Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
Gwen banged on the door but didn’t wait for him to answer. She let herself in, calling his name.
“Here,” he called and she hurried into the kitchen, yanking herself out of her peacoat. It was the first week of February,
a day of dazzling brilliance and bitter cold, and she had her hands clapped together, puffing on them to warm them.
Arthur was crouched in front of the open oven. He had just been checking on a pair of Hungry-Man TV dinners—fried chicken
for Van, Salisbury steak for himself. They needed to bake another ten minutes. At the age of twenty, Arthur’s idea of home
cooking ran the gamut from peanut butter on toast to beans on toast, with space in between for chipped corned beef on toast.
When they ran out of toast, they ate TV dinners. Donovan and Arthur did all their shopping at the 7-Eleven. Arthur hadn’t
been inside a supermarket since his mother had gone to prison.
“You need to look at something,” Gwen said. She reached for the hem of her Maine Black Bears hoodie and pulled it off over
her head. The T-shirt beneath rose to the cups of her bra. His pulse quickened at that sight of smooth bare stomach. Alongside
a sudden, intense throb of desire, he had a disorientating sensation of time doubling back on itself, something stronger than
garden variety déjà vu. It had been less than half a year since the day Tana walked into his kitchen and tugged off the Biko
hoodie to give it back to him. The rest of her clothes had followed, a memory that thrilled and provoked regret in equal measure.
He straightened and pushed the oven shut with his foot. Gwen grabbed his hand and towed him out of the kitchen and down the hall.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“No, I’m going crazy and I’m scared out of my mind.” She towed him into the dark of his room, turned, and without pausing,
stripped off her T-shirt.
She was breathing hard. The swell of her breasts shuddered in the pale violet cups of a worn-out bra. It was cold in his room,
and her torso was already prickling with goose bumps. Arthur’s pulse quickened and he thought of a silver pin again, pushing
through a butterfly and pinning it to black velvet. The needle was ready to sink into him now, and he wasn’t sure he could
flutter away this time.
“Do you crazy kids need some time alone?” Van asked them from the hallway, peering in through the half-open door. “I could
run some errands, head down to the Nite Owl to pick up some beer or . . . lube or . . . whatever? I’m here to help.”
“Get in here, Van,” she said. “I need you too.”
Arthur blanched.
“Oh, wow,” Van said. “Oh, WOW.” His voice softened, acquired an almost reverent tone. “I just never thought this would happen
to me.”
“No,” she said. “Not for that. I need both of you to tell me I’m not losing my mind. I just about want to throw up. Or sit down and cry. And I am not a
throw-up-and-start-crying kind of girl. Both of you, just—” She grabbed one of Arthur’s hands and one of Van’s and hauled
them farther into the room. She positioned both of them so they stood with their backs to the bed. “Sit down? Please?” She
hugged herself, arms crossed over her chest, and Arthur realized she was trembling.
He sat down. Van sank onto the edge of the mattress beside him.
“Whatever happens next,” Van murmured to Arthur, “I’m willing to put a hand on your butt or something, but nothing more than
that.”
“Shut up, Van,” Arthur said. He was unnerved himself by then, had never seen Gwen afraid before. He felt instinctively that whatever she wanted to show them was something he didn’t want to see.
Gwen went around the side of the bed and turned on the lamp. Then she returned to stand before them. Her pupils were dilated
from the dimness of the room. Her breathing was shallow and fast.
“Please tell me you’re seeing this too,” she said and lifted a hand to her left breast.
“I don’t . . .” Arthur began, his gaze sweeping the length of her torso once, and again . . . and then he pushed himself back
and away from her, his skin crawling.
Van made an unhappy sound in his throat, close to a moan. His gaunt hands clenched the sheets of Arthur’s bed and squeezed
into fists, bunching up the fabric.
The tattoo faded in from her waist upwards, a serpent in black and red, winding all the way around her waist, disappearing
behind her back, then reemerging high on her ribs. Its spade-shaped head rested across the top of her left breast, not an
inch from the two fingers she was pressing into her skin. She let out a pained breath and bent slightly, as if it hurt.
“You see it,” she said. “You both see it.” She sounded weak, and scared, but also relieved.
“That’s not real,” Arthur said.
“Yes, it is,” Van whispered. “I’ve got one too.”
At that, Gwen’s eyes widened. “You—what’d you say there?”
“I’ve got one just like it,” Van told her. His voice was pitched only slightly above a whisper.
