Sharlo dreamed of the theatre again.
There were no doors, no windows, and no memory of entering. The moment he opened his eyes, he was standing at centre stage beneath a single spotlight, white as a surgical lamp, so stark it left him without even a shadow.
Beyond the footlights, row upon row of empty seats faded greyly into the dark, with no end in sight. Dust lay thick enough on their backs to write in.
He had once counted as far as the fortieth row. Past that, the darkness grew dense as water, and if he stared into it too long, he began to feel that something was staring back.
Only one seat in the entire theatre was clean.
It stood at the exact centre of the front row, untouched by dust. The velvet of its cushion even held a dull crimson sheen, the sort of patina left by someone sitting there year after year. Yet Sharlo had never seen anyone in it.
He had tried many things in this dream. He had jumped down from the stage, only to discover that however long he walked, the front row remained "just a little farther ahead." He had sat with his back to the auditorium, only for the spotlight to circle round and shine in his face. He had shouted, "Is anyone there?" and the theatre had swallowed his voice whole, refusing him even an echo.
Tonight, he decided to try something new. He cleared his throat and bowed to the vacant darkness.
"Thank you all for coming," he said. "Tonight's performance is called—Rent. The tragic tale of how one young man raises three silver candles in three days. Running time: one lifetime. No intermission."
The darkness did not laugh.
But as he straightened, he heard something. A faint, dry sound, like two fingers brushing together—not applause, but the half-sound of palms closing just before the first clap.
Then he woke.
* * *
There was fog beyond the window, and bells within the fog. In Kandelburg, those two things always arrived before the morning light.
Sharlo lay awake for a while, waiting for his heartbeat to slow. For three months the dream had returned every few nights, always much the same. Today had been different. Today, it had almost applauded.
"Is that good or bad?" he asked the ceiling.
A water stain shaped like a crooked-necked sheep marked the plaster, the only thing in the room that had listened to him faithfully for years.
A knock sounded downstairs: three short, one long. Mrs. Porter.
His landlady never waited for an answer after knocking; she simply opened the door. Sharlo had therefore mastered the art of springing out of bed and appearing fully respectable in the interval between three short knocks and one long.
"Mr. Vane!" Mrs. Porter's voice entered before the rest of her. "Today is the seventeenth."
"Good morning, Mrs. Porter. You're looking remarkably well."
"Rent."
"I know it's the seventeenth," Sharlo said with perfect sincerity. "The seventeenth is an auspicious day. I have a feeling a client will walk in today. A client who can afford a deposit."
"You had that feeling last week."
"Premonitions improve the longer they mature."
Mrs. Porter planted one finger against the doorframe like a judge bringing down his gavel.
"Three days. Three silver candles in three days, and not one copper tinder less. Your uncle was late too, but at least he was late with dignity."
She went downstairs. Sharlo bowed to the doorframe, then turned to make coffee.
The beans were last month's stale remnants; ground, they smelled of an old wooden cupboard, and brewed, they produced something that could only technically be called "hot brown water." Cup in hand, he went to the window and pushed it open a crack.
Fogbank District lay steeping in mist. The canal ran below his building, a film of coal dust floating on the water while barge horns called dully through the murk.
Across the street, the gas lamps were still lit, and a lamplighter on a ladder was pinching them out one by one. In another quarter of an hour, it would be time for the Dawn Tower to "kindle the sun."
Sharlo waited with his cup.
At precisely seven, a spark of gold-red fire appeared atop the Dawn Tower in the eastern quarter of the city. It climbed along something unseen, through fog and cloud, and then—the sun in the sky came on with a thump.
There was no sound, but Sharlo always felt there ought to be a thump. As if an enormous lamp had been switched on.
Weary, dark-red light spilled over Kandelburg's rooftops. The fog flushed red, then gold, then slowly began to thin.
In the street, old women at morning prayer traced circles toward the Dawn Tower and murmured, "All light returns to the Daystar."
That was the first entry in Sharlo's "List of Things Wrong with This World."
He returned to his desk and opened the black notebook. A single line stood at the top of the first page: Things Wrong with This World.
One: The sun has to be lit. Everyone thinks the Sun-Kindling Rite is symbolic. But I have watched for three months. On cloudy days the flame climbs more slowly, and the sun comes on later. Symbols are not late.
Two: My pocket watch stops for one minute every midnight. The watchmaker says there is nothing wrong with it. I changed watches. The new one stops too. The problem is not the watch.
Three: I keep having the same dream. A theatre. Addition today: it almost applauded me.
Earlier pages bore older writing, fragments only he could understand: the name of a university, a rehearsal schedule for a drama club, a play never finished, rain, a car whose brakes had screamed for far too long.
Three months ago, Sharlo Vane had awakened in this room with two lives inside his head.
One belonged to "Sharlo Vane," twenty-two, born in Kandelburg, orphaned young and raised by his uncle August Vane, for whom he had done odd jobs at the Daydream Detective Agency.
