Warnings for ableism, discussion of childhood trauma and exploitation, vomit, and blood. A mother tracks down her son across worlds.
Dripping wet and underdressed, the shivering teenage boy stopped when he saw Beverly. Daiki could tell immediately something was wrong, even before he noticed the red seeping through her clothes. At first he thought something had happened to her, because her stiff, deliberate steps and the peculiar look in her eyes could have been shock.
“Bevie?” asked Daiki, because he wasn’t sure.
Sid shook Bevie’s head stiffly. “No,” he croaked, then cleared her throat. Sid spat more gunk out and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. He cracked a smile and tilted Bevie’s chin up. “I didn’t think I’d get to see you again. I missed you.”
Daiki hung back and hugged his arms, teeth chattering. “Who are you?”
Sid grinned but the blood and black vomit outlined each of Beverly’s teeth, turning the grin ghastly. The boy flinched back.
The horrid grin faded. The face Sid used to glare at Daiki twitched from a cool stare back into a sweeter smile. “It’s your boyfriend, silly. I know I don’t look like myself but, well, here I am,” Sid told him gently in a stolen voice.
“You’re not Paul,” asserted Daiki.
Sid tilted her head and squinted. “Paul?” He raised Bevie’s voice and snarled, “Who the fuck is this Paul?” Sid couldn’t access Bevie’s memories because she wasn’t sharing herself with him. He’d shoved her aside and he didn’t know her name, much less her thoughts and memories. “I’m the only boyfriend you’ve ever had, Daiki. You are mine. You will always be mine.”
It was difficult to tell from his blank affect, but Daiki looked at Bevie with concern. “Sid? Did you die?”
The horrible grin returned. “I knew you’d recognize me. Just took longer than I thought. It’s me, babe. You look like a drowned rat, but it’s always good to see you. Come here.” He beckoned and posed his puppet with open arms.
The living boy drew back. “No. Leave Bevie alone.”
“Who?” Sid tilted her head, lowered her arms, and blinked deliberately. “Is that it’s name?” He looked down at the body he possessed. “Oh. No, sorry, I need it right now.”
“You don’t,” Daiki corrected quietly.
Sid gave a twitchy attempt to mold Beverly’s face into a look of tender affection. “I love you.” He took a step toward Daiki and held out Bevie’s hand to beckon him closer.
Daiki took a step forward and raised his chin, a sharp anger redefining the blank affect. “No you don’t. I can’t enjoy blowjobs because of you.”
Sid laughed hoarsely then cleared her throat. “Say that again?”
“I can’t – I… you heard me.” Daiki’s face went hot and he looked away.
“That’s not my fault,” replied Sid. “That’s because of my mom.”
Daiki didn’t reply and just stared at Bevie. Not into her eyes; he didn’t have the energy for that, just at her. She had grown from the stick-thin creature he’d first seen through Paul’s eyes in Scott’s secret basement. Not just cleaner and livelier, but her hair looked healthier and she didn’t have such dark circles under her eyes. So it really showed when the ghost holding her strings made her look unwell. It burned him up to see her chained up again, even if the chains were invisible this time. Meanwhile, his personal business with the ghost didn’t appear to be getting anywhere.
He wondered how Sid had died.
Sid rotated her head and shoulders and shook out the tension in Bevie’s arms. He stepped closer. “We’re talking about this, then. Fine. She said it wouldn’t leave a mark, and you were too r*****ed to say anything. I didn’t even know you could talk back then,” Sidney explained. “I got it worse, anyhow.”
Daiki took a deep breath and sought out that tightwire of self control despite hearing about why he’d been their perfect choice as Sid’s costar. Speaking with difficulty, Daiki lowered his eyes and his shoulders tensed up further. “I just told you the mark it left. I can’t even think about getting a – about – without remembering the first time. I didn’t understand. I wasn’t scared, just confused why you’d want to do that.” If he just found the right words.
“What do you mean ‘why I’d want to.’” Sid snorted. “You seem to have fun -”
“I mean at the time!” Daiki’s throat hurt. He didn’t know why he needed Sid to understand, but he needed to be understood. “I mean – I’m telling you how – it – when I… at the time, the first time, and any time anybody...I just think about being confused and nervous and unable to speak, and the cookie, and she was watching, and I can’t let myself enjoy it.” His eyes lowered to his hands as he struggled to piece words together into something coherent. “My chest becomes...a stone...my throat hurts...I’m full of water and I don’t cry or make a noise or, I’m just still. I’m still there, then, and I’m still, I can’t move. I can’t speak. At the time I was curious and it was weird and the cookie - was too – was – I… I can’t.” The effort of putting words one after the other while he brought up the memories made tears well up in his eyes, where they clung to his lashes and hid the strange hallway in a blur. “Cold and hot and frozen and stuck. ‘No mark.’ She said that?”
Sid nodded and sighed, looking away. “Yeah. She said we would just adapt. ‘Kids adapt.’ We would just have fun because it’s fun, right? And she can make rent, and I get whatever toy I want. And you never said anything.” He sounded sad and bitter. This wasn’t a good memory for him, either. And Sid hadn’t orchestrated the secret movies; that was Sandra’s doing.
But it hadn’t ended there. It still wouldn’t end. Hell, Sidney had fucking died and he was still coming back to claim Daiki as his own. Daiki’s breathing came faster and more difficult. He didn’t say anything. If there was anything left to say, he couldn’t.
So Sid continued, speaking faster now. “She said my sister Mandy was too fat, but I was only the good one when I did that for her. Any other time I was dirt. It’s all I’m really good for. See, because I’m stupid, and trash, and steal girl’s clothes from the mall, and can’t make friends because I’m trash.” His dismissive tone had turned into sullen confession, put forth in a warped version of Bevie’s voice. Sid raised her eyes hopefully and smiled at Daiki. “But we have each other. I know what you like, and you know me like nobody else does. I love you.” Then, in warning, “Don’t say I don’t love you.”
Daiki still didn’t speak. Sidney’s anger flashed up again and the many seeping cuts on the stolen body stung hot on her thighs and arms, blood flowing feverishly through her veins. He felt thirsty and tired. One puppeted foot jerked forward, followed by another, closing the distance between them. “Don’t look away and sulk, you stupid baby. We were talking. Just fucking talk to me, you whiny little bitch! You know I love you. Say it!” Sid grabbed the sodden shirt Daiki wore and yanked him closer so he could smell the brackish water in Daiki’s hair. He softened Bevie’s voice. “Speak to me. I know you can talk. Use your words, baby,” Sid coaxed. “Come on. I love you. You know that, right? You’re mine.”
The boy tensed away, pulse tapping visibly on his neck. Heat traveled Daiki’s body and a familiar trap closed over his vocal chords and chest. The tears overflowed from his eyes.
“It wasn’t my fault!” insisted Sid. “It’s not my fault. Talk to me. Please.” He touched Bevie’s hand to Daiki’s cheek and wiped a tear away with her thumb. “No, don’t cry. I hate it when you cry. Speak to me.”
Still words stuck in Daiki’s throat. He bared his neck and looked at the opposite wall, barely breathing now.
“I hate it when you get like this,” snapped Sid. “You’re just trying to make me feel bad. But I forgive you. I love you even when you shut down into a r***** again. My stupid little idiot baby.” He smiled. “Remember the first time I found out you could talk? You stammered, ‘Givvet!’ because I took your stupid stuffy. Ten years old playing with stuffed animals like a baby.” Sid smirked and nuzzled the side of Daiki’s face. It was easier now that they were practically the same height. If anything he was, or Bevie was, a little shorter than Daiki. “You used to bark and hold your hands like this,” Sid imitated, lifting his wrists up to his chest with his hands hanging forward. “Paws. You were such a cute r*****.” He caressed Daiki’s face and nuzzled him again. “Oh, stop crying.”
Daiki sobbed and leaned into the caress. He could speak by the time he was four, but he spoke seldom enough back then that people always seemed so surprised when he did. It had been both annoying and amusing. Daiki smiled through his tears and remembered how hard it had been to carve himself into somebody even a bit more normal. Not even Winter really remembered what he’d been like before he learned to mask better and keep up in conversation reasonably well.
“Stop making that ugly noise; it’s not cute,” chided Sid.
His fears made manifest, Daiki had no will left to argue. Paul would never understand the weakness Daiki had for the boy who’d tormented him for so many years, and Daiki knew he’d lose Paul after this. The gently applied insults and sweet caresses would undo him, and he could only try to tune it out.
---
The hours worked weight on Rei’s bones, each step sharp on the bottoms of her feet, her back, her hip joints. There’d been her orthodontist work, with regular hours, followed by her second job at a clinic with a dental wing. She had on a black wool winter coat, her long black hair falling over her shoulders. Underneath she wore scrubs covered in a pattern of the cartoon bird from Peanuts over a field of cornflower blue. She stepped out of her shoes and walked into a worryingly quiet house. Had her teenagers gone to bed at a reasonable time? Unlikely. Her adult daughter at least had found an entry level job and a “roommate” in a small hovel on the other side of town, so she likely didn’t have to worry (at least for tonight) about Miyako.
A peanut butter and jelly sandwich waited for her on a plate covered in plastic in the refrigerator. She knew it was for her because her son had left a sticky note on top: For Mom in his handwriting. Rei smiled and set it on the counter, lifting the plastic sheet off and crumpling it in her hand. She set her purse on the couch and held one triangular half of the sandwich in one hand as she explored her abode. Somebody did emerge from her son’s room, approximately the same height and gothic dress code but definitely not him. Rei almost shrieked, but frankly she was too tired to do more than stiffen and step back.
“Um, hi,” greeted Calvin.
“Hi,” greeted Rei. “Where is everybody else?”
“They went to go see Duria.” He scowled and leaned his shoulder against the wall, arms crossed with a sullen expression. A bit of peanut butter on the corner of his mouth remained of the sandwich he’d had earlier in the evening.
“Duria...the...who’s that again?” asked Rei.
“My sister. She’s dead,” snapped Calvin.
“Wha – when did she die?”
“When we were in middle school.”
Rei took a bite of her sandwich and opened the door to her son’s room, peering inside. A mess of laundry, books, sketchbooks, CD’s, and so forth hid the floor and the bedding, as usual, lay askew. No sign of Daiki or his boyfriend. “Well I’m sorry, but you didn’t need to bite my head off about it,” Rei told the trans boy lingering near her in the doorway.
“Sorry,” mumbled Calvin.
“So did they go to her grave?” asked Rei.
Calvin sighed, with his whole body the way teenagers will, and explained, “There was a haunted doll thing that they said Winter made with magic or whatever, then something about a cryptid animal they’ve been feeding in the woods. I don’t know what it has to do with my sister, but I thought we were gonna go see the creature or the doll or whatever. Then they said they were going to see Duria.” He scowled and muttered, “Assholes.”
Rei didn’t see the connection between visiting a gravesite and being assholes, or between that and the occult games her youngest played with her friends. “So where exactly did they go?”
Calvin ran his fingers through his hair and shrugged. “The woods? Like, um, the thing, doll, cryptid whatever was in the woods, I heard.”
“ ‘The woods.’ There are trees everywhere in Washington. You can’t look in any direction without seeing trees. Except in Seattle,” ranted Rei, losing her patience a little. She felt bad. She was tired, sure, but she didn’t want to come down too hard on this kid who clearly already wasn’t in a good head space. “Point is, which woods?”
Calvin shrugged defensively and clammed up.
Rei pushed her hair out of her face and took a breath. “Please think. Was there anything you heard about what the woods were near? A street, a neighborhood, a park? Anything?”
“Winter’s friend’s house,” mumbled Calvin.
“Thank you.” Misha lived in an apartment complex that had a park next door, but the park wasn’t anything anybody would call ‘woods.’ It was a bit marshy in places but there were just thin copses of deciduous trees and a retention pond. Josh lived in their same neighborhood. That left Adam, who lived near what could easily be called a forest. Rei fetched her address book and flipped through the pages until she found it, then wrote down the address and phone number on a three-by-five card. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” muttered Calvin.
“Don’t you have a time you need to get home by? It’s late. I need to go find my kids, but I can drop you off,” she offered.
“Oh, um, thanks. Yeah, I wanna go home,” he admitted.
---
Adam’s dad answered the door. Winter hadn’t visited that day, but he’d heard about some game they’d been playing in the woods near the highway. More occult nonsense. Rei didn’t press him further because it was already quite late to be calling on somebody without warning. She thanked him and left, taking a side street that connected to the highway. Minutes later, she recognized Paul’s car parked on the shoulder and pulled up behind it. The car that had been tailgating her for taking her time on a stretch of road with a fifty mile an hour speed limit zoomed past, tail lights briefly illuminating the trees red.
Misha emerged from the shadows with a scared look on her face. She held back until she recognized Winter’s mom, then ran forward. “Oh-my-god how did you find us? They’re gone! They’re gone and I don’t know how, and we don’t have a phone, and we didn’t want to leave them there and -” She burst into tears.
Rei hugged the girl then bent to her level and looked her over. “Who’s gone?”
Misha led Rei into the trees instead of replying. Paul sat on a log, head in his hands, hyperventilating in the midst of a panic attack. Rei looked around for her kids but still didn’t see them, so she went to Paul and put a hand on his back. Her resources were wearing thin and she felt glad she’d eaten the sandwich before heading back out.
Paul jumped a bit at the contact then looked at Rei with his tear-streaked face, lit by light reflected up from the flashlight he’d left on the ground. “D-d-doc…” His rapid breathing got in the way of speaking.
Rei rubbed his back and looked back to Misha. She beckoned and the three of them all sat on the log in the dark. “Please tell me what happened,” urged Rei.
“We...we were coming to feed the thing, that thing,” Misha pointed her flashlight toward a tree and illuminated a strange shape stuck to the trunk. “Only it cocooned up, but when she, when Win went to look at it she, she just vanished. In the dark. She’s just gone.
“So then, um, her brother, he went to the cocoon thing too, and, and he’s just gone. So then I’m like, let’s stop going there; something’s wrong. Because something is wrong. But then the girl, um, Beatrice? Something? I don’t know her. But she went over like, it’s fine, right? But it’s not. Because then she’s gone, too.
“And we looked for them but they’re not anywhere and I don’t know what to do, and Paul’s just, like, you see him.” Misha gestured haplessly at the panicked boy sitting on the other side of Rei. A thought occurred to her. “If you go over there, you’ll disappear too! Please don’t disappear, Dr. Cooper, please!”
Rei took in and let out a deep breath. She patted Misha’s hand then picked up Paul’s flashlight and directed it at the tree. The shape had a pulse, and was disturbingly large for what it appeared to be. She was too tired to think what could have actually happened. There were two scared kids (or one scared kid and one technical adult who was still really a kid) and three missing kids.
“Look. Hold my hand,” instructed Rei.
Misha squeezed Rei’s hand and looked at her hopefully.
“I’m not going to disappear while we’re holding hands, right? I’m here now, you’re here, we’re not vanishing,” said Rei slowly.
“Yes,” agreed Misha. She looked a bit embarrassed.
“Okay. Now, we can walk over to that tree together. Maybe there is a pit,” theorized Rei.
“We looked. There’s no pit,” insisted Misha.
“Alright. Well. Let’s just look, okay?”
“Don’t step under the tree,” begged the girl.
Rei sighed. “I need to do something to find my kids. Sitting here on a log is not going to bring my children back to me. Giving up is not an option. Do you understand?”
Misha nodded. “I just, we don’t know what to do so -”
“I get that. I’m not mad. I’m trying to explain. Two of my children are missing. I will get them back, because I have to. There isn’t a possibility of a world in which I do not try to make sure my children are safe. Do you understand?”
Misha nodded again.
“How long has it been since they vanished?” Rei asked.
“I, um,” Misha shone her flashlight down onto her wristwatch. It was a blue digital watch, plastic. “Half an hour, I think.”
“Alright. Thank you. Now, let’s go to the tree. You hang back, but hold my hand, and I won’t disappear while you are holding my hand. Right?”
“Right.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
The aches and pains as Rei got up again from the log made her wince. She shone Paul’s flashlight on the ground just ahead of her, sweeping it to and fro, as she approached the tree. As they drew closer to the chrysalis, Misha fell farther back while still gripping Rei’s hand tightly. Rei looked over the pile of bones and moldy food scraps at the base of the tree within a ring of rough stones. The rocks had dirt on them but no moss; softball sized and lumpy, clearly pried up from the earth and arranged in a deliberate circle at the bottom of the tree. True to the teenagers’ observations, Rei did not see a pit or even a section of loose earth. She circled the tree, thinking perhaps her kids had tripped over the rocks and fallen into a ditch. The ground lay uneven and there was a log, branches, and undergrowth, all recently disturbed when Misha and Paul had searched fruitlessly for their friends. Rei sighed.
“Okay. There’s nothing here, just some rocks and carcasses,” muttered Rei. She was starting to get a headache and wished she’d grabbed a bottle of water or some coffee before she set out. “Don’t panic. I’m stepping under the tree.”
“Don’t!” pleaded Misha.
Rei was tired of coddling this girl’s unreasonable fears. She smiled tensely at the child then patted her cheek, turned, and stepped carefully over into the ring of stones. The small animal bones crunched under her feet. The cold air suppressed the smell of decay and mold. Rei turned the flashlight to the chrysalis and saw a smooth, tan, semitransparent shell stretched over what could have been a child curled into a fetal position with its back to her. The casing stretched thin over the growing form within. Rei bent for a closer look at the creature’s head. A dark, gray-blue eye blinked. Was that...a dog? No, not quite a puppy, not quite a child. Unfinished, whatever it was, with long limbs tucked in and folded close to its body. Rei tore her attention from this curiosity with some difficulty and crouched to examine the base of the tree for someplace that could have swallowed three people into it.
