The initial scream was as sharp in Birchwood as a glass crack. During the time during which Detective Sam Vega arrived at Grayfield Estate, the fire had already gained momentum. Timbers creaked, windows flew open and smoke swirled up into the morning fog.
Amid the confusion, Dr. Elise Moran fell off the ruins, pushing an unconscious woman, who was missing weeks, across the gravel. They both were dragged to safety by firefighters, and Elise continued to turn her head back and stare at the crumbling house.
He is inside there, she whispered.
Vega knelt beside her. “Who?”
Elise, said he, shaking thy shoulder. “Who?”
She met his eyes. “Nathaniel Gray. My patient.”
The name froze him in place.
The Mask Unveiled
Nathaniel had been a model prisoner converted to a patient–a man who was a story-collector like an antique collector. He did not talk much, but when he did, it was with a skewering accuracy whereby he reverted each question to the person who made it. Elise once referred to him as an echo chamber with mirrored walls: what you offered to him he returned in such a manner that you wondered at what you saw in the glass.
He disappeared days before the fire and when he did, the law enforcement thought that he did so on the ground. But Elise knew better. Nathaniel was not fleeing anything. He was redesigning his environment -shaping the town up the way he alone could interpret it.
At this point, there was just smoke left of the estate. His body was never found.
The Game
Reportedly, within weeks, there were reports. Windows remained open without anybody having touched it. Blank postcards, all with the same burnt edges, in the mail boxes. Some of them had sketches: rooms, stairs, and faces, without pupils.
Elise lived the days as though she was in water. She continued teaching at the university and continued to help trauma victims but every startling noise flinched her. Her sanity was strained.
One night she received a note under her office door.
“You left the door open. Again.”
That common line sunk in her heart. It had been penned in that same hand which had penned her patient files with questions regarding empathy, guilt, and human imitation.
She woke up Vega at once. “It’s him,” she said. “He’s alive.”
Vega sighed. “Or someone’s copying him.”
However, it was found that when forensics retrieved a print of the note, it was not a match anywhere in the database. Not Nathaniel Gray. Not any known identity.
Elise then had fancied she had understood–Nathaniel had wetted himself long before any of them could see.
The Revelation
The second wave was through students. Some of them were talking about a new visiting lecturer who had just been featured in their psychology course- a man purporting to be a specialist in behavioral architecture. His name in the list: Ian Grayson.
Elise read the name and felt the blood run out of her face. Gray. Son. The perfect disguise.
She had spent this night late at the university viewing security footage. She found him at 2:17 a. m.–strolling slowly along the west corridor, low-keyed coat, surgical precision in each stride. He moved straight below the camera, and looked up.
He smiled.
The Final Session
Elise made the confrontation on her own. The next night she entered Lecture Hall B, the light was very low, and the sound of her feet could be heard. Nathaniel–or Ian–was standing on the stage waiting as though the reunion was on time.
“Still chasing ghosts?” he asked.
Your death, you acted, she said. You were setting your house on fire to forget you.
He tilted his head. “Not erased. Redesign. People don’t fear death, Elise. They are afraid of losing their story”.
She stepped closer. “You killed Emily Carr.”
The first time his smile came faltering. I did not kill her because I did not want to kill her. Because you needed a witness. No good performance can be done without an audience.
Elise caught a glimpse of movement in the rear of him–a projector whirring into motion. There was a live video of her own house on the wall. The living room. A red light of the camera winking.
You have been a part of my experiment, you know, whispered him.
Elise sprang, and took the taser that was on her side. She fired. Nathaniel shook into a faint. Before she could breathe, an explosion of statical fire swept through the projector, then black.
Police arrived several minutes later and the hall was empty. Nathaniel–gone.
His voice alone was left, and he circled through the loudspeaker:
Kind-heartedness is your fault, doctor. You’ll never see me coming.”
The Return
Months passed. Birchwood became impatient.
Elise went back to her lectures. To normalcy, or something moulded out of it. On her desk every morning, however, there would be folded paper. Drawings,– staircases, corridors, faces without eyes.
She would find herself, sometimes, spending hours and hours, following every line to a message. She had other occasions where she burnt them without reading.
Nevertheless, she could not get rid of the feeling that Nathaniel had not disappeared. Only observing. Abiding, in the fog, perfecting the map of her brain.
As the fog always came back in Birchwood.
And now, here and there, it called her name.
