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The nights immediately after Jordan Kennedy gives his statement are the last peaceful nights of his life.
The nightmares don’t start immediately. After the third time that Jordan dreams of swarming ants it occurs to him that they have been there for weeks. It isn’t that he hasn’t notice. Dreams like this aren’t uncommon. Considering the kinds of things that he’d been called out to look at and destroy before, he has no reason to be surprised that sometimes finds insects crawling through his head at night.
Jordan is out with friends at the weekly pub quiz, tipsy, listening to Kate’s account of being kicked out of a shop earlier that day because the owner mixed her up with her older sister. This isn’t the first time that something like this happened to her, and overall Jordan thinks that she takes it in good stride. Some people are too touchy for their own good, and while Jordan sympathises—generally that’s his reaction, to sympathise, and generally it goes a long way—he doesn’t relate.
“The irony of all ironies,” Kate is saying—the punchline to every story that she has like this—“is that I am a twin. But no one thinks that I’m her!”
“Yeah,” Jordan says, “but she has green hair.”
A smile plays on Kate’s lip as she settles her gaze down on him. “Should I dye mine blue, do you think?”
“Maybe just cut it,” someone else says.
Her fingers slide through her pale brown hair, twirling the end of it. The pub so dim, everything roughly the same orange-brown-light, and Kate just blends into that.
“What do you think, Jordan?”
He laughs, almost choking on his drink. “Me? What do I know about what looks good?”
There’s other laughter, a few jokes about Kate wanting his opinion and how maybe he should take her advice once in a while, if he wants to scrub up a bit. Jordan laughs it off. He’s a neat man, does his part to look tidy. He was a neat child, although the fastidious attention to detail developed in his decade as an exterminator. It sets people at ease if he looks clean when he shows up to kill off their infestation or whatever disgusting hive of insects or creepy-crawlies was unfortunate enough to make a home where someone is already living. No one would wash their dishes with dirty water; no one wants the guy called in to get rid of all the bugs or mould or other contaminants to look like he’s going to foul the place up just by being there.
(He touches his neck, where that man had grabbed him by the throat and choked him. It’s been years since it happened, months since he told the Archivist about it, but since then he hasn’t felt clean, and no amount of scratching his skin raw in the shower is going to take away the nausea that comes from remembering.)
“Hey,” one of the lads that Jordan hasn’t known for as long as the others says. Alan? He’s only met the guy here, on nights like this. He speaks in a soft, quiet way that shouldn’t be heard over all the rest of the sound, but even that one word he says so forcefully. Kate shuts her mouth, sips at her drink; the guy sitting to Jordan’s right cranes around to see what Alan is saying.
“How long has that guy over there been sitting?” He nods towards the door. Kate stands up in her seat to look. At the same time, someone else nudges Jordan’s elbow, asking something about the buses.
“I don’t know,” Kate is saying. “I haven’t seen him around before.”
“Are you sure?”
“Do you know him?”
“He’s been sitting there for a while,” Alan says. “I think I’ve seen him before, but—”
Jordan turns around in his seat to look, but can’t bring himself to complete that action. There’s an ant on the sleeve of Kate’s shirt, crawling over the cuff, down to her hand. She brushes it away without even seeing it, and it falls on the table. It doesn’t move at first, then walks in a circle before walking across the table, under the light, under the fork that came with the battered calamari rings that Jordan ate earlier, when he first arrived. When it steps out from under the metal there are two of them, and when Jordan blinks they spill across the table, drowning it.
His mouth is dry. He jerks back in his seat, pushing himself away from the table. Kate swears, reaching for a napkin.
“Great job, Jordan,” one of his mates says, while Kate asks if they should call a taxi. He looks back to the table, but his scream dies on his lips. It’s only his beer, dripping over the edge of the table and onto the floor.
Smoking after he’s finished his job. Really, he should quit. It’s a disgusting habit. It saved his life once, but still.
It’s late enough in the morning that the early commute into the city is over, leaving just the regular goings-on that come when so many people live in the same place, packed tightly together like ants. (Like ants?) The sky is a sharp blue that he’s only seen in London, a colour that people might be tempted to call clear except that Jordan knows better. It wouldn’t be so bright if not for the pollutants, and the air here is filthy.
He started the morning early, with two cups of coffee. Usually he’d only be having his second cup now, but what sleep he gets is no longer comfortable. His morning starts at four, when he finally pulls himself out of (the crawling swarm of ants that infest) his dreams and finds himself awake in bed, relieved and exhausted in equal measures, alone although it doesn’t feel that way.
If he were really alone, then there wouldn’t be the press of a gaze on every point of his body.
He wakes most mornings clawing at the ghosts of ants that aren’t there, that burn him. His fingers bite through his own skin instead, until he realises where he is. A shower later and he’s usually more in his right mind, but he can forget about going back to sleep.
Jordan shakes his head, stubs out his cigarette. Daylight, now.
