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She died in early April.
Jon stood in the small graveyard, listening to a priest speak the words of a religion he no longer believed in as a thin drizzle turned the earth at his feet to mud. Umbrellas sprouted around the grave like mushrooms, sheltering the small crowd of mourners who had followed them from the church. He recognized a few faces: neighbors and elderly ladies from the local sewing circle. They’d offered him their condolences in wavering voices, and declared him a good boy, that his grandmother would be proud of.
Georgie huddled by his side, shivering slightly from the chill.
“Amen.” The priest bowed his head. Jon echoed the blessing, slightly out of sync from the crowd, and turned away as the coffin was lowered into the grave.
~~~~~
He sat at the kitchen table in the old house, staring down at his hands. Georgie bustled around him, fetching towels to mop up the drips they had left on the floor and turning the heat up. An old wooden clock ticked on the counter to his right, slicing time into thin slivers of eternity. A fine network of cracks spiderwebbed across its round glass face, a delicate fracture that had marked it for as long as Jon could remember.
“Are you sure you’re not-”
“Here.” Georgie was beside him. She draped a blanket over his shoulders, rubbing his arms for a moment through the material before she stepped to the side, taking a seat next to him.
Jon raised a hand, touching the soft fabric, before lowering it to the table again.
“Thanks,” he added belatedly.
Georgie just nodded, chewing on her lower lip. “Want a smoke?”
He held out his hand wordlessly. She placed a cigarette in it; he placed it between his lips and reached for the lighter, but she just shook her head, leaning forward and lighting it for him. He nodded in thanks, and she lit her own.
Smoke spiraled up toward the ceiling, joining the yellowish stains that spread across the old plaster like mold.
She’d never smoked in the house, when he was a child. Always rolled her eyes at the inconvenience of having to go out on the back porch to light up, always grumbled when the weather was bad and she couldn’t.
But she’d read that cigarette smoke was especially dangerous for young children, and despite her complaints, she never once brought it in the house.
“I’ve been calling for hours, where did you-”
“She laughed the first time she caught me smoking,” Jon recalled abruptly, speaking the words into the silent air.
Georgie looked at him, her eyes crinkled in sympathy. “Yeah?”
“Called me my father’s son.” He stared at the cigarette in his hand, the creeping line of ash burning its way toward his fingers.
She’d handed him her old zippo lighter and showed him how to use it; the particular flick of the wrist necessary to get the wick to catch. He’d practiced for hours that night, sitting on the couch beside her as an old soap opera flickered across the television.
The clock ticked. In his mind’s eye, his grandmother fussed around him, offering tea and hunkering down by the side of his chair, a worried look ill-hidden in her eyes.
“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” her voice, in his memory, was faded. “But you’ve always had such an active imagination. And, giant spiders, really…”
“She’d always offer me a cigarette when I visited, first thing,” Jon said, closing his eyes against the memory. “We’d sit out on the back porch smoking, and I’d tell her about my classes.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet her,” Georgie said softly. “She sounds like an interesting woman.”
Jon laughed softly. Interesting was one word for her, that was certain.
“Yes,” he said, and took another drag of the cigarette.
~~~~~
He quit smoking the next day.
~~~~~
“I am the very model of a modern Major-General, I've information animal, and mineral, and- er, wait…”
“Vegetable, animal, mineral, right?”
“I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral, I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, from Waterloo to Marathon-”
“No, no, that’s not right…”
“Want to jump in there?” Georgie nudged Jon’s arm with her elbow, winking. “You could show them all up.”
“Uh…” Jon looked over at where their friends stood bickering, debating the proper lines of the song between themselves. “No. I- I think I’ll leave them to it.”
“Oh come on,” Georgie’s grin was teasing. “You love being the center of attention.”
His neck prickled at the thought of all of their eyes on him, of being in the middle of all those open smiles and friendly conversation. Of trying to pretend he was having just as much fun as they were.
