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When Tim gets home after that endless, endless day – lost in those corridors with Martin for what must have been a week, at least, unable to sleep – once he’s crawled into bed fully clothed, he texts Sasha. Because that’s what he does, or it’s what he always used to do. He thinks the circumstances warrant it. He does not think about that thing he saw, Sasha’s face warped and stretched and crueller than he thought was possible, her limbs distended, moving with predatory speed. Or rather, he does, and he texts her, ignoring the fact that his last few texts, friendly rejoinders, have gone entirely unanswered.
Nothing between them is easy, now, because of the worms or Jon or the archives or just because that’s what happens. He doesn’t know what to say. Escaped from somewhere that might be hell, hope you’re okay. Btw did u run into some horrible twisted perversion of yourself? Please tell me it didn’t eat you xx. He settles on a you alright? and waits.
Three hours later, he wakes up sweating and there’s still no response. sash? he types. it’s cool if you dont want to talk but can you just msg so ik youre okay?
She’s probably asleep, he thinks, although the Sasha he remembers never went to bed before one because she so often got caught up in whatever she was doing. It’s been a weird day, he thinks. (But it hasn’t just been one, has it? He doesn’t let himself think further.) She’ll text in the morning. He falls into uneasy sleep.
He wakes up late, ears ringing like he’s hungover, and it takes him a minute before he can make sense of his surroundings. It’s just his flat. She hasn’t texted. He’s signed off work for – well, he doesn’t know exactly, but he’s willing to bet it’s a fair while. He messages her on instagram and twitter for good measure. Maybe she’s out of credit. He even sends her an email. Just a quick one. Just in case. He doesn’t get anything back. No indication that she’s even received any of his messages. Maybe she lost her phone. Maybe she’s just sleeping in.
He wastes hours on twitter. Cooks himself eggy bread, comfort food his mum used to make for him or Danny when one of them was off school sick. Nothing from Sasha even by four pm.
He talks himself into and then out of dropping by hers. They’re not that close any more. Not since Prentiss. But they are still – she is still Sasha, and he thinks it might be a good idea to check on her, as he doesn’t know if anyone else would think to. Well, Martin would, but he’s not sure Martin knows where she lives. He decides to go. She can tell him to piss off if she wants, but at least then he’ll know she’s okay. He tries not to think about it, but a part of him is hoping that seeing her back at her flat again, the first time since that night, will make something click and she’ll explain what’s been happening for the last year, that they’ll talk and things will make a little sense again.
He looks like death on the tube. There’s a bit more staring than usual, which is annoying, but he doesn’t think about it too much, just snaps “woman made of evil worms” at the man who stops dead in front of him staring, preventing him from getting on the lift.
In her building, he walks by the warped glass windows, the ones she liked to watch people out of, where she first saw Michael so long ago, before the worms were anything but abstract to him.
He feels stupid when he’s finally in front of her door. She’s going to see him and say she was sleeping, or lost her phone, or just didn’t see why she should talk to him. Still, he can’t not check. He knocks. Nothing. He knocks again. Nothing. Abruptly, he remembers Martin’s ordeal, the knocking that came and came and only made him hide for longer. He dismisses it.
He tries to peek through the little hole but he can’t see anything. He knocks again, harder.
“Sasha?” he says, and again.
Someone comes out. A neighbour.
“Alright, mate?” he looks wary, clearly eyeing Tim’s dishevelment and scars.
“Yeah I’m just – you haven’t seen the woman who lives here recently, have you?”
Now he looks really suspicious. “And who’s asking?”
“I’m her coworker,” Tim says, “her friend,”
“Right.”
“No, seriously,” He remembers how much she liked – likes – it here. “Uh, I have pictures,”
He goes through his camera roll – he has to go back a fair bit, but he finds selfies from a pub crawl for an old researcher buddy of theirs’ birthday.
The neighbour relaxes, at that.
“There was a sort of – incident at work yesterday and I didn’t manage to see her after so I just wanted to check that she’s alright,”
“Haven’t seen her,” the neighbour says. He frowns. “Not for – well, a couple of weeks now, if I’m honest,”
“Oh,” says Tim, and the neighbour is either bored or understands the “oh” for what it is, something roughly translating to something is very, very wrong here, because he claps Tim on the back and goes on his way.
