTING. NOT EVEN A. BANDANA. NOT EVEN SUNGLASSES. WHAT ARE YOU DOING. HERE?’ 

Her movements sounded like ceramic on marble, like clean, white stones being slowly dragged. They were eerily quiet for her size and presence. Guildenstern felt her lean in. 

‘DO YOU UNDERSTAND. HOW DISRESPECTFUL… THIS IS A PLACE OF ART…’  

‘I’m sure they’re just tourists, ma’am,’ a low, level voice piped up. ‘Surely the matter of the note needs your attention more than these two?’ 

‘YOU HANDLE. THEM. THEN.’ 

Smooth ceramic sliding again. Faint, deep footsteps. 

Milkwood took her hands from Guildenstern’s face; Guildenstern took his hands from Milkwood’s face. 

‘I don’t have eyes, G,’ Milkwood murmured. 

‘Fuck,’ Guildenstern murmured back. 

The other tourists had shuffled away from the two of them, leaving them standing, alone, on a patch of polished flooring. The tall, fat curator lady with the wispy blonde hair stood with her arms folded. The security guards marched away behind her. 

‘I don’t know who you two are, or how you even got in without the proper headsculpting, but I would really recommend you leave very shortly and see a clinic before coming back. Unless you want to come face to face with Eadisis.’

‘Oh? Oh, Eadisis. Oh, yeah, sorry. We’ll do that, definitely,’ Guildenstern said, nodding excessively. 

The curator looked dully at him. 

‘But, fuckin, what even happened? To the head?’ He faked a smile. ‘I really… wanted to see it.’ 

‘They found a note, they said,’ the curator lady huffed, standing with her fists clenched, looking aside at the security detail. ‘It was a “threat.” Somebody claimed they were going to steal it. Today. Of all the moronic…’ She trailed off. 

‘Well, that’s silly,’ Milkwood said, surreptitiously putting out her cigarette and hiding it behind her hip. ‘Anyone can just write and stick a note on an exhibit. Least of all an actual criminal.’ 

The curator had her hands on her hips. ‘That’s what I said. But of course they don’t believe me.’ She sniffed, took one last look at the two of them, and turned to walk away. ‘Well. Stay safe. Try not to become another justification for security’s already ridiculously bloated budget, hmm?’ 

They both stood there in that hallway, in silence. Guildenstern looked up at the ceiling. His reflection in polished marble looked back down at him. 

‘Light?’ Milkwood asked. Guildenstern lit her cigarette again. ‘Well, that was fucked up.’ 

‘What do you think about that note?’ 

‘If it’s her I’ll lose it,’ Milkwood said, placing the cigarette back in her mouth and patting her dress down. 

‘I’ve never seen you lose it. I kinda wanna see that,’ Guildenstern said, forcing a grin.

‘But it’s not possible. We’re in some liminal slipspace or a new plane of reality or something. And how would she even… the odds are so low. It can’t be her.’ 

Guildenstern waved at her reflection, and it waved back. She sighed. 

‘It’s definitely her.’ 

Milkwood pressed on her forehead. ‘I know.’ 

They did not follow the security detail, because that would have been very suspicious. They did what Milkwood described as ‘tailing.’ Tailing was a form of stalking notable for being interspersed with ‘acting natural.’ 

‘Okay. Now we look at this exhibit. And chat about it.’ 

‘We can’t look at it,’ Guildenstern pointed out. ‘We’re not meant to look at them.’ 

‘Alright. Now we don’t look at this exhibit. And… don’t chat about it.’

‘I think we’re allowed to chat about them. We must be allowed to chat about them.’ 

They tailed the security detail back along the halls they had passed, by the cafe and the gift store, by the cleaner’s closet, past the broad gentleman in the big suit with the sunglasses and the fedora and the grublike skin who gazed at Guildenstern from the centre of a crowd that swept around him like an island in the sea who seemed to freeze time and sound briefly when Guildenstern met his gaze, when they locked in silence, when an eerie electricity passed through them, before then turning and walking away, like he had never been there at all. And he walked out of Guildenstern’s very head, leaving a sensation like a zinc in her mouth, an unease of the kind you have on a darkened street in the rain, dreadfully alone, leaving her staring into the crowd and seeing nothing interesting at all. 

They continued past a set of spiralling stairs leading to a sunlit upper floor with a glass roof, past the bathrooms and some water fountains and benches of carved marble topped with slats of wood, to a dingy door in a dingy corner (there was not much dingy in that museum at all; this, presumably, was why they kept the bathrooms here) which the security detail unlocked and entered, one by one. 

Guildenstern and Milkwood acted natural: Guildenstern filled up his water bottle at the fountain; Milkwood lounged across the entire bench, her legs trailing off it. They waited as the guards, one by one, exited the door, and locked it. 

‘We need a plan,’ Guildenstern said, sitting on the floor with her back against the bench. Milkwood mumbled agreement. 

They sat quietly, watching the movements of visitors as they drifted in and out of the bathroom, glanced at the map that was set up on a pedestal in front of the spiralling stairs, drank at the fountains. They drifted off, slowly, until it was just the two of them and an old man nodding off to sleep, and a little boy sitting on the floor, watching loud, bright videos on a phone, waiting for his mother in the women’s bathroom. Guildenstern slipped to the door and cracked it quickly open.

The storeroom was broad and dark and they both walked with dread care. Every time Guildenstern felt something on her shoulder, felt his elbow brush by something, he thought it was the end; that the grey shelves that towered high towards the darkened ceiling would topple, one by one. Reduce the whole place to dust. 

Storerooms, warehouses, places of collections, were normally blinding to Guildenstern’s Secret Eyes. Apophenia in the air so thick you could run your hand through it. They were divine, in that manner, to Guildenstern. The same way that a lonely chapel or a quiet place in the woods with a burbling river or a spot on the hill going brassy orange in the evening drew aspects of the world, of humanity, of gentle numinosity into themselves, like magnets, like centres of gravity, so did storehouses. The entire world resided in places like storehouses, carried there on endless threads of obscure, apophenic connection.

This storeroom, however, was empty. It was not literally empty—the shelves were loaded with objects, many covered by tarps or in big boxes, many exposed. Objects of all kinds, objects that glimmered in the faint light of Guildenstern’s lighter; objects covered in fur; objects rolled up; objects stacked atop one another. Objects with painted eyes and rivers carved on their sides; objects with brass hands; objects with exposed bones. Yet it felt empty, in an unaccountable way, hollow, like it was all made of pasteboard. Like she could push holes in it all with her finger, knock it down flat, and see what was really there behind it all. 

Guildenstern remembered, suddenly, where she had seen the obsidian needle. She had dreamt it. A distant dream, back when she lived on the moon, those cold lunar suburbs with nothing to do but work and rest and ignore the news and long for something better.

The dream made little sense in retrospect; it was a modernist mass of lines and lights, of roads carved from thickly layered unmelting ice, of priest-fish breeding in ponds and lakes, of clock hands and colours and swans and the feeling of cold air and unfathomable speed and the breath caught in his throat. In the dream he was from Saint Chromatophore; had been born there, would die there, did die there. She had used a needle to sew—something. A shirt, or a scarf, or a hang glider, or a dog; when Guildenstern had finished sewing it, it morphed into something else. At some point she ended up with no pants on in an office building, waiting for an interview. Guildenstern couldn’t remember much of it. 

But she remembered the way the needle felt in her hand. Cool and glassy, smooth and irregular like ice. The light ran over it and glinted. It was the exact same needle in that exhibit. 

And he understood, now, the feeling the whole museum had given him since he entered; the feeling that soaked the storeroom, drenched it: bereft. Halved. Soulless. Objects alone in space. Contextless. They had no histories; they were from places that had never existed, or existed alone in imaginations; they had been manufactured as artefacts, to be artefacts. The museum birthed them on the spot. Glass case wombs. No wonder, then, nobody was allowed to look at them. 

Guildenstern felt hollow. He spread his fingers out, closed and opened his hands. 

‘It’ll be that room,’ Milkwood said, suddenly. 

‘How’d you know that—’ Milkwood’s hand closed over Guildenstern’s mouth. 

The security guards were hard to see, back against the wall, eyes shut. The taller one fiddled with a card, stretched, yawned, slipped it back into their breast pocket. The short one gazed dimly at the ceiling, at nothing in particular. 