In the corner of her vision, Misha moved in slow motion. A yawn split Rei’s mouth open and she shut her eyes as she took in the cold, earthy night air. The breath held for a second, then she felt dizzy and her weariness closed over her as the air slid softly back out of her lungs. A tide washed the bones and filth away from under her feet, pulling away the cold and the dirt and leaving sand and damp, clean air. Rei opened her eyes and blinked, gazing at the sand where she knelt. The flashlight lay on the ground nearby, its beam died away. She’d been...but...no, this was no time to take a nap, though she wanted nothing more than to lay down in the sand and fall back asleep. Back asleep? Had she been sleeping? No? Rei rubbed her eyes and gathered herself to her feet, picking up the flashlight from beside her. Such a long night already. What time was it?
Rei passed her flashlight over a low, dark passage, then over to a lake where the cavern ceiling sloped down to the water itself in jagged, water-carved spikes. She kept turning and saw a glittering natural wall. When she walked closer, she saw around the corner to stone steps leading up to a brightly lit corridor. She glanced back at the lake and noticed tracks from the water meandered about then joined her own footsteps leading to the stairs. Rei put the unneeded flashlight into her coat pocket and mounted the steps with a hand to the wall. There was a voice ahead, somebody crying and a cajoling in words Rei couldn’t make out from here. She followed the sound.
---
Hiding inside his mind would not be easy. The smell of the nearby room, rot and shit, joined with smells of fresh blood, fresh vomit (both normal, pungent gastric acid and supernaturally foul tarry purge), as well as the salty lake water drying on his own shivering frame. The odors pressed in and made breathing all the more difficult. Then there were fevered hands touching his face, his neck, pushing up under the gross sandy wet thermal, then down…
“You haven’t been with a girl before, have you?” whispered Sid.
The attempt at disassociation gave way to a bark of laughter. Daiki looked at the body Sid spoke from and grinned back at him, fortified by mirth.
“Why did you laugh?” Sid whispered. “Don’t laugh at me.” Bevie’s eyes narrowed and Sid used her hands to roughly grip Daiki’s hips.
Daiki’s grin faded and he brushed Bevie’s hands off. He couldn’t talk right now, but he took Bevie’s face in his hands, brushed her damp hair behind her ears, and searched for her in her eyes.
“What have you been doing while I was away?” Sid demanded. He took hold of Daiki’s wrists and maneuvered him backwards, walking with him as he pushed him into a wall. “I’ve told you you belong to me. Wipe that grin off your face, you stupid shit, and tell me.”
The mirth lingered in the corners of Daiki’s mouth and in the crinkle of his eyes. His voice remained locked up inside its box, but his icy fingers came alive and walked down Bevie to probe her sides. She flinched and slapped Daiki’s hands away. Was that her, or still Sid?
“Answer me!” insisted Sid.
Yeah, Sidney was still fixated on jealousy. The defensive posture of the body didn’t match up to the accusation etched in the face. Daiki tickled her again and she squirmed. Sid looked down at her body in disconcerted annoyance.
“It was this one, wasn’t it? You’ve known her,” Sid realized. Her head jerked to the side and grimaced, then Bevie interjected, “Fucking stop it! You know I hate that.” She shoved Daiki’s shoulder before stepping back.
Encouraged, Daiki beamed at Bevie and followed her steps to hug her fiercely around her arms. The body in his embrace spasmed and tensed. He stepped back and forced himself to look into her eyes again, searching hopefully for his friend.
“You’ve never looked at me like that,” Sid whispered. He looked down at Bevie’s body. “Was it you? Is that why he laughed at me?” He pinched her arms through the sleeves of her shirt and made the blood well up and spurt, dripping down to her fingers. “It wasn’t like this for them. Why does this body break itself trying to push me out?” He turned back to Daiki. “Why can’t you relax and just be with me, like in the dream.” Sid put Bevie’s hands over her face and muttered about tender warmth, and it was unclear whether he spoke of meat or a different flavor of tenderness.
Daiki slipped outside himself and allowed the fevered bleeding arms to cradle him, the fouled lips to kiss and whisper a mixture of jealous accusations and pleas. With a cold start he realized that from practice he’d done too good a job of disassociating and had literally projected outside himself, leaving his body limply pliant and unresponsive. Sid tried to wake him but Daiki looked instead toward the sound of footsteps on carpet. He hadn’t noticed them before. The muffled creak had a familiar pace, one he recognized from early mornings waking to the sound of footsteps followed by a knock on his door to rouse him for school.
“Hey!” shouted Rei. She rounded the corner, rushed forward, and shoved Beverly off her son. “What are you doing?”
Bevie fell on her ass and looked at the woman in stunned silence. Rei knelt over Daiki’s body and patted his cheeks. “Honey. Honey, come back to me. Not another coma.” She cursed under her breath and pushed Daiki’s eyelids open with her fingers. The face under Rei’s hands was lax and unresponsive. She fished the flashlight out of her pocket and shone it over his pupils. They dilated smaller and a waking tension spread through the muscles in Daiki’s face, closing his slack mouth. A sharp breath flared his nostrils then he gasped and looked back at his mom in confusion.
“Oh good, you’re awake. Baby, where are your clothes? You’re freezing!” Rei fretted.
Sid shook Bevie’s head. “No,” he whispered.
Rei looked over her shoulder as Daiki sat up. “Excuse me? Did you have something to add?”
“Makes me sick,” muttered Sid. He mocked in a falsetto, “ ‘Hi, Mommy, thanks for saving me from the bad man, Mommy!’ What are you even doing here? This is none of your business.”
Rei looked Bevie over with confused pity. “What is your problem?”
“Mothers,” Sid spat.
“Well keep that shit to yourself,” retorted Rei. She helped Daiki to his feet and gave him her coat. “I’m just glad I found you both. Yes, even you. I’m sure your mother will be glad to have you home, regardless of your feelings on the matter.” Rei looked around at the vomit on the ground then turned her eyes to a reeking room. “Where’s Winter?”
Daiki shook his head.
“Did something happen to her?” his mother asked. She walked over and looked into the room. First she noticed the desecrated gore, the broken television, tapes scattered all over, then she saw the chrysalides on the walls. “What the fuck?”
Her son moved to her side and shook his head again. He was having one of his mute episodes. A stuttered croak emerged when he tried to talk, and Daiki put his hand to his mouth and looked down in frustration.
Rei pointed to the corpse smeared across the floor. “That’s can’t be her. That’s not her, right? That was -” She looked again. Who ever that had been had a larger ribcage than would belong to a middle school girl. Oh, and there was a penis. Definitely not Winter. “Nope. Alright. I don’t know what to do about all of, uh, that. But I don’t think that’s my problem.” Rei’s nose wrinkled and she backed out of the doorway. “Alright, sorry to whoever that was, but I have enough on my plate already.”
“Not much left to my leftovers for your plate, anyway,” Sid remarked.
Rei squinted at Bevie and frowned. “Your leftovers?”
“Nothing,” mumbled Sid. He shrugged and smirked, not meeting the woman’s stare.
With the blood on the girl’s mouth and clothes, Rei speculated about connections between Bevie and the nearest corpse in the room. She gave Bevie a suspicious, guarded look and started guiding Daiki back the way they’d come. Sid followed, keeping a few paces back and glaring at the back of Rei’s head.
Back in the cave, Rei took the flashlight back out and looked around. She looked up at the ceiling, then over at the broad, low hole leading down into the dark. “How do we...hmm.” She put an arm around Daiki and noticed his friend held her son’s wrist in lieu of holding hands. Rei remembered the first aid kit in her car and decided she’d need to get a closer look at where all that blood was coming from if or when they got back. She closed her eyes and tried to think. Another hand held hers to her left. The cold air washed over her along with a wave of vertigo, and when she opened her eyes she remembered she’d still been holding Misha’s hand. Of course. And she couldn’t disappear if she was holding Misha’s hand.
There was hardly room for the three of them under the tree. Rei, Daiki, and Bevie picked their way out of the stone circle and joined Misha back out in the freezing cold night above ground. Paul looked up from where he sat on the log and almost tripped in his hurry to get to his boyfriend. Daiki’s bare legs stuck out from under the coat he borrowed from his mom, and dirt and leaves stuck to his bare feet. He stepped carefully and winced as each step managed to find something sharp to poke the bottoms of his feet. Paul kissed Daiki’s face and lifted him up in a hug.
“What happened to you?” Misha asked Bevie.
Bevie smiled and brushed her hair out of her face, unwittingly smearing blood from her fingers across her cheek. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about it.”
Warnings for self harm, blood, vomit, gore, possession (ghost kind).
Three teenagers wake up in the underworld.
She’d been dreaming of the forest by the highway, near Adam’s house. Winter mulled over her dream for a minute. Was it a dream? Because it felt as though she’d woken up, the way the trees and bones and people had given way to a cave. The girl sat on a sandy mound with the waters of a lake lapping the shore behind her. She blinked and rubbed her eyes, then turned slowly and looked around. Artificial light poured from an unseen source around a tunnel to her left, filling the chamber with diffused yellow light. Stripes of this same light played across water lapping against a sandy shore at her feet, with pale gray sand that shimmered, perhaps made of feldspar or the ground down remains of iridescent shells. A damp, cool air rose from the underground lake, salty and refreshing. Winter filled her lungs and admired the sparkling minerals in walls carved into magnificent shapes by eons of dripping water laced with limestone.
Lungs brimming with crisp salty air, boots damp and sandy, the young girl looked ahead and made out two passages she could take. She walked carefully over the sand to peer into the brilliantly illuminated passage, but as she drew closer her dream-fogged mind conjured a specific dream place she had visited often when she was a bit younger. It was a sequence of places: a cool, quiet conservatory or greenhouse where it was always night, followed by a mirror maze where a bright light pursued her. The greenhouse had dripping foliage and the scent of rain, a peaceful, restful darkness lush with life. In the maze had a smooth and trampled sandy floor, scorched dead ends, milky mirrors that did not confuse with reflections but magnified the light as it approached. The light was a lion without the shape of a beast; the light hunted relentlessly, a floating ball of blinding brilliance she would run from through narrow corridors.
That same hunted feel shone from the buzzing lights at the top of the stairs. It was just a feeling, just dreams remembered, but Winter grimaced and backed away. She circled round to the other passage. This one led down and narrowed into a close, impenetrable darkness. She would need to stoop to enter, but when she listened she merely heard echoing drips of water and the rustling, squeaky activity of bats. An earthy stink rose with the mossy scent of wet rock and running water. The soothing night garden under glass walls surfaced again in her mind. It didn’t make sense; man made stairs leading to a lit structure should be safer than creeping down into a dark hole. This strange crossroads lay thick with dreams and intuition, and when parsing through the dreams the darkness felt more secure.
So she bent and put a hand on the wall as she stepped carefully over uneven ground into the dark tunnel to her right. Winter liked the feel of the limestone formations under her palm, and trailed her fingers over the grainy, rough surface. Her eyes adjusted gradually as she moved deeper into the darkness, and she could see the outline of the tunnel ahead of her and pale glimmers catching on pebbles and stalagmites. She began to wonder how she’d gotten to this unfamiliar cave, but her mind still felt muddled and hazy. Gravel crunched under her boots and soon the darkness swallowed her up entirely so that she could see nothing whatsoever, and relied on feeling ahead with her hands and feet. A wholeness filled her, calm and at peace. It was just her and the ancient rocks and their fussy, tiny denizens.
---
Cold, dark water held Daiki close as his trench coat ballooned out to slow his descent. In the moments before he came to, the water in his ears fed the sound of his pulse back to him. He didn’t remember he needed to hold his breath, but his body remembered for him and kept him from gasping as he became alert. A lapping shore overlaid his pulse, and with it a murmur of overlapping human voices. Daiki couldn’t make out words, just the shape of them in different cadences whispering over each other without the rhythm of conversation. His arms thrashed out and he kicked, slipping out of his coat and pushing his pants off to make himself lighter. Time ran out for his lungs so he dragged his leaden sweater with him as he frantically pulled himself toward the surface. The whoosh of water he pushed aside drowned out the whispering voices, then all the voices dropped away as he broke up into the air. Now all he could hear was his own desperate gulping breaths and the thick sound of water sloshing inside his ears. Droplets slipping down the lenses of his glasses obscured and refracted the chamber around him.
A cave ceiling sharp with stalactites pressed in close to the black surface of the water. Surprisingly, the cavern was not completely dark. Daiki shrugged out of his sweater and swam to a spot where the ceiling lifted farther away from the surface of the subterranean lake. The water dripping from his face and hair into his mouth tasted silty-salty and a bit brackish. He spat it out and tread water, looking around for a shore. Every time his ears dipped below the surface, the whispers swarmed in louder than the time before. He still couldn’t parse more than a word or two, not half enough to make sense of any of it. Daiki’s feet found grooved sand shaped by waves and he began to wade out of the lake. His thermal clung cold and sodden to his body, tiny rivulets running down his hands and dripping off his fingers. He wrung out the lower hem of his thermal so he could use it to mop up the water from his glasses, or at least try to. It made the droplets smaller at least.
Sensations jittered with a static buzz in his teeth and pressed close to his nerves, still strung tight by burnout. The chattering of his teeth as he shivered and twitched helped release some of the jangling noise thrumming in his brain. He craved a bassline and a song on loop, lyrics to drown out spiraling half-thoughts. If not music, than bashing his head against a wall. These wet clothes were unbearable, the sand between his toes was unbearable, the ringing in his ears was unbearable. It was all. Too much. Too. Much. Daiki stripped down and leaned against the cave wall, hugging his arms and shutting his eyes as he gently tapped his forehead against limestone.
Some time passed before he returned enough to himself to stop hitting his head and just breathe. As soon as he stopped, Daiki missed the rhythm he’d maintained, the repeated thunk paired with a dull ache. His little sister had disappeared. He’d gone after her. Now he was here. Had she been here? Where was she? Daiki looked at the clothes he’d left in the sand. Wet clothes. Sandy wet clothes. He didn’t want to wander about in the nude, but the thought of putting those back on made his breathing halt and his gut flinch. Priority: find Winter to ensure her safety. Get dry and warm or at least dead so that wouldn’t be a concern anymore. Freezing to death was an option. That would have to wait until he found his sister, though. He didn’t consider his potential death with fear or sadness or even longing, just frank acknowledgment of a thing that could happen.
The quiet solitude and the rattle of his teeth together began to soothe the raw edges of his nerves. If he hummed through the chatter of his teeth it reverberated strangely with the clatter and added a new sensation that further eased him from the jaws of burnout. So, now that being alive and present felt reasonably bearable again, where would he find Winter? In the dark, damp cave or the strange and uncomfortably lit stairs? People might be up there. It looked like a place where people would be. If he went there to search for his sister, which he would have to do, people might see him naked, and that would undoubtedly make them uncomfortable and be just really awkward for everybody.
He reluctantly walked back over to the thermal and underwear laying in the sand and lifted each up, shaking sand and water from the garments before (and this was truly the worst) putting wet, gritty, cold clothes back onto his body. His limbs jerked out violently a few times in protest to the sheer discomfort of wearing these cold, itchy, terrible pieces of cloth. The thermal shirt and underpants clung to him like the worst second skin he cared to imagine. But he had to wear them. If there had been a possibility of fishing his trousers from the lake, he’d be obligated to wear those, too, since being seen in his underwear was almost as bad as being seen in the buff. The shivering almost didn’t soothe him enough and the clothes nearly drove him right back into hitting his head against solid rock. He couldn’t see it, but a red mark gradually darkening into a bruise marked his forehead from a few minutes before when the only thing to do had been to indulge in the self-soothing self destruction.
Daiki left damp, sandy footprints behind him as he cautiously began to ascend the stairs.
---
For a trapped and frenzied moment Beverly thought she’d found herself in the basement again. She felt the cold wall against her back and could feel immediately that she had woken up somewhere far from the sun, though a light shone in her face. Bevie crawled her hands up the wall until she stood on shaky legs at the base of the stairs. Somewhere in the darkness something splashed and struggled in a body of water beyond the end of the tunnel. The echoes told her of a chamber, and a gasping, thrashing struggle. In a burst, on unsteady feet helped by grasping hands, Beverly scrambled up the stairs into a long, stale hallway. Still far from the sky, perhaps divorced from the real world entirely, but the hall stood broader than the basement hall and better lit by far. She put a hand on one of the side rails and bent to unroll one of her socks, from which she dug a small razor. Beverly leaned against the wall and extracted one slim arm from layers of sleeves.
When she’d finished, and the razor waited patiently back within her sock, Beverly’s breathing had steadied and her head had cleared. Itchy soreness where blood seeped from the inside of her arm brought her to herself. She took a deep breath and walked farther into what could have been a hotel or a nursing home, something with rusty orange carpet and eggshell green walls, forest green below waist height. The moulding and handrail had a coat of warm brown paint. Beverly could see nails in the wall where paintings used to hang and saw one of the overhead fluorescent lights buzz and blink. Floorboards beneath the thin carpet creaked under her feet. The silence would make some sense for a hotel in the off season, but felt eerie all the same.
At an intersection, Beverly found a deep dark red stain in the orange carpet. It had long dried but a faint, familiar odor still wafted up from the spill. A faded trail of the same substance dragged along down one of the four corridors branching from the intersection. She paused and stared down the hall. Well, whatever had happened here had happened a good long while ago. Morbid curiosity drew her down the hall to follow the marks on the carpet. As she walked, a smell of old meat she’d been half conscious of became too pungent to brush off. Beverly put a hand over her nose and breathed through her mouth. The crusted stains led to a room with the door left open.
Decay overlaid with a familiar funk and the stench of feces all hit her at the doorway. Bevie whirled around and hurled onto the carpet, adding another ingredient to the foul cocktail that was the air. She spat, lingered bent in case her stomach had more to add, then wiped her mouth on the back of her wrist and straightened up. Sleeve over her mouth and nose, Bevie returned to the doorway to peer inside. A lamp on a table showed her the hole-ridden and gnawed corpse with its head crushed by a television. The flesh which remained had begun to turn iridescent gray, a sheen over shredded meat. Though something had dragged the bones away from their ordinary arrangement and very little skin remained in recognizable shape, the skeleton and scraps of cloth told her the deceased had been human.
