The Violet Room

by sarehptar

While working a psychology internship, Myde is given the challenge of analyzing Ienzo, a mysterious patient who spends his days writing on the walls of his hospital room. But when the story of 'Zexion' and 'Demyx' starts to sound familiar...

10. Storm

Please note:

1) This chapter is unbeta'd. DG's real life is way too busy/amazing for me to bother her, so if anything seems glaringly wrong, it's my fault. Con crit is always appreciated.

2) If anybody feels like the rating for this fic should be bumped to M for violence, just let me know and I will be happy to change it.

3) If you have a real life, don't try to read this in one sitting. It's way the hell too long.

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» Τ ђ ε – Vίσιετ – Яσσм «

Sarehptar

and

DistortedGaze

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Ĉħąρτεŕ IV

Ғāηŧąŝίą – Đ ε ł – Şσġησ – ( Äηđąηŧε ) :

Şŧσŗм

This chapter is dedicated to TheOptimisticPessimist and Magentian.

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The creaking of the automatic garage door behind him was every horror movie soundtrack combined: the broken twig that gave away his hidden location, the unfortunate echo that drew the eyes of every zombie in the mall—at the very least, the way its slamming rang into the house betrayed him, and before the door was even shut behind Myde, his mother's voice was swimming out of her office.

"Come here, My'."

It was the same as every other day, the exact same words in the exact same tone he heard every time she got home before he did. It evoked a sense of déjà vu so strong it smoldered in one corner of his mind, slow-burning through years of identical memories: he came through the garage, ignored her warning, kicked his shoes off in the hall in that exact spot every day…

If he had been Myde still—just Myde, anyway—he would have tossed the shoes down right there and tromped dutifully into his mother's office, content enough to give her the same summary of his day that he'd given her for years.

"My day was fine," he'd say, or maybe air some meaningless complaint like being called on twice in class.

Instead, the transcription of Ienzo's writing burned where Myde's messenger bag touched his leg and the thought of speaking to his mother burned in the back of his throat. If he could only avoid her forever…

"Coming," he answered finally. Every step he took toward her seemed drawn out into a miniature eternity, yet long before he wanted to, Myde found himself leaning against the door frame, staring into his mother's office. Although all he could see was her.

"What have you done to your hair?" she breathed, the words wispy and betrayed. The haircut. Of course she'd be worried about that—he'd completely forgotten, left before she saw it that morning, and now she was staring at him like she'd seen a ghost, that same hesitant glint as if she wasn't sure she had the right person at all.

"I j-just… felt like… a change?" Myde mumbled, pulling at some of the longer strands at the base of his neck. He slid, hangdog, into the room and waited, tensing from head to toe, fully expecting her to devolve into put-upon sighing. Then she'd start with the lancing reminders about the need for professional appearance, which he would have no way to answer except by apologizing again…

But she didn't. She didn't chastise him. She didn't even sigh. She refused to look anywhere but the shock of gelled strands at the top of his head or the close-cropped sides, and he thought (with another twinge of that sinking, emptying sensation) that she was looking there as an excuse not to look at his face.

But maybe that suited Myde just fine? He wasn't comfortable with the thought of meeting her eyes either. He'd see something hurtful there, or give something away. She'd read it on his face most of all: the fleeting idea forming in the back of his mind to just take Ienzo and run—

"How was your day?" she said at last, so practiced the words seemed to lose all meaning, breaking over him in a rush of dull noise.

Only habit supplied him with a suitable answer. "One of the patients ran off today. When I caught up to him, I bumped into Cloud…" Myde muttered, watching the flow of blood in and out of his knuckles as he gripped the edge of his office chair.

"Cloud?" his mother repeated, colored with relief. Cloud, she knew—Cloud (she thought) was normal.

Well aware of all the implications, Myde said, "It's weird how you can know people for ages and still not know anything about them." He managed a limp shrug. "Everyone has secrets, I guess…" Some almost as big as mine. He laughed or almost, a quick exhalation that ruffled the towering stack of magazine proofs beside his seat.

Mariana didn't say anything; the silence afterward sat in the air like a solid thing. Myde read the titles of the articles at the top of the paper heap just to fill his head: Adopting a Cause: Maid Marion's Touching Foster Care Mission, Fifty Weight-Busting Summer Sweets, Save Your Marriage in Seven Days. This was his mother's day, the ever-present slew of information to pick and choose from, articles covering the same dull topics over and over again, the same make-up ads just relabeled—and somehow all of it actually had merit to his mother, enough to keep her at her work year after year. It meant something to her, the way the hospital did to him, and the way being a Nobody did, and the way Ienzo did.

Myde opened his mouth, determined for half second to tell her the truth about his day, the things he had said and meant in the hospital garden, the story festering in his bag, the way it felt knowing he was not so damn alone on the planet—maybe she should know that, that he wasn't the only one different—

There's someone important to me, he wanted to say. There's someone like me.

But the words wouldn't form. What would she say if he tried? Would she interrupt him, or pretend he never said anything, or find some way to fit it back into "Myde," into the firm vision of normalcy she had for her child?

"Everything's fine," he said finally, to say something at all. It was the exact same thing he'd been saying since he started at Rufus Memorial. "Work's fun. I'm doing a good job." Sort of. Well, they hadn't fired him yet.

Mariana drummed her manicured nails over the cover samples for the next issue of Destati, perusing the smiling women and the strawberry cake displays with distant eyes. "That's—" she was on her way to saying "great" when the phone rang. Snatching up the receiver, she held out a hand to hush him although he hadn't been speaking.

"Hello? Yes?" She waited silently as the person on the other line spoke. A frown cut her face—or had it been there all along?—pulling down the corners of her lips until Myde could see where her coral shell lipstick was uneven, where the first fine lines of age were settling in. "I asked him to have that copy ready last week," she murmured, displeasure a sharp edge in her voice. "I know. Well..." A long silence. "Yes, that might be the best course. Why don't you—"

She was outlining some plan or other to get them back on track for publication; someone would pay for the delay somewhere down the road, but Myde couldn't find it in him to even fake interest. How many times had he heard the same conversation? If he tried hard enough, Myde thought he might be able to recite it by heart.

In the lull between her silence and the meaningless bell-chiming of her voice, Myde let his eyes wander the room. It felt oddly foreign to him and, with a jolt, he realized it was foreign: sometime between his running away and coming back, the room had been rearranged. It was not just a simple rearrangement of one or two stacks of paper either. The pair of bookshelves that had crowded the wall on his left for as long as Myde could remember (probably as long as the shelves had been there then—they hadn't had furniture for the house until he was almost thirteen) had been moved to the opposite side of the room, and the magazines that had long clogged the shelves in haphazard stacks had been painstakingly organized by publisher... He squinted toward the closest copies. She'd organized by volume and issue too, it seemed.

Something caught and stuck in Myde's throat, growing into a solid lump that made it harder to breathe by the second. His stomach lurched.

No one but he and his mother were allowed in her office. Their maid wasn't even allowed in, for fear of misplacing the one back issue or article query necessary to make or break Dawn City's most famous women's glossy.

If the room had been rearranged, Mariana had done it herself. And if there was one thing he knew about his mother, it was that she did not change.

The tossing and turning of his stomach only grew the more he looked around: the antique red and purple rug was finally gone. His mother had bought it years ago at the estate sale of some celebrity or another, the first piece of finery for the house that cost his mother so much they slept on the floors for six months.

He'd slept on that rug even, dreamed it would take off and fly him into some harrowing adventure. He'd marveled at the unfamiliar feeling of real carpet fibers beneath his outstretched hands for weeks. When the shelters had carpet, it had always been thin and rough as pasteboard, covered with unavoidable stains from years of use. He'd known the smooth chill old linoleum so well that anything else felt odd and wonderful.

Which was probably why his mother had loved that rug, cherished it long after it grew worn and dingy. Hidden in her office, it never had to match the spotless carpets from the rest of the house, the ones torn out as soon as a careless guest flecked them with wine or Myde tracked in another clod of dirt too persistent to bleach out. Tucked away, the rug in her office was never called upon to exceed expectations, and for that reason alone, Myde thought it would stay in the house forever—might be the one thing to keep his mother's affections when the day came that he inevitably let her down.

Except that day had come, and while Myde was still in the house, the carpet had vanished.

What had she done for the whole day between the incident in the kitchen and his teary-eyed return?

Because it had to have taken that long. The desk was in a different place too, and on the desk, her computer had switched sides, all the papers had been reorganized into far neater stacks and a set of paperweights he never seen before had been put into use. The very edge of the desk's far corner was taken up by a potted fern, so fresh-looking Myde knew she'd bought it the day before. Her long series of filing cabinets had been shifted to fill the bookshelves' old place, and she seemed to have added a pair of cabinets or so. Myde knew just how full those files were, and wondered for a minute how she had ever managed to move them herself—she must have taken every folder out, one-by-one, and then put them all back just as meticulously.

Even the pictures hanging on the walls were different. Like the carpet, the old waterlilies piece on the far wall was gone. It had been a gift from a museum to which Destati gave generous yearly donations, and the new picture—some clash of color and geometric patterns which looked like disjointed foxes—probably came from the same source. It was a much smaller painting; the back wall looked a little barren.

To make up for that, his high school diploma had been moved from the side wall to the back, along with several of the awards his mother had received over her long years as the magazine's enormously successful chief editor.

In place of these, on the right wall Mariana had found room for photos Myde had long forgotten: their first trip to Seven Flags Over DC, where he'd been too afraid to ride anything; the Mother's Day he'd gotten up early and almost set their closet-sized apartment on fire trying to make his mother pancakes; his first performance with the high school jazz band. And—

And what was that?

Dead center in the middle of the nearest wall was the framed cover of a magazine. It was an old, old issue of Destati, slightly discolored. Even the frame it sat in seemed to spring out of a different time, the glass a little cloudy, the wood well-worn. But despite the years and fade between them, there was no mistaking the cobalt shade of those eyes, the blue-steel hair in that photo.

Framed on his mother's rearranged wall was a magazine cover of Ienzo.

He looked young—ten maybe, or eleven—and he was stuck between two people who could only be his parents, judging by the woman's blue hair and the superior cant to the man's face which was eerily familiar to Myde. He'd seen that same vaguely condescending head tilt on Ienzo a hundred times.

But what he noticed most were the smiles. That look was one Myde had never seen on Ienzo's face and one he doubted he would ever see again: in the photo, Ienzo grinned from ear to ear, his eyes alight even on the faded page. He looked, for all the world, like a young boy who was the happiest he'd ever been. He was holding up an enormous golden cup, and if Myde squinted, he could make out the words "National Spelling Bee" engraved on it.

A long shudder crawled its way down Myde's spine. He realized, with an acute knifing pain between his lungs, that this was Ienzo before—before he had remembered anything really, before he had ever thought the name Zexion, or wondered about the origins of emotions... when he was just Ienzo, the brilliant child of a politician and an heiress, living a life so charmed it would have made Myde seethe at ten years old, when he and his mother were shuffling between low-income family centers and collecting cans on weekends, keeping change in an olive jar.

He knew better now. He knew, theoretically, what happened just after this photo. Ienzo had answered when Myde worked up the stuttering courage to ask.

Torn Apart, the headline blared. How a Mysterious Mental Illness Destroyed the Perfect Family.

Except that was not quite the way it looked. The grave lines of the older man's face stood out darkly to Myde, who saw beneath the projection of strength exactly what he found in Ienzo from time to time: cavernous ambition, swallowing anything in its path. The man looked as if he had never been satisfied with anything in his entire life. And the woman's hands around Ienzo's shoulders—not flawless so much as unworked—her demure smile, the almost surprised look in her eyes all whispered something like helplessness, the debilitating sensation of having everything laid out and decided for you, which Myde himself knew all too well.

Neither one of them would ever have been able to reach Ienzo, to find him when the fierce gale of old memories shook his eleven-year-old identity to pieces and didn't bother to put it back together again.

Maybe, like his own mother, all any normal person could do in the face of the endless void (the alien differences, the dire needs of Nobodies) was grasp at straws. Call out for their before-monster children.

"What... is this?" he mused to himself, because it occurred to him then, sure and solid, that there were no coincidences in this particular world.

His mother had kept a framed picture of Ienzo for years. From all the thousands of worlds and millions of people, Myde had found the remnants of the remnants, Zexion or Ienzo or both. His soul or whatever little bit it was that lasted had been drawn somehow to one familiar glimmer and refused to let it go.

Myde was jerked out of his rambling thoughts by his mother's voice. Her phone call had ended, and now she turned to stare at the framed cover too.

"That," she said, "was the first feature article I ever wrote." It took Myde a moment to realize she was answering his self-directed question. Her scowl evened out as she looked at the picture, not blank but certainly unreadable. "I was office help at the time, do you remember?"

Vaguely he did. She'd loved the job because it was a paying job, and even if she swayed on her feet when she got off the bus home every night, it paid enough to finally get them a place, a real place, small as it was. But she'd hit the ceiling fast, he remembered that too. She didn't have the job experience to move up the ladder, no matter how much she'd tried to make up for it with devotion. Every day she'd made him pray for a promotion.

"It was just luck in the end," she murmured, sliding her hand across the rich, dark wood of her desk, just one more sign of hard work ultimately well-rewarded. "Cruella was giving Anita Radcliffe such a hard time about her new puppies she begged that day off and left me in the office with the witch. When we got the tip-off that the press might be allowed interviews, Cruella sent me on the drop of a hat."

He hadn't known any of this. Or maybe he had, somewhere deep down in his memory? All that mattered to him back then was the fact that he suddenly had the money to buy school lunches and go on the field trips and she even, on occasion, took him out for ice cream.

"That edition of the magazine sold a record number. For a while it looked like Amaryllis was going to take over as governor; the trial with his son became a huge media scandal—and I was the only one who got a single word out of that boy through the whole thing."

The indecipherable expression on her face opened up into something Myde could understand, but he didn't like what he found. She stared far off, back into some memory he'd never have, and her jaw clenched so tightly Myde worried she'd crack her teeth gritting them.

When she spoke again after a long pause, it was in a bare whisper Myde had to lean to catch. "In my entire life, I have never been frightened of anything as much as that boy. He was just a little older than you, just as small... But when I met his eyes, it was like staring into a black hole. No remorse. No fear. No sadness. There was absolutely nothing inside him."

There's someone important to me. There's someone like me.

Myde couldn't control what happened next. He hardly knew what was happening. In an enormous spray the nearest stack of papers exploded outward across the floor, because his hand had swung out to knock them over. He stood so violently the office chair fell onto the floor too, wheels clattering and tangling in the papers.

Her new office plant went the same way as the mountain of articles when he swept it onto the ground. The ceramic pot shattered; shards shot across the floor and dirt like gunshot residue radiated far outward into the room. He shoved her computer monitor over so that nothing separated them, and from somewhere deep inside him came a cold voice as venomous as an adder.

"What would you know? You've never, ever had to feel that kind of empty. You don't have any clue what it's like. Don't pretend you know him because you got one look. You don't even know me and you call yourself my mother."

The words had a nasty echo; the discordant jangling of the room's water vapor in the back of his mind crashed against the heaving of his breath through his nose. He sealed his mouth sharply, half afraid if he left his lips open even a little, he'd vent some more poison into the air between the two of them.

Mariana stared at him, devoid of coherent thought. He had never acted like that. Not in his terrible twos, not when he was sixteen and sure the world was ending, not even when she had told him to change his music major. He had never purposefully destroyed anything.

Myde saw it the moment the shock wore off and turned into a flicker of fear. She hid it well but it was still there, lurking in the corners of her head: Mariana Cistern was certain she did not know the man standing in front of her. He was something irrevocably outside the realm of her control.

He saw it finally begin to dawn on her too, breaking at last through some of the vicious walls she had thrown up to protect herself from the realization: the oblivious Myde she had named and warred and suffered to raise was already dead and gone. Small changes in this office couldn't be bartered as concessions to avoid that fate. Nothing would ever be the same for her again.

"I'm sorry," he said. For everything. His hands shook. He hadn't meant to do this; he hadn't meant to ruin her work or her things, but he'd just felt...

He'd just felt. Anger. Hurt. Betrayal. Confusion. Fear. All of it.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. He wasn't supposed to be like this.

Mariana looked down at the back of her computer monitor. "Maybe you should just go," she said at last.

"M-Maybe I should," he agreed, although she meant to his room and he meant somewhere else entirely.

