Benno’s beard once again reeked of the putrid stew from August’s Bathhouse, somehow now returning even worse than before. He showered, using bottle after bottle of shampoo, but the stench only worsened until, left with no choice, he readied a pair of scissors and squared up in front of the mirror to do away with the cursed thing for good.

“Are you going to apologize to Onus?” Holes asked, perched on the edge of the sink.

Benno positioned the scissors as close to his chin as he could. “For what?”

“For hurting his neck.”

“No.” Benno hesitated to make the cut.

“Why?”

“You were right.” Benno lowered the scissors a half inch; maybe he could salvage some of it. “About Onus. He’s evil. Him and his sister. The whole family.”

“I didn’t say he’s evil.” Holes shrugged its petals. “I said he’s angry.”

Benno lifted the scissors back up closer to his chin. The whole thing had to go.

“You didn’t have to hurt him,” Holes said.

“Will you stop with that?”

“You didn’t have to hurt the people in the Bathhouse either. They didn’t do anything, and even if they had…”

The scissors drifted lower. “What do you know?” Benno scowled. “You didn’t even know there was anything other than that stupid movie until, what? Two days ago?”

“I know hurting people is wrong, especially when they can’t hurt you back.” Holes folded its petals in whatever constituted its lap. “Which for you, I think, is everyone.”

Benno adjusted the scissors. “It doesn’t work that way,” he said.

“Then how does it work?”

Benno huffed. “Life is… Sometimes things… Nothing really… It’s complicated.”

Holes watched him. “You don’t have to be like Jack.”

“Fuck it.” Benno dropped the scissors, which disappeared at his feet, glared at the beard in the mirror, huffed again, and climbed back into the shower.

#

Gemma led him to room 000003. Behind the door, Benno could hear voices. He stood for a long time—minutes—listening, trying to make out the words. But they were muffled. They might as well have been gibberish, just like the soundless words unfolding forever in his head—

—dlorsuleathdlorsulthulfisdlorsuleckalon—

—and finally, deciding if he subjected himself to two parallel streams of nonsense for much longer he would go insane, he knocked once—at which point the voices ceased—and then entered the room.

Onus sat on the sofa. His neck was bruised dark black from jaw to clavicle, and his sclera were speckled with bright blots of red. His fingers traced the zipper on the pocket at his chest for a moment before lowering to his lap.

By the window, looking out at the beach and the sun-speckled sea, Christopher Ryan stood. He turned slowly toward Benno as the door swung shut.

Benno kept his eyes on Onus. “You know your Tefached can’t protect you from me.”

Onus nodded.

Benno nodded in return. “I’m sorry about your neck.”

“It’s alright,” Onus croaked. The state of his voice alarmed Benno, and a pang of guilt passed through him, though it quickly dissolved in the bottomless pool of distrust and frustration that had guided him since the white wooden door opened in the basement of the Everson Family Motor Company.

Benno met Christopher Ryan’s gaze. The panes of his glasses were clear, and his small, dark eyes betrayed nothing but the fact of his own sight.

“I need answers,” Benno said. “From both of you. Now.”

Onus looked back at Christopher Ryan, wincing as he turned his neck.

Christopher Ryan removed his glasses, and proceeded to clean them with the front of his Polo shirt. “This is a bit awkward,” he said with a faint smile.

His smug voice—the first time Benno had heard it since the trial—coupled with the grin on his despicable lips, filled Benno with dense rage.

“I’ll tell you what I can,” he continued. “I don’t know if it’ll be satisfying to you, and I don’t know if you’ll like hearing a lot of it. But…” He replaced his glasses on his face. “Since we’re here.” He shrugged.

Benno placed his hand on Holes, hoping the cool plastic of its petals would give him the strength not to climb over the sofa and rip Christopher Ryan’s head from his neck.

“Where would you like me to start?” Christopher Ryan asked.

“Start from the beginning,” Benno said.

