Chapter Text
"It's interesting how these things work out, isn't it Layton?" Sycamore mused, idly tapping his fingers where they lay on his folded arms, his attention somewhere far away from the cafe where the brothers sat. "I knew Holt before he became quite so acclaimed. He was a friend of my wife's from her university days—she was fascinated with old paintings, and architecture; I can't say how many times I lost her in one gallery or another. I could swear I spent hours of my life trying to find her again." He laughed, but it was a rather brittle sound and the considerate breeze whisked it away before it could linger and break.
Layton said nothing, for there was really nothing to be said. Just as Desmond could say nothing to alleviate the loss of Claire. Each would bear witness, before shutting the thoughts away once more, stone monoliths dedicated to the other's desolation.
"In any case, I...I cut contacts with pretty much everyone after..." Sycamore paused and swallowed, standing on the precipice, before his will failed and conversation meandered back to safer pastures. "Holt was one of those I ousted from my social repertoire. The knowledge is not much use, but an interesting coincidence."
"Quite," agreed Layton. "You can never count on when or how you will next see a person. For example, one of the robots from Flora's village—Stachenscarfen, I believe—insists on appearing wherever I go. Though I must admit, I have not seen him in some time; I suspect he followed Flora to the Americas."
For a moment, both professors sat in comfortable silence, feeling the cat's-cradle of other people's lives tangle about them. Being part of another person's world was inescapable, your own existence irremovably twined with a hundred others that could mesh together to the point where they seemed inseparable, or could diverge at a moment and never reconnect. Even those that live and die entirely alone will leave some impact, some trail for a stranger to find and wonder over. Everything had a history and, more importantly, everything has a future.
"How should we proceed?" Layton asked, after several minutes of this contemplation. Desmond hummed thoughtfully.
They had exited the museum after a further hour of investigation, having found nothing more prevalent to the case; all evidence pointed to something that was quite the opposite of a break in—with a path that went from the exhibition room to an alley entrance. Nobody in town had seen anything, and nothing has been taken. There were no fingerprints, no fibres torn from coats or gloves, no footprints. The museum had been robbed by ghosts, the paintings spirited away into thin air. In his own scornful way, Descole was rather impressed.
In fact, the only new information gleaned in that hour had been the discovery of paint smudges suspended in the puddles flooding the alley mouth; the thieves had evidently been somewhat incautious, a fact that drove the director back to her office with a bottle of wine before anyone could offer even an idea of reassurance.
Holt had proved to be beyond anybody's contacts. When the police, after many failed calls to the number the museum had contacted him through, thought to look up his place of residence, they found that his listed accommodation had burned down in an accident some two years prior and their records had not been updated. The artist's whereabouts were currently as mystical as that of his paintings.
"To be quite frank, Layton, I'm not certain there's anything much we can do," Sycamore sighed, finally turning his unfocused eyes from whatever vigil they had been keeping in a world beyond the cafe wall. Frustration had hardened into a diamond sharpness at his pupil, this early thwarting beginning to spur his somewhat dangerous sense of perseverance. "We won't be able to find out much without speaking directly to Holt, and we thus far have nothing to work from; it's truly bizarre... I can't think of anyone who would have reason to deface his work...and deface it so bizarrely at that. Why go through the effort of recreating paintings without their occupants?"
"I'm not certain of that myself," Layton concurred, a deliberating lilt to his voice. "If it's revenge of some form, it is the strangest I have ever seen—" Sycamore nodded with enthusiasm. "—And I have seen people go to quite extravagant lengths in the name of vengeance," he finished rather pointedly, wondering, afterwards, how it was possible for Sycamore to glare so mulishly at him without actually changing any aspect of his genial expression.
"Yes, well...your social circuits aren't entirely conventional, now are they?" Sycamore returned, the arched eyebrow not present, but fully evident in tone, only softening a little when Layton laughed. "We should attempt to contact associates of Holt, see if he had any enemies who would do this. Maybe there's some sort of ransom being demanded and this is a display of power..." Sycamore trailed off, the criminal aspects of his mind considering the minutia of a criminal enterprise and the place a stunt such as this would take. There were some conceivable circumstances, but he would need further information before committing to any of them. Several were patently absurd, and were only included on the basis that, if such did turn out to be the case, he had regrettably seen stranger.