Myde turned and left the room without another sound or stutter, shutting the door behind him for the first time in his entire life.

On his shoulder the messenger bag felt like a titanic weight, the final cut script for an imminent apocalypse. His trudge up the stairs seemed to take forever. He wanted to read Ienzo's story and he didn't want to—what he wanted was answers and he knew he wouldn't find them, still couldn't help hoping... hoping at least that Ienzo would tell him how they could hope in the first place.

But all he would find were more questions, riddles even the genius couldn't solve. Earlier that day he'd been all right with that, had told Ienzo it was okay not to know...

Now he wasn't so certain. Now he was afraid he'd wade into the fountain of Ienzo's darkest memories and drown.

The sound of his bedroom door shutting was a reveille to an execution. He was hyper-sensitive to the sensation of discarded clothes brushing up against his socks and ankles, to the feeling of his comforter against his elbows as he slid across his bed, to the weight of the bound books in his palms, their plastic covers sticking to his fingers and their spiral binding pressing new prints into his skin.

He hefted the first two volumes out of his bag as he settled back against his pillows, preparing for what would inevitably be a long night. His whole arms trembled when he peeled the first transparent cover back. Skimming the words, his eyes darted down the opening page until he found the first thing he hadn't heard before, and that was where he began.

I was eight years old when I killed my father.

It was going to be a very, very long night.

o ― ― ― ― ― » τεισίV « ― ― ― ― ― o

He cuts dark shapes through the frost on the inside of the window pane with a fingernail the modern representation of a star begins at but he pauses in the middle to clean out the churned ice from beneath his nail. The calligraphic path is an outlet to which he presses one eye, breath alternately reobscuring and waning to pinprick beads of condensation. Outside the snow is falling even now. Outside the snow is even now a white rag at all their mouths muffling, at their eyes blurring, the refracted navy of the night sky and night shadows diffused to a singular, swirling shroud of gray.

Far away something in its depths is moving.

His father is still not home.

Ienzo's hand (too small at this point to be anything but comically fragile, he knows) frets the twine of his Midnight Anklet as many times as seconds on a wound clock, the worn black fiber fitting into long-callused grooves for which he has already been scolded, the arrow sharp charms twanging out a crystalline tune by now so familiar his tongue can almost mimic.

It's a ward against Darkness.

Outside is a white sort of darkness and no one around but through the momentary scratch marks he makes in the window frost Ienzo can watch indistinct figures shifting and pawing in the storm: a fanged maw opening, a spine bent in all non-Euclidean directions at once. A siege line of indecipherable monster bodies. All of them coming closer. He shuts his eyes but the image doesn't change at all. Anyway the snow was falling behind his eyelids all along.

Somewhere a grandfather clock is chiming but they've never owned one of those and in the hearth a fire is burning only it isn't, hasn't been lit today. That doesn't change the orange light on the corners of the furniture raising shadows which flicker of their own accord.

Trying to empty himself out again, Ienzo rests the small white edge of his teeth on top of one knee, worrying a fold of his handmade trousers. Then his face is more than half buried in his legs, one blue eye the only thing left open to the world. Over the silencing effect of the blizzard, there is the sound of fleshy dragging, eager rumbling calls. His father is late which means outside somewhere in the storm's eye teeming with teeth and tongues and throats, the dogs with the tentacle spines following the scent trails of his footprints in the ice…

On the floor of their silent living room, the shadows raised by the fire in the unlit hearth writhe and wriggle into impossible geometric figures, nonagons and seven-pointed stars and parabolic rises which deny the hard angles of the room and wash the whole place over in the creeping sensation of bad-dreaming the center will form a normal pentagon with five identical angles each measuring. Nothing unusual. Anymore.

A stew pot in the kitchen is thrown down on the counter with a shattering clang like the old bells of the castle chapel in the wind. He buries his whole face in his knees, and "Stop," his mother says in the other room, not a demand but a plea too exhausted and familiar to even be desperate anymore. "Stop." The sound of her voice in the echoing tremble of the cooking pot might as well be the skittering of a pebble before a glacier, but she's his mother and good mothers try.

Her eyes are playing tricks on her. Like always. Or his are.

The walls of the house begin to melt, the window glass liquefying like fat beads of sweat. The eaves begin to drip, and the ceiling bows and sags down around Ienzo in streams of rich, pulled candy. The roof opens up; the wooden floor begins to drip outward, a river through every crevice and mouse hole. In the kitchen, his mother doesn't so much as shriek, doesn't so much as move, even when the snow begins to drift in through the great open space where their roof had been—even when the sloshing remnants of the stone countertops stick her skirts to her ankles and she watches every precious, important, special, and expensive belonging they have to their names turn into crystal clear elixir and drain out into the frostbitten street.

The winter wind shakes her hair, that waterfall of pure blue tied high up on her head. She doesn't lift a hand to brush it clear of her face. Her fingers stay resolute, curled around the handle of a kitchen knife that has long since run out between her fingers, and her other hand never flinches, pressed into the outline of a cutting board that no longer exists. She even carries the motions through, continues to chop idly at some carrot or onion no one can see anymore.

Where he stares over his knees, Ienzo can see that the window seat he's been perched on has disappeared as completely as the lacquered wood paneling of the floor. His bare feet and fingers, white and questing, balance on thin air. But he never begins to fall. He doesn't expect to—though it might be nice, the wall of snow enough maybe to shield him from the hunchbacked wolves, from the new thing approaching tonight which even through the storm he can see has nine eyes and no nostrils.

His father enters at last through a door which had not been there a moment before, which had never been exactly there anyway, splitting the sitting room bookcase in two so that the first thirteen volumes of their encyclopedia set go one way and the last thirteen the other. The door his father enters through is warped and stained green by age, not paint; Ienzo thinks their real front door is a clean, demure shade of eggshell, but by now he might be mistaken.

"I'm home," Ienzo's father says.

And "Welcome home," Ienzo answers. There is a house again, and this time it is mostly right. Against the front window, the hot breath of a monster with a man's hair but a spider's mouth doubles the opaque frost.

Dutifully, Ienzo unfolds, slipping from the window seat and picking his way across the frozen floorboards. He doesn't bother to rearrange his face—couldn't name the expression on it at the moment even with the aid of a mirror. He couldn't even say for certain if what he'd see in the mirror would match his actual reflection. "How was your work, Father?"

But the man is already half way across the room, unraveling his knit scarf and loosening the upper buttons on his bridge coat. For a moment the buttons look like they should: six frosted golden discs, imprinted with some indistinguishable isometric pattern—but then the loosened set nearest to his father's neck untwines, spiraling out into two jointed millipede bodies, thousands of golden thread-thin legs wriggling them upward toward the hollows of his father's ears.

There is a sound like water and stones rolling in a glass bottle when the millipede closest to Ienzo begins to worm its way into his father's right ear, its exposed body belling impossibly out to collapse into the narrowed space; somewhere very close to Ienzo's own ear, a husky, old voice begins to talk about songs that never leave one's head, a few tuneless bars of a melody Ienzo has never heard drifting through the down hairs where his skull meets his neck.

Ienzo bites the very tip of his tongue until there is no sensation left in it, until it transforms into something which feels like a dragonfly beating against the inside of his lips. By this time, his mother has smoke-wisped her way from the kitchen and stands dwarfed in the high doorway, the dicing knife returned to her hand less an off note than a momentary, solid presence on which to hang her own knife-thin body.

"I'm home," Ienzo's father repeats, stopped for some reason in the middle of unbuttoning his coat. Melting snow drips from his boots, and the drops shrug off their polarity and go skittering away from each other to hide in the unlit corners of the room.

His mother's gaze darts between Ienzo's and his father's with an old question folding up in the creased corners of her eyes, which makes his father stand straighter still and finally shrug off the coat, crossing to hang it on the hook near the hearth with steps as stiff and efficient as a SOLDIER's. In a voice to match, not bothering to look over his shoulder, he demands, "Is dinner ready?"

Her eyes meet Ienzo's again. One of her irises turns from gray to blue and back again. Both eyes shiver almost imperceptibly in their sockets.

"It will be on the table in a minute," she replies finally, gesturing to the dining room without looking away from her son.

His father exhales loudly, just once, through his nose, the sort of measured scoff which inevitably implies disappointment but never exactly at what—whether at the surreptitious stare Ienzo's mother is throwing around the room or the fact he will have to wait a few bare seconds for the evening meal to arrive, Ienzo cannot decide. The resulting displeasure is always the same.

Ienzo ghosts along in his father's wake, able to match his own miniature stride exactly to the taller man's because sometime between arriving and undoing the fourth button, his father's footsteps started to glow, the custom indentations on the boots' leather soles leaving bioluminescent silhouettes in their wake which spill out in liquid-looking clouds of micro-lights all over their once pristine wooden floorboards.

Ienzo moves from boot print to boot print, tracing his father's direct and unerring path to the dining room. Everywhere his feet touch within his father's footprints the inexplicable light is extinguished, creating miniature carvings in the sturdy shapes not unlike the ancient etchings down outside the city gates, the haloed handprints and the nameless, featureless figures. Silent as, Ienzo slips through the doorway toe to heel with his father, not even his bare feet squeaking on the wooden floor, and when the older man takes his seat at the head of the table, Ienzo struggles to pull back the heavy and ornate chair directly to the right.

He is never quite able to make purchase on it, somehow the grooves of the grapes and roses carved into its backing either too narrow or too broad to suit his child's fingers, the cushion smoothed and slick from his mother's nervous habit of perpetual upkeep. Finally he pushes it far enough from the edge of the table to hoist himself into it, one knee crawling over the seat's edge, and then neither of his feet anywhere near to touching the floor.

From under the shock of bangs hiding half his face, Ienzo stares, searching, at his father, hoping for something like eye contact. The man makes nothing approaching the gesture, surveys the bone china plate before him with a disapproving eye, as if he can see a square inch of it buffed slightly less than the rest. Then his father looks up to the doorway which Ienzo's mother still has not entered through and leaves his gaze there, waiting.

Knowing he still will not be noticed or scolded, Ienzo tucks both of his feet up underneath him, his bare toes freezing even through his trousers.

There are two plates on the table and two sets of silverware. But when his mother finally brings the last side dish in, there is another plate tucked hidden underneath it. When she reaches the massive table and leans over her own seat—her own plate and fork and knife—the illusion crumbles, and watching Ienzo's father from the corner of her eye, she leans a little further, separating the clean dinner plate from the hot dish and placing it in the empty space directly before Ienzo.

His father's mouth compresses into a single, grave line. Ienzo's plate is not on the table for a whole second before he says, "How long will you continue this charade?"

Ienzo's mother flinches, shivers visibly. The plate is retracted, pressed close up against her chest.

"You cannot keep acting this way. There will be talk in town."

His mother does not say anything immediately, whips her head around in short, seizing shakes. "It's not…" she manages and then halts. "It's not a charade." Her voice is the half whisper, half rasp of the long-suffering ill, a hand fan churned only once in the midst of a humid, sweltering parlor.

In comparison, his father's voice is like a steel sword drawn straight from the fire, burning by proximity alone. "Dahlia," he says, "the boy has been dead half a year."

His mother's eyes roll white and enormous in their sockets, shaking her head again so the cascade of her hair lashes the space behind her and her clenching fingers turn as white as the plate they clutch. What she wants to say is No no he is here I can see him I can still see him I must still feed him because he is here and alive and you you you are the one who is wrong but even as she thinks it Ienzo lifts his hand to his face and stares straight at her through a near transparent palm.

What she says is "He's real." Or something like it.

What his father says is "He's not." Which might also be true.

o ― ― ― ― ― » τεισίV « ― ― ― ― ― o

The first snow of the season is a soft, warm snow, with enormous flakes which whirl through the air but melt before they ever reach the ground, so the street lamps grow haloes but no ice gathers up in the perilous cracks between the cobblestones. His laughing breeds a traveling cloud of fog, and Ienzo skips between one large stone and another, the brand new Midnight Anklet a foreign and unfamiliar but not unwelcome presence inside his left snow boot. Every time he lifts his foot, the dull points of the charms press into his ankle, not a pain so much as a perpetual reminder; every time he drops his foot, the new, stiff twine catches on the sock above his heel.

Even hidden by boots and the leg of his pants, the Midnight Anklet seems to exude its own dark light, a real presence as much as a mental one. He hasn't had it long enough to prove anything but the quality of its design, yet still there's something comforting about the cool weight of it, like trying on a parent's shoes and feeling certain of one's own future—or like his mother accompanies him even now, the tap of his heels on the stonework echoing out into the tapping of her steps, always light and humorous when they are alone.

But he is actually alone at the moment, of course, crossing Sector 7 on his way home from the tutor's the way he has now for the long two years between five and seven, since he first learned to navigate their section of the city, first learned not to share the contents of his lessons with every other passerby, no matter how interested they looked. Not that the back road route he's figured out has too many passerby, even on temperate, shining days.

Today, the light snow chases the streets clear entirely, moves the few milling ladies and the men in wool peacoats (who linger perpetually in the doorways of the pubs) finally inside, so that this winter seems to possess not only an obscuring but a silencing effect, a press of down or cotton in his ears. The street becomes a great distance across which all noises, even the nearby press of his boots on the stones, come muffled, late, and ghostly.

Belatedly, it feels a little lonesome, a little eerie.

His pace increases to something like a hopping step, the sensation of numbness creeping up his legs and in his mittened hands making him feel unnaturally sluggish, a confounding assault on his senses: his nose runs; his field of vision narrows.

The quiet on his walk home quickly becomes oppressive, and he wishes there were snow on the ground so he could make noise moving through it. To fill the air, he recites today's lesson with a heavy, half-frozen tongue, recalling measurements with impeccable clarity, even for himself.

"The sum of the angles of the regular pentagon at the center of a five-pointed star polygon is 540°. Each of the pentagon's five angles thus measures 108°. If the sum of degrees in any straight line is a given 180°, and the total number of degrees of the corresponding pentagon angle is 108°, the degree measurement for Angle A totals?"

The feeling of eyes on his back crawls down his body like bathwater left to chill, like his mother's hands in the dark on a feverish night when his whole head whirls the world around one central point of impossible focus—only the reassuring "Ssh, ssh" never comes, and when he finishes his math question, the answer falls from his mouth like a vein of heavy metals enough to crack the stone beneath him. The sound of his voice seems to lay there, an invisible, dead thing in the street.

"Seventy-two," he says, and finds he is trapped, the frog reflected in the eyes of the adder.

There is a brutal, animal sound from somewhere he is not looking, a low-thunder growling that makes Ienzo's gut clench beneath his skin, makes one quarter of his heart try to climb into the others, hide inside them like that might keep it safe from whatever abomination he hears but can not see.

Something inside of him disengages from his body, shrivels and leaves him feeling as if all his nerves have died at once or something else has entered him and assumed their command. He is reduced to a shivering, screaming ghost inside his own head runrunrun without even needing to know what is lurking just outside the blurring tunnel of his vision, violent and starved.

He has no control over his body then, but his head turns anyway, mechanical and slow, and when the black rim of blood rush clears from his eyes, he stares across into the shadowed edges of an intersecting alley, where a pair of pupilless, jaundice eyes reflect light out of the darkness.

The monster releases another sandpaper snarl that slinks along the stone walls of the alley and over the road until it seems to strike Ienzo like a promise to spill him inside out across the snow, fangs already anticipating the first touch. His knees give out beneath him in a sluggish fall that scrapes them raw on the stones, but he doesn't feel it really—

The monster, barrel chest near dragging in the ice, slides out of the alley toward him, each creeping click of its claws against the ground an extension of the easy rolling of its corded muscle, whip-like and wire tight. Its fur is nothing more than a sleek, skin-close red velvet sheath. It is a dog and a panther all at once, heavy-shouldered, long-legged—its skin clings to its spinal column and pelvis so closely Ienzo can count every furrow in its bones, every sinuous shifting of its vertebrae. And the wild cat's mouth is blood red, opening wider and wider before him until every yellowed fang is bared, the canines long as crescent moons.

Over its back, a single worming thread of flesh like a tail or tentacle or the elongated, clothed stem of its brain bursts from the back of its skull to sway and writhe in the air.

It is no natural creature, like nothing he has ever seen or should have ever been made to see and only the rotting, sweet vomit and garbage smell of it rolling over him makes him believe it is real.

