Disclaimer: This chapter references people and events introduced in the previous two chapters of the story, copies of which (albeit not the most recent revised versions [not that anyone but the author himself would notice the subtle changes]) may be found in the archives on this very journal. Please read those before delving into this, if you are concerned about missing something.

[Exit Orpheum.]

Chapter the Third

     Darkness consumed Fauntleroy "Alex" Graves as he hunched over an antiquated Underwood typewriter, punching the keys with such unrestrained savagery that one might believe he was attempting to fell his foes with words alone. And so he was, wielding his lethal prose as a dagger with which he may take revenge upon those who had wronged him throughout the rueful burden he called Life. The room's only illumination came from a single guttering candle in an elaborate candelabrum, which cast deep, menacing shadows upon Alex's face with its unsteady flicker. Swathed in that cloak of midnight, he was just another wraith lurking in the twilight, observing the world around him from the dark recesses of existence.
     There was a light tap on his door, and Alex wheeled around with eyes blazing.
     "Leave me be, you infernal hag!" he roared, lunging back to his work and releasing a fresh volley of hateful and dolorous words upon the paper, pieces of type falling like executioners' axes.
     "All right, honey, just tell me if you get hungry," Elise said, her voice tremulous as she backed away from the door. She worried about her younger son; he always seemed either unspeakably angry or overwhelmingly sad. She would make sure to have Dr. Canard examine Fauntleroy to ensure that nothing was the matter with him. Elise was not quite certain what the symptoms were for fever, but, feeling her forehead, she thought she detected unnatural warmth. It was time for her weekly check-up anyway.

     While Alex listened to the click-clack of his mother's shoes receding, he paused for a moment to reflect on his work thus far; he was satisfied with the latest chapter, which mainly had to do with the story's protagonist, a misunderstood young man named Nottingham, and his family.
     Although Nottingham appeared to be merely an overly cynical and despondent teenager, these attributes represented only a natural defensive response to his environment, which had oppressed him since early childhood. Nottingham's cynicism was primarily his way of laughing off his more distressing emotions, but it did partly stem from his ridiculous family members: the pompous, pedantic, but utterly oblivious father; the facile, overeager mother, with emotions fragile as a china doll and a head as hollow; the arrogant and incompetent brother, spitting image of his father; and the tempestuous sister, perhaps the only redeemable one in the group.
     Alex read over a section of what he had just written and nodded. This would do.

     Put simply, Nottingham's family was a joke. His father was a blustering fool who affected pedigree to cover up his own humiliating inadequacies. The man thus pretended as if he lived in the Victorian Age, with its impeccable etiquette and marked disapproval of anything deemed "uncouth." In truth, he was only a pathetic middle-aged man who wished he had done something more meaningful with his life.
     His home was not an opulent mansion in the countryside filled with crystal chandeliers and fine artwork, but rather a humble track home deep in the mundane wilderness of Suburbia; the closest thing Nottingham's father had to a servant was the family's dog, a plump, stupid Norwich terrier named Jeeves. His suits came from Wal-Mart, not Armani.
     Yet still this man, stripped of everything but his irrepressible pride, persisted in self-delusion. He clung to his self-aggrandised "aristocracy" as a drowning man does to a piece of wreckage, adrift in the vast ocean of Ignominy.

     Alex pulled away from the gleaming black typewriter and went to the open window. He looked out into the evening gloom; it gazed back with melancholy eyes, its voice the whisper of wind that beckoned him to breathe the cool night air, its fingers a gnarled tree branch that tapped expectantly on the windowpane.
     It asked if he could come out to play.
     In response, Alex climbed onto the branch that had, years ago, grown against the side of the house unchecked by Remington, who, unlike other fathers Alex knew, refused to get involved in any matters involving yardwork.
     "Leave that to the gardeners!" Remington would bellow. When someone else in the family attempted to explain that the gardening staff to which he referred was non-existent, he would merely wave them off with an impatient flourish of his hand. "It is not my responsibility to sully my hands with menial labor; that's what subordinates are for!"
     As he jumped down to the ground, his landing softened by the thick layer of leaves that had fallen around the crooked tree, Alex sighed. Someday he would be free of his family, which seemed to alternately forsake and smother him; until then, he was bound to the Graves family as an indentured servant is to his master, obligated to offer his services in return for eventual freedom. Alex was convinced that the only reason parents have children in the first place was for convenient labor, anyway; that, and to have someone to look after them in old age, when the ravages of senility had befallen the body and mind.
     But that was in the future. Like many pseudo-Romantic self-proclaimed artists, Alex hoped to die tragically young, preferably from some sort of excruciating and hopelessly outdated disease like tuberculosis, which, of course, he would call "The Consumption." During his short time on the earth, he would spend his time as a recluse, naturally, barely making the rent on his garret on the Seine. Whatever pittance he could scrounge would be spent on paper, ink for his battered Underwood, and that emerald elixir whose hallucinogenic influences supposedly work wonders on the imagination: absinthe.
     It was Alex's most fervent desire that, after succumbing to Death's summoning, his papers would be found and he would finally be discovered and recognised as one of the greats. He had only to wait until the foetid stench of his decomposing corpse brought someone to investigate, and his true potential would, at last, be realised.
     Alex pulled his cloak around him as he meandered down the street, admiring the simple beauty of a residential area at night. He marveled at the glow of streetlights that throw circles of light among deep pools of shadow; the silence that falls like a blanket over the city, pierced only by the occasional owl's hoot; the muted splendor of a place that, by daylight, would be bustling with businesspeople making their way to work and children cavorting through the spray of sprinklers.
     As a rule, he preferred night to day, not merely because the moon is inextricably tied to creativity, but for the simple reason that at night he was able to avoid the "teeming masses of mediocrity," as he liked to call them. These were the people—boors, really—who lurched through life without giving a second thought to the finer things in the world, whose minds were left unscathed by such concepts as humility, erudition, and art. Alex had discovered that an alarming number of such imbeciles walk the earth during the day, and the only proper way to save oneself from their maddening simplicity is to venture out only after sunset. Of course, there were other imbeciles and other unsavory characters to shun with the arrival of nightfall, but their numbers were far less unsettling.
     Alex passed by a neighbor's plate glass window and noticed that he was dully reflected in the sheen cast by a nearby streetlight. To anyone else wandering the streets that night, he would have presented an imposing figure: wrapped in his long black cloak, he might appear to be the Angel of Death, or so he hoped. Alex found that if he tilted his head the right way, his ghostly reflection would appear even more fearsome as his eyes disappeared into the shadows underneath his hood, giving him a cadaverous quality.
     By daylight, Alex was, like his sister, somewhat dismal but handsome nonetheless. His dark eyes looked out from beneath jet hair that hung over his face like the lachrymose limbs of a weeping willow. Gwen always said that his hair made him look like a hippie or some other filthy advocate of the Grunge Movement, but Alex liked it the way it was. Even in all the sun's glory, however, Alex could intimidate people; although he did not tower over his peers, he had a presence about him that others found disquieting. And for good reason: garbed only in black, Alex exuded such a funereal aura that it seemed the sun's cheerful rays were cast off his saturnine personality like water off a shaking dog.

