The student, Vicar soon discovered, was also English, and had come likewise from somewhere near Cambridge. Why he was in America, he declined to offer, and Vicar declined asking. There was something powerful in needing to leave one's homeland, and given the sensitivity of his own absence from his family's old house, he was politely ignorant.

He did ask, however, what the man was doing out in the dark. "Are you devoid of classes? It isn't so late that they've stopped altogether, is it?"

"No," smiled the stranger, who had been peering curiously at Vicar from the corner of his eye for some time. There was an unsettling lack of words in him, a stoicism not born of superiority that confused Vicar greatly. In his experience, people who hardly spoke and still carried themselves confidently were hiding something, and it was usually a disdain for everyone else. This person, however, was oddly... happy. Vicar was grateful to have been rescued, but was unsure how happy he was to be walking with the student.

"Do you walk around the willows often?"

"No. You work in the library, yes?"

Vicar blinked. The sensation of discomfort grew exponentially. A reader of Sade, a spy of presumed isolation - a curious mix, and a dangerous one. "I do. Your classmates are astonishingly inept at locating textbooks on their own."

The stranger laughed aloud, his voice like melted chocolate. It was a peculiar laugh, and Vicar felt his cheeks flush at it. In one of his brother's saner days, he'd put on a play for Vicar, an attempt to console him in the absence of any parental guidance for the day. Vicar couldn't remember what the play had been about, but he could recall Gaston's dress; all red and feathers and horns. A tail had been fashioned of socks and curtains, a red and pointed tail that Vicar still saw slithering around at the edge of his vision. It was the laugh of the devil, the very same laugh Gaston had made as he paraded about the curtained rooms of their house.

Crossing his arms in front of his chest, Vicar slowed his walk and stared hard at the stranger. "What are you here for?"

"I am seeking a degree in English Literature." The red-brown eyes flashed in the final blink of the sun. "Does our country not possess the very best, the most worthy stories of fear and thievery and misfortune? I am curious, I'll admit, what our friends on this side of the sea have to teach on the matter."

There was a long pause. "... why are you here?"

"I've come to find you, of course!"

Before Vicar could run and escape the horrid prickling feeling that crawled up his bones, a series of voices called out for the stranger, and the black-haired youth turned and flashed his teeth to them. In the brief distraction, Vicar slipped into the very shadows he'd been rescued from and hurried forth in the gloom, eager to find the nearest entrance into Pendragon-Hall. Just as he made his way indoors, though, he spared one last look at the bizarre scene and found the stranger was looking directly at him, unmistakably, even past the hundreds of yards that now separated them.

Shuddering where he sat on Winn's bed, the sharpness of the memory produced the same disgusting sensation it had even then. Scratching his arms, Vicar wished it would all just go away. The memories, the randomness of what came to his mind, the mysteries he found himself surrounded with. There was no safety, no matter which country or which room he fled to.

He stood and paced. His shoes had long ago been discarded, and his bare feet froze with each step. The sun may have been rising, albeit at its own disturbed pace, but the weather had long since doomed any hope of warmth. Vicar suspected being in such a grief-stained room didn't help with the cold, either. Cracking each toe against the floorboards, he walked to the window, but found that he couldn't focus on anything outside, not when there was so much in his head and in the room. Try as he might to think instead on Winn and her relationship to his brother, to the house (who's connection to Winn's time was still lost on Vicar - how and when had it become his family home, if it was once the doctor's? Was it not always in his family?), Vicar was drawn instead back to the memory of that evening in America, the peculiar encounter with a student he'd neither seen before nor since.

