Hide and Seek

The walk to the Weiss manor is always silent. There typically aren’t guests, after all. This is a thing Muse has always done alone. No point in changing that now.
 
Their feet scuff over the cracked cobbles of the courtyard. The hedgerows stand at silent attention. In the long afternoon light, their shadows sprawl long and black, casting a spider’s web of darkness over the unkempt gardens. Maybe they’d been buried under one of those beds, all this time. Maybe they’d been tucked under floorboards – it wasn’t as if Muse could have smelled the decay. Or maybe they had been thrown onto the lawn and left for the beasts.
 
Muse hadn’t asked. They still weren’t sure they wanted to know.
 
where are we? what the hell is going on?
the dust has only just begun to form
crop circles in the carpet,
sinking feeling
 
They circle the grounds on slow, ponderous feet. The First Mistress had picked out every single paving stone herself. She’d selected every stone and statue that lined every garden bed, and the First Master had let her. She needed a touch of home, he’d said, to feel more comfortable. It would help make sure she was happy.
 
Muse had watched with interested eyes as the workers laid each stone. Even then, they had already been making plans. Blending colors and textures in their head to accentuate the stone without disguising it. The Master and Mistress had their own ideas, of course, and Muse obeyed, incorporating their designs in with their own. They knew every single crack in every single statue, every crevice in every flagstone. More than anywhere else, thishad been their domain.
 
spin me around again and rub my eyes
this can't be happening
when busy streets amass with people
would stop to hold their heads, heavy
 
The Second Master had grown up running back and forth across the same pavestones his mother had ordered to be laid. He’d played in and around the bushes, learned to climb on the surfaces of the statues, learned to read under the shade of the bushes and trees. He’d often studied in any number of the gazebos, his calm, clear eyes bent studiously over his books.
 
The Second Lady, when she finally came to live at the manor, rarely set foot outside it. When she did, she could be found under the same shades, with her hand in her husband’s arm. Her storm-grey eyes had always slid coldly over the beds, as if nothing about them could please her. But still Muse had memorized every speck of soil, every blade of grass, every plant in and around the gardens, building them more lush and bright with every passing year.
 
hide and seek
trains and sewing machines
all those years
they were here first
 
They finish their loop of the grounds and climb the stairs, step by step. They study the moss that slicks the stone, as familiar to them as the wear marks etched into their own palms. Then they push the door open, listening to the familiar creak. It hasn’t always made that noise. It didn’t, when the boys were young – they ran through it full tilt often enough that Muse would have heard it. Now it sags, its hinges barely enough to hold its own rotting, waterlogged weight.
 
It took much longer to learn the inside of the house. They hadn’t had as much time with it as they’d had with the grounds. Still, when they’d finally stepped inside, they had wasted no time in committing every thread of every carpet and tapestry to memory. They’d run their hands along the balustrades, memorizing every curve of every carving. The cracked and pitted faces of the paintings on the walls glowered down at them, their expressions full of a condemnation that had frightened them, once.
 
Not any more.
 
oily marks appear on walls
where pleasure moments hung before
the takeover, the sweeping insensitivity
of this still life
 
They pass through room after room, each one blurring into the next. The living room, where a fire had burned mere months ago amidst the old ashes. The kitchen, recently scrubbed, now sinking back into a languid recline of dust and rust. The bedrooms, their windows half-repaired and half covered in tarps, carving each room half in shadow and half in light. The closets overturned for linens and clothes, anything that had survived enough to fit the person who’d come home to find them.
 
What else had he expected to find?
 
Did it matter, now?
 
hide and seek
trains and sewing machines
(oh, you won't catch me around here.)
blood and tears
they were here first
 
They step into the solarium. Dark wood rises in delicate archways around them. Two stories of windows overlook the gardens - gardens that couldn’t have been seen for all the diffusion of light through the frosted glass. There were instruments here, once, they supposed, and seats along the upper balcony to watch whoever was performing. Seats on the floor to watch, to play, to talk – but never once to glance behind them, never even able to look out into the world Muse had spent decades building for them.
 
