Chapter 7 Arthur
Arthur
It was happening again. The sea of grief.
The lapse in control. I didn’t want the Moreaus to see me coming apart like this, as naked as the day I’d burned the bloody clothes.
The woman in that urn hadn’t given a shit about her black hole of a son, collapsing inward and swallowing anything light and good.
So why did I still care about her?
I shouldn’t have even been the one to do this. All morning, I’d fought the slow rise of dread in my chest as we prepared to spread her ashes. Jack’s words made the anxious feeling calcify. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.
Whenever you’re ready.
I wasn’t ready.
“Arthur?” Izzy’s concern bled into her voice.
I shoved to my feet and thrust the box full of Mom’s ashes into her hands. “I need a minute,” I rasped.
The monster weighed as heavy as fresh, ripe fruit between my ribs as I stomped toward the house. I had to consume something, fast. The last time I got this hungry, I woke one morning with a crow stiff with rigor mortis stretched between my hands, my bare feet dark with forest soil.
I felt smaller and smaller with every step forward. I used to want that. The smaller I made myself, the easier I was to handle, and for so long that was all I’d wanted to be.
“Don’t cry for her.”
“I’m not!” I snapped back, forgetting to lower my voice. Maybe it didn’t matter. I was far enough from the Moreaus now that they likely wouldn’t hear me talking, presumably to myself.
At the top of the hill, I gripped the iron gate, surveying the cottage and the state of the yard, grown even more wild since that morning.
The weathervane rooster atop the cottage wore the daytime moon like a crown jewel on its head.
Errant skeins of prickly greenbrier stretched down the trellis and onto the porch, where scarlet bee balm spilled from a hole in the siding like the innards of a butchered pig.
All Eva’s rage.
The wildness shouted her name. In a sea of bad feelings, it was strangely grounding to latch on to something so concrete, even if that something was her bitterness toward me.
Her golden, gentle magic had always felt like something out of a folktale. She did impossible things, like pulling seeds from deep in the earth with nothing but desire and will. She woke the world up with every footstep, every laugh.
But she wasn’t laughing now, and the wildflowers her magic had yanked to the surface had a wretched kind of violence to them, their stems slightly twisted, the roses and greenbrier overpacked with thorns.
I wondered what she’d do with me, if given the chance. I doubted she’d be gentle, after all I’d done, and all I’d left her to bear alone.
The monster stopped me in my tracks and made me bend and pick a flower, wrapping my fingers around the bright red cluster of petals. “You need to consume.”
I swallowed hard. It was better than killing an animal, but still, I hated that I needed it. Hated even more that I was scared of what I might become if I refused.
So I crushed the flower in my fist and let it wither. The fragile bloom hardly sated the gnawing and desperate hunger inside me.
But it was something.
I went inside.
Once, this cottage had been my sanctuary.
I tried to ground myself by focusing on the details I remembered: the faded cherry wallpaper, the familiar snick of the door, the sag and groan of the floorboards, every scuffed one holy simply because it was something I wanted that would never really be mine.
Coming to a halt in front of the hall mirror, I stared, desperate to find something of myself in the reflection, instead of the beast. My hair had grown over my ears, my beard was in desperate need of a trim, and dark circles rimmed my eyes… but they were still my eyes.
This body was still mine.
“Of course it is.” My reflection smiled.
I clenched my hands into fists at my sides. “Get out,” I whispered.
“You called me here.” The monster’s lazy, reptilian stretch made me shudder.
Is that all I am? A skin, to be molted?
“You’re lying.”
The silence that followed bore the weight of a thousand moments just like this, when I’d reached instinctively for the monster, needing it to bear a weight I couldn’t bear myself. I hated myself for being so weak, but my body was heavy, and some days, it took effort just to keep going.
The monster helped with that.
“That’s right.” Like a heartbeat, it gently pulsed in the center of my chest. “I am the one who has walked beside you. I have been there to sit with you in the dark—”
A dark it created.
“I am the home you are looking for. Not this place.” It paused. “Not her.”
I struck the face in the glass.
Pain erupted in my knuckles, the shock of the impact running a current up my arm. A large crack spidered my features in the mirror, fragmenting me from nose to jaw.
“Who’s there?” someone called out. The sound made me jump, and heat washed over me as I realized I wasn’t alone. Tightening my fist, I paced to the kitchen’s open doorway, blood slicking my knuckles beneath my glove.
The intruder stood by the edge of the sink, facing me. In one hand, he held a jar filled to the brim with little blue flowers. In the other, a scoop.
“Connoway?” Shock rippled across his face at the sight of me. Then he shoved the tea to one side and ripped a chef’s knife out of the block on the counter. “What the hell are you doing here?”
The monster’s fury rose in an instant, sinking shards of ice into my bones. “What are we doing here?” it inwardly seethed.
“Lenny,” I said, the word as cold and dead as a corpse. I didn’t miss the way his grip tightened over the hilt of the knife, or the way his gaze skipped over my shoulder nervously. My eyes narrowed. “Whatcha got there?”
“None of your business.”
I huffed in disbelief, the hairs on the back of my neck lifting in unease.
