A/N: hello everyone! i am once again...posting a day early...mostly as a heads-up that i would really like to publish the last 4 chapters of this story tomorrow - but would that be overwhelming and flood your inboxes? maybe one for each day this week coming up...i am seeing amazing theories coming up from you guys (some that are close to the truth and some that aren't but that are SO good i wish i'd thought of them lol). have a healthy, happy week and i hope you enjoy this chapter!

Number 8

"number eight"

afterimage: seven

In August, the city of Oshkosh was pleasant and dry. There was not even a whistle of wind to bristle the evergreens surrounding the parking-lot in front of the lodge. Yet the hemlines of cotton-spun skirts swished and twirled around me as if stirred by a tempest.

Strangers attending the polka convention held by the lodge had begun to practice their dancing outside, in the narrow gaps between their station wagons. Their shoes clopped against the ground and silken ribbons slashed through the air with each hop and jig.

I weaved between them and entered the lodge.

Walnut-coloured buttresses soared toward the high, white-panelled ceiling. The wooden floorboards had been waxed. The gloss shone dully beneath the waxy yellow-orange lights. My footfalls sounded even louder amid the quiet of the lobby.

Mounted stoats stood guard at the mouth of the hallway which led to the meeting rooms.

Curtains smothered the sunlight and left the hall poorly-lit by leaf-patterned lampshades. The carpeted flooring in the hall left the space stale and overly warm. Suddenly I missed the hard tap of my shoes against the coldness of the floors in the lobby.

Shards of glass ground and crunched beneath my soles as if to make up for that silence. I followed the trail of glittering shards and found a vending-machine in the hallway, smashed open.

Through the doors ahead of me, A.J Carmichael came running.

He was the Head of the Commission.

He was also a tiny Shubunkin fish sloshing around in a bowl that had been bolted to a robotic body.

Upon seeing me, he skidded to a halt and held up both hands in surrender. He half-crouched, as if he would fall onto his knees, only barely holding himself up.

Blood spattered the glass of his bowl. The droplets trickled down toward his collar. Bubbles plopped and rose, burbling madly at the water's surface within his bowl.

He was terrified of Five - of me, too.

Even though I had been fading toward the end of our contract with the Commission, we had done such butchering and slaughtering that our names lingered in the halls of that building.

Carmichael was still at the midpoint of the hall, so that I would need to walk toward him to reach him; my first step reduced him to full-blown cowering with his knees pressed into the carpet and his hands now fully over his head.

"Number Eight," he simpered. "Please, I am sure we can all come to some kind of agreement –…"

Through a glowing portal of his own making, Five appeared, dropping promptly into that space between me and A.J.

Drenched in blood, Five swung a paddle onto his shoulder. I could not quite read his expression, because his back was turned, but he seemed electrified by the thrill of chasing Carmichael. He would have drawn it out had Carmichael not been halfway out of the lodge and almost clear of him.

There was something about seeing Five like that again that grated at my nerves, left them raw and prickling.

It had been so long since I had seen Five in his schoolboy uniform, slashing and hacking, that it felt as if I had crossed the astral realm into a foggy memory of our Commission days, for how much he had fallen so easily back into his old self.

Slowly he brought down the paddle, testing where it would land against A.J.

Then he swung.

He smashed A.J from all angles, until his bowl shattered and water spilled out, soaking into the carpet. The Shubunkin fish flopped against the ground. His robotic body lay akimbo beside him.

Five pulled a transparent bag from his pocket and snatched some water from the bottled rows standing on the table beside him. He stooped and nudged A.J into the bag. He filled up the bag with water until its sides bulged, and A.J was able to swim around again. He was frightened, darting from side of the bag to the other in search of an escape.

I leaned against the jamb of the doorway and watched Five, arms crossed.

Five grumbled to himself all the while, like the old man that he was beneath those culottes and knee-high socks. He set about fastening the bag, which set off his mutterings even more. It might have even been endearing.

Instead, I felt like snatching up that paddle and whacking him in the stomach like he had done to Carmichael. It was petty and childish and perfectly like a Hargreeves to want to do it.

Once Five had finished, and the bag had been secured, he stood to his full height and turned around.

Our eyes met.

I had never seen him look more like a deer caught in headlights.

I said, "The Handler told me she offered you a chance, this time."

He considered his words carefully, and spoke tentatively, knowing that he was balancing on a knife-edge.

