Chapter 15 - Kai - Worlds Collide
A dark, small-town mystery steeped in folklore. THE STUDY OF QUIET THINGS is a serialised fiction drama shared one chapter at a time.
This is a serialised fiction. If you haven’t read the previous chapters, you’ll find them here in order, so you can dive right in.
Bit awkward, thinks Kai.
He’s standing on the threshold of his client’s rather flamboyant dwelling, while his scantily clad client, one Mrs Carmen Beaufort of the 80s catwalk fame, drapes herself between door and doorframe in an alarmingly come-hither way.
“You must be Kai,” Carmen’s words ooze. She lowers her tone to a deep, pseudo-sexy timbre. “You’re here to check out my… electricity.”
Oh.
Dear.
Lord.
He morphs his features into something he hopes resembles an amicable smile and she widens the door a little, gesturing him inside with a theatrical sweep of her arm. The gap is small, and he is forced to press uncomfortably close to her as he enters. If this were the other way around, he muses, I’d be slapped with a MeToo hashtag. The shoulder of her silk dressing gown slips down, revealing bare skin Kai tries hard not to see.
“Thank you, Mrs Beaufort—”
“—Oh, please, call me Carmen. Life’s too short for formalities.”
He stops in his tracks. The house is, to put it in simpleton terms, bloody ginormous. And it reminds Kai of Danielewsji’s House of Leaves with its impossible interior dimensions at odds with its exterior. And it’s grand, grander beyond anything he has ever before seen. Kai is no stranger to wealth, not that he’s seen much of it since his father disowned him for becoming a ‘woke leftie’—as if.
Kai has no political affiliation, which is probably why he gets called a conspiracy theorist. Unbelievable really, that being mildly aware of a crumbling power system that no longer serves the people, and instead only acts to profit global conglomerates… stop. He’s doing it again. In a minute, he’ll be at the Waitrose checkout with a year’s supply of tin foil.
“Tell me, darling,” Carmen begins, fluttering her fingers about the air, “how does all this… EMF work?”
“You did read the information pack I emailed outlining the testing and procedures?” Kai asks.
Carmen’s laugh is the tinkle of crystal. “I believe my P.A. had a little read. She deals with such matters.”
Matters of such little concern as your home being filled with an invisible soup of radiation causing cancer and mental health issues? He wants to ask, but stops himself.
Kai contorts his lips into a smile and counts to nine to calm his mind as he places his large duffle bag onto the marble floor. He shuffles through his testing equipment to calm his annoyance—he can’t afford to be surly. He pulls out his EMF testing device, turns it on, and immediately, it bleeps. There is a graphometer flickering between green and amber. He waves the machine around, and as he does, the door, still ajar, opens further.
“Hello?” a - quite frankly - stunning girl asks, peering her head around the door.
Girl? Kai doesn’t know why he calls anyone under thirty a girl, but it is what it is. She steps inside and looks at once both bewildered and… what’s the word?
Broken?
Lost?
Her hair is the same ebony as Mabel’s and her eyes the same glimmer of gold. Bit weird. If he did believe in signs, he’d think this was a message from Claudia, perhaps. But he doesn’t believe in signs, so Kai tries not to stare and instead pulls a pencil from behind his ear and jots some notes on his clipboard. He’s not writing anything of great importance. He is biding himself time because, without wanting to be overly dramatic, the world just felt like it tipped on its axis.
“Morning, Sophie darling,” Carmen says. “You’re late.”
Kai wonders if Sophie might be Carmen’s daughter. She certainly has the fine features to be a supermodel’s progeny, despite her lack of height. And he knows from the preppy students he sees about town in Oxford that it’s on trend to dress down; those faded ripped jeans could cost a fortune. He doesn’t mean to, but he really does smile this time, though it is not returned.
The girl, Sophie, stares at him, and there’s something in those penetrating eyes; something akin to sadness but with sharper edges. And now he’s seen it, he can’t unsee it, and her attractiveness seems to dissolve into something paler than her complexion, and the world, thank God, rights itself.
The girl closes the door behind her and walks towards him, his machine’s bleeps intensify. She stops and stares, all cold and judgmental. Her eyes are red and bloodshot as if she’s been on an all-night bender, or, crying her soul out.
“What’s this?” she asks, nodding towards his EMF reader. “A new episode of Britain’s Most Haunted?”
Kai lowers his device with barely contained disappointment. His eye roll is a thing of splendour.
Beside him, Carmen barks a delighted laugh. “Oh, aren’t you a funny one?” Her warmth is about as honest as her orange spray tan. “Darling, this is Kai. Kai is checking the home for EMF. He’s an expert.”
“Kai the EMF guy,” the girl called Sophie mutters. “Nice.”
“Kai, this is Sophie, my cleaner.” Carmen places her hand on his arm and gives it a teasing squeeze. “She will help you with anything you need, won’t you, Sophie?”
The girl’s amber eyes slide from Carmen to her hand on Kai’s arm and finally to his face. Her expression doesn’t change. He offers a tight smile but the girl (there he goes again), appears unreachable, as if she is here and not here—too far away, in another world perhaps.
Sullen little thing, Kai thinks, and goes about his business. But as he steps closer to her, his machine bleeps louder and he has a good idea why. He strides right up to her and waggles the machine about her head. She pulls away, scowling in a way that doesn’t suit her face at all.
“Ha!” Kai barks. “I knew it. Those Bluetooth earbuds? Those cordless thingys? They gotta go. Give them here.”
