Capeworld Comics

December, 1865

 

Matthew Ernst gazed out from the second story window at herd of gigantic machines hauling brick and motor into the air with every spray of white steam. He liked watching the machines in the afternoon. Their labors were as regular as clockwork. They were said to be temporary, like their copies which worked night-and-day over the ruins of London, but he couldn’t imagine Blackwall without them. He couldn’t imagine Blackwall without their kettle-like hissing and their moving shadows that marked the time as well as any clock for those who knew how to read them. He couldn’t imagine Blackwall without their misty steam which condensed and clung to the streets and buildings in the wee hours of the morning like dew.

 

Blackwall was supposed to be a temporary place. It didn’t even have a name three months ago. Three months ago, it was just a mass of tents, an army of the lost and confused that shuffled to bullhorn announcements and orders. Matthew remembered clutching his gaeite candle to his chest beneath his cloak, scared nearly to death that someone would find it, because while no one was quite sure what happened in London, the words “gaeite,” “ghost,” and “manesologist” were muttered in every crowd. It was how he ran into Joseph Morton. Joseph saw he was acting, asked what was wrong, and after a brief and evasive conversation, came to the conclusion that Matthew was a manesologist, and was so confident in his conclusion that he revealed he was a manesologist too.

 

That was the kind of man Joseph Morton was. He could read a man like a book. “I have a woman’s sense of things.” he joked. It came in use when trying to communicate with manes. But he was also reckless. He made gambles off of hunches. That got him in trouble with the manes a few times, but Matthew knew he couldn’t complain. He had made some reckless decisions himself. He would have concluded that all manesologists were daredevils, but Martin Glass was an undeniable exception. He was far younger than Matthew, half the age of Joseph, yet he paused with caution whenever Matthew and Joseph acted with youthful abandon. Matthew wondered how much of that caution came from his temperment and how much of it came from his experience. Martin had looked behind the veil of Isis. He took the first step to becoming a thaumaturgist. But something he saw, something he wouldn’t discuss, not even with Joseph, and everyone shared everything with Joseph, made him turn away from the path.

 

He kept a few secrets from his brief career as a “wizard,” as Joseph called the thaumaturgists. They were a great help to the profession. His “dogs,” for instance, were invisible to man and manes, for while they were of a similar substance to manes, they weren’t of the exact substance. The dogs were useful in hunting itinerant, furtive manes, as their name implied, and also for scouting locations too dangerous to be immediately entered. The Yellow Room of Obesum Mission was an example. That was a very interesting trip to America.

 

Martin joined Matthew and Joseph a month ago, when Blackwall’s namesake was just finished around the Thames.

 

People thought the name came from a man who died helping others evacuate during the Great Fire. The office continued to get electrographs from people asking them to check this or that shadow for being “Mr. Blackwall.”

 

I SAID BLACKWALL TO MY FRIEND. THE SHADOW IN THE ALLEY GREW A HEAD. IT SAID SOMETHING TO ME BUT I COULDN’T HEAR IT. PLEASE INVESTIGATE.

 

But there never was a Mr. Blackwall. The name came from the dam.

 

Joseph joined a month ago. he came in, stiff and nervous, and asked for a job. It was raining that day. The wet stones had a pleasant scent. The great metal beasts looked like wrinkled spiders in the dark beneath their tarps. Everything was wet. Matthew remembered his socks feelin soaked beneath his boots.

 

Yet Joseph was completely dry as he wrung his fingers together and introduced himself like a schoolboy called to speak before the class for the first time.

 

It was one of the little miracles he picked up from the thaumaturgists.

 

That was a month ago, yet three months ago, it was just Matthew and Joseph. They were “prophets in the wilderness,” as Joseph called them. Everything was mud and stench. The public showers and lavatories couldn’t stop the filth from caking every face. Animals were a common sight–not just dogs, but wolves come to act like dogs. Matthew found a fox in his tent once, busy at work trying to bite into his tins. Joseph shooed it out with a stick.

 

They didn’t dare announce who they were, especially when the events of the Great Fire became known. They had to practice their trade in secret. There were rumors of manesologists being strung up from lampposts. They were only rumors, but Matthew and Joseph had no way of knowing that at the time, and the way people talked, they certainly wouldn’t have minded using a tree instead of a lamppost on the nearest manesologist.

