Chapter Text
There was something in the kitchen, and Gerard could neither see nor hear it.
This was nothing new. It was a fact of life, actually. Things passed through the Keay household from time to time, and Gerard just had to deal with that. If he was lucky, they came and went in a whisper, too hungry for other things to pay him much mind. If he wasn’t, they stayed long enough to lap from him, and the nightmares lingered even after they moved on.
If he was very unlucky, they came back. The persistent ones, Mum learned to welcome.
The thing in the kitchen seemed like a whisper at first—quiet, almost unobtrusive in the way it drifted through the empty space like a ghost. It brought with it the cold and the smell of rain, rippling Gerard’s skin with goosebumps whenever he got too close. The cold leaked through jumpers and jackets and blankets, leaving reddened stinging skin that itched even after he’d fled back to his room, but besides that it kept its looming silence and bitter bite to the kitchen. By morning it had left, and Gerard could breathe again.
And then it came back.
Coming back could mean a lot of things, in Gerard’s world. Usually it meant it was still hungry.
He told Mum about it on the second day—she would get rid of it or find it useful, and either way it would become her problem, not his—and felt sick at the excitement on her face when she rushed to look. By the time she reached the kitchen, it was gone again. Mum accepted his insistence that it had been there, it really had—but he knew better. Mum didn’t like being made a fool of.
And so, when the thing came back a third time, Gerard kept silent.
What could he say, when there would be hell to pay if he told Mum and she came running to find the kitchen empty again? What could he do, when there was nowhere else to turn?
He ate less, on the days it was there. Mum didn’t like it when he hoarded food, so he went hungry while he hid in his room, chewing gum from a pack he’d lifted from a corner store to stave off the pangs. Mum went to and from the kitchen, but that didn’t mean much. Mum knew everything about her world and the creatures in it, and she was too clever for any of it to take her. If Gerard tried it, then whatever was lurking in the kitchen and reeking of the Lonely would pull him in. He was sure of it.
And there would be no one to pull him out. Mum had no patience for fools who let themselves get eaten. That was what happened to his father—he was a fool and dead, and if Gerard didn’t mind his lessons, then he would share the same fate.
A fortnight passed before Gerard learned anything new. It started with bread; one evening after the whisper had left the kitchen, he pulled out the bagged loaf to find that a corner had been torn from the topmost slice. The following day, the apple half that he’d been saving vanished. The day after that, more bread and a few slices of cheese went missing as well.
It warranted an experiment. The next time the kitchen went cold, Gerard braved a brush with the Lonely to fix himself a small lunch. He ate half a peanut butter sandwich, then wandered off to do something else. When he returned, only a quarter of it remained.
It couldn’t be that simple, could it? The Dread Powers fed on fear, not scraps of food. That was what Mum said, anyway, and Mum knew more about this than he did. But… maybe she was right the rest, then. She lived and breathed surrounded by the Powers and their servants. Maybe Gerard could live with this.
Mum kept chocolates in her study. It was almost funny, if you thought about it. She always said she had no time for frivolities and neither should Gerard, but she kept a box in her study that hid chocolate truffles wrapped in colorful foil, just for herself. Gerard wasn’t allowed to touch them, and it might have occurred to him to be upset about that if he could count on eating on the best of days.
As it was, Gerard hadn’t thought about Mum’s chocolates at all, until she came storming into the kitchen one day and slapped him halfway across the room.
She had the box in her hands, open and still full of foil-wrapped chocolate. “Gerard,” she said mildly, as if she hadn’t just cracked him across the face. “What have you to say for yourself?”
“I-I didn’t—”
“I count them, Gerard.” It was best not to argue with her, when her voice went hard like that. It never ended well. Mum didn’t have much patience for arguments; she cared less about winning them than she did about ending them.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment, one hand on his numb cheek. His ears were still ringing.
“I don’t care if you’re sorry,” she told him. “Just don’t do it again.”
“I won’t.”
That night, as he stood over the sink, toothbrush in hand, and stared mutely at the spreading bruise on his face, he realized with a jolt that he could see his breath.
This would be how it got him, he supposed. Mum didn’t hit him much anymore, not since he learned to stop provoking her. But she did today, and if there was ever a time for the Forsaken to swallow him, it would be now. It was hard to think about what could anchor him to the world when he barely wanted to be in it.
The cold wrapped around him from behind, and his hands shook so violently that the toothbrush slipped from his fingers and clattered to the counter. Mist spread over the mirror, turning his pale reflection to a blur.
As he watched, thin little tracks cut through the condensation, as if drawn by invisible fingers. Slowly, haltingly, they formed into words.
I’M SORRY, the invisible finger wrote.
He gasped before he could stop himself, and in an instant the cold left him.
Gerard crept out into the hallway, just to be sure. Mum’s study was ajar, and when he cautiously edged his way close enough to see inside, he saw her sitting at her desk, studying one of her books again.