A call from his mother. It’s getting to be that time of the year again.
“It would be nice to see you again,” she says, after they finish going through all the basics. “I’ve missed you.”
“You too,” Jordan says. “How long has it been?”
She doesn’t remember; neither does he. He hasn’t been losing time or anything like that, but the weeks turn over pretty quickly. This is what anniversaries are for: marking time.
“Your grandmother wants to see you again.”
It’s been your grandmother for seven years, since his dad died. Before that it was ‘Nanna’ or ‘Julie’, depending on if she was talking to him as a man with his own company who killed insects for a living or as her baby boy, not a baby but her baby, who can never be anything else to her. He doesn’t know how to live up to that.
“Well, you know,” he says. “I’ve been pretty busy.”
“Have you put in leave, yet?”
It isn’t that Jordan is unsympathetic to his mum’s need to commemorate their mutual loss, but it’s been long enough that he doesn’t feel it anymore, this need for ceremony, as though it keeps her husband going. It feels wrong to sit there, the whole family gathered (less of them lately, since the five year mark), caught in this weird limbo between moving on—Have you started seeing anyone? Your father was so excited to be a granddad, one day? He’d be so proud of you—and living in a really specific past that can’t exist anymore and that never will again.
Yeah, he feels rotten about it. It doesn’t cost him anything to just be there, show his face, let everyone know that he’s still alive.
“Still waiting for that,” he lies. Without thinking about what he’s saying, he adds. “Things have been… rough.”
“What’s wrong?”
“You know, just haven’t been sleeping well.”
“It’s no wonder,” she says. “It’s always hard around this time of the year.”
Not correcting her has to count as some kind of a betrayal, the worst deception. He just lets it slide, promises that he’ll see about getting up to see her again soon. It’s all a part of this morbid tradition, even his reluctance; it’s the least that he could do.
Like one of those poems that he studied while doing his GCSEs. He doesn’t think this so much as he realises this, in some distant, poorly contained part of his mind that doesn’t still think he’s dreaming. Poetry has never been Jordan’s thing, at least not how it was taught to him in school. He’d asked on more than one occasion why the author didn’t just write it as a story, and got an answer about form and poetic devices—something about the structure of the poem being part of the poem, not just the worlds, which to Jordan just seemed like an excuse to write poetry. Another time he asked, “If they’re so good with words, why not just tell it straight?” which also earned him that same answer. He swapped between thinking that poetry was just something that people did when they wanted to sound smart, or important, and thinking that there was something deeply intelligent and thought-provoking about it that he just didn’t get. Then he’d look at some poem about peeling oranges that was apparently about love, or a nature poem—any nature poem!—that was apparently about literally anything other than nature, and he’d reconsider again. A string of objects tied together with some meaning that he didn’t grasp, arranged in a way that someone who liked to think in the abstract would be able to understand, easily, but could never explain to him.
If he was analysing his current situation the way that he’d analyse a poem then he’d describe it like this: Blood on his neck. Sweat stains on the sheets of his bed. Walls painted with writhing shadows, except that they weren’t shadows. (The relief of touching the wall and finding just wall.) The mattress tipped up, leaned against the wall. Pillows stripped bare. His desk pulled out, far enough from the wall that he could crawl behind it, which he had. The floorboard was pulled away, nails sticking out of the wood; Jordan’s fingers forcing themselves into the gap between the floorboard and the wall, pulling at it, picking at it. Nails bitten down. Skin peeled back on the tips of his fingers. Everything that lived on the floor was picked up, shaken out, piled onto his dresser.
The blood is a metaphor for the ants, crawling across his skin. He feels it, hears it on the inside of his skull as his heart pounds. There are no ants in the room now, and that’s a metaphor for how alone he is right now, even with the window open and the ambient sound of London breathing to keep him company.
So what does that mean?
He crouches down, pressing his face against the floor. What was the point of this? He can’t stop himself from reaching up again to touch his jaw, peel at the skin that he’d opened when he’d awoken, tearing at his face and throat.
If he’s alone, then there can be no one watching him.
He’s not sure about that. He should have been alone in his dreams, but he wasn’t—what makes now any different, other than the fact that he’s awake?
Jordan runs a hand over his face. This is all too weird. He’s losing it. Whatever part of his head isn’t crawling against his own thoughts, his own skin, needs to sort itself out and get a grip. He pushes himself away from the wall, sitting with his bare shoulder blades against the bedframe. Breathes.
“It’s fine,” he mutters. The inside of his mouth tastes bad. Now that he’s not doing that cross between hyperventilating and keening, the room is painfully silent. He coughs just to fill up some space, looks around to see if anyone heard him.