 

Where there were men, there were manes, and even the nascent Blackwall had its haunts. For non-violent haunts, which were the majority of haunts then as they were now, they let the manes be. If people could learn to live around people, they could learn to live around manes. For violent haunts, they did their work at night. The night was full and deep without gaslight. Matthew had never seen the stars so bright before. There wasn’t much he missed about the wilderness, but he missed the stars.

 

They lured the manes to the woods with the Zacare Operation, the Dyeus ritual of the winds, then they did what was needed. The Operation of Sehul and Menot, the Dyeus ritual of the sun and moon, was often what was needed. It strengthened the a manes’ sense of self, helped them overcome the hazy irrationality that often came with awakening into the world. Many of the means they treated were victims of the Great Fire. Their hosts ran from the fire and were struck down, so they ran. They weren’t sure what they ran from, but they knew they had to run, so they ran. They ran like streaking comets, like cannon shots. They threw aside men and tents in their blind charges. Some even brought a little fire from their memories and left trails of fire where they ran. The Operation of Sehul and Menot made them aware that there was nothing to run from and everything to walk towards. The manes walked the Earth and the Astral afterlives. Many walked to this day, still searching, but not running, never again running.

 

Other manes needed the Perkunos Operation. The strengthening rites of the Operation of Sehul and Menot had limits. Some manes could not be granted awareness. For them, the only thing that could be done was to take away their ability to harm people, make it so that when they ran, they ran through things like mist. Then came the decision–the very difficult decision–of whether to let them run as intangible memories of the Great Fire or to affix them with the Nothoa Operation, the Dyeus ritual of garments, and hypnotize them upon a certain point in the environment, returning them to a state called torpor, a state of deep sleep, in which the events of a manes’ life are repeated in dreams.

 

If they were affixed, they would be at peace, yet if they ran free, there was hope that they would develop self-awareness on their own, given time. And if they were affixed, there was no way to break the torpor before its natural end, and no way of telling when that end would be. The thaumaturgists knew, from visions of the long-departed Dyeus culture, that there was a way to break torpor, but it was a very complicated Operation and as of yet replicated by modern man.

 

Matthew and Joseph let some run free and affixed others. They would check on them every so often, summon them to their presence with the Zacare Operation, and assess them. There were some who stopped running on their own, who conversed with Matthew and Joseph and thanked them for not sending them to torpor. There were some who stopped running on their own and begged Matthew and Joseph to send to torpor, for they could not find anything worth clinging to in either the world or the Astral, and their pleas raised another difficult decision. Manesology was filled with difficult decisions, and regrets for making those decisions.

 

Not every manes Matthew and Joseph encountered were runners from the Great Fire. There was the wailer, who did exactly what her name implied, and the brute, a crushing, invisible force that seemed to live for nothing else but to slowly snap trees in half, making the eeriest noises in the middle of the night. The brute was easy to help. The Nothoa Operation could affix without torpor. He was affixed to the middle of the woods where he could break trees until the end of time. Sometimes it was easy to help manes. Most of the time it wasn’t, but sometimes it was.

 

There was sky witch, the manes of a woman who drowned in the Thames a century ago and now drowned in the sky, pelting whatever was below her with hailstones that were hard and cold even on warm, sunny days. The ice didn’t taste like water from the Thames (Joseph was the one that tasted it). It was salty, not like freshwater at all, but like tears. The sky witch was more of a danger than she appeared. The hailstones were potentially deadly, but so was their salinity. They mixed with the freshwater of lakes and ponds, killed fish, and disrupted ecosystems. But the solution wasn’t difficult, though it did require a trip to the coast which ate into their expenses. They affixed the sky witch over the sea.

 

Matthew believed that there were always solutions to manesological problems. They just had to be creative enough to find them.

 

The people of young, tent-filled Blackwall understood enough about the lights in the woods to know it was none of their business. They never had gawkers. It wasn’t like nowadays where people felt brave enough to rubberneck an investigation. Everyone wanted to see them “raise the dead.” Everyone wanted to see what a gaeite candle looked like when current from the candle base made it incandescent.

 

But the people in the wilderness never interfered. The woods were for the ghosts, and the “ghost men,” as the people called them.

 

Some of them even figured it out. People would leave Matthew and Joseph little packets of money. It was enough, in the end, that they were able to afford an office.