Everything inside him aches, beats against his ribs and head to the endless mantra of runrunrunrun but nothing works properly. He can't even lift his hands to be some flimsy guard around his face. He isn't good at running. He will not get away.

At a little beyond seven years old, Ienzo Amaryllis comes to the immutable realization that he is going to die.

Everything shuts down. The white tinged world dissolves around him, and all there is endless blackness.

Somewhere in the infinite space is an unfamiliar chiming. Something inside him stirs, in all the places around his heart, expanding: invisible waves of sound from a glass bell, rippling out and out. It spreads under his ribs, he feels (but does not see), until there is no room for air in his lungs, until his heart beats like an insect in a close, clear jar, and there is no change in the world but somehow it seems to shiver, all over convulsing on him.

A faint smell drifts through his muted senses on an evening wind (which does not exist) like cooking smoke from a far-off stove, warm and sooty, mixed with an underlying breath of heavy night-blooming flowers, the tender vines unfurling in watery circles of moonlight, and the presence of old trees and hot, dark earth. He is a thousand years away from winter, backward into the last stifling August night, when he sat, palms pressed to the heated stone in the public gardens, the fountains still, the air too thick to breathe—when the only thing that moved were the fireflies over the mirror black lake and the hands of the castle clock high overhead…

It will protect you, his mother's voice still saying.

All of the dark is warm, untouchable—yes, why not? Why not be here instead, safe inside a dream forever?

But he comes back to himself in degrees except no time has passed really and he doesn't come all the way back. The world has shifted sideways, reduced to road and towering vertical lines, snowflakes pinpricking the open expanse of his face. But the impulse to blink never comes, and he doesn't see or feel so much as register, slowly, that the monster is circling closer and closer. His uncovered eye is pressed almost to the frozen ground in line with its silvery claws, appearing from the sheaths of its toes and then withdrawing, nearer each time.

Poised to leap, the monster's head lowers, and the rolling frost of its breath washes over his skin, the last exuded liquid traces of corpse gasping, the inner meats gone slick and rancid, hot and sickly sweet: a dead thing smell, opening and opening.

But there is a cold, electric tingling beneath every inch of his unmoving skin.

"You don't see me," he says, thick and slow and divested from his body, thoughts safe a thousand miles away, ringed by a dark rope, by the deep glass beads cold and firm against his ankle—

Inside a fantasy.

"I'm not here."

It's a ward against darkness.

"You don't see me," he says again. And again. Every nerve worm-crawls under his skin.

The monster jerks, two swift steps backward and to the side simultaneously, fangs disappearing behind the wet folds of its lips as it draws in an enormous, searching sniff. Then it takes another step back. Ienzo feels faint, struggling inside the confines of his own skull to stay awake, to keep whispering his momentary mantra.

The beast begins to circle the area where he lies, its muzzle low to the stone, heaving in scents. The whip cord of its exposed brain stem thrashes and splits the air. A high, disturbed keening radiates from it, and it snaps forward without warning to swipe at the ground where he lies but its aim is off, a hair's breadth too far from his face to make contact. It dances backward again, dismayed and uncomprehending.

Then a shattering, metallic bellow tolls through the air and shivers the cobblestone beneath his cheek: at the heart of the Garden, all the castle's deep bells chime the half hour. The rolling sound carries on low frequencies even through the muffling snow, and—already unsettled but by what and how Ienzo doesn't know—the monster scrabbles, claws catching in the grooves between the paving stones. In bounds so fluid and frantic he cannot count or follow them, it vanishes, the spear end of the blood red tentacle lashing out behind it like a banner as it disappears between two indistinguishable buildings.

Ienzo breathes one short, stunned breath and discovers he probably has not been breathing much at all in the prior minutes. His head spins; the needling shocks to his nerves start to die off but leave a bone-deep weariness in their place, so much that even the task of sitting up seems incomprehensible.

He is alive. For long minutes after the monster has gone he doesn't dare to shiver, even to blink, and then from one street over or another someone calls out cheerfully and he remembers that the world is turning and the best course of action is probably not to be waiting for the beast to get over its fear and come back.

It takes a painful eternity to force his small body upright again, but the necessity of focus keeps him from thinking too deeply on the pressing question of why, exactly, the monster did not tear him limb from limb—and so he only discovers the truth after he is righted and breathing and he lifts one shivering hand to clear the melted snow from his face.

Where his mitten and hand should be, there is nothing. Where his too-long sleeve should be, there is nothing.

He feels his arm is there but cannot see it. He presses his wool-wrapped fingers close against his face, curling his hand into a hook to tangle in his bangs and still nothing, still just the dull white snow falling where he knows the fold of his arm should block all sight.

He doesn't want to look down but does anyway, and finds that even though he feels them, his legs tucked weakly underneath him are just gone, invisible or nowhere really.

Where Ienzo should be there is nothing but nothing.

That is when he finally starts to cry.

He isn't conscious of the stumbling journey home, just thinks of himself in the horrible place and then not, and he stares at the soft, eggshell beams of their front door a long time before he realizes he is not staggering forward anymore on invisible legs. His forehead falls heavily against the door, grating on the splintery planks, and he pounds one unseen, miniature mittened fist just under the wide brass handle. A string of noises half-garbled and half-wailed escape from him unbidden but he can't tell if they're coming out screams or murmurs.

Then the door falls open, and only his mother's hands (still damp from the washing maybe) keep him from crashing to the floor—but he doesn't discover this until later, because by now, the world is falling apart in degrees and adjacent angles, washed over in a devastating cacophony of dizzying colors that whirl and shiver inside his head and none of that relents until all he can see is blue, until he is surrounded by the warm, flowery smell of the fountains on an August night: still water and waterlilies.

His mother is wrapped around him, pressing his chilled face into her hair, her arms somewhere around his back like a final bastion, saying far away, "Ienzo, what happened? What's wrong?"

"You can see me?" he asks, his own voice more distant still.

"What are you talking about? How did you skin your knees?"

He'd forgotten about that. Can't feel it even when he tries. "I don't know," he answers which is nowhere near sufficient, but before his mother can say so he makes his resonant, tiny voice add, "Mother, have you ever seen a monster?"

"No," she replies, looking for the punchline in the words because her son is nothing if not stone cold practical and never once believed in monsters under the bed. "No," she repeats. "There hasn't been a single monster in the whole world since the Sorceress War, and that was a very, very long time ago."

She carries him inside their house. Ienzo wonders which parts, of any of this, are true.

o ― ― ― ― ― » τεισίV « ― ― ― ― ― o

"I can't take any more." His father's fist punctuates the words with ringing knocks against the wooden arm of the divan downstairs.

"I'm sorry." His mother apologizes for the hundred thousandth time.

Ienzo curls next to the heating duct in his room, listening to his parents' voices drifting directly up the chimney through the vents into his room. No one is mad, exactly, but every word that is added is another needling scalpel beneath his skin. Even as the heat of the fire in the hearth below begins to burn through his warm summer pajamas, Ienzo stays frozen in place, head almost pressed to the hot iron grating.

"A few misplaced books and fake puzzles in the way are one thing, Dahlia, but we can't even look out the Hyne-damned windows anymore without seeing—"

Here Ienzo imagines some vicious, cutting sweep of his father's hand to the wide front window, which all his life before has shown the winding, cozy lane of brick houses that dead-ends at their home, at the top of the bare incline, looking out over the roofs of the others—the front window which, for the last few months has intermittently shown what is really there and things which really aren't, and now is showing only the latter, a rapid fire, moving picture album of places Ienzo never even meant to imagine.

Reluctantly, Ienzo cranes his neck up to look out his own bedroom window, where instead of the distant peaks of the castle he sees steamy, swamp-like jungle with moss dangling hundreds of feet downward from the tree canopy so vivid green it hurts his eyes, all of it laced over and under by thousands of climbing vines. In the dark river that ambles its way through the scene, a large, sleek brown body breaks the surface, chirping and rolling this way and that in the water.

Ienzo doesn't know if this is what his parents are seeing downstairs, but it is wrong and that is good enough to merit their complaints. He screws his eyes shut, clenching so hard it seems the furrowing of his brow might impact his whole face, and through the dull discomfort of that he thinks Go away. Just go away. Let me go.

Ienzo knows he is to blame for the windows, for everything else before and after and up to: the mirrors which reflect inhuman faces, the food in the cold locker turning into serpents spitting smoke and black acid in his mother's face every time she opens the door. It never really stings her but nevertheless makes her face appear to melt downward into her hands, makes her vision go dark for uncountable stretches of time. He is to blame for the inexplicable movement of their furniture too, everything changing so one moment his father is in the living room reading on the divan and the next moment he is haphazardly held up by the hallway banister, forcing itself into the space where he normally might stretch. That and the preternatural knocking, the whispered voices of an unseen, milling crowd, swishing dresses and dapper heels on the boards of their floor but no one there, never anyone there but his father and his mother, forced to listen.

And the monsters, of course. He's brought to life every grotesque, unearthly shape and combination of creature, lurking in the blurred corners of their eyes or slinking up directly to scratch at the door—they've never bitten yet but still the fangs are present and still the thought that one day he will go outside again and the monsters will not be dreamed up but real, real with the dead scent in their mouths and nothing between him and the crescent slivers of their teeth…

He knows all the ones they see are from his imagination, but that doesn't teach him to stop them—doesn't even tell him how to pick and choose, so that if he has to see something that isn't real, at least he could make it always pleasant—so he could choose just the sweet dreams, and leave out the birds with the syringe bills built for vampire feeding on men. He is doing all of this and cannot do anything.

"It has to stop." His father is not stating the truth so much as making a promise.

"There's no one we can ask for help." His mother is not making a statement either; it's only a reiteration of his father's own decision, because no one with what Ienzo has—with magic—lives easily, and anyway Ienzo has never been allowed meet anyone with magic because that is not something people like his family do, that is not the kind of company anyone self-respecting keeps. Especially not the son of a martial adviser who stands to lose everything at any moment to any scandal.

No, a report cannot be made. A formal request to the king is out of the question. The neighbors must not, please, Ienzo, please, the neighbors must not know—

His cheek and side are burning from the vent but every other part of him shivers in comparison, pinpricked skin, and he's always so tired now, almost asleep already here on the floor, every slender margin of energy drawn out of him again and again to fuel the endless illusions he cannot control.

Someone smooths down his hair, pats the cool side of his head. But no one is in their home except his parents downstairs. He's sure of that, almost.

Ienzo Amaryllis does not know what real is anymore. Hasn't known what real was since the first snow last winter when his mother—still happy, both of them still whole and certain and incautious—when his mother slipped a Midnight Anklet over his foot and said it would protect him from things like the beast with its brain stem wriggling.

"We can't live in a mirage anymore."

"It's not like there's anything we can—" His mother doesn't finish her sentence; Ienzo listens to the words drop off into an incoherent keening. It means only what his father has already said, but somehow it digs at Ienzo even deeper. Adults do not cry.

And then he is angry and miserable in equal parts, scowling back hot, concentrated tears because even though his tutor (when he still was allowed to go to the tutor's) told him again and again he was smart enough to understand anything and he does understand that being an adult doesn't mean you can solve any particular problem—still, they are his parents and he is their son and that means that somehow they should fix him when something important inside has ceased to function. But he doesn't think that is the conclusion either one of them will come to tonight.

"If we…" his mother begins and then stops, and he imagines she is biting her lip. "If we sent him to someone better suited…"

Even through the vents, Ienzo can hear the sharp sigh his father draws over his teeth. "You mean SeeD?"

"I… I don't know who I…"

"It's impossible. Ansem—the damn peace-loving fool—has had them formally disbanded." Clearly, his father has considered this option before. The man is a military adviser after all. There's another rap of his father's fist against the wooden arm of the sofa. "But they've been de facto decommissioned for years anyway. All that's left of them is a load of fat old fools living off anniversary articles on their glory days."

It's quiet for a long time. Ienzo tries not to think about what any of it means. If he thinks about being sent away, the whole house might just vanish.

His mother makes some muffled ums and ahs before her next wistful admission. "If only there were some sort of book…"

His mother likes books. At least, she likes the kinds that tell their readers what to do: recipe-a-day books and self-help books and how-to guides and books of law which govern her actions very tidily without any need for self-insertion.

"There're plenty out there." His father laughs like a grinding stone. "But not on the right subject. I don't need to know how to kill a Sorceress, I need—" A crumbling of the logs in the fireplace below his grate obscures Ienzo's father's words, which Ienzo does not know if he should be thankful for. Perhaps the man meant to say something which might have given his son hope, some indication that his father believes there is a cure, or at least some way to become unobtrusive, neither seen nor heard. Or, when Ienzo quietly, quietly allows himself to wish for it: maybe his father is downstairs suggesting a way to master this, so Ienzo can shove it to the deepest-down hollow in his heart and never let it out again.

It's not like he hasn't tried. Not like he hasn't spent the last six months retracing every scientific methodology he has ever been taught, testing and retesting hypotheses according to the textbook steps. But there is no rhyme or reason here, no predictable pattern, no stable conditions to make his control group.

All he can find are variables of variables. Everything changes. Endless reverse sublimation. And no one to be proud of his discovery that he can no more will the illusions away than will them into being, no more order the sun to alter its course in the sky than return the moon to its place when a stray thought brings it down around their heads.

If he were smarter or stronger… If he could only fail to meet high expectations, instead of being the child for which all expectations are already of failure…

Again there's a soothing, cool hand on his face. His parents have been quiet another long stretch, a sort of helpless, furious silence. Something goes scuttling along the floorboards below, which makes his mother gasp sharp and loud.

"Ignore it," his father snaps, and whatever it is must be ugly to make her react at all when ugly things are now quite commonplace.

"If this hadn't happened…" But she says that same thing every night, and like every night, on this one she cannot finish the sentence, cannot imagine anymore a future in which the clocks tick the right direction and no half-transparent strangers lean over the kitchen counter to ask her why she isn't better at any of the things she chooses to do.

Ienzo hears his mother's throat constrict, hears the thickening hitch in her breath that means tears, which is also the same as every other night.

"If this hadn't…"

There is the slow, repetitive knocking of his father's fist on the divan which seems to do a great deal of speaking on its own. And then the tapping of heels tells Ienzo his mother is on her feet again, pacing; underneath the quiet rushing of the fire, he thinks he hears the sound of her skirts, familiar to him from the days he clung to them, a dry swill like wheat in a summer wind.

Only now there is something strangely solemn, something resolute and final in the noise, and the air from the grate doesn't feel warm to him anymore—instead it seems to sting him with a chill that sets his teeth hard against each other. It isn't like it's rare now, to listen to them grieving, but something tonight feels different (by which he might mean solid) and to be noticed through the perpetual mutation of his illusions, it must be something meaningful.

The mothering voice in his ear which does not belong to and has never belonged to his mother says, "Come away from there, Ienzo." There is incoherent, agitated buzzing in between. "Come away from there." He thinks this voice is probably only his commonsense talking, some spiteful manifestation of mental self-preservation. It wants to keep him sane, most likely, but it is very late.

His stomach clenches and then his lungs, and before he can stop himself, he wonders if tonight is the night they will finally decide that it isn't abandonment if there are mitigating circumstances and really it might just be better for everyone if (it would be better for everyone, maybe, because he hasn't been allowed outside in three weeks and no one has even noticed he's gone)… Or maybe tonight, his father, who has never been without an answer or an outline, might reveal one last shred of hope from a dark corner at the bottom of the box, one final, dangerous but—as always—ultimately successful gambit to seal the divisions in their fractured family.

Ienzo would follow any plan of his father's. Had always.

There's the heavier sound then that Ienzo equates with his father's stiff boots. The footsteps cross the floor and join his mother's heels so that each stops in time and he knows they are holding each other, momentarily a united front.

Something shivers like insect wings just below his heart, which Ienzo thinks of as the feeling that comes between anticipation and anxiety.

They are whispering to each other and he presses closer again to the grate to listen, willing the fire to die down for a moment so he can catch their words.

He hears his mother say that she wants her old son back. The one who could be trusted to walk himself home from the tutor's and not return in tears over teeth and claws.

His father says back that there is no old Ienzo and no new, only one continuous cask which, under the pressure, has finally developed a crack and let all the rotten wine inside seep out—an infant who, learning to speak too early, cannot stop the words once they have begun, ejects an endless stream of nonsense with a look of distress on his face even as he is privately satisfied by his own noise and perseverance.

