Work Text:
Nobody was coming for him. That’s what he decided in that instant. It had been a week already, probably. It felt like that to him, at least. Though, he hadn’t been getting much sleep with Prentiss’ strategic and spiteful knocking at his flat’s door. His internal clock was all wonky, since his flat hardly dared to get any natural light from anywhere , even in times where he wasn’t trapped by a worm-infested woman.
Martin groggily laid in his bed, near-delirious from a lack of sleep. His mouth tasted faintly of canned peaches and misery, and it seemed permanently chapped despite having access to running water. It’d just been a while since he got a sip, really. What if the worms found their way into the pipes?
He rolled onto his side. His ginger bangs flopped down the way gravity tugged them and he felt a tired spike of irritation as they nearly poked his eyes. After a moment, he realized he just didn’t really care. His latest pastime was staring at the blank wall across from his bed. While objectively boring, it meant that he could use his imagination while not getting too much visual input to distract him. It also made it easier to tune out the steady knocking from the door. Sort of.
He stared, absorbing the view of the empty gray wall. There was a scuff mark halfway down it from something. Martin wasn’t quite sure what. In his mind, he pictured all the ways it could have appeared. Maybe one night he’d accidentally scraped a piece of furniture against it when he first moved into his flat. Maybe he dropped something and it scratched it on the way down. Maybe-
His mind hastily sharpened into focus from the meandering train of thought. His wall wasn’t empty anymore. Martin’s vision was a bit blurry without the aid of his glasses, but he could see the door very clearly. Where there had once been a scuffed blank wall now stood a sickly yellow door. In the darkness, the yellow was dull and ugly in a way that set Martin on edge.
With a groan, he sat up and stared as the yellow door opened. It emitted an unsettling creak as it did so, and Martin hastily reached for his glasses on the nightstand by his bed. He knew, in the back of his mind, that he should be scared. There was a prickle of fear climbing up his shoulders for sure, but after the past week of non-stop knocking and cowering, his mind felt blissfully blank. Through the yellow door’s gap came a long, spindly hand. It crept along the wall like a spider and fluttered for a moment – just a split second – before moving to the inner door knob and swinging the door open.
What stood in the doorway was–
–absolutely infuriating . Jon liked to think of himself as a rational and calm man. Or, at least, marginally reasonable. However, his nerves were being played like a fiddle with each additional day his incompetent assistant didn’t waltz through the door into his archives. Did the man not realize that his absence meant that Jon needed to totally redistribute case loads between himself, Tim, and Sasha? In his defense, a more reasonable voice in his mind chimed in, he had a supposed stomach bug. One that lasted a week seemed either highly unlikely or highly unfortunate, but Jon didn’t really have reason to doubt Martin’s words. Well, he would say that if it were Tim or Sasha who were out. He didn’t really know Martin very well.
His assistant texted him each morning. A simple “ out today. ” or “ Still sick. ” would greet Jon each morning at a similar time. Every time he tried to pry and get the man to send an approximation of how much longer he’d be gone, he’d only get a “ don’t know. Sry. ” in return. The lackluster replies were beginning to annoy Jon. They also made him wary, for whatever reason. Maybe it was because Martin’s work texts in every instance before were usually littered with exclamation points and paradoxically proper grammar. Maybe it was because Jon had never seen him abbreviate apologies like an afterthought. If anything, Martin apologized much too profusely for Jon’s sanity over text. What all this meant, however, Jon had no clue. His assistant was too sick to care about consistency via text? Probably.
Generally, the week had been weird. Tim and Sasha also likely felt the same way with how they’d expectantly glance at the doorway each morning until Jon would walk into the bullpen with a shake of his head. The one thing Jon could give his absent assistant credit for was that the man could make damn good tea. And he’d make it consistently, leaving it on Jon’s desk and disappearing like a phantom from the periphery. Jon never really thought all too hard about it, busy as he was with the late Ms. Robinson’s disaster of an archive sorting system. Now – as he was forced to drag himself to the breakroom to make his own tea – he pondered the thought. Martin was terrible at writing reports and organizing data. It wasn’t some kind of secret or anything. He’d seen Tim and Sasha helping him out on occasion, the duo of them hunching over Martin’s shoulders and sharing some solid advice as they pointed at his computer.
Jon looked over his own shoulder and through the break room doorway to glance at Tim and Sasha. They each sat at their adjacent spaces, a lot quieter than usual. He frowned and turned away, electing to look down at the golden-brown tea in front of him. Jon certainly had a lot of opinions about Martin. Mostly negative ones. However, he mused as he grabbed his tea from the counter, Tim and Sasha appeared to have a good rapport with the man. They took him out for drinks and sat with him during lunches. Jon was far too busy to join them himself usually – the statements needed to be organized before the inevitable heat death of the universe – so he only heard stories about those times after the fact. The way Tim and Sasha talked and jested with Martin made him seem like- well, not like an incompetent idiot .
