The Ghost of Winn Peterson

21. Vicar

A slow chill had begun to creep up Vicar's legs. With a start, he realised he was sitting on them, one half-bent at such an angle that it quite cut off the flow of blood. Standing and stretching it, pins at once felt as though they were piercing the whole of the limb, cutting into the meat and the bone. It was a thoroughly disturbing sensation. Eager to rid himself of it, he limped over to the stained glass window and squinted beyond the fractured colours. Night was deep and dark. No stars peered down, no more more moonlight trickled in. He felt distinctly alone in the cosmos.

The thought made him wonder about Winn, which really wasn't saying much - he'd been absorbed in her life so many hours now that if he turned around, she would be there, flitting like the ghost those students in America would have murdered someone to see. What would he say to her, if her spirit still lived on in the house? Vicar didn't know much about the afterlife, and he didn't know much about religion, other than the jokes Gaston had made on occasion. If you sneak into my room one more time, he could remember his brother threatening him, you'll come back as a toad in your next life! Vicar hadn't taken it very seriously at the time, but did wonder in the following years what would happen to him.

The ladies who married into the Andrews family bore another stark difference to the men in this way. From what little Vicar could grasp about his own mother, she'd been of Christian faith, and all of his aunts and distant nieces were as well. How the family had continuously found like women from different backgrounds remained a curious coincidence. His father was absent of any of those notions of saving and grace, however, and what little could be taught of the world and what came after were crude denunciations. Gaston, Vicar knew, was profoundly affected by this conflict. Is the venerated and near-holy mother correct, and did her beliefs answer her early departure from the world? Or perhaps it is the father, wise in his years of observation from the bottom of a bottle? The late Mr. Andrews was no alcoholic, but if one wished a sensible answer (or a stern smack about the face, as Vicar was likely to receive), then they only needed to provide the liqueur.

Whoever was right, Gaston had gone the way of the shut-in, rejecting all methods of social interaction in favour of his experiments into what made humans move and lights turn on and various other meaningless tasks. Vicar believed his own ideology was fractured, but he wasn't aware of just how. Surely, the sole-target of his father's nihilistic and abusive ways, the victim of an absent mother, a banishing from home - these were all extreme breaking points in someone's psyche, but Vicar was far too lost in other people's lives to notice. What use was there in self-reflection when there were myths and monsters to turn into everyday words?

Perhaps that was the answer. Yes, it had to this grim collection of childhood events that formed him into a receptacle for others, for their pain and history. Would he care about Winn's life, if his own wasn't so devoid of affection? He sensed something familiar in her, his own youth, maybe. Vicar wasn't far into his twenties, but there was no sense of wonder in him anymore. Life was tiring and routine and possessed none of the passions he'd hoped for in the stories he read.

Winn Peterson, regardless of how poorly she felt about her life when Vicar had stopped reading, was still experiencing the thrill of something. A life around ships and a budding revolution of steel, guns, and expansion; a move to a country so quaint that she couldn't help falling in love; a friendship that could have blossomed into love. Never having had a friend, or felt the pull of his affections from anything, he could still picture it, could still recognise the influence such emotions would have. Did he not write a thousand time the entrancing words of Lord Tennyson of the glorious romance of Lancelot?

A pearl garland winds her head:

She leaneth on a velvet bed,

Full royally apparelled,