Chapter Text

Shortly following that announcement, the three had relocated to Holt's office, at Lilian's insistence, to reduce the chance of any discussion being overheard. By whom, it was not said. The strangeness of the house was beginning to settle in the professors minds, like sediment in a bottle, and Layton found that, if he avoided looking too closely at the dimensions of the walls, the study looked perfectly reasonable. The only feature of note was the large painting hung on the wall behind the desk, situated as such so that any visitors to the room would be greeted first and foremost by the staid, brush-stroke family it illustrated, their unblinking, immaculately portrayed eyes offering no condemnation and no reprieve.

"I sent a message to the police as soon as I realised he was no longer here, but that's the trouble with being in such a picturesque little place; we may as well not exist! I had thought you'd gotten here fast...but you're not police, and you come to tell me that there's been some sort of robbery? What? Why...why on earth would someone bother replicating his work if stealing it would be easier? Clearly they could have managed it; what you're proposing would have been harder!"

As had been the situation before, the brothers had to work around Lilian's command of the conversation. Her desire for an explanation, however, made this recount run smoother than their previous attempt, and they had almost completed it before she began to interject, confusion making strange curling shapes of her mouth and eyes.

"I hadn't expected to find him gone, of course. Erasmus had been away painting for several days, so I had seen very little of him—he keeps odd hours while he works, it's the very devil to live with. Usually though, I can hear him moving around, under the floorboards. His workroom is in the basement, you see. I...I'm actually not certain how to get down there anymore; the main entrance was bricked up...

Lilian hovered nearby as they picked through the office's contents. She had been immensely contrite over her inaccurate assumption, and even now something of an apology lurked in the centre of her eyes. Both realised that their reassurances of inoffence had been an ineffectual clemency; she was proud, and mistakes galled her until she deemed them properly repaired.

"Forgive me, I distract myself. I couldn't hear him, but I called down to check, and, on receiving no response, attempted to ring him; the phonelines extend down there, so I can reach him in the event of some emergency. Needless to say, there was no answering it. I could hear it ringing below me, but he never picked up. If anything had happened to him, I would have heard it...

"But nothing happened. He's not down there anymore, but he never came up, either. He's just...gone...

"Here's his study. If there were to be any indication of some...criminal involvement—any threats, and demands—he would have kept them here. Everything important is in this room. Please, feel free to look around; I put myself and my home at your disposal, gentlemen..."

Descole's first reaction to being given free reign of the room was to begin dismantling it, to dig whatever secrets it kept from the marrow of its bones. So far, Layton had not moved from his rapt contemplation of the painting behind the desk.

Unlike his brother, Layton had not had the pleasure of meeting their victim personally, face to face, but he had gathered up an impression that felt like cobweb in his hands. In his mind, he pinned shades and shapes into place, in the likeness of a man, and watched its faceless face to try and discern the expressions it might make, the things it might say, as he observed what Holt had left behind.

Paintings. A great many of them, in fact.

He had not met the man, but by now, he had met parts of him; fragments of Holt's soul were scattered through the house, strung proudly up on walls to watch newcomers with thousands of eyes, hundreds of faces. They were all of odd things, of the impossible or grotesque, but there was a tangibility to them that made them beautiful. In a million different ways, Holt had painted himself, and in an odd way, Layton felt as though he knew him better for it. This whole house was a temple, created with utter devotion, a monument over which he was a god.

Discerning the state of a man's psyche purely through that which he paints is not necessarily an accurate study, but is certainly a fascinating one.

The painting over the desk was no different, another altar; in it, Erasmus and his family waited, unblinking, Lilian seated, Alice on her lap, Holt himself standing with his arm about his wife's shoulders. It was the very essence of a model scene, and perhaps that's what felt wrong about it. Too neat to belong in this house of brilliant abstractions.

Or, perhaps, it was its stance, how it hung only slightly askew of the wall, not lying parallel as it should. The shadow on one side was lengthier than its counterpart. Any attempts to visually gauge just how much a difference it was were thwarted by the wall's waspish refusal to be looked at closely, but Layton's bones were certain of it.