     Alex continued down the road, then turned into an alleyway whose deeply planted shadows were not uprooted by officious streetlights. Here, the pale, lustrous glow of the moon held sway, and imparted upon the otherwise mundane contents of the alley a certain indistinctness that played tricks on the imagination.
     Thus did a rotting pile of garbage bags, their unspeakable contents spilling out onto the street, metamorphose into the vague form of a knight on horseback. His armour gleamed in the pallid moonlight, his blade's razor edge glimmering in errant beams, as he stood poised to strike. The knight's noble steed, black as sin, pawed at the asphalt and whinnied, as if to ask whether it were yet the time to attack. Alex imagined he saw the knight pat the horse's mane with his gauntlet to calm the impatient beast.
     "Christ, I need a smoke," Alex said, reaching for a hidden, but all too familiar, pocket on the inside of his cloak. From it he pulled a battered pack of Djarum cloves—more fragrant than regular cigarettes, but also more life-threatening—then put one of the carcinogen-laced treats to his lips. Alex could already taste the exotic, intoxicating flavor unique to cloves, and relished it in the seconds it took to find his trusty silver Zippo, etched with an elaborate intaglio. In one automatic movement, he flipped open the lighter, struck the flint, and lit his cigarette with the small, flickering flame.
     Alex inhaled deeply and felt the comforting warmth envelop him; no more knights or other quixotic visions would intrude upon this peaceful evening. All Alex wanted was to have some sanity in this madhouse of Life, yet it seemed the world was intent on derangement. And now it appeared that his own mind conspired against him, conjuring chimerical hallucinations to disorient and delude.
     Perhaps he, like so many impassioned artists before him, truly was going mad, tortured by the maleficent Mephistopheles of Creativity, who offered genius and renown in return for lifelong devotion and the sacrifice of one's soul. He supposed that insanity would help his standing as a tragic artist, but still did not delight in the idea that he would be tormented by inner demons for the whole of his life. But if he were to be daft, so be it.

     Bathed in the elegant radiance of the moon, Alex was inclined to agree with Shakespeare; that "sovereign mistress of the true melancholy" had always comforted him on his sombre strolls through the night-shrouded city. She reigns over the night as the soft-spoken monarch, graceful yet just as powerful as the gaudy despot of the sun, whose finery is too blinding to behold. While his brilliance may overshadow her during the day, her true poignancy is realised when dusk falls as velvet over the world. Her mercurial mystique and subtle beauty had acted as inspiration to artists for centuries, and now Alex was among the subjects of the Kingdom of Night, worshiping the queen of heaven above him.
     Alex left the alley, leaving the memory of the knight behind him, and made his way down a lane flanked by ancient trees, arboreal monoliths reaching with vast limbs toward the darkling firmament. Following proper autumn fashion, the trees donned their finest coats of leaves like so many vain women, each attempting to outdo the others with grand ochres and crimsons; in time, however, those vibrant colours dulled, and the same trees who had once flaunted their rich apparel soon strove to be rid of the unfashionable garb, deeming it "passé" as they prepared for winter's coming.
     Already, the ground around Alex was littered with the jettisoned gowns of the dignified dames whose reproachful whispers fueled the breeze that whipped his cloak and whistled through his hair. The wind plucked some leaves from the ground and sent them whirling past Alex, their rustling soothing him as he closed his eyes and simply listened to the sounds of the night. Truly, this is where he belonged, not in the glaring light of day.