The Reaches

[Near]

I need to talk to you about things was far from the straightforward explanation he had been hoping for, but the truth was he would have counted almost anything as acceptable.

“Sure.”

For all its husk of nonchalance, the assent drooped with more weariness than it had earned, as if they had locked horns for hours instead of minutes.

He caved too easy. Knew it, how he should have protested the intrusion a while longer on principle; declared his right to solitude on his own property (his own: strange -- true); probably barred anyone whose name he didn’t know from access to a house he barely knew. And he had, in the gap between “you” and “maybe,” considered the option of holding out and abandoned it to the soggy grasses as requiring more staying power than was in his reach right now. The part of him that fed alley strays didn’t want to turn the kid away, and there was relief in the yielding, palpable, like stretching his fingers after clenching them too long in a fist.

Whether or not he raised his voice enough that it reached its target, he turned and made the short journey back to the house, assuming the kid would follow even if he hadn’t heard, through the door left just open just a crack behind him. The sound of rainwater tapping against the floor as it dripped off of him syncopated with the thumping of Lew’s tail. She had re-positioned herself into a crouch in front of the window, from where she watched him now, ears back.

[Jude]

Near was not the only one who felt palpable relief. Jude had been transitioning to that interim stage right before someone makes their exit - where a person is looking for the doors, calculating how long it will take to go through one, and where, from there, they must go. If Near was not to be his dark horse patron, then Jude could not dawdle; the family was out there, looking for him, feeling for him. They hunted for him the way people scrounged in the dark when they dropped a key. It must be here somewhere...

Rain was only refreshing when one was in it. After that, it simply settled on the skin, in it, and that dampness reminded Jude of the tomb. He closed the door behind him after he followed Near inside. It shut with a soft creak. He inhaled deeply, taking in the smell of the house, the depths of its emptiness, its darkness. Yes, he remembered.

"I'm going to change," he said, and now, he did not wait for permission. He turned off down the hall with a familiarity that lent some credence to his claim of familiarity - or else Jude had a knack for the layouts of old houses. Or maybe (and this was the truth, the least believable of all) he simply found the things he was looking for, the maps and locations unfolding in his head as he willed them.

He returned, in a sweater and different pair of jeans, a hand towel appropriated for rubbing his hair dry. "It's so empty," he said. Jude's default tone was a level monotone, with only small peaks and dips. "So different from the parties."

[Near]

The dog growled -- a rumble, chthonic -- at the second ingress, but she stayed frozen in her gargoyle crouch beside the window, inspiring Near to a letdown cancellation of the internal ‘beware of dog’ quip that had drifted smugly across his thoughts outside. Nope, nothing to beware of here. Not that it should have surprised him to discover she was bark without bite, considering her personal history.

Just the growl, then, while a stranger who could have been a robber, an arsonist, a murderer, brushed past and into the deeper channels of the house with a level of nonchalance so unwarranted that Near found himself glued to the floor, still dripping, mouth fish-agape and unable to muster a response outside of a temptation toward another iteration of the fuck instead of the question (at least) or protest (better) that all of this deserved.

He didn’t indulge. Something about the way the kid moved through into hall, the way he set his shoulders, heightened a sensation that had infected him since he drove up Farr Reaches. He and the Lew seemed to arrive at a similar sort of conclusion at the same time: she got quiet and stood up, clattered off toward the dining room with her habitual houndlope. And he shrugged into the impression that, regardless of what any lawyers said, the notarized papers, he had no claim on this place. Maybe the one who did had arrived.

“I wouldn’t know.”

His reply to the party comment was dryer than he was, delivered from the sofa into which his clothes, his hair, imparted spreading halo of damp. He had replaced the gun (now leaned up next to him) with the bottle of Barolo.

“So what, did he owe you money?” After a glimmer of surprise to realize that his visitor hadn’t just toweled off in the bathroom, he had changed clothes. It followed somehow, clicked into place after a second as fitting with the rest of this encounter.

[Jude]

This place belonged to the earth, to the trees, to the wind that screamed at night. It belonged to things that had been here before the house and would be here after it. If Jude had any claim, it was only as an emmissary of the Things That Came Before and Would Come After. He just had power of attorney, the ability to sign in the stead of the great unnamed, the great unknown. Nothing belonged to him. He was not sure he belonged to him.