Descole was inspecting the desk, though what he was subjecting it to may have been a tad too rigorous to classify as mere 'inspection'; with unsettlingly obvious experience, he picked through sheafs of paper, scanning through them, separating them into piles to be more thoroughly examined later, placing trinkets carefully on the floor so that they would not be so obtrusive. The desk, it seemed, was under intense interrogation, from a great, patient magpie with a fondness for paper instead of shine, and, with each carefully extracted draw and each riffled book, it's secrets were being dragged out.

It was moments like this, Layton thought, in which it was easiest to see the truth of his brother's duality; the motions were sure and certain, but so well suited to stealth that everything he did was silent as dust, silent as shadow. Were it not for the very palpable gutting of the furniture, he may well have been a ghost. A ghost with garnet eyes and a knife-cruel smile hidden at the corner of his mouth, who looked up in askance when Layton gently nudged him out of the way to get a better look at the dark seam between frame and wall.

At close quarters the issue was plain. Behind the painting, there was some silvery protrusion that prevented the frame from lying flush. After glancing at Lilian to be certain he had permission, Layton levered the picture off its hook and laid it gently to one side. What was revealed was about ten inches in both length and width, coloured the stubborn grey of storm clouds, a notable aberrance interred in dark-wood walls, absolutely atonal in the rest of the room.

It was a safe, with a dark, truculent keyhole that glared with the same contumacious attitude as the walls. Layton felt the air in the room change, a snake nest of secrecy hissing in the sudden daylight. It was entirely possible that the safe had an entirely innocuous reason to be—a vault for valuables, perhaps, or important documents—but scandal is a vicious limelight, and it casts all aspects of commonality into devious shapes.

If Holt had been sent anything that he would wish to hide, this is where it would be.

"Would you happen to have the key to this?"

"I'm sure there's one lying around somewhere...I don't come in here often enough to know where, though." Peculiarly, Lilian was looking at the safe with something not unlike trepidation, a faint gape of recognition flaring at one corner of her mouth. Then her expression set again, and Layton was left to wonder if he'd actually seen the change at all.

Descole, his disassembly paused, met Layton's eyes when the latter glanced over, his mouth curiously skewed in question. Layton hoped his nonverbal disapproval of any potentially illegal ideas was enough of a deterrent—he was absolutely certain that Descole knew a thousand different ways to break into a vault, and equally sure he didn't want a demonstration, but he could hardly announce either declaration in front of their host. In response, he received a noncommittal shrug and a faintly cynical smile, which would have to be good enough.

Their discoveries made and individual curiosities satisfied, the two began to return the room to rights. Rather, Layton replaced the painting on the wall and spent a few minutes in fastidious concentration ensuring that it was indeed straight, while Descole reconstituted the desk and its contents, a process that went much more swiftly than it should have, considering the absolute mess he'd made of it. By some quirk of memorisation—eidetic or otherwise—the restoration was perfect...bar a pile of papers left to one side, swept inconspicuously beneath a blotting pad.

If, when they turned to Lilian to thank her for allowing them such unrestrained access to the study, and followed her lead back down to the parlour, those papers were no longer under the blotting pad, nobody noticed.

"You said your name was Desmond? Desmond Sycamore?" Their host seemed to have recovered her sanguine, something for which Layton was thankful, for she seemed pleasant, and the idea of discomfiting her was an uncomfortable one. "My husband mentioned he knew you, told me many things..."

"All good things, I hope?" The man who was no longer Sycamore joked, with levity that Layton sensed he did not truly feel. "I confess, I've not spoken to him in...close to ten years now. He was better acquainted with my wife than myself."

"Yes, I know that." Perhaps it was simply the structuring of her face, or some abstract design of the lighting, but the knowing look on Lilian's face was more than a little eerie. There was sympathy in her eyes, but it wasn't normal compassion, but something older than her. As though she sensed his growing unease, Lilian looked away, directing her next words to the world outside the window, stained glass glazing her richly in garnet and amethyst. "My husband told me you were smart enough to do anything you put your mind to. Maybe fate brought you back now."