He pushes himself to his feet. The flat is a non-smoking flat, but he can’t be fucked to put on a shirt and walk downstairs. Jordan walks to the window and leans his weight against the sill, looking at the weeds pushing up between the panes of wood, the grime caught in the corners, the mould—
Lights a cigarette. It feels better, for a moment. When he looks outside there’s no one there. The cool air touches his skin and he shivers, gooseflesh erupting up his arms. Despite this being London air, he feels clean. The smell of life after walking through a hospital, so to speak, with the antiseptic smell pressing on the inside of his nose.
The nightmares are rough. This one was the worst, but not technically. The dreams he had after it happened where he was swallowed by the writhing mound of ants that crawled up his legs and coated him as thoroughly as they coated him part of the wall, making him part of the wall and part of the writhing mess of ants, should be worse, but when he woke with the heels of his hands pressed into his face he was at least alone, shaking.
If he turned around in his dream—if he could open his eyes and not risk being stabbed in the eye by thousands of tiny legs as they crawled across his face—then he would have seen something looking back at him. But he doesn’t need to see it for it to watch him.
Waking up from these dreams that he’s been having recently always felt like losing something—sleep, time, another inch of himself, the boundaries between himself and the things crawling through him eroding.
Whatever it is that’s gone, he wishes instead that he didn’t feel so bad about losing it.
Jordan Kennedy is standing outside in the rain with a cigarette the first time that he lays eyes upon the Archivist. There are only two visible reactions that betray the chaos rolling through Jordan’s head. His breath catches in his throat and his fingers pinch the filter of the cigarette tightly. The end of the cigarette burns brighter as he finally exhales. No one who would have been able to see him would have noticed this.
There is very little respite for Jordan now. He is not at a shortage for things that bring him joy, only things that bring him peace.
Jordan calls his mother. After the third ring he considers hanging up but thinks better of it, resolves to leave a message just a second before she answers.
“Jordie?”
“Hey,” he says weakly. “How have you been?”
He makes this call in his van, pulled over on a residential street near Bushy Park. It’s the height of summer. The inside of his car is too warm, too stuffy, but all thoughts of getting out to walk vanish quickly when he turns his head towards the pavement. Maybe his van offers no real protection, but it’s his, and for now that will have to do.
His mother tells him about her day, her recent visit to her half-sister up in Carlisle, one of the aunts that he’s never met but who apparently always asks after him. Jordan listens with feigned attentiveness, making a show of fiddling with something in the glove compartment. His eyes never stray from the inside of the van. His equipment is here, along with a change of clothes, some snacks.
“What about you?” she asks.
“I just visited a house in Twickenham.”
“Are you back at your own flat?”
“No,” he says. “No way, there’s still all the paperwork.”
“Oh, that’s a shame. It’s beautiful out. There hasn’t been a day like this all summer.”
Jordan makes a sound of agreement, something like, “I know, right?” but it doesn’t come out like that. He pretends to have found what he was looking for, slams the glove compartment shut. Something to draw a conclusion to his pointless his actions, the things that he does when he’s alone to fill up his time, now that he’s no longer ever alone.
A pause on the phone. He can’t think of anything to say. Before he starts thinking of his excuses, she says, “What was it?”
“What?”
“The job that you just finished?”
“Oh. Nothing big.” He chokes on the word: “Ants.”
Not the worst thing that he’s ever seen. No matter what he sees in the future, no matter if he walks into a house that is somehow worse than that, it won’t be as bad as what he told the Archivist. The ants. The hive. Being choked by that man in the brown suit who he then set alight. Jordan isn’t naïve enough to believe that he’d seen it all, which bothers him more than anything else. Telling the Archivist about these incidents threw a new light on everything that he’d been prepared to deal with.
He scratches the back of his neck, confident that the legs he feels crawling on his skin in an evenly paced line are just his imagination, but still digging his nails hard enough into his body that he leaves a line.
“It wasn’t too bad,” he hears himself lie to his mother. “Just a grubby couple who didn’t clean their kitchen before going on holiday, and are paying for that now.” Except worse. For a job like that you’d call the exterminator, not the ECDC. Not him.
“I’m surprised that’s not most of your work.”
“Well, it varies.”
It is now that Jordan makes his mistake. He raises his head and looks out the front window, failing to avert his eyes before they land on the man standing by metal rails that surround the park. This mistake very nearly costs him his composure, but despite Jordan’s doubts about himself and his resolution, it is actually quite difficult to shake him.
He quickly averts his gaze, blinking hard. If this isn’t real, but is instead just a hallucination, a waking dream, then he can tolerate it. He doesn’t like the thought of his sanity being in tatters, but plenty of people carry on despite suffering worse.
But this is the third time this week that Jordan has looked around himself and seen the Archivist there—on the other side of the glass while Jordan pays for a sandwich, further behind him as Jordan walks back to his single-room flat late in the evening, standing outside of his window as he wakes from another one of those wretched nightmares.
Her voice interrupts the hammering in his head, cutting through the fog of fear. “Was there a reason that you called, Jordie?”
