Archive of Our Own ^beta

It is winter when Martin Blackwood moves to the house at the cliff’s edge.

The bitter cold rips through him as soon as he steps out of his little, elderly sedan, his legs cramped and painful from the drive. The gravel hisses and crunches below his feet, the same stony, flat gray as the sky. The air tastes sharp and acidic on Martin’s tongue, the tang of brine and ocean spray hanging around the cliffside like a fog. The house rises in front of him, an odd, slanting two-story miracle of white wood and black iron, perched on the clifftop like a statement. Like it had settled here just to prove it could.

“Mr. Blackwood!” a voice calls from the porch. Martin lifts his gaze from the cliff’s sharp, dizzying drop into the sea, meters below. The man sitting on the house’s front steps gets to his feet and waves at Martin enthusiastically. He’s wearing a deep blue suit and a crisp white shirt and has the intentional good looks of someone who knows that heads turn to follow them when they walk into a room. Martin is instantly on his guard.

“Tim Stoker?” Martin asks, approaching the porch slowly.

“The very same,” Tim answers, stretching a hand out to shake Martin’s with a grand flourish. “ So great to finally meet you in person, Mr. Blackwood. Video calls simply do not do you justice. You’re much taller than you looked on the screen.”

Martin decidedly does not blush. He says, “It’s nice to meet you, too. Call me Martin, please.”

Mr. Blackwood was my father, he does not say, because that doesn’t really feel like a funny joke anymore.

Tim Stoker appears undaunted. “Oh, absolutely, Martin. Ready to look around the house? Maintenance came last week, so the heating should be in working order.”

Martin nods enthusiastically, hugging his coat around himself. The front door creaks softly as it opens, like a greeting, and Martin and the realtor step across the threshold and into Martin’s new life.

“Give me a ring if the radiators give you any problems and I’ll get someone out here ASAP,” Tim is saying. “Worst case scenario, at least the fireplace is in working order. Ha! That was a joke. Mostly.”

As the front door creaks softly closed behind them, as he looks at the living room of the place he will now call home, Martin experiences something like a death, followed by a rebirth. He is shedding layers of himself, bits of Martin Blackwood sloughing off and falling, inert, to the well-worn wooden floor. He feels bare, laid open. His heart is cramped and static, too large for his chest cavity.

Beside him, Tim Stoker is talking animatedly about the light fixtures.

The house is… something. Its floorboards are an odd blue-gray, faded from years of sunlight and use. They creak insistently when Martin steps, as if complaining about the sudden and unfamiliar weight. The massive stone fireplace that Tim had mentioned is cavernous and empty, hungry-looking, an open maw. There is a wall of slightly foggy windows along the far side of the room, looking out over the cliff and onto the colorless, foaming ocean below. The furniture is all new, furnished by the company that flipped the house and put it on the market. The couches and chairs and rugs are all muted, different shades of cream and tan and deep, burgundy-brown. It’s supposed to look modern, Martin thinks. Instead, it just looks sad.

There’s a chill that hangs palpably in the air, despite the fact that the heat is obviously working, warmth seeping from the coiled white radiator set into the wall. A draft, maybe. Tim doesn’t seem to feel it.

“You know,” Tim tells Martin conversationally, as he steers him into the kitchen to show him the new dishwashing machine they’d installed that morning, “I think you’ll be good for this old place. I can’t remember the last time someone lived in this house. I actually think it’s been sitting empty since Gertrude Robinson lived here.”

He says this as though he expects Martin to know who Gertrude Robinson is. Martin appreciates it, even if it does have the effect of leaving him somewhat adrift in the conversation. It makes him feel less like an interloper, a voyeur, someone who has pressed his face up against the window of this sleepy island town to try and peer inside.

The kitchen, like the living room, is fashionable and modern and utterly lifeless, except for its lived-in floorboards and the way they creak and sigh. The upstairs bedroom is the same, as well as the bathroom and the study - although there is a rather grand mahogany desk sitting amongst the expensive forgettable-ness of the study’s furnishings. It’s pushed into a corner almost dismissively, large and intricately carved and lovely. It looks like a fairly expensive antique. There’s a large, burnished bronze lock visible on the topmost drawer.

Tim catches him staring at it.

“Ah,” he says, handsome mouth curving into a handsome grin. “Do you like ghost stories, Martin?”

“On occasion,” Martin says, because he used to like ghost stories. Before. “Why, is the desk haunted?”

Tim laughs and wiggles his fingers in a manner that is clearly intended to convey spooky.

“Not when it’s just sitting there. But they say that people who try to remove this desk from the house have all kinds of accidents. Close shaves with traffic accidents, sudden freak weather phenomena, all kinds of things. Even when they were remodeling, they had to leave the desk in the room and just do their work around it.”

“If you’re handing me off a haunted house, shouldn’t I be signing some liability waivers, or something?”

Tim laughs again, easy, and his brown hair falls charmingly and deliberately into his eyes as he does it.

“I completely forgot about the ghoul forms! I should have thought of it before we finished all the paperwork. Sasha will be so disappointed in me. We can’t afford to field another ghost-related lawsuit.”

Martin huffs a reluctant laugh. “I guess you don’t believe the stories, then?”

Tim waves an airy hand and directs Martin back into the hallway so they can inspect the closets. “Belief is one thing,” he says, with the air of someone imparting precious knowledge. “Ghoul forms are another entirely.”

“So who do I complain to if I start to have visions of the damned?” Martin returns.

“Well, not me, that’s for sure.” Tim snorts. “There is actually someone in town who’s got… well, I guess you can call it ‘expertise,’ in stuff like this.” He accompanies the word expertise with heavy air-quotes. “Let’s hope you don’t have any visions, though, damned or otherwise. He’s not exactly a pleasant guy. Best to avoid him if you can.”

“Oh,” Martin says. “Okay, no visions. Got it.”

“Want to see the back garden? I think they’ve got some planters set up for an herb garden.”

Martin follows Tim down the stairs and out of the house. It really is frightfully cold, the ocean wind stark and harsh across the cliffside, but Martin dutifully looks at the backyard planters and nods thoughtfully at the suggestion that they might be good for growing tomatoes.

By the time they get back inside, there is an aching tiredness seeping into his bones. He’s thinking about his dirt-covered sedan, parked in front of the house, stuffed with the few boxes of things he’d made himself bring from his flat in London. Books, mostly; a set of dishes; some clothes; a few photos from before he came here and died and was reborn. He’ll have to unpack them, unfold them, and lay some hidden part of himself bare when he does so. He thinks it will probably hurt.

“Would you like some tea before you go?” he asks Tim.

“That sounds great, thanks,” Tim answers. “It’s not usually this god-awful cold, I promise. By the time summer comes around, it’ll be the prettiest spot on the island.”

Martin nods, asks Tim how he likes his tea, and thinks that, no matter how cold and desolate this place is, it can’t be worse than the one he’d left.

Martin unpacks his boxes gradually over the next few days. It’s slow going, and sometimes he needs to stop and sit down, quietly, just for a little while. There are a couple photographs, framed and dusty, that he leaves in the shoebox he’d packed them in. He shoves the box all the way to the back of his closet and puts his least favorite pair of shoes on top of it. When he shuts the door, he feels exhausted, like he’d sealed away a nightmarish monster instead of a few ancient pictures of his mother.

The house is very large and very empty.

Martin had expected it to feel painfully quiet, heavy-heavy-heavy with the silence. It’s not, though. Instead, the building is full of little sounds, creaks and sighs and the inhalation-exhalation of the wind off the ocean. The floorboards choke and groan when he crosses the bedroom in the morning; the walls whisper to him when he’s sitting on the couch and watching baking shows late into the night; the pipes laugh and sing and settle in the late afternoon.

It’s probably desperately pathetic, but it feels like having a friend. The first friend Martin has had in a long, long time.

Two days after the last of Martin’s boxes have been unpacked, there is a knock at the door. The woman standing on his porch is wearing a frankly comically large pair of glasses and the loudest sweater Martin has ever seen. Her brown hair is swept up into a messy ponytail at the top of her head. When she sees Martin, she beams.

“Martin Blackwood! I’m Sasha James. It’s so nice to finally meet you.”

“O-oh!” Martin says. “Tim’s business partner?”

“That’s me,” Sasha confirms, flashing Martin a thumbs-up. “I thought it might be nice to go for a little tour of town. I’ll treat you to coffee.”

“Is that in your contract?” Martin asks, surprised.

