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(1: Pallor)
Dawn splits the sky when you greet me.
You stand lopsided and dead-centre of a room too decayed to resemble anything of a home, and I see it swim in your eyes. Iridescent, flickering, you look in directions unknown to me and I watch carefully. My judgement is a poor gauge for if my presence is something you’ve registered. We are brushed with youth, both of us, though it does not flatter you.
When your gaze settles and the restlessness subsides, your focus is not on me. It is on something behind, a place I cannot perceive, and still I turn to grace your vision with some semblance of tangibility. There is nothing there. Your nails produce horrible music as they dig into the pale ridge of your nape, burdened, sloping down under the weight of secrets I hunger to learn. The bed behind you displays sheets too crisply folded and I understand at once:
“You have not slept.”
My accusation is one you handle with the grace I expect, so to speak, none at all. You draw red from your neck and paint your face with it next, and it cannot hide the shadows beneath your eyes. Something trembles in your marrow and the silence is altogether unfitting for a frame so neglected. Petrified wood and petrichor scents flood my being, I have left the door open longer than I suspect you’d prefer. Do you mind it?
“Yes, well-”
The void in your socket blinks left and right.
“Noise. It is difficult to ignore, you see, in those twilight hours.”
You see me for the first time since I have entered the room. A flutter of hope leads me to believe the look you wear now is one of relief, despite the sinister sorrow that follows close behind, for denial suits my temperament far neater than it does yours. In the absence of sound, I venture a step forward. Nerves snap the fibres in your being when you look up at me, startle, even, and all movement has ceased within you. Owlish eyes bore into all that they behold, and I am no exception.
“I suppose you will not be present at this morning’s lecture, then?” I ask, cursing the lack of rigidity in my syllables.
The question is sobering to your drunken haze, this I notice. Something in the night seems to have convinced you of anxieties I could not imagine, and the world around you has slipped entirely from your scope of view. It shocks you, I think, to remember it; the lecture, the world, my presence. Existence drapes over your skin in an awkward fashion. You have never learned how to wear it well.
“The lecture?”
You scratch again, and there is nothing in this life more tempting than to seize your hand.
“No, no. I fear I will not attend. I can not leave this room.”
Every letter dissolves the moment it leaves your tongue until there is but a whisper, a shaking thing, hissing into the night. I catch hints of uncertainty in the curves of your teeth just as you catch concern in mine. What I dare not admit to knowing is that I have recognized what you remain blind to: your accent thickens under the weight of fear, of uncertainty, and it chases your breaths. It sharpens now, lengthens your vowels and turns your ‘r’ brittle, and something within me writhes to greet it with my own. Soon, I will match your city and your manner: my own voice will grow foreign to me.
You admitted to me once, how your name is but an empty shell of what you remember it to be. How your letters wore ornaments not fit for the spires you call home. Foolish, isn’t it? That I had felt a kinsmanship with you then? What symbols have we sacrificed, swapped out and purchased anew to rebuild some image that will find a place in this rat’s burrow? Yet there was no danger for you as there had been for me; your survival did not hinge on its acceptance.
“Micolash,” I begin, slow, deceitful. You forget this shell is yours.
“Has something happened?”
Too vast. I have asked you something of immeasurably simplicity, yet the clockwork cacophony of your mind creaks and groans as you feign at understanding my intentions. I watch as you measure, study, qualify and quantify the concepts of “something” and ‘‘happened” with the care I’d envision of a doctor’s son. Still, this uncertainty does not suit you. You are more hesitation than man.
Crow-like, you tilt your head to the side, your ill-nurtured brilliance balancing the weight of the terms I have given you. The difference of gravity, or perhaps perspective, allows you at last to sew together your patchwork conclusion.
“No,” you lie. “Nothing has happened.”
“Why are you unable to leave this room?”
I tire of our cumbersome dance. You hear it too; my voice is angled and precise, digging into the air between us so that I may extract some truth from your nebulous being. Your eyes- already they have been forced open with chronic wakefulness; they widen yet at my asking. Did you not anticipate that I would press on? That your meagre attempt at deception would fail to find footing against my own?
