Chapter 29 The Monster
The Monster
There was once a lonely little boy who reached inside the deep and darker parts of his subconscious for a friend. What he dredged from the depths of his own mind was something else entirely, something that would have frightened other little lonely children like him.
But Arthur wasn’t like other children. He never had been.
The monster worked itself into the cracks between their wills while Arthur slept, one arm slung around his bee girl.
It put the monster at ease to see him finally rest. This mind had been made for both of them, no matter what Arthur had tried to convince himself of over the years, shoring up his mental defenses as though the monster was an enemy.
As though they had never been friends.
Filling the hollows Arthur left unchecked felt like sliding a hand into a glove. Despite what Arthur believed, the monster didn’t relish making the boy feel helpless. It usually let Arthur guide the actions of their shared body.
But the monster always showed up when the boy needed it. Just as he did now.
Arthur twitched, unaware of the shift in control happening while he slumbered on.
The monster slinked delicately into the notches of the boy’s subconscious.
It wasn’t ready to wake him yet. The moment Arthur woke, he was sure to fight, and the monster wanted to use this time to plan their next step.
Most pressingly, they had to get off this mountain.
Arthur’s fever was worsening with every passing hour, and while the monster tried to soothe him and cool the heat burning him from the inside out, it didn’t have the power to truly heal.
It could numb, and for a short while it could shoulder a world of pain for the boy it loved so much.
But nothing would stop the march of death itself if they didn’t get Arthur to a hospital soon. The boy likely had no idea of how much the monster was already carrying for him, or how much worse he could feel.
Cautiously, the monster blinked Arthur’s eyes open.
The room around them smeared, waterlogged and rheumy.
One of Arthur’s arms was still flung across Eva’s waist. He’d wanted to keep her from falling off the cot.
The other arm was currently serving as a pillow for her, Eva’s cheek propped against the honeycomb tattoo.
Some of her hair had found its way across Arthur’s cheek and into his mouth, so tangled and folded together were their bodies.
The monster watched the rise and fall of Eva’s chest. She sighed, as though she, too, were close to waking. Maybe that would be to their advantage. She needed to agree to the monster’s plan, after all, but it was hard to wake her when she looked so peaceful.
Arthur’s already aching body had been rendered more sensitive by infection. The monster stretched itself, feeling like a tentacled creature in its effort to cool and soothe all the places where Arthur’s fever made it hard for his body to rest.
Eva’s eyes fluttered.
The monster’s awareness telescoped, and it took in the change of her heartbeat and breath with a new kind of fascination, flexing Arthur’s hand and running a thumb over the soft, pale flesh of Eva’s stomach.
“Hi.” Eva’s voice was dry and raspy. Her fingers knit into Arthur’s as she let out a sigh, still sleepy. “The… storm?”
“It stopped.” The words tasted strange on Arthur’s tongue, causing a shiver of delight to run through the monster. It felt good to hear its voice through Arthur’s vocal cords. It felt good to be real.
Eva stretched, her back arching as she yawned. “Finally.”
The monster didn’t usually get to be this near to her, to smell the damp of her hair or feel where her freckles lay flat against Arthur’s skin. It loved her freckles.
Eva’s touch had a tendency to push the monster back. At times, it had wondered if her absence had been the reason the monster had managed to slip past Arthur’s defenses so completely after Charlotte died.
The monster held its breath as the acute sensation of summer grew heavy around the two of them, but the sunny feeling didn’t hurt. It hummed.
Their eyes latched. Hers were summer-sky blue. The monster tenderly brushed a thumb across the dip in her waist again. Arthur’s body was weak right now. He needed the monster. It would be… irresponsible to relinquish the helm before the boy was well and safe.
“Hungry?” Eva asked. “There might be something in that trunk.”
The monster nodded, ignoring the physical protest of Arthur’s sore muscles as it extricated itself limb by limb from Eva’s embrace.
She’d found one of Jack’s old flannel shirts in the trunk.
With the storm gone, a streak of sunlight turned the total blackness of the shed into a hazy gray.
The monster could just make out where the buttons of Eva’s shirt had been improperly aligned, exposing a bit of her stomach.
