May Season Studio Archives
by Gintare O.
I.
The contract was signed on the eleventh of November, 1903, at the administrative site referenced in the federal field report filed the month prior. Cornelius Halloran went himself. He brought his attorney. He brought a junior clerk named Aldous Wren who had been with the firm for eleven months and who had been told, the morning before they left, that he would be handling the deliveries once the contract was in force. The senior staff had made that decision before the trip. Wren had not been consulted.
The signing was conducted in a small room with three chairs and one table. There were two copies of the contract laid out. The first was in English. The second was in a script the Halloran party did not recognize and was not invited to study. The representative of the Compact indicated that the two documents were identical in substance and that any discrepancy of interpretation would be resolved in favor of the second.
Halloran’s attorney asked whether the second could be translated.
The representative said no. The representative further indicated that the offer was extended on the understanding that Mr. Halloran was capable of accepting terms he could not verify, and that the offer would not be extended a second time.
The attorney leaned in and advised, in a quiet voice, against signing.
Mr. Halloran signed.
He signed slowly. He read each page before he initialed it, though he had no way of knowing whether the page he read corresponded to the page being executed. On the third page he was asked to record, in his own hand, the names of three Halloran employees authorized to make deliveries to the site. He wrote his own name. He wrote the attorney’s name. He wrote Wren’s name without looking at the clerk.
The contract was placed in a leather portfolio and given to the attorney. The Halloran party was conducted off the site by the same route by which they had arrived, which did not appear to follow any consistent compass heading.
On the return train to Chicago, Halloran did not speak. The attorney slept. Wren sat by the window and watched the country pass.
The assembly took six weeks. A warehouse on the south side of Chicago was leased for the purpose alone. Two senior staff handled procurement and were instructed not to discuss the nature of the client with the suppliers. The suppliers did not ask. The volumes were large enough to interest them and the payment was prompt enough to settle the matter.
The smallpox vaccine came from Pennsylvania. The diphtheria antitoxin came from New York. The carbolic acid arrived in industrial drums from a chemical works in Pittsburgh. The iodine, the boric acid, the silver nitrate moved through the firm’s existing surgical channels. The linens came from a cotton mill in southern Indiana. The beeswax came from an apiary in Wisconsin. The glass vessels were commissioned from a Toledo glassworks and delivered late. The salt came from the Saginaw Bay brine operations under a private arrangement that did not appear on the firm’s standard ledgers.
The soap was the harder matter. The formulation required a clay component that was not commercially available, and the Compact had agreed to supply it in raw form. Twenty barrels of pale grey-brown clay arrived by rail in late December, addressed to the firm under a freight code that did not match any of Halloran’s standing categories. The barrels were unmarked. The senior soapmaker engaged for the project remarked that he had never encountered the material and would not be in a position to identify it if asked. He was asked not to ask. He understood the instruction.
II.
The first delivery left Chicago on the sixth of January, 1904. Wren accompanied it. He was the only Halloran employee on the train.
He had been given a sealed letter of authorization, a manifest, a counter-signed bill of lading, and the leather portfolio containing the firm’s copy of the executed contract. He had been told to present the manifest at the site, obtain a receipt, and come home. He had not been told what to expect. He understood, from the absence of any instruction beyond the procedural, that the firm preferred not to know what he would see.
He arrived at the designated station on the eighth. The station was small. The platform was empty except for a single individual who did not give a name and who was not the same person who had met Halloran in November. Wren noted the change and made no remark.
The freight was unloaded onto two wagons drawn by horses. The horses did not behave in a manner Wren recognized from any prior experience with rural transport. They moved without direction. The driver did not hold the reins. He held a small leather book and made occasional notes in it. Wren rode in the lead wagon and was not addressed during the two-hour journey.
At the site, the goods were unloaded by a party of perhaps fifteen individuals who worked without speaking. Wren presented his manifest. A receipt was countersigned in his presence by a representative who Wren understood, from the portion of the federal report he had been permitted to read, was the same individual who had met the federal officer in September.
The inspection was thorough. The representative read the lot numbers on the diphtheria antitoxin shipments aloud and compared them against a list carried in a separate folder. The lot numbers matched. The representative recorded the match in writing and said nothing.
The soap was inspected last. The representative opened one bar, broke it in half, and held the broken edge to the light. He held the bar to his face and breathed it in. He passed the bar to a second individual who had been standing at a slight distance. The second individual repeated the gesture. The two of them looked at each other for a moment in a way Wren could not interpret, and then the representative turned back to him.
“The formulation is correct,” the representative said. “Convey to Mr. Halloran that the firm has executed in good faith. The Compact will execute in kind. Tell him the formulation must not be altered. Not in any respect. The bar must be made the way it has been made today, for as long as the contract is in force.”
Wren wrote it down.
The representative watched him write.
“You will return in ninety days,” the representative said. “The firm has authorized three individuals. Mr. Halloran will not come back. The attorney will not come back. You will. Until you cannot.”
Wren did not look up. He finished the line he was writing. He closed the notebook and put it in his coat. The representative did not appear to expect anything from him after that and Wren did not offer anything.
III.
The receipt went into the portfolio. Wren was driven back to the station by the same wagon and the same driver. The horses returned without direction.
He arrived at the Halloran offices on the eleventh of January. He presented the receipt to Halloran personally. He conveyed the message about the formulation. Halloran read the receipt twice and put it in his desk and did not speak for what Wren estimated was a full minute.
Then Halloran asked whether the clerk wished to remain with the firm.
Wren said that he did.
Halloran nodded once. He said the clerk’s salary would be adjusted, effective that day, to reflect the additional responsibilities. He said the adjustment would not appear on the firm’s standard payroll documentation and would not be referenced in writing. He said the clerk was not, under any circumstance, to discuss the nature of the account with any party not specifically authorized.
Wren said he understood.
Halloran did not thank him.
Wren returned to his desk. He worked through the correspondence that had accumulated in his absence. He left the office at the usual hour and took the usual streetcar and arrived at his home shortly after seven. His wife asked how the journey had been. He told her it had been uneventful. He ate his dinner.
He did not speak of the matter again that evening, or in any evening that followed, until the day he retired from the firm in 1947, at which point he spoke of it only once. He wrote a sealed letter to the man taking his place. The letter was marked for delivery only after the successor had accepted the same role Wren had accepted in the corner of a small room in November of 1903, without being asked.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
contracts in supernatural fiction usually carry drama. soul-selling, blood pacts, mirrors that talk back. i wanted the opposite. the most binding contract is the one signed quietly in a room you cannot read the second copy of, then carried home and never spoken of, then handed to someone who also was not asked.
written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.
Filed Under: halloran merchant co. records / from the may season studio employee files
Some contracts end.
This one did not.
Begin with:
The Covenant Client
Exit Interview: Surface Division
The Company That Regulates Reality
These are making me wonder what happened to Elias when he was sent to them.
I love what you’re doing with this