You grab at your shirt, at the space above your heart, and I watch as the creases and folds of light and shadow play lines across your chest. You are newborn in your own sensation, as though the presence of a body that surrounds your soul is something you’ve freshly discovered. Old fools cooped up in their towers of science and labour claim that a liar is as obvious as where his gaze is cast- driven by fear to never settle, and yet, your eyes have not moved from mine. I understand now; you sit in the space between an outlier and an anomaly, your existence alone frustrates all rationality. You blink.
“A guest waits for me on the roof,” you confess. “It-”
You pause, swallow down the last of your humanity and choke on it. Are those tears?
“Ah,” there is a laugh at the edge of your breath, barely sardonic. “I could not explain it. There is no song to convince your lot. But I heard, yes- I heard. Do you hear it?”
I strain, for you. Had I not been brought up with a level of the common man’s etiquette, I would have summoned a hand at the back of my ear to syphon this spectre of a sound. But there is nothing, and you see it, or you hear it, for I watch as your features sink with an emotion I can not name.
I straighten my posture, study every glimpse of you, a leech of a man you are. You take the shape of your bones, there is no flesh to guard your core, your belief, and it bears witness against you as you stand at every trial and tribulation with that same tint of the undead that has become your reputation. I hear it now, not your guest, but the judgement you are burdened with: Madness.
Madness. You’ve been born guilty of it. They call you mad more often than you care to admit, scholars all cloth-bound and shackled in study to this college built on rubble and the death of dreams. They chirp it incessantly as mockingjays that build their nests in lumber and brick, eager to sing whatever song their luminous provost allows. This is music I know too well, for the avian is deemed more sophisticated than the earthly here, and I have whittled myself nothing if not loyal to this dogma you call insufferable. I hear them still.
“Like a choir,” I think, borrowing your penchant for observation. Yes, like a choir. Layers and layers of faceless voices for a melodious song, a sacrifice of individuality in favour of harmony. You are off-key, obedient to a conductor near a figment of your wild imagination.
Insanity ails and guards you with more care than I’ve ever been able to summon forth, and it elicits some bitter sensation in me. You would call it jealousy, yet you call many things by many names that our colleagues pick apart as though it were sport. Not I. Not anymore.
I poise my hands up as though I were armed, and I await your contempt. You provide none. You perceive I’ve no weapon, no threat, a conclusion fit enough to melt you. Sharp angles soften into the face you wear when you fancy yourself a shape-shifter, a mimic, the costume that obscures your true voice. I see a certain warmth dance within your veins, too pure to be madness, or else your sanity burns chimeric.
It is wrong to see you like this. Desperation fashions you naive, uncentered, eagerness is too defined a concept for you to partake in it. Yet, you stand here, shaken and shivering in a way identical to the street dogs that chase us in the city alleys. You’ve always cared for them, those mangy things, disease-riddled and mottled with aggression. Had it been just yesterday, I scolded you for your ritual practice of luring them to your side with a meal that should have been yours? You grow yet weaker and thinner for paws engraved in the gutter, for scruffs roadside bound. In your gaze I see that you’ve taken on the spirit of your pitiful friends, you are without a leash, without a home. Worrying.
“Come, breathe the lake with me. I’ll escort you outside.”
You recoil, bristle, split and reform.
“I can’t. It waits for me.”
“It shall not have you in my presence. I swear it.”
You tremble more than I’ve ever seen you. The coldness in your sockets retreats into the brain, nervus opticus your frost covered roots, taking in vision and turning it snow. Your shadow dons me as a cape and still, you make yourself small.
I think to refuse you. To tell you what you’ve been told for centuries past- “there is nothing there. You’re mad,” Cherrywood becomes your podium for which you are cross-examined, you slam the hands you’ve borrowed from the underworld and plead, beg, argue, you fight. You maintain your standing, your case: I am not insane.
But you’ve no proof. No witness nor credibility to your name, and I pluck you from the purgatory of retrial you find yourself in at every waking walking hour. Classes turn masses; judge, jury, and ivory executioner. I think to grant you your sentence from my own lips, for would it be a mercy to you? Would you listen, walk yourself to the asylum with the grace of the gallow-bound?
“I swear it.”
I spare you. I spare you from indignity, surely, what you deserve. For when you struggle against the beartraps, hooks and nails that mangle your legs and shackle your wrists, blindness suffocates you in her embrace. You do not see me in your panic, you do not see the botanist- we are blurs to your eternal judgement and you drive us away, fangs bared, claws extended, huffing for a moment of peace in this academy turned hunting ground. A ravenous minded man you are, even when you are fractured, and I’ve no choice but to feed you.