The other belonged to a young man from another world, where no one had to light the sun and a thing called electricity made light at night. He had been rehearsing improvisational comedy with a drama club, and halfway through rehearsal, he had gone out to buy a late-night snack.
The two sets of memories fitted together inside his skull without a seam, and neither would admit to being false.
The uncle of this body—old Vane—had disappeared six months before Sharlo woke.
He had left behind a roomful of old case files, a violin with a broken string, half a tin of dreadful coffee, and a note: Away on business. Don't worry. Kindly pay my share of the rent.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
"Charming," Sharlo said, tucking the note back beneath the paperweight.
The Daydream Detective Agency occupied the building's second floor, one large room and one small. The small one was a bedroom; a desk, two visitors' chairs, and four floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets crammed the larger.
The cabinets were old Vane's kingdom. More than twenty years of case files stood regimented within them, each in a manila cover tied with twine, each label written in an immaculate hand.
Sharlo had spent three months reading every one.
Those files were the finest textbooks this world had given him.
His uncle's cases ranged widely: a flour mill whose stones turned by themselves at midnight and ground bitter flour; a ferry barge that refused to sink despite seven holes chopped through its hull, leaving its owner too frightened to burn it and too frightened not to; an old-town lady who claimed her cat came home every day to eat supper on behalf of her dead husband.
That file concluded: "Claim substantiated. Settlement reached. Cat to remain in residence."
A record of payment was appended to every case, the sums wonderfully erratic: three copper tinders, a basket of eggs, one free haircut, assorted promissory notes. At the agency's rates, survival depended entirely on quantity.
From those records, Sharlo had pieced together the outline of this world's hidden side. Strange things were real. They had always been there, damp beneath the floorboards.
Church and government each swept their own doorstep; whatever their brooms missed seeped along the baseboards and into little establishments like Daydream.
One compartment on the topmost shelf of the files was locked. Sharlo had tried twice in three months to open it and failed—not because the brass padlock was particularly strong, but because it had no keyhole.
Later, sitting in his chair, he had realised something that chilled him more the longer he considered it: a man who had a lock made without a keyhole must have known, before he vanished, that he was going to vanish.
The violin with its broken string stood in a corner, rosin marks still fresh upon its body. Sharlo could not play. But in his previous life, he had strummed a guitar badly after rehearsals.
The teacher who led their improvisation class had taught them a lesson Sharlo remembered to this day: the whole secret of improvisation was contained in two words—accept it.
Whatever your partner threw at you, accept it, then throw back something more interesting. Forget your line? Accept it. Prop breaks? Accept it.
If the sky falls, accept that first, and then work out how to throw it back.
The teacher had never known that one of his students would later put that craft to use in a place where the sky truly had fallen.
As for how Sharlo had survived the past three months, it was not a dignified tale.
He wrote letters home for illiterate dockhands at two copper tinders apiece; balanced the books for the landlady of the Anchor and Bell in exchange for supper; submitted letters under four different names to the Evening Bell Gazette so they could quarrel with one another over the same subject, then pooled the fees to buy half a pound of coffee.
As for genuine detective work—three months beneath his signboard, not one case.
The people of Kandelburg preferred to let strangeness rot in their bellies rather than open a door marked DAYDREAM.
He had reported his uncle missing at Central Police Headquarters as well.
After hearing "my uncle has disappeared," the desk sergeant opened his ledger and asked by rote: How long? Any enemies? Did he take his money?
At the third "I don't know," the sergeant closed the book and offered a Kandelburg kind of consolation.
"Son, a man who pays his rent before leaving isn't missing. He's travelling."
Perhaps. But travellers did not leave locks without keyholes.
Sharlo remained here partly because he was waiting for his uncle to return, and partly for a reason he could not put into words. The two sets of memories had fought in his head for three months.
His life on Earth had electric lamps and paved roads and a play left halfway through rehearsal, but none of those things could be touched.
This room—this desk, these files, this broken-stringed violin—was the only solid thing that existed beneath the name "Sharlo Vane." A man needed one patch of firm ground beneath his feet before he could set out in search of anything else.
Downstairs, the doorbell rang.
It was not Mrs. Porter's knock. Someone was yanking the bell-rope, fast and ragged, as though determined to tear it loose.
Sharlo leaned over the stairwell and saw a woman's silhouette beyond the glass door, the feather in her hat quivering in the fog.
He froze for half a second, then hurried downstairs. In the last instant before opening the door, he straightened his collar and wiped a clean streak across the dusty DAYDREAM DETECTIVE AGENCY sign with his sleeve.
"Good morning," he said as he opened the door. "This is—"
"Do you deal with strange things here?" the woman cut in.
She was perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six, respectably dressed but with one button fastened wrong. Her eyes were swollen, and she clutched a pair of men's gloves so hard her knuckles had gone white.
Her voice was badly hoarse, as if she had cried through an entire night and only a dry, inner burning remained.
