Chapter 13 of A Net Too Wide To Break His Fall, by Matt Boothman
I wrote this story chapter by chapter, without outlining first. It was an experiment in writing consistently, producing a chapter once a month, without fail, for the Foggy Outline newsletter. So don’t expect something polished or finished; but what it does have is momentum, and a fluidity that came from wanting to change things up enough to keep myself interested enough to write more.
If you’d be interested in a properly edited, fleshed out, finished version of this story, let me know!
“You’ve been here before,” said Lisaveta, “in my home.”
“That’s right,” said Callum, voice still cracking. “That’s how I knew I wanted that introduction.”
Later, they figured out the sequence of events.
The sequence started with Callum, locked in a bare basement room with a corpse for company, ripping cabling out of the walls through a rusty junction box in the corner, and ended with Callum and Lisaveta warily circling an alliance in Lisaveta’s living room.
In between, the tanning bed in the salon and the slot machine in the betting shop above the basement both lost power without warning, leaving one customer only half-cooked and cutting off another before they could turn around a losing streak.
The customers complained to the staff on shift, who had a go at fiddling with settings and cable connectors , enough to say they’d tried but not enough to risk getting electrocuted, before getting the bosses involved. The bosses went straight to blaming each other, and argued for a bit on the pavement outside about who should pay to get an electrician in. Through an unmarked door five steps away from the argument, down fifteen stairs and through another locked door, Callum was pulling at sheaves of wiring with bloodied hands and waning strength, counting the hours until he would die of thirst.
“You’ve seen some things I wanted kept private,” said Lisaveta. “Things that would put me in danger if the boss knew.”
“And I didn’t tell her about any of it,” said Callum. “She doesn’t know about your escape hatch or your fuck-you fund or any of the insurance. I told her you’re a good soldier, and I asked if she’d introduce us.”
“Why? You’re a ghost. Why reveal yourself?”
“Because I think you can help me pull her fangs,” said Callum, “so both of us can get out alive.”
The electrician traced the fault to the building’s high voltage circuit, but couldn’t locate the issuein either the salon or the bookie’s, and wouldn’t follow the cabling deeper into the building without assurances from whoever owned those floors. Liability issues, see.
The beautician and the bookie phoned their landlord and demanded, on speakerphone, in a kind of relay, to know who they had to slap about to get access to the basement. Which was a difficult question for the landlord to answer, having leased the basement on a handshake agreement and a cash transaction to the outermost fractal of a nautilus of overlapping corporate entities that existed purely theoretically and had no personnel real enough to pick up a phone or open a door. Ignoring the tenants’ hints about business premises leasing terms and small claims court, the landlord told them both that the issue would be investigated and addressed in ten to twelve business days, hung up, and refused further calls until they gave up trying.
“You terrorised me for her. To keep me in line.” Lisaveta’s voice was still controlled but barely so. A generalised sense of imminent discovery and doom had been the background radiation of her life for weeks, and now that doom suddenly had a face and a name. She’d let it back into her home, where it had slunk in before, unseen and uninvited. “Now you want me to conspire with you against her. You understand why I hesitate.”
“I do get it,” said Callum. “Does it help if it won’t be just the two of us?”
The landlord dithered for a day, nearly forgot the whole thing, then called a number handwritten on the back of one of their own business cards and buried in the middle of a wad of receipts and scraps in a fat leather wallet, and left a short message.
Meanwhile, the bookie, having spent a day fielding complaints from the cashiers about Gary, he of the losing streak, who usually spent all day in the corner quietly working the slot machine, but was now instead spending all day at the windows attempting conversation, had a bright idea only somewhat inspired by absolute desperation: to break into the basement personally to give the electrician a nice, clear, liability-free path to the problem.
The landlord’s message arrived in a voicemail inbox shared by various lieutenants of Vivian Hithercombe’s organisation, Lisaveta included. Most of those who bothered to play the message ignored it. Who cared? Only because she’d been the one to shake the landlord’s hand and deliver the cash did Lisaveta connect the landlord with the premises, and the premises with Big Anton’s big story about Vivian Hithercombe’s pet ghost killing a suspected rat and giving him the slip.
By the time Lisaveta arrived on the scene, the salon and the bookie’s were closed and there was a cross of police tape across the unmarked basement door. The ambulance had already come and gone with the day-old corpse the bookie had found in the basement cell. Across the road, another spool of police tape cordoned off a cafe. Lisaveta saw a smeared red handprint on the glass door.
After the heat died down, she got the story from the cafe owner. Shortly before the police had turned up outside the salon and the bookie’s, taps had started turning on by themselves in the kitchen and spraying everywhere. Several orders had disappeared off the preparation bench right in front of the kitchen staff. And then people had started noticing the bloody handprints. A trail of them from the front door to the back storeroom. The police had searched, taken samples, questioned all the staff and a few customers, and left under a cloud of frustration.
Lisaveta found Callum at the end of the trail, passed out under a set of shelves in the storeroom.
“Who else would risk this?” said Lisaveta. “Who else would help you? You’ve been spying on everyone, informing on everyone to the boss. You’ve made enemies of the entire crew. Big Anton couldn’t wait to try and kill you.”
“There’s someone else who wants out,” said Callum. “Someone the boss thinks she owns – but I know they’re playing her.”
“I need a name or you’re on your own,” said Lisaveta.
Callum opened his mouth. Gasped. Sipped water to wet his cracked throat.
“Autumn Wray Benjamin works for the government,” he said. “Help them, and they’ll help you. There’s just one catch.”
“Which is?”
“They can’t find out about me,” said Callum. “I need you to be the face.”