My hand extends as I urge it forwards. It takes one curtsy of my fingers for you to step close, another for you to outstretch yours as though I am the one to be feared. When you take it, I understand now, I grasp the motivations for our endless dissections of the deceased. You’d fool me for a corpse, your sickly pallor absent of all warmth.
I grasp it tightly.
(2: Algor)
There is a mercurial quality about the lake this time of day.
It spits flecks of sun back into us from the window and your expression withers and rots when the reflections warp your vision. You hide from it, stumbling at my left, your hand in mine. It digs into me and I make no comment on it, your strength is misleading. I suspect my skin has protested in shades of purple by the time you decide to release me, only to miss your tether. Morning waits for you, and at your side I fathom, finally, the depths of terror that daybreak can bring. It is a predator- lurking in the shadows and light scents of midnight rain that seep through these ancient halls.
Blue-tinted they are now, soaking in the aftermath of night, spilling bird songs into the air. A chirp is enough to disquiet you.
“Not too fast.”
Halfway between the moon and the stars; your voice is gone, dissolving in that space between pleas and demands.
You test the depths of my pity. Or could I be mistaken? Are you aware of it all- planting yourself in our room like a snare, awaiting my predictable nature so that I may accompany you at last? You told me once, perhaps in a dream:
“Rationality is your ruin. You’ll never catch me with legs so high-strung.”
I laughed at you then, but I cannot laugh any longer. Not when you keep running, and your image turns insignificant with distance. I could capture you between my hands; but you would not be mine. There would be too many miles between my fingers. Why must you go so far away? What waits for you that you cannot find in the confines of reality?
You tug at my shoulder, begging me to slow my pace. I let you rest against boards of a forest turned to architecture, and you hide yourself at the side of a pillar. Light snaps at our heels, it bleeds in through glass panes that feign existence, and I sense your nerves coiling as you press down your instinct to flee.
A creaking of the foundation catches my ears just as it rips off your own. You nearly jump, head swivelled and bones poised to get caught in the teeth of whatever beast awaits you. It is the only defence you can afford- the threat that you will not be an easy meal. You are sharp and unsteady as a blade poised in the hand of a scared child, a cornered animal, all rash abandon and the promise of death in your eyes. I place my other hand on your shoulder in the hopes that it will plant you. You whisper in my ear.
“We’re being followed,”
I turn. There is dust and wood-varnish and nothing else. Too keen on my perception, or lack thereof, I feel you tug at me.
“We’re being followed. We ought to turn back”
You poor thing. How I wish to hold you by the ear and scream that you’ve been deluded, lied to by the very stars you revere, that what you think chases you is but a mouse or a plank grown too impatient to stand still. Your diseased visage is quick to remind- you would hate me for it, for peeling back what you call spirituality to reveal it as poison for the brain. Do those various cavities in your skull ache still? I could never bring myself to ask.
I push us yet forwards until the maw of our academy greets us, shut with a chain that mocks a rosary, clamped between handlebar-hands. The tender cloth of my vest wrinkles as you dig yourself against my back, deftness faint enough to be mistaken for defiance. You are harelike, all pointed ears and twitching eyes, and I indulge your endless caution. There are no wolves, no foxes, no hawks or stoats that have risen at this hour, and it fashions you into something younger than you are.
Bizarre, it is, to imagine you too were a child once. You too, clung to nightgowns and weathered hands and complained of sounds in the darkness. I hypothesise the hunters I am blind to stalked you even then, growing with the years, for they seem greater beasts now.
The chain gives easily, though you do not. You place your hand over mine as I rest a palm on the door handle.
“She is waiting outside this door.”
“She?”
You bite your tongue, and I see you wince, and I wish it were my teeth against your flesh instead. You soothe the ache against the inside of your cheek.
“Yes, she. The voice, I intend- feminine. It would be motherly, if not for-“
She staggers your breathing.
“For the meaning beneath, the things she promises.”
At this, I contort the crevices of my face with disdain. Promising, what does your fractured conscience promise you? I see it painted in shades of sombre grey; you answer to a call with no face, no body, you commune with that which gives the accusations levied against you some credibility. The assurance with which you speak and the vitriol that surrounds you dance a horrible duet in perfect four-four time, and the rhythm distresses me. I fear your hysteria will be contagious.