 

Matthew was felt confident the thaumaturgists helped them in secret just as they themselves helped the nascent Blackwall in secret. It seemed odd that enough knew what they were to leave them money, but no one took action–though there was the incident with the young man. It was at the market, a big, chaotic sprawl where wares were marketed on ratty picnic blankets. Joseph described it as “The legendary bazaar of Bagdad, but without the legend.” There was a young man, hands in his pockets, who stared at Matthew and Joseph over a considerable distance for a considerable amount of time. He seemed to know who they were and he seemed to be thinking a long time about what he wanted to do about it. Joseph was about to confront him, but then suddenly, the man was gone. He was simply gone, there one moment, not the next.

 

Joseph thought the young man was a manes. “He probably thought better than to mess with us is all.” Matthew wasn’t so sure.

 

It would have been like the thaumaturgists to assist without a word.

 

The thaumaturgists were never much for talking. Joseph said it was because they did most of their communicating with the mind. They looked down on verbal communication, so they didn’t know how to so much as begin a conversation with the non-telepathic. When the thaumaturgists wanted to do something, they acted, and then maybe later they would talk and explain what they did–if what they did could even be explained.

They were the ones who, in 1860, made telepathic contact with someone or something they called Abramelin which slept far below the Nile. They said that Abramelin was neither man nor beast nor manes nor anything that soared through the ethereal Astral. All they said was that Abramelin was wise and old and benevolent. Through Abramelin’s mind, they saw glimpses of a past civilization called the Dyeus culture, a culture who found enlightenment by communing with their own souls.

 

They saw great amber colored spires that stretched to the heavens atop which creatures like man stood like gods, the ghosts of their ancestral lines flanking them like attendant angels. What became of the Dyeus, they could not say. They did not know. There was much about the memories of Abramelin they did not know. But they occupied the Earth, once, and traces of their civilization were present, though hidden.

 

They unearthed Dyeus ruins beneath Luxor. Amber-colored metal held within stones older than any touched by man greeted them. It was as if their dreams had stepped into reality. They hewed the amber-colored metal, which they called gaeite, and with it they worked miracles.

 

There was no other word for what they did besides miracles.

The world had been changed by their communion with Abramelin. The way they described it, there were worlds beyond the world–not worlds out in space, not worlds like the moon, but worlds beyond what was physical, what could be felt and touched. These worlds were separated from reality by something like a wall, but the act of communing with Abramelin had put holes in the wall, and now…now ghosts were real.

 

Ghost were real.

 

It would have been something to say just five years ago. But now it was like saying the sky was blue or that the ocean was wet.

 

Ghost were real. Though the proper term was manes, and in particularly formal circumstances, di manes. Joseph refused to call them anything but ghosts, just like how he refused to call the thaumaturgists anything but wizards.

 

Ghosts were real and there were more of them every day.

 

Recognizing that the world of man would be complicated by manes, to say the least, the thaumaturgists entrusted samples of gaeite to select physicists, occultists, and alienists. Matthew was an occultist–though he preferred the term folklorist–and Joseph was an alienist. Matthew was given his gaeite candle by a thaumaturgist named Robert Luman, a man with sad eyes and long, dark hair whose feet never touched the ground. It was possible he forgot how to walk. Joseph was given his by a thaumaturgist named Simon Carter, a man whose eyes blazed with fire and whose cloak contained stars.

“Take this and do good.” Robert Luman told him. And then he was gone, leaving behind a book that explained how mental exercises called Operations interacted with the incandescent glow of gaeite to cause effects in manes.

And Matthew hadn’t seen Robert since. He hadn’t seen him in three years, though he knew what he was up to by the various editions of the Astral Atlas he published. According to it, there were worlds beyond the world, worlds where a court of summer wage eternal war against a court of winter, worlds born from a cauldron of living shadows, worlds where genie lords retreated before the presence of an expanding humanity, and more, and more, and more. Only the thaumaturgists could visit these places, but they claimed that one day every man would walk the Astral as they did.

 

Matthew hoped that man would want to.

 

Sometimes, Matthew would think a shadow was Robert, but then he would realize that he was doing what non-manesologists did when they thought a shadow was “Mr. Blackwall.” He longed to talk to Robert again, or any manesologist for that matter. But everyone wanted to talk to them. Even Martin wanted to talk to them, and he generally disliked how they went about handling the world.

 

That was probably why they were so evasive in the first place.

