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"Georgie!"
Jonathan Sims pulled himself through the door at the top of Georgie Barker's basement stairs, an invisible spring in his step and a song in his heart.
Jonathan's informant had left another message, impossibly accurate and dangerously useful. Trilling its daily melody, waking him at dawn with letters containing relevant statements being pushed through Georgie's front door letterbox or emails signed without name, the little bird had so far guided Jon deeper into the slowly unravelling mystery of the Circus of the Other. Jonathan had, for the time being, no reason to believe that, when a letter slid into the room he had claimed as his temporary office, the witness that had asked to meet him in a restaurant not far from his location was anything less than what it seemed.
Half eager and half nervous to hear another statement be pulled from the lungs of his reporter, to learn — more than learn, know — every detail, Jonathan hardly noticed Georgie meet him at the bottom of the second set of stairs.
"Yes?"
"I'll be out tonight. Just- just wanted to let you know. You'll have to give the Admiral his dinner." Jonathan beamed as a string of twinkling bells sounded from the kitchen, followed by the yowling of an unfed cat. "That'll be him now."
Smirking as she turned to the kitchen door, and then back to Jon, Georgie asked, "you got yourself a date, then?"
Freezing up in place, any and all warmth leaving his skin, Jonathan swallowed, and opened his mouth to disagree. He thought better of it quickly and realised, with a slight annoyance, that explaining to Georgie his true motives would be more difficult than keeping up a brief charade. Closing his eyes, he nodded.
"Yeah, I do."
"Well," cocking her head and grinning before heading to the kitchen, Georgie smirked, "hope it goes well!"
"If it does, I'll see you tomorrow morning."
Jonathan wasn't sure if he'd just insinuated that he wouldn't survive the occasion, but Georgie didn't pick on his turn of phrase for once, so he stayed quiet.
"You're leaving now?"
"I thought I'd get there a little earlier."
"Alright."
Nodding in Jon's direction as her gaze was stolen by the Admiral, who had pushed his face through the gap between the door and the frame, Georgie sent him on his way, half dismissively and half genuinely.
"Enjoy!" She began to croon over her cat, and the Admiral uttered a thunderous purr as her hand met the back of his neck and her fingers massaged between his shoulders.
"Will do."
He'd spent the morning organising — he'd booked a table at a semi-popular restaurant, only a few minutes walk from Georgie's home, and arranged a meeting with the stranger. They'd neglected to give a name, or a description, but he had a feeling he'd know them when he saw them. Statement givers, he'd found, were like that: understandable, immediately, as if the air given from their lungs was discoloured, as if their voices trembled truths on a frequency that no one else could hear.
Jonathan had become, in recent weeks, increasingly frustrated with the lack of evidence for the Circus of the Other's return. Gertrude's tapes had helped — at times the thought of them had been all he needed to prevent his will from shattering and his body hurling itself through the nearest open window — but the path he was being pushed towards — by the Institute and their all-seeing inhabitants, and the diligent police force, snapping and slobbering and growling at his heels, waiting for someone to say, sternly, "sit, beg!" — was unhelpfully winding, and was drifting further and further into the choking darkness of obscurity. Jonathan found himself missing the Archives, the world of knowledge at his fingertips. This stranger had offered to give him a hand; Jonathan hoped that it was friendlier than Jude's had been.
The doors welcomed him in: outside was cold, and the restaurant's belly was warm. Within the establishment, a rush of noise met him; faces and bodies blurred with movement scampered from table to table, while laughing couples ordered food and flagged down waiters, waving signals in the air that meant "we've finished, let us pay the price and leave". Hot meals steamed in spiralling clouds, doors swung forward to allow guests freely inside, and the amount of languages mingling and merging within the space meant that — at times — even basic English was hard to understand. The atmosphere bustled and burst like a hot pan filled with rising fog. No one would notice as Jonathan discussed that of the uncanny and the paranormal: the hubbub of tangled nonsense drowned out everything else.
He settled quickly in an unused area of wall, shaking his head briskly at a waitress who had probably asked him if he'd like to be seated and fed — Jonathan hadn't really made an attempt to hear her over the babbling hurricane.
Time began to charge through the restaurant; Jonathan didn't move, he hardly breathed, his eyes scanning, dedicated, for anybody he recognised. Not remembered, recognised: knew, from the moment he would see them, you are here to talk to me, and I am here to listen.
And, a familiar face finally caught his attention.
Jonathan mentally latched onto a single figure in the crowd. It knew him too, he realised, and the eyes pulled forward the nose as the wearer turned to face Jonathan properly. The lips followed, generating a familiar smile, their colour — stained a frozen blue like wine or bruises — lagging just a second behind. From the scalp of the figure, golden hair sprung in coils; most of it was pulled into a knot at the back of its skull, but stray wisps hung over its ears, bouncing as though they were unaffected by gravity.
A dress hung from its body in frills, falling in translucent plumes from its shoulders like smoke, only to be bound to its waist by an decorated corset, embossed with plastic sequins and threads of gold, coloured in every cold and malignant shade of ultraviolet. The gown was cut at the front over its shins, which looked about as real as those of statues carved into marble, yet trailed behind its feet. Many layers of cloth and colour thrashed like frothing seas; dun foam and peach coral clashed with fluorescent orange and regal violet. The polluted colours of an oil slick lake danced iridescence over its glass armour. The twinkling fabric of the skirt blurred like city lights through the wet window of a fast car driving through torrential rain. Boots with heels that were wrought into spirals gleamed, overexposed and undersaturated like polaroid pictures left for weeks in the sun.
A scarf was wrung thrice around its neck, every possible shade of dark and drying crimson. It must have been warm, Jonathan thought; the scarf glowed like hot coals in the dim light, infrared.
Rail thin, and swaying gently from side to side, the Distortion made no effort to meet Jon, to shift itself through the incandescent atmosphere to his place, but still it continued to stare. It towered over the others in the venue, and still its eyes locked themselves deep into Jonathan's, drinking in every drop of colour, and leaving Jon like a dormouse, small and drowning.
Jonathan's bleary eyes suffered gradual pinpricks of confusion, until he rubbed them with the palm of his hand, and opened them again to see that Michael had joined him.
The others around the two of them did not react to the appearance of the Distortion. Jon figured that if he asked a fellow guest how Michael looked to them, whether it seemed at all distinct from the flurry of moving surroundings, if it seemed like it had been drawn on another layer, like to touch it would be to break through the boundaries of dimension, they would have given him back a response unlike his own.
It took no time in assuring Jonathan of its recognition, and pulled him, in a convulsion of visual error, behind a dark oak pillar, where the conversation began.