It is with your admission I begin to question if something so banal as sleep would improve your condition. For all your perception, all your endless wit and sharp gaze, there are truths I keep hidden in my own interest. I hear you, scholar. Not your unseen mistress nor your night terrors, yet I hear you, you alone, muttering into the night. You talk of joining the stars, in your mind, your brethren, and I want to turn the cosmos vacant. Stars burn endlessly with blinding self-righteousness, sit at the throne of worship from us lowly ones below, and you are but a dog yet. We are made to be, in a place like this, at the beck and call of the provost that shapes our kennel. You speak of the botanist, call for her aid over mine, and I lie awake and listen as her vowels creep up through your throat. You speak of oblivion, to be nothing and everything, matter and antimatter converging in a blasphemous ritual.
You speak of foul fantasies to leave your shell, and I pretend not to hear. A coward takes your place when you phrase abandonment as a noble undertaking. To flee this world is simple; to exist in it, however, is a challenge befitting to your intelligence. How I wish your thirst for competition persisted against your folly and delusion.
The ridges of your bone-carved hands pry at mine. There is blood beneath your fingernails. A heartbeat strikes me, quick in cadence, a fluttering bird trapped in flesh. I count your apprehension in notes on a sheet we hoped to play in harmony. You’ve gone too fast.
“Let us leave.”
You do not beg, and yet, it is all I picture in your weather-worn pallor. This is not right, not for a scholar of your ilk. You carve and anatomize, dissect and petrify, you chisel the planes of your science through drained organs and muscle unfolded. To see you now, shivering at the sight of the scalpel, gnawing at the sides of your rat’s cage, is too foreign a vision. I give you my best smile.
“She will not have you.”
You release me. Sunlight marks a line where your dissection begins, where the door opens: I ready my tools.
(3: Rigour)
We walk along the shoreline.
This is no ocean. It emits no calming sound nor healing air, yet I see it contains medicine all the same. Soft grass turns mud under my soles and I curse myself for bringing you here, for the work you’ve made for me. Mud does not wash easily.
When I turn, I see you freed of dim shadows and feeble candlelight, and you are a ghoul of a man. It halts me. You wrap your arms around yourself as though it will shield you from my stare, you craft a chrysalis from paper-thin tissue and tendons starved. Words turned termites in the shapes of letters eat at my teeth, I cannot summon the strength to speak. There are no words that do not make a curse out of you.
I see the sockets that swallow your eyes as a void, sinking them in pools of tar and elderberry. I wish to touch them, to wipe the pigment from your skin, but it is only a fantasy. Your mind is elsewhere, crafting theories and convoluted philosophies to explain your ghost’s absence at the door, where you had been utterly convinced she lay waiting in ambush. You would not perceive my touch, not when you are grasped at by a thousand hands still unseen.
Head craned to the horizon line, you refuse to meet my gaze. We continue walking, stumbling, in your case, and I await the dull sound of dirt catching your eventual fall. It never does, you never do. The sky burns in shades of crimson and copper, and I’d deem it beautiful, if not for the discomfort I predict it’d bring you. At last, you give me your voice.
“I’m tired,” you say, whispering still. “I want to watch the sunrise instead.”
Without awaiting a response you sit yourself down into the muck and grime of grasses slick with dew. You act as though that is where you belong, rotting in the soil with maggots as your only company. Though reluctant, I stand at your side. Your idle hand traces alchemical signs into the patch beside you, driven by some underlying sensation which I have not the name for. I crane my head, try to read them- but your penmanship is far too abstract, far too garrish, and I find myself lost in circles and dots with no origins. It hypnotises, invites me by the hand, spins me until I lose up from down. There are only a few I know by heart.
“Quicksilver?”
You pause, tear away from your beloved horizon, and feign a look of surprise.
“Mercury. The cosmic substance that joins life and death at one vertex.”
I hide a smile I’ve practised in the mirror. You prattle off your learned facts at me as though you were in any condition to tutor, and it brings out a vitality in your throat. At chemistry, you always harboured a peculiar interest.
“Is it your favourite?”