She lowered herself carefully to the floor again and fished through the trunk.
There were more overlarge and musty clothes inside, including a weathered pair of hiking boots with a hole in the toe that must have belonged to Jack.
They wouldn’t fit Arthur quite right, but they would protect his feet better than nothing.
Hiking without shoes had left Arthur’s soles aching.
The monster fished a few things out for itself as well. The sun was leaking through the cracks in the shed walls, rapidly heating the space inside. It had to be… what, late morning maybe? They hadn’t slept long.
The sounds of the soft fabric sliding over skin filled the tiny, quiet room.
“How did you sleep?” Eva asked.
The monster scratched a salt crystal out from the corner of its eye. “Good,” it said. A partial lie. It never slept, but Arthur did, and while the boy rested, the monster had run over again and again what Arthur had said.
You hurt me every time.
The words clanged inside its head. It was accustomed to being the thing Arthur rained his anger on, but those words—delivered so raw, so broken—had burrowed deep.
The monster touched the swirl of tattoos on Arthur’s arm.
The honeycomb hexagons. The dark, feathered songbirds.
The starling on his tendon covered his first and deepest scar.
The monster had spent a long time thinking about the night Arthur finally took a blade to his skin and tried to carve the monster out.
You hurt me every time.
He hadn’t meant that. He was just upset. Arthur sharpened himself on the blade of guilt so often that living itself had become an open wound. The monster didn’t want that for him. It was time for a change, time to write his boy a new story.
To do that, however, the monster needed to get Arthur medical aid and sustenance to help him heal.
There was life to be devoured in that meadow, flowers and field mice and all kinds of creatures that Arthur hadn’t let himself kill, too scared of what it would do to his soul to sacrifice another living thing to survive.
The monster had no such problem. It had always done what it had to do to protect Arthur.
From the moment the boy ripped the monster into existence, it had wanted nothing except to ease Arthur’s troubles and pains.
To become the home Charlotte had denied him.
Eva scratched the back of Bug’s head as she laid out more items from the trunk on the floor. She’d started on the task during the storm, before Arthur had coaxed her back to the cot, eager to sleep and arguing that they could hardly see the contents anyway.
Now in the light, the two of them cataloged their new inventory. There was a lighter, a first aid kit, a flashlight with dead batteries, and—
“Peppermints?” Eva laughed softly, crinkling something between her fingers. “Dad loves these!” She popped one out of its plastic pouch and held it out. Where her fingertips grazed Arthur’s palm, an electric zing of awareness sparked, bright and tingling.
The monster worked the stale mint into Arthur’s cheek and murmured its thanks, unable to stop the tug of its lips up into a smile. Bug seemed to have recovered from the state the storm had put her in, and she purred and pressed against Eva’s leg.
“Why did your dad create this place?” the monster asked.
Eva bit her cheek. “I’m… not sure, honestly,” she admitted.
“I never went with him to harvest these flowers. Come to think of it, I think I tried to, once, and he didn’t let me.
” She stilled, and a furrow knit between her brows.
“I had no idea what he’d built up here,” she said, turning her head up to the slanted roof of the little shed. “Must have taken him ages.”
“Must have.”
Carefully, the monster rose to stretch, mindful of Arthur’s weakened state. As expected, a dizzy spell made the room around them spin. The monster caught its balance on the wall.
Deep within, Arthur stirred, confused. The boy must be realizing that something felt wrong.
The monster tried to soothe him, cooling the fever running through Arthur, but the moment it tried, something inside Arthur snapped to attention, and alarm collected inside their shared body.
Arthur tried to push the monster out, but it was too deeply sunk in, firmly fitted inside its glove.
Arthur’s resistance was no more than a fly to skin.
Hush, now, little death-touch.
Though Arthur couldn’t hear the monster, it hoped the boy would feel the care behind its calming words.
Arthur couldn’t scream, couldn’t voice even a single word, but his shiver of terror moved through the body the two of them shared.
The monster knew this feeling. The fear of tight spaces, of feeling trapped, was an unfortunate side effect that had risen over the years as, from time to time, circumstances had forced the monster to take control in order to keep Arthur safe—from the world, and from himself.