It takes him a moment, but he decides to use the spare key. He’s always been more of a forgiveness guy than a permission one, and right now he thinks he’d be over the fucking moon if Sasha came out and gave him hell for invading her privacy.
Her flat is very, very quiet. A thin layer of dust covers everything. Not that there are really any things to speak of. There’s a tv, a small coffee table, a sofa, some shelves, but that’s about it. There’s nothing personal. When they were – when he was here before, every surface was covered with papers and trinkets and postits and the odd half-drunk glass of water. He remembers, because they’d been kissing from the moment they’d closed her front door behind them and had had to stop so she could shove some stacks onto the floor because there wasn’t any room on the sofa otherwise. And later, when she’d fallen asleep, he’d contented himself looking around the room, taking in what details he could, the tiny things which made this place hers. Tim’s been here before and this isn’t right. It’s been two years, fine, whatever, but she wouldn’t just – it doesn’t make any sense for her to get rid of everything she owns.
He walks through the flat, careful not to touch anything. He opens her bedroom door with his elbow. It’s neat. Sterile. Her bed is made, clean and smooth in a way which nauseates him. On her bedside table, a photo, the only one he’s seen in the flat. Sasha’s mum, before she got sick, smiling in the park with a little girl he doesn’t recognise.
The room seems too small all of a sudden. Tim turns on his heel and leaves.
***
Malaysia had been, he thinks, his one good idea. He’d missed it there. His cousins looked so much like Danny it hurt, and he hadn’t seen them in years, for that. But he’d thought that maybe that was what he needed; a hurt which made some sense. But he’d barely been able to make it to the hotel, and spent most of the trip flat on his back, watching the ceiling spin towards him. He shouldn’t have been surprised, he knows. It still hurts. He still misses it.
***
He knows Sasha is dead. It’s the thing he and Martin saw that day, of course. He knows this even as he tells himself, sometimes, that there’s no proof, that she’s just missing. She’ll come back in the middle of the night, and tell a story about being lost in the same endless corridors as him and Martin, and though it’s been weeks for him, it’s only been days for her, so she’ll come back, and things won’t be right, but she won’t be dead. Sometimes, he thinks, it’d be appropriately dramatic for Sasha. She deserved some fanfare. If she had to – and she didn’t have to, there are so very many ways in which he immediately hates himself for this thought, but if she had to die, at least it was impressive. It’s far better than the alternative, that Jon killed her.
He knows Sasha is dead when he wakes up at 11am and drags himself to work; he knows she’s dead when he drinks coffee in the breakroom; when he sits at his desk; when he lurches on the tube, his balance still off from the corridors. He knows she’s dead when he gets back to his empty flat. He knows she’s dead when he goes to sleep.
He still knows Sasha is dead the day Martin brings him to Elias’ office, and Jon is back, in front of him again for the first time in weeks, with an angry slash on his throat and blistered skin covering his hand. He doesn’t look well. He also doesn’t look at Tim like he thinks he might kill him. He doesn’t look at him at all. Elias tells them about the murders. Martin asks about Sasha, because he can’t, he can’t, and he watches Jon speak, in a tone softer than he’s managed in months, which still isn’t actually soft at all. Sasha died almost a year ago, Martin, and then he does look at Tim, and Tim can’t look away, every strange thing from the last year now making sudden, nauseating sense. Elias explains, crisp, Sasha’s death barely a footnote in the itinerary for today. If I showed you a picture of the real Sasha now, you’d have no idea who it was. He thinks about Danny, then, and skins which don’t fit, and statements of people who swear that the person they know is not the one in front of them, while everyone around them insists they’re wrong. He can’t look at Melanie. When they’re done, he goes to the men’s room and throws up. He doesn’t stand up again for a very long time.
***
Tim goes to work, because he can’t even fucking skip.
He goes to work and he pretends to research and he lies on the breakroom sofa and drifts in and out of consciousness. He doesn’t sleep, not really. He’s not that lucky. The only border there is is between coherence and incoherence, the times when he can make out Martin stuttering into the room with tea and a soft word, and the times all he sees is an endless sickening stream of Danny and Sasha and Sasha and Danny and smiles that are wrong and everything he should have done which he didn’t and everything he did do which he shouldn’t have. It eats him. He had thought he was saving her life. He thinks he knows how Laura Popham felt, pressed tight into those caves, her sister just out of reach. He thinks – is that what it was? Letting go of her hand, was that my way of saying take her, not me, take her, not me? Why did he, the worse brother, the worse friend, keep surviving, while the people who made his life real were killed?