"Aaarchivist," it lulled, and Jonathan felt a cold sweat pool on his neck and a chill roll down his spine as a leather-bound hand tightened its grip around his arm.
"Michael." Swallowing, he stiffened. "I don't suppose you're finally here to finish me off, are you?"
"My, you ask invasive questions, Archivist." Michael relaxed onto one false hip, its outline solidifying as the movement slowed. "You could have begun with pleasantries."
"Just tell me."
"Are you looking for an excuse?" Its smile widened beyond human proportions, and it began to lose itself in its excitement.
Shoulders slumped, fingers drumming ceaselessly on the pillar, Jonathan exhaled gruffly through pursed lips. "No." He wouldn't allow it the illusion of a merciful kill.
"Good," Michael said lowly, a glimmer waking its eyes and cheeks, "though," the light darkened and warped into a penetrating glare, "the time is nearing where killing you just might be an option for me. Not yet, though, so you needn't worry..."
"Why?" His heart racing, every nerve on fire as feel became fight or flight, Jonathan jumped to preservation.
Michael simply chuckled, softly at first, before it fled the disguise of human nature and the noise revealed itself to be almost unnoticeably coupled. It balanced living laughter like a tightrope, disconnected by a fraction of a second from the movement of its flesh.
"Because," Michael said between giggles, "the circus is coming to London, and you need to be alive when it does."
"Why me?"
"It's just what the Archivist does." Michael gave a smirk that told Jonathan all he needed to know before it had even reopened its mouth; Jon was going to be used, wrung for all he was worth, until he stopped being helpful to the Distortion and started being an irritant.
Swallowing, nervous, Jonathan eyed the exit, and Michael began to giggle again.
"Okay," breathing outward gently, and quietly, Jonathan whispered, "are you talking about the Circus of the Other?" Could it have been that Jon could still gather the information he'd come looking for from the scraps flaking from Michael's tangling enigma? "Are you talking about Nikola Orsinov?"
Twitching slightly beneath its mask, Michael glanced at Jonathan as though — for half a second — it wanted desperately to reveal a single cog in the grand mechanism of the future. Instead, it grinned, etching beautiful curves into its cheeks as its smile once again became broad and teasing.
"Is there another circus I should know about?"
Rolling his eyes, Jonathan supposed that its response had been a valid answer to his question. "How do you know about it?"
"Nothing escapes me, Archivist." For a moment, it glowered, enraged, a deep indigo presence falling over its pale figure.
Leaning against the pillar, it folded its arms, which bent awkwardly at more than just the elbow, and pressed its brow to the oak furnishing. As if adjusted to more freedom in its limbs, it became momentarily clumsy, weak, before settling. Piece by blurry piece, Michael's face morphed into a scowl, the fuzzy outlines of each neon feature stark on its blank canvas. For a while it rested there, hunched slightly in silent displeasure.
"Except the Forever Blind," it snarled, "but... it escapes everyone. Even you and your Archives aren't able to follow its swift, black trail."
The sneer was quickly and literally wiped from its face, along with portions of its lips and nose, and a rosy blush stained its cheeks in its place.
"But, it doesn't matter."
"Doesn't it?"
"No. Not yet, and not to me." It pulled itself away from the pillar, and Jonathan could see a black, charcoal silhouette left where its skin had met the wood. "Shall we find a place to sit?"
"Actually, I think I've got all I can out of this interaction," Jonathan grimaced, before turning on his heel toward the entrance.
"I wouldn't do that, if I were you!" It called after him, and Jonathan had every mind to ignore him as he strode purposefully toward the entrance.
He would invent an excuse for Geogie, he reasoned. He would make up a story, string together a perfect blanket of lies to smother the twisting flame, until every loose end was tied and the event could be marked off in the back of her mind as something unfortunate but not uncommon.
His date had not shown up: they were sick, tired, busy. Jonathan narrowed his eyes. Or, they were a shimmering mess of colour, a humanoid collection of fractals so winding and perfect that the disguise could fool everyone else in the building. A man whose bones had been pressed into his hands, whose skeleton had been wrought to ruin, bereft of marrow and drunk dry of cartilage.
Perhaps, the feelings had fled — Jonathan rolled his eyes — or, they had been chased away. Perhaps, the atmosphere had grown dull and slow, until Jonathan had been able to tell that the evening would not pass as planned.
His date had not shown up. His date had not been Michael. He did not want his date to be Michael.
Two seconds from the fire exit, Jonathan pulled himself from his thoughts and halted, his muscles freezing tight in place, the skin of his palm less than inches from the black handle of the yellow door before him.
Shit.
Sharply turning away from it, almost knocking into a young waitress carrying glasses and a bottle on a tray, Jonathan scanned the scene for another way out, any way out.
Yellow doors. Two more of them, side by side, their handles meeting in the centre between them, had replaced the original entrance and had stunted the flow of people into the restaurant.
Startling himself awake with a palm to his forehead, Jonathan's lungs began to pound in pain, straining against his ribs. He allowed himself, with difficultly, to breathe, and the ache began to ebb as he rapidly regained control of the oxygen entering his bloodstream.
A shuddering, breathless gasp made him jump to face what had come to rest beside him. Laughter followed: dreadful, echoing laughter. Air shook its paper bag lungs as it dragged through them, filled them, and left them just as quickly, allowing them to collapse. With every exhale, excess noise leaked from rusting iron hinges, as though every door in the venue was swinging forward and slamming shut. Michael trembled lightly, as the joy rolled through and rearranged it, wracked with laughter, leaning back and forth in place.
"Didn't anyone ever tell you that it was... rude to leave an evening early?"
Jonathan swallowed, a hopelessness opening a new cavern in his stomach and beginning to rot away the flesh cliff walls.
"Let's find a place to sit," Michael repeated, barely controlling the laughter that just kept seeping from spare throats — those unnecessary for speech, "there's a free table to your right."
It glanced toward a corner table. Red seats, clean and cushioned, with hard backs that spread from the wall to the table's edge, were hidden from the view of the rest of the restaurant. Dark wood was coated in a purple tablecloth, and an electric candelabra poked from the wall above where their heads would be. Jonathan swallowed, nervous, but Michael smiled, wide eyes gliding from the table, back to the Archivist.
"Take a seat."
Its movement, with all the grace of a lamb on new legs, one that can run and jump and flee but not for itself, never for itself, was a contorted composition of rolling motions, sweeping limbs, and doubling imagery. Echoes of the sounds of heels on old boards occurred before each foot fell, and words and stories made themselves clear to Jonathan's ears before the twitching of Michael's lips. Jonathan didn't care if they burbled with static or if its voice grew so close to white noise that sentences were comprised of hums and buzzes, because most of them were bound to be lies, and he could happily live without wasting energy digesting the pointless and the confusing.