“I just wanted to talk to you,” he says. “Can’t a man call his mother without it being weird?”
He hears her smile as she talks. “I wished that you called more often—”
“I know, I know.”
“You know that you can come see me if you need anything. Even just dinner—you could, you can stay the night, it isn’t a problem.”
He never considered himself someone that would go to pieces without sleep, at least not more than the average person. As a child he had chronic night terrors, past the age where children were meant to grow out of this. His parents even brought him to a sleep specialist to try to understand what was wrong with him. He never remembered what was in these night-terrors, which is apparently normal, but in the morning he always knew that he’d had another when he saw the look on the face of his mother. She regarded him strangely, in a way that as a child he didn’t understand but that scared him very much.
Looking back, he felt some measure of guilt for this. And now he feels guilt again, but in a new way that scares him. He’s let something horrible into his home, and now it’s following him.
“I know,” he says. “I appreciate it. Really.”
“So what do you need from me?”
“Do you remember—” The words are spilling out of him now. He looks away from the street, down at his hands. The backs of his palms all laced with scratches, blue veins standing out against his tanned skin like trees. “Was there ever a time when I—”
She worried about him. He didn’t know the intricate thoughts that she had about the subject back then, but Jordan knew enough to know that she blamed herself: both the night terrors and the lack of answers. How could she let her son suffer? If she had the opportunity to take these night-terrors upon herself, to live his fear, then she would. It would have been easier than the unease that clouded every evening before bed, the breath that she held from the time that her Jordan fell asleep until either the next morning when he woke, brought safely to where she sat in the kitchen, if she was lucky. Otherwise her breath lodged in her throat late in the night like a splinter, not to be let out even when she next saw him.
These dreams that he has now aren’t like that. He remembers them, to start with. He doesn’t wake from an unfathomable fear screaming, but clawing at himself like a savage animal.
She would still worry if she knew.
“Jordan?”
“Was I always like this?”
She laughs. “Yes, Jordie. Always. Even when you were in school, there was always something…” And she goes on, talking. It drones in his ear like a nest. He hears but doesn’t listen.
His fear is quiet. It’s exhausting. It’s a fear that he can’t shake, no matter how long he waits for the sun to shine through his windows, no matter what comfort should be found walking amongst other people on the street.
His fear is right there, and it’s watching him.
The Archivist becomes a fixture in Jordan’s waking life as easily as he became a fixture of his nightmares.
For a time Jordan briefly considers going back to the Magnus Institute to find him, but he quickly throws the thought away. Why would he want to meet the Archivist on his own territory? It’s a rationalisation that strikes Jordan as being absurd enough that he’s almost ashamed at how afraid he is.
Territory. As if this is a war.
Like with the nightmares, Jordan knows that if he could just get used to it then it wouldn’t bother him so much. Not a lot of things do—not a lot of things used to, anyway. He’s always been an easy guy to get along with. One of the most common things that people said about him was that he rarely raised any complaints, with a few people adding on that they were just waiting for the day that he finally snapped. He was patient, fastidious, meticulous. There were always a few people who heard what he did and were surprised, because he seemed so cool and level-headed. Those people always wanted to know how he could stomach what he did—as an exterminator, as an employee of the ECDC. Didn’t it disgust him? Didn’t he feel bad about killing living things? Jordan had never been particularly moved by either of those perspectives, and always disappointed people by saying that (like everything else) it genuinely didn’t bother him—he wasn’t particularly brave for being willing to hunt down some creepy things, nor was he one of those fanatics who thought insects and the like to be such an object of fascination: a terrifying monomaniacal interest culminating in their destruction. He got into the job because when he was seventeen, his dad had a friend who was in the business, in need of a driver after a particularly bad shoulder injury, and as things progressed Jordan soon found himself taking a more active role during call-outs. It just happened like that. This wasn’t really the kind of job that people got into if they had some dream career that they were hoping to follow up on. In Jordan’s opinion, it wasn’t a job that you could do well in if you had strong opinions about killing things, whether that be a total aversion (for obvious reasons) or a flat determination to be okay with it, to not think of animals as deserving to be alive (for reasons that were less obvious and that probably wouldn’t have made sense to anyone who wasn’t in the business themselves.) It just didn’t bother him.
A few people called him a pushover, too willing to just go with what was happening to him. Said that the reason that he had so much trouble with relationships was that he was never willing to push back, which had always amused Jordan: clearly, people who said that kind of thing didn’t understand what he wanted from a relationship, which was the easy-going comradery that came from being swallowed up in a group of friends who met pretty regularly, a certain interchangeable intimacy, and not much else. He’d never fancied the idea of being the sole focus of someone’s attention or affection, which of course made his particular situation now particularly unpleasant.
The Archivist has infected his dreams and his waking life. There isn’t anywhere that Jordan can turn to where he can escape the Archivist’s wide gaze. Everywhere he goes he sees the man, never directly but clearly enough. How do you handle a situation like this? Who do you call? If it were something different, then maybe this would be the kind of problem that you take to the Magnus Institute, but for obvious reasons that’s completely out of the question.