“Absolutely not,” Sasha answers, cheerfully. “This service is free, my friend. I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in a small town, Martin, but gossip is currency here. We don’t get many new faces, as I’m sure you’ve surmised, and I want to be the first to know your sordid backstory.”

“Why do you assume my backstory is sordid?” Martin asks, halfway between disgruntled and irrationally flattered.

Sasha shrugs. “Why else would you move out to an island in the middle of nowhere? Don’t worry. Other than the, like, three families who’ve lived here since the dawn of time, we’ve all come here with plenty of baggage. So, coffee?”

It’s a rather mild day, compared with the morning Martin had arrived. Rather than driving, Sasha and Martin decide to walk down the hillside and into town. It only takes them about twenty minutes, but the countryside between the compact town center and the clifftop house is awash with fields of scrubby, yellowish grass and grazing sheep. Martin spots a cow and points it out to Sasha, delighted. She laughs at him, but doesn’t seem particularly put off by his over-enthusiastic reaction to farm animals.

“Where were you living before this, then?” she asks him. “Big city boy?”

“London,” Martin admits. “I’m from Devon originally. It’s been a long time since I’ve lived there, though.”

Sasha gives him an appraising look. “I see. So why’d you decide to move out here?”

Martin hesitates. He knows he needs to get used to this - that he needs to get used to saying, I left London because my mum died and then my life fell apart. He can’t live the rest of his life acting as though he’d come from nowhere, sprouted up from the ground one day like an oversized, extra-anxious sunflower.

“I,” Martin begins.

Sasha lifts a hand. “It’s okay, Martin. You can tell me when you feel like it. Oh, look, there’s the coffee shop! What would you like? It’s on me.”

The island’s town center is really more of a collection of buildings, scattered haphazardly together as if dropped by an enormous, invisible hand. The buildings are all different sandy shades of seashell-color, tan and white and palest blue. The streets are branching and strange; Martin would fear getting lost if there had been more than ten or fifteen buildings. Most of the establishments aren’t named, and none of the roads are. CAFE, proclaims the weather-beaten sign above the coffee shop. PUB, is splayed in a fanciful font on the front window of the building beside it. Across the street, a small sign hangs on a door, painted with an image of a vividly green, open, staring eye and announcing, MEDIUM.

“Oh,” Martin says, surprised. “You have a town medium?”

“You’d be surprised how often his services are required. I think he was, too.” Sasha shoots the sign with the eye a look that’s somewhere between exasperated and fond. “Tim reckons he moved out here because he thought he’d be able to avoid ever interacting with a customer again. That’s his bad luck, though, because this island is the hauntedest in the British Isles.”

“I see,” Martin says, harboring serious doubts about whether or not hauntedest is actually a word. “I think Tim might have mentioned him. He said that he’s very unpleasant, your medium.”

“Oh, yes, Tim hates him,” Sasha enthuses. “Well, he says he does, anyway. Don’t tell him I told you, but I actually think he’s rather fond of the guy. Thinks he’s funny. Anyway, this is us.”

And Sasha directs Martin into the aptly-named CAFE, promising him the best mocha he’s had in his life, and the Unpleasant Man who works as a medium passes from his brain entirely.

Martin does have to hand it to Sasha. The mocha is good.

A week passes. Then two. The house at the cliff’s edge gets suddenly and unbearably cold sometimes, as if there are no walls at all, and Martin is suddenly alone on the clifftop with the wind whipping through him.

The place is old, though.

It must be a draft.

Martin does not move the desk from the study.

About two and a half weeks since Martin’s arrival on the island, the heavy freeze finally begins to break, and a tepid breeze passes gently through the air.

They have another half a month at least before spring properly arrives, but Martin is wild with the heady joy of temperatures warm enough to go out without a parka. He walks into town slowly, relishing the feeling of his favorite cable-knit sweater instead of his massive winter jacket. He waves to the sheep as he passes, because he wants to, and there’s no one around to see him and laugh.

When he arrives at the town center, his initial intention of picking up a couple groceries he’d forgotten on his last trip suddenly seems drastically unimportant. He simply follows his feet, peering in the antique shop’s window, stopping to buy a croissant from the CAFE , popping into the tiny little garden shop to pick up a few tomato plants for his window boxes.

That’s about when he spots the bookshop.

It’s understandable that he’d missed it up to this point. The building is small and squat, set at an awkward angle and tucked a little ways away from the main street, slightly behind Tim and Sasha’s office. Martin approaches the storefront with a startled, unsteady bubble of joy ballooning up inside his chest. Its windows are warmly lit with white-gold lights, a selection of current bestsellers propped in the display, but beyond, Martin can see rows and rows of well-loved shelves of books. It looks empty, other than the employee sitting behind the front desk.

He enters the shop and a bell dings quietly as he does.

The woman working the register looks, for some reason, oddly familiar. Her hair is dyed a vibrant wine-red, long and tucked behind one ear, which is filled with glittering piercings. Her eyeliner is so sharp and symmetrical Martin thinks she must’ve applied it with a ruler. She doesn’t seem to recognize Martin, though, so he must not know her after all. She just nods at him and goes back to whatever she’s reading.

Martin takes a look around the shop. Something inside him - something tight and knotted and anaerobic - sighs and releases for the first time in months. For the first time since he got the call from the care home.

The shop isn’t terribly large, and it feels even smaller with its massive, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. It smells warm, like dust and old paper and people, decades of people, passing through the same door and wandering the same aisles. Like the house at the cliff’s edge, the wooden floors complain noisily when Martin steps on them.

Martin feels larger than himself, suddenly. Peaceful and heady and half in love.

He navigates his way towards the back of the store, where a sign directs him to the poetry section. He stops in front of the shelf, the memory of a smile tugging at his mouth. Then there is a rustle of movement beside him and he nearly jumps out of his skin.

Martin is not, after all, the only one in the shop.

The man standing at the other end of the aisle has his head bowed, flipping through an ancient-looking book with an expression of furrowed intensity. He’s terribly handsome, Martin realizes, with a stab of something like surprise. He’s a little shorter than Martin, the slope of his shoulders trim and elegant. His skin and hair and eyes are all a deep shade of brown. His hair and close-cropped beard are shot through with silver, his hair worn just a little long and wavy around his ears and the back of his neck. He’s wearing a tan sweater over a shirt with a crisp white collar, but when Martin looks closer he realizes that the shirt is buttoned unevenly. The worn cover is embossed with letters that read, in a curling font, Dictionnaire Infernal.

Martin allows himself one more split-second of ridiculous, unfettered staring. Before he can dart his eyes away, though, the man reading the book stirs and looks up, right into Martin’s eyes.

Something… happens. In Martin’s chest.

Martin cannot describe it - couldn’t put it into words, even if he wanted to. The closest he can come is saying that it is every single one of the cliches: it is an electric shock, a fall from a towering height, a skipped heartbeat or two or three. The man’s eyes are steady and hickory-colored and lovely , and Martin sort of feels like he might like to fall into them and drown.

Instead, he opens his mouth and blurts out, “Hi.”

The man blinks and takes a breath, as if about to say something in reply.

And then a woman pops up in the aisle behind him. “All set, Jon?” she asks, stepping up to stand next to him. “I just need to confirm our dinner plans with Mel, and then I’m good to go.”

“Yes,” the man - Jon? - answers. His voice is surprisingly deep. It resonates pleasantly in the hollow at the base of Martin’s throat, in the empty expanse of his chest. “Yes, right, I’ll just. Buy this, then.”

The woman takes a look at the book in his hands and sighs theatrically. “Another spooky one? Seriously?”

“It’s for work , Georgie,” Jon mumbles, but he shoots Martin something like an embarrassed glance before following Georgie down the aisle and out of sight. He hears them talking to the shopkeeper for a few moments, and then the bell above the door rings, and Jon and Georgie are gone.

Martin only browses for a couple more minutes before grabbing a poetry collection off the shelf at random and going to check out. The woman working the register shoots him a long look before taking the book out of his hands to scan.

“You must be the clifftop house’s new victim, then,” the woman says.

“How’d you know?” Martin asks.

“Don’t get too many new faces around here. What’s your name?”

“Martin Blackwood. Yours?”

“Melanie-”

Martin’s wallet slips out of his fingers and falls to the counter with a clatter.

“Oh,” he says. “Oh! That’s how I knew you! Melanie King! Ghost Hunt UK!”

Melanie looks grim.

“Yes,” she says. “That’s me. Do you want a receipt?”

