Chapter 26 Arthur
Arthur
The honey was gone.
I stared as Eva tore frame after frame out of their hive boxes, growing more frantic by the second. It’s all gone. Blood pounded in my ears, and the world seemed to thin, stealing my breath until the center of my chest ached with that single, nauseating truth.
There was no honey.
No cure.
No escape. Not for Jack, and certainly not for me.
The words ran viscous through my mind, slipping through the cracks between my will and the monster’s, and I imagined the membranous barrier between us growing sticky.
Eva limped to the hive box farthest from where I stood, an audible sob slipping out as she tore off the top. I flinched at the cracking sound of the wood as storm-damaged splinters flecked off into the grass.
“It’s all gone,” she rasped.
A chill swept down my spine, the monster’s touch as gentle as a rime of frost on a window deep in autumn.
Hands shaking, I bent to lift a discarded wooden frame from the grass and tried to fight off the monster’s trickling cold.
Mildew speckled the rough-cut grain, the wood slightly warped from exposure to the elements.
Wax moths had eaten a tunnel through the cells, leaving silky, weblike strands behind.
The sparse remaining comb fragments had turned brittle and dark with age and neglect, the hives turned to ruin without proper care.
Bug jogged on soft paws through the carpet of swaying grasses and deep blue flowers, looking around curiously. She seemed oblivious to the source of Eva’s tears, and to the emptiness swelling inside me, content to play in this new, colorful place.
The monster didn’t say the obvious, that we were too late—many years too late, by the state of the frames. Instead, I felt its hope sink into a cool resolve inside my chest.
In my current state of overwhelm, it would be such a relief to just… let go. Let the monster have me. I already felt myself slipping—I always did when everything felt like too much. The monster had always been there for me, hadn’t it? It never let me fall or break. It was an escape.
The frame slipped from my fingers, thunking into the grass at my feet as the meadow kaleidoscoped in a swirl of blues and greens around me.
With a start, I realized I was tap-tap-tapping the side of my leg again.
It took effort to flatten my palm, and I closed my eyes and slowed my breath. Told myself to stay.
Stay here.
Stay present.
Stay me.
My resistance only drew its pity to the surface.
“Little death-touch,” the monster began, its concern a familiar weight in my chest. Cold.
Horrible. Caring. I hated everything about this…
this thing inside me that was so wrong and unnatural.
I hated that it cared so much when no one else ever had.
I didn’t want to always need fixing, a broken and pitiful thing so lost in my own head that the simplest gust of wind sent me spinning.
I didn’t want to need something to catch me. Especially not something—
“Like me?” the monster softly asked.
I clamped my bottom lip between my teeth.
“You’ve tried so hard to be rid of me.” The monster coiled inside my chest. “But you don’t need fixing.”
No. I needed a fucking exorcism.
The monster’s presence had once been a relief.
I was young when it had first come into being, just a boy with no other company but the voice in my head and the deadly power in my hands.
Together, we’d staved off the loneliness that reared its ugly head whenever Mom had worked too late, or when she hadn’t come home at all.
This wasn’t friendship anymore, though.
The monster saw itself as medicine, but medicine could poison too.
A cup of tea soothed so many ailments, but how many herbs acted as poison if administered in too high a dose?
For years, the monster’s protective nature had over-steeped inside me, turning whatever kinship we once had bitter and toxic with self-loathing.
“Arthur—”
“Stop,” I whispered, too quiet for Eva to hear. I was so tired of its voice. Its soft encouragement. Its brutal demands. It was too much to hold so much contradiction inside me.
“I just want to help.”
I kept tapping against the side of my leg. “I know.” A quiet seed of despair split open in my chest. “But whenever you try, someone gets hurt.”
Cold washed over me, touching every place the monster and I pressed together, hand to glove, soul to body. I wasn’t sure which one of those I was anymore, but I knew I had to resist. For all its talk of care, the monster could be ruthless, even cruel, when it felt wounded.
“I don’t hurt you.”
It had taken control at the cottage, then again in the pit. It would do so again. I knew it.
I needed to stay in control.
Stay me.
I gritted my teeth. “You hurt me every time,” I said under my breath.
