Through a Glass Darkly
a Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila
Standard Disclaimer: Is standard. Weiss Kreuz belongs to Takehito Koyasu, Kyoko Tsuchiya, Project Weiss, TV Tokyo and no doubt several other entities that I have either forgotten about or never heard of. This is a fan work written purely for fun, I make no profit and mean no offense.
Author's Notes: This is a story of two distinct halves, each with their own distinct character. The original plan – to try and turn both halves into a single whole – would have resulted in something very schizophrenic indeed, and thus was very quickly shelved for being too stupid. The second approach initially involved my writing both sides of the story, but it became clear that this wasn't going to be feasible either if the fic was going to be finished this side of the Last Trump. To that end the less, um, experimental side of the proceedings has been more than ably handled by Rokesmith in his fanfiction The Valley of the Shadow of Death. Both stories can be read as stand-alone works, but reading both provides a far completer understanding of the story as a whole.
There's a slight research error in this fic as it stands, as I didn't know how different Protestant and Catholic Bibles could get. I realized after finishing the first chapter I should have been using Catholic bibles - however, some of the verses I used read so differently in the Douay-Rheims and New Jerusalem versions they looked odd in context. I've therefore decided I'd far rather the verses used in this fic, most of which were chosen because they were extremely well-known, sounded familiar than were strictly doctrinally accurate.
Warnings: This fic involves live burial. It is consequently extremely dark and contains themes some readers may find very troubling. Rated for language and implied physical and sexual abuse.
Part One
in a wood, astray
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
The story began, as stories did tend to, with a woman. With Manx, calm and proud and dour, stood in the basement flipping out the lights: the story began with a mission. There was always a mission. A mission and a target – how many times had heard that one? – and a mistake, a simple one, and the mistake was his own.
And sudden pain, then darkness. Another basement room stinking of old blood and disinfectant, not enough of it, and of someone else's stale fear; things, shapeless and ugly and glistening even in the darkness, as if they would be unpleasantly moist to the touch, if he could only have walked to them and placed a hand against them. Things that he couldn't put a name to and gleaming trays full of… full of stuff, and the target, smiling. There'd been a mistake, a simple one – and mistakes, in his business, always got paid for one way or another.
That had been before. He didn't like to think about before. Which left him what? Just trapped alone in the shadows and how, oh how was this any better?
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
He was cold, he was cramped, he was shivering. Ken Hidaka didn't think he'd ever felt more frightened in his life.
Lying still and silent, the breath catching in his throat and his eyes tightly closed for fear of what he might see when he opened them, he tried not to think. He thought, quite carefully, of nothing at all. (Of a field, quite empty, of long grass whispering in the wind and the sun… no. No, that wasn't going to help.) He counted his breaths: one, three, nine—Ken tried to force himself to calm.
To think only of nothing. Not where he was and what was happening to him, and not that he was going to die. Not the dampness in the air, not the smell – he could barely move or even lift his head and all fighting had done was exhaust him, leaving his hands bruised and painfully throbbing, aching so badly when he tried to move his fingers he was sure he must have seriously hurt himself. There was nothing he could do and no way to save himself: no way out, apart from one. He could only lie there, laid out as if he were already dead… he wouldn't think about that, either.
Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
"Holy Mary mother of God—"
He felt something inside him give. Help me, oh God help me—Ken was screaming. Wordlessly, hysterically and he hardly knew why when there was nobody to hear him and it helped nothing. He knew he should stop, but he couldn't. Trapped and alone and so afraid he could hardly think, he was just screaming.
He opened his eyes and there was nothing. Darkness closed round him, darkness like a shroud, so intense and so unbroken his eyes could get no purchase upon it. He might have torn out his own eyes and not known it…
Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
This might, Ken thought, have been what it was like to be dead if only there were no such thing as Hell.
for you are with me
One of Ken's biggest secrets was that had been scared of the dark until he was almost eleven. Now, nine years down the line and lying alone in darkness so thick he felt he would choke on it, he thought about fear.
Could a man grow used to fear? If any man could have learned to simply live with it Ken thought that man should have been him, and if only it had worked that way! If only it had been that simple – but fear, like pain, never could be remembered properly. Shouldn't he have been used to this by now? He should have been able to cope with a game whose name was simply terror—
(Cope? With this?) I'm scared, Ken thought. Oh God. I'm scared…
Yet fear alone shouldn't have been enough to break him. There'd been the fire after all, though that had happened far too quickly for Ken to realize he should have been afraid. He'd barely had time for surprise, never mind fear… there'd been confusion, then agony. Nothing more. All right – though it hadn't been the same thing, not in the slightest – then before that: the weeks of suspicion and his own incomprehension, and terror, and desperate shame.
(Why the Hell shame? Why anything? I didn't do it.)
There'd been Kase – but he hadn't been frightened then, just angry and sad. He should have let it go, trusted in God…
There'd been his mother but he'd been five then, far too young to understand what he was seeing: all he had known at the time was that what he was seeing was bad. His mother was sick and his sisters were scared, and everything was changing so far and so fast that the world would never be the same again. Ken had watched her dragging herself, inch by agonizing inch, to her slow, undignified death, and had wished he wasn't so small.
There'd been (he didn't like to think of it) the first time he had killed. He couldn't remember the man's name any more. It had been something ridiculously common, something like Kondo or Sato or Ito, or maybe it was Ando. Something like that. He just couldn't remember, that was all, but somehow he felt he should have done and it shamed him that he didn't. He'd botched it, badly; his hands had been shaking, he'd been almost more afraid than his victim. Ken had ripped the man's stomach open and watched, wide-eyed and frozen in horror, as he bled to death on his office floor, and then Omi had congratulated him and he'd had to ask Manx to stop the car so he could throw up on the verge. God forgive me, he had thought, Oh, God, forgive me…
All the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, he'd been convinced the world could see his sin on his face. He'd jumped at the sound of the phone or the chime of the door, he'd waited for someone to come and take him away and lock him up, and hang him – and here he was almost three years on, still guilty, still fearful, still waiting.
