Walls of Gray

Chapter 13: Confined Once More

It would do you good to show your gratitude, boy.

Sterdon's words were still loud and clear in Clancy's head, almost as clear as the day the Deacon had first uttered them one week ago. Clancy had only been in Dema for a few hours at that point; Keons had left his side as soon as he'd been brought back to his apartment, abandoning him in the dark hallway, no doubt to discuss his escape with the other Bishops and, for a few brief and terrifying moments, leaving him completely at the mercy of his two advisors. Even now Clancy still marveled at how someone could sound so polite yet so stern and threatening, and it made his skin crawl just thinking about it.

Pardons like this don't come often.

Clancy shook his head, bringing himself out of his stupor, and at that moment the world seemed to return to its normal self, when the floor seemed to stop lurching violently beneath his feet. A few seconds passed before he looked down at his hands, his fingers still poised atop the keys of the typewriter. He wasn't even sure how much time had passed since he'd let himself sink into his own subconscious, but he knew for certain that it was more time than he would've liked. And not only that: it'd been at least an hour since he, much to his great dismay, had typed a single word. 

For all the times that he'd expected things to return to a semblance of normalcy, it seemed like he was accomplishing nothing. 

He should have reassured himself by now that everything was going to be at least somewhat fine. Or, at the very least, things could have been a lot worse. By some miracle, Keons had managed to negotiate his way out of having to give Clancy the dreaded FPE badge, the brand of shame given to those who had dared to disrupt the peace and escape the confines of Dema -- in other words, people like him. And if Reisdro was still determined to smear him for what he'd seen in the Second District that fateful night, then the old Bishop had made no effort to do so, even during the sermons. 

"It's been one week," Clancy whispered to himself the same way he'd done the entire morning. "Nothing has happened. You're safe." 

But are you? That insistent voice in his head responded, almost as if on cue. 

Clancy sat straight in his chair, trying not to let his thoughts get the better of him, and flexed his fingers, hoping to catch up on the quota before the end of his shift. He turned to the notes tacked to one side of his cubicle; the Scribes had finally graduated from the history of the Bishops and on to the history of strange happenings in Dema, happenings that were dubbed miraculous by the Bishops but just plain nightmarish by Clancy's standards. He gave the notes a look over before finally pressing down on the keys. 

In the sixty-third year of Nico's tenure as First Bishop of Dema, a citizen of the Fifth District reported a sighting of a frail-looking boy, no older than ten, whose hands were completely covered in what appeared to be black ink. While the witness could not get a close enough look, they reported that the boy appeared to be manipulating the nearby Watchers with ease, something that most of the Bishops at the time were incapable of doing. When asked about the sighting Nills, the only Bishop capable of manipulating the Watchers to such an extent, denied all rumors that the boy was one of his patrons with an unsurprisingly curt response. Nico himself remained tight-lipped as well, though he did mention briefly that he would investigate the matter. There were at least ten more sightings of the boy over the next five years before his sudden disappearance. No citizen of Dema has seen him since, and the Bishops have chosen to remain quiet for reasons that shall not be disclosed. 

Here Clancy paused. Hands completely covered in black ink. . .

Was the note talking about the boy he'd seen lying in the stream when he'd made his escape? After all something about him had seemed terribly odd, from the ink covering his hands to the way he seemed to move with a lifeless stumble across the bottom of the ravine, as if he were being pulled this way and that by a puppeteer's strings. Apparently that hadn't been the only thing strange about him.