The threshold led them into a hollow and dark hallway. The walls, like the ground beneath their feet, were composed of crumbling and rotted boards. This place was unlike any other passageway Ben had traversed before. It was as though they had entered an elongated, wooden box, rather than a hallway belonging to a building. The top of the makeshift walls were sporadicly lined with rusty candle sconces; concealed beneath a web of thick dust, the candles' minuscule wicks had nearly been burned to completion. They did nothing to light Ben and Adam's path.

Footsteps echoed through the passageway. A tell-tale series of boot soles thudding against the warped and worn floorboards. It was a sound that was neither created by father nor son. A resonance that Ben took as a sign to continue on, following the noise to wherever it could lead them.

Walking slightly behind him, Adam's hand still clutched Ben's own. His son showed no interest in letting go; he displayed no indication of compunction or indignance over having held it for so long. When Ben glanced back, meeting his son's eyes for the briefest of moments, he saw no hint of abashment or contempt; all he saw was fear. Adam was afraid; Ben could see it so clearly because he was afraid too.

"It's going to be okay," he said not knowing if the assurance was meant more for his son or himself. There was something deeply troublesome about this hallway, about the footsteps leading them through the darkness, about whatever it was the elders did not want them to see. He could not have shaken the fear that slowly overwhelmed him if he had wanted to. It was inevitable and incessant, seemingly embedding itself into the air their bodies demanded they breathe.

They had come too far to go back now; they couldn't have if they wanted to, Ben thought ruefully. The moment after they had stepped through it, the doorway which had transported them here had disappeared. Another senescent wall had taken its place, leaving them no other choice but to take step after step, blindly following the path of one who was walking the hallway before them.

"It's going to be okay," Ben said again, this reiteration as impetuous as the first declaration.

"No, it's not," Adam said.

"It is. You just need to trust me."

"You know, there was a time when I would have trusted you with damn near anything and everything."

Something about the response did not sit right. Ben stopped abruptly, his concern etching deep lines into his face as he turned around and found Adam's demeanor had changed.

Adam stared at him, his eyes glowing in the darkness, wide hazel orbs which gleamed with a new emotion, something that was equally as atypical as panic. If walking through the door had shaken Ben's certainty and instilled within him a stifling amount of fear, then it seemed it had invited his son to sit at a different point of the emotional spectrum. Whatever amount of faith Adam had summoned and placed in his father had been painfully fleeting. He let go of Ben's hand, smoothed his palms over his soiled shirt, and then held them high to appraise the fresh blood which smeared them.

"There's blood on my hands," he said. He sounded a little too collected, a little too cool and calm as he stared at the once bothersome substance which no longer seemed to trouble him at all. He was decidedly apathetic, seemingly detached from the situation and himself. "This time it's my own, but it hasn't always been. The blood of my brother once stained my hands, and, in time, your blood will too."

"I don't believe that," Ben said quickly, anxiously.

Adam's eyes were piercing, glowing despite the darkness surrounding them, leading them both to fixate on the blood staining his hands. He looked between it and his father. "The truth you say you want to see, it won't show itself to you in the way you expect it to."

A chill began to worm its way into Ben's heart. "The truth we need to see. Adam, son, you need to see it, too."

"I already see it. In fact, I can see a lot of things. I can see all the things you wish to continue disbelieving, and I can hear others that you would not dare say aloud. You think your determination will save you, but it won't. You think your love will save me, but it can't. You think you're somehow better than the elders. You fault them for taking a sliver of truth and exploiting it, twisting it so it resembles something that will fit their own means, but you do the same thing. You cling to the slightest hint of hope, and you exploit it. You try to tell yourself that the past is representative of the future. You arm yourself with your memories of me, you cling to the moments when I was a good man, like people can't change. Like they can't be pushed to become something other than what they are."

"You are a good man."

"You tell yourself that this has all been a big misunderstanding. A mistake. You tell yourself that someone must have tricked me, that this place, those men, that woman, one of them or all of them together, hold me under some kind of spell. You tell yourself that if something bad happened, then it wasn't really my fault. It can't be, right? Your sons don't make mistakes, and they aren't allowed to change."