Still here, then. It hadn’t taken him.
When he returned to the mirror, the mist was beginning to condense into droplets, but the words were still visible. On a whim, he lifted his hand to the mirror, and found that his own fingertip fit perfectly within the lines.
In spite of everything, the whisper was a lot like everything else his mother’s work brought home; after a while, Gerry just learned to live with it.
The little thefts continued, less frequently, and never again as ambitious as Mum’s sweets. It stuck to scraps from the fridge, little snacks that Gerard let out while his back was turned, and on one occasion, a packet of tissues he’d forgotten was in his pocket. It was mostly food, a little at a time, never anything that Mum would miss.
And that was odd, wasn’t it? The last time it took something Mum cared about, she’d hit him, and Gerard had been vulnerable. Wasn’t that what it wanted? If Mum was right about the Powers, then it should have been. It should have eaten him then and there, with Mum none the wiser.
Instead it wrote an apology on the bathroom mirror and never did it again.
“What do you want?” he demanded when it finally got to be too much. Instead of an answer, all he got was a breath of frigid air before the empty kitchen gradually warmed again.
He should have left it at that. He should have been relieved—finally, a monster that didn’t want to claim him for its own, that didn’t smile with bloody teeth as Mum welcomed it like a house guest. He should have kept an eye from afar and left it to its lurking.
And he might have, if it weren’t for the reminder left on the bathroom mirror.
Sometimes, on a strange whim that he could never explain, Gerard would close the door, climb up onto the counter, and breath on the same spot. And every time the words would reappear, a clumsy apology written in fingerprints smeared over the glass, as thin as his own.
A short walk away from the shop was a corner store, a cramped and dingy little place that stank of cigarettes. The people behind the counter still tolerated his presence, some of them eyeing him from afar but never stopping him. Mum barely ever noticed when he left the house, so one day he slipped out with a pocket full of loose change scavenged from around the house. He came back a short while later with a small packet of chocolate digestives, which he stowed beneath his mattress before settling down to wait.
That night, when the whisper came back to the kitchen, Gerard was ready for it. He opened the packet, placed it on the counter, and stepped back.
For a moment, nothing happened. The kitchen remained cold, but his offering sat untouched. Gerard considered the possibility that he would have to turn around to let it take them, before setting his face to a stubborn scowl and continuing to watch. In a moment of wild boldness, he stepped closer to the whisper just to nudge the packet toward it.
After a moment, the packet stirred on its own. A biscuit was pulled free, and sat floating in midair for a few moments before slowly disappearing to the sound of crunching.
“Is that all you want?” Gerard asked. “Food?”
The crunching stopped. The cold air stirred, but nothing else happened.
“Can you speak?” Gerard asked. Nothing. “Can you knock on things, then?”
After a moment, a soft knock against the pantry door answered him. It sounded like it came from low to the ground, as low as Gerard would reach, if he were doing the knocking.
“One for yes, two for no?”
Knock.
“Is food all you want?”
Knock. A pause. Then, almost timidly, two more knocks followed.
Gerard stepped back. If it wanted more than food, then it might want fear, as well. He didn’t want to wander the Forsaken forever.
But if it wanted to do that to him, then why hadn’t it yet?
“What are you?” he demanded, even though there was no way for the whisper to answer him.
The sound of footsteps on the stairs sent him into action even quicker than his heart could drop. Without a word, Gerard grabbed the biscuit packet off the counter and shoved it under his jacket, careful not to rustle the plastic.
The kitchen air was already starting to warm again by the time he fled back to his bedroom and the comforting illusion of safety.
The whisper moved from the kitchen into his bedroom.
Not permanently. Not even very often. But Gerard felt it there from time to time, hovering in the far corner as if watching him. It never touched him, never even came near, and it was never there when he went to sleep or woke up. Not to say it couldn’t have crept in while he slept. He was a light sleeper, but the Forsaken never made a sound. For all he knew, it hovered over him and watched as he twitched in his nightmares.
(If it wanted him, why hadn’t it taken him yet?)
Mum never said anything about it. Gerard was beginning to think, against all odds, that she might not know it was there at all. If she woke up one morning to find him already swallowed whole, she might never know what had happened.
(If it wanted him, why hadn’t it taken him yet?)
The first time Gerard left part of his meal uneaten, he wondered, in the back of his mind, what she would say if she did know. Would she call him an idiot for feeding it on a whim? Would she indulge him? Or would her hands settle on him again as she set another book in front of him, nails digging in as she taught him how to feed it the right way?
She needn’t have worried, not when his leftovers vanished from the plate when his back was turned.
The cold lingered in his bedroom that night, long after Mum had gone to bed. Gerard sat in the farthest corner, huddled and small and certain that he’d doomed himself. Hadn’t Mum told him that the Powers only ever asked for more?
