#*spectre

a cemetery at 3am sharp, the fog is making it hard to see even though they have flashlights

Spectre has a glass quality. Seethrough, uncanny, but now the water sinks into their hair, causing it to reach downwards like the wings of a drenched, drowned bird. Eurostar watches him through the door, sitting up in sheets - Bloodboiler's sheets - with elbows over his knees, feeling a heaviness and a weariness, like the suitbag still hanging over the window's lintel. It didn't arrive til two weeks after the funeral: and its shape covers the sun on his right side.

He unzips the bag, unfolds the trousers, and finds the shoes. They share an inseam, he did not consider that, as he finishes attaching the cufflinks.

Why? The impulse: he would say a game and he would believe it. They both understand the need to remove the man without removing him from the principle, removing the talisman by keeping it covered to your chest.

And the welcome he gets is not totally disapproving. As each of the dead man's clean, sharp edges start to warp and destroy in the steam.

-

Lotion will do. Around the puckered hole, his index finger's tip slightly enters him and stays there. He feels him go. Shuttering back open again as the shower surges, wrapped in silence like a reactor with its gold core giving off brief hues of life. Finally the rest of him is thick, mineral-coloured flesh, solid only as human limbs are solid.

He slides in slowly, everlasting seeming. Testing. Waiting. Then the hilt of his curled knuckle. Gentler than the night before. This is a truce. He doesn't say something smug back. It makes feel him too young, and wondering:

You don't see Spectre until he wants to be seen, so there's something redundant in looking too surprised.

Boy's different here, roots tie him to the house. Makes him look prehistoric and ageless all at once. That should worry him: an archipelago so near the arctic. But the tap water must come from somewhere. It can't all be salt.

The door handle he's got his hand on is probably older than the current borders in the middle east on ES-one's GPS; he's been putting his boots back on before morning roughly as long the need to cloak the hull.