Chapter Sixteen
SIXTEEN
Evander’s heartbeat is a catastrophe against his ribs, and he’s sure Laurie can feel every sickened, vicious lurch beneath the thin layer of his pajama shirt. Maybe he can feel the scars too. Maybe he is, even now, revolted.
A quick sideways glance down the hall shows no signs of Carrington, though Evander expected the creature to be on his heels with another fistful of poisonous berries, the horrifying contortion of his body on display for all to see.
But there’s nothing.
A small whimper escapes him as he sags against Laurie’s tight grip. But his breathing is slowing and he has not fallen outside of himself; he can’t. He is held together in this boy’s arms.
He finds he doesn’t hate it.
Laurie’s mouth is so close to his ear, his words a hot curl as they hit Evander’s cold, clammy skin. He whispers, “Breathe.”
Evander focuses on matching their breaths and not on the way Laurie’s thumb has started making slow circles on the sliver of fevered skin where Evander’s shirt has ridden up over his hip bone.
“Nightmare?” Laurie says.
“Carrington.” Evander forces it out, rusted and shrill, and when he stares down at his shaking fists, he realizes his fingernails have cut into his palms. “He-he-he was in my room.”
There’s a pause before Laurie says, “Er—how?”
To speak takes such momentous effort, as if his throat is coated in a toxic slurry. “He t-tried to poison me. It’s in my m-mouth. I’m—It’s in my mouth.” The sob is wet and wretched. “He wanted to take me outside and-and-and I think he’s dead.”
But here in a spill of light from Laurie’s room, it is harder to hold on to the picture of the monstrous decay of the old butler. Evander knows he didn’t make it up. He didn’t. But—
Pressure digs into his shoulder and it takes him a moment to register Laurie has rested his chin on Evander. The weight of it matches the solid, steady way his arms still circle Evander’s chest. The hyperventilating has slowed, the shaking ebbing.
“And you’re sure it wasn’t a nightmare?” Laurie says.
“It was real.” Evander’s teeth clench. “I—I—I saw him. His entire middle was gone like it had been ripped out and there’s this thing under my bed that tried to—” But he chops his last words off.
He sounds like a child wailing after a nightmare. What’s he going to say next? There are monsters under my bed.
A dizzy, sickened part of him wonders why Laurie hasn’t let go yet and shoved him off. Evander is being too messy, too loud.
“Sorry.” Evander’s voice catches, drowned in misery.
“It wasn’t an episode. I swear it wasn’t.
But I’m s-sorry. I’ll b-be quieter.” But he sounds unsteady and sick, not exactly an endorsement of a sound mind.
Adrenaline has worn off, his body unraveling like a spool of wet wool, and he wants nothing more than to lie down and cover his head.
He has embarrassed himself.
He shouldn’t be like this. He hates being like this.
Laurie shifts his chin off Evander’s shoulder and his forehead brushes against the nape of Evander’s neck. A shivery, unexplainable feeling plummets down his spine and pools like liquid mercury in his belly.
“Who tells you to be quiet all the time?” Laurie’s words are a low, thickened spill of warm honey. “Pain is meant to take up space or else we wouldn’t know how to scream. Fuck making your agony silent to avoid disturbing others. Maybe they should be disturbed.”
It’s easier to talk when they aren’t facing each other, when words are disembodied and could be meant for anyone, though Evander is surprised in a dull way that Laurie of all people is comforting him like this.
But maybe these are words no one ever said to Laurie, so he is saying them to someone else.
“Show me,” Laurie says.
Heat peppers Evander’s cheeks and he starts to pull away. Laurie immediately lets go; because that hold was never about pinning a hysterical boy down, not in the ways Evander grew used to as a child. That hold was only meant for comforting pressure.
Figuring out how he feels about any of this is beyond him. He’s too embarrassed to even look at Laurie. His chest is full of struck matches and gunpowder, and it seems safer to keep his eyes on the floor as he leads the way back to the north wing.
Laurie follows, a quiet weight at Evander’s back. Maybe they can both just never acknowledge that happened and go back to sniping at each other.