Martin winces. “N-no, no, that’s… that’s fine, thank you. I. Um. Sorry, did you maybe not want to be recognized?”

Melanie huffs out a laugh. “No, it’s fine. Bit flattered you remembered me, actually. I’m just used to being pretty much anonymous around here. Kind of left the city to… get away from it all, y’know.”

“I know,” Martin says, and he means it.

Melanie levels him with another long look before nodding.

“Right, well. Enjoy your book. And feel free to stop in again soon, if you’d like. I have a… friend. Well. A sort-of friend. He’s my girlfriend’s friend, at least. Anyway, he likes poetry a lot, if you want to talk recommendations. He was just in here, actually, you might have spotted him while you were back there.”

Martin, in a fit of desperate survival instinct, takes a mental shovel and buries the knowledge that Jon-of-the-soulful-eyes likes poetry six feet deep.

“I’ll definitely come back,” Martin says, hoping he sounds like a completely normal human person and not like he’s having a gay meltdown. “That’s a very kind offer. Thanks so much. It was lovely to meet you.”

Then he flees from the shop, blushing furiously for absolutely no good reason at all. And that, Martin thinks, is that.

Martin had expected to stay home for the next couple days, maybe take advantage of the weather and try to get the garden into passably decent shape for spring. It turns out, however, that he really had needed those groceries after all. So, somewhat reluctantly, he makes the trek back down to town the next day.

He is making his way out of the grocery store and back towards the hill, trying to wrestle his two overstuffed paper bags into compliance in his arms, when he runs headlong into a very solid something.

Martin’s breath huffs out in a heavy oof and he falls backwards onto his butt, hitting the ground hard enough to hurt. By the grace of some merciful god, he narrowly avoids losing his grip on his groceries. The person he’d bumped into isn’t as lucky, and, when they fall, they drop the book they’d been clutching onto the pavement, where it falls open.

“I’m so sorry,” Martin begins, stricken, just as the person he’d assailed growls, “Damn.”

Martin freezes in place on the ground and peers over the head of lettuce sticking out of his grocery bag.

Jon - Jon, who has pretty eyes and a deep, deep voice and likes poetry; Jon, who is sitting sprawled on the concrete with scraped hands and a bleeding knee; Jon, who Martin is just now realizing he is mildly terrified of - looks at Martin. It is a narrow, very pointy sort of expression. Like Martin is a particularly disagreeable fungus Jon has encountered on the side of the road.

“I am so sorry,” Martin repeats, with something like dawning horror. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

He sort of expects Jon to start cussing him out, but he just scowls and unfolds himself, grabbing his fallen book and getting to his feet with an awkward sort of dignity.

Martin scrambles to his feet, too, but immediately regrets it as pain shoots, hot and sharp, up his ankle. He must flinch visibly, because Jon makes a sudden and abortive gesture with his hand, like he’d considered reaching for Martin’s arm before thinking better of it.

“Are you all right?” Jon asks, with the manner of someone who would rather be literally anywhere else in the world.

“Oh,” Martin says. “O-oh, yes, yeah. I think it’s a sprain. It’ll be all right. Just a bit sore.”

“I see,” Jon says. “Do you need a doctor? The clinic is down the street.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Martin says. He tests his ankle, leans some weight on it, and while the motion sends a dull ache up his leg, he’ll at least be able to walk on it. “I really am sorry. You’re not hurt, are you?”

Jon shakes his head. “I’m rather hardy,” he says, with just a hint of something like humor in his voice, though his facial expression does not change. “You really ought to watch where you’re going, though.”

“Of course, yes,” Martin answers. “I am so-”

Jon lifts a hand. “All right, yes, apology accepted. Thank you, Martin. Now, if you’ll excuse me-”

“You… know my name?”

Jon starts, something small and just a little guilty passing over his face for a sliver of a second.

“Word travels fast,” he says - too quickly? “New people don’t move out here very often and I, ah. Heard about you from Melanie. The woman at the bookshop. She, uh, told me that your name was Martin.”

 “Oh,” Martin says, and then he stops.

Hang on. Has Jon been asking after him?

Keep it together, Martin, you’re going to creep him out. Again.

Like the intrepid soul he is, Martin soldiers bravely on. “I’m Martin, yes. Martin Blackwood. It’s nice to meet you… sort of properly, this time?”

Jon blinks. “Right. Yes. Jonathan Sims. Are you sure you don’t need to go to the clinic?”

Martin smiles. “Completely sure. Thank you, Jonathan.”

Jon’s nose scrunches up at the bridge. “Jon is… fine. Only my grandmother and my worst boss really ever called me Jonathan.”

Martin laughs at that, fully. Jon looks startled by the sound, his eyes tracking across Martin’s face and his eyebrows creased expressively at the bridge of his nose.

“I’m really glad I got to meet you, Jon,” Martin says. “I mean, despite the collateral damage, and stuff.”

Jon nods, and mutters something that sounds like, “Likewise,” in reply. And then they both turn and walk their separate ways, Jon checking the corners of his book as if worried about finding it dented, and Martin inexplicably charmed, despite his own better judgement.

He has the first of the nightmares that night.

At first, he thinks he’s simply woken up in the middle of the night. He’s lying in his bed, the room dark and still around him, the way it always is. Something’s off, though, Martin thinks. And then it dawns on him: the house is perfectly, utterly silent. None of the usual little noises, quiet sounds. Just a complete stillness, unbroken even by the sound of his breathing.

Martin pushes himself up to a seated position.

There is something standing at the foot of his bed, half-obscured by the gloom.

At first, it looks like an old woman. She is stooped, shoulders and neck sloping downwards as if under a heavy burden. Her hair is gray and wispy, pulled up into a rather severe bun, though strands are beginning to escape around her face. She seems to be wearing a dressing gown, pulled tight around her bony form.

She turns to look at Martin, and Martin swallows a scream.

Her face is covered in eyes. Dozens of them.

She has no nose or mouth or brows - only eyes, too many to count, luminous and narrow and emotionless.

Martin presses both his hands to his mouth to keep the horror inside of him. The thing that looks like an old woman looks at him, and looks at him, and looks at him. Her eyes are horrible things, icy and blank. She says nothing, only continues to watch him, until morning dawns in Martin’s bedroom and he finds himself waking up, sheets hopelessly tangled around his legs, his forehead drenched in sweat.

“It was just a nightmare,” Martin tells himself, all through his shower and the morning news and his cup of tea. “Just a nightmare. It’s the stress of the move and the new place and… and.”

He even manages to almost convince himself that that’s true.

Only, the thing at the foot of his bed comes back the next night.

And the next.

And the next.

By the end of the week, Martin has reached a sort of breaking point. He feels stretched out, scraped thin. Tolkein’s analogy of butter spread over too much bread comes to mind. It’s not that he’s not sleeping; he is. It’s just that every time he closes his eyes, he's afraid he’ll open them to the thing - to her - standing there and... watching him.

And then he finds the photograph of Gertrude Robinson.

It was tucked away, shoved up between a bookshelf and the wall for who knows how long. Martin finds it when he’s cleaning the house, wiping down every surface he sees with an aggression that is perhaps out of proportion to the task. He jostles the shelf a little too much while dusting, and the photo comes loose, slipping down to the floor and sliding to a stop in front of Martin’s foot.

Martin picks the photo up, surprised, and almost drops it when he recognizes the person it depicts.

An elderly woman with steely gray hair and a severe bun and a pair of very, very familiar eyes. She only had two when she was alive, Martin realizes with something like relief.

Then he thinks, Oh.

I'm being haunted.

And that’s about when he calls Tim Stoker.

Martin hesitates before opening the door to the medium’s office, his hand half-outstretched.

It’s not that Martin is particularly frightened of Unpleasant Man, even if Tim had said that coming here ought to be a last resort. It’s just that… Martin isn’t even sure if he believes in ghosts, really. He hadn’t before moving here, anyway. He’s fairly certain that he doesn’t believe in mediums, at least.

Also, coming here feels disturbingly like distilling his experiences into something real. If it is no longer only in Martin’s head, but also in the head of someone else, it becomes more difficult to explain the thing away.

Then he thinks about Gertrude Robinson, standing at the foot of his bed with her tens of hundreds of thousands eyes, and pushes the door of the medium’s office open.

It’s quite small inside, but rather than feeling cozy, like the bookshop, it feels… close. Tight. The entire front room mostly consists of a tiny little waiting area with one narrow purple sofa and two magazines tossed onto an end table like an afterthought. There’s a front desk, but it’s unmanned, and an unmarked door set into the far wall that Martin presumes must lead to the medium’s office. The walls are bare.

