At the door of the inn, the professors parted ways. There, their experiences split down the middle.
Returning to the warmth and steadfast solidity of the inn was an experience far more welcome than anticipated, with the certainty of stone walls closing about Layton like clamshell, and the red light of fire blurring away anything that didn't fit. Firelight has a very different perception of reality to everything else and, when present, will obfuscate detail and twist whatever finds itself within reach into new and lively contortions. Under its eyes, everything lives, and so the pressure of knowing what was and was not real was relieved from Layton's mind; he could hardly be expected to know now.
By the curious virtues of shade and light, it was impossible to say how many patrons were frequenting the inn that evening, but voices called back and fourth from the corners in ripples of conversation that rose and fell like sea swell. Mouths without faces, all of them abundantly cheerful in the red-dark of that room, and Layton felt a dreamlike sense of belonging fall upon him as he approached the counter and the woman behind it.
The woman behind the counter watched his approach, though watched is perhaps too a loose description. Though Layton could feel the eyes, beetle-black and stern, he could not see them. Some deviant sculptor had taken great joy in the asymmetry of the innkeeper's face, in the abstract droop and drip of her sagging skin, folded wrinkles cascading from beneath the mop of iron grey curls and obliterating her every feature into its seamed mass. She was the welcoming face of the establishment, and yet she had no face.
Her intuition—for it must be called that; for it to be sight would be a miracle—was therefore uncanny, as she knew precisely who he was the second he stopped before her, turning her sightless head his way, some slight challenge to the slant of her mouth. That morning, they had briefly exchanged some terse pleasantries, and from this limited interaction Layton knew her name to be Agnes, and knew that the pursed pucker of her mouth meant disapproval.
"You shouldn't pry. You'll only find trouble," Agnes squawked without preamble, her voice rough and grating like a crow's. "I'll not tell you twice, boy, but you're both young, you've got lives ahead of you. Leave this place to its business. She'll get you otherwise. If I'd known you were coming here to snoop, I'd have sent you away first off."
Thoughtful, Layton rested his hands on the counter, standing before this unassuming gatekeeper, mulling over the first overt warning there had been. Everything had been strange and unwelcoming up to that point, certainly, but this was the only open threat he had heard all day. For all its direness, it was refreshing to receive confirmation.
"I'm afraid we cannot leave yet," Layton answered, keeping his voice as low as hers. Peripherally, he was aware that Sycamore had not joined him. "If it were not us investigating, then others would be here in our stead. I'm afraid there's no escaping that now." Agnes' mouth contracted along its creases until it disappeared into a singular pucker of immense disapproval. A sigh escaped some part of her, deep with something like exasperation. "What do you mean by 'she'?"
"You can't be persuaded to leave?" Agnes pressed, ignoring the question entirely, with more warning than hope in her voice. Mutely, Layton shook his head, and the old woman snorted in angry derision. "Fine. On your head be it, and never say I didn't tell you."
"I'll bear it in mind," Layton promised. Then, unwilling to be dissuaded: "'She' is The Lady, correct?" And at the invocation of her name, though Layton did not recognise it immediately, the world shifted and things began to tilt. The broad swathe of the innkeeper's mouth stretched in a grin of surprised glee.
"Ha! You're a wily one! It won't save you, and it doesn't stop you being a fool, but still..." The grin faded into something more speculative. There was reverence in the dripping face, dominated adoration, quiet and gentle awe. "Lady's the only one I could mean. She knows everything that happens down here. You'll not avoid her notice for long...it's likely you've already got her attention." In a way, she seemed rather sorry about that.
Suddenly, Layton was overtly conscious of where he stood in the room, aware of every minute detail, even those that were imperceptible; the grain of the floorboard beneath his shoes, the moth-wing flutter of shadow over his face as the lamplight danced, the red pulsing hearts of the people laughing in the corners. It was not a customary bout of self-awareness, but an invasive certainty that felt as though some omniscient mind had slipped behind his eyes, it's view of the bar and his place within it picture-book clear, all its immense awareness childishly simple to it. It lasted for only a moment, then he was back within himself, feeling displaced in his skin.
Layton swallowed. Superstition and paranoia were the enemy of logic and reason, and no matter how strange everything seemed to be, he had to hold those values paramount. No matter how much of this place crept into his thoughts.
"Who is she?"
"She's..." For a long moment, Agnes paused, smiling faintly, her sagging features rising, marquee banners of flesh. "She's beautiful. She's like looking at the sun. She's all the stars and the sky along with them. You'll never forget her."