Guildenstern shook her head and took a deep breath and thought about the matter at hand. She needed the card. The door was alarmed, surely, and he had no faith that his entropic magic wouldn’t set it off. 

‘They’re going to rotate breaks. And, very likely, have them immediately one after the other,’ Milkwood said. ‘And even though, technically, they are not supposed to, they will both spend their breaks outside of this place. Terribly dusty in here. And the toilets are outside.’ Milkwood absentmindedly licked her lips and gazed upwards. ‘Guildenstern.’ 

‘Uhm?’ 

‘We won’t do this cleanly. What I mean is, is we will have to run. Eventually. Someone will notice something is wrong before we have left. I have the sense, already, for how you will answer, but I must ask.’ She smiled faintly as she spoke. ‘Do we still want to do this?’ 

‘Of course,’ Guildenstern said, resting his elbows carefully against the shelf behind him. 

‘And if we’re caught? If they surround us? If they have guns?’

‘We’re arrested without a fuss.’

‘If they want to cut our faces off? If they jail us in an unfamiliar world within which we may not even legally exist? If that curator statue thing wants to do… whatever to us?’ 

Guildenstern clenched her teeth and gazed through the shelves. She exhaled slowly. 

‘How desperate do we act?’ 

‘I don’t want to hurt anyone for… just a job.’ 

Milkwood sat cross-legged on the floor. Her knees came up high. ‘I know it’s not just a job, darling. But, well, we must weigh things out, hmm?’ She leaned her arm on her thigh, then leaned her head on her hand. ‘I am Um Vapat. So long as I am here there can be no blood on your hands. I promise at least that much.’ 

That didn’t seem fair to Guildenstern. But he didn’t mention a thing.

The plan was very simple. Milkwood was familiar with a silent, bloodless hold that would put down a moderately sized humanoid into a gentle, concussed sleep in just a few seconds. It was widespread among the nobler members of the IUUCS (the Interplanetary Union for Unobtrusive Cleaning Services, being the largest organisation of assassins in the system). Milkwood had learnt it years ago in an attempt to flirt with an assassin of such a kind. 

The shorter guard stretched, huffed, opened their phone. Their face lit up in the cool blue light, and they bumped their partner with an elbow. Their partner nodded. 

They slipped the phone into their pocket and began wandering lazily down the shelves. Milkwood recognised this guard from earlier, actually, within the mass that had surrounded the head’s exhibit. They stood out well—they were squatter than many of the other guards, dark-skinned, with a manner of walking (a swagger, really) that suggested a high degree of strangely placed confidence (she had no idea why she was being so judgemental. She had no idea who this person was at all). She drifted alongside them, opposite a shared shelf, slowing down and speeding up to remain, generally, outside of their sight. 

She slipped through a space between shelves and came out behind them. She had been in this position many times. It fascinated her, in some hideous voyeuristic manner, the motions and movements made by people who did not suspect her following them. They were always very boring, and graceless. Unbefitting of people with death impending. 

She took the guard quickly by the throat: ‘Hmp—!’ they exclaimed. Slamming their fist hard on Milkwood’s thigh, kicking their legs. Tighten, tighten, compress; feel the struggling die down. Muscles loosening. Lights going out. Lay them out limp. Very clean. Milkwood brushed her hands off. 

The guard’s posture shifted. Milkwood could practically see their eyes snap open (they didn’t actually have any, of course). They rolled back, staggered to their feet, grabbed their baton, ready for action—

CRACK! 

Milkwood brought the Xanaduian cricket bat down clean onto the centre of their head. They fell back and fainted. Milkwood checked the bat for marks (it was dented very noticeably at its centre), then, with exaggerated care, replaced it on the shelf. 

‘Oooooh fuck me,’ she murmured to herself. 

Guildenstern, who had no expertise in anything at all, let alone breaking and entering, had been assigned to ‘watch the other guard and make sure they don’t do anything weird’ duty. He had been doing a great job of it, too, until the CRACK! echoed through the room. 

‘Humm? You uh—you good, guy?’ the guard called out. 

Silence. The guard groaned, stood up off the wall, and began walking down the shelves. 

‘Y, yes!’ Guildenstern said, in a panicked falsetto. 

‘Whuh?’ 

‘Good. I’m good.’ 

The guard stopped and glanced all around the shelves. ‘Did you get sick or something?’ He began walking towards Guildenstern’s position. 

Guildenstern stood completely still, trying to squeeze into the shelf, keeping her head between a bust of God-Duke VEXEV and a woven fishwool scarf from Perennia. She was still trying to decide whether to run or try to find a better hiding spot when the guard turned the corner and met him face to face. 

‘Who the!’

Guildenstern had his hand on the lighter; he extended his arm quick (fire in his arm; fire in his chest; fire out his arm), pointed, CRUNCH, and the guard’s comms shrivelled away and popped like a tiny firework. 

‘Hah! Fuck you! No backup!’ Guildenstern exclaimed, in a burst of frantic excitement. 

The guard glared at Guildenstern, unfurled his baton. 

I feel like an asshole for that, Guildenstern thought, watching it curve through the air towards her face. So maybe I deserve this? Or at least just one hit? Can I even take one hit from a baton? Oh my god it’s really coming close maybe I should— 

‘Hmp—!’ the guard said as Milkwood wrapped her arm around his neck and choked him slowly out until the squirming died down and he splayed out, drooling, on the floor. Milkwood grabbed the bust of God-Duke VEXEV, wielded it high over her head, and watched the guard for any signs of movement. He did not move. 

‘That stunk,’ Milkwood hissed, digging the card out of the man’s breast pocket. ‘We need to move!’ 

‘I thought it was okay,’ Guildenstern mumbled to himself, following Milkwood back towards the security room. 

The door faintly beeped and unlocked. Milkwood pushed it open. 

It was dark and cramped in there, all cardboard and bubble wrap. A pale white sculpture, swaddled in plastic from head to toe, gazed at them from a corner. Guildenstern dug hastily through a smaller box, tossing packing peanuts aside. He felt dry paper.  

‘Uhmmm,’ Guildenstern murmured, slowly pulling it from the box. It was a crumpled silhouette, wrapped up in a dull, crinkled newspaper. He needed to be sure. He carefully tugged at a fold. A pale, sightless eye glinted in the light from Milkwood’s phone. He covered it back up, just as quick. ‘I’m sorry for the all this. Please bless us. A little. Not too much.’ 

‘Bless us as much as you can afford,’ Milkwood suggested. 

‘Yes,’ Guildenstern said. ‘But don’t put yourself out for our sake.’ 

‘Maybe a little bit,’ Milkwood concluded. 

They shut the door carefully behind them and turned together to face the squat guard, arms folded, down along the shelves. 

‘I hit that guy in the head with a bat,’ Milkwood murmured to Guildenstern. 

‘Was that the crack?!’ Guildenstern hissed back. ‘Waitfuckin, in the head?’ 

‘Yes, the head!’ the guard exclaimed, pointing at Milkwood. They stood boldly, a hand on their hip, legs wide. ‘I’ll need to pay you back for that, Milky!’ 

Milkwood froze. ‘Pardon?’ 

‘Milky,’ the guard said once more. ‘Yes, you were fooled, because the whole time it was me, in fac—’ The guard staggered back, dancing frantically between Milkwood’s wild swings. Long, silvery knives glinted. The guard’s face suddenly soared, cut into two floppy halves that landed with a pair of lame plops on the floor in front of Guildenstern. 

‘Drac you bitch!’ Milkwood hissed, bringing both knives down onto thin air as Countess Dracula XV flipped gracefully backwards through the air, flinging off the rest of her disguise, landing perfectly. She smirked. She was good at smirking. Her face was made for it. 

Countess Dracula XV was the foremost scion of the North American branch of the legendary Dracula (yes, that Dracula) family, and was also the only one remaining; her mother had been an Indonesian physics professor who died happily of old age while holidaying in Alaska with family nearly forty years ago, while her father, who was by this point eighty-or-so years divorced, had long moved back to the homeland, and spent much of his unlife unsuccessfully attempting to reenter the Romanian aristocracy. She was a supremely talented master thief of middling fame and varying recognition; she was a font of confidence, much of it misplaced. She had never paid for registration on a car and she struggled, in fact, to even do her own laundry. She could, however, do a double backflip from a standing position, and knew how to crawl through a ventilation system as fast as any other person could jog. 