And of course Jon knew that Martin was a person beyond his archival struggles. As he strode back through the bullpen and into his office once more, his lips fell into a thin line. He set the steaming mug down on his desk and circled around the desk to sit down. His mind wandered even as he tried to get back into researching an obviously fake statement. Many, many unwelcome thoughts wormed their way into his head. Martin was a person. Yes. He knew that. A person . Who also seemed to take a liking to messing up statement reports as a pastime. And Jon felt his mood curdling at the thought. His mind conjured the image of Martin on the first day they properly met – when he’d let a dog of all things into the archives .
He hastily took a sip of his tea. The burning heat of it in his mouth slowed his angry train of thought to a chugging, steady pace. No need to get annoyed when the man you were annoyed at hadn’t even bothered showing up to work. The tea tasted bitter, and not in an “acquired taste” kind of way. Jon’s brows furrowed at that, and he held the mug down in front of himself. His hands shook slightly, causing the surface of the beverage to quiver and spin into-
-spirals. The man’s shirt was covered in them. Looping, winding, nauseating spirals. They moved on their own, a molasses-slow march with no discernable beginning or end. Martin swayed lightly where he sat on the bed, his body mimicking the convulsing patterns. He wasn’t exactly sure what to feel at the moment. Everything felt turbid around him, and his mind felt no different.
“ You need a way out of here, don’t you, Assistant? ” the tall man said, his head tipping so that his blonde hair tumbled further down his torso. Although he spoke words, Martin saw that his mouth barely twitched from the full-tooth grin it was. It made Martin’s stomach churn – the fact that his stomach only contained canned peaches and sadness made the feeling all the worse.
“I… I-” Martin groggily tried to answer, his eyes unable to leave the strange man and the yellow door behind him. He did, didn’t he? The intruder was certainly right about that. As if to punctuate the thought, a particularly harsh knock ! rang out in the tense silence of his bedroom. Martin briefly turned to look in the direction of the front door of his flat. Prentiss must be getting impatient. His heart thumped faster at the thought. He knew, deep down, that sitting around and waiting for someone to show up would only lead to his own death. He knew – as much as he didn’t want to – that Prentiss would finally break down the door and claim her prize. He whipped his head back to face the blonde-haired man.
“ The Crawling Rot is feeling particularly rash today, it seems. Oh, but I’m sure your door can withstand thousands of her worms, ” he said, gazing down at Martin. He raised his hand and pressed one of his knife-like fingers against his lip in a facsimile of a comforting gesture. “ But if you happen to need an alternate route, I’d be happy to oblige. I can promise you there aren’t any worms in there. ”
Martin slowly stood from his bed, squinting his eyes against the vibrant intruder. He was being sarcastic, Martin could tell that much even in his own exhausted mind, but what other choice did he have?
“Who are you?” he asked. His hands absentmindedly clutched at his sleep shirt as he spoke. The stranger’s grin only grew wider in response.
“ I’m called Michael, ” the man replied, and he spoke in such a tone that indicated that the truth was far more complicated than that.
“Is the door- um- is it safe ? How do I know you’re not like…” Martin stumbled over his words, “...not like Prentiss?”
Michael laughed. “ I am not like the Crawling Rot. ” Okay, Martin thought, vague but at least some kind of answer. Martin took a step closer to Michael and the yellow door. In his hazy mind he hardly registered that Michael only answered one of his questions.
“If I go through the door, where will I end up?”
“ If you find the right way, you should end up exactly where you need to be. ”
And Martin frowned at that. He thought momentarily of the Institute, the archives, of his coworkers – friends – and getting out of his wretched flat. He also thought about warm food, of human contact that wasn’t a creature knocking outside his door. His hands clutching his sleep shirt fiddled with the fabric harder. All Michael did was continue staring down at him, patiently awaiting a response. Patiently might have been overstating it, though, since the man gazed down with the intensity of a predator watching its prey. And that was the biggest thing keeping Martin from sprinting through the yellow door and getting the hell out of dodge, honestly.
He had no idea what this Michael guy even was . Yeah, he wasn’t working for Prentiss, but what if he was something worse ? And yet he had offered Martin a way out. Martin’s hazy mind weighed the options carefully. If he used the door, this Michael probably would consider it a favor to pay back later. Probably. At least, if that were the case, he’d have Tim, Sasha, and Jon around to face whatever the price could be. Martin’s hands dropped from his shirt and he stood a bit taller at the thought. He was Martin Blackwood. He was not a coward. He can save himself .
“Fine. I’ll use the door.”
Michael grinned his toothy grin and stepped delicately to the side to give Martin a clear path to the sickly yellow door. Every movement he made reminded Martin vaguely of some stop-motion films he’d seen when he was younger, and he almost laughed at the absurdity of it all. He would have laughed if the swirling motions of Michael’s hair didn’t make him want to heave up his filling lunch of peaches.