Outside, the sun is finally beginning to set. Its orange light coats the remaining glass in a wash of light like captured flames. Muse watches it dance for a long, long while. Then they cross to the center of the solarium and sit cross-legged amidst the wreckage. They rest both hands on the warped wooden floorboards and lift their head up towards the frosted glass ceiling, glowing as brightly as the sun itself. And they begin to sing.
 
what’d you say? that you only meant well?
well, of course you did.
what’d you say? that it's all for the best?
of course it is.
what’d you say? that it's just what we need?
you decided this?
what’d you say?
what did she say?
 
Green sparks spread into the floorboards and sink away from Muse’s hands. They cascade down and down, through the stone foundation of the house, into the earth below. Muse can feel it humming against their fingers, slow and sluggish at first, then quicker. Brighter. The land here has grown sluggish, crushed into hibernation under uncountable tons of wood and glass and stone. Now, finally, they are stirring to life once again.
 
Muse does not have muscles to ache. They do not have vocal chords to grow tired. They simply lock their joints and sing. And deep beneath the earth, below them, around them, the ground stirs. It shifts. It breathes like a living thing. The minutes stretch into hours, but they have lost all concept of time. Their attention follows every individual spark of green as it hunts, and finds, and nurtures, and coaxes, until the soil vibrates like something caged, pushing against its bars with all its strength.
 
ransom notes keep falling out your mouth
mid-sweet talk, newspaper word cut-outs
speak, no feeling. no, I don't believe you.
you don't care a bit. you don't care a bit.
 
The movement is subtle, at first. Slender tendrils of green lift from between the floorboards. They curl upward, seeking the air, swaying in a joyful, desperate dance. Their pace can be measured in mere centimeters, but bit by bit, they grow. Long into the night, the laboring threads of life pull themselves up through every single crevice they can find, drawn by the haze of light waiting for them up above.
 
A mist of green rises from the manor’s paved floor and from the garden earth surrounding it, shot through with crackling sparks of light. Glittering green magic arcs up the lengths of every new shoot and vines. The foundation twists, and groans, and cracks under the weight of the life burgeoning up from beneath it. And still Muse sings, as thickening stems peel the floorboards back. As vines twist up the walls and balconies. As glass shatters against the unrelenting press of branches, as moss and grass boil over the spaces once filled by carpets and tapestries, as the pavestones are lifted and thrown aside by the upswell of roots beneath them.
 
(hide and seek)
ransom notes keep falling out your mouth
mid-sweet talk, newspaper word cut-outs
(hide and seek)
speak, no feeling. no, I don't believe you.
you don't care a bit. you don't care a bit.
 
As the first light of dawn peeks over the horizon, Muse’s voice falters, and finally fades. They draw their hands into their lap and turn their head slowly to take in the view. The dark wood of the solarium is now covered in a mat of green. Shattered glass litters the ground in a glittering carpet only half-subsumed by grass. And finally, finally, they can see through the windows, to the gardens outside.
 
They rise to their feet and step out through a blasted window. The gardens have run rampant. Flowers burst from every bed, winding over every surface. Statues lie in ruins, burst from the pressure of roots growing from their cracks. The trellises of roses they erected mere months ago have overgrown the haphazard contraptions that once contained them and hauled their ponderous, verdant weight up the sides of the manor itself. Windows hang ajar, leaves and vines spilling from their mouths. And from the hole in the roof, once desperately tarped over to keep out the rain, they can see the fresh, new branches of what will someday be a mighty oak.
 
They give the house one long, final look. Then they turn away and begin the long, slow walk back to the carriage.
 
Back to the train station.
 
Back home.
 
(hide and seek)
no, no. you don’t care a bit.
no, no. you don’t care a bit.
(hide and seek)
no, no. you don’t care a bit.
you don't care a bit. you don’t care a