Chapter 19
Monster to Monster
Oz
The day passes in the rhythm we’ve built. Maisie works. I help. We eat lunch on the porch, no longer worried someone might see us. We work some more.
By evening, exhaustion finds her again. The order progresses, and she falls asleep on the couch with her head on my chest and her hand curled against my body.
I hold her. I listen to her breathing slow down. I trace the patterns of her dreams through the micro-movements of her body, the way her fingers twitch, the way her lips part around words she doesn’t say aloud.
And I think about the ridge.
The green light. The presence I felt there, old and watchful and strange. The half-recognition that has been tugging at me since we found Captain at the mouth of that cave.
Maisie stirs against me, murmurs something shapeless, and settles deeper into sleep.
I wait until her breathing has been steady for an hour. Then I reach deep into myself and find the place where I can separate.
It costs something. A small something. I pull off a piece of my mass, barely larger than a cat, and I feel the loss like a word I can’t quite remember. The offshoot quivers on the floor beside the couch, gelid and faintly luminous, and I send it toward the door.
It slips beneath the gap, cold air rushing over its surface, and the sensation reaches me like a distant limb, numb but present.
I’m still holding Maisie. I’m still warm against her sleeping body.
And I’m also moving across the sand, low and slow, feeling the desert floor through a fragment of myself too small to register much beyond temperature and texture.
Cold sand. The scratch of a sagebrush. The distant call of an owl, felt more than heard as vibration through the ground.
The offshoot travels. I stay. The ridge rises through the offshoot’s limited senses, mostly temperature and texture and the faint vibration of something alive within the rock.
The green light pulses from the cave mouth, and I feel the presence inside go still. Watchful. The way I go still when I’m offering space.
I speak through the offshoot, my voice small and strange through so little mass.
“Hello.”
Silence. The green light flickers.
Something moves in the darkness, limbs unfolding slow and deliberate. A shape emerges, and I see him through the fragment’s senses. Pale green luminescence. The color of things that live without sun.
He is thin. Gaunt in the way of creatures that survive on minimum. His eyes catch what little light exists and throw it back, reflective, and the offshoot trembles at the focus of that gaze.
“You’re a piece,” he says. His voice cracks on the words, like rust flaking from old metal. “A piece of something bigger. The monster that was at my cave mouth just the other night.”
“Yes.”
“Where is the rest of you?”
“Back at the house. Holding someone while she sleeps.”
The creature goes still at that. A different kind of stillness. Something in his posture shifts.
“Holding,” he repeats.
He studies the offshoot. I study him through it. He is old. Old in the way I’m old, shaped by decades of solitude. His claws are worn. His hide scars over old wounds, healed poorly, the marks of rocks thrown and bullets that grazed.
“Why do you hide?” I ask.
He takes a long time to answer. The silence stretches between us, two old things in the dark, one speaking through a fragment and one speaking through rust.
“They fear what I am,” he says finally. “The stories they tell… They call me the Ridge Walker. They blame me for every misfortune. Missing goats and vanished hikers. They lay every unexplained thing at my feet because I’m a convenient shape to pin their fear onto.”
“Did you do those things?”
His luminescence flickers, dimmer, then brighter. A flinch, maybe. Or something closer to a sigh.
“The goats were the work of coyotes. The hiker—” He pauses. “The hiker found my cave. She was injured. I kept her warm until she could walk again. But she was scared and told the town a monster had attacked her.”
The offshoot registers the vibration of his voice, the way it moves through the air and into my small mass. He’s telling the truth. I can feel it in the steadiness of him, the way his body does not shift or deflect.
“The cat,” I say. “Captain. You kept him.”
“I took him.” The correction comes slow, heavy. “After so long alone, I wanted to hold something soft.”
I know that wanting. The specific ache of reaching for contact and finding only air.
“Then I found him,” I say.
“I let you. I knew I was being selfish.”
I process this. The capacity to hold something then release it because you understand it belongs elsewhere. The specific pain of that choice.
“The car,” I say. “The old vehicle. Deborah Pritchett’s Chevy.”
The Ridge Walker’s stillness changes. Something shifts in his posture, a tightening that might be embarrassment in a creature unused to the feeling.
“That was boredom.”
“Boredom?”
“Forty years I have watched that woman time her walks to observe her neighbors. Forty years she has peered through windows and counted cars and kept her little inventory of sins.” A sound emerges from him, dry and creaking, the ghost of a laugh.
“I wanted to see what she would do if something she couldn’t explain finally happened to her. ”
“I don’t think that’s it.”
“You don’t?”
“I think you wanted to be found,” I say.
He tilts his head. Long silence. The desert wind moves over us both.
“I wanted someone to look for me the way that man looked for his cat. I wanted someone to call my name across the ridge.” He pauses. “I wanted to matter enough to miss.”
I take this in. I’m not sure what to say, except that I once felt exactly like he did.
But before I can speak, the Ridge Walker straightens. His eyes catch the faint light and hold it, and something in his gaze sharpens into intent.
“I have a message,” he says.
I wait.
And he tells me just as the connection to my offshoot weakens to mere static. The offshoot dissolves.
The severance snaps through me like a thread pulled taut and cut, and for a moment I’m only myself, only this body, only the couch and the sleeping woman and the click of the ceiling fan.
The desert cold that ghosted along my fragment vanishes. The green light winks out. The Ridge Walker’s voice gutters into silence mid-word.
I reach out for what he told me.
There was something. A message, weight and shape, delivered in the moment before the connection frayed.
I felt it land. I felt it matter. But the specifics blur and scatter like light through disturbed water, leaving only the impression of something important, something meant for someone, something that cost him to say.
I’m still here.
That much surfaces. Or something close to it. The exact words dissolve the harder I grasp for them.
I never stopped waiting—
The rest is static.
I lie still beneath Maisie and try to reconstruct what I lost. The Ridge Walker’s loneliness. The Chevy stolen out of boredom and longing. The cat held for warmth and released for love. All of it circles something, some central truth he was building toward, and I can’t find the keystone.
Who was the message for?
The question sits heavy in me.
Maisie shifts against my chest. Her hand curls tighter over my body, and I feel the tiny flutter of her dreaming, the way her breath catches and releases. She is warm and alive and here, and the contrast with what I just left aches like a bruise.
The morning will come. She’ll wake. She’ll see that my colors have dimmed, that something pulls at me from beneath the ridge, and she’ll ask.
I don’t know what I’ll tell her.
The green light pulses somewhere in the dark, patient and alone, and I hold the weight of a message I can’t deliver to a person I can’t name, and the question turns and turns in the quiet of me.
Who was it for?