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In the Chateau: a collection of muddy boots by the door, dripping umbrellas in a myriad of colors, coats draped over the back of the couch.
The coffee that Haise nursed was stale and bitter, grainy with end-of-the-pot grit. He turned a tepid mouthful over, knuckled his eye, and tried to rub the coffee stains out of his paperwork. The expense report was over budget, he needed to locate at least three more receipts before he could submit it, and he hadn’t a clue where to start looking.
Lightning chewed through the clouds outside.
There was a noise like something heavy being dragged across the floor.
Haise paused, pen in head, to listen. Thunder rolled in the distance, off in some other ward altogether. It must be the house settling, he thought, and rose to prepare himself another pot of coffee despite the late hour. The smell of soaking dishes was, to his nose, powerful and sweetly sick.
Then that sound again, like the scrape of chair legs against hardwood.
Haise shut the water off, put on the new pot of coffee to brew, and eyed the living room. Damp coats and soggy boots, windows blind with darkness, but not a chair out of place, save his own. He looked around the corner, up the staircase-- maybe one of his subordinates was awake, most likely Saiko, who seemed to make a habit out of throwing all-nighters.
Haise called up the stairs, just loudly enough to be heard: “Saiko-chan, are you awake?”
Lightning lit up the dark room and threw shadows up the stairs. Somewhere, in the darkness, just beyond that quick light: a figure.
Haise scowled, and, climbing up the stairs, called out again. “Saiko-chan, I’ve told you before that you shouldn’t--”
A noise, behind him this time. It sounded out a rhythm, hitting every step on the stairs as it climbed, right on his heels, but the staircase is empty.
“Maman?” It was Saiko, bleary-eyed, in the threshold of her door.
He can't quite pull his eyes away when he said, "Sorry Saiko-chan, I didn't mean to wake you."
The next morning, Haise found the brand new pot of coffee he’d prepared; cold, stale, and untouched. His paperwork was on the table, undone.
“Rank 1 Sasaki,” Akira said, at his desk, tapping the stack of his paperwork against the flat of her palm.
Haise looked up. “Akira-san?”
“Thank you for the report, but try to keep the coffee in the cup next time.”
“I will do my best,” Haise assured her. “Part of the daily grind, you know?”
Akira rolled her eyes, shook her head, and handed him another set of papers. “I’m sending you down into the records room to pull some reports for me.”
The records room was a drafty concrete box, labyrinthine in its arrangement, deep in the basement of HQ. Towering metal shelves and endless yellowing papers, in duplicate, in triplicate. There were always officers pulling files, cursing the dust and poor lighting. Haise did not have company went he descended.
The records attendant was away from the desk, so Haise muttered, “Pardon me,” at the empty seat and dragged a stepstool away.
He had an armful of pulled files when a door slammed somewhere, and Haise started. The papers, and all those color-coded files, spilled from his hands and onto the floor. He cursed, and bent to gather them, collecting Torso’s file, throwing papers back into Serpent’s, and then paused. A folder, notable in its thickness, was among those he’d dropped. Typically, folders were labeled with thick sharpie ink, but the title of this one had been struck through, and it’s this that grabs his attention. He ran a thumb over the inked-out name, hoping perhaps to wipe aside the ink to see, somehow, what was underneath. The silence in the records room seemed to echo.
Very carefully, Haise lifted the folder into his hands and flipped through it.
Large swatches of the report were blacked out. It read poorly, now some secret, made generic. He scanned the paper with his eyes:
“On the night of ▬▬ all units were stationed at ▬▬ for ▬▬. ▬▬ were surprised by ▬▬ and ▬▬, which arrived in unprecedented numbers the likes of which had not been seen since ▬▬. The coffee shop ▬▬ was confirmed to have been harboring ▬▬ Ghouls, including...”
It went on in this way for page upon page. Haise thumbed through the report, head thrumming with the vague, cruel familiarity of it all. Something always just at the tip of his tongue. The deeper into the report, the thicker the blocks of black became: entire paragraphs, whole pages censored.
Names leapt out at him-- Akira, Arima, and Juuzou-- some names he had no recollection of hearing but burned his fingertips when he touched them. His eyes felt hot.
A door slammed, again, and Haise inhaled sharply, torn away from the report. Suddenly nervous, he tucked the papers back into the folder, casting around for anyone who might have seen him.