The monster threw itself at the wall between our wills, clawing for escape until my eyes watered from the strain of holding it back. “He’s in her house!”
I know.
Just seeing him here felt like sacrilege.
“You gonna let me by?” Lenny took a step forward. “Or are you here to finish what you started before you skipped town? It won’t be so easy this time.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lenny’s gaze darkened. “The hell you don’t.”
The monster flicked my gaze to the breadboard, where a long serrated knife lay beside a half-eaten loaf of focaccia. “Pick up the knife,” the monster urged.
I didn’t.
Lenny stepped forward, our mutual hatred charging the air. A sudden warning rang between my ears when he shifted his weight. “You really thought you could just show up here?” Lenny snatched my camera off the counter with his free hand and drew his arm back. “I know what you did, Connoway!”
He’s going to hit me.
I ducked a split second before Lenny slammed my camera into the cabinet. The hard crack it made at contact was so loud it bored into my ears, and as splinters of wood and shattered glass sprayed over the counter, the woodsy aroma of oregano burst in my nose.
My camera. Shock was a delicate blade to my heart. He broke my camera.
Lenny pinned me against the wainscoting and slid the blade of the knife against my throat. “I saw it all,” he growled.
The monster flared. “Don’t touch him!”
But Lenny couldn’t hear the voice in my head. Adrenaline pounded in my veins, and I pushed Lenny off me and tried to scramble away, afraid of what we might do to stop him. What I might do.
Lenny had to be lying. He’d been black-out drunk that night.
Glass crunched beneath my shoe, and I tripped over the pieces of my camera and lost my balance. For a split second, I went airborne.
Then my face slammed into the counter’s edge.
My brow split, a shock of pain stealing my breath. My ears whined with a harsh tinnitus, and hot blood ran down my face, blurring my vision in one eye and pooling on my upper lip.
The monster licked the blood away. “Enough,” it gritted out.
I struggled onto my knees. “Please,” I whispered as more blood dripped onto the woven rug beneath me. “Don’t do this.”
I didn’t want to hurt him.
The monster poured into my hollows, furious and cold. “Yes, we do,” it snapped.
As it stole my will, I felt myself become a passenger in my own body. It was always strange how loud the silence felt.
Numbness crawled up my fingertips into my palms. Into my forearms. My chest. Soon, my tether to my senses fell away entirely.
Gone was the ache in my knuckles from punching the mirror.
Gone was the floral-scented air. Gone was the taste of copper from where I’d bitten my tongue.
Weightless, I shifted from a man of flesh to a creature preserved in ice.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.
I could only witness.
Lenny’s chest rose and fell in angry bursts as he leered over us. “I know your girlfriend’s secret too. No one believed me before, but now—Ah!”
The monster yanked on the cuff of Lenny’s pants, forcing him to throw out his hands to catch his fall. Trapped inside myself, I could only watch as the monster leapt onto Lenny, throwing a clumsy punch to his jaw. Lenny’s head snapped back, smacking the tiles.
The monster growled—not in my head but in my very throat, a hoarse, unpracticed sound that shocked me to my core. “Why are you here?” The monster’s demand slipped past my own lips, feeling strange and foreign on my tongue. “Why are you in her house?!”
Horror collected inside me. It had never stolen my voice before.
“Arthur?”
Lenny’s eyes darted toward the sound of Eva’s voice, and he tried to call out for help, visibly alarmed. The windows exploded inward, thorny vines pouring in and knocking the basil plants off the windowsills.
For a moment, I was seventeen again. I was a killer, and I didn’t care.
Eva appeared in the doorway, hair unbound and wild eyes bright with alarm.
At her feet, the floorboards cracked and moss spilled out quick as flowing water across the kitchen floor.
The sight of her filled me with shame. I didn’t want the bee girl to see me like this, but I wasn’t in control of my body anymore.
The monster licked more blood off my lip, but I tasted nothing. I was nothing, just a husk to be molted.
Eva rushed toward us. “What are you doing?”
“He deserves to feel pain,” the monster snarled. When Lenny tried to wriggle away, the monster dug its grip into his forearms. We were brutal, furious and violent and
empty
enraged.
“Arthur, stop!” Eva shrieked.
I would have cried out in frustration if I could. I wanted to scream and tell her this wasn’t me, tell her I was in here, I was broken, I was sorry.
The monster shucked off my gloves, its dark intent flooding the body we shared. Wait. A full-body panic tore through me. Wait! Stop!
The monster didn’t stop, reaching for Lenny.
A pair of impossibly large hands locked over my arms in an iron grip.
Jack.
The monster struggled. “Let me go!” it barked aloud.
“No,” Jack huffed. The monster thrashed, but Jack Moreau was stronger than the beast. “Take a deep breath,” he commanded. “There’s a place in you where the darkness doesn’t reach, Arthur. Find it!”
I trembled within my prison of ice. He didn’t understand. I was the darkness. You can’t run from the parts of yourself you hate.
“What’s going on?” a voice I didn’t recognize called out.
Jack squeezed even tighter. “Don’t let go, Arthur.”
The monster didn’t like the way Jack’s branches dug into our back. Hurting us. With a snap of our teeth, it ripped an arm free and grasped the closest branch.
And snapped.