Asher Doyle was not, strictly speaking, in control of his life when he decided to join a cult. If pressed, he would’ve cited fieldwork. Ethnography. “Immersive observation in emergent spiritual communities.” What he wouldn’t have said -- (not to his advisor, not to his mother, maybe not even to himself) -- was that he’d just gotten dumped, was done checking the read receipts, and had recently developed an irrational but persistent fear of dying alone, naked, and partially eaten by raccoons. The phrase he used for it -- privately, ironically -- was death by misadventure.
At the time, he was finishing his PhD at Penn, which meant long days of pretending to read Deleuze in his apartment and longer nights at events labeled “networking mixers” that were essentially just venues for humanities grad students to get performatively drunk. It was after one such night -- thick with yellow wine, sweat stuck plastic cups, and the kind of improvised political arguments that start with
"Foucault would’ve hated brunch" and end in someone crying in a stairwell -- that someone pulled out a Tarot deck. A stranger with three piercings in one eyebrow and a vibe like they might legally own a knife. They shuffled like they’d been taught by someone who didn’t blink, and then they drew three cards for him, &they came fast: The Fool, reversed. The Eight of Cups. And then Death.
Not literal, they said. Metaphorical. Transformation. He’d heard this before, but something about the way they said it -- like they were quoting from a dream someone else had on his behalf -- made the hair on his forearms rise.
The message was clear, at least in retrospect:
"You have to go toward the thing you’re looking for."
Which is how, three weeks later, Asher Doyle -- 27, quietly unraveling, dissertation in freefall -- found himself buzzed into a half-abandoned warehouse in Marcus Hook, wearing a name tag that said simply INITIATE, and trying not to stare at the person leading the orientation, who looked exactly like Dana Scully from
The X-Files.
They didn’t call her Scully, of course. They didn’t call her anything at all. You weren’t supposed to speak her name. Some in the group referred to her as “the Engineer.” Others used a symbol -- a slanted asterisk inside a double circle -- that looked more like a misprint than a title. But when she walked into the room, the air changed. People stood up straighter. Phones went silent without being touched.
Asher thought:
This is a fucking joke.
And then she was in front of him. Not Dana Scully but Scully-shaped -- older, fuller in the face, hair the same improbable shade of red, parted with architectural precision. A thrift store trenchcoat, clipboard held like a prayer book or a security blanket. She blinked twice, too slowly, and said: “you’re one of the new ones,” her voice had the lilt of someone mid-rehearsal. She squinted at his name tag, not reading it, “you’ve got that look. Not the eyes, the --” she tapped her temple, “the inside part.”
Asher said nothing. Her mouth twitched, like she’d expected that. “They told me to greet. That’s the word they used. Greet. Like a train station. Or a welcome mat,” she looked over her shoulder briefly, as if double-checking the presence of the room. Everyone else was milling about, aimless and almost carefully not looking. “You won’t get much in the way of instructions,” she said, “that’s not how this place works. It’s more of uhhhh... --” she laughed at that, her lost train of thought, too loud and alone. Then leaned in slightly, sharing a secret neither of them understood: “I’ve been doing this six years now,” she said, “they didn’t tell me to. It just kept going.”
A pause. Her eyes scanned his face like they were waiting for a prompt. Asher opened his mouth. &closed it.
“They moved the meetings upstairs,” she added, "then back down. Then somewhere else. I just stayed here. Figured they’d come back eventually. And they did. Or maybe new ones came. It’s hard to tell,” another pause -- she scratched her ear, "if anyone gives you a number,” she said, “don’t call it.”
Then she stepped backward into the ambient crowd, and was gone.
Before he ever set foot in the warehouse, Asher had spent weeks that felt like months trying to track the thing called W. HOUSE. In university records, in library microfilm drawers, in dark-web forums with names like
syn4psionics and
RedThreadDead.
It had really started the night he got broken up with.
Not the clean kind, not the kind where people cry and say they’ll always care -- this was the cold kind, the shift-in-the-voice kind, where you realize halfway through the conversation that it’s already over and has been for weeks.
