Waking up is always a compromise with the devil. You return from oblivion, but never fully, leaving something important behind in the dark depths of consciousness. This time, it was a dream about my last unresolved case - the one that would have weighed on my conscience if I hadn’t drowned it in bourbon. A week ago, but it felt like I’d been coming to my senses for a century. That mind was dead now, and my investigation along with it. The psi-hunters had won.
I opened my eyes in my office, and the world regained its edges: gray light slashed through the blinds, silence reigned, broken only by the occasional creak of an old fan, and the smell of stale tobacco had seeped so deeply into the walls that it felt like part of the building’s structure - you could probably smoke them instead of cigarettes. A clock, no longer functioning, yet still audible, was suspended on the wall.
An empty bottle of bourbon was on the edge of my desk, lying upside down like time itself. The label - “Old Foggy London” - reminded me of something I’d rather forget. A glass with a murky puddle at the bottom stared at me with silent reproach. Quite the breakfast of champions. My head responded with a dull, insistent ache, as if mocking me: Honey, I’m home. Piles of papers had multiplied around me like mold. Actual mold was also present.
The door made a sound as it opened, and she entered.
“You’re sleeping on the job. As usual.” Her voice wrapped around my unshaven room.
Jocelyn. I never remembered her last name, never tried. My venomous secretary and, incidentally, the closest thing I had to an anchor in this chaos other people called life. A black gown clung to her, resembling the darkness, the delicate straps merging with her skin, her lips a shade of ripe cherries, and her eyes piercing enough to shatter glass. Her heels tapped against the ground, like a metronome counting down to the next calamity.
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“I wasn’t sleeping,” I muttered, rubbing my eyes. A bad boss has a reputation to maintain. “I was meditating.”
“On whiskey?” She tossed a thin folder onto my desk. The papers looked official, all sharp corners and tight fonts. The kind that never bring good news. “You’ve got a new case.”
“No.” I reached for a cigarette. The smoke spiraled upward, its movements deliberate and sluggish, as if it yearned to depart this place with greater haste than I did.
“You don’t even know what it’s about.”
“But I know it’s bad.”
“All your cases are bad. Otherwise, they wouldn’t come to you.” She crossed her arms, and her shadow on the wall looked like a hawk, ready to strike.
“What’s the case?” I finally relented. There's a time of humility on the clock.
“Murder. New England. Locked room, no traces. Your favorite kind of mess - after those cigarettes.”
Her words hung in the air like an omen. New England. A miserable refuge for those who had fled Old England when the Fog took it. No one really knew what it was - some climate anomaly, an experiment gone wrong, or something else, deeper, darker. People spoke of how the Fog swallowed cities, erased memories, dissolved reality itself. Those who made it to America built New London, New Oxfordshire, New New York - anything to remind themselves of what they had lost.
I thought about my bank account. As empty as the bottle on my desk. Bad case or not, a well-fed man doesn’t count pennies before bed.
“Fine,” I said, opening the folder, feeling the Fog invisibly creeping toward my tiny office, what others call the head. “But if this turns out to be another family drama, I’m quitting.”
“You’d bankrupt yourself on severance pay, boss,” she said, turning toward the door. “And by the way, clean yourself up. In New England, they like people to look... presentable.”
She was already gone, leaving behind only a faint trace of perfume and the sinking feeling that I had just signed my own death warrant.
“A proper New English murder,” I muttered, raising my glass. “What a goddamn joke.”
New England was waiting. And, as always, it wasn’t going to be kind.