Over the course of his career, Sycamore had seen a great many strange things, some disturbed, some wondrous. He had seen everything from the soured fruits of civilisations whose grand demise predated simple humanity by millennia, to the more modern, mania-driven innovations of his fellows. He had seen the convulsions in the red-hot heart of the world, the ruthless machinery placed at the earth's centre by gods unknown, and the point in space where the cold blueness of ozone met and meshed with the velvet skirts of space. He had listened, enraptured, to the jangling of the sequinned stars as they were ruffled by cosmic winds capable of razing a man's bones into whatever was less than dust. He had borne witness to things men didn't dare dream of.
About ten years ago, he had accepted that nothing would ever again frighten him, that all sensations of true horror had been scorched from his soul by the man he had always hoped to one day see again. Seven years after that came the loss of his sense of surprise at the world—after one has been killed and resurrected by antique mysticism, one tends to assume that there is nothing left.
Descole had been created bereft of all but the most necessary impressions of terror, a rudimentary scaffold to keep alive something that was not supposed to be and was never intended to remain as such. Extrapolating that, he had thought, with an idle vagueness, that he would never know those emotions that so stunned the rest.
He had been wrong. He had been so dreadfully wrong.
The mistake, he would theorise later in an ineffectual attempt to rationalise the experience, had been that he walked in anticipating a house. This wasn't a house. This was a dripping, melting fantasy cobbled together by the loosest impressions of walls, ceilings, and floors, with windows that looked out on to a hundred impossible sights.
Stumbling slightly, disoriented beyond words, Descole reached the doorway they had passed through only the day before, the one that, by all ordinance of logic, should have led to the parlour. Indeed, it seemed to; though it was now faceted as though on the other side of a broken mirror, and made up of a mosaic of a thousand, discordant colours like stained-glass windows, the parlour seemed exactly as he remembered it. But when he approached, it appeared to fold back in on itself, flattening itself out like a toad beneath a rock, all its wet edges glistening but without dimension.
Descole paused before the threshold. He reached out and, instead of meeting empty, inviting air, was met with the stern rejection of a wall; the room was a mosaic, a symphony of beads of coloured glass, small as grains of sand, glittery and granular beneath his palm. It was flat and unyielding, and the coldness it held spoke only of deeper stone, of layers of brick and mortar as endless and unfathomable as the dark. Tentatively, he knocked, fingers connecting with the panel that seemed to depict a blurred woman, and the sound struck with more solidity than he possessed in his own bones. The sound rippled through him and set off on its own journey through the rest of the house.
There was nothing on the other side.
It was not as though the room had been boarded up by a fresco dedicated to it—it was as though there had never been a room there to begin with.
And, all through the corridors, echoed the click and snap of what sounded like bare feet on floorboards.
With only stammering clarity Descole thought of Lovecraft's leviathans, creatures capable of unraveling the fine weave of a person's psyche and knitting it into unrecognisable shapes that drove others to tears. This was surely their residence, or else the dungeon where they hoarded their vast amassment of bedevilled souls.
Room after room, and nothing was normal. He came to a door, pressed his hand against its handle, and found that it was a painting, it's brushstrokes raised and textured like thorn. The few rooms that weren't made of pigment and glass were bare and dilapidated, quintessentially uninhabited, and Descole went from wall to wall feeling for canvas, a peculiar sense of dread filling him when he found only plaster.
He tripped up the stairs and found that the second floor was a painting in it's entirety.
There was only the loosest geography to the place, and very quickly he was lost. Corridors that should have been linear overlapped like shifting hands herding a small rodent between themselves. Each time he chanced a glance to one of the windows, the view it beheld was different; day, night, forests, icy plains, roiling oceans, burning cities, sunsets, and sunrise. A face, a figure getting closer—
Tap, tap, tap, went the creature, though the halls, unseen, like a heartbeat in veins.
He didn't want to see it again. It would kill him to see it again.