“Hope that was better than bread crusts and apple cores,” he muttered darkly.
For a moment, all he heard was silence, and all he felt was the chilly drafts from across the room. The darkness seemed to shift, curling like mist in a breeze.
Then—
“Thank you.”
The whisper barely reached his ears. If the room hadn’t been utterly silent, it never would have made it.
Gerard jerked his head up, shocked. With a muffled gasp, the invisible thing fled from his room and left him alone once more.
“Can you hear me?”
He could, and that was the whole problem. It was bad enough when the shred of Lonely had lingered silently in corners. He could pretend it was harmless, then. But now—
Now it spoke to him. Now it called to him. And that meant he couldn’t pretend anymore.
His first instinct was to panic. To pull back and ignore it, to keep his head down and his food to himself. But the whisper—a voice, now—would not be ignored. Scraps began to vanish again, and in spite of the new danger, Gerard couldn’t escape the pit in his stomach whenever he saw what it stole: bread crusts and scrapings, little things that his mother wouldn’t miss.
(Mum hit him once, and it never stole anything big again—)
“I know I’m talking. I can hear me. Can’t you hear me, too?”
He covered his ears. Maybe if he didn’t listen, he could buy more time before it finally pulled him in. It was what he did best: keeping his head down and his mouth shut, and staying alive. He thought it made him clever. He thought it made him strong, or at least as close to it as he could get.
But he wasn’t strong at all.
“Please. Please answer me?” The whispers turned to sobs, late at night while he lay in bed with his head beneath the blankets and feigned sleep.
“I don’t want to lose it again, I just got it back.”
“Please.”
“Please just tell me I’m still real.”
He sat up.
His room was dark, but he could just barely see his breath in the air. His blanket fell back, and the chill crept beneath his skin almost instantly. In the quiet that followed, all he could hear were his own shuddering breaths.
“What do you want?” he asked, as his breath curled from his lips and joined the other wisps of fog. He waited, as still as he could be when his body wanted to shiver.
“I want to go home,” the voice answered. “I want my mum to see me again.”
Later, Gerard would look back and wonder how he hadn’t realized how young the voice was. Whoever was talking couldn’t have been much older than him.
He’d never met anyone his own age before.
Maybe it was stupid. If it was a trap, then he was falling for it. Mum would smack him across the room again if she ever found out. But Mum was asleep right now, and Gerard reveled in any secret he could keep from her.
He learned forward, gathering the blankets around himself, for all the good they did.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
A quiet sniffle reached his ears, and that was what decided it, in the end. Monsters didn’t make sounds like that.
“I don’t remember,” the child caught in the Lonely replied. “I lost it in the fog.”
He could kick himself, honestly. For weeks he’d been creeping around in his own house, going hungry just to avoid the kitchen, trying not to invite the cold in by thinking about it—and he could have avoided all of it if he’d just talked to it.
(Him, not it. That was a boy in the fog; he might not remember his name, but he did know that much, and he got very upset if Gerry implied he was anything but.)
Because it was all very simple, in the end. Just one question would have explained everything.
“It happened after I read the book,” the boy told him, and Gerard’s heart sank so deep in his chest that he wasn’t sure it would rise again. “It was at the library. When I got home, I started to disappear, just like it said.”
Gerard knew he should be excited. Mum loved Leitners. The only times he ever saw her smile—a real smile, not the oily things she put on when she met with monsters—was when she had a brand-new Leitner in her hands. Sometimes he dreamed about going out and finding them when he was older. Maybe then she’d smile like that for him, too.
But he didn’t feel excited. All he felt was scared.
“Can I see it?” he asked, holding his hand out.
The cold air stirred. “No… no, I can’t let go of it.”
“Why not?”
“I put it down once, and I got lost. As long as I’m holding it, I can see where I am.”
He could just imagine what his mum would say about that: a Leitner of the Forsaken, that cast its victim in the Lonely while also serving as their only lifeline. What a wonderful trap.
Gerard shuddered, and it wasn’t just from the cold.
“I can tell you about it,” the boy offered. “If you want?”
He thought back through his mother’s lessons. Could a Leitner trap him if he only learned about it? No, it probably couldn’t—Mum said the Archivist took stories for the Beholding, and it’d be a waste of Archivists if they disappeared or got eaten every time they heard one about a Leitner.
“Sure,” he said at last. He’d come this far already, hadn’t he? “Tell me.”
“It was for a series I like,” the boy began. “Or, it was supposed to be. I don’t think this is the way the story was supposed to go.”
“It was a story?”
“There was a little girl,” it came out as a whisper. “And she was—she wasn’t happy. Because she was living with someone who didn’t love her. Only it wasn’t—her aunt didn’t hurt her, she didn’t—” he sniffled. “She didn’t shout or hit her—I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to make her do that, I promise.”