She had dark skin and a flat nose and heart-shaped lips; she took much pride in appearing more Indonesian than she looked European. She was short and round and soft-looking; she was very pretty, Guildenstern thought, in that matter-of-fact manner she thought of such things. She had black hair, dyed bright green at its edges, bangs cut flat, and a fashion sense that was almost forty percent fishnets. There were enough of them on her to catch the food to feed a family with for a day; she had, in fact, once fallen into a lake on a particularly daring heist, and come up with an entire bass wiggling to free itself from her thigh. 

She really was pretty. 

‘Hi, Dracula,’ Guildenstern said, waving. 

‘Heyyyy Sternie,’ she shouted, waving back, tilting her head and winking. 

‘What a stupid nickname,’ Milkwood exclaimed, swinging wide. Dracula hopped daintily up and landed, briefly, on the tip of Milkwood’s knife. She stuck her tongue out and vanished in a cloud of mist. Guildenstern saw a glimpse of tiny webbed wings in the darkness. 

‘G! The head!’ Milkwood yelled. 

Guildenstern nodded, turned around, began to jog away, and ran facefirst into Dracula. 

‘Fancy seeing you here, Sternie,’ she said, leaning forwards. 

‘We got this!’ Guildenstern said, wrapping his arms around the head. ‘Fair and square!’ 

‘As was part of my plan!’ Dracula exclaimed, spreading her hands wide and vanishing once more into a cloud of mist that rushed at Guildenstern, engulfed her, chilled her to the guts, and then coagulated behind her to reveal Dracula, her hands still wide, grasping the head. 

‘You see—’ She leapt up, over Milkwood, who charged right into Guildenstern. They both crashed down, a tangled mess of fabric and long limbs and a kitchen knife dangerously close to Guildenstern’s upper arm. 

‘Uuuughh, G, are you okay?!’ Milkwood said, taking him by the shoulders and shaking him. 

‘Your elbows are so sharp, Em,’ Guildenstern moaned. 

‘Hey! Hey!’ Dracula crouched atop the shelf to their left. ‘As I was saying: you see, I knew they would put the head into one of the high-security rooms, and, you see, I knew you clowns would attempt to take it from the rooms! It was a simple matter of posing as a new security guard—’ 

‘How’d you even do that?’ Guildenstern said, pulling himself to his feet and dusting himself off. He gestured to his forehead. ‘Your… that!’ 

‘Oh, that? I had to suck in and hold my breath the entire time.’ 

‘Oh. Wow,’ Guildenstern said, amazed. 

‘She doesn’t even need to breathe,’ Milkwood whispered to her. 

‘Oh. I guess that’s not so bad.’ 

Dracula cleared her throat loudly. ‘All I had to do was wait for you to break into the high security room so I could steal it for myself!’ 

‘You had the card,’ Milkwood said. 

‘Yes. But. Um. I can’t go into places I’m not invited.’ 

‘HA! Ha-ha-ha! HAH!’ Milkwood pointed and laughed. It was a loud, exaggerated laugh that sounded nothing like her actual laughter, which was faint and breathy and pleasant. ‘You dope!’ 

Dracula’s face screwed up. ‘You’re the dope! Because I have the head!’ She ducked under the spinning, glinting cleaver Milkwood threw. 

Milkwood grabbed a shelf bracket and pulled herself up to the top of the shelf opposing Dracula. They stood face to face. 

‘You need to leave with it first,’ Milkwood said, grinning. She sank into a low, hard stance with a combat knife raised, pointed at Dracula, and a kitchen knife sideways, level with her face. 

‘Okay!’ Dracula said, turning into a bat in a puff of mist. 

Milkwood leapt to the other shelf, then leapt again, grabbed the bat by the leg, and flung it down onto the shelf. Dracula appeared, limbs splayed, face down, groaning. 

‘As if I wouldn’t expect that,’ Milkwood said, standing smugly over Dracula’s form. 

Dracula rolled away and stood up. She seemed puffed up, like an angry bird. ‘Then a fight you’ll get!’ She wrapped the head around her wrist by the string that came from its neck and reached up to her left shoulder. She had a tattoo there—a pair of lips. The ink swam slowly under her skin; the mouth warped and opened. She reached in and pulled out, slowly, a huge Italian bill. 

It was an ornate thing that seemed more suited behind one of the glass cases than in her hands. A dark, wavy wood shaft; a bright brass head resembling a spearhead in distress with a hook on one side, a spike on the other, and a long, thin point. A ruby rested where the point met the shaft. A second ruby rested at its bottom end, under a brass cap. Dracula treated it with the fondness of an old family heirloom; in reality, she had stolen it from a museum only some years back. She had named it Lizzy Bathory. 

She spun it easily, danced back and forth and passed it behind her back, to her front again, and pointed it at Milkwood.

Milkwood was not impressed. She darted forward, moved low, stopped and weaved under Dracula’s jab, then again, this time bringing her knife up, parrying the bill aside. She rushed in, brought up the kitchen knife, and took the other end of the bill to the gut. 

‘Ow,’ she mumbled, dancing away just as Dracula brought it down again. 

‘You’re outranged!’ Dracula exclaimed. ‘Your little cheesecutters can’t even reach me MMPH,’ she said, taking the small sack of XET Dynasty gold coins Milkwood threw to the face. 

Milkwood moved in, ducked away from another jab, twisted around and arced her leg upwards, THWAP! knocking Dracula’s head limply up by the chin. She gripped the combat knife backwards, moved in fast, drew the knife up, severed the head’s strings, and took it in her other hand. 

She grinned, turned back to Dracula, and panickedly jumped up, away from the bill sweep aimed at her knees. She landed gracefully but distractedly; just enough for the next jab to hit. It cut quick through the air, past her face, and right into the head. It went through it, making a faint noise like dust blowing, like old groaning. 

Dracula winked as she raised the bill, and the head, high. 

‘That’s a saint!’ Guildenstern screamed from below. 

Milkwood rushed forwards, swung once, swung twice, Dracula dancing deftly out of reach until Milkwood’s foot shot out and collided with her shin with an ugly crunch. She yelped and staggered back and Milkwood rushed in close to dice her dead until she vanished into a bat, leaving the head pirouetting downwards, bonk! off Milkwood’s head and down to the floor, where Guildenstern leapt to catch it and missed entirely, ramming face-first into the opposite shelf that Dracula had just landed on. 

‘Take it and go, G!’ Milkwood exclaimed, jumping across to Dracula’s shelf. 

Guildenstern gave a dizzy thumbs up in the wrong direction, grabbed the head with both hands, and staggered helplessly around. 

‘Thaaaanks, Sternie,’ Dracula said, sweeping Lizzy down and hooking the head on it, drawing it back up and dropping it into her left hand. 

Milkwood lunged at her; she dodged it. She spun Lizzy, parried, jabbed; the two of them danced back and forth, darting, dodging, stabbing, swinging, spinning, exchanging the head.

There was a horrible creaking noise. An urn fell out of the shelf and snapped in two on the floor. 

The shelf was beginning to fall. 

Guildenstern, who was standing at the bottom of it all, with her lighter out and her finger pointed, trying to figure out how to shoot Dracula, and how hard, and when, gaped in horror. 

‘The shelves!’ 

‘The shelves!’ Dracula yelped, whacking the head out of Milkwood’s hands with the back of Lizzy, grabbing it out of the air, and performing an unnecessary double backflip onto the next shelf over. 

Milkwood leapt after her, parrying a jab and arcing a fast kick that Dracula ducked away from. ‘The shelf’s going to just knock over this one,’ she hissed, sidestepping a punch and snatching the head from Dracula’s grasp. ‘Why didn’t you jump the other way?’ 

‘I’ve been distracted!’ Dracula said, smirking and twirling her bill, bringing the end down towards Milkwood’s head. It was a clumsy move that Milkwood dodged easily, bringing the head within Dracula’s reach and allowing her to quickly grab it, vanish, and reappear on the next shelf down. 

Guildenstern sprinted down the room. Animal terror resounded through his head, all tight and numb. The falling shelves were already a row away, but they were loud—ancient coins clinking, one by one; salt-encrusted fabric tearing; zinc statuettes crumpling; stone wheels rolling away. He looked back and saw Milkwood and Dracula still duking it out, now four shelves down, the next shelf already rearing to continue the chain reaction. 