There were two beers in the fridge. He drank them. Then he left the apartment --
their apartment, technically still his -- and wandered south, toward the river. Somewhere around 10:30, he started texting people he hadn’t seen since undergrad. Around 11:15, someone texted back. By midnight he was in a basement bar with no name, the kind where the music makes your bones feel like strangers. Then, there was someone -- a boy, or a man, or something shimmering between the two. Bright eyes, chaotic hair, t-shirt with a cartoon snake smoking a joint. He said something that made Asher laugh too hard, and Asher said something that made the guy press a hand to his chest like he’d been struck.
Then a hallway. Then a darker room, pulsing with bodies. Smoke or fog or maybe just bad air.
Then —
Nothing.
No panic. No horror. Just the clean black slice of an evening erased. The next morning he woke up in his own bed, socks still on. His mouth tasted like metal.
The note was in his back pocket. Folded once. No smudges:
it was great to meet you
i think you’ll be the perfect addition
everyone thought you were so funny
talk soon
— W. HOUSE
&below the signature -- if it was a signature -- was a symbol: a circle bisected by a vertical line, with a black flag rising from the top. Something about it made his teeth ache. It resembled the Death card from the tarot, but wrong. Too clean. Too calm. Like it had been distilled. Asher stared at it for a long time. The paper didn’t smell like sweat or perfume or cigarettes. It smelled like nothing. He spent the rest of the day trying to remember the guy's name. &he couldn’t, but that night, he dreamed of a staircase descending beneath the city. He walked down into it barefoot, and every few steps, he passed a version of himself -- reading, weeping, laughing, shaving his head, throwing up in a fountain. At the bottom of the staircase was a red door, half-open. From behind it came voices -- familiar ones -- repeating his name in strange patterns.
The next morning, he googled: W. HOUSE. And everything began to bend. The problem wasn’t a lack of information. It was the opposite. Everything was too connected. One document -- a Xeroxed pamphlet from a 1986 consciousness conference in Santa Fe -- referenced “W.H.” as a “biocommunicative alignment protocol.” Another, buried in the footnotes of an MIT linguistics thesis, defined it as “a failed translation of the German
Weissehaus,” except no one could locate the original German manuscript. He’d found a blog post from 2007 that claimed W. HOUSE was a disinformation campaign launched by Sony Pictures to promote a never-aired
X-Files spinoff. A PDF hosted on a now-defunct Angelfire site alleged that W. HOUSE was a NATO-adjacent research cell tasked with tracking “entities with cross-medium signatures.” That phrase had stuck with him. Cross-medium signatures. It made him think of footprints left in radio static.
Every time he found a lead, it looped back into itself. Names changed. Dates slid around like magnets on a fridge. “H.O.U.S.E” sometimes stood for something -- Hierophantic Operating Unit for Signal Emergence, Huron, Ontario, U-ichigan, Superior, and Erie -- but never the same thing twice. It wasn't long before he started dreaming in acronyms. Then, the hit came one night at 2:12 am, buried in the digital holdings of the Van Pelt Library, under a folder marked “Access Unverified.” No author, no title, just a malformed RTF file filled with what looked like meeting minutes:
○ 4 attendees present
◓ One present virtually (signal distorted)
⏆ The red circle was not drawn correctly. Must repeat.
☃ Regarding Asher: too early to tell.
⛱ She is moving again. New host identified.
He read it three times before the file disappeared from his screen. He hadn’t clicked anything. It just blinked away.
The next day, Asher found himself wandering the fluorescent-lit corridors of Van Pelt, the glow of late spring sun leaking weakly through narrow windows. The hum of old H-VAC units mixed with the quiet clatter of keyboards and whispered conversations. Somewhere in this maze was the IT help desk, a place half-legendary, half-fabled among the students -- a gatekeeper’s lair for lost files and forgotten passwords.
He asked a passing librarian first, a woman with wireframe glasses perched on the end of her nose who smelled faintly of lavender and printer toner.
“IT help desk? Third floor. Near the old stacks. But they’re picky about appointments,” she warned, eyes flicking to his scruffy backpack and unshaven face.
Asher shrugged, figuring rules might bend for someone chasing ghosts.
On the third floor, behind a heavy oak door marked only with a faded “Authorized Personnel,” he found a narrow room crowded with dusty monitors, tangled cables, and a blinking server rack humming like a strange creature. The IT tech was a man in his late fourties, skinny, with glasses thick enough to distort the edges of his eyes and a band t-shirt that read “Syntax Error.” He looked up, mildly startled, as Asher approached.
