I’m not certain whether one can compose passive-aggressively, nor am I certain it is my intent to do so, but here we are. Wherever here is. Oh, I know where here is, but my reader may not, whoever that reader may be, and I do not know who that prospective reader might be… hence my potential passive aggression.

Life has been very different since joining the Laundry. No, that isn’t quite right. One does not “join” the Laundry.

Life has been very different since being inducted into the Laundry.

So much awash; “I don’t know where to begin” is so much a cliché that saying “I don’t know where to begin is a cliché” is a cliché in and of itself. Eventually “’I don’t know where to begin is a cliché’ is a cliché in and of itself” will become cliché. On and on down the rabbit hole until we wind up back at the beginning, not knowing where to begin and resigning that wherever we begin is the beginning, no matter how hard we resist it.

My name is not Reginald, nee “Reggie,” Carstairs.

Reginald Carstairs was the name of the man who filed the insurance claim I investigated, the one that led to my induction. When Human Resources asked me to choose a name, I could not think of one other than his. I’m not creative, you see. Never had much use for imagination. I muttered another man’s name because it was all I could think of when asked who I was going to be.

Reginald Carstairs’ mother had passed away under suspicious circumstances. She drowned in the Thames. Only she didn’t. Intake made sure the inquest labeled her cause of death as “accidental drowning,” but her son, Reginald, knew that wasn’t the case. Reginald Carstairs hadn’t read her journal entries about the ‘burbling piping sounds’ that she had been hearing from riverside for some nights before she followed them to the Thames. Reginald Carstairs knew his mother couldn’t swim and was deathly afraid of the water, even on holiday. Reginald Carstairs knew his mother wouldn’t go near the Thames on a bet.

So Reginald Carstairs hired a private investigator to look into why the insurance claim for “wrongful death” had been denied.

There’s so much that doesn’t add up there that it seems no wonder that Reginald Carstairs’ private investigator would be so dogged as to track me to the house my team and I occupy. But where could the chain of events have been interrupted so as not to arouse suspicion? H.R. declining to allow me to use the name? The Liaison Office making sure the insurance claim had been granted, or that the cause of death wouldn’t be changed to something Reginald would question? What would have been plausible, given the state of the body upon recovery? Velma Carstairs heard the pipes. She resisted their call for days, for weeks before succumbing to the fisherman and making her way to riverside. No one could have prevented her untimely death at the young age of 58.

I saw the fisherman. The journal itself wouldn’t have been enough to provoke my… recruitment, I don’t think. The story of the pipes, the sound of their warbling notes lilting up from subaquatic depths might have been. Enough, that is. To hear that music, though I suspect it could have been explained away. Irish folk music from a pub across a Saturday night’s London social district, distorted by waves of summer heat in the air, the muggy humidity of July weather over the river, perhaps. Perhaps.

The eyes. The luminous, bulbous saucers peering up at me from just under the surface, no more than two feet, of the water. How many ways are there to describe eyes? Isn’t every description of eyes at this point a cliché across literature? Pearlescent black, yet glowing within. I can’t say they were malevolent; am I malevolent when taking a plate of fish sticks out of the microwave oven? Are the men crewing the trawlers malevolent when baiting the hooks, casting the reels, throwing the nets into the sea? Is it malevolence to seek sustenance?

I may have to rethink what I eat.

I stood on the cobblestone sidewalk alongside the edge of the Thames, to the very spot where I know Velma Carstairs had stood, looking down into the water, following the sound of the pipes and peering down to meet this very gaze. I knew she’d bent closer, studying the swirling colors within the black pearls. Closer still, until she had fallen, no, until she had been snatched by the hook hidden within the bait.

Remembering Velma made me aware of the tensions within the muscle structures behind the black pearlescent eyes, within the fins, within the tentacles that were bracing against water to push off like a person would press against the starter’s blocks to launch into the hundred yard dash.

That second’s awareness is what saved me from the hook.

I hurled myself backwards with the same spring as the black pearl piper launched himself upwards. The tones of the pipe, the pipe which had been reedlike structures around what passed for the throat of the thing, the tones stopped as it broke the surface of the water, as I stumbled backwards, its webbed claws missing me by what must have been centimeters.

I fell, of course. I am not under any illusions that I am an agile man. I kicked at the stones, scrabbling to find purchase to propel myself backwards. Clawed tentacles whipped over the edge of the sculpted embankment, searching for me as I reach for a certain package of crisps upon a high shelf. The black pearl piper seemed confined to the Thames. A tentacle slapped stone between my ankles as I scrabbled backward, striking with enough force to chip a fragment of cobblestone from the ground.

That fragment is in my coat pocket now. A reminder of what might have been had that claw at the end of the tentacle struck home less than a meter to either side of where it did. Such an eventuality would have led to the fisherman’s hook being embedded into the flesh of my lower legs and dragging me over the edge and into the Thames.

Instead I scrambled backwards and continued scrambling until my back was against the building some fifteen meters from the embankment. I hoped that was far enough, but the fisherman’s hooks hadn’t struck any further inland than that first blind grasping. I watched it, three, four of the ropy tentacles striking simultaneously, grasping for prey, slowly accepting that I’d slipped the line and gotten away. I imagine it had the same rage as a novice fisherman who has lost a trout. The experts know that it happens, I imagine, and that there will always be more fish in the sea.

There will always be more fish in the sea.

I hope it was enraged. I hope it wasn’t an expert at its craft, knowing another would follow the pipes… but I suspect it is, and I was the lucky one, to have thought of Velma at the critical moment.

Velma Carstairs. Velma, and her son Reginald, whose insurance claim had brought me here.

Reginald Carstairs.

That’s who I’m not, today.