Chapter 23 #2
It takes an immense struggle to force myself even halfway back inside my seams, to swipe clumsy fingers through the spreading bloodstain of Bas’s vacant body and carefully, with childish strain, wet the carved divots of every rune and mark around the circle.
Despite the gore—one teenager dead, the other probably dying, her soul half hanging out of her broken body—my mother crashes to her knees and follows suit.
Her hands crimson to the wrist, she sketches every shape like she could do it in her sleep.
And hell, maybe she has been—maybe she’s spent the last seventeen years reliving this—because she draws with both hands at once, my hundred names a hungry ouroboros coiling around my frame.
Strength failing, dead heart woken and shuddering in my chest, I lay down over the hole in the world.
With one last gasp of effort, I kick off my wet combat boots. Barefoot seems like the way to go.
Grim and pale, my mother lifts the heavy contraption from her bag.
It dangles from her hands, deflated as roadkill, bloated with crystals and wires and filigree fragments, a complicated battery pack swaying like a fat belly.
She approaches me but stops short. Kneeling, she sets the device on the ground, shucks out of her coat, wads it up around the battery.
“It’ll get hot,” she chokes, throat too tight to force the words out. “I don’t want it to burn you.”
“A little late to worry about that.” I flick my head with a ghostly hand, lolling it her way. The smile is easier, one unseen finger tugging up my lips. “Not sure that matters in the scheme of things.”
“Don’t make jokes.”
“I wasn’t.”
Slowly, with heartbreaking care, my mother drapes the dissembled machine across me. It covers me from chin to knee, weighs both my blood-sticky arms down to stone. The battery pack wedges between my breasts, thudding against my cellphone with every breath, humped up over the jacket.
It smells like Mom’s perfume—flowery and antiseptic.
It used to smell like disappointment, like yet another argument.
Today, for some reason, it smells like a road trip.
My eyes flutter shut, and I should probably think of what I’m about to do next—should probably come up with a plan or climb out of my body or look for Bas—but bizarrely, all I can think about is a roadside attraction.
Mom took my picture next to a metal statue of Mothman, his bronze butt cheeks shiny from the slaps of a thousand passing tourists.
And it’s so simple, so small and human and ordinary, my eyes well up with tears.
I wasn’t done yet.
I never wanted to be here, but I wasn’t done yet.
In a small voice, I whisper, “Do you think it will hurt?”
“I don’t know,” Mom croaks. “I don’t think so. I guess… I guess it probably feels like euthanasia. Falling asleep between blinks.”
Rain drips against the back of my hand, smearing Bas’s blood.
I crack one eye open to find my mother’s face soaked by the storm, beads of water trembling on her chin.
Slowly, hand shaking, she presses the rewind button on the cassette player.
After a moment’s hesitation, a grumbling electronic complaint, it hisses backward.
She counts beneath her breath—an old habit resumed seventeen years later—and jams the button down.
Quietly, tinny from the old speakers and the tape a little worse for wear, someone sings he wishes I was here.
“Something to listen to,” Mom says. “If we’re playing the whole reel over, you should go out the way you came.”
Hazing outside my body, my shaking smile doubles through my meat and ghost. The rain blurs in my eyes, dripping backward, sticky in my hairline.
“I know I’m not your daughter,” I whisper. “Not really. But you were a good mom.”
Mom coughs, swallows hard. A fist tense in her stomach, she insists, “You will always be my daughter.”
I nod.
“But I will never be the one you lost.” Ungainly, I slap out a hand. My bloodstained fingers grope across the floor, tangling with hers. With effort, I find her eyes in the dark. “I’ll look for her,” I promise. “I’ll send her back when I find her. So you can finally say goodbye.”
“I said my goodbyes seventeen years ago and I’m not saying them now.” My mother’s fingers squeeze so tightly something in my hand cracks. “This isn’t goodbye. You are not dying, do you hear me? I forbid it.”
“Of course not,” I wheeze, cracking a smile, floodwaters rising in my throat. “I was never alive.”
Reaching out across the lip of the circle, my mother sweeps my hair back from my face. She wipes blood splatter from my forehead, helps me shut my eyes.
“I love you,” she whispers.
And turns on the machine.
With one last glance over her shoulder, she scrambles to the door on the far side of the room.
Backpack forgotten, rifle empty, she wrenches it open and throws herself behind it.
I hear her fists thud against the door. Hazing outside my body, I feel the flesh-warm imprint of her forehead, eyes squeezed shut in full-body flinch. Waiting. Braced for oncoming tragedy.
But it doesn’t feel tragic anymore. It just feels… warm. The trap on my chest blooms, a huge white star, a flower. It reaches into me, and I reach back. My last seams flake away in the heat of it, skin crisping, bones blowing away to ash. My soul billows outward, finally free.
And my heartbeat sings to me in the depths of the earth. My other half blazes, a beacon in the dark. I squeeze my mother’s shoulder to let her know I’m okay, swipe my cool palm across her dampened face, and billow up, out. Into the earth, into the world, into Bas.
My harvest god lays down his sword. A golden awareness swallows me; my night-laced silver dampens his flame. Summer follows winter. Moon follows sun. We collide, mass and stars and galaxies, inevitable and incomplete and merging. My heart wakes in my massive, moonlit chest and learns to beat again.
Together, hands doubled, two-in-one, we coax the ley line up and out of its imprisonment. A cat’s cradle, yarn in a labyrinth, a red cord stretched from ear to ear, we untangle it. Stitching fingers through the earth, we re-carve its proper, ancient path, and set it on its course.
Crystals in the ghost fence crack. Runes smoke. We reach, one finger outstretched, and hiss a divine psp psp psp.
Obedient, lightning slices through the storm, strikes our outstretched fingertips.
Iron burns cherry red. The half-built crown over this cursed tower crumbles.
We shatter it in our massive hands, filling our palms with little ghost sparks—fallen stars gently burning flesh and bone—and with our feet buried in the earth, we close every eye.
We sink. Our awareness travels down. We brush past our empty mortal bodies, silence in the cavern but for the sound of singing—we remember the words, and our voices mingle, as unearthly and strange as the old tape playing.
And it’s funny Chloe Green chose this one, all those years ago. True then and true now—
We wish they were here. We wish all of them were here—every ghost and hurting thing—and when we stretch out our hands, when we sing to them, they flood in. Like picking flowers, like asphodel and Helheim and a library table, we gather up every lost and aching soul.
Hell is where we are. And we are home—
—home—
home.