43. Curiouser and Curiouser

Mateo woke up with no idea where he was, which was getting to be par for the course these days. It was dark and he was sleeping on a floor on a couple blankets with his coat over him and his head on a backpack. He could also hear some dudes snoring. Paradoxically, that probably meant he wasn’t back in jail after all.

Right. Station X. Weird giant gingerbread house. Huts and Blocks and stuff. Codes. Keeping your future mouth shut so you didn’t cause the end of the world as we know it or get Three-Eyes to get wind of it, which honestly sounded about equally scary.

This was some kind of dorm, right. They’d said they’d get him a bunk or something tomorrow and he said take your time, whenever, this was a good gig and they had important stuff to worry about.

He was kind of regretting that now. It was like waking up early on a camping trip — you were never getting back to sleep ever so you might as well get up.

Nigel had told him (maybe five or so times, since he’d wanted to hear more than once) that he could walk around alone on the property so long as he carried his ID and stayed out of buildings he wasn’t allowed in. He seemed really sure Mateo wouldn’t get shot doing that, so maybe it was worth bailing and going for a walk. It smelled like early morning, which was good. Walking around in pitch dark on his first day seemed like a bad idea.

It turned out that since he wanted them, his boots were right at the bottom of the backpack. Good to know the basic laws of nature were still true. He tried to wrestle them out without waking anybody up. He eventually got them out and hung them around his neck by the laces while he tried to find his Mr. Rodgers sweater by feel. He got it eventually, put it and his coat on over the t-shirt he’d been sleeping in, made sure he had his ID, made sure again, and snuck out. Nobody woke up.

It was cold and misty and the sky was just lightening up from black when he stepped out. It was that weird in-between hour that feels like it doesn’t really quite exist, like this was some time that reality knocked off for some routine maintenance.

The dorm was one of those thrown-up “huts” facing a smooth stretch of grass leading to a gravel trail with tire tracks in it. There were big trees dotted around and some of those hedges, like somebody who’d never seen real woods had tried to fake it. It made the whole vibe even more fake-hour spooky. He kind of liked it.

He leaned against the wall and started putting on his boots. It was great to wear them again. Three-Eyes must have missed that they had modern material in them just like there was in his jumpsuit, ha ha, too bad Three-Eyes. Well, he was a busy guy, or just didn’t know what gore-tex or fiberglass toecaps looked like back now without running tests or cutting up his boots.

Mateo stood up and walked straight away from the building, leaving a darker trail in the dew, and kept going until he ran into dense hedge taller than his head, like something from that Alice movie. It had a gravel path beside it, so he followed it.

There was something white stuck in the leaves. He thought it was an animal at first, but it didn’t move as he got closer, and then he thought it was trash.

It turned out to be a tea mug balanced on a saucer, shoved into the branches until they stuck. There was still a little tea in the bottom. He stopped and stared at it for a while, scratching his head and getting hair oil on his fingers.

Well, ok. He decided to take it with him and put it back in Hut 2 or somewhere that made more sense than a bush, pulled it out, and kept walking.

The land sloped down, and he eventually found another path and followed it under the big old trees, still bare with early spring. He tried to imagine being so rich a place this size was your yard, not your farm, but his brain just creaked when he tried.

He came out by a big lake, maybe the size of two or three football fields, with beautiful trees and rushes and stuff around it, like they kind of tried to split the difference between real woods and wetlands and a garden. It was starting to get pink with dawn, and fog was rising off of the water. He could just barely see the gingerbread mansion across it. Ah, ok, this must have been where they walked last night.

As he watched, a man came strolling down the lakeshore on the far side from him, apparently drinking from one of those mugs like the one Mateo was still holding. It was pretty hard to see that far in those conditions, but it looked like the guy stopped dead, stood there for a minute, then threw his cup as far as he could out into the lake — Mateo saw the splash — and hurried back towards the mansion.

Mateo stared. They guy didn’t look mad, if his body language was anything to go by. What the heck. Mateo kept walking the next twenty feet to a spot where the grass sloped down to the water, between beds of stuff that looked kind of like cattails, and hunkered down. For a while he just hung out there without moving, taking a break from the world, watching things get lighter. Something pale drifted along the water. Some kind of bird? Were they close enough to the coast to get sea birds here? It seemed to be coming towards him.

It turned out to be another white teacup, balanced on a saucer. While he watched, the water lapped over the edge of the saucer, but the teacup kept going for another thirty feet or so before it overbalanced, the water got in, and it sank.

Mateo gave up, and went back to bed.

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