“I’m looking for some info about a file I accessed late last night,” Asher began, feeling like he was stepping into a scene from a bad cyber-thriller. “An RTF -- but it vanished before I could finish reading.”
The tech looked at him like a cat considering whether to pounce, “we don’t host RTFs here,” he said flatly, voice low, almost like he was sharing a secret no one cared to know, “we’re strictly PDF and HTML. That’s the protocol.”
Asher frowned. “But I swear --”
“Look,” the tech cut in, waving a hand as if brushing off a nuisance, “if something’s on a server, it’s got a trail," he said typing away at the keyboard -- "And I don’t see anything matching your description. No logs. No backups. No shadows.”
Asher pressed. “Could it be... hidden? Maybe on a different server? Some kind of backup? Or an archive?”
The tech smiled, but it wasn’t friendly. More like the kind of expression people get when they’re about to deliver bad news or an inconvenient truth. “There are places. Off the grid. Dark corners of the network. But you don’t want to go looking for those,” he said, “not unless you’re ready to lose yourself.”
The room seemed to tilt for a second. The humming servers pulsed, almost alive. Asher swallowed -- “who do I talk to about those?” his voice barely above a whisper.
The tech looked around, then leaned in slightly, not conspiratorial, just tired, “there are places,” he said, “directories that don’t resolve, caches that don’t belong to anything anymore. Phantom stuff," he said, an odd look in his eyes -- "stuff nobody admits is still spinning,” he drummed his fingers once, sharply, against the desk. A short rhythm. Tap-tap-pause-tap: “you probably saw a bleed.”
Asher: “A wha-?”
“Sometimes things that shouldn’t be there -- are. Not for long though. They leak through. Wrong format, wrong decade, wrong credentials. And then --
poof -- they’re gone,” he glanced over at one of the monitors, “kind of like you should be, probably.”
The screen reflected blue in his glasses. He didn’t look back up. Asher stood there for another full minute, idiot arms akimbo, waiting for something else. A warning. A joke. A name. But the tech just kept typing, the click of keys flat and arrhythmic, like distant rain with no storm attached.
Later that week, someone slipped a copy of
Rivers of the World into his campus mailbox. No note. Wrong return address -- a biology department office that had been shuttered since 2017. The book was heavy, water-stained at the corners, and smelled faintly of Camel cigarettes. When Asher opened the inside cover, he found his name already written there in faint pencil:
Doyle, A. The handwriting didn’t look like his, but it wasn’t not his either -- like someone trying to mimic it from memory. He carried it around all afternoon, trying not to be obvious about checking it for inserts. Marginalia. Dog-eared clues. The kind of thing that would let him treat this whole moment academically, keep the weirdness in the realm of data. But the book refused to cooperate. It was, as far as he could tell, a perfectly unremarkable survey of major waterways. The Danube. The Mekong. The Orinoco, described in ecstatic prose and grainy aerial photographs.
That night, he found himself re-reading an old fieldwork proposal he’d abandoned last semester -- something vague about urban folklore and mythic infiltration. At the time, his advisor had called it “ambitious but undercooked,” which Asher had taken to mean
too personal. Now it felt like a map. Or at least a reason. The poor fucker hadn’t cried since the breakup. Not really. He’d done that thing -- that distancing thing -- where he turned pain into language, then turned the language into notes, and the notes into files, and the files into tabs that he never closed. There were still messages he hadn’t read. Still clothes that smelled like someone else. A scarf folded too carefully. He told himself that was part of it, too. That maybe this --
W. HOUSE -- wasn’t just a subject, but a structure. A shape to put around the ache. A way to observe his own confusion from the safe distance of methodology. The book kept reappearing -- on his desk, in his bag, once laid neatly on a bench outside the anthropology building, even though he was sure he hadn’t brought it. And then, late one Thursday night, he got the message --
A sheet of graph paper, taped crookedly to the inside of his car window:
Locust Walk, 12:40 AM. Come alone. Bring the book.
There was no signature, but below the words, someone had drawn a small red circle with four tiny notches -- like a dial turned all the way down. Asher didn’t ask himself if he would go. The decision had already been made, somewhere in the machinery of the hour -- in the breath between footsteps, in the blink between streetlamp and star -- the yes had already slipped out of him.