The only movement in the room came from slowly pulsating chrysalides affixed to the walls. They reminded Beverly of the forest, and she remembered a bit of where she’d been right before she found herself at the base of the stairs. These ones looked much the same as the one on the tree. Stepping into the room and leaning to get a better look around, the girl noticed another, fresher corpse riddled with holes. This one had fur between the wounds, which she assumed looked pink from bloodstains. Long, spindly limbs sprawled out from the devoured frame, themselves too scrawny too have tempted much gnawing.
Bevie backed out of the room and moved away to breathe. It had been years since she’d been in school, but she remembered something about caterpillars eating a great deal while butterflies and moths ate very little if at all. So perhaps whatever would eventually crawl forth from that room wouldn’t try to eat her. Not that she planned on finding out, but it was a faintly comforting thought.
She had just heard a creak from the floorboards back up the hall where she’d come from when her limbs and spine went rigid and cold. Something had seized her, and she felt dizzy for a split second before she felt nothing at all. Beverly’s arms and legs bled from long-healed cuts, her jaw clenched up, and her gums bled, but she herself took up just a small dark corner hiding somewhere within herself. The body Sidney had grabbed for himself fought to push him back out, and the failing effort left it faint and pinched with pain. In his excitement to be able to greet who he’d sensed enter this changing labyrinth, he’d tried his hand at his first possession. Daiki and Duria had made it look easy. How come they hadn’t staggered and leaned against the wall, jerking and twitching stubborn limbs into motion? This body bent and heaved black syrupy muck onto the carpet and remained doubled for a minute, panting and bleeding. This wasn’t right. Daiki had practically bounced on his feet when Duria had merged into him. It wasn’t fair.
Speaking of Daiki, he’d be here soon. Sid yanked the girl upright and brought up a sleeved arm to wipe her face clean before peeling the hoodie off and dropping it on the floor. Blood soaked into sleeves and strange vomit spattered her boots. He put her hand to the wall for balance and reeled in the vertigo swarming her senses.
After mulling over and making notes about the next chapter, I've finally begun writing it. I need to remember to return to creating things or else my soul will dry up into nothing.
A light blue goblin with salt-and-pepper blond hair and white stubble on a craggy face followed a trail from a rectangular imprint where a kennel used to sit on the forest floor. Germ wore tan leather booty shorts and a lambskin vest. His hair stood out stiffly where he’d combed it out of his face with his fingers. He had the buggy wrinkled features of a hairless cat, but with an old man’s bulb nose and boxy chin. Germ plucked up and nibbled on the little black ground beetles he found along the way. Behind him, paying no attention to the tracks, Mal compared sticks picked off the ground and selected a new favorite switch for whipping against tree trunks, logs, rocks, bracken, puddles, droppings, and insects. He had a caterpillar green complexion and stood a few heads taller than Germ, with short brown hair under a leather cap with a long thorn on top and dangly straps hanging in front of his pointed ears. His short, stubbly muzzle held rather large teeth. Mal walked dick out in just an old holey sweater that used to be the pale yellow beige of grain but had gotten grayer and indistinct as dust settled into the fibers.
“Cudya and yer stick stick behind me so I can track the grub-girl’s tracks before you smack em?” requested Germ.
“Nope. Just smacking,” replied Mal.
Germ smacked a smarting slap across Mal’s knuckles. “ ‘Just smacking’ back thar.”
“Kay, kay, doin.” Mal grinned with his overlarge chonky sharp teeth and skittered back a short ways to give Germ room. He re-smacked a pile of deer scat he’d swatted already with his switch.
They continued on a winding path through broken ferns and crushed lichen. “Yooll see here she’s foraging. She don know the fuck she doon, but she hungers. Leaves, roots; I-kin see her lil teethy scratches on this treeskin. Trying to beaver bout it, but see she rustled oot vittle-type morsels roond herebouts. Try and err. She’s circled through this area a few times.”
“Yap yep,” listened Mal. He picked up a new, thicker stick and began peeling the bark off it with his thumbnail. “Yip yap yep yup.”
“Yeep yip yups,” agreed Germ.
“Yip yip yip.”
They echoed variations on that back and forth and the range of vowels and consonants shifted with each iteration.
“Ayk ayk, here we’ve gotter,” announced Germ. “Icker ker krer.”
“Kreck teck deck,” Mal said.
“Okeys, stoppit.” Germ got annoyed at their mouth sounds game and waved his hand at Mal to shush.
A larva the size of a fat corgi had crawled up the side of a maple tree and dug her sharp claws and wedged her tail into the bark. Her breath rippled down the smooth mushroom gray flanks as she rested her eyes, face pressed to the side of the trunk. Below her in the leaf litter and moss, scraps of fur and gnawed bones lay scattered: a opossum far past playing dead, a skeletal carcass with a striped tail, an antlered skull with bits of brain stinking up the inside. Germ crouched over the remains and found paper plates stained orange from tomato sauce, soggy fragments of paper napkins, overlooked bits of arugula, and a line of thatcher ants carrying off cornbread crumbs in a line.
“Somefolk feeds her,” remarked Germ. “Or somefolk likes having picnics on a pile of animal carcasses. We gots pasta maybe, breadstuff, ground beef bits, sauteed onion and garlic. Touching. You got a friend or what?” He got to his feet and reached up to pat the resting creature on her back. “Set to pupate. Muk says hi. Lesget a barrier up an you jus sit tight, big girl.”
She didn’t acknowledge him in any way. Germ snorted out a booger into the dirt then waved for Mal to follow him as he began poking around for big rocks. They rolled over the largest stones they could pry up from the earth and arranged them in a circle with the base of the tree forming the east wall. It took them a few hours, and it wasn’t much to look at when they were done, but after a short recitation in an underworld language the objects within the circle extending up for a few yards began to move in an odd flicker like a time lapse video. Flies and their young crawled in shimmering masses with beetles and ants, reducing the skeletons to dry husks at the tree’s feet. Pulses rippled down Duria’s oblong form as she swelled up. Her outermost skin split along her back, barbs, face, and other features with it. The pantyhose-thin sleeve peeled back and shrank to one end, revealing a tan, smooth mass. She writhed and pulled herself up into a compacter chrysalis, breathing in rapid beats as her larval form began to melt into something new.
---
Misha wore blue latex gloves and a simple raglan t with paint-splattered jeans as she sectioned off Winter’s hair in the bathroom. A box dye kit instructions lay kicked to the side on the floor, with the different chemicals arranged on the already busy vanity.
“The metal teeth were dope, but those old dudes were top tier freaky,” Misha said. Her aunt had redone her braids to have light and dark green strands worked in ending with white and gold pony beads that clattered behind her where she’d tied it all out of the way with a scrunchy. Winter in turn wanted to go from white to aqua blue, and since her roots had grown out so much it was time to redye it anyway.
“I wish I could cut out all the Riley bits. And Xander. I don’t care about all the romantic crap and weird orgasm jokes and these stupid Ken doll ‘hunks.’ I just want to see her fight monsters,” commented Winter. She played Pokemon FireRed with the screen angled to catch the vanity lights above the mirror behind her so she could see the game better.
“Did you like Angel better?” asked Misha.
“No, I just said I don’t care about the hunks. He was boring to be ‘ominous’ and I’m glad he’s off in his own show now. I really could not care less about the stupid boyfriend shit,” replied Winter.
“Angel is pretty good, I think. The show. But the guys they want to be cute just are most def not. I don’t know. I feel like I don’t really know what my type is but it’s just not that, you know? I guess they’re, like, hotter in anime or whatever.”
“I guess.”
“But forget the boyfriend crap. Super creepy episode, right? And what kind of fairy tale has goons in straight jackets?” Misha wondered.
“Ye old asylum horror fairy tale.” Winter giggled. “And the good fairy said, ‘Put them in padded rooms and throw away the key!’”
Misha snorted. “More like the evil fairy.”
While the dye set, Winter and Misha sat on the couch with the television on (turned down and ignored as background ambiance), and played pokemon together. They’d gotten the complementing versions together in the store with their allowances. The television would have had to compete with the music blasting from her brother’s room if they hadn’t muted it. Heard through the wall, the music crashed and wailed with often discordant melodies. Her brother had his friends over, not just the boyfriend who lived here but a couple goths muttering together under the overlapping guitar riffs. Within his room, Daiki sat on his bed with a sketchpad on his knees, leaned against the wall drawing monsters. Out in the living room, Bevie had her arms around Calvin’s middle with her hands tucked into his oversized black hoodie, sharing an armchair and a bag of barbecue potato chips. Since Bevie’s hands were full, Calvin put every other chip into his girlfriend’s mouth.
“I’d give them to you if I could,” mumbled Calvin.
“That would be fucking sick,” commented Bevie.
Calvin grinned and fed a potato chip into her mouth. “You would fall over. You’re a stick.”
“True,” agreed Bevie. She caught the younger adolescents on the couch staring at her hands moving around under her boyfriend’s shirt. “Worth it.” She lowered her voice and snuggled in closer. “How do you get okay with being fat? Because I just, I hate – not on you, you’re perfect, but like. Pinching up skin on myself? Retch. I hate hate hate folds and muffin tops and…” She saw Calvin’s expression. “Just on me, girl.” She realized her mistake and quickly corrected to, “Boy.”
Calvin sat still and gazed into space. Slowly he told her, “So, I am not comfortable with this. I don’t like when you call me fat, Bev.”
“What? I said you’re perfect, dude. Get over it. This is about me,” replied Bevie, annoyed.
“Sure, bitch. Sure.”
“Shut up and just let me play with your body.”
“You really are such a bitch,” he muttered.
“Cry a river, bridge, yada yada, zip it,” she grumbled. “Why did you stop giving me chips?”
“Get a room!” Winter complained.
“Daiki threw us out,” replied Calvin.
“Why? You’re here to hang out with him, aren’t you?” asked Winter.
“Where’s the other guy? Peter or...with the long hair?” asked Misha.
A timer went off in the kitchen. Winter sprang up and jogged over to turn it off. “Time to rinse my hair. I hope he gets back soon; we were going to go check on the grub thing.”
“Oh yeah, that pet cryptid?” Bevie asked. “I gotta see that. There’s no way that’s real.”
“Fine, come along if you want,” accepted Winter. She stopped at her brother’s room and called through the door. “Daiki? Can’t you drive yet?”
“He doesn’t have a car,” mentioned Bevie.
“Ugh, useless.” Winter ducked into the bathroom to wash the dye out.
When she came back out, Calvin and Bevie had slipped into Daiki’s room and shut the door. Misha played LeafGreen under the lamp. A few minutes later Daiki emerged from his room and shut the door behind him, looking back at the door with an annoyed expression.
“Why don’t you want to hang out with your friends?” Misha asked.
Daiki stood silently for a minute, and she thought he just wasn’t going to answer. Then he stated, “They want me to join them. I have a boyfriend.”
“Oh my god,” Misha commented.
“Wash your sheets after they leave,” advised Winter.
He nodded and sat down near Misha on the couch.
“You okay dude?” asked Misha.
“I’m. I don’t know. I’m unharmed,” decided Daiki.
“I hope I never get like that,” Winter remarked. “Like them. That’s gross.”
“They’re sorta cute and tsundere,” said Misha. She stretched out her legs and frowned over her game. “Can you ask your mom if we can get a pizza?”
“What the fuck is ‘tsundere’?” asked Daiki.
The door opened and Paul slipped in then sat down on a stool by the door to take off his winter boots. “Hey,” he greeted. “Oh, the blue is pretty. I like that color.” He still had the green corduroy jacket with the faux sheepskin collar more suited for autumn, but had layered it with a thick flannel shirt.
“Thank you! Oh Paul, can we go to the woods to see the grub?” asked Winter.
“I…” Paul sighed and retied his shoelaces. “Yeah, sure. I’m just kind of hungry.”
“Me too!” said Misha.
Daiki got up and moved to the kitchen where he began almost mechanically making sandwiches without comment. A stack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches gradually increased on a plate to his right, with an open bag of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a blue tub of jam to his left. Calvin and Bevie started arguing in Daiki’s room. The album Daiki had put on reached the end and the silence interrupted their argument as they became conscious of the rest of the house hearing their spat. Paul poured a glass of juice and helped himself to one of the sandwiches. Daiki bumped his head gently against his boyfriend then resumed his task until he’d made one sandwich for every person there, with one for his mom for when she finished her errands and got home. He covered the last one in plastic wrap and stuck it in the fridge.
“That’s for us?” Misha asked.
Daiki nodded.
“You rock,” she said and got up to get her sandwich.
Winter grabbed one then shouted through her brother’s bedroom door. “Stop your sex and come get your sandwiches!”
Paul choked on his juice and laughed into his hand.
Bevie, ruffled and casual, threw the door open and stepped out. “Who made sandwiches? Oh, hi Paul. Sup.”
“Hi Bev,” greeted Paul. A tamed animosity crackled between them: two cats with a truce.
Calvin walked out with his arms folded across his body, eyes down. “Hi. We weren’t...we...it’s not like. Shut up.”
“Yeah, sure,” said Winter. “Daiki made PB n’ J’s.”
“Suh-weet!” hooted Bevie. She snatched one and took a bite.
“We’re going to the woods to see Duria,” mentioned Paul.
Calvin had been reaching for a sandwich but his hand dropped. He looked around at everybody with a stony expression then walked back to Daiki’s room and slammed the door.
“Okay, the rest of us are going,” amended Paul. “I can only fit five in my car anyway.”
Daiki made one more sandwich and packed it into a ziploc bag. “For her.”
Everybody got their coats on and filed out the door. A frigid night greeted them, above freezing but still bitter for a climate that shied from extremes. Fog haloed the streetlights and deepened the darkness. With Paul in the driver seat, Bevie sat in the back with Winter and Misha, and Daiki took shotgun. His black trench coat was more suited for rain than chill, but he had on a sweater and a thick scarf. Paul put on a Pet Shop Boys CD, checked that everyone had their seat belts on, and pulled out onto the suburban street.
“Your team is underleveled. You gotta spend more time in the tall grass,” Misha suggested.
“It’s too dark to play anyway,” grumbled Winter. She saved her game and turned the console off. Misha followed suit. They shivered and leaned together for warmth in the chilly back seat. Bevie remained aloof from the two younger girls and looked out the window at passing houses decked in string lights. Her breath fogged up the window so she wrote HELP on the glass with her finger. Paul took the familiar streets slowly, leaning forward in his seat to see. He could see the shadow of his car in front of him in the headlights of the car right on their ass.
“Oh, excuse me for not speeding when I can’t fucking see,” grumbled Paul.
“Fuck being able to see when you drive. Just hit the gas and bring us right into the side of a house,” goaded Bevie.
“Until you got to the house bit I thought you were serious,” he replied.
“Yeah, can you imagine?” She twisted around in her seat and flipped off the car behind them.
Paul pulled over and the tailgater sped past. After a minute he cautiously pulled back out onto the road. Tension etched his posture into stark angles. The main road turned into a highway and houses gave way to tall conifers. A low mist crawled over the roots of the trees and slinked across the road.
“We’re here,” stated Paul. He pulled off to the shoulder and parked between the highway and the trees. His boyfriend had remained silent throughout the drive, so when everyone piled out of the car Paul took Daiki aside to check on him.
“Are you mad at me?” Paul asked.
“No,” replied Daiki. He turned his flashlight to the trees and started to walk away.
“Wait, hey, what’s wrong?” Paul asked and stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.
Daiki shrugged away and kept his eyes down. Paul waited for him to speak. Over in the trees, Winter showed Misha and Bevie some bones in the leaf litter. Daiki took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He glanced up at Paul without making eye contact, then opened the car and rooted around, setting his flashlight on the seat. After a minute or two he returned with a receipt from the floor and a pen from the glove compartment. Resting the receipt against a rear window, Daiki began to write.
I’m never alone anymore because of sharing my room. At school in the hallway I feel people shove me and call me names and when I turn around I can’t see who did it because of the crowd. I keep spacing out in class and I can’t help it and my grades are shitty. In my dreams Scott has found me and he hangs me or buries me in the ground or cuts me into tiny pieces. Or I dream about Sid. I don’t know what happened to him but he usually comes to see me at least once every couple weeks. If everything would just fucking stop and let me catch my breath then maybe I could be okay. I just want everything to stop.
By the end his writing had gotten quite small to fit on the receipt. Paul held it close under his flashlight and squinted. While he read it, Daiki walked away into the woods. Paul folded the receipt, put it in his pocket, and hurried to catch up with his flashlight making tall shadows swing along behind the trees. The group of teenagers made a racket of crunching and rustling noises as they pushed their way through the ferns, ivy, and reeds. Their breath hung condensed in the air and Bevie’s teeth rattled as the cold shook her thin frame.
“What if I sleep on the couch for awhile?” Paul offered.
“Okay,” accepted Daiki.
“You two splitting up?” asked Bevie through the chatter of her teeth.
“No!” snapped Paul.
“Just asking,” she said. Despite the layers she’d thrown on, she was just a pale little thing with no meat on her bones. Bevie hugged her arms and kept her hands in the sleeves of her hoodie.
“People can get lost in the woods really easily,” mentioned Misha. “Let’s not go too far from the road, okay?” She had a pair of fluffy earmuffs and a poofy padded nylon jacket. Her hands stayed warm in striped knit gloves.
“We come out here all the time. I know that log, and there’s the tree with the broken branch next to the hollow tree full of spider webs and roly polies, and that’s the ditch where Daiki tripped last time,” reassured Winter. She swung her flashlight around to all the different landmarks she’d come to know, now steeped in rolling mist.
“Well, okay. As long as we stay where things are familiar to you. It’s creepy out here, though,” Misha replied.
“Would that help?” Paul whispered.
“Would what help?” asked Daiki.
“If I give you some space.”
“Oh. Yeah. Probably,” mumbled Daiki. “I feel like...like a radio between stations.”
An owl hooted somewhere deeper in the trees. Paul’s flashlight landed on a strange, slug-like lump a tad shy of the size of a toddler. The smooth chrysalis had affixed itself to the side of a trunk.
“I think that’s the grub thing,” said Winter.
