It's kind of like the bad jokes Liam used to tell:
Hollis walks into the library. The second guy ducks.
Or something to that effect.
Hollis goes in, and he expects to hear his friend running to greet him -- or, more likely, roller-skating at high speed -- to hear Liam shout his name, as if he were going deaf instead of blind. It's almost funny, remembering a dead friend. You get to think: So that's the way it was.
And there are all those empty spaces, like the space between the branches of a tree where one has been cut out because it was diseased. Slowly, you become aware that something is missing -- and then you realize what. Like some kind of puzzle -- or one of those optical illusions, where it takes you a moment to realize the trick.
It's very cold, unexpectedly so. Hollis shivers, and doesn't bother even unbuttoning his coat. It's almost as if winter has come early to the Library; probably it's only that the boilers need refueling. It's very theatrical, anyway: Hollis half - expects some kind of comic villain to be here, declaiming loudly about his nefarious plans.
No comic villain, just Moth, who's certainly comic, in a tragic way. Sunglasses inside on a cloudy day is strange, yes, and makes him look blind. The long coat is just over the top, and combined with the guns holstered at his hips, he looks like some kind of bizarre gunslinger. A well-dressed gunslinger, nonetheless.
Is he sobbing? Hollis steps closer (on little cat feet, he thinks). No. He's laughing. At what, Hollis doesn't care to know. He's just here for Liam's things.
Hollis goes into Liam's office and starts putting things into boxes. He sweeps the papers off the desk into one box, seals it, and labels it "Desk". He'll probably never look at these things again, but you have to keep up pretenses, don't you? Empties the cabinets into "Drawer One", "Drawer Two", "Drawer Three", and so on. Carefully boxes his desk supplies in "Desk Supplies". Puts all the "Drawers" into a larger box marked "Cabinet".
It's just three boxes. Liam's life can be packed up, distilled, into three boxes. Of course, there was the matter of his house, but he had said his clothes were to be sold. So it comes down to just these boxes. Because this was his life, the place where he lived it. This was where he was, not the boarding house; he existed there, he lived at the library.
Hollis sighs and rubs his forehead with the back of his hand. His forehead feels a bit hotter than normal, but he doesn't feel feverish. He must be getting better, he thinks, and chuckles to himself. He's still a bit weak and pale, but the worrisome fever is gone at last, and he believes he's ready to re-embark upon his project. It'll be hard to catch on to where he left off on the thread of his discoveries, but he can catch on, there's no doubt. With a brain like Hollis', constantly running on full tilt, dashing from idea to idea, you have to have the talent to pick up where you left off. Or at least try.
"Y' should be at home, shouldn't y'?" asks a voice from behind him, and Hollis whirls in a flurry of déjà vu, as if time has turned back a week and he's talking with Liam again.
"I mean you look a bit sick." clarifies the voice. It's Moth. Hollis relaxs.
"Oh, hello, Moth," he says, picking up the boxes -- or rather, the box labeled "Desk Supplies". "Didn't expect to see you around." He pauses, waiting for Moth to offer his greetings as well before Hollis asks where he could find a hand trolley.
"Moth?" asks Moth, pulling his hair out of its ponytail. "Who do you mean?"
Hollis says, "You're Stephen, aren't you? Stephen Eisenheim?"
"That I am," says Stephen, and bows.
The voice is the clue Hollis missed; it's soft and educated, unlike Moth's even tones. Moth has a forgettable voice, just as some people have forgettable faces whose details slip from the mind as soon as the eyes leave them. Stephen's voice is commanding despite its softness; it's a voice that demands to be listened to.
Hollis notices, also, that even Stephen's stance is different. It's straighter; almost a military stance.
"How's your . . . novel going?" Hollis asks, trying to kill time.
"Fairly well," says Stephen. "Did you need a hand trolley?"
Suddenly, there's a hand trolley sitting next to Stephen. Hollis stares at it for a moment, wondering where on earth it had appeared from. He decides that it was there in the first place to settle his mind and says, "Yes, I did. Thank you."
"My pleasure," says Stephen. "Now, if you don't mind, I've got some reference work I need to do."
Hollis inclines his head in lieu of saying goodbye. Stephen turns and goes back to the table where he was sitting and sits back down.
Hollis stacks the boxes on the hand trolley; first "Cabinet", on top of which is "Desk", and on top of "Desk" is "Desk Supplies", which Hollis finds distantly amusing. He walks the hand trolley out into the main lobby, where he signs himself out. He walks outside and he goes home. He puts the boxes in the upstairs hallway, absently, hoping he won't have to think of them ever again. It's too soon now . . . perhaps in a year or two . . . or three . . . Hollis snickers as he pushes "Cabinet" closer to the wall. It's almost funny . . . but not quite.
Molly was at the Market, looking at some oranges.
There were three oranges, actually. Three perfectly round (well, they were a bit dented) citrus fruits, smelling faintly of the groves they came from.
Molly had seen oranges before, but only once or twice; gifts from some distant relative with property in the far Southern Outlands, where they grew oranges. At Twelve Oaks, it was far too cold to grow oranges, and besides, who would want one? City people liked exotic fruits, Molly had found. Country people didn't.
She assumed they were fabulously expensive because they had come such a long way, but didn't want to ask. It was far more fun to just contemplate them . . . to examine them with her eyes . . .
Someone bumped into Molly, and she turned around in surprise.
It was an old man, who had dropped his groceries.
"Oh, I'm sorry, sir," gabbled Molly as she stooped to pick up said dropped groceries and handed them to him.
