Chapter 2: Found Dead
Sadie Crane recalled the feel of pulling a sticker off the sheet, the slight give of the slick paper under their fingertips sticky with frozen peach cream from Viola’s party. They were twelve. The stickers kicked ass. Everything absolutely kicked ass when you were twelve.
After the party, Viola took one of her stickers–a yellow heart–and stuck it on Sadie Crane’s backpack. They still had it, the yellow heart. On the back of their denim jacket, with the lucky jackalope’s foot Sybil gave them.
Thought: Viola was attached to those stickers. Hurt to give you one. The color on the yellow heart has faded over the years. You were never able to earn any Good Kid jacket patches, not that you would have kept them. But that’s okay. You’ve got your own patches now, sewn with love. And her sticker.
“A train passes through a silent forest, the windows stained glass,” a voice rumbled from the radio. “It is carrying everything you can imagine. And if you can’t imagine things, just imagine the feeling of imagining things. Imagine having possessions, imagine some of those possessions being taken by train.”
Into snow-white static, a pleasant sultry voice receded. And with it, Sadie Crane was reborn. Into the real world.
The signal on the radio had gone wonky again. That was an ever-present problem of Alcoast, since before Sadie Crane was born. They kept having to fiddle with the dials because hell if they knew how to fix a radio. Perhaps they should take it in, finally get that hunky-doried? Give them something to do today.
Thought: You already have something to do. You have to get Sybil’s guitar from the farmhouse. Ain’t that a jazzy way to start the week?
The anarchist rolled over, a groan in their throat. Living in the past, the future, the formidable present. It was time to get out of bed, whatever shape.
They got out of bed and changed their outfit, checked to make sure the jackalope’s foot was attached firmly to back of their deerskin. It fell off once and got them panicked, they didn’t like being panicked. And they’d never asked where Sybil got the foot, it might be a family heirloom for all they knew. It had power, the foot–they could sense it, lightning to fingertips. And it’s smell, like spirits and dense dead fur.
A coal-dark smear, quick retreat out their sightline like a furl of smoke. Like muffled radio waves. They were getting sick of it, the coal-dark. It came to them in the waking, made their thoughts weird and buzzy. It would have been better for their head, if they knew what it was or why it was following.
Thought: We built the pieces anew, this world of ours.
Sadie Crane gave the radio a small unfocused check over, it was breathing snowy static into their café-hostal room. Their brief stint at the campus radio station was just that. Brief. They never learned to work the equipment for real. It was one of those Skills they were so bad at having.
Thought: Not that it would’ve done you any good.
The anarchist left their room finally, swinging their deerskin pack onto their shoulders and making jackalope foot wave like a pendulum or a dead thing on line. They had so much to get polished today.
Thought: Like it or not, you’re in this now.
The Spinners Club, gods alive. Gods stone cold six feet dead. They reckoned it was about time, a memorial to their best. They never thought anyone would say it, what they were all thinking. About how they needed to leave. About the hole sucking them in. About how much every breath and step felt stuttered and slogging.
They crossed the hallway with quick strides. They chewed at their bottom lip, sucked a breath through their teeth. Cripes. You don’t speak to someone for years and suddenly it’s this ordeal. You don’t even know your friends anymore, sorry sack. You don’t even know O’anna Eislane-Basalt with the angriest eyes you ever did see.
Their headphones on, Sadie Crane bounced downstairs to meet with Viola and De’afi in the first floor café. They could handle this, give them a minute to breathe. They’d had worse mornings with worse people at starboard.
Viola was sitting at the counter. She was balanced forward on an uncomfortable stool, her cheeks bulging with one last mouthful of honey cake. She smelled of hibiscus, which was odd but nice for her this early morning. She’d poured herself into another dressy thing and leggings, same colors but visibly different in subtle ways.
De’afi stretched forward hir workman’s goggles, sliding them up onto the prominent peak of hir forehead. The thick hexagon lenses shone plated, held in place by an elastic strap. Those lenses were non-adjustable magnifiers, based on an open source prototype. They differed from the sleek fashionable workman’s goggles of Ru Divine’s elite, the lenses especially. Those babies would set you back–at conversion–about two hundred silvers.
Thought: All the world’s for sale. In Ru Divine at least. In Arcadia, all the world is dead. The gods sleep. The king is dead. The spirits stir beneath All Creation. The future smells like cinnamon popping candy.