Confused, it took Gerard a moment to realize that the Lonely child was talking to him, not recounting the story. “Do what?”
“Your mum, when she…”
Without warning, an ice-cold fingertip brushed against his face. Gerard threw himself backward, crashing into wall with a thud that made his ears ring.
“Don’t touch me!”
“I’m sorry!” The voice sounded panicked. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry—”
It took a minute for Gerard to get his breath back. His hand was pressed to his face where the Lonely child touched him—where Mum hit him, for the chocolate he didn’t steal—
“It’s fine,” he snapped, harsher than he meant to. He tried again. “It’s fine. You surprised me. That’s all.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that.”
“I’m—okay.”
“Just—just keep going.” Gerard forced himself to put his hand down. “About the book. The girl and her aunt.”
“Okay. Um.” The child sniffled quietly. “Her aunt didn’t—didn’t shout or hit her, she just… ignored her. And pretended she wasn’t there. Even when the girl screamed and cried. Even when she broke things. Even—even when she cut herself and bled and bled, all over the walls and the rug and—” He faltered again. “No matter what, her aunt pretended she wasn’t there. So she started to disappear. First her fingers and hands. And then her arms, and legs, and bodies, and finally her face and all the rest of her. And her aunt, she started to change too—she’d hear her scream, or see her break things, and she’d get scared. Not because she was scared of the girl—she was scared because she was hearing things and seeing things at all. Like she’d forgotten she had a niece. Until finally she stopped seeing the broken things. Even when the girl threw them at her. Even when she picked up the shards of glass and—and—”
The boy stopped, gasping with shaking sobs. “So she got scared, and she ran out to find help, but nobody else could see her, either. Or hear her. Or feel her. And she looked and looked for someone who would, but she didn’t find anyone and finally she lost her voice and her name and everything else and she faded away and no one even knew there was supposed to be a little girl at all—”
“O-okay. Okay, okay.” Gerard’s voice cracked as it rang out. The panicked babble died down to breathless sobbing. “I think I get it.”
“I want to go home,” the Lonely child wept. “I don’t want to disappear.”
“Bit late for that,” Gerard remarked, and winced when it only made him cry harder. He shook his head, waiting for the kid to calm down. “Have you tried ripping up the book? Destroying it? Setting it on fire?”
“N-no,” he mumbled. “Not s’posed to play with matches. And—and I if I lose the book, I’ll lose all of me, too.”
“Right, fine.” His thoughts were already turning, tumbling end over end in his head. This house wasn’t a good place for a kid like this, all soft and weepy and a step away from normal. He couldn’t live on scraps and bread crusts, and Gerard couldn’t live on half-meals to feed him.
He had to leave, and that meant he had to get out of the Lonely.
“Is there…?” Gerard’s voice trailed off, and he wondered how to ask this. The way Mum explained it never made much sense to him. She talked about anchors, but she never explained what they meant, not in a way he could grasp. Then again… “Do you have parents?”
“I have a mum. And a dad, I think. But he’s gone—he left.”
“Do you think about your mum a lot?”
“Yes. All the time. I want to go home.”
Gerard didn’t answer right away. He couldn’t, not with the fear that suddenly gripped him by the throat.
Mum always said that if the Lonely tried to take him, he should think of her, because she was the only reason he was alive, and that made her an anchor. He was never really sure what that meant, but she was sure of it, and she knew more about these things than he did. But if it hadn’t worked for this other child…
This house had always felt safe the way a rabbit’s burrow might feel safe—somewhere warm and dark, hidden from the hungry things with gleaming teeth that lurked just beyond. And it felt safe because Mum was there, and as long as Mum was the one hurting and terrifying him, nothing else was.
For the first time, Gerard felt cold doubt setting in, as a little bit of that double-edged safety was slowly stripped away.
Another week passed before Gerard lit upon a solution.
Maybe “solution” was stretching it. He couldn’t be sure it would work; it probably wouldn’t, honestly. But he didn’t have any other ideas, and he couldn’t ask Mum for help.
(He could. He could. She would find it interesting, like she always did. It would put her in a good mood, and it might even last.
Except, she would take the book away and let the child fade away for good. She wouldn’t even hesitate.)
“You said before that the story was wrong,” he said one night, while Mum slept and the Lonely child took shelter in Gerard’s bedroom. “What did you mean?”
“I don’t think it was supposed to go that way,” the boy said. “I knew what book I wanted. And it looked like that book. It had the same title and everything. But it was all wrong.”
Gerard leaned forward and asked, “What book was it supposed to be?”
It was easy to slip out from time to time. Mum kept the doors locked against anyone coming in, but she never put much effort into keeping Gerard in. She didn’t have to; Gerard would either die or come back, and the two seemed equal in her eyes. Even when Gerard set out with a plan in his mind to never return, always, eventually, he’d come crawling back to the shop with an empty belly and a curve to his spine that never quite left.
