The room was silent save for the faint, yet rapid breathing of his frightened guest. A single streetlight filled the shameful little space with a weak amber glow.
"This can't be real," she breathed, her face scrunched into a mask of incredulity, her eyes bright with the hyper-aware gleam of a woman trying to maintain her grasp on reality.
"I wish that were true, because then I would not exist," he replied in the ghost of a sigh. His hand had maintained a near painful grip on the neck of the violin. Fearing we would break it, he moved to set it down upon the sill of the still opened window.
"The music…" she spoke with a far-away voice, like a woman long hypnotized emerging back to the world of consciousness. "The violin music. It was you…"
He hummed absently in agreement as he turned to see her eyes, wide and contemplative, as they had settled upon the antique instrument.
"My father," she closed her eyes with the blinding pain of a memory, "I thought he was delirious from the anesthesia—he wasn't, was he? You're real. The Angel of Music…you're what he's been hearing…the music he's been writing…"
He couldn't help the sharp bark of laughter that erupted from his withered throat. The harsh response renewed the fear in her eyes.
"I am no angel, my dear," he replied with a forced smoothness.
"Then what are you, really?" She weakly asked, stepping back to create more space between them, nearly tripping as the heel of her foot caught onto the ratty nest of his little bed.
His eyes broke from hers then. Any confidence or bravado he may have felt in the moments leading up until now fled him. How much should he reveal to her? Lucius had never been explicit in word, but he had eons of memories and experience to tell him that there were heavy and unpredictable consequences for mortals who saw too closely behind the veil before their time. Somehow, resonating within his very being there existed the understanding that the time to expose her to such an unfathomable truth had not yet come to pass.
With a sigh that offered no relief, only a tightening of the burden clinging to his bones, he offered a feeble reply.
"I was a man once—or the sketch of one, I suppose you could say."
"A sketch," she parroted, and the poor thing looked like she was wildly grappling for comprehension.
"A sketch," he agreed as though she herself had come up with the descriptor herself, his lips quirking up behind the cover of his mask. "And a poor one at that." Without ceremony, he tugged the cloth below his chin to settle the matter once and for all, his eyes connecting with hers once more despite the desire to keep them averted.
She took in a sharp gasp as another step backward had her stumbling and falling gracelessly onto the haphazard blankets in which he slept. He took an instinctive step back himself, as though to spare her the horror of his proximity.
"Your eyes…" She managed weakly.
"My eyes?" he blinked with surprise, before letting loose a pained chuckle. Of all the reactions he had expected to his face, this was one he had not predicted. "Yes," he mused, "I suppose they are quite unique. I once knew a man who compared them to that of a demon. Although," he smirked involuntarily at the memory of Nadir, "I did quite enjoy startling him in the dark and he was quite unamused by my pranks."
Her shaky breath filled the space once more. And he felt anxious to offer her a more suitable place to sit. Anything would be better than this agonizing tension between them.
Frightening others was something in which he was quite skillful, but he had such little practice with putting others at ease.
"Please tell me what you are," she softly begged, finally breaking the tension.
He shook his head in wordless denial and allowed his gaze to fall once more to the floorboards in silent despair.
"I'm afraid you must learn to live with that disappointment, Christine," he quietly replied. "Despite my greatest desire to set your fears at rest, there are secrets I am unable and unwilling to divulge at this time. Please understand that I am your humble servant and would quite happily take the role as more—your friend perhaps? —but you must trust that I will not harm you."
Her expression was unreadable for a heartbeat before she straightened to stand.
"I want to go home," she replied with a thin veneer of bravery.
Defeated, he closed his eyes and turned away from her to gaze out the window at the street below. With a dismissive wave of his hand, he summoned a portal beside her. Looking over his shoulder he watched her from the corner of his vision. She had an unmasked expression of awe as she watched the magical appearance of her own apartment on just the other side, the light of the room spilled onto the floor of his own like space bleeding into itself.
Standing before the gateway, he watched as she prepared to walk through. Gritting his teeth and clenching his fists, he returned his empty stare to the world outside the window.
"Go," he solemnly commanded. "Take your leave."
He did not want to watch her leave, because he knew, once she stepped beyond that threshold, that his brief time with her was over. It was decided he would leave this town after this spectacular blunder. He would likely spend the next century revisiting his choices this evening in obsessive detail, another heavy regret to add to an already lengthy list of regrets.
"I suppose it is better this way," he thought as the despair settled upon his shoulders like a thick, velvet cloak. Nothing good could have come to her by having known him. How many times did he need to learn the same lesson? How many lives had he touched and ruined with his mere presence?
A tear leaked from the corner of his eye to drift along the hollow of his cadaverous cheek. He did find he had the energy to wipe the traitor away, but he found himself steeling himself against the threat of more, squeezing his eyes shut to keep them at bay.
It had been so long since he had allowed himself to cry, he refused to allow it now.
