by Patrick Ness
Monica’s mouth opened to reply, and then it dropped open farther in amused astonishment. “You like her.”
Gudmund put on an ostentatiously innocent face.
“You do!” Monica nearly shouted. “Jesus, Gudmund, that’s like loving a concentration-camp guard!”
“I’m not saying I like her, don’t be stupid,” Gudmund said. “I’m just saying I could get her.”
Seth looked over at him.
“Get her?” H asked. “You mean like –” and he made a thrusting motion with his hips that caused a horrified silence. “What?” he said as they all stared at him.
Monica shook her head. “Not in a million years. It’s like she’s got a limited lifetime supply of fun, and she isn’t going to waste any of it on high school.”
“Those are the easiest ones to get,” Gudmund said. “All their morals are balanced way up high. One push knocks ’em right over.”
Monica shook her head again, smiling at him, like she always did. “The shit you talk.”
“You know what we should do?” H said, suddenly enthusiastic. “We should have like a bet, right? Where Gudmund has to sleep with Chiara Leithauser by like, spring break or something? ’Cause you could totally do it, bro. Show her where the wild things are.”
“From someone who can’t even find a map to the wild things,” Monica said.
“Hey!” H said to her, his voice low and aggrieved. “What did I say about telling them our business?”
Monica huffed and turned her back.
“What do you think, Sethy?” Gudmund said, trying to steer the moment away from an argument. “Think I should take that bet? Go for Chiara Leithauser?”
“What,” Seth said, “and then secretly find out she’s got a heart of gold and actually fall in love with her and then she dumps you when she finds out about the bet but you prove yourself to her by standing outside her house in the rain playing her your special song and on prom night you share a dance that reminds not just the school but the entire wounded world what love really means?”
He stopped because they were all looking at him.
“Damn, Seth,” Monica said admiringly. “‘The entire wounded world.’ I’m putting that in my next paper for Edson.”
Seth crossed his arms. “I’m just saying a bet over Gudmund having sex with Chiara Leithauser sounds like some piece of shit teenage movie none of us would watch in a million years.”
“Truer words, never spoken,” Gudmund said, standing up from the grass. “She doesn’t deserve me, anyway.”
“You’re right,” Monica said. “Dating the best-looking, richest, and most popular guy in school must be punishment enough.”
H made a scoffing sound. “Blake Woodrow isn’t that good-looking.”
They all stared at him again. “I am so sick of you guys doing that!” he said. “Not everything I say is stupid. Blake Woodrow has a girl’s haircut and the forehead of a caveman.”
There was another pause before Monica nodded. “Yeah, okay, I’ll give you that.”
“And Gudmund could totally get her if he wanted,” H said, getting up to join the rest of them.
“Thanks, man,” Gudmund said. “From you that’s almost a compliment.”
“But you’re not even going to try?” H said hopefully.
Monica hit him again. “That’s enough. I may hate her, but she’s not a prostitute. Quit talking about her like she’s someone you can just take off a shelf.” She looked at Gudmund. “Even you.”
“I wasn’t serious, you feminist,” Gudmund said, smiling. “I only said it was possible. If I wanted to.”
Monica stuck her tongue out at him before setting off across the field and onto the track, H on her heels, both of them trying to look as if they’d been running for the past half hour.
Gudmund glanced at Seth, who was watching him seriously. “You don’t think I could?”
“Monica would be so jealous she’d probably choke to death,” Seth said as they started running back across the field, too.
Gudmund shook his head. “Nah, Monica and I are like brother and sister.”
“You flirt that much with your sister? She wants you so bad, it’s like she’s got a permanent toothache.”
“Jeez, are you sure she’s the jealous one, Sethy?” Gudmund punched Seth playfully on the shoulder. “Homo,” he said.
But he said it with a grin.
They ran toward the now-shouting Coach Goodall and –
Seth snaps his head up.
The world is still the same. The sun still in the same place. The park still wild beneath him. It doesn’t even feel like he dozed off.
He groans. Are they going to come every time he closes his eyes? All the things that are most painful in their different ways, whether because they’re too bad or because they’re too good?
Hell, he reminds himself. This is hell. Why wouldn’t it suck?
He gathers his stuff and pushes the cart back toward the High Street, beginning to feel tired again.
“This is stupid,” he says, sweating profusely under the insulated clothes, the backpack on his shoulders, and the weight of the cans in the cart. He stops by the doors of the supermarket, swaps the spaghetti-stained T-shirt for a fresh one, then unloads half the cans onto the ground to come back for later.
He wipes the sweat from his brow and takes another drink of water. Nothing has moved down the High Street. The glass from where he broke into the outdoor store is still lying there, glinting in the sun. The bats have flown off to who knows where. It’s all just weeds and silence.
Lots and lots and lots of silence.
He feels it again. A strangeness. A threat. Something not right with this place beyond all that’s so obviously wrong.
He thinks again about the prison. It sits out there, unseen, like it’s waiting for him. A huge, heavy thing, almost like it has a gravity all its own, almost like it’s pulling at him to –
Maybe he’ll take the food back to the house now.