In the tenth room—was it the tenth? The world had lost its literacy, and moments were not laid out in long lines of cause to event, but skittered like thrown dice, a new configuration each time—amid the detritus of the floor, were long dusty-white stripes. It was testimony to the disquietude of the rest of the house that the sight of a skeleton roused no further fear, that they instead inspired a tepid sense of relief; something else had survived here, at least for a time.
Descole knelt. Tenderly, he slipped his hand under the curve of the skull, it's pale, half-moon grin, made of teeth like slick pearls, smiling up at him from beneath slitted nostrils and the pits where dark, clever eyes once sat. It was a grimly pretty thing, with elegant eyebrow arches and thin, high cheekbones, the bleached colour of fresh bone; a skeleton made of lily flesh, porous and bright. The skull lolled about under his guidance, the papery ligaments hidden within the spine crackling, the empty sockets of the eyes inquisitive. Descole felt overwhelmingly, despite the thing's lack of substantiating features, as though it were looking at him, eyebrows raised, asking 'what now?'
There was no answer to that.
With the same caution with which he had picked it up, Descole set the head back atop the chuckling cairn of its neck. As the bones rolled, the grey, biting scent of smoke curled into the air.
Tap, tap, tap, tap. The feet were so soft, so quiet that he sometimes wondered if he weren't hearing his own footsteps.
Like a puppet with its strings yanked, Descole stopped, without conscious will, without knowledge, at first, as to why he was stopping. Before him lay a long corridor, it's walls white and stretched-looking, windowless but curiously light, as though the wallpaper were woven of moonlight and the floorboards solid shafts of sun striped thin through wooded glades. It was so well lit that what was happening at its end was unmissable.
Like a bloom of ink diffusing slowly into water, a door was forming at the close of the corridor with the swiftness and regality of something making a grand entrance. It's solidity was disruptive, all dark-stained timber glistening like something alive and exposed, glossed as richly amber as the finest honey. Within seconds it stood there, with firm austerity, as though it had never not-existed.
The door swung coyly inwards, spilling the room inside out into the lightness of the corridor so that a corona of blackness stained the wall at the jamb with its tentacular shadows. From within, at knee height, unfurled a hand, like the most miserable of lotuses, withered and creased. It's skin was greying, tinted with plum tones towards the nails, which were themselves cracked and heavy like chips of quartz. It's palms were so thickly calloused they seemed formed of clay and there were crumbs of dirt in its every crease.
With heavy slowness the hand unfurled, beckoned him twitchily. Whatever spell the thing had woven was broken, the compulsion to follow shattered, the lingering tendrils of it brutally thrilling his nerves.
Descole turned—stopped. Once again he faced the door.
Wherever he turned, there it was before him, getting closer, closer, closer. It's darkness writhed greedily, reaching out for him, filling up the corners of his vision with a rushing blackness. Every time it drew nearer, the it gaped its mouth a little wider. All the light had turned hot-sugar gold and seemed to exist for the sole purpose of stroking its gilding fingertips over the barest outline of a face inside; the ridge of a cheek, the sunken curve of a temple, the greasy gleam of an amber eye smiling. The air smelled of laughter.
For the final time, Descole tried, in vain, to turn away. As it always would have been, the door was there, the hand no longer beckoning but outstretched in welcome.
Outside, the weary sun blinked its eye, shuttering watery light into drear smudges, before forcing the clouds to part and watching the colourless world and the things wandering aimlessly over planes that distance rendered flat. Sunlight so pale it was more white than gold streamed over things in a frothing river, dripping from branches and rooftops, running in cascades through windows, doorways, corridors. Searchingly, with cheerful but apathetic curiosity, light wandered through a house made of paper things and paper people, and shone inquisitively on a door where, either seconds or hours before, a man had stood.
Descole was gone.
•~*~•
The road along which Layton walked hovered amid the absolute whiteness like a pencil line dashed hastily across a blank page, with no destination adjoining either end, just a gentle, sketched gradient into nothing, as though someone had been called away before finishing the picture. It floated, attached to nothing but the occasional scrap of grass, blades tall, sparse, and perfectly placed to provide credence to the idea of an outside world.
