• Hands quivering as they rested on the slim, leather-bound artist’s journal in her lap, Alia stared at the floor, an indiscernible aura of madness burning in her pale green eyes. Gingerly taking her hand, Spencer rubbed his thumb comfortingly across the back of her hand. “You can wait until you’re ready to tell me,” he told her in soothing tones.

    Shaking her head, Alia tilted her head so that her eyes drilled into his, making him flinch from the direct stare. “I’m never going to be ready,” she said quietly. “So why will waiting make it any easier?”

    Neither of them had an answer to that, so Alia moved on. Tentatively, almost fearfully, Alia opened the journal to the first page. Blind, a tall man stood on the sidewalk by a busy street, smiling towards the onlooker that he could not see.

    “He has no eyes,” Spencer commented.

    “I couldn’t remember them,” she muttered, before turning the page. The man was standing there, in the midst of her living room, smiling to a young boy. Again, his eyes were gone. “That’s Riley,” she whispered, tracing a finger along the young boy’s cheek. “When he was five.”

    “You remember?” Spencer asked, and Alia merely nodded, eyes darkened as she stared intently at her old friend’s face. After a moment, Spencer dared to ask, “Who’s the man, then?”

    “He was a friend of the family friend,” she whispered. “He volunteered in the community, was a sunday school teacher at the old church, and taught kids how to play the piano.”

    “He sounds nice,” said Spencer with a faint smile towards the fellow pianist.

    “He does sound nice,” Alia said absently, turning the page.

    A disturbing scene was before their eyes. On his side, laying on a bed, the eyeless man was holding a young girl in his arms, a tender, yet eerie expression on his face. Somehow, the smile said so much more than a man and a student. The girl, face turned away, was looking up at the man. Even though her expression was unseen, her body said it all. Sad. Confused. Afraid, so very afraid.

    Spencer held his tongue, and Alia made no attempt to speak, merely turning the page. Once more, the man was with the girl, but he was holding her in his arms like one would a toddler. Face visible now, Alia’s childish pale eyes stared solemnly at them out of the page. “It’s you,” Spencer choked out. “So that girl, in the last picture...”

    “Was me,” she said, no emotion in her voice. For a long time they were silent, before she spoke again, voice quivering with unnamable emotions. “He had met me briefly, as my mother dragged me out of the door when she left my father.” Her voice dimmed, before growing strong again as she carried on. “He said that he had never seen such a beautiful child. He told me that I was special, that we were special....”

    “We?” Spencer asked, more sharply than he intended.

    “Yes. He said that he loved me,” she whispered.

    Reaching over, Spencer turned the page. A view of a man’s strong, bare shoulders, with his arm going towards the looker as if he was leaning over them. In the background, a small, pale hand was raised in a hopeless cry of fear. On his shoulders were nail marks, matching the ones on his forearms. “He told me that he went insane when my mother took me away,” Alia supplied dully. “He’d claw at himself, trying to tear his flesh off because he couldn’t stand not being around me.”

    Hoping to avoid further fear, Spencer turned the page, immediately wishing he hadn’t. An explicit scene lay before him, the man and the little girl, in bed. He gagged briefly, looking away. “I remembered in a dream,” Alia said, voice dead. “I stood and just watched it all happen again,” once again, her voice broke. Continuing on, she told him quietly, “You may want to skip the next five pages or so. I had these dreams a lot, and I don’t know what possessed me to draw them.”

    Listening to her advice, Spencer skipped those five pages and found himself staring back into a pair of intense, almost mad, eyes. He skipped ahead, finding page after page of intense, staring, insane eyes. The last pair frightened him the most. They were rolled up slightly, as if in ecstatsy, burning with such intense insanity that it made him cringe. “I told you I couldn’t remember them,” Alia whispered. “But I learned that I didn’t want to remember them, once I did.”

    At that, Spencer broke down crying, hiding his face in his hands as he cried for his love, the broken girl who was so horribly abused and had forced herself to forget. He cried for the injustice of it, the double-edged blade that she had carried with her all of her life; the pain of never knowing and the inexpressible agony of remembering. Placing an arm around his shoulders, Alia summed it all up by saying quietly, “Sometimes, what you don’t know can hurt you.”