"Perhaps." Descole's smile was taut, his eyes fever bright and sharp. "I was sent a letter. Or, rather, a letter was pushed under the door to my rooms at the University, which is a rather unorthodox way of obtaining my attention. Your address was written on it, in a different hand to the rest of the letter."

Lillian turned to them so abruptly there almost seemed no transition between her poses. Any emotion was gone from her face, and without its smile, her brilliance was forbidding and uncanny.

"What do you mean? What letter?" Lilian rapped out, each word harsh and clipped short as though by scissors. Something stormy slipped behind her eyes and turned their deep richness black. If he were not so used to Sycamore's whiplash reversals between himself and his alter, Layton might have been disturbed; as it was, he remained composed enough to watch a thin sliver of interest pass through his brother's eyes, and see Lilian's face regain its briefly discarded humanity as she composed herself. "I'm sorry, Professor Sycamore, but I have no idea about any letters...or where that could have come from. Do you...do you think I should be concerned?

"I'll be frank, professors, I'm frightened for my husband's safety—terribly so...but I have my daughter to consider. If someone is—oh, I don't know—watching us, I can't stay if it's going to put her in harm's way. Whoever they are, they have my husband. I'll not let them take my Alice." Her voice was devoid of conflict in this regard, all ice-cold certainty. In her dark eyes, terrible possibilities aired out their wings in breathy flutters, prepared to take flight at the first dry-wood crackle of danger.

Slowly, the damning scarlet drained out of Descole's eyes.

Gently—kindly—Desmond touched the skin of her wrist, just enough to draw her attention, just enough to dim those speculative, warlike flames.

"I understand, Lilian. It won't come to that, I swear to you."

The light did not go out, but it obligingly paled back to mere wariness. Lilian nodded, a gesture that was curt and unapologetic, but not condemning, before quietly excusing herself to stand by the window. Whatever she watched in the garden below, she watched with wild, worried eyes.

Was this parenthood? This combination of unflinching pragmatism and hysteria? This instantaneous forfeit of every other concern, to close off from the world, to wrap about your child as a clam draws its shell upon its soft heart? It faintly disturbed Layton to realise he didn't recognise it.

"Would you mind us speaking to Alice?" His voice sounded odd in his ears, too loud in his whispering thoughts. "Children are rather good at noticing things adults have missed entirely." Desmond's eyes flicked to him, narrow in consternation, but, once again, Lilian seemed oblivious, caught up in whatever occurred in her mind, whatever caused her eyes to dart and stab at that placid world outside.

"Must be the difference in perspective; hard to hide things from people whose eyes are at hand level!" She laughed, but the sound was hard and brittle, and there were roving tensions at the corners of her mouth, unthinking gestures born of fear. "By all means. I just ask that you be gentle with her. She's taking this well—Erasmus often abandoned us to paint, sometimes for a full week, so she's used to him not being here—but I won't have you distressing her over it."

"Of course."

As they left, Desmond looked meaningfully at Layton, as he slid a folded wad of paper from his jacket pocket, concealing it immediately after. The meaning was clear—He had found something; it would be discussed later.

•~*~•

They found Alice in the garden, a lush and verdant place flooded with all manner of things thriving and green. There was an almost maze-like quality to its arrangements of trellises and hedges, their way guided by the sound of a childish voice humming rather than the haphazard weave of paving slabs. Fully risen, the day was radiant, with only a few ragged tatters of clouds to mar the burnished hue of the wide open sky; it gave the air a giddy, limitless sense, drunk on opportunity.

Without much fanfare, the hedges opened up into a small clearing, a central point about which they all clustered, outfitted with benches and entertained by a hexagonal pond, which seemed uncharacteristically orderly for such an eclectic gathering of effusive flora. At the fringes of this pond stood a tiny girl in a powder blue dress, it's hem dark and dour with wet, her shoes and stockings discarded and bunched on a bench where they seemed to watch and tut at the childish impropriety. Every so often, she would raise up a foot, then bring it crashing down into the water, diamond bright fragments flying in every direction. In the centre of the pond, at a point where its waters grew deep and dark, fat copper and nickel fish hovered in place, their lazy eyes unseeing, gaping the broad holes of their mouths to swallow the ripples.

