The hallway was dark and the floorboards creaked because the hour was late, and restless phantoms romped in the corner of her eye. She ignored the phantoms, because she did not fear creatures that had no substance and merely leached their strength from her imagination. Integra was small, so the creaking was small, matching the size and harshness of her soft slippers that swept over the wood. And the door she searched for was blurred because she had forgotten her glasses. But she identified it for being the only door with a band of light beneath it - at this time of night, when it could also be accurately referred to as early morning. The time depended on her preference.
The doorknob turned perfectly, without a sound, and the door inched open far enough for small eyes to spy on the man at the desk who's back was hunched and seemed to be all that his body was composed of. As Integra's slippers swept forward over the carpet, she waited for her vision to strengthen and show her how tired a father's back could appear. He was slouched, and could have been asleep at his desk. But the back moved and straightened enough for a head to be seen, and an arm extended from it to bring a glass of some golden liquid to the newly emerged head. Integra watched as the glass was returned to the desk and heard it slide over the wood as her father pushed it away, as if it had not helped quench his thirst. Or perhaps it was warm.
Integra refused to drink warm apple juice, even if Walter had brought it to her himself. She imagined herself leaving as quietly as she had come, and going to the kitchen to fetch her father some ice cubes for his juice. She would need a cup to bring it back so it would not chill her hands and leave a trail of droplets through the house. He father wouldn't like that, and this unhappiness would negate her effort to make his juice cold and more enjoyable.
A slipper slipped backwards, and then the other followed its example as Integra chewed on the idea. When Arthur's head had disappeared over the crest of his back and lay buried in his arms, Integra scooted through the door and passed through the dark mansion, ignoring the phantoms that tussled with one another in the corner of her eye.
Lights from outside often drew her eyes to the windows, recognizing the eternal presence of the guards who kept the monsters of substance from her home. That was how Walter had explained it – that was why there were no monsters in her closets, or the corridors, or under her bed. So she was thankful for their presence and showed the guards only her best and politest behavior when they spoke to her. They were mostly all funny men and they all had little girls at home just like her. She asked them why they weren't at home guarding their little own little girls. The response she had gotten sounded strange, but that might have been because it had taken so long for the men to come up with an answer. "They have their mother's watching over them while we're away."
Oh. This had made sense to Integra. She didn't have a mother - which was the most potent monster repellant in existence - so she needed all of these guards to keep her safe. Hundreds of guards were necessary to match the power a mother had to repel monsters. This had increased her gratitude towards them immensely.
The ice shifted with a sudden ringing note that surprised Integra, and she squinted at the door she was approaching in the corridor, holding her breath as she expected to see her father emerge, which would spoil the surprise. But nothing emerged from the partially open door, and Integra allowed her lungs to fill as a little smile dimpled the baby fat that clung to her cheeks. She brushed past the door and swept over the carpet to her father's side, standing by an elbow that lay on the desk. She stood on tip-toe to try and see if he was asleep. But his head was buried somewhere in his arms, and she couldn't find his eyes. Integra decided that this was enough of a surprise, and tugged on the sleeve that covered the elbow on the desk. Arthur was startled and his head shot out of his arms and his back straightened until it was closer to the proper posture Walter had told Integra she should imitate. The amount of surprise in his expression deepened Integra's dimples. She held up the glass of ice cubes as far as her stubby arms could reach.
Now he'll be happy and drink his juice and pat me on the head and let me sit in his lap and call be a good girl and send me off to bed when I'm tired. Integra grinned up at her father, waiting for him to smile back. But his look was dazed, his hair ruffled, his eyes red and ringed like some of the quiet guards who never spoke to Integra. Would this mean her father wouldn't pat her and thank her for the ice cubes? Or was he too sleepy for juice?
"I brought you ice cubes." Integra said, and blue eyes that matched her own stared at her mutely. Arthur did not look at the glass of ice cubes, as if he could not be bothered to see it, though his daughter had just told him that they were for him. Integra began to dislike the attention she was receiving, which was not right, because she loved any attention she could get from her father. He was busy and always on trips. But now she squirmed and withdrew her arms as the stare remained unbroken and uncomfortably mute. "Daddy?" She asked, but Arthur said nothing. "Daddy, I brought ice cubes for your apple juice."