Cut To: That night. The campus, almost too quiet. Security lights blinked in dumb rhythm. A fox crossed the brick path ahead of him like a thought he almost had. He reached Locust Walk at 12:38. The book in his hand felt heavier than it ever had. At 12:42, someone emerged from the shadows beneath the footbridge. Not anyone he recognized. A tall person in a coat too big for them, holding a manila envelope. They didn’t speak. Just handed him the envelope and pointed once, vaguely, in the direction of the river. Then they walked away.
"Wait!" Asher insisted, but it was already too late. He stood there for a moment and then looked inside the envelope: a single laminated card. On it, a symbol he didn’t understand, an address scrawled in blue ink, and one word printed in small typeface across the bottom:
ACCESS
He stood under the blue-white glow of the sodium lights.
This is what I’m writing about, he told himself.
This is the research. But even as he thought it, he felt something click into place. Not quite belief. Not yet. But proximity. A system coming online. A gravity pulling inward, slow and certain. It was like stepping into the breath of something much larger than himself -- not a presence, exactly, but the shape left by one. Like the hush that falls before a bell rings, or the silence in a church that hasn’t held a service in decades but still remembers how. A shiver climbed the inside of his ribs. Not fear, not ecstasy -- recognition: he had found this thing, and it had been waiting. Then he saw it -- or almost saw it -- the outer curve of a pattern too large for the mind to hold. Something with no center and too many edges. Vast, patient, coiled in the walls of cities, in abandoned rooms with odd symbols carved beneath paint, in the timing of birds overhead. A design not
made by people but
worn into them. The cult -- if it even was a cult -- was just one fracture point. A spill. A crack in the vessel. Asher swayed slightly, the weight of it passing through him like a low fever. Then it was gone.
And there he stood, heart kicking once hard against his chest, the envelope soft in his hands. Still alone. Still just Asher Doyle. Still the same man who had made coffee every morning for someone who had stopped kissing him on the mouth. Who had typed
I understand in a text message he never sent. Who had deleted the calendar invite for their anniversary dinner before he could cry about it. But the ache was different now. Not gone, but refracted. Now there was something else to hold. Something to follow. Not a cure. Not a cause -- a current.
He didn’t know what it would ask of him. But he knew he would say
yes.
Asher was in the warehouse in Marcus Hook, under the flickering fluorescents, badge on his chest like a name he hadn’t chosen, when someone tapped him lightly on the shoulder.
He turned. &it was the boy.
From that night --
the night. The cartoon snake t-shirt was gone, replaced with a navy sweater slightly too big in the sleeves, collar slouched like he’d been pulling at it nervously. But it was him. Same eyes, still too bright. Same smile, a little crooked on the left -- “Hey,” the guy said, casually, like they were bumping into each other at a coffee shop, not at what may have been a cult induction ceremony, “you made it.”
Asher tried not to gasp, heart stuttering. The boy’s name was gone. Long gone. The name had fallen into that same blind corner of his brain where old locker combinations and childhood phone numbers went to rot. There was only blank static where the name should have lived. “Yah,” Asher said, voice too thin, “of course.”
The boy smiled deeper now, “I was hoping you’d come. Everyone thought you were hilarious. That thing you said about municipal ghosts?”
Asher made a noise that could pass as a laugh, “right, yah.”
“You were so dumb,” the boy added, fondly -- “you said something about buildings getting lonely. I wrote it down, actually. Somewhere.”
There was a moment -- a hanging pause -- where Asher thought:
I should say something. I should ask his name. Instead, he nodded and feigned a chuckle: “yah, that sounds like me.”
The boy beamed: “I’m really glad you’re here,” then he looked down at Asher’s INITIATE tag, the black-on-orange plastic gleaming faintly in the industrial light. Without asking, he gently touched the corner of it. Just a fingertip. Just a moment. Asher didn’t flinch. He felt, weirdly, like he was being sealed.
“I’ve gotta get back to circle,” the guy said, taking a step back -- as if beckoning -- “but I’ll see you inside. And hey --” he took a step forward again, “just... don’t drink anything until the second bell.” Then he winked -- fast, practiced -- and was gone, swallowed by the crowd, which was beginning to shift toward a set of freight doors on the far end of the room.
