by Sarah Porter
That’s all there was for a while, Miss Slippers. Stay with me and remember the darkness. We are here together in this memory, lying half-conscious and immobile in the dense filth on that floor, my skin impregnated with bottle caps and broken glass. I hope you find the experience educational.
Then I began to see a landscape that you’ve come to know quite well—though since I was still alive on this occasion, I could bring my own imagination to bear on the place. For me it wasn’t dim but blindingly bright, all dazzling blues and greens, with a levitating river of neon aquamarine and trees sprouting poisonous suns.
“Young Mr. Bohnacker,” someone said—again, just behind my left shoulder. I turned to see a man chartreuse and scaled like a snake, dressed in a business suit. It was my introduction to Aloysius, though I didn’t know anything about him at the time. I was nonplussed and didn’t immediately reply, and he gave me a smile that pleated his whole face. “Young Mr. Bohnacker, I have every reason to believe you’ll be on painfully intimate terms with us quite soon. You will discover then that it’s much, much more pleasant here if you haven’t done anything to annoy us in the meantime. You will find yourself anxious to be on the best possible footing with me in particular. I wouldn’t advise touching anything in this house that doesn’t belong to you. Keep your thievish dope-fiend’s mitts to yourself, there’s a good lad, and we’ll get along splendidly.”
I’d have liked to respond with something snappy and dismissive, but my body and even the garish world around me crystallized into a solid block of terror. Bright, icy, faceted, winking in the impossible sun. The snake-man was gone and for a long time I couldn’t move, my heart frozen in a violent contraction.
Darkness again. After some indeterminate time, the floor again, a thin stripe of light slicing in around the door. I was still paralyzed, unable to raise a hand as the cold claws of rats scrabbled across my neck. Hours of it, Ru-Ru, though I’ll spare you from remembering them in detail. Hours of dried shit and glass and rubbery tails flicking my lips. Only my heart kept palpitating in the most abject horror.
At dawn my limbs started banging around in wild convulsions, and the moment I regained an inkling of self-control I was on my feet and out the door. As I ran I noticed the chain binding the mailbox—how had I missed it yesterday? Ugh, and to think I could have spared myself from entering the house at all! But knowing where the stash was didn’t inspire me to try for it, not after that appalling night.
Withdrawal was starting to seem remarkably appealing, in view of my adventures.
* * *
There you go, Ru-Ru. That’s what happened. And as you may deduce, this was the occasion that moved me to go cold turkey, in the hope that I would never endure anything of the kind again. It worked for six long months, until an especially bad night shook my resolve.
So now here I am, the worm in your sweet apple. I can’t honestly say I don’t enjoy it, this opportunity to batten on your freshness. I can’t say I don’t enjoy living on your innocence, sharing your soft breath when you toss in your sleep. Ah, but could I possibly corrupt you more profoundly than I do by letting you be me?
* * *
I hold my pillow and listen to my dad yelling at Everett just outside my room. Ever didn’t deserve Dash, that’s all. Now that Dashiell and I are living in one body, one brain, aren’t we becoming a single person, a compound mind?
I am Ruby Dashiell Slippers. I am an endless message, dots and dashes spelled out in fire.
EVERETT
Okay. To my dad it’s absolutely a serious thing that he grounded me, and here I am straggling in at one in the morning, right in his face, like I don’t give a damn what he thinks. It’s frightening for him, because he worries all the time about me and Ruby going off the deep end and dragging him through a repeat of Dashiell. I get that. I even empathize. If my underperforming nerd son suddenly started acting the way I’ve been doing, I’d be concerned, too.
“Isn’t seeing what happened to your brother enough to make you think twice about imitating his behavior? Everett? Should I take this defiance as a bid for my attention, or are we already at the point where I have to resort to urine tests to stop you from destroying yourself? What have you been doing?”