"I suppose you would like us to return to the university?"
Sycamore paused. For all that his psyche prioritised logic, all the coldly rigid principles he held in high esteem, he had never quite succeeded in distancing himself from the thrall of emotion, not even those softer feelings, though he despised their frailty, the open wounds they left. In this regard, Layton was a splinter lodged firmly under his skin, a constant, nagging inspiration to at least attempt to be (for want of a different term) better. Of course, by this point in time, the other Professor was such a securely locked box, Layton's influence could do little more than worry the varnish, but for someone of such strident consistency, the difference was noted. Kindness was currency, to Sycamore, in respects to everyone but Layton.
He had nothing more he wanted here, but it would have taken a blind man to miss the wistful glances Layton had thrown about the town, and a few hours here would not be ruinous to his plans.
"So long as we return to the campus by nightfall, we shall be perfectly fine." Sycamore tilted his head to one side, the light in his eyes that of a far more hopeful, far more open man. "If there truly is nothing else to be gained from the museum, would you care to investigate the town with me?" Layton's smile was evening sunlight; soft, fond warmth.
"That would be lovely."
•~*~•
Night fell. Avenguard was luminescent in the dark, though the eyes of its windows winked out one by one as the boarding students rested; the great guard lights watched over them, remaining alert throughout the night, painting the gothic facade in perfect monochrome. Nothing moved behind the mullioned glass, not even in the rooms where people were still awake. Everything was utterly, unnaturally still. Something was going to happen, and even the wind was remaining respectfully quiet, the air itself anticipating whatever event seemed set to end the day.
If there had been some force observing the night, they might have found it curious that such particular reverence was being paid to what would otherwise be an inconsequential moment. Why so ordinary an occurrence as a man listening to a radio in the dead of night required even the stars to still. But there was no one observing—no force of either heaven or earth—and that suited Professor Sycamore just fine.
For the eighth time in ten minutes, he checked his watch and scorned time for its lacklustre pace. It drew out each second at a torturous speed, inching towards midnight with all the immediacy of syrup. But Sycamore could be patient, could be stubborn, and if tonight's wait came to a war of attrition on time, then so be it; the project had been a year in the making—it would keep a little longer.
With something that was too analytical to be fond, Desmond picked carefully through the binder set open on his desk, beside the radio that spat an endless slurry of white noise inter-sped with occasional comments from the ghosts of other stations. Earlier in the night, the radio had been tuned to a London broadcast, whose gloomy proclamations seemed to usher in the dark, invite it to sit with him in ponderous meditation. He had listened, with the gloomy attentiveness of a priest at a wake, and eventually it too faded, leaving him to wait in silence.
Waiting for this; it was three minutes to midnight.
Sycamore's office had an unnatural quality that should never be replicated by either intent or design, to such a degree that it seemed, at moments, to infect its inhabitant. The gaslights were unsettled and wore their bounty in rippling coronets, hoarded from a sea of shadows that seemed to have grown tired of their black uniformity; shadows in Sycamore's office were a medley of grey and grim shades, dried blood hues, dusky greens, greasy umbers. This calamity of lighting flickered occasionally across the Professor's face, drawing the eyes to cadaverous hollows, reducing his temples and cheeks to bone, and leeching from him every ounce of colour aside from that which resided in his eyes. Fixed on the radio now, as surely as they would be if a gaze were a thing to be nailed down, those eyes remained a deep and bloody red, no matter the fluctuation of the light.
It was two minutes to midnight.
Had he seen it, Layton would have recognised the breed of folder set open on the desk. In fact, visually, he would be very well acquainted with its entirety, from the incomprehensible label on the front to the compilation of equally indecipherable documents stored within. To Sycamore, it was far greater than that. It was the cumulation of a years worth of research, the product of many minds pitted against a common issue. Tonight was its conclusion, for better or for worse.
It was one minute to midnight.