"You ought to be careful you don't slip, young lady," Desmond scolded gently, some parental instinct breaking through over a decade of misuse. Layton swiftly disguised his fond laugh as a cough.

Alice was a diminutive creature, her mother in miniature, all black hair, bright eyes, and slightly strange air. There was, however, too much childishness imbued in both her face and manner for her to achieve that same gravitas as the elder she so closely resembled; her rounded features and soft mouth were full of genuine smiles, and her eyes—cornflower blue and startling—held a special sort of guilelessness that can only be found in the very young. Though it would have been difficult to say precisely how old she was (age in terms of appearance was a somewhat nebulous construct during certain phases of childhood, at least, for those who were not well acquainted with the child) what she was was self evident; a chestnut or conker, glossed all over with rich newness, protected in the invisible shell of her mother's devising, silk innards and thorny barbs turned outwards. She was protected, fiercely loved, and she had no knowledge of a world without either comfort.

Again she brought her foot down, and the surface of the pond shattered in to a crystalline arc, a glittering halo that fell into damp splotches at the feet of the interlopers.

"Mama says that," Alice hummed, high voice brightly indifferent to concerns. "But only the green bits are slippy, really." Then she stopped, seeming to realise something, turning her attention almost accusingly to these new curiosities. "You'renot mama."

"No, we're not. I'm—"

"You're daddy's friend!" Alice interrupted, comprehension dawning as suddenly and vividly as that morning's sunrise, excitement blossoming in her pupils. Shy around strangers, Lilian had said, and indeed, Layton had seen strains of such shyness initially, but clearly they no longer ranked amoungst strangers; she spoke as though their aquaintence were perfectly regular. "Have you come to bring him back? Is that why mama wanted to talk to you?" Another similarity between mother and child, Layton noted; both had a habit of derailing polite conversation to suit their own ends, the elder notably more genteel than the child.

"Yes." Desmond said it so simply, so factually, that disbelieving him was an impossibility. Even Layton, whose soul was unwittingly jaded by the last few years, beyond committing full belief to something so simple as well-meant promises, for a second trusted him fully. Only for second, though. "And now my brother and I need to ask you some things though, if you're willing to help us."

Alice watched them intently, her eyes completely focused, every inch of her set with immature solemnity. Evidently, the enormous severity of the situation had not escaped her and, far from shying from it, she was determined to draw up in earnest defence. Seldom few reach adulthood with the bravery they carry as children, courage born primarily from a misunderstanding of the world, and a false belief in one's own state of immortality; there's a brilliance to it, and seeing it so plainly displayed was both admirable and bittersweet.

Years would scrape it off, as sand scrapes moss from stone, but here it lay now, in all its idiot glory; Alice would win her father back with the aid of a painted sword, and all would be right with the world once more.

Something in the simple honesty of that optimism reminded Layton of Flora, and the association stung.

"What is it?"

"Do you know anything that your father would consider important? Anything he might have known that would be able to help us now? Was there anything odd happening before your father went away to paint?""

"Mmmmm," Alice looked between them, faintly mistrustful. "Mama says I can talk to you?" They both nodded and, though she narrowed her eyes at them with shrewdness that seemed inappropriate for her age, she capitulated. "Hmmmmm, ok. You can't tell her I said this! Mama thinks I didn't notice..."

With endearing officiousness, Alice stepped from the pond and walked over to one of the benches, where she sat like a witness at the stand, hands folded demurely in her lap, back ruler-straight, eyes fixed earnestly on her questioners. If one ignored the grass-stains on her skirts and her muddy soles, they might have thought a porcelain doll had come to testify in a great courtroom where the jury was made of roses, and the celestial judge the great sun hovering far above, in all its eminent dispassion.