Michael began to fill Jonathan's head with snow and his ears with sand as soon as they'd sat down. Crossing one bare leg, coldly cut like clean quartz, over the other, it settled itself onto the crimson seat. The Distortion's yielding flesh seemed to compress into the softness of the backrest as much as the pillows did into its body. Loose drapes of fabric seemed to spill from the dress, revealing the shoulder it lay its head upon. Its neck pulled like soft clay, still coloured warm and deep by the ruby scarf that, even then, suffocated its throat. It bled around the pale throat, woven veins threading deep and thick in plaits and stitches, winding, and winding. It seemed to bind the Distortion's head to its torso; its neck was far too thin and flimsy to do the job itself.
Jonathan sat himself down soon after, and retreated into the corner of his own, cushioned doom. Like a velvet-padded coffin, it enclosed him, and he took the Distortion's invitation for pleasantries without thought enough even to begin to fear.
"You've, uh, changed your hair..." he swallowed, nervously.
Bringing itself to full height, Michael beamed, drawing its hands to its lips as it giggled, "you noticed!"
Biting back a sour remark, Jonathan grimaced. "Yeah. I did." He furrowed his brow and glowered at what now sheltered its mouth. "What about the gloves?"
A pair of sleek, phthalo green gloves ensnared Michael's hands, compressing them into something recognisable, something right. Long, slender fingers protruded from its knuckles, fingers that remained just within the realm of human possibility. Any extra, alien length could be disguised as a facet of the gloves themselves, and disregarded as anything born of the immortal terror. Jonathan felt a semblance of safety crawl into his stomach, as if — despite what knives he knew lay beneath the leather — the sight of Michael's hands encased reduced the value of its threat.
Like a muzzle on a bad dog, they contained the pointed teeth. Squinting, Jonathan shifted, uneasy; most would say that there is no such thing as a bad dog: only misunderstood dogs, abused dogs, lost dogs. But, before Jon sat living proof, an elegant example of a big, bad wolf, wearing the curly fur of a patient golden retriever, and a lambskin coat.
"And... those earrings." Continuing his study of the figure before him, Jonathan dragged his mind away from the suspenseful tap, tap, tapping of Michael's muffled fingers on the tabletop.
Grinning, forgetting again its human disguise and letting slip the smile Jonathan knew and hated, Michael tucked loose strands of straw-like hair, spun into golden curls, behind its ear. It reminded Jon, briefly, of the Cheshire cat, as it revealed its twin rows of flat, white teeth, and its eyes thinned in effortless joy. Having shrugged teardrops from his beautiful fur, beaming as his paws were pulled into springs and twisted into stars, the cat had left Alice alone in her discomfort. And the mome raths outgrabe...
Beneath the silk strips of sickly blond hair, rectangular, yellow shapes hung from its ears, which were narrow, as if made of wax and pulled to a point. The earrings were then garnished with angular curves in each of four corners, folding in on themselves.
"They're... doors?" Jonathan rolled his eyes, as if it were obvious. "That's a bit on the nose, don't you think?"
Michael just laughed, a harsh and intense sound of creaking ribs and torn breath, shaken loose and thrown outwards like shed skins. Layers and layers of laughter built on top of each other, launched into the air between them, echoing and winding until Jonathan was lost in a labyrinth of ludicrosity.
"Perhaps," it exhaled the word, as if leant upon it while it could not lift itself, as if its abdomen was truly wracked with pain: hysteria-induced and mirth-infused pain. As if it truly felt the shivering of skins, the mournful ache of strained muscle after hours of laughter, Michael took a second to collect itself, before beaming in Jonathan's direction.
Jonathan's heart rate finally settled as he looked into its eyes: deep, not so in colour, but in endlessness. Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite! The claws that catch!
Those glass eyes, lightless and bleeding, falling and falling into each other like collapsing maelstroms, glanced over Jon's face and neck, but never quite focused on him. Michael seemed not to look into Jon's eyes, but rather through them, as if searching the backlogs of his brain for something worthy of its concentration. It found it.
"What about your hand, Archivist?" Finally, its gaze settled firm upon Jon's bandaged palm. "What did you get yourself into?"
It withdrew itself as Jonathan cleared his throat and shifted in his seat, discomfort crawling back into his body. "Had an accident with a piece of heated equipment."
He put hardly any effort into the lie, unlike he knew Michael would.
"Ah, so," reaching through the guise of domesticity that Jonathan had used to mask the ordeal, Michael tilted its head until it rested on the other shoulder, and the lines between the two parts of its body began to blur, "you had a devastating interaction with the Torturing Flame?" Smiling, still on its side, it continued, "Asag was never subtle, was it? No..."
Asag. "The Lightless Flame? You mean the Desolation?" Jonathan furrowed his brow.
"The Lightless Flame," Michael repeated, "the Desolation," at the sight of Jonathan's expression, it continued, "some call it the Blackened Earth, oh, you must know its name, Archivist, if it isn't to engulf you..."
"It hasn't yet."
"Then you've done extraordinarily well with crossing it. Who's hand did you shake?" It chucked again, quietly, at its own private joke, but then withdrew itself upright with raucous laughter, like a stunned murder of crows, when a sheepishness crept onto Jonathan's face.
"A woman named Jude Perry's."
"Oh, Archivist," pulling itself from the separate entity of laughter, one that oftentimes took forceful control and pulled aside the curtains to reveal itself, one who's echoes still bounced and shuddered while Michael's mouth formed new words, "did you really?"
"In my defence-"
"You have no defence." Michael shifted forward through the air in a flash of noise and a buzz of colour to rest its cheek upon its fists, its elbows on the table. "You really are exactly as I left you."
Gritting his teeth, Jonathan muttered, "I'm sure I am." A bitter rage delt devastating blows to Jonathan's humanity, enough to dent it but not nearly enough to force him to lash out, and Michael played with its hair with sheathed claws and half closed eyes.
That hair, Jonathan wanted to cut that beautiful hair, wind it into violin cords and play it till it screamed like any broken thing in pain. He wanted to coil it in the place of that woollen scarf around its brittle throat and strangle it, until no more laughter lived inside. There were no bones in Michael's body free of being haunted and shattered, left in pieces, splinters and shards of glass. Jonathan was desperate to gift the monster any kind of wound, any kind of confusion, pile on it the heaviest of suffering. He wanted to gouge out those iridescent eyes, leave Michael full of holes, lost. Michael deserved to be lost; Jonathan gripped with paling fingers the edge of the table.