It is a pity Layton isn't here. The thought was a brief, but familiar pang, pushed away with the ease of long practice and self-assurance that to do so isn't wrong. Layton was an enigma, Sycamore reminded himself firmly, and it would be impossible to tell in advance how he would take to such an enterprise as this.
Too many were involved, too much was at stake for its grand architect to jeopardise on human failings such as loneliness and love.
With all the fanfare of an apple falling from a tree, the clock abandoned its game and left to seek sport elsewhere. Midnight came with a dull 'click' like disapproving teeth.
Hand shaking, though it was so minutely perceptible you would have to touch him to realise, Sycamore turned the volume of the radio to its highest setting.
The second the hands of the clock gathered together and conspired to bring about next morning, the static had stopped dead, and given itself over to a void of quiet that was oceanic in proportion, with depth and magnitude that suggested that it was not simply a silencing of the speakers, but that it was broadcasting the absolute quiet of another room, many miles away.
Then began a sequence of no particular outward significance, noises like someone moving things around a desk. If it had not been for Sycamore's obvious tension as he noted down each instance with rigid attendance, one might have assumed it an error of some strange sort. Clicks and scrapes, each of a set delivered in quick succession, each set separated by five seconds of silence.
Click. Click. Click.
Click. Click. Scrape.
Scrape. Click. Scrape. Click.
Scrape. Click. Scrape. Click.
Click.
Click. Click. Click.
Click. Click. Click.
Then a crack like the snapping of a pencil. Then nothing. Of its own strange accord, the radio shut off, it's work for that night done.
What took under a minute to deliver had wrung irrevocable change from the world. Hands still trembling, now to a noticeable degree, Sycamore penned the final notes on the document, and filed it into the binder. There was a terrible energy building inside him, a hurricane of staticky indecision that demanded an outlet in anything, and it sent small, fluttery convulsions along his frame as he rose, prepared to do something—quite what, he wasn't sure.
Professor Lambent should be informed; Daniel West is his student after all. We must schedule more tests. A sample should be brought to the university so that we can observe it. We should withdraw from the site for now. No; we should extract the last of it from this vein, and then withdraw. No sense in leaving it half done...
I should tell—
Had he been shot dead, Sycamore could not have stopped his brisk, agitated stride more swiftly or completely.
There, on the aged floorboards, lay a letter, a good third of its surface still obscured by the door it had evidently been pushed under. Quite innocuously, the missive stared up at him, wax seal scratched and expectant, and Sycamore was struck briefly with the hazy realisation that the night had, in fact, been waiting for this.
There was very little to it. An unfussy envelope with no address containing a single letter, Neat and hand written—an oddity, as telegrams were swiftly becoming the norm for long distance communications—it appeared bizarrely aged, folded to the point of frailty, spotted with the years it had seen, mildew scented from its lengthy time interred within some musty desk.
There was a return address at the bottom—written in a different hand, in fresher ink—and Sycamore stared between that and the name of the sender, a growing sense of disquiet that verged on fright swelling firmly in his chest. The folder with all its essential documents was almost forgotten.
Dear Desmond,
I hope this letter finds you and dear Evangeline well. I thought it time to renew our correspondence—I feel rather foolish for abandoning it in the first place. Can't even remember why. It's very quiet out here, in this old house. Have you made any progress with your research? If I recall correctly, you were talking quite insistently about a garden last I saw you. I still say that it's a ridiculous notion that something organic could have survived so long—you can tell me it's crystal all you like! Did Evans find that painting she was looking for? Her collection is quite substantial, you should advise her to open a gallery.
I've missed this. I don't remember letter writing being so taxing. Isn't it odd that you have so many thoughts until it's time to put them to paper?
Ah, I do have something to tell you! I've been working on a new project. She's been in my head for years now; I can't remember a time without her. She's waiting.
She's beautiful, Desmoend, I can't stress that enough. Absolutely beautiful.
This will be my greatest achievement.
When you get this, give me a call—I'll enclose the number—and swing by the old workshop. Evangeline too!
It's been too long; I have so much to show you.
Your friend,
Erasmus. P. Holt.