As it had in Misthallery all those years ago, it struck him that there is a particular sense of isolation that is unique to walking alone and in silence through a dense fog. It is a thick kind of quiet, a newfound awareness of just how unsmiling the world is, how coldly the air presses against bare skin, how damply it sits on clothes. At the time, the isolation had presented a welcome moment, an age long, of meditative silence in which to contemplate the odd particulars of the case, his only informant the lyrical trickle of water.
Attempting to do the same here, however, resulted in no easy introspection but a sense of creeping disquietude that grew by the minute until nothing he turned his mind to would shake it. He felt that the copious fog had eddied it's way within his skull and now swirled thickly between his thoughts, obfuscating the bridges between them until he could no longer figure out how they connected...
Each step he took seemed muted, the silt swallowing sound. Layton walked without taking his eyes off the path ahead, half-afraid of what he would see if he did, to find that his footsteps weren't shadowing him as they had been made to, to find places he hadn't visited staring at him down the road.
More than any of those things, he felt that if he turned around he would be faced by a wandering legion of people he did not recognise but who knew him as closely as he did himself and that, in time, they would catch him up, he would walk among them, and inevitably come upon the sight of his own retreating back.
It was strange, slightly unpleasant, to walk alone after spending so long in his brother's company.
As though sensing his need for distraction, the village slipped slyly into existence, swelling like a dew drop at the end of the road. It fell with a splash; Layton stood in the centre, surrounded on all sides by pencil-sketch houses, half-finished, the background of an illustration. The sheer density of the mist had, in vampiric fashion, drowned the colours of things, and so The Professor's peripheral vision was made up entirely of greys.
It did not take Layton very long at all to make his way from the village mouth to the inn, for the route had been quick to become familiar. It looked...aberrantly solid, like something not made out of paper bricks, which would not be so very odd if that weren't what everything else appeared to be made from.
From within came a rush of voices that were a lot like raindrops in a storm—afforded no individual distinctions beyond the fact that they were many. They were engaged in some lively discourse of an undetermined manner and Layton felt the heat of the anxieties accumulated over his walk cool with the reassurance that came from the prospect of other people. All the comfort Descole's presence had offered with none of his unnaturalness.
The emptiness of the bar hit his hopeful anticipations like a breath of dour air, and all at once the cheerful clamour cut out, it's cobweb veneer punctured by the open door. Silence, and stillness, and a queer sort of desolation fell from the rafters like dust. Impossibly, the inn was utterly empty; even the shadows, which had last night seemed so vigorous in the dance of the lamp light, were dull as ash spectres.
"You? You're not supposed to be here."
Empty? No; no the room was not empty—there was a pale woman sat on one of the high stools in the corner of the bar. Spluttering churlishly on the table before this figure was a geriatric radio, made of dials and buttons of ambiguous function, with a long reach of wire stretching into the lustreless umbra of the roof.
But there had to be more people, he had been so certain of it; so many voices…where were their owners? Voices did not simply detach themselves from their origin and wander unfastened through the thin air, they did not reach the ear without some physical conveyance, the interference of teeth, and tongue, and mouth that must all belong to some body, so where were they? Where were the people and why could he no longer hear them?
One of the crackles resolved very briefly in to a mechanised voice that uttered half a phrase before lapsing back in to indistinction.
The implied lie was very clear to Layton. Carefully, he feigned belief, kept his face a smoothed mask of absolute neutrality.
Something had gone very wrong in Maidenhull.
"Excuse me madam, I don't suppose you could tell me where to find Mrs Holt? It's rather important I talk to her." He did not enquire as to the meaning of her initial statement—for once he had a preference for ignorance.
