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It becomes apparent that something is amiss when no unfurling memories walk beside Gentle as he makes his way through the house on Gamut Street. Nothing stirs in the corners of any room—there are no mice, no roaches, no flies, let alone any sort of patient recollection waiting to slosh about the returning Reconciler as he wades through the darkness.
All is quiet. Gentle lingers just past the threshold of the dining room. He imagines he can hear the flame hiss at the tip of his candle as it nibbles away at the wick, dancing despite the musty air weighing down on it. If any forgotten shard of history plans to present itself, it will do so now.
Stillness. No familiar (but lost) face from around the corner. No reminiscent (but cloying) scent through the shattered window. No chilling breeze; no sigh; no banter, even, in the adjoining rooms.
As Gentle raises his flickering candle and begins to turn slowly to the right, the tiny light collapses unceremoniously, struck down not by some errant wind, but by a sudden timid impulse, perhaps frightened into submission by a presence its holder cannot yet see. And indeed, something vague and sleek shifts at last in the peripheral shadows of the room—something that Gentle finds he can only begin to view the shape of once he looks past it.
“Who’s there?” he asks, more curiosity than accusation rippling beneath the surface of his words. By the waning light of a far window he can see a thin column of smoke rising from the now-extinguished wick. That light stops just short of the fluid shadow, and with the extension of dusk its area of illumination begins to shrink.
For a moment, nothing more rouses in the dank black of the room’s outskirts. Then two yellow cat eyes open in the depths of the darkness, reminiscent of twin waxing moons but for the terrible brightness of them. When Gentle says nothing—instead only staring, resolute—the guest lingers for a breath or two, simply gazing back, then emerges from that which had concealed it.
And guest it is, for any memory residing between these crumbling walls would certainly bring a sort of assurance with it, a confidence within Gentle that would guide his word and action. No such phenomenon uncoils into his extremities, and no warm recognition stills the ever-prepared killing breath in his lungs.
The guest unfurls a saber-sharp smile, at the edges of which dances a terrible, foreign familiarity. Gentle, traitor always to himself, finds himself drawing some unjust comparison with Pie ‘oh’ Pah, at the heart of which lies an ineluctable hegemony. And perhaps there is a chance that this, too, is a mystif of some sort or another: the radiating potential for sudden, fluid change; the unspeakable splendor in every angle and movement. But contrary to Pie ‘oh’ Pah's gentle, steady beauty, this stranger is all but blinding. It could be a conspecific of that (passionately missed) late lover, true, but Gentle imagines that it is more likely the acme of all mystifs—a godhead of those bent and twisted by fleeting fancies.
“Reconciler,” it says, an inescapable amusement woven through every swirling syllable. The dark spot it had stepped out of has, by now, inexplicably diminished, as if shrinking back in deference upon the unveiling of this solar presence. “You've returned for another promenade through the old stomping grounds.”
“I don't know about promenade,” answers Gentle, standing a degree straighter almost by instinct. “I’m only seeing to a bit of business. It pays to be thorough.” He places the extinguished candle on the rotting wood of the dining room table. To free his second hand, yes—but to extend in acknowledgement, or to seize a deadly exhale from his own two lungs? It depends on what happens next, he thinks, and, as if reading his mind, the pale stranger permits its smile to take the angle of a switchblade.
It reaches out to slide the candle toward itself across the table with two slender fingers. “Always tending to some affair, aren't you?”
In the instant that Gentle blinks, the wick ignites once more. “Only as of late.” The guest stoops to light the end of a cigarette with the reborn flame and, straightening back up, returns the lit candle to its place before Gentle. “And as for you?” he asks carefully, not daring to peel his gaze from the stranger’s own.
“Oh, I’m just visiting. I thought I’d come see the Maestro himself, before he goes off to reunite the Dominions once more. You do know, I trust,” it goes on, gesturing vaguely with the lit end of its cigarette, smoke twisting and bowing as it detaches from the ember, “that history does not always honor the mediator.” In the ancient amber of the creature's eyes, Gentle's reflection is a trapped insect. “If mediator is indeed what you are.”
“When we are successful,” says Gentle slowly, “we will write history ourselves.” The wind whistles, low and unimpressed, over the naked window frame across the room. “You know of me. Have we met before?” A pause, during which the Reconciler grants a wry smile. “I’d certainly remember under normal circumstances, but…”
The thing with the sun-eyed stare, catching Gentle’s suggestion as the words waltz through the smoke, begins to amble the long way around the table. Its lips turn up at the corners. “Have we met?” it echoes. “You might say that.” When it reaches the threshold past which Gentle only marginally stands (and still he keeps his eyes on the stranger, though the candle begs too to be beheld where it flickers on the table), it pauses, tilts its head ever so slightly to the left.
