Excerpt from The Adventures of Edward Brett: Volume One, Chapter One: ‘Grin and Bear it’.
In their bid to escape the ghoulish grinners, Edward and Wanda find refuge at the top of the council’s clock tower. But whilst Edward slams all the puzzle pieces together, has he just overstepped the mark as he analyses his new mortal friend?
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“We should be safe here,” Wanda panted, leaning against the window that overlooked the green outside the offices. It was dusty on the small, high landing, which existed only to house the hatch for the clock tower on top of the building. “I’ve never seen anyone else up here, ever. I only come up here myself when I’m -”
“Busy?” Edward asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Yes.”
“Sick building syndrome,” he announced like he was introducing someone. He too stared out of the window onto the green below, illuminated by street lamps. It looked peaceful out there. Cars drove by. A couple walked a dog along the pavement.
“What?”
“Have you heard of it?”
Wanda had heard of it, but literally just that. Heard of it. “Yeah.”
“It’s a real thing – it’s not supernatural, not normally. People who work in offices for too long, they get these symptoms, like the building’s making them sick. Headaches, like you and your colleagues. Breathlessness, eye strain and stress, too. That’s where it’s meant to stop. Office employees bored out of their wits, staring at screens all day and being bathed in more harsh artificial light than a guppy in a fish tank.”
“Fish tank?”
“Just go with it. As I said, that’s where it’s meant to stop. But here – here’s it’s done something different. It’s evolved. Hats off to your managers; they truly must have created the worst office you could possibly ever dread to find yourself in. All that frustration and boredom and sadness and aches and pains and headaches, all those thoughts of ‘could I do better?’ or ‘I want a new job’, all of that sickness – it’s got so strong here that tonight it’s actually reached a point where it can manifest itself. Thoughts and emotions, so strong they’ve pushed themselves into reality. The sickness embodied.”
“Can that happen? Thoughts can just come alive?”
“Well, no, it’s never that easy. But there’s some history to it: stone tape theory, the wall people, similar kind of thing.”
“Why me, though? Come on, you dodged it before, but it’s me, isn’t it? They want me?”
“You said you’ve been having headaches for a while. Just here, just at work. And you’ve worked here a long time. You’re not the longest staff member, though, so there must be something else about you, Wanda.” Edward turned to her and gave her an examining kind of look, like he was a coroner giving a corpse the once-over to determine the cause of death.
“Oi!” Wanda snapped. “Mind how you look at me. You’re looking at me like them.”
“What aren’t you saying, hmm? ‘Busy’ – you come to these out-of-the-way places when you’re busy. Except that doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Wanda felt herself clamming up. “You don’t know.”
“I think I do. I think busy means sad.”
At that, she clammed up some more, only it was angry clamming this time. “How dare you. You think because you say you’re a god and you know all stuff about ghosts and sick buildings, you can just put on a therapist’s hat and pass comment on people’s lives and emotions? Hmm?”
Edward looked a bit flummoxed, the most caught out she’d seen him since they’d met. “No. No, I–”
“Zip it, Mr Brett. I’m not some mystery for you to solve. I’ve seen you, enjoying puzzling out what’s happening here, putting all the pieces together and thinking you’re a top-drawer boffin for doing it. And you are. But you don’t do it to me, okay? Got it?”
He nodded like a kid who’d just been told off at school. “Got it.”
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