Their heads must be near together now, forehead to forehead, so that they can speak in a private world inside the world he has warped beyond understanding. Some of the words are muffled, but Ienzo understands his father's intention: whatever this dark descent, the rapid burrowing in of insanity, it was in Ienzo all along, predestined or at least predisposed. His father isn't wrong, like he is never wrong. Maybe.

His parents must be moving closer to the fire now, because when his father speaks again, lower still, Ienzo does not mistake a single word.

"Rather," his father intimates, "we should wish that he didn't exist."

It is only what has been on all their minds for weeks. It does not come as a surprise to Ienzo.

But still…

Still. He pulls himself up from his prone position on the floor and stands, although it does not feel like it. The floor seems to roll under him, and maybe he has changed angles too quickly, because he feels the blood rush to his head, black out his vision and send him reeling.

He stays upright but only barely, small hands outstretched and searching for support he will not find: they have been decreasing the number of furniture pieces in the house in the mistaken belief that that will make them stop appearing where they should not be. And anyway, he was never one for childish sentimentality, throws away all the puzzles after he finishes them so there is nothing to leave a cluttered trace.

(Rather, that he never existed.)

It isn't like he hasn't thought it. Isn't like he doesn't know how much easier that might make things, how much relief it would bring. But it's one thing to think it, and another to feel the weight of the words when they come in his father's voice, which has always been the citadel he retreats to at the first sign of uncertainty or potential for harm.

Mostly he thinks why and not why me.

It's another thing entirely now that he knows his father would prefer relief too. That compared to commanding the situation, his father—who has always been built of stone so snugly fit he needs no mortar—has decided to surrender.

The last thing Ienzo ever wanted to be was a burden.

A small, pale hand appears and takes Ienzo's unbalanced one. The grip is gentle, fumbling, of course familiar. It doesn't make the last of the vertigo recede but as Ienzo looks up and meets the eyes of his own mirror image, it is necessarily distracting.

The copy does not say anything. They never say anything really, mostly because it seems their thoughts and his (if they have thoughts, both of them) are easily legible to each other, consistently coincident. Instead it watches him with big, concerned eyes, coddles his hand in both of its own. It is far from the first carbon copy he has accidentally produced, but the circumstances and also perhaps the excess of moonlight (or is it jungle-tinted sun?) entering the window reveal all its uncanny closeness, the perfection of its mimicry a stark silhouette against the very wrongness of its being.

What he means is How can I be so small?

He is diminutive, barely taller than his own mattress at seven and a half years old, a foot or a thousand miles from reaching his own sock drawer in the dresser. He looks like a scale model of a boy held together by nothing but adhesive and will. A stray breeze could blow him over; certainly he has been eating less, had less appetite lately for his mother's food which always somehow ends up burnt now, but since he has not seen himself in a mirror in months, the excruciating slenderness of the figure in front of him takes him by surprise.

His wrists look skeletal, and the hollow below his copy's visible eye is a red and purple bruise hole from every long night when the feeling of something else invisible crawling into his bed wakes him at every half hour. The rest of his skin is waxy. Not enough sunlight, not enough care. Apparently there is a split in his chapped lips which he did not even know about until now. When he reaches up with his free hand to touch his own face, he finds the split reflected exactly from the copy, can't even tell himself apart anymore.

Ienzo knows, somewhere in the inconsequential areas of his mind, that he is a child. He is small, and physically weak, and still dependent on others for basic necessities. But for all that, he has not thought of himself as young in a long time, since even before the magic, since the first day maybe that he composed verse in Latin about lovers who moved from star to star, the chase from Aries to Libra through the dragon curled around the final, polar heart and his tutor refused to believe that it had come from him, searched for weeks through his collection of the classic poetry, insisting Ienzo's work had been lifted from an older master.

Or the first time the physics teacher admitted there was simply no new work for him to read, no new material to study—although perhaps he would like to discuss that last theory of his, on the wave-particle duality of photons?

Or even the way he must speak more simply for his mother, quiet, unassuming words so as not to upset her conceptions of a well-raised child…

He doesn't feel young, even if when he looks at his own body he is forced to admit it. Or not. Or not. Maybe he doesn't even look like a child anymore. He just looks desolate.

He looks dead already.

The copy nods, a single bobbing of partially-matted hair (reflexively, Ienzo lifts his free hand to his own head to brush out what tangles he can). It smiles, or something like it: thin-lipped agreement, not amusement. It meets Ienzo's own eyes directly, mise en abîme, an endless back and forth of blue and blue.

Then, for once, the look in its eyes (his own) is something Ienzo cannot read, a message which deaf ears might have a better chance of catching. It's anxious and caring and fearful and sacrificial all in a single blow which causes Ienzo's own heart to stutter in his chest. He doesn't understand, doesn't like this—

It looks like him and doesn't exist.

The copy lets go of his hand and takes a single step back. Then lifts itself with his skin-thin wrists onto the coverlet, contorting so that it sits upright with its legs stretched out toward the foot of the bed.

Ienzo doesn't know what is happening here, hates that feeling, has always hated not knowing—

It leans its head back, the perfect mimic of his bangs falling away from the copy's right eye so that his whole, clear, pale face is revealed and the exposed white arch of his throat.

A fleeting, wondrous thought crosses Ienzo's mind that this might be a peace offering direct from his own manic visions, a chance for him to slip into the outside world completely unnoticed by his father and just not come back. He could excise himself and his problems from his family like a cancer, which might come across as heroic.

But none of the illusions ever last. All the dreaming turns into new dreams.

And outside, still lurking, are the wolves.

(Or what if they never come looking for him? What if he fades out into invisibility again so long or often that there's just nothing left?)

Rather, that he never—

The copy kicks its feet once and then twice on the coverlet. It smiles again (almost).

Then, without warning or sound even, the copy begins to crumble. No, Ienzo keeps his wits only long enough to think, no, it is splitting. The white line of its borrowed throat opens jagged like the teeth of a zipper, pulling further and further back, a second wet grin that stretches so far around the pillar of his neck it aims for beheading, arterial rushing swift to coat the down of his pillow, his mother's careful patchwork.

By the time the bare thought of moving is across his head, the unfolding of the copy's skin has begun in a thousand other places on its (his) body, a myriad windstorm of open wounds, every stitch in the doll's seams ripping out at once, little threads of skin uncoiling around his fingers, the backs of its hands, beneath his clothes, and in the purple-read hollows of its eyes…

Beneath, the scarlet muscle is jumping, twitching in time to the copy's minute motions. Grey-yellow hints of bone push through. The copy swallows once in a reflex he does not think it has, and the split in its throat seizes and rolls and leaks. It isn't real, Ienzo says to himself, repeating. Notrealnotrealnotreal but he lies on the covers suffocating in his own blood with his whole body unraveling and who's to say which of them is the copy when there's no flaw in either except all the flaws that brought them both here together, inside the—

There's a sodden sound of saturated lungs and no comprehension in the copy's eyes now, so that Ienzo is sure there is no one there anymore (was no one there all along remember that please remember—) but still, of its own volition, Ienzo watches his mauled body arc off his soaked mattress, the last uncontrollable jerking of a brain deprived of so much oxygen. From his own flailing torn arms on the copy, a spattering of blood strikes his hair, face, exposed eye; he is frozen, unable to even clear the hot damp from his cheek, from his upper lip, from his scalp, sinking down and down maybe back to its original source at last.

The copy is still and quiet on the quilt then, ceasing like a half-sealed fountain the first freeze of winter. It doesn't breathe.

On the bed, Ienzo's body stares open-eyed and torn (claws and teeth and teeth and teeth). He is unmistakably dead. Ienzo manages one breath before he begins to scream.

Except the sound that comes out isn't his voice, isn't even human. It's breaking glass and animal howling and that Hyne-damned grandfather clock and all of it at the same decibel as background noise, just another off-time chiming of their senses gone wrong, and so his parents do not even stir downstairs, do not bother to look up from their own clouded collusion and he is left in the room with the dead thing—why why why is it not disappearing that is what the unreal things do they vanish and especially if they die they do not stay because even deep down he has never wanted to see that touch that be near that why—and his own throat going hoarse but none of his own voice leaving it (they never say much of anything).

He falls down hard where he is standing beside the bed, and with the grandfather clock still ringing off his tongue, he beats his fists against the floorboard. The sound is right but therefore inconsequential; he does not weigh enough to make the blows echo through the heavy wood down to his parents, who have long since lost trust in their ears.

They will not hear. They will not come.

He cries or he was crying all along and had not noticed, and with his face all but buried in his knees folded in half, one tear and then a half dozen fall on to the floor.

The entire house shakes with each drop as if the city were sinking beneath them. On the high shelves, his book collection wavers and topples over like dominoes. The stone walls groan.

Downstairs, his father slams one heavy boot against the floor, snarls something unintelligible and then shouts, his voice carrying up through the grate even over Ienzo's chapel bell hiccups: "That is enough for one night. Do you intend for the whole street to hear?" But there are his father's feet on the stairs finally. Ienzo can barely breathe between the shaking of his whole body and the sparking flood of relief. He lets his heated forehead rest against the floor, just sticking more blood to it.

There's a calming voice in the hallway and his mother is there too just beyond his door, and then the knob creaks and Ienzo knows without looking that the doorway is full of parents who will tell him—who will say—

He feels more than sees them go rigid on the threshold. Their gasps are proportionate and equally audible. His father is the one who makes the low, animal sound this time, like it's him who's been mortally wounded. He regains his faculties first and seems to cross the room in a single wild step, until he is leaning over the copy on the bed, touching its cheek, its chest.

He does not look at Ienzo uncurling on the floor. From the doorway, his mother turns her eyes from the copy, the bed, and his father, and looks down, to where her (real) son is sitting stained but living. Ienzo meets her eyes. She shudders so thoroughly it looks as if her knees are giving out beneath her.

Beside him, his father's legs are trembling too. Ienzo reaches out and curls one hand in his father's pant leg. He pulls once, twice, and then a third time with increasing weight behind the gesture but nothing happens—his father does not look down, does not pause in his ministrations to find the source of the pull. Maybe he doesn't feel it at all.

His father is a stream of words which at times seem to be comprehensible language and at other times are just noise, Ienzo's name the chorus line to which he constantly returns. He seems to be alternately searching for a pulse, pressing closed the gapping void at the copy's throat, and simply clutching what he can of the child not like this will bring him back but only because he must, must have something to hold on to or it will all slip away, fragments of symbolic dream that always dissolve on waking.

"God, God—Ienzo—my God, what have you done? What have you done Ienzo, tell me."

"N-Nothing, I didn't do anything Father; it isn't—I'm here. I'm right here." But his voice doesn't seem to carry, doesn't reach his father, anyway, although his mother seems to understand, steadies herself with the door frame and breathes long and slow, in and out, one slender hand pressed close to her heart as if preventing it from leaping out between her ribs.

"You can't," his father is ordering, shutting the copy's eye even so with a thumb that lingers in blood-clumped eyelashes. "You can't be, you can't be, you can't be—"

"Eitan—" his mother calls from the doorway. "Eitan, Ienzo is—"

His father ignores her interruption, refuses to hear. "Why?" he asks the copy, bracing under its neck and back to lift it over his knees, fold it around himself. The motion disturbs the fleshless patches on its arms, the hole through its throat which bubbles and gurgles almost like a voice and for a second the hopeful expression on his father's face hits Ienzo like a weighted stone.

Belatedly, he thinks we should wish does not mean we do wish.

"Father!" he's shouting without really meaning to, but even jumping, even with the leverage of the bed beside him and pulling at his father's expensive pressed top now stained red all over (but it's all right, it's all right because it isn't real none of this is real at all please listen) he can't catch his father's attention. It's like he doesn't exist at all.

Ienzo's mother starts across the room, staring with haunted eyes between the corpse on the bed and the animate body on the floor, and it's hot rocks in Ienzo's stomach this time when he realizes she doesn't trust him, can't tell the difference between the dead doll and the living one. She hasn't decided yet if she should be grieving or furious.

He says, "Mother, I'm the real one," which doesn't change her expression in the slightest.

His father has gathered the copy closer, pressed his face into the blue fall of its hair, and only because he is close can Ienzo hear the muffled flood of consolations which begin with my son and somewhere evolve into the whispered call: "Tactician," his father says as if somehow that alone can bring him back. "My little tactician." It is the last of the childhood gifts from his father, a nickname given in the middle of the make-believe war games requisite of every six-year-old boy which for Ienzo always began and ended with the war planning—supply lines and armored mounts—and never made it quite to marching out.

His father had told him the name was something best left behind with all the make-believe. Now, inside the whole world make-believe, it sounds in his voice exactly as warm as it first was, still, impossibly, just as proud. Ienzo's father does not cry, has never cried probably, but there's a heaving of his father's stomach beside Ienzo which is almost like a voiceless sob.

"That isn't me!" Ienzo insists. He rounds on his mother, begging in every way possible to be believed, because if no one else will believe it, how can he? "Mother, it's just another copy!"

This seems to get through to her at last, makes her jerk and then stand a little straighter, square her jaw and chase the wetness from the bottom wells of her eyes. "Eitan," she tries again, approaching his father slow with her arms open like she might need to hold him in place, not that she could if she tried. "It's another illusion. It's just another illusion. Ienzo is fine. Ienzo is here. He's still here."

His father's voice is starkly level when it comes. "Look out the window," he says.

Both Ienzo's head and his mother's snap upward toward the window; Ienzo had not even seen his father staring out it, so what could possibly have attracted his attention there—

Framed in the glass on the other side of his bed is the same vivid, humid jungle. The massive otter is gone, and now, in its place, a mile long snake is swimming languorously across the river in smooth swoops of its spine. It's not particularly different than it was before.

Ienzo looks to his mother first. The way her brow is furrowed and her eyes narrow slits says that she cannot figure out what they are supposed to be seeing either, what his father might consider so important. Ienzo looks out the window again but if she is seeing what he is seeing, the snake in the steamed garden, then surely that must be what they all are—

"You can see the street outside," his father says, monotone where there should be shock and joy at seeing real things for once. There's nothing like relief, nothing but a sort of grim, mortar-blown despair. "There are leaves on the neighbor's roof," he continues.

The moment has thrown Ienzo so far off base that comprehension dawns on him only very, very slowly. He is alive still. His mother can see him. Both of them are still seeing the illusion of another world outside the window.

But his father is not. His father is cradling the corpse copy to himself saying his son is dead and when he looks out the window what he doesn't see is the mirage.

Ienzo tries again, his motions jerking and half-automatic—he knows the outcome of the experiment already, knows exactly what is going on here—he reaches up and grabs his father's arm and tries his hardest to pull it toward himself, to latch on and reveal his presence by simply refusing to let go.

It's like trying to move a brick wall by throwing pebbles. His father's arm might as well not even feel his weight. Well, the truth is it just doesn't feel his weight. He certainly does not look down at Ienzo's final, frantic call, or back at his wife begging him to see what she sees so she'll know she's not the one still dreaming.

His father is not free from the nightmare. He has traded a thousand small miseries for a single, all-encompassing hallucination: to his eyes, the source of the magic is dead, and all the misplaced spells have gone with him. The monsters and the mysterious noises must all be gone, but the living boy standing right next to him might as well be a ghost now. Might well be a ghost now.

(Ienzo doesn't want to be a burden.)

His mother realizes only this: her husband sees a body and the real world while she sees a living boy and at least one lie.

(He also doesn't want to disappear.)

What is the truth? What can anyone still call reality in this godforsaken house?

His mother doesn't know anymore. She doesn't know anything anymore.

She sweeps a wet-eyed look from the window to her husband slumped over the blood-soaked blankets to Ienzo, her (real) son back-lit by the warm jungle light filtering in the window, blood all along his face, his eyes like two warding amulets set above the open, stunned circle of his mouth and all of him, even after all this, still somehow digging the knife in deeper.

Her knees give out as expected at last. "Why are you doing this to me?" she sobs.

He says "I don't know" and "I'm sorry" until he doesn't have a voice anymore.

o ― ― ― ― ― » τεισίV « ― ― ― ― ― o

"He's been dead six months, Dahlia, please sit down."

His mother hesitates, holding the plate she's brought (always brings) for Ienzo despite knowing that she won't ever be allowed to put it down. (Well, by now, Ienzo thinks, it is nothing but for show, a ritual to illustrate to her son how much of a good mother she really must be, how long-suffering, how well-meaning. No matter, the effect is the same: the plate never gets to him, only teases with its perpetual presence.) He sits through each meal in agonized silence not daring to filch even bread from the basket for fear it will trigger his father, reveal the subtle amounts his mother manages to save while cooking so that he can eat dinner at all.