“H-hello?” Martin calls. His voice cracks rather embarrassingly.

The office door swings open.

Martin nearly jumps out of his skin. It isn’t a specter or a ghoul who emerges, though; it isn’t even Unpleasant Man. It’s a woman, with brown skin and brilliantly red lipstick, wearing a hijab and a sharp black suit. She takes one look at Martin and says, “Ah. Problems with the supernatural, then?”

Martin considers this and settles on, “Maybe? I’m… really not completely sure. Tim Stoker suggested I come here, though, so…”

“You’re the new guy,” she realizes. “The one who moved into Gertrude’s place.”

Martin nods. “She’s actually why I’m here. Gertrude.”

The woman’s eyebrows fly up.

“I see,” she says. “Interesting. Here, why don’t you take a seat. Jon will want to hear this.”

Martin’s heart does a weird little kickflip.

“Jon,” he repeats, his voice a little high. “Wait, the medium-”

And then the front door swings open, and Jon Sims rushes in, loudly saying, “Basira, I think I’ve actually got something this time-”

“Jon,” Basira interrupts him. “We have a customer.”

“Oh,” Jon says, grinding to a halt and then turning to look at Martin. “Oh! Martin?”

Tim’s voice, in Martin’s head, announces, He’s not exactly a pleasant guy.

“Hi, Jon,” Martin says.

“Your ankle?” Jon asks, and his expression is completely impassive, but there’s just a hint of something in his voice. Martin feels suddenly warm down to his toes.

“Quite healed, thanks. What about your - your knee, and hands-”

Jon lifts his hands, which are unmarked. “I heal quickly,” he says, voice flat.

Basira clears her throat and levels Jon with an inscrutable look. “You two have met, then.”

“Yes,” Jon says shortly. “What’s the problem, then, Martin?”

“It’s the house,” he tells Jon. “I’ve been having these dreams, and it’s been hard to sleep, and Tim suggested I come here, so… here I am.”

“Dreams?” Jon repeats. “What kind of dreams?”

So Martin tells him.

Jon listens to him speak with rapt intensity, his eyes dark and serious and trained directly on Martin’s own. This close, Martin can see the variation in them, tiny threads of black and gold running through the brown like the formations of a geode. He doesn’t make a sound while Martin tells his story, simply offers the occasional suggestion of a nod. When Martin is finished, he nods again, thoughtfully this time, and says, “Basira, do we have any tea?”

“In the office,” Basira tells him.

“How do you take your tea, Martin?” Jon asks, already walking into the office.

Martin gamely protests, but he somehow finds himself seated on the ugly purple sofa anyway, sipping tea that’s slightly too bitter for his taste because he didn’t have the heart to ask Jon for two spoonfuls of sugar. Jon and Basira are muttering to each other, quietly enough that Martin only catches about every other word. “...Gertrude…” “...maybe she finally…” “...find it…” “...unlikely…”

After a couple minutes of this, Jon turns to look at Martin.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to come to the house. If I can See her, we can try to establish communication. Also, I might be able to help with the nightmares.”

“I mean, of course you can come. I don’t actually know if you’ll be able to see her, though. She usually only shows up in my dreams. She’s never even made the lights turn on and off or anything.”

Basira barks a laugh. “Don’t worry, Martin. Jon can See pretty much anything. If Gertrude is still around, he’ll find her.”

“If tomorrow is all right for you, I’ll come first thing in the morning,” Jon tells Martin. “If you have the dream again tonight, please write down as much as you can remember when you wake up.”

“Okay,” Martin says. “Y-yeah. Okay, that sounds good. Jon, do you think that she - I mean to say, is she-”

“Dangerous?” Jon finishes for him.

Martin nods.

“I don’t know,” Jon admits, and he looks frustrated just saying the words. “She might be. Not to you, though, I think.”

Martin nods and tries his best to look soothed by that.

Jon turns up on Martin’s doorstep the next morning at half-past eight. It’s a cool morning, the smell of rain in the air, and Jon is wrapped in a woolen overcoat and a knit scarf. A chill wind sweeps across the clifftop, and Jon sniffs belligerently.

“I brought coffee,” he announces, holding a paper bag out like a peace offering. “And muffins.”

“Come in,” Martin says, stepping back.

Jon nods and shuffles into the house, stopping in the entryway to unlace his boots and remove them. Looking at Jon’s feet in his striped stockings feels weirdly invasive and intimate, so Martin busies himself with taking the coffees and directing Jon into the house.

“I haven’t been here in a long time. It’s changed quite a lot,” Jon says, unwinding his scarf, looking around the living room curiously. Martin feels suddenly and sharply self-conscious of the decor. The pretentiously modern furniture has been pretty much untouched since Martin moved in, except for a few heavily-worn throw blankets tossed over the backs of chairs, as well as a few scattered piles of books and long-forgotten mugs of tea.

“I think they remodeled the whole place after… uh. To try and sell it, I mean.”

“Right,” Jon says, slowly. “It looks…”

“It looks like the Home and Garden channel’s worst remodeling show threw up all over it, I know.”

Jon looks taken aback, and then his mouth curves up into what is undeniably a smile. It’s slightly crooked and halting, like the muscles in Jon’s face are unaccustomed to the motion. But it’s a real, honest, genuinely amused smile. 

Martin feels himself turn scarlet and he turns and makes a beeline for the stairs, calling for Jon to follow him.

Once they reach the study, Jon heads to the corner immediately and inspects the desk closely, running his fingers carefully on the wood, his forehead creased with focus. Martin stands back and lets him work, feeling a little silly and useless. After several minutes of this, Jon straightens.

“She isn’t here right now,” Jon tells Martin. “But her trace is everywhere around this house. You said you had another dream last night? Did she say something to you?”

“No. She never says anything,” Martin says crossly. “Just stands there and… and looks at me.”

“Would you prefer to stop dreaming about her?”

Martin frowns and opens his mouth to answer because yes , of course he wants to stop dreaming about the horrible demon-shadow of Gertrude Robinson. But then he remembers the nightmares he used to get before she started visiting his dreams every night - an empty flat, fresh earth over his mother’s grave, the way she’d sounded when she told him to stop visiting her, stop coming, Martin, can’t you see you’re killing me?

“Martin?” Jon asks, and his voice is a little softer than usual, a little less certain.

“I want to stop dreaming about her,” Martin finally settles on.

At least the visions of his mother are familiar. Knowable.

Jon nods and says, “Hold still. I’m going to do something.”

Martin tilts his head and opens his mouth, but Jon just steps forward and presses his thumb to the center of Martin’s forehead and closes his eyes. He says something, low and fervent, and for some reason, Martin’s brain distorts the words beyond recognition. When Jon opens his eyes, they are alight from within, a startling and virulent green. Something passes across Martin, over his skin, warm and featherlight and sharp with static. And then Jon drops his hand and blinks, and his eyes are normal, and the feeling passes.

Martin makes a noise that sounds approximately like, huhnggn?

“That should protect your dreams, for awhile at least,” Jon says calmly, like he’s commenting on the weather, or the football scores.

“H-how?” Martin begins, but that’s about the only word his brain supplies him with.

Jon shrugs. “I’m good at my job,” he says. “I’m going to look into what we might be able to do about Gertrude. In the meantime, come see me if anything changes. And if the nightmares come back, you can call any of us - my two coworkers can both do protection charms like that, too.”

“I don’t have your number,” Martin points out, because he is an idiot and a fool, and also trying not to focus too hard on the phrase ‘protection charm.’

Jon doesn’t look freaked out, though. He says, “So you don’t,” and then holds out his own cell phone for Martin to add his contact to. When Martin does, shell-shocked, Jon takes his phone back and quickly types something. A second later, Martin’s phone buzzes in his pocket.

There is a message from a new number. The text says, :)

Jonathan Sims, Martin thinks numbly, is going to kill me.

“Anyway, I should probably go,” Jon begins.

“Have a muffin first,” Martin interrupts. “You brought them, after all, and I can’t eat all of them alone.”

“Oh,” Jon says, that startled look back in place on his face. “You… want me to stay?”

“Yes,” Martin says, firmly. “I do.”

Jon blinks.

“All right, then,” he finally says. “Okay.”

That night, for the first time in a week, Martin does not dream of Gertrude Robinson.