There'd been that day when Aya, God damn him, stupid fucking Aya had dropped comm. in the middle of a mission then, with the target dead and the police on the prowl, hadn't been there at the rendezvous. We've got to go, Omi had said, flames illuminating his face and his quiet voice almost lost beneath the clamor of sirens too close at hand… five and a half bastard hours he'd sat up, counting off the hours and wishing he'd been better, that he'd never wished Aya gone still less dead—five hours and then the next morning there Aya was, pale and pissy-looking as ever and strolling in for his shift like he'd never been gone at all, and Ken had grabbed him by the collar and punched him in the jaw.
There'd been… Christ, there'd been so much! So much it embarrassed him. Call yourself a man, Ken Hidaka?
There'd been so many times he'd caught himself wondering if he had ever, ever felt more frightened in his life than he felt at that moment. So many times that this – just lying alone in darkness – couldn't possibly have been the worst of it. It just couldn't, not with so much to choose from. Once upon a time he must have felt more frightened than he did now.
The only trouble with that (hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee, jesusmaryandjoseph get me out of here, get me out of here God, please!) the problem was that he couldn't for the life of him remember when.
burn after reading
Which of course changed nothing. It didn't even make him feel less afraid. Trapped sure as an unwanted kitten in a burlap bag and nothing to do but claw at the confines of his tiny prison, and cry, and wait for the inevitable, there was only one thing left for Ken to hope for, yet it was the one thing he didn't even dare to dream of.
Nobody was coming. Weiss killed and that was where the story ended, and if all he could do (he, the dumbass who'd been made in the first place; if he couldn't even manage a simple tail job without getting himself read within minutes, carried off and caught, what the Hell did he think was the point of him?) if all there was left for him was to wait for a rescue, it was all up. They went in, they got the target, they went home… he hadn't known it at first but it was the going home that was the hard part. Any fool, or so Manx had once told him, could kill a man: it was a mistake to think that Persia would want assassins simply to murder. He wanted them to get away with it…
The job came first. It had to.
It would have been the same if this had been, say, Youji's fuckup. It would be the same for anybody's. Game over, thanks for playing; the secretary will disavow all knowledge. Weiss were murderers, just that. They didn't do salvage jobs. Why call on a killer to keep you safe and whole, to save your life? That's dumb, Kenken, even for you.
Which meant he was on his own.
Which meant he was going to die.
one of five
Sometimes, they wouldn't believe in a word of it. They would laugh and glance about themselves as if they expected any minute to see a hidden camera, or for someone to jump out from behind a door. Surprised? I had you going for a second there… When life was a lucid nightmare, what was there to do but smile and wait to wake?
(—and what if none of this is real? maybe it's a game and they're trying to scare me, they're showing me something damn near unbearable and watching me freak and any minute now – any minute please God – they'll pull you away and say it again: so, Kenken, do you have anything you'd like to tell us? They need me alive, they need me sane, keep telling yourself that, this is no good to anybody if it leaves me dead or so fucked over I might as well be so maybe it's just a head trip, some stupid psychological shit and they never took me anywhere and I'm not underground at all—)
Sometimes, Ken would try the same trick, but it never really worked for him.
He had no reason to believe that he wasn't exactly where they'd said he'd be. The air, damp and close and chilly, was wrong and the sound, oh Christ! the sound when he beat against the wood before him was wrong. He could smell the earth about him, feel the weight of it bearing down upon the tiny box he lay in.
There was no need for the target to make up anything when the truth was so much more terrible.
(—what if none of this is real? maybe it's a nightmare and I can wake up from it, perhaps the briefing – Christ, those poor kids! – gave me bad dreams, God knows it's happened before and it always gets so much worse when there's children involved. Jesus fuck, what those boys must have gone through! Maybe the next time I open my eyes I'll wake up and this will all be over and the mission won't even have begun and I won't even remember what I dreamed of, I'll just know to be careful—)
Except his eyes were open. Ken would never have dreamed of this when even his nightmares were unmemorable.
Ken never had been a good liar, not even when he was lying to himself. His lies were too convenient, too good to be true, and the truth too cruel and too plain. This was real and he was trapped: they'd buried him alive, and left him. Oh God, Ken thought as he stared into the blackness before him, oh God, oh God, what am I going to do?
particular judgment
The room had been too dark, yet too bright. There were trays of sharp, shining things, things designed to cut or gouge or tear, and shapeless, twisted forms lurked in the shadows by the walls like horror movie monsters waiting to spring, yet the target – just another smirking nobody, a bland, business-suited middle-aged nonentity like so many of the men who had already met their deaths at Ken's hands – was the thing he couldn't take his eyes off. The target, with his tight little smile and his boring suit, had been the most frightening thing of all.
They'd stripped him bare, tied him down and hurt him and asked him again to talk: you're gonna have to do better than that, Ken had said, so they had done.
God almighty. He had a knack for getting himself into these fucking ridiculous situations, an utter fucking knack. Way to go, Hidaka, too busy trying to be brave to realize all bravery would be to a psycho like the target was a challenge. He should have had the sense to make like pain alone would have broken him. Ken should have given them – he didn't know. A little. Pleas and feigned tears and half a handful of truth. Something next to useless, some blind alley the target could blithely chase down. Something – anything – that would make them think they'd been getting to him.
Anything, as long as it bought him time. Time to think or to find an exit, or make one… time enough for the others to find him, or to find the target. Ken didn't care if he fell, as long as he took his murderer with him.
Just as long as he didn't break first.
Don't break, Hidaka. Whatever you do, for the love of God just don't break. The minute you do—
18:22
"Because you're going to talk eventually."
The target sounded merely disinterested and, in his disinterest, almost benign. Harmless even… he spoke as if this had nothing whatever to do with him and it was a lie, like the smart suit he hid behind and his placid half-smile. Just another dark beast playing at blamelessness and already his words seemed gratuitous. Of course Ken was going to talk: they both knew that. It was just a matter of when, and what he would say when he did: I don't know how to lie…
"You're going to talk," the target said again, and it wasn't a threat or even a promise. It was just – just there, a simple statement. "You know that as well as I do. Why not save us all a lot of time and trouble?"
(Save yourself the pain. Just tell me who you work for: maybe then I'll end it quickly.)
Ken smiled because he didn't know what else he should do. He thought of the others: a cheerful, crowded little corner store and Youji idling by the register doing nothing at all and Aya, in his own way, doing barely more than Youji, and Omi smiling and shoving the nearest flower he could find at a girl who seemed down… He said, "Can I help you?"
