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A cup of tea had been sitting on Martin’s desk for two days, long enough that a slight film seemed to have begun to form on top of it—perhaps milk separating out or curdling? He hadn’t given it much thought beyond the fact that it wasn’t evidently mold, and his mouth was sandpaper dry and any drink would be good, and also he needed the caffeine desperately. Sour and stale flavours, he usually could not stand, but they hardly registered as he drank the whole thing and hit the record button.
“It’s been four days since Jon…went missing,” he began. But his mouth was still too dry, and he didn’t bother stopping the recording as he stood to get himself a glass of water. “I had to get my neighbours to come in and feed Hedgehog the last two nights.” Martin felt that he deserved an award for not spilling any water while also not tripping over the purring mass at his feet. “I think she missed me.”
Shuddering breaths wrung themselves out of his chest when he sat down once more. “I wasn’t sure I’d get to see you again,” he said after a moment. Hedgehog closed her eyes in response.
“That miserable police officer showed up again asking about Jon. I’ve got the tape from it, I’m sure I don’t need to go over that again, but…god!” Martin slammed his hands against the table. Tea spilled across papers. Hedgehog darted out of the room with a hiss.
Martin put his head in his hands and breathed in and out deeply, once, twice, three times.
“I can’t talk to anyone about it.” He was acutely aware of how weak his voice had become, the feeling of his throat swelling up behind the stress. “No one outside of the Institute would believe me, and Sasha is—is—and that godawful cop just wanted to wash her hands of all of us, like she doesn’t already have blood on them herself. And Elias is—I mean, how do you even talk to Elias? He’s a fine boss and all, minus all of the weird and creepy stuff, but I’m not exactly planning on having a sit-down therapy chat in his office about my feelings, especially not after how that went over with…
He laughed humourlessly around his hands. “I thought Jon was crazy for his obsession with recording everything, and I get it, it’s his job as the head archivist, but until things started really happening I thought it was maybe just a way of managing with the paranoia. That maybe it was helping, somehow even, the same way sometimes you can look at video playback of a room and realize that actually you’re alright and you are alone and the stranger standing in the corner is just you having taken too much allergy medication. But I don’t think I’ll ever believe that anymore.
“So when I borrowed the tape recorder for, you know, a bit of an art project to record some poetry, I wasn’t expecting to get much mileage of it. Especially when I heard the playback—I don’t think I was prepared for the sound of my own voice like that, so I tucked it aside for a while. But it turns out it works, for just getting first thoughts out, if nothing else. And I have no one else to give those first thoughts to right now.”
Silence stretched through the room as Martin tried to find the words, silence like a creeping presence. A video of an amoeba seen through a microscope came to mind, the shape of it reaching out to consume its food. Nothing in the flat changed, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the silence made the lights feel dimmer, that the longer it stretched on the farther out of reach the words became, dragged away by those undefined things reaching out to encompass all of the air in the room.
“Daisy asked to see Tim after she sent me out.” The words left his lungs in a rush. They chased back the silence, the dimming lights, sweeping away the dust that threatened his mind and heart. “I couldn’t look him in the eye, and I don’t know what all he told her. I don’t…I don’t want to know. I mean, he thinks—thought—thinks—”
Hedgehog leapt up into his lap, cutting off his words. Martin wrapped his arms around her, took a few more deep breaths, tried to time them with hers so that there was something outside of himself that was real and breathing.
“When he said he was going after Jon, I thought it was the same reasons. I mean, he was right, Jon’s apology had been weird to say the least and I was glad to hear that I wasn’t the only one who thought that. Well. Glad isn’t exactly the right word, because really I thought I was going to throw up right then and there, I mean—”
A tear slid down his cheek, dampened Hedgehog’s nose.
“I mean, Tim was talking about stopping Jon and I was ready to run down there but then he started talking about needing evidence and that’s why he’d grabbed the tape, and I just could not understand what he was talking about at first, because it just seemed so obvious to me and all that I could think was that even though it was already so bad, that I was a terrible friend, and had missed something—everything! All of the warning signs! Sure, it would have been an abrupt about-face for Tim to suddenly worry about Jon like that when not two hours before he was dreaming about being able to take two months off just to get a break from him, but stranger things have happened, sometimes people get slapped with the little cricket inside their brain and grow a conscience. I’m sorry, that was mean. Uncalled for.
“But—but Jon had looked so sick and miserable when he sent us home, and if I’d actually walked out the front door I don’t think I properly would’ve forgiven myself no matter what happened next, not for leaving like that.”
The words were gone, trapped, stuck behind the sob that he felt deep in his throat, and when it tore its way out it was followed by a quiet keening that he couldn’t quite stop. Hedgehog hid her head in the crook of his arm and he squeezed her even more tightly.
“I know he’s not dead,” Martin tried to say. His words might’ve been unintelligible but he couldn’t care anymore, not about that, not now! “I—he can’t be, I’m sure Elias would have—And I know he didn’t do what they say he did, whatever else, he…he wouldn’t kill another person.”
The tape recording during his and Tim's time in the maze was simply static and nothing else, but the conversation still haunted him even without a record:
“Who knows who he’s already killed in these tunnels—at least if this Michael freak was right about him dying, it won’t be our problem anymore.”
Martin had whirled around at that. “You cut that shit out right now or I leave you here,” he snarled, that animal rage flaring to the surface. It burned, took the wind out of his lungs, and there had been a sudden fear on Tim’s face that made Martin wonder what he had looked like in that moment. He couldn’t bring himself to regret it. “You say something like that one more time and I’ll go and find my own goddamn way out of here, and you’re not my problem anymore, if you’re such a big fan of cutting someone loose when they get too much of a problem for your liking. Just snip the line and watch them float away, it’s that simple, Tim? Is that it for you?”