‘Stop taking us along the falling ones!’ Milkwood screeched. 

‘Maybe if you’d just lead the fight for once,’ Dracula sniffed, blocking the combat knife with Lizzy’s shaft. 

‘I can’t turn into a bat,’ Milkwood argued, ducking under Lizzy’s falling hook and swiping in turn. 

Guildenstern barely heard the alarm sounding through the priceless artefacts being crushed, crunched, crumpled, and clobbered. But the guards heard it well enough, and, as he watched Milkwood and Dracula fight and hop between the still collapsing shelves, she backed right into them. Kevlar and wiry muscle and the end of a baton pressed into her side. 

Three of them, tall, in the darkness. The lack of eyes only emphasised their scowls. 

‘I can explain,’ Guildenstern said. 

‘Can you?’ asked one. 

‘No. Not really.’ A verdigrised dye pot from Malvelia rolled down the room, bounced against Guildenstern’s shin, and shattered into brittle pieces. 

Milkwood had the edge on Dracula from the very beginning. She was a good fighter, of course, but Milkwood had killed a lot of good fighters. She was confident, which made her easy to read. 

Milkwood ran her knife up along the bill’s end and flicked it away. She slipped inwards, accounting for the shaft swipe, which she cleanly sidestepped left, then back in, her arms crossed over one another, both knives up, and now Dracula had nothing at all. She was too close to fight back, too close to make distance; any direction she stepped in she would meet a knife or a knee or a foot. It wasn’t hard. Milkwood moved in, converged like death itself or like lightning or falling rocks or an unavoidable illness predicted years ahead, bringing down both knives to cut Dracula’s throat open in an X-shape. 

Milkwood paused. She rested the two knives on Dracula’s throat. They were both very still. 

‘Well!’ Dracula said cheerfully. She looked, quickly, to the side, then back at Milkwood. ‘I know when I’m beat. Question is, Milky, do you?’ 

Milkwood glanced quickly to where Dracula had just looked—she took in, silently, the guards fanning outwards, making calls, organising formations—kept her knives still and her stance close. She didn’t account for the frogs. 

It was nearly instantaneous. It was explosive. Frogs everywhere, green, brown, striped, bright yellow. Milkwood staggered back, slimy wet forms crawling over her face and arms. 

She sputtered and staggered, flinging them aside, feeling the air behind her grow cool and wet and seeing a glimpse of Dracula, wreathed in mist, stuffing the head into the same lip tattoo she had pulled Lizzy from, winking, and then disappearing once more. A tiny black bat emerged from the mass of frogs, flapped into the darkness, and vanished, the head with it. 

Milkwood felt flat and weary. She looked down at the security guards surrounding her on both sides of her shelf. She saw Guildenstern, cuffed, at the outside of their group. He looked up. She looked down. She nodded towards the guards. 

Guildenstern shook her head. 

Milkwood sighed, dropped down, and let them arrest her. 

The museum was empty when they were marched back into its halls, up the spiral stairs and along lonely exhibits that felt ever more dead now that nobody was there to feign viewing them. Useless objects behind purposeless glass. The place was made of identical stuff as that of a grand marble dumpster, or the fanciest pile of garbage left in the most delicately polished alleyway. 

Their footsteps echoed out, then back in, and encircled them. Guildenstern wasn’t sure of it, but the guards seemed nearly nervous as she was. 

They came to a locked door in a dark corner in a section of the museum dedicated to artefacts from the third land war in Antarctica. The frontmost security guard fumbled for the keys in his pockets. 

Guildenstern looked far down the hall they had just come, looked at the light, at the air. He saw the gentleman in the big suit again. 

The door was opened now. Open to concrete walls and floors, to rattling air conditioning that smelled of mildew. The guards prodded them in. 

Guildenstern kept her eyes on the gentleman, even as the guards hissed at her to hurry up. The gentleman pulled his sunglasses off his face, folded them up, placed them in his breast pocket. Soft, pallid eyes. And he was shoved through the door. 

Down the corridors they went. It resembled an elongated fire exit, with dead bugs in the corners, white graffiti half scrubbed off the walls. They were worlds away from the air and space and refracting brightness of the museum’s halls. They were in its ugly guts, the bloody intestines. Miles underground, lit by pale LED lights. They stopped, suddenly, and were forced through a door identical to all the other doors, into a pale, white, smudged room, with cockroach corpses in the lights and gathering in the corners of greasy windows that let in a pale, oily suggestion of afternoon sunlight. 

‘I’m going to need those back,’ Milkwood said, boredly, as the guards piled up the final knife that they could find on her person on the long table at the back of the detainment room. 

When the Urcurator arrived, the guards all stood up straight. So did Guildenstern, in the rigid wooden chair that bit into his ass, arms tied behind his back. Milkwood remained unimpressed, leaning as far back as she could manage. 

The Urcurator positioned herself on the other end of the desk from the two of them. She was faintly battered. The ends of some of her fingers were chipped; a faint edge of dust hung around the rim of her urn head. A thin crack ran down from her left shoulder, towards her torso. She sat down shakily, shooing all but two guards away. ‘WHO ARE YOU. WHERE ARE YOU. FROM. WHAT IS YOUR NATURE. WHY ARE YOU. HERE.’ 

‘I’m Guildenstern,’ Guildenstern said. 

‘Dothe Perennia in Noctis,’ Milkwood said. 

‘I’m just a fella. Sometimes I find things for people,’ Guildenstern continued. 

‘I’m here because I was arrested,’ Milkwood answered. 

The Urcurator slammed the desk. A leg bent; the entire thing kneeled down. The microphone wired into it whipped back with a snapped neck. Guildenstern and Milkwood leant as far back as they could. 

‘SORRY. PLEASE REPLACE THIS. TABLE.’ She glared down a security guard, who nodded frantically, hauled the desk away, and rapidly brought in a new one. 

‘YOUR DAMAGE HAS BEEN. INCALCULABLE. YOU HAVE TAKEN PERSONAL. TOLL ON ME. FIRST YOUR NAKED EYES. DEFILING THE EXHIBITS. AND NOW…’ The Urcurator went very silent. She leant forwards. Her eyes looked at a barren spot on the desk. They then all, suddenly, turned back up to Guildenstern and Milkwood. 

‘HOW DID YOU ENTER. THE MUSEUM.’ 

Guildenstern glanced at Milkwood and Milkwood glanced back. 

‘Just the front,’ Guildenstern said. 

‘Walked right in.’ 

The Urcurator raised her arms to smash this desk into dust, too, then reconsidered it midway, and rested her arms back down on it. 

‘NO RECORDS SUGGEST. ANY ENTRY INTO THE MUSEUM. NO RECORDS SUGGEST THE EXISTENCE OF. GUILDENSTERN DOLORES OR MILKWOOD UM VAPAT. NO FACE-SCULPTING. JUSTIFY THIS. JUSTIFY THIS.’ 

‘Fake, uhh, names,’ Guildenstern said. ‘My real name is. Billmung. Mung. Bill Mung.’ 

Before Milkwood could open her mouth the Urcurator caved the desk in with a fist. ‘SORRY. NEW DESK. NOW.’ 

The guard hauled the desk out and hauled a new one in. 

‘AND LEAVE.’ The security guards looked, baffled, at one another, and then left, one by one. The Urcurator leant in close. She spoke low. ‘I UNDERSTOOD YOUR NATURE. THE MOMENT I SAW YOU. ATOM THINGS. INERTIA AND MATHEMATICS. THE RULES THAT FORMULATE YOU ARE. GRACELESS AND HIDEOUS. YOUR PERCEPTION CARVES DARK. LINES IN THE WALLS. IN MY EXHIBITS.’ She paused for a long moment, almost seeming asleep. 

Guildenstern sank deep into her seat. She was very sweaty, she realised. And her throat hurt. He needed water, he needed to breathe. He needed cool air. 

‘I KNOW THE PEOPLE YOU WORK FOR. YOU INTEND TO RETURN HERE? RECLAIM WHAT IS. YOURS? THIS PLACE HAS NO NEED OF YOUR. EYES. UNDERSTAND ME THAT THIS PLACE IS. MINE TO DEFINE. NOT YOURS. MINE MINE MINE. MINE.’ 

A fly batted against one of the shut windows. Milkwood watched it intently. 