The woman widened her eyes in what seemed to be polite amusement. It was inordinately difficult to discern her precise expression; any actual feeling was eaten up by her powder-paleness. In many ways, though it was the oddest of comparisons, she looked like an elderly cat from some palatial estate; well cared for and aloof, but undeniably faded. Her hair was thin and so extremely white that it looked far sparser than it was, the eggshell curve of her skull stark within the sugar-frosted haze. From the sleeves of a matted, white fur coat protruded gnarled hands, more bone and vein than anything else, and they held a lit cigarette that, despite the smoke it produced, didn't seem to be burning down. Nothing about her was of real interest, but something about the sheer coldness emanating from her was arresting.
"Lilian? Not here, that's for certain, and if she's not here I'm afraid I wouldn't know where she would be." With thoughtful slowness she took a drag from her cigarette. "You know, you probably get as much out of her by not speaking to her as you would if you did. Not finding her mightn't be a loss."
"I beg your pardon?" The woman lifted one shoulder in an apathetic shrug.
"Everyone has secrets, Mr Professor." There was nothing accusatory about the woman's tone; she spoke as though she were telling him everyone had a face.
"I assure you, Lillian has been quite forthcoming," Layton told her, voice firm.
"She's not told you everything. I guarantee it. I know it. There are some things you just don't tell people, and our dear Lily is made out of them. She's not a liar, I suppose, just not someone who stands to gain a lot from being all that honest." Another drag of the cigarette. "You heard about the fights?"
"Yes." Throughout the conversation, The Professor had left his hand resting upon the door knob but he couldn't bring himself to turn it.
"Did Lillian tell you? About the fighting? About the letters? No. What has she told you, Professor?"
Against his will, Layton paused to consider it. What had they been told? Not simply by Lillian, but over all; what had they been told by letters, and circumstance, and strangers whose words were like sculptures of sand, that dissolved in his hands and scattered fragmentary thoughts over his notebooks.
Why hadn't Lillian told him about the letters? Layton thought back to their meeting; had there been something, in the wasteland wildness of Lillian's wet eyes, something hard and calculating and lightning bright, almost hidden by their reflections in her pupils? She had stood before them and defended her daughter with vehemence…and had spoken of her husband as one might speak of a fond stranger…
How far had their quarrels led them? What strange, wrathful tensions lurked under the pretty mask?
The longer he thought on the matter, the more the image he held of Lillian warped from woman made garrulous with fear to something shrewder, more calculated. To something potentially dangerous.
Something moved out of the corner of his eye, and Layton's thoughts snapped attentively to the present; the woman at the bar was smiling. The exposed inside of her mouth were coloured an ugly sanguine.
"...Thank you for your assistance," Layton excused himself. Through the crack he opened in the door, the fog came meandering through; tendrils curled about The Professor—about his legs, his chest, his head—seeking to pull him back outside. "I apologise for interrupting."
"Oh, it's quite alright, Professor," assured the woman. Her ghostly countenance had fused with the mist as the room was eaten up around her, leaving behind slanted, smirking grey eyes and a Cheshire Cat mouth. "Have a lovely day won't you?"
"And you, Miss...?"
"Constance Throckmorton, but please—" she smiled again, and her perfectly red lips were glossy as the innards of a wound. "—my friends call me Connie."
"Thank you for your assistance Miss Throckmorton."
The door shut between them. For all intents and purposes, the room ceased to exist.
(In the brief moments before it did, in the second before the latch clicked home, a ribbon of sound made its way through and was summarily crushed between the jamb:
"He wasn't supposed to bring anyone else, you know...")
Outside, the fog had not abated. If anything, it had worsened; he could now only see the faintest smudge of the shape of the house opposing. Feeling abstractly defensive, Layton tucked his hands into his jacket pockets, unwilling to let his limbs stray too far from him lest he somehow loose them. The mist was nothing like he had experienced previously; nothing like the suffocating tresses of coal-vapour, and chemical, and a thousand living souls heralding London, or the choked blanket of concrete heaviness that had covered his city after Clive Dove brought her to her knees, or the clean moss scent so endemic to Misthallery it seemed exhaled by the stones. This mist smelled of cold; not a cold of mint, nor a cold that had a texture to it like sleek ice. It was a cold like an absence, a hole in the world threw which a draft blew, and each breath drew a little more of it into him, replaced a little more of his flesh with softly sinking nothing.