You hardly look a Justine to me. Vicar had not expected to be the only person alive who still read any of the Marquis de Sade's work, but a university student studying English classics? A man barely out of his teens? Vicar had not grown up with any of the technological advances the students he'd been surrounded with had, but he was quite certain that the use of the notorious headphones had killed any of the creative spirit of those who used them. How many people had blundered into his library, noise blaring from the damn things and the little tapes that wound endlessly in circles, totally unaware of how to look up even the most basic of books? It was a strange thing indeed, then, to have something so obscure by the modern standards understood by this stranger. The story of the Justine in question was a story indeed high in possession of fear and thievery and misfortune, as the stranger had claimed his interest in English literature was founded on. Les Malheurs de la Vertu, it was called in its native tongue. In his younger days, Vicar had loved a damsel-in-distress tale, a demoiselle en détresse. Perhaps he felt a kinship with the women eternally suffering in isolation, or the cruel hands of the men they were entrusted to (was he not the very same, awaiting the day when he came of age and could leave the miserable walls of his abusive father?). He did not like to ponder why he enjoyed things too much, though - better to enjoy it and leave it at that. Justine had been his favourite damsel. Justine had been trusting to a fault, a trait he envied in a fashion. Every horrible thing committed to her had hardly dimmed the sense of absolute faith in humanity. Each cruelty inflicted upon her innocent flesh served only as reminder that one day, justice and goodness would prevail and see her safe.

Miss Dubois had rescued her, reuinted her with a long-lost sister, allowed nature to strike the poor girl down where mankind had been unable. The reference had been a joke, but the more Vicar considered, the more he felt he had somehow doomed himself with this stranger. Justine had still died, and had led no noble life despite her convictions. The acts of Miss Dubois were worthless, in the end.

The most disturbing piece of this seemingly random recollection of Vicar's was the author, Justine being just one in a dozen of horrible, vile pieces of fiction of this Marquis. Vicar knew why he'd been drawn to the one example, but why should this stranger have read any of the Marquis' work? Any other man interested in that sort of writing was worrisome indeed.

Desperate to think of something else, despite being unable to stop seeing those piercing red-brown eyes, Vicar moved out of the room and drifted down the hallway. He looked up at the paintings on the wall, curious which members of his cursed family were doomed to remain on the peeling wallpaper for a hundred more years to come. Had Winnifred wondered the same as she drifted in her depressing daze? He reached up to a particularly gloomy face, a mess of auburn hair covering smouldering eyes of such intense dislike that Vicar was impressed the subject had sat through the painting at all. Dust an inch think came away in a clump on his finger. "What a waste," he said with a sigh. "You've seen so much, and still can't tell me anything I need to know. You saw more of my brother than I did, in the end, and likely saw who killed him. You saw Winn and her friends, and the lords and ladies that passed through these halls until they dwindled down to me. Am I so disappointing?"

The painting did not answer. The removal of the dust only made the familiar dark brow more obvious, more ill-figured.

He moved on to the next painting, surprised when he realised that he hadn't seen any of the more macabre decorations Winn wrote of. He'd grown up here, so whatever had decorated the house in the past two-and-a-half decades was so a part of his background memory that none of it would have stood out. Even made aware of the darker details of the house, he saw none of it. Perhaps his father had long ago thrown them out, or maybe the removal of the doctor had changed the inhabitant's tastes? He remembered that the doctor had not been removed, but still lurked about, had lurked his way into Gaston's life until the end of it.

Where was the doctor now? Vicar had never known the man, but then, it was Gaston who was always sick with something, Gaston who was always locked away in his room, especially in the later years. Fifteen years, he reminded himself, was the difference in their age - once Vicar had been old enough to entertain himself in the absence of his father, he was left to practise that very thing, and all while Gaston used his illness for good. What better time, Gaston always said, to practise one's craft than while bedridden?

His mind was working too much. He needed to rest, sleep off the stress of avoiding his family all day. Winn and Gaston and the damn doctor, they could all wait until he'd soothed his mind of their horrors and energies.

Nudging his way down the hall into the master bedroom, the dark and glowering chamber where his mother had once lived and which had been totally uninhabited since her death, Vicar made his way into what he now suspected had been Evelyn Thomas' room. If such was the case, then the doctor had, too, lived in here, filled the space with his oppressive scent. Sleepily curious if he stayed in here as Gaston lay dying, he stumbled to the bed and threw himself down on the heavy sheets. He pictured his mother, a ray of light he'd never had the memory to see. She must have been angelic, must have been something heavenly he was sure. Closing his eyes and imagining she sang him to sleep, Vicar hoped he didn't dream of the red eyes from his past, nor of the fire that occurred shortly after.

Vicar

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