He had expected anger. The target merely sighed. Closing his eyes, he shook his head, weary as a father saddened by the obstinacy of his child. The hard way, then.
"Very well. If you change your mind at any point, do let me know."
Later: bruised and aching inside and out, Ken lay on his side and concentrated only on the cold. It was better than the why of it or admitting, guiltily, to his fear and how much he wished he were at home, or dreaming of a rescue he knew better than to believe would come. It must have been dawn, or nearly so. A key scraped in the lock; he raised his head, fighting down a sudden surge of panic. The target stood before him looking clean and sleek and well-rested, dressed far too smartly and smelling faintly of some expensive cologne. This is a sedative, he'd said, holding up the syringe like this was some stupid object lesson. When you wake up, we will have buried you alive. Now, do you have anything you'd like to tell me?
Ken had laughed. He must have looked terrified. He said, fuck off. You're wasting your time.
Oh, said the target, I don't think so…
I'm not an unreasonable man—the truly horrifying thing was that the target had said it like he meant it. Certainly they'd left him water, and given him a blanket: they hadn't had to do that and if you think you might want to change your mind, the target had said, now would be the time to do so. And the sudden sting of the needle.
(Or shall we ask you again in a few hours?)
But that was for later. Now the target was bending to him and there was a hand on his brow smoothing his hair and he couldn't move, fuck it! he couldn't move—
Ken knew what this man did, and (so much for Siberian) he knew himself helpless in the face of it. It should have been appalling, should have left him revolted and terrified—and yet, though Ken struggled and bit back a curse and fought frantically and hopelessly against the restraints, somehow it no longer seemed to matter very much. He was dead anyway and before he died he would talk. Who cared how he got there, how it happened?
"Welcome," Ken said: the words had no meaning for him. "Can I help you?"
Don't, the target murmured, be afraid to scream.
the path leads downward
An abandoned child learned early that they could rely on nobody. Born to betrayal, Ken understood painfully well that every time he put his faith in something – in his family, in friends, in God or God knew what; the why of it hardly mattered – it turned out to have been woefully misplaced and yet he never stopped believing. He kept trying, kept hoping that maybe next time it would all work out: it changed nothing.
He'd tried to trust in his family; now Ken clung to his friends because there was nobody else left to cling to, and hoped like Hell they didn't know it. Despair would have been easier than hope in the face of experience.
Abandonment shouldn't still have surprised him.
He shouldn't have still been hoping that maybe this time, maybe just this once it would be different.
(Of course there was no reason why it should have been, except that he wanted it more than anything. Except Ken didn't want to die, not here, not like this! and wasn't it about time he had someone – anyone! – he could believe in? Ken was tired of thinking of himself as disposable; just another parentless child, another infinitely replaceable cog in the machine. A face in the crowd and not even a remarkable one, plenty more where he came from. Just once in his life Ken wanted to be missed for himself, and not for what he could do…)
That changed nothing either. They might miss him terribly and wish him back, might hate his inevitable replacement for no reason other than they weren't him, but Ken couldn't count on his team to save him. The mission, as it always did, would come first. It had to.
The nuns said, trust in God. He wondered if he ever had. Probably not. It was hard for an abandoned child to trust in anything they couldn't see.
Besides, Ken never had done well with fathers.
only downward
And yet Judas was just one man.
That's all it needs, Kase murmured, low and seductive as the serpent to Eve. An offer too good to refuse, and one man greedy or stupid or desperate enough to take it. Which are you? Money or fame or death, what the hell do you have to lose? Things can hardly get worse. They're going to kill you anyway, and they did this to you, they were the ones let you down… Deception's easy, and by the time it starts to matter you'll be dead. Who cares if they know it was you?
Ken cared. If there was to be a betrayal (and is there anything, the target said, that you would like to tell me?) he knew it would come from him, and it would be his team that he sold.
Even the thought left him horrified. The last thing Ken wanted was to betray them, but what he wanted was irrelevant. He stared fixedly into nothing at all, tears queuing up, breath catching in his throat and Christ knew what he'd done to his hands but it hurt, it hurt so bad he couldn't even form a fist without wanting to scream. There were splinters in his fingers, shards of wood trapped under his nails: something was bleeding. He was bleeding, he could smell it, could feel the blood, hot and heavy and ticklish, crawling over his hands.
He had never feared death before but Ken had always presumed it would come quickly. A single slip, a moment's pain, and then nothing but darkness: that kind of death would be easy. Why worry about that? He hadn't been counting on seeing it coming and knowing he could do nothing to save himself. He couldn't hold up to this, lying in darkness watching death circling about him, creeping ever closer.
The target would come to him and offer him an ending and, weeping and hating himself, Ken would sell his team for nothing but the promise of a quick, merciful end and he probably wouldn't even get that—
(Find me. Please, please, find me. Get me out of here, before I betray us all.)
"I'm a florist," Ken whispered, and even in his own head he sounded beaten-down and miserable. "We sell flowers."
it leads to the city
"The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me by still water, he restores my soul, he leads me in paths of righteousness…"
Ken knew he had no right to pray, and yet what else could he do? It hurt to clasp his hands, to lace his fingers together; tears sprang to his eyes as he pressed his palms together. His fingers weren't moving right. When they found him (but when?) they would shudder over the state of his hands. Here lies a stranger, a boy of nineteen left trapped in a waking nightmare with nothing to do but to wait—
He was alive, they would say, when they put him down here. They would say that whoever he was, whatever his sins, he didn't deserve what had been done to him. Nobody deserved to die like that. To die like this.
"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for…" Ken heard his voice, already shaking, break; he bit his lip in a vain attempt to choke back a sob, screwing his eyes shut against the darkness. Oh, Christ and Saint Joseph. Oh, Mary Mother of God. Please. Please. "I will fear no evil, for you are with me…"
Ken wept.
Wept, and barked his knuckles on the lid of the coffin as he raised his hand to wipe at his eyes, and talked through his tears, like a child. "Surely," he said, though he didn't believe it, could never have believed it again, "surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. Amen."
Amen. It was wrong, it was all wrong. He knew he'd forgotten.
