Sycamore opened his eyes.

Lillian was sitting before him, calm and collected. The faint grating of a spoon on the inside of a cup was the only sound in the room; she finished stirring her tea, tapped the spoon—once, twice—against, against the cup's rim before placing it gently beside the saucer on the desk.

For reasons best known to her—or perhaps for no reason at all but the result of some unconscious whim, some idea of neatness—Lilian had chosen to shift the chair so that it no longer sat centrally behind its desk, so that she sat directly before her place in the painting. From just behind her head stared eyes that looked exactly like hers, though they were made still, cold, and granular as sand flats by canvas.

"Again, I'm sorry for intruding." 'Again'? Had he said this before? He couldn't remember. Lillian's hair made a silky, susurrant sound over her blouse as she shook her head.

"It's hardly an intrusion if I invited you in, is it?"

"You didn't—" Desmond stopped himself, regarding the serene face with narrow disquiet. Admitting to his invasion was unlikely to go over smoothly, and yet how could she have so swiftly forgotten the circumstance of their being there? Over the remains of whatever had happened before stretched the reality crafted by Lillian's words, like gauze on an open wound; whatever had lain beneath it was indeterminate and hard to think about. "Well…thank you for being forgiving."

"It's no trouble." Lilian smiled, bright and blithe as a cold spring. Desmond pressed his lips together to prevent his thoughts from slipping out.

While Sycamore was not usually one to doubt his senses, he was nevertheless acutely aware that certain conditions within his mind meant that he was not infallible.

He could not for a moment believe that Nothing had happened, but the exact specifications of what could have filled the gap between arriving and appearing in the office were lost to him in all but the barest detail. He had entered a house and had wandered until discovered by the owner—beyond that he hadn't the faintest idea what had passed. Someone had stolen that part of his memory, leafing through his thoughts and carefully unpicking the thread that bound that page to the rest. Left behind, close to his spine, were fragmentary emotions, a racing heart, a thick strain of dread, a grimness he couldn't name or bear. And everything was worse for that glaring absence.

Something had happened. Something he had forgotten.

Movements ponderous with thought, Sycamore tapped his spoon against the rim of his own cup and was about to put it down when something in it caught his eye. His reflection…small and inverted, but his…why that should bother him he didn't quite know…

"Is there something you wished to discuss with me?" Lillian asked, from a distance away. Her warm voice held no significance and, even as he heard her, Desmond couldn't place meaning within the words. Something was wrong, very wrong.

He drew the spoon closer to his face. Warped within its depths, he hung from the ceiling, upside down, distorted face far too pale, far too worried.

There was a shadow behind him where a shadow should not be. It swirled and surged, drawing closer without any intervention until the portion that made up its head grew clear and took on the hazy likeness of a face—

Sycamore opened his eyes. Lillian was sitting before him, calm and collected. The faint grating of a spoon on the inside of a cup was the only sound in the room; she finished stirring her tea, tapped the spoon—once, twice—against, against the cup's rim before placing it gently beside the saucer on the desk. Sycamore drew a sharp breath, a sleepwalker waking, and placed his own spoon resolutely down. It made an ugly clatter against the wood.

His host smiled indulgently, but the expression faded before it filled her eyes, and the untouched remainder was sharp.

Gathering his thoughts with some difficulty, Sycamore thumbed through paper scraps for an hint of their original purpose. It did little good; there were tears and smudges where there should have been the neat, cohesive calligraphy of his ideas. Last night, and even on the walk up to the house that morning, he had all his thoughts set out like books, sensibly bound and filed for relevance and importance—now they were strewn about, as though some careless reader had slipped in without his notice and abandoned them in a hurry. Try as he might, it would take time to set to rights and he could not shake the sharp scent of fright from the pages. Descole lurked behind the shelves, seen only in the flash of a white mask in the gaps between the tops of books and the shelf and the heavy, underwater fluttering of his cloak as he moved. Vainly, Sycamore shouted to him, separated by the innumerable isles of his own mind, chasing the sound of footsteps he couldn't follow; if Descole had any answers, he kept them to himself.