"That's not true."

"You're going to have to let go of your hope, you know. It'll be easier on you if you decide to just… change your mind, admit that the past is the past and now is now. You need to believe that there are things beyond any one man's control that can change things, that can change him. If you keep walking down this hallway, if you allow those footsteps you hear to guide you, then you're going to witness everything you don't want to see. You're going to know all that you don't want to know, and it's going to break you in ways you can't even imagine."

"That isn't reason enough to stop."

Adam nodded as though the response had been expected. "In that case, I want you to remember something. I want you to know that I tried to protect you from this. I did my best to guide you away from this place, but now that you're here, you can't go back. I can't go back either." He tilted his head, then lowered his hands and voice. "The footsteps you hear, who do you think they belong to?"

Ben shook his head dismissively. "I don't believe asking questions will serve us at this point."

"I don't believe anything will serve us at this point."

"The truth will."

Adam evaluated him silently. "You really believe that, don't you?" he asked. "You still think that in a place where nothing matters, the things you deem important still do. You think if you will it enough, if you just become privy to some hidden moment, everything will become clear; you'll figure out a way to fix what you perceive as broken. You think I'm not intelligent enough to understand the power keeping me here. That I am not clever enough to see through the men you yourself never trusted. You think all that, even though you know that between the two of us, I am not the one who has ever had difficulty seeing things as they really are. You say you want the truth, or that I need to see the truth, like it still means something. You cling to your request for clarity as though it will save me, but it won't. You don't want the truth. You want to be lied to. You want to be told a story where in the end everything will be all right because you're afraid to admit what you already know."

"I do want the truth."

"No, you don't. Not here. Not now. The first time you asked what happened to Joe and me, between Joe and me, you were requesting the truth. When the truth was shared with you by the elders, you did not want to hear it. You do not want to believe it, so you chose to spend your time asking unanswerable questions and grasping for lies. You heard the truth and then you saw it, and still, you are keeping yourself from believing it."

Ben took a step backwards, his feet moving beneath his body without clear instruction from his brain. Something was wrong here. Wrong with the dark hallway. Wrong with the feeling of dread which was embedding itself into his heart. Wrong with the footsteps which echoed relentlessly; the sound had become stagnant, neither fading nor intensifying. It was as though the person they belonged to had become stuck, forced to walk in place while father and son stood immobile.

"What are you trying to say?" Ben asked.

"Not what," Adam said. "Not why, not how, not when. It was always if and who. If and who are the key to everything. To all the things I wanted to say to you but wasn't allowed to. To all the things I wish I could hide from you forever but that you refuse to allow me to. I wanted you to be smarter than this, Pa. I really did. I wanted you to listen to the things I wasn't saying, I wanted you to trust my judgement more than your own, but you never were destined to be any good at that. You never trusted me. Not really, and not just here either. Even back home, there are occasions when you bend over backwards not to trust my decisions, or my intuition, which time has proven to be better than yours."

Ben's stomach turned dreadfully. Something was very wrong. With this conversation. With this place. With the way his son was looking at him and the way he was speaking. With the way his demeanor had so swiftly changed. Gone were Adam's uncertainty and fear. Gone was his desire to allow his father to lead him. Gone was his hand which Ben had held so tightly in his own as he led him through the doorway. It was Adam who had initiated the grip, and it was he who had dissolved it. With nothing to hold on to, Ben could not help wondering who had really been leading whom?

"It's just as much my fault as it is yours, I suppose," Adam continued. "After all, I am the one who always allows myself to bend so that you and I don't break. I'm the one who always caves, shrinking myself to fit into the perimeters you set for me."

"That's not true," Ben whispered.