Jordan is terrified and he knows it.
One Tuesday night Jordan climbs the stairs of a building that he’s only been to once. The air is cool; there’s a breeze. He’s already been home and showered and changed, and was just getting ready to start picking at the weeds growing around the edges of his window, as he’s taken to doing lately so that nothing else will grow there, when a thought strikes him with shocking clarity. He doesn’t expect Alan to be in, or to answer. When he does Jordan takes a moment to consider what it is that he’s going to say.
He has the thought that Alan won’t recognise him. He’s not in his uniform, and that does most of the talking when he gets to a job.
“Is everything okay?” Alan says.
“Yeah,” Jordan answers. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
Alan shrugs. “No reason. Just… weird that you’re here. Did I ever tell you where my flat was, or…?”
“I stopped by the other week, to pick you up,” he says. “When we were—”
“Oh! Yeah, I remember. What’s up?”
“Here, can I come in for a minute?”
Alan eyes him in a certain way that Jordan doesn’t like, like he’s sizing him up. At some point in the past the notion would have been so completely ridiculous: Jordan’s small, not weak but even being generous with muscle mass, someone that Alan could heft over his shoulder easily.
There’s a certain way that people look when they’re trying to decide if they want to trust you, and Jordan does his part to make himself look trustworthy: to be non-descript, polite, mild. It does wonders for all the people who used to be worried that they’ll get ripped off, who are calling him because they’re in a pretty dire predicament and are starting to doubt that they’ll get their money’s worth here. Since taking the job with the ECDC, there’s been less of the blatant fear of independent contractors, but the kinds of things that he’s called out to look at are breeding grounds for that kind of doubt, where everything is uncertain but the stakes are unfathomably high.
It’s always the same: Can I trust you? Will you save me? The look Alan gives him is this but in the opposite direction.
I don’t know what has you looking like that, but I don’t want anything to do with it.
“Look,” he says. “Now isn’t really the best time.”
“I just need a minute, man.”
“If you need cash, I can…”
“It isn’t that.”
Alan looks at him warily, and for the first time Jordan wonders how he must look. How bad he looks.
“Do you remember when we were out at the pub that night—”
“Which night?”
“When you thought you saw someone by the door. Everyone else turned to look, I didn’t get the chance—”
“Before you spilled your drink everywhere, yeah, I remember that.”
Is he annoyed? Wary?
“What did that man look like?”
Alan makes a face, shrugs. “Oh, man. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I was a bit shitfaced, I have to tell you.”
Jordan laughs, genuinely. It’s so abrupt that it surprises him, but a smile eases across his face and he shakes his head. Alan just looks confused, so Jordan elaborates: “Who the hell gets shitfaced at a pub quiz?”
“Oh, like you can talk. If I remember right, you couldn’t even turn around to look without making a mess.”
Jordan’s spilled drinks, the ants pouring out across the table. He raises a hand to scratch his neck again before catching himself and running his nails over his hand. There’s a rash on his neck from how often he scratches at it. And the back of his hand. And a spot on his hip, just under his shirt, where he’s found his hand trailing to without even needing to be told.
Alan’s looking at him again, frowning. “What’s wrong?”
“Just tell me what the guy looked like,” he says. “It’s important.”
“Man, I don’t know—he was a guy. He was small. And he was just sitting there by the door, staring at us. I don’t even think he’d ordered anything to drink, or any food. That’s what I thought was so weird about the whole thing, you know. Like, why was he here?”
Jordan nods. “Right. Not sure what I expected.”
Not sure what he hoped for. There’s not enough detail to confirm that it is or isn’t the Archivist. Is it better or worse to think that this has been going on for as long as it has, that the Archivist has been so persistent since before Jordan even realised that this was something that he needed to be worried about? He doesn’t like to think about being stalked for so long, being helpless for that whole time without even knowing it.
And maybe it wasn’t even the Archivist. Maybe it was just as Alan said—some guy.
“Look,” Alan says. “Jordan.” The word hangs between them for a moment, and he looks like he’s going to follow it up with something. The silence between them stretches thin.
Jordan reaches up to touch his neck, lowers his hand. There is something at the back of his head, the phantom falling of ants pouring out between his fingers all coming from him and crawling up his arm and under his shirt and over it like a second skin—he shakes his hand, trying to throw them off, but of course there’s nothing there because there never is, only in his dreams.
“Jordan—”
He turns on his heel, quickly now, and catches sight of a movement at the end of the hall.
Alan grabs his shoulder, turns him around. “What the hell has gotten into you?”
He opens his mouth to answer, but there’s nothing that he can point to. “Never mind,” he says, wanting to say that he didn’t mean it—this has all been just a horrible misunderstanding. “Look, I need to go.”
