It was overcast, which made it somewhat timeless. Madani felt the dark night bleeding into grey day in her mind. She wouldn’t be able to separate these parts of the trip in her head in a week or two. They’d fuzz together like overlapping photographs.

It was made worse by fatigue. Lack of sleep. She was feeling a bit feverish around the edges. An energy drink had bookended her car trip the day before and two coffees had began her morning now. She was feeling stimulated. It didn’t feel nice.

Gwen was sitting tall beside her. Madani was coming to the conclusion the woman did everything tall. Which most likely wasn’t difficult. There was around a foot of difference between them. But it was still impressive. She walked like she was trying to be as far away from the planet as possible.

Madani could feel something radiating from her whenever they were in the car or within ten feet of each other but she wasn’t dwelling on it. There was a lot of things about her new partner she was trying not to dwell on.

She’d always felt confident she was the oddest duckling the room. There was both a comradely relief and a feeling of being booted out of the gold medal position in the realization she may not be.

“I didn’t even notice. I thought we were just passing at different times now,” the woman across the table said. Her name was Anna. They hadn’t asked for her surname. Maybe a misstep in a typical investigation, but Madani knew she wasn’t a part of whatever happened in the house like she knew her own name.

Gwen blinked beside her. Her mouth moved slightly. Lips opening and closing slightly. Like a word spoken silent. She didn’t follow it up with anything.

“Did you hear any noise coming from the house?” Madani asked. The woman mirrored Gwen. Blink. Blink. It looked less thoughtful than her partner.

“Like what?”

Madani paused. Part of her didn’t want to lead the woman into a response. Especially in these circumstances. Part of her didn’t want to fall down the strange noises and groans and banging, oh my rabbit hole. Come off like a weirdo.

“Anything out of the ordinary,” was the best she could give her. When Anna looked like she was starting to look past Madani rather than at her, she added, “It’s okay if you don’t recall. Better not to force these things.”

Gwen was still purposefully blinking beside her. She’d spoken her name at the front door after a short knock. Madani had asked the usual questions. There was a lot of new-acquaintance benefit-of-the doubt between the two women, but that still annoyed Madani. A little bit. That’s all she’d be willing to admit to.

Anna looked shaken in a detached way. Like when a schoolmate passes. Or when your neighbour dies. The relationship was existing enough she was questioned by (as far as she knew) two FBI agents. It was tenuous enough she had no good answers. Just two people living in concrete boxes, separated by maybe ten feet and the weight of modern asocialization.

She’d be fine. Maybe she’d have some trouble sleeping for a couple nights. Or not want to look at the house. Or maybe she’d move because homing beside a murder-spot wasn’t as glamorous as some people may think.

“Did you ever feel bad? About the house?” Gwen asked. Madani looked at her. Anna looked at her. The woman’s eyebrows moved together fitfully. Gwen blinked again.

Anna looked a bit bare. Spiritually bare. She was in a baggy T-shirt and bike shorts because it was hot. She was on the edge of sleep still. Her mind was trying to convince her she wasn’t, but it was losing.

“Pardon?” Was her best response. Which was admirable. Madani couldn’t help because she also didn’t know what in the blue fuck was being asked.

“When you passed the house. Or looked at it. Thought about it, maybe. Did you ever get any bad uh, bad feelings?”

Anna chewed on her lip as a metaphor for the question. She looked down at the table between them in a very specific way. Not showing disinterest or confusion. She was searching the wood grain for thoroughly.

“I, uh- maybe. I dunno,” she faltered. The first couple syllables sounded a lot braver than the rest. She came out of the gate excited.

“I did,” Gwen said. Anna looked at her from underneath the shadow of her eyebrows and through the cataracts of dream. Gwen shrugged. Looked away a little.

“Definitely felt something about that house.” The thought felt unfinished. Madani didn’t know how. Anna was pulling into herself. Like she was collapsing into fatigue. She would probably think this had all been a dream.

“It always seemed darker than it was. Even with the lights on,” she said quickly. Then shrugged. Then paused. Then shrugged.

They left after that. Gwen didn’t seem unhappy at the answer. She didn’t seem unhappy about much. She had a pair of aviators hanging from the tiny, tiny V her single undone button made. The elbows of the glasses tapped her tie softly with movement. She put them on her face at the front door. Those were the two places they’d been for the trip. Hanging off clothing or hooked around her ears.

She looked like a constant state in them. Like a timeless force. The world moved on around her and she didn’t give it much thought.

Madani could see the sides of Gwen’s eyes between the bright crack that split the edges of the frames and her facial structure. They stared at the car. Intently. They looked downtrodden. Like they weren’t used to being fed much of anything save for worldly stimulation and visual noise.

Madani had the keys. So she went around. Left Gwen at the passenger side door. Perpendicular to the house. It had been a pretty neat parking job. She was secretly and tinily proud of it. It was worth something small but fantastic.