‘We represent Professional and Private Apophenic Services,’ Guildenstern spoke slowly, afraid of getting the words wrong. ‘I look for things people have lost. A client of mine hired me to find the head of their granddad, and I was directed here. It’s her property. Her dead grandfather. We’ll fuck off, easy, when we have it. We—I can… uh. Try to pay you.’ Guildenstern could not pay her. He sweated and hoped she wouldn’t look too hard into that suggestion. 

‘LIAR! GOVERNMENT LACKEY FILTH. BUT IT DOESN’T. MATTER. THIS PLACE IS. NOT FOR YOU. ANYMORE. MINE TO PERCEIVE. MINE ALONE. I AM DEFINEMENT ALONE. I CAN MAINTAIN.’ All of the Urcurator’s eyes were directed at Guildenstern and she felt them peering at all her edges and sides, her nooks and crannies; she felt them looking in and out her, and she understood that observation was ownership. He existed then within the Urcurator’s gaze and, when she eventually turned away, he would be no more. ‘YOU CANNOT TAKE THIS FROM ME. I WILL NOT HAVE ANYONE. TAKE THIS. THIS IS A. THIS IS A.’ 

She went silent again. Her head fell limply to the side. She placed her hands delicately on the desk. Her voice was low, smooth: 

‘Are you associated with an SIB affiliated organisation?’

‘Um. Is that related?’ Guildenstern asked. 

‘No? What?’ Milkwood said. 

‘Are you aware of the light in the hill?’ 

Guildenstern and Milkwood shared another glance, agreeing together on a silent plan. 

‘No,’ Guildenstern said. 

‘Yes,’ Milkwood said. 

‘Fuck,’ Guildenstern said. 

The Urcurator was silent for some moments longer. She seemed smaller, thoroughly; emptied out like the unviewed exhibits. Briefly dead. She then stood up suddenly, nearly knocking the table over. She ran a hand over her head, traced along the crack down her shoulder. 

‘I CAN’T BEAR. YOUR GAZE ANY LONGER. I CAN’T INTERVIEW UNDER. SUCH CONDITIONS.’ She leant forwards, pressing a tiny button on the desk’s microphone with a giant finger. ‘SECURITY. BRING AN ESCORT. PREPARE EADISIS.’

The escort came shortly. A trio of still-faced guards who surrounded them, prodded them down another mass of identical grey corridors, of doorways with peeling paint, of dead bugs and broken air conditioning. Litter began to pile up as they went. Plastic wrappers first, bright advertising scratched off by age, slathered with dirt, their innards still faintly shiny, piling up steadily until the halls edges were practically lined with them, like sedge grass bursting through cracks in the cement. Old plastic water bottles, fluffy with mould, burst like flowers from corners. Garbage rose up, erupted from the walls, bulging black bags oozing old coffee, brown apples, plastic sandwich containers from the cafe. They shuffled through it like floodwater.

One corridor, between two doors, was the centre of the bloom. Garbage was on the ceiling, garbage was emerging from the ceiling. A great hole in the wall was beringed with blossoming trash, flowers with dusty chip packets for petals and wet tissues for fronds. As they passed it, they realised there was nothing through it. It was pitch black. Like it had been painted there. It ate the too-bright lights.

The guards seemed to barely notice it. They prodded them forwards when they paused in the face of a large spill, or a torn open garbage bag, stomped in and out of sticky, wet filth like it wasn’t even there, like they couldn’t feel it running down their shoes, in their socks. 

‘Soooo, this Eadisis. Sounds nice. Non-torturey. Is it like an intervention? Like when you want your friend to go off cigarettes?’ Milkwood asked with exaggerated cheer. 

‘EADISIS IS A NECESSITY FOR THE FUNCTIONING OF. THIS MUSEUM. IT WAS YOUR PEOPLE WHO. MADE IT.’ 

They passed through one door, rounded a corner, then another, with a security guard stationed at each, slumped boredly against a wall or glancing at a phone and suddenly straightening up at the Urcurator’s arrival. 

They came to yet another door, a thick steel one, with huge bolts and yellow safety signs. EMERGENCY ADMIN SYSTEMS it said in thick font on its upper left corner.

‘E-ad-sys,’ Guildenstern groaned. 

‘Oh, emergency,’ Milkwood whispered. ‘Nice.’ 

The room’s walls were made of bolted metal. The floor was concrete, with old, dark stains that Guildenstern tried not to think about too hard. Up a set of stairs and behind thick glass was a large console, behind which rested a series of unused office chairs and two security guards, neither of whom were allowed to sit down. 

The Eadisis machine was hard to look at. It was a suggestion of industrial technology, undulating in the centre of the room. It had a fat body and a slender neck that reached all the way to the ceiling from which protruded a small, compact cube, with a set of four appendages, all insectoid joints and ends and bolts, folded against itself. Four flat operating tables laid around the machine. These were the aspects that remained consistent; the central ideology its actual form rotated and warped around. It was an amorphous semipresent thing, a mass of metal plates and rubber servomotors and safety warnings and hazard tape that twisted, kaleidoscopic, in response to subtle changes in the angles they viewed it from. It was an impression of a feeling and nothing more; Guildenstern had a sense that she was inventing it, on the spot, that her brain was filling in an impossible space with something that, basically, fit. 

They were laid down on the tables. Guildenstern didn’t struggle. She was shaking through her entire body, shaking so hard she felt immobilised, incapable of moving. She was so stressed, she somehow didn’t even feel afraid. She clenched her teeth and thought to herself: Well, it’s okay. I’ve lived well enough. I made some friends. Rented an apartment. Basically finished high school. I can be happy with this.’

Milkwood struggled until they put the gun to Guildenstern’s head. She had barely noticed the one to her own head. It was nearly comforting, in an insane way. She’d had guns digging into the sides of her head since she was a teenager. 

It simply didn’t suit Guildenstern, Guildenstern with the slow amble and the wobbly smile, Guildenstern who drank the coffee slowly and savoured things. She thought to herself as she relaxed on the bed: Well, it’s okay. I’ll find a way to kill all of them before I die. Every Um Vapat can do that.

Their legs were strapped, then their hands. 

The Urcurator took up her position behind the console, also not sitting in any of the office chairs, being too big for any of them. 

The other curator appeared at the door. Tall, fat, oddly jaunty as she rushed in. 

‘Excuse me excuse me! I’m not late, am I?’ 

The Urcurator groaned and spoke through a microphone. ‘WHAT? WHAT DO YOU. NEED?’ 

‘Oh! Pardon me,’ she said, shuffling past security guards and to the console room’s door. ‘I’m on for Eadisis duty today. Don’t you remember? You put me up for it.’ 

The Urcurator glared silently at her. ‘YOU FIND THE ADMINISTRATIVE. PROCESSES TO BE. VILE.’ 

‘I found them vile, but, well, I figured, good to keep an open mind, you know? That’s why I agreed at all! Come on, ma’am, you take on so many of the museum duties on your own, and, you know, you look so stressed all the time, and—’ 

‘JUST GET IN. HERE.’ 

The curator smiled widely, slipped into the room and into one of the office chairs. ‘I promise, ma’am, I remember basically what’s going on here. I just need a moment to jog the memory.’ 

‘MAKE SURE YOU DON’T FLIP—’ 

She flipped the small red switch the Urcurator gestured at. The machine’s four arms, still folded, glowed with deep red light. Metal screeched. She flipped the switch off immediately. 

‘Okay! That’s the laser. That’s the cutty laser. Don’t turn that on when it’s folded.’ 

The Urcurator loomed over her, very still. ‘YES.’ 

‘And this is… oh this does that,’ she said, now slamming buttons seemingly at random. The arms extended, retracted, twisted. A servo hissed. The lights in the room went blue, and the arm restraints on Guildenstern and Milkwood clicked and retracted. She slammed the switch back down, and they locked once more. 

‘YOU—’ 

She tapped at an array of buttons at the console’s centre, and the blue lights went red, then green, then yellow, then white, then orange. ‘Wow! You know what this reminds me of? Ricky’s birthday party. Remember that?’ she said, looking up at the guard on the far end of the room, who perked up in terror. 

‘BIRTHDAY. PARTY?’ The Urcurator rumbled. 

‘Weren’t you there? Weren’t you invited?’ the curator said, pressing a button that made small jets of steam vent from the arms. ‘I swear you were there.’ 