Yeah, maybe that’s what he’ll do.
He grows more and more tired as he pushes the cart back down the main road, unreasonably so, like he’s getting over being really sick. By the time he makes it to the sinkhole – the fox and her kits long gone – he feels like he’s run a marathon and has to stop and take in more water.
He turns down his own street. The cart grows heavier as he approaches his front path, and as much as he doesn’t feel like he should just leave it on the sidewalk, he’s too tired to bring it all in just now. He takes his backpack, the torch, and a couple cans of food and heads into the house.
The door swings open again under his touch, and he holds up the torch, halfheartedly ready to swing it should he meet anyone who needs clobbering. The hallway is still shadowy, and the light from the torch guides his way in. As he heads down the hall, he thinks he might just heat up some custard next, if it’s still good in these cans. He hasn’t had custard since –
He freezes.
The torch has caught the stairs. It’s the first time he’s properly looked at them, the first time a proper light has been on them, and he sees –
Footprints.
In the dust coming down the stairs.
He’s not alone. There’s somebody else here.
He backs up so quickly his new pack catches the door, shutting it behind him, and for a moment he panics at being trapped inside with whoever it is. He scrambles around and gets the door open, running back down the front steps, dropping the cans of custard, looking behind him to ward off whoever might be there –
He stops by the shopping cart, panting heavily, holding the torch out like a club, shaking with adrenaline, ready to fight.
But there’s no one.
No one comes running out after him. No one attacks him. No sound at all from inside the house.
“Hey!” he calls. “I know you’re in there!” He grips the torch even tighter. “Who’s there? Who is it?”
And again, nothing.
Well, of course, there’s nothing. Because even if there was someone, why would they identify themselves?
Seth looks up and down the street, heart pounding, wondering what to do. All the terraced houses, with their doors shut and their curtains pulled. Maybe every house was hiding someone. Maybe this place wasn’t empty after all. Maybe they were just waiting for him to –
He stops. Waiting for him to what?
This road, these houses. You couldn’t have a world with people in it and have this much stuff undisturbed. You just couldn’t. There were no other tracks in the dirt, no plants broken, no paths cleared. People had to go out, and if they didn’t, they had to have stuff brought to them.
And nobody but Seth has come down this street for a very long time.
He looks back at his front door, still open from where he fled.
He waits. And waits.
Nothing changes. No sounds, no movement, not even any animals. Just the bright-blue sky and plenty of sunshine to make a mockery of his fear. Eventually, he starts to calm down. All that was true is still true. Even in his day or two (or whatever) here, he’s seen nothing, not one thing to indicate anyone else.
Not yet, anyway.
But still he waits.
Until finally, the adrenaline starts to fade and his exhaustion returns. He has to lie down, that’s all there is to it. He has to eat, as well. He has to get over this weakness that’s making everything here so hard.
And the final truth of it is, where else is he going to go?
Keeping the torch in front of him, he walks slowly down the path, up the steps, and to the doorway. He stops there, shining the light down to the staircase. Now that he’s looking, he can see the footprints pretty clearly, coming down from the very top step, some places with a clear print, some with the dust smeared like the person was stumbling down the stairs.
Down, but not back up. They’re only facing one direction.
“Hello?” he calls again, more tentatively this time.
He edges inside, toward the doorway to the main room. Heart thumping loudly, he turns the corner, ready to club someone with the torch.
But there’s no one there. Nothing’s been disturbed, other than where he disturbed it, in either the living or dining areas, nothing moved in the cubbyhole, everything in the kitchen just as he left it. He even looks out the back, but it’s the same, too, the metallic-sided bandages still lying in their heap, unmoved.
So the footprints could have been there for who knows how long, he thinks, relaxing a little. They could have been there since before he –
He stops.
Stumbling down the stairs, he thinks, the words suddenly making a kind of sense.
He goes back and stands over the bottom step. He’s looking at prints of feet, bare feet, not shoes.
He kicks off a sneaker and peels off his new sock. He places his foot by the lowest, dusty footprint.
They match. Exactly.
He looks, for the first time, up the staircase. There’s been something about the thought of going up there that’s made him wary ever since he first arrived. That cramped attic bedroom he shared with Owen when they were small. Those nights he spent there, alone, wondering if they were ever going to get Owen back, and then wondering if he’d live when they did.
But he’s already been up there, it seems.
He woke up on the path outside, and the reason was obviously because he’d stumbled down the stairs, in those horrible, confused moments after he died. He’d come down the hallway, out into sunlight, and collapsed onto the path.
Where he woke up.
But clearly not for the first time.
He shines the torch up the stairwell but doesn’t see much past the bathroom door at the top of the landing, shut tight. The bathroom is over the kitchen, and the landing turns from it, to the office and his parents’ bedroom over his head and the attic another floor up.
What was he doing up there?
And why had he run from it?