He’s yelling, and the interesting thing is that what I pick up on now isn’t so much that he’s mad at me, but that he’s scared shitless. And I guess it’s because of some leftover trace of Dashiell in me that his fear makes me tempted to go on the attack. Like he’s prey. Like he’s already weakened by what Dash did to him, and it wouldn’t be so hard to—what? Finish him off? I have to deliberately squelch an impulse to say something cruel.
“I had a fight with Ruby,” I say—Dash’s old trick of using the truth to lie, basically. “I just needed to get out for a walk.”
His fear is so ludicrous, though. That’s what’s getting under my skin—that he’s afraid of all the wrong things, and also not nearly afraid enough. I can’t say I understand what’s happening, but it’s obvious that it’s going to be the most dangerous decision of my life: if I should trust a pack of strange ghosts, just because they’re my only hope of ever getting free of Dashiell. Now Dad is skeptically pinching his mouth at me, and he has no clue what the real risks are. He doesn’t even know what’s already living in his house. It’s hard not to look down on him for it—though really, how is he supposed to know? Dad, see, Ruby and I are both possessed by our dead brother, and it’s been super stressful.
Yeah, I won’t be saying that.
“I thought we had a strong relationship,” he says. At least he’s not yelling now, but he’s looking at me way too hard. Leaning on the wall with his silver hair gleaming. “I thought you trusted me, Everett. But there is clearly something very wrong here, and it’s affecting both you and Ruby, and I need to know what it is. Tell me the truth. Please.”
“I’m not on drugs. I don’t even smoke pot. Watching Dash left me completely skeeved out about that stuff.”
“Maybe so. But then what is this?” He stares. Bright gray eyes, totally focused on me. He’s not a dumb guy at all, and he’s not weak; it’s good to be reminded of that. “Did you know that Ruby baked what appears to be a birthday cake? I found it in the kitchen. It might not be so disturbing if she hadn’t gone to the extent of putting candles on it and blowing them out. Twenty-three of them. I counted. Or did you do that?”
“I had nothing to do with it.” We’re still in the front hallway, sandwiched between Ruby’s room and the kitchen, and I’m suddenly so exhausted I feel nauseous—or maybe the nausea comes from thinking about that cake again.
“But you’d agree that it seems like a strange thing to do? Baking a cake for a dead man, even one she loved intensely? Engaging in this pretense that he can get older?”
“That’s why we were fighting,” I say. I’m swaying on my feet, dying to get away from him and collapse upstairs, but really this is my chance to push his anxiety off me. I can deflect it onto Ruby. Simple, as Dash would say. “That’s what upset me so much I had to get out of the house.” Dad starts opening his mouth, obviously to ask me why I didn’t just go to my room if I needed space. “That cake started giving me this weird feeling like maybe the house is haunted, like in your dream? I know that’s not rational but it still tripped me out.”
And now he’s nodding like that explains everything. “Delayed reaction. I’m afraid I’ve seriously underestimated how deeply traumatized you both are. You’re still grounded—don’t think I won’t respond much more severely if you ignore that again—but I’m afraid this is my fault, Everett. I should have cut back on my hours much sooner. I should have anticipated that the two of you would need much more from me, in the wake of … of the absolute catastrophe our family has endured. You have my apology for that.”
He turns his back on me decisively, like that settles that, and marches into the kitchen. He’s moving in this hard, snapping way, but some of the defeated sag I saw this morning is back in his shoulders. I follow him in, stil
l processing what he just said, and watch while he picks up the cake, stomps over to the garbage, levers up the lid, and tips it in. It skids sluggishly off the plate and splats down in a mess.
“There. No more delusions. We’ve lost him and we all have to accept that, no matter how painful it is. Tomorrow I’ll start making enquiries. A good therapist. Someone who specializes in grieving. Works well with teenagers. It’s been entirely too much.”
My brain’s not working so well, because it’s taken me this long to figure out we have a problem. “You’re cutting back on your hours?” If he’s around the house more, it’ll be a lot harder to hide from him just how messed up and insane everything is now. We’re doing a lousy job of hiding it as it is, obviously. What was Ruby thinking, leaving that cake out for him to find?