He holds out his hands, beckoning with his fingers. She balks, as most people do when he tells them the same thing. But she follows his orders, albeit reluctantly, and pulls out her pods to place them in his palm. He waggles his wailing machine at them and shows Sophie a frequency graph flashing vibrant red. She shrugs.
“They might look small and innocuous,” Kai starts, “but they’re not passive, they’re active transmitters—and you’ve got them in your head. In your actual head!” Kai honestly can’t believe these things are even legal.
Sophie is given him that look, the one that tells him he’s being melodramatic.
He turns back to Carmen who watches him with such flirtatious intensity, it makes his skin crawl. “I need to see all your devices, anything Bluetooth or wireless. Anything SMART.” He turns to Sophie with a grin, then. “Do you know what I think SMART stands for?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me,” Sophie mutters.
He enunciates each word: “So. Much. Awful. Radiation.” Kai says proudly.
“What about T?” the girl asks.
“Thank you, but I don’t drink tea,” Kai says, suppressing his urge to laugh.
Sophie’s mouth bobs open and closed. “Is that supposed to be… a joke?”
Kai smiles with child-like earnestness, “But if you’re making a coffee?”
Sophie is stunned into silence. Carmen chortles. “Sophie darling, pour Kai a fresh coffee and be a good girl and go gather up all my devices. My driver will be here any moment and I just need to freshen up for this meeting.” Carman allows her silken dressing gown to fall from a shoulder again as she ascends the wide, curling staircase and casts a demure-not-demure look over her shoulder at Kai.
Oh.
God.
He diverts his eyes as quickly as possible, and Sophie catches them. It’s a strange, awkward little exchange, and Kai doesn’t know why, but he wants to ask the girl if she is okay? She looks like she could do with a shoulder to cry on… or a stiff tequila.
“I’ll get the devices,” the girl says with a resigned sigh when Carmen is out of view. “To be honest, most of them are still in their boxes, unused. It’s not about using them with Carmen, it’s about owning them.”
Kai detects several layers within that short statement as she squeezes past him in the doorway. The machine suddenly screams to life.
“Jesus Christ!” Kai bellows, his machine is having a fit. It is no longer beeping and instead, one long, painful, incessant squeal emits.
“Hasn’t that thing got a volume control?” Sophie shouts, covering her ears. “What’s it doing?”
“I don’t know!” Kai shouts over its squeals.
“I thought you were an expert?” Sophie yells.
“I am!” he shouts indigent.
He points the machine toward Sophie once more, and the ring gets even louder. Even higher. “It’s you?” he says. “What other devices do you have?”
Sophie shrugs, holding out her phone, but even when she turns it on to airplane mode, his machine continues screaming.
“There must be something else?” Kai shouts, bashing the side of his machine with the palm of his hand, the noise grating on his bones. The girl frantically checks her pockets—in her fist, she holds out a string of tired tissue papers, a bunch of receipts she’ll never need, a small braid of hair, strange, and half a pack of chewing gum…
An electric pulse emits from the machine, shocking Kai. He barks a yelp and drops the machine.
It crashes to the ground.
Sophie jumps back, smashing into a sideboard.
The machine’s squeal turns to a warble; its dying breath.
A short-lived silence.
But the silence is somehow made louder by the impossible-to-stop tumble of an exquisite blue and white vase toppling from the sideboard. In a gasp of held breath, it smashes to the ground between their feet to a crescendo of a million porcelain screams.
Sophie and Kai have only one more moment of stunned silence to share before a different scream erupts.
“My vase? My vase! My fucking vase!” Carmen shrieks from over the mezzanine on the first floor. She races down the stairs. “For fuck’s sake you useless klutz, that’s an original Ming!”
Kai looks down, his head tipped to the side. “Well, it was—”
“That’s it. Sophie, get out. You’re fired! Get out!”
“But—” Kai begins. Carmen thrusts her palm towards his face and silences him. There is something very unfair about the series of events that leaves Kai feeling this entire thing was his fault, despite the girl having smacked into the sideboard. If it wasn’t for him dropping the machine…
The woman’s eyes are red; devil red like the stained glass windows in the door. “Get out! Now!”
“Mrs Beaufort—” Kai tries, but Carmen doesn’t hear or doesn’t care. “This was my fault.”
The girl called Sophie snaps him a look of utter surprise, as if she has never had anyone stand up for her in her entire life.
“I said, get out!” Carmen ignores him.
The girl turns to Carmen—her mouth is open in a perfect ‘O’
Kai looks at the vase smashed into a million pieces next to his broken EMF machine, then back at Sophie, and he pulls a strange face that he hopes says sorry, but more likely says fuck.
And then the girl does something totally unexpected.
She smiles; it is a smile full of sad contradictions, and it breaks Kai’s heart. Her eyes are rimmed with tears. He can tell she fights hard to stop them falling by the balled-up fists by her sides, and in that split second, Kai understands a new depth of hopelessness. And without even a murmur of goodbye, she turns and walks out of the house.
Kai doesn’t believe in signs, but he does find it poetically fitting that a cloud passes over the sun outside at the same time as the door slams behind her, causing a shadow to intrude through the windows, and crawl across the fancy marble room. It strips away any colour, tarnishing the sparkling bright corals with an intense melancholy which has such density, his EMF machine could probably pick up on it.
If it wasn’t broken.
Bit awkward, thinks Kai.
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I can't think of a more appropriate title for this chapter, and I am HERE for it. :D