Asher stood still, heart ticking fast beneath his jacket, and tried again to remember the boy’s name. Nothing. Just a bright, slippery feeling behind his ribs, soaked in gin.
That's when the freight doors groaned open with the theatrical resistance of something that hadn’t been used in years but had clearly been rehearsed. The crowd began to file through, all shuffling and murmurs, like students headed into a lecture hall they hadn’t signed up for. Asher followed, trying not to look lost. The corridor beyond the doors had the industrial scent of wet steel. At the end of it, the world widened into a makeshift theater -- folding chairs arranged in a concentric arc; a projection screen pinned against one wall with red electrical tape. Someone had rigged an old reel-to-reel in the back, or maybe just wanted it to look that way.
Asher took a seat near the center. The lights flickered twice, then the Scully Lady reappeared -- not from the stage but from behind the screen itself, as though she’d been resting inside it. Her hands folded neatly in front of her like a flight attendant about to lie: “Welcome, initiates,” she bellowed, then there was applause. She went on: “Please remain silent for the duration of the presentation. You will know when it’s over,” her voice had a pleasing rasp, like someone who’d spent decades speaking quietly in high-ceilinged rooms. She smiled -- tight, bureaucratic, rehearsed. Then stepped aside -- the projector buzzed to life with the whirr of something older than electricity --
A countdown: 5… 4… 3…
White text against a black field, jittering slightly as if the film were being dragged through too fast:
W. HOUSE INITIATION PRESENTS:
A FILM BY FUTURE TRAINSPOTTERS OF AMERICA (FTA)
[Someone behind Asher stifled a laugh. Or a cough. Or both.]
On screen: a man in a lab coat pointing at a diagram that looked like a subway map. The voiceover crackled to life -- male, British, possibly synthetic:
“In the beginning, there were only terminals. Points of arrival. Points of departure. A great and shifting calculus of movement and intention...” The man on screen was now holding a chicken. Or possibly a baby in a feathered costume. Either way, the image began to stutter -- jump-cutting slightly, as if someone was nudging the reel.
Then: silence.
Then: music.
A jangly, organ-heavy funk riff burst through the speakers -- the kind of track that made you want to dance in bell bottoms and question your own tax returns, like the system had found a way to monetize heartbreak and loop it on vinyl; a broken record stuck between a confession and a warning, spinning just slow enough to make you dizzy but fast enough
to never quite let go. The screen snapped into a new image: a woman in a sunshine yellow leotard and knee socks, polka dots -- maybe they were stripes? -- twirling in slow motion across an empty suburban street. Behind her: a cul-de-sac, a Buick, and she was wearing a fanny pack. It was bright red, and almost disturbingly prominent -- like it had been keyed into the frame in post.
“THEY CALLED IT HYSTERIA.”
“THEY CALLED IT SATAN.”
“THEY CALLED IT THE AMERICAN HOUSEHOLD.”
Each phrase exploded on screen in thick, serifed type. A gong sounded softly in the background.
The woman danced harder.
“In the late 1980s,” the narrator resumed, now with the velvety cadence of a late-night infomercial, “spiritual destabilization reached a cultural tipping point. Children were whispering in their sleep. Daycares were fracturing. Grandmothers were burning toast and blaming it on Lucifer!”
Cut to footage of a local news anchor in plaid:
“Police say the daycare center had three goats, no permits, and several large crystals believed to be mood-regulators.”
The image froze, then began to melt -- literally melt -- in celluloid drips.
The woman reappeared. She was now indoors, possibly in a bowling alley. Still dancing. Still wearing the fanny pack, which now had stickers on it:
I Voted,
SeaWorld, and a small circular one that simply read
W. HOUSE in courier type.
“As national hysteria grew, the need for pattern recognition intensified. The Future Trainspotters of America, operating under multiple names and tax IDs, developed counter-media -- a way of inoculating Initiates against conventional optics.”
The screen split into a kaleidoscope of footage:
— A rotary phone dialing itself
— A boy in a Cub Scout uniform eating a raw egg
— A cake being frosted by a pair of hands wearing latex gloves
“The film you are watching has been designed for your safety. For your preparation. For your permission.”