"It was a good deal. All I had to do was wipe out the board. In exchange, the Handler's gonna give me a briefcase that'll take us back to our timeline. I think if we can get back there, we can fix your memory problems - …"

"Not that." I stood straight, without the jamb to support me. "She offered you a chance to bring your partner with you on this contract, like old times. Only you turned her down. You wanted to do it alone. She offered you a chance to find me like you said you would, in the parking-lot. Remember that?"

"Astrid –…"

"Right. You told me before not to question what you remember. Scribbled that one down in my notepad, like you told me. That was in the parking-lot outside MeriTech, leading up to the first apocalypse we faced."

There was a trickle of blood running from his hairline. It spilled over his eyebrow. He bundled up his cuff, harshly rubbed away that blood and ended up marring his skin in a reddened flush.

Somehow I suspected he had seen this all coming and still he was unable to explain himself.

I supposed it all stemmed from his habit of rushing off on his own, shovelling burdens onto his shoulders, searching for storms no matter how much he swore he wanted still waters. He clenched his jaw and I could tell he was chewing his tongue between his teeth to prevent himself from saying anything like what he had said in the parking-lot hours ago.

But what did I want him to say anyway?

What did I want from him?

I wanted him to admit what had become more and more obvious to me.

He no longer trusted me.

He no longer trusted me to remember. It stung like a lemon squeezed over an open wound. It stung even more because I could not blame him for it.

Trust had been wrapped like a string between us, drawing us together. But it had been frizzing at its edges and straining at each pull and tug until, finally, brutally, it had been torn apart as soon as I had asked that damned question.

Who the Hell are you?

"I know that things have been difficult between us," I said. "I know that I have given you plenty of reasons to think I'm – I'm useless. I know I'm forgetting. So I understand why you thought it was better to work alone."

His jaw tightened. His eyes looked away. I had still seen shame.

"But you wrote something in that notepad I used to carry around. You said I should help you save the world," I said quietly. "I wish you would let me help you, Five. Even if I'm fading. I can still help. I remember more than you think and I - I want to help you. You're not alone. I'm here. I'm still -..."

The hall fizzled out like a lightbulb had burst.

I found myself back in Elliott's apartment, surrounded by a chorus of televisions whose screens whirled and flashed between different shows, ringing out in shrieking laughter or awed gasps.

But this time I knew how I had ended up here.

The Handler had given me an odd, golden-plated timepiece which had been counting down each millisecond until it had reached the twenty minute mark - that was all the time she would allow me to find Five and see that he really was working without me, like she had told me.

Twenty minutes.

It was a timepiece that would have only brought me to Oshkosh and nowhere else in the world. Its chronometer had been set in place, too, so that it could not be reworked to allow us back to our own timeline.

Because the Handler did not trust me either.

The timepiece clicked in my palm as if a spring had suddenly come loose, before its casing popped and a thin puff of smoke rolled out. Despite all her precautions, she had still set the timepiece to self-destruct as soon as it brought me back to Dallas.

At least she had been right not to trust me. But Five -...

He had good reason, I reminded myself. No matter how much it hurt me.

I tossed the timepiece aside. I wondered inwardly if Theo had made it himself. It was magnificent craftsmanship.

Slowly, unwillingly, my eyes drifted toward that chair in which Elliott had been murdered.

Sometime in the night, Luther and Diego had taken his body out and driven off someplace. Dirt had coated their hands and wrists, afterward. They had not explained. I had not asked. The night had been sombre enough.

Afterward Luther had eaten half the contents of the fridge while Diego had toyed with a pocket-knife. It had been quiet, miserable. I had locked myself in the bedroom to escape it.

Yet the heaviness in the apartment still remained. It was something stifling that could not be let out through an opened window.

It was grief.

Another heaping of grief shovelled on top of all the rest that had been building and building. I felt like the grief was rubble and it fell on us like it had in the house, when Vanya had destroyed it.

How long ago that had been. How recent, too.

I had likened grief to a garden, before. Now it was overgrown, in need of pruning. I looked away from it like Five had looked away from me. I wanted some kind of distraction, and headed for the door to the alleyway.

x

Dallas was hot and sticky. Heat enveloped me upon stepping out front. Behind me, the sign flapped against the glass door, showing that the store was closed. Luther might have flipped it around, but it was more likely that Elliott had changed it the night beforehand, believing that he would switch it back around in the morning.

He had still believed he had time to spare.

We always thought we had time.