The Professor blew out a deliberate breath and watched the fog billow around the negative space his life's intrusion made. He hadn't felt real since leaving his brother's watchful, wary gaze.
For a long moment, Layton stood there. The chill was lulling, soothing everything to a stillness like death. Never had there been less life to stone; serenity was crushing, had seeped into reality's immaculate braids and undone them, was combing out the careful strands in to something loose and formless. The little bit of ground Layton stood on was untethered from the whole, caught on someone's sleeve and separated from its vitality, it's sensibility. Layton stood still and wondered whether he would be able to move if he wanted to.
Noise. From the side. The muscles in his neck were thick with ice.
There were footsteps, harried, hasty, little clicks, sounding through the mists, and attached to them was a small shadow—a child's ghost—that was really just a minor fluctuation in the whiteness that had swallowed the world. It would pause, appear to glance about itself, before setting off again, it's every gesture furtive, and though it could simply be an innocent case of another soul lost in the fog, in his heart Layton knew it was not.
With a weary heaviness, The Professor knew he must set out after it, as the sun is condemned to chase to moon across the wide empty moors of the sky, tripping through scrubland clouds yet never catching up.
Unlike the chase between Descole and his unpleasant companion, there was no sense of toying with this pursuit, no monstrous, otherworldly joy; the figure slipped in and out of the world, eidolic as everything that day seemed bound to be, but the footsteps remained a solid constant no matter how far ahead their owner strayed. They were real—concretely real—and had Layton been in any way aware of his brother's plight he might have been grateful for that slim mercy.
Part of the greyness condensed, then resolved, quite suddenly into a redness from which the Laytonmobile, in all it's reassuring solidity, appeared. It wasn't grey. Everything else had been so, so grey. It looked like the only real thing left on earth after even bricks and glass had died. The vividity was so stark, so startling, that it took several minutes for it to fully register to Layton that whoever he had been following had stopped just in front of the car.
When he reached for them, it was with a bizarre understanding of the inevitability of what happened, a pre-acceptance of their melting into translucence and tearing on the breath of the mild-mannered wind. From where the shadow of a person had stood rolled a tiny skull, a child's skull with its twin smiles glittering unevenly and its empty eyes still round with a sad innocence. From the way it stared up at him he fatuously thought it wanted him to reach for it, but only made it halfway through the gesture before a gust of wind, peppery with laughter, seized the bones and bowled them away back towards the town-that-never-was.
There was a note pinned beneath the windscreen wipers. It's hand was untraceably familiar.
Dear Layton,
You may be disinclined to trust yourself to the judgements and advice offered by a mysterious note left by a stranger, and believe me when I tell you, if I could, I would be advising you in a more direct fashion. However, to do that would endanger us both. Suffice to say, we want the same thing, and I am here to help. You're not the first to come here, and you certainly wouldn't be the first to never leave.
By now you must be quite accustomed to our confusing little village. I've found that the messages it leaves us are best viewed from the other side. If things aren't adding up, try looking at them from another angle; after all, it it seems suspicious initially, there's probably good reason for it.
Be careful in the house. Nothing good ever came from that house.
Layton ran.
•~*~•
Within the room, there were shadows, and the shadows were like birds; they flittered hither and thither with a battering agitation and panicky swiftness that should not have been native to anything other than a living being. They had no apparent source—there was no singular source of light or flighty creature to cast a shade—and there was nothing moving that might explain the diaphanous flutters.
