Read Online Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes - Free Book Online

months. Not that we really knew Carlos anyway, to begin with. The original Carlos, in his office, before he had left the building. I’m curious what remains… Apparently, we’re still not allowed in. Absurd. Why can’t we walk in another man’s office, a fellow man, a colleague? Though I suppose we never did before, bar Señora Vasquez, who knows nothing.
    VASQUEZ: I am not Señora Vasquez, I only pretend.
    KANDINSKI: You do realize the door is on upside down? Removed at the hinges and reapplied oppositely. Why? It won’t open naturally this way. Who did this? What does Vasquez have to say?
    DIAS: What happened to Carlos? Is that rhetorical?
    KANDINSKI: The first day he didn’t arrive – which would be the day after he disappeared, the first morning we worked without him – there was a trail of sticks by the sixth-floor copier. Vasquez reported it and saw that it was cleaned up almost immediately, I mean almost immediately the first of us had noticed it; it could have been there all night for all we knew. No one noticed any bigger trail leading in, just this one deposit of short, broken sticks rather neatly placed together, almost folded or arranged, like a bird had made it, Vasquez said.
    VASQUEZ: It is a minor detail, but you said to include everything, right, no matter how insignificant it might seem? Everything we remember around the time of his disappearance, anything at all out of the ordinary – that’s what you said, isn’t it? Well the only thing I have is the sticks – around fourteen of them, the largest no more than 4 cm long and 2 wide. It might have been a joke, a game somebody was playing, only I can’t think of anyone who fits the bill. We have a very strict policy here regarding the outdoors. Technically, you are supposed to change footwear upon entering the basement, though security are likely to turn a blind eye, so long as you’ve been indoors all the way, entering your car via a garage annex, etc. But whoever trailed in the sticks must have walked outside, over woodland I imagine, which is quite unorthodox. Any vestibule areas are designated ‘mud rooms’ – they’re explicitly thresholds, where anyone coming from outside can fix themselves, change outfit and adapt to being indoors again.
    VASQUEZ: I’ve often wondered exactly what he was trying to tell us. I never mentioned this to anyone, but before they cleared the sticks away I inspected them, I looked for signs. There was this change, this atmosphere – it was 10 a.m., which meant that Carlos was late, unprecedented, as you know, and maybe we all just sensed that something had gone wrong. Nothing had been communicated at that stage, he’d been gone only a matter of hours. But I swear something was different. The sticks landing there suddenly. I don’t see how they could have been brought in or who could have done it. We couldn’t all have missed the pile, could we? No one had entered since 8.47.
    KANDINSKI: I thought they looked prepared, built – that they weren’t an accident. That’s how it looked. I don’t know if it was a part of something bigger, some clue or other. Where they were placed, it looked like what had been there before – carpet – was gone. That this stick pile had replaced it. I know that doesn’t make sense. We’re not, as a rule, superstitious on the sixth floor – someone might occasionally send round the horoscopes, but that’s as far as it will go. So it means something, it’s notable, when I say that we were spooked.
    VASQUEZ: I know that he went missing from the restaurant the previous night, and that there was no question of him returning here in the interim, but several of us had the feeling he’d been here again, he’d visited, that the office was the real place he’d vanished from. Isn’t it a little suspicious it happened at a