***
It’s the strangest thing, too, because ever since Jon told him about Sasha, he’s started to remember things. Not her voice, not her face, but conversations they had. Things she liked. He realises, slowly, that he hasn’t been able to think about these things, really, in the last year. He knew they were friends, of course, but the how and why – that she’d watched him ball up a piece of paper and throw it into the bin across the room, and without a word had silently done the same, resulting in a fiercely competitive silent battle which he had won, barely, because the other researchers returned from lunch, and she’d thrown her last ball at him, instead, and grinned, and he hadn’t even minded – had been behind some kind of fog. It’s good, remembering the person she was. He never knows when it will happen, and it lays him out every time, rediscovering her, and his own grief in the process.
***
He sees women on the street, sometimes, who look just like Sasha. They look like her for long enough that he watches them, until he remembers that not only is that not Sasha’s face, it is not Sasha’s face.
***
Tim had learned to love research at uni, the satisfying pull of information from file to article to archive to librarian to sweet talk until he reached the conclusion. It’s always soothed him. He didn’t cry once, after Danny. After the police left him alone and Penguin put him on compassionate leave with a strong recommendation that he see a psychiatrist, he began. Danny was stronger than him and brighter than him and he’d loved him for that, and if Danny couldn’t escape whatever had – whatever it was, there was no way he could, not in person. But he could research. The clown part was easy, but it went deeper – there was a circus, a very old circus, and stories on webforums about places that went wrong, and people who never came back. He quit Penguin. He joined the Magnus Institute. And it had been terrible and pointless and brilliant. Just for a little while. Just when it was him and Sasha, together, sorting files while she discussed her latest projects. He’d hated himself for that, for enjoying it, for loving being with Sasha, when he should be focused on Danny. And Sasha had noticed, and she had asked. And he had told her. She had been the first person he told after Penguin. She had sat on the floor with him, files set aside, in the quiet, and told him that she was sorry, that she believed him.
“I mean, I’m obviously glad, but why?”
“Some of the things I’ve seen in artefact storage–” she sighed. “There’s a reason I transferred out, let’s say,”
“You wanna talk about it?”
“Maybe another time,” she looked right at him. “I’m sorry about Danny. I’ll keep an eye out for anything about clowns.”
“Thank you,” he’d said, and it wasn’t just for this, it was for everything, for being able to look forward to lunch breaks, look forward to anything at all other than the endlessly retreating truth.
“It’s okay to be happy sometimes, you know,” she’d laughed at the look on his face. “I’m not a mindreader, I just – when I lost my mum, I felt like that. Like any laughter was an insult. It’s not. Besides, you’ll get further with research if you’re not making yourself feel worse because you think you should.”
She hadn’t said it was what Danny would have wanted, which he is grateful for, because that doesn’t matter any more. Danny wouldn’t have wanted to be skinned alive, either. So he’s dead and Tim’s the one who has to do what’s right.
This time – and God, that phrase is maybe the most depressing part of all – this time isn’t like with Danny. There’s no desire to prove and study and research and examine and taxonomise. He has final confirmation that yes, unspeakable supernatural horrors exist, and they kill, and they killed his brother, and they killed his – they killed Sasha, and now one of them owns him. Tim has never been one for crying, but what else is there to do? So he lets the tears roll out of him, numb, barely even noticing, because he has no imperative either way. He just wants out. Smirke’s Fourteen mean nothing now, however real they’ve proven to be.
And isn’t that what this is? Isn’t this strange, doesn’t he feel unreal, doesn’t he feel like nothing but an empty body, a puppet, like he’s on fire, like the world and everything in it is expanding away from him, like he’s wrapped in some thick and blinding fog, like he’s blind, like he’s only ever seconds away from being torn apart, like he’s chasing something, endlessly, like there’s something inside him that shouldn’t be there? Doesn’t he ache for an end?
