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He wakes.
With the suddenness of a struck match, his eyes open to the blue tint of his bed's canopy.
The night presses cold and dark just beyond his front door, its presence as oppressive as Death. He is, as ever, painfully attuned to his surroundings. He can sense the person standing outside his home in the way a cat can sense a mouse within the walls.
Mere seconds later, the expected slip of paper slides into his house from beneath the door. He waits, because he does not need to see that paper to know what is written on it, but he does need a moment for his heart to still.
His dreams are as black and empty as the night, peaceful as the winter's eve, but he often snaps into wakefulness like this; with trembling, sweat-slicked palms and vision blurred by tears.
The strangest thing, he thinks, wiping them away. It's the strangest thing.
After a few minutes or seconds or hours, he swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands. The floorboards creak beneath his weight, which is also strange when he feels light as a feather.
It's always like this when he leaves his doctor's care. His oceans of weariness ebb into silence. His long days of work bleed into long nights of work, but the tension eases away with little more than the kiss of a needle at his nape.
His fingers skirt along the floor, picking up dust and then the paper. His eyes scan over the targets listed, committing the information to memory without seeing it.
Another busy night lies ahead. Pulling his cloak over his shoulders, he slips out through his door and merges with that cold dark.
He dances.
One-two, one-two; a waltz, a funeral procession. One-two, one-two; a conductor and the symphony. The heels of his boots on cobblestone are silent, stark in contrast to the cacophonous scramble of those he hunts.
One-two, one-two; an unwilling hand in his. One-two, one-two; a body sleek in motion and one frenetic in its twists.
A demon falls to the ground, and there it rests, still. He flays it open, pins it down so that the eye of God may roam at leisure and read the tome of its empty chest.
A bird perches upon his shoulder in the daylight. His sister laughs, reaching out with white-blue fingers to touch its feathers.
In the black-blue of night, he stitches a path toward salvation with glistening red thread. He unwinds each spool from unfeeling circuitry. From hundreds or dozens or thousands, he weaves miracles. The weight of pulp and wire is lighter than a sparrow's wing in his palm.
His mouth opens to recite words he knows so well that his ears no longer hear them. They offer comfort nonetheless, each a blanket, a prayer to Heaven, a hand extended.
The work that you do is sacred, he thinks in a voice that is his own.
When he breathes in too deeply, the winter cold cuts his lungs. It tastes like the dry air by the shore. His throat tightens in repulsion. He cannot discern why.
As the night marches onward, so too do his partners. A merchant with a bookstore he visited when building his personal library. A researcher famed for unique solutions to problems arising at the Institute. A fruit vendor who brought the best peaches and plums and only recently became a Reliver.
He dances with many demons, sending each off as kindly as he can. With patience, he whittles the names on his list down to nothing.
He walks.
With unburdened steps, he ghosts around the red that seep into gutters, cutting the thread before anyone can follow it to him. It would do no good were he to make a mess large enough to be traced.
This name is the last for tonight, his harvest complete. His gaze lifts skyward. Overhead, the silver moon hangs like a jewel, smudged and searing. With a squint, he tucks himself down a familiar alley barren of all torchlight. He moves like the ghost of a breath across windowpanes.
Even now, there is a rhythm to his unhurried pace.
One-two, one-two. There is an ache in his chest. Perhaps his medicine has begun to wear off.
One-two, one-two. The wetness seeping below the edge of his gloves is familiar enough to ignore.
From a doorway to his left, a voice calls his name. The door remains shut, the lights off. He only glances toward it briefly on his way past.
His body carries him into a familiar hospital and down its halls, hollowed out like a bloodless vein come nightfall. His sister's door is to the right. He passes with a fond glance, picturing her softly sleeping in the bed on the other side.
Two doors beyond it sits the room he sometimes calls his own when his health tumbles, and he passes by that, too. In a creaky corner of him, there is unease. There are flashes of scalpels, of emptying IV bags and winding tubes, of needles, of needles, of needles—
He looks away.
He walks past full rooms with closed doors and open rooms with open doors. He walks past the rooms that had been occupied not that long ago, whose patients either left through the lobby or on a gurney down an empty hall.
The entrance to that underground church and its adjoining lab is an unobtrusive one, easily missed by those who do not know what to look for. A small door, always locked, as nondescript as a closet.
He is there, in the darkness of the stairwell leading down to it. He is somewhere far away.
He sits.