The woman stopped dancing. Looked directly into the camera.
And smiled.
And the screen cut to static.
A flicker. A pop.
Then: a long, slow shot of a beach.
Palm trees bending in an offshore wind. White sky. Water so still it looked like a sheet of cellophane. The sound of gulls -- or something (coo) trying to sound (c00) like gulls -- eminated faintly from the speakers. There was a massive shape slumped on the shoreline.
It must have been? Was it? A wreck!
The metal bones of what had once been a
Pan Am Clipper -- its hull sun-bleached and gutted, windows fogged with salt and time. The logo, barely visible, trailed across the side in fractured blue: P_A_ _ M_RI_A_
The camera moved closer. The image sharpened. You could see into the cockpit -- a dead bird rested beside it like an offering.
Then: a woman, holding a child’s hand, stepped into the frame. She wore a visor and a blouse with shoulder pads. The child pointed -- not afraid, not excited, just curious.
They stood there for a long time. No music. Just wind.
The woman knelt. Said something inaudible to the child. Smiled, almost shyly.
Then she pointed at the wreckage.
A subtitle appeared in stark white, a child's voice:
“That’s my name.”
The screen clicked off. The reel spun down. No one clapped. The lights stayed off for a beat. Then: a soft chime, almost apologetic, and one of the side doors creaked open. No one was told to move, but the crowd began to drift -- the way sheep do when one of them decides the fence has vanished.
&so Asher followed.
The next room was lit in buzzing strips of halogen. It looked like the inside of a thrifstore that had been rearranged by someone with only the vaguest sense of what a store was supposed to be. Racks of vintage clothing -- sparkly blouses, army jackets, a whole row of airline uniforms in impossible colors -- circled like a carousel. Stacks of VHS tapes arranged by moon phase. Glass cases full of costume jewelry and pocket Bibles, all tagged with the same price: $7.77.
A bar had been set up beneath a hanging globe of Earth, cracked along the equator. The drinks were pink, citrusy, rimmed with salt dyed green. Everyone was holding one now, Asher included. No one was drinking yet. Asher stepped lightly around a half-deflated rubber dog and picked up a copy of
A Field Guide to American Clocks, just to have something to do with his hands -- an old trick he had learned from an uncle. The pages were stiff and smelled like attic insulation.
Then he felt it -- or rather, her. The Scully Lady, but no longer framed in screenlight or speaking in riddles. She wasn’t looking at him -- not quite. But she was near enough to be deliberate. Holding a cocktail. Wearing a suede jacket with shoulder pads sharp enough to land a plane on -- when did she get a chance to change costume? Her hair was different now too. Pulled back. Or maybe it never changed and the light was lying.
Their eyes met and she raised her glass a millimeter, then took a sip from her drink -- something floral on the rim. “You know,” she said, not looking at him, “you keep making the face of someone who doesn’t realize they’ve already won.”
Asher opened his mouth. Took a sip of the drink. Tried again: “I just wanted to know --”
“You still do,” she said.
He glanced sideways, searching for someone he might plausibly interrupt, someone to whom he might belong. But everyone else was already in character -- sipping, browsing, whispering over bins of misprinted self-help books and boxed sets of long forgotten TV shows. He caught a glimpse of a paperback titled
Your Aura Is a Liability. “I don’t even know what this is,” he said finally.
“This,” she said, sweeping a hand gently at the racks of vintage windbreakers, color-coded crockpots, “is what’s left.” She turned to face him then -- actually face him. Up close, her jacket looked too well worn, in the way that made you suspicious of its origin. “I’m Sara,” she said, extending her hand -- “Sara NoH.”
Asher shook the hand and “no -- ?”
“As in
NoH Theater,” she said, as if that cleared everything up, “as in -- well. You’ll see.”
“Okay," he said, convinced this whole thing was a put on.
“You’re Asher Doyle," she said.
That landed. He managed a nod. “Did you -- ”
“Someone told me,” she said, breezily, “you’d be surprised," sipping on her drink.
He stared down into his drink now. The ice was melting into a soft geometry.
She tilted her head toward a cluttered aisle in the back. “You’ve got an admirer, by the way. Boy in the navy sweater by the 8-track tapes. Been orbiting you all night.”
