Chapter Text
—and it had vanished as fast as it had come, bursting out of itself, blue light and static buzz and a flurry of bats; then, the cold, stinging weight of its message, ringing in his ears like the roar of a crowd, a rush of vertigo and swirling down, down, his eye aflame, down, until—
The rumble beneath him—tyres on a nighttime road, moving straight and steady, dizzying all the same. His cheek, pressed onto the back of a leather seat. His lower back aching from where he’d slumped. He swallowed, coughing on something sharp in his throat, groaning like a high-rise in the wind.
“Does it hurt?”
Through the haze, he saw a handkerchief held in front of his face, stained and bloody. The hand that held it seemed poised to act at a moment’s notice. He reached up, touching with a tentative finger, feeling a crust around his nose, dried and sticky on top of his paint. The residue went down to his upper lip. He must look a state.
“You never hit it,” said a different voice.
“Came out of nowhere,” the first voice added, “much like—”
“No, no,” he said, dropping his hand to the seat, pushing himself upright. He waved a dismissal and the handkerchief too was lowered.
The concerns of those who sat with him had not been so readily waved away. Through the eyes of four chrome masks, he was watched. Like he was watched by the blinking lights of the city’s towers, from shadowed ground-level roads to the clouds they swam in, and the papers that passed from boy to man on crowded pavements, clutched against a briefcase—they were pasted to derelict glass, left to sink to mulch in the puddles of exhaust, his face and title and legacy a melted splurge of ink.
Papa shifted in his seat, muttering an apology when his knee brushed that of his neighbour. He was seated in the middle of two of them, the other two in the opposite seats. Both leaning forward. Both pairs of eyes fixed on him.
“The other car is a write-off.”
“Mm. Windows shattered, glass all over the seats. Opportunistic vandals.”
“Kids,” Papa said, and cleared his throat. “In all likelihood.”
“Or bats.” To the look he received from another Ghoul, this one shrugged. “What? They could have taken down the Grand, if they had put their minds to it.”
A murmuration, blacking out bright neon glow. Suffocating dark into piercing blue. His head swam, the flicking lights still burned into his eyes, even when he pressed them shut. And his left eye—Lucifer below, his left eye throbbed as if the weight of the stampede fell upon it. He pushed his hand to it, heedless of the grimace that all four of them would see, so dizzy in the stop-and-start of the car that he might not have been in it at all. He might be falling, buffeted by the swirling winds, down and down from those points of the city that grazed the stars—
“Papa?”
He opened his eyes, steeling his jaw and tilting forward, forcing himself to look out the window. Through the film of dirt was the sky-high night; the soaring view from a six-lane bridge.
“Pull over.” He swallowed after he spoke, lest his heart spill out of his throat. “Driver. Pull over —”
He did not register words from the front seat, only cautious refusal. The Ghoul with the handkerchief laid a hand on his knee.
“There is a hard shoulder. Use it.”
Papa was not easily denied. The indicators clicked and they left the lane to a chorus of horns, jolting when the car stopped, harsh and abrupt. He did not wait another moment—his lungs were tight, caught on a breath. He stood, unsteady and stooped, fumbling for the door handle across the lap of the Ghoul to his left.
The Ghoul pulled the handle for him without a word. He swung out of the car and held the door whilst Papa clambered over the seat, unsteady when he met the tarmac. That first mouthful of cold, thin air had him reeling, his head spinning like the car hadn’t stopped. He stumbled towards the edge of the hard shoulder, desperation forcing numb legs forward, making for the open air beyond the car and the road and what loomed in his mind’s eye—the Ghoul stepped aside to let him.
The thud of the car door was barely there over the winds that poured over the bridge, rivalling the roar in his ears and the din of the cars that passed. Gusts took him by the shoulders, pushing him closer to the barrier at the edge of it. Papa let them. Gloved hands met blackened metal; he tried to breathe deep to draw himself back to stability, but only managed to cough on the exhaust of the road.
Lights were blurred by the clinging smog. The road was clear of it at this height, thanks only to the winds that never ceased, though the cars did not cease either. They left his mouth sour in their wake. He pinched his lips, taking cold breaths through his nose, wiping at his upper lip when those breaths stung; his gloves came away bloodied.