"Are all your kind made like that?" her small voice cut through the silence like a blade.
His eyes opened in astonishment.
Why was she still here?!
With unnatural slowness he turned to face her once more. There she stood, hair lovely and frizzled from whatever sleep she had managed before she discovered his world and nightshirt still wet from the spill of dairy. She seemed wary, her eyes darting nervously between him and the rapidly fading view of her apartment as the portal sealed from its disuse.
"How do you mean?" he breathlessly asked.
"I mean," her hand lifted to gesture to her own face as though words which would create the question regarding his visage were too uncomfortable to form.
With a gentle shrug, he shook his head.
"No," he replied, smiling weakly at the admission "I am an anomaly, much to my mother's great disgust."
"You have a mother?" she asked with sudden interest which seemed almost scholarly and out of place considering the location and circumstance.
"Of course," he replied. "Doesn't everyone?"
She seemed embarrassed by that.
"I'm sorry," she muttered, her eyes falling away from his and he mourned the loss. "I just assumed…"
"Ah," he nodded, in understanding "I am unnatural, so you supposed my creation must also follow that order." He offered a wan smile, before continuing. His words were now fueled by a mad desire to appease her discomfort and claim whatever strands of humanity he had left to him. "I was born just as you, and I did have a mother once, who I am sure has been long laid to rest. I told you I was once a man—despite my outward appearance suggesting otherwise." His next admission slipped past his lips before he could reel it back, "It was an unhappy existence, and continues to be all the same." He then shrugged the words away like a duck rolling water droplets off its back.
She considered him for a very long moment before she surveyed her surroundings with less fear in her eyes. Though he lacked any sentimentality for the objects in the room, save the violin at the window, her eyes about the space felt like an intimate caress upon his person that caused him to shiver with shame and delight.
"How long have you been watching me?" she halfway demanded, her voice growing more spine by the second.
"Since the night you first moved in," he easily admitted.
"Why?" she demanded, her shoulders straightening. "Why me?"
"You interested me…" he was preparing to answer more fully, then giving a stiff shake of his head to correct himself, he asked, "Why are you still here, Christine? You were so eager to leave mere moments ago," he did not mean for the last several words to escape as a strangled rasp, but they did, and he watched them fill the space between them like a frightened, brittle serpentine creature poised to strike. For a fleeting moment, he wondered if she could see it too, the way those words expressed everything and nothing all the same, the way they formed in the air like an organism—though he knew it was unlikely. Throughout his existence he had not met another who experienced sound in quite the same peculiar fashion.
"My father…" she nervously, yet firmly, replied, "I want you to help him."
Ah, there it was, the source of her spontaneous bravery.
"I regret that is not possible," he tenderly replied. "I cannot extend his life."
Her face contorted with raw pain, but she shook her head.
"That's not what I am asking," she said.
"Please explain," he insisted, removing the edge in his voice to keep her at ease.
"I—oh this is insane," she rubbed her face between her flattened palms. "I can't believe any of this is real, I don't even know if you're the devil trying to seduce me. What else would you be? A vampire? A fae creature? I shouldn't even ask for your help."
He giggled— giggled! at the thought that he could be confused for a fairy—the vampire seemed plausible and, in some realms of argument, quite fitting. Yet it was the suggestion that he was a devil capable of seduction which truly sent him into fits—for a devil he may be—but a Don Juan he was certainly not.
She did not seem to see the humor in her remarks, however, for she stared at him like she was witnessing live carnage, fresh terror returning to her impossibly cornflower eyes.
Schooling his wild outburst, he rapidly sobered.
"I apologize, my dear. I merely found your suggestions amusing."
"Are you—"she looked down, and gently tried again, "Are you something wicked?"
He caught her eyes once more and offered his best imitation of a comforting smile, though he was sure it came off more as the rictus of a seven-day-old jack-o-lantern.
"I am happy to announce my time as a member of the wicked is long behind me," he smoothly replied. "But I do occasionally eat them for breakfast."
"I'm not sure how that is supposed to assure me," she nervously replied.
"My presence is not a danger to you or your father," he responded with a long exhale. "Even if it were my desire to bring you harm, there are greater forces in play that would keep me from such acts."
"I don't understand," her face was such a mask of confusion it would have been endearing under different circumstances. Everything about her was adorable and he could scarcely believe she was still here in this little hole speaking to him.
"I don't fully understand it all myself, Christine," he easily replied. "Now, no more probing. I am not willing to offer more details of my true nature."
"Okay," she relented, her shoulders sagging beneath an invisible weight, "But, please, help my father."
"As I said, I have no abilities to heal—"
"That's not what he needs," she interrupted. "The doctor thinks this surgery may save him. What he needs is hope."
"Hope," he echoed, his eyes narrowing with doubt.
"He's heard your music, and he thinks he's been visited by an angel," she sadly explained,
"He thinks your music is divine inspiration for a great composition. I didn't believe him until I heard it myself—it's unlike anything I've ever heard."
