PARLOR TRICKS: Still, Again

Every haunting is personal

Welcome to Ashford Row

PARLOR TRICKS # 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

SMOKE & MIRRORS # 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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Still, Again

Ashford Row was not built for the sound of rushing water.

There were fountains, yes, and the occasional polite rain that slicked the cobblestones and gave the lamps something to shimmer against. But this low, continuous rush murmured as though something unseen had been set loose along the city streets.

Arthur paused at the edge of the square. The town center spread out before him in careful geometry: shopfronts with their tidy displays, benches arranged for conversation, the clocktower standing in quiet authority over it all. And cutting across that order, spilling between it, was water.

It ran in narrow, insistent channels along cracks and grooves. Followed the seams between stones. Around table legs. Over the edges of steps. It gathered where it pleased, then moved again, fickle in its flow.

People kept their distance. A shopkeeper stood in his doorway, apron twisted in his hands. A pair of women lingered beneath an awning with a particular stillness as they watched. Ashford Row tolerated many peculiar things. This was approaching the edge of those limits.

Arthur adjusted his grip on his cane and stepped forward. As he did so, the water shifted. It was subtle movement, a slight drawing inward, a tension along its surface. Recognition. “Yes,” Arthur murmured. “I thought it might be you.” He followed its flow.

The man he found stood near the base of the clocktower, shoes already darkened through. He had not moved to higher ground. Had not even attempted it. His posture carried that same exhausted stillness Arthur remembered from the pier, though it had settled deeper now, as if the weight he bore had found a more permanent place to rest.

“You’ve come into town,” said Arthur as he approached. “And brought it with you.”

The man gave a humorless huff. “Didn’t mean to.”

“And yet,” said Arthur, sweeping one arm, “here you are.”

The water curled around the man’s ankles, not quite touching his skin. It moved with a strange restraint there, as though it recognized him differently than it did the rest of the world.

Arthur stopped a few paces away. “We had an understanding.”

The man’s gaze flicked up. “You said I could keep it.”

“I said you could live alongside it,” Arthur corrected. “This is something else entirely.”

The man looked down at the water. For a moment, something like uncertainty crossed his face. “It’s not usually like this.”

The water stilled. Then, with a suddenness that cracked the moment cleanly in two, it surged. It gathered itself, drawing inward from every thin stream and shallow pool, converging with unnatural speed. The channels emptied. The seams ran dry. All of it pulled toward and around the man in a tightening spiral.

Arthur moved before the motion completed, striking his cane to the stone with a sharp, deliberate crack. “Enough.”

For an instant, the water hesitated. Then it lunged. It hit like a body thrown. Arthur pivoted, the force catching him across the side and driving him back a step. Cold soaked through his coat immediately, heavier than it should have been, clinging with an intent that had nothing to do with gravity. Denser than water. Memory.

Arthur planted the ferrule of his cane against the stone and dragged it in a short, deliberate arc. The motion left a faint, scuffed crescent against the cobblestones. “Stay,” he said, quieter now.

The water recoiled from the line. The boundary had meaning. Arthur’s eyes narrowed. “Good,” he murmured.

The second surge came differently. It split around the mark he’d made, flowing to either side before rejoining behind him. Clever. Adaptive. Arthur turned too late, and the impact took him from behind, knocking his legs out from under him. The world dropped away into cold and motion, the neat geometry of the square dissolving into a spinning wash of gray light and darker currents.

He hit the ground hard, the breath driven from his chest. Water closed over him with a pressure that filled every space at once, forcing itself into his ears, his nose, the back of his throat. The sound was too loud and too close, a roaring that carried something beneath it. A voice, perhaps. Or the memory of its notes.

Arthur’s hand tightened on his cane as he struggled for control. The silver tip struck against stone amidst the swirling current, and he felt his cane vibrate. A point of contact. A point of truth. He pressed it firmly. The vibration sharpened. For a moment, the water around him stuttered, losing cohesion, like a thought interrupted mid-formation. Then the current took him again. This time it pulled down. Space tilted with the impossible suggestion of depth where there should have been none. The world narrowed to a single, terrible direction.

Arthur’s composure cracked. “Ah,” he managed, voice thin in the pressure. “I see you now.”

The memory had found its shape. Arthur was no longer in the square. He was tumbling in the water. Not this water, not truly, but the original water. The one that had weight to it, consequence to it. The one that had taken something long ago.