Twenty-three was a jigsaw with half the pieces missing. It was a book, with a hank of pages torn roughly from the bindings and scattered God knew where. He'd chosen an easy one (everyone knew twenty-three, God damn it! Didn't even have to believe this shit to know this one—!) and it made no damned difference. He just couldn't remember, that was all. He couldn't, but maybe – and even the thought was a desperate one; it left him feeling frantic and guilty and only half-sane – maybe, Ken thought, if I can remember it all, maybe then I'll be saved.
what it's like to be dead
"You're dead," Ken said, when finally he found his voice.
Kase must have smiled. Smiling, he came to crouch at Ken's head: the very tips of his fingers, long and slender and spidery, grazed lightly against Ken's fringe as he gazed down into his face, like a guest at a wake.
"You so sure you're not? I did say we'd meet again."
And there was the smile, familiar and idiosyncratic and utterly lost: Ken's breath caught painfully in his throat, a soft, stifled sound escaping his lips and he wasn't sure if he was gasping or choking back a sob, or even why it should have mattered. Kase's smile was lopsided and no more than semi-sincere, and it carried with it the slightest hint of cruelty. Ken couldn't remember if that had always been there, or if it never had been. Maybe he was making it up, just like he was making up Kase…
He had to be making him up. Kase was dead. Ken had torn him open, watched him guttering and fading, bleeding his life out on an unremarkable stretch of paving before an unremarkable office tower.
"Not me," Ken said. Why should he have sounded so uncertain? "Death wouldn't be this boring."
Kase just shrugged. "Hell's what you make it. Trust me."
Trust me? "We already played that," Ken said, and heard himself start to laugh.
"You lost," Kase said comfortably.
"No." Ken turned his head, so he wouldn't have to look in Kase's eyes any more. "No, Kase. We both lost."
"You sentimental bastard, Hidaka. Tell me… can you think of anything worse than this?"
No. Of course he couldn't, not any more. There was nothing worse than this – lying trapped in perfect darkness with his own voice too loud in his ears, cramped and chilled to the bone and desperately thirsty, and with nothing to do but wait for an ending, however it came. Pain was a nothing next to this. Betrayal was better, burning was. Ken had died once already and it had been easier than this.
If he wasn't dead he was dying, and if this didn't kill him…
(You're going to talk, said the target. Eventually.)
"Exactly. You totally sure this isn't Hell? It's not just burning for ever, you know. Hell is…" Kase hesitated. Smiled, just slightly. "It's more personal."
"No. No, that's not it. There's a mission, they're coming back to me, there's something I have to tell them—"
"You sure? Look at me, Ken." Kase's hands were on his face. All Ken could do was close his eyes and it didn't help. "No. Look at me."
There was blood on Kase's hands, and the front of his too-white suit was scored with a series of five telltale tears. His breath smelled faintly sweetish, hung heavy with rot. He was a monster, tainted with the stench of the grave.
"You're dead, Kase. I saw you die. Fuck off."
Kase laughed, soft as sighing. He had never laughed like that before, back when they were alive. It made Ken think of the wind in winter-naked trees, and dry bones. "Sorry, no. I'm not going anywhere. Don't you know what I am?" Though he knew full well there was nothing to hear but the wheeze of the pump and, louder, the sound of his own breathing, the triumph in Kase's voice still made Ken shudder. "I'm you, Ken. I'm you."
a ghost story
Of course Ken knew what Kase was. He knew this was an another attempt to escape. He had struggled, he had fought, hello, can I help you? he had screamed until his voice gave out, he had clawed at the wood before him until his fingers were ripped and blood-slick, and pain and exhaustion made him stop. The trapped, stale air hung heavy with the coppery tang of his own blood.
You tried to get away, Kase said, and you did a piss-poor job of it. Now your mind's trying the same trick.
Ken knew why Kase was there, but that didn't make him feel any less afraid.
walled city
No, it wasn't true. There was a mission, they were coming back for him, there was something he had to say that would make all this stop—God, how badly he wanted this to stop! There was the truth, Hidaka; hang onto that. He was alive, but he was trapped and terrified and he was alone, he was all alone. Kase was a nothing: he wasn't even a real ghost, just a phantom of the mind. Nobody spoke to him, he was talking to himself, to a voice that nobody else could have heard. The hands that touched Ken's face… There was nothing there.
Kase had betrayed him once already, but he was right. I'm you, Ken. I'm you…
(I couldn't leave even if I wanted to.)
Ken wasn't dead but he was dying by inches, of the thirst and of the cold – the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; the pieces were missing, he'd lost the fucking pieces! – and Kase just waited. He had all the time in the world.
"What do you want?"
"Me?" For a moment, Kase looked almost comically startled – he had never seen that expression on Kase's face before. It had no place there, it looked all wrong on him, left him looking like a blurred, bad photocopy of Youji play-acting at going undercover. Kase was fading, slipping from his fingers; he didn't remember him right any more. "I don't want anything. You're not getting rid of me that easily, Kenken."
Kase had never called him that, either.
The target stepped quietly from the shadows and drifted idle as smoke over to Kase, placing a heavy, paternal hand on his shoulder: a nothing of a gesture, and yet there was no mistaking the threat in it. He loomed. Ken wanted to tell him to get the Hell away from Kase, and he had nothing to offer him. Nothing at all – just an inadmissible truth that would damn them all.
"We sell flowers," Ken said.
Kase laughed at him. His eyes were green. "You're losing it, Hidaka."
"I'm a florist." You don't understand, Kase. Don't you see him?
"I always knew," said Kase, "that you were crazy."
And when had Kase started telling him the truth? He remembered a dull, rainy afternoon and nothing much to do but mark time (and why should that be so difficult, when it rained? He never had any problems finding things to do with the whole twelve year old world to do it in, but when it rained, when there was nothing to do but fold himself away in Kase's room and wait for the sun, time dragged its feet) and himself sprawled face-down upon Kase's bed watching his friend playing Sonic 2, and Kase throwing the controller aside and grabbing his collar and—he'd shoved him backward, said, cut that out. Had Kase thought him crazy even then?
But this wasn't Kase. It wasn't anyone. It was only Ken himself, lost in the shadows with nothing to do but die, arguing with a made-up man...
All right, so he was crazy. But what exactly – Ken placed his hands, palms flat, on the wood before him as if to anchor himself: yes, here I am – what was so sane about this? If sanity was a wooden box, darkness so thick he felt he could choke on it, and the air reeking of damp earth, why the Hell not go mad?
