The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [22]
“Uhm. No.”
She squeezed his shoulder gently. “Breathe through your mouth. It helps.”
Alan nodded, his eyes lingering on the photograph, particularly on the little boy. He looked so intense, despite his short pants and neatly-combed hair. There were no photographs like that in the Charterhouse home. Did the little boy have trouble standing still for that long? You’re stalling, Alan told himself.
“Shit.” Beckett called out from the parlor. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“What is it?” Skinner’s voice was faintly tinged with alarm. A sudden rapping—the Knocker’s natural telerhythmia—moved rapidly across the walls in the hallway and into the other room. “What’s wrong?”
“The bodies,” Beckett said as he returned.
“What about them?”
“They’re gone.”
Skinner shoved past Alan and into the room. Alan followed quietly behind her. “What happened?” The Knocker asked.
“Someone moved them. There are streaks of blood on the floor.”
“Do you think it was the Committee?” The two coroners continued to discuss the issue in low tones, while Alan looked around the room. It was an ordinary-looking parlor, furnished brightly but not garishly with red and gold. There were large bloodstains on the floor and couches. It was easier than Alan thought it would be to distance himself from that fact. His hands itched; there was a strange texture to the air, something he’d never felt before. He knelt down, and lightly touched his fingertips to the rug…
Sensory information began pouring in. There were sharpsie feet; he recognized the leathery texture of their skin. There were human feet, lots of human feet. Children’s feet. The children, Alan thought, as he imagined them running through the door to climb onto the sofa with their parents. He almost lost his focus then, but shook the image off. There was something here he was missing, something new but elusive. He tried to clear his mind, to blot out the other textures. He narrowed his field of touch to that one, strange texture…
. . . and almost cried out. There it was: something… something awful. He couldn’t say what it was, or even what it felt like. It was not just unfamiliar, but alien—completely alien. He’d never felt anything like this: something not just unknown, but unknowable, something completely dissimilar from the million textures he’d ever experienced. The horror of this thought grew as did the sense that the floor was covered in something that was completely impossible for him to comprehend. Alan snatched his hand up.
“…must be trying to hide something…Charterhouse. What’s wrong?” There was more curiosity than concern in Beckett’s voice. The weight of his attention suddenly seemed very heavy.
Alan realized he was biting his lip. He consciously stretched his jaw and puffed out his cheeks for a moment, before releasing it with a “puh” sound. “I don’t know, sir. There’s… there was something here. Something…” Alan shook his head and backed into the corner, inadvertently banging against the gramophone. “I can’t…I don’t know what it is.”
“Was it a person?” Skinner asked him, her tone worried. “A sharpsie?”
“N-no. No. It wasn’t made of . . . of what people are made of. Or of what anything’s made of.” Alan sank to the floor. The sense of the alien presence was fading, and nervous energy was making Alan’s hands twitch.
“What does that mean?” Beckett asked him.
“I can’t explain it.” Alan snatched up one of the cylinders from the gramophone and began to fiddle with it. “I’ve never felt anything like it.”
Beckett looked at him appraisingly for a moment. “All right. Take a minute for yourself, then I want you to check the rest of the room.”
Alan nodded. “There were sharpsies, here, sir. I’m having trouble sorting out the chronology, because of all the people that have been in and out. I’d say yesterday, or the day before.”
Beckett turned back to his partner. “That puts them here about the time of the murder.”
“So Stitch is wrong?” Skinner asked.
“Maybe. I want to know why there’s no struggle.”
“Poison? Maybe the sharpsies