She passed her flashlight to Misha and ran up to the chrysalis. Paul’s flashlight blinked out. He cursed and smacked the side of the plastic case. Misha stumbled over a branch on the forest floor and aimed her flashlight at her feet to keep from tripping. When Paul’s flashlight flickered back on, Winter wasn’t there. Now Misha and Paul both directed their flashlights at the large shape stuck to the side of a conifer. A mound of rot shifted perceptibly at the base of the tree, but nobody stood near it.
“Winter?” Misha called out.
No answer.
Daiki moved forward to the base of the tree. He put a hand on the trunk and peered around the back of the tree, then off toward the surrounding trees where the wane yellow light from the flashlights barely illuminated a chaos of ferns, underbrush, and fungi. Nowhere could he see a young girl in a bulky coat. Daiki moved strangely quick once he’d gotten close to the chrysalis. His mouth moved in silence and he turned back toward his friends, then he dropped away.
“Daiki?” Paul asked.
“Okay, nobody else walk up to the tree,” declared Misha. “Something is wrong.”
“Bullshit,” replied Bevie. She walked over and nearly tripped over one of the rocks set up near the tree’s roots. “They’re just behind the trees; I’ll show you.”
As she entered the direct proximity of the chrysalis, both flashlights died. Night closed in around them and muted the two remained teenagers. Paul unscrewed the top of his flashlight and checked the batteries, then put them back in. It worked more or less, but its beam showed no sign of Winter, Daiki, or Beverly.
“Daiki?” repeated Paul.
“Winter!” shouted Misha.
Since nobody called out for Bevie, Paul did. “Bev! Beverly! Daiki? Please answer!”
A movie date. Kids interrupt a grub at her meal. A mother mothers.
Paul took the bus back to Munizza High School so they could take his car instead, and so he wouldn’t be leaving his car in the school parking lot overnight. He had some bottled water in his trunk and he gave one to Daiki. Daiki unscrewed the lid and took a small sip before he tipped the clear plastic bottle back and guzzled the water down. He shoved the bottle into the grocery bag Paul kept as a trash bag hooked over the gear shift. Paul could hear Daiki’s teeth chattering in the freezing car. The air blowing through the vents still took awhile to heat up even after they’d gotten started down the road toward Downtown Xachu.
“I wanna go to this little cinema that shows indie and foreign movies,” mentioned Paul. “I don’t think they’re still showing the Matrix. At the regular theaters, I mean. That one was mind blowing. Did you see it?”
Daiki shook his head. “I don’t go to the movies much.”
“You gotta see it. Rent it or something when it comes out on video.” Paul entered the grid of old streets lined with parked cars.
String lights decorated low brick buildings that had Christmas displays in shop windows. Clusters of people smoked in front of shops or drifted along the steeply inclined sidewalk. Paul drove slowly past compact shop fronts, some in alcoves or under awnings, some boarded up and gone. Tattoo parlor and a smoke shop, restaurants and bars, antiques and boutiques on slow parade as people milled along the sidewalk with buskers and homeless people just trying to exist, until he saw a glowing marquee bordered in neon lights: Bijou Cinema. There wasn’t any parking in the immediate vicinity, so Paul circled around the block and the next block over until he found parking at a meter. Daiki waited while Paul parked by degrees. Cars drove around them.
“Don’t laugh,” muttered Paul. He put his arm behind Daiki’s backrest to peer backwards as he inched toward the car behind them. “Unless you can parallel park.”
“I can’t drive yet,” Daiki replied. “I’m still working on my permit. My mom was kinda concerned about me driving since I went into a coma for no reason.”
“Alright then, don’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing.”
They got out of the warm car into biting cold and hiked two blocks back to the cinema down the hill. The two kids resisted holding hands and tried to move as if they were just friends. That is, until Daiki noticed an old gay couple emerging from a restaurant, bundled up and casually familiar, wrinkled and gray and beautiful. The two couples met eyes and Paul cautiously allowed Daiki to hold his hand. The older couple smiled warmly at them and whispered together.
A fluttering feeling trembled in Paul’s chest and he got in line for tickets still holding Daiki’s hand. While they stood in line they looked around at the lit up posters on the walls near the doors. The ticket booth stood in the middle with the pavements sloping upward from the street to the two pairs of glass doors. Warm light shone through from inside where more movie posters lined the wall of a cozy lobby with worn red carpet and a small concessions stand. They decided on Run, Lola, Run and moved indoors. Paul eyed concessions and probed through his wallet, remembering that he didn’t get an allowance anymore. He’d just spent the last of his cash and didn’t know when or how he’d acquire more. Daiki pretended not to see the snacks and popcorn machine and pulled Paul over to a podium where an usher waited. The usher tore their tickets, gave them the stubs, and directed them to the theater that would show their movie.
They continued down a ramp into a dimly lit hall until they reached a door with the correct number over it. Inside, small red upholstered seats led in rows down toward the screen with an aisle down the middle. The screen hung over a small stage, indicating that sometimes Bijou Cinema showed live theater productions. Ornate but chipped plaster petals curled up toward cherubs holding lights between curtained intervals along the side walls. Paul found a spot in the middle and pushed the armrest up between his and Daiki’s seat. The butterflies in his stomach flittered and danced about all the worse as he and his boyfriend settled in. The previews played and more people filtered in to settle in around them.
As the lights dimmed and the screen went black, Paul lifted Daiki’s hand and kissed the tips of his fingers. Daiki watched Paul by the light of the white letters appearing on the black screen, Prokino followed by a quote attributed to T. S. Elliot. Paul looked back and smiled warmly, nervous but sweet. Daiki led Paul’s hand to his own mouth and began a demonstration on one of Paul’s fingers. It was too dark to see Paul’s ears turn red. A strange bronze pendulum swung to and fro across the screen as music and a ticking noise rose from the speakers concealed around the edges of the theater. Paul whimpered and sank down further into his seat, reclaiming his hand and turning back to the screen. Daiki grinned and leaned his head on Paul’s shoulder.
The movie threw them into the mouth of a gargoyle holding a clock, and from there Daiki’s attention fixed almost wholly to the screen. Paul’s mind kept straying back to the saliva evaporating off of his finger and the curve of Daiki’s grin. Heat traveled through his arms and face. He looked back and forth between the rough hand-drawn animation in the opening to the flicker of lights over his boyfriend’s glasses. Lola got the call from Manni on the red telephone and Paul, tapping a damp finger against his thigh, let the movie draw him in. An hour and sixteen minutes later, as the credits rolled, he would have ordinarily stayed seated through the credits to listen to the pulse of electronic music. Instead Paul found Daiki’s hand and pulled him along out of the theater.
“How was the money in the bag still a hundred thousand after the guy got himself a suit, a bike, and all those drinks at the sausage place?” Daiki wondered aloud as Paul dragged him into the hall with its thin carpet and illuminated posters.
“It...I don’t know,” breathed Paul. He watched other people filter past them and pulled his boyfriend along a bit farther. “It wouldn’t be, would it? Maybe Manni had some cash on him and made up the difference. I don’t really care.” He found an alcove for the restroom doors where he could push Daiki against a wall and kiss his neck.
Daiki kissed Paul’s cheek and guided him into the men’s room. “Yeah, why ruin a happy ending with too many questions?”
“Exactly,” agreed Paul. “I know the whole reason for the date was, like, to comfort you because you worried about...um. Well. About pressuring me. So this, I just -”
“Am I pressuring you?” Daiki asked and hooked his fingers over Paul’s belt.
Paul shook his head and smiled. “No. Not at all.”
“Alright then.”
---
Winter looked up from the photos Josh had gotten back stacked up in their paper envelope. Her brother walked through the door smiling and flushed, tucked under Paul’s arm. They’d lingered in the car awhile before crossing the front walk to the house. Winter had peeked out the front window at the two of them making out in the car, and now that they stepped through the door she stared at them judgmentally.
“Everyone can see you basically fucking in the car,” Winter told them.
“Oh,” said Paul. He looked away and put a hand to the side of his face, ears burning.
“That wasn’t in the car,” Daiki replied.
“What? Yes it was, I saw you. Everyone can see you.”
Daiki exercised enough will to not explain his joke. “So stop watching.”
“ ‘So stop watching,’ he says. Stop mating every time you get within smooching distance to your boyfriend,” complained Winter. She held up a photo to the light. Most had turned out blurry or focused on the kennel bars instead of the creature inside it, but Winter had found one of the clearer photos.
“What’s that?” asked Daiki.
Paul cleared his throat and drifted further on into the house.
“A demon thing spawned from that doll, the one with Duria in it.” She handed her brother the picture.
He held it carefully by the edges and squinted at large wet eyes and the fleshy barbs above its dark mouth. It had long bristled legs like an insect, mostly blurred from motion, sprawled out from a grayish curled body.
“What the fuck?” said Daiki. He frowned and sat next to his sister to look at the other pictures. “This came out of the doll?”
“Yeah. We tried to trap it in a cage, but the legs were skinny enough to reach right between the bars and open the latch. You should see the video Adam’s editing together from the footage. The doll got seriously gross and messed up and that’s before the head even popped off.”
“The doll was haunted by Duria? You didn’t tell me that was Duria!” He flipped through the photos. “The face is almost sort of human. Sort of. What the fuck.”
“Yeah there was no way I was gonna tell you that. What if you found a way to get her ghost back? I don’t like when you’re possessed and weird; just your regular weird is fine.”
“So now she’s just out in the woods somewhere?” Daiki handed the pictures back but still stared at the topmost photo with a look of concern.
“This thing is. You think that thing is Duria? We tried asking it, but it can’t even talk. It just hisses and crawls around looking freaky as hell.” Winter looked over to see Paul had changed into his pajamas. “Does Sid still bother you sometimes?”
“No, I haven’t seen him.” Daiki pouted. He missed Duria but knew his sister wouldn’t sympathize with that. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing. I’m glad you got rid of him, whatever you did.”
Daiki looked quietly down at his hands. “Sure.” A kind of dread churned in his gut and he tried to summon back the weightless euphoria from his date. He thought about a weird creature that might be some weird reincarnation of his friend. Thoughts also crowded in to wonder if Sidney was going to call on him out of the blue and whether he could deter Sid and stay faithful to Paul, or if he’d feel as powerless as he always did and fuck everything up. “Where did you have her caged up?”
“In the woods near Adam’s place. We could show you if you want to come over tomorrow and see the video,” Winter offered.
“Yes. Please.”
---
Trees caught the rain in their leaves and dropped larger dribbles and drops down in scattered showers. Puddles formed between roots and reddish reeds. A rivulet flowed through a pebbly ditch near a thatcher ant mound. From the shadows of the trees, blinking eyes reflected the cool blue of the clouds overhead. A creature the size the raccoon scrabbled in the frigid damp undergrowth, tearing into dandelion leaves and digging the roots out with her claws. She’d done nothing but eat since she’d let herself out of the kennel, eat and grow. Beetles, half-frozen frogs, dandelions, nettles, a hibernating squirrel, whatever she could get her claws on that seemed halfway edible. Snails tasted foul, ants were a bit tangy but not worth the effort, and there just wasn’t very much out here in the winter. At least it hadn’t snowed and she could root around a bit easier. At some point she’d gone back and deigned to eat the dog food Winter had put out for her.
Digging up the dandelion roots brought up grubs and crunchy little rolly pollies. Dirt clung to her teeth and throat. She drank from a puddle then used it to wash her face. A car splashed through another puddle somewhere to her left. Duria followed the direction of the sound and found a bend in a highway. A raccoon had strayed onto the asphalt sometime recently and now its intestines smeared the oily pavement. She scuttled out to the roadkill, sank her teeth into the stiffened furry flesh, and dragged the poor thing off the road. The grub didn’t want to remember the girl she used to be when she tore furry hide aside and ripped off ribbons of meat. Duria scarfed down the meat and did her best to keep her thoughts empty. This wasn’t who she wanted to be, this wasn’t what she’d ever wanted to be. A flashlight lit her up and Duria froze.
“Oh god, is that really her?” Daiki asked.
“That’s the thing,” confirmed his little sister.
No. Not somebody who knew her. Duria hated for him to see her like this. She backed into the ferns, dragging the raccoon with her. She could see him now, in a black raincoat and holding a large flashlight. The boy they’d met as souls together stood a bit behind Daiki under an umbrella, and there was Winter in her green trench coat and a bucket hat.
“Duria?” Daiki called out in a concerned voice.
She remembered having warm skin and soft hair. That alone brought tears to Duria’s eyes. Hearing his voice from the outside felt wrong. It felt like watching a video of herself. She used spidery paws to wipe blood from her face and barbs and sighed from spiracles along her abdomen. Tears flowed freer and faster and she curled up, hiding her face behind her legs.
“Is it crying?” asked Paul. He craned forward to see. “It was eating roadkill.”
Staggered hisses created by the scrape of leg bristles came from the thatch of ferns and reeds. She didn’t have a voice but she could make whispery noises with friction. Duria gnashed her teeth and shuddered where she hid.
“She’s crying,” confirmed Daiki.
“Oh jeez,” said Paul.
Daiki started toward the pathetic, ugly creature. “It’s okay, Duria. How’d you get like this? Is that really you?”
“It got bigger,” remarked Winter.
Her brother found a stick on the ground and reached it toward the shivering larva. Duria caught the stick, bit it, and yanked it away. She held it in her forelegs and scooted forward, then used the end of it to reach toward Daiki’s face. He flinched away, so she held the stick still and waited until he allowed her to put the stick to his face. She traced a line first near Daiki’s ear, then over his cheekbone. He stared at her and she stared back, then she repeated the motion, drawing two short lines on the left side of his face near his temple.
“At the playground,” Daiki remembered. “With the knife.”
Duria tapped the ground with the stick and bobbed up and down.
“What?” asked Paul.
“The day before, no, the same day as when Sid killed her. She cut my face with a knife,” recalled Daiki. “This is her.”
“That’s completely normal and not creepy at all,” remarked Paul.
“She cut you? With a knife?” Winter asked incredulously.
“In a good way!” Daiki replied defensively.
“What’s ‘a good way’ to cut your face with a knife?” asked Paul.
Daiki scoffed and looked back at the weird grub. “It was sexy and cool when she did it. I don’t know how to get you to understand.”
“No, I think I get it. You’re just kinda fucked up like that,” Winter commented.
“Well, not, I mean. Okay, yeah,” admitted Paul reluctantly. “Yeah. Okay.”
Daiki got back to his feet. He watched the creature gnaw on the stick and crouch in a puddle. A moment stretched on with just the pattering rain. A car splashed them as it followed the curve of the bend at fifty miles per hour, headlights illuminating orange triangles set up to warn cars in the night that the highway changed direction.
“I’m going to make her something real to eat and bring it back out here. She shouldn’t be eating roadkill. I don’t know what else I can do for her, but I can cook. And I hate to see her like this,” concluded Daiki. “You got that, Duria? I’ll meet you back here in an hour.”
Duria waved a claw to show she understood. She knew him well enough to know he meant what he said, that he didn’t offer empty promises as comfort. The familiarity made her present situation feel all the more shitty and hope didn’t come easily. She hid under fronds and chewed on the stick until they went away.
---
Paul had a peculiar expression as he sat behind the wheel. Winter sat in the back, Daiki in the front passenger seat. The closest trunks of trees blurred past while the farther trees shifted just a mite slower, creating endlessly changing bar codes out of the light that fell between them.
“What do you do with that? When you know there are ghosts?” Paul asked. He drove a bit faster than he really needed to. “But then, not just that there are ghosts. That children can take the spirit of a dead person, a real person who once lived, and just put them in an object. Then that object, I’m not done, no, that object just ‘spawns’ a monster. A little creepy monster that doesn’t look like any one animal or even faintly human, but like some Heironymus Bosch demon that you might see playing a trumpet with its ass. You sister and her friends did that, somehow. People can just do that. But we don’t see little Boschian demons everywhere, so either they lucked out and happened upon the exact spell that turns a dead person’s soul into a haunted doll then into a catfish spider grub, or I don’t even fucking know. How did this happen? How is this just happening in my life, right now?” Paul demanded. “That used to be a person! Some years and a few incantations ago, but we knew a girl, and now she’s a thing eating roadkill and poking your face with a stick. I didn’t really know her, like I met her, went to school with her, but like, I barely remember her.”
“Stop sign,” said Daiki.
“Shit, yes, stop sign.” Paul slammed on the brakes and everybody in the car flew forward against their seatbelts. “Stop. Sign. Yes.” He took a breath.
“You’re also allowed to go after you stop,” reminded Daiki. “When it’s safe. Which it is.”
“I know! I have my license!” Paul replied.
“We broke him,” commented Winter.
“I’m fine!” Paul argued, unconvincingly. “If monsters and ghosts are real, why not mermaids? Dragons?” He looked around the intersection then cautiously pulled forward. “Do you think elves are little and dorky or tall and pretty? Or maybe they look like freaky demons, too. That’s a possibility. Apparently.”
“When you die I could put you in a Barbie,” offered Winter. She grinned.
Paul looked at her in the rear view mirror then looked at the road. He heaved a sigh heavy with stress and fury. “Why a Barbie?”
“Because it’s funny,” she replied.
“Why did you make a haunted doll in the first place? Was that supposed to lead to good things? What if she ended up getting a kitchen knife and killing people?” Paul asked.
Winter shrugged. “I didn’t think it would really work. Besides, better that she’s in a doll than in my brother. Do you know how creepy it is when somebody you love turns into somebody else?”
Daiki looked over his shoulder at her then looked out his window at the trees.
“My grandparents didn’t turn out to be who I thought they were,” muttered Paul.
“Okay, cool. What does that have to do with ghosts?” Winter asked.
Paul glared ahead at a road sign warning drivers not to “drug and drive,” with a presumably dead person’s name listed beneath. A cross decked with a wreath a short distance from the sign also marked the site of that person’s death. “Nothing,” said Paul.
“We weren’t hurting anybody,” said Daiki angrily. “We were happy. I love her, and I loved being her.”
“Yeah well I love you!” snapped Winter, rising against her seatbelt and grabbing the corner of Daiki’s seat. “Not her! Not you mixed with her!” She sat back down and hugged one of her knees to her chest. “I’m sorry she’s a Bosch thing, though. I didn’t think that would happen. I didn’t even think the spells would work. I’m sorry.”
