A slow chill had begun to creep up Vicar's legs. With a start, he realised he was sitting on them, one half-bent at such an angle that it quite cut off the flow of blood. Standing and stretching it, pins at once felt as though they were piercing the whole of the limb, cutting into the meat and the bone. It was a thoroughly disturbing sensation. Eager to rid himself of it, he limped over to the stained glass window and squinted beyond the fractured colours. Night was deep and dark. No stars peered down, no more more moonlight trickled in. He felt distinctly alone in the cosmos.

The thought made him wonder about Winn, which really wasn't saying much - he'd been absorbed in her life so many hours now that if he turned around, she would be there, flitting like the ghost those students in America would have murdered someone to see. What would he say to her, if her spirit still lived on in the house? Vicar didn't know much about the afterlife, and he didn't know much about religion, other than the jokes Gaston had made on occasion. If you sneak into my room one more time, he could remember his brother threatening him, you'll come back as a toad in your next life! Vicar hadn't taken it very seriously at the time, but did wonder in the following years what would happen to him.

The ladies who married into the Andrews family bore another stark difference to the men in this way. From what little Vicar could grasp about his own mother, she'd been of Christian faith, and all of his aunts and distant nieces were as well. How the family had continuously found like women from different backgrounds remained a curious coincidence. His father was absent of any of those notions of saving and grace, however, and what little could be taught of the world and what came after were crude denunciations. Gaston, Vicar knew, was profoundly affected by this conflict. Is the venerated and near-holy mother correct, and did her beliefs answer her early departure from the world? Or perhaps it is the father, wise in his years of observation from the bottom of a bottle? The late Mr. Andrews was no alcoholic, but if one wished a sensible answer (or a stern smack about the face, as Vicar was likely to receive), then they only needed to provide the liqueur.

Whoever was right, Gaston had gone the way of the shut-in, rejecting all methods of social interaction in favour of his experiments into what made humans move and lights turn on and various other meaningless tasks. Vicar believed his own ideology was fractured, but he wasn't aware of just how. Surely, the sole-target of his father's nihilistic and abusive ways, the victim of an absent mother, a banishing from home - these were all extreme breaking points in someone's psyche, but Vicar was far too lost in other people's lives to notice. What use was there in self-reflection when there were myths and monsters to turn into everyday words?

Perhaps that was the answer. Yes, it had to this grim collection of childhood events that formed him into a receptacle for others, for their pain and history. Would he care about Winn's life, if his own wasn't so devoid of affection? He sensed something familiar in her, his own youth, maybe. Vicar wasn't far into his twenties, but there was no sense of wonder in him anymore. Life was tiring and routine and possessed none of the passions he'd hoped for in the stories he read.

Winn Peterson, regardless of how poorly she felt about her life when Vicar had stopped reading, was still experiencing the thrill of something. A life around ships and a budding revolution of steel, guns, and expansion; a move to a country so quaint that she couldn't help falling in love; a friendship that could have blossomed into love. Never having had a friend, or felt the pull of his affections from anything, he could still picture it, could still recognise the influence such emotions would have. Did he not write a thousand time the entrancing words of Lord Tennyson of the glorious romance of Lancelot?

A pearl garland winds her head:

She leaneth on a velvet bed,

Full royally apparelled,

The Lady of Shalott.

Or even the meaningful prose of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, so heartbreaking when she wrote

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

Vicar knew of love, whether he knew it for himself or not, and it was very apparent that Winn Peterson loved her friend. Despite the tragedy in being removed from her home, Winn still had love to keep her sane and strong, and that was more than Vicar could ever dream of.

Still. He was empathetic. One doesn't go about reading all sorts of fantastical and romantic stories without developing any concern for problems that weren't his. He felt the rise of desperation as Winn was shuttled into the carriage and taken away from all she knew. The sting of confusion and anger when she was left like luggage in her strange new room reminded Vicar all too much of being alone in America. Even the thrill of meeting someone new seemed all too much like the suspicious presence of the Latin students - a foreign surprise, but ultimately, welcome. Then again, the students likely didn't feel Vicar was welcome, as he'd kindly reduced all of their notes and hard work to ash.

"Why not see what I've seen?" He jolted, turned away from the window.

"There's nobody else in here," he replied, not entirely convinced the whiskey had left his system. The question, regardless of ownership, was repeated. A breeze lifted the stained glass, a feature Vicar was unaware of, and filled the room with a stinging cold.

If it was the moonlight, exposed after a passing cloud expired or appearing divinely, or his unanswered grief, Vicar couldn't say, but what he did know was that he stared at the woeful apparition of a young woman. She was taller than he expected. A tumble of hair, curly and long, fell over her shoulders and past her collarbone. Eyes like watering pools of snow sparkled at him. If there was any colour at all to her, Vicar suspected they would be hazel, or a pale brown. Winn had never described what she looked like beyond her hair, but Vicar had known a fair number of couples of varying ancestries whose children came out with the same milky-tan complexion, sugary-blonde hair, and striking eyes of green and brown.