Christopher Ryan looked at Onus, who nodded.

“Alright then,” he said. “I was born in…”

#

“…a town called Winsted, in a Schema D Realm like yours, in April, nineteen—”

“I thought you were born in Fairfield,” Benno interrupted. “Connecticut. In my Realm.”

Christopher Ryan shook his head. “I’ll get to all that. But my birthplace wasn’t too dissimilar from Fairfield. I actually went to Fairfield once. It’s… it’s fine. Either way. I grew up in Winsted. Went off to college to study finance. Graduated, moved to a city, got a job at a wealth management firm. Blah blah blah. I was there for about ten years before I met Annabel.

“She was the daughter of one of the firms long-time clients. He was rich—not insane rich, but enviably rich. Tens of millions. He died suddenly, youngish. I think in his early sixties. Anyway, he had a lot of money caught up in things, various high-yield investment, but very little cash. And no will. So his daughter came in. I saw her on the books, and my boss warned me it might be an awkward conversation. We’d dealt with frustrated heirs before. They were tough people. Their whole lives they’d been under an impression that one day they would become rich overnight. But it didn’t always happen that way. Rich people—especially rich men—like to leave final fuck yous, especially to their ungrateful kids. So once in a while you get an estate that all divided up in surprising ways, or where the bulk is left to someone random, like a housekeeper or some old girlfriend. And that leaves the kids frustrated. Pissed, is maybe a more accurate term. So because this particular rich guy hadn’t even left a will, and we were still holding the bulk of his assets, we were anticipating that his daughter would come in frustrated. Pissed.

“But Annabel… She wasn’t like that. Actually, she wasn’t like anyone I’d ever met. First of all, she didn’t even want the money. She just wanted to know if there was anything she needed to do for us. So that we were free to move it around. She was the only daughter—the money was, in the absence of any will, all, technically, hers if she’d taken it to court—but she didn’t want a dime. We gave her some papers to sign, just standard permissions, and told her that if she needed cash or anything at any point, to just give us a heads up, so we could get it loose. But instead, she asked to open a new account. A savings account. With her own money.

“Now we don’t typically do static savings. I mean, we’ll set aside portions of larger capital assets into savings accounts. But in this case, seeing as she did, again technically, have million of dollars invested with us via her late father, we figured we’d make an exception. My boss let me take the lead on opening the account. I brought Annabel to my office—it was small, with a view of another building—and sat her down. At that point, everything kind of made sense to me: She didn’t want any of her father’s cash because she had her own money. She was young—twenty-six at the time, I came to know—but in that day and age, young people with a good head on their shoulder were able to make money hand over fist. So I got all the paperwork ready for her. I was excited, because since my boss put me in charge of opening the account, it meant he probably expected me to oversee it, and it would be my first solo multi-million dollar management. But when I asked Annabel how much she wanted to put into the savings, and from what bank, she said she’d like to put in a hundred and twenty five. In cash.

“Which she then proceeded to pull out from her pocket. I remember it exactly. A fifty, three twenties, and the rest in ones. For a minute I thought she was joking. She had a way about her, an expression on her face, a sort of permanent, gentle smile. I thought maybe it was part of her humor. But she wasn’t humorous—not like that. She was just… She was simple. Not in a derogatory way. She was smarter than me about a lot of things. But simple as in… peaceful. I don’t know. Even after all these years, she’s a mystery.

“In that moment that she held up that crumpled wad of bills—I think that’s the first time I fell in love with her. I had to explain to her of course that the amount was too small for our firm to manage, but if she wanted, I would take her to the Bank of America across the street and help her open a savings account, which she graciously accepted. After that I offered to take her to lunch. So thus ensued our first sort of date.