The next day, he gets up early, walks to town, and heads to the little garden store. He’d tried to Google flower meanings, in an effort to pick something that would appropriately express gratitude, but ended up getting overwhelmed and just picking a bouquet of white daisies. At the very least, it’ll look pretty, he thinks.

By the time he arrives at Jon’s office, both Jon and Basira are already there, standing in the tiny lobby space and arguing animatedly about something. They both look up when Martin comes in, and Jon’s mouth immediately snaps shut.

“Hello,” Martin says. “I’m sorry for interrupting. I just wanted to stop by and say thank you for yesterday. Whatever you did, it worked.”

Basira looks at the flowers in Martin’s hands and says, “Oh. Oh-ho.”

“This is completely unnecessary,” Jon tells Martin, but he sounds baffled rather than annoyed, which Martin chalks up as a win.

Martin waves him off. “Still. I wanted to. It’ll cheer up the office a little.”

Basira squints at the bouquet. “Are these… daisies?”

“Yes,” Martin says. “Is that… Is that a bad thing?”

“Absolutely not,” Basira tells him. “Are you making a joke, though, or is this just a wild coincidence?”

“Coincidence, I think,” Martin says. “I don’t-”

“Our third… compatriot,” Jon says, a little painfully. “Barisa’s wife. Her name is Daisy.”

Basira barks a laugh at the look on Martin’s face.

“Right you are, Martin,” she says. “Those will look nice in here, thanks very much. We’re grateful. Aren’t we, Jon?”

“We… are… yes,” Jon says, slowly, still staring at Martin like he’d just dropped from the sky and claimed the sun goes round the earth.

“It’s really no problem. Thank you again for all your help,” Martin tells them, and then he leaves the office, feeling unsteady in his skin.

Martin does not dream of Gertrude Robinson anymore. He does, however, dream of Jon.

Another month passes in the house at the cliff’s edge.

When he packed up and left his flat in London, Martin had figured that adjusting to his new life would be a gradual process, with bits and pieces slowly falling into place over time. A long time, he’d thought. After all, a lot of Martin had died when he’d buried his mum. He’d been like a tree with decaying branches, while the trunk was still hardy and whole. He wasn’t sure he even knew what it meant to belong somewhere anymore.

 It’s not really like that, though. Instead, he wakes up one day and the house feels familiar. The breeze off the sea smells like home. The texts on his phone are all from people whose names and faces he knows - Jon checking in, Sasha asking if he’d like to go for drinks with her and Tim that evening, Melanie informing him that the poetry anthology he’d put in an order for had arrived at the shop.

Some days are harder than others. But it’s beginning to feel more like Martin’s grief is a part of his life, rather than his life being a part of his grief.

Which is why he feels so put out when the haunting begins again.

It’s not the dreams, this time. Gertrude Robinson must have realized she couldn’t get through to him that way anymore. Instead, it’s a more traditional method. Mugs smash to the ground when Martin’s head is turned, shattering on the tiled floor of the kitchen with the strength of a bomb going off. Windows rattle when Martin passes, like someone is slamming on the glass from the outside. The temperature in the house drops and rises suddenly, seemingly at random. One morning, Martin wakes up and all the furniture in his living room has been moved. Gertrude piled it all in the corner, leaving only the little coffee table in place in the center of the room.

“Is this a joke?” Martin asks the empty room miserably. “Are you having me on right now?”

The room is silent.

“I’ve been trying to be understanding,” Martin continues, a bit mulishly, “but this is a bit much, isn’t it?”

The ghost of Gertrude Robinson does not answer.

Martin holds out for about a week of this before he finally breaks and texts Jon.

Hi. Gertrude is trying to smash every breakable item in the house, I think. I’m running out of dishware. Could you stop by?

The reply comes in less than a minute.

I’m on my way.

Martin waits on the porch anxiously, twisting the hem of his sweater between his fingers. When he spots Jon cresting the hill, a slim spot of dark against the cool spring-blue of the sky, he releases an audible breath of relief.

Jon’s face is, as usual, carefully impassive, but Martin spots the concerned slope to his eyebrows.

“How long has this been happening?” he asks, after Martin explains.

“About eight days ago, I think? Maybe nine? It started with little things, so I wasn’t paying terribly close attention, but, I mean…”

“It escalated,” Jon supplies.

“Right,” Martin says. He pauses, gives his hem a harsh tug, and then says, very softly, “Jon, I can’t go back to London.”

Jon just looks at him and waits for him to continue.

“I can’t sell this house,” Martin continues, barely managing to coach his voice above a tiny warble. “I can’t leave. I can’t go back. I don’t know how to live like this, though.”

For a long, steady moment, Jon’s eyes do not leave Martin’s.

Then he sighs and says, “Come back to the office with me. I’ll talk you through what I’ve been thinking.”

Martin takes a deep, unsteady breath.

“Okay,” he mumbles. “Only if we can stop for lunch, though. I haven’t eaten since yesterday because Gertrude kept turning up the burner and ruining my eggs.”

They settle in Jon’s office with sandwiches and tea from the CAFE. It’s just the two of them today, Jon explains - Daisy and Basira are both on a trip to the mainland to do a housecall for a client experiencing a particularly problematic residual haunting. Martin nods politely and tries not to crane his neck as he looks around the little room where Jon keeps his desk.

Unlike the front room, which is barren and empty of personality, everything about the inner office feels like Jon. The walls are lined with bookshelves, which are stuffed to bursting with books of every sort. There are massive, dusty tomes like the Dictionnaire Infernal, which Martin had seen Jon reading when they’d first come face-to-face in the bookshop. There are also slender paperbacks and hardbound reference books and even a couple modern novels. Jon’s desk is cluttered and packed with papers and notebooks, his laptop shoved into the corner like an afterthought. He has two pictures propped on his desk. In one, he is standing beside the woman from the bookshop, Georgie. In the other, he’s perched on the couch in the office’s front room with Basira and another woman who must be Daisy. Even the wastebasket suits Jon, filled with crumpled papers covered in scrawled ink and empty coffee cups.

“I’m sorry about the mess,” Jon tells Martin with a grimace. “I’ve been a little preoccupied.”

Martin shrugs and swallows a bite of his sandwich. “I don’t mind. Really, I don’t. You should have seen my flat in London. Couldn’t even see the floor at one point.”

Jon raises an eyebrow. “I’m surprised. You don’t come off as untidy.”

Martin pauses. Considers. Takes another bite of sandwich and chews it thoughtfully. “Oh. Yeah, I’m usually not. It was only after my mum died, really.”

Jon’s face does something that is somehow both minute and complicated.

“Ah. I see. I’m sorry for your loss, Martin.”

Martin manages a tiny smile.

“I hadn’t seen her for a long time,” he admits. “I sort of thought that would make it easier.”

“There aren’t many things that do,” Jon says.

Martin swallows hard and then says, his voice an approximation of normal, “Anyway. Tell me about Gertrude.”

“Right,” Jon says, his gaze leaving Martin’s face, which feels like a physical weight lifting off Martin’s chest. “How much do you know about magic, Martin?”

“Nothing,” Martin says. “Unless you mean, like, fantasy magic? I did read Lord of the Rings.”

Jon snorts. It takes a moment, but then Martin realizes, with a stab of shock, that that was a laugh - Jon is laughing.

“No,” Jon says. “Like what I did to help you sleep. Like Gertrude forcibly appearing in your dreams. That kind of thing.”

“Right, that’s what I thought you meant. Nothing, then.”

Jon nods and starts rifling through the papers on his desk. “It was Gertrude’s life. She’d been studying it for decades before she died. I moved here because I’d hoped to learn from her, actually. It had been my dream for a long time to study her work. Our sort have pretty narrow circles, for obvious reasons, and Gertrude had become something of a legend. By the time I got here, though - anyway, I was too late. Gertrude was gone, and her research had disappeared with her. Oh, here it is.”

Jon extracts a slim moleskine notebook from the mess of his desk and passes it to Martin. Martin flips it open; it’s covered with pages and pages of narrow, sharp handwriting in precise, black ink.

“I’ve been trying to find her research,” Jon says, a note of something desperately earnest in his voice. “To reconstruct it. And now, with the haunting at your house - I think she discovered something big before she died. Something she needs found, something she didn’t want to take to the grave with her.”

“Is she trying to communicate something to me, then?” Martin asks. “With the dreams, and the… the property destruction?”

“There is a very good chance that that is the case, yes.”