“I’m just not in the mood, okay?” he said, and it came out sharper than he intended.
Georgie just laid a gentle hand on his arm. “Okay.”
~~~~~
Her parents invited them both over to their house after the graduation ceremony. Jon smiled in the pictures, and answered questions about his career plans, and tried to ignore how deliberate it felt, whenever his own family was tactfully not mentioned.
~~~~~
“How’s Jon doing?”
Jon paused in the hallway of the small flat he shared with Georgie as he heard his own name. One of their friends had come over, and they were talking in low voices.
“He’s…” Georgie sighed. “He’s taking it hard. I mean, I can’t blame him. She was the only family he had.”
“It’s been months, though.”
“Grieving takes time.” He could almost hear her shrug. “It’s not my place to rush him.”
There was a long silence. Jon closed his eyes, leaning back against the wall until his head rested on the old, peeling paper.
“How are you holding up?” the friend asked eventually. “It can’t be easy, being his only support system.”
“It’s not.” Another pause. The soft chink of a mug being set on a table. “But… I’m happy to do it. I care about him, you know? I’m hardly going to leave him just because things are a bit difficult, right now.”
“He quit smoking, didn’t he?”
“Yeah,” there was a huff of laughter behind the words. “I think he’s going through a bit of an existential crisis, if I’m being honest.”
“He certainly seems… changed.”
“He’s figuring things out.” Her voice was light, like she was smiling. “I’m happy to stick with him, though, until he finds his way back to himself.”
The conversation moved on. Jon walked away, lost in thought.
Was he not himself? He still felt like himself. Maybe not the him he had been before, but… still fundamentally him.
He had changed, though. He hadn’t realized Georgie was waiting for him to change back.
Did he even want to be the person he had been, before?
He was… quieter, now. He knew that. More somber. More solitary.
He tried to reach back with his mind, to find any trace of the carefree, happy young man he’d been before.
It vanished through his fingers like smoke.
Had it ever been real?
It was the person he’d wanted to be. Coming out of a lonely childhood, out of dreary teen years. He’d wanted to be friendly, to be cheerful, to be the sort of person that other people wanted to be around. He’d made sure he was that person, learned to smile and tell jokes and put himself forward and make new friends. It hadn’t come naturally, but it had fit him, for a while. People had liked him, and he’d liked being that person.
He felt slightly sick at the idea of being that person again, now.
He didn’t want to be that person again.
But if Georgie was waiting for him to find his way back…
…What did that mean for his relationship with her?
~~~~~
He broke up with her the next week.
It was messier than he’d expected. She was shocked, angry. He was… distant. He told her it was for the best, that he didn’t want to waste her time, that he couldn’t lead her on into thinking he was still someone who had died by that grave, on that rainy April day. She told him not to be dramatic, and that he shouldn’t assume her mind, and that he didn’t know his own.
He walked away from it knowing that he had broken things beyond repair, and that she would hate him forever.
(She walked away from it knowing she would forgive him, in time. He was grieving, after all, and moving on meant leaving some things behind. She only regretted that one of those things had been her.)
~~~~~
She had left him everything in her will. There was no one else to leave it to. It wasn’t much, all told, but it was enough for a flat in London and a few months’ grace period before he had to worry about finding a job.
He stood in his empty living room, surrounded by cardboard boxes, with a strange, aching feeling in his chest.
He’d felt like this as a child, sneaking away from the house while she was out running errands, wandering the city streets with no destination. It was the feeling of being completely untethered from the world, of knowing, deep in his soul, that no one knew where he was. No one would come looking for him. No one was waiting for him.
I’m going to a friend’s house, Jon had trained himself to say, because he knew that any grown-ups who saw him would be worried. None had ever bothered to ask, but he’d been prepared, even so.
“I’m going to a friend’s house,” Jon said to himself now, and shut the door of his flat behind him.
