In case you didn't know I was back: hi I'm back. And I'm writing quick, broody little atmospheric pieces again (and man have I missed this.)
Enjoy.
You sit in the darkness and wait.
It would be less dark, if you drew the curtains, but you feel more at home this way. In the dark, and the silence. There has been too much light for too long.
They speak to you in whispers, murmuring like the rustling of pages. They do not ask why; you have gotten all of that over with long ago. It's just the inane chatter of people gathered together and bored with waiting. You do not listen to the words. It is enough that the voices are there. It makes you feel less alone.
(There have been times you have paced the shelves, brushing your fingertips over cool leathery spines. Your footsteps echo in the huge vaulted ceiling. The way the house was built, the ballroom with its polished marble floor is at the bottom, and the library is not a separate room but a balcony extending almost all the way to the massive chandelier. There are even steps going down, so that if you wanted you could leave the long lines of shelves and in the crystallized starlight do a minuet or two with your ghosts.
But now you are old, and tired, and you do not have the energy to dance.)
When she finally comes, the first thing she says is, "This was a beautiful house, once."
"It was abandoned after the Revolution," you tell her.
"You don't seem surprised to see me here."
"I have been waiting for you."
She crosses from the door to the window and draws back the curtain. It is night, moon dark, and the stars send tiny pinpricks of silver to stab your dilated pupils.
"I suppose," you add, "you want to see the library."
She stares at you with expressionless grey eyes. She looks nothing like you. Her hair must be blonde, because it's grey too, in the dim light.
"Get up, old man."
You rise. (You feel fragile, like her words are shaking you to pieces already.)
"Come."
Her face remains expressionless as she stands before the shelves. You reach out to stroke lank honey-coloured hair.
"Who was that?"
The voices whisper, and you wonder if she can hear them.
"I don't remember. I don't remember... so many things."
She looks into the head's blank, open green eyes.
"You must have loved him, to keep him here so long."
"I don't remember," you say again. "I've been here for such a long time. So much seems unimportant now."
"I'm here to replace you," she says.
"I know."
"You'll die."
"Like them?"
She steps back to the railing and gazes around. "I don't intend to keep a library."
The eyes follow you. The bones are on the edges but you keep the heads on the shelf in the middle, so they can see when you dance.
"Do you regret it?" she says abruptly, into the cold, still air. You wonder if she has ever been inside a crypt before.
"I am old."
"That's not an answer."
There's a head with pale soft short hair and one with pale soft long hair and one with an Asian face and one still wearing a scowl and they all whisper in your ear.
"What is there to regret?"
She grips your wrist with surprising strength and you feel the brittle bones inside your fleshless hand being ground into power.
She leads you down the stairs.
"Dance with me, Tolvydas."
You haven't heard that name in so long.
You dance with her in the starlight and the ghosts surround you, eyes bright and alive and hungry. Feliks. That's his name, the honey-coloured one. You see him most, twirling on the edge of the ballroom with wild abandon, slender arms like columns of dust. And Ivan and Tasha and Yao and Lovino and— the one with curly hair and sad grey eyes like the girl you're dancing with- you used to love him, you think. His bones are the ones that clatter when you walk past them, like they're reaching for you.
But you are old. You are tired and you do not remember.
You dance with your daughter in the starlight, and feel your fingers and toes beginning to soften into dust. Your skin is boiling away into nothingness. There will not be bones left. You will cease to exist completely. The prospect brings nothing- not fear, not relief.
"What do they call you?"
It is suddenly desperately important to know. You haven't wanted anything this desperately in a long time.
She smiles like a thin blade in the starlight.
"Viltė," she says, and you have time, before your chest crumbles, to approve.
Viltė: "hope", from viltis