The Urcurator turned to Ricky the guard. He put his hands up and sputtered: ‘I don’t—I mean—It was my birthday, but—’

‘I NEVER AUTHORISED ANYTHING. OF THE SORT.’ 

The curator twisted a knob that faintly raised the humidity in the room, and then lowered it once more. ‘Ow! Stuff like that’s probably why you weren’t invited, ma’am!’ 

‘I KNOW YOU AREN’T. C-TWO-THREE. ENOUGH.’ 

‘But of course!’ The curator exclaimed, hopping onto the console, onto a series of buttons that sent the room’s lights flashing and switched the machine’s cutting lasers on. They groaned and radiated. Smoke started swirling around the room’s ceiling. 

‘It always was I—’ She bowed and tore off the mask of the curator’s face. ‘Drac—’ 

‘SHOOT. HER.’ 

Ricky and the other guard, in sheer panic, let loose. Bullets ricocheted through the console room, pinging off the bulletproof glass, bouncing off buttons, ripping through the backs of office chairs and sending them flying. Dracula danced frantically in the air, this leg up, then this, then ducked, then jumped, then landed just in time to kick the switch to retract Guildenstern and Milkwood’s arm restraints, and then kicked the switch to retract their leg restraints. 

‘NOT BOTH. OF YOU!’ the Urcurator hissed, standing still as bullets bounced harmlessly her porcelain skin. 

‘Yes ma’am!’ Ricky exclaimed, clicking the safety of his gun back on and immediately crumpling to the floor screaming as a bullet ricocheted into his thigh. 

‘Oh my God!’ the other guard yelled, shutting his gun’s safety back on. 

‘Ew! Don’t say that around me!’ Dracula exclaimed, kicking the gun out of his hand, darting down off the console into a roll, snatching the gun off the ground, and popping back up in the console room’s doorframe. 

‘Goodbye!’ she said, slamming the door, placing the pistol atop the doorknob, overlapping the doorframe, raising a closed fist and then ramming it down onto the pistol, bending the doorknob, ripping wood, and jamming the door shut. 

Two security guards at the front doors rushed in with their guns up but Milkwood was on them fast, pouncing like death, bending one of their wrists until it gave way and the gun popped out of their hand like an old fruit and hoisting them in front of her, knife at their neck (where had the knife been? Guildenstern had to ask himself. Where had she stored it? How had she grabbed it?), between them and the other guard who stood still with their gun shaking until Dracula danced out of the air, landing on top of him with both feet, bouncing off, and landing right where he had just been standing with a dumb grin on her face and a wild look in her eyes. 

No words. The look was clear enough. A too-enthusiastic: 

‘Let’s go go go go go!’ 

And they were off. 

Even with all the aches in her bones, the little brittle spots where she had been jabbed a bit too hard, where an arm had been bent too rough for too long, Dracula’s energy was infectious. And faintly unnerving. Guildenstern grinned, in spite of it all. 

They fled from the Eadisis room, down the hall, ignoring the sound of the Urcurator brutalising the door open behind them. 

The guard at the end of that hall, where the corridors branched left and right, had dull eyes and pursed lips. She smiled oddly as they approached. 

‘Oh, oh hi! Hi. You must be the people the curator told me about. Hey, you know, you look exactly like those thieves we just detained.’ 

‘Small world,’ Guildenstern mumbled as she pushed past her. 

‘Funny coincidence,’ Milkwood agreed, nodding. 

‘Yeah!’ she said, turning around and watching them go by. ‘Have a nice day!’ 

The hallway branched again eventually. Dracula took them to the right. Milkwood went left. 

‘Em!’ Guildenstern yelled. 

‘My knives. I need my knives.’ 

‘Your knives?’ Dracula said, skidding to a stop. ‘Everyone’s gonna be down that way! You’ve got plenty of knives, you’ve got, like, ten on you right now!’ 

‘And the ones in the Rosethorn!’ Guildenstern spoke up. 

‘Those knives are fine, I need the knives back in that room,’ Milkwood said. Her voice was free of the faint, sing-song irony it always carried. Without it it was heavy and still. ‘I’ll meet you two back in the museum.’ 

‘And do you even know the way out?’ Dracula asked. 

‘Obviously. I counted the turns.’ She smiled coolly. ‘I’ve done worse than this. These people are clowns. Don’t be too late on me, hum?’ 

‘Yeah I also counted! I counted the turns also!’ Dracula yelled as Milkwood disappeared down the corridor. 

They continued jogging down the concrete floor, past the dicks and illegible writing graffitied on the walls, the endless identical doors. They passed a security guard very seriously keeping watch over a spot on the wall to their side (another act of hypnosis, Guildenstern hoped), and ignored the distant yells, the faraway sounds of hard shoes on hard floors. 

‘What a nut!’ Dracula said, suddenly. 

‘Huh? Em?’ Guildenstern thought about whether Milkwood was a nut or not for a bit. He wasn’t good at judging this sort of thing. And she was very well accustomed to Milkwood’s habits by this point. She didn’t usually understand her motivations, but she was used to that, too. Milkwood not entirely making sense made sense. 

‘I guess so.’

Dracula smiled devilishly. ‘I guess you’d like that in her, hey?’

‘Uh.’ 

‘Well. It is cute. In its way.’

And Guildenstern thought about that, for a bit, until they rounded a corner and came face to face with a pair of raised pistols and the security guards who barked at them to put their hands up. 

‘Hey now, you just missed them!’ Dracula explained. 

‘What?’ asked one of the guards. 

‘Yeah, babe, you literally missed them! They went down the other way!’ 

‘You can’t just say that and expect us to believe it,’ said the other guard. ‘You clearly are the thieves.’ 

‘Yes I can,’ Dracula said. Her hair stood, faintly, on end. 

‘No you can’t,’ the guard said. 

‘Well, maybe she has a point,’ said the other guard, putting his gun down. His eyes were sleepy, his breathing was slow. ‘Maybe she can expect us to believe that.’ 

The first guard paused, tapped his chin with a finger. 

‘It makes complete sense if you think about it,’ Dracula said. 

‘It does. When I think about it, it makes sense,’ said the first guard. 

‘Like, you can’t really argue with it.’

The first guard shook his head. ‘I really can’t argue with that.’ 

The two of them, pistols in hand, turned, and ran down the hallway, after the thieves. 

They moved forward as garbage began to collect along the sides of the corridors, as wet stains glistened and bled. They sidestepped a shiny garbage bag, torn open, spilling old wet papers and coffee cups. They crushed crumpled papers and filth-encrusted tinfoil underfoot. There was faint yelling. A gun went off. Sounds seemed muffled in there. 

‘Um,’ Guildenstern said. 

They took a left and saw Milkwood sprinting down towards them with a bloody knife clenched between her teeth. She ran down, steady and quiet, hoisted them by the shoulders and led them down the opposite direction. 

‘Not that way!’ Dracula hissed, being dragged along like an upset cat. 

Gunshots rang through the hall. A trio of bulletholes suddenly ripped through the door to their right. Dracula shut up immediately. 

They ran silently now; they were all silent, the three of them, the guards, the distant Urcurator, sliding against concrete. In their silence, noise blossomed. Footsteps on concrete, wrappers being crushed. A bullet ripping into a garbage bag. Guildenstern’s guts in her chest, her heart in her ears, her hands vibrating. Another turn, now. 

A solid wall. They skidded to a stop. 

‘We will not survive this,’ Milkwood said matter of factly, removing the knife from her mouth, revealing another from her dress. ‘I’m certain I can kill basically all of them, however.’

‘Close your eyes!’ Guildenstern barked. 

‘What?’ Dracula and Milkwood said at once. 

‘Close your fucking eyes! Please!’ Guildenstern howled, hands balled up, staring at the wall, trying to ignore the footsteps encroaching on them. 

Dracula closed her eyes. Milkwood, presumably, closed her eyes. 

‘There’s no wall,’ Guildenstern explained, shutting his eyes. ‘There was never a wall. It was never here. We can just run out. We don’t need to kill anyone.’ 

‘Sternie, what are you talking about?!’ Dracula asked. 

‘There’s no wall,’ Guildenstern continued. ‘So why the hell are we standing here with our fuckin eyes closed?!’ 

