The Shell House

- The Shell House -

'It was nice to finally learn your name! You've got to tell me more about your nightmare boss. If you want, I can sneak you into the Shell House one night.'

Two weeks passed. No response. I walked to work past pits of black bushes that smelled rotten in the rain.

Then she messaged me. 'Just saw this! Show me those shells!'

That night I stood at the point where our paths converged -- hers sloping down from the Botanical Dome, mine upward from the Server Sheds. But I didn't see her approach until she was right upon me, and pressing a seed bar into my hand.

'I can't stand them,' she said. 'But they're handed out free at the dome.'

The path to the Shell House was steep, and I dutifully chewed seeds while she describe her long day cataloguing cell samples. The paving plateaued and I took her down the steps that ducked to the side door. I pressed my keycard to the plastic sensor. Seeds wedged my teeth apart.

'We're almost done hooking up the network,' I said. The sensor beeped. 'They're going to want the card back soon.'

'The last night of the Shell House...' She moved into the darkness, and I followed, flicking switches.

The collection was diverse and valuable, the eccentric pride of the campus administration, now disinterred from the Zoology Vaults and intended for public display. She kept blinking, from all the day's computer in her eyes, like sharp sand. But then we slowed. She became studious.

We stood surrounded by the plinths of the cephalopods. I had seen them all many times, while working. But with her beside me they took on stranger, clearer forms in the light.

Some were curled inwards, pensive and penitent, enrolled in eternity of blank meditation. Others had hardened with proud exhibitionism, like supreme productions of a remote and alien aesthetics. But wet hot life had wriggled free of them all. Why hadn't I seen this before?

You have to stay very still to really picture that squirming. Try it. Eyes nervy, filmy, pulsing beads. Orifices streaming salty waste. Feelers tugged meaninglessly by deep-sea currents. It had all slipped out long before they were shipped here.

How would it feel, to be loosed from your shell, and lie half-buried in that silt, in that mineral silence?

An awareness, slowly growing, of her fingers between mine.

We were standing before a hulking crustacean. Sunburn-pink splotches where it bulged up to the light -- milky opalescence in its dim inner folds. Her fingers tightened, and I felt the heat of her breath before I heard her words.

'Imagine grilling this guy up with a *big* wedge of lime.'

But at some point our hands must have slipped apart.

Because after we had wandered into the Grand Atrium I looked up and saw volumes of unlit air between the green panes, and I saw the sea snails ranked up in perfect platoons, as if in preparation for a ceremony -- but I couldn't see her.

Then I heard her shoes clanging steel. I found the spiral staircase, still ringing from her ascent, and I followed her up to a high mezzanine where the Silurian fossils hung on wires in the dark -- where she was already leaning on the railings.

And for a moment we stood breathing the same prehistoric dust.

'Do you know the bio of the donor?' she said.

The donor who had established the collection, the old Victorian. No, I didn't, nothing beyond his plaque mounted in the entrance hall.

'I looked him up, at work,' she said, 'before I went to meet you. Do you know how he died? How he made the bequeathal?

No.

'Well. He's in Paris, to meet a dealer, of shells, obviously. To purchase a rare find from the islands -- what are they called? -- where Gaugin was painting his girls. The night before his appointment, he goes drinking, alone, and he meets a prostitute, a young Parisian man.'

The mezzanine floor was metal grillwork. You could drop a coin through the holes to the marble below.

'He follows the man to a park,' she continued. 'It's night, there's no lamps in the park. There's the lake, there's a grotto, and they go to the grotto. They have sex. Then the man takes out a small knife, and stabs the shell collector, several times. The collector's bleeding and the man steals all the money from his pockets, the collector can't stop him.

'Then as he's fleeing the collector calls out. He's calling out, crawling and dragging himself across the stones and he calls out for the man to come back. And for some reason he does -- can you imagine him bending down, kneeling so close above his face, to hear the words? -- because the next day he posts a letter that the collector wrote while he lay dying.

