Hey everyone. *Ducks flying debris* Yes, Urchin is super not-awesome for taking so long (yet again) to update. I'm hoping to put in some updates around the holidays, once the thesis papers and grad school applications are finished.

This is sort of a preview of what's going to happen in Psycho. Much of it is Ivan-introspection, and it's rated M because Ivan is a very, very bad boy.

I

I am the Dark One, – the Widower, – the Unconsoled
The Aquitaine Prince whose Tower is destroyed:
My only star is dead,- and my constellated lute
Bears the black Sun of Melancholia.

~o*oOo*o~

It'd take a better eye than mine to even fault a stitch
The simple hair is golden as the grain
While in Piccadilly Circus, hunkered down and neon-lit
There are kids with ancient faces who are praying for a hit
But tonight the only free one is the rain

And to the stricken tower came the Prince of Aquitaine.

Present Time

It's still dark, and the air is dry and brittle with cold.

Your breath makes puffs, His more so. He's panting, bare chest heaving, his pale arms gleaming. Bemused, you look up and see Him grimace as he bolts, brow heavily creased. It looks so much better smooth, when plum eyes are soft and smiling beneath. But they're sharp now, narrowed and hard. It's a little frightening. He continues zig-zagging amongst the trees, which smell damp and earthy and cold.

You might cry if you weren't so surprised. Seconds ago, the bed was wonderful and so was sleep and so were His arms woven around you. Safe.

Safe, even when those limbs made nightmares of not-breathing worse when they crushed you against his breast.

Screaming-screaming-screaming-holding-you-too-close-writhing in hot, tangled sheets. Hushing noises and large hands (bloody, small hands, pointing you out, mURdeREr) smothering, caressing. Holding you tight and safe, shushing and rocking. Eyes pressed against fabric, tears soaking it.

Tears must be bits of sadness trickling out your eyes from a chasm inside, you figure. But now matter how much you cry, the torn hollow always reappears, bottomless. Even when He cradles you, feeds you with His hands, and holds you close in your favorite chair. Sometimes the pain of that kindness makes you wail. You think of the mouse in the blue pointy hat desperately bailing out water with a thimble as an army of enchanted brooms relentlessly marches on with their buckets.

Your eyes prick, and you press your cheek against His sternum, something pounding beneath it. You're in His arms now, wrapped in a thin blanket. Your bare feet poke out beneath.

These arms rock you when you drop awake in a cold sweat. Sometimes the hands tickle you and make you giggle until you cry. And cry, and cry, and cannot stop crying until the arms rock you again. Sometimes for a long, long time as your sobs subside, as you breathe in quietness and it breathed heavily back into you.

But tonight had been very good. No dreams. You vaguely remember that He had returned and that made you wild with joy. After eating-yum came slightly a bitter draft. The glass had followed your lips even when you fussed.

Soon you were woozy, and giggly, and there had been a movie. You were read to. Pajamas and bed.

Then something LOUD cracked in the night. You jolted awake, and He was at the window. Turned away, white, white, white in the dark. Looked stricken. Said something. Scooped you up, hurried down the stairs, and flew outside. Into the woods. It's a very strange game.

From not very far away, you hear something loud. Crashing, sticks breaking, distant shouts. Bemused, you wait to wake up, and set your chin on His shoulder, humming tunelessly.

Three-quarters of the moon are chasing you both in a soft indigo sky. You look dumbly at it, at your shadows over the frosty grass.

And for the first time since quite possibly ever-you don't know-you think a thought in words:

Something is coming.

Twenty-Four Hours Before Present Time

The house was large and grand—a warm beige color, with three floors of windows set with wine red shutters. It was trimmed by dipping palm trees, which in turn were surrounded by an iron gate of black swirls. Atop the gate, the swirls gradually turned into spikes. After pulling down the mirror flap to shield his eyes from the sun glare, Ivan checked the address again, though he knew this was the place. The cobblestone driveway—courtyard, rather—was flooded with gleaming Mercedes and catering vans surrounding the fountain described: a naked cherub looking indolently aside as water streamed from its bronze pitcher.

He heard pop music pulsing from inside and he agitatedly fingered the cello case sitting in the passenger seat.