It continued to toy with its hair as it spoke. "But, Jude Perry — the arsonist?"
"That's one word for it."
"It's the best word for it." Michael dismissed her existence quickly. "Driven mad by a love for that incendiary girl: they said she was Asag made flesh!"
"Agnes. Agnes Montague."
"Ahh... pyromania, entombed. She was kept safe and well for so many years, and she really was so... so difficult to keep." Raising itself, Michael rolled its eyes. "So much so that, when she started falling apart, they saw no other option."
"Other option than..?"
"You've read the statement, Archivist," Michael grinned, "you know the state in which they found her body."
"Yes..."
"More than that—" it chuckled, "—I know that you thought of me! Of... Michael. The arsonist mentioned Michael Crew — you thought of me. I am honoured to take up space in your crowded mind. It is crowded, isn't it?"
"Yes," Gritting his teeth before relaxing, sighing, Jonathan nodded, and Michael began to laugh.
Corridors.
Hollow laughter, mocking joy; it tumbled from its mouth, rolling and twining and interloping like an awkward maze. It galloped in shudders and sighs as coils formed in Michael's cheeks, worming into creases and folds.
Weird limbs.
As it laughed, it stretched its fingers, one at a time, to run them over its face, peeling skin, and through its tangling hair. Knives cut through the wash of cascading hair, but, while the tie that held it was snapped, it remained intact, as Michael exposed gleaming white teeth — far too many of them, great white shark.
Laughs like a... headache?
Jonathan's words had come back to haunt him, at the very least to frighten him, and the Distortion continued to laugh and laugh as though the topic of Jonathan spending any time thinking of it was one of sweet hysteria and split seams. The comedic genius of the Archivist thinking of Michael sent it into spiralling laughter, and centuries, millennia, must have passed before it calmed itself down enough to speak.
"Ah," grinning as it reinstated itself against the velvet backrest, Michael changed the subject, "I'm sure he's here to take our order."
A waiter, smartly dressed in all but expression, had glided to their table, and Jonathan hadn't even noticed its arrival.
His face was wrung and twisted into knots, bliss was injected into small, black eyes, and skin blurred with hair and features as he moved. In his right hand was a notepad and in his left the stem of a broken wineglass.
Michael gave no indication that the waiter was anything more or less than what was expected.
"Oh," it said, its voice a disharmony against the ambience of the restaurant as the waiter nodded questioningly in its direction, "I won't be ordering."
Turning its eyes, a deep, glowering hue unrecognisable, to Jonathan, it continued, "I'm being fed quite well."
Feeling his skin turn cold, Jonathan imagined just how much colour had been drained from his face. The waiter didn't take much notice of his sudden shock, and instead continued to gaze with those dark eyes, hardened like plastic, in his direction.
"Archivist?" Michael lulled, strangling an air of purity and grace and wearing its flesh like a mask; it sung, "will you be eating?"
"I, uh," Jonathan could hardly hear the question above the roaring of his blood in his ears and the humming of the gaping wound in space and time: the hallways. "I- I don't think I'm ready to... to order. Could you get back to me?"
With a dismissive nod, the waiter left, and Jonathan gave himself only a moment spare to collect his senses and confront Michael.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean," Michael straightened, the words that flew from its lips clear and stagnant, "that there is nothing in this establishment that I can eat."
As the grip that the question had affixed onto Michael faded, it slouched again, it's chin in one hand, bowed beneath the line between its shoulders. It smirked. "Save for the guests."
Spinning round fast enough to cause dizziness, Jonathan threw his gaze at the door.
A young couple, finely dressed and rosy with liquor, were guiding themselves through the open entrance. They laughed as they were pulled, nudged so gently, through the door, their facial features blurring with motion and excitement as each eye passed the boundary between reality and the corridors. With their smiles contorted in painful mirth, their limbs long and pulled, and their skin drawn into ribbons that were sucked through the doorway, they continued walking. They were swallowed.
Turning back to Michael, who was now hiding a giggle behind a clenched fist, padded, iron fingers curling into themselves, Jonathan slumped slightly, astonishment and guilt manifesting as a weight comparable to grief.
"Why do that?"
"Because I'm not eating you."
"Michael, please-"
"Ohh, it is far, far too late for them now, and all that entered before them. They don't remember their evening; they don't remember their lives."
Starstruck, Jonathan found his mouth dry and wordless.
"Honestly, Archivist," Michael asked, closing eyes that began to bleed ivory through its lashes regardless, "why the surprise?"
"I'm- I'm used to you trying to take me. I'm used to hearing people talk about you trying to take them. But this-"
"This is different, is it? Because you are... complicit?" At the flicker of open eyelids, the pearly tears fell in waterfalls and waves, pouring from the sockets in its skull. "I have news for you."
The golden hair drooped, sagging like wilted vines, as though every strand had suddenly been seduced by gravity. The gloves attempted to twist themselves loose, to free Michael's hands from their grasp.
Then, Michael dragged itself forward by a foot in a flash, gliding as it extended itself over the table, which swirled and warped beneath the bubbling air that sizzled as Michael passed it. Joints buckled and bent at odd angles as its limbs became crooked, rigid, holding itself up with its palms pressing into the tabletop. All that was elastic, its neck, its arms, stretched as it moved, pulling and driving forward the force of madness that just then came to a halt an inch before Jon's face. It left Michael's own behind, dripping like melted wax onto the tablecloth, and the Distortion studied Jonathan with all six, seven, eight of its marble eyes and all twelve, fourteen, sixteen of its hollow pupils. A heat that Jonathan recognised climbed into his skin.
It was shape, and colour, but none that Jonathan could comfortably name. It was brighter than suns, and as sharp as glass. Any semblance to a human being that it had worn was torn off and discarded in the hurry to remind Jon of its true form, of what it was capable of doing, of causing. It stung Jonathan's eyes like a thousand papercuts just to witness, and the Distortion spoke.
"I am not starving myself to see you," it hissed, inhaling a breath so ragged that it may have been absorbed through the cracks and holes in its form, only to seep right through, "so, I will eat as I please. You will watch."
It kissed Jonathan briefly, and its lips were serrated.
It immediately withdrew itself, just as fast as it had revealed itself, and Michael's face, hair, gloves, returned to their original states.
As the face melded back into the technicolour skin, which soon became a single, solid colour once again, Michael allowed itself to beam, the mask revealing no motive, no meaning, to the truth behind it. Michael continued to act as it had done beforehand, as though it were fully human, and it hadn't shed its scales to reveal the working innards, wire, flesh, and madness. Its hair, sprouting once again from above the sculpted face, one it had been eager to lose, danced and flew as though carried by unseen forces, a golden aurora of spirals and curls. The gloves grew around the hands, fibre by fibre and string by string. They were the first puzzle piece of Michael's costume to return to it, and the most truly unnerving to imagine removed. You wouldn't take the handcuffs off the wrists of a crazed convict, would you?