“You came all this way to ask me…” But Alan doesn’t know how to finish that sentence.
Jordan shakes his head. “I know what you’re thinking.” He’s tired. It’s been a long time since he’s slept well, or slept at all. For the past few days now it’s been the minutes that he catches on his commute when he’s going into the office, or between jobs. A nap stolen in the kitchen while he waits for his water to boil. Eventually he’s going to just have to cut his losses, catch whatever rest he can steal before falling into that same, drawn-out nightmare of his life that he relives every night.
“You don’t look so good,” Alan is saying, and Jordan brushes him off.
“There’s just been a lot going on.”
“Do you need…” Another missed step in the conversation. Jordan doesn’t know what to say.
“It’s just been a lot.”
“Work?” He looks dubious, even as he says it.
“Yeah, you have no idea.”
“Look, Jordan, just—” Pausing again. “If you need to see someone—”
“I know, I know,” Jordan says, agreeing but already thinking of slipping away down the stairs, back out to the street where it will be dark and where he will be alone again.
(Admittedly, it’s a pretty ridiculous situation. Even Jordan can admit that, drinking his fifth cup of coffee this morning, on his commute into work. His skin stings; there’s a deep exhaustion that aches all the way down to his bones, but it’s nothing compared to the phantom crawling on his skin, not the pain that comes from biting but something else altogether. He almost walked out in front of a train that morning, and was only dragged back at the last minute by a business man with two laptop cases, one slung over each shoulder.
“Have you thought about watching where you’re going?” he asked, and Jordan was about to apologise and thank him in the same breath when his own gaze landed on a distinctive set of green eyes just over his shoulders.
“Yeah,” he says. “I don’t know what—”
The eyes don’t blink; his voice trails off, not following his thoughts.
The man shakes him, and Jordan snaps his attention back to the unkind face of the man who saved his life. Only a few seconds have passed since he crossed that familiar yellow line. The train comes just as Jordan opens his mouth to gives his thanks, drowning out his words, and the man shakes his head, irritated and annoyed and almost missing his train.
The platform empties, Jordan carried along in the tide of commuters loading themselves onto the train. He looks out the window at the platform, people hurrying (like ants) in all directions, and he expects to see nothing distinct, just the familiar mindless movement of people going about their lives.
The Archivist is there, watching. Jordan is almost too tired to give a damn.)
And then one day he sees the Archivist, except that it’s really him. Not that it’s been some imposter that he’s been seeing in the corner of his eye for all these month, another face in the crowd. That’s been him too, but only to watch: not to be there.
It’s late. Jordan is tired, restless in a way that you can only reach through ceaseless exhaustion, and now he’s out walking instead of sleeping. He doesn’t have a plan. For months now he’s weighed up the possibility that he’s going insane, hoping that this is all that it is. There’s no proof that it’s anything more than that. Isn’t a lack of sleep meant to do this to you? Drive you mad, make you see things that aren’t there? Jordan doesn’t believe that. There is clearly some creepy shit happening here, more terrible than anything he could do to himself.
The Archivist is right there. Jordan stares at him, blinks.
He stubs out his cigarette and squashes it under his boot.
The Archivist remains in place as Jordan draws near him, also with a cigarette in hand. They’re the only two people on the street. The only sounds that can be heard are the distant ones—motors and trains, the occasional peel of laughter from the beer garden of the pub just down the road. It’s late enough that Jordan feels a clenching fear twine itself around his chest, an old wariness of being out alone in the dark, now magnified by this man who has been such a constant companion for this past several months.
He’s grabbing the Archivist by the front of his shirt, hauling him forward with a strength that he doesn’t believe in. When he shouts it isn’t a scream, but something reeking of desperation.
“What do you want from me?” he demands. “Why won’t you leave me alone?”
For a moment, the eyes that look up at him belong only to Jonathan Sims, Jon, the man once defeated by relief when Jordan had told him that Jane Prentiss was dead and made him repeat it. Fear sparks across Jordan’s skin. He opens his mouth, the excuses nesting in his mouth ready to burst—I’ve got the wrong guy, sorry, my bad—but before he has the chance the Archivist grips his wrist and drags him forward. The Archivist looks at him with new eyes that open on his cheekbones. His skin is peeling back, all with the same ease that an orange peels when you dig your thumb in at the right angle. Not just on his face, but on his neck. All the eyes swivel up to look at Jordan’s face.
“Oh, God.” He tries to take a step back but the Archivist won’t let him go. He looks down at his own hands where the Archivist is still holding his wrists, having not so much as flinched away from Jordan. More eyes look up at him, in pairs and in clusters. The Archivist is a glittering constellation of eyes all blinking at different times, and when he does Jordan sees that the eyelids are as scarred as the Archivist’s hands, worn through with burns and bites and other scars.