The darkness shies away from them as Laurie hits light switches as they pass.
Evander jumps at every shadow, his nerves so frayed that even his own breathing makes him flinch.
Around every corner, he expects to see Carrington roar murderously toward them.
But there’s nothing but clumps of dirt marking where he trod.
Evander can’t exactly claim them as proof of Carrington’s existence when he’s made just as much mess, knocking over furniture and potted plants in his headlong flight.
It would be easy to explain all of this away as a nightmare.
Probably because that’s all it was.
By the time they reach Evander’s flung-open bedroom door, he’s been struck through with mortification. Reading about creepy poisonous plants before falling asleep did this to him. That’s the only logical explanation.
But he can’t shake the feel of those stripped, fleshless finger bones stroking his curls and the explosion of toxic sweetness in his mouth.
the garden wants you—
Since cowardice already won, he hangs back and lets Laurie enter his room first. Neither of them, it seems, are going to talk about their fight in the garden earlier—was it a fight?
—and now Evander has to sort through the messy, upturned feelings about the way Laurie held him. Held him without malice or mockery.
Laurie flicks on the overhead lights, making Evander wither even further as the shadows are cut from all the corners.
A sweaty, fear-soaked odor sours the stagnant room and it feels too small with both of them crowded in here.
Again, he can’t push aside the sting of realizing he has lived for seven years inside these walls and it’s one of the smallest rooms in the mansion.
“So, what exactly happened?” Laurie sounds neutral, but Evander is busy staring at the neatly arranged line of jam jars on his window seat.
He didn’t do that. They should be on the floor amongst his strewn chaos of papers.
“I didn’t make it up,” he says with quiet bitterness. “It wasn’t an episode.”
Laurie drops down to his stomach and peers under the bed.
Without the dark softening the space between them, it is very hard not to focus on the thinness of his T-shirt and boxers, the outline of body unmistakable under the cotton.
Evander needs to remove his brain and wash it out under a cold faucet.
“Okay, I’ll ask it.” Laurie is still on his stomach, peering under the bed. “What the actual hell is an ‘episode’?”
Evander’s stomach starts churning again, his shivering fingers digging into his greasy, lank hair.
Heat licks across his cheekbones until he is ablaze with all the things he wishes he’d never said.
The episodes should have stayed a secret; no one will ever take him seriously or see him as normal if they know how miserably easy he is to unravel.
“I don’t—” He digs fingers into his scalp. “They’re not … I’m not some tantrumming child—”
“I never said you were.” Laurie’s mouth is a flat line.
“Are they meltdowns? Because I’m pretty sure anyone can have a meltdown when they’re being pushed off the goddamn edge.
But is that what Carrington or Grandfather told you they were?
‘Episodes’? It’s fucking derogatory,” he adds, with surprising venom.
Having this conversation while Laurie is laid out on the floor is removing some of the tension, but Evander still feels an acidic, crawling need to apologize. Or maybe snap back. Laurie is the one, after all, who dismissively said Evander wasn’t functional.
“No, I’m not—” Evander’s voice stretches. “I can’t explain it. I’m not awake for them. I—I don’t have them very often if I’m taking my meds.”
“Okay, so seizures?” Laurie sits up, but stays cross-legged on the floor. “Because if you’re having seizures, you shouldn’t be alone.”
Evander presses his palms to his eyes so hard white static sparks before him. “No. They’re just like … I lose time and I wake up bruised and exhausted and I feel sick.”
He wakes up in places he wasn’t before and finds his fingernails ripped off, scratches at the back of his door, blood on the carpet, his mouth busted open and filled with the pervasive taste of clover and moss.
He usually tries not to think about it, how he could be doing anything and wouldn’t even know it. Maybe he shouldn’t be trusted either.
“Okay.” Laurie yawns as if barely interested even though he started this line of questioning. “Guess I’ll just have to watch you have one and see what happens.”
Evander stares at him in muted dismay. “No? They’re—No, that’s embarrassing.”
Laurie rolls onto his stomach so he can look under the bed again, though he doesn’t need to make a show of pretending there are monsters to ferret out.