“What the hell do you mean, you got one just like it?” Arthur asked. He was tingling all over, as chilled as if he were the
one who had pulled off his shirt in this cold room.
“I saw it four days ago, when I got out of the shower. I was so freaked out I did some mescaline to calm myself down, and
then later, I told myself it was a peyote hallucination. Even though when I got out of the shower, I was cold sober. And I
didn’t look again because I was scared shitless of it coming back.”
Gwen’s hand dropped from her breast and the tattoo began to vanish, disappearing from the head backward, erasing itself from her skin. In a moment it was as if it had never been there at all. Gwen dropped onto one of the beanbags. Arthur had an idea her legs had gone out on her.
“Are you both fucking with me?” Arthur asked. His voice had discovered a new, higher register.
“Would I fuck, son?” Van asked him. “He said he was going to mark us.”
“Who said?”
“King Sorrow. The dragon.”
Arthur felt a sense of dislocation so profound, it dizzied him. He flashed to a recollection of chasing a dead man with a
skinned back across the snow; he recalled a voice speaking from beneath a battered Russian helmet. A part of him knew those
things had happened. Another part of him refused to know it. It was like experiencing double vision, the world splitting and
separating into overlapping images, then swimming back together—only it wasn’t double vision, it was double memory.
Van shifted his gaze to look at him sidelong. “You remember. I know you remember. You fed him a heart on a china plate. Not
the kind of thing a person forgets.”
Arthur let out a short gasping breath. “That’s not funny.”
“It was never funny,” Van said. He looked to Gwen. “You remember.”
Gwen was still topless, aside from her bra, but whatever erotic charge had been present was long gone. She had her T-shirt
in her lap but seemed to have forgotten about it. The hand that had touched her breast now rose to her left temple and began
to move in small circles there.
“I remember I was really drunk, maybe for the first time in my life. Drunk, and I s’pose I had a contact high too. I remember
I took the butterflies off the wall and I unpinned them and told them to fly away while they had a chance. Fly to the land
of Honalee and bring back Puff the Magic Dragon.”
“’Fraid they came back with a nastier lizard altogether, hon.”
“Why are we cloudy on what happened and you aren’t?” Gwen asked.
“I always thought someday I’d make contact with something from the astral realm,” Van said, “if I smoked enough of the good shit. Matter of time, really.”
While they spoke, Arthur began to pull himself out of his shirt with leaden arms. He let it drop to the floor and considered
his sunken torso in the poor light. All he had to do was lift his hand to his heart, but he found himself strangely unwilling,
as unwilling as he would’ve been to reach into a gaping chest wound. (You were plenty willing to reach into an open chest not so long ago, Arthur, don’t kid yourself you weren’t.)
“Go on, Arthur,” Gwen said. “We’re here. We’re in this together. Go on and do it.”
He touched his chest above his left nipple and the tattoo faded in from his waist upward, winding itself around his torso.
His sides prickled, as if he were being kissed by a rope of thorns.
“What happens if I touch the—”
“Don’t,” Gwen said, and Van said, “He comes through. He comes through and lays waste.”
“Lays waste to what?”
“Us, most likely.”
Arthur’s hand dropped from his chest and the ink dropped from his skin, the lines unwriting themselves from his chest. They
sat in silence together. Gwen was at his feet, had a hand on his knee, and was looking into his face with frightened eyes.
“There’s one bright side to this,” Van said.
“What’s that?” Gwen asked.
“I’m going to have to drop in on Allie and Donna now and tell them about this and there is a practical certainty Allie is
going to take her shirt off.”
The fire alarm went off, a stammering electronic shriek that went right through Arthur’s head. It’s him! he thought in that first wild instant. He’s come through! Believing the alarm was the alien shriek of a four-hundred-ton reptile from a J.R.R. Tolkien novel.
He leapt up, adrenaline gunning his heart, and then almost tumbled over Gwen. She caught his waist to steady him. There was
a haze of smoke in the hallway.
“Fuck,” Arthur said, running into the kitchen, where the smoke was thick enough to sting his eyes. “Fuck fuck fuck.” He jumped and stabbed the button on the fire alarm to shut it off.
Arthur got a towel and waved it at the smoke. It caught in his lungs and he began to cough, helplessly. He ran for the oven
and threw it open and a black gush of smoke billowed into his face, driving him back, and he
sits up in bed, heart beating too fast, beating like after a blast of cheap, shitty cocaine. There’s someone in the house,
someone moving around.
There’s no way to tell what time it is. The digital clock by the bedside blinks 12:00. It’s been blinking 12:00 for days.