A few hesitant steps led him right up to the door. Where it sat, the door was nearly closed. There was a miniscule gap between door and frame, but Martin couldn’t tell what lay behind it. He raised his right hand to the knob and clutched it. The metal felt oddly warm, as if somebody had used it recently – an odd sensation of comfort came from that. Surely that meant that he could trust it? He swung the door open and stepped through without a second thought. As soon as he crossed the threshold, he could feel the weight of the door slamming shut into his back and toppling him forward. The force of it nearly knocked his glasses off and he sprawled out. His hands roughly scraped against the carpet coating the corridor’s floor. His knees hardly fared any better through his thin pajama pants. For a moment he just lay there, his back heaving with uncertain breaths. Then, he stood. He felt unstable as he did so – his shoulder bumped into the vibrant wall beside him as he regained his tired composure.
All at once the choice to trust the mysterious stranger in his room felt a lot more stupid than it had when he was staring said stranger down. Martin’s head swiveled and observed the dizzying corridor ahead of him. With each slight tilt of his head, the corridor responded in kind like some optical illusion Martin had seen online. All along the walls were paintings of… the corridor itself? He squinted at the one nearest to himself, noting that it was like a photo of the corridor from an upwards angle. There were also peculiar lighting fixtures interspersed between some of the pictures, lighting the way while brightening the sickening color combo of the floor and walls. Well then.
Martin tipped back upright and adjusted his glasses with his hand. Then, he brushed his bangs upwards – they had become displaced when he’d fallen to the floor. He took a grounding breath and began to walk forward through the corridor. He only had to pad through the carpeted-path for a few minutes before reaching a sudden turn in the corridor. It was a sharp right angle, and the wall blocked his view of what exactly the turn led to. A wave of dread crept across his shoulders and any trace of tiredness he’d felt before vanished in an instant. He turned the corner and-
-stepped into the breakroom. Tim and Sasha were eating lunch and conversing casually. Or, rather, they were pretending to just converse casually. Jon could see the way the two of them snapped to attention when he made his appearance through the door. He raised a hand in greeting to the pair and made his way to the collective staff fridge to pick out his lunch that he brought to work. On the way, he plopped his empty tea mug beside the shiny metal sink.
“So… Boss? Any updates from Martin yet? It’s been nine days ,” Tim piped up first, holding a fork in his right hand. Both he and Sasha were sat at the circular table in the corner of the room across from the fridge. Jon could feel Tim’s gaze on his back as he dug through the fridge.
“Nothing that I haven’t told you already,” Jon shortly replied, already sick of the routine. Tim and Sasha insisted on asking him the same line of questioning every day without fail. Jon snatched his sandwich bag from the fridge and shut it sharply. He pivoted on his heel and went to sit in one of the two empty chairs beside the circle table. In the process, he caught the concerned gazes Tim and Sasha shot at each other. As he opened the Ziploc bag containing his sandwich, Sasha chimed in with her own thoughts.
“Tim and I should pop by and check on him.” She said this with an air of calm, but the way she picked at her food betrayed how she really felt. They were really worried about Martin, weren’t they? “I’m sure he could use some proper food and company. I can’t imagine being sick and quarantined for nine whole days, honestly. I think I would die of boredom.”
Jon personally didn’t understand the concern, and he scoffed to show it. Tim and Sasha gave him a collective stare of unsurprised annoyance.
“Listen, Jon, we know you don’t like Martin-”
“-He has only proven to be lackluster as an assistant-”
“- but I think you should cut him a little slack. He doesn’t seem the type to fake an illness like this. This is Martin we’re talking about,” Sasha continued despite Jon’s interruption. Jon bristled a bit at her words.
“I wasn’t implying that ,” he insisted, raising his sandwich to his mouth. Okay. Maybe he was, a little. Nine days was just highly unrealistic in his mind. However , it wasn’t like he was accusing Martin of bunking off and gallivanting somewhere crazy. “I just think that it isn’t a huge deal that he isn’t present at work. He can hardly get a report done when he doesn’t have a stomach bug anyway.”
Jon left it at that, taking a cheeky bite of his sandwich to punctuate his point and how nonchalant he was about it all. Maybe then Tim and Sasha would stop worrying so much. He sneaked a glance at the two, and they both looked… Not mad, not even disappointed, just tired. After a moment, Tim spoke up.
“Hopefully he’ll be back soon. It should be any day now, really.” Jon took another bite of his sandwich and noted that neither Tim nor Sasha had bothered arguing with him further about the subject. Maybe they knew it wouldn’t get anywhere. Not really . Jon wasn’t about to start singing praises about Martin just because the man caught a nasty bug.
“Yes, it should be,” Jon murmured in response. He wasn’t all too focused as he felt his phone buzz against his thigh in his pocket. He slid the sandwich back into the bag and placed it delicately on the table. Then, he pulled out his phone. With a creeping sense of anticipation, he then opened it and clicked the message notification and–
Gibberish. The message Martin had just sent mere moments ago was utterly unintelligible . The text read ‘ hwwtsiwtacfa ’ – very eloquent, Jon thought with a biting venom – and nothing more, nothing less. Very Martin .
