Chương 10: “What He Is”

She asked on a Friday evening, sitting cross-legged on the bed with her homework open and untouched.

"What are you?" He had been waiting for this. He had a speech, precise, true, comprehensive, designed to make her put him down and step back and make the decision any sensible creature would make when presented with the full account of what he was. He delivered it the only way he could. He dimmed the room. He let the dark deepen, the real dark, the one that knew what it was. He let her feel the scale of it, the age of it, the long patient history of everything he had consumed.

He showed her as clearly as he could, without words, without hands, with only what he was, what he had been, what he had done, the full ledger of it. He watched her face. She was scared. He felt it, the spike of it, real and cold. Her hands went tight in her lap. She did not move. The dark receded. The room came back. He sat on the windowsill and waited. She was quiet for a long time. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

"How many?" she said. He had no answer that would fit anywhere. She read the silence.

"A lot," she said. He did not glow. She looked down at her hands. Then she looked back up and she said: "You ate the biscuit I left you." He said nothing.

"You fixed the fence. Twice." She paused.

"You watched Mom until she got home safe last Tuesday. I wasn't asleep." He had thought she was asleep. She reached out and picked him up and held him at eye level, the same way she had the first night, the same unhurried care, and she said with the certainty of a nine year old who has made up her mind and does not expect to unmake it:"I think you're trying really hard to be the scary thing. And I think it keeps not working." He had no answer for that.

She put him back on the windowsill and picked up her pencil and went back to her homework like the conversation was finished, which for her it was, because she had said the thing and now it was said and she was not the kind of person who needed to keep saying things after they were done. He sat on the windowsill. He thought about the speech he had prepared. He thought about the forty seconds on the first night when he had tried to kill her and failed.

He thought about the biscuit and the fence and the Tuesday she didn't tell him she'd seen. He thought about the memory on the second floor that wouldn't leave. He thought: she is nine years old. He thought: she is also, somehow, correct. System: Bond Strength: 31%. There it is. That's the number we've been waiting for. Not because 31% means anything by itself. Because of what it took to get here. You know what it took. You were there for all of it. So were we. There it is.