Daiki sighed. After a few seconds he said, “Thank you.”
---
Back at the house, while Daiki darted about the kitchen with a kind of tunnel vision honed in on his task, Paul stayed out from underfoot. Winter grabbed the phone and went to her room to call a friend. Rei had been reading a book in the warm light of a lamp, but put a receipt between the pages and set it down when Daiki, Winter, and Paul came home.
“I see you’re all back,” said Rei. She got up and came over to sit next to Paul on the couch. “Where did you go?”
Paul hesitated.
She patted his arm. “While you fabricate a mom-friendly story about where you’ve been with my son, how about you put that on hold, actually. I was making small talk. There’s something we do need to talk about.”
“Oh, um, okay.”
She leaned her elbows on her knees and wove her fingers together. “So I can’t help but notice lately that you’ve moved in. Do you have any plans for independence? Where you’ll go from here and how you’ll get there?” Rei asked gently. She looked into his freckled face and tilted her head.
“I, um. Well…” Paul took a deep breath. “I’ve been working on college applications at school. So, I’m thinking maybe I’ll get into a dorm and I’ll move out when I go to college?”
Rei nodded. “I see. So, we’re just now getting into December. You moved in on November eleventh, out of necessity. The new school year at college will be in September of next year. So that’s…” She counted out months under her breath. “Or I could do it by numbers. September is the ninth month so ten months from now. Right. So your plan is to live in my house, in my son’s room, for most of a year. Do you have a Plan B?”
Paul shrank in on himself and toyed his fingers together in his lap. “Right. I guess I better get a job and, uh, find...an apartment?”
“Right, so when you sign a lease that is usually for a year. So you would need to break the lease to – Paul, honey? I’m not scolding you. I like you. I just want you to grow up, and I want to help you do that. I am trying to help you.” She put a hand on his shoulder and leaned forward to try to catch eye contact. “You’re trembling, Honey. Stop holding your breath.”
“Sorry,” managed Paul. He sat up with effort and tried to still his hands on his knees. “I’m sorry. I don’t really know anything about, um, I mean I’m not stupid -”
“Just a bit spoiled. I know.”
He frowned and looked a bit offended. “Oh.”
“There’s a laundry list of things I could go over about that, but let’s stay focused.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I heard you, I know. Thank you. I appreciate that you’re sorry, but I need you to work with me here and find a solution, not just apologize. You’ve apologized, I’ve accepted your apology, so let’s move on now. Breathe, Honey. Paul.”
“Yes.”
“Let’s get you started on a resume. Come on, let’s go to my office and you can use my computer.” Rei got up and waited while Paul slowly got to his feet.
“I don’t know what I’ll put on it. I haven’t had a job and I haven’t even graduated yet so, um. I don’t know.” He followed her through the living room and into a small bedroom Rei had converted into a home library and office. It had bookshelves, some old art supplies, a paper cutter, and a heavy steel desk with a desktop computer upon it between stacks of paper, binders, and envelopes.
“What’s your job?” asked Paul.
“I’m an orthodontist,” replied Rei. She woke her computer up from its screensaver of branching pipes by moving the mouse.
The office chair squeaked when Paul sat in it. There was a smooth plastic mat underneath the wheels so it could roll around easier than on the carpet. Paul took the mouse and opened a new, blank document.
“Is Cooper your maiden name?” Paul asked.
“No. I remarried after the divorce from Daiki’s dad, and then didn’t want to go through the whole hassle of a name change again after I divorced again,” explained Rei. “Name changes are a royal pain in the ass. I mean it’s a bit easier with marriage or divorce paperwork, but there’s still getting a new social security card, a new driver’s license, getting it changed at the bank, and so on and so forth.”
“You -”
“So after my first husband took the kids after having a baby with Sarah, I was having a hard time of it and just sort of fell into another marriage. Things can kind of just happen when you’re depressed and vulnerable, y’know? It was stupid. But I came to my senses eventually and divorced again (much, much easier without custody battles), and now I am wholly done with that bullshit. And now I have my kids, and Sarah’s kid, and then now you as well, bless your heart.” Rei smiled a crooked smile and tossed her long hair behind her shoulder with a flick of her hand.
“Oh, wow.” Paul looked up at her, stunned.
“Let me get another chair so I’m not just hovering over you.” She left the room and came back with one of the chairs from the dining room set: a narrow wooden chair with a green cushion. Rei set it perpendicular to the office chair and landed heavily into the seat, setting an elbow on the desk. “Alright!”
“Alright,” echoed Paul.
Rei leaned in and got Paul started on a resume, talking over possible part time jobs, expanding his resume with volunteer work, and so on. Daiki walked in with a confused expression awhile later.
“I made cornbread and chili,” mentioned Daiki.
“Ooh, lovely! I didn’t realize you were making dinner,” said Rei.
“No, it’s for my friend in the woods. I mean, it doesn’t all have to be. There’s enough for everybody I guess, but she’s waiting and I said I’d be back in an hour,” Daiki explained.
Rei’s face fell slightly. “Did you make a homeless friend?”
“Uh...yes. Yeah, that’s technically true,” Daiki confirmed. “But, uh, can I have my boyfriend back so he can drive me back out there?”
I've made some changes to the latter chapters but I know of only one person who has made it that far in the story. If other people are reading it, it would be nice if they let me know somehow.
I've changed it so the V tattoos are stick and poke done by Sparrow, not Romeo, and Romeo Rosemary thinks Daiki is old enough for a tattoo during Spinal Centipede.
At some point while writing before going to visit my friend, I was dissatisfied with a word choice. Then, on the plane or something, the word I'd wanted to use but couldn't think of came to mind and I wrote it down. Now I have "hoisted" written into my journal and I'm not sure exactly where I intended to use that word.
The two remaining foremen of the Vipers enter the labyrinth.
CW Gore, violence, death
The door’s slam echoed in the warehouse, echoes eaten into the scuttling of beetle feet over the walls, floor, and shelves. It seemed to Isabel that insects didn’t normally sound that loud. She put a hand to her mouth and coughed, and a moth flew out from her lips. Sir recoiled in horror and hurried through the door to get out of the surreal infestation.
Alarms immediately went off in her mind when instead of a dark night with the open air smelling of river water and factory pollution, she stepped into a bright hallway. It looked like a hospital, except that hospitals these days painted their walls earth tones and pastels with art on the walls. The stark white walls and tiled floor unnerved her enough on their own, but when she followed Scott’s sandy shoe prints on the tile with her eyes they led to a splash of blood across the floor with more pooled in the middle of the hallway. Shoe prints and tracks like large raccoon hands smeared through the blood and, stepping cautiously closer, Isabel saw marks like a fallen body, dog paw prints mixed in with the raccoon prints, and drag marks leading farther down the hall.
Since the only other option here was the door behind her, Sir followed the drag marks until she arrived at an intersection with black checkered tile and a curved mirror. Given options, Sir headed in the opposite direction from the blood. Keeping one hand on the right wall, Isabel wandered the corridors for awhile. Her throat felt parched and burnt, so she was grateful to find a water fountain in an alcove. Icy cold, clear water sprang forth when she turned a knob with four spokes on the side, and a small sip tasted fine. She drank deeply until quenched, then stood back up. These hallways didn’t seem to lead anywhere.
---
In the warehouse, Leopold held back from the door. He’d seen the bright hallway on the other side of it, and though he’d put his trust in the cardboard tunnel in his refrigerator, he felt wary of this passage. Sitting on the stairs, however, he began to feel the biting of ants crawling up his legs and clothes. Acid sting smarted his skin and he sprang up from the step, shaking his limbs out and brushing ants off. Looking around the hot, crawling shelves, Leo decided it was time to leave, misbehaving doors or not. Still brushing ants off and flicking them from his fingers, he hurried to the door, slipped through, and shut it behind him. The bright lights made him flinch so he worked a pair of cheap sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. Better.
Fortified against the light, Leo started when he saw the blood puddle with its smears and splatters a short ways down the hall. “Fuck.” He walked forward and could see that the shallower areas had dried to the tile and only the middle puddle remained sticky and wet. A scrap of denim about the length of Leo’s hand lay in the splatter, itself soaked and crusty.
“Well fuck,” Leo said, and began to follow the trail. At the four way intersection the trail curved around to the left. The bloody path continued around yet another corner and then in through a doorway.
Leopold walked softly and peeked through the doorway. Static buzzed across a tape showing engaged bodies in some amateur production, giving a flickering cold light to an otherwise warmly lit room furnished in red and orange. Tapes, formerly stacked, had fallen over and strewn across the carpet. Scott’s body had become unrecognizable, until Leo found the upper half of the man’s face at one end of the carnage. The thick, heavy smell of blood hung in the air mixed with the stench of shit from spilled intestines.
As the disemboweled and ravaged spread began to turn Leo’s stomach, he thought he saw Scott blink and heard a wet gurgle from his torn throat. Leopold shook his head and retreated back out of the room to stand with his back to the wall beside the door frame. As he stood there he could hear a repeating wet scraping noise and breathing. Morbid curiosity drew Leo’s attention back to the room and he reminded himself silently that nobody could live through this kind of evisceration and blood loss. The blink had to be a trick of his imagination. He saw an arm twitch and the fingers seem to flex, but the limb in question had been torn almost completely off.
As for the wet scraping, Leo turned his attention to a creature licking between its legs behind the television. Viscera clotted its fur and, rising from its back, fat shiny larvae swayed and pulsed, each one decked with blunt spines poking from its gorged body. Sid looked up from cleaning his dick and licked his nose as he turned to face Leopold. Leo hesitated, but his doubts about the blink and the twitching drove him forward. He skirted around Scott’s body spread out over the carpet, hauled the heavy CRT off the glass table, and smashed it down on Scott’s head.
“Dead. For sure now. Dead,” whispered Leopold. He turned around to face Sid, feeling some of Scott squish under his shoes as he did.
Sid grinned and raised a monkey-like paw to wave at Leo. “Hey!”
Leo waved back. “H-hey. Hi. Uh.” He took another step back toward the door, this time crunching the bones of Scott’s forearm under his heel. “Sorry. Shit.”
“Urreyohh! Yuu ghaught mee ahht a ghadt tayymm. Eyyumm,” Sid smiled apologetically and looked down at the remains of his meal on the floor. “Ehtull taayg me a yithuu geht gyeendup.” Leo! You caught me at a bad time. Umm, it’ll take me a bit to get cleaned up.
“It talks. You talk. Hi. Um.” Leo looked behind him as he continued to walk backwards and found the doorframe with his hand.
“Eyrunnahhs hasstas ah ghar so dohnnut erruuhn,” warned Sidney. I run as fast as a car, so don’t run.
Leo laughed nervously then began to run. A fragment of meat stuck to the bottom of his shoe slipped on the smooth floor and he staggered, caught himself before he fell, and took off down the hall leaving bloody shoe prints. Just around the corner he ran full on into Isabel with a shout. They tangled for a second before Leo gave her an urgent look and continued sprinting down the hall. Sid wasn’t even hungry, but the temptation to chase prey took hold and he bounded into the hall. Even if he couldn’t hear Leo running, and he could, the tracks were blindingly obvious. The long-legged creature ran right past Isabel. Leo had just gotten to another bend in the hall when the maned wolf mowed him down from behind, grasped his neck, and shook him until the vertebrae snapped.
Isabel covered her mouth and sneaked as quietly as she could around the corner where she found the blood trail leading into the room with the red carpet. Static buzzed and sparks flashed from a broken television on the head of a body she only recognized from the clothes. As far as she could tell, this was the only room in the labyrinth she’d found herself in. None of the other hallways lead anywhere. A sinking feeling of despair washed coldly down over her and she cursed.
One high school boy deals with grief and another high school boy deals with PTSD.
The language class Daiki had decided on way back when he was getting ready for his freshman year was Japanese, because he didn’t know Japanese well enough to converse in it and figured it might be nice to know. He’d stuck with it all the way to his current junior year despite the fact that the class was absolutely packed with weeaboos. Calvin had fallen in among their ranks two years ago, and he hadn’t even heard of anime before he started high school. For one, at least half of the weeb friends Calvin had met in this class used his correct pronouns when speaking to him and more or less accepted him as an honorary boy in a “let’s humor him since we’re all pretty weird” sort of way.
Daiki’s memory was slipping with the phonetic alphabets and he was getting nowhere with the kanji. He was thinking maybe for his senior year he’d just stop taking Japanese altogether, since he only needed two years of language credits. As he struggled his way through a worksheet, something small and wet bounced off the side of his face. Daiki shuddered from the spitball and looked up to see who’d decided to pester him. Calvin made eye contact then flicked a folded paper football from his desk to Daiki’s. Daiki gave Calvin an annoyed look and set the paper triangle aside. Within a minute of looking back down at the worksheet, a spitball bounced off his ear. Daiki’s shoulders scrunched up and he heard a cackle.
“Your face, dude,” Calvin whispered.
“Fuck off,” Daiki hissed.
“Jeez, chill out. Read the note.”
“It’s a note?”
“Yeah, duh!”
Daiki unfolded the football into a creased sheet of college rule paper.
I heard your gay YES or NO
Daiki didn’t circle either and instead wrote bisexual. He didn’t know how to fold a paper football but he did his best to recreate it from the pattern of creases. It didn’t work. He flicked back what he’d made anyway. It came back folded correctly with a new message. Daiki caught the paper football under his finger.
That means yes. So whos your boyfriend?
He’d watched Calvin refold it so he could figure out how to do that, and noticed the absence of a worksheet on Calvin’s desk. After twitching his pencil to and fro balanced between two fingers and his thumb, Daiki unfolded the piece of lined paper and changed the subject.
My boyfriend is in the closet. Are you already done with your worksheet?
Yes duh it was easy.
Could you help me?
Calvin looked at the note and grinned. He leaned across the aisle and whispered in Japanese, “What, can’t you write?”
Replying in kind, Daiki said, “Not well. I speak okay.”
“I don’t have my worksheet. The teacher has it,” Calvin whispered. He didn’t know how to say he’d turned it in. “I can do your worksheet.”
“Write the answers on that paper. I’ll write it on my worksheet.”
“What…” Calvin struggled for a few seconds then switched to English. “What’s in it for me?”
Returning the conversation to Japanese, Daiki asked, “What do you want?”
“Can I talk to my...big sister, no, um, Duria?” Calvin asked. He knew the words for big sister or little sister but not the word for twin sister. He had been born a few hours after Duria but didn’t want to call her older than him.
Daiki seemed to shrink in on himself a little. “Duria left. What else do you want?”
At that point their teacher caught them whispering and made them stand outside in the hall. Daiki sighed and leaned his back against the panel of the wall between the door and the yellow lockers. Calvin squeezed in next to him.
Speaking in English but keeping his voice low so they wouldn’t get caught, Calvin asked, “So she’s not possessing you anymore? When did that happen?”
“Like a week ago. No wait, it was on my birthday. Almost two weeks ago I went to get some work done on my tattoo -”
“Your tattoo?”
Daiki lifted his t-shirt and twisted away from the wall so Calvin could look.
“No way! Wait, how old are you?” Calvin asked.
“Seventeen. It’s not legal, and since I don’t think I’m in the Vipers anymore I don’t know how to get in touch with the tattoo artist. So I think I have to wait a year to get it colored in. I’m not going back there, anyway, because Scott is a pedophile and he beat the shit out of me because we let...you let...Bevie out.”
“I remember,” Calvin replied. “She was kinda mean when I met her but she’s nicer to me now that you broke up with her and, like, I think we’re going out?”
“She was using me (which, to be clear, I’m completely cool with) back when we were sort of a thing, so you should ask if you’re on the same page about if she’s your girlfriend or not,” warned Daiki. He warmed at the memory of what she’d used him for.
“Oh…” Calvin saw a tangent he could spiral on, then remembered what he’d asked about before that. “But I still don’t know how you got exorcised.”
“I don’t really know. When I went to the warehouse where Scott lived (because my tattoo appointment was there) Duria just disappeared. It wasn’t from getting the shit beat out of me because – don’t laugh, please, I’m -”
“You’re a twink,” supplied Calvin. “A bishounen. A sissy. A skinny little emo nerd. A toothpick. A -”
“Thanks. Anyway it was before Scott -”
“Handed you your ass.”
“Yes.” Daiki rolled his eyes. “It was before I got my ass handed to me because I’m ‘a twink.’ Thanks, Calvin. I’m sure you’d go toe to toe with a grown man just fine.” He remembered what brought them to talking about Duria. “But I’m sorry your sister is gone. I miss her too.”
Calvin’s eye twitched and he looked sour for a second before he looked away and nodded. “Yeah. It’s...it’s a lot.”
There was a pause. Calvin plucked at his eyebrows and closed off for a minute while he figured out if he actually wanted to talk about this or not. Daiki had his own thing grinding his gears and didn’t seem to mind the silence. It took a lot to pry the words out, but Calvin hadn’t talked about his loss to anybody in awhile and didn’t know when he’d get the chance to again. His mom never wanted to talk about it, and it would have been to much of a bummer to bring up at Anime Club.
“My mom changed after my sister died. I don’t feel like I know her anymore and it’s like…” He didn’t really have the words and shrugged. “It’s awful. Even if it’s been a few years it doesn’t feel like it. My friends really like slasher movies and I can’t watch them. I try to, but then I feel sick when the killing starts.” Drawing breath became difficult. “There was...there was this one time when I saw her in the mirror. Not like just seeing things, but for real. It was her ghost; she was visiting me. And I drove her away.” He covered his face, took in a deep breath, and held it. Tears welled up in his eyes and his throat closed off.
Daiki nodded. He thought it probably inappropriate to mention he remembered it too as if he’d been the one in the mirror. Instead he put a hand on Calvin’s back.
After a few minutes Calvin wiped his tears away and gave Daiki a hug. “Thanks for listening. If you want me to help you with your homework we could hang out, or something.”
“Oh, thanks! Yeah, I need the help. I don't even want to take this class anymore since I’m forgetting everything I learned and it makes me feel stupid,” Daiki admitted.