***
Quite often, he will go into the breakroom and just stop. All he can think of is Sasha at the table, Sasha, crying with laughter, Sasha, eating her shitty fucking yoghurt which he refused to validate her life choices regarding, Sasha looking back at him, serious, focused, but with that glint in her eye that he knew to read as amusement. People didn’t know how to read her, a lot of them, read her quiet as hostility, her seriousness as dullness. He remembers these things about her, but where her body should be, where her face should be, there’s nothing. Quite often, he will be thinking this, as if he could remember her nose – there was something about her nose he found charming, he’s recently decided – through sheer force of will alone, and realise that someone is sitting at the table, where Sasha should be. Someone from accounts or research or any other department in this stupid haunted place. He will want to hit them, or throw something, but he won’t. He’d tried it a couple of times, when he was alone, and it hadn’t unfurled anything in him, just made him more acutely aware of his own impotence, the shards of mug on the floor lying pathetically, mockingly.
His coworkers will often glance at him, uncomfortably, and he will realise he is crying, and he will not care. It’s just like being back at Penguin. Everyone was very sensitive, very careful, but too uncomfortable with – “you know his brother –” “something of a breakdown, I’m afraid,” to give him anything but platitudes. He could feel them losing patience, reaching the expiry date. He didn’t care. In a way, he relishes the performance of it, the way that it makes something real, at least a little, outside of himself. He tells them to leave, get as far the fuck away from here as they can, while they still can, or at the very least to avoid the archives, avoid artefact storage.
Sonya approaches him one day. “I’m sorry about Sasha,” she says. “I know you two were close.” He nods. “Sonya, you should get out,” He doesn’t try to explain. She’s worked in artefact storage longer than anyone. She knows. “I can’t,” she says. “I have things I have to do,” And Tim nods, and he’s numb, because he knows the feeling, but there really is just nothing, isn’t there. Nothing he can do. Nothing that means anything anymore.
“Be safe, then,” he says, but he’s knows it’s empty.
“You too, Tim.” She looks at him, he can tell through his peripheral vision. He does not look at her.
***
They had been working late, back when they were in research, and Jon had been a normal coworker. Tim imagines telling himself back then what it would come to, what Jon would be to him, and feels a hysterical bubble of mirth rise within him. But that’s not what he wants to think about. No. He rehearses it, his memory, doing his utmost not to let himself alter it in the remembering. He witnesses.
They’d been working late, something like a year into knowing each other, and had both gone into the same storage cupboard to fetch something – a file or a piece of paper or a stapler, and it was very small, and he thinks something like they’d both thought the other was going to hold the door open, but neither did, and then they were alone in the dark, and the office, and very, very close.
Neither of them had said a word.
They’d made eye contact. There was that breathless moment of tension, his favourite part of it all, when evitable becomes inevitable, and then he’d leaned in, slowly, and she’d met him with no small enthusiasm.
“This is such a cliché,” she murmured against his lips.
“I don’t think you can do media analysis on our real lives, Sash,”
“Watch me,” she said, and kissed him again. The dark made everything more real somehow, made him hyperconscious of every part of his body, but specifically in how they existed in relation to hers. Her hands on him made him real, from the line down his scalp and the shiver of his nape and her grip on his shoulders. He had to shut his eyes, even in the dark, because there was just too much to take in. When they broke, it was all he could do to keep breathing. He could hear her breath too, a little rushed, and it filled him with a flush of affection he could cry from. He remembers thinking that he was smiling so hard it was probably audible.
“Do you – would you like to go back to mine?”
He kissed her again in response, cupping her face with one hand.
“You make a strong point, Stoker,” she’d laughed.
The pull of silence and dark lingered. They stayed in that quiet moment together. Remembering, Tim tries to spin it out longer and longer, but it’s not elastic enough, and inevitably the next moment comes. He – his past self, determined to ruin him – turns the light on. He sees her face. He can’t trust anything that comes after.
***
She had been so expansive, that’s the thing he remembers now. She was – she was warm, yes, funny, kind, competent to a fault, but most of all she had known what she was for and she had pursued it. It wasn’t that she was desperate, because the way Sasha pursued things was slowly, relentlessly. Patiently. She was the least panicked of anyone he’d ever met. It wasn’t that she wasn’t scared; she was too smart for that. It was that she knew herself, and she knew she would get where she needed to be. She’d put in the transfer to leave Artefact Storage, she told him once, after she had a dream where she woke up in the middle of the sea, alone, the water spitting itself at her. “I remember knowing,” she’d said, “that there was nowhere for me to go, that the only place I could ever be was there, unable to touch anything, unable to get closer or further away from anything. No tether. No direction. That’s when I knew.” She laughed, then. “That, and the rusted chair. Smelling of blood constantly does nothing for a girl’s social life, let me tell you.” In the early days, particularly, Tim had needed that steadiness. And that’s the worst part, he thinks. She never got wherever she would’ve gone. For no reason at all. Or rather, for a thousand smaller reasons, individually meaningless, writhing into one cohesive, deadly, heartbreaking mass. He thinks about it, and his scars ache.