It was the Commission that had murdered him.

It was the Commission coming after us.

It was always the Commission.

While I walked, I started to think that Five would want to bring down the Commission, too. If he made things right like he kept saying, and returned us to our timeline, he would allow himself to be idle for a little while, sipping rum and whiskey and just about anything else he could find in the liquor cabinet.

Then, it would start.

Because he liked disasters.

So he would bounce his leg and pace about the room and wait, wait until we were sitting someplace together, when things had grown dull and domestic. It would be at that point, while twirling pasta around his fork or flipping through some channels on the television, he would drop it into conversation that the Commission was still a threat, you know.

He would say it airily, unprompted, like it was just a stray thought that he had plucked from nothingness.

But the truth was that he had been itching, and the scratch had become much too irritating to ignore. It was a rash, it bled and burned. It was caused by his desire for riddles and equations and world-ending problems.

He would want us to bring down the Commission together, and so he would watch me from his peripheral, and hope that I would look at him, surprised, and with a furrow between my eyebrows that told him I was considering it. He would hope that I would agree. And I probably would, to make him happy.

Off we would run, then, onto another adventure, and another, and another –…

Sunlight warmed my nape until a shadow stretched up behind me, abruptly blotting it out.

Alarms thundered in my head, warning that it could be the Commission agents, or possibly the Handler, who had positioned herself like a hungered spider over Dallas, all eight legs stretching out across its streets to tease us.

But it was not her behind me, looming with clacking pincers.

It was Reginald.

"Good afternoon," he said.

There was a sleek black car dallying beside us. In the front-seat sat his driver, wearing thick-rimmed glasses, staring resolutely ahead.

I found myself struck mute before Reginald all over again, like I had been in the lounge. I wished that I could melt into those cracks in the sidewalk and slither away like some gelatinous blob. It was the heat, sweat prickling at my skin, and I was sure that I would only need loosen my collar to come undone.

"I had planned on indulging myself in a spot of tea and scones with strawberry jam this afternoon," he continued. "Might you be willing to join me?"

It was the first time in my life that Reginald Hargreeves had ever sincerely asked if I wanted to do something.

x

Dallas dwindled from cramped red-brick buildings and suburban houses into great swaths of land. Trees flit past, blurring together, until it seemed there was only wilderness around.

The road had been smooth and subtle beneath us before a sudden turn shifted us to hard shuddering bumps across churning gravel. Now trees curled around the car like a ribcage, and bramble brushed against its sides. It was like we had climbed onto the brittle fingertips of a skeleton and rode along its wrist, upward and upward.

We were trundling along a dirt path, which had opened wide at its mouth like the unhinged jaw of a famished snake until it began to narrow the further we travelled towards its tail, ending at a Jacobean-style manor house with mullioned windows and a façade of warm, beige stone.

Once the engine had been cut and the car sank against the gravel like a tired old dog lolloping into its bed, Reginald pulled off his leather gloves and folded them in his lap.

His monocle swivelled around hungrily, seeking me out. I thought it would latch onto me with silver teeth, breaking skin, tasting blood. But he pulled it off for a moment to clean it. He was open, exposed.

"Would you like to head inside?"

It was a startling question. He had again asked permission for something in a manner that he never would have in the future. He awaited an answer without the slightest hint of annoyance either, merely smoothing the creases from his gloves, and glancing sporadically through his window at the house as he placed his monocle back where it had been.

The house's doorways were parted by what looked like a butler, allowing me to peek inside. There was a glorious, mahogany minstrels' gallery which overlooked some marbled figures obscured in the shade of the house.

Was this some kind of test?

He had often sprung those on us as children, and it had brought him a malicious thrill to watch us fumble and flounder for answers.

So I looked up at him then and nodded, not trusting myself to speak just yet.

"Then let us go together."

With that, he pushed out of the car and continued toward the house where a flurry of housemaids rushed about, visible through the open doorway. He cut through them like a streamliner through sea, tossing his gloves onto the table as he went.

I followed.

His strides were brutally fast. I felt myself a clumsy foal clopping behind, until we reached a hall inside the house. It was there that he stopped, and turned to look along the length of his nose at me.

"Rather like a necropolis, this house," he said casually. "Loathe it myself. I hate how the sound echoes between each room."

I chased after him on my heron-like legs, remembering only then how knobbly and awkward it was for me within this thirteen-year-old body. He headed for the conservatory at the other end of the manor, which was magnificent for its domed ceiling, its glass slightly clouded in a haze of sunlight.