"You wish me to visit him in the guise of an angel and give my music for his own?" he cocked a hairless brow with gentle seriousness.
"He would never publish it," she insisted, "But he needs something to cling to. Please…" her voice thickened with the onset of tears, "I can't watch his mind fall apart anymore."
Here it was, he thought, a tiny gap by which he could wriggle into her life, a miraculous opening that had not previously existed even in his dreams—a little hope of his own.
"Very well," he agreed with a faint nod of his head, "On one condition," he added.
The uncertainty he found in her expression felt like a step back, but he was committed to obtaining this one thing.
"What—" she quietly faltered.
"I only request your presence on occasion."
"Why?" she stiffened, brows lowering in concern.
"Nothing sinister, I assure you," he folded his arms about his rail-thin chest, suddenly aware of the shameful state of his attire. "I only wish for your company."
"I understand that…but why?" she asked.
"Because I'm lonely," he bittered snapped. At her responding flinch, he schooled his temper and continued, "I only request your tender companionship, in exchange I will give your father all the music he could possibly desire."
"You don't have friends," she stated—and oh—the horrendous appearance of pity toying at her features was more than he could stomach.
"No," he stiffly responded, turning away from that ugly look on her face as though it were a more atrocious crime of nature than his own.
The space remained quiet for several minutes. The thick, tangible silence of the room felt as suffocating as that mirrored torture chamber in which he once took such peacocked pride. How fitting that he should understand the caged agony of his own victims now, though it was not the blistering heat of a dozen kerosene lamps which caused him such ardent distress, but the withering display of her well-meaning pity and the consideration of her gentle denial. There was no iron hanging tree here to end his suffering, just the long, extended expanse of time to greet his failure, to seek something as fickle and unknowable as redemption.
"Okay," her honey voice cut through his existential thoughts with its daggered sweetness, causing him to freeze with an uncertain, yet disarming thrill. "I will…visit with you." She agreed with brief reluctance.
He turned and bowed his head like a humbled king acknowledging a mighty sacrifice.
"So it shall be," he breathed with mellow reverence, the beat of his long-dead heart quickening with a swell of slow elation.
"How will it work?" she asked. "How do I contact you?"
How indeed.
"I will make arrangements and I will come to you with those means," he replied, his feet carrying him to a slow pace as the plan spread before him in his mind's eye. "For the time being, I will visit with your father in his hospital room."
"Thank you," she whispered, and it was then he noticed how drawn her face had become.
"Now, go home, my dear, go to sleep" he sighed, "Your apartment ought to be habitable again."
"I don't think I'll ever sleep again," she anxiously replied, but she followed him anyway as he opened the door to his room. He opted not to use his gateway, deciding on a method which extended her closeness for a few more ephemeral moments.
No more words were exchanged as he guided her through the depressing hallway and down the dark flight of stairs. Outside, the city hummed with the dulled activity of early morning life, the hiss of cars and the distant sound of a police helicopter dominated the soundscape.
Her apartment door was locked with her keys inside and he had no choice at that point but to open a gateway and escort her through with the faint words of farewell.
She left him with nothing more than the exhausted nod of a woman whose entire life perception had just been irrevocably altered forever. Alternating between the star-spangled joy of her promised time and crippling self-loathing for inserting himself into her life, he stood on the other side of her apartment door wondering if he had just unintentionally started the process of destroying this poor girl. He felt entitled to her and undeserving in equal turn, but none of it made sense, none of it added up at all. It just felt like he was sinking into the mire of thing profound and unknowable, a clumsy mammoth in the tarpit of his own choices.
"I don't understand," he whispered into the void.
He had often heard it said that nothing good ever happens after 2am. He hoped, in this case, that wasn't true.
Reaching into his suitcoat pocket, he withdrew the scuffed silver pocket watch he had kept on his person for over a century. The exterior had slowly darked with the blue-green hue of tarnish, the ornate detailing rubbed down and dulled with age and use, but the inside inscription remained the same.
He opened it now to read the words he knew well; the Persian words had haunted him since the day Nadir had first gifted him the damn thing.
'A walk with a friend in the dark is better than a walk alone in the light.'
The pocket watch had been Erik's first gift, made more meaningful by the promise of the words inside, but he had rejected it all, offering some snide and inexcusable comment. Nadir's face had fallen into expectant grief while Erik had reveled in creating such dismay.
He wondered now; what Nadir would think if he were to possess the knowledge that Erik had meticulously kept up the watch for nearly three lifetimes of the moments of sheer panic that had surged through his decrepit system at times he had thought the cursed thing to be missing, and every time he had scoured the world for the right gears when it failed to keep time.
It was the second, and only other, possession to which he clung.
The hour was still early now, but he decided he would make a trip to the hospital to uphold his end of their agreement.
At the very least, it would act as a distraction to the chaos growing inside his own head.