Chapter 9: We Go On From Here
Saints lined the hallway. Half-busted wicker frames. Oil on canvas. Each portrait had been vandalized in skinny black streaks, made--Sadie Crane could guess--with a graphite pencil. They hadn't just been written over, but stabbed. Deep violent lacerations split and tore the faces of this ark's gravekeepers. Scraps of canvas skin hanging still.
There had to be more. Always had to be more. As if being judged the once wasn't enough. As if every sin had to be--what? Put on the scale? Measured? Poked at? Laughed at? They wanted to be free of this. Could they ever ever be free of this?
Thought: The silent watchers.
Sadie Crane made fast into the bathroom. They pushed into the door with the wide of their shoulder and a little of their back. Shut the thing with a yell of hinges sounding like a cat getting its tail stepped on. An ungodly racket to match their mood. Cripes. This was too much hell for one person, could they maybe have less hell? Pretty please and thanks, sugar on pie? Gods alive. Gotta breathe all the same, gotta breathe.
Thought: Having to breathe is the worst part. Your lungs filling with the promise of life going on.
They went to the mirror and stuck their finger at the glass. Getting real strange. They were having another vision. Or something. You're not gonna find good words for it this side of All Creation.
Thought: Weirdy-weird-weird. That's your life now. Forever. Whatever the fuck this is, it's You.
His late morning alive, Sybil's fingernail dragged on the bathroom mirror. He traced phantom lines all up his face. Age that would never be. He was too damn young to feel so old, he at least knew that much. His guardians had shouted at him that morning and well into afternoon. He wore their anger like it could save him. Save parts of him leastways. He knew he was gonna die tonight, he would have been stupid not to see it. It'd been a long time coming.
Thought: But that's not
Sadie Crane reeled their finger off the mirror. The vision dissipated like something never there. Like a scene from a stage play. But it was something else. Something deep and coal-dark. They didn't actually know what Sybil did his last morning alive. He never saw fit to tell them. Or perhaps he did and it got lost in the trauma wave.
Thought: He wouldn't have told. He knew you'd come, no matter.
They used the toilet and made quick to the sink. Short pulls on the faucet and it all sputtered to life. The coughing struggle of the pipes made their heart ache something fierce.
Thought: You trust your head?
They washed and dried their hands. Sadie Crane had to get back before Viola and De'afi worried their heads off. Was that all they did? Worried? About each other mostly? Sure felt like it.
They pushed out of the bathroom. Sadie Crane had a guitar to find.
They swept their eyes down the hallway. Past tattered Saints and mounted glass lamps along the passage. Damn. The Basalt-Eislanes were living nice before Alcoast. Wonder why they left.
Other end of the hallway, opposite from where the anarchist stood, a movement like the flutter of silk. Inches past where the lamps stopped, something retreated real quick into an open door. As if someone flicked their gown into the passage. Strands of moonlight poured from the window.
Thought: Don't go over there. You won't like it.
Cripes. They drew back, disturbed. Figured they were gonna find something in that old empty house. Black Sparrow said she could talk to the dead--like spirits and shit. Perhaps a little bit of that rubbed off on them? Or perhaps they were nuts? Real easy to find out.
They put up their lantern and made deeper into the passage. A jackalope ripped the air asunder with its mourning shriek. The anarchist stumbled, but kept on.
Thought: Ghosts are real and you're living in one.
Going in felt like a trespass, more so than entering the house. But Sybil would have done the same, he would have laughed while doing it. If Sadie Crane had died that night.
They moved further into the room. They adjusted to what little could be seen in that dancing flicker. Open crates and boxes, a suitcase on the floor. Nothing special.
Thought: This is bad. GO BACK.
"Shut up," the anarchist snarled.
That was a mistake, immediately a mistake. Their voice belled in their ears and shrank away from them. A sound swallow, a crush in the surrounding air. The anarchist smacked a palm over their mouth and gasped devil hard. Cripes.
Thought: The final noise. After the last song plays.
The flicker hit something and Sadie Crane damn near shrieked. This Thing rose up at them like the encroaching shadow of a bull on its hind legs. To crush them. To take hold of their arms and dash them against the nearest wall. To snap their spine in half. To do everything that could be done to a human body. It promised them every sort of pain.
Thought: The kind you deserve. For surviving when he didn't stand a chance. They all say so. Or they think. Damn you, Sadie Crane.
But it was nothing. It was absolutely god-damned nothing. A stack of busted radios. They were piled to the ceiling. The flicker caught something big and their head filled in the blanks. It could happen to any of us. It happened to Sadie Crane in that abandoned house.
Thought: Great, we've seen the haunted radio collection. Now get out.