So, when Mum left the house the following day for an errand, Gerard barely waited before slipping out after her.
It was a gamble on whether she’d notice the money missing; she didn’t count it like she counted chocolate truffles and Leitners and other things she really valued. He wasn’t worried; worst case scenario, she’d shout and swing at him maybe once before she lost interest in the whole thing and moved on. It was enough for a two-way trip on the tube, just as far as the public library.
He came here from time to time, when things got to be too much at home and he had to run away. He’d given up on finding anything to read, after the well-meaning librarian’s futile attempts to help. But he liked the smell of the place, and the plush chairs, and the quiet.
As he entered the children’s section his stomach clenched, as it always did. There was nothing disgusting or dangerous here; quite the opposite, and that was the problem. His last few attempts to read something normal had ended with him dissatisfied and angry and feeling far more alone than he ever had before.
But he was on a mission now. This time, he knew what he was looking for.
He found the author first—she had half a shelf of books, hard covers laminated and stamped, pages well-thumbed and dog-eared. The one that Gerard was looking for sat square in the middle of them, and he gingerly eased it out with flinching fingers.
A quick peek past the cover reassured him—no bookplate.
The first few pages had him frowning—not the way he’d frowned the first time he tried to read kids’ books. It simply made no sense; there were names he didn’t recognize and words that he was pretty sure weren’t actual words, and it felt more like he’d opened to the middle of a book than the beginning.
The Lonely child had said it was part of a series, wasn’t it?
Gerard looked back to the shelf and suppressed a sigh. He’d been hoping to only read one book today, but if he couldn’t understand it, then it wouldn’t help, would it? He’d have to start at the beginning.
He pulled the first few off the shelf, stacked them carefully on top of the one he already had, and made his way to one of the plush chairs he liked. He set his small stack on the floor beside him, then sifted through them and flipped to the first pages until he was satisfied as to which one was supposed to come first.
With a sigh, Gerard settled into his seat and opened The Moomins and the Great Flood.
The first book that Gerard ever tried to read was called Ramona and Her Mother, and he’d hated it from the first page.
He hadn’t hated it the way he hated Leitners. The book wasn’t dangerous, and it had never soaked up smiles from Mum that she never spared for him. But the world outside of Pinhole Books—the one that wasn’t crawling with monsters and Dread Powers—frustrated him. It existed within reach, taunting him with a shallow ignorant contentment that he couldn’t have, no matter how many times he tried to reach for it. And the book had been a piece of that world, shrunk down and shoved into a yellowed paperback that crackled when he turned the pages. The story mocked him with characters whose lives and problems played at being familiar, but didn’t make any sense to him. In the end he’d kicked it across the floor and gone crawling back home again.
These books… weren’t like that.
It wasn’t that they were familiar. Far from it; the world trapped in these pages was like nothing Gerard had ever seen. But that was the nice thing; it had some of the familiar trappings of the real world, existing unobtrusively in the background, but everything else about it, all the important things, were strange and inexplicable in ways he found almost calming.
He didn’t know what a moomin was. But that was alright, because he wasn’t meant to. They didn’t exist outside of the book. These stories weren’t about his world, but they weren’t about the world that taunted him, either. If anything it was a soft midpoint between the two, full of strange creatures and lurking monsters, just familiar enough to hold his attention, but unfamiliar enough to be tantalizing.
And so he read on.
Gerard was halfway through the third book in the stack when he put it down, hands shaking. He checked himself over, then got up from his seat to make a quick circuit of the library before returning. Finding nothing amiss, he retrieved the book and checked, once more, for a bookplate. He went through each book, just to make sure.
None. These weren’t Leitners. But they had to be, he knew they had to be. Books that left you with strange, unfamiliar feelings had to be Leitners, and he’d just read three of them and put his hands all over several more. And the worst part was, he couldn’t tell which of the Dread Powers it was.
Shaken, Gerard abandoned the stack of books and fled the library without another word.
His heart was pounding as he crept inside. The lights were on and Mum was home, and that meant she’d know, the second she saw him. Mum had just enough of the Beholding in her to see the scars left by the Powers. She’d know what he did.
Gerard passed by her, heart in his throat, and she barely gave him a second glance.
That was important—she gave him a first glance, but not a second.
Emboldened, he tried again, passing before her eyes so he could be sure that she’d see him. All she did was snap at him for getting underfoot.
“Did you find it?” the Lonely child asked late at night, when the house was dark and silent.
“Yeah,” Gerard answered. “But I didn’t read it yet.”
“Oh.” He sounded so crestfallen that Gerard couldn’t help scoffing and kicking out a little. His foot caught something with a gentle, glancing blow, rewarding him with a quiet oof.
