Today

Pinned: "Today." by Exterminators (posted 7:02 AM, 3,311 replies)

cold_open_77 · 7:10 AM · 1,204 likes: I did not sleep. I regret nothing.

mothlight · 7:15 AM · 988 likes: Okay, the drawings were incredible, but one word?? Chills.

m_aurelius_jr · 7:31 AM · 640 likes: Updating the Index. Commitment: 4.9. Plausibility: a firm 1.

velvet_hour · 8:02 AM · 411 likes: Whatever happens tonight, thank you for the best three weeks this room has ever had.

On the day it happened, Asher Cole was the happiest he had ever been.

He knew it the moment he woke, a full hour before the alarm, with the gray light coming in around the shade and the laundromat's first dryer thumping below the floor. He lay there and listened to his own heart. There was nothing wrong with it. It was only going a little faster than it should, as it did on the morning of an exam for which he was fully prepared, and he lay with his eyes on the ceiling and let the feeling grow, a bright clean excitement, like the first day of a holiday, and then he reached for the phone on the blanket, and there it was.

Today.

A single word, in white letters on black, with the mask above it. Posted at two minutes past seven, while he slept. No picture. No drawing. No date, because there was no need of a date any longer. It stood there at the top of the page in its stark plain type, and under it the replies were already pouring down the screen faster than he could follow, and the little number beside it had passed three thousand.

He read it four times. He felt the hair rise along his arms.

He dressed quickly. He put on the blue tie that he thought made him look like someone who might be asked back in the fall, and he ate his cereal standing, and ran down the stairs two at a time, and out into the cold bright street, where the sky was a hard pale blue and the pavement shone from the night's rain, and he walked the six blocks to the subway with a spring in his stride that he had not felt since college. People passed him with their heads down. A man at the corner was selling roasted chestnuts out of a cart. The whole city looked to him like a place in which something was about to be revealed.

…

The morning at the office passed in a golden blur.

He was aware of the meeting. He was aware of Hargrove at the head of the table, tapping the pen. But it came to him through glass, from a great distance. He took notes with a smile on his face. When Hargrove asked him, in front of the others, whether he had finished the revised summary, he answered Yes, sir, it's in your inbox, in a cheerful ringing voice, and was half aware of a ripple of surprise around the table, and of Dana looking up at him. It was true. He had finished it at six that morning, in forty minutes, with a lightness of mind that astonished him. He had cut it to a single page.

"Thank you, Cole," said Hargrove, and there was a long pause, and Asher thought he saw something odd cross the older man's face, a slight lift of the eyebrows, as if at the sight of a dog standing on two legs. "That's... good. Next item."

He could not stop smiling. He tried. He pressed his lips together and looked at the table and thought about statutes, and the corners of his mouth went on lifting of their own accord, and the day went forward.

By noon, he had read the thread nineteen times.

…

The canteen was nearly empty when he came down. It was a Friday, the day before a long weekend, and half of the building had left early with their luggage in the trunks of their cars. There were a dozen people scattered at the tables, and a smell of onions and bay leaf, and in the big steel pot on the counter, behind a wall of steam, the soup of the day.

Asher took the corner table by the vending machines.

He set down his tray, and propped his phone against the napkin dispenser, and sat with both elbows on the table and his chin in his hands. He did not touch the food. He did not need it. The whole of the forum lay open before him in a single glowing column, and he went through it from the top, with the bright greedy attention of a man at the last chapter of a long novel.

Okay but if this is real it's the best performance art ever.

What time? Does anyone know what time?

He said "tonight." He didn't say what hour. Do we just refresh forever??

I took the day off. Don't tell my boss.

I made popcorn. Do not judge me.

He laughed aloud, a bright short bark, and a man at the next table glanced up. He did not care. The room was so alive! There was a kind of electricity in it, as at a stadium before a match, three thousand voices all calling to one another across the dark, and he was among them, and he felt that of all those voices his was perhaps the one that understood best what the evening was. He wrote a comment. He wrote it carefully, in a clear professional style, and it said: Whatever you believe about the authenticity of the project, the craft is remarkable. The sustained narrative discipline alone is worth the admission. He posted it and watched it climb. He wrote a second, and a third. He typed with both thumbs, so fast that the phone slid on the napkin dispenser, and he caught it and set it back, and went on.

He did not hear the paddle.

He did not notice that the soup pot behind the counter had been left unattended for some minutes, that its steam had slackened, that no one stood at the counter with the wooden paddle going round seven times and the little rap on the rim. The pot was simmering. No one was serving it.

A shadow fell across the table.

"Excuse me."

The voice was low and thick and strangely uneven, as if the speaker had been running. Asher did not look up. He had just reached a comment that said please let it be a hoax, please let it be a hoax, please let it be, and he gave it a like with his thumb, and said, "Mm. In a minute."

