Bailey was halfway dressed for work when the call came, and halfway frustrated with that before she saw the number.
It was from the shop. That didn’t happen, not unsecured. So she answered the impossible call with an awkward compromise between appropriate formality and appropriate security, which consisted of saying “yes?” but in a very deferential way.
“You’re off shift,” said the shop. Terse, but not aggressive. Urgent. “Come on down and bring a change of clothes or two; this could get messy.”
“Alright.”
“Talk to you in an hour.”
Click.
Bailey got fully undressed for work, halfway dressed for casual, completely mentally undone at the seams, and all the way down to the shop – (behind two false fronts and never you mind the details) – before she dared consider what was going on, which was at the same moment she was bowing politely before Chandelier.
“Esteemed,” she said.
“Not a lot of time,” Chandelier told Bailey, ignoring both of their manners with similar ease. Her grey hair looked greyer, her big tired brown eyes looked heavier, her rumpled suit was verging on crumpled – crumpling farther, as she bent over and began to dig through the bottom drawers of her desk. “The ‘keep is going to be out of town for the weekend. We need someone to housesit. You’re up. Know it’s in here someplace…”
“What, esteemed?” asked Bailey, in a terrible compromise between saying what was on her mind and maintaining operational professionalism.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get a detailed list and we’re fitting you with a nictitating meninx,” said Chandelier, effortlessly introducing several new things for Bailey to worry about. She gave a small grunt in small triumph and swayed back to desk height, a little grey cardboard box in her palm. “Here it is. Take this and get it to Candlemaker, the third door on the right down the pink hall. She’ll set you up.”
“Esteemed,” said Bailey, hands shaking, brain shocked, mouth unwisely let off the leash. “Why me? I’m not even third watt.”
Chandelier actually looked at Bailey for the first time since she’d entered the shop, and it was terrible. Sympathy, weary jealousy, irritation, a little contempt that stuck out like the red spot on Jupiter.
“Because the rest of us will be going with the shopkeep and doing a lot worse than housesitting this weekend,” she said, each word heat-sterilized before it entered the world. “So take your new meninx and your self down to Candlemaker and be happy for the time off. Now.”
“Yes, esteemed,” said Bailey. And fled to somewhere safer, to the office of Candlemaker with his wild shock of hair and his inappropriately big smile and his complicated and overwrought razorblades, who laughed in her face at her delivery and shook his head at her meek request for more information.
“The list’ll set you up,” he said, picking up and putting down things somewhere between scalpels and dental floss. “Honestly? The less you know outside of it the better. The meninx will do its job, no fear, but if it has to face pressure from you AND the environment? It might strain, a little. And if you strain it a little, it might stretch. And if it might stretch it might snap. And then you’re in trouble. So stop asking questions and do as you’re told, alright?”
“Yes, esteemed,” said Bailey.
“God, you sound like you’re up against a firing squad. Hey, look at my chin.”
Bailey looked at Candlemaker’s chin and fell asleep. When she woke up her head hurt, her leg was asleep, and she was sitting in a wooden lounge chair on a nice deck attached to a polite little two-story house that would’ve been middle-class twenty years ago and now was the height of unfeasible luxury.
The world was wrong.
She blinked.
No, that wasn’t it. The world was fine, but…
She remembered when she was six years old and she’d finally gotten a magic eye picture to work. How it had felt when her eyes had unfocused just right, her brow had furrowed just so, her brain had slid loose just enough, and then the sailboat popped out of nowhere, floating off the page.
Right now she felt like the whole world was a magic eye picture, she couldn’t stop seeing it, and her head was already as creased as Chendelier’s suit.
There was a list in her hand. Big, bold handwriting, easy to soak up even in her state.
A little bird sang its heart out in a tree altogether too close to her ears.
Autostereograms, that was what those pictures were called.
Well.
Thank God it’s Friday indeed.
***
Besides the little knot tied between Bailey’s eyes and her brain, the house was nice. Clean. Furnished. It was a little over-populated with knickknacks in the way that reminded her of her great-grandmother’s place when she was a small child: half the accumulation of a long life, half the relics of a style of decoration long-since passed-by. The fridge was almost overflowing. There was a tank of goldfish in the living room, and a birdfeeder in the backyard. There was a small almost-grove of tall, sober trees that didn’t seem to be able to decide if they had needles or leaves.
There was a big and not necessarily overwhelming sofa, which Bailey sat on as she read the list.
It was divided into a DO section, which was long, and DON’T section, which was short.
DO
-Water the plants. Half-a-can of water per day per plant, two in the living room, one on the shelf in the kitchen.
-Fill the birdfeeder with a cup of the black birdseed and a pinch of the purple birdseed every day.