The other's silence made dread sing all the keener in his blood.

"Where is your daughter?" It seemed a reasonable thing to say—he knew he had not seen Alice on his unauthorised trip through the halls. Very faintly, Sycamore felt he could still hear the echoes of the little rhyme she had been humming; in the house of upside down...

"Playing. Outside." Lillian did not stop smiling for the question, but perhaps there was a second of uneasiness in the answer, a wince or a snag, some aspect of her face not moving quickly enough to match the surety of the rest.

"In this fog?! She's liable to get lost." An instinct, long forgotten, drove him to his feet and to a window with unprecedented vigour. Everything outside was blank with fog and made red by the glass, a bloody tincture of diluted world. Though nothing but air lay on the other side of the glass, one got the feeling looking out that they were peering in to some vast aquarium, that the cloudy nothing was an immense quantity of water, whose pressure you could feel on your bones and from whose dark depths might swim, at any moment, an unknowable monstrosity. A chill like an ache ran through Sycamore's marrow; as unsafe as inside felt, perhaps outside was worse.

I sent Layton out in to this...

Ignorant to the sudden guilt colouring the increasingly frantic thoughts of her companion, Lillian laughed. It was not an entirely happy sound, though there was a note of pride in it.

"Oh hardly; I dare say she knows this old place better than I do. She's always been here." Desmond was a bare step above deaf to her, listening to the most passive, unavoidable degree—how could I have sent Layton out in to this? He felt the presence at the desk behind him notice his inattentiveness. "Professor Sycamore, I assure you, my Alice will be fine." The slightly confiding warmth of her cadence instructed him to look at her, which he did, though it felt like death to do so. Lillian had turned her head to watch him without the involvement of the rest of her; her face sat against a backdrop of shadows, discordant with her body, which seemed to have been abandoned having a tea party on its own, cup still raised halfway to where the mouth had been before it left. "It's better this way."

The shadows itched where they lay across his skin, their scratchy, taffeta weight intolerable, and they moved not with the sinuous glissade that was custom but like a hoard of flies operating under some piecemeal hive mind.

Behind Lillian, those shadows stretched and grew. His eyes followed compulsively upwards and they writhed and tangled in organic sprawls over the wall, stretching languorously towards the ceiling. Nothing in the room was moving, the shades were detached from all physicality. Just behind Lillian's head, the penumbra thickened from gauze to wool. It seemed to draw the disparate strands surrounding to its centre and began a process of weaving them together in to...something else. Something that achieved mammoth sized before it managed any distinction.

Lillian was talking again, but the shadow had things to tell him; he could hear the visceral scraping of its bones as it pulled itself into existence and leant forwards, the rustle like taffeta as shade became flesh. It looked like the outline of a person, and yet like nothing human at all.

Sycamore stared, his eyes feeling glassy and cold in his skull. The part of the shadow that common logic denoted to be the head hung like a moon above Lillian, it's shape firm but obliquely featureless—at least until it wasn't. Until it opened eyes made of moonlight and they spilled stars down features of an impossible face in a hundred tiny waterfalls. Radiance ran in tributaries to its chin, where it collected to a point and dripped like moisture from the tip of a stalactite into Lillian's hair. Either unaware or unconcerned, the woman's lips kept making conversational movements, no sound coming out.

The shadow opened its mouth. It's teeth were like pearls. It's throat was lined with velvet and led into an infinite emptiness—

Sycamore opened his eyes. Lillian was sitting before him, calm and collected. The faint grating of a spoon on the inside of a cup was the only sound in the room; she finished stirring her tea, tapped the spoon—once, twice—against the cup's rim before placing it gently beside the saucer on the desk. Sycamore's own spoon was laid neatly beside it, just out of his reach. He was seated back in his chair and the red window's curtain was closed.

