Marcel LeCourt paused in the foyer of his home – the little screened-off room just before his darkneded living room. Here, the cold from the outside night lingered like a specter, watching through the windows, biting at the sliding glass door to the interior of his house, where the warmth awaited him like an old friend’s embrace. But the warmth didn’t mean much to him anymore. It was just the same thing, say in and day out, scratching at the scars across his ACE bandage-wrapped wrists. The wounds had been stitched closed long ago – years now, in fact – but they sat on the bridge where his hands met his arms, mocking him with their painted crimson lineage of ancestral pain. It was something he could never quite overcome; the everlasting portrait of his life’s misgivings. Those thick red ribbons entangling his wrists and traveling up the road of his arm’s veins into a bleak, red-dawned morrow.

With a sigh, Marcel LeCourt paused to watch his breath funnel out of his mouth like the smoke from the maw of a dragon. When the apparition of his life’s proof dissipated in the dim porch light, LeCourt finally pulled open the sliding glass door and stepped hesitantly into the dark of his living room. He kicked off his polished black work shoes and heard them CLUNK against the wall. The tiny threads, the warm hands of the pinkish carpet tickled his calloused feet – a welcome comfort in the war of his world. These were the little things he could appreciate; he had written a short essay long ago about these miniscule comforts and how he never had the opportunity to enjoy them, given the constant movement of the earth. It spun beneath the carpet against the soles of his bare feet, never ceasing, never waiting. Life would never wait for him. Never.

He moved along the blackened hallway, letting his hand brace against the wall for guidance. The pulse of the house thumped against his palm, reassuring him that his castle was still secure. And yet, something seemed off about the rhythm of the walls’ arterial rhythm. Something was amiss, though Marcel could not make sense of it. Not yet. It would soon become drastically apparent.

He finally arrived in the open, breathy freedom of the wide living room, still wrapped up like a newborn in the dark of the evening. Casually, Marcel strolled over to the side table next to the couch, which he knew was still draped in that horrid afghan his former pupil at Oxford – that wretched Irish girl with hair as pale as wheat, teeth spaced like stones, libido far too high and far too attracted to authority figures years older than herself – had knitted for him as a “parting gift” after their final meeting had let out. He didn’t much want to see it; dreaded the idea, in fact, as his right hand reached out, fumbled about, and found the switch to the lamp. But as he turned it and flooded the living room with the orangeish light of the bulb, he came to see something far more horrible than the ugly afghan, checking his own image in the mirror attached to the opposite wall.







“Good evening, Professor,” Mystica greeted with a solemnity in his baritone voice. He smirked, flicked back his hairline, and turned away from the mirror to face LeCourt, whose jaw had fallen agape in surprise. As if by instinct, Marcel dove to his right, past the side table, and landed on his knees before his study desk. His hands moved quickly, pulling open the bottom drawer and removing, of all things, a small revolver – a Smith and Wesson 337 Airlite. With both hands shaking, Marcel rose to his feet, the revolver’s white nose pointed squarely at the intruder. But Mystica was unfazed by the sudden display of the firearm, and did not raise his hands in surrender. Rather, a proud grin spread across his face, like the Black Plague across Europe’s landscapes and villas. He seemed more amused than threatened.

“How did you get in my house?” Marcel questioned, his voice now quavering with the rush of adrenaline running through his damaged veins.

Mystica chuckled amusedly at Marcel’s sudden explosion of action and defensive quality. The sense of surprise and fear in the professor’s voice only seemed to harden Mystica’s resolve. He could only remind himself of the reason he had come here. A simple goal, really. He just needed to weaken LeCourt’s resolve. Then, with physical contact, he could jump inside and leave this form – this mistake he had made, mixing his mind with David’s. It had been his biggest mistake, and he would not make the same mistake with LeCourt. This was do or die. Or, rather, do or…kill.

“What, you don’t remember me, Mr. LeCourt?” Mystica asked with a tone of innocence, drawing upon David’s memories. There had been this face – this look that David would express that used to elicit a courteousness in LeCourt’s demeanor those many years ago at Oxford. He’d ask a genuine question, flash that face that screamed inquisitiveness, and LeCourt would answer his glances with:

“David?”

Marcel lowered the revolver to get a better look at the intruder. Then, in realization, horrified realization, he let his guard down. The hand holding the trigger loosened, and his arm dropped to his side as his eyes widened in a flash of recollection.

