X.

The doors of a certain small Anglican church open, and a lone figure skirts in.

It is Marianne, with the dawn at her heels as she enters the tall and silently majestic nave: with a renaissance gothic-style architecture inclined to sharp arches, mounted gargoyles, and stained glass windows. Her footsteps echo against the polished smooth marble floor of this rare bastion of serenity within the industrial town, as she finds a seat among the empty aisles. The sanctum is empty, save for one other: at as at the pulpit Father Roderick stands, composedly thumbing through the shiny leaves of his holy book--having noticed her presence as soon as she entered, but simply allowing some time to pass before he approaches her...

Enough time, he figured, for her to decide on exactly what to say.

"Father." She said, timidly licking her lips.

"I am...most sorry, for my actions that dreadful night."

At this he smiled, just as he did a decade ago.

"Marianne." He said, his contenance just as warm as it was a decade ago, even with a few more white hairs to his head. "I wish you'd have visited looking less criminally anxious--like you're about to burglar the place."

"I didn't know where else to turn." She says plainly, as though in excuse.

The good father stares at her inquisitively for a bit, observing the way she sits with her head bowed; not in prayer, but rather hung under the weight of some as of yet unspoken guilt.

For as long as he's spent ruminating on Marianne's character, ever since the events of that fateful night, he'd come to view her as the type to stubbornly refuse all help offered to her: whereupon, as a final resort, she would turn her eyes toward heaven when the situation was at its most bleak. And for this, he figured some might call her insolent, or cowardly; but the good father only sees a sheep that is strayed far from the herd: stuck, and perhaps even prideful of its independance, but no less deserving of love and acceptance.

The good father therefore sets his book away, to give her his full attention.

"So, then--what ails you to-day, my child?"

Marianne locks eyes with him, with there being a clear moment of hesitation as she licks her lips while briefly glancing at the figure of Christ on the cross at the central altar: looming behind the priest's back, like an encroaching third party to their discussion.

"I feel...burdened--by the sins I have committed, father." She says.

"However, I endeavor now to make right."

...

...

It is a terrible experience to have lived closely with someone, only for that someone to one day be inexorably gone.

To make matters worse, if the circumstances of the other's leaving was wholly not of their own desire: such that one is left to their intolerable imaginings of how, somewhere, that other person's heart pines for them as well--beyond their material reach--whilst the thought of them existing as naught but a ghost; a memory doomed to fade and lose shape over time, as it becomes gradually lost to the haunted recesses of the mind.

In Marianne's case, she had experienced this condition once before: with the death of her mother, in how it had cast a grievous pall over the fleeting sunshine of her childhood; yet now, she failed to even restore a face--to that once-sacred image she'd held of her.

What is this frailty of human faculty? She lies awake wondering, sprawled across a mound of unmended clothes, on that first night she has suffered to withstand alone since Luella's confession.

In a sense, she ponders, is life not but a sea of exchanges?

Are the relationships we forge not unlike ships, drifting between the lonely harbors of one another's lives? Arrived, at first, with a purpose to dock: that we may lose our goods and retrieve some in turn; and then set sail to open waters again--disappearing into the swallowing fog of night, with our duties done, until duty returns us again?; if, indeed ever again? Whether those ships be blood relation, or business associates, or intimate friends or lovers.

An endless give-and-take?--until the day beyond our controls when the waves crash ashore, and all that was traded is washed away in the current, losing all it meaning, as the harbor is destroyed and the worker men all condemned to the depths: more skeletons, to become littered across the ocean floor, thereafter to dissolve into sand...

While indulging in such melancholic musings, Marianne is stirred: by the noise of a slamming door, followed by shuffling footsteps downstairs.

A burglar? Heart pounding, she goes for a candle.

In her nightgown, she descends the stairs, as the banter of some unknown entities ruckusing through the storefront grows clearer: of items being dropped, and carelessly thrown about; things of glass and porcelain shattered; clandestine schemes (from what she could gather, something was being sought after) along with frustrated curses, being surreptitiously uttered.