There was no wall there, no time to be baffled: they sprinted ahead, over piling up garbage and around a turn, and another turn, finally to a door at the end of a hall that they slammed open to emerge back into the museum. They dashed in, one after the other, continuing the escape, until Guildenstern’s ankle caught on a cardboard box and he fell over facefirst, too agonisingly tired to even shift her limbs. She laid there, in garbage, warm with sweat and adrenaline, until Milkwood stalked back and hauled her up, onto her legs, against one of the pillars. 

Milkwood stretched out, pulled out a new cigarette, and lowered it down to Guildenstern, who wordlessly lit it. Dracula, who had been at the lead, crept back, hopping between islands of relatively untouched floor in between bloated, sloughing garbage. She exchanged a silent look with Milkwood, who was now leaning against the pillar, cleaning the blood off a knife with a white handkerchief.

‘Just a moment. I’m pooped, too.’ 

It was all trash in there. Trash piled up around the white pillars, trash under the polished, gleaming walls; mountains of trash with pools of aged, colourful sludge. Trash flowers made from bloated black bags encircled with colourful chip wrappers, trash trees of cardboard stuck together. It stunk like fermentation, like hallucigenia, sweet and sour. Some spots of trash were locked behind big, polished glass cases, named and labelled: ‘coffee cups of the Northard Presbyterate’; ‘the heap of King Ferdalles.’ A collection of chip bags were pierced on little sticks, their parts carefully labelled. ‘Wings’ for their corners; ‘lips’ for their open tops. ‘Guts spilling out,’ for the bag that was split open, revealing its bright tin innards. 

There were the holes there, too, big gashes in the firmament of the museum. Pools of emptiness circled by clotting masses of filth, like wounds that refused to scab. Everything was quiet. 

‘What was that!’ Dracula finally exclaimed, standing back up and grabbing Guildenstern by the shoulders. ‘You have powers, Sternie? For how long?!’ 

‘What? No—’ Dracula started shaking him. ‘Stop shaking me!’ She stopped shaking him. 

‘This is projected—this is a projected world. It’s fucking conceivisistic. It’s why this place is so weird. And everyone being blinded—they’re contributing to the, to the fuckin—’ Guildenstern gesticulated arbitrarily, wheeling her arms, flapping her hands, in an attempt to help visualise what he was saying. Milkwood smoked quietly to the side, trying to discern what all the hand movements symbolised. 

‘They’re contributing to the overall noosphere, right, cause, it’s all noosphere. It’s all noosphere. We’re standing on it. This place is all made of thought-shit. But without their eyes and bits of their brains and probably their other senses, too, they can’t define it. It’s just Urcurator. And us.’ 

Dracula started shaking Guildenstern again. ‘So I have powers too?!’ 

‘Stop shaking me! And you already had powers!’ Dracula stopped shaking her. ‘But, yes, I guess?’ 

Milkwood swept her arm at the dark holes. At a garbage bag that split open, revealing a symmetrical ring of crumpled tissues and colourful cardboard boxes. ‘Explains the rot. This place’s been dying for ages.’

‘Projected manifold arrhythmia!’ Dracula said cheerily, excited to add to the conversation.

‘What?’ Milkwood said. 

‘It’s a disease that happens to projected landscapes that are unconvinced of themselves. It always happens to conceivisist worlds that get too old, or when people try to get too, umm, dumb with them.’ 

Milkwood grimaced. ‘How do you know that?’ 

‘I had tutors, duh. Why didn’t you know that?’ 

‘My tutors taught me useful things. Like. Where people’s arteries are.’ She puffed a little ring of smoke. ‘Okay. Break done. It’s time to go.’ 

Porcelain on concrete. Porcelain shoving aside garbage bags and plastic bottles. The Urcurator seemed drawn from the air. She was there, where she just wasn’t. 

‘DIE.’

‘Where the fuc—’ Dracula spear tackled Milkwood aside, leaving her cigarette spinning in the air, before it was pounded into the ground by the Urcurator’s fists. 

The Urcurator reeled back again, this time over Guildenstern, pulled her arm back to smite him once and for all—

Kssssssssch! 

A cloud of cool white foam bloomed over the Urcurator’s left leg, up her back. She turned around and the curator, tall and blonde and steely-faced, sprayed her chest and face with her fire extinguisher. She sprayed in thin, wiggly lines, covering as many of the Urcurator’s frantically blinking eyes as possible. 

‘WHAT ARE YOU—’ the Urcurator said, before she stopped existing. 

The curator huffed, groaned, and threw the fire extinguisher to the ground. 

‘Now I’ve really done it,’ She looked over them all, her lips pursed. She started to make her way along the hall. ‘Okay. There we are. Follow me now.’ 

Milkwood didn’t move. She dug around in her dress for another cigarette. ‘So we trust you, now?’ 

‘You owe it to me. And, anyways—’ Footsteps and disorganised yelling began to echo down from the still open door the Urcurator had come from. ‘You’re dead if you don’t.’ 

She led them into the centre of the hall, and then paused. She rubbed her chin, spun to the right. She marched right into one of those great black holes, squishing through old trash and tin cans and wet paper. 

They stood, facing it. She was gone. It had eaten her. The yelling and stepping and scrabbling grew closer. Dracula grimaced. Veins popped on her forehead. She was expending as much of her energy as possible on floating, faintly, above the trash. 

‘Ugh!’ Guildenstern yelled, suddenly, taking Milkwood’s hand, then Dracula’s hand, hauling them forward. 

‘G, G,’ Milkwood sputtered. 

‘My shoes,’ Dracula moaned, stumbling along. 

Guildenstern entered the pitch blackness and dragged Milkwood and Dracula after. 

No form in that black space. A projected world was all thoughtspace. The museum was the dream. The black space, then, was that infinite, indefinite stuff outside of the dream. The inky uncreative part of the subconscious; the hollow element, waiting to be filled. So the stars don’t exist without a bleak, black night sky, or a candle without a dark room. If you cut a hole in the universe, Guildenstern thought, black liquid would spill through.

Guildenstern was a dot. Dracula and Milkwood were dots. The curator was a dot. It was a drifting, pulling sensation; the mind was not equipped for it. Guildenstern saw magenta in the sky. Guildenstern saw a field in the wind, saw the birds flitting and spreading away and blooming when they hit the horizon, peeling open, gleaming, morning stars in vivid mist. Colours drifting like the clouds of Jupiter. Guildenstern lifted her arm; she had no arm. His arm was melting. His arm was a mass of balloons. His arm was a festival of gleaming colours. 

‘You killed this place the second you stepped in, you know,’ the curator said (she did not speak; there was no sound or air. Guildenstern dreamt that she spoke. Guildenstern heard the words swirling in ringing circles, heard them carved into her collarbone). ‘If Urcurator had had sense she would’ve squished you on the spot. But she’s the only one convinced of this place anymore.’ 

‘Why is there an artificial dream world underneath the museum in Bunk Falls?’ Milkwood asked (her voice felt to Guildenstern like the taste of heavy black coffee with a drip of blueberry syrup, warm and slow, spreading in your chest. Her voice felt like the heat rising off the mug, on your lips). 

‘A museum,’ the curator said. She undulated in mild surprise. She huffed a long sigh. ‘This is a projected oracular landscape. We were established by the SIB to monitor Bunk Hyperiridescence Dynamics and the development of the New Bunk metropolis across extraontological space. Yadda, yadda. Sorry, I’m still caught on the museum thing. It’s really a museum out there?’ 

Guildenstern felt the long grass on her ankles, felt the evening breeze, the orange sunlight, faintly warm, cooled down and bereft of its midday force, on her skin. He couldn’t open his eyes when he tried, nor could he close them. He had no eyes. When he tried to look at anything specific—at a flitting dragonfly, at a tree’s bark—it all swam away and reformed. ‘Why were you surprised that we have a museum? You predicted it.’ 

Shoulders raised. Hilltops shrugged. The curator spoke: ‘They weren’t ever happy with our predictions. So we decided to lie a little. Keep them from shutting us off for a time. It’s not easy balancing accurate prediction with sheer lying. Hence our… Urcurator. She was always just meant to be a consistency program. Um. Is it big?’ 

‘What?’ 

‘The museum. Is it like we projected? We thought, by this point, in this future, you’d have moved on from Postfingercolonialist architecture. Neofingercolonialist. Martian immigrants coming back to Earth, bringing their architectural forms with them. Sort of a return to classic Fingercolonialism, but with the open space and the sunlight and all of Postfingercolonial—well, ah. Is it like it?’ 