“What’s it say?” Tim asked, and Jon suddenly remembered who was in the room with him.
“It’s just garbled nonsense,” Jon sighed, holding up the phone to his two assistants. The two leaned forward and squinted their eyes, trying to make sense of whatever Martin had just sent him. Jon could relate to the furrowing of their brows.
“Must be, like, the text equivalent of a butt dial,” Tim added, tilting his head.
“Maybe he fell asleep on his phone or something? Or maybe got water on it?” Sasha thoughtfully inputted. Jon huffed at her suggestions, broadcasting his displeasure at both. A second later the three dots appeared on Martin’s side of the app. He was typing.
“Apology incoming,” joked Tim, who was scooping up another bite of his lunch with a fork. Of course, Jon thought, it was just an accident. The catastrophizing part of his brain had – against his will – conjured the idea of Martin being in some kind of danger. He placed his phone on the table in front of himself and picked up his sandwich for another bite. The text was just a silly mistake-
A buzz. His phone rattled against the solid table. Rolling his eyes, he leaned forward to check the inevitable message of ‘ I’m sorry! I bumped a few keys! It won’t happen again! ’ or something of the sort… He nearly dropped his sandwich in surprise at what he saw instead.
‘ Will be at work soon :) ’
Huh.
“He should- It says he’ll be ‘at work soon’?” Jon explained to Tim and Sasha, using his free hand to make little quotation marks at the last part. “No specified time or reason – of course .”
“Hey, that’s great! I’m glad he’s feeling better.” Tim smiled as he said this, placing his fork in his empty food tupperware. Sasha herself seemed a little confused. Or – Jon realized as he analyzed her face a moment longer – concerned. Possibly both. She was always one to sink her claws into a mystery. It was why Jon thought she would be a good influence on Martin – her myth-busting skills were unmatched by any of the others in the archives. For a second she opened her mouth, looking keen to crack open the case and investigate. However, she shut it a second later and shrugged.
“I suppose nine days gave him enough time to recover,” she admitted. She sank backwards in her chair, looking a bit unsatisfied. “Honestly, I thought he’d gotten hit by a car or something at this rate. Glad that doesn’t seem to be the case?” Her sentence trailed off into a question. Jon met her concerned eyes and he shook his head.
“He’s fine . You’ll see it yourself soon enough, apparently,” Jon replied sharply, turning off his phone and stuffing it in his pocket. He was just glad the whole debacle would be over. Gone were the days where he had to reorganize a perfectly fine work process.
Tim and Sasha relented with hopefully optimistic looks on their faces. After a minute or so, the two of them excused themselves – their lunch breaks were over, since they’d already been in the breakroom some time before Jon. Then, Jon was all alone, sitting with his sandwich gripped between both hands. The uneasy feeling that had blanketed over his mind at Martin’s messages never fully dissipated. It permeated around his mind like an unrelenting fog as he took bite after bite.
In the end, he didn’t finish his sandwich. When his break was over, he shoved the baggie into the fridge and pivoted to leave the breakroom. He strode across the room and – almost on autopilot – walked to his office. He bumped his shoulder on his office’s door frame, which was-
-gaping, a horrible gaping maw waiting to clamp down. Martin’s unsteady shuffling through the corridor was cut short when the walls and floor began to quake and creak. It happened slowly at first, the rumbling seeming like it was his own mind trying to scare him. He’d been walking for god knows how long anyway. When he had been navigating the dizzying corridors – all of which were identically garish and disorientating – he pondered all the articles he’d read online about sleep deprivation and hallucinations. He considered multiple times that he was just… well… making it all up to keep his mind entertained while his body practically rotted on his bed. Escapism was certainly not a new concept to Martin.
However, the quaking of the corridor punctured many holes in that theory, especially as it strengthened in magnitude. Suddenly what seemed like a miniscule earthquake felt like- well, he felt like he’d just been on a boat for a really long time and he was suddenly on land again. That was how he was walking. The shaking had been all fine and dandy, really . Martin couldn’t say the same about what happened after.
He stood frozen in place, his momentum entirely killed. The hallway ahead of him shook and morphed before his eyes. Light fixtures – ivory white as they were – swirled and contorted into piercing fractals. They sharply stood against the colored wall. They looked like teeth . Oh god . What the fuck was going on? Martin’s eyes flickered towards the many paintings littered down the walls. The glare on their glass coverings twisted and twirled like ribbons. He could see as they shifted and shattered into equally-sharp shapes. All of the bright white teeth swirled and spiraled in Martin’s vision – he could only gawk in his tired state.
As if on cue, the furthest light-fixture-tooth from Martin shattered loudly and darkened the end of the hallway into a void. He realized very suddenly that he was staring down the throat of something he never should have messed with in the first place. Not for the first time he found himself yearning for his friends, for his boss, for his mother . For somebody . No matter how much they hated him, he needed someone to be there. He didn’t want to die . He was going to die, wasn’t he? He would die, and he would die without even remembering his last words to his friends.