"Okay," Adam scoffed. "You just tell yourself whatever you need to so that you can ignore the truth you don't want to acknowledge or see. I could never do that, you know. With all the things I learned from you, I never did master that one. I did, however, pick up another skill, something I learned not from you, but because of you. I learned how to pretend; I learned the ways in which I had to act in order to get what I wanted. All this time, you thought that my conviction, my boldness, and poise were strengths. I suppose, I viewed them as the same." He nodded at their surroundings. "It was this place that showed me the truth, and now it will show you the truth, too. The pure truth, unadulterated and unsullied by perception or point of view. You aren't ready to see it, and you will do everything you can to reject it when you do. The elders think I am rushing you; they believe bringing you in here is too much too soon. She thinks it's too little too late. As for me, I can't help wondering if you don't see it now, then when are you going to see it? I am your flesh, your blood. My strengths and weaknesses were sowed by you; they will be reaped by you, too. At the beginning, I didn't want any of this. I tried to keep you away from it. I tried to protect you from all that I knew you didn't want to see. You should have listened. You should have done what I told you to do, but you didn't because, even here, you're still you. You will always expect me to bend so that we don't break."

Expression darkening, Adam smiled, wet lips curling over clenched teeth.

"I can't bend anymore, Pa. Not here. Not now. No, here and now, I have already been broken. I can only pretend otherwise, and I suppose I'm through with that, too. You think you know things, but I know more things than you. You think I'm afraid because I believe I really hurt Joe. I'm not afraid because I know I hurt him. You say that whatever really happened to him occurred after I left the room, like I don't know what happened to him. Like I wasn't there when…" He paused, glanced at his hands, and smoothed his tongue over his bottom lip. "You know I left that room, but you don't know I went back to it. You don't know that Joe awoke while I was gone, that he was awake when I returned, and you don't know how much you don't want to see what happened after that, because She had found me by then, you know. She had really sunken her claws into me. The sad thing is, it really didn't take much for her to worm her way into my head. A scandalous telegraph spurning a trip to a place that shouldn't exist. To most people it doesn't. You don't see M Alice unless she wants you to; She doesn't show herself to just anyone."

"But she showed herself to you," Ben whispered sadly.

"Yes."

"She's fond of you. Are you fond of her, too?"

"Maybe. After all, She trusts me in a way that you never could."

"I don't think that's true."

"You don't want to think a lot of things are true. In a way, that made things easier. Harder too. You were easy to run around in circles, but it is damn hard for you to accept the things you don't want to."

"You said it was this place that would run circles around a man if he allowed it to."

"I said a lot of things you should have thought more about. I didn't say countless others that you should have just understood. During the time you've been here, I've led you to believe all sorts of things. I was the one who ran you in circles. Of course, I had help with that. It is so nice to have friends you can count on in a place like this."

"You don't trust those men. You don't trust the midwife."

"No," Adam said deeply. He stepped forward, closing the space between them. Shoulders and chin squared, he leaned over slightly, lowering his voice to whisper forebodingly in his father's ear. "I don't trust you. The funny thing is, that out there, when I was begging you not to walk through this door, you thought that I did. You thought you were the one who needed to convince me to trust you so you could lead me. You didn't think for even a second that it was me who was pretending so that I could lead you. If you weren't such a goddamn fool, then you would have stopped trusting me the moment you saw her spread your blood on my lips. Don't you understand, don't you see?"

Ben shook his head, desperate for his son to stop speaking, for he himself to find the proper words to say. He didn't want to believe what he was hearing. He didn't want to think his son was capable of instilling within him so much genuine fear. He took a step backwards, then another, and then another. He watched in horror as the blood matting Adam's shirt disappeared, leaving the material unstained and dry. His heartbeat thudded in his chest, the pounding reverberating in his ears, forming a maddening chorus with the phantom footsteps. He watched the sporadic scratches which had marred his son's forearms and hands—the scrapes and bruises which had marked Adam's body since his father had first seen him sitting in the lonely jail cell—inexplicably vanished. Back then, they had served as evidence of a vicious fight. Now, Ben did not want to think about the terrible truth their miraculous absence declared.

"You said you weren't like her," Ben whispered, his voice thickened by emotion he could not repress. "You said that she hadn't made you like her."

"I'm not like her. I am much, much worse."

"No…that can't be true." Ben shook his head violently. His heart couldn't handle the admission; he simply could not accept it. "Please, Adam, it isn't true. You're confused. This place has confused you. I think…" He turned his desperate gaze upon their surroundings. "I think it's trying to confuse me too."

