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The sound of the rain outside had long since been swallowed up by the loudest silence he had ever heard.

Confident in his experience despite the lack of memories, he was deep in the bowels of the formidable edifice that was, apparently, the Castle Maus, and he was almost entirely certain that he had lost his way. Even though exploring abandoned buildings was, he was certain, his bread and butter. Piece of cake. A cake walk. How strange that so many synonyms for ease were associated with food. He had known hunger, too, as he had once known danger, and his body remembered what his head had forgotten.

The danger now, of course, was imaginary. He could immediately and with little effort whisk himself back to his apartment. Or at least that's what he told himself as a means to keep moving against the dread that mounted incessantly as he tracked and backtracked through labyrinthine corridors, shut out from windows or the makeshift apertures of rotted walls, and fumbling up and down staircases until he no longer even knew if he was above ground. Perhaps he was wrong, and he lacked the magical reception to free himself, but it was best not to think of this.

He attempted once to whistle a tune, but the echoes of his own noise silenced him; he was, besides, focused on listening for the movement of air that might suggest some outward opening. It was still, cold, and surprisingly dry, and no draft stirred to direct him.

Joy had outfitted him handsomely, and he was grateful for a flashlight better than whatever cheap and dinky one he would have brought. The blackness, at times, seemed like a palpable thing, not simply kept at bay by the beam but actually struggling back against it, clawing at it with dark hands and trying to reach him. The crush of it at his back was a felt weight.

After twenty or so minutes without the sound of rain or the movement of air, he pulled from his subspace a can of spray paint, which he had been stashing for much more mundane exploration and vandalism, and he started marking the floors as he went. Joy had told him to treat the place with reverence and respect if he wanted its rewards - including the rewards of an incorruptible heart, which in his terror he craved more than anything - and so he tried to ignore a queasy panic as he marked the place up and attempted to find comfort in the familiar paint fumes. Easy for her to say, when she was sitting pretty in a richly ornamented keep sitting on a river. Perhaps she'd feel differently in some dark, twisting brick of stone nestled in dense black trees.

He was going in circles. He stood above an arrow he'd already marked, swinging the flashlight beam over it, and closed his eyes to avoid seeing the darkness beyond it. He felt instinctively for cigarettes before remembering that he was, again, trying to quit, and then he stood in silence.

Joy had said that the memories would come back to him, or that he would have some mentor here. He remembered nothing, straining for what was as inaccessible to him as the person he'd been a month ago, and wondered whether he had, somehow, locked those memories away as well as the others.

“ –” he said, parting his lips to call out for some ghostly assistance before aborting the attempt with a sudden fear. But although no real sound had emerged, he was subjected to the inexplicable feeling that his unspoken word echoed along the corridor, multiplying into silent whispers. The hairs on his arms rose; the skin at the base of his neck prickled.

He heard something, then, and he was not sure how, because what he had heard had made no sound. He was, he realized, too terrified to open his eyes.

Joy had treated the idea of a ghost so casually, like a sort of eccentric roommate. But here in the silent blackness a ghost had a different meaning, and he tried and failed to swallow, his mouth dry. She had also seemed to think that the demeanor of any ghost might have a direct bearing on his wellbeing; she had even suggested that a ghost might not be as powerless as he imagined. The words did not seem like a comfort now. Nor was it a comfort to think that this building was more like a cave than a castle, and might bring him down with the mundane power of bad air even without the help of a ghost. Perhaps even now a canary, if he'd had one, would be a corpse in its cage. Which was only a reminder of corpses in general.

He did not want to see it. It was suddenly clear to him that the most awful thing in the world would be to see some dead person in the darkness, perhaps even bearing the marks of its demise.

And so, after a moment, he turned off the flashlight, and after a moment more willed himself to open his eyes, comforted by seeing nothing. He crept along slowly, one hand touching the wall, numb and terrified and realizing, somehow, that he could not leave until he found his way back to the rainy windows that were somewhere above or beyond him. The sound of his fingers touching the stone sent little whispering echoes out before him, and he found himself dragging his feet in some desperate attempt to provide a noise that he could explain, that could serve as cover just in case he heard any that he couldn't.

He did not know how long he moved in that utter darkness. But he felt, at last, a stirring of air, and to his shame his eyes nearly filled with the tears of panic lest it not be a draft but the movement of some horrible spirit that a few hours before he had been searching for and was now desperate to avoid.

He tried to will himself to remember. If he could remember, there was no ghost. Follow the air. Go where it moves. Remember this? Remember where this corridor opens? He scrabbled at a blankness that offered no mental purchase. No familiarity came. He did not even have the maddening, slippery sense of erased recall that he had when trying to remember that he had once been Sawyer, and not Kay. There were no memories. There had never been memories. There was some spirit, then, and he was trapped down here with it, unknowing what it could do to him.

He moved through a column of fresh, cool air and into the unmistakable sensation of open space above him, and it smelled of rain. He inhaled, hard, the sharp freshness of it, and was almost giddy with relief. The sensation of light pressed against his closed eyelids, and he opened his eyes joyously, only to find that the oppressive blackness before had misled him, and that what waited to greet his vision was not a bright beam of greyish light, but a trickle.