-Shovel the front and back steps with the big blue shovel resting on the front porch.
-Feed the goldfish in the living room. One spoonful of feed per goldfish per day.
-Make polite conversation with the spider above the stair in the morning. The weather is best.
-Sleep in each bed once.
-Keep the thermostat at 17 degrees.
-Check the pump in the basement before going to bed.
-Pick up the phone and put it down again twice a day.
-Eat the food on the bottom shelf of the fridge.
DON’T
-Use the little yellow-handled shovel.
-Sleep in any bed more than once.
-Be rude to the spider.
-Eat food from anywhere other than the bottom shelf of the fridge.
-Feed anything the red birdseed.
At the very bottom of the list Candlemaker had written ‘Have Fun!!!!’
Bailey stared at this and wondered if it was technically attached to the DON’T section by placement, then decided she had better things to do and started from the top.
It didn’t take too long. The plants were odd and unrecognizable; the spider didn’t talk back; the goldfish were pleasantly rounded and healthy. The birds were not quite chickadees, but even though Bailey and her birdwatching app couldn’t identify their song it was quite pleasant. The phoneline sounded quite normal when she gave into curiosity and listened before putting it back down. The first container she found in the bottom of the fridge was humble takeout poutine of average quality (i.e., bad and therefore excellent), and the grey salt-studded slush on the steps peeled away easily under the big clumsy blade of the blue shovel. The only odd thing was the thermostat: someone had set it to 19 degrees.
Bailey fixed that and spent the afternoon reading, which had been neither DO or DON’T. She tried the books from the overstuffed study first, but abandoned that plan quickly – each of them were filled with lorum ipsum that made her eyes water on contact – and retreated to her phone.
The pump in the basement was innocuous and unmoving.
The one disconcerting thing was the master bed. Bailey sank into it like a pebble dropped over the Mariana Trench and woke at 4 AM Saturday after indiscernible, troubling dreams to find herself deeper still. She decided an early morning was a safer bet than switching beds.
Breakfast came in the same takeout container as the poutine: an immaculate beef wellington. She microwaved it and felt a sense of inevitable, righteous doom overtake her until the first bite.
The thermometer was at 15 degrees. She fixed that. The steps were covered in (still salty, oddly) slush again. She shoveled that.
“I’m not sure where it came from,” she told the spider honestly, “there’s no snow anywhere else. Not on the branches, not on the roof, nothing. I guess I’d better not think about it.”
The spider did not reply, no more than the goldfish did, and the birds still sang. Long trills and clicks, like Morse code set to music.
Dinner was what appeared to be plain scraped-from-a-can beans in molasses, and this Bailey felt far less guilty about microwaving. It tasted like university desperation and retail overtime, and raising her spoon felt like work. She read a paragraph for every bite, and the meal ran so late into the evening that at first she almost mistook her visitor for a flicker of the shadows in the old half-buzzing lights, or even one of the little twitches in her field of view she’d almost gotten used to by now.
A roach. Not too big, but unpleasant to even look at.
“Guh!” said Bailey articulately, and – thanks to her quick reflexes – this became the insect’s epitaph. It thrashed and died and one leg twitched and clawed at the air and her and the universe and oh.
Oh, that was a sensation.
Despite what migraines might advertise, Bailey knew that the human brain was famously devoid of pain receptors.
So, what she was feeling right then, that tearing, scraping, rending….thing? Inside her skull. That was very specifically not pain. It was completely not like pain. Pain and bright pink and strawberry-scent and velvet-soft and salty-taste were all much closer cousins to each other than this was.
But Bailey still felt very strongly that the correct response to it was to scream. Not a lot, or for long, but definitely to scream. Short and sharp and shattering like glass, with a hand slapped over her right eye.
Her right eye. Very specifically her right eye. Quicker than thought, like a hand snatched from a burning stovetop.
She looked at the dead cockroach with her left eye. A dead, mashed cockroach. No twitch left in the legs. Gross.
She looked at the dead cockroach with her closed right eye. She thought about opening it. She thought about what she would see.
She thought about how the pressure in her head had let up. About how the furrow in her brow was gone.
So instead of opening her right eye Bailey made an eyepatch out of one of her socks and some duct tape and she threw the cockroach out in the garbage, and then she went downstairs to check the pump in the basement.
It was innocuous and unmoving but it was also at the far end of the basement from where it had started.
Bailey’s right eye itched.
She ran up the stairs to bed in such a hurry that she nearly forgot herself and took the master bedroom again, but when she set foot in the room she looked at its deep, soft folds and felt its dusty breath and saw it wriggle – just a little – and remembered herself so fast she backed out without even turning around.