If his father thinks something is missing, if he discovers the rolled napkin she's taken to hiding close to her body, he will seize it, will rage and pity and pray out loud for his poor wife who must have lost her mind at the sight of their son's body and now won't stop feeding his ghost. Food hoarding, he calls it, and it might have been, if Ienzo was not mostly convinced he did still need to eat to live.

She sits down at the table, puts the plate out of sight. For a long time there is no noise but his father's silverware; his mother barely serves herself.

"You need to eat," his father says finally, somewhere between the air of a commanding officer and a condescending social worker for the clinically addled.

"So does he—" she begins, an ornamental objection which they all know never changes anything.

His father interjects, "Listen to yourself." He doesn't raise his voice but is agitated and agitates the air nonetheless. "You're carrying on a crazy dream; it isn't healthy. The hallucinations are gone. Isn't that enough proof for you?"

How could it be, when for her the walls still change color daily, when their son still peeks over his knees at her, hungry and imploring? It's like a too-small cage. A trap box inside which she cannot even turn around. There's no truth or true way to win. To wake up each morning, to move and breathe, is half-insurmountable and only growing worse.

Ienzo tries not to look at her too often anymore. But it is hard not to look, because the only other body to which he is close possesses perfectly closed senses, a gaze that smoothly slides over him like the brook over its stones, unseeing, unhearing, unfeeling.

He tries not to look, but it's like neighbors who argue behind open windows: he never means to linger but once the point of contact is made he cannot help but notice and re-notice the way her grey eyes sit so far down in her head now, the skin beneath them belled out, fine lines appearing at every corner and angle even though she is still young in general terms. She skips washing so that he can use the day's hot water when his father is not home, neglecting the care of her long hair and well-bred features that before had been a rather solitary source of pride. Her hands shake all the time now such that numerous nervous tears in her dresses are seamed closed by messy and uneven stitches for which she does not forgive herself.

He has become the center on which she relies but she will not hold. They are both, or all, headed into ruination.

His parents don't fight like this all the time, but it is becoming more frequent. In the months just after the copy, his father had himself been like a sleepwalker. But with time working on the wound and quiet clarity working on his mind, he began again, began to move past grieving into the state of relief brought on by seeing his own reflection in mirrors once more.

Then, and only then, did it became apparent that Ienzo's mother was not moving on with him, that she refused to delight in the image of their street out the front window.

Of course Ienzo's father had waited. Mothers, after all, he reasoned, need longer to heal. But two months turned to three, and three to four, and she continued to bring the third plate to the table, to look over her shoulder at things that weren't there—continued to talk, even, with the boy as if he still sitting by the fire between them.

He had let it go too long, let it advance too far. While he had been quietly healing, she had been deteriorating, sense slipping out between her fingers like grains of sand in an hour glass. Soon she would be yelling from the rooftops that their son was still alive, when half the Sector had attended his funeral.

This behavior needed to end, Ienzo's father had said, and it needed to end soon.

She eats reluctantly, and although Ienzo mostly watches the table, trying not to think about the tastes of dinner things when they are warm and how swiftly they change when they are not, he can feel the weight of her eyes flicking up and down, on to him and away.

The sound of her silverware slower and behind his father's gives the whole room the funeral feeling of chiming hand bells, and the air is so thick, any hope of conversation is stifled. Anyway, they have nothing to say to each other. She cannot speak to her son across the table without inciting chastisement from her husband; she cannot speak to her husband without turning her eyes sometimes to look at Ienzo; probably, Ienzo thinks, she won't want to hear anything he has to say. Not that he has anything to say anymore, with no new lessons, limited knowledge of the Garden goings-on, too many dreams by far to share any one. No new books to read even, although she is trying.

They're all dead-locked. Stagnating. Just waiting and waiting for something to change or break it all down into irreparable pieces.

Dabbing the hard edge of his mouth with his embroidered napkin, Ienzo's father makes cursory attempts at conversation, tries to engage his wife in the proper topics of politics and urban frivolities. Ienzo goes back to staring at the table, not able to focus anymore on who is hoping to undercut whose voting base or who is suspected of accepting funds from this or that private individual. Court political jockeying has its own appeal to him; he is almost always willing to hear about this or that treachery or how a particularly clever manipulation has been executed, but tonight he is more tired and lonely than usual.

He wants to leave the table but he doesn't want to leave the table, and he wants to be away from the unpleasant way his father's eyes blink over him, but if he does not at least sit here in the presence of some other living beings, the only things he will have to keep him company at all will be the monsters, slipping up behind to breathe over his shoulders in the dark. He has to hear real voices speaking. He has to see real faces.

Painful though it always is, dinner ends too soon by half for Ienzo's taste, and though his father retreats to the study down the hall from their dining room, his mother does not quite dare to (perhaps, somewhere inside, cannot decide if she even wants to) wish Ienzo good night. She clears the table to busy her hands so she is also not required to hug him or kiss his brow (contact makes it all worse, all of it), and the stacking of the plates demands the constant vigilance of her eyes.

It is still early. Before the illusions, he had always chosen his own hours, his father permissive of late night reading so long as Ienzo never once complained of being woken in the morning, was never once late to any meeting with the tutors. Now Ienzo is always on the brink of sleep or just beyond it, no way to distinguish, of course, whether at any given hour he is awake or unconscious. But sometimes he does genuinely dream good dreams—of believing everything he sees and being believed. And now there is no good reason not to be asleep, when his father will not stand over him in the library suggesting a book or two for re-reading, reinterpreting through the lens of this or that new theorist. And if he just went to sleep early tonight, like every night, it would make the evening easier for his mother. He has made her anxious long enough today.

"Good night," he says, and like always, "I love you."

His father is a room away but might as well have his ear pressed to the wall. He especially hates her talking to Ienzo; there is something inherently indicative of insanity in conversing with a person who simply isn't there. She does not dare to say good night. Or anything else.

When she has cleared the final dishes and is lingering in the kitchen, fretting her wash rag between her two hands to the time of some ghostly music box tinkling far away, Ienzo drops out of his too-tall chair and escorts himself carefully to the place he calls his room now.

He no longer lives in the second floor bedroom near the chimney. When his mother's grieving had first begun to look obsessive, when it first seemed to carry on too long, his father made the hard decision: they would clean out Ienzo's room. With his mother mumbling desperate protests that fell on deaf ears—protests that had never, in the first place, really intended to stand up for themselves—his father resolutely gathered up his things and sealed them away in a scant few boxes, every shred of his clothing, every leather-bound tutoring notebook, even the sheets for his small bed folded up tight and made to vanish. Reminders, he must have thought, would only make his wife's mental situation worse. She had to let go.

Ienzo had had to let go. Unable to bring himself to fill it with new furniture or storage, his father had sealed the door to the old room tight and hidden the key. His mother had searched for it. Ienzo himself had searched for it, of course. But no matter how many drawers he opened or books he rifled through or boxes he overturned, there had been no key. Maybe it had gone out with the garbage or—more likely—maybe his father carried it on him, even now, the only hidden memento he could permit himself in a house shared with a wife so close to the edge of madness.

Ienzo had taken up a spot on the divan in the living room for a short while, but that brought its own set of quiet miseries: his father would see the blankets and pillows his mother left out and seize them, leaving Ienzo night after night to huddle in the cold air or near the embers in the hearth. It was equally unpleasant to wake up half numb and discover he was being sat upon by his father, who could no more feel than see him. Worst, of course, was the proximity of the man at all times. Even if he was all the way down the corridor, it never seemed possible for Ienzo's mother to avoid his attention, and night after night her attempts to feed Ienzo dinner were thwarted by furious intervention.

So, although it was unsettling to be away from everything familiar, it was Ienzo himself who suggested the final move, Ienzo himself who carried his last remaining blanket up and up into the attic.

Their attic is a dark space, and small, not tall enough even for his mother to stand up exactly straight. Yet it fits him, somehow, the lowest beams of the rafters a foot above his head and cradling, not stifling, in their nearness. Neither of his parents are untidy, but in the narrow corners of forgettable rooms, it is only natural for the detritus of the living to gather, and evenly stacked crates and boxes of his mother's old clothing quietly crawling with silverfish dot the stone floor, converting the open layout of the room into a dust-laden labyrinth.

There are half moon windows at either end of the floor, but from most places in the attic where there is enough room for him to stand they cannot be seen, and so it is perpetually gloomy, half-lit at best.

In fact, all of it but the occasional house spider suits him, in its own way. The attic is a manageable space, an untouched area which can be controlled down to its minutiae. He cleans what he has to when he has to in order to move what he wants, re-sculpting the maze into one of his own design, complex pathways inaccessible to all but a child of his size. In this way, he still has secrets. In this way, he has holes for hiding when the influx of nightmares begins to press eyes to the crevices between boxes. He can retreat, inevitably, to the hollow beneath his mother's old iron dress form, the bell curve of the metal a diving cage to keep out every serpent and kraken.

Beyond the cast-off labyrinth of his design, in the corner farthest from the stairwell, he has built a safehouse of old quilt batting and clothing, blankets and hand towels, a composite mattress dressed out in patched tailcoats and lace knit tablecloths. It's the last defensible location, a fort or secret base, and there is the final flicker of childhood in him. He has never been good at having the sort of fun that children have, but there must be something universal in it, something intrinsically appealing about rolling up in a father's coat in a soft hidden place built by his own hands keeping the whole of the universe at bay.

The attic is so quiet that from across the room he can hear his mother's uneven footsteps at the bottom of the stair. She knocks once and then again against the wall down the stairs, unspoken language for the fact that she will come again later when she can come unwatched. This also is ritual.

For a long time that night it is nothing but mercifully dark. Then he wakes up much later to uncommon sounds, uncommonly muffled.

For a moment he turns on his makeshift mattress, unwilling to get up even if it is his mother come again—but it isn't, some under part of his consciousness aware that it is too loud, too harsh and high to be anyone attempting stealth, and anyway it is two voices clashing. He sits up groggy in his bed, the blanket clutched close to his shoulders, and he listens.

Distant and stifled—who closed the attic door?—Ienzo hears, "This is it, Dahlia. No more."

"Let me go," his mother is saying back, more bite in her words that Ienzo has ever heard, and more finality too, so that even through the last vestiges of sleep the gravity of the situation strikes him and he sits up straighter, feels every muscle under his skin begin to tense. They are fighting for real this time, for real—not his father making a demand that will inevitably be answered by a yes, dear but his father holding her back and she's refusing. The thought is so unbelievable, and the truth so untrustworthy to begin with, that for a long minute he believes he is still dreaming, conjuring a deep-down desire for confrontation into almost living beings, shells of his parents acting out his own need for resolution.

But maybe it's that his mother's will and sentience has finally broken down, and, clinging desperately to the pestle ground pieces of her promised happy (easy) life, she has been forced to make some stand. He hears her shouting in ways and ranges he never could have imagined, like nothing he would ever want to dream.

"You will let me go. I don't care if you make the rules for this house; even if I am insane, I'll do what I have to—if it means I have to go around or over or under you—because I might not know what's real anymore, but I know what needs to be done, and there's no way I can look at the face of our son and let him starve like a dog you don't want."

But it isn't the dinners he really needs, Ienzo thinks. It isn't the food so much as the contact, so much as the natural trust which he never put much stock in before he felt that cold tingling beneath all his skin and he vanished from the world, fell into the playground of the fata morgana, dragging his whole family in with him wailing. He only wants someone to believe in him again.

"You can't abandon someone who isn't there!"

"How do you know that he isn't there?" Their voices rise in pitch and speed until they are two engine pistons variably shrieking, back and forth closer to the door; he presses his hands over his ears, but it is not enough, has never been enough, and even burying his face in the blanket just traps the sounds of their scuffling closer. He can imagine all their movements in the hall like snake and bobcat two mouths open full of teeth peeling away at each other's skin—there's a sound like someone pushed into a wall which he believes and doesn't believe because half of what he hears he invented and he can't see, it's inimitably dark and cramped and hulking shadows blacker than black all around him are milling, leaning in—

"I'm only doing what's best for you—"

"You don't know! You do not know what's—"

"Because I love you and will always—"

"Let me go!" Something against stone the room swims before his eyes in a heat haze splitting rippling—

"And I loved him too, you know. I loved him just as much as you! That's why you have to let him rest in peace!"

A sharp, single cry something like a monster scuttling his father's boots and reverberating still out of six month memory his father's fist on the divan slowly, slowly knocking. That he never. That he never.

"He won't rest! He just won't lie down and—"

And behind Ienzo's eyelids pushing in his eyes pushing down everything inward he can hear their bodies moving or he can see and smell something underneath which is a familiar metal or meat, white as moonlight straight-edge cutting like his mother's knife dripping out of her hand cutting and from their bodies in the dark, neither one seeing the other but still moving forward and away in motions all bone all angle the tissue stripped away the skin in threads stripped away all the blood it smells like blood only no one is bleeding he doesn't think yet the world shivered.

In the hall down the stairs at the backs of his eyes he sees his mother her hair behind her shoulders falling all over the door also herself a wall with her arms open her fingers canted forward a little animal in the corner. Her mouth is an open line panting her eyes all over white and searching.

His father is before her waiting but not really only looking for the seam so that he can move through no it must be around her so he can also search but for what?

"Why are you in my way, Dahlia?" he asks, which is what Ienzo both wants to and does not.

(She knows Ienzo's father will not find anything in the attic even if he searches. So why is she fighting him? Why is she making a stand like something has changed, like his father hasn't stopped her numerous times already from sneaking things to Ienzo and yes, this is the first time he's discovered their attic hiding place—but maybe she thinks of this as the end. The attic was the his last safe haven and maybe now his father will change the lock below the old iron knob, trap Ienzo up behind the door and swallow that key too so that she can't get to him no matter how hard she tries, no matter how hard she pleads, no matter how hard he beats his weak hands against the other side of the wood and begs to be released before he starves—)

"Let me go," she says again and again only it's like the words don't even move her lips so maybe it isn't her saying them or maybe none of them needs a mouth anymore to speak. It is her voice still only it's not clear which of all possible directions she wants to go. From here there is neither a forward nor back.

But there is a massive movement in the hall or of the hall such that his father has both hands on his mother's shoulders then and is wresting the way he might wrest open a rusting door the way he might heave an immovable object. She is not (as always) pliant but catches his hands with the talon cups of her own and closes and closes in more than one way. Something gives.

Ienzo buries his face in the blanket which he can hear himself not really breathing through. His mother throws his father's hands to the side, their foreheads close together, her eyes not once blinking like grasshopper eyes white as moonlight and cutting like neither one of them even talks anymore but the corridor is full of noise and the claws in the crevices of the stonework tiny things crawling in high breathless notes.

His father reaches out to wrap around her like a black shadow when the light sets halfway, and he lifts her bodily off the floor and makes a little space between her and the door and Ienzo hates this or everything.

Why did I why did I why did I

His mother starts to laugh from her place against the wall beside the door now her hair bunched up in tangles her blouse in hand-shaped bunches her mouth an open red seam emitting sound and also the smell like knife metal melting which is fear. She laughs just once which somewhere between the constriction of her bird-thin throat and the walled-in air of the hall becomes a whole chorus of bestial howling.

His father turns the knob on the attic door and Ienzo actually does hear (might hear) this through the walls of other detritus, the living memento mori in boxes squirming in the crates squirming one of his mother's dresses reaches out arms to him, and the door doesn't open because for this door also there is a key which his father does not have.

There is another revolution of the world or their world and his father turns back to his mother laughing again her eyelashes sewing themselves shut over the gray stagnant water of her eyes, and he says, level, "What are you hiding?"

It's not what she's hiding, but what she stands to lose. Maybe.

Something seizes up inside Ienzo, paper thin pretenses crumpling and the last shivering shard of hope left in the bottom of the jar unwinding to block every passage in his body, every one of his heartbeats wasted, bubbling backward in his chest so that all of his skin feels ice-sheathed in seconds and when he looks down at the blankets clenched in his fists, it isn't his grip that is turning the beds of his nails blue—it's something unnamable that pulls taut inside him, just a certain knowledge that nothing can or ever will be the same after this and that there is nothing he can do to save anyone (not his mother not his father not himself can't even just stop it).

