Ripheus23

[Resident introduction scene.]

[Library scene.]

… The Amphitheater rises around a dark-marked tree, a cedar with a black square painted in the center. Simon thinks of it like a dead television screen with no possible remote except his own—or another parkgoer’s—mind. He kneels there, praying and remembering: to his mysterious God, and the man Dean who he feels would have loved to see this park.

            Awhile later Simon makes his way to the Hall of Cedars, a stretch of trees with no lesser foliage closing the gaps between the great sentinels. When he makes his way half-way to the overturned crown of roots at the heart of a small glade, he stops in dread.

            There’s a deer standing before him, not running. One horn broke off of late, and the other grows like the horn of unicorn. So, a unicorn anyway, technically. Its eyes take in Simon warily, but not fearfully.

            “Only one who believes in unicorns/Is only one ever killed by one,” Simon mumbles, imagining an Internet meme with his face, stupidly grinning, for the background.

            The deer reflects upon the man, though Simon has no idea why or to what effect. He sits in the glade and the creature continues to walk around him from a distance.

            He wonders whether Dean would have killed the animal for some reason; Simon never figured out if Dean goes hunting from time to time. The thought makes him as sick as daydream nightmares in which Mr. Utah ravishes some unguessable girl. “I just want to find a guy to talk to,” Dean had said years ago, before he disappeared. “You know, I think the Law of Attraction is the reason we met.”

            Evidently not.

            Wind haunts the cedars’ sky.

            Simon tries to read a book.

            The wind pushes the pages back and forth.

            Hello, Simon.

            He leaps up. “What the hell?” he says.

            Though I am indeed Hell itself, I have much to say to you ere your torment begins.

            Slamming the book closed, Simon looks in as many directions as he can. The deer, far away, looks back. “Don’t… don’t leave…?” Simon whispers to it. If it counts as a unicorn, maybe it can protect him?

            It will be killed when I wish it to. You cannot protect it. You can protect nothing, Simon.

            He fiddles in a pocket, gripping his little bottle of antipsychotic medication.

            In the beginning, there was a Machine…

            Simon runs from the Hall, the deer running too, both away from each other and the words of darkness.