Chapter 3

(In which we meet a Shade, learn of our villain, and are taught how to clear away a blind spot.)

Elizabeth stood too stunned to speak, her mouth half open. She was suddenly very conscious of the feeling of the air against her eyeballs. The man seemed as surprised as she was, and his hands lost their grip on the book, which slid and bounced off the bed, landing spine down on the floor, its pages swaying in the breeze from the open window

Finally, after a long moment, he cleared his throat and in a hesitant voice, gravelly from disuse, said, "Could you...close the door?" 

Her astonishment overwhelming her better judgment, Elizabeth stepped into the room and eased the door shut behind her, letting it stop just short of clicking the latch. She let her eyes take him in.

He appeared to be a few years older than she was, though perhaps as old as mid-twenties. But something about the proportions of his torso and limbs was off; he was like a three-quarter scale figure of a man. His skin was darkened. Not brown, like someone of African descent, more like a white person who was in a room with the lights turned off, though the overhead and pastel-blue desk lamp provided more than enough illumination to fill this small room. He wore a simple white shirt and light-brown pants, both frayed at the edges, and his pants were held up with a belt made of clothesline.

Neither of them spoke. The man stood up from the bed and stepped to face her, keeping as much distance between the two of them as the room would allow. His smell was that of woodsmoke, mixing with the mild mustiness of a space long shut up from the outside world.

The man opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, as if he was reconsidering how to start. He did this a few more times, before finally settling on his first word: "Eliza."

Elizabeth looked at him quizzically, felt her mouth opening and closing in an unintentional parody of his own hesitation. "Why did you call me that? How did you know my--" She paused; it wasn't really her name. "Why did you call me that?"

He looked puzzled. "I'm sorry." She recognized that this was not an answer to her question. He did not appear to have anything else to say.

Elizabeth felt both curious and awkward. This man did not appear scared, or ashamed, or even guilty, despite being an uninvited visitor, and did not offer any explanation or excuse for his presence. He had closed his mouth firmly, and his eyes now rapidly scanned her, his manner more scientific than threatening. His gaze kept returning to her hands, empty and held in a ready-position at waist-level. She couldn't remember what had happened to the ceramic shard.

She cleared her throat, speaking in an even but quiet tone. "Look, I don't mean to be rude, but I assume there's a reason why you're in my house? Some sort of reason why I shouldn't be running to wake my father up or calling the police right now?" She thought back to how she had found the door in the first place. "Something you want to say about this hidden door and secret room?"

He was silent. She waited for a count of ten and was about to repeat herself when he abruptly began speaking. “I am Grim. This is your brother's room. I came here to see if there was any way to stop him. I am sorry if I called you by the wrong name. I am a stranger here. I thought you were Eliza the knife-fingered. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps Silas has two sisters.” He spoke with a clipped manner, his consonants harsh. “You may forget you saw me, if you wish.”

Elizabeth thought there were few things less likely than her forgetting that she had seen this man, and this room. She sized him up; he was roughly her height, thin but appearing to be made entirely of muscle and sinew. She didn't feel threatened by him, exactly, but there was something about his movements and his manner of speaking that made her uneasy.

“Have you been here long?”

“Six weeks.” As long as I have, she thought. “It may be more or less. I am not used to time here.”

"Does my father know you're here?"

"He does not. I am quiet."

“Have you been in this room that whole time?”

“No. I sometimes go out at night.”

“How do you get out?” She was hoping he hadn't been walking down their hallway every night; the idea of this strange man sneaking by her bedroom while she slept was troubling. She usually kept her door closed at night. But she never locked it.

“The door. The stairs. Another door. It is not hard. I slip.”

Elizabeth ignored the last word for now; it sounded like 'slip', but had a different feel to it, like the word itself was slippery in her ears. “Did you make this door?”

“This door has been here for as long as the house has been here. You have opened this door many times.”

