"Are you sure this is something you want to do?" Kai was right up close to Jeremiah, her face inches from his. He was beginning to become familiar with the intensity of her gaze, her propensity for nearness, but he wasn't sure he'd ever get used to it.

"Yes, it's fine. I've been wanting to come here for years."

"Bucket list?"

"Something like that."

They stood before the doors of the unassuming museum, its classic brick and sandstone façade and large wooden doors hardly the stuff of nightmares. And yet, what lay within . . . Jeremiah had known of this place for years, but he'd never been sure he'd be able to visit it--wasn't sure he was up to it even now, physically or otherwise.

"Is your skeleton in there?"

"No. I've already told you--Charles Byrne is at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. They've got some other giant here. I don't know who."

Rather than respond to his brusqueness, Kai took hold of his hand, wrapped her small fingers through his long fingers, and squeezed. Jeremiah let out a quavering breath. Why she'd stayed with him after their confusing first encounter, after he'd blubbered all over her shoulder when she'd reminded him he'd wanted to die, he didn't know, and he didn't ask. They'd been inseparable since then, though not due to a romantic connection so much as a human one. Kai hadn't trusted him on his own, and he hadn't wanted to be alone, so he'd stayed with her and her auntie ( Nan had gone off to eat nachos somewhere else, presumably). After gathering the courage, he'd quit his job and cleaned out what little he'd had in his studio apartment, and they'd rented a car. Since then, they'd been coasting, meandering slowly toward what he knew was his point of no return.

He hadn't told Kai much about what was going on. In fact, she'd seemed almost disinterested, hadn't asked him any questions about where they were headed or why they were headed there. She had asked him only why he'd wanted to die--that'd been the day he'd woken at her place--and he'd told her it'd been because of a message, a text from someone in his hometown, telling him it was time he came back. If Kai had wondered what about that could possibly push Jeremiah to the brink of suicide, she hadn't asked.

She herself was a mystery, but he hadn't been able to get out of his own head enough to try to get into hers. He just accepted (though not quite appreciated) the fact that she was there.

Philadelphia was one stop on their journey; it wasn't particularly on the way, but in conversation, Jeremiah had pointedly mentioned a desire (more an imperative), to go to a museum there--a museum of human oddities. So now here they stood before it, Kai with her arm looped in his, and as they ascended the steps, she laughed almost nervously. "It's like we're going to one of those old time circuses, with their terrible exploitations. Ladies and gentlemen, step right in--like that!"

Jeremiah said nothing, and within moments they'd immersed themselves in an assemblage of horrors more visceral than any ghosts or supernatural creatures. Skeletons and conjoined fetuses and bits of flesh and hair, wax models of the heinous effects of various diseases and malformations, cross-sections of all manner of things that were never meant to be seen, rotten and infected innards, hands and feet and pickled brains and a miraculously preserved corpse or two, a nine-foot-long colon and an entire wall of skulls--these and so many more gruesome bits were meticulously curated and displayed for any depraved or morbidly curious soul to encounter. Such grisly material, phantasms and monsters in their own right, touched a well, a void deep within Jeremiah, for these were mutations and violations of the body itself, one's most private, most intimate boundary. And it wasn't the mere existence of such monstrosities that disturbed him so much as the fact that they were visible, laid bare for absolutely anyone to gawk at, the secret shames and pains and parts of real people.

Pausing before a glass case full of model faces (or more accurately, the top quarters of faces) revealing various garish deformities and diseases of the eye, Jeremiah closed his own eyes to breathe for a moment. Kai had become absorbed in some exhibit concerning vintage photographs of warped, malformed bodies, and he was glad to be alone. She understood him in some inscrutable way, knew he'd want to be in his own dark thoughts as he wandered through the fascinating hell this place was for him.

Why exactly he put himself through this, he couldn't word, and yet he was aware of some piece of himself that had always possessed this aberrant desire to place himself in the mystery and revulsion of it all, to know the terror that was within him, that fear of being subject to others' scrutiny, being turned inside out and made a freak, a novelty. And there was some deeper anxiety that all of this touched, something too primal to comprehend with his limited brain, some geometry that didn't quite fit with the coherent shapes and lines of the world around him. It was an anxiety exacerbated by what had happened at the resort, and yet he knew that it'd been there before that summer, that it was something rooted within the very nature of his being.

The other patrons passed by him as he stood grappling with his thoughts. Surely they were irritated that such a tall grown man was hindering their view of the diseased eyes, there as they were to marvel or gasp at the weirdness around them. They'd be fine after their encounters with the bizarre, most of them--would skip off to lunch after their morning museum visit, laughing and going on about the freaky stuff they'd seen. But there were others who'd be less capable of dealing with the grotesquerie of the museum, who'd be forever after somehow changed, somewhat traumatized to recognize the fragility of the human form, the pure fortune they'd had in acquiring their own rather mundane shape, the reality that they were housed in something impossible to entirely understand or control and that was almost a thing separate from themselves.