"Are you... are you Winnifred?" He felt so stupid asking once he heard the words, but the ghost (as he was going to call it, drunkenness be damned), made no movement of recognition. Instead, the apparition turned its head away and drifted to the window, passing through him by the arm and standing where he had by the glass.

"I don't want to die in obscurity," it whispered, holding a whispery hand to the glass. "Won't you see what I've seen?" It occurred to Vicar that Winn did not know he was there. Her question had been purely accidental in its target. Curious, he approached and reached a trembling finger to her arm. It passed through, leaving a peculiar swirl of dust in the wake.

"What do you want me to see?"

Feeling profoundly stupid, and vowing off alcohol in the future, Vicar remembered where he was, and where Winn had been moved to since he'd last read her journal. While her address had not been listed, the description of his own home was so obvious that he felt he'd deliberately ignored that Winn's bedroom was somewhere near to him. Smacking his forehead, Vicar turned to the doorway and pushed on the squeaking handle. There were no more voices.

He slid out of the door and wobbled. How very, very stupid to drink alcohol! The stairs swam before his vision and he considered emptying the contents of his stomach across the floorboards. After a nauseating second, the feeling passed and he continued back downstairs. This trip only required he peruse the second floor, and he was located near the very top of that. All he needed to do was circle around the hallways a bit, and there: Winn's old bedroom. The wallpaper hadn't changed at all outside of her door, so there was no difficulty whatsoever in locating the entrance to what almost felt like a mythical location.

After he closed himself in, Vicar felt his heart seize for a moment. The window stole his attention first - though the black lace curtain was still draped gently over the panes, holes eaten away at the edges, the moonlight had found its will to shine and filled everything with a silver glow. A dresser stood beside a bed, wrapped up in a four-poster style with the same fabric that decorated the window. At the sides of the bed lay a pair of reading glasses and small memo book that appeared far too modern to have been left for a hundred years. Who else had lived in this room, unknowing of the past resident, trapped likely until her death?

Vicar stepped quietly to the window and lifted the lace. Below, the glimmer of the river, a mere thread running across the garden, refused to be taken over by the trees and overgrowth. Hardly anybody still lived in the houses that circled the garden in, and thus, the state of nature had been left to its own devices. All of the lady Andrews bemoaned this entangled state, but no attempts to restore the garden to its former glory were met with success. In the distance, he could just make out the grove of apple trees, though they were withered and had never yielded any fruit in Vicar's memory.

To see these things as meaningful for the first time gave Vicar a strange sensation in his stomach. Life had new meaning, and it was all due to the unfortunate death of his brother. Vicar had come home before Gaston passed, but his brother never would have mentioned this seemingly random story if he were alive.

He turned away from the window and allowed himself to cry just a little. It was rather odd, as Vicar didn't usually cry, and so the tears dried up rather quickly and left him with only a pain in his head. "How many more people have to die?" His family had been swept away, and the unconventional friendship he held with Winn (for only a friend could read something so intimate as a journal, and as much of it as he'd already perused) really only revealed that Winn was dead, too. Even if she escaped as she so dearly wanted, Winn was just as dead as his poor Professor in America, as all of those students who had screamed and screamed to be saved, even as Vicar slept soundly through the fire and noise.

There, it was out. He had thought about the one thing he'd tried desperately not to this whole night. It plagued him in his dreams and it haunted him while he woke, but he still could not find even one day of peace from the memory. Amelia and Clark and Henson, all of their voices shrill as the bookshelves collapsed on their only exits. Bobby and James and Harrison, their throats melted shut so that no cries could be heard. All of their papers, swept up in one gust of smoke, ash, and fire.

If only the tears could come now. Vicar sat on the bed and put his face in his hands. He could see Amelia's face, her excitable freckles lighting up as she considered the possibility of another academic hunt. Her interests were never exclusive to the group Vicar often found her in, and he wasn't sure the Latin students even knew Amelia was there for the treasure of old books and their stories. She hadn't cared about ghosts or bringing back the dead.

Her enthusiasm didn't matter, anyway. Even Winn, who's pale figure had drifted back inside and was now staring forlornly out of the window, wasn't able to use her interested nature to survive.

Vicar, eager to end his self-loathing and misery, picked up the black memo book and flipped it open. Was there someone else, doomed to forced living in the house, the he had yet to discover? As surprised as he was to read his brother's name on the inner cover of the book, he had no reaction. Winn's ghost took that time to wail, and the sound, very much like rain on snow, stole Vicar's attention for a very sad while.