“Yeah, if anybody should know Japanese, you should,” teased Calvin. He socked Daiki’s shoulder. “Basically all the other Asian kids are in these cliques and go about talking to each other in, like, Vietnamese or whatever.”
Daiki gave Calvin a sideways look. “Uh huh. Well, I guess being Japanese American didn’t magically make this easier to -”
“No no I mean like, don’t you speak it at home?”
“Not really.”
Calvin looked embarrassed. “Oh. Uh, sorry.”
“Anyway. Yeah, let’s hang out and you can help me with my homework.”
---
They arranged to meet by the bell tower after school. Daiki stopped by the pay phones to call his mom and let her know so she wouldn’t freak out. After that, he found Calvin sitting with Bevie on the bench surrounding the dry fountain under the tower. Bevie used Calvin as a backrest and read a tween magazine.
“Miss me already? Too late. I don’t even like you anymore, so don’t even try to get back together,” Bevie greeted, barely lifting her eyes from her reading material.
Daiki sat next to Calvin. “Okay, I won’t.”
“I said I’d help him with his homework,” Calvin told her.
“Why, are you a nerd?” Bevie asked.
Daiki looked up while they bickered and brightened when he noticed Paul standing a few yards away. It looked like Paul had stopped in his tracks on the verge of joining Daiki. Paul hung back, assessing his boyfriend’s company, then made his way over. He pushed his hair behind his ear and perched his ass primly on the edge of the bench.
“You told me you hated him,” Bevie told Calvin.
“I got over it,” replied Calvin.
“Pff, boring. Where’s the drama in that?” Bevie shut her magazine and sat up. “Oh look, it’s Paul. Hi.”
Paul waved. “Hi, Bevie.”
Bevie looked him over then draped her arms over Calvin. “Hey Callie, you remember when I was at your house and you wanted to watch that boring ass old war movie in your room?”
“Uh, sorry you were bored,” mumbled Calvin.
“Who cares, not my point. I found Jawbreaker,” she informed him.
Calvin looked at the two potential candidates for this moniker. “How can you tell?”
“His jeans are just a bit too small,” hinted Bevie.
Which meant she couldn’t mean Daiki, because Daiki was wearing a long black skirt of cotton drill fastened with chunky plastic clips up one side, not jeans.
“The school lets you wear skirts?” Calvin asked him.
Daiki pinched at the skirt material and smiled. “The dress code only has rules for what girls can wear,” he replied. “What’s the ‘Jawbreaker’ shit you’re on about?”
“The dentist guy in a comedy from I think the seventies set in Korea,” Calvin began.
“A Korean dentist called Jawbreaker?”
“No, military hospital stationed in Korea. And there’s this show called MASH with the same name,” explained Calvin. “Anyway, there’s a peep hole in the shower tent, and people line up to take a peek whenever this dude takes a shower, ‘cause like the whole gag with this dude is just that he’s hung. Not really the most interesting guy in the movie.”
“Nothing is interesting in that movie,” declared Bevie.
“I like MASH. The show, anyway,” mentioned Paul. “I never watched the movie.”
Calvin and Bevie both looked at Paul with an impish delight. Daiki chewed on the sleeve of his coat and blushed, looking down at his boots.
“What did I say?” asked Paul.
“Nothing,” Bevie said cagily. “Nothing at all.” She sprang up off the bench and stretched. “Let’s all go somewhere. Hanging out at the school sucks anyway.”
As a group the four of them walked to the city bus stop on the street. Those seventeen and under could ride for seventy-five cents, so Paul just said he was seventeen too and saved a quarter.
“So where are we going?” asked Daiki.
“Were you really going to ‘study’?” asked Bevie, leaning on Calvin’s shoulder from the seat next to him. She reached back to the seat behind them and cupped Daiki’s chin in her hand. “I’m sure I could teach you both a few things.” She scratched the stubble on the underside of his jawline and grinned at his flustered squirming.
“I didn’t have euphemisms in mind when I asked for help with my homework,” Daiki replied.
“A femme-ism?” she asked.
“Euphemism.” He couldn’t tell if she was honestly asking or not.
“Feminism? Femememism?”
Okay she was probably teasing. Paul swatted Bevie’s hand off Daiki’s face.
Bevie looked at Paul. “Hey Jawbreaker. Too bad you’re so stuck up.”
“Too bad you’re a bitch,” Paul replied. Realizing the implications of the nickname she’d just given him, he moved his backpack to his lap.
She giggled. “So, are you more of a tits or ass man?”
“I must be a late bloomer, because after all these years I just don’t have any boobs,” lamented Paul in jest. “But, neither do you so I guess that’s normal.”
“Ouch,” Bevie said, unhurt, and grinned. “Cute.”
Daiki almost leaned on Paul but thought better of it. Bevie had a buttering-up tune to her questions as she asked Paul about Audrey and about what he was into. Paul actually took out his sketchbook and showed her the gryphons, dragons, and mermaids he liked to draw, and his character who shapeshifted between a girl and boy form. He tried to emulate the style from The Last Unicorn and fairy tale illustrations in books he’d brought with him when his grandparents kicked him out. Oh, why did they kick him out? Um, he didn’t want to talk about that right now. Or ever. Daiki ended up tuning out their conversation and withdrawing into the hungry longing he felt between distractions. A hollow need had opened up inside in the days of relative chastity since he broke up with Bevie. Before Bevie there had been Sid, who had first opened the wound that turned into a needy maw. Daiki chewed on his lip and wove his fingers together, exploring scenarios in his mind’s eye and letting the need ferment. Sid hadn’t pestered him in ages, seemed like. Not that he wanted that. Or, didn’t want to want. Paul caught his eye and smiled at him warmly.
“What are you smiling about?” demanded Bevie.
Paul looked away and shrugged. “Can’t I smile?”
Bevie gasped. “You’re the secret boyfriend! Smiling like that at this dumbass. You fruity stuck-up asshole! Ha! See his face? I’m right. I knew it and I’m right.” She sighed. “What a waste. Jawbreaker is fucking gay.”
Calvin turned around in his seat and grinned. “Paul? You’re Daiki’s boyfriend?”
“No!” Paul blushed. “All it took was a fucking smile? Are you serious? Fuck!”
“Yeah, man, nobody just smiles all lovey-dovey for no reason,” Calvin replied.
Daiki snapped out of his horny reverie and looked around. “Oh, did you tell them?”
“No, I didn’t tell anybody,” replied Paul. “Of course I didn’t. But apparently they could just tell. I wasn’t even doing anything. Now they’re going to tell everybody and...ugh. I am so sick of high school.”
“Drop out. I did,” suggested Bevie. “I never even went to high school. Like, don’t get kidnapped or someshit but, you know what I mean.”
“I’m halfway...wait…” Paul counted off months and did a quick calculation in his head. “I’m a third of the way through my senior year. It would be stupid to just drop out now.” He sighed. “It’s fine. But if you could just not tell everybody, that would be great.”
“I won’t tell anybody,” promised Calvin.
“I don’t give a fuck, but I don’t even go to school. I literally just told you that,” said Bevie.
“So have you done it yet?” asked Calvin.
“No!” Paul replied.
“Does that ‘no’ mean ‘yes’ like a second ago when you were denying going out with Daiki or does this ‘no’ just mean -” Calvin started.
“Just means no, we haven’t ‘done it,’” replied Daiki.
“So can I, or what?” Bevie asked. “Because I promise you, it means nothing and it’s just scratching an itch.”
“Hey!” objected Calvin.
“I make no apologies for my damage. And you never said we were exclusive,” Bevie told him. “You’re just like, ‘I’m for real a boy so please respect that okay?’ and sure. Whatever.”
“It was implied!” Calvin told her.
“I told you to make sure,” said Daiki.
Paul pulled the cord to request a stop. He tucked his sketchbook back into his backpack.
“Where are we going?” asked Daiki. “I think I asked that already.”
“I just decided we’re going to the gully by Hyun’s house. We can do whatever we want there,” replied Paul.
“So are you going to suck each other’s dicks before or after Calvin does Daiki’s homework?” Bevie asked. “Just want to get the schedule down pat.”
“Shut up,” snapped Paul.
The bus slowed to a stop. They got up as one, walked down the grooved steps through the folding door, and out onto the sidewalk. Even though they’d only just gotten out of school, in early December the sun had already started to set. Frost crusted the grass and leaves and frigid air nipped at any exposed skin. Daiki zipped up his coat and followed Paul and Calvin to a deer path leading from the sidewalk, between some fir trees, and down a wooded hill overgrown with morning glory and ferns. In the crease of the small valley a stream of storm run off flowed into a pipe blocked off with rusted bars. A monster truck tire lay half buried so that the top two thirds bridged the stream, where bottle caps and broken glass glittered reflections of the fading milky blue sky. Paul fished a stashed six pack of beer and a battery powered lantern from inside the tire, then sat on the worn rubber tread and popped open one of the cans.
“Go ahead and do your homework, Daiki,” encouraged Paul. “Don't listen to Bev. She’s just a jealous bitch who doesn’t know how to just chill out with other people without making it weird.”
“Whatever, virgin,” Bevie said and held her hand out for a beer. Paul handed one over despite his apparent animosity.
In minutes the gully became dark, shielded from the street lights by the dense copse of fir trees. Calvin and Daiki sat on a boulder and used the lantern. When Calvin read out the questions, Daiki was able to answer them, and then Calvin just showed him how to write it by transcribing Daiki’s answers onto a separate piece of paper.
“See, you know this stuff. You’re just illiterate,” Calvin commented.
“Thanks,” mumbled Daiki. He finished the homework and slipped it into a folder of his binder, then put the binder in his backpack. He refused the beer and perched on the rock with a stony expression.
“You’re so quiet. Are you, like, deep in thought or something?” Calvin asked.
“I guess?”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Fucking.”
Calvin snorted and slapped Daiki’s back. “Alright, dude. You’ve got a boyfriend though so I dunno why you don’t just hit it.”
“I...um. That’s.” Daiki fell silent and turned away. His face turned red and he buried his fingers in his hair, hiding his face behind his arm. Calvin hung out for half a minute before he got bored of the silence and wandered over to hug Bevie from behind and kiss her shoulder.
Daiki got up and drifted over to Paul. He pulled Paul down by his shirt to whisper one of the ideas that had been gnawing at him into Paul’s ear.
Paul’s eyes widened and he smiled nervously. “Oh. Hah. Huh. Hm. Wow.” He straightened up and sipped his beer.
Daiki buried his face in Paul’s chest and made a childish whining noise. His boyfriend patted his head. This patronizing gesture turned Daiki’s aching hunger into anger. He pulled back, slapped Paul’s hand away, and stomped off into the trees to sulk and chew on his hands.
“What did you want me to do?” Paul called after him.
“I spelled it out!” Daiki called back.
Bevie giggled. “What did he say? Tell me. Please? Oh come on. Please?” She cackled and stomped her emptied beer can flat with her boot. “If it was about fisting, I gave him that idea. There’s a lot more ideas where that came from, baby!”
Daiki flipped her off from behind a tree and she just cackled again.
Calvin got up off the boulder. “I’m gonna just go home. We used to hang out down here and it was pretty cool, but now it’s just really awkward. So...bye.” He got out his bus transfer and hiked back up the deer path to the sidewalk.
“Wait!” Bevie called out. “Don’t leave me with these losers. I’m coming too.” She jogged after him. In less than a minute, Paul and Daiki were alone.
The lantern on the boulder lit the gully in a pale, hazy wash of artificial light. Eyes in the dark reflected that light, and the withered vines cast strange shadows. Paul sat on the tire for a little while, looking down at his hands and shivering. At last he climbed down from the monster truck tire and made his way up the steep side of the gully to the tree where Daiki had concealed himself. Daiki sat hugging his knees, rocking and weeping, gnawing on his arm.
“Oh jeez, I’m sorry,” Paul said and sat in the cold dirt, reaching out to offer comfort.
“I won’t be a rapist. I won’t. Please don’t listen to me,” pleaded Daiki. “I have...a whole body itch to be handled, shoved down, and destroyed. I feel like I’ll die without it and it’s burning me up and none of that is on you.” He sniffled and wiped his eyes. “I’m just broken and have to keep getting broken. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” The weeping crumbled into sobs.
“Have you been going back to Bevie because I wanted to take it slow?” Paul asked. He wanted to comfort Daiki but he also feared this was a confession.
“No,” sobbed Daiki. He shook his head. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I broke up with her and she hates me because she has the same itch I do. I haven’t...no. No. No.”
“Okay, okay,” Paul accepted. He rubbed Daiki’s back. “What can I do?”
“Don’t! Don’t think you have to do anything you don’t want to! Please no. If you fuck me now because I ‘need’ it, I’m a monster.” Noticing Paul flinch back, Daiki added, “Rubbing my back is okay. That’s okay. But don’t give me what I want just because I’m crying like a goddamn little baby. I don’t want to become a monster.”
“Alright. Thank you, because I would. I’d do whatever you want me to,” admitted Paul. “I love you.”
Daiki sobbed harder and buried his face. “Jesus fucking Christ, don’t say that shit! Have limits for me to listen to or there’s nothing, no, no way to tell if I’m going to fuck up. Even though Sid didn’t listen to my limits, I still have them!”
“What did he do to you?” Paul asked.
A coarse laugh broke out from Daiki and he laid back into the ferns. “Oh my god. Do you really want to know?”
Paul hesitated. “Is it something you want to talk about?”
“No!”
“Then no.” Paul laid down beside Daiki and rolled closer to stroke his face.
“I love you too,” whispered Daiki. “I get so mad that you don’t get right down to it and that’s not fair. And I never went very long without, um…” He entwined his fingers and took a deep breath. “So I didn’t know it would drive me crazy like this. But I don’t want to make you do anything. I don’t want to turn into Sid.” He turned away to hide how his face crumpled up as he started to cry again.
“Shhhh. You’re okay. I got you. You aren’t hurting anyone. We’re here, we’re just here together right now. Thank you for telling me all of this. You’re really quiet and I worry about you. Shhhhh.” Paul wrapped the weeping mess in his arms and held him. The sobbing quieted back down and by degrees Daiki could breathe again, broken pieces held back into the right shape. Daiki wiped his face on his coat sleeve, all the snot and tears, and took one breath after another.
“Let’s get you something to drink that isn’t this old gross beer and we’ll go to a movie,” invited Paul. “My treat.” He kissed Daiki’s damp forehead.
That weekend, Adam brought the camcorder into the garage and trained it on the doll. He noticed its skin had gone from gray-beige to green mottled with black, and the dress had pale brown watery stains. The garage stank of rotting meat. He adjusted the tripod to an appropriate height, checked the charge of the battery, and focused the lens before allowing himself to be concerned about the horrible stink. First Adam checked the recycling bins to see if somebody threw garbage in with the aluminum cans or glass bottles and jars, but the smell didn’t rise from the bins.
Adam followed the stench instead to the doll, and saw the sticky sheen of meat juices on the plastic limbs, dribbled from the eye sockets, and soaked into the dress. A fly crawled out from under the skirt and buzzed up into the air before circling back around to land on one of the doll’s pigtails. Where the hair plugged into the plastic scalp, ichor had bled out of the holes and gunked up the roots of the shiny brown hair. Adam stepped closer with his hand over his nose and peered closer at the doll without touching it. He saw maggots spilling out of a hole in the doll’s back, crumbs of gray-green rotting meat, and an impression of writhing within.
“Daria?” he whispered through his fingers, keeping his hand clenched fast over his mouth and nose. “You did all this?”
The doll didn’t respond. He began to worry about what his mom would say when she found this disgusting thing in her garage. Adam left the camcorder recording and left to get dish gloves and a garbage bag with plans to move the operation to the woods where it wouldn’t stink up his home. On the way to the kitchen he stopped and went to the phone instead. He plucked the phone off its cradle on the wall and dialed his friend’s number.
“Hi, can I talk to Winter?” Adam asked.
“Who is this?” asked Daiki.
“Adam.”
“Oh. Yeah, sure. Hold on.” Daiki set the phone down.
Almost a minute later, Winter picked up. “Adam?”
“The doll changed!” he told her.
“What did it do?” she asked.
“It’s got maggots and flies and meat! It’s rotting! I don’t know how or when but it’s real, I swear. I gotta get it out of my garage.”
“Good thing you didn’t keep her in your room,” commented Winter.
“No kidding. I want to move it to the woods, but it might get stolen by a coyote or a bear or something now that it’s got meat.”
“Maybe tie her down or put her in, like, a cage?” suggested Winter.
“Yeah. Yeah, maybe. Do you have a cage? We have a cat carrier, but it’s hard plastic on the outside and we wouldn’t be able to film the doll once it was inside. We have to do something before my parents find it because they’ll just throw it away.”
“My grandpa had a wire cage he used to trap squirrels. He used to trap them with peanut butter on crackers then release them at the park,” said Winter. “I’ll ask Rei if we still have that, or something like that, and see if I can come over. Are you filming her now?”
“I am. Of course. This is wicked. Gross, but wicked.”
“Sweet. I’ll call you back.”
After they hung up, Adam found a pair of yellow dishwashing gloves in the kitchen hanging near the sink and a black garbage bag from under the sink. He put the gloves on and ran back over to the garage. When he got inside, he stopped and froze in place. The doll was twitching and rocking. Flies buzzed in a whirling cloud over the doll’s head and more maggots spilled out onto the crate from the doll’s back. The neck split apart and the head pushed up and to one side as something began to crawl out from between the doll’s shoulders. Adam backed up and grimaced, watching transfixed. The head tumbled off, bounced off the edge of the crate, and fell to the floor. Lanks of hair fell out of the holes in the scalp while crumbs of grayed fuzzy meat and squirming maggots tumbled from the neck hole as the head rolled across the floor.