"Excuse me. Please."

Something about the voice caught at him. He looked up, annoyed, and saw Tomas.

The old cook was standing at the end of his table, in the white apron, with the long paddle still in his right hand like a staff, and his face was not the face Asher knew. The color had gone from it. The kind heavy brown eyes were wide and fixed, and they were not looking at Asher at all. They were looking at the phone. His mouth hung a little open, and a drop of sweat was running down from his temple along the side of his jaw, and the paddle, Asher saw, was trembling, with a fine rapid tremor, so that the wooden tip knocked softly and continuously against the leg of the table.

"Tomas? Are you all right?"

Tomas did not answer. He raised his left hand, slowly, and pointed. His finger shook.

"That," he said. "The picture."

"The picture?"

"The little one. With the mask." He had to stop, and swallow. "The one next to the words."

Asher looked at the screen. In the corner of the thread, beside the pinned post, was the avatar, a white mask on a black circle, the size of a coin. He had looked at it a thousand times. He had stopped seeing it, as one stops seeing a familiar face in a photograph. It looked up at him now with its narrow slits for eyes and its blank mouth, and he saw it, for a moment, as Tomas must have, a thing that could make a man's knees shake.

"It's an avatar," he said. "It's a forum. A group I'm in."

"What is the name?" said Tomas. "The name of the person."

"Exterminators. It's just a username."

The old man closed his eyes. His lips moved. He said something that Asher did not catch, and then again, in his own language, in a rapid, soft, broken mutter. It sounded like a prayer, or a curse. His big hand went up and gripped the edge of the table, and the knuckles whitened, and the table gave a small tick against the floor.

"What group?" he said at last, in a whisper. "What is it called? What is in it? What do they do there?"

…

Afterward, Asher was never able to explain why he did what he did.

He had not meant to be unkind. That was the thing. He thought about it later, on a great many nights, sitting in the dark on the edge of a bed, going back over the moment again and again with the hopeless care of a man searching a field for a lost key. There had been no malice in him. There had been only the high, golden, careless feeling that filled him from head to foot, the feeling of a man for whom the whole world is a story and everybody in it a character, and who has just discovered that one of them has asked to come in.

He thought: how delightful.

"It's called The Quiet Room," he said. "It's a kind of... horror-fiction community. Very well done. There's a story going on tonight. Almost a game. Everyone's reading along." He was smiling. He could feel himself smiling, an eager, generous, expansive smile, the smile of a host. "You've never been on? You'd like it. It's all fake, of course. Everyone knows that. It's in the first line."

"Fake."

"Fiction. It's performance."

"I want to see it," said Tomas.

"Of course!" Asher was already searching his pockets. He found the pen from his breast pocket and pulled a paper napkin from the dispenser and flattened it on the table. "Here. I'll write it down. You can look at it on your phone tonight. The site's a bit hidden, you need the exact address. I'll send you the invite code, if you like. I'm one of the senior members."

He wrote it out in big careful letters, THE QUIET ROOM, and under it the address of the site, and under that, after a moment's thought, the word Welcome. He tore off the corner with the writing on it and held it out, between his two fingers, as a man offers a ticket.

Tomas took it.

His hand shook so badly that the little square of paper rattled. He held it close to his face. He read it, and read it again, and Asher saw his eyes go from left to right and back, and a muscle begin to jump along the side of his jaw.

"Don't," said Tomas.

"Sorry?"

"Do not talk to this person." He said it in a low voice, very distinct, without the least trace of his usual soft English. He looked at Asher, then, directly, for the first time. "Do not answer him. If he writes to you, you do not answer. You hear me? Whatever he says. Whoever he is."

Asher stared.

And then, helplessly, he began to laugh.

"Tomas," he said. "Are you serious? It's a story. I told you, it's art. It's the most extraordinary piece of..." He shook his head, still laughing, with a kind of fond indulgence. "Are you jealous? Is that what this is? You feel left out of the game?"

The old man didn't answer.

"Because I'll get you in. I told you I would. You don't have to be afraid of the big mask."

Tomas turned and walked away.

He did not run. He walked, with the paddle still in his hand, the length of the canteen, between the tables, past the two men in suits and the cleaner with her mop, and the square of napkin was crumpled in his left fist. He walked behind the counter. He stood a moment before the big steel pot, where the soup had begun to catch and send up a thin gray smell of scorching. He looked into it. Then he laid the long wooden paddle down on the counter, quite gently, beside the rim.

He took off his apron, and hung it on the hook, and went out through the back door without looking round. The pot went on boiling behind him.

Asher watched him go. He shrugged, and chuckled, and turned back to the screen, where the number beside the pinned post had passed four thousand, and where, at that moment, the little gray notice appeared in the corner. He was still smiling. He did not think about Tomas again for twelve days.