Unlike the phantoms in the dark places of the mansion, and though she loved her father dearly, she was frightened by the expression on his face – so strange that she felt like she could peel it off and find her father's real face beneath it - …and his paleness, and his rumbled clothes, and the way he barely blinked and was so quiet... Then her brain suggested that he might be unhappy because she was up past her bedtime.
Meekly, Integra reached up and placed the glass of ice cubes on her father's desk, and one slipper swept backwards, the other following its example slowly. Her hands were a tight knot of tangled fingers pressed against her thudding chest. "Good night Daddy."
Arthur did not see that his daughter was disturbed; he was debating, deeply in his brandy muddled mind, whether he should tell her of her grandfather's decision to curse his bloodline, weighing them down with responsibilities they had never agreed to accept. They had never been given the opportunity to scream at him for having ever considered putting his children through something so awful. Should he explain what horrors await her in the future? What horrors keep her father at his desk, drinking at this hour, unable to bear the darkness, unable to rest without the incessant torment of memories that should be stories, fiction not reality, not in a world where they were real and they could find you and touch you, rip you and kill you, and so many other terrible awful haunting things that they could do to you. Should he tell her that she should hate her grandfather as much as she should respect him? Would this only introduce the horrors to a little girl who still expected Santa Claus to fill stockings if they've been tacked over the fire on Christmas Eve? How could his father have been so monstrous, so selfish and callous, to condemn a little girl who called brandy apple juice to this wretched life.
But Arthur had been drinking and his thoughts were unclear. When the fog of his doubts and questions cleared from his eyes, she saw that Integra was leaving him. "Come here. I'm tired, that's all. Yes, good girl, climb on my lap and hand me those ice cubes." The ice cubes plopped into the brandy and tinked against the bottom and sides of the glass before they buoyed to the surface.
Integra was too small to catch the scent of alcohol from Arthur's mouth. It was just far enough away to escape the senses of a perceptive child. And then he petted her and Integra was glad she had brought the ice cubes, though she did not see her father drink his juice. And he was smiling, a little, so she smiled a lot and beamed with joy. Her eyes glanced over the surface of the desk, brought there by curiosity, since this was the only time she could see what was on the desk. When she was bigger, she would not need to sit on her father's lap to see the quilt of papers, all mixed and roughened in a great messy pile that spilled over the sides of the desk, with a little spot of wood towards the edge where her father sat and the glass of juice and the glass of melting ice cubes stood side by side. There was a shelf that rose from the opposite side of the desk, and she noticed that most of the books had fallen over or were slanted. When she peered down to check the side of the desk, she found a few books sprawled out over the floor and one another, their white pages exposed like layers of lace and silk undergarments beneath a respectable gown. It was unsightly for these books to be in such a position, so Integra told her father about them since he obviously had not noticed.
"Daddy, the books fell."
"Oh. Don't mind them, sweetheart." Arthur said, never turning his head. He was focused on his daughter's blonde head of hair, petting it slowly with a contemplative expression that showed his internal debate had not yet concluded.
"But won't the pages crease?" Integra asked, her dimples disappearing as her lips scrunched to form a tight little frown. She shook her head which disturbed her father's rhythmic petting – this seemed to rouse him from his thoughts. Arthur held her still with his arms when Integra tried to get down from his lap. "But I want to pick up the books for you." She protested, and now Arthur saw her frown. He unwrapped his arms and Integra slipped to the floor where she busied herself picking up the books, flattening curled or bent pages, and stacking the books into a stout pile. She attempted to place them on the desk, but her hands only held the bottom book, and the two books above it slipped towards her as the angle of their ascent became too sharp.
With imperfect reflexes, and the second of foresight parents are granted when their children are in danger, Arthur slapped the second book back onto the bottom book, and pinned them both against the edge of the desk. But the first fell the short distance that had separated it from Integra's face and hit her across her brow, matching the alignment of her eyebrows. Arthur stared at her numbly, waiting for her to show that she was hurt, that he was a bad father because he had been drinking and had let his little girl pick up the books he had knocked down during a fit of rage that had expired earlier and left him so morose, ashamed, and fatigued.
