On one of the benches overlooking the beach, black-clad arm fallen and long, white fingers brushing the sand, a man lies comatose. Gaunt, framed by nearly eighteenth-century clothes and sea-salted black hair, his face would look twenties-young (and his style the gothic of an over-meticulous modern histrionic) if it weren’t so haggardly drawn, the shadows under the eyes so deep and dark. It’s a striking incongruity, although, when he first appeared, he looked a seventy with little strange about it. The forbidding, heavy-clothed, over-buttoned outfit hangs on him rather, although it isn’t cut for a heavy man.
He has a nearly foot-long piece of pale wood holstered to one thigh--smoothly carved, well-worn, and just slightly rosy, with a few remaining flecks of walnut-stain lingering in its few deep groves--and a collection of intriguing little textured vials to the other. A few men with more respect for value and their own curiosity than dignity or possession have, since his unceremonious appearance on the bench, tried to handle or even make off with one or the other. All ran away quickly in pain and astonishment, clutching hideously blistered hands. One tried gloves, to no avail, and one paused to land a retributive backhanded blow.
The only relief of blackness on him are the odd and varied stains on his bony hands, and the spectacularly attractive mess of blood, bruised swelling, and bone-white cravat at his throat. He looks like a vampire victim, were the vampire diseased and the body stirred to a froth of outraged rejection. From the twin wounds, rather large to have been from a human mouth, emerge a slow, exhausted trickle of almost clear fluid. His skin is cold, his heart beats, perhaps, once a minute, and his breath, while regular and continuous, is so slowly even as to be invisible too all but the most interested observer. Peeking from under the cravat is the edge of a note, its handwriting crabbed, annoyed, and painstakingly legible.
( To_you_who_have_chosen_to_concern_yourself )And, upside down at the bottom of the paper, in a quite different hand, less irritated than morose,
“Riddle
Though in theory I’m always behind you,
Your shadow, to prop and remind you,
And you may, as you roam,
Wish to make me your home,
Do not dwell on me much: I may blind you.”And, folded into a hidden pocket, just showing since the departure of the disgruntled tough, is a sheet of heavy paper, so full of linen fiber as to feel nearly cloth,
much and madly scribbled on.
“Leave me alone,” he says. “Sod off, I’m dead,” he says. “Reports of my demise have been grievously understated,” he says. “Of course I’m sure, stop wittering,” he snaps. Unreliable bratstard. Wait till he realizes he started waking up on his birthday =.=
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