Asher looked. It was the boy. That boy. The one from -- “you know him?” Asher blurted out, still not looking back at her and forgetting why he was there in the first place.
“Of course,” she said, “that’s Bobby Hodges.”
The name cracked something open. Not a memory exactly -- more like the outline of one. Like light filtering in around the edges of a photograph that had been burned before it could be developed. Something warm. Something sour. A park bench. A shared pair of headphones. That ridiculous sweatshirt with the Looney Tunes embroidery. But every time he tried to grab hold of a scene, it dissolved into static.
“I thought he was your roommate,” she said
Asher turned toward her, eyes narrowed. She was still watching the crowd.
“In fact,” she said, now gently, “as I’ve been told, he’s your boyfriend.”
Asher realized that his cocktail suddenly tasted stronger. Not bad, exactly -- just louder. Like it had finally remembered its ingredients: rosewater, vinegar, citrus rind, something coppery underneath. He swallowed once. Then again.
Did his mouth always taste this way? The thrift store lights clicked -- a power blink, nothing major -- like nothing had happened, but the colors were... off. Too saturated. Like someone had punched up the contrast on reality. Every corduroy sleeve in the room had a personal aura. A child-sized mannequin wearing a rust-colored vest was nodding at no one in particular.
Asher blinked. Once. Twice. The ceiling tiles were breathing.
A woman in a giant Hello Kitty mascot head brushed past him -- oversized, foam, possibly flammable -- her voice muffled but insistent as she pressed a slip of pink paper into his hand. He caught a whiff of strawberry vape and cinnamon. “Not for now,” she said, in that flat, automated voice the head imposed, “but for when it’s time.”
He unfolded the paper. A phone number, handwritten in red marker. Underneath it, in lowercase:
press pound for human operator. He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, holding it. Time had stopped explaining itself. His thumb ran the edge of the paper, over and over, until the ink began to smear. Had Sara NoH really said that? That Bobby Hodges was his boyfriend? That Bobby always knew his name, had a
history with him?
He couldn’t tell if it was the cocktail, or the room, or just the way the word “boyfriend” had echoed -- too sudden, too close, like a stranger whispering your childhood nickname in a crowded elevator. Either way, it short-circuited something in him: he needed air. Or distance. Or time travel. Instead, he found a phone. Wedged between two shelves labeled
Self-Help &
Devotionals for Left-Handed Teens, the payphone looked like it had always been there, waiting for someone who didn’t believe in coincidence. Its cord hung like a question mark. The receiver was oily with someone else’s confusion. Asher didn’t hesitate. He just stepped into the alcove like he’d rehearsed it. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a coin. It was already between his fingers -- warm, unfamiliar -- he fed it into the slot and dialed the number the Cat Person gave him.
It rang once. Some part of him hoped it would ring and ring forever. Another part, deeper and quieter, was already letting go. Then -- not a voice, but a sound. Something between a throat being cleared and an airport intercom powering on. The receiver began to warm in his hand. Then the warmth spread. To his arm. His shoulder. His ear. Not painful, but transformative. Like being poured into something. Or out of something. The entire building began to shudder. Not visibly, but from the inside out. The kind of vibration you feel in your teeth before you hear it in the room. The lights inverted. The smell of gin. Clinking glass. A jukebox murmuring something in a language no one had invented yet.
Asher was sitting in a booth. Leatherette. Burgundy. Sticky. A bar. Probably. He blinked. Looked down. His drink had followed him. The pink one. Still fizzing. The Hello Kitty head sat beside him in the booth, leaking strawberry mist. The payphone was gone.
"Looks like we got another one!" a voice shouted from somewhere. Asher began to touch every part of his body, check his jacket, his pockets, to make sure everything was still there. His shoes were still on.
What the hell just happened?
“I bet you’re wondering what the hell just happened,” came a voice from behind.
Asher turned, slowly, as if the air had thickened.
The man standing there was lean, sun-weathered, duck-like, with a pilot’s cap slightly askew on his head and a scarf knotted in a way that suggested he’d just flown in from 1973. His bomber jacket was littered with stitched-on insignia that looked both official and completely invented -- one patch read
PAN AM RELAY / OPERATION: SKY VAULT. Another simply said SCOUT.
