The night that Laurie walked again had begun cold and got colder. Outside, I could see my breath as I smoked my cigarette, smoke mingling with cloudy air on its way out of my lungs. I shivered on the patio. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a movement, and I turned, arms around myself for warmth.

It was walking.

The white robes caught in the slight wind, making it into a vision. I froze on the spot.

It came closer without seeing, footsteps making no sound, barefoot on the grass and then passing me on the patio. The electric blue eyes that had always looked on me with love, even in my dreams, looked past me, unseeing. It opened the sliding door with a severe force, slamming it home in its runners.

Overcome with shock but able to move I followed it, holding the forgotten cigarette in my hand. The chill stayed with me as I moved inside.

I knew where it was going before it reached the stairs, hauling itself up two flights leaning on the wooden rail. I didn't need to wonder that it might run out of strength before it got there, reaching the top landing still without acknowledgment of my presence.

The doors slammed open, the ones that I had waited outside of so many times.

Leechtin stood up to welcome his visitor, then recoiled in abject terror, the first time I have ever seen him completely without pretense.

Laurent, or his body, stood in the doorway for only a moment before striding toward its maker. If there had been a weapon on the desk to strike his beloved ward with Leechtin might have reached for it, but the futility was obvious. The hands reached out and the fingers closed around Leechtin's fragile white neck, tightening. The beloved studied its master with clouded eyes, utterly emotionless, choking the life out of him. There was no air in the room. Leechtin did not struggle, staring back, as if it were only another dream.

And then behind me the child appeared holding the bell jar.

The corpse turned round slowly.

Nicolas held the jar over his head, and then dropped it, smashing it on the ground. It shattered around the severed heart, the one that had been stolen. No one moved for a moment, and then the thing that had been Laurent made towards it, melting to its knees and gathering up the organ.

It pressed it delicately into the hollow wound in its chest cavity, holding it there like a little dove. I heard it breathing and realized that the sound had been absent previously. It sat like that on its knees with head bowed, holding the thing like it were a quivering bird.

And then the blood began to roll, pushing out through the corpse's fingers, pulsing past the hands and down the forearms, blood that shouldn't have been in a body that had been dead for nearly five decades. We watched it and could do nothing. No one but Leechtin, who couldn't stand to watch it, he came forward and went to the floor like he had always been meant to do it, cradling the thing that used to be alive.

And then it began to wail, quietly, high pitched cries like a small puppy being tortured, head hidden against Leechtin's chest. Nicky began to back away, horrified and I know that I silently fell apart but I don't remember it.

For an interminable amount of time it cried in Leechtin's arms, and then all of a sudden it was silent. In that time more had come to the door, drawn by the sound or by some indefinable sense of its movement, those who had loved it when it was alive.

They were ignored just as I was. It only had eyes for Leechtin.

Leechtin lifted it, put it to bed, drew the curtain, and we went away because we had to.



In the morning, before the sun had risen, they were gone, the two of them. They left without a word and took nothing.

It has been profoundly damaging.