Eventually, it seemed satisfied with the crude recreation of Michael.
"You were always better at that, anyway."
Jonathan, once more, couldn't find the words to respond.
"Awh, Archivist," Michael crooned as its lips settled into the right place on its face and its eyes ceased to pour themselves dry of snow, "its as if you don't know me at all."
"I don't."
"Don't you?"
Jonathan swallowed hard and exhaled harder, eyes still dashing from wall to window.
He'd lied, he realised; of course, he knew Michael. Its unpredictability had begun to transform into anything but. A reliability inhabited what once was maddeningly complex: an amorphous mass of tangling hues that shuddered through the colour wheel, shaking worlds and shuddering breaths. Jonathan was understanding Michael, and where he had once been very afraid, he had become rigid, as though his will were enough to predict every action and fight every whisper.
While so many monsters sought ends to lives, rituals, gatherings, Michael was — refreshingly — a game. For the time being, it had little interest in relieving the Archivist of its head, and it would play the game as though that fact was the only real rule. Games it led weren't difficult to understand, to figure out as you played. They were to inspire fear and confusion, and any physical harm picked up along the way was accidental, meaningless.
Now, Michael was acting love, to confuse, concern, and confound. Playing pretend, as though the Archivist were a china doll, its performance existed only to exploit; Jonathan's fear had been enough once to sustain it, but his bewilderment had been more than lunch, but entertainment. Jonathan had been, to his detriment, a worthy adversary.
"I do," Jonathan whispered. "I do know you. I know that I am the last of all that ever intrigued you. I know that they run scared, or walk through your door without any rebuttal or fight. I know that you control them, and you know that you can't control me."
"Not easily," Michael sighed, a grin crawling back onto its face, the corners of its mouth once again creasing its cheeks like origami paper.
"I'm fun, aren't I?"
"That... and more. You're also devastatingly ignorant—" Michael threw its gloved hands into the air about its face in a mock shrug— "but it can be overlooked, in favour of your stubborn will, and your lethal need to ask questions, to know." Michael giggled, a mauve blush turning its cheeks ice cold. "You're right, Archivist. You're fun."
Curiouser and curiouser.
"Why?" Jonathan asked, and a creeping confidence swallowed him whole. "In your own words."
Michael talked for what felt like hours after that, and finished seconds after. It had spoken keenly of Jonathan's decisions, of what made him so interesting to follow, of the sporadic and thoughtless choices that had peppered his career as the Archivist. It described Jon's dimension as something of many textures and many themes. Jonathan had, at every opportunity, fought the entity of Michael, and, on occasion, impressed it. It was not easy, it made clear, to fight insanity; it was not a simple task to stare into delusion's very own soul and decide to make it your challenger, your problem, to know it, to destroy it. Jonathan had been the first, the only, to push back against Michael's madness, and Michael had fallen ill with obsession at the idea of discovering its very own polar opposite.
Asking questions, it had said, had been Jonathan's saving grace, and Michael had taken a liking to him; tearing a page from Jon's book, it had begun to observe him. Him, and the Archives, but mostly him. When Jonathan had cracked the table in two — hollow, just cobwebs and dust — Michael had relished in the opportunity to intervene. Perhaps the Archivist would die, and it intended on having the glorious honour of watching.
The Archivist did not die. Michael had decided to continue watching, but, unlike the Archivist and she who came before him, its focus was untethered and its concentration loose and lacking. So, at times, it decided it would be exciting to enrich the Archivist — to introduce variables to its enclosure. A door: would he notice? No, apparently not, it reasoned, when Jonathan had fallen right through. Would a dance release the Archivist of the stress that he had gathered — after all, Gertrude Robinson's murder was still unsolved, even while it spoke, was it not? — the answer had been the same, but his reactions had been interesting to study.
"Did you kill Gertrude, then?"
Jon had already guessed the answer when Michael rolled its head upon its neck from one shoulder to the other and sighed, "no, but I am indebted to whoever did, I'm sure."
"Continue." It wasn't a request.
"What more is there to say?" Michael giggled. "I decided I'd make a second attempt at the procedure in a new environment."
"A restaurant," he spat.
"Yes."
Yeah. Jonathan mused, narrowing his eyes, the very hint of a smile on his face. Statement ends.
"Alright," he straightened, his eyes finding the Distortion's and sealing the connection between them.
Exhaling slowly, deeply, Jonathan relaxed his shoulders and raised his chin, keeping straight his neck. Crossing his hands over his lap, he allowed his arms to slacken, and he threw one knee over the other to fully seal the performance.
"I will play your game, I will play out this evening, and then you will let me leave."
"I will! And, will you eat?"
"I'm not so hungry anymore." For, Jon knew, one should never drink too much from a bottle marked 'poison', regardless of how sweet it may be.
Michael eyed him like someone on the very edge of asking that beautiful question — why? — but said nothing, continuing to grin, instead.
It shifted its weight onto one hip, pulling itself backward and throwing one knee over the other. Once backed into the corner, it raised one arm, its elbow propping itself against the smooth leather of the sofa back, and wove together its slender fingers, positioning its chin over their knuckles, while the other elbow landed on the thigh closest to it. It relaxed, its flesh softened and the tense muscle bound to its fragile bones slackened. It sighed. Drink me. It seemed to shrink, become frail, quiet.
"Wonderful," it whispered, purring every word as it gazed at Jonathan with half closed eyes, "then, we can be alone."
"What about the waiters?"
"They won't be back."
"That's not what I mean," Jonathan decided to push the boundaries slightly, "are they human? When will they leave? Are they under your control?"
"One question at a time, Archivist," Michael sung. "Yes, they are as alive as your archival assistants are, perhaps moreso. It is not their fault that the minds of the weak are so easily molded."
"And that's... not me?"
"You're not going to ask me something stupid, are you, Archivist?"
"No. It's fine. May I ask you something else?"
"Go ahead," it shrugged the words as though they had no weight to them.
"What about the scarf?"
Immediately, a stiffness inhabited the Distortion's puppet flesh. Muscle and bone ceased to twitch and shiver along its neck and over its arms. The smile fell, shrinking, until parted lips revealed an expression of total disbelief. All light disappeared from its eyes and left them a storm grey, and they widened briefly, carrying its raised brows and softly lowering them. Tears of pearl beaded at their very corners, and threatened to leave trails over its cheeks, which had lost all their natural warmth and had turned a pale lilac. Whatever empty heat had occupied its blue lips had fled, and they were deep, and cold, dyed with nightshade poison and cut with crystal ice.
