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| Just have to press these in the right order... |
On the plus side, this means there'll be 30+ TPU posts for November instead of the usual 20-25, on the downside there's no essays or short stories for a bit (comics will keep coming, they're too much fun).
For those just tuning in, here's a link to Chapter One to get started. Navigate using the shortcuts at the bottom of each chapter, or of course with the post-by-post shortcuts on the right-hand side of the blog.
So follow along if you dare and see a start-to-finish novel (albeit a short one) emerge before your very eyes! Will it be 50,000 words long? Probably! Will it have a beginning, middle, and an end? Hopefully! Will it be any fun to read? You decide!
The Stats:
Words this entry: 2,028 Words total: 5,999 Words to go: 44,001
Chapter Three
The Stats:
Words this entry: 2,028 Words total: 5,999 Words to go: 44,001
Chapter Three
For a moment Eva was too surprised to reply. She stared at the strange man in astonishment, looking hard into his cartoonish face and wondering whether she’d seen him before.
“What do you mean,” she said, “help me with my work?”
“I thought I might be of assistance,” the stranger said politely.
Eva looked closely at his face. He started to look uncomfortable.
“Who are you?” she said. “Who put you up to this?”
His two hands, hat and all, flew up in polite gesture of refusal.
“I mean no harm,” he said defensively.
“Who are you?” Eva said again. She was trying to think of something really intelligent and severe to say, in keeping with the startled and serious way she felt about the stranger in the dark building, but she was too flustered, and kept falling back on expressing her confusion in the simplest terms possible.
In spite of this, the man seemed overwhelmed by the question, looking about himself with an unhappy expression.
“You’ve got ten seconds to explain yourself,” Eva said, “before I call campus security.”
At this the man became agitated.
“Please don’t do that,” he said, “I would hate to cause trouble.”
And what’s this you’re causing me? Eva said to herself. But she didn’t say it out loud, the man seemed suddenly so pitiful.
“Look,” she said, relenting somewhat. “I won’t really call security, but just tell me what you want, and let me get back to my work.”
“Ah,” said the man, growing energetic at the mention of getting back to work, “could I see what you’re working on? I’m curious as to how far you’ve gotten, perhaps I can glance over your notes if you have a spare copy?”
“Why do you want to help me with my work?” Eva said, immediately on the defense again.
At her tone, he sagged forlornly again.
“It’s what I came here to do,” he said. “He said it would be hard to tell you.”
“‘He?’” said Eva. “‘He’ who?”
He looked so put out and unhappy to have distressed her that she almost dropped her karate stance, but then she remembered herself. He was so bewildered and unsure of himself that she began to suspect he was some poor imbecile, maybe a homeless guy, cleaned and dressed up by one of the other candidates and sent to torment her in her struggles as a joke. And she bet she knew just who.
“Who put you up to this?” she asked, pressing the inquiry. “Was it Jeffrey? He’s a short guy with curly hair and glasses, smells like too much cologne.”
Mr. Nibb seemed more confused than ever.
“I’m afraid I don’t know anyone by that description,” he said, as if trying to understand her. “All I want is to help you, if I can. Didn’t the letter from my associate tell you anything about my visiting you?”
“Associate?” Eva asked, looking around her as if she expected another stranger to pop out of the refrigerator. “What letter?”
“Oh dear,” said the man, touching his face and closing his eyes. “This explains it, I’ll bet you anything. He either misdirected the letter, or more likely he never sent it. So you’ve had no introduction to my visit at all.”
“No, no introduction,” said Eva, feeling a little taken aback; she almost never checked her official mailbox in the department downstairs.
“Well,” said the man, “as for who I am, like I said, my name is Mr. Nibb.”
“You’ve said that already,” said Eva patiently. “I mean, why are you here?”
“I was given to understand,” Mr. Nibb said delicately, “that you were in need of some assistance with this project of yours, and I have come to lend you assistance, if I can.
“I am something of an expert on this line of work,” he added, with a diffident little cough.
“What line of work?” Eva asked, more confused than ever. “How do you know what I’m working on?” Probably not a practical joke; maybe this guy was just crazy. The hair on her neck prickled.
“The building’s locked,” she said. “How’d you even get in here?”
The man gave a small embarrassed cough and said nothing, as if Eva had asked a question it wasn’t polite to ask.
“
“Am I?” the man replied.
She realized she didn’t feel threatened, just irritated; on the one hand his manner hardly seemed threatening. On the other, it was the middle of the night, she was jumpy, and he was blocking the only exit out of the little closet room.
And then again, all this was time spent neither brewing coffee nor getting back to her station. She reached for her phone to see what time it was, then nearly groaned out loud: it was back in the lab. All she had in her pocket was her passkey.
“Look,” she said, “if you wont’ explain yourself, you’ll have to excuse me, it’s late and I have work to do.”
She gestured for him to let her pass through the door.
“Oh, of course,” said the man, stepping aside as if he didn’t realize he was in the way. “I beg your pardon.”
She stepped past him into the half-lit hall, deciding that coffee was no longer needed thanks to the surge of adrenaline. The smell was very strong as she went past him.
