Chapter 5: Break at 99%

He had his eye to the gap in the door and he counted the fan’s shadow around the tile nine times before anything in the room changed.

What he could see was a slice of it: tile, the corner of the counter, three pairs of shoes. The shadow came around, up over the cabinet, over the shoes, back. The shoes didn’t move. Nothing in there had moved since the blade came around and all three of them turned their heads to follow it.

Lila’s hand was still up near her collarbone, fingers curled around nothing. Toby’s hands hung two inches off his thighs. Owen’s arms were pinned flat to his sides, the way a man stands at attention in a cold room, except nobody had told him to.

Their faces had gone the color of the inside of a drain.

Slip on each wrist — paper cuff, wax seal, one pull and they’d be back in the gym with the bleachers and the floor wax and a nurse with a flashlight. Milo’s own slip was in his pocket, and his fingers were already around it, and his fingers were dry.

They couldn’t reach theirs. That was the part he kept coming back to. Not that they were hurt. That they had walked into a room and stopped being able to reach their own wrists.

Then Lila’s fingers moved.

Not a twitch. A decision. Her hand came down, her head came down after it, and her whole body turned like a key in a lock. She came through the door sideways with one hand on the frame. The fog split around her knees. She got two steps into the hall before her back found the wall and she slid down it.

There was blood on her mouth. She’d bitten her tongue, and she was holding her jaw like the hinge had come loose.

“What,” Milo said. “What’s in there.”

She spat on the tile. It came out red.

“Fan,” she said.

“Fan.”

“There’s an eye on the fan.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and looked at the red on it like it belonged to somebody else. “It’s red. It’s an eye. It looks at you and you’re not here anymore. You’re — it’s all blood, and thorns, and they go in. Into your head.” She knocked two knuckles against her own temple, hard, twice. “I bit my tongue. That’s the only reason I’m sitting in this hall.”

Milo looked at the door.

“How do you break it.”

“You don’t break it.”

“How do you break it, Lila.”

“You don’t look at it.” Her voice cracked down the middle; she hated it and pushed through. “It has to see you looking. That’s all I’ve got.”

Half a minute later the other two came out on their hands and knees.

Owen first, glasses hanging off one ear. He cleared the door and lay down on his side in the fog like a man who had decided not to be a person for a while. Toby came out behind him on his elbows, teeth chattering hard enough that Milo could hear it from three feet away, and every time he tried to say something his jaw wouldn’t do it.

Then he got a hand on the wall and got his head up and saw Milo, and his face finished coming back together in a way Milo didn’t like.

“You,” Toby said. “You put us in there.”

“Did I?” Milo said. “Because I remember a speech. From you. About what she’s for.”

“You knew—“

“I said after you. You told Owen to shut up.” Milo tipped his head. “I was very clear. I’d like that on the record. I was polite.”

“We could’ve died.”

“You could’ve.” Milo nodded at the door. “You didn’t. And then you came out and told me what’s in there, which is more than either of you managed on your own. So. All’s well.”

Toby looked at Lila for backup. She was still on the floor with her hand under her jaw, and she was looking at Milo, and Milo let her do the math: the eye, the door, Toby going in behind her, Milo not going in at all.

“If you’d gone first,” she said, “you’d be dead. You’d be in there with your eyes open and nothing behind them. You don’t know the trick. You’d have walked in and looked up like a—“

“I know the trick,” Milo said. “I just didn’t have to pay for it.”

“Nobody’s paying anything. I’m the one with a bitten tongue.”

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “That’s what going first buys you. Early bird gets the worm. You got the thorns.”

“Say that again.”

“The early bird—“

BREAK +30

Lila got up off the floor. She did it badly, one hand on the wall, teeth together, and she looked at the three of them and then past Milo at the corridor, where the fog lay flat and the lights ticked away down the line into the dark.

“That thing isn’t worth my tongue,” she said. “Half a ghost at best. He can have it.”

“Lila—“ Toby said.

“Get up. We’re moving.” She pushed off the wall. “I’m not standing in a hall next to him.”

Toby got up. He had one more thing to say to Milo’s face and it was already coming out of his mouth, and Milo watched him decide to swallow it, and then he went after her.

Owen got up last. He put his glasses on correctly, both ears, and looked at Milo, and his hands were still going, and he said, quietly, “There’s something under the fan.”

Then he jogged after the others, and the fog rolled over the place where they’d been.

“Lapdog,” Milo said, at Toby’s back. Not loud.

He didn’t watch them go. He turned, put his shoulder to the door, and went in.

