word count: 4k
didn't proofread!!!! it's hell!!!!!!


You have to keep going back, was what Joy had said, and it had only been for the promise - no, that was too generous; only for the suggested hope - of an incorruptible heart that he had bothered.

Not for the first time he stood in the dreary grey of the pines and the drizzling rain, lifting his eyes to the formidable blankness of stone walls, and he considered that it must be easier for Joy to make time to visit the Garde - beautiful, peaceful, festive - than it would ever be for him to find pleasure in coming here.

His reluctance was validated almost as soon as he pulled aside the massive door that it had taken him almost a half hour to open the first time he was there - he had realized, at some point, that it was designed to be opened by two people simultaneously, which had struck him as strange - and was greeted immediately by a wail of rage which he had at least been half-braced for.

The door stood open and let in all the damp chill air, and he closed his eyes so that he would not see the awful contorting face behind that scream, which had seemed to have a thousand years of rage and isolation in it. Easy, too, for Joy to retreat to a place haunted only by a man that as far as he could tell almost never spoke unless it was to be useful to her, and who followed her around as docile as a dog when he was asked to, and who never seemed the least bit sad or angry or - well, anything that he could tell.

He opened his eyes again when the sound, at last, ended, and she was standing across the broad, entirely empty chamber and making a strange, frantic gesture with her hands, as if trying to pull something from the air. Watching her do it kindled a strange sensation in him, as if he ought to in some way be taking notes, but he pushed it aside and stood in trembling silence as her aggressive movements trailed off into desperate ones, and then into a single, wracking cry that was half a sob.

“Please,” he said at last, trying to sound gentle. How did you interact with even living children, let alone dead ones? He couldn’t draw a sheep on a sticker for a ghost, or at least he was sure that she wouldn’t care if he did. “Can you at least -”

And she was gone, at least without a scream this time, leaving him to assess his plans for the day and for Kay - not Maus - to put in his earbuds with shaking hands.

With a better idea of what to face he had come with better supplies. There was a sort of sensory memory attached to cracking open and shaking glowsticks, but it didn’t bring him any pleasure and the music was all wrong, anyway. Distancing himself from the oppressive silence helped shake the lurking terror of the place that he felt ridiculous for indulging. He regularly spent his evenings off traipsing around in dens of hantavirus and tetanus and angry people whose uneasy sleep he had interrupted. There was nothing to threaten him here - only a dead child who could not reach him to enact the violence she clearly willed on him - and yet he could feel, in the lulls of the music, the blood throbbing in his ears.

Marking the way he came with the glow sticks was more effective than the spray paint alone, too, in that he could see the hidden gaps of doorways from a distance rather than stumbling on - or past - each turning. He identified almost immediately a loop that might have gotten him stuck several times before, and had almost - but not quite - relaxed by the fifth or sixth time he stopped and stooped, again, over the graph paper he was carrying, only to discover with a numb sense of dismay that the uneven corridors had drawn his cartography into a strange and impossible corner.

Still, it was a start, and between the makeshift, broken map and the trail of glowsticks - and it was a shame they’d have burned themselves out by the time he got back in two weeks - he found his way back to the yawning chamber in which he’d started, and discovered, not to much surprise, that it was occupied.

To his surprise, she did not scream. She only looked at him with an expression of preternatural exhaustion, as if she were a very old woman, and the way that expression sat on her childish features made his skin crawl with hateful pity.

“I had to use the spray paint again,” he said quietly, apologetic, and she made a restless movement. He didn’t expect her to answer, but he pulled the earbud from one ear, just in case. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how else to get around. Maybe, if you could -”

She stepped forward, then, and reached her ghostly hand towards the end of his sleeve as if to examine it, and he remained still, as he might have if a bird had landed on his arm. She squinted her strange, unsettling eyes at the fabric, and then at the earbud in his palm, leaning very close to it and then turning her ear towards it with her brows wrinkled together.

