A/N: Previously published separately.
Written November 2015, June 2016 and May 2017, pre TPTR.
~•o•~
The lights of the Roadhouse were low. One spotlight of blue reflected off the white of the singer's dress and lit the room, the faces of the audience.
He leaned against the bar as he listened. The Roadhouse was different; the singer and the lyrics were as well. Where once there was melancholia, tranquility, there is now energy, beams of hostility. The will to move but the inability.
In the booths along the wall, a young woman smiled, laughing over something her friend had said. Her coloring, her character, made him think of the past, the times they'd shared the same booth.
He looked away, feeling guilt, feeling the passage of time. Somewhere in the dark is their son, the boy who had taken with him his mother's life with his entrance to the world.
o
In the room now empty, made black, a shaft of light colored her white legs orange. She backed away. Her body sore, weak. Backed further away from the light and to the walls, further into the dark, though she knew there was no use hiding.
He could feel where she was, no need to grope in the dark. Her fear was like a beacon.
He descended the stairs, moving as though not real. His legs, his arms, wavering as if suspended, brought forward, in time.
She kept pulling herself back, scrambling to get away. Noises left her throat, cries that grew more and more desperate.
The door closed behind him, taking with it the light.
o
The house was empty, save for what had been. The darkness, the moments that others had suffered were pressed into the walls, the floors. The make.
The window that was once used as another door, as a means between worlds, was no longer touched. Opened.
As the one lived, who remained, she continued to feel it, to know its evil as those who had shared her life.
Their lives had been delved into. Split open until they were halved. Splintered. One was another. One was not even half.
She could feel his presence.
~•o•~
The girl learned that she had been born as her mother slept, trapped in a dream from which she'd had no way of awakening.
From the moment she stepped into the circle of trees until her death, Annie Blackburne's eyes had remained vacant, crossed. The few words passed from her to nurses, to her family, had made little sense.
Her daughter was never allowed to know her as anything other than a faded effigy seen only in sleep.
~•o•~
In her dreams her father isn't the man she's seen in waking, not the one she is able to sense in town and in the woods.
Sometimes she awakes with the image of the calm one, the one who loves, silently watching her, a backing of red. His thin smile not always meeting his eyes, but there. He whispers to her at times, words she doesn't recall.
She pretends, plays along, sometimes - as if the man emerging from thick branches and briers, cursing to himself, doesn't contain what he does. Other times she finds herself behind a building, her back leaned against the rough bricks, not knowing what to do. Not knowing how to move without him spotting her.
Many times she's been drawn through mazes of trees to a dilapidated white house. Afraid of what is inside, she imagines her mother singing, but it does little to calm her.
O
In low light a man in a beige suit stands amid a sea of silhouetted trees. In front of him is a black gash made at the base of a hill and into its side; its wounds bleeding an oil. An opening as another made deeper. A white lined mouth.
Charred, the nearby ground. Black and barren in the wake of fire. Gray rows of stones in circles frame.
The wind blows through the heavy limbs of trees as the man waits, looking to dark limbs as waves.
In the air is the spoil of leaves followed by smoke.
Conscious of the loose rocks under his shoe, he turns his ankle, feeling and hearing the stones as they hit against one another. Realizing himself, he stops.
O
It's night when she leaves with him. Like so long ago.
Passing fences, under streetlamps, under the dark sky, she sees the whites of his face in blurs, but not his eyes.
And the air from his mouth passes over him, over in a cloud like a ghost.
She wants to be that ghost, away in the darkness like a figment, but she feels her hand in his, cold, almost wet, and it's before. Hanging branches, the moon and the movement of his steps. Her heart.
It's all as before.
O
An agent, a different man, with his hands in his pockets, speaks. A woman crosses his path, crosses but refuses to look.
There are others gathered around, and he looks to them, distance in his glance.
They believe.
The plan known only by him.
O
Through the trees there is a voice, a whisper raised high. A woman talking.
He hears but doesn't let on.
Between branches the sky is red, but he can't see it. Can't see anything beyond his thoughts.
Scraping the shoulder of his jacket, messing his hair, through the forest, he goes on as always. As every night.
And about him there is a madness, a sense of decay and of sorrow mixed with the presence of sickness and corruption that makes him whole.
So slowly he moves through the woods without aid. His placed steps made without caution through the thick, fallen leaves.
His intentions clear.
O
~oOo~