“It turned out she was mostly estranged from her father. Her mother had raised her alone, more-or-less, and it had been over a decade since she’d seen her father before his death. She still lived with her mother, up in the country. A very modest life. They had chickens, she told me, and then proceeded to name each one. I still remember: Deborah, Danielle, Delilah, Dena, Danika, Dianne, and Doris. She loved those chickens. She loved to paint; I would end up seeing some of her work. She was so gifted. And she loved her life. Her simple life. She only wanted to set up the savings account, she said, because her father’s death had caused her to think about her mother’s advancing age, and she figured they might need something, some cash, somewhere down the line for medical bills and care. I suggested she use the money her father had left behind, which I was happy to help her get control of. But she didn’t like the idea. It wasn’t hers, she said. It had nothing to do with her.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“After lunch I walked her to the bus. I asked if I could see her again. She said of course, that she would be back down to the city later in the year to check on her savings account. I could have told her the whole thing could be overseen online, but I don’t even think she had a phone, and besides, I wanted her to come back. I enjoyed being near her. I wanted to be near her more.

“When she was gone, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Her face, her soft voice, her simple way. It was like she embodied a way of living, a way of seeing the world, that had been kept from me. A secret I needed to know. After a few weeks I knew I needed to see her again. We had her address on file from the permissions she’d signed, and I took a Friday off, rented a car, and drove north.

“It was a beautiful part of the country. It reminded me of Winsted, where I’d grown up. Only back then I’d resented Winsted—the rurality—for its sluggishness, its relentless silence, its dearth of economic activity. But as I pulled up the long dirt driveway of the home Annabel lived in with her mother, a cottage in a meadow nestled against a low forest, I thought that I had been wrong, and that this was the way. I could live here, with her and her mother, and their chickens, and I could be happy.

“She was surprised to see me. Her first question was if something had happened to her savings account. When I told her that it was, as far as I knew, fine, she was puzzled. Why was I here? What did I need? I became nervous; the whole drive I’d been so sure. I’d been so excited to see her again—her simple beauty—that I hadn’t even considered that I might be making a mistake. As I stood on her porch, with the warm breeze clanking the chimes on the eave, I became filled with doubt.

“But love does not play games. I knew—I was certain—and I needed her to know too. The way I felt about her was too powerful to be unrequited. She was all I thought about. I wanted to see her paintings. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to meet her mother. I loved her. My love spilled from me, flooding the world.

“I told her all this, there on the front porch, her hair drifting in the breeze.

“When I was done, she looked past me, back toward the road, for a long time. Coming to an understanding, an understanding of her own feelings. I had helped her discover what was wrong, the abyss that had opened in her since we met only weeks before. It was me. She loved me too. She’d known it all along, but hadn’t realized it. I wondered if I should have brought flowers.

“But then she looked at me, and she was not overcome with love. She was not crying tears of joy like I was. She looked afraid, and angry. She asked me to leave, and she closed the door, and I heard it lock. The wind stopped, I remember, as if the air itself recoiled in shock and revulsion, as I did.

“I had failed. I had failed to adequately express to her my feelings. If I hadn’t she would have understood. She would have realized what I already knew, which was that she loved me, too. She would have brought me into her house, and introduced me to her mother. We would have had a meal, perhaps a bottle of wine. That night we would have made love in her small bed, or in the shower, or under the stars. In the morning I would have watched her paint. I would learn to feed the chicken. We would have children. When her mother got too old, I would pay for her care. We too would grow old. Mine would be the last face she saw before death.

“I simply needed to help her see all this. But I didn’t know how. I needed time to think. I got back in the car and drove a ways down the road. There was an abandoned barn, and I parked behind it. The barn’s interior was dusty, and smelled like animals. From a gap in the barn’s slats I could see Annabel’s house. I watched it, hoping that its sight—or a glimpse of her going to feed the chickens—would help inspire me, would help me find the words, or the gesture, that would unlock for her the truth of our love.

