A Matter of Agency
by Eldritch Thrum
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Aseph and Linnea stood beneath the last rung, in awe of what the agent had helped them discover and the infinite possibilities these presented.
“I want this one, Linnea. You keep your hornets’ nest, and I’ll keep... all this!”
Linnea thought about the two dead hornets, how she left them and the nest in the attic; she wondered how they all died, whether their spirits might be flying about the rafters in search of their dislocated nest, and felt a momentary regret for abandoning them.
“Fine, the attic has more light, anyway, and tons more things to explore,” she asserted, but Aseph had already begun snaking through the tall stacks of boxed remnants and diaphanous webs abandoned by their owners. By the time she caught him, both felt disoriented.
“Where are we?” Linnea asked, curious but unflustered.
“Here!” Asepth smirked, pointing to the ground.
“Don’t be daft! Which way is out?”
Extending his left arm across the other, he pointed to a row of dark, assorted coats dangling from wooden hangers on a steel rod, which was suspended by two wires drooping from a thick pipe overhead.
“Through there?”
A door on which hung several dresses opened to a proper stairway and coiled up to the kitchen that adjoined the living room, where their parents sat.
The agent, entering the kitchen from another room, walked up behind them.
“Mr. Moen, we beat you here!”
“As I thought you might.” He bowed, directing them toward the deep, rolled-arm sofas on which Kael and Telah sat, still holding hands.
“If you wish,” said the agent, “I can leave the four of you to continue your conversation privately.”
“No.” Kael smiled. “You should stay.”
“So, what is the verdict from our jury of two?” Telah’s voice wavered slightly as she attempted to veil her own enthusiasm from the twins.
Aseph and Linnea fell into the empty sofa with an uncharacteristic lack of propriety, colliding with each other with the initial rebound and laughing imprudently. “We love it!” Their words harmonized, and hearing the melody their simultaneous response created only encouraged their silliness.
Telah whispered into Kael’s ear, kissed his cheek, and rose to sit with her children. Kael subdued the deeper, unremitting sadness that threatened to darken the moment and turned to address the agent. “Mr. Moen, we wish to claim this house.”
* * *
The agent sat upright on the small, round ottoman, his fingers lightly tracing the intricate pattern carved deeply into the worn, pliable binding of the book, gifted to him by his predecessor. Its pages, though nearly a century old, were unwilted, marred only by the thin, vermilion letters and numbers that testified to the agent’s professional acumen. Yet it was the texture of the binding, the divinity of the pattern, and the origin of its pages that always afforded comfort and guidance when he held it in his hands.
Several hawk-moths now clung to the wide, floor-to-ceiling window, undulating their wings slowly, almost synchronously to a music silenced by the thick glass. He inhaled deeply, closed his eyes, and held the breath for a moment, listening for the music that guided them here. When he exhaled and opened his eyes, they remained on the glass, waiting for him.
Meticulously placed between the pages of the book were the forms he and each of the Ribers would have to sign and mark for the claiming to be ratified. It was 11:47 a.m. and, while emotionally exultant for the family, his body began to feel the toll of twelve consecutive days and at least eighty cumulative hours of professional service on their behalf. He longed for a warm drink in his own chair facing his own window, perhaps listening to soft music or nothing at all for several uninterrupted hours before returning the call of his next client.
When the silence was broken by the family laughing in the kitchen, the agent rose, bowed to the window, and picked up the book and the worn-leather doctor’s bag he had procured from his car while the family had sanctified their spaces within the house, per his instruction. He made his way to one end of the granite island, opened the book, and handed each of them the customary wheat-colored form, as well as a long, black pen he had taken from his bag. His voice became deep, solemn.
“Per the great commission of our faith, a family must claim their own house within an appointed time. You have claimed this house, and each of you has consecrated a space within it. At the top of this form, you will see your name. Beneath it are the articles to which you have already given verbal pledge. Please read them and, with the black pen, sign your initials on the line to the right of each article, signifying your covenant with the Lender.”
In the breadth of his career, the agent was accustomed to seeing most families — particularly those with younger children — become perceptibly agitated at this stage, often from a mounting, existential angst over the ironclad nature of the form they were required to mark. The Riber family thus far presented themselves as a rare exception, the parents smiling, the children giggling as they initialed.
The agent continued. “The Lender now requires your complete signature at the bottom left-hand corner of the second page.”
As they signed, he looked into his bag and sifted through the implements, pondering whether he knew the Ribers well enough to determine the means each would select.
He continued. “And finally, the Lender requires the mark of blood from our faith’s symbol, which must be cut into the palm of your hand by a fellow believer. Linnea and Aseph, because you are underage, the symbol must be made by one or both of your parents.”
From the bag, he lifted a folded handkerchief and a small karambit knife with a wooden handle. On each side of the blade was etched the spiral symbol that Kael and Telah had precisely but prematurely shaped into one another’s palms a few days before enlisting Mr. Moen’s agency, when both were convinced that a small, rustic, seaside cottage would be their forever home, until Kael, overcome by a much deeper wound, relented.
Aseph exposed his palm first, and Telah, taking the blade from the agent’s hand, reached over, kissed her son’s palm, and recited as she made the incision, “May we share this home forever, my son,” to which the agent added, “May your family share this home forever, Aseph Riber,” and placed Aseph’s palm onto the bottom right-hand corner of the form.
