Inspection

by Josh Malerman

  Spoiled rotten, D.A.D. said.

  It’s just a door, Q had said in the Orchard. But Q knew better than that. Q knew J was asking what happened to a boy inside.

  Was it Location they searched for in the Inspections? Or was it Vees? The names had changed so many times over the years, and the explanations didn’t stay the same for very long. The boys never asked for one.

  Why not?

  D.A.D. hardly explained anything at all. What he did say he said in passing, casually, as if suggesting a game of Boats.

  Excellent Inspection, J. No signs of Moldus at all.

  I’m glad to hear you don’t have Rotts.

  No Vees, J. And that, my boy, is a good thing.

  Oh, J knew the Inspections were for his own good. He knew the Parenthood was doing all it could to protect him and the others from unfathomably dangerous things. He loved them for it. He loved them for getting him through the years when he was too small to protect himself, too little to follow the rules.

  Moldus, Rotts, Vees, Placasores, Vegicks.

  Location.

  J studied the shape in the woods.

  His mind, however, the track he was on, couldn’t be stopped. He thought back to the infirmary, back to the Check-Up room, back to the thousands of Inspections he’d endured.

  Was it all some sort of test? Was Location the kind of thing a boy could fail? Was he supposed to encounter Rotts in the woods and eventually overcome it on his lonesome own?

  And if he didn’t, if he failed?

  Exactly what would happen if any of the many diseases with the changing names were discovered on him?

  No boy had ever failed an Inspection. Not even A and Z.

  “So why do Inspections scare you?”

  The adult tone of his voice scared him even more than his thoughts, and J looked over his shoulder, half-expecting to see a full-grown man. D.A.D., perhaps, with the answers. Always, D.A.D. over the shoulders of the Alphabet Boys.

  But J was alone. Alone with this new voice. A voice that sounded smarter than he believed himself to be.

  J almost wanted to see A and Z again, through the glass, as if, in death, they might explain things to him. Luxley had written about a ghost once, the first time any of the Alphabet Boys had ever been exposed to the idea at all. In Luxley’s book, a man died and returned from the dead to instruct a young boy on the right way to live. To study, to focus, to make progress in whatever field he chose to devote his life. But, despite the daunting message, it was the concept of the ghost that shocked J most.

  J looked to the pines and was surprised to see the branches and leaves in great detail. The Yard was no longer shadowed with snowfall but rather a blinding, glossing white.

  “Oh no,” J said, feeling the unstoppable pinpricks of horror. “The sun.”

  J had no idea how long he’d been standing at the window on the first floor and certainly no idea when he’d woken from his dream of A and Z. But the sun was coming up and that meant that, sooner rather than later, the tinny voice from the silver speaker on the eighth-floor hall would announce the day’s Inspection.

  Would they catch this on him? Would they find it on his person, the fact that he’d spent the night staring out into the pines that bordered the Yard?

  A door clicked open down the black-tiled hall, in the direction of D.A.D.’s quarters.

  J ran. Quiet as he could, he ran to the door marked STAIRS and then took them up again, realizing at the fourth floor that he was less afraid of the vision of the dead boys he’d seen tonight than he was of the living grown men who might be patrolling the first floor already. Inspectors. Staff. D.A.D. And by the time J reached the still partially open door to his quarters and slipped inside, his mind was full of madness: the infirmary, Luxley’s books, the names of the many diseases, the Inspectors with their magnifying glasses held close to his naked body, and the endless questions D.A.D. asked in the Check-Up room every morning of every day of J’s suddenly confusing life.

  He got into bed fast.

  And he realized, too, pulling the covers to his nose, that, despite the fact that two of his brothers had been spoiled rotten and that he’d dreamed of their festering forms, he’d never been so scared in his life as he was just then. Scared to hear the voice in the hall.

  Scared of the coming Inspection.

  Warren Learns the Printing Press

  Half-dazed, the fingertips of his right hand blistered bad, his shirt stained with sweat and cold coffee, Warren walked the dark halls of the basement, headed places he shouldn’t go.

  His mind was moving a mile a minute, hadn’t moved this fast in years. Years. In fact, Warren couldn’t remember a writing experience quite like the one he’d had overnight. How many pages did he write? He’d gone through a legal pad and a half, no doubt about that, a seventy-five-page handwritten cannon blast that even smelled a bit like gunpowder. Holy shit it felt good. So good that he wished he was in Milwaukee, could phone up the Gangsters, tell ’em all to come down to Don Don’s, boy did he have a story to tell.

  “Seventy-five pages?”

  He wanted to smile but his face hurt from keeping a straight one all day, all night, and into the morning, as the sounds of the Parenthood waking slowly dribbled into his office. The truth was, the smile he searched for wasn’t a happy one anyway, hardly even proud. But seventy-five pages was a quarter of a book. This book. And how many pages did he need? Wouldn’t one suffice? One page with a detailed, vivid, living, breathing…

  …woman?

  Oh, if he were to bump into Richard now. If, turning the corner ahead, Richard were to suddenly pop out of the shadows, his beard rendered snake-hole black by the bright red of his gaudy ever-present jacket and gloves. He’d most likely place one of those hands squarely on Warren’s shoulder and say, Why the sudden interest in the printing press, Warren?