"You'd better watch out, kid," Kase said, almost kindly, "or there won't be anything left of you to come back."
(You must be mad or you wouldn't have come here… the Cheshire Cat vanished slowly, from the tip of his tail, until only his smile remained. A soul could get lost in Wonderland.)
"I don't want to come back," Ken said, and he sounded petulant as a child. "Nobody's coming." What's to come back to, Kase? Answer me that.
"Don't count on it," Kase said. And, "Bye bye, Kenken. I'll see you later."
It could have been a promise, or a threat.
the tree stands in the center
It started, as so many other stories had done before, with a woman.
Ken had thought she was a nurse at first. Hidaka-san, you have a visitor: her heels clicked against the linoleum as she strode through the door, her head up and her bearing erect as a soldier's. Temptation was a woman, a pretty, curvy redhead with soft curls and cold eyes, standing by his bedside with her arms folded beneath her breasts, gazing down at him like a scientist might gaze down the barrel of her microscope at an uninteresting specimen. Have you ever heard of an organization called Kritiker? She hadn't thought to tell him he was selling his soul.
But Eve could have fallen alone. The fault was his own, the burden of guilt his to shoulder: a sin however reluctantly perpetrated was a sin all the same. Oh, he could say, the woman gave me fruit and I did eat—he could say what he liked but God knew the truth, all the way back to Adam. All Erika had done was show him the way.
It's not the woman's fault if you take her hand, and fall with her.
The Lord is my shepherd—
dust
And some day, maybe, Omi would find his sign tucked away behind a row of planters in the stock cupboard, or hidden between the pages of an old order book, and wish that he was still around to yell at.
Ken knew it wasn't much of a sign. Just a roughly rectangular piece of cardboard stolen from the side of a delivery box with the words 'closed for lunch' printed on it in black marker, in his own handwriting. One slow, rainy, seventeen year old afternoon he, feeling penned in and frustrated and utterly sick of flower shops, had made the sign, printing the characters as neat and as careful as he could manage, and stuck it to the shop door; two years down the line it had become a habit. Youji didn't say anything: why would he when he appreciated the break just as much as Ken did? As for Aya, even he had to eat.
Four times he'd destroyed the sign to keep Omi from finding it. Twice, he'd simply lost track of it for a while. It didn't matter. It was an easy enough task to make a new one.
Really, he'd said, they expect us to sell flowers? Is this some kind of a joke?
The truly weird thing was he'd grown to rather enjoy it. Morning in the flower shop – if he closed his eyes he could see it so clearly it hurt. Mid-morning on a cloudy Tuesday with custom slowing to a standstill: sometimes, Ken would look up from the order he was fussing over and simply watch – watch, though there was nothing whatever to see. Just Aya scowling at nothing in particular, and a load of flowers, and languid Youji propping up the register with his chin resting on the heel of one slender hand… Omi didn't know how lucky he was to escape those dreary, dragging Tuesdays.
It could have been a fantasy, or a memory. There was the shop, gaudy with paintbox blooms, the air heavy with the scents of pollen and leaf mold and damp earth; there was Youji, eyelids drooping, constantly threatening to fall asleep in his seat but never quite getting there; there was Momoe's cat weaving about Ken's ankles, and dirt under his nails.
And fallen petals, blood on the floor. Rosettes of blood spattered across the tiles and tracked into the back rooms, smears of it across the white walls, and the shattered glass fronts of the display cabinets. Youji raised his head at the chime of the shop door, granting the young woman who stepped inside a charming smile, and somewhere just out of sight a man was screaming, and his voice was familiar. If Ken closed his eyes he could see them dying.
He was going to talk.
He was going to kill them.
And there was nothing, absolutely nothing that he could do.
& ashes
"Oh God."
Ken's mouth was dry, his throat was hoarse and his voice sounded like a stranger's, but he kept talking. Jesus and Saint Jude help him, he kept talking.
When he fell silent, the noise was unbearable.
When he fell silent there was nothing. There was the silence, thick and oppressive, broken only by the sound of his own breathing; there was the darkness, heavy and total – and, caught somewhere on the edge of awareness, there was the soft, regular sighs of the air pump: a nothing of a sound, wallpaper for the ears. Rhythmic, persistent as the purr of a fan or waves breaking on a distant shore, or the grumble of traffic crawling through the clogged city streets, it hardly counted as noise at all. It was one of those sounds the brain tired of hearing and so shut itself off to.
Ken thought the noise would drive him mad. Should have stopped hearing it long ago, but he couldn't shut it off or pretend it meant nothing. There was nothing else to concentrate on that would have him forgetting to hear it: there was only his own voice to drown it out. When he was quiet, he feared the noise might deafen him. Shut up, Ken thought desperately, please, for Christ's sake, shut up!
And yet he didn't want that at all. All he could think of was what would happen if the noise stopped…
"Oh God," Ken said – it wasn't a prayer and it wasn't a plea. It wasn't anything. Just a single, cracked-record phrase, repeated and repeated until all sense was gone. "Oh God, oh God, oh God."
alice
Sometimes (not often, but often enough) he would think in what ifs.
Usually they were simple. The regrets any man in his situation might well have shared, guilt-born and couched in the terms if only I hadn't. If he still had his mother, or his father had bothered to try; if Kase had never betrayed him, or if they had never met at all; if he'd had enough talent to play well for fun, but never enough to be envied it; if he'd died when they'd said he did, what would have changed? If there'd never been a woman whose name wasn't Erika or an organization that called itself Kritiker, if he'd known temptation when he saw it. Never fell.
Weiss were just another regret. Another handful of sins mortal and sins venal, committed remorsefully but committed all the same. There was nothing about them to do over when they should never have been done at all… And yet, caught against a gray ground, he could see the slender, silhouetted figure of a woman – she was a girl really, barely any older than he was – bearing an infant in her arms.
Slender and beautiful and… and familiar, somehow. At first he thought she must have been his mother, but where his mother had been short and plump and bosomy this girl was taller, long-haired and loose-limbed; she held the child as if it were somehow accidental, as if someone had handed it to her bare minutes before and she didn't quite know what to do with it. She was a gawky, charming mess of a girl and Ken had loved her so much it left him breathless – so much he'd had no choice but to let her go.