Haven't we done this? Haven't we been here before?

Descole bridled, imperative feelings rolling through their shared body like a wave under a boat, lurching Sycamore about with just enough violence to be sickening. We are at risk here, he whispered and Sycamore, who had come to much the same conclusion himself, had nothing to say back.

There was no room in the situation to be uneasy, but it was simultaneously impossible to feel anything else. A certain insistent nervousness sat beneath his skin like a bubble of air, a singular gasp, and as it rolled from place to place within him it separated the upper layer of his skin from the slick viscera of muscle beneath, leaving him loose inside. There was his body, sat serenely in front of Lillian, whose inscrutable calm was glacial, and he was drifting—detached, disoriented, disassociated—somewhere just a step behind, a second out of synch with himself.

He didn't feel like himself. He didn't quite feel unlike himself either, however, and somehow that was worse.

The urge to stand and pace, to walk around until his thoughts colluded like wisps of candy floss about a stick, was almost overwhelming but so too was the conviction that, should he take his eyes from Lillian for even a moment, she would slip from this reality as a coin disappears into the lining of a jacket, and sit somewhere maddeningly beyond his reach. Or perhaps it was him who would slip, vanishing into some Other version of the house, his only company the rainstorm patter of feet moving unseen through unknown halls…

In a lapse of Sycamore's concentration, Descole stood, jerking their body about with all the grace of a marionette with tangled strings. Though he wrested command back within the next second, Desmond found himself without the will to return to their pantomime, found the facade of sitting at a desk pretending there was any good faith in the situation intolerable. Nonplussed, Lillian—still smiling, always smiling—raised an eyebrow in amused evaluation, before pressing her hands to the desk and rising herself. Whatever illusion they had entertained broke across her head like spiders silk, like the skin of the ocean dressed in foam, leaving them breathing clear air that was dangerous and smelt of the promises they would die for. Sycamore's tongue came unstuck.

"Why didn't you tell us about Holt receiving letters?" Whatever Lillian had been expecting him to say, that had clearly not been it. Like an actor whose partner has forgotten their lines on opening night, she struggled, her face perfectly set in its last expression, even as her eyes widened and narrowed in thought and her tongue traced useless words on the inside of her mouth. This state of indecision lasted only a few seconds before breaking with a silver bell laugh.

"Alice told you," Lillian murmured, her smile one of gentle understanding, with fond frustration at its edges, the sort you might encounter should a pet do something endearing but inconvenient like stealing your guest's shoes.

"It doesn't matter who told us." It didn't matter if he confirmed it for her—particularly as something in the depths of her eyes said she had always known in any case—but giving Lillian any more information felt like trusting weight to creaking boards. Sycamore's mind flickered back to their first encounter, to how compulsively easy it had been to talk to the woman facing him, and the thought seized him that, if he didn't keep his responses brief, she would reel the thoughts out of him until there was nothing left but a husk and a half-drunk cup of tea.

Unconcerned by his reticence, Lillian limply raised a shoulder, earnestness shrouding her.

"I didn't think it mattered." She gave the slightest frown, more pensive than discontent. "Erasmus would come home with hundreds of the wretched things, and they bothered me so I tried not to dwell on them—I guess they slipped my mind."

"You don't know who they came from? Why they were being sent?" Another rustle of hair shaken over blouse. The papery cadence of the reminder (and the hand that reached surreptitiously in to an empty jacket pocket) brought the unpalatable reminder that the letters had followed Layton to the village.

"Certainly not who they professed to come from—not our friends. I got quite angry with some of them before I realised that, it was a fine mess." Lillian laughed, but there were teeth in the sound, and her mouth, once relaxed from the smiling shape fell into more bitter contours before she could catch it; for a second, she looked desperately unhappy. "As for why, well, the ones I read were fanatically concerned with his paintings. He already spends so much time shut away to work, it...irked me to have strangers harassing us, encouraging him to leave me again."