Martin hesitates. He flips through the notebook in his hands again, presses his thumb flat against the ink, imagining Jon sitting alone in this office, scribbling furiously. Imagining Gertrude, trapped beyond some invisible veil, desperately attempting to get a message to someone - to anyone who would listen.

Martin knows what that feels like.

“Then, shouldn’t I try to ask her what she has to say?” he asks Jon.

Jon pauses. His gaze returns to Martin’s face. Martin shifts under the weight of his eyes. Why does Jon always look at Martin like Martin is a puzzle he can’t seem to solve?

“You said you didn’t want to dream of her anymore,” Jon says, cautiously.

“That’s because I thought she was, I don’t know, trying to run me out of the house or something. Like in ghost hunting TV shows or Poltergeist or something. If she’s trying to say something-”

“She might be dangerous,” Jon points out.

“Not to me, you said,” Martin answers, stubborn.

“I think, I said,” Jon says, exasperated. “I think she’s not dangerous to you. I’m not all-knowing, you know.”

“Jon,” Martin says. “She is an old lady trying to tell us something from beyond the grave. She’s saying something. I want to listen.”

“She frightens you, though-”

“Jonathan Sims, I am a grown man. I can handle being a little scared.”

Jon huffs an annoyed breath, but his expression is softening, becoming warm and round around the edges.

“You need to be sure,” Jon tells him. “Fully, one hundred percent sure.”

“I’m sure,” Martin says.

“Martin-”

“I’m sure, Jon.”

“...All right, then.” Jon gets up from his seat and crosses to the other side of the desk. Before Martin can ask what he’s doing, Jon kneels in front of him and says, quietly, “Close your eyes.”

Martin knows he’s turning scarlet, but he does what Jon says. A second later, a gentle touch presses lightly against his closed eyelids. Jon whispers something, and the words distort in Martin’s brain, the same way they had weeks and weeks ago. And then the pressure is gone, and Martin opens his eyes.

Jon is glowing.

Martin gasps and reels back a little. Jon’s skin is surrounded with a pale halo of bright light, radiating off him in gentle, curling waves. And, in the center of his forehead, is a geometric, green symbol shaped exactly like the open eye painted on the MEDIUM sign outside the office. It emits a pale light, the shade and brightness of a snapped glowstick. He looks radiant, somehow, burning brighter than anything Martin has ever seen in his life.

“I opened your Eyes,” Jon tells him. “Just a little. It should help Gertrude communicate tonight. Don’t worry, it won’t last much longer than a day or so.”

Dazed, Martin blinks at Jon and says, dizzily, “You’re beautiful.”

Jon’s eyes go wide.

Martin’s brain catches up with his mouth.

“Oh, my God, I’m so sorry,” he begins, but Jon shakes his head.

“No, no, it’s. It’s fine. Suddenly having Sight can be disorientating. I should have given you a proper warning.”

Martin buries his face in his hands. Jon lets out a shaky little sound that might very possibly be another laugh.

You ruined everything, Martin’s brain informs him acerbically.

And then Jon says, “I can walk you home. If you want, I mean.”

After that, Martin’s brain is helpfully silent.

That night, when Gertrude appears at the foot of his bed, Martin is ready.

Instead of shrinking back or closing his eyes in the desperate hopes that when he opens them again, she will be gone, Martin sits up and gets out of bed. He approaches her, with her hundreds of eyes, all blinking in unison. She stares at him, silent and horrible and watching watching watching.

“Hello, Gertrude,” Martin says.

The dream shudders dramatically around him, ripples, like a pebble dropped into still water.

“Well, it’s about time,” Gertrude replies sharply.

Even now, after all this, Martin was decidedly not expecting her to say anything. After all, she doesn’t have a mouth. Rather than being audible, the sound resonates directly in Martin’s head, as clear as if it were his own thoughts. Gertrude’s voice sounds precisely like any other elderly woman Martin might happen upon on the street.

He lets out a tiny little gasp before schooling his expression back to neutrality.

Gertrude’s face, despite being made up of All Eyes, manages to look decidedly unimpressed.

“You broke my favorite mug,” Martin says weakly.

“You cut off my only method of communication,” Gertrude responds, primly unrepentant. “What was I supposed to do? Sit nicely and hope the house’s next owner has a stronger spiritual presence and a stiffer backbone? I am up against a ticking clock, Mr. Blackwood.”

Martin only flinches a little bit at the acid in her tone. “Is it something to do with your research?”

“Obviously. To be more precise, it is about my library.”

She levels her horrible, many-eyed gaze on Martin.

“My research must be destroyed, Mr. Blackwood.”

“B-but,” Martin sputters. “But… isn’t that your life’s work?”

“Indeed,” Getrude replies. “And by the end of my life, I was quite confident in the knowledge that it needed to be removed from this earth. I sealed it away, but was unable to finish the job before my death.”

“And you want me to do it? Destroy your research?” Martin asks, aghast.

He pictures Jon’s face, the enthusiasm in his voice when he talked about Gertrude, the rapt and electric energy in his eyes.

I moved here because I’d hoped to learn from her, actually. It had been my dream for a long time to study her work… I’ve been trying to find her research.

“Isn’t there any other way?” Martin asks urgently.

“No,” Gertrude answers, almost before the words are out of Martin’s mouth. “Believe me, Mr. Blackwood, if there was I would have found it by now. My library must be burned. It is the only way.”

Martin opens and closes his hands into fists.

“Okay,” he finally says. “Okay. I’ll do it. How?”

“My library can only be opened by following the instructions I’ve locked in the top drawer of the desk. The desk is spelled - it will not open without the key.”

“And where is the key?” Martin asks.

Gertrude sniffs. “That is the problem, young man. When I was alive, I buried the key beyond the cliffs - in a place of extremely powerful but simple magic. I cannot tell you where it is. You must find it yourself.”

“That sounds like a pretty terrible place to hide a key,” Martin mutters, before he can help himself.

Gertrude’s gaze becomes remarkably pointy.

“Sorry,” Martin says. “Okay, yes, sorry. I understand. I know someone who might be able to help me look for it.”

“Jonathan Sims,” Gertrude says.

Martin chokes.

“I. I mean, yes, but. How did you know?”

“I watch, Mr. Blackwood. It is all I do these days.”

“Great,” Martin says, faintly. “Like, all the time?”

Gertrude just blinks at him.

“Okay, well. That’s. Ahem. Anyway. I’ll talk to Jon and we’ll… try to find the key. We’ll destroy your research. If that’s what you want.”

“Believe me,” Gertrude Robinson tells him. “It is what the world wants.”

And then Martin blinks. Day is dawning in his bedroom, pale blue-gray light flooding in from the window. He is lying in his bed, and he is alone.

Jon answers the phone on the first ring.

“Martin, how are you? How did it go?” he asks. He sounds alert, wide-awake, which is absurd, because it’s barely six o’clock in the morning.

“It went,” Martin says. “Can we meet up? It’ll be easier to tell you about it in person.”

“Of course. Come to the office. You can just let yourself in, the door’s unlocked.”

Martin frowns at his phone. “Jon. Have you been up all night?”

“What? No. Only since… hmm. Four o’clock or so.”

“And did you spend all night at the office?”

Jon hesitates for several seconds before saying, sheepishly, “Maybe.”

Martin forces himself to hang up before he can start tossing around statistics about circadian rhythms and proper sleep schedules.

He walks into town slowly, the morning wind soft and warm on his face. Spring is starting to bloom to life around the island. The fields are awash with golden flowers, the color of the long grass deepening to a brilliant green. The ocean has changed, too. When Martin stares at it from up on top of the cliff, the water looks vibrant and alive, a hundred different shades of teal and lapis and ultramarine. The sky is a pale yellow, dotted with clouds still stained with sunrise.

The town is just beginning to stir as Martin arrives outside Jon’s office. The lights are on in the CAFE, which is awash with the smell of ground coffee and baking bread.

Jon meets him at the door of his office. A pale glow still hovers above Jon’s skin, the memory of the eye faintly visible on his forehead, thanks to the remnants of Martin’s Sight. The sleeves of Jon’s button-up have been shoved up to his elbows, the collar folded up on one side. His hair is a runaway mess on the top of his head. Martin battles the helpless impulse to reach out and smooth it down - to straighten his collar - to press his fingertips to the heavy bags under his eyes.

“Are you all right?” Jon demands, practically hauling Martin into the office. “Tell me everything.”