Another far away bulb shattered, creeping the void ever closer to his person. The other teeth continued to spin, and the walls crept in closer in all their shaking glory. Like a bug in a flytrap, Martin quaked. What were his last words to Tim? To Sasha? To his mom? It had been so long since he’d seen any of them. He didn’t- he couldn’t for the life of him even conjure up the final conversations he’d had. Sure, he could just assume that he’d said ‘bye’ or something of the sort to any of them as his last word. But that wasn’t a last last word. That was what you said when you thought you would see them at work the next morning. When you thought you were going to bother them with a phone call the next week.
Another bulb. The gaping maw’s spiraling appearance was no less paralyzing with the passing seconds. Martin tried to move, to do anything , but he found that the hallway behind him had closed up to meet his back. All he could do was press back against the wall and cower. He felt lost. Metaphorically, literally, spiritually, whatever. Would his friends miss him? He knew his boss certainly wouldn’t . No matter how much poetry he wrote about the man (in secret, of course), he would always hate Martin. That was a fact of life. A fact as certain as the fact that he was going to die in these corridors.
And yet nothing felt like fact as the bulbs continued to shatter, one by one, until the hot breath of the distorted hallway brushed against his face. It felt like fiction- horrible, twisted fiction. All at once he felt like one of the statement givers at the Institute. A poor, deluded soul who wished only to breathe what they thought was real to an unforgiving icy glare of academia. What would Jon say if he had come to him ranting and raving about a corridor with teeth? A man who had blonde, cascading rivulets of hair that denied all known laws of physics? A yellow door that led into one’s own demise – one that feasted on the helplessness of its victims?
Another bulb shattered before the pattern stopped. It was eerily quiet as Martin stared down the mouth of a hungry, insatiable monster.
Jon would say that he was insane. Maybe he wouldn’t be wrong.
Suddenly the walls curled inwards around him, consuming, clawing, melding into him and chewing him up and spitting him out -
-of the doorway came a voice. One that was familiar to Jon. It certainly plucked a chord of annoyance in his mind when he heard it. Though, he did feel a twinge of relief that Martin was back. He stood up from his desk and entered the bullpen, already anticipating excited chatter from his two archival assistants at Martin’s return.
As he expected, Tim and Sasha were talking with Martin, not apparently worried about contracting the supposed nine-day stomach bug judging by how closely they orbited the man.
“-and Sash thought you were run over by a car !”
“ Tim , you can’t blame me for being concerned! He was gone for nine days ,” Sasha contended, brushing his shoulder with hers. Jon slowly approached the group and observed from a distance. He knew better than to interrupt their little reunion, no matter how strongly his urges to chew Martin out were pressing in his mind. His ears perked up at Martin’s laugh at the two assistants’ interaction. It wasn’t like he’d never heard Martin laugh before. It was just- It was weird. The same tingling sense of unease rippled through him, for whatever reason.
“I certainly felt like I’d been run over,” Martin jovially replied, tilting his head at Tim and Sasha. When he noticed Jon, however, his head snapped in his direction. “Sorry about the text earlier, Jon. Some water got on my phone.”
Jon nearly flinched at the sudden attention on himself. He hadn’t realized Martin had even noticed him come in.
“It’s- It’s fine. I, um, I have several reports that you should get started on waiting for you at your desk,” Jon mumbled back at the man. For some reason, the way Martin stood and the way he stared right at him was causing him to flounder. As if that wasn’t weird enough, Jon could feel a small headache flaring in his head whenever he dared a glance back at Martin. Tim and Sasha also turned to look at Jon, though they seemed mildly amused at his anxiety in the situation. Traitors .
“Alright. Thanks,” Martin said, and wasn’t that interesting? He spoke with such a neutral cadence that his words lodged uncomfortably in Jon’s brain. His typical anxious, trying-to-make-myself-as-small-as-possible demeanor was nowhere to be seen on his face. And, the most glaring fact of all, he hadn’t apologized at all for missing any days of work. Only a simple apology about the text ? And after a brief moment of staring, Martin walked past Jon and towards his desk. Jon’s lips pursed into a flat line and his brows furrowed, feeling equally confused.
“Glad to see he’s all better,” Tim said, shrugging. He moved to head back to his own work (or whatever he actually did on his computer in lieu of working) but Jon halted him with a hand on his arm.
“Can I speak to you two in my office?” he asked tersely, purposely looking at the wall behind them instead of meeting their eyes.
“Sure, Boss man. Lead the way.”
And so the three of them shuffled through the bullpen back to Jon’s office. When they passed Martin and the man had inquired what they were up to, Jon hastily made up an excuse about needing to discuss a statement with them. Martin smiled and turned back to his computer, which only set Jon’s mind on edge further . He hadn’t even offered to help discuss it, or to make them tea , or to- well, to anything . Jon was fairly certain that Martin wanted to be included and to prove himself as an assistant – Jon could’ve at least appreciated the effort there if it actually showed in his reports – and yet the man was just so… blasé about a secret archival worker meeting that only he wasn’t included in. Right. Clearly hell hath frozen over.