The room itself was unpleasingly average, though in the most unsettling of ways; there was no one element that made it an unpleasant place to reside, nor was there anything in it that was particularly uncommon—it was outfitted with the usual trappings of a cloakroom, with a mirror affixed to the far wall and railings running parallel all along the ceiling, generously bedecked with all manner of coats and blazers. Indeed, the only thing that might be considered out of place in any way was the simple chair sat, without ceremony, before the looking glass, staring solemnly at its inverted twin. It was, in fact, this very ubiquity of setting that would later make the memory so unbearable.
Adding to the restiveness was the unfortunate fact that neither Descole nor Desmond could allow each other complete control of the situation, resulting in a strobing consciousness, an understanding of events that was half-formed at best and overtured with desires and directives that were hazy and conflicted; an insistent fear for Layton, a dread for himself, something stubborn and angry, something twisted, snappish, and scared, a preoccupation with Avenguard's project nearby, a knife keen curiosity about the matters at hand. Everything within his mind was dark and ambivalent, like the turbulent waters of the sea, and the cold-air reality was something he surfaced to only occasionally.
All the world was a vast zoetrope turning at an enormous speed, populated with temporal things whose firm, tempering backbone had been ripped out. The floor jostled and bucked, a gear having come loose during one of its insane revolutions, and yet he felt no need to scrabble for purchase on its tilted plane, nor did the shoes abandon their racks, or the coats escape their hangers. It was chaos of the softest sort, unobtrusive enough that Sycamore would not notice it until it stopped. His full focus was on those thin slivers of World he could sense somewhere beyond the veil of himself, a place he knew was precarious and brightly coloured as fireworks.
He couldn't see the thing that had beckoned him in to the cupboard, nor could he see the door through which he had entered. Behind him had closed a curtain made of such dense velvet it's weight was immovable, it's elegant folds and beauteous drapery like carved marble. There would be no returning to the dreadful corridors, and for that he was obliquely thankful.
There was a smudge of some sort on the glass of the mirror, a greyishness no larger than a fingerprint.
Encumbered by increasing delirium, Sycamore swayed forwards and, as he did, the smudge warped and thickened in consistency. In the realm of the mirror, the coats leaned towards him in inquiry, the selection of hats set on the rack above rising up on the brows of emerging faces that grew clearer in distinction as he shamblingly progressed. The clarity of the glass was such that it seemed not to exist at all, seemed that there were simply two identical rooms facing each other.
Such an illusion would have persisted if not for this smudge; its opacity was that of something solid and, as it resolved, it began to take the guise of a figure, seated in the chair.
Suffusing the air was the chill and weight of the deep sea, and the small quarter of Sycamore's mind still active recognised that he felt like something drowned, something whose limbs were weighted by manacles of jewelled seaweed and jailed by dragging fathoms of water. Something compelled to move under the whims of a current it could neither resist nor understand.
The figure didn't initially look much like anything; it was small enough to be a child, but long-limbed and swathed in a cloak that occupied some unspecified place between grey and beige. With every advancement it seemed to grow, and indeed alter its entire disposition until it no longer looked to be pressed flat against the mirror but within it. After a time it had become something shaped like an adult.
There was no reflection of Sycamore in the mirror.
They remained there, a mere half foot apart, neither moving, neither appearing to breathe, pinned under each other's study like specimens crushed under the glassy glare of a microscope's lens for quite some time. Sycamore felt certain that, at this close distance, he should be able to see whatever face lay beneath the cowl, but all his searching found nothing—nothing but silky, sable dark, textureless and with only the drape and curve of the fabric surrounding it to suggest it hid something solid. Should the stranger have a head, it must surely be made out of shadow to be so entirely invisible. In regards to the rest of the garment, it bore just enough structure to allude to the idea of a body, the idea, not of shoulders, but of clavicle and scapula, the fabric pooling in the cavity of the pelvis then rising up along the ridges of femurs.
Whoever they were, they sat with perfect regality on that simple wooden chair. Their dowdy cloak was arrayed into a sort of sea around them, magnificent in its opulence if not in its form, covered in pieces of glimmer, as though doused in shards of glass. Their gloved hands were folded demurely upon their lap but there was an anticipatory tension in the stretch of the fabric.