Martin does. He watches Jon’s expression carefully as he recounts everything Gertrude had told him, with as much detail as he can remember. Jon stays mostly impassive, but Martin sees the tiny flicker of hurt that passes across his face when he says, “She needs us to destroy it, Jon. She swears it’s the only way.”

“Right,” Jon mutters. “Right. Of course.”

He gets to his feet and crosses to the bookshelf, scanning.

“You said that the place where she hides the key has simple but powerful magic. Magic that keeps her from telling you outright where it is. There aren’t too many places like that on the island - she did say it was on the island, correct?”

“Yes. Beyond the cliffs, she said.”

“Okay, then. That limits our options. I’ll just have to…”

He trails off and pulls out a thin, gray book, its spine emblazoned with the name of the island in a no-nonsense, black font.

“Do some research,” he finishes, turning the book over in his hands.

Martin nods. “Let me help.”

Jon lifts an eyebrow.

Martin rolls his eyes. “Look, I know I don’t exactly know a lot about magic, or… or places of power, or anything like that, but I’m good at research. I can at least help you look. And stuff like this is better with company, anyway.”

“I work best alone,” Jon says, but his voice is rather weak, and he looks away from Martin as he says it.

“I won’t be a bother,” Martin promises. “Really. Just… give me a chance, Jon.”

Jon looks at him for a long moment before slowly nodding.

“Okay, then. Okay.”

Over the next week, Martin spends more time in Jon’s company than he’s spent with another person since his mother sent him away.

They start by combing through the few books on the island’s history that Jon already has in his collection. Martin also digs through the internet, but the island is small and off-the-beaten-path enough that there really isn’t much to be found there. Once they exhaust those options, Jon and Martin head to the bookshop, almost cleaning out Melanie’s local section. Jon gives Martin a list of things to look out for: places of disproportionate historical import, odd natural configurations, ancient religious sites. They mark their findings on a map of the island tacked up on the wall in Jon’s front room.

Once Daisy and Basira return from their trip to the mainland, Jon sets them to work, too. After Jon and Martin identify a site, Daisy and Basira vet it, listing out as much information about the location as possible. It doesn’t take long before they’ve narrowed down their list to four or five significant locations, far enough away from settlement that it’s feasible that no one has discovered or disturbed it yet.

The week is mostly a blur of typeface and ink-smudged fingers and Jon, Jon, Jon, Jon. A few moments stand out in Martin’s mind, though, when he looks back on it after the fact.

One. The look on Melanie’s face when Jon and Martin turn up at the front counter of the bookshop with a pile of about twenty obscure works on the island’s history.

Two. The first time Martin meets Daisy, small and sharp as a razor blade, and has to force himself not to duck behind Jon and hide.

Three. The first time Martin turns up to the office to find Daisy on the couch watching a daytime soap opera on her tablet.

Four. Tim and Sasha’s expressions (of shock and horror and absolute delight, respectively) when Martin turns up late to dinner and has to explain that it’s because he’d fallen asleep on Jon’s couch.

Five. Waking up on Jon’s couch, bleary-eyed and confused, to see Jon carefully tucking his own coat over Martin like a blanket.

These moments feel unbearably, unspeakably precious to Martin, for a reason he cannot name. He files them away inside of himself, and they burrow down and make a home there.

After research is done and the five most likely hiding-spot options identified, all there is to do is get into Martin’s sedan and start the search.

They check the two they feel least confident about first. One is a spot on the beach, fairly close to Gertrude and Martin’s home, where the island’s lighthouse used to sit before it crumbled into the ocean. It’s a powerful site with plenty of latent energy, Jon determines once they’ve walked out there, but it’s not beyond the cliffs, like Gertrude had said. They cross it off their list.

The second site is better, ground zero for a meteor strike that occurred in the late 19th century. The spot is a little further inland, but there’s a bustling farm nearby with grazing cattle, and when they arrive at the impact site, there’s no key to be found. The trip isn’t a complete wash, though. Martin points at a particularly fat cow in delight, half-expecting Jon to roll his eyes, but instead he just smiles at Martin in a way that makes the corners of his eyes crinkle up.

Their visits to sites three and four are similarly unfruitful. Martin drives them to the final spot on their list, a scrubby forest of pine trees almost precisely in the center of the island, and tries to keep his spirits up.

“We have plenty of other options,” he tells Jon. “If it’s not here, I… I’m sure we’ll find it eventually.”

Jon looks unconcerned, relaxed in Martin’s passenger’s seat, one of his legs tucked up and under the other.

Martin parks on the side of the road and they climb out, standing at the edge of the treeline and gazing up. The pines are dark and jagged, almost blackened, as if singed by some great, ancient fire. There’s a narrow path leading into the forest, but it’s mostly overgrown, covered with a low layer of grass and vines and bramble.

Martin groans.

“I’m not much for hiking,” he tells Jon.

Jon laughs. “No. Neither am I. I have a… feeling, though. About this place.”

“Oh! Good feeling or bad feeling?”

Jon considers this. “Neutral feeling,” he settles on. “There’s just something here. I think it’s waiting for us.”

Martin nods firmly. “Okay, then. Let’s go.”

They battle their way through the undergrowth, winding their way between the shadow-dark trees. The earth is wet with spring, mud clinging to Martin’s boots. After about half an hour of this, though, the path begins to open up, until the brambles and debris are gone and they’re following a narrow, packed-dirt trail leading into the center of the woods.

“Interesting,” Jon says, something alight in his eyes.

“Sure,” Martin says, his voice a little higher than normal.

As they walk, the trees seem to grow closer around them. The earthen trail grows slimmer, forcing them to walk closer together. Martin’s hand brushes against Jon’s, their fingers catching just for a second, and Martin quickly pulls away, heat rising high in his cheeks.

And then, finally, the trees part, and Jon and Martin step into a round, empty clearing.

As soon as they leave the path and step into the clearing, the air changes. It reminds Martin of what had happened when he finally spoke to Gertrude in his dream, the way the world had shuddered and rippled. The air seems to twist and then untwist around them.

The clearing is a blank space, bare even of grass. It is a gap, a hole, almost disturbing to look at - the juxtaposition is shocking, compared to the dense claustrophobia of the trees. There is a wrongness about the place, something fundamental and atomic.

There is a small circle of stone cairns built in the center of the clearing.

“This is it,” Jon tells Martin.

Martin opens his bag and pulls out the handheld gardening spade he’d brought with him, holding it out for Jon to take. “Let’s get digging, then.”

It doesn’t actually take them much time to prove Jon’s hypothesis right, it turns out. Gertrude hadn’t buried her key terribly deep. It’s only five minutes or so before the spade catches something hard, and they’re able to uncover a small wooden box. It pops open when Martin tries the latch. The key inside is tempered metal and small and astonishingly normal-looking. It looks a bit like the key to Martin’s car.

It was the place itself that was the protection, Martin thinks, not the earth and soil.

“Step one, done,” Martin says. “Let’s go unlock that desk.”

Back at the house at the cliff’s edge, Martin toes out of his dirty boots and moves aside to let Jon in. They shut the front door behind them, and the house issues a low and quiet groan, as if in greeting.

“No piles of furniture today,” Jon remarks. “Gertrude must be in a good mood.”

“I think she hates me less now,” Martin admits, with something like mild pride. “She’s only broken, like, two dishes this past week.”

Jon grins at him. “An overwhelming victory, to be sure.”

“Listen, I take what I can get.”

They troop up the stairs and into the study, where the desk sits still and untouched. When Martin stoops down and touches the wood, inserting the key into the top drawer’s brass lock, something like an electric shock passes through him.

“Are you all right?” Jon asks immediately, a hand finding Martin’s shoulder, gentle and solid.

Martin turns to smile up at him.

“I am. Ready?”

Jon nods, his eyes fierce and bright, so Martin turns the key and then slowly, carefully, opens the drawer.

It is completely, entirely empty, except for a single leather-bound notebook about the size of Martin’s hand.

Battling a sense of anticlimax, Martin picks up the notebook and hands it to Jon, allowing the drawer to slide shut.

“It might just be another clue,” he says, a little mulishly. “I’m starting to think Gertrude is sending us on the world’s worst scavenger hunt.”

As soon as Jon’s hands touch the leather, though, a shudder goes through him. Martin gasps and reaches out, catching Jon’s forearms to steady him, as Jon’s eyes light up with a now-familiar green glow. For a long moment, Jon stares into nothing, his lips parted and his luminous eyes blown wide. But then the light fades, and Jon’s shoulders slump, and he lets the notebook fall to the ground.

