by Devin Graham
“Unrestrained, indeed,” Gabriel said.
“In truth, Mister Baryon,” Anna said, her smile fading, “I believe there are more important things for the people of this world to worry about. Wouldn't you agree?”
Gabriel frowned slightly.
“Yes,” he said, after a pause, “I think there are.”
There was a span of thoughtful silence between the two, as though they were both thinking of a specific thing. Gabriel's mind went to the demons. It seemed to him, the demons were planning something. Placent had been the second lord to be killed within the month and demons almost never targeted people so high up in the hierarchy. They were drawing attention to themselves. Which could be a very bad thing.
Gabriel shoved the concerns away. He was not supposed to care about that. At his side, hidden beneath his duster jacket, Gabriel became aware of the weight of his revolver, Retribution, in its holster there. A gift, from the faceless woman's murderer. The demon who had taken her...that was his only care.
He studied Anna's unseeing eyes. As to where her thoughts had taken her, Gabriel could not even guess.
“If you don't mind my saying,” she began again, breaking the silence, and blinking away whatever ever her mind's eyes had been seeing, “I didn't exactly peg you as the type who would care much for literature.”
“I'm sorry?” Gabriel asked, before realizing she had gestured toward the book in his lap. Changing the subject, he noted.
“Right,” he said, looking down at the book. The worn cover was unadorned and a rather bland shade of brown. He did enjoy the occasional book, but, at the moment, he was more interested in the sketch hidden between its pages. “You find all the good stories in books. But, now I'm interested: What type did you peg me for, exactly?”
Anna's cheeks went red.
“Well,” she began slowly, “drawing from my very first impression of you, I'd have guessed your interests would extend more toward...women.”
“Well, yes, I suppose there are good stories to find with women, also.”
“Mister Baryon!” Anna said, gaping. Then, she laughed and shook her head incredulously. “But, Mister Baryon, as we've been speaking, you have become sort of a mystery to me, in honesty.”
“How so?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“There seems to be so many different personalities hidden behind that charming smile of yours, it is simply impossible to know for certain what you care for. I know we've only just met, but I am usually pretty good at pegging types. If I could be more certain, I would say you aren't exactly who you display yourself as being.”
Gabriel frowned.
“Really?” he said, carefully.
Anna nodded.
“For one,” she said, “true charmers are not inclined to let themselves get too close to any woman for too long a time. Woman do tend to be mere passing...experiences...in the charmer's life; and very rarely are they made important to that life. You, however, were once married.”
Gabriel felt a chill run the length of his spine.
“How did you...?”
“Your hand keeps moving to the ring finger of your left hand, as if to twirl a ring that's no longer there,” she answered, smiling knowingly.
Gabriel glanced down at his hands and separated them. He had not even noticed he was doing it.
“And,” Anna continued, “she must have been one of the most important things to your life, considering you have been doing that for the better part of our conversation.”
“That's...” Gabriel shook his head, in true awe of the woman, “...very keen of you. How did you learn to do that?”
“I took a profiling class in school,” she said, glancing out the train's window. “Wanted to become an investigator.”
“What happened, if I might ask?”
Anna seemed to hesitate.
“Family issues,” she answered, after a few moments. “They are taken care of now,” she added, then rather abruptly leaned in toward Gabriel, looking over the pull-out tray with the teacup and at the book in his lap. “Keen Eyes and a Crimson Pool, by Wayne Philgrim,” she read aloud, tilting her head to see the book's spine. The title and author's name, in their silver lettering, were all the decoration the book bore. “Mystery?”
“Horror,” Gabriel answered distantly. This woman was, perhaps, a larger mystery than Gabriel. “Or, at least, that's what it's supposed to be, I think.”
Anna cringed, leaning back in her seat.
“I never cared much for scary stories,” she said. “Too gruesome for my liking.”
“I find they make the real world seem a little bit of a better place to be,” Gabriel said. “Do you enjoy reading?”
“I try to keep myself at a distance from books,” Anna replied, then sighed. “My father already has me nearly drowning myself in a very particular topic of nonfiction—which could be easily confused with horror, if you ask me. Yes, indeed, horribly boring.”
Gabriel chuckled.
“I do like your spirit, Miss Thornrose.”
“I like your acceptance of it,” she said. “It's not often a woman meets a man with whom she can freely express herself.”
The two of them sat smiling at one another for quite a few seconds. Then, the train released a cringe-worthy shrill and jolted Gabriel forward, as the breaks were thrown and it began slowing to a stop. Amazingly, his teacup, and the saucer atop which it sat, seemed to maintain a better grounding than he did.
Gabriel glanced out the window, finding a weathered sign, reading: Pleasant Station. His eyes turned back to Anna.
“It seems I've reached my stop,” he announced, pushing the tray aside and standing.
“What a coincidence, Mister Baryon,” Anna said, standing also and placing her cloche back on her head. “This is my stop as well.”
Gabriel grinned, then gestured toward the corridor outside his cabin.
“In that case, after you, madam,” he said.