The realization that she had spent a thousand years hearing nothing but her own voice and the sound of rain on stone and wind-lashed pines went through him as cold as a knife, and moving gingerly he disconnected them, and let the tinny phone speakers play. She jumped back at first, startling them both, but only for an instant before being compelled back by the music.

“Do you like it?” he asked, a little leery. It was hard to picture this medieval urchin particularly enjoying Blockhead, but he realized that she was bouncing gently on her heels. A wave of relief poured into him, mingled with the pain that can only come of realizing that some small thing we take for granted can be a fountain of untasted joy for someone less fortunate than ourselves. “Good, right?” he asked, and feeling as stupid as he’d ever felt - a high bar to clear - he, too, began to gently bounce on his heels.

Dancing with people had always made him feel good about them, whether it was in a crowded nightclub or with an eighty-year-old woman on the sidewalk who was enjoying the strains of gospel from her kitchen or some insistent part-timer at work who wanted to rope him into a TikTok. To move was a human impulse - and not just human, it seemed - and it was fun.

Probably she had not had much fun in the last few centuries. She bobbed her head, and began doing what might be called dancing - of a very childish, unformed sort - in a little circle. She -

He realized that he still did not know what to call her. He allowed himself to at least participate in the head bobbing, as a sort of olive branch, and assayed the tentative question.

“Hey,” he said gently. “What’s your name?”

She stopped dancing, then, her steps first slowing and then her body settling to stillness, and she looked at him with her strange eyes and an expression of contempt. When she spoke at last her voice was strange and hoarse, as if she had the throat and lungs to be rough from disuse and from her screaming.

“Maus,” she said, as if daring him to contradict her.

“Funny,” he said, feeling very tired. “That’s my name too.”

—

“How’d you get that?” Elaine asked, jabbing a finger at the corner of bandage on his arm that just showed below his sleeve now that he’d stripped off his coat.

“New tattoo,” he said automatically, and sensing her irritation immediately corrected himself: “Youma.”

There was a sense of her waiting with a threat in the wings, which relaxed when he did not again change his answer.

She was holding Petitcru under one arm and watching him eat warmed-up gyro that was not any better for having been through the microwave twice now. “When?”

“Few days ago. It’s mostly better.” For reasons inexplicable even to himself, he did not tell her about Micah. Maybe she’d only think it was one of his random, senseless embroideries of the truth.

She was silent, again, and he was somewhere between exhausted and amused and defiant and annoyed under her critical eye, as he generally was. “And you’ve been out the last - three? Four? Nights.”

“I mean, define out. If you mean doing things to get bitten by a youma, no. If you mean out, generally -”

“I meant both.”

“Then yeah.”

“Where do you get the energy?” Someone else might have sounded envious. She didn’t. She flung it like an accusation.

“I don’t know.” And then: “Did you get my Venmo?”

“Yeah. Don’t leave the emojis, people are gonna think I’m selling you weed. Which I understand is probably why you’re doing it. But stop anyway. Are you just gonna borrow it back?”

“Maybe.”

“Then don’t bother sending it next time.” And then, disgruntled by having to be outwardly charitable: “I can wait.”

“For what? It’s not like I’m falling into a cushy office job soon. Maybe I’ll start selling feet pics,” he added drily, and she gave him a Look.

He was left to blessed peace to dispatch most of what was left of the dried-out rice, only to be blindsided by her next statement. “You need to - to start running marathons or swimming or like - join a gym or something. You’ve got too much energy and you need to burn it off better than you are.” It was as close as she was going to get to a lecture about his more self-destructive propensities, which she must have seen for herself were growing distractingly insistent. He suspected that she was viewing him as an unruly dog that needed discipline, since that’s how she viewed most men and how he was starting to view himself. “You’re gonna lose your job and I’ll start charging interest,” she added aggressively. <******** running, running sucks. I’ll get right on the rest when you find a gym that takes credit on terms as lax as yours,” he answered flatly.

