Work Text:
Chapter One
A young man, perhaps in his twenties, skinny and seemingly of the bookish type, yawned away the remaining tiredness and opened his curtains to a wonderfully average day in England.
Eliot Hamming was his name. With one L, not two, he would gently remind people, as often as required, which was often. Who on earth spells Elliot with one L? some wondered, though never aloud, and never to him. Eliot was quite particular about it, and nobody quite wanted to be on the receiving end of the patience with which he would explain.
He could never quite get accustomed to the sheer expanse of the grey filter that settles over England most of the year. It brought as much colour to the world as his love life brought him happiness, which is to say that neither provided anything in that aspect, and he had, over time, come to accept both as features of the landscape. Eliot Hamming. Described politely as consistent in his annual review, and in blunter language, by himself, in his own kitchen at eleven at night, dull.
If only, sometimes he permitted himself to think, he could be whisked away. Perhaps somewhere far, somewhere hot, somewhere with a plot. Somewhere with a reason to trot outdoors on a simple Tuesday morning that was not the Tuesday which presented itself before him.
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Dear reader, you may be inclined to hope that this is the sort of story in which such a whisking occurs. You may be preparing yourself for a portal, a prophecy, a stranger in a long coat with a morsel of Turkish delight — an odyssey waiting on the other side. I am sorry to tell you that no such wardrobes exist. This is not that kind of story.
This is the other kind, where the Tuesday arrives, and then another Tuesday arrives, and then a great many Tuesdays arrive in succession, and somewhere in the middle of them a quiet man is taken apart so gently that he does not notice until there is nothing left to notice with. You are welcome to close the book now. I would not blame you. But someone must watch this happen, and the people inside the story cannot, and so the duty falls, regrettably, to us.