Eva turned toward me then, wholly unaware of my inner struggle. Her eyes were bright with tears, and the empty frames lay in a scattered puzzle at her feet. Wild grasses pushed taller where she stood, green blades splitting from their roots in testament to her breaking heart.
“Arthur, please,” the monster whispered. I shivered. It was so rare to hear it say my name. A hot tear rolled down my cheek, in stark contrast to the ice in my bones. “Let me help you,” it urged again, its sadness swelling inside me. “You need to consume.”
“No,” I snapped, and this time Eva heard, though what she made of it, I didn’t know. When she looked at me, I turned away.
Sometimes it felt as though the weight of the whole Earth was pressing on my chest. It felt like being buried alive. I didn’t know how to escape that feeling without the monster’s help, but I knew that I wanted to find a way.
I didn’t want to go numb anymore. Maybe once doing so had been my only means of survival, but that wasn’t living. Eva had shown me that back when she’d taken a boy no one wanted and accepted him as hers.
Even though our mistakes had changed the shape of who we were to each other, I would never forget how her kind of love had rearranged my view of the world. It had made everything brighter, and had made me want to live brighter too.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I pushed the monster back. It was difficult. My body was worn out, sore in too many ways to count.
The monster snarled in frustration. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”
That had always been the case.
“You need me!” it called out, fainter now as I smothered it in pure resolve.
This wasn’t a long-term solution—I knew that.
I wasn’t even sure it would last the day, especially with the fever and infection worsening.
Maybe the monster would keep clawing away, hungry to devour my pain, as the wax moths had done to the honeycomb, until only a brittle shell of me remained.
But for now, for as long as I could, I wanted to be my own.
My knees gave out, the weight of my body sinking down into the soft earth below. I sagged against the abandoned hive box, eyes closing. “I don’t need you.”
Another storm was brewing across the dark and frothy sky. The instant the first drop fell, I felt the monster’s desire to wipe it off our cheek, but I fought that too.
This body was still mine.
The clouds opened just as the plonk of Eva’s walking stick and the shush of her feet sounded in the grass behind me. In seconds, the slow dribble quickened to a roar.
“Arthur?”
A stream of raindrops was already cooling my too-warm skin, making a shiver roll over me.
“Arthur!” Strong hands gripped my shoulders and shook. “You’ve got to get up!”
“Bee girl,” I whispered, eyes fluttering.
Eva hauled me to my feet and nodded to the other side of the meadow. “I think that’s a shed.”
To my bewilderment, she was right. Beyond the sea of rippling violet flowers, there was a simple wooden door, smothered in a mound of green ivy.
Eva dragged me toward it, leaning heavily on her walking stick.
All the while, the monster’s hunger for the life around us swelled and built inside me.
These flowers were different. They seemed to glow with life.
My mouth watered, the monster’s thirst stretching through me.
It wanted to take the tender petals between our fingertips.
It wanted me to get on my knees and rip the plants up, to sink my teeth into the roots and suck the meadow dry.
Mortified, I clutched my shirt with my free hand to keep it still, and together, Eva and I hobbled up to the door of the strange abandoned shed.
Bug followed close behind us. As we came nearer, my gaze fell on a circle of stones arranged in what had clearly once been a fire pit, though now the protective ring was covered in a rime of moss and lichen, and wildflowers bloomed where the flames had once burned.
The shed had been built on the flat ground at the bottom of a slope. Wedged between its back wall and the rising hill sat a pile of chopped wood, covered in a tarp that had frayed and been eaten away to nothing more than a scrap now.
Eva tried the door. “It’s locked.”
Of course it was.
She nudged me. “Check the top of the doorframe.”
Wind whipped the rain sideways, throwing skeins of ivy into our faces.
Water dripped down my chin as I ran my hand over the top of the doorframe.
“No luck.” I pulled away, watching the ivy shrivel back at my touch, green leaves crisping to brown remains.
I should have felt shame. I did feel shame, somewhere under all my exhaustion.
Eva crouched, picking up stones near the base of the door and turning them over.
“What are you doing?” I asked her.
“Looking for—aha!” Eva pulled a smooth-looking stone from the dirt and brushed it off. Mud streaked her fingers. Eva’s face lit up in fierce triumph as she held up a ceramic figurine. “The turtle!”
She flipped a panel on its belly, slid out a hidden key, and unlocked the door.