You raise a ridge of your colourless face, and I catch the slightest indications of amusement in your bloodshot eyes. Does the way I perceive this world seem like a folly, scholar? I concern myself with the tangible, with the sane, with what I can shape in my own two hands. With things you’d call short-sighted in your infinite vision. And yet, you are here in the dirt, shaken, haunted, and I stand above you enjoying the light of the sun you so despise. I await your answer.
“Favourite’ is not the correct term. It is important, yes, very important. There can be no bridging of worlds without the messenger.”
“You fancy yourself a bridgemaker, then?”
You draw another symbol, neater, cleaner, and I realise you are human yet when you soothe yourself this way. Soon, I fear the lakeside will be turned a table for the elements. Transmutation occurs in the edges of the water kissed by algae, tadpoles to frogs, sproutlings to reeds. Bone and stardust are not so far apart, not so alike, a paradox you loathe and worship simultaneously.
“Gold.”
“One you’d revere, I suspect. The perfection of all things.”
The viscera within readies me to scoff, to stamp out the symbol with my heel and flatten its perfect circumference back into worm-food. That is where it belongs, we know, we see. That is where all your ideas have gone. Instead, I offer you a frown.
“Gold is soft, too easily melded. The alchemists of old noted the hue and deemed it an offspring of the sun, without the rigour or carefulness you claim them to possess.”
“You are thinking too practically,” you remind. “They thought it to be a product of the sun, not for the colour. It burns the eyes with light.”
You squint at the horizon, demonstrating your point.
“Or, so we assume.”
The sun is swallowed in your gaze and it is too wide for your frame, I fear. Your eyes, kissed by the sea at the left and the earth on the right, will sink to the lake bottom should you lean forwards. You’ve stopped shaking, still, the wires inside you have been crossed and braided into a rope that chokes, a sequence of nerves intertwined in wrong patterns and harsh knots. They anchor, send messages in loops and notches worn around the arm, a secret language we had studied together. To spell a message in morse. You do not blink, there is nothing for me to read.
Nothing but alchemical signs.
A breeze carries the scents of duckweed and decaying hedgenettles to us, crowning you still living despite the circumstances. It drowns in your hair, sifts through it as a craftsman does thread, a greedy thing. Basking in a light too spring-sweet for our youthful dimensions, you are made holy; a weeping statue in your own right, though torn from your wings. I see it illuminate the bridge of your nose; the sharp edge of your face, the hollow under your eyes, a dent in your form where your clavicle connects. Specks of gold for a figure undeserving.
You turn to me. The question erupts before I choke it in the cradle.
“What is it you saw in our room?”
The nausea is immediate. Fearful again, you fail your symbol’s perfect circle, slay them all with a line drawn briskly in ground made molasses. I hear your breath quicken. You look left and right and I yearn for the hilt of a knife in my grasp. Anything to defend us with.
“God.”
There is no warmth nor miracle in the title, nothing but the uncertainty of a man abandoned by the heavens. You say the name as though it has eaten you, claimed some piece of you and turned it to dust. The letters alone, a triumvirate, brace themselves to be disbelieved.
I consider the possibility that our worship has been wrong. We’ve been misaligned, measuring in numbers too short, ideas too narrow: perhaps we’ve beckoned something that is God only in name. Perhaps we’ve made a deity from brimstone. Pews are splintered wood, still. Varnish does not change this.
“What did she look like?”
You swallow the humid morning air, lick your teeth clear of it.
“A spider. A leviathan of one.”
Impatience colours your voice a shade darker, I imagine, but I cannot be sure. It is you who sees the world in song and pigment, not I, and I cannot ask you what you see now. I pray it is only sunlight. You’ve not glanced back at the old college since we’ve left its grounds, kept your focus squarely on the line that swallows the sea. Head hung low, you rest your tired alchemist’s arms on your knees and obscure yourself from my sight, curled like a talon. When we do not believe you, you confide in your kind; those abandoned and shunned from the light of love, those things that are detested and spat at, never adored, never worshipped, the grotesque. The sinew that clings to the ribs of a stag, the mice preserved mid-scurry in jars of fluoride, crows, rats, the slugs that writhe in their salt-beds when we get a hold of them. Macabre, aren’t you, when you’ve found your place in the pitch that holds Byrgenwerth’s planks together.
