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The dreams weren’t fading, not like most dreams should. I could still hear Devere, still feel his touch on my body. I closed my eyes, listened to the wind through the trees, the birdsong, and I could hear his chiming clocks somewhere far off. I still felt him in my heart, where it hurt the most.
Forgive me.
I couldn’t. It was too much to forgive.
I left the gravesite and returned home to Elisabeth peeling vegetables for dinner. Sometimes we talked, and sometimes we sat together by the fire, not needing words. She had no husband and had lost both parents to pox some years ago. It felt good to have her company. Felt… normal, as things should feel.
As time wore on, she’d stayed longer, sleeping in the spare room overnight. She hadn’t asked for anything more intimate, perhaps sensing I could not give it.
I’d secured a job at one of the nearby estates, and while the work was arduous, my body gained weight in muscle.
It seemed as though I might have a life, a real life.
But while the days ticked on, the seasons changed—summer turned to autumn, turned to winter, and the snow came. My heart grew cold. I’d often walk to the abandoned toy store in the snow, where Elisabeth would later find me sitting in the doorway. She’d ask what I was looking for among its ruins. What could I say? A dream who did not exist.
Winter then waned again, making way for bright daffodils and the first signs of spring.
This was my life now.
Yet the hole in my heart grew ever larger, threatening to consume me whole.
“It seems, sometimes, you are far away.”
I lifted my gaze from the fireplace and smiled at Elisabeth. “I’m here.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.” I laughed softly, then downed my wine and refilled my glass. I leaned over to fill hers. “Where else would I be?”
“I think about how you were sometimes.”
“Let’s not.”
“Sometimes, when you stare at the fire or when you watch the snow, I lose you again.”
“I’m fine.” I covered her hand with mine. “That is not me, not anymore.”
“Forgive me. It’s silly. But… something happened to you, didn’t it? Something you can’t or won’t explain.”
“A prolonged psychotic episode, likely brought on by my childhood treatment.” She knew about the cupboard under the stairs and why it was nailed shut.
“I suppose, but there are other words for such things.”
“Such as?”
“Bespelled.”
“Be-spelled? As in magic?” My laugh rattled out of me.
“You laugh, but that’s what I thought, the rare times I saw you before you woke up. As though something had a hold of your heart and mind. Your body went through the motion of being alive, but you were not here, not really. Something else controlled you.”
My heart thumped. “Goodness, that’s quite the imagination.”
“Or someone did.”
“Regardless, it’s over.”
“Then I wondered about the toymaker,” she went on. “You asked about him that day on the street, when you finally seemed to have broken from the spell. That was the first thing you said.”