Tim, Sasha, and Jon all squeezed into Jon’s office. It was a decently-sized room, for sure, but it was clearly suited for one-on-one meetings (Statement givers or Elias), he noted as Tim took a seat in the chair opposite of Jon’s desk and Sasha leaned against the wall. Jon took his usual position in his slightly-uncomfortable office chair and took a deep breath. What he was about to say was for sure going to get him a headache of a conversation, even worse than the one that still thrummed in his head from… looking too long at Martin? He guessed? Jon was no stranger to migraines and head pains, but it was highly unusual for one to appear spontaneously and without reason. He felt hydrated, he ate a little bit of food – which was significantly better than his usual amount of ‘none’ – and he hadn’t had any sort of budget meetings that day. Those were the usual suspects when he felt a sharp pain grace his temples, and yet none of the boxes were checked off. It all started when he looked at his missing archival assistant.
“That’s not- It-” he began, his hands clenching into light fists. It was difficult to choose words when the idea they were trying to convey was utterly insane , but he tried again anyway. “Something’s wrong with Martin.” Each word came out like a struggle, and Tim and Sasha looked at him with full attention. He couldn’t meet their eyes after he spoke.
Sasha replied first, her tone reproachful. “I mean, he was sick with a stomach bug for a while, but I don’t-”
“No, it’s just- I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just- that’s not him .” Jon’s hands broke from their fists and fanned out over the desk. “My head started hurting when I looked at him.” Even he knew that his reasoning was flimsy as the words tumbled out of his mouth. However, his gut was screaming to his mind that his words were right . Tim just made an exasperated chuckle. Jon’s head snapped up to look at him.
“I mean, that seems pretty par for the course for you, given how much you like to shout at him,” Tim goaded. He scooched around to sit sideways in the chair, his legs now resting over the armrest. He was the picture of unbothered, and it ticked Jon off. Couldn’t he see what Jon was talking about? Why was he the only one getting – pardon his phrasing – ‘bad vibes’ from the Martin that walked through the archive door? At his words, Sasha pushed herself off the wall and stood behind Tim. She placed one of her manicured hands on his shoulder.
“I think I sort of know what you mean,” Sasha mused, using her free hand to adjust her glasses. “I’m not trying to prove anything, but it startled me when he noticed you in the room. It was so sudden.”
“Is it really out of character for him to notice Jon as soon as he enters a room?” mused Tim right back, and the two shared a look. Jon was unsure exactly what Tim was saying and felt like he’d missed out on some weird inside joke the two had. Maybe something about the man’s anxiety? Odd.
“ And ,” Jon continued, “I could tell his mannerisms were different, too. He only apologized once. You two of all people should know that that’s… strange .” Tim and Sasha shared another look – Tim’s neck nearly straining to look over his shoulder at his companion – but it wasn’t like the last one. Jon could read it very well. They agreed with him.
“Jon, we know what you’re talking about but- what exactly is your goal here? Why does Martin acting weird have to do with anything at all? What’s your aim here?” Sasha pushed. She turned to look at Jon with piercing eyes.
“Case #0070107. The one with – you know – Graham Folger.”
And Tim and Sasha had to chew on that thought for a moment. Jon regretted bringing them back to his office. His gut feeling was clearly wrong and he was just making a fool of himself. Fantastic.
“You think Martin’s been replaced.” And Sasha’s words sounded more like a statement than a question. Her tone was even, if not a bit surprised. “By- By whatever took Graham Folger, right?”
“It’s nothing certain. I-”
Tim chimed in. “Jon, Bossman, friend, are you telling us that you actually believe one of the statements?”
“I’m not- It’s not about that , I’m just concerned about potential threats and risks to the archives and to ourselves. As your boss, that’s my job .”
Once again Jon averted his eyes, feeling more and more ridiculous. He didn’t want to see the surprised looks on his assistants’ faces. Worse even smug looks. He knew he’d been putting on a barrier of professionalism and skepticism since day one.
“I know , but you usually send any statement givers out the door feeling like nutjobs . Pardon me for being a bit surprised-”
“Tim, please . Just- trust me on this. I can’t- I have this horrible feeling about this and I don’t-” Jon’s eyes burned as he said this, his chest constricting with conflicting feelings of desperation. He wasn’t sure what exactly stirred his emotional instability in the moment, but the visions of creaking doors and engulfing spider legs burned behind his retinas. He looked desperately at the two in front of him in hopes that their faces would overwhelm the startling images.
“Okay.” Sasha seemed to sense his despairing, and her placating tone helped soothe his mania somewhat. “We’ll be careful around him. Try to figure out what’s happening.” Tim’s head tilted to look up at her, and he seemed to reach the same conclusion as her. When he looked back across at Jon, he looked significantly less exasperated.
