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Weird s**t was going on and it was making Aleksy hells of jittery. When he felt this jittery, there was only one thing to do, and that was to go talk to Eve. She'd been in Ashdown for ages and ages, and she was something of a mentor to him besides; she was a good listener; it was a natural thing to do, to want to talk to her.

So anyway, he closed the shop early and turned up his collar to keep out the damp. It wasn't a long walk to equinox, but the fog was thick as hell, and he wasn't going to risk getting a chill even with his flu shot. He was glad to leave the spooky streets of Ashdown to step inside the tiny, warm tea shop. "Eve," he called. "Are you in? It's me."

Aleksy settled down in his usual chair gratefully. He knew better than to pet Clover without permission, but he did give the dog a small smile; it felt wrong to ignore such a vital part of Eve's life. Aleksy wrapped his hands around the cup, watching the tea he would never admit to liking color the water. It'd be so, so easy to be like, oh, I think my boyfriend wants to bone my sister, which was actually true and also very irritating, but it wasn't really a problem. "The fog is bothering me," he admitted, shoulders hunching in. "And... the disappearances, too. I know Detective Mercer, and... people keep... coming to talk to me about the disappearances, and the detective, and..."

He bit his lip. "Now's not a bad time, is it?"

Aleksy's sense of smell wasn't terribly acute--he'd smoked for a little while as a teenager and that wreaked havoc on your sense of taste and smell--but he still wrinkled his nose at Eve's licorice root. It smelled like licorice, which was not a good smell, but Eve liked it and Clover wanted attention anyway. He scuffed a hand over Clover's head, giving her a good scratching behind her ears as he sipped his chamomile tea.

"It is like being in a trap," said Aleksy. "I know I should tell the people asking where Mercer could be what I know. But if I tell them what I know, they'll at best arrest me for obstructing justice, though I'm not, and that's..." For a lot of reasons, he hoped he could avoid ever having to spend the night in County. "And this--" he used a very creative and unprintable Russian swear here "--comes into my shop and demands I tell him things that are personal! Things that won't help him! And he says, so you just want me to wait! And I say, yes! And his hand was..."

He trailed off, and finished lamely, "...his hand."

Aleksy shook his head. "It was that shooting, first," he said. "Then the disappearances. I asked about them..."

He gnawed his lip for a moment, glad his hands were occupied with Clover and her soft furry ears. "I am not crazy," he said, defensive. "I... don't know how to explain."

Aleksy nodded, and looked down at Clover, because it was one thing to sass off at Mercer and tell Mercer all the weird s**t that happened, and it was another thing entirely to tell someone that he actually really, really cared about what he knew. If Mercer thought he was crazy, so what? If Eve thought he was crazy, then... then Aleksy was out a very dear friend.

"I told him about the other ashdown," said Aleksy, "that it is real, and I think that is where the missing teenagers went."

Aleksy hunched in further on himself. Eve wasn't the type to mock him, so he didn't know why he felt judged, just that he did. "I don't believe," he said. "You don't believe in, in gravity, or entropy, or the Earth orbiting the sun, that doesn't make it, that doesn't make it real. It is, and so it is real."

He looked down at Clover, and then up at Eve through his bangs. "I have been there," he said. Matter-of-fact. "It is awful. I hope you never see it."

"I didn't do anything wrong," Aleksy insisted. His chest felt tight, not just from the binder, but like something inside him had got both hands around his lungs and wasn't going to let go. "I only... I told Mercer about the other place, and about his..."

This story was so ******** complicated. "About how he had to stop talking to the witch on the beach," he said. "She's changing him. But there's no one to see it but me, and why should he listen to me?"

"You're going to think I'm insane," said Aleksy, because even if Eve had never doubted him before, he'd always only tolerated her magic--it was an excellent sort of placebo, he always felt safer when wearing one of the little charms she gave him--and now he was claiming to have it. "But people change when they go to the other Ashdown, they become different, their faces aren't human anymore, and I can see how it changes them, I can..."