Sometimes (not often enough, because to think of her at all left him dazed and aching and strangely resentful – and what else could he ever have done?) Ken would think of her.
He wanted to call out to her, but he couldn't find the words.
(I miss you, he wanted to say. And, I'm sorry.)
There was no child, of course. Just the pale little ghost of something that could have been, if it hadn't been snuffed out before it had really begun: she was ghostlike too, wan and insubstantial as smoke and yet, the baby cradled awkwardly in her arms, there she was. Distant, too distant to touch, she had been watching him all along, silent and grave-eyed, as if she were waiting for something – and what was there that he could give to her now?
"Yuriko," Ken said.
She started at the sound of her name, gave him a vague smile – she didn't recognize him at all except as a face from some half-forgotten daydream – and then, lifting the baby to rest against her shoulder, she turned her back to him. Erasing him with the turn of her head, she padded away, losing herself in the light. That was all his fault too.
three of five
Yet sometimes they would bargain. Sometimes, still and silent and quite unsmiling, he would watch them cower and what do you want, they would ask. They would say, I have money. They would say, do you want my car? Hands shaking, they would hold the keys out to him. They held them at arm's length, between finger and thumb or cradled in a sweat-damp palm. You can have my car, you can take my money. Name your price: name anything you want, and it's yours. I'll make sure of it, I promise – just don't kill me. Please, I'm begging you, please don't kill me!
They had nothing they could offer him but still they would bargain. Take my money, take everything I own, just leave me my life… now Ken tried the same thing, pleading not with the target but with the silent and indifferent saints. Saint Joseph, Saint Jude, I lay it all before you. Anything you like is yours, if you'll but let me live.
I'll do anything, he thought, frantic as a deathbed prayer. Anything at all. I'll be better, I'll judge not, I promise I can change. I'll leave Weiss, I'll never kill again – I never wanted to, Lord, but a sin's still a sin. I never should have done it. Death pays all debts but it's Yours to avenge: it was always Yours. I'm a sinner. I'm weak. I'm wrong and I'm sorry. I sold my soul for a handful of silver, and now I'll buy the potter's field, for the priests to bury strangers in. Just one more chance, Mother Mary. Please, I'm begging you, please let me live…
Yet why should God extend His grace to a murderer?
Ken had nothing he could offer either.
the lake is frozen
That wasn't it either. There was still twenty-three; salvation would come through memory. Ken believed in that now. It was crazy, it was senseless, but it was a comfort. Far easier for him to believe that than to realize that there was truly nothing he could do. As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff – he smiled, eyes wide; he could do this, he could save himself, now please – they comfort me.
I'll keep my side of the deal. Just save me. Mary mother of God, save me.
Ken thought he must have been screaming. He couldn't tell for sure. He couldn't remember giving into his own terror again, losing himself in it, but he must have done. Certainly his throat felt dry and abraded but what else was new? He didn't know. He didn't even know if his eyes were open or closed: he thought they must have been open, and just like that Omi was there. He didn't come like Kase had: Omi came vague as a ghost, a no more than half-seen figure caught on the edge of sight. When Ken tried to turn his head the boy slipped from view as if, like a ghost, he could never be faced head-on.
"You're not real," Ken said: like a prayer, a prayer of exorcism. His voice shook. "You're not really here."
"No," Omi said. "Of course I'm not."
He smiled and his smile was calm, compassionate and utterly unremarkable; it was a benevolent lie. It was the kind of smile the boy would offer, with a flower, to a pretty girl caught moping by the display cases. He looked so normal, did Omi. He always looked so normal, so utterly benign, every inch of him some young girl's favorite Saturday-afternoon shop-boy. Dressed all in white, a slight breeze tugging at the hanging ends of his tee-shirt and tenderly tousling his fair hair like the fingers of a fond uncle, even here there was sunlight on his face. Girls looked at him and saw nothing but warmth and guilelessness, ice cream melting down the knuckles and sunlight on daisies. Safety.
Ken believed in Omi and Omi was a liar.
"Nothing you can see exists." Omi crouched to look at him, knees drawn up to his chest and fingers laced before him, as if Ken were some kind of curiosity. "Kase was quite correct, you know. I'm you. We're all you."
"Am I going crazy?"
"Probably. It's the sanest response."
All Omi made it sound was logical. From him it even seemed sensible, just the next step. (But the path led downward, only down.) Ken lay in darkness and talked to himself – and whyever not? What else would he have to anchor him, if it weren't for the voices in his head?
Ken swallowed. "I'm going to talk," he said, and it was simply a statement.
Omi nodded briskly, as if he had never expected anything else. He didn't even look surprised. "You're not that good, Ken-kun," he said as if by way of an explanation. "None of us are that good."
The boy spoke as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. To him it probably was – but he wasn't real, Ken reminded himself. This wasn't Omi. This wasn't anybody at all: it was only another part of himself. It was his mind out there, struggling (like a pinned-down bug, something small and delicate with gauzy wings, something easily crushed) to keep itself together. Christ, it was pathetic to think he'd broken so easy.
"Not really," Omi said simply. "Everything can be broken if you know where to push."
Ken said, "I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry too, Ken-kun." The worst thing about it was Omi genuinely sounded it. "I'm sorry."
Which meant he was dead regardless.
(Would the real Omi have said something like that? Would he have sounded sorry? Ken didn't know any more, he hardly knew if he ever had done. What, when it came down to it, the Hell did he know about Omi? He once thought he knew Kase too, and look how well that had ended up!)
It was almost a relief. Once he'd prayed for escape but now Ken merely prayed for an ending, however it came. There was, after all, more than one route to salvation. "You're going to kill me."
"Probably," Omi said again, just that, and it was all wrong. The real Omi would never have been that straightforward. It was him out there, blunt and hostile and awkward, and he didn't know how else to be. "I'm sorry. We'll probably have to. We're all dead otherwise."
Ken swallowed. "Then kill me," he said hopelessly. "Please, Omi."
The boy just smiled sadly. "But I'm not real, Ken-kun. Nothing here is real."
(Yet Ken fancied he could feel one of the boy's hands, his skin marble-cool and his touch gentle, resting lightly against his bare shoulder, and he shivered because he knew that what Omi was saying was true. Nothing here was real – so what the Hell was that? What did he just feel touch him if there was nothing there to feel?)
"Remember that, Ken-kun."
