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We went back to the sitting room first.

We restarted everything, exactly where Black and I began.

All of us stood there around the couch and watched the interaction between the two people who may or may not have been Brick’s parents.

They were just starting to kiss, getting ready to have sex, when a new thought hit me.

I stepped towards the back of the couch, right as the man was undoing the front of her dress. I knew they were going to fuck soon. I wanted to catch them before they started.

“Hey.” I spoke directly to the apparitions. “Denis D’aureville. Virginie. Who are you?”

They flickered, phasing briefly in and out.

Then, slowly, both of them turned.

They stared at me.

It was like watching one of those antique video games that contained actual video, the original “choose your adventure” type games they still had in really old arcades. Those old games would stop and jerk each time you made a decision, sending the game into a new video clip when you started on a different track.

The video chosen depended on what decision you made as a player.

This was like that.

The virtual program in front of us had been playing along on a certain track, but when I interrupted that track, the program phased… flickered… then bumped us along a different track. The woman and man on the couch froze, mid-kiss, phased, and then ceased to follow the little show Black and I watched to its conclusion earlier.

Instead of having sex, they were both sitting on the couch.

The woman looked up at me.

Her eyes widened in surprise as she stared at me.

She looked me up and down, taking in my clothing.

Then she burst out in a trilling sort of laugh.

Her voice had a heavy French accent, or maybe a Creole one, given where I knew Brick’s people to be from. I suspected that accent was mixed with whatever local, English variant of accent she’d learned, given the rough time period.

“Who amI?”She let out a trilling sort of laugh. “You are standing in my home, peasant. Perhaps it isyouwho should be giving that information to us?”

I rolled my eyes.

Classic Brick, that he would have his parents’ ghosts mock us.

Then, strangely, and entirely unnaturally, Virginie D’aureville went on as if she hadn’t said that part. She began to answer my question instead. A part of me couldn’t help but dwell on how deeplyweirdit was that Brick had taken the time to program in semi-realistic reactions to his fake people seeing us inside their home.

“I am Virginie D’aureville,” she said haughtily. “This is my husband, Denis. You already said our names, so clearly you know who we are.”

Both of the apparitions continued to sit on the couch.

They stared at us expectantly, clearly expecting us to ask them more.

It was so strange.

I had to remind myself they weren’t real at all.

All of this––the burning fireplace in the background, the vases and figurines on the wooden mantle, the paintings, the gold frames, how different the room looked when I stared at them versus when I looked away, the very real-looking expressions on their faces––it was all artifice, all put here by Brick the Vampire King.