Chapter 5:  A Never Dying Soul to Save
The fog had returned to Los Angeles, first to the bay, where it flowed under the pier across the eddies, and swirled on the remains of the ebbing tide; into the docks, where it rolled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollution of the dirty city. It lay out on the yards, hovering in the stacks of the cargo ships, drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. It crawled into the eyes and throats of the matelots loading the last of the containers onto an ocean bound carrier; streamed into the stuffy cabin of the skipper, asleep on his bunk, the afternoon siesta a preparation for the long night-watch ahead. Fog everywhere, searching, probing, slithering towards the city on the humid air, hunting an enemy, driving the daylight before it to a premature dusk.

The oppressive heat squeezed itself between the thin cracks of the window blind of the hotel room, the last beams of sunlight reduced to thin slivers in the dust-laden air. Illyria watched the motes glimmering in the shafts of light as they made their way towards the motionless figure seated in the armchair. Even on a stifling, unhealthy afternoon such as this, the blinds were closed and the room lit by candlelight until the electricity could be reconnected, no necro-tempered glass here to protect those for who the sun was a lethal weapon.

Spike lay sprawled on the small bed beside the wall, his arms across his eyes. Whether he was asleep or not, the other occupants of the room couldn’t tell. He'd arrived earlier for 'a little chat with The Green Man' who watched him anxiously for further signs of the instability he'd displayed in the hotel lobby. Throughout their conversation, Illyria and Wesley remained silent; each locked in an internal discourse of their own.

Illyria reached out and placed a hand in the stream of shimmering specks filtering through the blinds. She watched as the beam disintegrated, scattering glistening atoms across the surface of her leather clad arm, light sensitive particles travelling along the neural pathways, stimulating electrochemical activity inside her head.

"I am constrained by this shell, and yet I still perceive that which beyond the cognisance of the swarm of misery that is humanity." She stared into the space between her and Wesley. "Wretched vermin parasites breeding in these ruined shelters that are no more than prisons for ones such as I. You shut yourselves inside . . . in cages of bone, in rooms of brick, with mere slats of lense and glass through which you attempt to discern reality. "

“You lied to me.” Wesley spoke for the first time since Spike had entered Fred's old room.

“Is that not what you asked?”

“You said we’d be together . . . that I’d be where she was . . .” Wesley stopped, his voice breaking into a soft sob.

“ You returned to her place here. Surely this is where she is to be found?” Illyria crossed the room and contemplated the wall beside the bed. "These walls confine you, just as this bag of sticks stifles the glory that was once mine." She frowned in concentration as the thin mist obscuring her vision cleared. “There are hieroglyphs, impenetrable and meaningless to me, a web designed to deceive and entangle." Her head twitched, so imperceptibly that Lorne, watching her as closely as he did Wesley, missed it. "Hypermassively parallel-processed by human neural nets, causally dislocated by the logic paths that must traverse Ant Country, and therefore cannot be mapped."

Wesley's eyes opened wide and he looked at her for the first time.

"Illyria?" He rose from the chair and joined her beside the bed, peering into her eyes, searching for evidence of what he’d heard in what she’d just said. "Fred?" Wesley narrowed his eyes and turned from her to study the wall instead. "What do you see?"

Illyria swung angrily on Lorne, still seated in the chair opposite the one Wesley had vacated. “How can I be restored to where I wish to be when you have returned my guide to me unable to help himself,” she asked, her normally icy tone replaced by one that struck him with the ferocity of the thunder lurking outside the window in the oppressively humid air. “Humankind evolved from vampire-like parasites, insects that feasted on beings greater than they, their senses centred on blood and taste and feelings.” She turned to Wesley once more. Your sensory experiences confuse and conceal, just as the fog that moves towards us screens and filters, denying you clear sight of what you seek."

At the word 'vampire', Spike sat up and watched the fog, slipping into the room along the fading rays of sunlight, the luminous grains twirling like a movie projector, whirring in undifferentiated phosphor-lit blankness, performing their destiny. The image transported him to another place, another time. There a calculated nostalgia engine discharged its contents, memories of an earlier media era, one of bright bulbs, photochemical emulsions, reflective surfaces, and dust motes swirling into life, into light. There, where Drusilla made him, before the first film projector ever created the magic, his destiny was revealed.

"I see you. A man surrounded by fools who cannot see his strength, his vision, his glory. That and burning baby fish swimming all around your head."

Spike turned his head away from the ghostly figure of Drusilla forming in the mist gathering in front of the window. He scanned the wall, his face contorted with the effort of trying to catch a memory just beyond his reach. Something about Fred and these walls.

"No, not these walls, the other walls!" Spike vocalised the flash of intuition, to capture it, record it in the memory of the others so that it might not be lost again.

The first roll of thunder struck the window, causing it to rattle in its frame. All eyes turned from Spike as a second percussive shock shook the walls. The sound of raised voices, swiftly followed by the crash of a door slamming in the lobby below drove Lorne to his feet and out onto the landing outside the room.

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