The room is tidy. It smells of alcohol, copper, something sweet and stale. His doctor places a set of glass vials on the table and uncorks them by candlelight, drawing the liquid into a matching set of syringes. The curled end of the untrimmed wick crackles.
In the space where a memory of walking from the stairwell to this room should exist, there is nothing. The weighted calm seated in the heart of him refuses his panic or suspicion.
Pinpricks sweep across his skin, light as the rain flecking the windows above ground. Cold glass, cold touch, cold metal. Clinical hands, soft cotton, bright candle. Dark, dark night; the fingers of it spider in through cracks between stone and wood, chilling the room.
His gaze drifts to the candle's flickering light. He watches its color seep and spill across the table; a guardian keeping inky blackness at bay. It bubbles and bleeds at the edges, warm and distantly mournful like the call of a foghorn.
When his doctor places the last emptied syringe on its tray, his eyes fall upon a line of condensation gathering on a sickly green tank at the opposite end of the room. One needle is fine. Two needles are fine. Seeing too many needles together sets a deep pit of anxiety in his stomach for reasons that he cannot name, and not even his favorite medicine can ease it away.
A hand rests against his shoulder, firm and self-assured. It is the same, it is different entirely from the hand that reaches out to him in daylight. There is his doctor, and then there is the Minister.
A voice speaks to him from behind. He feels the shape of the words as they settle in his chest more than he hears them.
"Wash up before you leave."
A familiar set of instructions.
Abruptly, he becomes aware of sticky-tacky warmth on the exposed heels of his palms. Summer fruit ripe to bursting. Peaches, plums, honey, glue, bile. The scent of salt tickles his nose. His eyes water.
"Ah... Of course," he agrees. His voice lilts soft as spidersilk, light and drifting.
By contrast, his body is clumsy as he rises from the perch of his chair. The ghost he had been on the other side of that staircase feels lifetimes away with how heavy each limb is now.
Leaden legs carry him to the sink, where he peels away his gloves and rinses the leather clean. His hands, next. Absently, he watches the water run from red to pink to clear, thinking about which books he ought to bring for the lesson he must teach in four hours and twenty-three minutes. When he reaches for the hand towel, he looks up.
A man with flaxen hair and accusing eyes watches him from the mirror-glass behind the sink, but it is only his reflection.
He drifts.
Four hours and twenty-three minutes burn down in the way time tends to. He walks along the water's edge back to his home, unafraid of running into danger with God's protection granted to him.
His recollection is fragile glass, a river feeding into itself, a broken clock.
He recalls walking an angel home, and he is there, walking her home again. He smells the buttery warmth of the bakery he stops by when he tutors in Chedis' eastern end. The ocean's silver surface reflects his own figure back when he leans over the railing, and then he is at his favorite bench, and then he is near the road that leads to his parent's home, walking by it as an adult and running from it as a child. He is in one place and then another; an amusing trick to pass the time.
He avoids the alleys that contain his most recent work. He does not do it because all of the oozing red sickens him. He does not do it because he cannot bear to see their faces again. He certainly does not do it out of fear.
When he slips back in through his front door, he leaves the lights off, as always. The moonlight through the window still dyes everything in soft, asphyxiated blues. He hurries to his closet, fetching something more comfortable to change into after washing up.
He does not look into the mirror as he passes. The face with hypothermic lips and distant eyes is not one that comforts him in the dark.
With practiced ease, he disrobes in his bathroom so that the red on his clothing will not stain his lovely wooden floors. He showers, sprays down the pink-flecked walls after, and thinks to himself that he must buy fresh linens and more cleaning solution soon.
When he is washed and warm and tucked away beneath his blankets, he still drifts.
The pale colors overhead waver and tumble and turn. It is the ceiling. It is the white sand of the beach. It is the death of tide upon the shore.
It is the wall at the back of the classroom.
A child asks him for help solving a math problem. The sun outside dapples gold on swaths of white flowers, which sway like ribbons in the breeze. The sky sits blue against the outline of a Sister as she walks in front of the window, sliding it open to let spring in. A thick, metallic smell drifts along with it, weaving itself into the tapestries of the halls.
On his way to a desk, he pauses to rearrange a vase of roses sitting on the windowsill, their stems vibrant green, thorny, stiff with rigor mortis. He is in the orphanage. He is in the hospital. He is sweeping up a broken glass that he carelessly knocked from a bedside table.
In a field, he weaves daisies together and crowns his sister's fevered head with them.