What God sees in you, I do not bother to wonder. I know. Like the haunting glow of ore superheated, nothing gentle, nothing warm- you harbour a burning curiosity, a quality I dare not to name, it is reverence, it is forbidden and needed more than air all at once. I hate it. It drags you by your neck like a chain and you follow obediently, marching forwards into lecture halls and libraries and catacombs and to my side, and I wish to cut you free, and I wish to cage you somewhere dark and damp where you’ll never face the sun again. A crucible to hold your genius that none of us care to call as such. God would not reach you there, would not get through me. I’d not let her.
“Insomnia is making a madman of you.”
A curse I’m under: the curse of rationality. I must bring you back down into the dirt and the grass and the lake and the wood. I cannot let you fly away- not yet, not when we’ve still much to learn. An asylum is no place for you. Had you uttered your truths to anyone else, another version of me, the forbidden name of my past or the false one of our initial meeting, he would have sent you there and not thought thrice of it.
I do not see you smile, but I hear the dry, quivering, dust-eaten laugh that follows. It is ancient, still, you make it as though you’ve never done it before. Each breath a pronounced mockery of my own.
“Not insomnia. Divinity.”
I begin to feel my skin prickle, an itch and a caress by another name. Sunburn. It is morning already.
We will not attend the lecture.
(4: Livor)
It is half-past eight, beyond dewdrop dreams, when we hear the bell toll.
A low funeral groan, or a whalesong made brutish steel. The echo reverberates within us both, and I see you reject the sound with a sluggish sway that disrupts a melody. The sunrise dissolves amidst overcast clouds; we’ve survived dawn and all its dangers, though you do not act the part. The curve of your spine, low and bent as the brick and mortar archways of your beloved city, the city that does not love me, rattles when you say;
“We should return. Before they find us.”
It is only when you speak that I find your wounds again, the speckled half-moons that rip at your nape and tear the space behind your ear. Sleepless eyes, eager to catch me red-handed, drown me in their colours.
“They won’t be looking. There are more important things to contend with than two wayward scholars.”
The beginnings of a grin rise and fall, fade, and you frown instead. Expressions melt between one another on such a face; transitory, always, a constant chemical reaction between the countenance you owe the world and the hideous one beneath. You fail at this craft, make simple mistakes and trip over your own lines, your own laces. You’re not built for the stage, the blinding lights, the hollow stares of your classmates and your professors. It is an art you’ve not mastered yet- to deceive another. I know it well.
“Ah, but they’ll look for you. You’re quite beloved, after all.”
The heart in my rib-fashioned cage protests against its capture; for a moment too long, I misunderstand you, I forget you are speaking through the medium of our peers. These are not your thoughts alone.
“Not this far out,” I say, and we both tell apart theory from truth. “It’s too early for a search.”
You shrug your shoulders starved of all sustenance, yet not a word escapes you. When silence is what you wish for, you make it absolute. It continues a beat longer than I’d like- two, three, and I wonder what it is you sulk over. In the recesses of my memory I play your faith over a metronome; real, not-real, real, not-real. She is not real, not in the corridors nor the lecture halls, not in the school or its grounds, not on the windows or the walls.
But she is real to you.
The mud that envelops my soles is real, it sinks me an inch or so closer to the ground, the mass and the gravity, the force and the push-pull. They act in mathematical unison, numbers and chalk-glyphs prove their existence. You are a man of science, so you claim, and so I choose to believe. I think of the spider in our room, how to graph what cannot be seen, how to calculate the existence of her or her web. Calculations you’ve already run, no doubt.
I sit down next to you, on a log half-moss and half-rotted wood, ruining more of my uniform than I bother to dwell on. In some distant land of stalks and water-scapes, we hear a frog sing. You rest your head on your arms, tilt your focus at me. In this new angle, I wonder, is there something you hope to discover?
“This ‘God’ of yours, is there evidence that she exists?”
You stiffen. Turn away from me in shame, or regret by another name.
Spindly fingers haunt the space above your neck and I prepare to wince, tensed like a spring, yet I see you refrain. You choose to weave your devil’s idle hand through black locks instead, scratch with what I presume to be frustration.
“Evidence. Rather broad, wouldn’t you say? Of course, there’s evidence. Every iteration of our kind finds a god. Loran, Isz, the East and the West. Her voice, and a presence- it creates shadows on the wall when you aren’t there, in the hours where you’re fast asleep. The ceiling creaks when she peers in through the curtains.”