The furniture was antique, I suspected, though he had no cabinets in here like he had had in the Academy, stuffed to the brim with broken-spined books and old pistols. It was airy and light and looked into the garden full of asters and marigolds which clashed together in a vibrant swell of colour.

Reginald waved his hand at the chair across from his own, motioning for me to take it, which I did. He dropped onto his own chair with a light exhale, as if exhausted from his travels.

"Please," he said. "Help yourself to whatever you fancy."

Powdered scones teetered on a stand. Jam clotted in glass containers. From the spout of a teapot curled white foaming wisps of heat. I leaned forward, grasping hold of its handle and pouring myself a cup before plopping sugar-cubes into the blend. Each one sizzled louder than the last.

It was me, now, testing him.

I stirred around a teaspoon, purposefully letting it clink against the rim, casting rapid-fire glances at him, anticipating a scolding. Instead, he lifted a newspaper and flicked idly through it. I sipped slowly, indulging myself in its warmth and comfort while looking out at that garden again.

Finally Reginald folded his newspaper in a lively rustle of pages, setting it aside.

"I ought to apologise for my outburst last time we saw one another," he said. "It was bewildering, you understand, finding myself hounded by unknown individuals claiming that I had adopted them as children. Preposterous it seemed to me. I would much prefer a pack of dogs than children. Both slobber and whine, of course. But at least a dog can be left at a kennel."

While he had been speaking, Reginald prepared a cup of tea for himself. It had been sweetened with three sugar-cubes, and flushed pale with dollops of milk. He had been blasé in tone, for he had not thought that anything he said about children and dogs had seemed callous. It was the truth, to him, so that he had said it with as much bluntness as he would have had he been discussing theorems, or the weather, or the light dusting of sugar coating the scones.

He sipped his tea twice and smacked his lips together.

The sound bothered me, and my hand cramped painfully hard in my lap. I hid it from his sight and studied him beneath the golden light sloping from the ceiling.

I wondered, again, what it was that he wanted from me.

In the Academy, I had watched him like that, too, with eyes narrowed, darting about his face and scrutinising each flick of his brow and scrunch of his thin mouth. He had always liked to tease me, promising some profound knowledge, dangling it like a carrot and me the pitiful donkey trundling endlessly after it.

So there I sat watching him again, like I had as a little girl, and there was that damned carrot which bobbed in front of me, and all the questions swirling around within my head.

"The Umbrella Academy." His laugh was rich. "I should fancy you had a caretaker of some kind. Nannies, perhaps?"

"Mother."

"Birthmother?"

"No." I hesitated, then added, "You built an android. She was our caretaker; our mother."

"Do you ever wonder about your birthmother?"

"No."

"Why not?"

I raked my tongue between my teeth, then released it and said, "Because the mother I had was already the best I could have asked for."

He toyed with his spoon.

"An android," he repeated. "In your best interest, I imagine. Even a goldfish would most likely perish if left entirely within my care. Many have, in fact. Barker does his best to attend to them, but the man is simply overrun with managing the staff around the house, so that I have often returned from business trips to find the poor wretched goldfish belly-up in its bowl. No more goldfish, is what I told him after the last. I cannot venture that I was much better in caring for children. Tell me, was I a terrible brute to you?"

I was startled. I had been thinking of all those goldfish he had mentioned. I had been thinking of A.J Carmichael, bobbing around in a bag of water that Five held, his own skin spotted in blood, and a grin dimpling his cheeks, turning around to face me -...

I looked down at my lap.

"Yes," I said finally.

"Then I shall offer another apology. I have been informed as of late that I am a monstrously difficult man to live with, though I possess only good intentions."

For once, I spoke boldly. "I doubt that."

His lips twitched, like he stifled a laugh. "Is that so?"

"You've always been –…" I faltered, clamming up, finishing with a feeble: "…Complicated."

"I am many things, and in this I am content."

He shook out his shoulders and leaned back in his seat.

"Right, then. Did you capture many criminals?"

"Come again?"

"The whole purpose of this Umbrella Academy was to apprehend criminals. Therefore I question whether you had any success."

"Oh - uh, yes. We did. We - We captured hundreds," I said.

His eyebrows rose. "Jolly good stuff. How thrilling it must have been for you all. Once these criminals were captured, what was done with them?"