How he wished he had not accepted the invitation! Ivan lugged his Armani instrument case into his arms and hugged it, checked the dashboard clock. Thirty minutes to. He supposed he could head in now, but it seemed rude—best to slip in after they cut the cake.

He refrained from approaching the gate (Ivan thought calling an automatic striped stick a 'gate' silly) and waved when the fat, beige-uniformed security officer behind the community gate looked at him. Setting the Armani case back in its seat, he opted to circle around the block again. You couldn't see much of the house from this angle, though Ivan caught the cerulean blur of a pool from the backyard.

Twenty-eight minutes to. Still too early. He was only agitating himself by wanting—wanting wanting wanting to breathe in his own stillness. The noise of this trip reverted Ivan's thoughts to static: A staccato blur of sentiment that was heavy breathing and left him near-paralyzed when alone with wordless thoughts for too long.

He straightened his scarf, pressing faded cotton against his cheek. Really, he was being ridiculous. It'd be a quick social visit, and soon he'd be home again.

A warm, precious weight. Soft hands touching his face, his eyes, childishly bold while tracing. Cooing, the smell of warm skin, the sound of sleep.

Ivan smiled a bit, glancing at the rearview mirror and seeing bruise-dark bags beneath narrowed eyes. It was really too bad the party address had been so far away, that he still had a long drive ahead of him afterwards. Ivan would've rathered watched Pinocchio or Ernest and Celestine for the three hundredth time tonight, but he needed tonight. He'd brought along a quality bottle of vodka, too.

Ivan wasn't very good at parties. Alfred had graciously invited him to events Ivan otherwise would not have been at school. The gesture made him feel slightly pathetic, but had meant far, far more to him than the parties themselves had.

Still, he had liked being around people once.

He'd watch friends eagerly greet friends whom meant more to them than Ivan did. Sometimes they swarmed around video game counsels and ping-pong tables plastered with red cups and beer. But Alfred was often the beacon bolt of attention, throaty and eager voice the invisible finger that tilted chins up as soon as he spoke. Ivan was happy to force his way into a crowd to be near him, ignoring the stares directed in his wake.

Before senior year, he'd hardly been to a social event outside of school in his life. Occasionally classmates grudgingly gave him invitations retrieved from recycle bins and Ivan responded with frantic joy, near-strangling people with hugs. He vigorously attempted forging friendships with those people whose mothers forced them to hand out birthday party invites to everyone, the friendships meaning more than the people with whom he attempted to connect.

He hastily hit the brakes when a little girl ducked into the street. A woman shouted behind her, hastily throwing Ivan a grateful nod without so much as a real glance. "BINA! Bina Elizabeth, get back here!"

The child turned. Her mother stormed over, seized her by the hand. "You NEVER do that! Ever! I told you!"

"Mommy, Richard's hiding at the Bailey's! He's cheating!"

"I don't care!"

Ready or not…he drummed the wheel, remembered a classmate's party when they'd all played hide-and-go-seek. Ivan darted around the backyard, remembered all the hiding places being filled with children whom told him this spot's taken, we're full, go away, Ivan, you smell, why don't you ever wear nice clothes, you're too big for here, Dmitry's mad you didn't get him a present, there's no room for you. He'd eventually settled on a shed, having to work a bit at the wooden latch to open it. He ducked inside, eyes bright with excitement and something else.

He waited for some time, both hoping to be found and to remain undetected. Eventually a head did poke inside and Ivan stood up, but the door was closed again. Laughing, Ivan went to push the door open but too late; Dmitry called for his friends to keep the door shut as they rushed for things to barricade the entrance. Dmitry's home was currently undergoing some remodeling, so eager young boys dragged paint cans and pressed them against the door, and Ivan's hammering against the wood grew a little more emphatic, bordering on desperation. Soon a heavy ladder a painter left behind was produced and leaned against the door.

Ivan bawled and wept all throughout the day, when the children left to play in the front yard and to eat cake. Eventually Dmitry's mother found him, the boys were produced and denied any wrongdoing—they were forced to apologize. Dmitry's mother offered him a slice of birthday cake as consolation, only to discover that it was already all gone. She sent Ivan home with her regrets and the recommendation that he take a shower.