 

Many said they were responsible, if indirectly, for London. Matthew thought that was a specious claim. More had been razed by nature and the conventional means of man, perhaps not as swiftly or as dramatically, but the fact remained London was not the first city in history to be destroyed. And did they not stem what would have been a far greater loss of life? The fireball spread from the heart of London out to Oxford in the West and over Southend in the East out into the Atlantic. The Thames boiled so that only a dry riverbed was left.

Many perished, but not as many as might have, because somehow the thaumaturgists knew in an instant what was happening and acted.

Matthew remembered flames. He remembered black flames and by the time he could wonder why “ghost fire” was on him, he was preoccupied by another, more incredible observation–he wasn’t burning. He didn’t even feel hot. And then came a torrential downpour the likes of which he never saw, a rain so strong it nearly stung him like hail, a rain that hammered London until it roared.

But it was strange–the city did not flood, though it felt like rivers were poured over London.

 

But stranger still, the ghost fires were snuffed out, even though Matthew knew that water could not extinguish an odic blaze.

 

Many lives were saved along with a few buildings, but the city as a whole had been lost. The thaumaturgists still had much to do. They restored the Thames and its fish, though no one knew where the fish came from let alone the water. To this day people whispered that the fish of the Thames were cursed, that they were the souls of those that died in the Great Fire.

 

They kept the little settlements that sprang up around the Thames like Blackwall from collapsing into chaos. It didn’t snow this winter, though everyone assumed it would, and there was somehow enough food and clean water. Doctors wearily accepted that many would die from sickness, and while a few did, it was far fewer than they anticipated–miraculously fewer. Some men and women reported of having a fever that broke as suddenly as it started. They will ill, bedridden, vomiting, dying even–and then they were well.

 

They built the great mechanical beasts that built Blackwall, that were rebuilding London even now, were created by the thaumaturgists. They worked like machines. There were controls that determined what they would do and they moved when water was fed through a system of pipes, but no one was quite sure how exactly they worked. They had even taken parts away from the beasts to try and found out how they could do what they did, but they still functioned. They still moved. No one could understand it.

 

Matthew felt manesologists were in position similar to the operators of the mechanical beasts. They both knew just enough to get the job done and not one bit more.

 

The thaumaturgists did much. Still, others thought they should have done more. Joseph was one. “They flitter about like faeries between those alien worlds up in the Astral and then they write about supping with Zeus and sleeping in fairy palaces while we, their “chosen ambassadors to the rising tide of phantoms,” sit in mud. I think we should have asked for a palace to go with the gaeite, or at least a cottage. The next time a strange man with his eyes full of fire and his cloak full of stars hands me a chunk of metal from a lost civilization, I’m going to ask for a mansion to go with it. I’m going to look him in his spooky eyes and tell him, “Thank you wizard, but how about some real estate first?”

 

But they might have saved their lives. That young man might have had a knife or a gun and while their gaeite candles gave them considerable power over manes, it gave them considerably less over humans. Matthew figured that it was hard to give a person more than his life.

 

How distant, Matthew thought as he stared out over Blackwall, how very distant were those three months to now. Blackwall then was a skeleton of survivors, masses of people moving like a disturbed anthill beneath hole-filled cloth supported by discolored metal poles, children combing through piles of trash that naturally shed from the crowd like hair from a giant animal for lost coins and salvage, but now, now there was meat upon the bones. Instead of tents, there were buildings with windows and roofs. Instead of an expanse of dirt with maybe a few wooden signs that maybe were accurate a week ago there were roads and residences and metal signs.

 

And instead of having to hide who they were, they had the office. And Matthew kept it scrubbed so that it never lost that new-building purity. Cleanliness was the lesson he learned from the wilderness. It was a luxury he indulged in. He was convinced that many manes would be happy if their haunts were clean, if instead of cobweb encrusted attics and damp basements they had little shrines as the pagans made for their ancestors. In many ways, the pagans were wrong about manes, but in setting aside places of veneration for them, they were correct. If only it caught on with the modern world. Cleanliness made himself feel happy, so why wouldn’t it make manes feel happy? It was too bad that Joseph learned a different lesson from the wilderness. Matthew could barely convince him to keep his desk clean and as for helping scrub, forget it. Visiting Joseph’s desk, it was a coin flip whether it would be covered with cigar wrappers and dirty plates filled with the remains of street vendor food (he had a weakness for pickled whelks) or if it would only be partially covered.