  “Who said anything about the pressroom?” Warren said out loud, his voice bizarrely hoarse, as if he’d recorded himself reading seventy-five pages rather than writing them.

  “Warren Bratt,” a voice spoke. Warren turned to face it quick. “I was beginning to think you didn’t like us.”

  Warren shook his head no, prepared to lie if he had to, no no no, I haven’t begun writing a book I shouldn’t be writing. No no, I wasn’t intentionally heading for the printing press.

  But here he was all the same.

  It was the printer Mark who spoke to him. The lithe man emerged from the smoke and shadows within the cramped space and extended a hand. Warren took it.

  “You remember Clarence, doncha, Warren?” Mark thumbed toward a man hunched by the press. “The grumpiest man in the Parenthood. Be nice, Clarence.”

  “I remember Clarence.” Warren’s voice again. Hoarse. As if some part of him had slept and was just waking as the rest of him wrote that book.

  “What brings you to this side of the basement?” Mark asked.

  “Fresh air.”

  Mark laughed. Clarence eyed Warren from behind the machine he was fixing.

  “Figured I can relate to you two more than most,” Warren said, attempting to make something of this meeting. The very something he’d come here for, whether he’d admitted it to himself or not. “The kitchen is a fucking maze to me, and good luck squeezing an ounce of entertainment out of accounting.”

  Mark laughed again.

  “We’re actually setting today’s news right now,” Mark said, wiping ink on his jeans. “Why don’t you come see how it’s done?”

  Warren eyed the man as if Mark had just announced to the whole Parenthood his intent.

  Richard, Warren could hear the wiry, greasy man saying, Warren stopped by. Pretty interested in the printing press. What do you think inspired him?

  Warren felt like it was all over him. A broken egg.

  Intrigue.

  “
Clarence won’t tell you himself, but it took all morning just to fix a smudge on page eighty-five of the new science book. Got it set, anyway.”

  Clarence grunted. Warren watched as he traded out one wrench for another.

  He heard a bootheel in the hall.

  Richard?

  Are you happy, Warren?

  Do you like the Parenthood, Warren?

  What are you doing over here, Warren?

  An Inspector tipped his hat to Warren as he passed. It wasn’t Richard. But it was close.

  “Come on in,” Mark said. He even motioned with his hand the way drug dealers do with their marks. The way people do when you shouldn’t follow them. This way. Warren followed him. “The paper’s easy,” Mark said, preparing the ink. “But a Luxley book takes about half the day.”

  “More ’n that,” Clarence grumbled.

  Half the day.

  “I’m always a hassle,” Warren said. “One way or another.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Mark said, smiling.

  “How many hours is half the day?” Warren asked.

  It made him nervous, asking questions directly rather than waiting for the information to be offered up.

  “A good seven hours,” Mark said.

  “More ’n that,” Clarence said, swapping wrenches again.

  Mark stepped to where the templates of the news lay spread upon a transparent tabletop. Warren stepped farther into the room. Whether he looked too interested or not, he needed to see this part.

  Mercifully, Mark was a show-off.

  “Say this was your book,” Mark began.

  Yeah, let’s say it was one of my books.

  “We don’t need to set every page, but we damn well need to eyeball ’em. Things get stuck all the time. Pages are off a centimeter and the whole thing is shit-city. You’ve probably noticed inconsistencies yourself. It’s the best we can do, using this old heap.”

  “It’s a good machine,” Clarence said.

  “Sure,” Mark said. “When we’re running the news, it’s a beauty queen. But dammit if those Luxley books don’t make us mean.”

  Warren watched everything. Every movement Mark made. He counted the steps of the process, one, two, three, and wished he was able to write them down. Instead, he experienced it like he would a story. Chapters. And tried to retain them the same way.

  “What are you fixing?” Warren asked Clarence.

  “What Clarence is trying so valiantly to adjust,” Mark said, “is the actual ink vat. Fucker gets clogged all the time. And unless you feel like writing out all thirty copies on your own, Clarence has got to keep it going. Can’t have the news without ink, can you?”

  Mark crossed the room, stopping at what looked like big towel-dryer rolls. He nicked his shoulder on the string of the room’s hanging lightbulb and it swung. Warren thought of an interrogation.

  “The pages run through these twice,” Mark said. “Once on the way in and once to help dry the ink. But if we’ve got the rollers too tight we can smudge the pages, and if we’ve got them too loose we can end up with the words overlapping on the page above and below it. It’s a delicate business, but I suppose you got your own problems to deal with, Warren.”

  A delicate business. The Delicate Years.

  Warren wished Mark would stop saying his name.

  Who came to visit you today?

  Warren.

  Who did you show the printing press to today?

  Warren.

  Who was sweating and looked like he might try to bring down the Parenthood today?

  Warren.

  Warren pointed to his own head.

  “All my problems are up here,” he said.

  Mark smiled. “I like that! And that’s why you’re the writer. You do got a way with words.”

  “A lot of words,” Clarence muttered.

  Mark pointed to the pages of the news, spread out on the table.