“No, that's not right. I've never even seen this door before tonight. It wasn't even here this afternoon.” Elizabeth didn't think he was lying...not exactly. But he had said he might have been confused about who she was. It occurred to her that he might be insane.

“This door is a--” he paused, hesitating, grasping for the right word, as though he was speaking an unfamiliar language,”--blind spot. It is here. It is always here. You ignore it. But your mark is on the handle. On both sides of the door. So is his.”

“His? 'His' who?”

“Silas. Your brother. The Chzezch. The Pretender. His stink is all over this place.” The man's face had been passive to the point of wooden for this whole odd conversation, but when he spoke these words, he looked as though he was going to follow them by spitting on the floor.

“You say I've been in this room before?” He nodded, once. Elizabeth looked around the room. Scattered about were a few items she recognized, probably scavenged from the rest of the house, lending credence to his claims of his nightly wanderings. But of the room itself, she had no recognition, no tugging of deja vu. She tried picturing it without furniture, just blank walls and wooden floorboards, and still got no memories of being here before tonight.

The window had been propped open with a pile of books: treasuries of children's stories she hadn't seen since she couldn't remember when. A pleasant night breeze stirred the sun-bleached curtains. She kept the man in her peripheral vision but hazarded a glance out the window...there was the backyard, the garage and the shape of her father's truck grayed by the moonlight. “There's no window here.”

He hesitated. “There is.”

“Not from the outside. There isn't.” She had helped her father paint the house a few summers prior; she herself had slopped the paint on this section of the house, perched on a scaffold with her father, the July sun burning their shoulders brown and a Yankees game on the radio. There was just no way this window had been there then.

“There is. It is on both the outside and the inside. You just ignore it.”

Elizabeth's eyes fell upon a framed photograph on the top of the dresser. The glass was thick with dust around the borders, but the central part had been cleared by finger-swipes. The picture was of herself and her parents from when she was ten or so, on a trip to Maine. The three of them squinting in the sun, Elizabeth smiling crookedly as she held a shell out, offering it to the camera. “Why did you steal this?”

“I did not. This has been here.”

“Why would this be here?”

“It is a picture of the four of you. Is this unusual? I am not sure why it would not be here. I only looked at it. It is not damaged.”

Elizabeth stared at him coolly. “There are three of us in this picture. Not four. There are three of us in my family.” She looked back at the photo. This was probably one of the last happy times they had had together, the summer before her parents separated. “You've mentioned a brother a few times now. Silas, you said? That's the name?”  Impatience flared within her. It was late, she was tired and confused, and the more this man talked, the less sense he made. At this point she was more than willing to make herself believe this was all a dream. "I don't know who you are or where you came from or where this--", she motioned to include the entire room, "--is, but clearly you’ve been in this house long enough to see what you've needed to see. Look through our photo albums. Scrounge in our basement and our attic, through our closets; you probably already have. There's nothing here you're looking for." She gathered up her courage for her next sentence, puffing up her chest and straightening her spine and her resolve. "I think it would be best if you left.”

The man gesticulated as though he were waving her away. "I have been through these closets and basement and attic. I have slipped through yard and town. And everywhere I see proof. But you ignore it. Everyone ignores it. It is not your fault. It is a blind spot." He pointed to the bed. "Your brother. He slept here." He moved his hand across the room. "He lived here." He pointed at her. "He was your brother."

The man walked over to the bed and sat down. He sighed, and ran his hands through his short, dark grey hair. "It is a bigger blind spot than I thought. It may be the biggest one ever impressed onto this world. " He looked at her, and his face grew troubled. "You are getting angry. This is also not your fault. I make you frightened. It is to be expected. I am Grim. I am a Shade. This is what happens when we spend too much time in the light." This last sentence was said more to himself than to Elizabeth.

He stood up suddenly, was on his feet so fast that it seemed he had been catapulted from the bed. "I will show you. This is the only way," he said resolutely. "Priest taught me a trick that might work."