He planted his hands on the barrier again and looked, through the smog and the dark and his watering eyes, at the city that lay splayed out beneath him—this time, he took vertigo by the hand, his elbows locked, gasping into overwhelm. The cry of the highway fought what impended his mind’s eye, and if he squinted into the thick clouds beyond, their bellies aglow, it was almost as if he could see —
Papa let go with one hand, fumbling in his pocket for a packet of cigarettes.
It had been crushed by the Ghoul who sat beside him, or whatever he’d done after he’d passed out, but the contents were still intact. The weight of a cigarette against his lips was grounding like nothing else could be; he patted his jacket, searching for the lighter he’d slipped into a pocket in the lining, but his trembling hand found nothing.
“Fell out when we lifted you,” came a voice from behind, raised over the noise of the bridge.
The Ghoul flicked the lighter open with his thumb, making his offer with a gesture. Papa accepted, cupping his hand when the Ghoul cracked the flame, nodding his thanks when the embers caught. Meagre heat against his palm would usually be a comfort, but the spark made him shiver tonight.
The Ghoul’s hand hovered, as if he were about to touch Papa’s sleeve, but he let it fall to the barrier as he, too, gazed out into the city’s swell.
“Do you think it hurt anybody?” He said, his eyes roaming the horizon.
Papa drew a breath, letting smoke fill his lungs, a weak balm against the shake in his limbs. He shook his head and let the mouthful go. “That was hardly its intent.”
The Ghoul was quiet for a moment, allowing the statement to sit. He scuffed his feet on the tarmac. “And you know what that intent was?”
“Not with any certainty,” he lied. Smoke caught the blare of headlamps. “But when has there ever been, hm? We do not do clear-cut .”
To him, the message had been as obvious as they come. To those who had watched the spectre fill the sky, all that had been obvious was the recipient of it.
“Our doing, then,” the Ghoul said, and without a look, held out his hand.
Papa relinquished the cigarette, passing it so that his wrist sheltered the lit end. The Ghoul took it and lifted his mask, just long enough to fill his chest, and Papa did not pay heed to the roll of his stomach, or the alluring satisfaction in his stance. Here was not the place. Nowhere ever had been.
He accepted the cigarette back, ignoring the slight dampness from another’s lips. “Without a doubt.”
Doubt , hm? How about that? A whisper of it and he was running into the street, pinned on his feet by light from above, gazing up, up, up into the calls of his own heart, and the voice that answered back. He had been laid bare. And who was he to anger at it? He knew his failings, accepted the message that was nothing more than his twisted compass being forced back into place; he had not the strength to do that himself.
And today, on the day of the premiere—not that its interruption had been a major blow. That had been the point, hadn’t it? The night treated as disposable. As good a time as any to pass on the memo.
He watched the clouds, sickly green, searching for a flash of blue he knew he wouldn’t see. He would do this each and every time he looked out into the night; turning his back to the skies would forever feel as though they watched him from behind. But he would not be afraid, if he could follow the gaze forward—if spectral hands guided him to where he was supposed to be. Though his legs still shook, his fingers tense and numb on the remnants of the cigarette, he forced himself to envision it in front of him, dwarfing the city, eclipsing the moon—
“Papa. Look at me.” The Ghoul’s voice was distant.
He would look as little as possible, reserving anything longer than a glance for behind closed doors. Or the Ghoul, too, would become a known distraction.
A distraction from the Path.
But he turned, away from the sweeping horizon, hair blowing across his face, stubbing out the cigarette on the barrier like it wasn’t his hand responsible. Headlamps shone back at him from the curves of the mask.
The Ghoul tugged the handkerchief from his pocket, folding it to find a corner that was not already browned. He took Papa’s chin in his hand, stooping when he brought the handkerchief to his face again; this time, he dabbed it underneath one eye.
The eye on the left, that pulsed in its socket like something might soon break free.
“Sorry,” the Ghoul said, when Papa flinched. It was half drowned out by passing cars.
He touched his cheek with the back of his white-gloved hand, the fingers tobacco-stained, brown from his bloody nose and urban grime. The fresh blood it came away with seemed black in the night.
He stared at it, wind in his ears. “As far as I am concerned,” he said, as the glove blurred and his insides turned liquid and the cigarette stub slipped from his fingers, “that could have been a fax.”