"People say," she began, "there's a Daydream Agency by the canal in Fogbank District, and old Vane handles the things no one else will. Things the church won't touch, the hospital won't touch, and the police laugh at. Is this the place?"
Sharlo opened the door all the way.
"Old Vane isn't here," he said. "But the agency is. Please come in—and mind the third stair. It's half an inch taller than the others. I've always suspected malice."
* * *
The client was Cheryl Hart, a bookkeeper for a silk merchant in the harbour district. Her fiancé, Thomas Ophir, worked at a bill house.
They had been engaged for one year and two months, and their wedding was set for the winter solstice.
"He isn't missing," Cheryl said from the visitor's chair, her back held perfectly straight as though she were using the last of her strength to remain respectable. "He goes to work as usual, eats as usual, greets me as usual. He lives in the same place. Anyone can find him."
"Then what is strange?"
Cheryl's fingers tightened around the gloves.
"Ten days ago, we were still choosing designs for the invitations. Nine mornings ago, he met me in the street, took off his hat, and said, 'Good morning, Miss Hart.'"
She raised her eyes.
"Mr. Vane, he called me Miss Hart. He looked at me the way he might look at an old bill he'd already entered in the ledger. Every figure correct, but none of it his concern anymore."
Sharlo said nothing. He pushed a cup of hot brown water toward her.
"I thought he was joking. Thomas doesn't make jokes like that, but I would rather he had been. I asked if he didn't know me. He said, 'I do, Miss Hart. We were engaged.'"
"When he said 'were engaged,' it sounded as though he were reading from someone else's accounts."
Cheryl's voice was terrifyingly flat.
"I took him to a doctor. The doctor said he was perfectly well, his memory intact, every answer lucid. I took him to the Church of the Daystar. The priest blessed him, and he knelt, rose, and gave thanks with perfect courtesy."
"At last I asked him: Thomas, do you still love me?"
She paused.
"He thought about it. He truly thought hard, Mr. Vane. He's a serious man. Then he said, 'I remember that I loved you. The way I remember a number in a ledger. But that column is empty now.'"
The room fell silent for several seconds. Far outside, a barge gave a low call.
"His eyes," Sharlo said. "Have they gone grey?"
Cheryl's head snapped up.
"How did you know?"
Sharlo did not, in fact, know how he knew. The question had leapt out by itself, like a line whispered into his ear for him to repeat. The skin prickled along the back of his neck.
"A guess," he said. "Guesswork is fundamental to the profession. One last question, Miss Hart."
"Has Thomas been anywhere new lately? Not his usual tavern, church, or prospective mother-in-law's house. Somewhere he would never ordinarily have gone in his life."
Cheryl thought for a long while.
"The opera," she said. "The Golden Iris Opera House. He went once two months ago. A colleague from the bill house invited him."
"I teased him—since when could Mr. Bill Clerk afford to hear the Nightingale sing? He was happy for days afterward. Said it was the finest thing he had ever heard."
Her eyes reddened again.
"He went back several times. I don't know where he found the money."
Sharlo wrote on the paper: Golden Iris. Nightingale. Money.
"The agency accepts your case," he said. "One silver candle as a deposit. Ordinarily it would be two, but you've fastened one button wrong, which means you had no attention left for the mirror when you left home. Nobody ought to rob a burning house at a time like that."
Cheryl stared, looked down at her bodice, and suddenly began to cry. She stifled herself after two sobs, then counted twelve copper tinders from her handbag and placed them on the desk one by one, each perfectly aligned.
"Bring him back," she said. "Or... at least tell me where the contents of that column went. The books cannot simply balance like this. Mr. Vane, one year and two months cannot vanish without an entry showing where it went."
* * *
That night, Sharlo was bent over his desk arranging his notes. As he wrote the words "grey eyes," his pocket watch sounded.
Not a chime. The sound of stopping—the ticking ceased.
He lifted the watch. Its hands pointed to precisely midnight, the second hand suspended in mid-air as though pinned beneath a finger.
Every other sound in the room stopped with it. The canal water, the snores downstairs, the horns in the fog—all receded until the silence resembled the theatre.
Then, at the very heart of that silence, Sharlo heard a voice.
Faint, dry, courteous, and utterly without feeling, like an announcement before the curtain rose:
"Act One—The Faded Lover."
"We hope you enjoy the performance."
Tick. The second hand fell. The sounds of the world flooded back like a returning tide.
Sharlo sat where he was, gripping the watch, and did not move for a long while.
Then he opened the black notebook and added a line beneath the third entry, pressing the pen hard into the paper:
Addition to Three: It isn't only a dream. It is watching me work a case. It calls the case a "play."
He closed the notebook and blew out the lamp. In the darkness, he addressed an auditorium whose whereabouts he did not know.
"If you want to watch, buy a ticket. One silver candle as a deposit."
No one answered. But for some reason, he felt that something deep in the dark had settled back against its seat in satisfaction.