Something moved down by the figure's feet...the creature, it's monstrous visage down-turned and rested upon the ugly, mortiferous hands that topped the bare bones on its arms, which were themselves folded one atop the other in an image of idle repose. Like everything else beyond the mirror, it held perfectly still.
Neither would ever be able to say what distracted them but, should a god have surveyed the scene in omnipresence it would have noted that his moment of disorientation co-occurred with Layton removing the note from the wipers, and it would have known that it was the being beyond the glass and not Sycamore that had been distracted.
Regardless of semantical blame, that moment of distraction—brief as it was—was all it took for two things to happen at once, for things to do precisely what they shouldn't, for things to move.
There were no bones in that outstretched hand, which is to say there was no indication that what the skin stretched over was the customary composition of phalanges, knuckle, and metacarpal. It's rigidity was instead maintained by wire-thin structures that crisscrossed like scaffolding, and tapered to talons instead of nails. They moved slowly but with mammoth portent through the glass of the mirror.
And the doors opened—one in the reflection and one that Sycamore could hear behind him that painted stripes of light across his back. A slice of face poked curiously through the gap. The drape of black curtain hung over her forehead and across her cheek like a swathe of velvet hair. He turned to her, and she looked no less strange inverted.
The coin of The Other Professor's consciousness ceased it's spinning and settled cleanly on Desmond, jolting him copper-cold into his body, Descole's verdigris sheen disappearing back into the depths of his head to fizz nervily about his spine.
"Professor Sycamore? I thought I could hear someone wandering around. Might I ask what you're doing in my cupboard?"
Lilian. Lilian, in all her uncanny glory. Lillian, whose skin exhaled mystique like a rose's heady perfume. Lillian, who was not supposed to be there.
"You...you weren't here before..." Perhaps it was some queer disorientation caused by so often switching between his minds, but Sycamore found himself feeling more than a little faint. "You weren't here..."
Lilian laughed, fond and bemused. Something about only seeing her face roused a very exact distrust in Sycamore the reason for which he couldn't place.
"Well, no—I don't tend to linger in cloakrooms, particularly not my own; it's not a terribly interesting place. Why don't we go elsewhere, and you can tell me why you're here?"
Why was he there? Reason had dissolved somewhere after climbing through the window, taken off at the door like muddy shoes so he wouldn't defile the labyrinthine corridors with the filth of rational though. Everything in his head was white noise shouted by a million voices in a hundred languages, newspaper fragments, article notes, every moment cited down to its last second; he was a library caught in a maelstrom. He couldn't bring himself to understand, let alone ask someone else to try.
"Can you see...? There's something in the mirror—a...a person in the mirror." Even as he said it he could taste the absurdity of it, and her disbelief prickled the back of his neck.
"Really?" The rest of Lilian followed her face into the room, each limb stained a different colour by the light from outside. Their reflections stood side by side, the chair empty between them, like the hollow of a question mark. "It's just us."
It was gone. The figure—it hadn't moved, but it was gone. So was the thing that had led him to the room in the first place. The ranks of people who had surveyed him from each side, they were gone too. All of it, the whole nightmarish phantasm, had vanished like a breath on glass ageing to transparency. Sycamore blinked and saw their spectres still on the inside of his eyelids. Lilian tilted her head...whatever she saw in the mirror caused her features to soften; Sycamore felt more than saw her hand curve over his shoulder, more command than coax.
"Nobody's there but us. Why don't we go sit down?"
After a person's death, the ones left behind are left to perform rituals, all the little rites and comfortless ceremonies that endeavour to inject meaning into the grim hole. Some create death casts, sculpted smiles and empty eyes and plaster pale skin, their expressions gentle and held forever in suspension. Peaceful in a way nothing else can be, thin masks over nothing, after all thought and emotion is reduced to smoke.
It was at that moment, following the wraith of a woman down the corridor, Desmond realised Lillian looked a lot like those masks.