"Prison, usually." I wished away the dull throbbing ache of my left-hand, which was still ground into a fist, almost as if I had been struck with a sudden bout of arthritis. "Others got off scot-free."

"Did the ones carted off to prison ever reoffend?"

"Usually," I answered. "Nine times out of ten."

"Then I suppose one cannot consider the Umbrella Academy to have been that successful at all; an exercise in futility, one might call it."

Once more, it had rolled off his tongue as easily as if he had been speaking about the rhododendrons that shivered in his garden, stirred in a faint and dying wind.

Clouds came heavy and fat like clotted cream to darken the skies.

There was a clatter of dishes moved around, somewhere down the hall, where an unseen orchestra darted about; an orchestra of scullery-maids and butlers and porters rushing this way and that, brandishing feather-dusters for the silvery glisten of a cobweb, or wiping clean the bookcases and bannisters with a spritzed cloth.

Reginald motioned toward the folded paper beside him. "Do you often read the newspaper?"

"No, sir." I loathed myself for having let that title come out. "Not often."

"I would not recommend you take up the habit," he said. "It seems its sole purpose, as of late, has been to remind the population that justice is an out-dated concept. One reads of hardened criminals with the most illustrious records being released with nothing more than a slap on the wrist."

From the garden came a wet, earthy scent. The lawn had been freshly mowed. I followed the flight of a bumblebee, heaving itself drowsily from one flower to another. There had been no bumblebees in those forty years Five and I had wandered the apocalypse. There had been no rhododendrons, and no sodden-earth scents, either.

Reginald grabbed a powered scone from the tower of pastries and sliced neatly through it with his knife. He lathered it in a lumpish coating of strawberry-jam, and bit into it. Its colour stained his lips.

"I do wonder," he took up again, "what would have happened if one of those criminals you mentioned had sought revenge on the Academy and murdered one of you. What then? Would you kill them in return?"

There was something about this conversation that reminded me of the double-pendulum Five and I had talked about. It lulled in great swooping arches, never once allowing me to predict its trajectory. It was verbal whiplash, which rang my ears and slackened my jaw.

Then his eyes, colourless and bland, bore into mine.

It seemed that something vital was happening between us, which had been his sole purpose in bringing me to his manor house and toying with me like he did, as if he were a cat batting a frightened field mouse between his paws. I felt myself diluted, like his tea, milky, pale.

Now his monocle turned on me in a snarl of silver.

The room was very quiet, very still.

He asked again, "Would you kill them?"

"Yes."

"You sound quite sure. Have you killed before?"

There was a lead-heavy denseness to my tongue, this time around.

"Yes," I said. "Many times over."

"I find myself more and more astounded by you. If only I had realised your potential that day you came to me."

So there it was: the carrot snatched away, and the foolish donkey slowing to a halt.

He looked me over.

I amused him.

"The boy mentioned your lapse in memory," he said. "Not that much occurred between us worth remembering. You approached me on the twelfth of November, but you seemed to fall mute. Nothing was said between us. I walked away from you. When I looked back again, you were gone. I scrubbed it from my mind almost immediately."

So that was why I had appeared in his diary. He had seen me that day.

"But then?"

"But then along came the others to harass me, and I remembered that thirteen-year-old child who had stood on the sidewalk in front of me. You were watching me. There was something remarkably eerie about the whole affair."

"Eerie?"

"Yes," he said, seemingly distracted. "It almost felt as if, while your eyes were upon me, I was watched by hundreds more."

My left hand loosened, but soon scrunched all over again. The sweetened scent of flowers nauseated me. I wanted to bolt from this room, run along the driveway with gravel spitting underneath my shoes until I reached that dirt-road, until the manor was a splotch of beige colour between the rustling treetops behind me.

I heard a dull chime that was picking up in speed, but there had been no grandfather clock in his hall that I had seen, and no little clocks dotted around that could explain it either.

He patted vaguely around his pockets, saying, "The boy was fantastically thorough in his description of your cognitive troubles. Did you know I have always found myself fascinated by the mere concept of an astral realm? Almost all cultures mention something about souls separating from their physical form. All the greats wrote about it, too. What was it Proclus said?"

With that simple question, I had been reminded of the exam scripts he had written for our lessons, slapping them onto the table before us. Sunlight had dripped through the slatted blinds and shone against our pencils, our erasers, all arranged in neat rows.

He would stand at the front of the classroom and watch us for the entirety of the exam, while the clock ticked overhead to warn us of what little time was left.