He extended a hand with the casual gravity of someone who’d shaken hands in a dozen timelines. “Scout Metradon,” he said. “First-name basis. Retired postal wing, kind of. Now freelance courier for parties of interest. Welcome to The Propeller Club.” Asher didn’t reach for it. Instead, he stared at the man’s scarf, which was patterned like topography maps but moved like smoke. His brain felt misthreaded, like a film reel spinning off-axis. He swallowed, once, slowly -- like he had to convince his throat the world was real.
Scout waited. Not impatient. Just observant.
There was no question forming in Asher’s head. Only a soft churn. Like soup being stirred in another room. Scout nodded toward the Hello Kitty head, which had now slumped forward in a posture of respectable unconsciousness. “Happens a lot,” he said. “They never remember the ride. Can’t say I blame them. You called the number, huh?” Before Asher could answer, Scout turned and whistled through his teeth. “Hey, Nicole!”
From a back booth, a woman looked up over the rim of a martini glass and slid out with the deliberate ease of someone who'd once lived underground for six months and now wore only linen. She was short, round-faced, and walked like her legs had memorized how to dodge rubber bullets. A single long braid trailed down the back of her leather vest, and her sunglasses were too large to be ironic.
“Just Nicole,” she said, offering Asher a hand. “AKA Nicole the Troll. Don’t let him call me that.”
“I already did,” Scout said.
Just Nicole rolled her eyes. “He always does.”
Asher looked between them. “What... is this place?”
“Technically, Philadelphia,” Just Nicole said. “But less the ZIP-code version and more the long-wave afterimage. Some of us just call it The Propeller Club. Telephone booth drops are rare, but not unheard of. Especially post-second bell.”
Asher’s brow furrowed. “What bell?”
“Oh honey,” she said. “You drank before the second bell?”
Scout let out a low whistle.
“You didn’t talk to Bobby Hodges?” Just Nicole asked.
“I did.”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“He said not to -- he said not to drink before the second bell.”
Just Nicole leaned back, unimpressed. “At least
someone tried to help.”
“But it wasn’t him,” Asher added, “it was Sara NoH who told me not to make the call.”
Scout’s eyes narrowed. “Now
there’s a name.”
“You know her? Wait -- you know both of them?” Asher asked.
“We know
of them,” Just Nicole said, “he's the one with a face of an intern? Hands too clean? He tends to show up in a lot of places right before things go sideways. And Sara: sharp shoulder pads, mystery file where a resume should be? When she shows up the lights get weird.”
Scout scoffed, “they like people like that. Smoke signals in heels. Confusion you can shake hands with.”
“You’re saying Sara’s with them?” Asher asked.
“We’re saying nothing about Sara,” Just Nicole said. “Except that you shouldn’t trust anyone who gives advice like it’s a test you already failed.”
Scout raised his glass and nodded solemnly, “especially if they never give the same name twice.”
Just Nicole smiled, “which means, Asher, that you’re either incredibly brave, incredibly dumb, or incredibly on time.”
Asher: “You know my name?”
“We’ve been on the W. HOUSE case a long time, we know a lot of things,” she said with a smile, “not all of them useful. But some patterns repeat.”
“Like this bar,” Scout said. “Like the booth. Like the name Bobby Hodges.”
That name rang in his ears again -- and not gently. “Who are you people?” Asher asked, barely above a whisper.
Just Nicole shrugged. “Me? I was a forger in a former life. Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. Media, PA, 1971 -- ring a bell? I was nineteen. Now I’m an architect. Still build things no one’s supposed to see.”
“And I’m a pilot,” Scout added, pulling on his jacket: “in the spiritual-aviation sense.”
“You’ve been following me?” Asher asked.
“No,” Just Nicole said, “we’ve been following her. Sara NoH. And the thing she calls W. HOUSE.”
Scout looked serious for the first time: “And now you’re in it. Whether you wanted to be or not.”
Asher’s hands moved toward his jacket again, almost by instinct -- checking himself again, the coin, the note. Everything was still there, more or less. But something else had arrived, too. The sense that the ground was shifting again -- not violently, not yet. But with the quiet authority of something ancient waking up beneath the street. A rush, then a hiccup -- like the city exhaling through its manholes. Asher covered his mouth.
He threw up all over the place.
--------->Chapter Two