Something fell over. In the room they were in. Outside the little prick of light they had to see by. They reckoned that wasn't good.
"Hello?" said the anarchist. "Uh, anyone here?"
Dead quiet. No answer.
"Sybil?" they queried.
All this sound came out, other end of the room. Linen scraping against the floor.
Thought: Ethereal. Other Real.
Gods stone dead. They shoved their lantern into the air, a lighthouse in the pitch. They stood straighter on their feet with real confidence. As if they were gonna make it out alive. Just you wait and see.
"Okay, yeah, I get it," they snapped. "Where are you?"
A shuffle kinda like a rodent scurry. Some varmint hidden far outside the reach of Sadie Crane's light.
Thought: It's not that. Probably.
"I'm sorry," the anarchist said. "I couldn't save you--no one could save you from anything. It's not fair."
They'd never asked Sybil about his home life, about the fighting with his guardians and sibling. They'd kissed him and held him and made love to him, but they'd known so little about him. He was like that stack of busted radios. Forgotten in some old house.
Thought: You couldn't. It don't work like that.
There was no more time for patience and contemplation. The darkness rushed at them like molasses. The spell broke, a primal urge springing quick up their throat. Out out out out out OUT.
They thundered down the passage and heard their friends shouting. But their voices took a hard backseat. The air was shrieking, screaming, having the time of its night. Creature shrilling drowned their screams.
It was bats. It was damn bats. Loads of them bursting from the bedroom in one upswinging curtain like the end of all things. Barreling at the ceiling like a puff of tarry smoke, then out that window end of the hallway.
Sadie Crane did not like bats.
Back into the front room. A bat-free zone.
Viola bent forward and snatched at her arms in a frenzy. With the tips of her fingernails, she stabbed crescents into her skin.
"What did you do?" she demanded.
The question tasted like a knife. Excuse me, what did they do? What did they do? Like it was any of their damn fault!
Thought: You could hurt each other. You won't hurt each other.
"I thought I saw Sybil's ghost," they said. "Guess I did? Maybe? Like--before the bats? I dunno. And radios. Lotsa radios. Cripes, my head."
The journalist rubbed circles into her temples. 'Course it was a ghost, the damn fucking ghosts again. She'd been tearing this place up looking for a guitar while Sadie Crane chased spirits. Gods alive, gods stone fucking dead.
"Why'd we even come here?" she despaired.
Thought: Guilt.
"Closure," De'afi asserted.
The anarchist swung around quick. They looked De'afi straight in both eyes.
"No, we came here cuz we thought we were gonna find what we're after," they said. "But that ain't how this goes. Our friend is dead. Our friend is dead. We ain't gonna get over it because he's dead. No memorial's gonna fix that. No guitar's gonna make that okay."
They were shaking real hard. They asked their head why any of this happened. It shouldn't have. Kings and royalists and dead friends. No gods in that. No forest spirits either.
Sadie Crane made for the porch. Their nostrils flared. They were done with mourning and done with The Spinners Club. The idea was dead walking.
Thought: The world's gone wrong. Whose gonna fix it?
Viola stepped onto the whining porch. She creaked over to the railing and squeezed it up in both fists. She was damn sick of giving in so easy. She had a whole life of that. About time All Creation played a different song and got her dancing for real.
The anarchist took Viola's hand and squeezed it real hard.
"My guardians are kinda awful," said the journalist. "Sybil was kinda awful. We're kinda awful. It's all kinda awful."
Thought: We're all just shit on top of shit.
De'afi came out to the porch, lips so tight they could have squinched right off hir face and ricochet-hit the ground like big floppy slippery worms. Silently, ze took Viola's other hand.
"I hate the feeling bad," ze said. "When's it stop, you reckon?"
Thought: Another six years.
"Never," they said back. "Never getting over this stuff."
A coal-dark streak passed serpentine through their peripherals. They cricked their head to follow.
The streak didn't vanish. It solidified. Something real. Eight feet standing. Edge of the where that middle of bum-ass nowhere yard met the woods. You got the line between night and day. The line between safety and danger. The line between life and death. It straddled that line as only nightmares could. Its antlers glinted in the moonlight. And to their right, a figure turned away from Sadie Crane. Long rope of braid extending down their nude back.
Thought: He never went. He never went away from you.
"Sybil?" they breathed.
Viola and De'afi turned their heads around faster than anything, but it was far too late. They couldn't have stopped it. The story goes and goes and goes.
Sadie Crane vaulted over that railing and pelted off into the woods. Before Viola and De'afi could move a hare's inch from the porch, their friend was gone. Past tree line and into the woods.
End of Chapter 9