Chapter 22 Arthur
Arthur
Cold shot through my veins, a hard freeze working a path up my body from toes to crown. In seconds, the fear I felt, pressed between the walls of sinking soil, gave way to a much worse kind of claustrophobia as the monster fit itself into my hollows.
I tried to suck in a breath, tried to push back, but the monster held fast, its relentless determination disconnecting me from my body in the space of a moment.
The trickle of raining sediment lifted away. The pain I’d felt released, leaving me untethered, weightless to the point of nausea. I shivered as even that physical anchor sloughed off, leaving me wholly detached from my body. I became nothing. Just a scrap of detritus in my own head.
Terror gripped me.
The monster reached to grasp a root squiggling out of the dirt to the side of Eva’s head. Upon contact, the roots curled back from the deadly power coursing through me. That was all I could still feel: cold, bitter death.
“Can we get on your shoulders?” the monster asked Eva.
I couldn’t smell the dirt coating the both of us in a dark rime of earth. I couldn’t feel the warm pressure of her body against mine, as I had when she’d taken my face in her hands and kissed me.
Kissed me.
For a moment, our connection point had felt like the first drop of summer. She was a warm flash of heat.
But then she was gone and I was ice again.
Eva nodded, bending into a crouch. I felt the monster’s intention move through me as it stepped both our feet onto her shoulders.
It was careful to position our weight so as not to knock her off-balance.
I couldn’t feel my legs shake. Maybe I had stopped trembling, or maybe the numbness had stolen that too.
“Okay?” the monster asked her. It was strange, and awful, to hear my voice speak without my consent.
To watch my body move and act as an observer, the claustrophobic weight of my own mind pressing in around me like walls closing in, while I was trapped inside myself like a prehistoric insect caught in amber.
Eva nodded. “I’m okay.”
The monster dug our fingers into the soil, clawing every possible hold as it lengthened our body to our full height and reached overhead.
I couldn’t hear its thoughts anymore, alone in my head again.
I tried to push against the membrane where our wills met.
I tried to find one pulse of warmth. To grit my teeth and stay, stay, stay.
But I was already gone.
“Almost there.”
A scream built inside me, but with no release, its pressure became panic.
With a cry of triumph, the monster grasped one of the lower-hanging roots. “Got it!”
I couldn’t feel where our fingers stubbed into the fibrous rootscape, but the moment the monster ripped the life from the interweaving vines, a face flashed before my eyes.
It was my mother.
Her face twisted in shock, then pain, her eyes blowing wide. When the roots shrank back, she disappeared, swallowed by the dark.
Grunting, the monster split a window through the roots, sending debris of unearthed flora, moss, and insects raining down below. It wrestled our forearms onto the surface and scrambled up, rolling onto our back.
For a moment, we stared at the dark sky, and though I couldn’t hear the monster’s thoughts anymore, its triumph coursed through me.
Let me out, I begged.
No answer. Instead, the monster rolled onto our knees, plucking a long stick from the underbrush and extending it down to Eva. With the monster in control, I couldn’t feel the strain it took on my muscles to haul her out of the pit. I couldn’t even feel the burn in my stitches anymore.
Let me go.
I couldn’t get out of my own head. I couldn’t get free. Fear built in whatever shred of me was left, trapped behind the will of something stronger.
“You did it!” Eva’s smile was painfully bright as the monster helped her out of the pit. The pride it felt was reflected in her eyes too.
The icy grip holding me still seemed to get even colder. Couldn’t she tell there was something wrong with me? Was there so little of me that wasn’t monstrous that she couldn’t even see that that wasn’t me?
The grove of aspens around us had withered, their chalky husks hollowed of life. Soon, the dead wood would likely become the home and feast of a dozen other species, fungus and insect alike making a home of what had once been only destruction. But just now, the trunks were empty of life.
The monster’s gaze fell to something lying in the grass. It stepped closer. When the dark, feathered form took shape, a spike of nausea reached deep into my frozen state to make me gag.