Head down. He put it down before he crossed the threshold and kept it there.

Floor. Linoleum yellowed at the edges, a drain, a long brown stain worked into the grout. A phoropter on a stand with dusty lenses. A counter. Under the counter, a glass cabinet, shelves of little brown bottles. A rolling stool with a screw sticking out of the post.

A three-blade fan on a rod, turning slow, its shadow going around the tile.

The switch was a plate on the wall by the door. Rotary dial, cracked knob, and next to it, in a strip of label-maker tape, somebody had typed MAX.

Milo put his hand on it and turned it all the way up.

The fan woke like a machine that had been waiting ten years for somebody to ask. Air came off it in a wall, took the loose papers off the counter, blew a paper cup into the corner, pushed the fog up against the baseboard. Milo’s hair went sideways. He kept his eyes on the drain and felt the room get cold.

“Hey.”

The voice came from overhead. It came out wrong — dry, scraped, a hinge with something soft in it.

“Hey. Hey. Turn that down.”

Milo looked at the drain.

“Turn it down—“

BREAK +20

“Turn it off, kid, I’m—“ A wet click of a swallow. “I’m not — turn it off—“

BREAK +20

“You think this is funny? When I get off this fan I’m going to get my hands on you and I’m going to take my time with—“

The fan took the rest of it apart. Whatever the end of that sentence was, it came out as a sound.

Milo stood still and let the air pull at his jacket and watched the blade shadow cross the floor and the counter and his own shoes, and did the only piece of arithmetic available in the room. Five minutes on that dial, more or less, if the motor held.

It took about five minutes, by his count, for the screaming to change.

“Turn it off,” the voice said. “Turn it off, I’m going to be sick. Ghosts don’t get sick. I’m going to—“

BREAK +20

BREAK 88%
FORCED CONTRACT AT 99%

The number hung in the air in front of him where only he could see it, and it stayed there. The fan ran. The cup skittered across the linoleum. The shadow went around and around and the number didn’t move.

Milo crouched, sat back on his heels, and looked at the drain.

“So here’s a thing,” he said.

“Here’s a thing.” The voice was high and shredded. “Here’s a thing. Listen to him. Here’s a—“

“You want the fan off. I want a ghost.”

The fan went around twice.

“You want a contract,” the voice said.

“I want a contract.”

“Come over here and say it to my face.”

“No.”

A pause. “Why not.”

“Because you’d look at me,” Milo said.

The pause got longer. The shadow kept turning over the tile.

“Yeah,” the voice said, and something in it dropped — quieter, flatter, almost tired. “Yeah, I would.”

Milo got up, found the stool with his heel, pulled it out, sat. He put his ankles on the edge of the counter and crossed them. The stool took his weight, rolled an inch, stopped.

“Turn the fan off and we’ll talk about it,” the voice said.

“Nope.”

“Kid—“

“Eighty-eight,” Milo said. He picked at the seam of his cuff. “You screamed yourself hoarse and it didn’t move. It’s not going anywhere, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t know what that means.” He picked at the seam again. “So. New subject. You sign, I turn it off.”

The fan turned. Up in the middle of all that noise something made a sound like a man deciding.

“Fine,” the voice said. “Turn it off.”

“Sign first.”

“I can’t sign anything with this thing going. Turn it off, all the way, and I’ll—“ It caught whatever came next and started over. “Turn it off. Please.”

Milo thought about it for a second. Then he reached sideways without getting up and turned the dial to zero.

The fan didn’t stop. It slowed, the way big motors slow, wind falling off, the paper cup settling, the fog sliding down off the baseboard to lie flat on the floor. The shadow got slower and slower over the tile. Overhead, in the middle of the ceiling, something breathed — wet and long, like a man who’d had a hand around his throat all day finally getting one lungful.

“Okay,” Milo said. “Contract.”

“My eyes are dry,” the thing said.

“…What.”

“From the wind. They’re bone dry.” A thick, goopy blink. “There’s drops in the cabinet. Second shelf. Get them.”

Milo sat for a second. Then he put his feet down, crossed to the cabinet, and opened the glass door.

Little brown bottles, rows of them, pharmacy samples, blue caps and white labels, a pump bottle knocked over on its side. Every label had an expiration date on it, and most of the dates were years back. He checked the second shelf, and the second shelf was exactly what the thing had said it was.

And in the back corner, down on the bottom shelf, with a kid’s sticker half peeled off the front, a fat bottle of cyanoacrylate glue that had no business in an eye clinic and had clearly been there a long time.

Milo looked at it.