Ivan hummed as he watched a little boy produced from behind a row of hedgerows, the girl pouncing on him. He protested and their irate mother took them by the hand and began dragging them towards a pretty house.

It would have been far, far too suspicious if anything happened to Dmitry right away, so Ivan waited. There was a field trip to a natural history museum. While everyone was blinking at a five-minute film on decay in a dark room, Ivan crept outside, back to the bus. Their lunch bags sat innocently on their seats, and Ivan scraped a generous amount of peanut butter from the lunch his teacher made him into Dmitry's sandwich. He returned to the tiny theater.

Soon they lined up to take their lunches to the tiny cafeteria. Ivan remembered being inordinately interested in his chewing. Soon Dmitry fell over three tables over, clutching at his closing throat, swollen tongue lolling grotesquely out his mouth as if he were a dog.

Students swarmed around him, buzzing excitedly as teachers shouted for a medic, Dmitry convulsing on the ground, fingers scrabbling in his pocket for an epi-pen that was not there.

He was carried out on a stretcher.

On the journey back, Ivan could speak without being heard as students eagerly recounted the day's favorite event. Teachers and parent chaperones looked grim, worried. Ivan liked it, that serious atmosphere. He knew well enough to smile through it.

Tempting to break out the vodka now, but he was behind the wheel. And how tacky would it be to bring an already-opened bottle to a party? He wanted to go home now.

The quiet green digits were barely yielding; twenty-five more minutes. Ivan parked near the curb, wishing he thought to bring a book. There was one, he grudgingly conceded as he opened the glove compartment, only Ivan kept the battered novel with him precisely because it irritated him so:

Lolita.

The spine was bent from the many times Ivan had hurled the thing at the wall. It was a nasty book—certainly it would've been banned back in Russia—and not simply because of its pornographic content. Ivan wondered if a certain insect had known that his homeland's Lolita fashions were named after the young victim of a deluded rapist.

He flipped towards the end—Ivan could never read a book start-to-fish straight through twice—and wondered at the book's continual power over him. Possibly it was his disgust, although Ivan wasn't a masochist.

He hardly found it very stimulating—at least, he never yearned for anyone in the story the way he yearned his beloved. Yet there was still something about the book that had him tracing passages, disturbed and repulsed and quietly hungry.

Ivan found Lolita on the list of banned books his English teacher presented the class and asked them to research one. Soon Ivan could understand why people would want to torch such a thing; it was the narrative of a man named Humbert Humbert, whom, after abducting the child of an old lover tried re-shaping her into his bride. The book posed considerable controversy, because while Humbert painted a blooming fresco of a loving courtship, his frenzied preying on a little girl portrayed lunatical nightmares.

Ivan thought he would like very much to tear Humbert to bits, resurrect him, and puncture his lungs. He was an insult to gardeners and their pruning. Humbert was diseased, and his fanatic delusion over so poor and stupid a creature made Ivan uncomfortable. It were as if a madman were raving over a weed when Ivan was still tending to the lovechild of a flower and the prince whom loved her.

The final pages in which Lolita found her freedom and Humphrey died were as savagely satisfying as they were unsettling. He tucked the book away, reaches for a thinner book. There's a black 50 scribbled on the Scotch tape on its spine—it used to belong to Ivan's French classroom, but then Alfred lent Ivan his copy.

The book opened to El Desdichado. The prose was in French, but Ivan read it so often he translated seamlessly.

Another horror, these stanzas. Withering sunflowers came to mind, as did the dark glistening of a ruby set within a crown, or orb and scepter. Sunlight through stained glass, the high-ceilings of a chapel that made you tinier than the open sky could. Pirated language as ornate as fresco-painted eggs set with pearl-studded watercolor portraits. Useless, fragile things!

Not for the first time he wondered whom the Aquitane Prince was. It was never specified, though several poets quoted the infamous image of the Prince stricken in his tower; Eliot was one, Anna Akmatova another. She tentatively put a person to the suffering Prince:

The snowstorm grew quiet among the pines,
silence itself, drunk even without wine,
sang like Ophelia,
to us throughout the night.
He who appeared only to me
was betrothed to that silence.
After he'd said goodbye, he generously remained,
He remained with me till death.