It was enough, given how long he had been fumbling in blindness, to see by: to see the long, narrow, unwinding corridor before him, the vaulted ceilings high, the walls devoid of any side passages or stairwells. It terminated only in a door, the shape of it barely visible in the thin, sickly beam of light that arrived from somewhere over his head and behind him and in which dust swirled.

The door, however, was of little consequence to him now. He viewed it through a shadowy shape, which crouched like some feral creature, and which he could loosely perceive to be the figure of a girl, her hands cupped around some glittering thing on the floor. She was difficult to discern, a silvery phantom in the shadows, but she swung her head towards him, and that greyish light caught on two lambent eyes, reflecting silver-white in the darkness like an animal’s. He could swear that beneath those reflecting lights she opened her mouth, perhaps to scream or hiss, although no sound emerged.

He could not move. Seized by a sudden paralysis, he attempted to reason with himself via an inward scream: she is here to help. She is your teacher.

But the so-called mentor was only a child, her lank hair falling around her skinny ankles and hands on the rain-damp floor, her awful shining eyes fixed on him round and blank, and when she finally moved it was with a hellish speed, rising abruptly and sprinting towards him down the corridor in long, loping strides.

Instinct, then, moved him. He turned to run back the way he had come, blind and terrified, only to find himself confronted by a swallowing darkness he could not face. There was nowhere to go: blackness to one side, the creature to the other. Helpless, he could only watch as she hurtled towards him, a rasping, horrible cry strangled out of her as she closed the last few feet by flinging herself towards him.

She passed through him and beyond him, a chill drenching his bones, and emitted a primal wail of rage as her scrawny, ephemeral hands began clawing uselessly at the empty air where he was.

And in that moment, seeing her clearly, he saw - not a monster - but a child. A strange child, to be sure: lanky, ill-proportioned, sickly. But a child - perhaps a teenager - filled with a futile anger that he half-remembered sharing in the way that he could not remember this place.

And what could he do, faced with a furious child?

“Hey. Hey.” He made his pointless, soothing noises, backing away from her clutching hands although they closed on nothing. “Chill out. It'll be -”

And then she was gone. The hissing, hoarse cry remained only in a few echoes, swallowed up by the rain, and he was alone and shaken.

This, then, was his mentor. This was his guide through his new life. He felt the sickness that comes only of seeing suffering we were not meant to witness. When he was able to move he crept in numb terror towards the door, paralyzed by the fear of her returning even if she could hurt nothing but his imagination, and when he arrived at it he paused to look down at the thing on the floor where she had crouched.

She had had a Gollum-like quality. That felt appropriate, he thought, as he mechanically bent to pick up the ring on the floor: heavy, ornate, shaped like a rat contorting as if in a poisoned seizure.

He waited for a moment for some nightmarish reproach or scream of possessive rage. But none came, and after a moment he, with shaky hands, pushed open the door, and found himself on an exterior landing, blinded by the grey light, bathed in the cold drizzle, and only steps away from a steep fall into the trees.

He closed his hand around the ring, his heart pounding, and it took slow minutes to turn back and look down that long corridor towards the blackness at the other end of it, expecting to see the glint of two white eyes. <******** you too,” he called at last, although his voice trembled. But this daring challenge met only silence, and he turned to look down into the forests below, and then to close his eyes, again, and fall back into the blessed arms of mundane reality.

—

He woke around three AM, surprisingly not from any nightmares but from a deep and restful sleep, and he crept to the front door, to lean against the threshold and look over the chilly, foggy parking lot. It was, perhaps, a foregone conclusion that he would do what he then did, and light up the “just in case” one-last-cigarette he had kept aside for this sort of occasion.

There was a dreary and comforting familiarity to this: this exhausted moment with nicotine at an ungodly but peaceful hour. He wanted a drink. He wanted a lot of things which he knew, somehow, he had left behind him a long time ago, long before he had left behind Sawyer. The trappings, he imagined, of a boyish Bacchanal life sacrificed to paranoia and guilt.

He thought of the girl who had seemed enraged by his intrusion on her eons of uninterrupted peace; thought of a girl who had died so young as to leave behind a ghost barely more than a child; and he thought of a boy he could not remember, who had found himself at the end of a forgotten birthday with a hand inside his chest, compelling him to horrors. What a comfort to have screamed and clawed at the unavailing cruelty of Destiny, as perhaps he had done then and which he now, a grown man, wanted to do again.

The ring - stolen goods - was heavy on his hand. Maybe even now a spirit screeched its rage at having lost it to some new owner. Kay, inwardly, screamed with her, feeling - not for the first time - the everything scanty and enormous that had been taken from him.

“Morning,” said a neighbor, stumbling drunk back to his apartment, and Kay smiled his automatic smile, lifting the cigarette in amiable greeting, while the inward scream raged onwards.

“Morning,” he said, flicking the butt into the damp grass by the stoop.

He turned to go quietly back to his stale bed, his ribs and throat swollen by the violence of the soundless scream, and with his eyes turned blankly to his unadorned wall he considered the days before him, unnumbered and unknowable, and therefore exactly like all the days behind him.