“With the resignation of my prodigal brother, and the abandonment of all his creatures,” it sighs, cigarette descending from its lips while the smile remains, “I like to believe that you are one of mine.” And saying so, it continues beyond the threshold, down the hallway to the foot of the attic stairs.
From where he stands now, Gentle can see the guest in its entirety as it proceeds down the narrow corridor, a gleaming chip of axe blade in the splinters of rotting wood. A hundred taunts (a hundred questions) waver in the heat haze of its second shadow cast on the moaning floorboards and walls.
One beat, then two; then following after the thing is as simple and thoughtless as succumbing to the waters at the Cradle of Chzercemit—and perhaps equally as deadly; perhaps equally as delivering. Notwithstanding, Gentle cannot imagine this figure, no matter how celestial, as one of Huzzah's goddesses.
But still he follows.
“I am no one's creature,” he says.
“No?”
No. But there are those who may be mine. “No more than any other Maestro.”
The stranger stops once more, only turning its head enough to see Gentle from the corner of its eye. “Maestros are all at the mercy of their ego. Just as you are at the mercy of your desire.”
And with this last word, delivered like a hammer upon the upright head of a nail, the stranger ceases to be so—it twists like a figure fashioned from smoke, and Gentle perceives not a blinding, sharp-edged presence, but one of unselfish darkness. It is as soft and fleeting as a deer darting between trees, but recognizable even so. How could it not be? The thing that is not Pie (but now takes the face right off the mystif in a dead-desecrating act) sits not before the attic window—a position achingly familiar to Gentle—but seems backlit anyway by some radiant star. It would take very little for Gentle to suspend his disbelief, to believe one of many miracles had indeed returned Pie ‘oh’ Pah to him. His Pie, with its arrowhead resolve; his endless companion, fluid as a stream and constant still.
Endless? No, maybe not.
But one must hold on to hope.
Then the thing that is not Pie takes one last drag of its cigarette, then exhales gently (but still with a vague cruelty that tears Gentle out of his reverie), and through the smoke its face alters perpetually: it is Judith; it is Vanessa (slit your lying throat); it is one common expression on a thousand forgotten visages. It is Gentle the Reconciler; it is Sartori the Autarch.
All are true at once. One face blends into another until the unseen memories in the walls of the house begin to shriek their senseless torment. Gentle steps back once down the hall, and the floor groans as if he has trodden on a living thing.
The smoke dissipates. The creature at the end of the corridor reclaims its first set of features, and it smiles.
“Who are you?” asks Gentle—or at least he believes he does. He has been witness to greater oddities than this; there have been far more harrowing horrors, and motives lying leagues beyond this level of spite. Still, there is something about this stranger that demands a degree of dread—the shadows in the dining room had felt it, and the Reconciler feels it now, against his oh-so-exalted will.
Its cigarette’s descent to the floor is accompanied by a scoff. “I’ve told you, haven’t I?” One decisive heel grinds the discarded thing into the already grimy floor. “Desire, Sartori. Always Desire.”
And Desire moves to ascend the rickety attic steps before Gentle can so much as begin to formulate an articulate response.
“I’ll be watching you, Reconciler,” says Desire without turning around. The cigarette left shrivelled at the foot of the stairs looks a bit to Gentle like a worm in the epilogue of its death throes. Each of Desire’s footfalls on the creaking steps is another steady strike of Gentle’s beating heart. “I look forward to seeing your great work.”
At the top of the stairs it extends one flawless hand to twist the attic door knob, and steps over the threshold, and shuts the door behind itself with a dull thud.
All is quiet. The dormant memories of 28 Gamut Street leave their Reconciler, prodigal in his own right, to strain his ears trying to detect any further movement in the attic. He perceives no such thing. When he follows his guest a moment later, the creaking of the stairs elongates into a keening wail which only ceases with the reopening of the attic door.
Gentle knows not what he expects to find. Of course Pie is gone—has been gone; no silhouette rests against the illumination of the window on the far wall. No inciting echo of that which once was creeps from the gaps in the floor, and, of course, Desire has withdrawn.
Or perhaps it has not. What else could drive the Reconciliation, if not desire?
Then all right, thinks Gentle, standing alone in the dilapidated skull of the house, see it through. Maybe he’s got the thing’s approval, a white-hot blessing seared into the back of his eyes; maybe he'll meet Desire once more in the Unbeheld's domain.
Still the house is silent. Its master, hesitating for a moment which assumes the stature of an hour, turns to descend the stairs once more. There is work to be done, yes—much of it. There are very important people not to disappoint.