***
When Jon’s gone, the second time – although he’s been gone for far longer than he’s been absent, really – Tim listens to the tapes he made when he was on the run. There’s nothing else to do. The one that strikes him is the one with Georgie – and how that happened is something Tim would sorely love to hear. He would have, anyway. The moment you die will feel just like this one – and in his endless time on the breakroom sofa, he sees the shelf falling, he feels Sasha’s warm hand in his, and he lets go. He thinks that’s the moment he died.
Jon leaves him other tapes, too. Sasha’s. A short note in his scrawl and a list of time stamps. She’s on these ones. The last one is the only one with an additional note. This is when it happened. He’d asked Melanie, before, about the two Sashas, what she looked like. He’d toyed with asking Jon if he could use his whole thing to see her face. He doesn’t want that now. He listens to the tapes and he sobs like a child.
***
The Unknowing changes everything. Or learning about it does. He’d exhausted much of the supernatural clown data out there in the years after Danny, but now he knows what he’s looking for, he makes real strides. He can’t pass out on the sofa any more, he’s too electrified; he stays awake for days on less sleep than Jon, even, the caffeine functioning more as an accessory than an actual stimulant. He’s going to end this. He has to. The Circus is going to burn. And if he has to go with it, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
Sometimes Jon shows up while he’s researching. He tells him to fuck off, mostly, but as long as Jon doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t do more than that. He doesn’t say anything, for what it’s worth, just watches, looking very, very sad and tired. Tim doesn’t say anything either.
***
Jon says, "In and out, we'll be quick," in the van on the way, like a charm, like it'll save any of them.
"Sure thing, boss. Pop in, here’s your C4, if you don’t mind please blow up and die now, turrah, thank you kindly,"
"It'll be okay," Jon is attempting to use his Stern Voice on Tim, which would probably compel, like, Martin, no offence, but Tim has never found him scary when he’s trying to be.
"Using your spooky powers for that one?" It comes out bitter, but he thinks Jon understands. It even gets a queasy half smile, the kind he would have relished back in the day, proof of the person somewhere hiding behind Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Archives. And isn’t that funny, now?
"No. But it will," and now it seems Jon is pleading with him. He would've made a joke about that, then. But he's too tired.
***
They stand in silence outside the hotel together. (Jon, in an uncharacteristic fit of indulgence, had booked it. Tim wasn’t going to complain.) Jon has a cigarette. Tim listens to the road, the low rush of a car every minute or so. Watches Jon's smoke curl away into nothing.
“Tim, I –”
“No,” he says, dry. “You don't get to apologise.”
“I just wanted to –” Tim knows that, of course.
“I don't care. This isn’t – we're not doing this. You'll be fine,”
“What about you?” Jon sounds resigned.
“Are you going to be fine?” Tim can feel the pressure emanating off the other man – it’s not deliberate, it’s just what he is now. Tim can’t not answer, but he can redirect.
“I'll do what needs to be done,” he lands on. “And I told you, don’t do that,”
“That doesn't –”
“I'm going to bed.” He stops, for a brief moment. “You’ll be okay, Jon.”
He does not look him in the eyes, but he can feel them watching him, in a way that feels almost normal. Tim goes back to his shitty motel room, and he does not sleep.
***
hands turn into flesh with no boundary into
h and a and n and d and s
and what is a letter anyway but shape and what is shape with no frame of reference and what is a sound when ears are made of flesh and shape and letters and what are words when all there is is sound and quiet and the boundary between and all of him wants to burn it all to erupt from my own body and make yourself real but what is him self other than this unknown flesh and unknown sound and the marks squirming somewhere in something that must be him and the open wounds which hurt as much and make as much sense as they did before
whatever time is when all there is is the endless now
and then there's a hand and a light and jon and you hate him and of course you love him too and now you're both going to die because he makes you see.
“Tim, what’s in your hand?” And your hand is your own again, it’s flesh and it’s scar and it’s you, and you can almost feel the press of Sasha’s fingers in yours as you quirk a grin at the monster you’re finally, finally ending.
You make your last shit joke.
You press down.
And Tim Stoker ends.