She moved past him, into the corridor. He placed his bowler hat atop his head and slid his small book into one of the pockets on the inside of his duster, before—clutching his small suitcase in one hand and a polished mahogany cane in the other—following a step behind.
“I'll have you know,” Gabriel began, as they made their way toward the exit, “I will be attending Duke Bawdlin's ball tonight. If you should find yourself confined by the restraints of society, perhaps you would like to join me there.” Confined by the restraints of society? Flames, I'm getting good at this lord talk.
In front of him Anna laughed.
“And so you would have me cram myself in an entire building full of the gods of restraint?” she asked.
“Well,” Gabriel said, as they both stepped out of the train and onto the wooden platform which made up much of Pleasant Station, then faced her, “I did say I would be attending said ball. Perhaps, we shall show the other lords what's what, eh?”
“I might have taken you up on that offer, if I were not here on business already,” she said. “Perchance, I will see you another time, Mister Baryon. It was lovely speaking with you.”
“Was it the charm that made it lovely?” Gabriel raised a brow and smirked.
“No.” Anna shook her head. “It was the fact that I could never tell whether you were lying or not, even with the simple things—such as the genre of your book; I still can't be sure whether it's a mystery or horror. You are the first true mystery I have encountered in a number of years, Mister Baryon. A lord in a duster coat.”
Anna Thornrose turned and started away, toward a coachman who was waving her down, while another was loading the coach with a large trunk which he presumed was her luggage. Gabriel frowned as he watched her leave, uncertain how he should feel about her words.
Rejected, he thought. And she basically said my words couldn't be trusted. Hmm.
He turned his attention back to the actual station—a small building set near the center of the large, wooded platform—, then his eyes swept across the platfor
m. It was busier than he remembered it being, when he and...her, the faceless woman...had come here many years before for... What had they come here for?
She had loved the quiet of the place. The way it seemed separated from the rest of the world. He remembered that much, at least.
And she had loved the trees... Gabriel's frown deepened. Where were the trees? The station was built on the edge of a small wooded area, which separated it from the town of Pleasant. Or, rather, it had been. It appeared the trees had nearly all been cleared and a wide, dirt path cut through where they had once stood.
A couple, thick, grey billows of smoke plumed into the sky about half a mile's distance away. Factory smoke.
More and more, the quiet towns of the Southern Region were becoming like the cities in the North. More and more, her memory was fading from the South and from his mind. It appeared that expansion had finally found its way to Pleasant.
Gabriel's boots pounded against the platform, as he made his way down to the dirt road. Fixing his eyes on the billows of smoke in the distance, and sighing to himself, he started forward.
The air was thick and humid, making him rethink his decision to wear his duster.
If there were trees to shade the path, he grumbled inwardly, I might find some solace. Truthfully, Gabriel liked the heat. It kept his mind from the constant, dull roar of the others—the demons—in his mind. What he disliked, however, was change. It was change that slowly tore her memory from him.
His eyes strayed from the road occasionally, to the empty, half-finished husks of wood and concrete that would become one type of building or another once they were finished. He had not yet reached the town, but he was already feeling as if nothing about this place was the same.
I'm not even thirty. Should everything be changing so quickly?
A few coaches passed him by along the way, the coachmen and their passengers sparing him no more than brief glances—sometimes, not even that. They most likely did not even suspect Gabriel was supposed to be a lord. He should probably work on his presence a bit more. A lord in a duster, as Anna had called him, was not exactly the sort of attention he wanted to draw to himself.
Briefly, he considered taking off his duster, but quickly decided against it. The coat was a tool—a more personal tool—, he used to separate himself from the nobleman he pretended to be. When one spent his time acting as a certain type of person—during the moments he was not actively hunting a demon, of course—it could be difficult not to incorporate the ideals of that person—fake or not—as his own. And so, sweat beading along his forehead, he continued along the road.
Eventually, the shouting of street vendors cut through the silence, and the heavy smell of industrialism, perfume, and musk settled down around Gabriel. It was actually a welcome smell, considering he spent much of his time chasing the stench of rotting flesh.
To his right, a large sign read in curving white letters, Welcome to Pleasant.
You should not enter this place, a single voice, somewhere beneath the constant hum of the other demons, whispered, so faint Gabriel questioned whether or not it had truly been there. You should not enter this place, it repeated.
Gabriel paused. His instincts, his hunch—he used to call it his Demon Radar, before deciding it was a ridiculous name—told him he would find a demon here. And those he worked with in the underground—those not afraid to admit the existence of demon-kind—had confirmed there was evidence of demon activity in Pleasant.
He was not exactly sure how they were able to pinpoint the activity of demons—he thought, perhaps, they somehow followed trails of unexplained disappearances, and even that, finding anything using those sorts of leads, seemed far-fetched. Nevertheless, they in the underground were almost always accurate and Gabriel was smart enough not to ask questions. The people making up the underground of any city were not the type to take well to questions about the way they operated.
Leave, the voice continued.