“David Martin?” he asked, eyes narrowed in a combination of minute relief and transfixed suspicion.

“In the flesh,” Mystica replied, widening his arms in display of himself. Inside, the Sleeping God chuckled at his own irony. No, very much not David Martin, though he was, indeed, in his flesh.

“Oh, my God,” Marcel muttered, gently, oh-so-carefully placing the gun down on the desk’s surface as though it were the most valuable gem in the museum, at the same time never taking his tired grayish eyes off of Mystica. “David, it’s been…how many years?”

“You do remember me, then?” Mystica questioned with a smile. It was a grin wrapped up in falsehood, all stolen from David’s underlying consciousness. But they were not two separate entities. Mystica knew he was in control, but was he, really? They were one in the same – two minds, mixed together like the ingredients of a dirty bomb, ready to explode in a vulgar display of forced cooperation.

“Of course I do,” Marcel chuckled nervously, still unnerved by the way in which David had made his visit. Why in the world had the boy felt the need to break into his house? “You were one of my brightest students. I always remember the significant ones.”

“Ah, I was significant?” Mystica asked with a tinge of boyish admiration. “Thank you, sir.”

As he stepped forward closer to LeCourt, his knee bumped the side table on the opposite side of the couch. Like a man who feared for his child, LeCourt suddenly jolted forward. In the instant he was in the air, he had caught something falling over the side of the table from Mystica’s careless bump. Climbing back to his feet, Marcel raised the nearly-fallen object: a coffee mug, emblazoned with, of all things, a graduate’s cap picture. From his angle, Mystica could see why LeCourt had moved so quickly to grab it. A clear liquid inside the mug sloshed from side to side as LeCourt placed it back on the side-table. Ah, Mystica thought, that familiar smell. Alcohol. A coffee mug of vodka.

“My apologies, professor,” Mystica simpered. “I’m much too clumsy.”

“No worries,” Marcel replied with a weak smile, which clearly was an attempt to hide the desperation of his saving dive of the drink. “You’ve always been a bit out there, right? Hasn’t changed.”

“We all have troubles,” Mystica noted with a half-grin. LeCourt caught his gaze, and for a moment, Mystica believed he had been had. Gig’s up. LeCourt, for that moment, seemed to see something in this grin – the monster wearing David Martin’s face. But then LeCourt chuckled.

“You were special,” he snickered, suddenly snatching up the mug of vodka, right out from Mystica’s gaze. “Your poetry was astounding. The colours and shapes. The images of it all.”

“Synesthesia,” Mystica added, amused at LeCourt’s sudden, drastic thirst. “Everything all mixed together. Emotional time-space mapping. People like me…different. Scary different. We see the world in a different way."

LeCourt took a deep draught from the mug, not wincing at all from the burning sensation and subsequent warmth of the cheap, convenience-store booze flowing down his throat. The alcoholism had set itself deep in his bones and ate away at the marrow like a corrosive acid. And yet, somehow, it had become home to him – an escape from the horrid misery of his eyes’ perception of the hostile world around him. Sorrow was now a good friend to him – perhaps the only friend he could rely on to welcome him home every night. It was the warmth of a hearth moving down his gullet and burning like a fire in his stomach.

“Yes, you did scream the symptoms of being somewhere on the autistic spectrum,” Marcel chuckled, as though recalling the memory of a loved one. “You were gifted. Troubled, but gifted.”

“And the troubles just keep coming, dear teacher,” Mystica murmured, looking over his shoulder at LeCourt’s kitchen. Let’s see, he thought, where would any self-loathing novelist keep his poison of choice? The cabinet was too obvious; no decent alcoholic with a professional life would keep a liquor cabinet stocked to the brim out in the open where any old friend might notice it. Ah, but LeCourt didn’t have any friends; he only had peers. And there was the rub – that grand joke of the universe, coming back to haunt him in his nightmares. Interaction. Man is sometimes an island unto himself.

Mystica turned back to LeCourt, who had drained the mug of vodka.

Marcel figured, as long as David had now seen his worries for what they were – a harrowing, crippling disease – what hurt was there in exercising the pain, in carving those wounds wide open and showing him the bones of what made him real? He shoved past David, imploring the boy to follow him into the kitchen for a drink. Mystica happily complied, knowing this was the beginning of a long night, and the opening he was looking for.

LeCourt had essentially built his own casket.