“I’m going to,” Gerard said. “It just didn’t make any sense, so I found the other ones first.”
“Oh!” the boy sounded relieved. “What do you think?”
“What?”
“Do you like them?” he asked, a little eagerly. “I do.”
“No,” said Gerard, because if he liked them then that meant they had him.
“Oh.” He was back to sounding crestfallen again. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to read them if you don’t want to.”
It took a moment for the words to sink in, but when they did— “What did you just say?”
“You don’t have to read them,” the boy said. “If you don’t like them.”
The words stuck in his head for the rest of the night, and he wasn’t sure why. They weren’t complicated. They were dead simple, actually. Short, easy words in a short, easy idea.
He went back to the library the next day. The books had been put away, but they were still there on the shelf where he’d first found them. Gerard stood before it, staring at them—glaring, even—and waiting. For what, he wasn’t sure.
Finally, when enough empty minutes had passed, he reached out and pulled down the one he’d been reading. His heart leapt to his throat again, but he swallowed the feeling down and simply held it in his hands. It was an experiment, that was all. Nothing to be afraid of. He’d already read half of it and two more like yesterday—if anything was going to happen, then it was already too late to do anything about it.
He opened it, read a few lines, and closed it again. He put it back, and walked away.
The book let him.
He wasted another hour just testing the book, trying its patience. He must have looked strange, to anyone in the library who might be watching. But he couldn’t help it, could he? He’d never encountered a book like this before—a book that made him feel strange things that he couldn’t quite describe, and yet let him close it, and put it down, and walk away, and come back when he wanted.
More than once he sat down and opened it again to read it properly, and found that the feelings returned. But instead of drawing him in and devouring him whole, they were gentler every time he came back.
It was late afternoon, and Gerard had finished the fifth book, when he finally skipped ahead to the one he was actually there for.
Tales from Moominvalley, the title read. Each book so far seemed to be its own story, so it might not hurt to skip. And this one looked like a collection of shorter stories. Carefully—checking one last time that there was no Leitner bookplate on the inside cover—he flipped to the table of contents.
Partway down the list, his eyes widened.
The Invisible Child, it read.
When he started it, he was sure he’d been wrong. It didn’t start with a little girl and her aunt at all. It started with the usual characters, and the child from the title didn’t come in until a couple of pages in. She even had a name.
There were just enough similarities to keep him reading—an invisible little girl, a cruel caretaker, the loss of her voice—but beyond that, it wasn’t all that different from the rest of the stories he’d read. Simple, oddly sweet, with a strange feeling threaded through it all that Gerard couldn’t quite name.
He read more closely when the story mentioned a medicine to cure the invisibility, but as he got to the end, he was forced to accept that the story wasn’t going to tell him what was in it.
He read it again, several more times to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. In the end he closed the book, left the library, and wondered where he was supposed to go from here.
“You found it?” the Lonely boy asked, quietly eager. “The real one, not the bad one?”
“Obviously,” Gerard scoffed. “You’ve got the bad one.”
“Oh, ” he said sheepishly. “ Then… there’s only one of them, right? ”
“Should be.” Gerard thought for a moment. Mum said the Leitners were all unique. So that must mean there weren’t copies of the same one. They might not be as valuable, if there were.
“Gerard? ” The bed dipped, making him jump. He could swear that had never happened before, but it must have, right? This was a real person, and not just a cold spot hovering in midair. “ Could I come with you to the library? Tomorrow? ”
“What for?”
“I want to read it. Th-that’s why I picked up this one. But it was wrong, and I want to read the real one. ”
“Fine, sure. Tomorrow, alright?” Mum was still busy with one of her projects. She’d hardly miss him.
“Thank you, ” the nameless boy murmured. “ And thanks for reading it. I know you don’t like them. ”
Gerard stiffened. “I didn’t say that.”
“Yes you did. I asked, and you said no. ”
He had, hadn’t he. He’d been scared, then. Stupid, for thinking a book was a Leitner just because he enjoyed the story in it. “I changed my mind.”
“Oh! Really? ”
“Don’t make a big thing of it,” he grumbled, turning over.
The child didn’t laugh at him. ( Ninny didn’t laugh either, he thought, unbidden.) But Gerard imagined he could feel the chill in the air ease, just a little.
“There has to be something I can call you,” Gerard said under his breath. The library was quiet but never silent; if he talked softly enough, no one would notice that he was talking to thin air.
“I still don’t remember my name. ”
“Then just pick one. Don’t you ever wish people would call you something else?”
There was a moment of silence. Then—“ Do… do you? ”
“Yeah. All the time.” It occurred to Gerard then that this might be one of those things that was normal to his world and no one else’s.
“Why? ”
He shrugged. “Don’t like how Mum says it. And she’s been saying it all my life, so now it’s ruined.”
“I like it… ”
“Must be nice for you.”