Before I felt like hurting him, sick as that urge was, but now I’m completely pissed at Ruby for not realizing that we need to protect him. Like, maybe we’re still kids, but when it comes to Dashiell haunting us, it’s our dad who’s the innocent. He thinks a therapist is going to fix this?
“I am. The hospital offered me a part-time schedule last spring. I declined; I’m well aware that there are still your college expenses and Ruby’s to get through. But I think if I go back to them now and explain … even if it’s only temporary…”
His foot is still on the lever of the garbage can. He’s still standing over it, staring down at the heap of lavender frosting and crumbs and tipped birthday candles. The garbage is full enough that I can see the candles from halfway across the room. Jagged and mismatched, twisty little fingers trying to claw their way out of the ground.
I wonder if that’s what he’s seeing, too: smashed brown cake like upturned earth, and something in it struggling to get free.
* * *
Brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed have never felt like such a big deal before. It’s like some kind of elaborate purification ritual before I go off to battle. Because even if Mabel and her friends told me I could take my time deciding, I’m pretty sure they’re not going to be all that patient in practice. I’ve given up, for now, on trying to figure out what I should do until I’m actually there, and maybe then I’ll get a better idea by observing how they act.
When I finally lie down and start to drift off I hear something scratching and pounding at the floorboards beneath my bed. Over and over the noise wakes me up, but every time I open my eyes onto my dark room it’s instantly totally silent. My bedroom is right above our kitchen, and finally I get up and sneak downstairs to see what’s going on, shadows rumpling around me and weird sparks floating in my eyes. I half-expect to find Ruby in there, in full-on Dashiell mode, doing something perverse like digging the rest of his cake out of the garbage with both hands and stuffing it in her face. But no: the room is empty. Streetlamp glow kites across the ceiling and the curtains shift a little in a draft. There’s no light under Ruby’s door, either. So I go back to bed, but as soon as my thoughts start to slither around in that pre-sleep way the noise jars me again.
It’s not until maybe the fourth or fifth time that I get it: there isn’t anything clawing at the floor of my room.
They’re attacking the floor of my sleep. The ghosts are down on some deeper level and the way between us is blocked or barricaded somehow. It’s not hard to guess who must have done that, and I know it should piss me off; I have to get down there, after all, if I’m ever going to learn the secret to being Dashiell-proof. But it’s actually kind of reassuring, because honestly I’m not ready to make such a huge decision. And maybe the scratching means I’m safe for now. It finally quiets down like they’ve given up for the night, and I’m able to relax in a way that I haven’t since this whole mess started; Christ, less than a week ago.
I’m finally able to fall into serious sleep. Nice and dark and soft, just like none of this ever happened. When my alarm starts screaming at me in the morning, I smack it dead and roll over.
And keep rolling. My eyes start to jumble with shaken-kaleidoscope flashes. I’m standing on the bank of a river. The light looks predawn gray, but the river is shining in a million twisted colors, red and lime and blue-violet.
And a little girl is standing right next to me. Thick, dark brown curls, pink cheeks, a fluffy white dress with a black sash. You can tell she’s been crying for a long time, because her eyes are red and her face is bloated and streaky. If I had only heard Mabel’s voice without seeing her lumbering old-dude body, this is pretty much exactly how I would have pictured her.
“Don’t worry,” she says, and she’s Mabel all right. “I can’t do anything to you, Everett Bohnacker. You didn’t do—what you’d have to do. And even if I could, I’d get in too much trouble!” Then she gets this self-conscious expression and swats something off her dress. I don’t get a good look at whatever it is, but it crawls away at a good clip.
“I’m not worried,” I say—and in the same moment I realize that hey, I really should be. “Why were you crying?” It’s easier to be nice to her now that her body isn’t so eerily out of whack with her voice; I guess it’s superficial to judge on stuff like that, but it’s hard to fight that kind of visceral creep-out.
