Read Online Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes - Free Book Online Page A

restaurant? The ideal place for a vanishing, right? Because presumably everything there would be covered up almost instantly – all the cooking, the cleaning – and there would be nothing left to recover, no evidence. I shouldn’t say this. It’s nonsense, I know. I’m just saying what it felt like and I want to tell you everything.
    KANDINSKI: Someone said they smelled burning.
    DIAS: The sticks were a curse. They came as he went missing. That day was a write-off. You might think it’s crass to talk this way, but I don’t care. I’m telling you everything. It was our lowest daily yield that quarter. It was really poor. We were distracted. The sticks got in the way.
    KANDINSKI: They weren’t supposed to be there and they changed everything. I know we had them cleared away the moment the first of us noticed anything, but by that stage it was too late, the damage had been done. They had contradicted the office. It should have been unfathomable, the sticks, and I gather that’s how it was for some of the others. But for me, that day, I had the terrible feeling that it had been entirely natural and correct that the sticks were there. And that around them and over them was something else, and that stuff was us.
    DIAS: I don’t want to feel that myself, my staff, my office are intruding.
    KANDINSKI: I imagined the sticks multiplying, covering the floor, the walls, the drawers, then piling up in layers, drowning us slowly. We kept climbing, there was less air to breathe, then the sticks were inside us, pressed against our orifices, until finally they swallowed us. I got that from a small pile of sticks innocuously trailed on the office floor. How on earth can you account for that? The sticks were provocative, they changed us.
    DIAS: Vasquez tried his number repeatedly on the hour. The family hadn’t yet got in touch, nor the police. It was too soon for anything to be made official. I know you have your reasons, I know there has to be some line drawn, but those first forty-eight hours, when someone has gone but is not yet considered missing, they strike me as very strange. What kind of suspension are they supposed to be in? So we, or rather Señora Vasquez, kept trying his number; we’d have to get through eventually, wouldn’t we? Someone would pick up. What’s the alternative – nothing? We were annoyed rather than alarmed, because we were counting on Carlos, we needed his input and by the time I arranged appropriate cover it would be getting to the end of the working day.
    VASQUEZ: The sticks meant something. Someone had put them there that way, in that particular formation. We shouldn’t have ordered their removal, we should have given them more of our attention, offered them a more considered response. The individual sticks were very delicately placed over each other. There was a sort of symmetry to it, a pattern repeated either side of the centre. Each stick appeared to have a contrived relationship with all the others. We should have measured them; it might have told us something. There may have been a message kept inside. But maybe it’s best we didn’t find out, that we didn’t read it.
    DIAS: You think there’s something else going on now, around us in the office, something awful, something we don’t want you to know about, and that’s why we are keeping you in here and spinning stories about the sticks? Something that also happens to be the answer to the question of what ultimately happened to Carlos. Am I right? Have I caught your trail? Why don’t we go out this moment and see what’s happening? No one is expecting us to emerge for at least an hour. If we go now, into the foyer and towards the other doors, what we would see would be completely natural and unscripted. We would go out into the middle of it and if there was anything happening then we’d see it right away, it’d be all around us. Shall we do