Gabriel shoved the voice to the background, deciding it was probably only one of the others trying to mislead him. Follow the demons, find her murderer. Eventually. It was not much to go on, he knew. But, with demons constantly having to change bodies and no way to track one using any form of identification, it was all he had to go on.
He continued onward, passing the sign. Below him, his boots clomped softly as the dirt path gave way to a cobbled street.
I'm giving up on you, the voice whispered. Gabriel shivered, but ignored the words.
His mood lifted slightly as he took in the large town, not quite a city. Although they were not the mighty pines the once-wooded area had consisted of, there were a few trees here, lining a cobbled streets here or there. Dainty trees, bearing pretty blossoms of pink and white, but still trees.
Gabriel looked about him as he walked. Though many of the citizens of Pleasant were busy haggling with street vendors or listening to an a cappella group singing on a nearby street corner, a few stared at him as he passed them by. Despite its expansion, the people here knew a stranger when they saw one.
Gabriel ignored the few stares, his eyes searching the signs of the many businesses, blossoming in this progressing era like flowers in the springtime, as he strode along the street. It was not long until he caught sight of a sign composed of flashing amber lights in front of a large, two-storey building. Evening was only just arriving, yet the dimly glowing lights were still enough to catch any passerby's attention. Electric bulbs were one of the newer advents of the era. Pleasant was certainly advancing, indeed.
The flashing bulbs—probably set on timers—making up the letters of the sign ran vertically, reading, Grand Theatre. Gabriel had seen grander. He started toward the lights.
The moment he entered in through the bronze-edged double doors, a man standing behind a podium with a ready smile on his face called, “Welcome to the Grand Theatre, good sir! May I see your ticket, please?”
Gabriel tilted his hat politely to the man.
“I'm not here for the show,” Gabriel said. “I'm here to see the man who owns this fine theater. A Mister Barnes. Do you know where I might find him?”
The custodian shook his head, his smile not fading a bit. “I apologize, sir, but I am not permitted to let anyone pass without a ticket in hand. However, you may purchase a ticket from me here, if you wish.”
“Not even a lord can pass?” Gabriel asked.
The custodian seemed to hesitate at this and Gabriel started forward. He paused as the employee stepped out from behind his podium, hesitantly. Gabriel raised an eyebrow. Although, he realized, he looked nothing like a lord in his current wear. Gabriel, himself, would certainly be unconvinced.
“I-I'm sorry, sir,” the man stammered, “but I really can't let you pass without a ticket. The last guy who let someone pass without a ticket—as a favor to a friend—got dusted. Please, sir, I can't get fired too.”
Gabriel screwed his mouth up tightly, then sighed, giving the man a thin smile. “Very well,” he said in a lofty tone. He might as well act like a lord. “Will you, at least, go fetch Mister Barnes for me? Tell him Lord Baryon is here to see him.”
The man wavered briefly, before turning to another employee, who was sweeping the floor nearby. “Parkens, you take over my position for a minute. I'm going to get Master Barnes for...Lord Baryon.” The man eyed Gabriel, still obviously unconvinced. Gabriel lifted his chin haughtily.
The younger lad complied with a smile—were the smiles permanent for the employees here?—, while the other man went away. Gabriel watched him go until he rounded a corner, then moved aside to sit at one of the benches in the reception area. Setting his suitcase on the bench beside him, he pulled his book from its place in his duster and opened it.
He actually tried to read the words this time, as he waited. With the constant rumble of the voices in his head and his own thoughts constantly digressing to the faceless woman, however, his focus was quick to stray. He soon found himself leafing through the pages, until he rea
ched his sketch.
The woman whose face he could not remember enough to draw. He could not even guess the color of her eyes. Yet she was important. He always felt as if he remembered her better the previous day, than he did the current one. Each day he awoke, there seemed to be something about her that was missing from his memory.
What is your name? he wondered.
It was her memory—or lack thereof—that drove him to consume the demons, breathing them into that part of himself he could not begin to understand. It was her who kept him human, at the core of it all. Yet, what more was she now, than a dead wife he could not remember?
Only snatches of recollection remained of the time before the last two years—his hunting years. There was a bank and...blood. Aside from that, he knew almost nothing of who he had been, of who he was. Gabriel hardly even remembered his own parents. She was the last remnant of his life before, and she was little more than an outline of a face, and the flashing image of a corridor, at the end of which stood the demon who had taken her life.
In truth, and what scared him the most, was that he did not want to remember more. Those memories held too much pain for him. That memory had broken him once before. But, he did not want to remember less, either.
Yet, day by day, she slipped closer and closer to the blackness.
Gabriel reached inside his duster and brought out a pencil. She had no face and she had no name, but she was more than those things. He placed the tip of his pencil to the paper, within the blank space of her face.
She liked the trees, he wrote. She was my wife... He leaned back on the bench, pressing his brain for more information.
“Ah, Lord Baryon,” came a deep, aging voice.
Gabriel shut his book with a start, tucking it back in its place within his duster as he glanced up to see two approaching figures. The custodian, along with Lannister Barnes, who was a tall, slender and slightly greying man.
“I've been expecting you,” Barnes said. His voice was much older than his face.