“Would you? Or would you just blow it off when it got boring?”

“I’d have to find something that didn’t get boring.”

“Like what? I’m imagining you in a dance class and it’s giving me cold chills.”

She often gave him these useless, idle lines of questioning. He supposed that it was her natural pleasure in interrogating a man who felt obligated to answer, which he did. He owed her too much to get recalcitrant, and her sharp look of warning turned him away from a flippant joke or a lie.

“Fighting,” he said at last. There was something seductive in the promise of controlled violence - in learning to tame, maybe, that part of him that was dangerous, since it could never be euthanized. “Boxing, maybe.”

She snorted. “You can do that already when you go out. Both kinds of out. You’ve got an awfully punchable - well. Start running into fists instead of youma teeth, I’m sure it’ll come easy.”

“It does,” he said.

—

The youma bite was a lingering memory when he again turned up to watch the sky: fitful, smoky clouds scuttling beneath the thick grey ones above and the pine boughs wet with recent rain.

It was hard to open that damn door without the help of Maus’s strength, but his suspicions that it would be better for diplomacy were confirmed when Kay stepped into the dismal, dark chamber and was greeted by the ghost, but by no screams. She looked at him with that same weary expression as before, and vanished in silence before he could say a word.

It was not exactly how he had hoped that encounter to go, but it was better than the rage. The glowsticks and graph paper and spray paint were in a backpack, this time, rather than subspace, and he tucked in his earbuds and set to work.

Experience was teaching him, as much as anything, and he felt a swell of relief the first time he rounded a pitch black corner and found exactly what he had expected - a spent glowstick, pink - at the juncture. Even better when he realized that there was a small imperfection in the stonework in the right hand wall that could serve as a landmark by feel, which led to the heart-leaping thrill of realizing that there were such little grooves not only near the turnings but gouged into the floor - unfelt through his civilian shoes but surely perceptible to Maus’s thin-soled boots. The tunnels, then, were not unmarked - only unmarked as far as he had been able to tell.

His imperfect map underwent a few revisions - it was of only a small area, but so much the better, as that meant he was identifying the limits of what he had already explored before branching off into the rest - and opened up to him the possibility of an empty space he had not yet seen somewhere between the ones he had. This led naturally to a more thorough accounting of the doors and turnings, and he found himself at last sliding a half-rusted hasp and opening a door into a room that he could immediately sense was larger and more open than the others, even before the flashlight beam swept around to confirm it.

It was, like the main chamber, large and unadorned, with only the single point of entry, but unlike the main chamber it was full of debris. The instinctive pleasure of the urban explorer rose in him when confronted by all these boxes and crates and barrels and unrifled goodies, and he meandered to the first promising cache, propping up his flashlight and commencing a ransack.

For a long time he found very little that was not crumbling, rusted, rotted, or garbage. But he closed his hand around a stack of silver coins and stuffed them into his pocket - could you pawn a long-dead Wonder’s metal? Maybe if it was melted down - and paused to look over his shoulder, wary that the ghost might have arrived to interrupt his theft of what she undoubtedly considered her property, just as he’d stolen her ring and her medallion. He was alone, however, and he removed an earbud as a somewhat-stupid precaution - against what approaching footsteps? - and bent back to the work.

The only other item of note was arresting for him in particular: a strangely-made clockwork mouse, its brass body configured of seams and hinges like some sort of complex origami. He put it into a pocket, thinking vaguely that he would wind it up later to see what it did when he was somewhere light, so that he could observe and have space to run if it ended up being some sort of bomb.

He arrived at the end of the first box and found in the very bottom a single sheet of unusually-pristine paper, which he lifted into the beam of the flashlight. It depicted hands grasping at the air in a gesture so clearly drawn that the hair on his arms prickled at the memory of the ghost frantically seeming to grab for something she could not hold. The memory grew even more unpleasant as the diagram - for so it seemed to be - continued, and demonstrated the hands closing around a translucent knife, which was then thrust into a faceless figure’s back.