Its hair, Jon realised last, had lost all sense of itself; escaping the bun they had been contained in, the golden ringlets had fallen, chasing gravity, embracing it. They fell about its shoulders and over its eye, and became inanimate, dull, dead. It had lost all its sheen, that wild mane, and no longer gleamed, uncaring and unruly. Broken, tamed, submissive, blond hair hung like a noose around the Distortion's throat.
A mist, transparent and hardly noticeable, blew from its shivering lips as it spoke.
"What?" It asked the word so softly, it meant it so sincerely and, in its confusion, broke contact with Jon's eyes with several, stunned blinks. But, Jonathan wasn't one to answer questions — does the interrogator ever cease to press for answers long enough to tell a story of its own? Michael had not conjured the same level of insistence that the Archivist had, and Jonathan repeated himself, cold and clear.
"The scarf," with just enough emphasis applied so that Michael felt even a hint of fear, and just enough left behind to seem like his question had been innocent, Jonathan asked again. "Why do you still wear it?"
Immediately, the atmosphere fell cold, dropping through temperatures until Michael's misty breath began to condense in the air, falling like fog. Jonathan didn't see the vapour leave his own lips. Hours of bustling atmosphere collapsed into seconds of dead silence, and a weight swept over the restaurant until the waiters and the guests were frozen solid, bound to their places by invisible threads.
Michael closed its plain, dark eyes, and inhaled through the gloves it now pressed to its face. Smoothing aside heavy strands of hair with its fingers, its pupils found Jon's, and Jonathan marvelled at how expertly it bluffed guilt and terror, how it played a faux anguish. Crocodile tears.
Now, Jonathan's eye was the reducing chamber, and Michael had foregone the safety of its corridors to be sealed in the perfect illusion of the Archivist.
"Tell me."
As if planning not to give Jonathan the satisfaction of an explanation, Michael's distress folded into a glower, tears in its eyes.
It ended up hissing, "I can't remove it."
"Go on."
It crumbled like a house of cards; the Distortion had abandoned its host and left it a desolate corpse. Weakened, it recoiled, curling into flesh that Jon expected to come undone like stitches. "It wrapped itself around my throat," it begun.
Michael's sorrow spun a wonderful tale; a rabbit hole of twitching nerves and shattered glass, a flurry of colour, with no depth. Jonathan wanted to direct it to the subject of his next question — from which poor soul did you peel that bloodstain? — more matter, with less art.
Instead, he followed Michael's twisted yarn, picking apart the fibres and loving the sensation of truly becoming. The observed of all observers: Michael watched him with a thousand eyes, but could never be the sum of them. Jonathan was satisfied with two that obeyed him, two that he could trust; they worked just fine.
Michael spoke of a harrowing pain, of endlessness forced into physicality, but never gave a reason.
Michael confessed to something of a destiny, a dream, but never found the words to describe it.
Michael told of an obstacle, a weak, pathetic thing, that, like the lamb served on a silver tray, stumbled into its midst and drained their rapture dry, but never gave it a name.
Finally, heaving sobs that carried notes of laughter, that had the consistency of it, Michael whispered, "I can't tell you any more," and Jonathan blinked.
Shrugging itself free of human fragility, the Distortion sighed as though an immense weight had been lifted from its flimsy figure, drooping onto the table, its colourless cheek against its cold, blue arm, which begun to sing, rosy, as the world was brought to life, and the warmth begun to seep back into its skin. Rasping breaths and uneasy gasps slowed into a laughing rhythm, but its eyes, rainclouds over dusk, never quite found again their hypnotic hues. Its hair, a tablecloth, draped itself over the surface they'd shared, exhausted. Tendrils and knots slackened and fell in rolling curls, and Michael blinked its eyes clear of them without bothering to move its frozen fingers.
"Michael," Jonathan whispered, "why do you try?"
Its limbs briefly stiffened, and its fists clenched. A stuttering gasp preceded the response.
"Something within me tries."
"Well." Jon glared darkly at the exit, which he would have made a run for had it not been so brightly coloured: a toxic frog in a rainforest. "It hasn't made me care for you. That's a promise."
Michael did more than stiffen; it threw itself backward, its face against its shoulder and its hands gripping the table ledge.
"What have you done for me?" Jonathan, intent on hitting whatever pressure point he'd exposed in Michael, kept pressing.
The man that had been Michael let out a howl like a fox trapped in a snare, a fox that was starting to look like a white rabbit, its sides heaving in agony and fear and its eyes darting from left, to right, to the Archivist. Its hands found a serviette, kneading at the tearing tissue with trembling fingers.
"I- I try, Archivist," it stammered — poor thing.
"Do you?"
"Yes! Yes! I- I- I really, really try!" A pitifully human, watercolour flush painted its face, and it shook its head, losing its own voice in the labyrinth of nerves.
Jonathan didn't speak, no question would conjure a worthwhile reply, and the figure became quickly distressed. "All I ever did for- for you was try, didn't I? Didn't I?" A spark of anger tore through the terror, and it asked again. "Didn't I?"
All of a sudden, the sound between the parallel planes of existence — the corridors, and the world Jonathan knew, but never loved — began to scream. Electronic voice phenomenon, Jonathan thought, in his hurry to dispel the chill that caught him, but still, he listened. He listened, and the one that had been Michael began to cry; white hot tears that sizzled and burned and evaporated, cooked by fury and nursed by spite, fell from its cold, grey, eyes.
And as it cried, the doorframes, the stitches that held together the opposing worlds, burst into a flurry of horrified noise, a tempest of devastating rage. They screamed, and he listened.
How could you do this to me!? Hoarse and aching, the creaking groans of the question filled Jonathan's soul with ice. I'm starving! They wept, and it was bitter. I did everything you asked! Jonathan heard them, and, though he couldn't understand, he could feel — sincerely, feel — the creeping, itching needles of hate, pressing gently into his palms, wrists, throat, eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes. Why won't you love me!?
Jonathan couldn't bring himself to listen further, but the figure lunged forward, throwing itself back into the face and body of Michael, the Distortion, until it was close to colliding with the Archivist, and it screamed, "tell me you love me!"
Extinction burst. Volcanic eruption. Last ditch effort. Hail Mary. Call it what you will, it broke Michael.
It sat back down, it folded its arms, it crossed its legs, and it blinked, blankly, an emptiness on its face, in Jonathan's direction.