Elizabeth started to step back as he approached her. She was still holding the photograph's frame, and he reached out and pinched the side farthest from her grasp. He moved his other hand toward her face. She pulled back, but her fingers wouldn't let go of the frame; she remained tethered to him by their grips on the object.

Grim held his other hand to her face, his fingers hovering just over her temple, then executed an abrupt back-and-forth motion across her field of vision, as if drawing a curtain or grabbing at a fly. His hand then, just as quickly, reared back and struck her, open palm, on the chest, making her stumble back a step, striking the door with a soft thump.

"Hey!” she hissed at him. "What the hell!" He had released the frame when he struck her, and she raised her arm instinctively to block any further assault.

But as she lifted her arm, she caught sight of the photograph, and her anger at Grim submerged. The picture had altered subtly, had become fuller and brighter and more in focus. She realigned her glasses, to be sure the changes weren't some smudge or imperfection in the lens.

For it appeared Grim's tally had been correct: there were four people in this picture. She and her parents were still there, unchanged, but there was now a small boy clinging to her father's back, arms slung around the man's neck in piggy-back position. One of his hands held a shell identical to Elizabeth's.

She tilted the picture to get a better perspective. The boy had dark brown hair, thick like her mother's, and had her mother's almond-shaped eyes, but the rest of his face was her father’s. He had to be four or five years old. Certainly no younger than that.

"What..." she exhaled as she looked up at Grim. But whatever she planned to say dissolved into silent open-mouthed chewing motions as her eyes flooded with newly exposed details of this room.

The walls were adorned with drawings, almost to the point of being wallpapered with them; houses and trees and suns and cars and superheroes and firemen and birds all rendered in a child’s hand. There was a corkboard with tacked-on photographs, their lower corners curling upwards like flower petals; the largest held the same young boy, front and center among two rows of standing and kneeling children, around an adult who held a hand-printed sign reading "Pre-K."

Elizabeth whirled around, speechless; the room looked so much more lived-in. Still dusty, and it was clear that no one had spent much time in it for years, but every new detail was one that imbued the room with personality, signs that a small boy had once played and slept and lived here. 

Above the dresser hung a large drawing that was crammed edge to edge with renditions of birds of varying sizes and colors. She saw in the lower corner, almost obscured by the birds' legs that crowded it, crudely printed block letters spelling out "Silas Wrren."

She turned back to Grim. "How did you do this?"

Grim gave a half-shrug. "It is not complete. The blind spot is still here. But you had already started to break through it. You found the door. You would not have been able to if you had not already started stretching the blind spot." He had an uncanny knack for answering a question that was almost, but not quite, the one she had asked.

She pointed at the school photo of the boy. "That's my brother?" Grim nodded. "Why don't I remember him? I'm in that picture with him..." There was a stack of photographs on the top of the dresser, apparently culled by Grim from the family photo albums. She flipped through them. "...and I'm in this one, and this one, and this one with him."

She separated out a picture taken at an amusement park, in which she sat in the ladybug-shaped cab of a child-sized roller-coaster, her arm slung over the boy's shoulders, his face contorted mid-wail. "I remember this day. This shirt? This was my favorite shirt for years, and I remember we got it because I spilled juice all over the shirt I was wearing, and we bought this one." She paused. "I remember the day. Why don't I remember him?"

Grim's face had remained stony during her emergence into clarity, but at this, it softened a little. He seemed to be working over words in his mind, deciding how to explain. He inhaled and began, "If you want a thing to disappear, you can do many things. You can destroy it. You can make it invisible. You can slip it into a pocket or into the cracks.

"But," he continued, "If you want it to truly disappear and leave no one looking for it, then you must make them forget. Forget that it ever existed. This is easy if it is just one object or a place. People’s minds will fill in details and they will not even know that something was forgotten.