Marianne alerts one of their ranks with a subsequent frightened gasp: one of three scoundrels dressed in all black with masked faces, who inmediately avails to her presence with an undaunted, businessmanlike precision while his compatriots continue in their tasks.

"I shall scream--and alert the nightwatch." Marianne warns, backing from the man.

"Go ahead." He returns. "Lafferty says if you should stand in our way, "he'll talk.""

It is like a dagger being thrust to her chest.

Thusly, Marianne's hands and words are bound: being placed firmly under the unrelenting thumb of her once former employer--now turned tormentor--once more; a ship capsized, and drowning: sinking ever closer to what is assuredly a final, watery grave on the seabed, when she retreats and hides in her room as a rabbit to its burrow, and waits there until sunrise.

Come morning, the full scope of the damages those ruffians have caused could be inspected: looking as though a pack of dogs had torn through the storefront at the scent of something, and laid waste to everything in their pursuit, with the trail leading them to the connecting room as well: the neglected side-chamber housing the befouled boxes of clothes having been disarrayed, as well as Dintman's office that had recieved the worst of it: his papers scattered and strewn, desk drawers pulled out and left there, his clothes closet turned out of its contents.

Marianne views this all with a discomforted silence, to know that she has been masterfully trapped and cornered: as she could not possibly reopen the store, to continue to avoid suspicion of Arthur's disapearance, within its current destruction; nor could she confer to the police to alert them of Lafferty's crime, for fear of direct exposure.

Any which way she looks at it, Marianne has been thwarted--the future having never before looked so grim.

And worst of all, Luella is forever gone.

Overtaken by self-pity, and with seemingly no options to take, Marianne takes to a seat on the chair in Dintman's destroyed office, falling to tears--as, just then, an old friend whom she hadn't seen in quite some years, decides to pay a visit...

"Enough of that, Marianne: we've experienced far worse than this in our time."

Marianne glances ip to see Queen Elizabeth, striding elegantly through the office--overlooking its state with a proudly stoic face, and unbothered air.

"Those hoodlums...sought after something."

"Some such item that must surely be of incredible value to Mr. Lafferty, for him to attempt such an overt action to facillitate its recovery."

With a champion grin, she fixes upon Marianne.

"I wonder...if they'd managed to find it?"

"Did they search everywhere? Or, did they perhaps...miss a spot?"

Peering upward, then, Marianne's own gaze simultaneously followed--to meet at the conspicuously sealed entry to the attic crawlspace.

Entgralled by hope, she unfolded the stairs to have an investigation; to discover that, curiously, the attic crawlspace had been left untouched: the vandals, it seemed, having missed sight of its obscurely small entrypoint, in their reckless haste.

So, Marianne proceeds--having to bend her tall head low--into the dusty, cobwebbed confinement, and begins opening the number of ancient-looking boxes and wall-stacked paper-stuffed portfolios stored therein: the boxes containing mostly old Dintman memorabilia, that hint at no major significance; whereas, the portfolios--

"Artwork?" Marianne whispers in surprise. "Arthur Dintman...was an artist?"

It is page after page of sketches: depicting women in all ways of dress and activity amid some fledgling attempts at scenery--although, it is indubitable as to where the artist's true passion lie.

But beneath all these portfolios of similar contents, exists one of particular interest...

Marianne takes up the final one and impatiently opens it just as she had the others...only, on this occurence, to be shocked by the face she views staring back at her, in the first sketch she unveils.

For, the face staring back at Marianne...she is certain it is her's!

In fact, the entirety of the portfolio's offerings are comprised of drawings done of her own likeness! Some, of her existing in imagined scenes, or outfits, as well as (the lady did blush) in the bare nude--yet still, almost always divorced of her characteristically austere and brooding air, in favor of warm smiles or laughs: another sure example of his imagination at play.

Baffled by this finding, Marianne sits and stares a moment, gawking with incredulity--simply of the fact someone might possibly find her attractive enough to recreate her likeness.