If the key to his old room has been thoroughly hidden, Ienzo knows the key to the attic has not. It's there, just under the high collar of his mother's dress on a thin cord waiting to be torn free and used, and then his father will be on the stairs, hunting with every quivering still he will find nothing and what then?

What then? His father will lock the attic door for good. How had Ienzo not seen that this labyrinth would become a trap? How had he not seen that his graveyard would be cast-off keepsakes in the insulated, dreamy dark?

His mother is quiet for maybe one second and then she laughs again, only this time it is a sort of spiteful crooning, a high, off-sweet wriggling of her throat. Still against the wall in the hallway below (Ienzo can see her but he can't he can't he can't), she tips her head back all the way and blind-eyed shoots her voice up into the floor of the attic, every breath a cutting swing. "You can look for it forever." She breaks the words over her teeth through her animal laughing. "You can look for it forever but you will never find it. You can look right into its face and never find it."

"Whatever you are hiding in this attic is not our son."

"Prove it." The giggling keeps seething up through crevices between the stones and sliding up Ienzo's arms like the golden millipedes of his father's buttons in the firelight like the scintillating shaft of brain cord exposed like Darkness it's a ward against it's a ward against he reaches under his makeshift blankets to press the Midnight Anklet sharp against the inside of his hand.

"Whatever is there is not Ienzo." It's not that his father's voice doesn't sound confident, only that it doesn't sound like his father's voice at all, some mangled thing made to come out of its rock-bored hiding hole and slither out into the air, formless and meaningless. "There will be nothing there but all this food you've been stealing from our mouths."

Not even that. He won't even find a single, rotting trace.

Still aware of the cold pressure jerking beneath his muscles near down to his bones, Ienzo feels himself leave his body almost, not wholly not a spectator above it all but like a shadow sticking to the bent light sticking to their feet two pairs struggling back and forth kicking out at each other's knees and crushing toes and ankles heels and leather soles scraping ugly jagged marks. He's an after-image ghost in the whirling of their hands weapons between each other like every glancing grappling of their fingers strikes him too. There in his mother's place seeing his father's eyes a black metal-solid shade in the dark so that his pupils bleed out indistinct and huge, his lips vanished pressed to a wound line of white tissue in his face, and then in his father's place down-turned to look at his mother not looking back just trying and trying to breathe under the depressions of her chest (not laughter now just something halfway between that and a choreographed rhythmic collapsing of her lungs).

"You can look," she murmurs, half song, still smiling. "You can look forever and you will not find it. It's all gone. Now everybody's waking. Now it's the morning now. Now."

"Give me the key to the attic," his father says. "Give it now. Let me end this madness." It's still not his voice but a sheet of metal flat shining and his hands are still on her shoulders or on her shoulders again a pressure not like the real intent to harm but to enclose to undermine and her hands are over the top of his nails fangs splitting the skin on the backs of his hands splitting the thickened visible veins there and still not looking at him but above above to where Ienzo is she trills, "Be my guest. End it."

Except she doesn't lift her hands from his, doesn't make any move to surrender the key, doesn't even blink her eyes in the dim, just moves, her head tipped back still slow and boneless from side to side as if she is counting the stars in the sky through the dark curtain of her roof. Her chest hitches a little so that her shoulders shake under his hands, which somehow just makes his father angrier like she can barely keep herself on her feet because she wants to tease or torture him, like it's all her fault.

Ienzo knows better but that's never changed anything. Or anyone.

She doesn't move to surrender the key and his father cannot pull his hands back so with a single violent tearing of limbs and limbs he snaps his hand forward, pointed, aimed directly for the long curve of her neck where he knows she must be keeping the key. She jerks her entire body away so roughly all the ends and hems of her being catch and scrape on the wall, a long line of displaced epithelial tissue opening up on the back of her neck, irreparable tangles making their way up the strands of her hair and after all that he follows, pushes forward still.

She's going to break herself escaping but he will break her just trying to save them all. Ienzo loves his father. Even now, when his fingers, too long and bone-laced the prying head of an arrow, lance around her scraped red skin and scratching, reaching leave welts he can imagine into being leave traces leave the space above her collar empty-handed.

"Give me the key!" he repeats, this time the militant shout, the command, and she has bowed to him and bowed to him until her backbone or whatever she propped herself aloft with before them had broken and now none of them know how to live without her bowing but she doesn't. She just doesn't. She jerks away from him again, doesn't seem to register at all when his nails catch across her cheek. She shudders back a step in the inky black of the hallway which moves around them with a mind of its own (tied to Ienzo's inextricably now and always maybe) so that it seems to carry her much farther away than she goes.

Elegant as ever like she isn't disheveled like her eyes aren't rolling over and tongue swollen in her mouth so she doesn't dare to close her lips for fear of biting it off like she isn't laughing still, uncontrollable under her breath, she draws her matted hair back, spills the water blue fall of hair over one shoulder and smoothly draws out the leather cord on which the key is swinging.

It's iron and plain and never has been anything less but now it looks like a weapon. Now he thinks just don't give in just don't give in just don't let him lock me in like his senses like his mind like his heart have locked me out.

The key dangles on the cord, and his father lunges for it where it hangs before her eyes, but she is ready for that, and she is not faster but she is more cruel and so when he reaches out she turns it so that the heavy, sharp head of the key faces his palm, faces outward toward the flesh rushing directly forward it.

The head of the key meets the face of his father's palm and glances sideways, tearing down his hand, turning his life line into a deep score. He doesn't flinch. Instead he closes his twitching fingers over the key and in one fierce motion rips the cord down, yanking her head forward, tangling in every flicker of her hair it can, until finally, with a half-audible snapping, it comes undone, splits around with a whipping across both sides of her neck. He extricates himself from her and spins on his heel, forcing the key toward the knob.

Behind him, she looks up only when the key has slid into the lock, displaced the tumblers and begun to turn the mechanism. Because Ienzo can see everything maybe is everything maybe invented all of this and his parents are actually sleeping soundly in their rooms—because he can see all of this, he sees behind his father his mother look up from the floor, her hair half over her face, sticking to the last vestiges of her lip paint the smudged edges of her smile, and her brow draws narrow and something in her eyes gray as mortar and harder by half sends every alarm bell ringing in his chest, tapping out messages of caution against the inside of his skull.

He wants to warn his father but he doesn't know what he is warning against or even if the only one he should be warning is himself. His father has the key to the attic now. He can make it disappear at any moment and how will his mother get to him them? How will she keep him safe still when the door between them would be almost a foot thick?

His father turns the lock on the attic door completely, and Ienzo hears the door shriek against the hard stone beneath, unused to ever being closed. No longer muffled, he hears the metal knob crashing back against the wall behind it, hears his father's boots echoing up the narrow stairwell together toward Ienzo's hiding place far back in the attic maze.

His father will not see him, but that doesn't matter. There is no way to win here except to get out, to get out of the attic before his father makes his final decision and Ienzo's only escape route is cut off.

Shrugging the blanket off in angry, frantic tugs, he tumbles free and forces himself to his feet. His legs shake, even his metatarsals quivering inside his feet so that he feels as if the whole world is a sea rolling beneath him, and were it not for the high walls of boxes and crates and disused furniture surrounding him, he might not be able to stand, let alone to begin creeping out of his safehole towards the stairwell.

He should be going cautiously, but caution in the face of his father is a thing of the past, the very first thing he taught himself to forget when he himself had been forgotten. He could walk right by the man and not be seen.

The floor stabilizes under him after he takes a few steps, and he reaches a hand out to trace the walls of his labyrinth in the dark. He knows the route now by heart but in the blackness any brace is a guardian string to lead him free. He takes a left between two propped up portrait frames, and then he ducks low to slide between a stack of crates. On the other side of the room, he hears his father begin to ascend the stairs, something off about his steps—too light, too slow, as if he intends to somehow sneak up on whatever disturbing collection he thinks his wife has been accumulating in these hiding holes throughout their home.

Somehow the sensation of his father creeping closer and closer in the dark makes Ienzo freeze between the crates, makes him shrink in his skin and his heart begins to jump and skitter. Why is he reacting this way? There isn't any reason: he will still be invisible, inaudible, undetectable to his father. But his heart wriggles like a dying insect, stuck and spilled out, anyway. He would go out of his way to take a different path, but there has only ever been one exit and it might not exist long enough now to validate any dawdling.

But Ienzo can't make himself charge through anymore, sidles along the box walls, inching here and there over the protruding limb of a standing mirror, a footed chair. He takes a sharp right and then another left, moving closer silently to the head of the stairs, where is father is undoubtedly now standing, sniffing deeply once and then again as if he is searching for the scent of rotting food—or a disinterred body maybe; maybe he thinks Ienzo's mother has gone that far, to sneak their son's corpse back into the house and try in her own desperate way to bring it back to breathing again. Well, the truth is not so different. Or any better.

Ienzo is half way across the room, sandwiched between a crate full of old slides and slide-making equipment and a huge file of paper, probably from his father's work, gathering moth larvae and wood-boring beetles. Ienzo is half way across the room when it happens, when down the stairwell far beyond his father he hears the door to the attic slam closed, hears the key grating in the lock, hears the pins fall into place again.

The door is locked. His mother has locked the door, locked the door with his father still forcing himself into the space, leaning over to avoid brushing his head against the cobwebbed and nail-studded ceiling. He is locked in with his father—and his mother, on the outside, can't have done so by accident.

A bolt like the blow from a broad sword seems to split his head in two, sets his ears to ringing and his heart jerks to a dead stop from its racing.

Is she going to ever open it again?

Suddenly it makes sense that she was caught now of all times, suddenly it makes sense that she fought his father, denied and goaded him in a way she would never have considered doing in her right mind. Now it made sense all those times she had not said I love you back because maybe after all this she couldn't.

He might as well have stolen reality from her. His father traded the illusions in for peace she never could. They were free and she was trapped.

Ienzo is trapped in the dark dusty space behind a foot-thick door, behind metal hinges twice as thick around as his wrists, behind a lock so heavy he couldn't have picked it even with the perfect equipment. If she never returns… if she never…

At the top of the stairs, Ienzo hears his father spit out a curse—at himself, at his wife, at Ienzo, at anything—and throw himself back down to the stairs, taking them three at a time and slamming into the door as his stopping point on the way down. The door does not even rattle beneath his weight.

Ienzo's father curses again, begins to pound at the wood with the balled fleshy sides of his fists. "Dahlia, let me out. Unlock the door right now!"

There's no answer from the other side, not even to Ienzo's uncontainable imagination. There's no shuffling of feet or a sigh to latch onto. It's like the hallway behind is simply dead. If his mother is still in it, she might as well have become a ghost. They might all be really: all ghosts in a sealed house, no one knowing where they have gone to, no one caring on the outside for anyone except his father, and when they come to knock on the doors well they'll all be locked they'll all be locked and they'll have to pry and pry and inside they'll find three whole bodies or if Ienzo's magic lasts after he does, they might just find nothing at all.

For a long moment, curled beside a crate, listening to his father pound on the immovable wood and his mother be anything but there, Ienzo wonders whether being nothing at all might finally, finally be preferable to the ruin he currently is. If he were only dead or selfless in the way that means he has no self then he wouldn't be able to fear this or the monsters in the streets and no guilt like a massive throat closing dark and thick around him throat muscle writhing him down into the final pit of dissolution if only he had really died then his father would not be here trapped and trapped behind the veil of his own senses. And his mother—

His mother would not be before the embers of the fire, free, even now maybe laughing. Even now maybe laughing and if he can free her more, then good, good but please not in this way, not quietly wasting in the dark because he will die. He will die if she never opens the door, no source of water here no food and his stomach already peeling away at its own lining and the closeness of it all the pressing everything that moves moving beyond his sight and control and his father in the black soon he will stop shouting.

Not this way, slow and jet black, the memories made alive again pressing up against him, a skin outside his skin. Not this way, completely alone.

He has to get to the door. He has to get to the door even if it does nothing, has to plead, add his voice to his father's because she's the only one who can still hear them both maybe and maybe that will move her in ways nothing does anymore. He pushes forward out from beyond the crates and keeps crawling almost on his hands and knees now along the jagged saddle-backed track of his own choosing—well if he could get over the high stacks of boxes he would, but there's no air to breathe between them and the ceiling falling down around his head—

All the while his father beats against the door, shouting devolved into obscenities, and any minute he also will surrender. Except he is strong enough that if he tries maybe he can find something in the dusty remnants to pick the lock or smash the wood, prise at least enough to break the knob down and slip them both free. Yes, in his right mind his father might free them both, but who in Ienzo's life has had a right mind since that winter, since then when they sailed a straight course into the superior mirage and like a ship in the ghost lines drifted back to shore entirely devoid of crew? What right minds? No counting on it.

He doesn't want to die. He doesn't want to die like this right now, not yet, not here and this one thought consumes him, sets his heart again breaking against the smooth wells of his ribs inside his chest he can feel his throat closing in degrees so that air must worm its way through back and forth writhing through the narrowing space and in seconds spots of black blacker than even the lightless cavern of the attic sparkle like stars across the galaxy of his sight.

Do not panic but that's useless advice in the face of reality (who is he fooling anymore?) and, at last, he abandons all pretense of silence or calm and begins to frantically run. He abandons all logic and sense and all attempts at secrecy as well, so that his steps echo like foghorns in the night and his breath comes ragged and loud over his wavering tongue and even at one point he might be calling out Mother Mother don't why Mother don't because it doesn't matter no one will hear no one will notice why

He doesn't want to die invisible. He doesn't want to die alone.

His foot catches on a box, catches on some portrait album of their earlier lives at one point precious now forgotten and unwanted clutter much like him (consigned), and he plunges to the floor, scraping his knees and stinging his palms on the unsmoothed stones, grit entering the skin of the heels of his hands like unwelcome visitors pushing their way in through the front door. It stings, but that's nothing to what he has already felt, been feeling, will feel. What really strikes him is the silence afterward, the sharp dead silence like the whole world inhaling and holding it or dead and not this way please he doesn't want to be alone—

"Who's there?" his father calls out. And the dead silence is his father's fists steady on the door, no longer beating, no long shouting. In the claustrophobic black space, Ienzo ceases to breathe.

There's a sound from the foot of the stair, and then a body turning, and on the floor Ienzo cannot pick himself up, cannot move, only braces on his hands and knees, all his body close together as his father begins to climb.

For a long moment, Ienzo cannot decide what to do, perceives no options at all which feel appealing and he knows that no choice is predictable or good here, but if it was him that his father heard—if it was him that was heard at last, then he is not he will not be alone—his heart in his chest swings like the head of a nervous serpent ready to strike, to unfold, and he finds his voice at last, trembling and dry and disused and tiny, but he makes it shout, "Father, it's me! I'm here!" and then a half second later because it feels necessary he adds, "It's Ienzo. Ienzo." It feels wonderful to say his name after all this time but afterward a vein of alkaline turns his stomach, because there is still more silence and no moving, and maybe his father hasn't heard him at all. Maybe all he heard was some far off scurrying of mice or wind.

Then his father gasps and takes the stairs two at the time Ienzo judges by the sounds of his boots, and then he stops at the head of the stair bent almost double to fit in the narrow space of the attic and he just inhales again and again for a long while like he can scent Ienzo out, like a sporthunterapexpredator devourer in search of the most elusive prey, and Ienzo wonders for a moment if he has made all the wrong choices, most especially this one.

His father makes a sound that is not chuckling and is not scoffing but somehow expresses them both, somehow is bleak and macabre amusement and utter, glacial disdain all at once and agony and rage beside them in equal doses. "What have you been hiding, Dahlia?" he drawls, but even as he does so, it's painful and obvious that he doesn't believe a word he is saying anymore. Against his will, Ienzo's body curls in closer, so that his head meets the shivering lines of his forearms, and he knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that he has been heard but that that will not, will not be helping him tonight.

"Who are you?" his father demands in the dark. "Who are you this time?"