Out of the splitting, bulging neck a kind of new head shoved itself through and opened a maw of shiny black teeth. Catfish barbs stretched out from either side of a snuffling little knob of a nose and watery silver-blue eyes bugged out. A mottled fish-white face about the size of an apple looked back at Adam. The plastic arms in turn popped off and four long, spindly arms covered in moth-wing scales stretched out from the holes and gripped the edge of the crate. Still wearing the doll, the creature crawled forward, spilling maggots along the way as it threw itself down to the floor. The plastic torso split open upon impact and a chubby creature bodily wriggled forth. At first the dirty red dress clung to the creature, but it peeled the cloth off with the ripping of velcro and cotton and tossed it aside. Behind the shoulders of slender arms ending in small, sharp claws, a shrimp-like body curled around itself, fuzzy underneath and plated above, ending in a hard chitin fin. Adam moved forward and popped the camcorder off the tripod so he could point it down at the floor.
“That’s so gross!” Adam commented in awe, then added, “Diabolical.” He checked to make sure he was still recording. “Good, good,” he muttered.
The creature grinned up at Adam with her broad mouth of sharp black teeth, then scuttled under the shelving unit into hiding. The boy knelt down and aimed the camcorder into the shadows, but the camera didn’t pick out any details out of the darkness. He panned the camera over the broken pieces of the doll and the ripped dress, then tried to get a good view under the shelves again without getting too close. Minutes passed and he couldn’t see anything, so he put the camcorder back on the tripod, angled it down, and got a broom to clean up the maggots and broken pieces of discolored plastic. While cleaning, Adam noticed a bulky red flashlight with a handle and fetched it down from the camping supplies. He turned it on and aimed it under the shelving unit. All he could see was dead bugs, spider webs, and dust. The phone in the house rang. Adam set the flashlight down and went inside.
“All I found was -” Winter started to saw when he picked up the phone, but Adam cut her off to tell her, “It got away.”
“The doll got away?” she asked. “It can move now?”
“No, something hatched out of the doll like an egg. Some kind of monster. Just burst out! It was crazy! I got it on tape. You gotta see it!” raved Adam.
“No way.”
“But it crawled off in my garage and I can’t find it anymore. I don’t know how it managed to hide; the thing was like almost a foot long. It was some kind of monster, or a demon!” He paused and looked back at the garage door apprehensively. “I don’t think I can sleep until we find it. That thing was super freaky. That squirrel trap would be perfect.”
“We don’t have my grandpa’s squirrel trap,” said Winter.
“No? Dammit!”
“I guess we didn’t keep it after he died. That’s wild though. I never ever heard of a haunted doll hatching monsters before.”
“Me neither! It doesn’t say anything about that in the book,” said Adam. “Are you coming over?”
“Of course!”
---
The amalgam of Duria and the parasitic wasp hound larva clung to the back of a box of barbecue equipment. It trembled and turned its watery eyes to look around in the dim shadows behind the shelves in Adam’s garage, then found a nook between boxes to stop and groom itself. It no longer smelled the atrocious stink of rot that clung to its carapace, though it did not care for feeling so sticky and gross. For the moment it just found and snacked on maggots and bits of gray meat from inner elbows and the fuzz on the underside of its body. It could hear Adam sweeping up the broken doll a few feet away. The pieces clattered from the dust pan into a garbage bag which he then tied off and stuffed into one of the bins. Duria crept along between the shelf and the wall, moving through dusty spider webs and scraping its back against the wall, moving closer to the door. Adam heard the scraping and looked up. He peered between boxes and caught sight of one of Duria’s legs where its foot hooked around a part of the shelving unit. The boy shuddered and backed off a step, then turned as he heard the doorbell ring. Duria tried to get closer to the door to the house but didn’t make it in time before Adam shut the door behind him.
A minute later Winter and Adam returned to the garage.
“Ewww it smells rank in here,” Winter complained and closed her hand over her nose.
“I cleaned up the mess. It’s probably the thing that stinks,” speculated Adam.
“Did you just put the bag in there?” she asked and pointed to one of the bins.
“Yeah.”
“Throw it out outside.”
“Oh. Okay.” Adam dug the trash bag out of the bin and carried it with him back into the house to take out to the outdoor bins.
While he was gone, Winter looked around curiously. She heard something move and saw the shape through a gap between two crates. A small pale face looked out at her and hissed. Winter shrieked and ran out of the garage. Duria crawled out from behind the shelves, reached up, and tried its claws at turning the doorknob. To its delight, if it stood up on the rear claws, leaned itself against the door, and reached up, it could wrap the padded claws at the end of its forelegs around the knob and twist it. The door fell open and Duria scuttled into the house. It found itself in a living room, two closed doors in an alcove to its right, the front door to its left, and an open plan living room that led right into the kitchen ahead of it.
“There it is!” Adam cried out. He’d just come in from the sliding doors on the other end of the house.
Duria hissed again and crawled behind the couch.
“It stinks!” commented Winter. “It’s so weird! Gross!”
“We gotta capture it.”
“I’m not going near it.”
They heard the creature chittering behind the couch and its long jointed legs scrabbling against the wall.
“If it climbs up the wall like a spider I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I will kill that thing,” threatened Winter.
“Don’t kill it!” Adam pleaded. He hadn’t put the broom away yet so he grabbed that, then searched around until he found a hard plastic box full of legos. “Here, we’ll trap it in this and keep it alive and take pictures of it.” The box was about two by three feet and about a foot and a half deep. It could definitely hold Duria, but it would not be comfortable quarters for any length of time.
“How will it breathe?” Winter asked.
“You were saying you were going to kill it a second ago.”
“Yeah but if we’re going to keep it alive, let’s keep it alive, not suffocate it.”
Adam thought for a minute as he peered behind the couch. He could see the dark shrimp-like shape and could just make out its buggy weird face. “So is that Daria now?”
Winter snorted. “Duria was human. That’s a creepy little monster thing.”
“But if it has her soul in it, isn’t it still her?”
She shrugged. Winter crouched beside Adam to watch the creature pace restlessly in its hiding place. “We need like a dog kennel or something. A wire cage. I could use nails to poke holes in the box so it, er, so she doesn’t suffocate, and then we can ask Josh if he has a kennel. He’s got dogs.”
“Ooh, right. I’ll call him.”
“Duria?” Winter called out. “Duria, is that you?”
Duria chattered her teeth and hissed. It looked back at Winter and scowled. Adam looked through his address book and found Josh’s name, number, and address.
“So you filmed the whole thing?” Winter asked.
He nodded. “Yeah. Let’s get her or it or whatever into the box before we watch it, okay? I don’t like it just hanging out in my house.”
“Of course,” agreed Winter. “Duria? Did you turn into a bug?”
When Duria tried to speak, air emerged from spiracles instead of its mouth and it just managed another hiss. It scratched at the back of the couch then curled up and turned away. Adam spoke to Josh’s mother on the phone while Winter sat and watched the creature to make sure it didn’t slip away. Adam hadn’t put the broom and dustpan away yet, so to make herself feel better Winter laid the broom handle across her lap. After Adam hung up, he and Winter coordinated to herd Duria out from behind the couch with the broom, catch it with hands protected by oven mitts, and shove it into the box. Only after they shut the box did they remember Adam’s plan to punch holes in the lid with nails, so Duria watched from inside the cloudy semi-transparent white box as Adam used a hammer to plunge nails through the thick plastic.
The chemical smell of plastic fumes clouded in on all sides. Duria groomed its belly fur and under its tail fin, finding bits of meat to snack on. The box moved and cold fresh air seeped through the nail holes above Duria. Adam and Winter had carried the box out into the woods near his house. Frost covered the ground and dry brush grew between sparse narrow trees. Some time later, the kids transferred the creature to a large wire kennel that smelled strongly of dog. Josh rested his hands on his knees and let out a low whistle in appreciation then took out a disposable camera and began snapping pictures. Duria bared its teeth and climbed the wire grid, hanging tenuously upside down then lowering itself down and huddling in a corner. Winter opened the hatch to put in a bowl of water and a bowl of dog food as Adam set up his camcorder on the tripod. After a few minutes of hanging out looking at it, the kids wandered back to Adam’s house and left Duria out in the woods.
A pattering hush from the small waterfall filled the cave mouth where Rub and Muk sipped mead. Nearby their ghost maiden friend lingered on mossy stones and looked out over the deep green water where a few large, dark shapes darted around in the clear depths. From deeper inside the cave, a lanky man creature with long gray hair and beard dragged parcels along with him as he crawled over to sit with the smaller fae. Rub and Muk hooted warmly and slapped his arms.
“Arrinyee! Good seeing ye, brother,” Rub crowed. “Didja bring yer jerky? Aw, good man, Arrinyee. Give that here.”
“On the bone,” Spiders guy told her as he passed the newspaper-wrapped remains of a cat to the much smaller goblin woman. “Agéd well, as always. Yer not much biggeran the snack, girlie, share betwixt ye.”
“Ooh ooh smells fishy.” Muk ripped bits of paper off and buried their nose in the potent rind. “Best cat jerky from our big brother.” They tore off a small piece, popped it in their mouth, and sucked on it.
Rub drew out a new bottle of mead from the stream and passed it Spiders’ way. “Ainchu in one a em Raven King dens up topside? Had peoples bringing more an cream last you wrote us. Did the deal topple?”
“In a sorts. Funneled em firewise inter between doors for tithe. Pot’s muscle lass walked out,” he explained. He uncorked the bottle and took an appreciative sip.
“Flower pot had a girlie?” asked Muk.
“Friend girl,” clarified Spiders. “It waslike her pet, testy as they got.”
“Arrinyee fired out a kingden?” asked Rub. “Notso hoblike, brother.”
“Was time for it. My bones said so.” He looked over at the ghost maiden. “Do I know this wispy bit?”
Duria peered back at Spiders. “The other wicks in the hippie.”
He stared at her and absorbed her answer for a minute and took a drippy sip of mead. Something clicked and the bright eyes shadowed in gray hair lit up. “Oooh yes, rescue the princess,” recalled Spiders.
“I’m off to pick at the charred bits for treasures,” declared Muk. They propped a foot against the jerky cat and twisted at a leathery limb until the joint popped loose, then slung the dried and salted leg over their shoulder. “Snacky.”
Rub caught Muk’s hand and gave it a kiss then patted their foot. “Be seeing ya, bestie.”
Muk kissed the top of Rub’s head, kissed the hob’s cheek, then scampered back up into the cave holding the cat leg in their tusky mouth. The stalactites dripped and beetles scuttled as tiny clever hands found hold in the tunnels. The savory meat in their mouth made them drool. Muk slurped the spit back into their mouth, stopped, and braced their back against the wall to push a large stone aside with their feet. They blinked in the relative brightness of what used to be Scott’s basement.
Spiders’ arson had left the warehouse a charred skeleton of the two storey box it had been, but glanced over the basement, burning its ceiling aside. Muk looked up and saw pollution-choked stars between clouds tinted red from the streetlights. They emerged from the cave and sat on the rubble-dusted floor to stop and rip a strip of jerky off the bone. The dumpy little creature, dried up cat leg in one hand, began picking over the odds and ends as they found them. A leather collar: donned and buckled in place on Muk’s neck. Bedding: too big to take, but Muk ripped off a piece of a stained sheet and tied it around their head under their chin to add to their personal aroma with the weed-liked scent of maned wolf piss. A dulled metallic sheen near one wall caught their eye.
Muk scrambled over to find the wyrm Miyako had plucked from Sidney’s back twisted in on itself, drying out on the floor. The cat meat in Muk’s mouth muffled their squeak of horror.
Muk took the leg out of their mouth and set it beside the wyrm, which weakly began to nibble.
“Baby!” They looked around frantically, ran back over to the bedding, and ripped off a larger piece to fashion into a sling. Muk returned to the wyrm and bundled it and the cat leg tenderly into a personal hammock that would shine readily under black light. They cradled the creature’s coils and pondered taking the wyrm back to the other goblin. The illusions the parasites projected to control their hosts repelled ghosts as an unintended side effect. Bringing ghost bane to ghost central would be an unkindness to the dead, and Muk didn’t want to do an unkindness.
The little goblin paced uneasily around the singed basement, contemplating if they should check with the faun who smuggled the egg-heavy hornet hound to the human party, but Muk didn’t know where to find or contact Rodion. After a bit more pacing, Muk figured maybe the parasite didn’t broadcast illusions without a host to broadcast them to, or at least that the little guy had to be pretty weak after somebody removed it from the meat. Muk sprinted on all fours back over to the cave entrance, slipping silently back into the underworld.
Spiders looked up at the stone-slapping sounds of Muk’s approach. The little goblin squeaked, “Bahbeee!”
“Babby?” asked Spiders.
Muk nodded and looked around for their friend. “Rub Rub Rub!”
A naiad surfaced from the waters beneath the waterfall with the dark blue goblin sitting on her shoulders. Large fishy green eyes peered up and the naiad’s hair spread out over the surface of the water around her round blue face. Immersed in the curly flaxen strands, Rub waved up at the cave mouth.
“Mucky!” Rub called. “Whatcha find?”
“Sprout babby!” Muk called back.
“What?” Rub crawled over the naiad’s head and Firth sank silently down back out of sight. The goblin dogpaddled the rest of the way to the rocks and scaled the wet stones under the waterfall to rejoin her friend at the top. “Oooh, leather collar and Mary Jane piss rag. Iszat all?”
Muk held out the sling with the unmoving serpentine creature resting within gnawing on the cat leg. “Sprout baby wyrmy fell outa the pot!”
Rub looked over at the nearest ghost to see if they’d disturbed the haunting grounds with cross contamination. The maiden shimmered restlessly on the ceiling. “Weak baby. Needs meat and company.”
Muk nodded. “Blood habitat with fatty bits and bobs. Company?”
“Aye, itty bitty pup wasting away lonely-like.” Rub ran her fingers through her mane and stamped her feet in quick damp plaps on the rock shelf. “Oy puddle ghost, you’s joint to the hip to your boy before. New hip to joint to, new body, come down. Get here, ghostie, down down to me.”
The pale gleam slid down the wall. “New hip joint?”
“Ya ya surgery-like. This lil babby needs a new breath to it. Bond snugbug into the meatsauce and the body grown out of the mush can be most any sorta goblin-type you fit into. Horticulture spirit blend, underground sciences. Become?” offered Rub.
“I’ll be a goblin? This is where goblins come from?” asked Duria.
Rub and Muk exchanged a look then turned back to the shimmer girl. “Yes,” they said in unison then grinned grins that revealed many chunky sharp teeth.
“So a goblin laid eggs in Sid’s back and -”
“No. Jellyfish-style complicated,” Muk interrupted. “Goblins emerge all sortsa org-nasisms cycle-like. Other sprouts grow handsome hound-dogs, but plant inna differn dirt, get hortycult blend inna some new you. Down?”
“Wow.” Duria peered at the dead-looking snake thing in the goblin’s baby sling. “Sure? I’m down. Yeah.”
Muk stamped their feet. They and Rub did a pattycake duel clap dance together.
“Artful sowing time,” commented Spiders, still looking out over the nymph pool and sipping mead. “Love this for you.”
Rub held Muk’s shoulders. “You got this, sib.”
Muk nodded and rapidly descended back into the tunnels. Through some roundabout route, the creature shimmied into Adam’s garage. Adam had stashed the haunted doll in which Duria’s spirit rotted on a plastic storage crate on a shelf, currently free from the camcorder’s scrutiny. Scrambling up the shelves, Muk snatched up the doll and carried it under their arm. Finding the door into the house locked, Muk made a door with sidewalk chalk on the garage wall and made their way to the kitchen. The ice maker in the refrigerator crackled as new semi-circles of ice clinked together within its inner workings. Muk left the doll on the floor and climbed up cabinet doors to find a paring knife in a knife block, dagger sized to this small critter. They chirped and dropped down to the hardwood floor, turned the doll over in their fingers, and prised apart the velcro on the back of the doll’s dress. Discolored peach and green-gray plastic revealed itself beneath the cheap floral cloth, whereupon Muk stabbed into the doll and sawed out a rounded square of plastic from the doll’s back.
Body thus opened, Muk fed the wyrm into the hole. The wyrm’s body had begun to stiffen as it dried out, so it took some doing to fold and stuff the long scaled body into the plastic cavity. At last only a beetle-like face peeked out, peeping rusty little protests to the meatless shell it found itself in. Muk petted its face and cooed before leaving the doll again on the floor to roust up nourishment. Scrounging around, they uncovered a styrofoam tray of ground beef wrapped in cellophane, lean and grass fed, on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. Muk tore open the plastic wrap and began shoving fistfuls of soft pink meat into the doll in all the cavities the wyrm hadn’t filled: arms, legs, neck, and head. Satisfied, the goblin closed up the velcro on the back of the dress and carried it back down to replace it on the storage crate in the garage.
As the doll, her prison and her pseudo body, Duria felt much less hollow than before. First when Muk sliced into her with the paring knife, the plastic did not feel pain because it had no nerves. Psychosomatic shivers traveled down plastic limbs to see the shell sliced open. Removing a panel of her prison felt more like opening a window. She almost felt like she could breathe. Then a larva with pine resin sharp breath filled her space.
Starvation had sharpened the knife of its young mind; despair had softened its mettle. It remembered fruit-flesh nectar dreams in which Duria’s own face looked back at her in a daisy-spotted sundress. The blush in her mind awakened the thick blue circulation within the larva. A shiver passed through its noodly body, and Duria was the wyrm. Just as she began to look out of its tiny eye dots, mammalian flesh began to fill the spaces around it: pulverized cow meat, cold and mostly bloodless. Her mouth began to work immediately and she tasted it. Desperate hunger made the unseasoned raw meat appetizing and Duria tried to imagine a grilled burger, melted cheese, juicy condiments and grease enmeshed in shredded iceberg lettuce and fried onions. The wyrm had a skill set devoted to making imagination and desires vivid and present, but as soon as it tried to change her perception of the meat’s taste her teeth went numb and a sharp ache stabbed behind her eyes. Duria flinched and eased back the larva’s urge to sweeten reality into a glamour. The meat would remain cold and sticky and bland, a bit bloody and pink. She devoured about as fast as Muk could cram the beef into the plastic doll until, fattened and revived, the wyrm shifted within the manufactured shape of a girl child and got comfortable within the squishy soft bovine flesh molded into human-like limbs. Juices leaked from the joints where the limbs met the trunk and stained the red dress with its white (now pinkish) flowers.