“And from that barn I discovered the reason for her doubt: There was an interferer. A man. He drove up in his pickup truck less than an hour after I left. He was tall. I watched him climb the porch and knock on the door. I saw Annabel open it and hug him. I watched them kiss. She hurried him inside. He never left, even as it got dark. This man… He had her fooled. He had her believing something untrue. He had my sweet, simple Annabel tricked into thinking that he was her love. Him and her mother and the chickens and the quaint little house. They were illusions. They were standing between us, and I knew what I had to do.

“When I was a little boy, I saw a fire. A few houses down from ours, in Winsted. In the middle of the night. I woke up to the sound of sirens and went outside with my mom and dad. The house was ablaze. A pillar of flames. The firefighters couldn’t do anything but stand around and keep the neighbors back. Within an hour the whole house was a pile of ash. The walls, the roof, everything inside it. Everyone inside it. Gone, just like that. I thought about it all the time. I thought about how if something needed to disappear, fire was the perfect solution. It ate the thing that made things things. It ate their essences. So it was perfect. Fire would be perfect here.

“I’d seen in movies how people suck gas out of their cars with a hose. It works in real life too, and I didn’t even swallow that much of it. I filled up some old buckets I found in the barn and waited until it was late, late at night. I poured it around the base of the house, where the flowerbeds were. I covered the porch. I even poured a trail to the chicken coop. It was so much gasoline I could see it shimmering in the moonlight. I was nervous that I had some on my clothes, and that I would catch on fire too. So I undressed. I lit a match and tossed it, but it went out before it landed. The second match I tossed more gently, and the flames danced.

“My plan was simple—simple like Annabel. When the house was burning I would run in and save her. I would pull her out, but I would leave the man and the mother and the chickens. I would let the fire eat their souls. And the tricks that blinded Annabel from the truth would be removed, and she would see me, and see our love, and we would be together. Plus she would owe me. It was all worth it.

“But I underestimated the speed with which the fire would grow. Within minutes, the whole house was surrounded by a wall of flame higher than the roof. The heat was unbearable, and I had to retreat. This was one of the darkest moments of my life. I had killed her. I had killed my true love. Now she would never know. I had doomed myself to being without her in an even more terrible way than I had been up until then.

“There weren’t any neighbors nearby, and no one to call the fire department. I watched for a long time from the barn as the house shrunk and the flames grew. I decided I would drive away, back to the city, and start to work out for myself that maybe this was all for the best, that in some ways, if no one else could have her, that she was mine. That I had been the most important thing in her life. I could’ve made that work… But then she emerged from the flame.

“Her skin was gone. In the moonlight I could see the glint of her bone. She had no hair, no face, no shapely form. Just charred flesh and teeth and ribs. She was dragging something, out onto the field. A body. Also charred. She left it in the grass, and then ran—ran like someone intact—back into the flame. A minute later she reappeared, with another charred body. She laid it next to the first, and then she fell to her knees. I watched her. I watched her wail, a shadow before the blaze. And as I watched, before my eyes, she started to change.

“I didn’t understand what was happening at first. I thought the light was changing, or I was imagining things. But I wasn’t. Her flesh was growing back. The clumps of ash were falling from her, and in their place her muscles, her sinews, were reconfiguring themselves around her bones. Her skin—her simple, unblemished skin—crept back across her new flesh, and soon—besides for her hair—she was as whole and as new as the day she’d come into my firm. In the firelight, her naked skin danced and glimmered. I understood then that she was more than just my true love. She was an angel. She was a goddess.

“I went to her. Remember, I had undressed to avoid smelling like gas, and our mutual nakedness, I thought, there by the fire that had cleansed her illusion, that had brought her to me, would lubricate her into my arms. I stood beside her, and softly I touched her bare scalp. I found her baldness, if I’m being honest, unappealing. But the hair would grow back. And if it didn’t I would buy her a wig. I would buy her anything she wanted, with my money and her father’s.