The guestroom bed, by contrast, was firm. Immobile. Hard as a rock.
Baily didn’t fall asleep on it. But she did SOMETHING, because the dreams started before she’d even finished getting comfortable.
The birds sat in the window and watched her. The plants moved downstairs and talked in damp, dark voices. The books merged and split and recombined like microbes, filled the downstairs, the upstairs, to the ceiling, past the roof. The shovels marched into the mass and carved it away and slipped back downstairs to report to the pump and the pump couldn’t stop messing with the thermostat.
And all the while the birds watched her.
***
As she hadn’t slept, Bailey didn’t wake up. But she did start moving around again.
Her phone said it was Sunday. She hoped it was right. She also hoped she was reading it right; part of her field of view was…odd… right now. Swollen, like a bruise. Despite the eyepatch, despite a firmly-clamped-shut right eyelid, she could see things on the right side of her nose. Somehow.
She swallowed the lump in her throat and her thoughts in one gulp and went downstairs to water the plants. She didn’t enjoy it. They kept making contact, brushing her wrists, and no matter how often she pushed their hands away they wouldn’t listen. No ears.
The goldfish were better. Their little hands only moved to cup the bones from the water and drink them down, their mouths murmured in gratitude and blessings. They reminded her of her grandfather after gramma died, all prayers and no thoughts.
The birds weren’t watching her. The birds were making eye contact. The birds were making eye contact with her right side. She was making it right back.
Her eyepatch was still on. Her eyes were both shut.
Bailey screamed a little and ran back inside and slammed the door and shook herself for a few minutes, then went to talk to the spider.
“I’m really sorry, esteemed,” she mumbled. “But this is going very badly.”
The nictitating meninx was torn, the spider explained. She was seeing things that were there.
“That’s not good.”
The spider agreed. It suggested a solution, if she could go to the kitchen and find the sharpest knife. It would help.
Bailey did that.
The spider told her to point the knife at her right eyeball.
Bailey didn’t do that.
She really should, explained the spider.
“Maybe later,” said Baily.
She went to check the thermostat. It was at eleventeen. She spun the dial, spun the dial, spun the dial, then saw seventeen at last and twisted it home true only to realize she was looking at it with her left eye shut and her right eye wide and the sock eyepatch had burned its way into dust.
She looked behind her and caught the pump in the middle of moving from one end of the basement to the other.
It hissed.
Bailey went back upstairs, picked up the knife again, and did as the spider instructed.
Leave it with me as payment, it told her.
“Take my eye. Please,” said Bailey. And giggled, but in relief. Her left eye was twitching again in that offset rhythm, her brain’s brow was furrowed and aching once more. How did that even work? Surely autostereograms need stereo vision, that was just common sense.
Hee hee who cared. Not her! Not Bailey! She was seeing single now, and one thing at a time was enough for her. She had mapo tofu for brunch from the fridge (and boy was she glad she hadn’t looked in it earlier), she checked the phone, she went down to the basement and gave the (now-relocated) pump a quick look and a middle finger, and she went out to the porch and boldly reached out and picked up the little yellow-handled shovel.
Oh wow, she thought. Missed by six inches. Depth perception DOES matter.
***
Bailey woke back up with a face against hers and a set of fingers in her right eyesocket.
“This is alright,” said the face. It was a very ordinary face, so ordinary that it was extraordinary that it remained ordinary. A face that ordinary should be memorable.
She agreed with it. Compared to what had happened after she touched the little yellow-handled shovel, this was perfect.
“You have done nothing wrong.”
Arguable.
“The pest should not have been there. Killing it was good. Your suffering was a narrow escape. The spider gave good advice.” The face clucked its tongue. “You should not have touched the little yellow-handled shovel. That wasn’t wrong and that wasn’t right. It was entropy, it was statistical decay. I came home early. Statistical decay.”
Oh alright then.
“You are going home now.” The face moved away. The fingers went deeper. “And you will return with two eyes. You orphaned this one, and it will help you.”
***
Bailey saw everything.
She saw the look of disgust and shock and hidden envy travelling from Chandelier’s brain to her glands to her face and back.
She saw the experiments Candlemaker ran on the tatters of the nictitating meninx she’d carried home in her coat pocket, staining the fabric with cerebrospinal fluid.
She saw that she wasn’t a third watt anymore, whether or not anyone had said it aloud or not.
She saw that the pest had not been a cockroach.
She saw forwards and backwards and side to side and up and down and all around and beyond.
And she saw that standing there with her hand on the door to the shop wasn’t going to stop any of those things from happening.
So Bailey sighed deep, blinked with the eye that could still blink – the one that fit inside her eyesocket – and turned the doorknob, and stepped into a life that popped loose and floated above the page.