For a moment, Jonathan took in an oddly human Michael: not quite distorted, not quite drawn into springs, hurricane drunk, not quite mad, but, equally, not quite dead. No loss of colour could be seen — the passion of the outburst had left its eyes raw and wet, and its cheeks rosy. Its lip ceased trembling as it inhaled, though the breath shook as it filled its lungs, revealing that — after hearing just the right question — it would tip itself head-over-heels, and spill tears once more.
Its hair no longer bloomed, wildflower, deathly allergen, but instead sat, coiling and curling around its chin and shoulders, which it had slumped in sadness.
All in all, Michael, a fragile frame of a human being, sat silent, solemn, looking all too sorry for itself, and, having never come even close to watching Michael break its facade — it must have been a facade, no healthy creature sobs istelf dry like that — Jonathan felt a frightening sense of encroaching sympathy. It horrified him to know that, deep down below anything he'd ever willingly show on his face, Jonathan couldn't bear the thought of Michael falling to such a mortal low.
Or, perhaps, he simply couldn't allow such a horrific being the pleasure of catharsis. Jonathan decided that lying only brought him to Michael's level.
"You know," Jonathan hated himself as he spoke, begging his own voice to break, embarrass himself into shutting up, but he kept going, "it would be rude of you... not to take me home."
Michael's eyes, every tedious shade of wallpaper white, lifeless, rolled toward him. "What," a human voice, "Archivist?"
"You heard me," Jonathan muttered, and Michael straightened.
Faltering, leaning slowly forward, Michael placed either cold, gloved hand on the table, and bowed his head. "I'll return you."
In a moment of weakness, a guilty flutter of heartstrings and a rush of pity, Jonathan found one of Michael's hands and nudged it gently with one finger. Beneath, it burned, eager to escape and become itself, but Michael made no effort to pry his weapons free.
"I want to ask you one more question." Jonathan found a way to make his intention to compel clear without doing so.
Raising its head, blinking slowly in submission, it wondered, "will it hurt?"
Sighing only intensified the grip around Jon's heart. "Maybe. I want to try anyway."
"The Archivist always does."
"Well, as we're on that topic, did Gertrude Robinson ever know you?"
There was a weirdly awkward pause, then Michael shrugged.
"In a sense..." it whispered. Eyeing him softly, it said, "do you really want to know?"
"I'm not ready, am I?" Jonathan winced, having asked another question, and Michael hummed, thoughtfully.
"Perhaps not. Would it appease you to know that it doesn't really matter? That, really — in the grand scheme of things — it is pointless? A waste of breath, and poor sustenance?"
"Yes," Jonathan nodded, and Michael lay its head back on the tabletop, relieved. "Now, please, take me back home."
Life returned to the restaurant as the Distortion approached the fire exit.
Falling back into semi-hostile neutrality, it quietly and coolly grasped the handle of the yellow door, as warm as canary feathers, worth its weight in gold. Opening it to reveal the grand warren of the corridors, a hall of infinitely reflecting looking glasses, Michael gestured meekly for Jonathan to enter, still thin as bone, bound by weak human flesh. Its hair shifted over its face, but didn't raise itself by even an inch, when it said, "after you."
"What? So I can lose myself in there?"
"Please, Archivist," it sighed, "I've rather lost my appetite."
"I think I'll fare better if I follow you."
"Whatever suits you, Archivist..."
Michael bowed its head slightly, as if on instinct, as it passed through the open door, though, in its compressed and fearful body, the tip of the doorframe would have flown at least a few inches over its skull. Jonathan followed, squashing his hesitation in clenched fists while watching Michael saunter and sway as though maddeningly dizzy. Its eyes travelled now, forward and backward, to and from each corner of the corridors, each mirror on the wall — there must have been thousands. It crept ahead as though it were terribly afraid, as though Jonathan's comments had shaken it to its vibrant core, rattled it to its twisted heart. Did Michael have a heart? Jonathan didn't care: whatever state he had pushed Michael into, whatever basic elements it had been boiled down to, was not a working model fit to act fast, much less devour Jonathan whole. His state was solid, sound, safe, so Michael's really didn't matter.
In those endless mirrors, with their warped glass, Michael's figure expanded, grew, and straightened. It strode foward with a purpose that the Michael that Jonathan had been abducted by seemed to have been stripped of, and it marched with a confidence and understanding that the new Michael simply couldn't match. Jon watched, wide eyed, as the reflections morphed right back into the monster that Sasha had met while in that cafe. Sasha. A portion of his heart ached.
It continued aching; Jonathan mourned the Archives like an amputated limb, a phantom presence that surrounded him. It couldn't protect him from the people already corrupted by monsters past the point of no return: Jared, Jane, Michael; he winced. At the very least it had been a silent space, a place to think, learn. A dark and painfully underwhelming hopelessness enveloped him and swallowed him whole. Homesick, he thought of the statements passing through Georgie's letterbox, of the fuel they contained, a burning flame to keep alight his sense of self and wonder and knowledge. Truthfully, he had to know. Know what? He couldn't answer. Only that which was worth knowing.
The Archivist was so far from the Archives.
And he couldn't help but imagine that, without one, the building was crumbling. Dust and debris remained where a disruption had been made along the great chain of being, and the hierarchy had come tumbling down. A crucial organ had been pulled from the grand vivisection of the Magnus Institute, and the creature itself was continuing to try and live with no heart to beat clean blood, and no stomach to dismantle sweet information to its basic parts and distribute them.
"Do you think the Archives want me back?" Jonathan asked, absentmindedly, and Michael sighed.
"I'm sure that, lacking an Archivist, the Archives are functioning slower than they should be."
"Hm..."
"Equally," it suggested, "I'm sure that it could be just fine, if that soothes your conscious."
"Thank you." Jon muttered the words, and Michael nodded swiftly, but didn't turn its head. The Michael in the mirror had ceased crying, but Jonathan couldn't tell how much of it was the same monster that was guiding him through the halls, and how much of it was another lie.
Questions continued once Jonathan found himself overcome with relief, his feet on the concrete and Georgie's home in sight.
"What happened to you, in there?" Jonathan asked somewhat hesitantly.
Michael took in a single breath, and held it, before exhaling. Small, glassy tears rolled over its cheeks and fell to the ground, crystalline.
"Nothing that concerns you," its rebuttal was shallow, "Archivist."
"But... I'll know?"
"You'll know." Michael's shoulders lowered and its hands ceased to clutch its sides. "Now, leave. This is your house, isn't it?"
"Technically, no." Sighing, Jonathan found the floor and settled his eyes on those small pearls. "You could say I don't exactly... belong in my own corridors, though."