Then he looked at the floor, and the counter, and the light on the glass, and he reached in and picked it up.

“What’s taking so long,” the thing said.

“Which one of these do you want,” Milo said, turning his back to the fan. “There’s like forty. They’re all different.”

“The blue ones. The—“ A wet scrape; the eye tilting as far as the veins would let it. “The one on the end.”

Milo was already rolling the glue in his hand. The label came off in one piece, all the way around, and he dropped it behind a tray of metal tools.

“Any of these have a name on them?” he said.

“I don’t read, kid, my eyes are in my head. Just — the biggest one. Throw it up. Slow.”

“Sure,” Milo said, and threw it up over his shoulder.

He didn’t watch it go. Which meant that for a second there was nothing in that room but the fan coasting on its rod and his own boots on the linoleum.

Then: “Heh.”

A soft, wet, satisfied thing.

“Thanks,” the thing said. “Two drops. Then you and me are going to have that conversation about a contract.”

“Great,” Milo said. He was looking at the cabinet, at the labels, at the dates. He was not looking at his hands, and his hands were not shaking, and he noticed that, and left it alone.

Up on the fan a vessel uncoiled, took the bottle out of the air. There was a click. A sound like a stopper coming out. A drop, and then another one.

“There,” the voice said, and it was already sounding better — warmer, more like an actual throat. “There. Now. Where were we. When I get my strength back I’m going to pull your arms off and put them somewhere you’ll—“

The voice stopped.

Milo counted two seconds.

“What,” he said.

“It’s—“ The fan stirred the fog. “My eye. My eye won’t open.”

Milo scratched the back of his head.

“My eye won’t open—“ and then the sound of something very large fighting with itself, a wet wrenching, vessels dragging over a seam they couldn’t get under. “It’s stuck. It’s stuck, it’s—“

“Huh,” Milo said. “Maybe they’re expired.”

He waited three more seconds. Then he looked up.

He took it slow, because he wasn’t an idiot. Counter, tray of tools, cabinet door hanging open where he’d left it, the rod, the blades. Then the thing between them.

It was red. A globe the size of a grapefruit, red as a stop sign, lashed to the hub of the fan in a nest of its own veins. The white of it was scarred and yellowed in two places, and there was a hard clear shine across the seam of the lids.

The lids were shut. They weren’t going to open. Tiny vessels along the rim hauled at the seam with everything they had and got nowhere.

“Expired,” the thing said.

“I mean, those samples are old.”

“Expired.” Then it roared, and the fan shook in its housing.

“You did this. You walked in here and you put — do you know how I got on this fan? Do you know why I’m up here? Some thing twice my size came through this room with a bottle of that and stuck me to this fan and left me. That’s the whole story, that’s all of it, that’s—“ The voice broke up into a wheeze. “And now you had me put it in my eye.”

BREAK +50

BREAK 99%
FORCED CONTRACT AVAILABLE
[ CONFIRM ]

Milo put his hands in his jacket pockets.

“Sign,” he said.

MISS BLOOD-EYE — DO YOU TAKE MILO GRANT, TO HAVE AND TO HOLD, FOR THE REMAINDER OF YOUR EXISTENCE?

“Are you — no. No, I won’t.” A pause, and the pause was worse than the yelling. “Also I’m not a miss, I’m— that’s not the point. The point is I said no. I said it out loud. It’s right there. Anybody could hear it—“

BLOOD-EYE CONSENTS.

“Hey. Hey. I did not—“

BINDING: 10%… 20%…

“Take it back. Take it back, I never signed, nobody asked me—“

30%… 40%…

Milo watched the number climb over the fan and the eye and the whole grey room.

He hadn’t known the system would do that.

He put it somewhere and left it there, and watched the number, because it was at sixty and he needed it at a hundred, and because a kid who walked out of this room with an empty cap walked back to Halcyon with nothing.

70%… 80%…

“I said no,” the thing said, quieter now. “I said no.”

90%.

BINDING COMPLETE.

The vessels let go of the hub, one by one, like fingers.

The fan, suddenly light, hopped on its rod and spun up with a whine. The eye came off the hub, and it did not fall the way a thing falls. It came across the room at the height of his face.

Milo got an arm up. He had no idea what he thought that would do.

It went through his arm like the arm wasn’t the thing it was aiming at. The last of it he saw was the seam of the lids, shut tight, an inch from his own.

PARTIAL GHOST INTEGRATING.

The fan whined against its rod. Out in the corridor the fog lay flat and the lights ticked down the line, and the open gap of the door showed nothing standing in it.