She got in the car. Subconsciously noticed a draft. After a few seconds of her door being closed and the dashboard being fiddled, she noticed the air. Cool. Coming from her right. The door was still open. She could see Gwen’s hamstrings. They weren’t moving. Immobile. Sentry-like.

She pulled herself out the car like a cautious animal curious to see what the other mammals were looking at. Gwen was staring at the house. Madani could see a distorted world reflected in the back of the lenses. They let their gaze upon the roof.

Madani took a couple seconds to think of what she may say. She didn’t see anything. There were birds around. Behind them, a skybox of a sad leeching gray. It was a depressed herald. It called for snow and wet things outside of its own volition. It didn’t want what was coming.

Oi would be forceful. Construed as a little rude from a new colleague. It was the first thing on her tongue, though. Maybe she was a little annoyed. It was also a little bit too British for the situation.

“Hey,” was said softly and faded-in. It grew a bit in volume. The waveform looked like a tiny ramp. She spoke like she was talking to a dog staring longing and vicious at a thing beyond.

Gwen didn’t startle like a dog. Madani got the feeling she’d known she was being looked upon. She’d been prepared to answer.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“The birds are avoiding it,” she said. Madani had seen the birds. They hadn’t registered as anything but low-grade background. Like unimportant watercolour strokes in an animation. She blinked stimulatingly and it did nothing. She looked back with the same tired organs.

The left house had wings and beaks milling about. They pecked, or maybe just did something that looked like it because it was what the two women were expecting.

The right house had wings and beaks milling about. They looked sleepier. Maybe they were tired. Maybe they needed a nap. If birds did that sort of thing. They moved without looking like they much wanted to.

Two birds circled around the middle house for the moment. The Carmen house. Madani could sense the closet inside it still. It throbbed audibly somewhere in the peripheral of her head. It was like blood circulating a bruise if she focused on it. Tender and pulsating organically.

It was still open, like a patient thing laying on its side waiting for wandering rodents. It beckoned like the ground, twenty floors up.

The birds had the energy of someone hovering over a doorknob, unsure if they should go in. Minuscule dips and pullbacks in body language. They circled some more. Then split up. One went left. The other right.

Gwen got in the car then. Suddenly. Like she was instantly stricken with a pain and the only cure was car seat. Madani looked down and saw her take the glasses off. Just a minute or so after putting them on. Muscle memory maybe. Or she just really liked her glasses.

She was still looking at the house. After a second or two or three she stopped. She stared ahead physically. Madani could see she was looking at the inside of her own corneas, so to speak. A loose-lipped, idea sort of look.

Madani echoed her. She didn’t have anywhere far away to stare at unfortunately. She had to drive.

The photos hadn’t changed. The shapes beneath the gloss looked the same. The same furniture. A couch pulled close to the TV. Blankets made into a home that was for sure not on-code. Enough non-perishables huddled around the area she could tell it wasn’t just errant snacking. It was supplies.

Julen. Tiny. Madani thought he may have been tiny for his age. Curled up fatally on the kitchen floor. Curled, multiple. The fetal position, curled. All his limbs, curled. Just different ways. The thing had been creative. Not one extremity the same direction.

Marla. Larger than her son. Maybe not substantially in height, but she outweighed him. She looked like a farmer. Caught in one of those romcoms, where she gets whisked away to the city. Made over. A secretary to some handsome CEO. Their meet-cute is her knocking the stapler off the desk and both of them rushing to catch it. Or something.

The blouse and pants were nice once. Madani knew by instinct. She dressed the same. They’d been worn for weeks in a desperate place. They looked like an ending now.

She was stuck up on the bed in these photos. Pointing to the ceiling with her crown. Her muscles looked defeated. Rigid in the sense that they had lost a fight with something else and just let it go without much relaxation. She was laid out now. On cold metal. Ermin had told them they’d got her squared away easy enough.

She held the manilla folder like a non-fiction piece she had some passing interest in. Non-engrossing. Maybe a three star work. She didn’t want to get too close to the photos. Even in the high of noon she felt like that space inside the frame knew something she didn’t.

Gwen drove sturdy. She held the wheel like she could fight it if she had to. She sat like the seat was forcing her to. She had a tendency toward darting in the actual act of travel, though. Her form was a mountain. Her eyes were a colony of moths. Madani could see behind the lenses again. Her pupils barely stopped moving.

She pulled into the lot. Found a spot. Parked in it with a choppy cadence. It didn’t feel unsafe. It just wasn’t an experience Madani would ever pay for.

The sun felt low despite the approximate time. It was a low sort of day. Even the sky felt closer, more intimate in a dangerous way. Everything felt impending. The sense radiated from the morgue in front of them.

They’d called ahead. Madani had called ahead. Gwen hadn’t resisted but Madani had felt something there, an avoidance of the suggestion. A moment between the two of them had passed, just a little beat. It had been silent. Madani had pulled out her phone right after.