She wondered if she should alert security that he was there, but after all, it was a public building, there was nothing valuable he could damage or walk off with that wasn’t locked away. So long as she didn’t let him into the lab, she didn’t see why it was her job to bully him away.
“You really won’t tell me what you’re doing here?” she asked, pausing before she walked back.
“As I said before,” he said, “I thought you might need help with your work this evening.”
“But you won’t say how you know that,” said Eva, “or who sent you here, or why, or even how you got in the building.”
The man seemed flustered.
“I think,” said the man, “that my associate, when he arrives, will be able to answer your questions better than I can.”
“What associate?” Eva asked.
“I’m sorry to pass off responsibility in this way, but I’m really only here to help with your work, I can’t really explain the situation very well, at least not as well as he can. I’m really just the mathematics specialist, you see, he’s the mission lead.”
“Mission?” said Eva. “What mission?”
“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Nibb, more put out than ever, and was quiet.
“Oh no you don’t,” said Eva, bordering on belligerent, “you don’t get to say something like ‘mission’ and then clam up. It was Jeffrey that sent you, wasn’t it? Are you a friend of his?”
Mr. Nibb fidgeted under the hall light, seemingly resolved to say nothing.
“Who do you think you are, coming here and badgering me in the middle of my work session?” asked Eva. “I will call security, just watch.” With that she gave up talking and strode back to the computer lab and her phone.
She passed the key over the lock and pulled the door open after the beep. Her things were all still at her station, exactly as she’d left them, so there was that at least. Whoever was setting her up was content to send loomings to chase her in the hallway without disrupting her actual work, so at least she had that going for her.
On one hand she was almost flattered that the other candidates thought she was worthy of a prank like this. She never really felt like she’d made much of a connection with any of them, they all seemed so wrapped up in their own projects and inside jokes that it was hard for her to ease into the group. They all seemed like their studies were their entire lives, that there was nothing and never could be anything as important as what they were doing there. Eva wasn’t able to bring her enthusiasm for her projects up to the religious fervor her piers seemed to live on, so faking a sufficient level of interest in what they were working on, in order to get them to talk to her, was always more work than she was happy to make.
The jokes were a sort of tradition in the department, especially at this time of year, when things were coming to a head for most of the candidates. It eased tension, at least for most. When Kyle Hardgrace had come back from a session to find his office filled with plastic ball-pit balls and four or five colleagues, he wasn’t as pleased with the diversion as everyone had expected. On the other hand, when Sally Baker had, it turns out, lost most of her existing work on her presentation due to her thumb drive vanishing in an episode involving an inflatable kiddie pool, a piñata shaped like a rocket ship, several dozen gallons of chocolate pudding and a giant bouncy ball with a handle, she had shrugged it off and laughed harder than anyone for appreciation of their effort. Everyone but Eva actually, who had been at home taking a nap; she’d been told when it would be happening but had eaten a really big sandwich that day and forgotten.
But if this was a joke, Eva was unable to savor its nuance, nor was she able to see who was benefiting from it; except for her and that creeper in the hall with the antiquarian wardrobe, the building seemed deserted. Hidden cameras? Who knew. No doubt Jeffrey Palmer, the ring leader of the pranks brigade, would make in plain soon enough what the rest of their little joke was, and make certain that Eva got the most out of it that she could. Eva really didn’t much mind, except she was critically short on time.
Maybe if she came up with nothing she could tell her advisor that it was because of these hijinks, out of her hands. It might buy her some extra time, though she wouldn’t be able to get back on the array for another few weeks at the soonest. And if there were a more thorough way to further alienate and put off the other kids than throwing their little joke back in their faces by getting the faculty officially involved, she couldn’t think of what that would be.
Enough, she had to get back to work.
She went back to her chair and fished her phone out of her satchel. She took a breath and checked the time, then let out a little sound like a hum through her nose and nearly dropped the phone as if it were stinging hot. She had, somehow, barely forty minutes left of her session. If she were putting her completed formulas in this instant, it would be a close shave to see if they would come out the other end in time.
In a sudden agony of nerves and indecision, she sat back at her seat and went once again to her notes. She looked at what she’d scribbled before she left: it was almost indecipherable. She pulled her crumpled guide paper from her pocket to start copying it again.
Instead of beginning to copy it over, she stared hard at the computer array in the next room. Maybe she could bash the mainframe in with a hammer and claim technical difficulties...
As she looked at the array, a man appeared out of thin air near the open doorway and fell to the floor in a heavy heap.
WHUMP!
To her credit, Eva did not cry out aloud, but she did jump, she bolted out of her chair, not from shock when the man first appeared, but when she looked twice and saw that he was real. She went straight for the door out to the hallway again, and then she did make a sound.
Although it felt like a short scream to her, to an outside observer it actually sounded more like the ribbit of a frog. (By this time, the sight of the man appearing out of thin air was beginning to actually sink into her awareness, and nerve systems are wont to behave unpredictably while resisting the genuinely impossible.) The doors of the lab were doubled, one inside the other, like an airlock, and both had wire-reinforced windows set at face level so that you could look out or in.
Looking through the glass towards the hall, Eva saw that Mr. Nib was plainly visible, outside the keycard-locked outer door, smiling and holding up a coffee cup encouragingly.
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