"Mmmm," Jude said, as if to mean, No, of course you wouldn't know, you were never there. "I never saw you here." Upon closer inspection, without the mystifying properties of mist and rain, it appeared they were not dissimilar in age. They could have known each other. They could have met. They simply -- hadn't, until now. "I just heard about you."

He came up behind the sofa, and folded his arms along the back of it, leaning over Near, peering down at him. The towel was likewise folded. "No, he didn't owe me anything." Jude sighed again. This -- this was the part the family always did for him, the explanations. Jude never did his own introductions. "I'm sorry, I've never had to talk about this before."

Another pause, and he remembered something else he had forgotten - another thing the family did for him. "I haven't told you my name." He extended his hand over and down, in the general direction of Near's chest. "I'm Jude."

[Near]

“Oh, are you? Jude?” A name with a whiff of vintage, of catechism. A hitch in his ears, weird, but time and experience had taught Near Farr to quash passing thoughts about the unsuitability of other people’s names as soon as they began to form: they invariably got turned back around on him. Defending “Near” and explaining “Courtland” had lost any satisfaction they may have once had over the first eight hundred iterations.

In fact, he opted not to reciprocate the introduction at all, rather tacking on a “Fantastic,” into which the sarcasm just audible in the preceding questions continued to creep like an infection.

It was not a particularly mean-spirited strain; nor was it even directed toward the scrawny young man, the party-goer, the apparent friend of his dead father’s, who was standing at his shoulder with his hand out, really; its intended mark was the broader situation -- or maybe even Near himself, for allowing the situation to form as it had. He couldn’t have said, really; he only heard it and agreed with himself, even as he reached his own bottle-less hand out, bypassing the prompt for some kind of gentleman’s reception and instead snatching the towel, flopping it over his head.

He rose to his feet and began to blot still-dripping curls with it, continuing, “Talk about what?” Then, without pausing for an answer, “Wait, heard about me from who?” The statement had caught up to him like a needle passing through numbed skin. Wrong question, though. Had to be Daddy. Who else? But what could the old bastard have had to say about him?

[Jude]

"From the family. And your father." A little of column A, a little of column B. Don't you have a boy about their age? When he was a child, Jude had not considered himself one; by his own observations, he and his sister did not meet the criteria. To be a child, one had to spend their time being a child, and being regarded as one, and Jude was always - something else. Still, he'd heard of Near Farr, off at some boarding school, or summer getaway, or weekend excursion. Never home when, the family came to play.

If he caught the sarcasm, Jude once more opted for disregard. Acknowledging things, he knew, could often make them worse. "Have you ever had a really bad nightmare? One that you thought was so real, that when you woke up, you weren't sure you were awake?" It was all a set-up for a melodramatic ghost story - the storm, the forest, the empty house, the stranger. Horror novels had made the frightening seem quaint by making them predictable and familiar. Near could almost laugh. But beneath the cliche and absurdity, there was the thread of truth that made people write those horror novels in the first place: the eeriness of the other, the mercilessness of nature, the mysteries of the dark. Was Jude a joke?

Or was he a nightmare?

[Near]

“Listen, kid.”

Kid had struck him as the right right word when they were standing outside. Here, face-to-face with a damp sofa between them, if he were forced to pick again, it probably would have been different. Something less neutral, something that aimed a faint taunt at the sculpted aspect of his face, the way he held himself. Lord Something. Little Lord Something. But nobody was making him pick again, and kid had fit itself nicely in his head, regardless of the fact that the age difference he thought he’d discerned before seemed less distinct now.

“You got what you wanted. You’re inside.” Pointed out because it was a favor Near had done him, and not for the pleasure of hearing him recite Twilight Zone opening monologues. He didn’t give a fuck about discussing nightmares with strangers. What he did find himself giving a fuck about (and not liking it) was the topic of what Courtland had ever had to say about him -- but he wasn’t going to give Courtland’s ghost the satisfaction of hearing him beg for more. He finished with his hair and crumpled the towel over his shoulder.