The receptionist felt like she was quietly rebelling against her job at every chance she got. There was nothing she did wrong. It wasn’t even blame, from Madani’s end. She respected the rattling of the bars of the administrative prison. She’d been in that cell enough in her life she knew you had to colour the spaces in between the actions with something resistant. Only way to get you through the shift.

She got them logged in and pushed through. Which was all that could be asked of her. Even though Madani was thirsty. She wasn’t going to push her luck.

It felt like a blur, all the law enforcement motions she went through sometimes. Even the new ones. She’d been in negotiations. Hostage rescue, from the human perspective. She’d managed to get into the people part of stopping criminality. So she rarely got to stand by a popped-open steel door as the metal bed was pulled from the maw. See a body look inanimate in the chill. It still felt mundane to her.

They gathered around Marla like a funeral. A body raised from the grave. There was a bit of expectancy in the air. Maybe she would do something for them. Maybe she would give them some answers. She didn’t. The medical examiner spoke instead.

She didn’t introduce herself. It felt right. She didn’t give the air of someone who did it much. Her name was on her chest after all. Anyone with eyes could see it. She sat here, secluded in a room of steel and tile, awaiting appointments for people who already knew what she did. There was no point.

The oddities of the body: she was dead. It was before her time. The rigor in her muscles had vanished. She was limp and heavy now. Blood had pooled in her buttocks and thighs and soles and palms.

The normalities: she hadn’t been touched otherwise. Which wasn’t normal. She was dead without a cause. Fluids had stopped and settled, organs had given up on their purposes, the thoughts were gone from her mind. She was an unsettling doll.

Madani felt nothing from her. That twinge in the peripherals of her mind that she gave. The visual sparkle and audible twinkle turned into mental stimulation. She still felt her recognize something kindred in that closet. Far away on other roads, but there. It was like an anxious dog at the end of a leash. A pressure of sorts.

Gwen was staring in ways she rarely stared. Her lips were pursed loose and her eyes were mostly upper lid. She loomed spectacularly over that slab containing flesh and looked into eyes Madani was avoiding trying to think about avoiding.

She was picking at something on her leg. Her hand looked like it had a disconnected and separate brain. She was still in the torso and the legs and the neck. Only her eyes roamed in tight little circles, untethered from the up-and-down movements of her fingers. The scratching of cartilage was notable in the dead silence.

No more questions. No more notations. Slide. A body back in the dark, sleeping in its cave. Two feet to the left. Metal wheels against tracks. Marla had been a gracious form on the death bed. Julen was meat.

His face had been left alone. That was what Madani latched onto. She wasn’t scared to stare elsewhere. She just couldn’t bring herself to look away from the well-preserved face. Except for the eye. That had been taken. There were marks around the socket.

The oddities: the bends. The twists. New joints had been created. Useless ones, that couldn’t move once gifted. Skin had split and let the underneath through. He had died of blood loss. Or just damage. Shock.

But it hadn’t been all at once. There was smaller marks between the fissures. Older wounds. Months. Like the blood around the home. Two people. Tens of weeks of injuries and ichor.

The normalities: his face had been left undamaged. It wasn’t the examiners job to guess why. The psychology was up to them.

She knew they weren’t stupid. She didn’t leave them with a parting glance and a note of how no human could do this. She boxed him back up in silence. They’d get the Spark Notes digitally, after she’d finalized them. She shook both their hands, outside the morgue. Under the yellow lights, not the white.

She disappeared down another hall. Maybe a break room. Just another day. Maybe an office, to write up that report. Finish up, get home. It wasn’t just another day.

The sunlight felt diminished somehow. The big dish light had been close and bright. Something alien and probing. This was just their sun. Sans another two people under it.

“She looked empty,” Gwen said after five moments of them feeling concrete beneath their soles.

“Marla?” Madani asked. Clarification trained into her from years of administrative duties. Who else would she be talking about?

“Mhmm.”

“Not out of the norm, I would say,” Madani responded. Gwen shifted beside her. Uncomfortable in clothes she couldn’t take off, maybe. The aviators hung between her collar bones. Like a pendant. For luck, or to keep bad things away.

“What’s next?” Gwen asked. Madani squinted in thought. As if trying to hold on to what exactly was going through her head. She tilted, to let the thoughts slide to one side, to trap them there.

“Back to the motel, I think. Dot the I’s and cross the T’s and all that. Make some notes and start condensing everything.”

Gwen nodded at that. She moved her eyes to look around, like her neck might snap if she shifted it. There was air between her lips. It flowed in circles for a few seconds before she let it out.

“I’m gonna do a walk.”

Madani looked up at the sky. Wondered for a few moments. About how many different paths had converged to get her to this point.

“Uh huh? Where to?” She asked. Gwen shrugged with her head. Tilted it to the side a little. Tapped her aviators with a nail, the same one that had been bothering her pants.

“Don’t know. You’ve got my number. If you find anything.”