A savage lump swelled in Ivan's throat, threatening to rupture. He blinked it away, longed for a distracting burn. Just a little longer. He switched on the radio, and listened to a tinkling piano tune composed for a boy who walked in the air with last he had waited enough, and Ivan idly drove back to the large house, fingering the pass in his pocket. He had stopped at a florist and got a wilting chrysanthemum for his lapel. Did people do that anymore? Oh well.

~o*oOo*o~

By six-thirteen, there were eighteen corpses. Empty cello case at his feet, Ivan hugged his hot Kepler and Coche black assault rifle to his chest, gazing at the living room. The walls were now riddled with holes like sponge. A few paintings were now splattered with scarlet, as was the piano. Ivan had accidentally shot a fishbowl and a shimmery green-blue fish with fins that probably flowed majestic underwater and now looked like wet tissue paper lay amongst shattered glass. Its tiny mouth rapidly opening and closing, eyes bulging. He thought of Dmitry.

Platters of picked-at cheese, watery crackers and large grapes were now overturned on the floor. Several plates fell when the shooting began, sending spreads and nuts all over the carpet.

The speakers still played Mediterranean salsa. Or maybe that was tango. It sounded like the music played when cartoon characters danced tango, roses clutched in their jaws.

He breathed it in, the salty smell of fresh death. Bodies, bodies everywhere, a large man with a wine-colored birthmark on his balding head, several women in stringy boutique dresses, a lanky young man whose stubbly face bore the stamp of an alarm clock pressed too soon.

Dark scarlet seeped from wounds, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, depending on where the punctures were. It flooded the floor, underneath shattered windowpane and champagne glass. Underneath brimming garbage cans, into the carpet. Ivan had the strange desire to take off his shoe and step into the warm wound, feel the glistening carnage squelch into his sock. Of course he didn't.

Gun at the ready, Ivan tentatively crept into a hall, circled into the dining room past a large buffet table that had seen eager hands. There were men in Polo shirts on the patio that had taken ten seconds, a wrinkly-skinned woman in the bathroom whose hair was dyed a watery yellow had taken three. The Ivan traced back to the main parlor, ears pricked.

I need nineteen.

He heard a soft clink, and immediately rounded on a closed door. He opened fire once more.

The door shuddered underneath the assault, creeping open once the automatic stopped. Ivan saw a sandy-haired man in a cravat crumple to his knees, a revolver and bullet cartridge sliding out his hand. Ivan saw the punctured wall behind the man spattered with gore as the man fell over, and died.

Boots gently crushing broken glass to powder, Ivan swept his unwieldy submachine gun back into the black cello case. He preferred his pipe; guns were too impersonal for his liking. But he'd done it. The party was a success. He retrieved the Smirnoff bottle from his coat pocket. The air fluttering in through shattered windows was cold.

I am invincible. It never ceased to be a marvel, this invulnerability which Ivan owed to his saint rather than his experience. My angel makes me invincible.

Not wanting to swig directly from the bottle, Ivan fetched a shot glass from the open bar. He poured himself a glass, raised it in a toast to the people scattered around him. He was glad for the company; he disliked drinking alone. People became alcoholics that way.

He downed the burning shot, pleased at the warmth that flared in his throat. He might traipse upstairs and see if there were anything sparkling his beloved could play with, provided it wasn't small enough to choke on.

And….almost forgot….

"Excuse me," Ivan said politely, stooping to kiss the hostess's limp hand, on which there was a pear-shaped diamond. Ugly. "I hope you don't mind."

Ivan wandered to the marble-topped counter, and cut a generously-large slice of cake for Alfred, and another for himself. He wrapped them in plastic, and headed to the door.

He turned and paused, looked back at the catastrophe. A girl no older than fifteen had a bullet pierce her throat. She hadn't been able to scream as she'd fallen, blood seeping underneath white-blond, immaculately-curled hair. Ivan looked at her, and slowly headed back into the living room.

And then he walked past her, back into the kitchen. He wrapped up another slice of cake—it was a glistening dark chocolate with pink frosting rosebuds—and left.

You can check out the original El Desdichado or read the translated version; it's lovely either way.

To sum up: Ivan's a hitman, and poor Alfred's gone absolutely nuts. There will be further explanation in the next Psycho chapter. See you then.