'The fringe of the paper is dark from soaking up blood, and his handwriting is shaky and frantic. But in the letter he leaves all his shells to the public, his whole collection, care of the university. That's the story. That's the origin of the Shell House.'

I looked down over the railing, at the plunging space of the atrium, at the backs of sea snails, burnished darkly. It was like an ocean drained of its waters. And we hung above it, on metal that seemed, slightly, to sway.

'But why did the prostitute feel he had to post the letter?'

'Don't ask me,' she said. 'But those are the facts.'

I think it was the fricative of her 'fact', her front teeth pressing into her lip, that surfaced what had been building inside me. Small incredible woman. I wanted her. I reached out, aiming roughly to where the cut of her top exposed freckled clavicle.

But she withdrew. It was reflex, a kind of spasm. Something had crackled across her nerve endings. I saw alarm in her eyes and I felt at fault. I felt squeamish of my own hand. And I felt a pang anger towards her.

'Let's head out,' I said. My hand was back in jacket pocket, clenched around the seed bar's plastic wrapper.

'No, wait, I like it in here. And we haven't seen the east wing yet.'

'It's unfinished. There's nothing there.'

'I want to see it.'

Side-chambers and galleries branched off from the east wing's archway. The displays there were empty -- just whitewash and glass -- and the crates of exhibits were still sealed with white tape.

We weren't talking. No sounds, except an electrical hum that filled my head instead of thoughts. No factsheets covered the walls, but wires spilled out from punctures in the paint, and we found a curator's coffee mug, encrusted with lipstick. She pocketed a screwdriver that was lying on a sawdust-covered bench. 'A souvenir,' she said, grinning.

When we found the exit and stepped outside she breathed a deep lungful of the cold air.

We'd seen the Shell House. That was the plan. Our night was done.

But we didn't walk to the steps. We walked round the side of the building, to the terrace on its far end. I don't know who was following who.

The air was still. Biting cold. Something nocturnal flapped in the undergrowth. The terrace was wide. A bronze sculpture stood in its centre, but we ignored it. We were done contemplating objects.

We walked to the edge where the slabs stopped abruptly and trees swelled up.

'Look,' she said.

She had stepped off the slabs and onto the dirt, and before her the dry knotwork of branches parted and gaped. It was like the opening of a disturbed tomb, like the beaten track of an enormous, extinct animal.

She turned to me, poised against the black. I could see the pulsing under her skin. It seemed painful effort to hold her body in such pale unblinking stillness, to bear the stinging exposure to all that empty space.

'In here,' she said. She took a step back, towards the gap in the trees.

It was a kind of invitation, or plea, or command -- I don't know. But what was it in her eyes? Something from the lower ocean. Something from the Paris dark of another century.

I faltered. Don't blame me.

She saw my hesitation. For a moment she tightened with that same shudder I saw on the mezzanine. If she was embarrassed it crossed her face too fast for me to see, because in a moment her features organised into a smile, like a good-humoured professional with an exasperating boss, a reluctant recipient of free seed bars.

'It's late,' she said.

Yes.

And she looped her arm lightly, politely through mine as we walked back down the steps, our hands in our respective coat pockets. Hers in the pocket with the screwdriver.

The project wrapped up. I handed in my keycard. The Shell House opened its doors and a banner above its entrance advertised 'The Enigmas of the Depths', with a stock-photo scuba diver raising a thumbs-up to the public. She hadn't contacted me since that night, and I had no plans to contact her.

I looked up the shell collector's Wikipedia page a few weeks later.

He'd never gone to Paris in his life. The bequeathal was a longstanding arrangement with his solicitor. He died of pneumonia, his wife at his side.

I sent her a link to the page. She didn't respond. I sent three more messages that night.

'What do you make of this?'

'Any explanation? Lol.'

'Do you remember the Shell House?'

Each morning the growths in the pits multiply, sticky black vegetation, reaching up and out. I suppose it's the rains that swell them so. The same rains that bring snails crawling across the campus paths, to get crushed into wet shards under students' feet.