Iris stubbed her toe against the raised doorframe as she entered her room, returning from a late dinner that had almost made her forget the horrors of their quaint, medieval inn chamber. The night was cold, with the laggard snow front encroaching from the west finally catching up to them. Snow, to Iris’s disappointment, was much too overrated, and she had wished for nothing more than the comfort of a cosy room, a luxury she realised she had been robbed of.
The deep red curtains by the paper-thin windows made her skin itch, and each wooden beam seemed to gift her a splinter with the slightest touch. The floorboards were—after thorough investigation—uneven from anywhere between five and eleven millimetres and seemed to latch onto her boots with spiteful mischief spared only to her.
There was a small statue of a Spirit resting on the nightstand, a set of four wings sprouting from what she could only describe as a frog-mouthed gargoyle with the stubbiest of fingers. Iris would sit on the coarse bedsheets and stare into its eyes, or at least the one it wasn’t licking with a grotesquely bulbous tongue. She could swear it was laughing at her, sneering as she armoured herself, head to toe for a journey from the armchair to the bathroom. She had every mind to throw the thing out the window before having to sleep under its gaze. Unfortunately, Elliot intervened just as she was about to enact her revenge and, after a heated debate, settled on locking it away in the nightstand’s drawer.
“You get way too invested in things sometimes, Iris,” Elliot complained, his voice toning down to disappointment, reaching the tail end of his scolding. “Especially when you’re mad.”
“It was looking at me funny,” she insisted, unsuccessfully trying to pry a splinter from her thumb. “This place hates me.”
“It doesn’t hate you, it’s just old and you’re cold and tired. Sleep early, it’s been a big day.”
Elliot waddled into the kitchen, switching on the buzzing light and the groaning faucet. “Dad,” she called after him, only receiving a grunt of acknowledgement. She persisted nonetheless. “Mum didn’t end up telling me what Granddad was like.”
“Oh wow they still have tooth powder,” she heard him say.
“Dad!”
“Yeah,” he replied, pausing. “You could ask…if you wanted, but I think you’re too young to hear it,” he said, words fighting through his toothbrush. He trudged to the bathroom’s door, leaning one arm on the frame while the other worked his teeth, yelping the moment his forearm rested on the wood. “Splinter!”
Iris plucked her own from her thumb, watching Elliot carry on the struggle and wondering what part of him was a renowned ace pilot, because it certainly wasn’t the way he slouched in blue cotton pyjamas, suffering at the hands of the danger he had so hubristically dismissed.
Too young to hear it. Iris had seen all manner of things in her short few years; she could imagine little that she’d consider herself too young for.
“No, I don’t think I’ll ask,” Iris admitted, falling onto the bed. “If that was all she had to show me, then there probably isn’t much more I need to see.”
Elliot smiled, although Iris was unsure if it was part of his response or his toothbrushing routine. “Sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one,” Iris heard, but only after heavily translating the slurred words. He returned to the bathroom sink, spitting out the powder and running the faucet. “I won’t pretend that family is all about love,” he said before gargling and spitting, “but a lot of things have to go wrong before family gives up on you.”
He turned off the faucet and stepped out of the bathroom, sitting by Iris as he worked away at the splinter in his arm. “I didn’t know the old man too much, and I’m glad I didn’t, but even what he was doing was out of some twisted form of love. That’s what Evalyn wants you to understand, probably…maybe.”
Iris agreed, again internally applauding Elliot’s knack for reading his wife like a cookbook, distilling a whole thought process into an easy step-by-step procedure. A kilogram of self-doubt mixed thoroughly with a pinch of guilt and served on a base of rocky upbringings and grey areas was, aside from being a horrid way to put it, accurate.
Perhaps it was being in the same position as her father once was, but the line between fighting in spite of his assured peace and fighting for the sake of assuring her peace was blurry. When the collateral damage was similar, who could blame her?
Fickle as it was forever, a blessing and curse enduring through silence and death.
“Weren’t you going to make a call to Colte? Ask him about that dream last night?”
“Oh yeah,” Iris muttered, sitting upright. “Can I borrow a coin?”
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“Take a few,” Elliot said, “it could get long.”
The first floor’s cafeteria was deserted by the time Iris returned to use the pay phone. The grazing guests who had until a few hours ago lined the candlelit tables and benches had migrated on to the next paddock, tonight being the local inn across the road. Iris shivered, feeling the cold set in as candle after candle ran out of wax. Frost was aggregating on the windowpanes, and all she could see of the aforementioned inn were the diffused windows and the warmth radiating from within. Winter was cold, the nights were dark, and it had long since been Iris’s least favourite season—a shame, seeing that the biggest festivities always sandwiched themselves in its most inhospitable weeks.