In any case, she thinks of Arthur as a foolish man--having kept hidden his art like he did his most sincere enotions, while living a lie.

Turning her gaze with a sigh, it us then--

She glimpses a hole in the wall, where previously thd stack of portfolios had rested, allowing in a stream of light from the adjacent side, which--Marianne had sweated to realize--could not have been the store's exterior, with how she constructed the place in her mind.

While crouching, to warily peer through it, her movement causes the portfolio that had been resting in her lap to drop the last of its remaining secrets--

In the form of a tall envelope.

...

...

The good father has sat in the confession booth with Marianne, silently listening to her entire tale up to this point: from the night of her departure from the church, until her present return; nodding along in understanding with much of it, or else furrowing his brow at some parts, but never once casting judgment.

"I am not sorry I killed him, Father." Marianne says with firmness, as the Horseman sits to her left at the pew behind her, carressing her shoulder.

Their voices speak in unison:

"I wanted him dead; it was no accident."

"I would've stomped until his blood seeped through my boot, and permanently stained my sole red. I would have stomped until he was nothing but paste beneath my foot."

"And...I would do worse still, to the next man who thinks he can take from me."

Father Roderick, though imperceptive of her demon, can clearly sense the deep-seated evil within Marianne's heart: an evil that had first been planted as but a seed in her the day her mother died; since blossomed into its full, frightening maturity.

However...

The good father leans in close to her.

"I can see how your heart aches, Marianne."

She appears struck: her tender lip quavering, as her mouth hangs unconsciously agape--there being a faraway stare manifested in her eyes: seeing beyond the priest, the church, the whole of the town with skies permanently greyed by a thick haze of factory-produced smog--through all of time and space, to hone on what lay at the cosmic center of it all:

"Luella." She epiphines--releasing her name like a long-withheld sigh.

"I've been waiting for her to save me again, all along: through all the torment...the abuse...the deplorable conditions I've lived in…I wanted hers to be the hand that freed me; when all along she was also suffering, and being held captive, while I always had the power to save myself."

With this admission, the good father leans his head back, appearing more relaxed.

"What of the contents of that envelope?"

"Ledgers." She quickly replies, her eyebrows abruptly narrowing with seriousness. "Business ledgers, detailing the sources as well as the buyers of all the dirtied clothes Arthur Dintman has been procuring, to clean and refashion for resale. It turns out the Dintmans had been in collusion with burglars, as well as graverobbers--for the clothes stolen off dead corpses."

"And as it so happens, LAFFERTY has always been one of their top customers."

Father Roderick is struck pale by this news.

He turns his head, rubbing his eyes wearily as Marianne continues:

"I shall confront Lafferty with this knowledge."

"My offer shall be: in exchange for Luella's freedom and my promised security, as well as him providing me with a cover for Arthur's disappearance, I shall forfeit the ledgers and forever be gone from his concerns."

The good father sighs. "Marianne...you're waging a battle with the most powerful man in town."

Marianne rises. "I will do it, Father--for Luella."

"For, it is she who requires a savior now."

"There is only a few days until her ship arrives, and I won't let it take her away from me."

She draws something from her blouse--

"Father Roderick, I need you to hold unto this. It is the very same sealed envelope I had mentioned, containing the damning details about Lafferty's enterprise with the Dintmans."

Roderick is shaken. "Marianne! As a priest, I cannot--"

She touches his hand, calming him at once.

"I impart them unto you, as a church is the one place Lafferty and his minions would never dare to impose, trusting you'll be able to keep them safe until I can confirm with you whether the deal is struck."

"What if something goes wrong?"

Marianne grunts. "I suppose, then..." She pauses, biting her lip with a ponderous gaze, before continuing again with vigor:

"Should no word be heard back from me within three months' time, I permit you to do with these documents as you please: whether to release, or to destroy."

"No, but Marianne you mustn't! Wait--"

Before he can complete his protest, Marianne has already risen from the booth.

He chases, but quickly loses sight of her among a throng of people now entering through the doors to attend to their daily devotions.