Jordan isn’t weak. He’s small, unassuming, and has only ever hurt someone in a serious way once. The strength that he summons up to wrench his hands away from the Archivist and to stumble back onto the street shocks him. He wants to run, but the Archivist doesn’t need to follow to keep him pinned under that wretched, multi-lensed gaze.
“What are you?” he screams.
Then the Archivist does the worst thing that he could do right now. He takes a step forward, towards Jordan. His thin mouth grimaces, and he parts his lips. Jordan slams his hands over his ears and screams something, he doesn’t know what. Through the throbbing of his own heartbeat in his ears, he hears the Archivist say something, and despite himself he looks up because he wants to know.
When he looks at the Archivist again, locks eyes with the million of green points staring back at him, each with a light of their own, Jordan finds his vision comes and goes, fading and blurring. Jordan tries to say something; fails. A new fear possesses him. He doesn’t know where to look, can’t meet them all.
The ground meets him with a hardness as he collapses. It is completely unsurprising to him that he can’t summon any strength in his legs to push himself up, but nonetheless he tries to scramble way.
“Wait,” the Archivist says, softly. “Jordan.”
“No,” he whimpers, turning his face down to look at the pavement. “Don’t do this to me. Let me go.” Although by now he barely hears his own words, flattened as they are under the weight of the Archivist’s undivided attention.
Jordan wakes up in a room that he doesn’t recognise. His head hurts. His whole body aches. When he opens his eyes a sharp, white pain burns through his head. If he could think without hurting himself then he would consider the explosions in the backs of his eyelids.
“Here,” says the Archivist.
Jordan turns his head away against the rough, scratchy fabric of the sofa. A hand settles on his shoulder which he struggles to throw off, fails to crawl away from. His panic is short-lived, subdued by something cold rested against his forehead. When it covers his eyes he settles, too exhausted to do much else.
Then the hand returns to his arm. He lets it guide his body to a sitting position where he can lean his elbows on his knees. Something from in his head pulls at his eyes, straining the muscles around his forehead. He can’t settle, can’t stop the pain.
“Jordan Kennedy.”
He knows what he will see when he looks up, and that it will hurt. Nonetheless he pulls the frozen cloth away from his face and squints through the dim light, into the face of Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute.
Jordan wishes that he was still in possession of even a sliver of what he’d felt on the street, fear turning to anger that never quite made it. He’s shocked at his own surprise, that this is just a man with two eyes, skin all twisted and scarred in such a human way even if Jordan suspects that the initial injuries weren’t normal—but still, just skin.
Jon looks worse than Jordan remembers.
“Oh, God.” He sits up straighter, runs a hand over his face. Despite everything, he’s embarrassed for losing it like that. “I didn’t mean to… I don’t know what made me do that.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
They sit quietly for a time. Jon’s face twists into something bitter, then softens again. He isn’t even looking at Jordan, but Jordan knows that he’s being watched.
“What is this?” Jordan asks. “Why did you bring me here? What did you do to me?”
“I suppose that I have a lot to explain,” Jon says, choosing his words slowly. It’s really hard to keep his thoughts straight—the man with all the eyes on the street, the man who is all eyes in his dreams, the man who was so anxious in the Institute, so keen to have Jordan’s statement when he sat down and gave it.
“You may as well start somewhere,” Jordan says, not wanting to be unkind, but who is he kidding? He doesn’t hate the Archivist, not really, but he’s scared of him.
Jon starts by handing Jordan a glass of water. He moves to stand on the other side of the coffee table. Jordan doesn’t want to drink it at first, thinks it’s too friendly considering what they are to each other, but his mouth is sticky and tastes awful.
As has become usual for him these days, Jordan turns his attention to something immediately in front of him. Having one thing to look at is a good distracting from being watched.
“I am sorry.”
It’s the last thing Jordan expected to hear.
“I don’t even know what you’re apologising for.”
“A lot has happened,” Jon says. “And I do regret what that’s done to you.”
“What happened to me?” Jordan snaps. “What are you?”
“That’s the part that’s difficult to explain, and I am sorry for that. I don’t know how much you want to hear. It wouldn’t help you.”
“Do you think it’s too weird—weirder than Jane Prentiss, or weirder than—more confusing than—” The man in the ill-fitting suit, who burned when Jordan held a light to him.
Jon murmurs something to himself—an hearse?—but Jordan can’t make it out. It means nothing to him, anyway.
“It isn’t that,” Jon says quickly. “I know that you’ve seen a lot.”
“Not just what I told you, either. You know that too, right?” For some reason this is important, a hill worth killing this conversation on.
But Jon just nods. “No details, of course, but I know what your line of work is.”
It’s funny, in a horrible way. The man whose job it is to collect stories like Jordan’s, knowing what he doesn’t know. Meanwhile Jordan doesn’t even have that.
The words come out of his mouth evenly, a clean anger cutting through how awful everything about this night is. “Why are you doing this to me?”