He touches the flowers on a casket, each petal lily-soft against his fingertips. A man as tall as the sky stands beside him and berates him. The words melt before he can understand their shape. The flowers are warm; the casket is cold. When he looks away from it, it shifts as though alive and begins sinking into the wet soil.
To whom it belongs, he has no desire to discover.
He leaves.
From the field, he takes a step to the left, a step forward, and soon steps from flattened flowers into the gray stone of an alley. His foot catches on nothing and he briefly staggers. Disjointed, he thinks: ah, have I left myself behind?
A boy stands before him, pale face, pale hair, pale eyes. The cobblestone glistens like a ruby beneath the gauzy edges of the moon.
There are shapes like logs around the boy's feet. As he stares, they lose formlessness, gain features. Short hair, pink gloves, green eyes, black shoes; strangers in every way that matters, intimate acquaintances in the one way that matters more. A little voice whispers names in the back of his mind, and he hushes it, soothes it into silence.
Demons. They're only demons. A list of demons with icebright pupils, the phantom beat of circuitry still cruelly mimicking a human's heart even in death.
In the cradle of him, something squirms and writhes and scratches.
The boy crouches down, the edges of his night-black cloak soaking up the red all around him. His eyes are wide and miserable, and he covers his ears as if he alone can hear some horrible thing. His whispers carry a desperate desire to make amends. The red thread wound around him does not stitch a path to anything, but instead binds his ankles and wrists.
It is a mystery to him what this boy fears, what he grieves.
"Surely," a voice that is his own speaks from just beside his ear, "God would grant you His blessings for your good work."
The boy looks up at him as though he is the one who spoke. Through those distant eyes, he can see the sorrow burrowed down to the root of him, and it stuns him silent for a breath.
"Would He?" asks the boy, lips as still as a corpse.
"Surely," he repeats with his own mouth.
"Then why are you here again?"
The words settle into him like a leaf skirting against a lake's still surface. He is sure that he has never seen this place before. He is sure that he has seen it every night.
In this alley, he closes his eyes and has the faintest realization that his eyes are already closed where his body lies in rest. Downy blanket, soft bed, blue-white ceiling, blue-white lips. Something red, always.
He moves.
In only a few steps, he is close enough to kneel before the boy. The red liquid casts back a reflection of that high, hanging moon and the bodies around them, but neither he nor the boy appear in it.
It's the strangest thing.
His sleep is sometimes restless and sometimes fitful, attuned as he is to his surroundings even in the black of his most dormant states. In the throes of that mid-conscious twilight, his body reflects a bizarre tumult.
Sometimes he awakens with a start, seized by sharp panic. Sometimes he wakes with the salt of tears on his tongue. He can never remember what brought it about. Was he crying hours ago, or have nights already passed since? A hand raises; he touches his own dry cheek absently.
Here, within the portrait frame of his dreams, it is only the boy who cries.
Despite being so adept at handling children, he often feels he does not know how to console this child. It is as though every kind word, every reassurance, every encouragement sloughs off of him like rainwater.
—Ah. That's right. He has been here before. He can recall the shape of his disappointment when this child cried before him on his hands and knees, showing mercy and kindness for even the vilest of demons.
The memory of it is there, and then it is gone just as quickly. He reaches out to rest a gentle hand upon the boy's cloaked back.
"There isn't any need to cry."
His voice sounds more certain than comforting, soft at the edges like melting sheet-ice floating in the sea.
The boy does not heed the truth in his words and continues to cry all the same.
Tears drip from his cheeks and his hands, trailing down his wrists. They disappear into the fabric of his sleeve cuffs and roll like glass marbles onto the ground. When he reaches out and attempts to wipe them away, the boy shirks from him like a trapped deer.
They stay together like this, the two of them, as the moon dips down toward the horizon with no sun rising to replace it.
Minutes pass, or days, or not a sliver of time at all.
He wanders.
The world is devoid of light and brighter than it has ever been. The boy's hand rests within his own. He leads the sniffling child along, their feet hitting rain-sleek ground and leaving nothing but echoing footfalls behind. He does not know when this walk began. Perhaps just now. Perhaps from the start.
The alley warps around them in the seamless way that things change within the eye of one's dreamscape. It is raining, and then it is snowing. The air is cold, the wind biting and cruel. It reminds him of a last breath that he once heard, the air roughly catching on synthetic vocal chords and sounding so real that it made him vomit into the pools of red around him until his stomach was empty.