 

Looking out over Blackwall, Matthew was content. He didn’t even feel like a cigarette. The need simply wasn’t there. Not even Joseph hammering the new sign above the door, the one with the image of a gaeite candle he thought looked very striking. It really was their symbol. He knew some manesologists that used coffins for their symbols or funeral palls with eyeholes. But he felt that only the candle worked. It’s rectangular cut stick of amber-colored gaeite and was the truest visual shorthand for manesologists.

 

The hammering below stopped. Matthew left the window and descended the stairs to the first floor. He walked outside to find Joseph standing on a stool.

“Oh, is it ready?” Matthew asked, “Let me see! I want to see it!”

 

“It’s not ready.” Joseph hopped to the ground. “See for yourself, it’s not.”

 

Joseph was a wrinkled old man. His skin hung like tanned leather on his wiry frame. He typically wore a to hat as large as a factory chimney, if not larger, but as he banged on the sign his bald spot was visible for everyone to see, surrounded by a little ring of patchy gray hairs.

 

Matthew smiled on the sign. It was exactly what he wanted–ERNST, MORTON, AND GLASS. MANESOLOGISTS in bold black metal

“It looks ready to me. Ready and wonderful! I can’t wait to put it on the cards!”

 

“What? What are you talking about?” Joseph turned his short neck this way and that to try and see what Matthew saw. “It’s crooked. I know its crooked because it was when I first put the nails in, and then when I took the nails out and tried again, it was still crooked., and then when I tried again, well, just look at it! You got eyes, don’t you? It’s at an angle!”

 

“But it’s supposed to be at an angle.”

 

“It’s what?”

 

“Yes. The slight angulation complements the font. It gives it an element of dynamism. You know, like contraposto in a statue.”

 

“What? Is upside-down writing fashionable now? Are we turning into Celestials? You mean I did all this hammering and you want the sign crooked?”

“Not crooked, angled.. Excuse me?” Matthew asked the crowd, “Do you think the sign looks right?

 

The crowd stared blankly.

 

There was always a crowd outside the office. There had been ever since the first sign went up, the one with the tiny font Matthew hated.

A few of them were unemployed thrill seekers who, having nothing better to do, waited outside to see if a ghost would show up. Blackwall was still too underdeveloped to serve all the needs of its populace. It was either wait to see ghosts or kick stones for many people. Others waited outside the office as a job. They were paid by insurance companies to make a note of who came in and follow them to where they lived. Haunts carried a stigma of danger after the Great Fire. An owner of a confirmed haunted house could see his or her insurance payments skyrocket, which was why insurance companies stooped to such tactics.

 

Matthew and Joseph caught on to the game pretty quickly. Electrograph helped as it meant arrangements could be made with clients without a visit to the office, but[ even better was the hidden passageway in the basement. A manes dug it for them as a favor for the help they gave him and while the tunnel probably broke a few zoning restrictions, Matthew and Joseph frankly didn’t care. If the city was fine with the vulture’s nest outside their window in plain view of the populace the city could endure a secret tunnel.

 

“Why are you asking them?” Joseph waved dismissively at the crowd. “Useless, the whole lot of them!”

 

A small disapproving murmur started in the back of the crowd.

“You heard me right, useless! You pack of rubberneckers and opportunists! You don’t want a thing to do with us until you want to know where your rich uncle hid the inheritance, and for those of you who aren’t being paid to tar the names of whoever walks over our threshold. Tell me, do your insurance company masters know that prying into the business of good people is bound to get you haunted by a goblin? Manesological truth.”

“Joseph!” Matthew whispered sharply to his friend. “They could be our clients one day!”

 

“Yeah. What a rueful day that’ll be! I’ll have to get the boy to handle my duties that day, I’ll be sick in bed.”

 

The boy was what Joseph called Martin, though Matthew was certain Joseph was old enough to call him boy, too.

 

“Excuse me, gentlemen and ladies.” Matthew spoke up, “I apologize for the comments made my by coworker, but we will be closing our office soon, so if you have any business with us, please come inside now.”

 

 

They, of course, didn’t.

 

 

“Was that supposed to be a joke?” Joseph asked.

 

“You never know who might need our help. Even snoops might.”

 

“People like them can only be helped by god.”