His monocle would flash, and flash, and flash.

We would race one another to finish first. Five would be onto the fourth page of the exam while Luther was still agonising over the first, and Vanya was quietly marking her rough work in the margins of the draft paper he had given us.

I would often skim the question and the answer would spring up within me. I had trained, I had studied.

But I would sabotage myself by looking up from my sheet, because I would feel his eyes pricking me, and I would see that he was watching me.

Whatever answer had been in my head would drain out from my ear like water gushing into a sewer.

He was watching me now.

He was sitting within my head, watching out through my own eyes, knowing every thought and wish I had ever had.

The words bubbled up between the sewer-grates, like it always did even during this exams, as soon as I was able to tear my eyes away from his own.

I answered: "'Man is a little world.'"

"Yes. That was it." He finally grasped something within his breast pocket and pulled it out. "Divine and mortal body."

Then I saw that he held a notebook with a thin cord. I recognised it. It was the one he used in front of me before, stuffing it full of notes and theories, including the pages Pogo had given him.

Only the cord of this notebook had not yet frayed and its spine had yet not become lined from too many notes stuffed between its pages. Reginald had written on its first page alone, it seemed, once he unravelled the cord to skim a line.

His gaze flicked up to meet mine and I felt myself awash in an icy coldness.

I hated him, I loathed him.

Spite swelled within my throat, like bile.

It was the same bile that had been festering in me while Five had squabbled with Diego about JFK and Luther had come between them and I had wished them all dead for whining and bothering me and being wrong, all wrong.

Reginald was wrong, too, and I wished to spit at him the closer he came. I wished he would choke and flush a hideous purple shade.

"There!" He leaned forward, staring intently at me. "There it is again, that sense of a hundred eyes blinking back at me. Tell me, what was the astral realm like?"

"I thought Five told you everything."

"Oh, come now. You must not begrudge him. He was remarkably worried. Should have gotten himself a puppy instead, if you ask me."

"Or a goldfish."

For the first time that I could ever remember, he smiled at me. It was not a sneering smile, either. It warmed his face, and softened his typical glare.

"Yes," he agreed softly. "Or a goldfish."

Slowly I began to tell him the message about Argo, and what had then happened in the astral realm. It seemed to me that Five had already told him almost everything, as his pencil only scratched paper in sporadic bursts.

With this notepad, I felt as if he diagnosed me, as if I had been terribly ill all along and he would soon find the source, and offer some kind of prescription that would remedy it. I was vague about the memories I had seen in the astral realm, because those had been too personal. But I did tell him about finding Klaus, and explained the strange messages coming through the radio and what I had seen on the television.

In desperation, I had done what I resented Five for doing.

I had sought the help of Reginald Hargreeves.

By this point, he had put away his notebook.

"Marvellous," he said. "What a fascinating little puzzle. It would seem to me that you already understand what has happened to you. You came out of this portal, in Dallas, and encountered this salesman named Elliott. Then, in an attempt to connect with that hippy, you embarked on a journey into the astral realm. But you are so untrained in your gifts, so much like an infant learning to take its first steps, you stumbled around and found yourself spat out on the other side."

The light shifted, drawing down the hollows of his cheeks, sculpting his features into something more corpse-like and waxy. His sockets darkened, too; his eyes were hidden within those darkened pits.

I fidgeted. I dug my fingernails into my palms.

I repeated, "The other side?"

"How did you describe the astral realm to this Elliott fellow?" He snapped his fingers. "Ah, yes. A 'cosmic doorway'. I think that is an apt description for it. A doorway brings you from one location across the threshold to another, does it not? There is something on the other side of the astral realm, and you found it, dear girl. But tell me, what is the problem with a doorway?"

The clouds shimmered, mackerel-scaled. Like them, I felt cold, frosted.

I answered, "It goes both ways."

"Precisely. It would appear to me that you, in your ineptitude, left the door to this dimension ajar, and some other being has slipped right through."

"Why?" I searched his face. "Wh-What do they want?"

"I surmise that there is likely an event occurring in their dimension, one of such significant magnitude, that they have come to me for assistance."

"You?"

"In the two instances that you lost control of your body, it found its way to me. In the first meeting, you were unable to communicate with me. Our second meeting was more fruitful. This individual succeeded in passing along a message that they deemed vitally important: 'I see a barn axe fall'. It presumably should mean something to me. It does not. But I am sure, in time, that it will become clear."