Sycamore blinked, already uncertain if her face had changed at all.

"Whoever wrote the letters brought me here." He thought of the letters, the writing...something was still wrong there, very wrong—it was a wrongness that breathed down his neck whenever he stopped thinking about it. Some part of his mind already had the answer. "They falsified a response to the one Holt would have thought was from me. Somebody else annotated it with this address. I'd ask you if you recognised the handwriting but...well, Layton was supposed to be here..."

Had he been paying more attention, Sycamore might have noticed the flare of brightness in Lillian's eyes at the mention of handwriting. He might have noticed her opening her mouth, the pink point of her tongue covered in secrets...but at the mention of her the missing professor, that brightness—curiosity, irritation, hope, realisation, whatever it had been—died quietly. She met his gaze, when it returned, with no expression.

"It's quite strange, isn't it?"

"Strange?"

"Yes."

They stood in silence for a long moment; it stretched like fabric, physical but endlessly yielding, and yet enough to choke in. It lasted until Lilian sighed and clapped her hands together, her every joint cracking like breaking porcelain.

"I'm glad you came." She clasped long-fingered hands before her. "I had wanted to talk to you alone."

Sycamore—who was more than slightly preoccupied with the concern and surprising degree of guilt that came with abandoning his brother to the whims of some obscure fog—and Descole—who rejected the principle of being in the house at all—felt identical flickers of angry agitation at that announcement.

"Really? I'm quite certain anything you wished to say to me could have been said in front of Layton."

"No." Another rustle of paper hair. "It's…different. You're different, the two of you. You see, my Erasmus told me much of you—I know nothing of Professor Layton."

"And why is it so important to know me?" There was a slight bite to his voice.

The air in the room was somehow…stiller than it should be…like something lingering. Everything had a slightly crystallised quality, seeming more solid than usual, as though the air were not in fact air but a great hand pressing the scene flat and condensed. Perhaps it was not air at all. Perhaps it was liquid, so pure and temperate you didn't notice it until you tried to breath in, and then it was in your lungs and you were drowning without panic or complaint, and your body was suspended eternally in that ponderous quiet. Sycamore tried to turn his head and found that, while he could do so, he felt unaccountably cold after the fact, as though he had been ensconced within a bubble, had shattered it by moving, and opened himself up to the machinations of a place unknown to him.

"Why is it important?" And all pretence was dropped, and the quality of Knowing that had always lurked like a current beneath still water under the surface of Lillian's face overflowed and doused her features in a dreadful, prophetic intelligence. "Because ahead is a dark path filled with dark things—powerful things—and very soon you will walk among them. Because you're clever, and your cleverness makes you blind. My husband thought he was clever. My husband walked this road, and then the darkness swallowed him whole, and I am stuck with these shadows he left me!"

Sycamore stared at her, appalled.

"How much do you know?" Whatever voice spoke those words was less than a whisper. How could she know? How could anyone know? Desmond's heart stopped beating in his chest and he couldn't feel it starting again. His world stopped and teetered on its golden axis.

Separated from them by the bare distance of a mile lay the culmination of three years' work, lay a gateway to things unimaginable, lay magnificence, and peril, and a thousand miraculous horrors each grander than the last. There were those at Avenguard who, after working diligently on their scrap of the puzzle for three years and more, still didn't know the scope of the full picture, still didn't know the place of their cog in that great machine. His own brother did not know the nature of this project...how could Lillian know? The woman gave a hysterical little laugh in a voice that wasn't hers.

"Know? I know nothing. There's so much I wish I knew. Why—he never told me why!" With visible effort she wrested her frantic gabble back under control. "Maybe it's too late, maybe you've already found secrets you can't turn back from; but now that you're here it's inevitable." Horror turned to incomprehension in Sycamore's stare and, seeing it, Lillian paused. A sense passed between them, a shared comprehension that was shocking in its completeness as, at the exact same moment, they came to the equal realisation that they had each gravely misunderstood the other. Their secrets untangled and drifted apart, unaware as ships in the dark.