“Morning, babes,” ze said.
Aching with silent judgment from O’anna’s stare, Sadie Crane took the stool next to Viola.
“What’s up today, sunshine?” queried the anarchist.
The journalist massaged at her throat and bent her head forward. She stayed like a good memory. She stayed like a song. She stayed like every poem Sadie Crane had ever spoke aloud.
“The farmhouse,” she said. “Gotta get Sybil’s guitar. And you gotta clean out. Ain’t that the way?”
Thought: You’re gonna crumple like magazine paper the second anyone gives you The Look. Probably get into a fight. Whole damn town thinks you’re a liar. You ain’t loved here.
O’anna Eislane-Basalt swiped a ragged sea-green cloth down length of the countertop, mopping up stain. There was rage there. Always. At the sheer audacity of one Sadie Crane.
Thought: Deserved. Wholly.
Viola took a small object from her bag, a brown leather notebook. The pages were bound with black twine. The corners were stained and tested with age.
Thought: Oooh, a notebook. Very profesh.
“Very profesh,” said the anarchist with staggering honesty.
A quick twitch of a smile on Viola’s lips, gone in a flash. No one had ever called her profesh with a straight face. At her other side, she felt De’afi trembling with held back laughter.
Her fingers worked the inner spine of her leather-bound notebook. Where they were going. What they were doing. The working cranial fossae of travel.
“Why’d you get that idea in the first?” De’afi queried. “You ain’t up to going all this time, so why now?”
The first to question. The first to get that expression of withered panic.
“Cuz I thought,” the journalist squared. “And I felt. And I had to. I tried missing people. Damn years of it. Started looking for anything that didn’t feel bad. And this–it’s what we gotta do. You know it.”
They’d all, in their ways, tried missing people. The tunica intima of All Creation had grown bloated with missing people and missing places and missing the way of things before.
“Feels like it, yeah,” De’afi admitted. “Feels like we’re all loosing the goose with our grief, ya get me?”
“Loosey-goosey,” the journalist corrected in a short pinned tone of voice.
Around the aviator’s right wrist, a beaded bracelet. Each bead made from a mixture of crushed jade powder and the ashes of a deceased loved one.
Thought: Mourning beads. Worn at wakes.
“Ain’t you supposed to, like–wear gloves?” the anarchist said.
They inclined their head at the graphite pencil, at the smudges of dark on Viola’s fingertips.
A coal-dark streak careened shudder through peripherals. Those fuckers really didn’t know how to take breaks.
Thought: It’s in you now. You can’t leave this at the door.
Viola worried the pencil between her fingers, the smudges spread to outer rims of her tips.
“I like the stains,” said the most beautiful and strangest person Sadie Crane had ever met their whole life.
She worked her fingers down the first page. Viola moved like a sparrow’s wings under powdered snowdrift, labored and elegant.
Thought: Get yourself one of those. A notebook. You’ll look like the real deal. Promise.
The person who used graphite pencils because they looked cool and because she liked the stains flipped her notebook shut.
“Think we’re all gonna get found dead?” queried the anarchist.
Viola moved, her finger stroking down the notebook. Dragging that smudge of dark in a wide trail.
“Yeah,” the journalist said back.
With nothing else to do, O’anna tugged at the black cashmere fabric corset belt. It didn’t make for good butting in, when they were all having very serious talking.
“We ain’t forgot, you know,” O’anna said. “The–all of it, everything. We ain’t forgot. You think I sleep at night?”
O’anna swallowed the distraught, a prudent quiver on the lower lip. Two hours of this, before the change over with Sheona.
Thought: O’anna doesn’t want you to feel sorry. O’anna would rather be hated by you.
“Hurts real bad,” Sadie Crane said. “Hurts. Got this burning, deep down my chest. Not going away. Ever. Kinda like that, isn’t it? Kinda?”
The last time Viola M’et-Sepirot-Keita saw Sybil Basalt-Eislane, he was inhaling a mouthful of black tar smoke that promised to stain his teeth a nasty pitch. The last time De’afi of the Mother’s Land saw Sybil Basalt-Eislane, he was passing to them a stack of fashion magazines on import from Ru Divine. The last time Sadie Crane saw Sybil Basalt-Eislane, his body was lying broken as a bird in the dirt. A length of dim silk fabric sprawled from him like the wings of a ghost monarch over his collapsed body. He was in a dress, a shapeless thing with lantern sleeves his sibling made for him.