He felt, again, that strange stirring of awareness as he looked at it. Hardly aware of what he did, he assumed the guise of Maus, at which point that undertow of instinct that had taught him how to come here and how to use the ring swept him up, again, and he reached into the empty air with a dreamlike slowness. No knife appeared in his hand, but he lifted his eyes into the beam of the flashlight and to the ghost who now stood there looking at him with an expression of rage, and the blade manifested behind her - she as spectral as the weapon was - and drove with sudden angry violence between her shoulderblades.

He startled, dropping out of Knight form with his blood rushing in his ears to the point of drowning out the noise of the single remaining earbud, his hands shaking. If he had not already been folded up on the floor he might have fallen weakly to his knees. Something horrible - something so terrible about watching his own hands inflicting violence on a helpless figure - something he’d been running from and couldn’t remember - like a nightmare forgotten as soon as you awoke from it with your heart still racing.

She did not scream, however, or flinch. She looked at him, and she laughed a strange, hoarse laugh, clapping her hands as if he had done a particularly clever trick while he sucked in lungfuls of cold air to dispel the rising urge to vomit.

She was gone by the time he recovered himself, his trembling hands closing around the page and thrusting it back into the box with the rest of the trash. For a horrible moment he thought he might cry, at last, but although his throat was tight and his eyes were burning, no tears really came.

It was probably good to be reminded that he had the capacity to do harm with a weapon in his hands. There was, again, that sense that he was a dangerous animal who would benefit from rigorous domestication. Fear was a tool to subdue an animal as much as anything else.

He marked the location of the room on his map and retraced his steps, meticulously double-checking the pattern of grooves and trying to mark them on the increasingly-crowded graph paper, and found himself in the main chamber again, where the ghost was watching him, apparently unhurt and unmoved.

He hesitated. “I brought you a present,” he said, a little ashamed when his voice trembled. He reached into his backpack, holding it out towards her. “It plays music. I can turn it on when I leave. It only has power to play for a few hours - but if you want -”

She fixed him with a stare of strange, sad intensity, and gave him a curt little nod. When he stooped, however, to put the thrifted music player on the floor - the work of long hours on one of his older machines to get it loaded up with music - she suddenly crouched near him, shaking her head and putting out a hand as if to stop him.

“No?” he asked, confused, and then with understanding: “Somewhere else. OK. Show me.”

She led him, then, back into that maze, and he felt a flutter of misgiving when she led him beyond his half-mapped, half-understood base of operations. He struggled against an irrational urge to bolt, one hand closed around the music player in his pocket and the other on the flashlight as he fought down a suspicion that she was leading him to some place where she could enact a horrible revenge for his having stabbed her, however little damage it seemed to have done her. And there was something about that, too - some recoiling from the idea of a closed-in space with violence and a terrified stranger - that his body recoiled from, as if remembering something that his brain could not.

But what could she do, after all? She had not even been able to summon the ghostly knife despite her frantic efforts. She was like mist in the beam of his flashlight, with only the reflective shine of her unsettling eyes clear when she turned them on him as if to make sure he still followed, and she reached out as if to take his hand, guiding it towards the grooves in the stone.

“I saw,” he said. She nodded, businesslike, and then made a little tap-tap motion at the wall, which he obediently mimicked, and continued to mimic as they crept down a particularly long and narrow corridor, which he felt was winding upwards by slight degrees. The sound produced was a thump-thump right up until the moment that it was instead a snap-snap, and he paused. Her night-animal eyes turned on him in an expression of satisfaction.

“I should do this,” he suggested, “when I’m going around? To find landmarks.”

She did not answer. Perhaps she did not find it necessary. He kept tapping, therefore, as they went, and found himself now and again confronted with a change in sound that might - if he was mapping - act as another landmark, when he’d had time to memorize them.