‘It’s crap,’ Dracula said. 

‘It’s cute,’ Milkwood followed up. 

‘It’s just an old brick building,’ Guildenstern said. Lacquered wood lined the hills, and dusty old corners, and tables covered in creaking masses of old junk. There was a faint smell of mildew. ‘With some stuff in it. It’s kinda run down. But they do scavenger hunts. The public school has an excursion into it every year. It’s nice. Not as nice as yours, though.’ 

‘No, no. That sounds nice. Everything here’s too big. Even the toilets.’ 

‘Where are you taking us?’ Dracula asked, suddenly. She was a bristling ball of flitting blackness that suggested, faintly, bat wings. 

‘That place you came in, of course. You really should go.’ 

‘You should come with us, then,’ Guildenstern said. ‘People need to get out of here.’

The curator turned and looked at her. Guildenstern felt a faint phosphorescence fall upon her. Cool and green. ‘No evacuating. This place is dead already.’ 

‘No—what? Don’t say that. We can get people out. If we’re responsible for this—’ 

‘When you came in, didn’t you see the computer?’ the curator asked. She flickered like a candle, like the light lingering in a lightbulb after it’s been turned off. ‘Shut off, for years? Dusty? Wires cold?’ 

They drifted in a timeless transitory period just long enough for the drifting colours to fizzle into new shades, for oranges to turn to purples. For the rain to fill the holes up and drain out and evaporate, for the silence to settle and spread like mist, plucked at by the breeze. 

‘That’s that. I’ll be seeing you.’ The curator stopped. Her passage was at an end. She was the smell of dusty concrete. Your fingertips running down a grainy stone. 

‘Be seeing you,’ Guildenstern said. 

‘Methek-um,’ Milkwood murmured. 

They passed out of that empty space, through spaces in the brickwork, through the spaces between the atoms that made them up, into the museum, which no longer existed. A suggestion of it remained, an idea of stacked white bricks, of high ceilings and sunlight falling through high arched glass, like spice that lingers on your lips and fades away slowly. It buffeted in the wind. Garbage rot lapped at the corners, in the walls, bloomed like flowers behind the exhibits. It was all trash, now; had always been trash. A grand dumpster. 

An idea of the Urcurator remained, too, squatting on the ground. Still as a statue. Chip wrappers and tiny bottle caps and scrunched up tissues festering on her shoulders and arms. Tiny wisps of foam still rested along her spine, on the backs of her legs; she wiped one away with a finger, then flicked it off. 

The part of Guildenstern that told her to run away was overwhelmed by the unreality of it all, the tenuousness. The Urcurator couldn’t touch them without coming apart. 

‘AND HERE IT. IS. HERE IS WHAT YOU COULD NEVER BEAR. TO SEE.’ The Urcurator’s voice wavered. It was fading in and out. It struggled for purchase. ‘I SUGGEST YOU NOTE THIS IN. YOUR REPORT.’ 

The Urcurator stood up. Her arm crumbled off and when it hit the ground it rattled, bounced, a pile of soggy papers and tin cans. ‘AU. REVOIR.’ 

When the Urcurator shut her eyes, all at once, the museum finally faded. A wind came and swept it up, swept her up, into the sky, like a heaving final breath, into the dark sky with the dark stars with the red winemoon rising over Peak Surrender like a halo. They stood on a wide concrete square in the centre of New Bunk, which boiled around them. 

An alarm howled. Plumes of smoke rose through the sky. Helicopter blades chopped, pulsed, deafened. The moon bled light. 

Concrete swam beneath them, then quaked, rumbled and cracked. Great red pipes were torn, taut, out of the earth, exploding from asphalt, from pavements, from beneath parked cars with shrill alarms, ripping down apartment walls. They rose up, straight and tight, like threads being drawn by a faraway hand. Drawn towards Peak Surrender. One of them ripped, exploded, spurting iridescent blood that sprayed over streetlights and down a gutter and sublimated into a gleaming, glinting rainbow mist. 

Guildenstern gripped Milkwood’s hand, desperate for something still and solid, but it was growing thin and weak, like fabric, like the threads were coming apart, and she gripped a little harder and ripped right through, and felt nothing but her own fingers. And those were coming apart, too. Guildenstern looked up, through the gas and the light and the disintegration, and saw Peak Surrender being torn open. An arm reaching out, grabbing blindly against the dark sky. 

Guildenstern shut her eyes and when she opened them she was standing with her back against the wall in the Bunk Falls Historical Museum basement, hand wrapped around Milkwood’s, with the stink of mildew and old stagnant water and rust in his nose. 

Roslyn Cisse stood at the end of the room with her hands clutched together, smiling apologetically. The teenager was there, too, tiredly picking his nose. And a baffled thick-browed security guard who marched ahead, took Guildenstern, then Milkwood, by the shoulders, and said: 

‘Get out of here. If I see either of you in here again, I’ll have to call the sheriff. Geddit?’

Guildenstern and Milkwood got it. They staggered out, went shakily up the ladder.

Guildenstern looked quickly around, searching for Dracula. Her eyes fell onto the monitor. The screen was cracked. A faint line of smoke unspooled from its guts and the room smelled like burning rubber. Silence inside of it, like dead stone. It was just silicon now. 

---

Guildenstern elbowed papers and books and a stapler off his office table. One hand shovelled a forkful of noodles suffused with sriracha and thousand island sauce into her mouth and the other kept her phone to her ear. She looked through the big dusty windows by the front door, watched the street lights flicker on, one by one, over Bunk Falls. Flat purple houses glowing from inside like lamps, silhouetted forms moving slowly, switching on televisions, making dinner. A dog barked faraway. The sky was a deep, sleepy blue. Black mountain slopes lapped at its knees. She couldn’t see the moon. Bill Client (as she was labelled in Guildenstern’s phone) finally picked up. 

‘Mmrph mmhp,’ Guildenstern said. He paused to swallow the noodles, breathed, then tried again. ‘Uhh, hey, Miss Fearey. Yes, this is regarding the head. I noticed you sent in money for the acquisitions fee.’ 

He gobbled down another forkful of noodles, as fast, as quiet, and as gracefully as he could have. ‘If you wanted a refund, I’m gonna need your card details, uh. Uh?’  

‘You delivered it! Or, or, your associate delivered it. I’m sorry if you had any trouble with it! She said it had been something of a mess!’ Bill spoke too far from her phone; her voice was quick and breathy. Everything she said was accompanied with a faint fuzziness. 

Guildenstern leant back in her chair, the fork leaning out of her mouth. He pulled it out, slowly, then rested it in the bowl.

‘Uuuh. Yeah. It was fine. Say. I wanna ask really quick.’ 

‘Yes?’ 

‘Was that head ever. Y’know. Real?’ 

Bill was quiet. 

‘Was your granddad sainted? Or, uh.’ Guildenstern regretted even bringing it up. This was a bad silence. Now he felt like a dickhead. He sipped his orange juice. No more colour in the sky. A lonely car rattled across her street, drawing a cone of pale white light. 

‘I don’t mean fuckin, to intrude, just. We found it in a weird place where that kinda seemed like a good thing to ask and—’ 

‘No. The fire was only some months before he was, ah, sainted. They couldn’t even find him in the wreck.’ Her phone shifted in her hand, her voice went quiet, then loud again. ‘The first possible saint in our family, youknow, and then it all just… Aaaah, well. I was so surprised you got it at all. You people are miracle workers.’ 

Guildenstern wasn’t sure if the word ‘miracle’ applied to any of the events of the past day. But he didn’t mention a thing. ‘We try pretty hard.’ 

‘Oh, oh, but it has no powers, mind you. Or MD field. I’m just glad to have something of him at all, youknow?’ 

Guildenstern smiled faintly and tried to ignore her memory of shrivelled skin in darkness, of a gazing eye, of stringy hair. She looked, again, over her front yard, at the street light on the corner where Vinegar Avenue met Sahack Street, at the moths flitting like bits of static around its lamp, at the dry, brownish grass that shivered in the wind. 

At the very edge of the light, by a fence with chipped paint, she thought she saw the arch of a small, furry back; pitch black fur and faintly luminescent eyes. But just for a second. 

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