Nobody had. A metal cabinet groaned somewhere under the weight of paper, off in the dim distance.
The bags under his eyes were black and blue as bruises, and when he met his own eye in the bathroom mirror, Haise grimaced. The tiles smelled sharply of bleach. Haise rinsed out his mouth, scrubbed at his face.
The mirror fogged while the hot water ran and ran, consuming his own face, his tired eyes. A hairline crack from one corner of the mirror to the other cut the reflection of his face diagonally. He examined the two halves, framed by stark lighting, how they met in the middle and did not line up right. Something intrinsically, unkindly, unsymmetrical.
The sound of chair legs scraping across the tile, like someone drawing up a seat for him.
From the couch, watching a talk show, Shirazu heard the front door open.
“Sassan,” He called out, by way of greeting. Saiko gave a grunt from the floor, punching buttons on her handheld. A couple of moments passed, and Shirazu didn’t hear the door close.
“Uh, Sassan?” Shirazu called out again, and when he did not receive an answer, he exchanged a look with Saiko. Shirazu raised his eyebrows and jerked his chin to the door, and Saiko pouted, made to argue, and then thought better of it.
“Maman, you there?” She asked, rolling on to her stomach and rising from the floor.
In the hallway, looking vacantly at four pairs of soggy boots, stood Haise. His umbrella dripped as he held it, still extended, in his hand. The front door was wide open.
“Maman,” Saiko called out to him, “You OK?”
Like coming out of a dream, Haise blinked to attention. “Saiko,” he said, as if he’s only just noticed her there. “Is everyone home?”
“Yeah.”
Haise stared at the umbrellas, five of them, and something dark came across his face. “Whose umbrella is that?” He asked, gesturing.
“I dunno,” Saiko shrugged, fisted her hands in the hem of her shirt. “Isn’t it yours?”
The hand around his own umbrella, the sixth soaking one in a house of five, clenched, knuckles white as bone.
Saiko, embarrassed that she’d noticed, toed the floor with her patterned socks and said, “Can you close the door, Maman, you’re letting the rain inside.”
“Ah,” he said, and he does, stooping to drop his briefcase and shake off the rain from his umbrella. “Sorry about that. You’re probably waiting on dinner. I’ll get on it right now. You can let the others know, OK?”
Saiko went back to the couch.
“What’s up?” Shirazu asked her, flipping channels.
“Maman is acting funny. Also he says dinner will be ready soon.”
“Nice, I’m starving.” Three channels flipped. A news anchor. Animals hunting. A prank show. “Acting funny how?”
Saiko leaned over, bumped her shoulder against Shirazu’s. “I dunno. Something about umbrellas.”
Shirazu shrugged. Clatters from the kitchen, the sound of running water, the metallic snick of a knife working.
“Very few people know,” said some talking head before Shirazu flipped the channel again, “that mistletoe is, in fact, a parasite.”
Dinner was empty plates before long, the easy of clink of them as they were gathered from the table and put into the sink with the pots and pans left to soak. Saiko pardoned herself to attend to her games. Urie didn’t say a word, but left all the same.
Before he went upstairs, Mutsuki said, “Thank you for dinner, Sensei, it was really good.”
Haise summoned half a smile for him.
There were leftovers he needed to put away, and all the kids had gone up to their rooms, leaving downstairs empty and silent and dark in a way that made Haise nervous. He had a headache, one that sat at the base of his neck and pulsed behind his eyes. The sound and texture of the knife against the plate as he slid scraps into the trash was painful. He stopped, knuckle against his temple, and breathed through his nose.
Dinner smelled unrelentingly foul.
He eyed the crusting leftovers-- the rinds, the seeds, the skins, the bones. Things that could not be ingested. This refuse looked, to him, indistinguishable from the edible. He envied that natural talent for eating that humans had. What was it like to have a palette? To have a meal served hot or cold, to have a preference either way?
His stomach growled.
He pulled out a clean plate from the cupboard and fetched a pair of chopsticks.
Haise had committed to memory the way a plate should be crafted: he watched his squad carefully when they ate, made sure their diet was balanced in all the ways his could not be. There is an etiquette to it. A form.
He scooped some cold rice from the rice cooker. Then, a single strip of fried chicken, greasy with time, which he laid across his bed of rice like he was laying down the dead. Ladled some brothy miso into a bowl. Added mushrooms, green onions, a cube of tofu.