"Thank you," he said stiffly, and Molly noticed how tall he was; nearly six feet tall, quite a height for such an aged man. His white hair was neatly trimmed, swept back behind his ears from its centre part. He had a high forehead, emphasized both by the part and by the style of his hair. There were freckles running across the bridge of his nose.
And Molly saw that he had to be blind, for although his eyes were blue, they did not possess that clear quality which most eyes possess when lit from the side. His eyes seemed to reject the light, to deny it; they were a blue that seemed to keep secrets, the blue of a lake on a troubled summer day. A blue that kept itself to itself . . . and whatever thoughts passed behind it, were thought alone. Or however it went; Molly remembered a quotation Annabelle had said once to that effect. Something similar, anyway.
"You're welcome," said Molly with as much lady-like grace as she could muster, and curtsied.
He tipped his hat to her and continued on.
Molly had no real reason to be here, and she decided she'd go home. Sarah had said for her to go watch people at the Market, anyway, and hadn't said when, so she had a good excuse . . .
Molly turned the corner to go home, and someone yanked her back. And for the first time, she saw the house.
The red bricks, spattered with debris. The slate roof. The door, the glass windows which obscured the inside of the house from view (she knew there were curtains on the inside which produced this effect), the faint smell of apples.
And then it was gone. The house crumbled like a falling cake, or like a delicate pastry tromped on by a military boot. One moment it stood as always in red-brick splendor . . . the next there was a mess of bricks and broken glass, wooden support beams and floors, where the house had stood.
Molly stared at the mess, confused by its suddenness. She expected the house to still be there, and only when passersby began to rush to the rubble and shift it aside (seeking, she presumed, survivors of the collapse, or perhaps looting the remains) did she realize that it was gone. The house -- her home in the strange city -- was gone. For ever.
"Was that your house?" asked a voice, and Molly turned around.
The speaker was a lady of respectable age, who looked at Molly with flat, kind curiosity. Molly nodded in response to her question.
"That's too bad," said the lady, who turned away from Molly and returned to her shopping.
Molly blinked, her eyes blurry with tears all of a sudden. The house had been her home here, and now it was simply gone. Did none of them see her standing there -- the young girl in a plain dress, hands clasped in front of her, staring solemnly at the ruins of a house?
None of them did, it seemed. For even though a few hurried past her to scavenge from the rubble -- or to dig through it for any who might have survived -- none of them really saw her. They glimpsed her from the sides of their eyes, but none of them bothered even to stop and ask if she was all right.
Molly wiped her eyes with her sleep. From there, it looked very much like her destination would be the Orphan's Home, for she had no money to buy a train ticket home to Twelve Oaks -- and what would the house be without its mistress? Miss Tanith had not yet chosen an heir when she was called away to the city, and so the house would pass on to her cousin, it seemed likely -- for both she and Uncle Robert were likely dead now, leaving no one with real claim to the house.
She sniffled a bit, and sat down on a bench, still watching the crew of amateur rescuers digging through the rubble of her home. Far away, a siren had begun to warble its high - pitched, screechy tune, but Molly ignored the sound. There was a brick sitting next to her shoe, and she studiously fixed her attention on it, so she would not have to think of all that had been lost. It was a red brick -- half the bricks in the city were -- and she pushed her mind away from the thought of the house which had so shortly before been built of red brick. It was a little crumbled around the edges -- an old brick -- and clumps of mortar stuck to it here and there. Someone -- a bored schoolboy, most likely -- had drawn a little stick - man on the side that would have faced the street with a graphite pencil. She studied it with detached interest.
"Hullo," said a voice beside her, and Molly pretended not to have heard.
"Miss?" said the voice, perplexed, and Molly turned her head a bit to observe this new person. It was a young boy, of perhaps her own age, with neatly combed dark hair and a smudge of dirt on his forehead, where perhaps he had wiped it with a begrimed hand. He was dressed in much the same way ; street things, prettied up a little bit.
"What?" said Molly, dropping her gaze to the brick again.
"I dunno," said the boy, obviously stalling.
"Well, what?" said Molly impatiently. "My house has just collapsed, I doubt it's that important."
The boy blushed, producing an amusing effect on his forehead, where the pink blush was overlain by a skim of dirt. They lapsed into silence, and the boy began to swing his feet back and forth, as children often do.
Out of the crowd appeared the old man who had knocked into Molly earlier. He cried:
"Thomas! Is that her?"
"I dunno, mister," said the boy beside her. "Is it?"
"Wit will get you nowhere at your age, Thomas," said the old man darkly. "Weren't you the young lady who helped me earlier?" he added to Molly.
"Yes," Molly said dubiously. "I might have been."
"You were looking at the oranges," he said. "And I walked into you."
Molly looked up at him, sullenly.
"Was the house still called Greenhame?" he asked, almost blushing. "Owned by a man called Robert?"
Molly looked at him suspiciously.
"His sister, Tanith?"
The old man stood for a moment, thinking:
"I remember Robert had a daughter -- Margaret."
"Miss Margaret's dead," said Molly quietly, staring at her shoes. She looked up at the old man, as innocently as she could manage.
His eyes widened. "Is she? When?"
"Not sure," said Molly dully, kicking her feet back and forth. "While ago."
The old man looked off in the direction of the rubble.
" 'Spect Miss Tanith's dead, too," said Molly, "and Uncle Robert. Stephanie and Anna, too. All of 'em. Dead. Just me."
"Oh." said the old man. "Oh, my. Have you got anyplace to stay?"
"No," said Molly, staring at the brick. " 'Spect I'll go to the orphanage. Don't have any family any more."
"Not after that," said the old man, musingly. "Well, I'm sorry to have borrowed you. I was going to ask you to lunch, but I suppose -- "
Molly looked up. "Lunch?" she asked.