That, of course, is rather the problem with secrets; once you have one, guarded as close to your breast as you can manage, you cannot help but turn draconic eyes upon the world. Your secret is golden, you think, it is the most precious thing imaginable, and so surely others must covert a piece of it? They must be watching you, hearing the chainmail rustle of mysteries in your step, and in the moments that you aren't looking they must have succeeded in stealing a coin for themselves. Every innocuous word is a sly flash of another's stolen knowing, every misplaced gesture a threat or bribe. Paranoia makes for a dreadful advisor; but such is the nature of secrecy.

Desmond and Lillian stared at each other, knowing nothing of the other's secrets beyond that the other's mystery was vital. There was no time to repair the difference.

"Listen to me," Lillian whispered, her voice low and harried. "Don't—"

Abruptly, the woman broke off, her head snapping to the left with such swiftness it almost seemed as though she had been struck. Her face was frozen in its last expression, a mask abandoned. Only the glisten of her eyes remained to give life to that still body, and it was a frightened sort of life, a glassy sort of glisten; the stillness that subsumed her was not native to a person, thieved from hares and deer facing calamity, a consummate fear of something somehow greater than death.

Making a conscious effort to move as little as possible lest he incite something, Sycamore turned his eyes to the point of Lillian's fervent focus. But it was nothing; just another painting. In it, a crowd stared ever outwards, eyes glazed, faces slack, mouths agape. Another nonsensical painting in a house full of things that made no sense.

By the time he was turning back around, Lillian had abandoned her place behind the desk. Her closeness smelt of dry flowers, smoke, and glue.

"Would you bring her back?" She asked the question with the quiet fervour of a zealot speaking to a confident, and yet it meant nothing to him.

"What?" The question felt like a pebble, simple, grey, and textureless.

"Evangeline. If you could bring her back, would you?"

Everything stopped. A wound gaped open in the fabric of the world and all sound crumbled in to it. It kept opening, widening, deepening, the world falling into its depths, air unspooling like ribbon, stars drained and shattered, vanishing, vanishing, vanishing, until there was nothing left. There was nothing left.

"Don't you dare bring her into your madness." Desmond felt his mouth form the words, but was no longer there to hear them. Malice flooded him, hit and sudden as blood from a head wound. Spectres of things he couldn't put a name to writhed through his flesh in eddies set to tear him apart. Calm cost everything. The face of woman before him contorted until it no longer looked like itself, until it no longer looked human.

"My madness?! Mine?!" Lillian was screaming, hysterical as cracked china, but she had not raised her voice. "You have no idea—no idea!—what you're talking about!" Her hands found his shoulders, fingers hard and bone, and squeezed with all the force she couldn't convey otherwise. "What would you know of madness?!" With visible effort she wrested herself back under command. Too late—far too late. "It is better to be dead, so much kinder to leave them dead—"

"Get your hands off me!" Filled with a soundless, sourceless, heedless roar, Descole seized ahold of Lillian's wrist and twisted.

Mania pulsed in his blood, and mania didn't care for such pithy frailties as flesh and bone, or the constrictions of joint and gristle, or the pain of the living thing that flesh was attached to. That insane energy, more compelling, more irresistible than the swell of the sea, battered itself against the floodgates of his failing restraint with hurricane force, and swept all both its master and its victim up in its white-rapid rush and carried them away.

His intention was to take her arm and push her away. His only thought was that that idealised face and it's angry determination was too close, too real, too terribly vivid when he shut his eyes...

He didn't even realise that he'd broken her arm until he looked at it in conjunction with the rest of her.

Considered against his history, a broken arm was hardly the worst offence he had committed, nor was it the most grievous injury he had dealt out...and yet...all those others had the strength of intent, the certainty that the other person deserved it, the surety that he had meant to hurt them. He had not gripped her that hard—hard enough to hurt, perhaps, but not enough to break her… how easily she had broken! Like a frail china doll or a scarecrow with weathered wooden limbs.