Thought: O’anna looks just like him.
They had a feeling about the day they were having. But the trouble with feelings was they weren’t cardinal directions.
Alcoast was made to be passed through, a stopping point on the way to somewhere better. People who left hardly ever came back.
Thought: Unless they’re masochists of course.
Viola scrambled off back of the motorbike, she popped her helmet like the lid of a preserve jar. Alright, let’s never do that again. Motorbikes bad. Motorbikes loud and fast and bad. Viola’s legs were a mess under her, she sagged into the bike and her breathing creased for a moment. The fingernails of her left hand stabbed anxious dents into her right forearm.
The anarchist put out their arms to keep Viola upright, stood while Viola caught her breath. She was light and soft as a butterfly disturbing the windsweep.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” said the anarchist who was habitually in love with All Creation. “Too fast, sunshine?”
Sunshine. There it was again, like a bad toothache. She recalled a paper packet of sunflower seeds, the hand that gripped them dark brown and warm to the touch. Alcoast Town Fair written sideways across the packet, seeds cracking crunch crunch crunch between Viola’s teeth. It was the last time she would feel like anything good was about to happen, that town fair. She was thirteen and her sister Millennia was sixteen, that town fair.
“Fuck,” she said, both in the past and in the now.
She pitched forward and away from the motorbike, hand fiddling her throat. The memory of Alcoast Town Fair dissipated like steam off a cast iron pan, leaving behind impressions she could split with her fingers. It was 1999. It was the year 1999 and she was a full adult with adult problems and one very absolutely dead friend called Sybil.
Arriving close to the first, another motorbike slowed to a crawl and then to a halt. Cobbled from a pair of blueprints sourced through a public inventors archive in Eudora. This baby came with a sleeker hand clutch and a four times more powerful headlight. At right-hand attachment to the machine, the smallish bullet of a luggage-carrying sidecar on two wheels. The design was partially inspired by the motorized delivery bikes of Ru Divine.
The aviator swung both legs off the motorbike, placing the flats of hir feet on the ground.
“Helen’s high water,” ze said harshly.
“Hell and high water,” the journalist corrected irritably.
The architecturists among you might have called the farmhouse rustic. It was no more rustic than any other building holding vigil within Arcadia’s entrails of civilization. We won’t mince words here. It was certainly a a lesser told tale, as the saying went in Turaq and upper Kat-Ari. It had been lived in. But not for some time. It hadn’t been taken or moved into. Those who knew the history stayed well away and it was far enough off the road that travelers only came to stay some of the time.
“Kinda haunted,” the anarchist said about the place they’d lived the first nineteen years of their life. “Like–every building’s gonna get haunted, leave it well enough. No matter if anyone died here. Leastways, don’t think anyone ever did. Got dead, I mean. In this house.”
Thought: Literally. But in metaphor?
De’afi nodded hir head. The lasting impressions of habitation, the wonderfully bad and the miserably good coming to a neutral mundane. From decay, renewal. From renewal, agony.
Thought: We die everywhere. Every day. Little parts of us. That’s where ghosts come from.
“Ghosts ain’t real, space cadet,” said Viola.
Thought: Yeah they are.
“What, you don’t believe in red walkers either?” the aviator demanded to know.
Thought: “Red walkers”. In Ru Divine, they call them “bloodsuckers”. “Vampires”.
“They’re called cops and they suck,” replied the journalist shortly.
The interior came to them in pieces, the front door creaking open to reveal–ah. There were the old sofa chairs, eaten to rags by varmints. There was the dining table, from which they ate sugar bread and rice pudding. During the cold months, they’d eat through their preserves and whatever they’d put to frozen in the icebox.
Thought: And whatever the townsfolk brought you, blankets and food and games to play. You’ve never done anything alone.
Beforementioned aside, the room was almost naked. The wood stove like some big stinking bear crouched in the corner, a sink for washing, a large dressing box and a considerably-sized storage trunk. The stairs led to a small loft space a few inches below the ceiling, under which had been set up blankets for sleeping and an oil lantern for reading by. All else had gone to their guardians, White Doe and Black Sparrow and Sadie Crane’s traveling merchant dads.