“If anyone can figure this out, it’s Sash,” he praised, “Besides, we’ve practically mastered research down here.” He shot Jon a flashing smile, even if it didn’t fully meet his eyes. Clearly – Jon realized – the two were trying to cheer him up instead of entirely genuine platitudes, but it was working. There was a reason he had requested Tim and Sasha to join him in his transfer, anyways. He took a shuddering deep breath and calmed his nerves.
“I think the only thing you’ve ‘mastered’ down here is Solitaire, Tim, but I don’t doubt Sasha in the slightest,” Jon ribbed back. He hoped his silent signal of ‘I’ll be okay’ didn’t get missed by the duo. He couldn’t exactly tell if it had or hadn’t, but that was okay. He would be okay. His assistants hadn’t laughed him out of the institute, which was a decent start.
“Guilty as charged,” Tim said as he stood from his chair. He lifted his hands momentarily in a signal of surrender. “Anyways, I think we should get to our research on that statement right about now.”
“Tim,” Sasha replied with a sigh, “We don’t need to talk in code yet. Martin isn’t even in here.”
“ Yet? So you establish we should 100% give him some kind of code name if we ever want to observe him in the same room?”
“I establish that we need to take this a bit more seriously. This is our friend we’re talking about.”
A pause.
“Now that you mention it, a code name might actually be a bit useful. Just- Not a silly one. I think I trust Jon to do that more than you, Tim.”
The two standing assistants looked at Jon expectantly. He was rather caught off guard at how on-board they were at investigating whether or not the other assistant had been replaced by a monster, but he supposed that was what it was like having friends like them. Headstrong, loyal. It was… nice. He wasn’t even sure if they fully believed his theory, and yet they’d already begun planning a full-scale investigation to make him feel better.
“Uh- a code name? I mean, you could always just call him ‘the person I interviewed’ to avoid any suspicion. Martin knows I set you up on calls and out in the field to talk to people, so it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to consistently mention someone like that,” he proposed, folding his arms across his chest. Sasha nodded, but Tim looked a bit annoyed.
“Aw, that one’s no fun. It just sounds like work talk ,” he complained, reaching for Jon’s office door. “But fine. We should be getting back to work anyway-” and as Tim said this, a knock tattooed on Jon’s door. Tim jumped back from the door minutely and turned to look at Jon and Sasha back and forth. “It’s Martin.”
“No duh , Tim. Open the door. We have nothing to hide,” Sasha said evenly, gesturing her hand towards the door. Then, she leaned against the chair, trying to paint the picture of being nonchalant. Though, she seemed to realize something and slightly adjusted her pose. Jon wasn’t sure what it was, but he ignored it and anxiously looked at the office door. Tim did as he was told and twisted the doorknob, revealing a smiling Martin in the doorway. He stood nearly stock-straight with a steaming mug between his hands. Ah, right.
“I brought your tea,” the man said amicably, smiling in that uncertain way Jon was used to seeing on his face. “Is everything alright in here?” Jon inwardly cringed at that, knowing that Martin could notice just how not nonchalant Tim and Sasha appeared – Tim elected to lean against the wall with his arms crossed. Brilliant .
“Yes. We actually just finished discussing the case. Sasha finally figured out how to contact the family of one of the statement givers,” Jon covered, his face not betraying the fact that he was lying through his teeth. He picked up one of the papers from his desk for an extra bit of flair and believability. Sasha and Tim nodded along.
“Ah, excellent,” was all that Martin said. He stepped forward and placed the tea on the empty corner of Jon’s desk – it was his designated ‘tea spot’ in the sea of paperwork that otherwise coated it – and let his hands linger on the side of the mug for a moment before tucking them into his pockets. “You got some lunch, right Jon?”
“I- er. Yes, I did. I had some of my sandwich.”
Normally Jon wouldn’t provide that much detail when Martin asked usually (before he went missing for nine days, essentially), but again the composure which this new man – impostor, maybe – held left Jon feeling wobbly in his words.
“Good. I best get back to work,” Martin – Not-Martin? – explained before moving to leave the office once more.
“Right then,” Jon said to a closing door. When Martin was out of sight, all the tension in the room came crashing down. The three stayed silent for a moment, staring at the door.
“That was a bit weird, wasn’t it?” inquired Tim, raising a brow. But Jon wasn’t entirely focused. One detail stuck out to him in that interaction: Martin’s hands . When the man had left them resting on the mug, Jon got a good look at them on the desk. The nails looked neatly filed into points, not super noticeable but not super subtle. Each finger looked slightly more spindly than one would expect from a man of Martin’s stature. It wasn’t like Jon was an expert on those hands. On a good day he rarely had looked up from his paperwork to thank Martin for the cuppa. And yet… like with the body language of him, Jon knew with a certainty that it was off. It boggled his mind that he was so certain.
“Jon?” Sasha’s voice broke him out of his thought spiral and he whipped his head up to look at her.
“Did you see his hands?” he asked, staring at Sasha with what he was sure was a frantic gaze. Her eyes darted to the floor for a moment before rising to meet his. So she did .