Taking a step back, Adam expelled a deep, exasperated sigh. "No," he said, his quickly dwindling patience made obvious by his tone of voice and darkening expression. "It hasn't. It's made everything explicit and clear…"

"This isn't real."

"…This is a place where nothing matters…"

"This can't be real."

"…Not your previous perception of me, not your desires, hopes, or fears. None of it matters."

"You simply cannot be like her."

"You should have trusted me. You should have listened to Joe. You should have looked at him, then should have looked at me in that jail cell, and then you should have done what I told you to do. You should have left. You should have gone as far away from this place as you possibly could have. You wanted to enter the door. You wanted to be shown the truth. This is the truth. It didn't have to be like this. You didn't have to come in here. You could have held on to the man you still thought I was for the rest of your life if you would have left the doorway alone. You could have trusted me."

"This absolutely cannot be happening."

But as the midwife approached them, appearing from seemingly nowhere to take up residence in the space where the door which had allowed them to enter the hallway had once stood, Ben knew that it was. "Oh, Adam," he whispered breathlessly, his wide eyes filled with unshed tears. "If you're like her what does this mean for you?"

"Or you?" the midwife asked simply. Standing next to Adam, she took his hand in her own, her black eyes gleaming fiendishly. "It means he won't save you. He can't. His loyalties have shifted; the vow he made to me supersedes any he has ever made to you, or anyone else. He can't feel love for you. He can't feel anything you want him to. Not regret, guilt, pain, or even fear. But I can make him feel anything. I like him best when he's angry; his fury pleases me in ways you can't begin to imagine, and he will do anything in his power to please me. Your youngest son's injuries are a testament to that, as are your own. He hit you once; I'm sure, given time, he'll hit you again. He'll do anything I tell him to do."

"I don't believe that," Ben whispered.

"No, you don't want to believe it," the midwife corrected. "You've seen and you know, but you still struggle to believe." She lifted her free hand, indicating at the dark hallway with a slender index finger. "And that is why you must continue the path you've begun. You must follow where your son's footsteps will lead you. Then you will know how all this came to be. You will see exactly what your son has become."

Ben evaluated the darkened corridor numbly. The footsteps continued on, their incessant stomping ricocheting off the walls, making the place where he stood feel much smaller than it was. Or maybe the hallway had always been this small. This dark. Maybe his hope, his faith in Adam had made the surroundings feel better lit and wider, easier to traverse somehow. Now it felt narrow, small, and a little too dark.

Looking at his son—his beloved, beautiful, brilliant boy—Ben found that the gleam in Adam's eyes which he had previously struggled to properly identify and define had returned. It had always been a hint of something unholy—a glimpse of something much darker than Ben wanted to see or believe. Before he had fought to ignore it; now he could not. Adam's eyes were as dark and black as the midwife's. There was nothing familiar about them. No hint of understanding or kindness lurked in their once hazel depths. They were feral and venomous, unsettling and aberrant to stare into for an extended period of time.

Unable to bear looking at them any longer, Ben focused his attention on the midwife. "And if I don't continue?" he asked.

The midwife grinned, her lips curling over too-sharp teeth. "Trust me when I say, you don't want to know. Your son will do anything I command. He may have entered this place belonging to you, but he belongs to me now, and now you must force yourself to see that which you do not wish to know. It must be decided to whom you will belong, and after, if you still have questions about the truth, you must find a way to answer them yourself. You will continue through this corridor alone. You will see and you will hear until you are ready to believe."

"And if I refuse?" Ben asked.

"You cannot."

"But if I do?"

"There is no alternative in a place where nothing matters except the promises we make," Adam said resolutely. "You promised the elders you would have faith in the things that would be said. You promised to hear them. You made a sacred vow you cannot break. You must trust them. You must have faith that what is to happen is the only thing that can be done."

"You will continue and walk the path your son told you to avoid," the midwife said firmly. "And you will accept what I wish you to have." She glanced at Adam. "And that which I have taken from you."

"Step into the darkness," Adam ordered firmly, leaving Ben no alternative but to do what he was told. "You will see; you will know; and then you will finally believe."

TBC