Thought: Even without them, it’s all felt like home.
They started getting the house in order. De’afi brought extra blankets from the hall closet and a cloth for the dining table. Viola lit the wood stove. Their spirits bettered, Sadie Crane opened the enormous storage trunk keeping vigil near the stairs leading up.
“Take whatever,” they said.
Viola opened the dressing box. She took old clothes from inside and stacked them in neat piles on the dining table. Viola’d never worn anything that wasn’t hand-me-downed or gifted. The merchants came with their clothing wares, fabrics with names like “chiffon” and “crepe”. And fashion magazines, which Sadie Crane and Sybil and De’afi loved but Viola abhorred like the plague. As if Viola M’et-Sepirot-Keita cared more than jack-nothing about fashion, long as she breathed.
A few silk gowns and a pair of linen pants had been left. By Sadie Crane’s guardians or a traveler come by, the journalist didn’t know. She took the linen pants and a silk gown for wearing to bed. Silk was alright for having, so was cotton and perhaps denim.
The silk in Arcadia was made from spiders–or something like that–and it lasted. Wasn’t even a tiny bit like those dresses they had up in Ru Divine, to the west. The gowns made of paper and dainty slippers for putting one’s feet in and shoes with little blocks on the heel worn by the upper crust. De’afi’d always wanted to wear those, the block shoes. Viola did not and never would see the appeal.
Hir palms spread eagle as Viola said the beforementioned out loud, De’afi pressed a buttery white cloth over the dining table.
“Block shoes are cool,” the aviator said. “They look badass. You could, like, brain someone dead with one of them. Like kill them right through the head.”
“They always got paper gowns on, that’s no good,” Viola said stubbornly.
“I think those are for, maybe, uh–torture?” the anarchist chimed. “Torturing the upper class? Set ’em on fire or something? Dunno. No damn way anyone wears that for real.”
“Oh, yeah, no way,” the aviator agreed. “Like, it’d get soaked up real bad when you’re out picking the fields. Guess maybe they don’t have that over there? Or maybe only the guys who don’t work or nothing wear ’em?”
“You know where Sybil’s stuff got to?” Viola queried, throat-cutting that speculation. “Ain’t seen it a spell.”
“I got an idea, yeah,” the anarchist replied. “Haven’t touched it since he got found dead.”
Thought: One place.
Sadie Crane pried open that storage trunk, palms coming under the gaps. What this place retained were mementos, the stuff of nightmares. Their journal from that time. A small portable radio they’d left from way back, from the cold months when Sybil would stay over and they’d listen to audio theater. And a small box of Sybil’s things, the last to be thought about.
Thought: Burn everything away. You’ll find him again. You’ll find a version of him you can love.
The anarchist bore hands down into the storage trunk, took out a small covered wooden box. It was about the size of a coffin for putting to rest a beloved family rodent. That was all the space they had for him, a rat’s coffin. He would have laughed and laughed and laughed his round little ass off, at what stayed of Sybil Basalt-Eislane long gone from All Creation.
It was the last of what they took from Sybil’s house post-death.
They uncovered the box, the watchers each inhaled audibly at the reveal. A photo journal, a guitar pick, a tattered scrap of blue cloth. Punk magazines from about twenty years odd. All the most normal things you could put in a box.
Thought: This is it. This is him. This is all of him, his every breath and every thought and every being alive. This is Sybil Basalt-Eislane.
And then the kicker. The real kicker. Viola saw it first, with her smart eyes good for noticing. She pointed, with one of her nails chewed to ragged skin.
“No patches,” she said.
The aviator moved fast. One moment ze was leaning over to get a look, the next ze was lunging full tilt at the box in Sadie Crane’s hands. Ze ripped it out their grip hard enough to split their wrists if they’d tried to hold.
“What in All Creation’s last sloppy fuck?” De’afi shouted in anguish.
“Hey, ouch!” the anarchist protested shrilly.
Their tallest friend turned hir eyes away guiltily, inhaling heavy into hir chest. Ze was sorry for that, truly sorry. But ze’d just seen–oh gods alive. It was his. All his. The guitar pick he messed with through his nimbly little fingers. The notebook full of poetry and lyrical mish. His stupid magazines he read instead of books. All. His.