Ienzo doesn't understand. Doesn't understand why now, of all times, the spell on his father would break except—

(he'd rather be a burden then a ghost and he'd rather die unwanted than unnoticed rather face this with someone anyone even if he's done nothing but ruin every dream they ever had and please Father just please I am here please I am)

—doesn't understand what his father's words mean, or why the man crouches at the top of the stairs not getting any closer, not calling out "How can you be my son?" not even "He's dead, my son is dead so you cannot be him!" There's nothing like that, nothing at all, just his father waiting for some answer that Ienzo does not know how to give and he hates this, hates surprise quizzes can't give the right answer if the right answer can't be found in books, hasn't been taught to him—

"So I am dreaming again," his father says after a long beat, half contemplative, and Ienzo still doesn't quite follow (well, no, he follows but can't bring himself to like what he hears, is his father really saying what Ienzo thinks he is)— "Just dreaming." His father grunts but it sounds more like a voice, more like How reassuring. For a moment I was actually concerned. than anything like disinterest.

Ienzo is the one concerned. Ienzo knows best of all that the things which happen in dreams are inconsequential. They do not matter, illusions do not matter, and so you might do whatever you like to them, you might use all your power to make them vanish or extort every ounce of whatever it is you desire from their life's blood, because in the end they always vanish.

He is not a dream. He wants to tell his father that but he also does not want to be a liar and who knows anymore which parts are which.

(But he certainly does not want to vanish, and that is one definitive form of the truth.)

"Well," his father says, and there's another shifting so the man is almost on his knees maybe, his back a dark arch, the line of his hair over his spine not unlike brain stem writhing, his mouth open and hued, his hands half extended, silvering talons on stone. Ienzo has been here before; he might also be sleeping. "Well I know how to deal with this kind of nightmare," his father reassures. "I know."

The man begins to move, a slow, inexorable forward march through the maze, skittering nails against the cardboard, against the old wood and metal and dust silver fabric of the remnants of their happier life, moving forward and forward toward where Ienzo waits.

He wants to cry out again. He wants to cry out again and tell the truth as he knows it which is that he is living, still living, not an illusion of his own right yet, just a little faded at the edges, just a little untrustworthy, but mostly, for the moment, still there, still willing to sit at his father's feet listening to the virtues of a strong supply line, the virtues of a tactical leader, the best laid plans, and always agreeing, if only his father would please let him exist please let him be there anymore please.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," the white curve of teeth in the dark demands.

Ienzo cannot move, knows that he will be seen if his father finds him (because, for the first time in a long time, for a moment, he really wanted to be seen, really wanted to be a part of his father's life again and look how that is turning out, look how all of this will turn out now). He does not want to be found but he still can't control it, still can't make himself invisible on command or even just quiet enough not to be noticed, and if his father finds him, well, won't he try to put a stop to all this madness, won't he try to end it?

Ienzo is the source of the illusion. Is, for his father, all the illusion ever was. What happens in dreams has no meaning, and so, sometimes, it is okay in your sleep to kill the ones you love.

He will not die a slow death if his father finds him. But the pain might be no less real.

He is in the maze of his own making in the realm of his own control and he knows it better than his father certainly, but the man has strength in his favor and disregard and fanaticism, and Ienzo can't even think anymore, can't remember the best corners to hide in, the most secret curves he has designed. He only knows that somewhere here is the metal dress form, the cage of which can fall around him like a guardian force like everything solid and protective in her skirts, like before.

He claws his way to his feet, still trembling so violently his legs waver beneath him. He begins to stagger a slow way along, further and further from his father's solid steps behind.

Back behind and to his left somewhere, on the other side of one stack of boxes, comes the familiar sound of his father's fist tapping on the walls separating them, the fluid rolling of his wrist, the hard bone lines of his fingers taut against an unyielding surface and the sound is everywhere in the room, shuddering.

The grandfather clock they don't own is ringing and his father's hand is the second hand in motion. Ienzo hears the noise pass above him, actually above him, and he holds his breath, fights to stifle his own shivering so that there will not even be movement in the particles of air around him. His father is just on the other side of this wall of boxes, and if Ienzo does not move, a single turn might bring them face to face, might reveal him after all this time and there will nothing to stop his father from lashing out at the face of all his woe, at the face in all his nightmares, at the child he just knows he buried good and dead in the ground—

The moment the sound is past, Ienzo scurries along, his bare feet blessedly gliding along the stone floor in silence. He turns away from the path his father is taking and backtracks. Maybe if he can get around toward the window right behind the dress form he can knock it out and—

The even, steady pacing of feet and the solemn knocking of the fist never stops. Ienzo feels it like the point of a sword against the nape of his neck.

"Let's not play games tonight," his father insists to what he believes is a nightmare. What is his nightmare and he doesn't even know it anymore. "I am certainly not in the mood."

Ienzo has never been the kind to play childish games, least of all now.

He pushes around old crinolines, and, straight on the other end of the attic, he sees his mother's abandoned mannequin, half crooked, open at the bottom only far enough to admit his small body, the metal wiring of the cage inviting as ever the delicate weft of her dresses had been. Back lit by the dirty window behind it, it blurs, beacons. He drags himself forward, over a protruding sack of old belts, over the last traces of his mother's blue period, all the silk cornflowers strewn out across the path. He doesn't dare to run but he wants to.

Ienzo slides beneath the form's metal prongs finally. He crushes himself in behind the solid pole keeping it all aloft like this thin barrier might protect him. At the far end of the attic, his father turns the corner. He's a dark, doubled-over figure, claws first, resolute and unstoppable in approaching.

The pointed beads of the Midnight Anklet sink into his foot and all he can think is she lied.

I'm not afraid of the dark—

Ienzo forces his body to freeze, wills his father not to see him and wants to laugh at the irony, wants to laugh period all hysterical and around a mouthful of tears—irony not because he wants to be invisible now that he finally can be seen, or even that being seen will be the final tool to making him really and truly invisible at last, but because even as he prays to go unnoticed, in reality, it must be that somewhere underneath this surface he wants to be seen. Because the illusion of nonexistence isn't coming back. Even now, he must want to be verified and validated. No, he doesn't know what he wants anymore. His father is closer and closer.

Ienzo's head swims, every inhalation drawn silent through the straw-like shutter of his throat. He watches with one unblinking eye as his father's hunched form becomes the roughened edges of boots looming, almost touching the metal dress form, and the lightless air is all that separates them. His father lingers there at the end of the row; Ienzo can't even bring himself to close his eyes: he needs to be present for the moment in which his father might finally discover him again for the first time in six months, needs to know if there will be any flash of old recognition, of fondness—if something in his father's face will go soft at last at the thought of him living, like the tenderness of his hands in the copy's hair. Or maybe what Ienzo really wants to see is whether or not all that is gone, desperation or desire for one singular normality the only thing left.

Deep under the frantic tautness of his shoulders, Ienzo almost hopes their eyes do meet, but then his father is moving again, turning away to the right and disappearing around an unused canvas and easel. The mechanical thudding of his boots fades out to nothing, but Ienzo had read too many Gothic stories like this to even think of moving. Not without promise, not without security, not without certainty, none of which Ienzo has had in a long time.

But also he is human, and when there is no sound for a long stretch of time, he is tempted to move, to extricate himself and find something to break the window near his back, even if that means jumping...

Slow as fish in a still pond, he unfurls, hands meeting the floor stones, bare feet sliding out from underneath him. The Midnight Anklet scrapes on the floor and Ienzo panics for a moment but there's no answering noise. He makes it around the dress form's metal base without more mishap, and, turning on to his back to pass under the wire cage, he pushes himself half free. The back of his shirt catches on the wire edges though, and when he tries to free himself, there's a harsh twanging of metal on metal, a low-pitched long sound that seems to ring and ring and then—

"Found you," his father's voice leaks through the crevice between two cartons, the next row up, but there might as well be nothing between them; there's a fierce shove and everything is crashing down around him, a flurry of papers, glass shattering, a chair topples half over him; the dress cage slides sideways and traps his legs under it. An explosion of old, pressed military shirts suffocating up around his face on the floor and he doesn't have time to blink before his father's hands close around his shoulders.

Heedless of Ienzo's trapped position, his father rips him free of the refuse memories, blunt-edged metal scoring livid tears down the legs of his pants, down the backs of his knees. Ienzo cries out, the sharp shock of pain and discovery and fear and sadness and care all at once.

"It's me!" he says, tries to say. "It's me." And with the cold vices of the man's hands still bruising his upper arms, Ienzo looks up and meets his father's eyes.

Only there's nothing there. Nothing there, just two eyes with no meaning and no specificity, filled by neither wrath nor joy nor regret. There is not even recognition, not even focus, like looking into the open eyes of an automatic blinking doll, a sleepwalker far away thinking. He stares at Ienzo—at, not through—but still he doesn't see him or anything but artifactual remnants of a failed endeavor. Ienzo braces, but for what, he doesn't know.

Pupils wide and wider so Ienzo can see that they really are just two holes, his father leans forward so he half surrounds him, and loosens his hold on Ienzo's shoulders, lifts his hands up to cup Ienzo's cheeks. "If only," he says, and that is all. If only. The proper conclusion to which might be any wistful number of things but most especially he did not exist. His father's touch on his face is achingly light, tentative, exalting, the way he might hold a very old thing which never belonged to him. He traces the thin lines of Ienzo's brows, under the tangled fall of his bangs, thumbs tear-trailing from Ienzo's temples to his chin, where he slowly, barely tilts Ienzo's head to one side and then the other, inspecting or memorizing.

His father's hands fall slack to his collar (to his throat), rest there weightless and unassuming. Ienzo trembles.

"Can you imagine how sick I am of this kind of dream?" His father's hands tighten, not a grip (not yet), just reflexive motion, and below his vacant look his mouth is an untrustworthy arbiter of his expression, turned up but full of teeth. His voice a pendulum swinging, half choked. "Every single night when I go to look for him all I find is you. Nothing but smoke and mirrors wrapped up like I should believe it but the moment I catch hold—" his hands tighten, tighten, "—it's gone. It's all gone all over again, light slipping out through my fingers—every single night he's there and I can't reach him. I can put my hands on him but he doesn't come home because he's never coming back.

"He's never coming back, do you see?" He shakes Ienzo, only enough to elicit a response but Ienzo can't think of anything safe, can't think of anything except that he knows what is next.

The man says, "You're not him."

"I am," Ienzo manages. And "This is not a dream."

"Why are you doing this to me?" his father replies, rhetorical and agonized and his father and suddenly it is the hot, dark night six months ago in the room wet with mirage-blood his mother on her knees begging for some palatable answer Why are you doing this why are you doing this why are you—and Ienzo flinches away, meets the solid wall of his father's fingers against the back of his neck, unyielding.

"Every night knowing he won't be back in his room when I wake. Every morning looking at the empty place where he was. Every—single—dream ends in a disappearing act." In the snow a year ago now his legs beneath him invisible there but gone his hands gone his heart pumping blood he can't verify his father's eyes moving over him never on him just beyond meaningless that he didn't exist we should wish that we should—

"You're nothing but a cheap imitation in the back of my head. You're here to guilt me, aren't you? Here to torture me again and again like I wanted him to die. Like I wanted to bury my only child. So that when you disappear tonight the wound will open up all over again. But you can't fool me. I did bury him. I've made my peace. So go on, imposter," closer, quieter, conspiratorial, "disappear."

His father's hands close and close, the noose trap on the neck of the furbearer, steel teeth sealing the open column of Ienzo's throat until he can feel every artery, every pathway shutting down in degrees, a bright band of pain like a sheet driven between his body and his mind everything pressed inward and inward and the blood beats in his ears. In his ears beating and the blood below his father's hands also beating two separate halves of a system on a normal planar representation the lines of a star polygon begin at a single vertex and proceed until the same vertex is reached but not surpassed and the black holes sparking before his eyes are hypoxemia or hypoxia or he doesn't know anymore just the lancing pain just the pressing in his father's knuckles over the bottom edges of his brain over the vertebral rise of his spinal column grinding down and in the dark stars fireworking on his vision to coalesce to blindness or blind panic.

Somewhere a clock is ringing that they never had the rays of the polygon self-intersect two times at the base pentagram forming a series of open mouth vertices and he doesn't feel his fingers anymore but they are jerking toothing at his father's flesh his close trimmed nails clawing no dissuasion no help even splitting the skin the man doesn't feel it or he doesn't feel anything anymore his eyes turning inside out looking inward despite meeting somewhere above Ienzo's own two cut lines of communication nothing going in or out. Ienzo coughs, kicks out instinctively even as he feels his own legs buckling beneath him, the raised vice of his father's hands the only thing keeping him standing and fighting does nothing, could never have done: his father is invincible as always which from the time before Ienzo could think almost he knew.

His father's face is determined or impassive no difference looking over him not at him and Ienzo cannot breathe. Cannotbreathe nothing going in and yet everything in and in and in and inside he feels as if something wants to break solid flexing like a bone in his throat hyoid he means to think doesn't make it around the white phosphorescent burning of the dead blood in his neck on either side the split his whole body seizing his lungs in his chest beating better than the stutter empty chambering of his heart and he wants to cry out or just cry but can't even. Can't. Was he ever conscious?

"Get back in the grave where you belong." His father voice like a thing not from his body. Maybe not from his body. Ienzo can't see his lips move or see at all anymore the shades closed and closing still.

At a little beyond eight years old, in early winter again, Ienzo Amaryllis comes to the immutable realization that he is going to die.

This should be the moment he finally surrenders. But it isn't. This should be the moment when he lets his hands fall like two stone weights, when he closes his eyes for the last time because if there was ever someone with less to live for, he has not heard of them. But it isn't. He can't push any harder back against and his face is a hemorrhaged cloud of bruises and his flesh fills the grooves in his father's fingers but everywhere under his skin there is a cold, electric tingling.

But everything under his skin shivers down to the sinew, coiled wire tight around his bones, and somewhere the clock has stopped chiming and for a moment over the blood rushing like wings of a massive bird in his ears all Ienzo hears is his father's harsh breathing and he doesn't think, not really, except that he preferred the last time, the last time in the snow with the monster half-bowed over him also breathing open mouthed and eager over the monster fangs the monster tongue; his whole body stings down at the bone collapsing bloodless devoured, yes, preferred the monster—

From behind them in the dark there is a brutal, animal sound familiar from every nightmare Ienzo has had since last winter. His father's hands loosen and Ienzo goes slack against backward against the dress form, not free enough from his father's grip to fall yet, the curved band of fingers still hooked under Ienzo's jaw so that the weight of his body distends his neck with an agonizing flash of pain through his skull. He breathes in heaving gasps. His head swims; everything shakes.

Behind them, over a low plume of boxes, a deep muscle-red shape is moving, a coalition of muscles under flesh so tight even in the dim he can see the rope slither of the tendons under sleek fur bunching at the joints. The tentacle extension of its skull streams like a banner, and the monster slinks across the surface of the low pile of boxes, the whole mess beneath it precariously shaking but not falling. When it reaches the end of the formation, a single nonchalant leap brings it in line with them both, ten feet from them or closer, and now it is behind his father so that Ienzo cannot even try to follow it with his swollen, bleary eyes.

He knows it isn't real. Not this time, not here for no reason, no way in or out. It's memory, memory and nothing more, but the sound of its wet scenting worms in his ears over the constant tinnitus as paced and deliberate as any real breathing, counterpoint to his panting.

His father's head turns, the barest curvature of his spine so that he might look over his shoulder, and he doesn't let go of Ienzo even when he finally lays eyes on the monster. Ienzo can't tell what is going on, feels the forceful temptation to give into unconsciousness—but this monster is one of his own making, and he doesn't know what will happen, what it will become, if he is not there to witness. Except he doesn't know what he is witnessing now and his father agrees, turns back around to face Ienzo with not even a frown on his passionless face, because they both lived in the nightmare long enough to remember Ienzo's monsters look but do not touch. They are illusions but not weapons.

Behind them, the monster warning-growls, a low frequency splitting of air atoms or something inside him that makes Ienzo feel he is opening and opening backward into the snow a year ago, the wet yellow rims of its eyes from the alley circling closer and closer, the red extension of its mouth spreading, the sound of its feet on the road the exact same as the sound now, striking like flint on the stone floor as it moves nearer and still nearer.

Then: What if it is not his? What if it is real, can feed, can roar? His heart fails. His ragged thoughts shudder to a stop. The problem is he makes things real. Or almost.

His father's face remains idle rigging on the frame of his skull, fastened shut and bound. He says, "It's been a while," back toward the monster in some stiff, ironic voice. It's nuance lost on Ienzo in the moment, who hears only the ranged, metallic striking of the claws first in one ear and then the other as if the monster is pacing (only until it decides from which angle to leap).