At the dining room table, he tried to remember how to hold chopsticks. The meal, innocuous in its presentation, sat as unappetizing and dangerous as motor oil before him.
Mutsuki said it was good.
“Thank you for the food,” he said, quietly, to no one.
Haise took a bite. Chewed slowly. Swallowed.
“Ah,” Haise said, hand over his mouth, “Mutsuki shouldn’t lie like that.”
There was another set of dishes to wash when Mutsuki woke, and all the leftovers were in the trash.
Scrubbing them, Mutsuki blamed Saiko.
“I’m just asking that if you come down for a midnight snack, to tidy up after yourself. And how could you waste all of sensei’s food?”
“It wasn’t meeee,” she wailed, “It wasn’t me!”
Mutsuki paused, gave her a hard but sympathetic look with his one visible eye, and said, “Then who could it have been?”
Haise palms a candy meant for Juuzou into Saiko’s hand, picked up his briefcase, and shut the door without commenting.
Haise heard the noise again a couple of days later, while he read in his bedroom, waiting to be tired. Some ponderous thing being dragged across the floor.
He got up, went to the door, and stood at the top of the stairs with his hand on the light switch. Something in the dark moved, and he flicked the light on. Off again when nothing turned out to be there. Repeat.
Shirazu, toothbrush in his mouth, said from behind him: “Sassan, watcha doin’?”
“Oh,” Haise said. “Nothing.”
Shirazu gave his teeth a few thoughtful brushes and then went back to the bathroom. The noise stopped. Haise retreated to his room and closed the door behind him.
He returned to his book, reading:
“Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, ▬▬, had been--”
Breath in his throat, Haise removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes, then returned them to his face and continued reading.
“Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood-- but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country—a letter from ▬▬ --”
He turned the page.
“Perhaps the eye of a ▬▬ observer might have discovered a barely perceptible crack--” He turned another page. “To an anomalous species of ▬▬ I found him a bounden ▬▬. ‘I shall perish,’ said he, ‘I must perish in this deplorable ▬▬ thus, and not ▬▬, shall I be ▬▬. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their ▬▬ --’ ”
Haise flipped two pages, four. Great chunks of text, struck through. Redacted. Not for his eyes.
The last pages were black only.
The book sailed across the room, hit the other wall with an empty noise and fell to the ground. He pressed his palms into his eyes until he saw colors. Something is scratching at the inside of his head, dragging a black fingernail down, down.
It had rained so much in such a short period of time that there were puddles forming on the front lawn of the Chateau, making the sod soggy and the gutters swell.
The house was reflected, patchwork, in those puddles, reversed but identical in every other way.
When Haise stood before the Chateau, admiring this temporary mirror, he thought, for a moment, he had seen the silhouette of someone in the window of his room. A dark, ghostly character, pulling back the curtains. The illusion fades when the rain intensifies and the mirror is broken by dozens of ripples.
None of the Quinx were home, and his room was empty when he turned the light on and stood in the doorway.
“Rank 1 Sasaki,” Akira addressed him, voice quiet enough that it did not carry. She is passing out report briefs, and the paper she held out for him was just out of his reach, withholding it.
She said: “You look like shit.”
Haise gave a sheepish smile and raised his coffee cup to his lips. “Sorry for not looking my best, Akira-san.”
She pursed her lips at him, contemplating saying more, but didn’t. Instead, she placed the piece of paper in front of him and moved away.
His squad noticed a change in him, too. Mutsuki offered to drive, to get coffee, to fetch Saiko from her deep sleep. Shirazu shuffled through thresholds, shoulders up to his ears. Urie left his headphones at home.
The meeting carried on around him, and he sipped thoughtfully at his coffee, followed along in the brief. Reports of a sloppy Ghoul. A distinctive MO.
His fingers ached, and he traced his knuckles with a thumb. Akira, delivering her theory that the Ghoul may be related to a series of kidnappings. A bundle of bones. Mutsuki, asking where has the Ghoul been sighted? Something itching in his ear.
He cracked a knuckle. And then, because it felt so good, because it felt like the thing to do, he cracked another. And then another.
“Sasaki,” said Akira, voice stern and maybe, even, a little wary. Haise looked up. His squad looked back at him anxiously. “Stop.”
He stopped, and put his hands in his lap.
When he dreams, there’s a black and white room. A single empty chair sits in the middle, waiting for someone to sit.