It was a nest. Dislodged, perhaps, when the trees had uprooted themselves to bury us in soil. Or perhaps it was the monster’s doing. Perhaps its deadly touch had traveled up the roots and trunk and branches until it found bone and blood and flesh.
Something rustled to my right. The leaves had turned yellow and fallen to the earth, like drops of gold in autumn. The monster reached for the flapping, wounded mother bird thrashing in the brush there.
STOP!
Seemingly oblivious to my protest, the monster lifted the injured robin into the cradle of our palms. I couldn’t flex a single muscle, no matter how panicked I was.
But I still felt the bird die.
And it felt good.
Eva approached cautiously. She gently took the bird and set it in the grass. “Hey,” she said, watching me too knowingly. Of course she did. Eva knew how precious birds were to me. “You okay?”
“Sometimes death is a mercy.”
Her eyes widened at the callous words.
“Are you sur—”
“We should probably get going.” The monster cut her off and nodded our head at the dead aspens. “Ground might not be stable.”
For a moment, I thought Eva might protest. Her mouth puckered. Where she touched me, I could almost feel again, the numbness pushed back by a glow of warmth. I couldn’t breathe, hope pushing through like sprouts from a dormant bulb. If I was ice, then surely she was sun.
I worked my lips without sound, unable to form the words at first. There had been a moment, down in the pit, when I’d tried to tell her the truth: There was something awful and deadly inside me, and I was afraid that I no longer had control of it.
The monster hadn’t let me get the words out.
Sensation trickled in slowly, painfully, like blood returning to a numbed limb. “Please, Ev,” I rasped.
The monster ripped away from her touch, but it was too late. The ice had melted, and for the first time in minutes, I took a deep breath. My lungs felt burned, my throat raw.
My stitches were agony.
“Please,” I repeated, my knees giving out.
Eva caught me on the way down. “Oh, hey, hey. Take a minute, okay?”
I nodded, the world spinning in dark shades of night around me. Eva rubbed a circle over my spine as she waited for me to speak.
I searched for a way to explain, afraid of the monster cutting me off again. “Do you ever feel… hollow?” I finally asked.
Eva’s hand slowed over my lower back. “What do you mean?”
I didn’t know how else to say it. “Like something inside you is… missing,” I roughed out, letting my eyes close. “Something important.”
When she didn’t answer, I looked up. Eva’s cheeks were pale against the moonlit sky. “Yeah,” she said softly.
It was ridiculous, to cast my shadow over her light. The bee girl didn’t know what it was like to wonder if she even had a soul, or if the emptiness inside was merely a sign that her soul was rotten. She had honey in her veins, not death. Not rot.
Not like me.
The kiss we’d shared sat like a phantom between us now. I couldn’t help the drop of my eyes to her mouth. She had a bit of dirt smudged on her chin. I wanted to reach out and clear it away with the pad of my thumb. I wanted to touch her again. I wanted to tell her I was sorry.
More than anything, I wanted another chance to show her I could be good.
But then I thought of the nest of hatchlings, their delicate bodies broken and still. I thought of how easily the monster had taken the life of their mother with a single, pitiless touch, and my mouth closed, the words dying just as easily on my lips.
I didn’t deserve absolution.
The monster squirmed inside me, the membranous layer between our wills stretching thin. I knew if it pressed, it could take me over again, no matter how deeply Eva’s warmth touched the ice inside my heart.
“Let’s follow the river,” Eva said, rising to her feet. She whistled for Bug, and to my surprise, the little fluff monster darted out from between the trees. Relief unfurled inside me. She was okay. “The atlas showed it curving around the meadow.”
The atlas. We’d lost that too, lost everything we weren’t wearing when we went to bed. I looked down at my socked feet, poking out beneath a pair of fuzzy checkered pajama pants. Eva wore my old sweatshirt and a pair of boxers repurposed into sleep shorts.
Heat bloomed up my neck. “Right. Yeah, let’s go.”