Part of Evander wants to be alone again so he can crawl into bed and sleep away his shame, but he also knows that closing his eyes will be so profoundly awful that he’ll do anything to stay awake.
He wipes his mouth, a prickling unease on his skin that could be the poison kicking in—or could be in his head. What does it feel like, anyway, to die with the garden in your mouth?
“I think the garden has Carrington. I know that sounds ridiculous, but—” Evander breaks off as Laurie slides halfway under his bed.
He gives a small oomph sound and then starts squirming backward, yanking something with him. For a wild second, Evander thinks it’ll be the corpse of Carrington, dragged into view with his blown-out middle and eyes foamy with decay.
There is the rustling snap of old twigs and crushed leaves before Laurie topples backward and a huge mound of dead vines slides out from under the bed.
He yelps, the knot of twisted, gnarled roots crashing around him with the wild smell of crumbling fungi.
Those strange bloody flowers deflate on the carpet as if the light offends them.
Neither of them move. They just stare at the mass of decomposing foliage.
“You need a gardener.” Laurie’s breathing too fast. “But, like, for under the bed.”
Vindication roars to life in Evander’s chest and he jabs a finger at it, his voice rising. “SEE. That grabbed me. I wasn’t imagining it!”
Laurie snaps off a flower and surveys it. When he gets to his feet, his T-shirt is flecked with dirt, his jaw smeared with dust.
Evander snatches the flower and flings it across the room.
“That’s a Devil’s Tongue. I saw it in the field guide.
They’re extremely poisonous, like touch-the-pollen-and-have-your-tongue-swell-up-and-burst kind of poison.
” He starts pacing while Laurie hastily wipes his hands on his shirt.
“Carrington tried to poison me and I think, maybe—maybe I didn’t swallow enough for it to hurt me?
But how can he walk around with half his body missing?
He must have been in the garden and—” He whirls on Laurie, his voice going high.
“Those entrails. Those were Carrington’s.
What’s behind that red door? Why is it red? ”
Laurie has drifted toward the window seat and is looking at the flourishing cuttings in their jam jars. His mouth tips down at the corners and his voice is very, very soft. “Someone painted it in blood.”
Silence stretches between them. It must have just been painted right before they arrived, to be that bright a red, which is …
terrible to think about. He’d known it somehow, known it in ways he hadn’t wanted to quantify.
Why else had he wanted so badly to put his mouth to the door and feel the rough wood splinters against his tongue?
Blood—coppery, luscious, fresh.
But his hunger is still a wild thing, licking the inside of his rib cage raw.
It takes effort to keep himself together, to not split apart under the weight of all these things that shouldn’t be real. “Is there a monster in the garden? Did your family—” He swallows. “Did they lock up a monster?”
Laurie cuts a quick sideways glance at him, but can’t seem to hold eye contact. He picks up a fallen leaf and rubs it between thumb and forefinger, but he’s tucking his brace tight against his stomach again—another tell, a real one this time, of when he’s anxious. Of when he’s in pain.
“What happens”—Evander takes a step forward, his voice low and shaking—“if we unlock the monster’s door?”
He is so sick of this: the silence, the lies, the deflections. The way he wants to wrap his fingers around Laurie’s neck and scrape his teeth along his throat is a compulsion he almost can’t tame.
“I don’t know,” Laurie says at last, but Evander isn’t sure which question he’s answering.
Evander is about to snap at him when something catches his eye beyond the window. A frown furrows his brow and he moves quickly to flick off the lights and then kneel on the window seat and press his face to the speckled, dusty glass.
Below, a figure moves in the moonlight, footsteps listing sideways as it staggers deeper into the gardens.
Laurie crushes in beside Evander, uninvited yet warm. His eyes are on the garden, his breathing gone shallow.
“The hell,” he mutters. “Carrington?”
A ferocious sort of need flattens Evander’s fear and he slides off the seat and heads for the door. Madness has him by the throat, a fevered sort of courage flooding his lungs.
He needs to know.
He has lost his goddamn mind right now, but he isn’t stopping.
“I’m going outside,” he says.