Giles can't remember a time the world felt this small.
He sits with heaved shoulders on his swivel chair in front of the window of his apartment. His pen is still, resigned to the glass to the right of his empty easel. Rain pours unending against the window, supplemented by lightning that chased the dark away for a few seconds. Bolts of it pursued each other across the sky, and in that particular hunt Giles sees two forms. The lightning cuts out their shapes against the inked, cloudy sky as he watches it. He sighs. In his mind, the black void of the sky mutates into the equally shrouded abyss of the ocean floor. One of the chasing sprites shifts, becoming trills and golden eyes and saltwater. The other is the avatar of grace, wavy midnight locks and milky skin. The eyes of the apparition sparkle, like treasure.
He almost wants to paint it, but the bottomless depth of his loneliness transfixes him, turning him into a statue.
His universe is painfully, unmistakably minute now. It is this apartment he sits in, the mewling cats that he somehow found on every surface. It consists of forgotten ghosts in paper, spectral paintings that fluttered where he hung them. It is his faded old hieroglyphic couch, the bygone starlets of ages past on his television, and the window he observes the fury of the gods through now.
Not now or ever again, though, would his world include them.
He felt like a dramatist. He stood on a stage in the golden spotlight, delivering lines and soliloquies with the chutzpah of Laurence Olivier. But, unlike such an acting titan and so many other performers, Giles walked among prop and backdrop alone. With no other colleagues to bounce cues and inflections off of, he forgets his lines entirely. Giles stands on the stage, speechless, before an audience as silent as an open grave. With no direction to his performance or life.
He'd tried to convince Elisa's friend, the other cleaner from OCCAM, Zelda, to move in across the hall from him. The quarrels of her and her husband were no Andy Williams, but at least they'd fill the deafening, static silence that permeated the whole building. The woman had informed Giles with a sigh that all of the trouble with the creature and its escape from OCCAM, had spooked her ogre of a husband.
"He's packin' as we speak," Zelda had told him when he'd called her. "Don't want no more trouble from the feds or anybody. He's taking us up to Philadelphia. Get outta dodge, y'know? I tried talkin' him into it, but he wasn't havin' none of it when I let slip ya like to bring home boys."
"Oh," Giles had breathed into the receiver, dejected. "Don't suppose you can write?"
Zelda'd perked up a little at that. "I sure will try!" she'd replied with a bit more of herself in her voice.
And she had, for a month. Giles guessed that the stresses of the infamous Brewster he'd heard so much about caught up with her after a while. The letters were fewer, farther apart, less and less descriptive. Zelda only had so much soul to give. She was human.
So through the strength-sapping pressures of the world, the last of Giles' human connections is severed forever. A gruff man and his family moved in next door, not interested in talking with their shut-in neighbor in the slightest.
Giles had futilely tried, for one or two days after, to get in touch with the doctor, the one from OCCAM. The one who'd euthanized a military policeman on the verge of shooting him. Elisa had never told him the man's name, and he'd never come around again. One of his last letters from Zelda held the doctor's phone number, and Giles had stood out in the rundown hallway, tears in his eyes, hoping beyond hope that the dead ringing in the speaker would yield something. He screamed in anguish that afternoon and pounded on the wall, every blow a swing at the solitude that Elisa had forced him into the ring with. It danced through his fists and struck him, in the stomach, across the face. The doctor's line went dead, and Giles fell to his knees.
For a moment, his eyebrows became jagged and his heart filled with uncontainable anger. How dare she leave him here?! How could she abandon him for something so foreign, so recent? Giles had been with her from day one. One day she met that chimera and he was her world. Giles no longer belonged in it. More than her cold body had been stolen away by the ocean that night. It was her presence, her dance and her smile and her good heart ; all the things his friend had that made Giles' life worth living.
But even that burned away. Nothing remained but grey.
That had been hours ago. Now, Giles just watched their avatars of lightning up in the sky, missing Elisa and her monster so terribly.
He sat there for a long while, noisy cats and the children of the man next door ignored. The sky had just begun to lighten, filling the apartment with soft, amicable light, when an answer fell from the newly opened heavens.
Giles knew exactly what to do.
He left his door unlocked when he left, putting plenty of catfood out for Thor and the rest. The children across the hall were good-hearted. They'd surely adopt a few of the felines. On his couch, he puts a note.
Art, TV, couch can be sold. Make what you can from the rest.
G.D.
Giles shuts the red door to the stairs, and makes sure to give his key back to Mr. Arzoumanian. The rough old Bulgarian is perplexed, but accepts them with a simple "hmpfh." Giles didn't need them anymore. He strides down the street, away from the Orpheum, clad in only a nightshirt and a frayed pair of brown pants. The storm still dances above him and the various steps and twirls of that dance are only made more obvious as the sky lightens.
It might have taken a hour or only a few seconds ; Giles isn't entirely sure. His mind was filled with such purpose and drive that all other thoughts, all his angers and his hurts were shouted out by that single instinct. He stands on the pier of a dock. It must have been a more aged one than was the modern standard. The only vessels tied here were small, carved and wooden. One, a dark little boat, catches his eye. It is the only one that still has oars within it. Giles reaches out and catches one as the choppy waves bob them off balance. He steps into the boat, stone certainty chiseled into his old face. The rope that holds the vessel to land coils up in it like a braided serpent, and Giles Dupont departs Baltimore.
The sea welcomes him, opening up and maddened with anticipation at his arrival. He rows and rows for what feels like an eternity, the morning sun shining at his back but the sky still grey and black. His aged arms begin to tire, the spin of the oars slowly as the ocean becomes more furious. Baltimore is far behind now, far behind him. Somewhere out here he can feel them. His eyes search the black and blue waters for the girl and the monster, frantically. They're so close, and Giles is going to find them.
The rain has soaked through his clothes completely, and he loses an oar. The ocean is near godhood now, angry and beautiful and ready, like a waiting lover. He humps his way over a nasty wave, the wind blowing away his glasses. They fly into the air and are lost, to time and civilization. Salt and air and wind-whipped power surge into his eyes and he has to wipe them away to see. The ocean was a painful mistress. The other oar flies from his hand and the ocean devours it, hungrily and lustily. It eats away at the bottom of the boat, waterspouts that taste like tears flying from the broken hull.
In the flurrying midst of that howling and immeasurable demiurge, Giles looks up with squinty eyes. Towards he and his broken boat surges a frothing, loving wave as high as the Orpheum was. The shadow it cast over him was so dark, so terrible and black he half thought it was night again.
He thinks he sees her, signing his name, and her creature, lit up like a young sun, within the water as it crashes over him.