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The first time Tim noticed it was the worms. Getting beyond the fact that he still could feel them burrowing into his skin where the scars still lay, that he could wake in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, slapping at his arms to try and get rid of that which he knew was long dead, he had realized long after that there was more to it than just the physical reminders that left scars on his skin.
Itching on scarred skin was normal. Itching so bad he wanted to claw off his skin while hunting for a new flat was something else entirely. Not until a week later when he saw on the news that the entire building was being closed off and gutted for black mold that had sent two to the hospital.
A fear of clowns was natural. A fear of clowns when you were Tim Stoker was not only common sense, but to be expected. Yet that fear didn’t explain the sense of dread that came over him when his second cousin was invited to a friend’s birthday party. A party that, according to the bright and colorful invites, would include a clown. He’d fought with his cousin until they had agreed she wouldn’t attend the party, an announcement that left one six year old in tears and one cousin two years older than he was demanding that he make things right.
While he’d taken the child out that day and shown her the best time with cake and ice cream and movies and arcades, it wasn’t until the news that night that he’d proven he had truly made things right. A fire set off by a helium tank at the same birthday party had left two children in the hospital and the mother of the birthday girl dead.
It wasn’t enough he knew when others were watching him. He could tell when a person was casing a place, or if someone was standing just behind the curtains, watching while they thought no one else could see them. It wasn’t just that he found himself becoming dizzy when others lied to him, or that he’d learned during a kitchen mistake that fire didn’t burn his skin. Each and every day that they came closer to the Unknowing, Tim began to realize that he was not nearly as normal as he wanted to insist he was.
Certainly he would claim to the others that he was as much victim as they were, a person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like Martin and Sasha. They had applied for a job and gotten trapped. Except Tim knew. Tim knew he had walked into this with his eyes wide open, knowing what the Institute was, and what kind of things he would face on the other side of his application. He had known because of his brother, and because of the circus, and he had taken that chance anyway.
And now he was finding it was so much more than that.
No one else that he worked with felt it. He tried talking to Martin about it, but of course he was oblivious to what was going on around them, especially if it contradicted what the great and powerful Jonathan had to say. He tried talking to the others, but they were all so wrapped up in their singular focus that they thought he was falling a bit mad, but they all confirmed the same. None of them, including those that had been there during the Prentiss, noticed these things, but Tim knew they were real.
He’d lost the ability to eat meat, constantly hearing the screams of the dead as he tried to chew until he’d given up, eating more salads than he knew what to do with, and hating every minute of it. He noticed the spiders everywhere, and felt the encroaching darkness at the end of the day like a stalker watching just over his shoulder. Tim worked for the Institute, and he was owned - for lack of a better word - by the Eye, and yet he could feel them all. They were there, constant companions, haunting beings, the ghosts that shadowed him in everything he did and everywhere he went.
Learning you are trapped forever in your existence to the being that lured you in, and lured you away. Maybe not for the others, but for Tim. That night he had followed his brother he had been noticed by the Circus, and the weight of that meeting had stayed with him ever since he’d sat in that audience, hiding, knowing he could do nothing, that it was too late, and yet realizing that it is all he is meant to take away from it. The Stranger wanted him to see, wanted Tim to live with that, and he did. And yet they hadn’t taken him as well. They had let him leave that night, knowing he would seek answers, that he would do whatever he must to find the truth.
It was in that knowledge that Tim realized that the first encounter he’d experienced had not been with The Stranger that night, but long before with the Eye. Long before even he knew what the Institute was, or had applied for a job with the Magnus Archives.
That desire to know, to learn, it had been what drove him there that night. He hadn’t left, had watched the entire macabre scene, from a desperation to know. Because of Elias and his knowledge, because of knowing that when you were in the Archives you were always being watched, likely recorded, most of them ignored the other side of the Eye. The side that they saw day in and day out in Jonathan and ignored. That side that made Tim want to punch him hard in the face. Because he understood it, and it had used him just as it used Jon. Except Tim fought it, and Jonathan Sims gave into it each and every time, letting it control him like a puppet.