The soft murmuring of those around him (for most guests exhibited a reverence of sorts for what they saw, save for an occasional snorting teenager using his puerility to mask his fear) pulsed slightly, faded. A sort of white noise filled Jeremiah's skull, moving thoughts outward, to the walls of his head, so that a larger awareness could form, some knowledge of the reality he'd have to face soon enough. He'd been able to avoid thinking of it--though never quite forget it--for years. This reckoning was always in the cellar of his mind, though, waiting for its exhumation, and now it was mere months, weeks before he'd have to face it all again.

He reached out and grabbed a hand-rail to steady himself. Crystal would be there, at least. They'd forced that distance between themselves, but ultimately, they were meant to do this together. And the others, Kevin and Heather . . . surely they'd be there as well. He didn't have adequate faith in any of them, because what had happened had stripped him of anything close to faith, but they'd at least be bodies facing the reality alongside him; he wouldn't be alone . . . at least, not at first, not until the end. But ends came and went quickly. It was everything leading up to them that were so difficult.

And now there was Kai. What was he supposed to do with her? Although he was, without quite knowing it, grateful for her presence, he was sure he couldn't justify involving her in his mess. At some point, he'd have to tell her the truth--

Jeremiah opened his eyes. He was alone in the room, surrounded by medical paraphernalia and anomalies. A soft light flowed around him, falling softly on the dark red carpet, reflecting off the curiosity cabinets and accentuating bits of glass and metal within them like strange flaring stars. A coolness brushed across his face, over his left cheekbone, the bridge of his nose, the socket of his eye--but not his eye . . . his eye? He--he couldn't see out of it, out of his left eye. He saw only with his right! Why the chill, there, suddenly? No pain, no feeling, exactly, but more a sensation of emptiness, of nothing at all.

Raising trembling fingers to his face, a sudden nausea creeping into his gut, Jeremiah touched the left side, above his bristly chin, above his smooth, quivering lips. Nothing was there. Well, something was there, though it was farther back than he expected it was, and it was wet, and soft, and as shuddering breaths began to overtake his chest, he turned toward the case of models and saw, beyond his own ghastly mangled reflection, the very segment of his face that had been removed, blinking at him from within.

Jeremiah backed up so quickly that he flipped over a railing. Suddenly Kai was there, looking down at his long, gangly figure sprawled out on the carpet.

"What's wrong? What's the matter? Are you all right?" She crouched down next to him, put a hand behind his shoulder as if she could lift him.

A few other people nosed over; Jeremiah realized they were looking at him and immediately sat up. He pressed his fingers against his fully in-tact face and swallowed what threatened to be vomit. "I have to get out of here."

Kai rose as he did. "There's a garden," she murmured. "Let's go to the garden."

The two of them walked briskly toward the door leading out of the museum and into the adjacent garden. It was for medicinal herbs, and though the weather was very cold and the herb beds were covered, the earth bare, it was a space away from everything, where they could sit and Jeremiah could recover. They situated themselves side by side on a bench. Nobody else was around; it was too cold for that, and though it wasn't snowing at the moment, the sky threatened a wintry mix. Kai regarded Jeremiah with that somewhat concerned look she had the habit of giving him. It didn't annoy him as much as it had at first, but he was embarrassed by his behavior. She thought he was fragile, and surely he'd presented that way more than once, from the very inception of their companionship, of course. Under normal circumstances, maybe he'd have been ashamed to have her always fussing over him, but any sort of perceived normal had vanished with the text he'd received from Cris not long back.

"You want to talk about it, love?"

Jeremiah pondered how best to answer. "I think you should go home."

She placed a hand on his. "I've told you--my home is with you, right now."

He knew as much; she'd said it so many times since they'd met. "Kai, you don't understand."

"You tell me when you're ready."

Jeremiah turned to actually look at her. Kai's large brown eyes possessed a warmth, a sincerity that calmed him. He'd wondered more than once whether she were something like a guardian angel, and yet, she was the one who'd kept him from probably ending his life; she was the one encouraging him to face whatever it was he needed to face. Would any benevolent being really behave in such a way?

The woman shifted a bit, knowing he wasn't any more ready to tell her than he had been the night they'd met. She reached into her oversized coat and retrieved a pair of red earmuffs, then stretched them over her head onto her ears and smiled. "Isn't this a lovely garden, even in the winter? The ground is so strange. As hard and cold as it gets, there's always something at work underneath it, just waiting to wake again."

Jeremiah's own smile was a bitter simulacrum of hers. You have no idea, he thought.