Arthur’s grip slipped. The cane wrenched from his hand. For the first time in a very long while, Arthur Mercer was not in control of the exchange.

Something seized his coat. The motion was abrupt, ungraceful. A desperate, human grip. He was hauled sideways, then up. Air returned in a violent rush and Arthur collapsed onto the cobblestones, coughing hard enough to blur the edges of his vision. Water spilled from him in sheets, though far less than there should have been.

“Thanks,” he managed hoarsely. “Much appreciated.”

The man stood over him, soaked to the bone, breathing hard. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” He stopped, shaking his head. He looked upon the water swirling and gathering itself. “I didn’t mean to cause this.”

The water had drawn back again. It circled them now in a slow, tightening ring as if reconsidering its approach. Arthur retrieved his cane, his movements slower this time. The water surged again, rising, gathering itself into a shape that was almost, but not quite, human. A suggestion of shoulders. The faintest tilt of a head. The surface trembling with the effort of holding form.

The man’s gaze fixed on it, unblinking. He staggered back a step. “I couldn’t reach him,” he said, the words coming faster now, facing his memory in watery form. “I was right there. I could see him. I just— I couldn’t—” The man’s voice came small. “I tried.”

“I know,” said Arthur.

“I went in after him.”

“I know.”

“I just—” His breath hitched. “I just wasn’t fast enough.”

Arthur’s grip tightened on his cane. “No,” he said quietly. “You weren’t.”

The man looked up at Arthur. “What do I do?”

At the threat of those words, the water lurched violently. Arthur stepped between them. Instead of raising his cane again, he reached into his coat. From an inner pocket, he withdrew a folded paper object, yellowed slightly with age and softened at the edges from being carried too long. A paper boat.

“What does a river do,” he said calmly, “when it encounters something small enough that it cannot justify destroying?”

The man stared. “What?”

Arthur crouched and set the little boat carefully atop the rushing water at their feet. Immediately, the current caught it. The water surged harder, spiraling inward, but the tiny boat bobbed unevenly through it, dipping and turning, refusing to sink despite the violence around it.

“Water remembers force,” Arthur said. “But it also remembers shape. Direction. Pattern. All this water has ever known is drowning.”

The water struck again, trying to swamp the paper boat, but the folded paper shape simply spun about. It drifted toward the center of the swirling current with playful bobs.

“Even water may be taught another path.”

The demon gathered itself into that wavering human outline again, shoulders forming from churning water, head bowed and indistinct. The boat passed directly through it. For the first time, the shape faltered.

The man stared at it, breathing unevenly. “I don’t understand.”

“You are beginning to interrupt it,” Arthur said quietly.

The current surged toward the man. This time, Arthur did not step between them. The paper boat struck the man’s boot and lodged there against the current. Small. Fragile. Waiting. Like a child’s toy passed to him. The man looked down at the boat. Then at the water. Then finally at the shape trying so desperately to become the memory of his brother.

“I’m here,” he said. The water trembled.

“I should have gone back sooner.”

The shape destabilized.

“I was scared.”

The current weakened.

“And I’ve been drowning with you ever since.”

The paper boat tipped once, and the entire shape collapsed around it, like tension finally released. The force drained from it, leaving only ordinary water behind.

The channels reformed. The seams filled. Then, slowly, even that began to recede. Arthur waited until the last of it slipped back into nothing. The square settled. Sound returned in cautious pieces. A door opening somewhere. A voice, low and uncertain. The distant, ordinary life of Ashford Row resuming its place around the disturbance. The man stood where he was, breathing hard, but upright.

Arthur approached him. “Well,” he said, brushing a bit of damp from his sleeve. “That’s considerably better.”

The man let out a long breath. “Is it gone?”

Arthur considered. “No,” he said. “But it’s no longer trying to drown the town.”

The man nodded once. “That seems fair.”

Arthur studied him for a moment longer. “You understand what comes next.”

The man looked down at the last faint traces of damp on the stone, then back up. “I do.”

Arthur turned, beginning to make his way back across the square.

Behind him, the man spoke. “Arthur.”

He paused, glancing back.

“Thank you,” said the man.

Arthur considered that. “You’re welcome.” Then, with the faintest hint of dry amusement: “Though I do prefer my demonstrations somewhat less immersive.”

He adjusted his grip on his cane and continued on, leaving the square to its repairs and the man to his reckoning.