His father's hands begin to tighten again. Had they never been interrupted. And anticipation of agony makes every inch within Ienzo jump, all nerves sparking systemic through pathways around his heart and laboring lungs he did not think he had—pressure ready to split all his throat in two again not again please not someone help someone and the world is his wet choking for a moment, then. help me.

Ienzo feels more than sees the impact, the muscled coil of tonnage lunging toward them at untraceable speed, two paws large as his head tearing at the backs of his father's arms; the massive jaws which appear above his father's shoulders are not unlike a shark's throat in the sea, wide and wider, and Ienzo sees nothing but yellow moon teeth closing (hands closing like his own hands closing) and the scarlet writhing tongue before his father is torn away, thrown down, dragged back across the floor in a single, fluid movement with blood on his neck in a pattern like cornflowers. The monster bites down again.

Not real, Ienzo says, tries to, finds his own throat nonfunctional; without the support of his father's vice hands, his legs crumble underneath him and he slumps on the floor still struggling to breathe. It's not real but like eyes all other senses can be deceived and there's sounds like something breaking and bone-white terror anguish on his father's writhing face—he cannot die of illusory wounds but his mind believes and so he feels them—feels every pinprick of the bone-splitting pressure of the cat or canine's teeth scissor-shutting, not splitting but tearing the flesh, excising arteries, the mass of red tissue slick through crushing. The jagged exposure.

Air entering where there should be none. Ienzo says Not real. His father kicks and the weight of the compressing mouth swallows any screaming, half the blood inside down inside where it does not belong gurgling spitting he must be making some noise but Ienzo cannot hear it the chapel bells in the wind distant ringing and under the fleshy srrp srrping of his father's infrequent hard fought breaths he claws at the monster face above him fingers boring where jaundice eyes should be but not real or misplaced or immune and the monster doesn't flinch doesn't let go even with his father's knee convulsing against its rib cage—

Ienzo's eyes are wet or damaged so the world also bleeds into mute shapes, unfocused colors, the hole in his father's throat sangria velvet, the weakening shift of his father's hands against its forelegs a cotton white. Its head right-angle twists the skin; the corded stem of its brain lashes behind it in a cracking, erratic glee. His father's kicking falters. His hands fall ashed and barely trembling. He manages some noise in no language but the infantile, numb-mindless humming the white-eyed moan. He should be dead. He knows it.

It's just illusion, yes, Ienzo knows that too, but that doesn't mean he can move.

The monster drops his father's head back with a tender slowness, licks over the blurred wound. Ienzo can't focus but knows it is stepping back, and it makes him cruel and caught both that he only thinks not me. It sniffs once over the cotton moth white of his father's face and then it moves—moves back not me its eyes low to the floor, fading at the edges a sanguine moveable fountain dripping out just color—it bows, steps over his father or on him or through him and seems to fold into the edges of Ienzo's vision going soft and black there's just the true red of its mouth the fat tissue yellow of teeth—fabric ripping—his father's haze body shudders maybe then is open maybe open the cat's face inside maybe there's a sound dull stretching pulled ropes the monster leans back trailing slickness his father makes noises not a human being but maybe still prayers. Ienzo cannot see will not please except that on the white bed of papers over the floor on the grey floor itself there are pieces no longer inside a body that should be red flowering flung down thick unattended.

The monster chews. His father's eyes half-lidded (corpsing), but still living, survey the hole in his abdomen over the exposed white rise of one rib not even disbelieving anymore just wondering somewhere far away why his brain won't let him die and then there is a steady, slow, and terrible tapping, perfect echo to his father's fist on the divan which is actually his skull on the floor tipping back lifting dropping his skull on the stone floor again again—

Not even disbelieving anymore, all of them just so long caught up in the fantasy (not sure not willing to risk not being sure) where is the past from here where is the future is there beyond this anything beyond this some moment of waking well Ienzo only wants to know what is and what isn't—"It's not real!" Ienzo finds his voice at last to scream. "This isn't real!" and of this he is certain at least of this he must be certain there is no other option no other instance no moment he would want this his father a wound hole his own mouth bloody (might as well be) so none of it, none of it, none of it has even happened. Or will ever. The truth.

The monster dissolves. Dissolves completely, becomes grains of colored dust that disperse until there is nothing left at all, only the grave quiet of the attic, the overturned boxes, his father lying on his back on the floor—but in one piece, no bite marks, no open stomach cavity.

But his father's face is still contorted, phantom pains from every inch no recovery, half on his side now with his arms not moving his legs not moving the narrow rise and fall of his chest nothing else except lifting and dropping his head dropping and dropping his temple on the stones already discolored the same measured beating of his fist on the divan a knock and a knock and a knock but visceral (thhk thhk thhk): his head flesh and bone not ever pausing and eventually the man begins to laugh.

His father giggles one continuous exhalation beating his own skull on the floor half-open-eyed but still not seeing. "Time to wake up," he says and says. "It's time to wake up now."

Ienzo leans against his mother's dress form, tilts his own head back to stare at the dark beams of the roof. Just staring like an aftermath already, long and slow. He doesn't feel so much as is empty, no introspection anymore, no thinking, only a miniature machine for perception, a miniature set of eyesearstonguefingers groping in the crevices of the floor, sliding down along the way. An existence prolonged beyond all sense of meaning.

It is hours or minutes before his father stops laughing. Stops moving all at once, his body no longer resounding with the fall of his head, his neck no longer lifting the heavy weight of his skull to brain himself. When Ienzo looks over, his own neck a stone block unmoving, his father's face is worn raw (not bloody, just not real skin anymore), and every inch is slack, his mouth almost open against the floor. There's no noise from him, no flicker of a glassed-over eye; there's only a scent, low and late, something gaseous or rotten like bodily refuse or like the monster's mouth last winter in the snow: a dead thing.

A dead thing. And this the part where Ienzo should care, where he should cry or wallow in the guilt or just scream and keep screaming until he has no voice anymore, but his head and body feel eons apart, his skin nothing but a stifling blanket thrown over the shrinking confines of his heart. He looks at his father gone before him (not suicide murder it was not him it was me) and for once, blessedly, feels nothing at all except shock, a smoke sort of grey inside his mind swirling. Dream-like and meaningless.

A long time later he stands, takes one uneven step and then a steadier second, bare-foot sliding over the spilled papers away from his father's body, no destination in mind really, only away from the corpse smell sticking to his tongue. He finds himself at the head of the attic stairs without knowing how he got there, looking down into the dark stairwell and the darker face of the sealed door at the bottom.

He doesn't remember ever going down the stairs, but he remembers looking eye-to-eye with the keyhole and seeing nothing but pitch on the other side, hearing nothing but his hand useless turning on the knob, and, of course, it still won't open.

Then he hears himself speak but doesn't recall speaking, isn't his voice anyway, just something that sits colorless in the air: "Mother, Father is dead now. Can I please come out?"

She never answers.

Who knows how long he stands behind the door waiting, only that when he climbs back up the stairs again, his hands are sore from the repetitive knocking, his voice has gone from hoarse to nonexistent calling out. The attic is still stone quiet though less dark, a barely perceptible lightening of the gloom from the sides of the room inward. Either it is early morning or just past dawn; he can't care.

Without any genuine thoughts forming against the inside of his skull it occurs to Ienzo that he will need a coat, that he will need shoes. The only place to go now is out. But he outgrew his old shoes months ago and she was never given the money to buy new ones and he hasn't needed them really, hasn't put half a foot outside since last winter when he became a prisoner at first of his own choosing because in the hard shadow of his father and the Gaussian domesticity of his mother he had been safe, for a while, from monsters. Had been safe until he brought their images inside (became).

He squirms between rows of boxes and stumbles over the jutting forms of old curtain rods. When he finally reaches it, the temptation to lay down in his makeshift bed is almost ravenous, all-consuming, and he wavers for a moment looking at the old great coat he had preferred to a blanket, weighing the work of pulling it on against curling up underneath it, his face buried too so that nothing might enter, no rot, no light.

He picks it up, sluggishly pulls it around and around and does up the highest clasp although that barely keeps it clinging to the edges of his shoulders. He has to hold it, himself inside it, to keep it on or close.

A statement on his need for control that—even now when everything else inside his head has tumbled into the same howling wind tunnel of thought and fear and other feeling just beneath the surface—he remembers somewhere in the right corner of the attic is a box of his father's old dress shoes. And near the place where his father is (was) that old sack of leather belts still firm enough to bind together, strong enough to bear his weight times over…

He dusts a house spider off one pair of shoes and puts them on, laces them as tight as he can. They still clunk and slap loose against the floor, intermittently press the Midnight Anklet sharp against his skin and slipping under his soles already sweating against the leather without socks. Tight enough, at least, to last.

(Only to last how long he does not know, has not thought about, might never think about now. He has to go, but isn't conscious enough to decide where.)

The belts are where he left them, his mother's careful arraignment by size maintained, and with numb fingers he strings them together, holes of one through the buckle of another until they are a chain, snapped firm under his tugging.

Then there is a moment's hesitation, something inside above the bound, gagged rest making its screams at last heard not there not there not again there but it's a small voice (child's), worthless; he stands, worms his way back across the attic to the window he knows he can reach, trailing coat tails and rope. He passes his father's body and even without looking down he can still see it monster-torn, bitten and wet, the old coat and the old shoes and the old belts like the cast-off skin brought back and greedy for the blood and flesh that once filled them, absorbing, assuming the liquid hue—this also is not real but who cares anymore?

Ienzo tips the dress form over with a half shove more violent and steady than he has any right to be at the moment, doesn't know where the strength to move at all is coming from. He watches the shape of his mother tumble over with a harsh, resonant clanging and equal amounts of dispassion. Struggling with it, with the things packed in behind, he pushes until one of its firm metal legs finally rests against the frosted glass of the attic window.

One shove forward on the shoulders of the dress form makes the window lightly shiver, metal on glass an unassuming scraping. Ienzo doesn't wait for it to settle before he pushes with against the dress form again all the weight he can muster. And then again and again.

The principle is as simple as playground mechanics, the arc of the swing rising and rising, and he recites in his head the full text of one physics lecture or another because it fills space that otherwise would be left free potential energy builds up within the medium which upon contact transfers as transformed kinetic force the window shakes under the repeated pressure of the metal strut, and then, without forewarning, cracks open.

The first piece comes free, falls out and hits the street below with a muffled, tinkling shatter. A cold gust of air rushes in the opening. It is winter. Somewhere he knew that, had known that, only he had forgotten.

A half-hearted sideways push on the dress form breaks out the rest of the window, lets in a swift flurry of the snow gathered up on the window ledge. Ienzo hooks the buckle at one end of the belt rope over the top leg of the mannequin. The whole base is too wide to fit through the window, he can see. It will hold in place inside. Long enough. (To reach the ground. But then what? Then?)

The other long end of the rope goes through the belt loops of his trousers—it is his father's, goes all the way around Ienzo's waist and back out around, so he can pull it through the buckle too and pile hitch it.

Testing the edges of the window for any remaining shards of glass with the soles of his father's old shoes, Ienzo puts first one leg and then the other out the half moon window, over the barest ledge. The frigid air flashes against his skin, over the cooling glass beads of his anklet. He catches his strung-together rope tight between his hands and shifts farther backward, stopped on the edge of the tipping point, the half weightless moment between crawling back into what he has always known as safety and plunging down into what might be the waiting mouth of the monster still, red and reeking and real.

It's a ward against Darkness and he'd say she lied but the truth is he is still living.

I am not afraid of the dark and he'd say he lied.

He hesitates, head near the floor, hands tangled, looking back over his father's body permanently still just indistinct black rises in the dark and he can't see the ground below either, didn't even pause to look; outside was where it started (fearing) and not even where it will end—my father I hurt them I hurt them I ruined I did Ienzo did it all a dream still dreaming some shuddering thing inside him a familiar voice but far away that needs to stay away right now. (He needs to not be right now.)

So he just moves, slides backward through the window and his feet catch on the stone wall and the rope holds tight on his waist even though his wrists are too weak to do the full work of holding. For a moment he is falling backward through the grey pre-dawn overhead the stars blurring out ten angles opening ten vertices always equal measures always one answer just one answer and then the bottom of one too-large shoe scrapes the ground and he feels himself reach out, undo the rope, drop to his knees, boneless and frozen but somehow still breathing.

It's another immeasurable stretch of time before he can stand, hands already half-blue from the chill and no snow falling but some gathered at every corner around the side of their house (not his, not anymore). He finally pulls his hands in close, lets the sleeves fall over them, and struggling free of the coat tails, begins to leave at last.

Compulsion or morbidity or something softer, piteous and young, makes him look back after he reaches the street, and for the first time in months, he looks in through the wide front window of their house where before there had been a garden. Now there is a real morning fire in hearth, the curtains undrawn, and backlit in soft oranges turned to copper in her hair his mother sits coyly on the edge of an armchair, blank-eyed and open-booked.

She leans over the low table between the divan and chair, carrying a teapot and a vacant, eager smile, talking rapidly to people who are not and never will be there. She pours tea for three. Listens to something. Laughs, easy.

And maybe this is the part it is supposed to come back (lovehopeguiltdespaircomfort). Maybe this is where he should start crying, where he should run back begging for their simple, radiant life—only it isn't.

This is the part where he walks away.

The part where the neighbors sleep behind their own closed doors unaware, outside, of the red death that passes, and he leaves his quiet, enclosing neighborhood without thinking a single real thought, without picking a direction or destination; he only goes.

It doesn't matter where he stops—he doesn't even notice he has stopped until there is a sound too near to him, and he discovers a high wall has materialized behind his back, that he is sitting on the ground hours (days?) later in some sector of the city he has never seen, his legs sprawled out sore before him, his head back against the wall, watching but not seeing curtains flap out an open window above him through the sun, bright-cold—then the near sound again, resolving itself into footsteps, closer:

"Hey, Ïsa, get a load of this!" Boyish. Obnoxious.

"No, you can't keep it."

Somewhere the first voice says something about blue eyes. Ienzo doesn't turn his head to look, but soon enough there is a blur of primary color in his face, just green waving back and forth, and he tries to focus for the first time since the red opening of his father in the attic. The shivering color becomes the rough underside of a mitten too close to his eyes, and when the hand is finally withdrawn, Ienzo's vision clears but the green stays, two eyes worth of glass chips or the hardest liquor locked in his father's cabinet, the one for the worst nights that his mother serves (served) with sugar and matches—

"Yah okay there?"

Ienzo doesn't answer. Not interested in people. Not even that they can actually see him, that they might be able to touch him or be something to him if he tried or let them try because he has been in that place before and it just ends in the dark. He looks down at his hands in his lap under the pooling, stolen sleeves.

"Aw, don't be like that," Green Eyes wheedles, another step closer, leaning a bit to try and look Ienzo in the face again.

"The name's Lea," he says. "Got it memorized?"

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Şŧσŗм : Ғίηίŧσ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

My-notes-are-getting-long-now-sorry:

1) As ever, I apologize for the long time between updates. I normally try to avoid complaining, but this last year has been excruciating physically, creatively, and mentally, which the contents of this chapter might indicate. Hoping for a brighter 2013.

2) Trivia:
― o Last chapter referenced W. B. Yeat's poem "The Song of the Happy Shepherd". Next to "The Masque of the Red Death," this poem had a huge hand in shaping TVR, so you should totally read it. Last chapter also referenced Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem (which is, in turn, a Yeats reference).

― o This chapter pulls a very famous line from which equally famous 1909 French horror novel? And: The entire last scene of this chapter is an homage to which (equally) famous modern horror novel by Stephen King?

3) Regarding mysterious side characters: I keep forgetting that not everyone in the KH fandom is in Final Fantasy or Disney fandoms, so I apologize if some of the characters who have popped up on the side have confused anyone. I'll make notes on them in the future. For the lovely reviewer who brought this to my attention: Laguna Loire from the last chapter (along with his friends Kiros and Ward) are from Final Fantasy VIII. In the original draft of chapter six, Ienzo's lawyer was actually Rebecca Cunningham, from Disney's Tailspin. But I wasn't confident about my characterization of her, so I changed a few traits and made her (mostly) an OC. If anyone else is confused about a character, please just let me know!

4) Two more amazing fans—SisterofScarletDevil and Lil-Kiddy-K—have drawn crazy stunning fanart for this fic. Hurry over to the link in my profile to coo all over their incredible and adorable art and show just how much their work is appreciated! (I'm still glowing about it, all these months later!)

Please review, especially if you have this story on your favorites or alerts list!