The need to know.
It had sent Tim there that night. It drove Martin to keep reading the statements, and Jonathan to galavant around the country, constantly seeking to know more, to learn anything he could. The Eye was always watching, but watching was not enough. It wanted to learn, and it needed them to learn for it. Yet in Tim’s case, it didn’t seem to be the only one of them, of the Entities, that seemed to have a connection to Tim.
He hated it. Hated they all seemed to want a piece of him, and not in the same way that they did Martin and Jon and the others. None of them had tried to kill him. None of them had tried to destroy him as they had others. It wasn’t what he wanted, and he had no desire to be drawn into their games, but if they were going to force it on him, then Tim knew he could and would use it all to his advantage. Use them all. And he knew that because of this, he could make his escape during the Unknowing.
Under the cover of the ritual, with the Stranger in control and it’s Circus of the Damned running the show, the Eye would be at its weakest. It would have no sight past the chaos and the madness that the Spiral fed upon. Despite the warnings, Tim rushed in. He called on the End, and he called on the Slaughter. Letting it rush through him, lending him strength and cover, a cover from the Eye. A cover from being Tim Stoker.
And then he called on the Dark, and everything went black and dark and his world ended in that moment with the screams and the pain and the fear swirling around him, eddying him like a storm.
It isn’t light that comes to him but consciousness. Awake, unharmed, and lying prone somewhere that didn’t feel like anything at all. The plan worked, and Tim survived not by denying them but calling on them. Yet he wasn’t alone, and it was more than just those beings who had touched his life since, perhaps, long before his brother was captured by them. He had thought one led to the other, but he knew now that he was likely the catalyst to his brother’s death and not the other way around.
Slowly he moved to sit up, peering through the dimness to try and make out the shape nearby. Mostly humanish from the look of him, with a long dark robe or coat on, and darkness that seemed to pour down over his face. Except it wasn’t darkness, but hair.
“Tim Stoker. As I live and… well…” Gerard laughed at his own joke, the sound rich and throaty as he moved closer though he didn’t seem to walk at all. Slowly he stooped down, trying to get a better look at Tim. “When I felt them pull me up from the neverending darkness of death, I thought it was going to be Jon sitting here, but seems he survived.”
“Good. That was the point of all of this,” Tim growled, glaring at the apparition with narrowed eyes.
“Oh no, that was the point of all that they did,” he pointed out, balancing his forearms against his knees, staring at Tim. “What you did though, that is something remarkable. I admit, never seen it before. Never knew anyone that could call on them all and owe allegiance to none. How’d you manage that?” Despite the rumble of a death rattle to Gerard’s words, there was a wistfulness to them that the living alone never could manage.
“I don’t know. I just… I realized that unlike Jon and the Eye, I could contact them. More than that… they were contacting me.”
“Little bits and pieces, hmmm.” Not asking but stating. “A buzz here, a bit of a vision there? Like they do with the others, but then one at a time?”
“Something like that,” he said, hooking his arms over his crooked knee. “You know how it is though, don’t you? Your mother and you? Leitner? None of you were beholden to only one of them either.”
“Oh no. We were nothing like you, Timmy Boy. You were called by all, and we were held by none. None except now, without choice, death. We swore no allegiance, and we called on none. We fought them when we could, and destroyed their markings when given the chance. Certainly we used one to destroy another, but ... “ He peers at Tim, eyes narrowing. “You have the marks of at least ten of them, and then you’re here, seated in the Vast as if it were a nice parlor for a visit.”
“The…” Tim glanced around but the dimness of the room meant he couldn’t see much further than just beyond his reach. “I thought the End.”
“Death? For you?” Gerard laughed, a sound like wind whistling through the trees. “As if any one of them would give you up to another. Not permanently. You are, in a way, like Leitner and myself. Except wherein we were beholden,” he said, smirking at the word choice. “To no one, you are to all of them. You are in a unique and interesting position, Mr Stoker. I wonder if you appreciate that.”
“Appreciate what? That in trying to get rid of the damn Eye, I’m now trapped even more?”