It touched the scar on his forearm again, a grounding reminder to its purpose.
You’re going to survive this too, it silently vowed.
When the boy tried to lash out again, the monster pushed back, hardening the barrier that enclosed him until it calcified.
The first aid kit allowed the monster to treat the lesser of Arthur’s wounds.
It used the pack of cleansing wipes to clean the dirt off the cuts in his skin, then applied a soothing balm that clearly hailed from the Moreau household.
It came in the same shallow tins Eva used when she boiled down her beeswax, but the smell was different from her usual concoctions, too heavy on the lavender.
The monster warmed the balm between its finger and thumb, and rubbed more over Arthur’s bug bites, as Eva had done the summer they spent together.
“Let’s go down to the river,” Eva said as she wrapped Band-Aids over the still-healing blisters on her heels. “We can use those tablets and the canteen to purify some water.”
The monster chose not to remind her how much of the river’s unpurified water they had certainly swallowed when they fell in.
It was as good an idea as any. But when it reached for the purifying tablets, something hard and compact slipped out from the pile of stacked, used clothing. The monster plucked it off the floor.
And froze.
Even with Arthur held perfectly still and quiet inside him, the monster felt the boy’s shock when they registered what they were looking at.
A satellite phone.
The monster sucked a breath deep into Arthur’s lungs, stunned, then pushed the ON button.
Nothing. The battery inside the phone must be long dead.
The monster all but launched itself toward the trunk and began digging out the few remaining contents, searching for a backup battery, a generator to recharge it, something.
“Whoa, what are you doing?”
The monster held up the satellite phone. “If we can get this to work, we can call for help.”
Eva gasped. “Of course!”
Together, the two of them discarded a tube of rock-hard toothpaste, a bar of soap, a paper-wrapped roll of toilet paper, and at least two dozen more individually wrapped peppermints.
Frustrated, the monster tossed a pair of folded socks across the room. The loud thunk made the monster jump, and it looked back at the small cotton lump. That had been far too loud, and too heavy as well. It retrieved the socks and folded the cuffs down.
There, protected inside, was an unopened package containing a phone battery.
Eva gasped.
Delicately, the monster removed the old battery from the phone. There didn’t seem to be any leakage or physical degradation inside the battery chamber—a miracle in and of itself. When was the last time Jack had been up here? Would the new battery even work?
The monster chewed on the inside of Arthur’s cheek as it made the swap. Arthur had used phones like these before and knew how to operate them.
It held its breath as it pushed the ON button again.
A red light flashed, indicating a poor signal.
The monster shoved to its feet and stumbled outside, a furious hope coiling inside it as it blinked the bright sunlight out of its eyes.
The storm had cleared the air, leaving a pristine scent of earth and minerals rising off the soil.
The monster held the phone up. A step behind, Eva grabbed her makeshift walking stick.
The phone connected.
The monster let out a whoop of joy and tapped 9-1-1.
“It worked?” Eva exclaimed.
“It worked!” The monster couldn’t believe their luck. It would have to deal with the sheriff and the mess of all they’d left behind, but that didn’t matter, so long as it could get Arthur safe and well again. The rest they would figure out together, one step at a time.
“911, what’s your emergency?” a voice buzzed, the connection crackling.
“Hello, can you hear me?” the monster said loudly. “We need help out here!”
“Can you identify your location for me?”
“I-I don’t know. We’re off-trail.” The monster stumbled over its words, doubting itself in a way that felt unfamiliar.
“My dad will know how to find us,” Eva said.
She was right. The monster gripped the phone, desperately blurting out, “There’s a man in the town of Audrey, Pennsylvania, named Jack Moreau. He’ll know exactly where we are!”
The operator’s voice cut out before they could reply. Alarmed, the monster smacked the side of the phone. To its relief, the voice came back in. “Are there any injured in your party?”
The monster swallowed hard. “My friend and I are both hurt. I don’t know if we can make it back down.”
“All right, sir, I’m going to get you help. Just stay with me. Can you describe your location? Any landmarks nearb—?”
The phone cut out again. The monster shook it, then smacked the side, holding its breath. Instead of coming back, the operator’s voice clicked out, and the red light started blinking again.
No signal.