But the patches–for his jacket, the patches De’afi made him–they weren’t in the box. Damn. Damn it all to gates of Paradise, back all the way around. Ze’d taken care making those patches, ze never took care. He’d worn them proudly, on that tattered cotton thing he liked to put about his shoulders when it got cold out.
The journalist held De’afi’s shoulder.
“Sorry, my love,” she said uselessly.
The aviator brushed Viola’s hand off hir, stuffed the box into Sadie Crane’s hands and went to sulk like a great big angry bear in a corner of the space. Lower lip shaking upset, bushy eyebrows turned down into a pissed off V. The journalist watched sympathetically, but did not move to comfort. Give hir the space.
Thought: You make more of yourself out of Sybil’s life.
Coal-dark smudges rose from up out the floorboards at Sadie Crane’s feet. Something inside them leaked black, like a popped artery. They didn’t need this. They needed all and everything else, but not this. It came in polyps of that coal-dark, it came in having and wanting gone.
They flipped through the photo journal, years of memories unfolded. Memories they were never meant to be a part of, they felt like a stranger in their own thoughts. They framed one page between thumb and forefinger, touching at the edge points.
They did not know it, the places in the photographs. Landscape, skyscapes pretty enough for dreaming. Sky bloated with hot white stars. The corner of a radio tower, half out of frame. A lake under midnight moon, winks of starshine reflected on the unnaturally mirrored surface. Flipping back to the front and sliding their fingers over the unfamiliar glossy photograph paper.
Viola came to stand beside, hands to herself as to not touch the photographs or the book.
“That’s an instant,”* she said. “My big sister has one of those. All the faci got them too, I think. Cuz they’re real modern, good for photo taking if you wanna do it profesh.”
They shook, holding that journal. The Stranger peered at them oddly from behind the camera lens, unseen by all but those who knew what to look for. In their mind’s eye, The Stranger’s head creaked around like a patio door to stare. “Why do you care so much?”
Thought: We got our noses broken real bad once. That makes a bond. In blood.
They squinched limp paper between fingers and palm, grinding nails into the left corner. Was that all? A bond in blood? Called to kiss every broken nose he ever had? What a load of–what an absolute load of–the worst. An absolute load of the worst.
In another lifetime, an instant camera spat recreation of a scene onto photo paper. It could never be as good as the original, but the likeness was an uncanny constant to the person who stood behind that lens. Forever dead solid in that flash, one millisecond of time that would never come again. The Stranger let out one irritated heave of a sigh, set the camera down, and watched the stars move.
“Gods alive.”
They broke the words free through gritted teeth, releasing the paper from between fingers and palm. The violent outward shove of the words seemed to dissipate whatever memory, real or maybe not, grew fungal in their head. They were back. Sybil Basalt-Eislane was deceased going on years now. Abakris was choking themself dead on tar cigarettes. De’afi and Viola were the only ones left.
Thought: This sounds like one of those tragedy novellas.
“Are you good?” asked the journalist tentatively.
Sadie Crane had gone quiet and blank as door nails. They could hear the roots of their hair and the growing of their fingernails. Their eyes filmed over coal-dark. Through the smoke, bodies moved about and they could not tell which was which. They could not tell if there had always been four, one looming above three others with antlers.
Thought: And on some level, It’s always waited. You know these things. You know they wait. These fragments of past, all they do is wait. For you to come back, pick them up, cut your skin on them.
Shape One took hold of Sadie Crane’s shoulders.
“I gotcha, space cadet,” she said.
Shape Two moved, but without producing anything less than a bleak whine in back of hir throat. Ze was sorry. So very sorry. For however much–jack, it felt–that was worth something in this turvy world. Ze’d loved him much as anyone else. But not enough to save him. No one loved Sybil Basalt-Eislane enough to save him. From old old spirits come back.
Thought: No, wait–there’s something–
In distant, they heard a jackalope screaming. A lonesome begging cry. Sadie Crane stood forefront, all eyes in the room–of which there were only two pairs–on them. Their head crushed inward like sheet metal, a coal-dark blur speared hot through their sight line. They forgot what breathing even was.
They took the guitar pick, casing it between their fingers. They rubbed it, like he would. They held it, like he would. They loved it, like he would. They loved it like their last kiss. The final breath they stole from him, greedy greedy Sadie Crane wanting all his breath for themself.
Thought: Your nose is bleeding.
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