Except it isn’t just anger. There’s exhaustion there, fear. He really wants the answer, as afraid as he is to have it. He can’t even bring himself to ask what happened on the street, much less to ask about the dreams. And the Archivist’s face, as soon as the words leave his mouth, sinks with exhaustion. And this, despite the fear of the nightmares where the Archivist watches him live through the ants which has gifted him an exhaustion all his own, makes Jordan feel wretched all over again.
He wants to take the questions back, take back his anger: here, now; on the street. It’s embarrassing. As he’s always telling himself these days, he isn’t the kind of person that cracks up. He didn’t used to be.
“Never mind,” he says. “I don’t care. There’s something really creepy happening here, and I’m starting to think that it might be better if I don’t know anything about it.”
“I wish that I could tell you something,” Jon says. “If you want to know, then I can explain, but I won’t disagree with you. Maybe it is better that you don’t know.”
He reaches a hand to his neck without thinking, scratching the same raw patch of skin that he’s been digging through for weeks. When he looks up, Jon is watching him still. It’s impossible to tell if he’s sad or frustrated. It would be easier if he hadn’t seen that.
“You’re there,” Jordan says. “In my nightmares.”
“Yes.”
“And the rest of the time.”
“In a sense.”
“Is it real?”
Jon’s hands fall still. Jordan hadn’t even noticed how he was picking at his own hand, fingers twitching like he was wanting a cigarette. Mirroring Jordan?
“The nightmares,” Jordan repeats. “Are they real?”
“Yes. Not in a way that we’re used to things being real, but it isn’t just a dream, or—I suppose more of a nightmare, really.”
Not his childhood night terrors. Or the ones that he had as an adult, rare but still a periodic part of his life. Things that he can’t remember in the morning when well-meaning friends ask what had him screaming like that in the night, thrashing around in his bed, terrified of something that they will never know. How pointless it all seemed, to be so scared of something that could never touch the rest of his life but still disturbed everyone around him.
At least with the night terrors he just has to deal with well-meaning friends worried about him, scared for him, and the awkwardness that comes from not remembering.
These dreams are a wound bleeding into the daylight.
“Why me?”
“It isn’t just you.”
“But why?”
“Because,” Jon says, “you gave me your statement.”
Jordan doesn’t know what answer he expected. It’s both telling and utterly useless. Revealing and exhausting to think about—all those months ago, years ago. He thinks about the Institute from time to time, but not in any serious way.
Meeting Jon’s eyes hurts, though, and so his gaze falls back to the coffee table. “I didn’t plan to say anything to you.”
“I know.”
“You sounded real convincing on the phone,” Jordan says. “I thought it was something urgent. More worms, or—” He laughs. “I don’t know what I thought. That it would be a quick job. You just wanted the ashes back, and to talk about it. I don’t know why I expected anything.” Maybe he hadn’t. It was all so long ago, as routine as the incidents that he gave to the Archivist: only significant after the fact.
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
Distantly, Jordan hears Jon moving. For the first time he’s struck by the realisation that this is probably the Archivist’s flat, where he stays when he’s not stalking Jordan, or anyone else who’s been unlucky enough to make the same mistake. It looks like it could be anyone’s flat, albeit a flat that belongs to quite a reserved, bookish person—maybe someone who doesn’t get out much, although with none of the traits that, through his work, Jordan has come to associate with people who lock themselves away in their own filth.
Still, the idea that he’s sat in the home with the man from his septic nightmares is dizzying.
Jon is standing, now, leaning against the far wall. He stays silent. He’s not looking at Jordan directly, but Jordan knows that he still sees him.
“You don’t know me. You understand that, right?” Jon remains silent, which is all the answer that Jordan needs, really. “You might know a few of the creepy things that I’ve seen, but you don’t know—you don’t have—that isn’t me.”
“It isn’t personal,” Jon says, “if that matters.”
And it really, really doesn’t.
Outside. Morning, again. Jordan supposes that this means that he’s spent the whole of the night at the Archivist’s flat—Jon’s flat?—and he wishes that he had more to say for that. Had he thought that it would change anything when he paced up to Jon on the street? It’s difficult to remember.
He walks across the street, to the bus stop, to see where he is. It’s further out than he would have suspected. Jordan had ideas about the Archivist living in Kensington, but there’s no basis for that except that this is where the Institute is.
He’s shaky. It reminds him of the days in his late teens when he’d stumble home after going out to the club, the cold air hitting his face from all angles. Mindless, knowing that the night was full and the lights on the streets bright, but starting to feel bad about that.
It’s a long walk home, and like then, he just wants to sit down and close his eyes. He wants to know that he’ll be better when he wakes up. He might even want to die.
Jordan leans his weight against the glass edge of the bus stop. When he looks back to the Archivist’s window, the curtains continue to hang lifeless. No flutter of movement, nor any other sign that anyone had just pulled them aside to watch him step out into the daylight.
It isn’t a comfort.