“Somebody got hurt,” Mabel whispers. “He might even die. So I was crying about him, and then Aloysius got angry at me again! Even though I had to go! How could I stay here when he was pointing a gun around?”
“A gun?” I say. “Aloysius has a gun?” I’m starting to wish my alarm would go off again, but I already know that time might not work the same way in this place. The snooze button on my clock is set for eight minutes of silence between noise-bursts.
Eight minutes in the real world might get translated down here into all the time they need.
She shakes her head. “I don’t mean him. That’s not what he has.” The whole statement is way too vague to be comforting. “So can I take you now? Where we’re supposed to go?”
Bad idea, Everett. I know I have to think fast, and clearly, but the truth is that I don’t have enough information to make a good choice. So Aloysius is pretty clearly evil, but is he really any worse than my fabulously dead, throat-slitting older brother? That’s probably the essential question, but there’s no realistic way that I can get an answer. Ding-dong, bad idea.
“Where do you have in mind?”
“Oh!” Mabel says, and wipes her face with the back of one hand. Like she’s surprised that it isn’t obvious. “Just, um, back where you were before? When you came here? If you want to close yourself up so Dashiell can’t get in anymore, then we have to go there together. Okay?” Her tone has shifted into this sickly sweet coo, like she’s coaxing a rabbit.
“I’ll go take a look,” I tell her. I still have no idea what I’m doing, but maybe this way I can learn more. It’s also a chance to stall for time—because there’s always the possibility that my alarm will blast through here and save me from deciding. Nuke me out of this place. “I’m not making any promises about what I’ll do when we get there, though.”
She gives me this little, nervous smirk. It’s taken me this long to notice that the light on her looks too bright for the dimness around us, like she has an overcast afternoon all to herself.
“I know you don’t trust me, Everett,” she trills. “But we really can, really can help you. There is a secret way to shut him out! We don’t tell it to anybody alive, not ever, but we’re going to tell you. You’ll see. And then you’ll like me better, won’t you? And you’ll tell Ruby how nice I was?”
“Ruby and I aren’t talking much right now,” I say, but Mabel’s got this faraway, drifty look on her face and she just holds out one sticky little hand for me.
And I take it. Dashiell’s always telling me how cautious and self-protective I am, and it seems like a fun change of pace to try being as reckless and chaotic as he is. He always gets away with it—he even got away with dying. So why shouldn’t I?
Really, I already know the answer to that question. I’m just not interested in knowing i
t.
Up on the bank there’s a gigantic, slabbish building made of corrugated steel, maybe some kind of warehouse. Mabel drags me up to it and opens a door in the side, and then we’re back in the same old hell-zone where I met Dashiell, half naked and languid and dangling his feet while he waited to butcher me. We’re walking through the same maze of phosphorescent scarlet gears taller than my head, and shuffling floors, and creaking green engines, and everything shifts in confusion but Mabel still has her fluffy daylight clarity. She’s bouncing with excitement now, urging me to go faster.
“How did you die so young, anyway?”
Her happy little face collapses and she shoots me a reproachful look over her shoulder. I guess it was insensitive of me to bring it up. “Scarlet fever. My favorite cousin was quarantined. I snuck in to see her, and then she got better! She was just fine, and she grew up and lived in a beautiful mansion with big chandeliers. But I had to come here.”
“That sucks,” I say, partly because it’s true and partly to make up for upsetting her. She’s just a little kid who had horrible luck and it’s totally understandable that she resents never getting to have a regular life. “I’m really sorry.”
“She was much prettier than Ruby,” Mabel says primly, like she’s correcting me. “But Ruby seems so nice.”
That’s not the word I would use, but I don’t feel like arguing. We’ve come within sight of that glowing yellow scaffolding; it sears my eyes and makes it hard to focus on anything else, but I can just make out some pale slug shape dangling off the edge of the platform high above. I can’t tell what it is, but something about it makes me flinch back in revulsion.