“You know what, how about a drink? To celebrate. Getting inside. You look like you could stand one. The Old Man --” had he mentioned he was Courtland Three? He must have; his visitor seemed to know it -- “liked his liquor, I guess.” Near with a half-empty bottled in his clenched hand. Genetics wins out. He went around the couch and submitted it to Jude for consideration. “Here.”

[Jude]

Yes, that was how some people reacted - this is all nonsense and fairy tales, don't waste my time. Disbelief and disdain were typically cues to hold back there, to parry the prickly response with some disarming self-effacement. Jude fell silent, going over the tapes in his head, the hundreds and hundreds of choppy strips of failed and successful persuasions. The thing with the family was, there was always another mark. The very rich were as vulnerable to snake oil as the very poor, and nothing tempted them more than the one thing their money could not yet buy. But Jude - Jude had only a handful of names and places, scribbled hastily in his notebook. His hopes, and time, were limited.

"How do you know," he asked absently, "what it is I really want?" He took the bottle from Near's hands, and turned it over, examining it. He nearly told Near the truth, simple as he was - I don't drink. Alcohol, coffee, cold medicine - all of it he avoided, the way a wary parent never left their car keys where their teenager might lift them. But he thought on the bottle a little more, and came up with another idea. "He had a cellar, yes?"

[Near]

“Shit, did I say I knew your deepest desires?” He was pretty sure he had said no such thing. Maybe, given more time, if he wanted to, he could suss a want more profound than “come in from the rain” out of the kid. The Reaches’ atmosphere at the moment was about right, dim and damp and forlorn enough that he wouldn’t have felt too strange flipping on the ‘you can talk to me’ mode that those who tend dim, damp, forlorn bars sometimes develop like the symptom of a slow-moving but debilitating disease, and which was known to induce the unbidden confession of deep desires.

Still, the question was not devoid its tinge of sincerity.

Spreading outward from an obscure corner of Near’s thoughts was that peculiar, light-prickle suspicion that he and the person across from him were having two distinct conversations, and the possibility existed that something he had said carried unintended implications on the side that was not his. He knew from experience: there was a danger inherent in the enterprise of talking to a person who heard something other than what you were saying.

“But you said you wanted in. So that’s how I knew that.” Gentler -- snide note muted, though not snuffed. “And yeah, a cellar ...” This veering in the direction of a question without quite getting there. The vaguest recollection lingered in him of there being a downstairs here, cool and cavernous and somehow a place that he should not make any attempt to get back to. “I think the door’s locked.” At least he had come across a locked door in the butler’s pantry and had been pointedly not looking for the key that belonged to it. The shrug that accompanied was to shake himself free of the uncomfortable feeling the idea of the door being open brought as much as to demonstrate his lack of concern to his audience.

[Jude]

That actually got a chuckle from Jude, a closed mouth 'Hmmmm!' of amusement. What was his deepest desire? He generally contented himself with simpler wants - a chocolate milkshake, strolling through a garden as the azaleas were blooming, the smell of fresh burning lavender - because the risk was low, and the reward could be deepened by a sense of gratitude and simplicity. Complex wants, true wants, deep wants, were the sorts of things that kept people up at night, that made them haggard and weak and bitter. Sometimes, the chasm between having and wanting was so great that people threw themselves into that gaping cavern, and died there.

Jude did not want to die. Not yet.

"It would have been too long a conversation on the lawn," Jude explained, similarly feeling that Near was missing the point, mostly through sheer force of will. Certain types of people laughed off coincidences and ignored patterns, waving their hands and saying, No, no, that would be ridiculous, submerging themselves in what was commonly accepted as true and never surfacing. Often times what was once absurd or impossible burst from the cage of conspiracy to be plain fact, and these skeptics, these head-shaking plain Joes and Janes, were left blinking owlishly at the New Obvious.

"You didn't get that from down there?" He nodded at the bottle. "You haven't been up here long, have you?" When two people were talking past one another, the weaker party had to submit to the stronger. Jude's conversation left his intended path and merged onto Near's, the roads temporarily joined as Jude continued to ponder how to explain, to this total stranger, that his father had been involved with a cult that was trying to destroy the country, and, ideally, the world.