He had a blurry memory of gesturing so violently in Tim’s direction that he’d stepped back and looked ready to flee into the unknowns of the maze, as if that would be preferable to Martin in that moment.
“You have been going on and on about what a danger Jon is to everyone else, and how you’re so worried about you and Sasha and even me, and won’t shut up about the fact that you’re so very convinced he’s going to, what, go on some killing spree after too many statements or a paranoid break, but have you considered for five fucking seconds that Jon apologized because he didn’t plan on making it back? And you had such goddamn tunnel vision that you just kept talking on and on and on about how he was going to hurt someone else when if you actually took the time to listen you would know that the only person he’s a danger to right now is himself, and all you can talk about is you! And now we are stuck here in—in the middle of god lit’rally only knows where—and Jon could be getting devoured by that thing because he didn’t plan on being able to win a fight with it, or he’s bleeding out somewhere, or hanging from a noose he tied with his own fucking tie and we can not do ANYTHING to help him—”
It was the animal fear in Tim’s eyes that had driven Martin into silence, but no guilt filled the space where his white-hot words had been just a breath before.
“When we get back to the tunnels,” Martin had said after that silence stretched too long and too thin to be bearable, “I am going to go and look for him. I am not going to stop until I find him. You do not have to come with me, Tim, but all I ask of you in the meantime is that you stop letting your imagination turn him into a slasher-film villain because he’s having a severe paranoid episode.” His voice had been firm, brooking no argument, and as gentle as he could possibly manage, which was not as gentle as he would have liked right then. He didn’t want to be gentle at all with Tim, but he had only just been beginning to recover from his deer-in-the-headlights look.
“To tell the truth,” Martin said to the tape recorder on his kitchen table after explaining what had gone unrecorded, “I don’t know if I would have had the courage to leave Tim there. I didn’t want him to die either, we’d already lost Sasha and I was—am—scared we’ve lost Jon too, and if Tim was gone too I think I’d wither away of grief, and I don’t say that to be dramatic. Does…does that make me a bad friend? God, I’m a coward, for all that I said I’d do anything I couldn’t even stay and talk to Jon before he went into the tunnels, or before things got this bad in the first place.
“When I thought he was going to kill himself I felt like I’d been given a large needle of epinephrine, ready to go down into the tunnels without a light or anything, even though I still thought I was going to be sick, but then that thing said his name and…I still don’t know honestly if that was better or worse, that he was being chased, no, hunted by something else. Even though there was nothing I’d really be able to do to stop it, I think I might’ve rather that over trying to talk Jon down from whatever edge he’d managed to wind himself up to.”
His hands were shaking, Martin realized, and a moment later realized that he was still holding his glass, though the trembling had pitched water all over his shirt. He tried to place it on the table but couldn’t convince himself to let go. He was certain he would squeeze it so tightly it would shatter and slice his hand to ribbons if he didn’t let go right away.
His hand relaxed.
“So I don’t exactly have anything to say to Tim right now,” Martin finished. “If I’m being honest…” He paused. Saying things aloud was always so different from thinking them. “If I’m being honest, even if Jon wasn’t down there to have some privacy while he…while he died, I still don’t think…”
Untouched in his bag and yet burning his heart was another tape, this one recorded to nearly the end. No one else at the Institute knew that he had it, nor that it existed. After having heard it once, Martin didn’t think he wanted for anyone else to hear it. This was the artifact that would kill him if he had to listen to it again.
If either of you hear this, I’m… sorry. You deserve the truth. I wish… I’m not losing anyone else.
“He wasn’t expecting to make it back either way,” Martin whispered.
There it was, the truth staring him in the face, taken full form now that he’d said it aloud. Jon had gone into those tunnels to die.
Martin had nearly let him.
It wouldn’t have been your fault, some part of him whispered above the sobs that he could no longer control. He’s been behaving so erratically lately, he practically looks like a corpse already, all ashen and hollowed out. You couldn’t have known, not when he was sequestering himself away, and you tried to make sure he ate some food, slept, at least knew that other people existed outside of the statements he got caught up in. Nothing really changed, nothing to let you know.
And yet he couldn’t help the feeling, that he should have known anyhow, that he should have seen long ago the naked truth of Jon, so shallow you hardly had to break skin to reveal it. When Daisy had suggested that the two of them were close, Martin could hardly believe it, but it seemed she’d understood that same truth: that his archivist cared too much to be contained in his body, in the small office, even in the sprawling archives. That no matter how hard he tried to keep it, to keep himself, under control, it would all burst forth like shaken soda from a bottle: recklessly, aimless only because it needed to be everywhere immediately, to do everything that he could possibly do.
“Bashira said to me once he was like a dog with a bone.” The crackling of the tape recorder felt like someone humming an acknowledgement, telling him to go on, and Martin hardly needed the persuading. “That once he had something in his teeth, you couldn’t wrestle it from him no matter how hard you tried, not without one of you getting killed in the process, not until he decided to finally let it go.
“I don’t know what he was letting go of when he went. Himself? His life? The Archive? Us?
“…me?”
He sat there until the tape ran out, unable to bring himself to turn it off himself. Its telltale snapping noise, followed by the click of the off button as it came to its end, brought him far enough into reality to wipe the tears from his cheeks.
Before the silence had a chance to return, Martin drifted towards his bed and crawled fully-clothed under his sheets. Against all odds, he was asleep almost immediately; in retrospect, that may have had something to do with the fact that he hadn’t slept since meeting Michael. He’d been too busy combing through the tunnels for any sign of life.
For any sign of Jon.