"But you can't tell me what she looks like?" Already, Agnes was shaking her head, a seam of what seemed to be frustration at her brow.
"I don't have the words. The words haven't been made yet. She's lovelier than the words, by far."
The intermittent swells of conversation from the corners of the room, the heady, red warmth from the fire, Agnes' rasping raven voice, it was sweeping Layton away, a dark tide on a moonless night. All he could think of, the prevailing image within his mind, was a creature all the lovelier for its imperfections, like the armless statue of Venus. Hair streaked liberally with moonlight. A scar like a copper coin on the forehead. Feline eyes shadowed in shades of midnight blue. Though his mind instinctively rebuked the idea that such a figure could exist, he couldn't listen. Maybe it was the certainty Agnes spoke with. Maybe it was the image in his mind of standing before an opening door. Maybe it was the insidious warmth of the room, the sun setting on the reason of the waking world outside. Whatever it was, he could not discard the notion, for all that he wanted to, for all that it would be sensible.
It seemed time to try a different line of questioning, not because he believed Agnes had run out of things to say on the matter, or that he had run out of questions, but because to think on it any longer would be to dissolve his reason entirely.
"Can...can you tell me what happened to Holt?" Agnes' mouth gaped shapeless with confusion, and Layton elaborated. "He's gone. Would you happen to know why?"
"The founder? He's happy here. Always has been, and we're glad for it. This place wouldn't be the same without him."
"I see." Where was Sycamore? The absence of his brother at his side was growing, a hole in sand that the encroaching tide was running its tongue over, washing a little more away each time until it was a yawning dimple, oceans wide. "I've heard several people credit Holt with being 'the founder' now. Why is that, exactly?"
"Well, this old place wouldn't be the same without him." Agnes accompanied this with a rolling shrug, as though she thought these things should have been transparently obvious. "Seems only right. His wife is a sour one though. Never see her for very long, she's too lofty to spend much time down here with us. Doesn't let the child come here either. Shame that; it's got such pretty eyes." Layton felt his expression pull tight, though he couldn't quite tell what face he was making. "Oh don't worry yourself, it's only you who's in danger here; Lady has a soft spot for the child."
Layton's mind struggled through thick syrup, jamming puzzle pieces together in ill-fitting configurations, their edges jagged, spasms of interlocked coincidences. Nothing made sense, things were brightly coloured and incomprehensible. It was hot, too hot, thoughts were boiling off his mind, wet clouds of misted concepts, blurred conversations and images melding together. It was impossible to think beyond the recognition that he could not think. Where was Sycamore?
"Oh Connie! I told that awful girl to—" Agnes clenched her jaw, her jowls bunching tight, and somewhere in the depths of the inn glass shattered. The air took on an awful squeezing sensation. "She never listens! Don't know why I bother..."
Layton turned, though every muscle felt suffused with molasses, a thick heaviness that made movement a near unfathomable task. The room passed before him in a haze of abstract colour with streaks of light and shadow, as though it were something moving at speed, though all logic should dictate otherwise. The cat's cradle of other's lives, which before had been so natural, so unifying, bound about him like waterweed and were dragging him down to drown.
Sycamore met his gaze from across the room, from where he stood in the doorway to the cloakroom. The lights in his eyes were horrible flat discs, burning with such an immense and humourless enthusiasm they were frightening. Not insanity, for insanity suggests some personality, some life, which those eyes held none of. Just a hideous, purposeless vigour that held Layton fettered as the empty husk of his brother drew closer and whisked him away. Like water, his own sense of paranoia drained away; though he wasn't sure yet what was happening, he was thoroughly convinced it would be made infinitely worse if they both lost their heads.
Voices chased the professors up the stairs, as loud in the hallways as they had been in the bar, and only when the door to their quarters had been slammed behind them did that clamour cut off into instant nonexistence. The first breath in silence was the first breath of sweet Spring air, and for the first time in many minutes, the world slid obediently back on its axis, and everything was once more in place, just beads on an abacus.
Still, Layton felt that, before the door slammed and silenced them, he had heard one voice rise up above the others. It had sounded like Agnes. It had sounded like a key turning in a lock.
"You're on your own now, boy. Don't say I didn't try..."
•~*~•
The globe of the moon hung low on a branch of starlight, celestial fruit, ripe and full; drunk on cold, open air, they wondered if they could reach out, pull it down, bite it, feel silver juices running down their chin. Everything in the village was theirs, all that lived and breathed, why should the sweet moon not be too?