His foot sinks into something soft and he feels the heavy grit of sand. The smell of brine and rotting, moored sea creatures meet his nose soon after. An unpleasant bouquet. There is a fear tucked in the back of his ribs that if he lingers for too long, the barnacles dotted along the tideline will claim his flesh, too.
The child wipes at his eyes with the back of his hand.
"Where are we going?"
He does not know. These words exist only within his heart, but seem to be understood all the same. The child nods, slow and contemplative. You never do is the sensation, the unsaid-said sentiment in return.
Upon reaching the water's edge, he stops and stares out across it. The tide is powder-pink and foamy, reminding him of the froth that the dying sometimes cough up. When it laps against his bare feet, he draws away. The child remains in place, staring down at the water with a furrowed brow.
When he speaks again, it is with the air of someone who already knows the answer to their question.
"Where do they go when they die?"
"When they're purified," he corrects, ignoring the sound of some far-off creature crying from somewhere deep within the forests of himself.
"To Heaven, my dear. When you set a bird free, it takes flight, doesn't it? Do ships not sail away once the anchor keeping it in place is lifted? Of course they go to Heaven."
It is the strangest thing, the way that he speaks. It's strange how the words are his and they come from his mouth so easily, but feel as though they stem from much further back in his throat, in the echoing emptiness of his mind.
(Something is there, there is something else within him, and he is frightened for all of a passing heartbeat before calm claims him once more, quick as a falcon's talons. He will not look. He will never look. He cannot bear to.)
He and the child stand alone. The child regards him with such deep distrust, and it saddens him to see. He crouches down again so that they can be level with one another, and the pink seafoam stains the white fabric around his ankles.
"You'll see for yourself someday, I promise you that. It will be much easier to understand once you complete your mission and earn your welcome into Heaven."
His voice rings with the clarity of a church bell, gaze as hazy as the sea fog rolling in around them. From somewhere out in the now-obscured water, there is a deep, hollow groan, like some large structure buckling under enormous weight.
He reaches forward and pats the boy's head gently (one-two, one-two) and smiles.
"I won't," the boy replies. His small shape is quickly lost within the billows of mist, fog, smoke—rolls and rolls of it unwinding like skeins of wool around them. The air smells of salt and iron, resting wet against his cheeks.
The horizon drifts and dips and darkens. Lily, wine, amethyst. Black sky, white moon. Red in all the world's rubies and entrails and white, white teeth.
That small hand remains in his.
"There is no place in Heaven for a sinner like me."
He returns.
As his consciousness weaves itself back together, his eyes see and then recognize the pale blue of his canopy, the white of his curtains. His room.
It's still night. Judging by the cast of the shadows and the color of the light, he's certain that not more than an hour could have passed.
(Or perhaps a day, and he has merely woken up at the same time twenty-four hours later, and what will he do about his lesson if that is the case? A thought for another time.)
In the seconds-minutes-hours that it takes him to adjust to reality and register where and when he is, the contents of his mind have blinked out into nothingness like dying stars. His medicine keeps his pulse steady. The venomous teachings that he clings to erode away every unpleasantry that he cannot stomach, just as the ocean carves any shape it pleases out of even the strongest stone. He does not know this. He knows it all too well.
When his hand rises habitually to touch his cheek, it is dry. Despite that, his eyes sting, and his fingers find spots on his pillow like fading drops of rain when they drift across its surface.
Strange, strange.
Tonight, too, he turns away from every ghost that haunts his home and every accusing stare that he has ever known and forgotten. Guilt hangs like cobwebs in a room with a door that he locks and re-locks like a nightly ritual.
The weight of that intangible key hangs around his neck. He touches the soft hollow of his throat, immediately losing the thought that wonders if the life will be strangled from him by it someday.
The weight of that boy's small body sits against his side, light as air, heavy as the gallows. Where had he seen that face before? The familiarity of it lingers, but he can no longer picture the shape of his eyes, nose, mouth. Whose face is it? What is it that he's trying to recall, again? It is gone like a passing curiosity.
The weight of a halberd sits across his palm, taking him past the ocean's floor and down into the cradle of Hades like an anchor.
He pays no mind to the stiffened fingers clawing across that closed door, across the cage bars in his cellar, over funeral wood and through spilled wine. What a strange thing, indeed.
Turning onto his side, he settles into his soft comforter in a bed too large for him.
He sleeps.