  “Have you ever seen one of your books laid out like this?”

  “No. Didn’t know it happened like this.”

  “I imagine it’d be like seeing what the human body looks like for the first time, under all that skin.”

  Warren watched him closely.

  “The editor, Jim, gives it to us this way. After he’s typed out your chicken scratch. Technically we could run copies of your rough drafts, but who’d read that?”

  Yeah, Warren thought. Who, indeed?

  Mark went on, “We set it, of course, but we get every page separated, one-sided, formatted just this way. I’d explain to you why, but we’d be here till lunch. Come here, this will interest you.”

  Mark flipped a switch on the side of the table and both their faces were lit from below. It worried Warren, being this far into the room. Looked less like a man stopping by and more like one staying.

  “Now, you’ve got to keep the pages within these borders or not only will some words get axed from the final pressing but you’ll clog the whole thing and it’ll take Clarence all day to pull the pages out. Trust me. We’ve done it before. Just don’t bring up Allan Prime if you don’t want to make Clarence crazy.”

  “I had no idea there’d been an issue with that book,” Warren said.

  Clarence peered around the machine.

  “Nobody told you the work we had to do on that one?” Mark asked.

  “Nobody.”

  Clarence huffed and got back to work.

  “It’s really pretty neat,” Mark said. “You line them up like so, and when the machine’s running, you flip the green switch and send the pages through and your book comes out like a book. Bound, I mean. It’s no cakewalk. Grumpy Clarence here would run me through the rollers if he heard me say it was.”

  Chapters. Warren felt like he’d retained the info as if given to him in chapters. He badly wanted to get back to his office and write it down.

  He looked to the wall clock.

  “You gotta get back?” Mark asked.

  “I should.”

  “Breakfast?”

  “I should.”

  What you should do is sleep. What you should not do is write another seventy-five pages of a book that will get you killed.

  “Jeez-o-pizza pie,” Mark said. “I probably talked your ear off and here you are just taking a stroll before breakfast.”

  “Oh, it was cool,” Warren said. Then, “It’s nice to see other people have just as much bullshit to deal with as I do.”

  Mark nodded. Clarence looked up from the ink vat.

  Nobody said, Hey, know what? This is fucking insane, us working in a place where we’re hiding the knowledge of women from twenty-four boys who we call the Alphabet Boys. This is FUCKING CRIMINALLY INSANE.

  Warren headed for the door. It seemed to get farther away the closer he got.

  “Stop by anytime,” Mark said. “And good luck with this.” He pointed to his head like Warren had earlier.

  Warren half-smiled and nodded. Just a couple of coworkers talking shop around the watercooler. Nothing insane here. Nothing at all.

  When Warren stepped out of the printing room, he looked both ways down the dark stone corridor. To his right, about a hundred feet away, a red arrow glistened. It had been painted long before Warren arrived at the Parenthood, but he knew what it was. The one hallway in all the Parenthood that only Richard was allowed to walk.

  The Glasgow Tunnel.

  For reasons Warren couldn’t articulate, that red arrow scared him as deeply as the Corner door.

  Heading back to his office, keeping the chapters fresh in his mind, he heard another set of bootheels on the stone floor. A flock of red-leather birds took flight in his imagination, and he realized he had no good excuse prepared.

  He thought of the Corner. The Alphabet Boys had reached the Delicate Years, that stupi
d appellation Richard couldn’t stop using. Warren had never seen Richard quite this…

  …piqued.

  You’ve been a bad boy, Warren Bratt. Go sit in the Corner.

  And every thought of the Corner came with an image of its door opening…just for him.

  You’re spoiled, Warren. Spoiled rotten.

  The bootheels again, closer.

  Warren slipped into a closet, a tool room, he couldn’t be sure. And it wasn’t until he was fully inside, the door closed, that he realized how terrible the decision had been.

  Not having a prepared excuse for wandering the basement was one thing, but being caught hiding was suicide.

  Worth the money, Bratt? It was Arlene’s voice. Arlene from the Writing Gangsters. Worth making money in a world you can’t leave?

  No, Warren thought. No, it’s not. He closed his eyes and imagined the title page of the book he’d written seventy-five scorching pages for.

  Needs

  (a novel of reality and what’s real)

  Working at the Parenthood, every waking (and sleeping) moment came with a bit of fear. But Warren hadn’t been this scared in a long time.

  Nobody’s gonna open the door. Calm down. It would be too…too…too fucking terrible. CALM DOWN.

  The boots were very close now. Warren heard them as if he wore them himself.

  Clack-clack, clack-clack.

  He flattened himself to the wall. Almost knocked something over in the process. He tried to keep the chapters quiet in his mind, his knowledge of the printing press like an autopsy of a still-living hyena, messy and loud.

  Looks like you could print a book all by your lonesome little self, couldn’t you now, Warren?

  The boots stopped outside the closet door, an inch of wood away. Warren could hear dust under one heel.

  He balled up a fist. He understood clearly that he was prepared to murder whoever opened that door.

  The doorknob turned.

  “Dan!”

  Warren leaned forward at the sound of a name. His fist up and ready in the dark.

  “Dan, hurry up! We’ve got about four minutes here!”