{Delilah} Got you where I want you
Delilah chewed on the whole situation for nights on end. She was still angry with her Grandfather, he had no right to be so uncaring and spiteful toward Bill, and he bloody well should have told her what was going on.
But he didn't, and this was the mess that they ALL had created, wasn't it? She was no more innocent than the rest in this. She sighed, gathered up the journal and headed back to her home through the tunnels.
She had to talk to him one last time.
She looks about for a few minutes and then sits down with a bottle and her cigarettes, the items in front of her now. She takes her Masonic ring off and then puts it next to her Grandfather's. For a wild moment, she almost hoped it would do . . . something. But it didn't, the two rings staring blankly at her like a pair of dead eyes. She looked at the items once again; the cheap belongings of a . . . what the hell WAS she, Bill's mother? Her . . . step-mother? Her . . . great aunt? Both . . . sort of? Her mental family tree was beginning to look like something Shade may have pruned in earlier meditations. Making certain all of the items save the ring were as Bill gave them to her, she slides them back into the satchel, and stands up. She grabbed an envelope and a small box from her desk and returns. Putting the rings in the small box, and the box in the envelope, she
scrawled a note with two sketches and then put it in the envelope, and seals it.
Then she sits. And waits.
She continues to wait, fiddling with the envelope, playing with her key, thinking about her Grandfather. She just thinks about her Grandfather, thinks about where he could be, thinks about how she wants him there in the living room to finish the conversation that he began.
As her thoughts focused it was as if she could sense the other presence out there, somewhere, faint lines of connectivity linking her knowledge of him to her. She need only reach out and tug gently, and like a toy on a string he would be drawn to her.
The room darkened visibly and a chill set in as the specter stepped through the door, without opening it.
She raised her eyebrow for a split second in a barely visible reaction of shock at what she had just done, and then turned around on the couch, her arm draped over the back of it to look at him. "Hello."
"I take it you wanted to see me?" The face seemed puzzled, "odd, only the most potent of mediums can pull that little trick."
She smiled back at him rather proudly, her shock gone to be dealt with at a later time, "exactly."
She reached behind herself and pulled the journal into full view, "sorry I didn't get the obvious reference before, but I just wasn't expecting . . . this," she held it up a bit.
He smiled wolfishly, "perhaps now you understand?"
She shakes her head, "not in the least, actually, but I suppose it doesn't matter anymore, does it?" Her shoulders slump and she puts the book to the side again, kind of stares through him for a second, pride that he noticed her talent for even a second now gone. "You should have told me, Father."
"The fewer who knew the better. If things had gone as planned no one need ever have known."
She speaks evenly, trying to keep all her emotion out of her voice. "Rather ridiculous not to at least tell one or two of the key people in the plan, Father." Saying the word 'father' felt strange, but still more normal than any other paternal reference she'd made in her life. She looks at him and suppresses an unnatural shudder of excitement.
"I . . . I have no idea what to say anymore. I can hash out the details of the past exhaustively; but it won't do me any good, and certainly not you."
"I doubt it would, but I've explained that some secrets are safer with the dead, at least in the case of most families."
He lit the phantom pipe and this time the scent of cherry tobacco wafted through the room, "if you have questions, ask them."
"You're really disappointed in me, aren't you?" The meager and selfish question rushes out of her before she could stop it. Her tone is still flat.
"You at least accomplished something before... this."
"So it's Bill you hate."
"Hate is a strong word, but he was a disappointment."
"Do you figure he'd be such a disappointment had you taken a little more active position in his life?"
"I didn't think of it at all, you're right. It was an accident, but I'd think that some of the breeding of this family should have shown through, but he was a Sykes, to the bone."
She tenses a bit, then just shakes her head. "I'm not going to argue with you the many exceptional qualities of Bill, Father. You'd convinced me that you despised my very existence for over 60 years; I'm not expecting a hug and understanding for either of us."
The figure shrugs, "I may not have been sentimental, but I was dedicated."
She stares at him, "dedicated to what, exactly? You completely buggered it all up! And what you didn't completely fuck or left to chance, I managed to destroy all by myself. Such dedication. You didn't go to my mother with a plan," she shudders openly this time as she thinks of the night she was conceived, but not out of revulsion, "none of this was planned; I was an accident just like Bill was an accident."
"Sadly your mother was in no shape to... disagree, I suppose I must take the blame for that. With the amount of... inbreeding this family had there were instabilities, she saw something she could never cope with."
She blinks at him with both her sets of eyelids, "are you talking about killing you own wife and driving your daughter mad with it or fucking her in an insane asylum? I just want to be clear on this point." She looks utterly shocked but hardly judgemental; she looks insanely curious at this point, "could she stop you? Would she have wanted to? She could still speak. Your blood is only a shade off what it was supposed to be; you fell victim to it's afflictions, too, when you were alive."
"Regrettably I did suffer a moment of weakness, but I don't see you complaining about your existence. I was referring to her unfortunate condition making her... incapable of rational thought, you never did see her. She was a slave to her most basic instincts, it was all I could do to make it out of that room alive, when she was done."
"In the end she didn't understand the complexity, and couldn't benefit, as you did, from my actions."
"Then what is it, Father? I was the culmination and beneficiary of your vast dedication and planning, or I was a regrettable accident?"
She runs her fingers through her long black hair, hair like her mother's, "and I wasn't complaining."
"You were perhaps a lucky accident, maybe something to justify what I did, in the name of our lineage."
"And I completely fucked the last chance we had, happy accident or no." She lits a cigarette, "what is it that binds you to us?"
"I suppose having all my work come to nothing might have that effect. How do you feel knowing that all that work is wasted?"
She looks at him with a dead stare, her voice even again, "lousy and regretful. For the first time in my entire existence. Happy now?"
"Yes, for once at least one of you understands me." The figure begins to fade from sight, a satisfied smirk on its face. "But just so you know dear, there's another."