 

Suddenly, several faces turned to look up the road. It was as if the crowd was a pool of water that had been struck at the corner by rock. Their attention came in a ripple, starting with one person on the edge of the crowd and spreading to two next to him and then two next to them. Soon they were all looking.

 

Joseph squinted into the distance. “Oh, now doesn’t he look like a client, Matthew?”

Matthew nodded. “Man or manes, you think?”

“Looks like a bunch of clothes from here.”

 

The man walked very slowly, very deliberately, each step a long stride. He was covered from head to toe, not a single spot of skin showed. His black coat was buttoned to the neck, and above the neck was a red scarf that concealed most of the face. What wasn’t concealed by the scarf was hidden by the thickest, largest spectacles Matthew had ever seen tinted black to hide what was behind them and a broad boater had with a red band.

 

The man looked straight ahead and did not alter his gaze even an inch. he looked straight ahead and walked in a perfectly straight line. Matthew was worried for a moment that he would walk right on past the office and continue on into the evening. But he stopped , and in one motion turned his entire body to face the office.

 

Joseph glared at the crowd. “Go on and take your notes, jackals.” he muttered, then he turned to the man. ‘Ah, a walk-in! Great! They’re always more interesting than an electrogram.” Joseph held out a hand. “My name is Joseph Morten, I’m the second guy on the sign there.”

 

The man raised his arm, looked at Joseph’s hand, and then lowered his arm.

“This is my associate Matthew Ernst.” Joseph didn’t miss a beat. So the man didn’t like being touched. So what of it?

 

“Welcome, welcome!” Matthew led the man through the door. “There’s a place in the back we can conference.” he could tell that this would be a client that wouldn’t want to talk near a window.

 

The man paused. His gloves hovered over the buttons of his coat. “May I remove my coat and hat and scarf?” he asked.

 

The voice was perfectly clear. It was as if he spoke through the scarf. He spoke slowly, calmly, quietly. He was as careful in his words as he was in his movements.

 

He sounded weary, and maybe even a little scared.

 

“Certainly!” Matthew said. “Coatrack is right over there, though if you feel more comfortable leaving your things on, we really don’t ‘mind.”

 

“Oh.” the man fiddled with a button. “I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.”

 

“It’s not about us, it’s about you.” Joseph said. “We get all kinds of people to come in and pay us a visit with all kinds of idiosyncrasies and quirks. If you wanted to come inside dressed like an Eskimo we wouldn’t think twice about it.”

 

The man stared at Joseph through his enormous black glasses. “I look rather strange underneath it all.”

 

“Oh, strange you say! Well we’ll be the judge of that. I hope you are strange. We see so much here that people call strange that it all seems rather humdrum to us. Bleeding eyes. Saltwater drenched hair. Oh, Matthew, you remember the burning fellow, yes?”

 

“Yes I do.”

 

“He wasn’t so strange at all, was he?”

 

“No. He wasn’t strange at all once we talked to him.”

 

“Though lord almighty the smell of him–that was another thing entirely! It took me awhile to recover my love for cooking bacon in the morning.”

 

The man’s hand went to his face. “I had hoped you had seen some strangeness. I’ve had…poor experiences concerning people so much as glimpsing how I am. I’ve seen people scream at the sight of me.”

 

Actually, you got me rather curious now. I want to see if you really are strange. Come now! Off with the hat and scarf, lets have a good look at you!”

 

The man’s gloved hand went to his face…and then something happened with the glove. Whatever filled that glove moved in such a way that no hand could. It made the leather compress together.

 

The man pantomimed grabbing the scarf. The hand touched the scarf, then the fingers…they did not close around the scarf. Rather, they…pulsed, and the scarf and the glasses were pulled toward the hand as if they were metal and it a magnet. The scarf and glasses hung on the back of the hand.

 

He realized at this point that it was no use going through the effort of acting and felt very silly.

 

It all came off his head in one tug of force and floated next to him in a little ball.

 

There didn’t seem to be a head behind all the clothes.

 

“Hmmm…” Joseph peered deeply into the air above the man’s shoulders. “I think I can…one moment, forgive me, my eyes are bad. Are those…blue eyes? Do you have blue eyes?”

 

“I don’t believe I have eyes at all anymore.”

 

“Well you got a little something there, and there. Two little watercolor drops. Hmph. And you said you were strange. Are blue eyes really that strange? I got an niece with blue eyes.”