“Yes,” she admitted, “But I don’t- I don’t know what that could mean . If it were like Graham Folger, wouldn’t he be identical to Martin?” Jon could tell she was slightly shaking, and Tim moved from his place on the wall to stand closer to her. Their shoulders pressed against each other.
“Well, nobody else could tell that he looked any different before. It seemed only Patel could notice anything. Maybe… Maybe that’s already gone into effect and the Martin we think we see right now isn’t what he used to be?...” Jon murmured, more thinking aloud than anything. His shoulders slumped in thought and his words brought about a heavy silence to the group. Tim, once more, broke a silence and braved a response.
“If it’s the same thing, then wouldn’t Martin be…” his own words were even quieter than Jon’s brainstorming. However, it rung out loudly in the office. Jon hadn’t even considered the possibility that Martin was deceased. God . He’d been so focused on the mystery that he didn’t even ponder where his actual assistant could be. Martin could legitimately be- No. That was out of the question. He wasn’t stupid about what the implications would be. When he was working in research, he’d heard the rumors of his predecessor and how her assistants continually disappeared without a trace. There hadn’t been specific reasons for any of their absences, and every other employee at the institute knew it. Like with the filing, Jon was determined to not replicate the late Gertrude Robinson’s failings.
“ No . As long as we aren’t positively sure that he’s… deceased, we shouldn’t panic and make assumptions. That won’t help us at all,” he said with a considerable amount of confidence he didn’t feel.
“Right, right. Yeah,” Sasha agreed. She seemed to be thinking of something for a moment before she chimed in again. “If he were the creature from the statement, why would we all be able to tell that something was wrong and still recognize him as the same Martin from before he got sick? I think we could be dealing with something different here.”
Tim hummed and nodded, his eyes a little manic. Jon noted that his assistants seemed to be taking his faux-confidence in stride. Good. There was no need to panic now, not when it was still so soon . And yet he could see a spark of something flaring up in Tim’s gaze that set his nerves on edge.
“I’ll go look into it. See if I can find anything in the library, maybe,” Tim suddenly announced, once more moving towards Jon’s office door.
“Right. Of course, let me know if you find anything.”
“Aye, aye, Bossman.”
And Tim left the office with a light click! of the door shutting. Sasha swayed where she stood towards the door indecisively. Jon wasn’t sure what she was contemplating, so he just grabbed the mug from the corner of the desk and brought it to his lips.
“Don’t let this stress you out too much, Jon. As much as I know we’re dying to know what’s happening-” her eyes shimmered behind her glasses as she said this “-we need to take care of ourselves too, just in case Martin is in immediate danger and needs us to rush in.” Jon looked up at her from his seat and caught her gaze. He lowered the mug from his mouth to respond.
“Right, yes. Same to you.”
And Sasha left the office, tracing Tim’s steps – she seemed nearly as eager as Tim to get out and do research. When the door shut once more, Jon deflated in his seat. His headache still raged on like an incessant drumbeat in his mind, which was… annoying . He thought – with a touch of melancholic irony – that this was the most mental capacity he’d ever spent on his ungainly assistant. And it was when there was the chance the man was…
Well . No time to dwell on that. He took a swig of his tea, still quite warm at this rate, and let the molten molasses-colored drink fill his senses for a moment. Huh. It wasn’t the tea he usually got from Martin. It still sat in his mouth – he was hesitant to swallow it – and he swished it around. It wasn’t bad , really. Just. Different. It wasn’t nearly as sweet, and there was a confusing citrus aftertaste that was more bitter than anything. When he swallowed, it fell heavy down his throat, dripping like burning white-hot magma to his stomach. His face twisted with displeasure. Immediately his mind conjured a thought that twisted his gut even further: Martin would never make tea like this for me.
Almost as if on autopilot, his hand placed the mug back on the desolate corner of his desk and he looked away, guilt swirling alongside mediocre tea in his body.
After a second of mourning the cup of tea he’d had before Martin’s disappearance, Jon twisted in his chair and snatched up a box of files from the floor. If there was any place to start investigating, it would be in the statements. Something pricked in his mind, goading him to learn and know . He let that sensation sweep him through reading through each and every paper… Every single drunkard who’d stumbled into the institute. Every single manic episode that had somehow found its way onto official documents. Things of the like.
And when his phone’s alarm alerted him that the workday was over, he pushed onwards. Tim and Sasha had popped in together to say farewell – Not-Martin staring at him from over the pair’s shoulders - but that wasn’t enough to get him to leave just yet.
What did stop him, however, was when he’d finally examined his way through all of the boxes he kept stored in his cramped little office. There were plenty more to be found in the archives themselves, he knew, but the feeling that he’d done hours of thumbing through papers without any sort of gratification made the weight of his drooping eyelids so much heavier. He wound up asleep at his desk, the cold tea-filled mug forgotten amidst the new storm of papers that called his desk home. And that night he dreamed. He dreamed of tea, and rippling waves upon its surface, and an unfamiliar smile gracing a familiar face…