“Jon?” Martin asks, his hands on Jon’s elbows, warm through his shirt. “Jon? Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Jon gasps. “Yes. I know… I know how to open her library.”

Martin follows Jon down the stairs and into the kitchen. While Jon rifles furiously through the tiny notebook, Martin gathers every candle in the house and sets them on the floor in as precise a circle as he can manage. They fill Martin’s largest mixing bowl with water from the sink and place it in the center of the circle of candles. Once the candles have been lit, Jon kneels and holds a hand out over the bowl, using the other to cut a small incision into his palm with one of Martin’s smallest kitchen knives. Martin winces as the blood spills into the water, cloudy and dark, and then Jon begins to speak, his eyes lighting up with that vivid, citric green.

Like every time Martin has heard Jon’s magic spoken aloud, the sounds resonate strangely in his brain. His mind resists his attempts to wrestle the noise into words. Jon’s voice echoes and arches and lifts, becoming loud and heavy and too large for the room. The water in the mixing bowl shudders and ripples.

Jon says one last thing, final and staccato, the vocal equivalent of a period at the end of a sentence.

And then Martin’s jaw drops.

There, right in the middle of his kitchen, is an entryway that had not been there a fraction of a second ago.

It’s less of a door and more of a moon gate, perfectly circular and crafted from hewn stone, with an intricate iron handle set into the center of its face. Moss grows up onto the stone - as if the doorway has been outdoors for a long, long time, and not Nowhere and then In Martin’s Kitchen. There are runes deeply etched into the stones, words in a language Martin doesn’t recognize.

“Shit,” Martin says. “Okay.”

Jon gets to his feet, cradling his injured hand against his chest. Martin crosses the room to him before he can think better of it, taking Jon’s hand between his own to inspect the cut.

“It’s fine,” Jon tells him. “Really. It doesn’t hurt.”

Martin squints at him suspiciously but still lets his hands fall away from Jon’s. Before he can step away, though, Jon reaches out with his uninjured hand and catches Martin’s, giving it a single, tight squeeze. His fingers are calloused and delicate and sure.

“We can do this,” Jon says.

“We can do this,” Martin echoes.

Jon presses his palm flat against the door and pushes it. It issues a soft sigh as it opens under his touch.

Inside, the chamber beyond is completely, perfectly dark.

Jon whispers a word that rolls around in Martin’s mind, and then light bursts into life above their heads. Martin’s breath catches painfully in his chest as Gertrude’s library is illuminated, fully, for what must be the first time since she died.

It is cavernous. Massive. Gargantuan. 

The library consists of rows upon rows upon rows of shelves, going back as far as Martin can see. There are books, yes, what must be thousands of them, packed into the shelves and piled on the floors. But there are also items. A coffee table with an odd design, a massive wooden coffin, a strange little calliope organ. The chamber smells odd - a little musty, but also sharp. Like ozone. The smell of magic.

“Good lord,” Jon says, faintly.

Martin takes a halting step forward, staring around himself with wide eyes. He’s about to go further, maybe pick up a book to inspect it, but Jon’s hand catches his own again, his fingers sliding between Martin’s.

“Stop,” Jon says. “Listen.”

So Martin does. And, inside his head, a chorus of voices begins to whisper.

Martin Blackwood. Come in. Sit down. This place is yours now.

Everything there is, laid out in front of you. To see and to learn and to know.

Knowledge, connection. It is yours, yours, yours, all yours.

You ought to stay. Jonathan Sims wants to stay. You can be beside him. Forever and forever and forever. Isn’t that what you want?

Martin hisses in his breath through his teeth.

“What is that?” he asks Jon.

“The books, I think,” Jon says. He looks out at the library, eyes wide and glassy. His palm is warm and dry against Martin’s.

Martin squeezes, once.

Jon says, “Martin, stand back.”

“Okay,” Martin says, slowly. “Okay, but Jon-”

“Now, Martin.”

Martin releases Jon’s hand and backs up, stepping until he reaches the boundary, the point where the library becomes his kitchen. The voices in his head rise in pitch and volume, and he winces, pressing his hands over his ears.

Jon looks back at him, once, and then out into the endless expanse of Gertrude’s knowledge.

He holds out his hand, still dripping with dark, wet blood. And he snaps his fingers.

The fire starts in the center of the room. The flames aren’t ordinary, even Martin can see that - they’re every color of the rainbow, burning icy cold instead of hot, and they rip through the books and the shelves and the artifacts like ravenous hounds. Soon, the flames are howling, towering, licking at the walls and the floors and the ceiling. The whole room shudders, and Martin sprints forward to grab Jon’s arm.

The floor buckles and rattles, the fire bright as a supernova and freezing as a winter wind.

Martin drags them both out of the library, off-balance and frantic. He slams the door behind them, and the motion sends them both tumbling onto the floor.

They sit on the tiled floor of the house at the cliff’s edge and watch as Jon’s flames slowly, steadily, eat away at the gateway in front of them until it is ash - less than ash - nothing. Until it is a memory, which used to sit in the center of Martin’s kitchen and now sits nowhere at all.

Martin presses his palms flat against the ground, breathing heavily, the tang of soot and powerful magic coating his tongue. Beside him, Jon buries his face in his hands, his fingers curling in the hair around his temples.

“Jon,” Martin says. “Hey. Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Jon chokes out. “Just. Give me a minute. That was a lot.”

Martin nods, tucking his knees up and resting his chin on them. He listens to the sound of Jon’s ragged breathing for a long, long time, before finally whispering, “You wanted to go in there. You wanted to study, to learn.”

Jon doesn’t protest.

“So why didn’t you?”

“In my opinion,” Jon says, stiffly, “knowledge is worth a lot of things. Human life is

not one of them.”

“Oh,” Martin says.

And then, because his timing is the worst in the world, he unfolds himself and leans over and kisses Jon, right on the lips.

Jon makes a quiet sound of surprise. Then he reaches up and touches Martin’s jaw, his mouth softening against Martin’s. Martin’s arms fold around Jon’s waist and Jon’s wrap around Martin’s neck and they kiss and they kiss and they kiss, right there on Martin’s kitchen floor.

Around them, the house issues a gentle sigh.

Outside, the sun is rising.

The sun is brilliant and hot on Martin’s cheeks as he steps out into the surf. The waves are slow and frothy, a delicately effervescent blue under the noontime sunshine. They tug gently at Martin’s ankles, washing over his feet. Under the sun and the sky, Martin takes Gertrude Robinson’s key out of his pocket and throws it, as hard as he can, into the sea.

The library is gone. The desk drawer is empty. This action is nothing, really.

Nothing besides a goodbye.

He stands there for a long, quiet moment, feeling the tug of the waves and the spray of salt. Then, Martin turns.

Gertrude stands in the sand behind him. She looks odd in the daytime - translucent and faded. Anachronistic, against the brilliant blue of the sky. A spot of sepia in a world of technicolor.

“We did it,” Martin tells her.

Gertrude just looks at him with her dozens and hundreds and thousands of eyes. Then she says, in her terrible, normal, unremarkable old-lady voice, “Well done, Martin. I do believe I chose well.”

And then she disappears, one moment there and the next gone, leaving Martin alone with the sand and the sea and the sky.

He hikes up the hill, back to the house at the cliff’s edge. He pushes the door open and enters, greeted by the soft and familiar sounds of the house. It’s his, now - his, only. This thought sits strangely with him. He’s been living with the ghost of an old woman for so long, it almost feels lonely to think about this space, this pocket of reality, existing without her.

He steps into the living room, though, and Jon Sims is sitting on his couch in an old black band t-shirt and plaid pajama bottoms too long for his legs. He’s reading one of Martin’s old books of poetry, a collected edition of the works of the romantic poets. He looks up when Martin enters, a look of consternation on his face.

“This is unreadable,” he tells Martin, because he has terrible taste.

“I love you,” Martin tells Jon, because he does.

“Absurd,” Jon replies, but his voice is soft with affection and gratitude. And, as Martin settles on the couch beside him, he lays his lips against Martin’s temple and whispers, “I love you, too.”

“Let’s get pizza for dinner,” Martin says, flopping down to lay his head in Jon’s lap. Jon’s fingers begin to card through his hair automatically, gentle and easy.

“No olives,” Jon tells him, sternly.

“You’re no fun,” Martin says.

Above him, Jon laughs.

Martin closes his eyes. When he falls asleep, Jon’s hand still and careful and warm in his hair, it is dreamless.