“But the illusion had not been broken. When I touched her she screamed, and looked at me like someone might something putrid, like a charred corpse. And yet I was not the charred corpse. I was the living man, unscathed. I still had my essence. Yet somehow I was putrid to her. She screamed at me, first from fear, then with rage. She stood, her arms outspread, as if to protect the bodies of her mother and the despicable man from me. To shield them. I was startled more than anything, and disappointed, and in my nakedness I was vulnerable. I fled from her. She simply wasn’t ready. She needed time. I would give her time.

“Weeks went by. I tried to return to the firm and carry on with my duties, but I was distracted. I was paranoid. I kept expecting the police to show up—to the firm or to my apartment—and haul me away. It wouldn’t matter that what I’d done—in the name of true love—was protected by rights that transcended the laws of men. They wouldn’t understand. I tried to reason that if I went to prison, it was a small price to pay for having freed a simple angel like Annabel from her own imprisonment. An imprisonment of illusion. I braced myself for this acceptance. But the police never arrived.

“Eventually, enough time had passed that I was no longer expecting to see the police, but rather to see Annabel herself show up at the firm. To rush to me and embrace me, and shower me with tearful kisses. To be indebted to me for saving her. I figured, one afternoon as I sat in my office gazing out at the face of the building across the street, that right at that moment, Annabel was preparing to depart for the city, to come to me. I decided to save her the trip. I left work early, rented another car, and drove back north. I was giddy. I was downright excited.

“But when I arrived, I found the charred ruins of her home encircled with yellow tape, and abandoned. Of course she couldn’t stay there, I realized, in its condition. I drove to the nearest town and asked at the grocery store if anyone had seen her. The clerk told me she’d been staying in a motel since the fire. What a tragedy, he’d said, shaking his head, not understanding. I bought a bouquet of blue flowers from the grocery store and drove to the motel—only again to find disappointment.

“The motel manager told me Annabel had been staying there, but that she was gone. Not left, he said. Disappeared. Her things were still in her room, but she hadn’t been there in at least a week. Her car, too, was still parked outside. But no sign of Annabel. There was a bill, he said, if I wanted to take care of it. I told him I would pay the bill if I could see the room.

“There wasn’t much there. She’d bought new clothes—a pair of jeans, a sweater, some undergarments—since her old clothes, I figured, were lost in the fire. A half-drunk bottle of wine on the dresser, and a wineglass beside it with the smudge of her lips. A sketch pad and a pencil, though neither had been used. There wasn’t even a toothbrush.

“I did pay the bill; it was only a couple hundred dollars. I also took the things with me back to the city. When she showed up for me, I would return them, or buy her new, nicer things. I figured it would only be a matter of days.

“But the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, and soon a year had passed. I found it harder and harder to concentrate at work. I spent all day watching the front of the office, expecting her to walk in. My boss, apparently, noticed the decline in my work, and eventually let me go. I spent my days in my apartment. I kept Annabel’s clothes—her jeans and sweater and underwear—with me at all times. It was, for then, the closest I could be to her. Meanwhile, my own finances were dwindling. My rent was high, and I was forced to move out. It was absurd, of course, since if Annabel had come to me, we could both be living off her father’s relative fortune and never have to worry again. But she hadn’t come to me yet. I moved back into my childhood home in Winsted.

“And there I remained for three more years, almost four. Both my parents died in that period. They left me nothing but the house, with its deteriorating roof. I should’ve moved on. My love for Annabel should’ve lessened. I should’ve put her clothes away in a closet, or simply thrown them out. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. She had become all of me. I knew nothing but my longing for her. I couldn’t hold a job. I gained weight. I slept each night with her clothes beneath my head. I thought about killing myself. But that would’ve been unfair to me. This was her fault after all. She was taking too long to accept the truth of our love, and she was wasting both of our lives away.

“At least that’s what I thought at the time.

“And that’s where it could’ve ended, until one night, while I slept, I had a dream…”