She weaved through the tables, taking a snaking path left and right through the grid pattern just for the sake of it while being mindful of her wounded toe. The kitchen was sound besides a few whisps of closing-shift gossip and chatter, a good sign she could talk without being overly conservative with her volume. All were considerations that had become second nature to her, yet oftentimes were unnecessary. To the uninitiated, she sounded like a troubled girl talking to a counsellor or a bright-eyed amateur author with high fantasy in mind—neither were strictly ideal portrayals of her character, but as long as they were not truthful.
She found the pay phone drilled into the plaster walls adjacent to the bathrooms, a convenient location for someone to organise a ride home after throwing up their guts. 'Payphone', however, was a gross exaggeration that described a wooden box nailed to the wall, fitted with two bells, a microphone, and a speaker that made for an oddly fly-like face. What gave it the title of ‘pay’ was the retrofitted money box nailed next to it, the glass front showing off the surprising lucrativeness of the trust system. ‘Ten marks every three minutes,’ the label read.
Iris looked at the coins in her hand, then back at the box, the petty criminal instincts whispering in her left ear while the good morals of her guardians whispered in the other.
It was two whole candy bars; that was two weeks’ worth of ecstasy.
She sacrificed one and pocketed the others, a compromise and disappointment to both the devil and the angel. As long as she wasn’t stealing from Delis again, Evalyn would not bat an eye.
She dialled the numbers one by one, leaning against the wall as she held the speaker to her ear and listened for the operator to answer, forgetting the microphone was still attached to the box itself. Speaking into the fly’s proboscis was something Iris was glad wasn’t a daily routine for her, especially when she could not help but stare into the ringer bell eyes as she spoke. International calls were tedious and time-consuming to organise, inflating the returns on Iris’s immoral choice by the second.
Eventually, she heard it: the familiar voice of someone who sounded as though they spoke through their smoking pipe.
“Who’s this?” Colte grumbled.
“Hi Mr Colte,” Iris replied politely, “how are you?”
“My god Iris it gives me the heebie-jeebies whenever you speak to me like that,” he sighed. “What’s wrong with my first name?”
“Mum says I should speak to you with respect,” Iris answered, “or else I’ll end up speaking to every adult too casually.”
“And if she didn’t tell you to?”
“…no. Your first name is much easier than Mr Colte.”
“Somehow, that’s even more discouraging,” Colte chuckled, turning into an ugly yawn halfway through. “It’s late, what’s on your mind?”
Iris desperately wanted to sit or lean during her explanation, the vexing topic frustrating enough without performing the endurance exercise. Their conversations were rarely more straightforward than her hallucinations, the sequence forward often cumbersome and meandering, with Iris stumbling upon details and conclusion only after Colte asked for further elaboration—less like a maze and more like the process of building one. With no clear goal in sight nor a correct path, they could only hope to stand at the end once they cut the last hedge. Too often, they would lock themselves in a dead end.
“Hm,” Colte said, vocalising his deliberation after Iris finished her sentence. Dreams were often clearer than hallucinations, with door openings being excessively explicit as though to colonise her memory. “Well, I don’t think the two are related,” he concluded.
“You don’t think so?” Iris asked.
“Well, I can’t say for certain, but what’s happened every other time you’ve opened a door?”
“I get more power?”
“Well,” he yawned, “it could be more that you’re regaining power, each coming with one more ‘memory’, if that’s even the right word. I’m starting to think that’s the only link between the two; you’ve unlocked another door, and with it comes a reclaimed memory and power, like you’re piecing things back together.”
“I thought the same, but I don’t know what they mean.”
Colte shifted in his bedsheets, communicated to Iris through a feverish rustle of many folds of fabric. “I think the dream confirms you’re in some way related to that crystal city and whoever Wesper was raving about before Evalyn put him out of his misery. Have you heard anything from that front by the way?”
“No,” Iris said. “As far as we know, no one has seen anyone from that group. It’s hard when you don’t know who or what you’re looking for.”
“Everyone wants to change the world nowadays, hell of a way to blend in if you ask me. At least there’s a semblance of a doctrine we can pinpoint now; let me find a notepad.”
Again, more shuffling followed by a brief period of silence. She heard the springs squeak, accompanied by a muted sigh. “I’ve got all the major points down; it’ll be easier to find what we’re looking for if we keep track of buzzwords and dogma. As for the hallucination, I don’t think there’s much need to ponder that.”
“I guess so,” Iris agreed rather half-heartedly. “I don’t think I’m ready to handle it, though.”
“Gas and smoke aren’t too different when you’re controlling them,” Colte mused. “I’ll teach you when I have the time.”
Iris heard him wheeze over the phone, the first half of the infamous steam-engine chuckle and the only thing that broke the silver fox illusion he otherwise maintained so religiously. “You’re growing up too fast, Iris.”
“I need to,” Iris answered rather bluntly.
“I know,” he said. “I know. Look, I’ll speak to you later I’m on the cusp of passing out, but be an angel and tell your mother to call me when she has the chance, okay?”
“Why?”
“I have a job for her, unfortunately.”