The agent took the blade, carefully wiped it clean with the anointed cloth, and saw himself in the purity of its steel. Unexpectedly, the blade became heavier in his hand, and he was seized by a brief but discernible sadness. Katla, he thought. My dear Katla! He looked again at the blade, beyond the indelible pattern, and saw his daughter’s face.
“Mr. Moen?” Linnea spoke his name softly, cautiously, instantly breaking the spell that seemed to paralyze him, though only briefly. Recovering himself, the agent lifted the blade and placed the handle into Kael’s palm, noting the familiar pattern.
When Kael had cut the shape into Linnea’s hand and had spoken the words, he wiped his children’s blood from the granite surface with the handkerchief. The agent, erasing the features of his daughter’s face from Linnea’s, said, with slightly more intonation, “May your family share this home forever, Linnea Riber.”
Telah stood beside Kael and held her spiral-scarred hand in his.
“Telah and Kael, since you have marked each other’s hand before enlisting my agency, I must cut the symbol into your unmarked hand. Telah Riber, your commitment to your family is strong and, to our Lord and Lender, even stronger. By His providence, I designate you co-guardian of this home.”
Light refracted from the blade and into Telah’s eyes as the tip curved along the skin.
With another handkerchief he had taken from the bag, the agent caught the converging droplets of blood before they pooled too deeply, turned her hand onto the page, and pressed gently until the mark was made.
“Kael Riber, your commitment to your family is strong and to our—”
Kael pulled his hand from the agent’s light grip.
“Mr. Riber?”
“Babe? What is it?”
They were met with a vacant expression. Kael stood there, transfixed by memories of seeing his father’s head crushed beneath the fallen boom of a dragline excavator; of watching his mother’s second husband, a village parson, mark her and his younger sisters’ hands with the inscribed blade; of running away from the house his family had claimed, returning to find their bodies bumping into each other as they hung from thick ropes tied to the wrought iron railing at the top of the stairs.
“Kael!” Telah reached over and squeezed his hand.
“Sorry. Felt a bit disoriented there. Probably the blood. Sorry, Mr. Moen. Please continue,” and he extended his hand.
Yet the images of his stepfather’s dark, bloated tongue and his mother’s and sisters’ lifeless, branded palms lingered as the agent completed the recitation.
“Kael Riber, your commitment to your family is strong and to our Lord and Lender, even stronger. By His providence, I designate you co-guardian of this home.”
When the blade cut into the thenar eminence, he winced; his mother’s blue-lipped, sagging maw coming frighteningly close. When the tip reached the distal transverse, he made a sharp inhalation; his sisters’ sightless, distended eyes locking into his. Yet, he did not pull away again and, when the agent had made the mark and pressed his new wound onto the paper, Kael took Telah’s hand and kissed it to reassure her of his oath.
* * *
Aseph wanted to be first. He stood in the corner of the basement near the enclosed passage that led to the attic and kneeled before the small door. The agent stood behind him.
“Mr. Moen?”
“Yes, young Mr. Riber?”
“Will it take long?”
“Oh no, no! Almost instantly, and painlessly, as your parents insisted.”
“Will I taste it?”
The agent opened his bag, lifted from it a small glass vial, and examined it in the light that streamed through the narrow window behind him.
“If ingested in this form, yes, and you would most likely die from the taste alone! I’ve been told it is quite awful! But I always come prepared.”
He pulled from the bag a small cup and a plastic bottle of blue liquid, then walked around the boy to demonstrate.
“I pour these tiny, powdery rocks into the cup. See? Now, just a swallow’s worth of this tasty blue drink into the cup, as well, and.... Mmm. Do you smell that? And it tastes even sweeter! Here, hold the cup, but do not drink just yet.”
Aseph’s hand was remarkably steady.
“So, when you have swallowed this, you must close your eyes and begin to imagine your body floating through every inch of space in this basement. Imagine floating through this door without having to open it, up the ladder without ever stepping on a rung, and into the attic, where Linnea will be. You must see these things very clearly in your mind while your eyes are closed. When the blue drink goes down your throat, your body will start to feel warm, then numb, and then you will feel very sleepy. At that point, let your body sleep, but never stop seeing yourself move on the air through this room, the passageway, and the attic. Do you understand, young Mr. Riber?”
“Mr. Moen, what’ll it be like after? You know, the floating around?”
Throughout his long career with the agency, he had never had to explain something so esoteric, particularly to an adolescent. When Katla was newly born, able to fit in the crook of his arm, he had composed in his mind a laconic story featuring a happy wisp of smoke that had once been a frightened little girl, a story he had forced himself to forget when another man had become his wife’s lover.
“Well, as I am still very much flesh and blood and, since I have never been able to ask my clients — or even see them — once they have, well, left their bodies, I have no personal knowledge about ‘floating around’ that I can share with you, but I imagine it might be quite an extraordinary, unending adventure that only you can experience.”
He waited, searching the boy’s eyes for assent and was rewarded with a smile.
“Then our Lord will be blessed this day by your faith, Aseph Riber! Drink, and enjoy your new home, forever!”
The agent walked back to the bag he had set on a Canterbury end table. He took his time opening it, returning the vial, the cup, and the bottle, listening to the rate of the boy’s breathing, turning only when he heard the body collapse to the floor.
* * *
Copyright © 2021 by Eldritch Thrum