“I see. So you don’t appreciate it. Well then… Let me try and make it clear for you,” he said. “It would be easier for it to be clear if there was more Light. Since we aren’t at the End, and this is not the domain of the Dark, after all.”
“Yeah light would be good,” Tim said, speaking slowly and not understanding yet what Keay was getting at. “Course, I’d rather not see the Vast like this. Not a fear, mind you but…”
“But it can become one on it’s own easily, can’t it,” he says, agreeing with a nod.
Even as Gerard spoke the dimness all around them shifted, changing, almost like fog dissipating and letting the light through. Frowning, Tim arched to look around, taking in the open space that appeared around them, much more of a bubble than a vista.
“How did you do that?”
“Not me, Tim. That is all on you. Just like being here is, or my temporary release from the Dark. That’s all you.”
“But… how?”
“If I had to guess, I would say that’s for you to find out. My understanding is you asked for a way out from the Eye. Now you have it. Up to you to figure out what to do with it.”
Tim scrambled to his feet then, taking several steps away and then turning, looking the other way. The light was brighter, as requested, and the space mostly nebulous and undefined. No mile long plains of emerald green grass and brilliant blue skies. Just a room with no corners and no walls in the middle of nowhere.
“So I’m… I’m trapped here?”
Bile rose in the back of Tim’s throat, acidic and raw and burning. He’d wanted free of the Eye, but death would be preferable to this. To a constant space with nothing else constant about it.
“I doubt it,” Gerard said, slowly rising to his feet with an easy grace that wasn’t at all human. “The Vast may take but it rarely keeps. Eventually it will spit you out. Some where. Some time. Some place. Maybe another world for all we know of it. Might explain those that disappear, and what things like the book Ex Altiora do. Maybe they come here and then vanish to time past, or future. Or another place entirely. Makes about as much sense as us having this talk after I was turned into a page and the man who freed me playing with puppets down there.”
“The man…” He blinked, turning back towards Keay and taking a step his way. “Jonathan burned your page?”
“Found his spine and even stole it. From the hunters,” he said, sliding his hands into the pockets of his coat, sounding impressed. “I admit, despite our talks and all I told him, I didn’t think he had the strength. And then he found it. Good for him. Now you’re going to have to find yours, Tim.”
Drawing his hand from his pocket, he held out something to Stoker. A small book, no larger than a deck of cards. “Wherever you find yourself, if you want help without calling of Them? Write in this book. If we can, there will be an answer.”
“Wait, what? We? How?” His nose wrinkled, thinking about Keay’s mother, about the statements about the books. “I won’t use it if it means you, or anyone, is trapped in it. I didn’t do this to hurt more people with this.”
“As if I would willingly bind myself to a page,” he said with a delicate snort. “It is less like that and more like, call it a magic missive.” Again he got that tone that was full of amusement at his own joke. “Perhaps we’ll see it, maybe we won’t. If we do and can, we’ll help.”
“We?” Again Tim prompted, irritation in his tones, though all of this was enough to make him cranky, much more beyond Gerard’s word games.
“We. Myself, my mother, and Leitner. There are others but I don’t think they ever came directly to your attention. You’re different, Tim. Jonathan is a key to the Eye, and Gertrude was their nemesis in many ways. Your Martin? One day he will sit in Elias’ seat and wish you were there instead. The Eye picked well this round, but not good enough to keep you from making your play. Try and not destroy all that is and all that ever will be, okay?”
Tim stared at the book, suddenly in his hand though he hadn’t taken it. Looking up, he realizing that Gerard was gone. Vanished back into the Dark.
“What the ever loving Hell? Gerard! Jonathan! Martin!?”
No one answered his call, though he could feel it. Not only the infinity of the Vastness that was all around him, but more. So many more things that seemed just out of his line of sight, just beyond his hearing, but they were there. Watching. Waiting. And they all, every one of them, counted him as an ally or a pawn.
Tim sighed, running a hand over his face even as he clutched the book tightly in the other.
“I am so fucked.”