A sigh.
“But- I suppose you meant evidence of a physical sort. Samples, or a silk-trail? In that regard, I’ve nothing to show. Only a theory, and my word.”
Despair dampens your being, attention darts away as though tugged at by a hook, fished up and placed somewhere else. It turns you away like a strike to the face, paints you red before you go pale again. I wonder how often you’ve had this conversation, how many times someone’s pitied you, poked you in lieu of a creature trapped in glass and hypothesised your reaction. What did you see? How do you know? Can it be proven? Can you carve the unfathomable into an offering acceptable enough for our tastes?
It is no surprise, then, that you had fought with a considerable amount of determination to hide your situation. It was reckless to give in at my interrogation- I think to scold you, an instinct carved deep into my bones, but I never do. You are a master of probability where I cannot grasp the concept- you should have known better than anyone the chance that I would not have believed you, reprimanded you, perhaps, and sowed anger rather than the understanding you so badly crave. I could have sent you away, held you down whilst attendants and the like pulled you away into a prison by another name. Turn your brilliance into rot and your wit into malice.
Still, you confessed.
“Your word is substantial.”
An eye, the left, weeps wet specks of light when the surprise takes you, when my own voice wrenches yours from your throat and leaves you speechless. Here, I forget why we’re here. Why I’ve followed you- or you me, why I’ve thrown my efforts and study to the wayside for a lake full of decaying scales and fish-bones, if your suspicion persists even now, if everything I say looks a lie to you. You stare as though I’ve taken something- ripped it from your hands and held it high above my head.
Then, a smile. A smile that brings you back into your shell at the library- at the place where I’d seen you properly. When you were at the youngest I’ve seen you, when the season had been pleasant and the walls painted themselves a shade closer to home. It is warm like a candle, abrasive like the sun- a grin too young for such a tired face. If I were braver, I’d have told you as much.
“You believe me, then?”
“For now.”
(5: Putrefaction)
For now.
To disbelieve you now would do no good, would fuel the rampant desire to abandon your flesh, the life inside you. Tomorrow, I may scoff in the privacy of our room, safe from all leviathans and creaking ceiling-boards. I could laugh with astonishment at how you managed to place at an academy such as this, in a town so quick to throw its lunatics to the wolves. You say she was a spider? How doltish. There’s no such thing.
Madness. Visions, Insomnia, Hysteria, Paranoia, a Neurotic Disposition that runs in your lineage. Episodes of extreme nervosity bordering on aggression: a tendency to adopt habits of a self-destructive nature. Frailty. A Weak Constitution, plagued by lengthy Daydreams and Night-Terrors. Somnambulism.
They’ll label you with anything but your name.
Tomorrow is a land full of false promises and blind grabs towards a truth. It is the lie we tell ourselves, the proverbial pearled gate to a better future, a future where you are believed, where I am someone else, Where I’ve blood that belongs. Sleep will snap at your heels, turn your world black the moment you close your eyes. I will be questioned on my absence, forgiven, and a coldness will fill the space between us. Every rule will be followed, every lecture attended, every meal eaten and every candle extinguished come lights-out. Tomorrow: this will all be a fever-born dream, and you’ll wonder if it was even real.
But today, I sit next to you. I allow the sun to burn me more whilst I wait for the madness to wear off, for your neck to heal and your tremors to leave you be. A sheepishness settles over your grotesque habits, softens them with wool coats and pliant grasses until all that remains is the fatigue.
There is something warmer here, a gentleness to your ragged edges. It bears little resemblance to the man from the hallway, the version of you where you are convinced you will die and no-one will piece together how. I think of the fear, attempt to conjure it for myself, feel my own heart race the way it should have matched yours. It is foreign to me. Not the panic but the disbelief, how it feels to be branded untrustworthy. The reputation you wear as a collar chokes us both.
You rest your head against my knee, close the eyes that have braved sights and storms I wish never to fathom. I feel soft breathing through fabric and remember that you are alive, tangible and physical, the dreams have not taken you yet. Sleep may not suffice to fix you- still I remain foolish enough to hope. It is the naïvete our age allows us.
“I’m tired,” you whisper.
I let you rest.