The book fell on the floor with a cushioned thud, and Integra pronounced a postponed and childish "Ow." Her hands touched the area that had been hit as if to agree that this was where the discomfort should be felt, and then she bent to pick up the book and give it to her father. But as she held it out to him, he tried to take it with his free hand, reaching over his other arm that had the books pinned down. The motion was awkward enough for the books to tumble onto the floor.
Without showing any response to this, Arthur took the book Integra still held and then stood to place it back on the shelf. Significantly more alert hands straightened the other books, and when Arthur was finished, Integra was holding the two remaining books for him to take.
With the books set in order, Integra bobbed up and down around the desk, picking up papers that had slipped onto the floor - some of them having glided a good distance away from the desk. In fact, she found that they were scattered all over the study. Some were lodged in the book shelves against the walls, laying on top of a row of books or slumped up against the base of the book shelves on the carpet. She even spotted a paper drooping from the frame of a painting, where it had been caught against the wall. There were a couple that were held against the curtains by some mysterious force Integra did not understand.
Her father was organizing the papers on his desk, so Integra gathered the papers she could reach, retreating to the middle of the study to lay them in little neat piles. When Arthur had finished, she asked him to help her reach the papers on the shelves and the paper caught by the painting. It was amazing how far away papers could fall from a desk.
When it came to the papers on the curtains, Integra stopped her father for a moment. "How come these papers didn't fall down? Why are they sticking to the curtains? Did you get juice on them? Because that's what happens when I spill juice on my hands. They get all sticky and stick to everything and it's yucky."
"It's magic." Arthur assured her, plucking the papers from the curtains as if he were taking ripened oranges from a tree. His mood had noticeably warmed, and Integra couldn't remember why she had been frightened. Then Arthur turned back to the piles on the floor and scooped them up as well.
"No it isn't! It's not magic! Tell me- Tell me how!" Integra complained and pestered her father for the real answer. But once he had fixed the last pile of papers on his desk, he swung her up into his arms and kissed every inch of her face so that she giggled and shrieked with delight and forgot her curiosity. Then he hummed contently within a smile and carried her from the study, into the dark hallway.
"It's terribly dark, isn't it?" Arthur observed, and then glanced at Integra in his arms. He still wore the smile.
"I'm not afraid of the dark." Integra said.
Arthur hummed tunelessly as they passed the windows with the lights that showed his men were at their posts, and walked through the darker parts of the house, towards the bedrooms where his daughter's was situated beside his own, and Walter's was not too far away. Arthur no longer had an appetite for women who had served to fulfill his carnal desires before he had married and become a father in the evening, and a widower in the morning.
They entered Integra's bedroom, and the little girl turned expectantly in his arms to look at her bed. But he stopped just before it and did not place her under the covers. They were rocking ever so slightly, Arthur turning gently from side to side as he held Integra.
"Why aren't you afraid of the dark? Your daddy is afraid of the dark." He spoke softly, hushed so that his voice would not travel through the door or be heard by ears that were so keen Arthur was never sure what ever managed to escape them.
"No!" Integra giggled at the funny things her father was saying. "Daddy isn't afraid of anything." Because daddies are never supposed to be afraid.
"I'm afraid of the dark, though. Does that make you braver than your daddy?" Arthur's voice was delicate, but his tone maintained the possibility that his words were meant for humor.
Let it be so. That would be a comfort.
Integra giggled again at the joke. "No you aren't!" she laughed, being too clever to believe him. "You can't be afraid of the dark!"
Arthur only hummed and then held his daughter close, holding her for what she felt was a long time – but it was warm and safe in her father's arms.
When he stepped to the side of the bed and placed her beneath the covers, the sheets felt cold in comparison to his arms. Integra suddenly didn't like her bed. It felt lonely. But it became a little warmer and a little less lonely when Arthur tucked her in snuggly and kissed her and hugged her the way only he could hug her - the hug Walter would never be able to imitate. She never caught the scent of the kisses, only their warmth, so that soon after Arthur had left her and shut the door, Integra was asleep.