"Daddy was getting letters sent to him," Alice began, hands abandoning her lap in order to better pantomime her story. "Lots of them. Nobody usually talks to us, but suddenly there were letters everywhere." Her little fingers scattered to illustrate the multitude. "And then daddy would read them, and mama would get upset. So he tried to hide them, but they were still coming, and when they couldn't get through the door, I'd find them in the flowerbeds, and in the graveyard, and in the trees outside my window. And mama was still sad, and angry, and whenever daddy tried to talk to her it wouldn't work, 'cause the letters made him happy.

"They argued." Alice shuffled a little, shoving her demonstrative hands under her thighs and kicking her legs in agitation. "Mama doesn't think I saw, but she was yelling, and it woke me up, so I went and sat on the stairs." She trailed off, her sudden despondency casting a pall over the otherwise sunny day.

"Did you hear what they were arguing about?" Layton asked gently. Usually, during a questioning, he would have a sense of a great tangle of yarn, one end in his hand, and every word from the witnesses would thread him through the tangle towards the conclusion. Not this time; Alice's sentences had no beginning and no end, a fluid stream of half-concepts, and Layton could feel some vital control of the situation slipping from his grasp.

"Only bits. I couldn't hear daddy, he was quiet. Mama wasn't—she was too angry to be quiet. She's always angry about the fire." A beat. An intake of breath not drawn by the lungs of any attending that unofficial interrogation, but by the air, and by the ground, by the soil and surplus of the garden; that little haven held Alice at its heart, and even it knew she hadn't meant to say that. She froze, first with guilt, then a sort of righteousness, a well-copied, transparently borrowed insistence that sent the ever tumbling pebble skittering further down the hill. "I can't tell you about the fire. Mama doesn't like it, and she says I have to be good right now, or the Lady will come after us."

Now this circumstance, on its own, would not have been catastrophic; far from it, in fact. Isolated, it was a witness confession, untainted by adult guile and the torrid convulsions of motive. What moved the moment to disaster was not the sudden reticence—for determination had made her talkative, and an answer, or some semblance, could likely be coaxed from her—but the events of the following seconds. A voice called out from the direction of the house—or at least, Layton assumed it to be the direction of the house; the warped paths of the hedges had mazed his sense of direction, somewhat—its tones sounding something like Lillian's, and Alice, obedient as a hound called to hunt, straightened and turned. The next moment, she was gone, a faint, childish strain of "Oh, goodbye! I hope you find him!" lingering in her wake.

But where had she gone? All around, he crazed pattern of hedgerows tremored with girlish laugher, and, somewhere, an imaginary path was mapped out by the slap of tiny, bare feet. But they hadn't seen her leave, and could not see her now, and had neither hope nor intention of following her. Lillian's thorny shell had closed, and the flash of opportunity was locked within.

Feeling somewhat lightheaded all of a sudden, Layton sat down on a bench, the neighbour to Alice's, the one where her shoes and socks still curled in judgemental heaps. Where he sat, his brother's shadow crossed over him, and a quick glance disclosed that Sycamore had become a statue, all sharp angles and sharper eyes, with the mind whirring industriously at its centre the sharpest of the whole affair. He had the strange thought that they had been falling down a well since arrival and had finally reached the bottom.

A breeze ruffled the leaves of the garden into a symphony that sounded like applause, like rain. On its back lay the echo of a child's voice, a lullaby that melted into half-words under the light of day.

In the house of upside down, cellar's top floor, attic's ground...

Nonsense. Sweet, substanceless nonsense, yet all Layton could think of was a house who's walls didn't want to be looked at. What had they learnt by coming here? Facts, if you could call them such, that made the whole business less sensible than it had been before. As good as nothing, if one were predisposed to despondency.

No. That wasn't quite true. They had learnt; Holt and his wife had been at a disagreement at the time of his disappearance from a basement gallery that was unreachable by any remaining, there were letters and a safe with no key, and a figurehead called The Lady. Altogether, Layton was beheld to a lurking suspicion that they had learnt more than somebody wanted them to...but, for the life of him, he couldn't have said who, or what precisely they worried would be derived from the ashes of other people's thoughts.

Physical similarity wasn't the only constant between the girl and her mother, Layton reflected; both were boxes of secrets, polished to a glisten, finely made, and tightly locked.