~~~~~
He wandered. London was big, bigger than Oxford, bigger than Bournemouth. He’d known, conceptually, that this was the case, but it felt different actually being there, with the city sprawling around him on all sides.
His aimless feet took him past the zoo. He paused just outside, staring at the bright and cheerful sign. Families thronged around him, excited little kids and bored teenagers, each chivvied along by an accompanying adult clutching a map, or a bag, or an itinerary. He remembered a few of his classmates, in primary school, returning from vacations with fantastical tales of the animals they had seen on their trips to the city. He’d mostly ignored them, never one to feel very sociable when placed in the middle of a group of his peers.
Without really thinking about the action, Jon purchased a ticket and went inside.
He wasn’t expecting the carousel.
It caught him by surprise, appearing suddenly in front of him as he turned a corner, brilliant and colorful and flashing with lights. Carved animals rose and fell in their endless circuit, horses and lions and dragons, too, unless he was very much mistaken. It was incongruous amidst the endless animal exhibits, bright and artificial in the middle of all that nature, and Jon stood, and stared, as people passed by around him.
Something in him ached.
He wanted to ride it. It was a stupid desire, childish and immature. Still, it existed.
Jon stepped forward as the carousel slowed to a stop, his neck prickling with embarrassment. He felt like someone was going to stop him at any moment. Call him out, tell him this wasn’t allowed, that he was too old to be doing a thing like this. He wasn’t even going with anyone; what kind of adult rode a merry-go-round on their own?
But battened against that was another feeling, that same untethered certainty that had followed him all day. No one here knew his name. No one here knew his face. He would never see anyone here again.
So maybe it was a bit childish. Maybe he would look silly, a man in his twenties riding on a painted horse on a carousel built for children. No one important would ever know.
No one called him out as he purchased his ticket; as he queued at the gate in a crowd of others, waiting for the previous passengers to disembark so they could ride. No one was laughing behind their hands, or sending him side-glances. No one even seemed to realize he was there.
Jon stepped onto the ride carrying that strange feeling of invisibility in his chest, that discomfiting, thrilling feeling like he was getting away with something. He took the closest horse: a pale white thing with a golden harness, painted with swirls of reds and blues over its legs. Its wooden back was hard and uncomfortable when he sat down; he wrapped his hands, gingerly, around the spiraled golden pole in front of him.
He sat there for a long, silent moment, as the other passengers found their places around him.
And then the carousel started moving.
It was a swooping lurch in his stomach as his feet left the ground, the horse rising into the air as it began its circuit; a plummeting drop as it sank down again. It was moving fast, faster than it had looked from the ground; Jon could feel the wind in his hair, teasing at the short strands of it, blowing it back from his face.
The horse rose into the air once more, high, higher, and the world fell away around him, nothing left but the rush of motion, the rattle of old machinery, and the wind, a constant and eager presence urging him ever forward.
Jon felt like he was flying.
~~~~~
He slept late the next day.
The kitchen was still understocked; he made tea and toast for breakfast, and sat on the single chair at the small table for a long time, hands cupped around the mug to feel its warmth.
He was drifting, he knew. Spinning his wheels. He needed a purpose in his life, something to drive him. A reason to get up in the morning.
On the counter beside him, the old, wooden clock ticked, the spiderweb of cracks still glinting across its face.
In his minds eye, his grandmother made him a cup of tea, and pushed it into his hands with worried eyes. Georgie put a blanket around his shoulders, and offered him a cigarette.
Jon cupped his hands over his mug and leaned down until he could press his forehead against the back of them, squeezing his eyes shut.
Something had happened to him, he knew. Something that had left him with questions he’d spent years trying to run away from. Something impossible.
His laptop was still in his backpack from the move. He took it out and settled on his bed, with the computer resting on his crossed legs, and searched.
Jobs in the field of paranormal research.
Most of the results looked like scams, or cheesy ghost-hunting shows looking for new locations. One looked real.
Jon clicked the link for the Magnus Institute homepage, and hit apply.