And he was gone, melting back into the shadows as suddenly as he had appeared, leaving Ken alone.
we all fall down
When he fell silent, the noise was unbearable.
When Ken fell silent there was nothing. There was only the sound of the pump, sighing gently to itself as if in sorrow, unable to believe that he should have been brought so low. It sounded (how strange!) it sounded like something from a hospital. Like a ventilator, or some other benevolently malicious device created to sustain life, which all too often merely condemned the man who relied on it to a lingering, degrading death. How, Ken wondered, could you claim to be alive when you couldn't even breathe for yourself?
When the pump began to fail, when whatever it was that powered it gave out, he would suffocate. God, how he would have welcomed it! Please, please, Saint Joseph and Saint Jude, get me out of here. I don't care how, just get me out of here before I betray us all.
And it hurt, it hurt to talk. His mouth was dry, and tasted bitter. His voice rasped in his throat like a file pressed to a bar. Even the trapped, thrice-used air seemed stale.
Hail Mary full of grace—
exile
"We sell flowers," Ken whispered.
His eyes, though there was nothing whatever to see, were open wide; he could feel a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. Smiling, he ran his hands against the lid of his coffin, the roof of his prison, tracing a pattern that only he could see. The wood, scarred with the marks his nails, now bruised and split to the quick, had left behind, felt rough beneath his palms. Three days they'd buried Christ. How could He have borne it?
His fingers hurt. He thought they must have been bleeding again.
The wood bore scratches; they would know that he had lived once, and that he had fought for it. He had failed, he had known he would fail, but still he had fought. It wasn't enough, but it was something.
Now, over those scratches, Ken wrote his name so that when they found his body they would know who he was.
"We sell flowers. I'll show you."
honor thy father
He was buried with his mother.
Ken never had done well with fathers. Sometimes, his head bowed low over a wreath or a garland, Ken would wonder if his father had come to his funeral, or ever visited his grave. Sometimes, he would wonder how his father had felt on hearing about his death…
First Kase had come, smirking and smelling of rot and gazing at him with Youji's eyes; then there had been Omi and even here he had been comforting. Now, looking uncomfortable and out of place and totally insignificant – bastard, Ken thought furiously, you bastard, how dare you come here now! – there was his father. A wan, rumpled-looking little man, faded as a figure in a forgotten photograph and fraying slightly at the edges. His hair was tousled and needed cutting. His suit was old and ill-fitting, a cheap department-store knockoff that would have looked no better when new.
He had done nothing and been nowhere. He might as well have never left.
"You never cared," Ken heard himself say.
"Never's a big word," his father said, soft as a sigh: oh Jesus, Ken thought, spare me the parable! "I couldn't stay."
Another denial; Ken half-expected to hear a cock crowing, yet he would be the one left to mourn – and what the Hell had he expected from this man? "Damn it! Why couldn't you?" Look what you did to me! "Why?"
There was no answer. Certainly Ken had none; his father's ghost knew no more.
(Even in his own head, he couldn't make his father feel sorry.)
Sometimes Ken wondered what it was his father had been feeling the day he left his life behind. If the man had felt even remotely guilty about what he had gone on to do to his family, his own children, how the Hell could he have gone through with it? Ken could never have done it, he didn't know how anyone could. Had the bastard even felt bad?
Ken's mother had no choice but to let him go: his father simply left, abandoning his little family as he had abandoned the rest of his dead wife's effects – her shoes and her dresses, sad and chaste and ample; the wedding dress she had kept wrapped in paper in a bottom drawer, the cheap little ornaments she had so carefully hoarded and carefully kept clean until she grew too ill to dust – on the church doorstep and walking away, hands in his pockets, without so much as glancing back. Just junk, just so much junk to be cleared out without a second thought.
Her children were only another reminder.
"Even if I told you," his father was saying, "what would it change?"
He had no answer. What possible difference could why make when actions spoke so plain? His father's excuses would be just another pathetic, self-glorifying justification, just another poor-little-me whine. It wasn't me, it wasn't my idea—he'd heard it all too many times before, heard it from men cornered like rats, throwing the blame onto everyone and everything else they could think of but never onto themselves. It was all bullshit anyway; your sins were your own. If a man owned nothing else in this world, at least he would own his sin.
Ken turned his head, gazed into nothing at all. "What the fuck would you know about it? You're me, you bastard! You're not even real!"
"I'm afraid so," said his father and, smiling, shook his head. "I'm not real. None of this is. Look after yourself, Ken."
The man smiled at him, placing a heavy, proprietorial hand on his head – a second of contact, maybe two, then it was over and he was gone: nobody's father again. Ken covered his face with his wounded hands, and he wept. What hurt the most was that he had expected nothing else. An abandoned child learned early that they could rely on nobody.
The nuns told him to make himself agreeable; he could still find new parents. Ken, shy and angry and resentful, and still in shock, wasn't surprised not to. His own father hadn't wanted him – why in the world would anyone else?
When he was young Ken had wished his father dead. Now he just hoped his father thought of him sometimes, and he hoped that the thought hurt.
fait accompli
You're going to talk, the target said.
Ken said, I know.
decades
O my Jesus
forgive us our sins.
He counted fifty. He had no beads so he counted in his head, scratching one nail against the lid of the coffin, hoping against hope he would keep count and maybe, if he got it right, then God would look kindly upon him and he might still be saved. He stood, head bowed, before the judge, and said his prayers, and a single slip would be all it took to damn him. Hail Mary, hail Mary, hail Mary full of grace; one step nearer to the fold. His lips, dry and bitten bloody, moved without sound.
Lamb of God, have mercy upon us.
Save us from the fires of hell
lead all souls to Heaven.
He counted fifty – but, like twenty-three, the prayers slipped through his fingers swift and sure as warm sand through the fingers of a boy on a long-forgotten childhood beach. Evening in the kitchen and stock bubbling on the stove, dust motes dancing in the sunlight as it slanted through the blinds, and Romantic Mode singing Love Is The Destiny as he washed and cut scallions for the dinner nobody else would have noticed missing, if he hadn't been there to shove it in front of them… The prayers had been lost, drowned in a sea of junk music and lines from bad movies he'd watched only out of boredom; now he hunted for the words frantic as a woman searching for her scattered beads, hoping against hope that somehow he could string the prayers back together.
