The girl kicked the streets until she found the house of her client. It was a cozy home, artisanally carved wood part of its very structure. The kind of home where you saw a beware with the dog sign hanging from the door, and when the stained glass windows opened the head of a silly, slobbering Labrador popped out, a dog that would barely find energy to bark once, in a desperate demand to be pet by you, the stranger. And after the petting toll was paid, you’d find that the fat Labrador, without consulting with its owner —either an old trusty grandma that bakes unnaturally tasty cookies and is prime murder victim material or a psychopath that has his basement soundproofed and filled with caged children, no in-between— decided to open the door and let you in, no matter your intentions because, hey, you petted him. Yes, definitively that kind of home.
Samari knocked on the door with her fingers curled like claws, short nails resounding against the wooden planks.
Nobody answered.
The girl extricated her spirit from her fingers, inserted it inside the keyhole, and began mumbling. “Nothing on one, nothing on two, three is binding, click on three, four explodes if pressed further, five electrocutes you, six’s existence is debated by theoretical physicists, seven is binding…”
After a bit of wiggle, Samari opened the lock and found another door, identical to the first, firmly emplaced behind it. She had just reinserted her spirit into her flesh and had to separate them again, what a hassle.
Repeating the process, she opened the second door, and her smile left her face when, contrary to the third door she expected, she found a swole dogo licking his lips at the end of a long entry hall.
The dog charged at his possible dinner with the full intent of tearing Samari’s throat out. Instead of running, the girl positioned herself, and most important, her spirit, to deal with the animal. She had dealt with wolves back in the ruins of her home, a roided mutt couldn’t be much different.
The beast’s muscles pumped under a white coat, propelling him towards his serene prey. Something was amiss. The girl stood quiet but resolute. Probably came from Valelike Vale.
When the dog went for the throat, Samari turned her body to the side to dodge, and used the spirit of both her hands to trip her adversary midair. The dog fell and rolled, recovering quickly, and finding Samari’s hand coming for his snout when he turned back. She used both her right hand and its spirit as a pincer to surround the dog’s mouth, keeping it closed as it thrashed to break free, and, when she saw the chance, she inserted the spirit of her other hand into the dog’s nostrils. This had to be easy.
Samari mumbled as she worked, the dog frozen from the sheer audacity of the brat in front of him. “Nothing on one, spiritual node two is binding tightly… clicked there, spiritual node three is a baptized spool… pretty clever… four is binding fourth-dimensionally, probably an atheistic gate…” She bit her tongue while lockpicking.
The fear of death loomed over the poor guard dog as his spirit got manipulated and his body paralyzed. Dogpicking was a forbidden, ancient art lost to time, and this little meal had rediscovered it.
The dogo stopped whining when Samari released the last spiritual pin and turned the dog’s nose one hundred eighty degrees, defusing Rocko (that’s what he was called, the poor thing). She pulled the nose-cylinder out of the head and tossed the onyx rod to a side, to make sure the dog remained deactivated while she worked. She placed her thumb between her index and middle fingers and held it in front of the catatonic canid’s lost stare. “Got your nose, buddy.”
The dog lay there, aware but unable to maul the little shit, his body weighing more than a weightlifter on Jupiter. Not even his tear ducts responded. Maybe this was how dying felt like. Maybe it was just failure, because the invader was now strutting into the house. Slapping her ever-so-maulable butt cheeks to mock him.
At the end of the hall Samari found an unlocked door, and crossing it, her client. The man lay across a red and gold sofa, his green-tinted glasses so big they could be used by anime characters, nine generations of peacocks plucked to make his fabulous attire.
“Are you the Arcagnostic I asked for, my height-disadvantaged darling?” he crooned, his voice perfectly fitting his purple goatee.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Are you going to kidnap me by offering candy, or just bake me into a cake?” Samari asked, patting her pants for the job’s paperwork.
“Neither, darling: I have a problem with rats that you are going to solve.”
“Shame, I wanted candy.” Samari paced around, staring at all the bird-shaped piñatas hanging around. “Are you an ornithologist?”
“I am more of an hornythologist.”
“You said the same word as I,” Samari, unable to read minds or these pages, wronged.
“Did I, dear? Did I?” The extravagant man giggled.
“Yes you did. What’s your problem with rats?”
“Well…” he leaned forwards, his hands fidgeting with his rings, “the rats have become fully agnostic.”