He was mulling the implications of returning often enough to commit the dismal blackness of the labyrinth to memory when the corridor ended so abruptly that he nearly walked into the door at the end of it, through which she passed without comment. Somewhat to his surprise it opened easily, and he stepped - as he had once before - out into daylight that was blinding despite the heavy clouds, and into the smell of fresh air. But rather than finding himself on a narrow ledge, he found himself - alarmed - on the roof, despite thinking himself a solid twenty feet below. It was too easy to lose your sense of space in there - too easy to get disoriented -

He had not yet seen her beneath daylight, and she was a silvery film as if painted on the air, moving across the inches-thick blanket of pine needles and leaves and dust that had collected on the roof towards a patch that looked stranger than the rest. He followed in silence, managing to suppress a yelp as his foot disturbed what had looked almost like some strange, waterlogged fur carpet ruffling in the constant wind - which promptly exploded into a thousand little greyish-brown wings. A sea of moths erupted and swelled, swirling into clumsy clouds and dispersing, and the ghost watched them with satisfaction before patting her hand on the blank stone where they had been.

He could not immediately move, watching the moths with a swell of strange, distant emotion: the only living things here, he supposed, besides himself. It was only when she stomped her foot - soundless but angry - that he shook himself back to reality (which felt quite unreal in that moment) and placed the music player down, hesitating before bending to push the button.

He watched her strange and childish dancing; watched the few remaining, sluggish moths slicing through her translucent arms like the nothing that they were. It would be good to dance with her - to show himself her friend - but he could not, and after a moment he only, in silence, left.

—

The gyro and the youma bite had been weeks ago. Kay sat at Elaine’s bar with wet hair. He’d pretended his hot water was out again - a believable enough lie - to have the benefit of her superior shower, and he was eating her leftover samosas as slowly as he could manage, for the sake of savoring them.

After a moment, she shifted Petitcru to one arm and slid an envelope across the bar. It took him a moment to realize that it was for him, and he opened it after hastily licking chutney off his thumb, only to look at its contents in stupid confusion.

“This is,” she said, “a trial run. I’m trading it for good behavior. And it’s not a loan, so don’t get shitty about your tab,” she added, with that strange aggressiveness that she sometimes surfaced when caught out being too charitable or too emotional. “The sticks aren’t working so I’m trying the carrot.”

He held the pamphlet in his hands in numb bewilderment, looking at the list of class times. “They told me,” she continued, “that they’re flexible if your schedule is s**t, because I told them you never know when you’re working until the week before. So figure that out with your boss. You get the gear on the first day you go, whatever that entails. I didn’t ask. And I got you shoes that don’t have laces,” she added, and he felt the frustrating formation of a useless lump in his throat at this act of kindness, which Knew him even where he did not quite know himself. “And I made sure it’s close to a bus stop and the routes don’t suck. I want photographic proof of you showing up, putting the work in, and leaving exhausted at least once a week if you can’t manage more, and if I find out you’re using it as an excuse to over-extend yourself even more instead of as an outlet I’m canceling it and putting every month of membership fee you wasted on your ******** tab. With interest.”

She waited impatiently, and he realized, finally, what she was waiting for. “Thank you,” he said mechanically. And then: “Really.”

“And I just paid for your ********’ teeth, so take care you’re not getting them knocked out because I’m not paying for replacements.”

“They’re just gonna have me hitting a bag for months, anyway,” he said, turning the paper over in his hands to look at the boxing glove logo on the front and read the WHO WE ARE blurb beneath it, which informed him - as he already knew - that it was a very human thing to want to move, and that discipline was a good thing to court. How strange to read a sales pitch for what he had been craving, in some way, for so long. And then, impulsively, again, his voice a little strained: “Thank you.”

“Don’t cry,” she warned him, and he laughed a weak little laugh.

“Couldn’t dream of it,” he said.