"A person is a much bigger thing to forget. Especially a person who has parents, and a sister and friends and neighbors. This would require a very large blind spot. Very difficult, a large amount of skill and work, requiring the cooperation of many weavers. But this--" He seemed to have run out of words, had to pause to gather up the rest of his thoughts. "--This is a problem. Because the more people who know about the forgetting, the less point there is to make the blind spot, because if any of these people were to decide to, they might give it away, to break the blind spot. So this is not done often. I do not know if it has ever been done before.

"The only reason it was done this time is that it was the Chzezch. The Pretender would have many such resources at his disposal. And the blind spot would be a focused one, affecting only the people he left behind in Central." He looked up at her, realizing he had said something that required interruption and further explanation. "This place is Central."

She took this pause as a sign that she was allowed to speak. "This room?"

"No, this...this place. This house, this town, this--" He wrinkled his brow in concentration, giving up after a moment, "--this place. This is Central. It is the place that is not Edge. Do you understand?"

Elizabeth had to admit that she did not. But before further questions could be asked, she heard motion from behind her. Through the door of this bedroom, she could hear the sounds of her father’s stirring. Through the window, the sky was glowing with the first hints of sunrise. Her father generally woke in stages; it would be a while before he ventured downstairs, but he was probably conscious enough that he would hear them if they spoke much longer. 

Reaching back for the doorknob, she looked at Grim. "Should I tell my father about this?"

Grim shook his head. "Your father still has the blind spot upon him; it is much stronger on him than it is on you. He has not been to Edge. If you try to tell him, he will not hear you. He lives with evidence of Silas every day, and cannot see it. Your words will be the same." Grim intensified his gaze at her. "Do not try to convince him. If he does not see and you try to make him, it could be dangerous for him. He is an older man. His mind not so bendable. Do not test him."

Elizabeth had no shortage of questions, but the scrape-stepping sounds of her father were starting to get more insistent, and she wasn't sure if his catching sight of this open door would count as testing him. She pulled the door open and started to close it behind her, but paused. "Will you be here later? Tomorrow? Will I be able to find you again?"

"Yes." It answered all three questions.

"Okay." She closed the door behind her. She saw the end table still set askew in the hallway and set it back in place, careful not to rattle the doorknob as she pushed it back into position. She gathered up the books and the unbroken foo dog and set them on the table, the books stacked rather than standing, the statuette on top.

Her father stepped out into the hall, his arrival heralded by the low squeak of the hinges of his door. "Morning," he yawned, then saw the two halves of the ceramic figure in his daughter's hands. "Looks like you won. But be careful, he's got a partner." He nodded toward the end table.

Elizabeth hoped her face looked sorry, but her mind was busy thinking of the other things her father had lost. "It was an accident, I bumped the table on accident on my way to the bathroom."

“Well, be sure to sweep and vacuum. I don’t want either of us to track bloody footprints across the floor.” 

"Ewww." Elizabeth kissed his scratchy cheek good morning, then bounded down the stairs while her father returned to his bedroom. As she walked through the front hall to get the vacuum, her peripheral vision was assailed by a shifting motion that left her feeling off-balance. The pictures on the walls--not all of them, but more than a few--were melting and snapping back into place as the ranks of faces were joined by repetitions of a single, smaller one.

Her brother's face--Silas's face. As a round-cheeked baby, fat and happy. As an ice-cream-faced toddler, all drips and stickiness. Barely visible within a large fur-lined winter hat. Caught by a camera in mid-tackle of their mother in their backyard.

She grabbed the vacuum and dragged it up the stairs. Losing herself in its humming drone, she thought back to some of the more curious things Grim had said. He had spoken of two places: Central and Edge, and had said that her father would have difficulty with removal of the blind spot because he hadn't been to Edge. Did that mean that she had been to that place? How much had she been made to forget?
And then there was what Grim had said about Silas. That he was here to stop him. If Silas was four or five in the amusement park picture, he couldn't be more than ten now. Why would someone have to stop a ten-year-old? And the way that Grim had looked when speaking of him: like he was talking about a snake, or some other venomous animal.

What exactly was Grim here to do?