“Ah,” Samari said, taking it with an unwarranted calm. “That’s the most normal statement I could have heard today.”
“By the way, darling, what did you do to Rocko?”
“I lockpicked him. Insert the nose back into the nosehole, upside down, and then turn counterclockwise until it clicks. That should revert the process.”
“What?” he asked, lowering his shades to somehow hear his interlocutor. better.
“I hear my own statements too,” Samari said as she looked around for the stairs that would go down and into the basement. “Tell me more about the rats, will you?”
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The door of the basement opened and the light that gamboled in was blinding for the demotivated rats. And there were a lot of lots of rats: the variegated stuffed birds were covered in the rodents, as did the barrels, the floor, the structural support of the floor above, the rats themselves —bigger rats were covered in smaller rats, and the smaller rats in tiny rats, almost a fractal of rats— and even the bag of rat poison. They stared at the balld silhouette that casted a looming ashadow over them, and one of the rats opened his mouths.
“Aliens?” It asked.
“We don’t know,” all the others answered in unison.
Realizing what a bunch of talking rats going full agnostic meant, Samari swallowed in an attempt to ease the parched sensation on her throat. “So… you are rats?” She tried to strike a casual conversation.
“We don’t know!” the rats answered in a matter-of-factly tone.
She would need to walk them through the necessary proceedings of cognition. “Can you know?”
“We don’t know if we can know.”
Samari scratched her head, went back to the ground floor, grabbed a chair and brought it back down to the basement, leaving it over the thick rat rug. In a second the chair got completely bedecked in rodents, such that Samari barely had time to pull her hands away lest they clang onto her too. Being mummified among a tide of warm rats was not her idea of a job done well.
She sat on the lower step of the stairs, as the rats didn’t reach there. They had taken over the basement, and not a centimeter more of the house. These were proud, boundary-respecting rats. She tapped the tip of her nose with a single finger, once and again, as she thought about how to solve this situation. The cyborg horse was sleeping, and she didn’t want to wake her imaginary friend up for this. She would need to return rats to the realm of rational behavior with instinctual, albeit ultimately nonsensical, bases. First, she needed to fragment the hivemind.
“Rats, how do you know that the other rats don’t know?”
“We don’t know!” said most of the rats
“I don’t know,” proclaimed a brave one, and the chant echoed through the others, until every rat was saying “I” instead of “we”.
Good, that had been easy.
“Well, rats, how can each of you be sure that you, in particular, don’t know?”
“I don’t know if I can,” they answered.
Samari was growing tired of the High Fidelity Rodent Surround that came from the cellar. She needed to dispatch this job soon, and she couldn’t just kill the rats. No, the job specified she had to “deal with the rat problem”. And it was plain to see that the “rat problem” was a philosophical one.
Shes canned the tapestry of bristled grey hairs, yellowed sharp teeth, rosey wormy tails and reddish eyes in front of her. There had ot be a way to make at least some of the rats accept they, for most intents and purposes, knew.
“What is to know, rats?”
“I don’t know.”
Clearly that wasn’t the correct approach. Samari checked her sanity. Counted to ten inside her head and found no strange new numbers hiding in the decimals. The termineightor kept snoring loudly in a corner of her mind.
“Rats, how do you know what the words you are using mean?”
“Dictionary.”
Samari was taken aback by the fact that the rats hadn’t answered that they didn’t knew.
“But how can you know the dictionary is accurate?”
The rats went silent before some squeaks surged here and there. Then a couple chirps. A wide smile stealthily made its way into Samari’s expression. She joined her hands in delight: the rats had returned to speaking in their native language, at the very least.
A second later, the rats popped out of existence, leaving a shining clean cellar brimming with colors behind, and demolishing Samari’s hopes and self-esteem. With a concerned expression, she ascended the stairs, and dedicated a long stare to her client, who still lay in his eye-hurting sofa.
“I am sorry… I am sorry…” she repeated, shaking her head.
The man straightened his back and took down his glasses to look the little Arcagnostic in the eyes. “What happened, darling?”
“I accidentally made the rats reason themselves out of existence,” she admitted, her chest overwhelmed by burning guilt.
“How?” The man blurted out, standing from the sofa and adjusting his feathery hat.
Samari began sobbing as she shuffled her feet towards the exist. “I don’t know!”