Lamb of God, have mercy upon us.
Especially those in most need of Thy mercy.
He counted fifty (hail holy Queen, Mother of mercy) stumbling over verses he had half-forgotten, prayers he barely recalled saying at all, never mind saying and meaning. Counted fifty, and counted again (Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) he believed just enough to believe he was damned. He had no right to pray, but he didn't know what else to do. God had let him fall long ago, but what did he have to cling to if he didn't have faith? Lead us home, mother Mary. Our father who art in heaven, we sell flowers—
Lamb of God, bring us peace.
Amen.
five of five
Yet sometimes – rarely: in three years murdering for money it had happened, he was sure, no more than twice – they would smile at him and step forward, and they would say, I'm ready. They were evil to the very marrow yet they knew the secret: everybody who lived would die, sooner or later, of something. Why fight when your own turn came?
There was (or so Ken had thought, though he had never tried to explain it to the others) something almost admirable in that. A target who embraced his death had at least possessed the courage not to compound his sins with hypocrisy. In life he had shown no mercy to his victims; now, facing his own end at the hands of a man not all that different from himself, he expected nothing more. He had known the game was over, and that at the last he had lost everything. There was nothing more he could do…
Ken had been afraid the first time he'd faced a target who saw no fear in death. Now, far beyond fear himself, he finally understood. God didn't grant second chances.
To die would be only a relief.
The nun had smiled and sung for him as she bled her life out in his arms. Back then Ken had wept, but now his eyes were dry. Now, thinking of her, he merely smiled, his gaze distant as morning stars. She hadn't meant to, but in death she had told him the truth: life was sin, but to die would be to put an end to sinning. Sometimes, death could be a beautiful thing. It could be all a soul could ever have wanted.
Soon the target would come for him and ask again if he had anything to tell him, and offer him an ending. Ken would weep, he would hate himself, but he would take it…
So he would pray the pump failed first. He would pray that thirst took him, or madness. He would pray for death to come quickly, and for forgiveness. Ken would die smiling, and through his death he would save them all. I'm ready, Saint Joseph. Show me the way.
Death would be freedom.
the way to the plains
Oh death, where is thy victory – the phrase had got stuck. It had snared on something in his mind, and become trapped there. Two sentences, two questions caught in his head and they weren't even Ken's questions.It was a line from a hymn, he thought, or a prayer, or maybe from a sermon: he'd heard it before, too many times to count. He had never understood it back when he was alive, but now he saw clearly. Oh death, where is thy sting?
He might have been trying to talk. Another broken-record phrase, repeated over and over. Soon the pump would fail, and all sound would cease.
All sound: he was hearing things again.
Nobody was there. Kase was gone; Omi too, and the target. Ken was alone, with nothing but the darkness behind his eyes and the laboring pump and the sound of his own heartbeat too loud in his ears, and he was pretending that, far above him, he could hear voices. Perhaps the voices were in his own head, perhaps they were the voices of angels, or a wandering poet and his guide – who knew? It was just sound and it wasn't real. None of this was real, only the darkness and the cold, and the simple fact of his own death. That much he could count on.
Not the voices – someone far above him was calling out, over and over again, calling something that might have been his name as if anybody should remember that. As if calling to the dead would help! It didn't mean anything at all, it was simply a thin thread of sound.
"We sell flowers," Ken whispered.
It was his name.
(It really should have meant more.)
The cries came louder now. Louder and, with them, the sound of movement and surely, he thought, goodness and mercy shall follow me all of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever but he couldn't remember: the beads had been scattered long ago, scattered and been lost. He was dying, that or dead, and it was only a relief…
Yet that wasn't it at all. There was something different in the quality of the air, some lessening of the weight of the earth bearing down upon him and this is real, something in him murmured, and what did that mean? The dead would rise bodily on Judgment Day. The saints would come, and the angels; they, the dead, would be pulled from the ground and led to await their verdicts… what would that be if not real?
Ken wondered what it was that had killed him in the end and listened to the voices, all strangely familiar, almost even comforting, without really hearing a word – they called to him and to each other but he could hardly tell the difference, hardly imagine why it mattered. It was just noise, noise and the sensation of weight, not of soil, but of someone gently lowering themselves onto the top of the coffin, hands slipping across the lid, brushing off the mud and searching for something: searching, then finding. It meant nothing, and yet it was all real.
Somehow it seemed crazier than the visions. There was someone up there after all, yet Ken felt nothing. Not relief, not a sudden rush of fear: he had been trapped somewhere far beyond terror, beyond perhaps everything. All he thought was here we go again—he felt nothing, but he didn't know if he could bear it.
He closed his eyes and, heedless of the pain, clasped his hands together. The skin of his chest, clammy and cold, felt like the flesh of a man newly killed.
(Ken, somebody was saying, over and over: it hardly sounded like a name at all. Ken—for of course they would know his name.)
Then light, as if it really was that simple. As though all the Lord had to do was wish it: wood scraped against wood and somewhere a million miles distant, someone cursed. He felt sure he should have recognized that voice. He should have known it anywhere and yet all it was to him was eerily and unaccountably familiar, like the figure of a slender girl with nothing in her arms but a potentiality. Ken almost laughed. Only you, Hidaka, only you could fuck up resurrection. He'd always thought it would be easier than this for the angels…
He said, "Hail Mary," and the words came soft as a sigh, caught and carried almost accidentally on his breath.
The chill of the air, when it hit his lungs, made him gasp. The air smelled fresh, cool and crisp and forest-sweet, and when he opened his eyes he opened them on the heavens.
And he did not want, and he feared no evil.
There were figures with familiar faces gazing down at him, their clothes spattered with mud as if they had climbed only recently from their own graves: their faces were pale and there was terror trapped in their eyes. Why are you frightened, Ken wanted to ask. What on earth is there to be afraid of? He wondered, for a moment, if he was dreaming again. He wondered if they would all be judged together, and punished likewise.
It hurt to know they had died so young, so soon after he had. Perhaps that had been his fault too. Perhaps, after all, the target had found them—but everything that lived had to die, sooner or later, of something. It was too late to confess, but God had always known the truth. Why compound his sins with falsehood?
So Ken said, "We sell flowers," and his voice was hushed and fervent as the voice of a child at prayer.
"We sell flowers. I'll show you."
- continue -