For a couple of moments, he paused and looked out into the garden, and his monocle glinted conspiratorially against the light to hide his thoughts from me.

"Yes," he murmured. "I am quite certain that this individual believes I hold information which will prevent the demise of their dimension. To put it in the simplest of terms: they need help. Consequently, they are sending you messages and imagery in an attempt to communicate that fact."

"It seems risky. Travelling to another dimension on the off-chance that you might be able to help them?"

His laugh was brief and smooth. "I was informed that the hippy had done exactly that in the timeline from which you originated and within which I committed suicide. It seemed to him, in that moment, that his world was in such grave danger, that to find me in another dimension was his sole option. It is thus not entirely unreasonable to assume that this person, on the other side of the astral realm, is implementing the same reasoning as the hippy."

"His name is Klaus."

He dismissed me with a swift flutter of his hand, swatting me aside like an irritating buzzard.

I asked, "If this person needs help, why send such a vague message?"

"Again, I am led to believe that you attempted to communicate through messages when trapped in that apocalypse carting around that doll and wagon like the little girl that you were," he said. "What was it you sent?"

Mortally wounded, I fell back against my seat, as if he had knocked the breath from me, my eyes meeting his own. I pressed my spine against the knobbly carvings on the wooden back behind me for distraction.

It burned through me to know Five had told Reginald about Delores and the wagon.

He had broken something sacred. Five and I were suffering from a cruel, unforgiving fracture, opening wider and wider between us with each passing second. He had told Reginald about Delores and the red-wagon like he had told him about everything else, when they were together in that damned lounge, sipping cognac. It had loosened Five's tongue.

But it tightened my left hand even more.

"I wasn't able to control my body fully," I answered reluctantly. "I blinked through morse code and tried to tell Diego the date that the apocalypse would happen in their timeline. But I wasn't strong enough to stay in my body. I slipped back into the apocalypse - into my astral form."

"Then should we not assume that this person is similarly unable to remain for long lengths of time in this dimension, and is incapable of communicating except through possessing you?"

"Yes."

"There you have it."

Silence bubbled up between us.

He watched the goings-on of the garden; the heaving slowness of a snail which oozed slickly across a stone, and the stubbornness of rich forest-green moss seeping out from between the cracks in the path, uprooted by the gloved fist of a gardener who gripped, lifted, tossed.

Reginald watched all of this, and smiled.

"Proclus was correct," he mused. "Man is a little world, and you are many worlds in one."

"What are we going to do?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing," he said. "For the death of their world is as much of an inevitability as the death of our own."

"But there has to be something we can do," I said. "Some way to help them - …"

"To whom are you referring when you say 'we'?" His tone was suddenly cold, biting sharp. "There is no 'we' in this situation."

His eyes raked over me.

"What a terrible burden it must be," he added with a quiet, thoughtful hum. "To think yourself a hero to others in a story where you are the one who most needs saving."

"I don't need saving."

He had crossed his legs. His foot bobbed.

"You misunderstand," he said. "I am referring to the Umbrella Academy as a whole. I saw you, all of you, in that lounge, and thought that I had never seen a sorrier bunch in all my life. Especially that boy. He is the one most convinced that he can save you all."

"You don't know us," I said feebly.

"I warn you," Reginald said, "that if you attempt to assist this person, you are signing your own death warrant. It is a journey your mind clearly cannot handle, and your body even less so, if the tremors in your hand are anything to go by."

I burned beetroot. He had noticed the scrunch of my hand after all.

The brilliance of the room had been dulled by the clouds rolling overhead. No more did the golden rafters shine. The scones seemed lumpish and stale. He had left the lid off the jam. Little red dots clung stubbornly beneath the rim. A wasp had come to prod its innards.

Outside, that lone gardener crossed the lawn, pushing his lawn-mower ahead of him.

Moments later, we heard its rumbling. Thin strips of green shot up from its snarling mouth and sprinkled the gardener's wellingtons, sticking against them, then shed as he rounded the trimmings of the flowerbeds.

I imagined the parties hosted in this manor, with garland and lanterns strung around the garden at night. I pictured Reginald in a fine suit, standing on the threshold, sipping from a flute like he probably had done at the Consulate, too, overlooking his guests chattering and laughing around the stately fountain.

He cut through the daydream when he said, "Well, this was all quite enlightening. Don't you agree?"

There was a finality in his words, a death knell.