Later. They would eat the moon later. There was more to do in town this night.
They moved in a slippery way, swimming through the infinite shadows of the night, ruffling the still-lake waters until they curled about their silhouette in glassy peaks. Darkness parted for them, their body like scissor-points shearing through great swathes of velvet, silver skin unnaturally luminous. Through the village, this human star moved, and it moved with purpose. They were the thread that bound this world together, pulling it into new shapes as they moved.
They often wandered like this, in the cool quiet of dusk when there was nothing about to shatter the illusion of their isolation, when there were no eyes to claim them, when, for a few hours, they were all that remained in the world, God in a nocturnal Eden. Those times where they walked through the streets and across the moors under cloak of shade—radiance undiluted by ravenous eyes so starved for beauty they would tear them to shreds, when they could pull the stars down to nest as diamonds in their hair, alone and unburdened by company—those times were their favourite.
Maidenhull slept. It's heart beat with cat's footsteps, silent but for the metallic rustle of chained bracelets.
Their eyes saw everything, great wells of liquid light dripping down their face, watching the village with intense attendance, all thoughts open to them, every subtlety of the mind rendered bare and bleeding painlessly. But there were two dark spots in their domain now, and they could not see into them as they could see into everything else, and so they had departed their castle in curiosity.
Noiseless as dust, The Lady Of The House scaled the wall of the inn and peered in through the window of the Professor's room.
If they had possessed any curiosity regarding the mortal condition, The Lady would have been aware that her experience of the world was similar to no one else's, and indeed that they were not really looking at the world at all. But that is hardly of importance, for they were not especially interested in the precise details of humanity; the world existed to them in fiery coronas and a thousand glittering mosaics—they knew and cared for nothing else.
It was not a large room, but it was warm in all aspects, every flat surface cluttered with papers they couldn't read, the blankets on the bed quilted and lumpy, the candle light rosy where it lay on the faces of the occupants.
One of them was sat upon the bed, deeply invested in thought. The Lady couldn't read the expression on his face, for expressions were useless to them, but stared into the inkwells of his eyes with fascination; therein lay a thousand configurations of thought, mixing and reordering themselves in patterns they couldn't grasp, always changing before they had an opportunity to fully appreciate any of them.
It was like a bird made of sun; difficult to look at but fascinating.
They recognised the face of the second man. For years, his had been one of the many faces that had floated about them in the unadoring void of inky black they had called their world. Here it was, years after that captivity, made sharper and angrier by things unknown to them, but so intimately familiar that they could have gladly called him an acquaintance.
Gently, The Lady drummed her fingers upon the window sill. They had missed that face. They wondered if he would let them keep it.
"Do you...can you hear something?"
As one entity it seemed, the men looked towards the window, one apprehensive, the other with hawkish, almost violent, attention. But no matter the angle at which they looked, the only faces in the glass were their own ghostly impressions stamped translucently over the star-pitted sky.
"I can't see anything. Maybe it's just the wind?" They were coming closer. The Lady studied her acquaintance closely...
Maybe they wouldn't take the whole face; the eyes, like cut gemstones, would do.
That disparity The Lady had felt between them was clearer this close. Clinging strands of the strangeness that surrounded everything wreathed both their heads, The Lady's artifice binding tight, though it had succeeded in piercing neither. On the elder, along the line where the mask of his face was cracked in two, those tendrils were constantly engaged with an invisible enemy, lashing out against an endless barrage of suspicion and paranoia in order to keep him captive, like flags rippling in the constant shriek of a hurricane. The Lady was not winning, not quickly, and this would have impressed them if it were not for the case of the younger. Like rivulets of water over marble, the tendrils clung and slithered, dancing off some impenetrable barrier. The elder was resisting; the younger was untouchable.
It was incredible. It was admirable. It could not be tolerated.
A few more days—but no more. They would not be allowed to last.
The Lady watched the sinuous stretch of their smile reflected back in the glass like a second, crescent moon, hovering just between the two faces, one they knew like their own and another they would be sad to grow fond of. Ending the game would be an exquisite pity...
Eventually, the brother's suspicion waned and their attention left the window, though both continued to glance at it periodically throughout the night. At one point, the man they had called Sycamore looked straight into their eyes with such conviction The Lady was certain for a second he had seen them.
Still smiling, The Lady shook their head, offered their captives a blithe wave.
Something would have to be done, that was a certainty. But not tonight; there were other things to do this night.
The Lady left, taking the moon with them. Everything in the village was quiet, and nothing moved.
~END OF CHAPTER 2~