Intention did not matter. Descole, and all the things he might have though about the situation, was drowned in a mind that became Sycamore's again, awash in cold shock, still protesting he had not gripped her that hard.

It would not be accurate to say that Sycamore felt horrified for that implied some agency of action on his part. Horror felt him, slipped matter-of-fact into his skin and solidified so that it was all that was left. It wasn't even fear so much as it was awe; awe of what he had unthinkingly done, awe at the impossibility.

Beneath the too-hot palm of his hand, barely contained within that melting flesh—the texture of which was decreasingly like flesh and rapidly becoming something so much softer, something purulent—little shards of bone needled, urging themselves through whatever lay within to break her skin and spill over the rug. Impelled by an obsession of nausea, he was helpless to consider the warmth of that sick, red slurry as, in his repelled imagination, it poured from the torn skin of her wrist, flowing and flowing until all her insides were reduced to a puddle on the floor and she lay in his arms, a snakeskin made of silk with a coldly peaceful face.

Mesmerised by disgust and a certain flavour of terror, Sycamore stared at Lillian, transfixed by her absolute dispassion. All the howling agony, all the ruin whose presence should have been invoked the second the bone snapped, all the realisation of the pains of the flesh, all that should have shown so transparently within her terrible beauty…it wasn't there. There was a touch of frustration to her mouth and that was the total sum of emotion she expressed in retaliation.

Nobody could have borne such grievous injury without screaming.

And... her face...

It was textured like… like nothing flesh had ever been textured. It was uneven, lumpish, but not in the manner of a cyst or cancer. Distortion cascaded through her. There was no variance in her skin tone, which was of a shade to indiscriminately pick out every imperfection, but showed no indication of the shape of her bones or the contours of her muscle, no matter the way she moved; it sat solidly upon her form, like plaster or wax if either of those things were soft. Very faintly, Sycamore could discern straight-edged ridges in the skin of her face, meeting and parting a angles perpendicular to each other. The hair that fell over her head was that of a doll's, shiny with plastic health. Her eyes were glassy, fathoming nothing, feeling nothing.

Calmly, Lillian took ahold of her own wrist and gave it a pragmatic twist. Above the grim, wet squelch of mobile gristle, the bones made a loathsome snapping sound as they came together again, and then her arm was arrow straight once more. The look she directed at him mixed apology, reassurance, and a touch of chagrin.

"No harm done."

Straight, as though it had never been otherwise.

For a long moment, Sycamore grappled with his mind, before it slipped from between his grasping hands and shattered softly. He fell to his knees, plucking helplessly at the shards of his reason, each one staining red as he picked it up and placed it in the shadow of the space it should have filled. The shape of his thoughts was bloody.

Gently, worriedly, Lillian touched his hand, moth-wing soft. Her fingers had no nails. The ring finger of her left hand still bore its wedding band, sunken in to the paste of he flesh—

Sycamore opened his eyes. Lillian was sitting before him, calm and collected. She finished stirring her tea, tapped the spoon—once, twice—against the cup's rim before placing it gently beside the saucer on the desk.

Her skin was smooth and radiant. Her hair was grey touched and a little disarrayed. Her eyes were soft with a warm understanding. She looked exactly as she did in the painting. Never had looking at a face made him feel more ill.

"What is this place?" Though his lips shaped the words, they did so unthinkingly and without sound; all the strength had drained from him, all the colour was gone from his thoughts, and the snappish, cautioning voice that sat at the base of his skull was silent. There was nothing left.

"Here?" For a moment—a singular moment—Lillian looked unspeakably sad. "Home. Would you like some more tea?"

Desmond couldn't shake his head. There were footsteps on the stairs. Lifeless as a doll, he sat and stared numbly up at Lilian's painted double as though it had been the one speaking to him. The faint grating of a spoon on the inside of a cup was the only sound in the room.