Our time together had ended.

What followed was stolen, borrowed, unwanted, impressed upon him without his consent. He had finished with me, and now he wished me out. He was sending me away.

My shoes had become too tight. My uniform hung around me, ridiculous and out of place. I was a little girl rolling a doll and wagon to Reginald Hargreeves. I always would be.

Already he had pulled a new address book from his pocket, and flicked through its names, preparing himself for his next appointment. He no longer wanted me in his presence. It had been the same in another timeline, and it would be like this in all the others that were close enough to match, almost entirely synchronised, if not for some minor differences.

And I had suffered this humiliation so often that I pushed out from his table without argument.

Perhaps he had invited me to pass the hours of boredom between one duty and another. I had been a plaything, merely a distraction. He would have cricket in the afternoon, and a dinner-party after that. He was likely thinking more about renewing the whipping of his bat than he was other dimensions at that moment.

The world was ending soon.

But what did he care about that?

He did not care about the apocalypse. He was intrigued by the astral realm, that was all. He had no interest in me. It was not unlike an admirer of art examining a painting in a gallery and turning to a guide to question the composition and colours.

I could only tell him the composition and colours of the astral realm. I was the vessel of knowledge. I was a pitcher holding water. I was a spring in a broken pocket-watch.

That was all.

Barker, his butler, had appeared in the doorway. He had come to clear out yet another goldfish that had turned belly-up.

I stood up, and looked down at this man, who was neither my father nor even an acquaintance, really, despite all those years between us in which we had lived in the same house, and eaten at the same table, and passed entire hours in the same room. I could not say what his favourite genre of literature was, nor his favourite musician if he had one. I could not even say if he had ever been happy a day in his life.

"You're wrong, you know," I said.

He continued examining his address book. "Hm?"

"The Academy might surprise you," I told him. "Five might surprise you. I - …"

"Yes, well," he interrupted briskly, "if only the boy had as much faith in you as you do in him. What a dagger in the heart that must be."

He had done it - what he always did.

I shrivelled, feeling small and awkward and utterly dumb.

The butler watched us.

The garden chittered with birdsong and bumblebees. It blended together in a chorus. I skirted around the table and trudged toward Barker.

He blurred before me, because my eyes were scorched with red-hot tears that I refused to let fall until I was out of that room.

So I limped away from him, having taken that dagger to the heart, because man was a little world, and mine was falling apart.

"Reggie?"

Grace stood in the doorway. In her gloved hands, she held a purse. My head lifted at the sound of her voice and so too did my heart upon seeing her there.

Reginald stood immediately, righting his cuffs and putting aside his address book. He seemed almost flustered that she was here. Her gaze flicked between us.

"Grace," he started, "What are you doing here?"

Her cheeks flushed. "I forgot my purse when I was collectin' my things."

"I would have had it brought to you."

"I can fetch it myself." Her tone had hardened. Her shoulders evened out as she looked at me.

Kindly, she asked, "Do you want a ride back to Dallas, honey?"

Without missing a beat, I said, "Yes, ma'am."

"Then let's head out."

"Grace," Reginald called, "might you spare a moment to speak?"

"I've said all I need to say, Reg. Good evening to you."

The fresh air was wonderful. Grace had driven here in a convertible; it was open and clean, much more so than the leathery heaviness of the sleek black car that had brought me here. Her face was alight in a smile as she followed me out and slipped into the driver's seat.

"All right, honey. Dallas is a-waitin'."

The seats were smooth, warm. She wore a scarf, like an old movie-star. Once we pulled out of the driveway, its tail whipped in the wind. Blonde strands fluttered and streamed against her cheeks.

I told her the address of the apartment, but my voice was swept out of the car, carried away in the heady scent of the wildflowers in the fields surrounding us. Part of me wanted to lean across that gap between us and ask if she might drive us further than Dallas, further and further, until the apocalypse was forced to chase our tailpipe.

Eventually, though, the car crawled to a halt in front of the store. Grace lowered her sunglasses to look at it.

I scooted sideways, reaching for the handle. "Thanks for the ride."

"I remember you," she said.

"We met at the Consulate," I told her.

"Before that." Her head turned. "At the house. You met Reggie. I - I overhead you two talkin'. Now I need to ask you somethin' and I need you to be honest with me."

Anticipation strung me up like a marionnette. "What is it?"

Her eyes flashed.

"What the Hell did he tell you about Project Argo?"

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