The boy sighed, sounding a little annoyed. It was better than the frightened gasps and squeaks from back when they first started talking. But it wasn’t until Gerard was reaching up to retrieve the book that he finally answered the question.
“… Martin. ”
Gerard paused, one finger on the spine. “What?”
“It’s stupid. ”
“No, shut up. Say that again?”
“Do you want me to shut up or say it again? ”
Gerard glared at where he hoped the boy’s face was. A whispery noise reached him, not quite a laugh, but somewhere in the range of one.
“I-I said, Martin, ” he repeated. “ I-I’ve always liked that name. Martin. ”
Gerard shrugged. “Fine then, I’ll just call you Martin.”
“I told my mum once. ” It came out forcefully, almost as if he was trying to argue. “ She said it wasn’t—it’s not the right kind of name for me, and even if it was it’s not even that good a name, it’s plain and— ”
“Do I look like your mum?” Gerard scoffed. “And I’ve got to call you something, don’t I? Might as well be something you like. So you’re Martin.”
And the thing was, he didn’t mean anything by it. Or at least, he didn’t mean to do anything. He was just being practical, after all, he couldn’t just keep calling him “hey you” until he remembered his name again.
But it didn’t matter, because for a split second, Gerard could see him.
It was quick, and not very clear. But Gerard was lucky enough not to blink and miss the sight of a small, chubby boy before the Lonely dragged him back again.
He couldn’t help it; he jumped.
“What’s the matter? ” Martin asked.
“Think I just saw you,” Gerard replied. “Could you do it again?”
“I-I didn’t do anything. But are you sure? ”
“I know what I saw,” Gerard insisted. “You’ve got glasses, and hair down to here.”
“That’s me! ” Martin’s voice was hushed but excited, as if he was sharing a precious secret. “ You can call me Martin, if you want. ”
Gerard wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything, so he shrugged. “Good. I was going to.”
In the end, Martin couldn’t read the book himself when he was already holding one that he couldn’t afford to put down. So, instead, Gerard held the book for him and turned the pages when he asked, tolerating the cold on one side so that Martin could sit close enough to read.
Gerard hadn’t even looked at the other stories before skipping to the one he thought would help. He’d never read like this before, huddled up with someone reading over his shoulder. Mum either set a book in front of him and left, or watched him like a hawk as he struggled. He used to tell himself it was so she could protect him, in case one of the books tried to hurt him. Then he accidentally wrinkled a page on one, and he learned that it wasn’t him that she wanted to protect.
But Martin leaned on him, a cold but bearable weight, and made soft humming noises at the parts that Gerard had already read.
He felt Martin tense when they got to the chapter about the invisible child, and he almost closed the book. But Martin shook his head—he was close enough for Gerard to feel his cold, damp hair against his neck—and insisted on reading on.
Once they reached the end, with Ninny visible again and laughing, Gerard felt him relax again.
“That was nice. ” Martin sounded relieved. “ That was really nice. ”
Gerard snorted. “Didn’t help you, did it. Least it could’ve done is say what went into that medicine that fixed her.”
“Maybe. I still liked it. ”
“Guess so.”
They finished off that book, and when Martin didn’t object, Gerard started on the one he’d skipped before. The lingering chill remained in his periphery—it wasn’t going anywhere as long as Martin wasn’t—but it was a bearable sort of discomfort. With Martin pressed up against him, he couldn’t help thinking how strange it was that here, with the Lonely so viciously close, he was the closest he’d ever been to another person.
He was nearly done with the book when it occurred to him that Martin hadn’t said anything for a while, or moved for that matter. Poking him brought him around with a faint murmuring, and Gerard realized with a jolt that Martin had fallen asleep on him.
He hadn’t realized that Martin could sleep, like this. Where had he been sleeping before?
Gerard didn’t bother asking. Questions like that didn’t do much except make Martin upset, and—well. Stupid thought, really. He had no reason to believe the story had anything to do with the Leitner. But in it, making Ninny upset made the invisibility last longer. So, better safe than sorry.
Martin put up a fight when Gerard tried to bully him under the covers that night—“ It’s your bed! I can’t kick you out of your bed! ”—until Gerry rolled his eyes and pulled him down next to him. Martin made an empty hump under the blankets, just like in the story, and he fidgeted for a while before he settled down. It was cold that night, but Gerard was used to cold nights.
Freedom was usually something that Gerard craved and hated in equal measure. He left the shop when he needed time out of Mum’s reach to breathe. But he could never leave for very long, not without being taunted by the ignorant world he could never be part of.
Martin changed that.
He was like a shield, or maybe a tour guide. Things that had always seemed infuriating and stupid to Gerard suddenly made sense when he explained them. And even if Gerard couldn’t see him, he could take cues by listening to the pitch of his voice, and feeling how heavily or gently the Lonely pressed down on him.
