Alex sprang back.
Darlington’s body seemed to shift again, retracting. The horns vanished, the golden bands. He looked mortal. He stood there for a moment, gazing at Anselm’s remains, then turned and started up the stairs.
“Darlington?” Alex stammered. “I … Where are you going?”
“To get some clothes, Stern,” he said, climbing the steps and leaving bloody footprints behind. “A man can spend only so much time without trousers on before he begins to feel like a deviant.”
Alex stared up at him, one hand on the banister. The gentleman of Lethe had returned.
Doom Sparrow (also Bloodfinch or Black-Winged Harbinger); familyPasseridae
Provenance: Nepal; date of origin unknown
Donor: St. Elmo, 1899
Whether these sparrows were bred or enchanted, or developed theirunique traits in the wild is unknown. The first were identified circa 700
when a sparrow colony took up residence in a mountain village, thepopulation of which subsequently poisoned themselves in an act of masssuicide. World population of the bird is also unknown, but at least twelveexist in captivity.
Notes on care and feeding: The sparrow is kept in a state of magicalstasis but should be fed weekly, at which time it should be allowed to flyor its wings will atrophy. It prefers dark, cold spaces and will becomelethargic in sunlight. When tending to the sparrow, keep your earpassages blocked with wax or cotton. Failure to do so may result inlistlessness, depression, or, in the case of prolonged exposure, death.
See also the Tyneside Canary and Manuscript’s Queen-MoonNightingale.
Gifted by St. Elmo, who believed they were acquiring aCloudBeaked Harbinger, notable for its ability to predict storms in itsflight patterns.
—from the Lethe Armory Catalogue as revised and edited by Pamela Dawes,
Oculus
Has no one noticed that the societies “gift” Lethe with all of the magicthey deem too unsafe or too worthless for their own collections? Theleavings, the disasters, the mistakes, the worn-out artifacts andunpredictable objects. Though our armory may represent one of thegreatest repositories of magic housed at a university, it also has thedubious distinction of being the most hazardous.
—Lethe Days Diary of Raymond Walsh-Whiteley(Silliman
College ’78)
37
Darlington had been asleep and in his dreams he’d been a monster. But now he was awake and brutally cold. And maybe a monster still.
He made his way up the steps, dimly aware that he was leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind him. His own blood. Anselm had no blood to leave.
He’d broken in half as if he were filled with sawdust, a facsimile of a man.
Each step made a drumbeat: anger, desire, anger, desire. He wanted to fuck.
He wanted to fight. He wanted to sleep for a thousand years.
Darlington knew that at some point he would have been embarrassed that he was naked. But maybe he’d spent so long in two places at once that his modesty had gotten lost somewhere in between. He didn’t want to see the damage he’d done to the ballroom. In fact, after so long in captivity, he wasn’t sure he ever wanted to see the ballroom again. Instead he headed directly to his bedroom on the third floor.
He felt as if he were viewing it through thick glass, or one of those old View-Masters, click the button, turn the slide. The colors seemed wrong, the books foreign. He had loved this room. He had loved this house. Or someone had. But now it gave him no pleasure.
I’m home.
He should be glad. Why wasn’t he? Maybe because Alex had freed his soul, but some part of him would forever be trapped in hell, carrying rock after rock, setting stone upon stone, begging to stop, to rest, but unable to.
There’d been no boredom, no sense of repetition. He’d been desperate the whole time, a man trying to revive a corpse, trying to breathe life into a body gone cold, looking for some sign of hope, sure that every single stone was the one that would bring Black Elm back to glory. There was more, of course.
He had been many things in hell, jailer and jailed, torturer and tortured, but he wasn’t ready to think about that and he was only relieved that there were some secrets he could still keep from Galaxy Stern.
He could sense her standing at the bottom of the stairs, hesitant, and he was ashamed of the thoughts that entered his head. Could he blame the demon for these visions of carnality? Or was he just a man who’d been in jail for a year? His cock didn’t much care about the debate and he was glad he was alone. And that his erection wasn’t glowing like a New England lighthouse anymore. He pulled on jeans, a sweatshirt, his old coat, waited patiently for the tide of want to recede. He packed a small overnight bag— his grandfather’s old leather satchel. It was only then that it hit him.
His parents were dead. And in a way, he had killed them. Golgarot had fed on his soul in hell, dined on his shame and hopelessness. He’d eaten Darlington’s memories and the worst of his sadness and need. He had killed Michael Anselm for the sake of his plans, an expedient means to an end. But killing Darlington’s parents would have delighted him, not just because Anselm drew satisfaction from pain, but because some shriveled, bitter part of Darlington wanted them to die and die badly—and Golgarot knew it. The boy who had been abandoned to the stones of Black Elm had no care or clemency to give his mother and father, only violence.
Darlington sat down on the edge of the bed, the knowledge of everything that had happened crashing into him. If he let his mind alight on any single thought for too long, he’d go mad. Or maybe he was already mad. How was he supposed to be human again after what he’d seen and done?
Nothing had changed. Everything had changed. His bedroom looked just as he’d left it, and aside from the giant hole in the ballroom floor that he could never afford to repair, the house seemed to be intact. His parents were dead.
He couldn’t quite get the fact to take on weight and settle.
So he would keep moving. Think about the bag, pick it up. Think about the door, open it. Think about each step he was taking down the hall. These were safe things to gather around him.
Darlington descended the stairs. The patch of squirming maggots Anselm had left behind should have repelled him, but maybe it was his demon skin that refused to crawl. Alex was waiting in the kitchen, eating dry cereal from a box. She was the same too—skinny, sallow, ready to take a swing at anything that looked at her wrong.
She’s a killer. That had seemed important once, a dark revelation. He remembered her standing in the basement of Rosenfeld Hall, how still she’d been in the moment when he’d needed her to act, a silent girl with black glass eyes, her gaze as steady and as wary as it was now. I have been crying out to you from the start.
They watched each other in the quiet of the kitchen. They knew everything about each other. They knew nothing at all. He had a sense that they had entered into an uneasy truce, but he couldn’t quite name the war.
She was more beautiful than he remembered. No, that wasn’t true. It wasn’t that she had changed or that his vision had sharpened. He was just less afraid of her beauty now.
