Dungeon Exploiter

The service was scheduled for ten.

The first guest arrived at six. Before the staff, before the flowers. He signed nothing.

There is an art to attending things. Most people never learn it, because most people attend in order to be seen attending. They arrive in the middle and sit where the sitting is visible.

The first guest had unlearned all of that a long time ago.

The corner behind the sound equipment had a clean line to the door, the podium, and eleven of the twelve windows. Nobody had looked at that corner since the building was built.

The guest looked at it once, approved, and stayed there for five hours.

The monsters came early too. Ones and twos, wearing their researched manners.

A hedge-thing bowed to every third chair. A flower-person shook hands with the coat rack, and the coat rack, to its credit, did not correct her.

The guest watched all of it without moving. He noted one thing, privately: every one of the forty-one had chosen a seat with a clean line to an exit.

Floor training. Hers.

The woman in the photograph at the front had spent twenty-three years teaching warehouse staff where to stand. The proof of her life's work was sitting in her funeral in neat, survivable rows.

The guest thought that was a better eulogy than the one on the laminated card.

Though the card wasn't bad, as these things go.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

The screens interrupted it, of course. The screens interrupt everything now.

The guest did not look at the screens. The guest had stopped being interrupted some time ago.

The man arrived with the crowd and stood where the family stands. There was no family. Or rather, there was, and it wore a borrowed tie and an oversized suit and one small goblin's idea of formalwear.

The guest studied the man for a while. The way you study a page you've read before, to see if it's changed.

He was thinner than the footage. He watched the door more than the casket.

And at the end, when the room loosened and everyone stopped performing their grief and started carrying it, the man did the thing the guest had come to see.

He walked the room, and he counted it.

He was not obvious about it. He was obvious about nothing. He moved like a man looking for someone to talk to, and touched every cluster of mourners with his eyes exactly once.

His lips didn't move. Hers never had either.

The guest watched him work the floor the way she used to work it. Door to rack, rack to wall, corner to corner. Then a second pass, standing still, eyes closed, checking the room in his head.

Sixty-five. That's the number the man would get.

It was the correct number, for him.

The guest ran the count as well. Old habit, or something dressed as old habit.

Sixty-six.

The count includes the counter. She'd have told him that. It was the first thing she'd have told him, and the last thing anyone would.

The people who teach you to count yourself in are rare. The world is very good at using them up.

The guest stayed until the room began to thin.

Then he left through the side door, during the exact eleven seconds nobody was positioned to see it. Those seconds had been identified at six that morning. Before the staff. Before the flowers.

No signature. No condolences. Nothing kept, except one observation, filed where the guest files things.

The counter has started counting.

Somebody should keep the record of that, too.