In turn, Gerard led Martin away from the treacherous spots—the places where fragments of the Dread Powers lurked and hunted. Sometimes, when Martin was feeling bold enough to let go of the Leitner with one hand, he’d reach out and hold Gerard’s. To not get lost, he said.
One day when Gerard was much older and had more in his head than what his mother had put there, he would understand what happened, and why. But at the time, at least in his eyes, there was hardly any sense to it at all.
It happened when they were getting out of a crowded train carriage. The press of bodies around him jostled Gerard from side to side, and Martin’s hand slipped from his. He didn’t think much of it, which was why the sudden drop in temperature caught him off guard.
Martin cried out, and Gerard didn’t think much of it because Martin got anxious about getting lost. He stuck his elbows out and bulled his way back into the crowd, ignoring the grumbling and glaring from the people around them. He pushed toward the heart of the cold spot and reached for it, hand out and open, and was rewarded when Martin latched on tightly and let him pull him clear.
He found a secluded spot where Martin could calm down, an empty and dingy corner of the station with nothing around them but litter and a half-smoked cigarette that someone hadn’t put out properly. They were well out of earshot from the crowds, because disembodied crying was usually a good way to attract unwanted attention.
“You aren’t going to start crying, are you?” he sighed when he heard Martin sniffle. “You didn’t even get lost. I was right there. I wasn’t about to leave you behind.”
He said it to try to get Martin to calm down. He didn’t want to hear Martin cry, and not even because it was annoying. He just didn’t like it at all. It wasn’t that it made him want to cry—Gerard couldn’t remember the last time he’d ever cried—but it made him feel awful all the same.
Instead of calming down, Martin squeezed his hand and started crying in earnest.
Frantically, Gerard looked around to see if anyone had noticed; luckily, there was no one in earshot. “No, stop—what’s the matter? It was just a crowd, it wasn’t even—”
“Do you mean it?”
Gerard blinked. Martin’s voice sounded different. Not strange, exactly—the opposite of strange. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but—“What? Yes, obviously. What would I leave you for?”
It didn’t feel like a spell, or an invocation. It was just the truth. Gerard said it because he meant it. But the words were barely out of his mouth when—when there he was.
He was short, and chubby, with curly hair all the way down to his shoulders. He was a little pale too, but that might have been the cold. Gerard had seen people who crawled from the Lonely before, and they always looked like they’d lost a bit of color.
The book he had clutched to his chest looked remarkably similar to the one they’d read together at the library. It didn’t even have a lot of fog on the cover, or anything really horrifying. It just looked like a book. That was how it got you, Gerard supposed.
“Martin?” he asked cautiously.
Martin looked at him, still teary-eyed. Then he looked down, following the line of Gerard’s arm down to their joined hands. All at once, he went still.
Gerard was sure he didn’t see Martin blink for a full minute, as if he was afraid he’d disappear again the second he closed his eyes. But finally he did blink, and found that he was still there.
“Am I…?” That was why his voice sounded different; it was normal, without the fog muffling it. “Am I back?”
“Think so.” Gerard could still see wisps of fog drifting around the cover of the Leitner, licking at Martin like flames. “Um. You should probably let go of that.”
Martin tensed, clutching the book tighter to his chest. “But—but what if it takes me again?” He wasn’t crying anymore. Maybe he was too frightened to cry. “What if I let go, and I get lost?”
“You won’t.” Gerard squeezed his hand. “I’ve got you, remember?”
Martin looked down at their joined hands the way Mum sometimes looked at Leitners. No one had ever looked at any part of Gerard that way before.
Slowly, shakily, Martin loosened his grip on the book and let it fall. It hit the ground with a muffled thud.
He didn’t disappear again.
Gerard felt Martin’s sigh of relief all the way down to his bones.
“W-what now?” Martin whispered. With his now free hand, he reached up and wiped his eyes. “What if someone else picks it up?”
“They won’t,” said Gerard.
“How do you know?”
Because he could reach down and pick it up himself. He could take it home. Show it to Mum. She’d be so happy with him—maybe she’d look at him the way she looked at Leitners.
The thoughts passed through his head, touching him the way he’d touch the surface of a scab. Instead of hope, instead of pain, instead of wistful longing, he felt nothing but a vague, unpleasant itch. The scab wouldn’t go away if he scratched it—all it would do was bleed.
The smell of cigarette smoke drew his eyes. There it was, lying on the ground by a bin, still glowing and lit. Gerard retrieved it, careful not to burn his fingers on the lit end.
“Gerard?”
He hadn’t answered Martin’s question. “I’ll make sure,” he said.
The book called to him, a bit. He could see himself swallowed in the fog, far away from Mum and her books and lessons and expectations. But Martin was holding his hand. He couldn’t get lost, as long as Martin was holding his hand.
Gerard knelt down, and burned his first Leitner.