He shucks off the backpack, dropping it to the floor, then he places his foot on the bottom step, avoiding his footprint. He takes the step up. And then another. Holding the torch in front of him, he reaches the bathroom door. There’s a sliver of light underneath it, so he opens it, shedding sunlight on the landing from the bathroom window.
The bathroom floor is the same terrible burgundy linoleum that his mother always hated but his father had never gotten around to replacing. There are no footsteps across the dust of it, nothing’s been disturbed here. He leaves the door open for light and turns back to the landing. Across which his bare, smeared footprints are walking toward him.
He takes care, without knowing precisely why, to avoid stepping in them as he crosses the landing. The office is first on his right, and he looks inside. It’s exactly how he remembers it, down to the ancient filing cabinet his mother refused to allow to be shipped to America and a hilariously bulky old-fashioned computer. He flicks the light switch without much hope or success, but like the bathroom, nothing in the office has been disturbed.
There are no footprints coming from his parents’ bedroom either, but Seth opens the door anyway. Inside, the bed is made, the floor is clear, the closet doors are shut tight. Seth goes to the curtains and looks down on the front walk. The shopping cart is still out there, unmoved, unbothered.
He heads back out to the landing and confirms what he suspected all along. His footsteps come down from the upper floor, from the attic where his bedroom was.
And they don’t go back up.
However this started, it started up there.
He shines the torch up the second flight of stairs. There’s only a small landing up top as the house narrows to the peak of its roof. The door to the attic bedroom is there.
It’s open.
Seth can see a dim light coming through it, no doubt from the skylight that served as the bedroom’s only window.
“Hello?” he says.
He starts up the second flight, torch still out in front of him. He can feel himself breathing harder. He keeps his eyes on the door as he climbs, stopping on the last step. The sweat on his palms is making the torch slippery in his hands.
Dammit, he thinks. What am I so afraid of?
He takes another deep breath, raises the torch until it’s practically over his head, and leaps through the doorway and into his old bedroom, ready to fight, ready to be fought –
But there’s no one there. Again.
It’s just his old bedroom.
With one big difference.
There’s a coffin sitting in the middle of the floor.
And it’s open.
Everything else is the same.
The crescent-moon wallpaper is still on the walls, the water stain still spreading through it under the skylight in the sloped ceiling. He thinks he can even see the face patterned there that he always used to scare Owen with, telling him that if he didn’t fall asleep in the next one minute, the face would eat him alive.
Their beds are there, too, unbelievably small against two corners, Owen’s little more than a cot, really. There’s the shelf with all their books, very roughly used but still favorites. Below it is their box of toys, piled with plastic action figures and cars and ray guns that shot out little more than loudness, and on Owen’s bed is a whole array of stuffed toys – elephants, mostly, they were his favorite – every single one of which Seth knows is across the ocean in his brother’s bedroom.
And taking up the middle of the room, on the floor in the space between the beds, sits the long black coffin, the lid opened like a giant clam.
The blind is down over the skylight, making the light vague in here, but Seth doesn’t want to step past the coffin to raise it.
It takes him a moment to remember that the torch has other uses than as a weapon. He shines it on the coffin. He tries to remember if he’s ever actually seen one in real life. He’s never been to a funeral, not even in ninth grade when Tammy Fernandez had a seizure on school grounds
. Nearly everyone went to that one, but Seth’s parents weren’t going to be swayed from an overnight trip to Seattle. “You didn’t even know her,” his mother had said, and that was that.
This coffin, though, is definitely shining back at him, and not like polished wood might. It shines back almost like the hood of a really expensive car. In fact, exactly like the hood of a really expensive car. It even seems to be made of a kind of black metal. The corners of it are rounded, too. Seth’s curiosity gets the better of him, and he moves closer. It’s strange, stranger than even at first glance. Sleek and expensive looking, almost futuristic, like something out of a movie.
Definitely a coffin, though, as the inside is all white cushions and pillows and –
“Holy shit,” Seth says, under his breath.
Crisscrossing the bedding are streamers of metallic-sided tape.
They look as if they’ve been torn and pulled against, as if someone was tied down by them and that person struggled and pulled with all their might until they were free.
Free to stumble blindly down the stairs before collapsing on the path outside.
Seth stands there for a long, long time, not knowing what to think.
An ultra-modern coffin, big enough to hold the nearly fully-grown version of him, yet here in the room he left as a child.
But no coffin for Owen. And nothing for his parents.
Just him.
“Because I’m the only one who died,” he whispers.
He puts his hand on the open lid. It’s cool, just how he’d expect the metal to feel, but he’s surprised to find a thin layer of dust on his hand when he takes it away. The inside, though, is almost a blazing white, even in the low light from the blind-covered window. It’s cushioned with contoured pillows on all sides, vaguely in the shape of a person.
There are torn metallic bandages –“conductive tape” – all the way down the length of it. And tubes, too, big and small, some disappearing into the sides of the coffin, their stray ends having left stains here and there against the whiteness of the pillows.
He thinks of the abrasions along his body and how it hurt to pee.