Michael had to laugh, albeit weakly. "Neither do I."
Jonathan raised his head, again, and another door had appeared in the ugly brickwork, a sweet pollen yellow, worked into with spirals, and held by black hinges as though it had been installed along with all the others.
Michael found its handle and twisted it, and it opened with a groan. As the light from within spilled into the street, covering Michael's face and clothes in a lace blanket of sunflower petals, Jonathan could almost have imagined that its form receeded. Its hair grew in volume, once more brimming with curls, and its harsh outline softened until Michael was a part of the world again. The scarf burned golden in the light and a shiver of cold, fright, or excitement rolled through its body. Two slim shimmers coated in round rings its eyes, and its expression became deep with awe, wonder, and astonishment, as though it were opening the door for the first time again.
Jonathan froze. There must have been a first time.
It clenched its unused fist as the weary weight returned to hold down every writhing, reaching limb, string, and essence of it, and Jonathan's fatal guilt returned.
"Wait," Jon muttered, joining it at the door.
Michael's astonishment turned to alarm as he took its right hand in his own and raised it, but Jonathan didn't meet its curious gaze.
Tucking one thumb under the glove, stunned briefly to find that it was cold beneath before shaking himself awake, Jonathan set loose Michael's fingers, dragging the suffocating fabric from a hand whose fingers continued long past where they should have met nail. Immediately, ignoring Michael's sigh of relief, and cautious laughter, laughter that echoed again and flooded every new set of lips, Jonathan reached for its second hand, avoiding the excited knives that were now freely cutting through the air.
After pulling away the second glove and discarding it, Jonathan staggered backward while Michael rejoiced at the sight of its own hands, doubling over and pressing its fingers to its lips — which did nothing to prevent the flow of what was now unstoppable and violent laughter. Its hair filled itself with water, twirling with whirlwind volume, exploding in golden rays. The sight, intensely vibrant and agonisingly obtrusive colour spilling and twisting in glorious spirals, immediately gave Jon a headache, and he elected to witness the event from a place of safety — a choice he was immediately relieved to have made; in its ecstacy, Michael spun, every second reverting to its original tangling mass of light before encasing itself in human skin, a thousand times, strobing in its rapture, and tearing black marks over walls with its talons.
Eventually, exhausted from its evident bliss, Michael's laughter withdrew itself back into its lungs, heaving joyous breaths, and losing beaded tears with each of them. It found Jon in an instant, and Jonathan hadn't a second spare to reject his fate before Michael's being, still melting between human and painfully not so, enveloped him.
"Thank you, Archivist," it giggled between the kisses it left in his hair, and Jonathan choked a reply.
"You're welcome?!"
Darting back to the door in a whir of humming static and burning pigment, Michael bid Jonathan farewell and, in his dazed, distracted state, Jonathan couldn't even see the Distortion within it anymore.
Instead, a young man with sandy blond hair, a flowing red scarf, blue lips, and slender hands with fingertips stained black with ink waved him goodbye, and pulled the squealing door shut behind him, plunging the street into as much darkness as London could muster, for the last time.
Before Jonathan made any attempt to leave, but after he'd given himself a few minutes to collect himself, he bent down, and crouched on the concrete, picking up one solid, glossy tear that Michael had left behind. It melted in his hand.
Morning came, and Jonathan had already made up his mind; he'd forget the experience, discredit it as an anomaly of the past. Nothing of interest had been learned, nothing of value had been exchanged, other than, perhaps, Jonathan was now aware — and, rather predictably, curious about — Michael's seeming sensitivity toward rejection, loss, and the topic of the Archivist. Love from the Archivist seemed to be a prize it could not grasp. Rolling his eyes, Jonathan reminded himself that — until he needed, rather than wanted, to know — he was electing to avoid the topic.
He'd fallen asleep on Georgie's sofa, and a stiff ache had crawled into his spine. He clicked as he moved, a skeleton drawing itself from a crypt, and Georgie met him with a smile in her kitchen.
"You slept late," she leant against her kitchen table as though she'd never left the room that Jon had last seen her enter, and the Admiral sat with her, eyeing with vicious intent the bagel she had held between her thumb and forefinger.
The cat's lip raised briefly and his ear twitched in quick succession, large, round, pupils focused on his prize. Noticing him, Georgie scooped him upward, her unused hand snaking around his stomach, hoisted him to her chest, before crouching down and tossing him gently onto the floor. The bell around his collar rung as he landed, and Georgie muttered some affectionate insults.
"Did- did I?" Jonathan's eyes followed the cat as he trotted around the table legs and came to press his soft body against him; a tremendous pur sounded from him, sweet cat. "What's the time?"
"See for yourself."
"Goodness, that late?"
"It looked like you slept well though. No more nightmares."
Tutting as he reached for the kettle, which had just begun to hiss and steam, Jonathan said, "that date was a nightmare, though."
"No way."
"Yeah! Good lord..." suddenly remembering the explosive aftereffects of Michael's joy, Jonathan placed the kettle down onto a mat and left the room. "I'll be back."
Having allowed Jonathan to remove his affliction, Michael had burst into beautiful excitement. His claws, Jonathan feared, would have cracked bricks, scratched buildings, cut fences clean in two. Jonathan almost laughed; the neighbours' overgrown hedges had needed to be trimmed, anyway.
But, no blemishes were to be found. At least, Jonathan realised, none that didn't look decades old. Initials had been carved into the brickwork, reminiscent of old loves and ancient enemies. Sticks and stones had sliced into the walls, cutting and chipping away until deep gashes had been formed. Jonathan was almost fooled by three, parallel stripes, running charred over the wall but, putting his finger to them, found that they had been smoothened by years of rain, and were cold.
No, unless Jonathan had overslept by a lifetime, Michael hadn't left any scars.
The last small clues, lying unsubtle in the middle of the pavement, just beyond the steps to Georgie's house, were two deep green gloves. Soft and damp under his touch, they lay on the ground until he lifted them, turning them over in his hands.
Cages, Jonathan thought. Masks. Shackles.
Turning back to the door, open by a split, Jonathan gripped them tightly, running his fingers over untouched seams and unbroken seals. He turned to the bins beside the door, almost consumed by an unruly bush more thorns than roses, and opened them. Tossing the gloves inside one and feeling no fear, Jonathan slammed it shut, muttered a silent apology, and turned to the street.
He'd return to the Archives sooner or later, he decided; he'd know when to do it. He'd learn about Michael, solve its twisting enigma, gaze right into every paradox it provided. When the time came, he'd know where to look.
For now, he hadn't eaten since breakfast the day before, and was beginning to understand the Admiral in his desires for a bagel.