His home was isolated as per his father’s design, and Alec ran for miles, racing against the sun. When he climbed the front steps and fell against the door, there was still time. But a mountain of sand had slipped through the hourglass. He had made it, though only barely. He hammered down the knocker until its iron almost split. No response came from within. All windows had already been sealed with their wooden defences, denying any points of entry. Alec’s father was in the study, passed out drunk, leaving his son outside in the night for the first time in his life. Strike two, and Alec hadn’t seen the darkness since.

He slouched back in his chair and cast a disappointed eye over his lot in life – the room that had, since birth, been his prison. It was a solemn place. A sepulchre of unwanted memories. Every year it felt a little smaller as though its four walls were constantly shifting inward ever so slightly. Given the lifetime that Alec had spent there, it was a wonder he hadn’t been crushed alive already. Where had the years gone? His hands were those of an old man; veins and grey-skinned bone. He had never known love or meaningful friendship. The world’s offering was denied to him. If it was pity he deserved, then there was no one to give it to him.

He knew that his father would never have approved of what he had done. But then, every Sparling eventually cracked in some way or other. Addiction, depression, even madness; they were as common to his blood as the curse that sired them. For Alec, it was his obsession with escaping his fate, to do what his father had deemed impossible. So many had been sacrificed by his own self-concern and cowardice. And still it remained, as contagious as the day it was first spoken.

It never changed. Not since it had been created. It didn’t age. It didn’t die.

‘Bedtime,’ Alec said as he raised himself to his feet, quitting those thoughts, flinching slightly from that rusty feeling in his lower back. He walked over to the fireplace and shifted its iron guard in place. His shadow came to stand in the cage now strewn across the floor. There was still a spit of brandy in the glass beside his armchair. Memories of his father tainted even that simple pleasure. The grandfather clock read half past ten. Its eleven chimes would be loud and long, and he would rather not be around to hear them.