I went through each chapter and read it aloud to myself to help with editing, since reading it aloud to my friend while on a trip kept revealing problems. Not sure I found all the same problems reading it aloud to myself, but I did a lot of good polishing to the chapters. Also removed the most recent chapter "Cry" because there's other things I want to make happen before that chapter.
XXXVII. Hell is a Hot Car With a Dog Trapped Inside
Table of Contents
Doors change where they lead, uniting a few adults in an old building before funneling one into a liminal space where a starving creature waits.
CW gore, necrophilia, and mentions of child abuse media that doesn't actually exist
Scott climbed to his feet as the two teenagers slipped out the door. He brushed sand and dust off his legs and pressed his lips together into a thin line, turning his gaze up toward the dark rafters. His bones told him he was getting too old for this, and the humiliation of having a high school wrestler pin him left him sour and needing a drink. Scrabbling, scratching noises and hushed voices in the dilapidated walls of his squatter’s refuge distracted Scott for half a minute before the tattoo artist cautiously slipped back down the stairs.
“Did the kid show up?” Romeo asked. “I heard...something.”
Scott weighed possible responses. “He canceled.”
“He showed up to cancel his appointment.”
“Appointment is canceled,” insisted Scott irritably. He glared at her.
Romeo didn’t notice the rope because the whole place was a mess, and she wasn’t even aware there was a game of I Spy for finding what had changed since she had last been in the room almost forty minutes ago. Instead she sighed, cursed, and went back upstairs to gather her things and see if Sir could contact Daiki to find out what was really going on. Scott sat down in one of the chairs and picked his book up off the floor.
Spiders Guy dropped from a hole in the ceiling onto a shelf. He had an unusual train of strung up and desiccated packages wrapped in newspaper hanging from his arms. They snagged a bit on debris as Spiders climbed down in a show of unusual athleticism for such an old man, but he worked them free as he descended. He set some half-melted candle in a nest of newspaper into one of the piles of old wooden palettes. Scott glanced over his shoulder, noticed Spiders, then turned back to his book. He tried to read the same page over again, too unsettled to really absorb the words. Spiders struck a match and bent low to reach into the palettes. Wick lit, he shook the match out before it singed his fingers and walked away, dragging the seasoned corpses of cats behind him along the concrete floor. A heavy odor of canned tuna and cured cat meat followed him.
“The fuck are those?” Scott asked.
“Provisions, of course,” replied Spiders. “Au revoir.”
“Ciao. Freak.”
---
Leopold took a hit from a bong made from an apple then sat back on the couch to gaze at nothing in particular: the lights from the street cast across the ceiling through the blinds, or the small cracks and imperfections in the plaster, or the stink bug crawling up the window. He sighed, sat up, then picked up his guitar and leaned over it. Leo practiced for an upcoming gig and lost track of time. Light moved across the ceiling and the stink bug fell off the glass, taking a clumsy flight down to the dirty clothes and dust bunnies on the floor. Getting hungry, Leo set the guitar back down and walked across the studio to the kitchenette. When he opened the fridge, the first thing he noticed was darkness instead of the fridge light. Wondering if his power got turned off again, he looked and expected shelves splashed with ancient substances, boxes shoved to the back he dared not open, an assortment of expired condiments, beer, and some more recent takeout. Instead he saw a tunnel made of large cardboard boxes taped together.
“Fuck yeah. Magic door,” mumbled Leo.
He stooped down and stepped inside. The sound of wind whistled on the other side of thin corrugated walls and he felt a bit of a chill. Leo stepped back out, grabbed a blue hoodie off the back of the couch, pulled it on over his head, then returned. He half expected the passage to be gone when he let it out of his sight, but he just didn’t want to be cold and uncomfortable.
Crawling through the cardboard, a hushed voice drifted through on the wind. Leo felt he’d recognize it if he could just hear it better. “Where… hell… anywhere… warehouhh… where… hell… where are… where are… hell?”
“Not when it’s this chilly,” mumbled Leo. The cardboard swayed and started to shift and roll.
Bits and pieces of a voice he didn’t recognize murmured, “Going into…a bit tipsy…her new ragdoll…”
Leo found a spot where a flap had started to tear at the fold and he pushed on it. It ripped wide open and he spilled out onto the warehouse stairs, tumbling down the steps bruised and groaning. “It just leads to Scott’s place? That’s not magical. That’s not even Hell,” Leo complained.
Scott rose to his feet and looked behind him. “When did you get here?”
“Just now. I was hungry,” muttered Leo. He rolled onto his back on the floor and stretched out. “Your rafters are full of pigeons, man. They’re gonna shit on all your stuff.”
Scott looked up. “Oh. Yeah, you’re right.”
Sir walked down the stairs and stepped over Leo. She entwined her fingers, stretched her hands, and cleared her throat. “Get up, Leopold. You’re in the way.”
“In a minute. I’m disappointed in miracles,” Leopold replied. He rolled over on his side. “All the angels are pigeons and hell is just a hot car with a dog trapped inside. Narnia is a fucking condemned building.”
Sir decided to ignore this.
“Daiki got away. I need to get him back,” Scott told her.
“How did he get away?” Sir asked. “He’s like five foot nothing and not even a hundred pounds.”
“He had some fucking help,” snapped Scott.
“Or you’re just an old man,” replied Sir.
He nodded and put the book on the seat of a different chair.
“May’s brobro,” mumbled Leo. He sat up and stretched. “Whatcha need him for?” As he waited for a response, a memory clicked. “May! The voice through the cardboard. I knew I know that voice. She’s lost somewhere, ain’t she?”
Continuing to ignore him, Isabel asked, “Want to go get drinks?”
Scott nodded. “Let’s.”
Romeo lugged her case down the stairs. She paused at the bottom step, moved around Leo, then looked up at the ruffling feathers and soft coos in the rafters. Moths crawled over and flittered around the pillars while ground beetles spread across the floor. An orange light reflected off the ashen brown wings and the grooved black shells.
Romeo shook her head. “No, all I had for the next few hours was this appointment slot and since Daiki’s showing up to not show up, I’m free.”
She gave Scott a suspicious look. Scott’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. He got his shapeless old brown coat from where he’d tossed it on a shelf. Beetles fell off of the coarse tan fabric and tumbled down to his feet, some unfolding their sheer wings along the way to flutter to the ash-specked floor. A crackling noise grew louder and an opossum fled across the floor with a soft hiss, fleshy mouth baring little teeth.
“Jesus,” Romeo cursed and flinched away. “I think I’ll just go home.” She hurried out the door without a goodbye.
“Is May down below?” wondered Leopold aloud, thinking of Hell.
Scott whirled around and stared. “What makes you think that?”
“I heard her voice,” replied Leo.
“No you didn’t.”
“It’s warm in here,” observed Isabel, then declared, “All these bugs and birds are giving me the creeps.” She tried to look unbothered as she hurried toward the door.
“Doors are behaving wrong!” warned Leopold. He got up off the floor and looked around at the chaos of insects spreading over the pillars, shelves, and floor. “The bugs are wrong, too.”
“Shut up, Leo!” snapped Sir.
Scott left his coat on the floor and walked past Sir to the door. He opened it and stepped through, glancing back over his shoulder with disgust at the guy standing awkwardly near the stairs. Leo pointed at the doorway and shouted, “See? See?” before Scott slammed the door behind him.
---
A flat pink tongue scraped out every last trace of lobeira juice from the inside of the dog bowl. Sid sniffed the red carpet with its leafy vine pattern and lapped up the fragments that he’d spilled when feasting on the green fruit. Looking back over to where his friend had been watching television, he saw that Miyako had gone. Sidney whined and warbled, walked over, found the smell of her ass on the carpet where she’d been seated, then looked over at the VHS tapes. He instantly recognized them, though he could have sworn his mom had already sold all of these tapes. Sandra had sold them all to separate people no less, so how did they end up in a neat stack in this weird room? He’d have shrugged if he’d still been bipedal. Running a finger down the labels, he read the dates and names with the nostalgic urge to watch some of his old trauma.
Sid trotted over to the doorway and peeked into the hall. He whined, “May?”
But she was gone.
He returned to the stack, grabbed one at random and slid it into the slot. Sid turned the television back on and settled in down to where he could still smell Miyako in the carpet. His tongue rested on his lower teeth and he stretched out. The maned wolf hummed a little tune in his distorted voice and toyed his fingers through the soft fur of his empty belly. He itched at the bandage tape and picked off a bloody hunk of gauze from beneath the stretchy beige material. After he tossed it aside, Sid turned back to the CRT screen. The old familiar scenes dug into his eyes, prying out a host of sensations in the base of his gut, in the top of his throat, and curdling there in sweet acid. When the tape finished, rewind whining until it clicked and regurgitated the tape, Sid pulled it out and put in another. The sound of a door opening reminded Sid of the hunger he’d managed to shove to the back of his mind.
Squirming parasites that nestled beside his vital organs spurred Sid to his feet. He pressed stop on the VCR then sprinted into the hall. It had changed to a sterile bright white hallway with black hand rails along the walls and black tiles checkered into the white at intersections. Bowled mirrors reflected fisheye glimpses around corners from the ceiling. Sid didn’t know where the sound of the door had come from. His nails clacked on the tiles and drool dripped off his lolling tongue. By the time he found Scott, the hunger paired with the hunt had worked his mind into a frenzied noise. The sweet honeyed illusion dripped into place just as he spotted a figure and before it clicked who it was.
Blinking slowly, Sid reverently approached the boy at the end of the hall. The white walls had dimmed to a comfortable cream with sunlight filtered through tree branches as red and orange maple leaves whispered across the tiles. A touch of sun brought out the brown in Daiki’s black hair and gave a warm gray cast to his black tank top and torn mesh shirt with the long sleeves hooked over his thumbs. Silver jewelry glinted at his throat and on his fingers with their painted nails. Sid let the canine-deepened charcuterie board of familiar scents tantalize his senses as he snuffled at Daiki’s tattered jeans. Daiki crouched to just below eye level and scribbled his fingers through Sid’s mane, behind his ears, and under his chin.
Daiki’s low singing voice, at the confident, steady volume he only used when he thought he was alone, serenaded Sid. “Underneath the bridge, the tarp has sprung a leak...”
Sid knew it wasn’t real this time. He ripped the denim like paper and found the comfort of an inner thigh. As his teeth ripped open Daiki’s soft skin and the hot sweet nectar washed over his face and soaked into his fur, Sid just felt grateful he wasn’t killing the real Daiki, and that the singing didn’t stop but just grew louder and more fervent. He wondered briefly who he devoured. When he’d dug his snout deeper and ripped a few mouthfuls of flesh off to gobble greedily into his maw, Sid stopped to drag his meal back to the room with the television so he could watch old home movies and dine on a facsimile of his costar. He even re-enacted scenes with his beloved, inspired as he was by the abuse and exploitation on the static-fringed screen.
Sated for a time, the maned wolf played with scraps of cloth and rolled in sticky pools of spilled intestine. The silver wyrms slurped in their share of nourishment from Scott’s meat, and a dislocated jaw could still sing sweet melancholic melodies as long as they need exist only in Sid’s head.
Paul sipped some tomato juice from a tall glass and toyed with his hemp choker while he stood idly in the hallway. He watched Adam and Winter set up the doll at the end of the hall outside the bedrooms on a wooden chair, with the camcorder on a tripod fixed toward the doll.
“Have you heard of the whole Y2K thing?” Paul asked.
“Yeah,” confirmed Adam. He stood back from the camcorder and pursed his lips.
“What do you think is going to happen?”
“I think all the computers are going to die. And then we’ll just turn them back on again because they’re just machines, and it will be fine,” speculated Adam.
Paul nodded and finished his juice.
Adam continued, “But before they all get turned on again, the gap in radio interference will allow a time traveler to get through. And they’ll warn us about, oh, I don’t know. Plague or aliens or something. But only a fringe group with no influence will believe them, and the warning won’t lead to any meaningful changes. And the time traveler will be stuck here with the small cult that forms around the warning and they’ll do the whole kool-aid thing and that will ultimately accelerate the plague the traveler warned about, and half the world population will die.”
“Really?” Paul asked, amused.
“I don’t know. I just made all that up. But it could happen,” replied Adam.
Paul nodded. “Yeah, maybe. You’re probably right.”
“I hope not.”
After a minute, Paul asked, “You know that ghost is real, right? A girl your age died and now you put her into a plastic doll? How would you like to be stuck in a doll when you die?”
“I think it would be sick as fuck to be stuck in a doll after I die,” Adam replied. “But I’ll let her go. I just want to see what happens.”
---
For hours she had filled the plastic as a pool of trapped spirit, stagnant and curdling. With some effort Duria could rotate the glass eyes in their hinged metal casing again. Her presence had started to discolor the inside of the plastic to a washed out salty gray, and a mottled bleed of that seeped through the thin shell into grayed lividity mottling the lower portions of the pseudo limbs and frame.
In her pickled fury, Duria sank back into a familiar cavern. Whispers echoed into hushed nonsense within the dripping walls. Creatures crept just out of sight; sightless fish darted about puddles and ponds. Blue as ocean depths, with long black hair in a shaggy mane behind pointed ears and a birdlike face, the small goblin woman stood only a couple feet high but had condensed, thick proportions. Rub had dressed herself in scraps of dark fabric sequined with pinecone scales and beetle shells. She had sharp eyes under heavy eyebrows, and a corvid’s profile. From what she could see, a glimmer of light reflected off of a puddle teaming with tiny white fish onto a pale cavern wall with contours of melted wax. The spun silver light wavered in the indistinct shape of a sulking maiden with dark eyes and long flowing hair. Rub sat herself on an outcrop of rock marbled with mildew and kicked her feet over the pond. Her pupils had maxed out so she could see perfectly well that there was no light source to reflect off of the silty surface of the puddle.
Echoes whispered, “I had a real body. A real body. We were him together. Give it back.”
“Nae doin,” Rub replied to the damp air. Her voice matched her profile: a raven’s raspy articulation.
“We did everything together. Years. Every. Second. For years. Give it back,” the whisper added resentfully.
“All things gether, eh?” Rub asked. “No per-snail space? Gross. Yer beau broke off, did he? I’d snap off too ta gimme summa that breathe-room. Nunna that join-at-the-hip bullshit.” She bent forward and snatched a fish out of the puddle with her little hand, then tossed it in the air and caught it in her beak. “Snacky.”
The splash scattered the reflection into resentful distorted faces on all nearby walls and the low, spiked ceiling then settled back to the same surface as before. Now the maiden stood on her feet with head tilted. Her hair fell over her uncertain shape and she lifted a hand to push her hair out of her face. “Where is the beast?” she asked.
“I dunno. I’m here alone wi’ ees fishies n bats n grubs,” listed off Rub. “And yous.”
“A real body. We were him. Together. Give it back. I’m not a doll.”
“If yer not, how’s that pullstring making you pete’n’repeat over again?” Rub teased. She stretched her limbs and took in a deep breath of the dank spore-filled air. “Did yer together self have a name?”
When Duria didn’t reply, Rub said, “I don’t go stealing names as some fae doing. Just chewin fats wi’ ya, glitters.”
“What’s a fae?”
Rub grimaced. “Fer fuck’s sake. Fairies? Naiads? Goblins? Ya hear any beddy-by stories when yous wick?”
“I did.” Duria went silent for a few beats. “Why are you in the underworld?”
“Ees sorta goblin thing. Hobs do houses, naiads do the wet. Somebody gotta dredge in the decay unner soil,” explained Rub.
“I had a real body,” the maiden began again.
Rub hopped down from the rock, splashed through the puddle, and continued on through the low, pinching passage carved by water through stone. “Lemme know when you got that sorted. Catch you later, puddle ghost.”
The light scattered into dancing facets before disappearing. Rub’s calloused fingers and bare feet felt their way through a cave now in complete darkness. The close tunnels and pitch dark held their own comforts; she could neither see nor be seen. Around the corner, phosphorescent fungi jeweled the low ceiling in pale blue. Rub picked a fish bone out from between her teeth and flicked the bone fragment into the dark.
The sound of running water and traces of starlight guided the goblin to a grotto where melted glacier pools kept glass bottles frigid under a pattering waterfall. Bats chased moths out past the arched roots of trees gripping the wet stones. Rub lifted out a dark green bottle and uncorked it to toss back a burning cold swig of heady mead. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth and, noticing a friend, held out the bottle to a goblin with soft, dumpy features and elbow antennae enjoying the breeze on a root under the sky. Muk grunted gratefully and accepted the bottle in both hands. They tipped it back gently toward their own tusked snout and took a long, thoughtful sip before passing it back.
---
The words curdled inside and Daiki could not will them to vocalize, so he flipped open a journal to a blank page and wrote:
I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry
I miss being able to talk clearly and smile and it feels like part of me is missing and broken when she is not part of me anymore. Without her I must be so boring. I want to join into conversations and show my emotions on my face. It is so pathetic that I am more alive when something dead is possessing my body.
Pretty sure my mom is a bit tired of you staying over all the time. When I’m alone I just want to find you again and even if I am just silently leaning on you and we’re not doing anything special it’s really nice.
But it’s probably dull for you when I am just sitting next to you drawing or some shit like that. I look like I’m just absorbed into my own little thing but I like having you there. You’re so graceful and beautiful and I love the sound of your voice and every detail about you.
When you go to college I’m still going to be in high school. What are we going to do? You don’t have to stick around close by just for me. I don’t want you to go to some shitty college just to be where I can see you every day. I’m not worth it, believe me. That sounds so manipulative like I am trying to make you feel guilty but I’m not. I’m sorry I’m sorry. I mean it.
You’ll meet somebody who you can really talk to who isn’t just some horny pathetic loser and you’ll be happier, and I want you to be happy. So it’s okay. But I’m not breaking up with you. Fuck. I don’t know what I meant to write. I love you.
Daiki read back over the few pages he had filled, tore them out of the spiral-bound journal, then crumpled them up and ate them.
XXXVII. Hell is a hot car with a dog trapped inside.
"Duria walked over to the bathroom doorway. The door, left just a bit ajar, blocked her view of the smoky room but she could see them in the vanity mirror."
