Patchwork

by Karsten Knight

  I flex back far enough with it that my vertebrae crack.

  Osiris kneels to steady his aim.

  I swing the axe-head down with wrath, like the ice is Osiris and this is my killing blow to him, my fond-fucking-farewell to the serial killer who’s ruining my life.

  The blade penetrates the ice, passing clean through to the water underneath.

  The ice still holds.

  I can all but feel Osiris’s finger on the trigger. I close my eyes tight.

  Then the surface of the pond implodes at once, dragging me into the coldest bath I’ve ever experienced just as I hear the muffled crack of Osiris’s rifle. The frigid waters suck all the remaining heat right out of me. The adrenaline rush is like a hundred caffeine syringes expelling their contents into my veins all at once.

  And in the vicious, hypothermic cold of this frigid New England pond, I strangely find the fire to rip myself free from the earth.

  Back to Patchwork I go.

  The Poison Within

  Osiris’s Book of Riddles, 2016 A.D.

  I don’t feel sexual urges

  the way that humans do

  But the thrill of watching

  Renata from the shadows

  when she doesn’t sense

  my preying eyes upon her

  Is a carnal appetite all its own

  Today, she visited the softball diamond

  with the most important man in her life—

  her father

  She flirts with some of the boys at school

  and reserves a special smile for Troy

  But there’s a bliss that only strikes her eye

  while she’s waiting with a bat on her shoulder

  for her dad to release a fastball

  Little does she know, her father

  will be the first tile to fall

  when her world starts caving in

  And I won’t even be the one

  to take him from her

  The blight inside is aging body

  will do the work

  all on its own

  I can taste the tide of death

  lapping at his mortal shores

  You see, bodies and souls aren’t so different:

  When you destroy either one

  the deadliest poisons

  always kill from within

  When that day comes

  I can’t wait to see her face

  I’ve wormed my way into Renata’s life

  but you never truly know someone intimately

  until you’ve seen her in her darkest moments

  Patchwork Frozen

  I hadn’t really thought past escaping a bullet to the brain in reality, so it comes as a surprise to me when I arrive in Patchwork—and I’m still underwater.

  Worse, the pond here has frozen over.

  With me trapped below.

  My hatchet has disappeared, so I pound my fist on the underside of the ice. The water slows my motions. I might as well be punching a concrete wall.

  The chill worms deeper into my body. My joints stiffen. I’m so cold that even blinking takes longer.

  This is it. I’ve escaped Osiris, but I’m going to drown in Patchwork. My only hope is that if the wheels of time are already turning backward, maybe my death will have prevented Osiris from ever butchering my friends. Even as my lungs are straining, a sudden calm sweeps through me and I let my limbs go slack. Maybe with my body so numb from the cold, drowning won’t feel so bad.

  Yes, a dark voice rasps in me, as cold as the chill that’s freezing my veins. Osiris is kicking your ass. This is four massacres in a row now, four days you’ve had to watch your friends die. You’re exhausted. You’re burned out, and worst of all, you’re carelessly missing details that will get you killed. Eventually you’re going to slip up and then all your friends will stay dead.

  But my survival is about more than me now. If I give up, if I let myself die here, then Osiris gets to keep on breathing, like he has for centuries, biding his time until the phoenix mantle I threw away passes to the next unlucky bastard. And once that phoenix’s powers manifest, Osiris will track her down and murder her and everyone she knows. And he’ll do the same to the next phoenix. And the next.

  There’s only one way to save my friends, one way to prevent any other teenager from having to wake up in Patchwork and realize that they and their friends are going to die. I have to be the phoenix who succeeds where all my predecessors have failed.

  I need to survive long enough to kill Osiris.

  My new mission gives me the focus I need to draw on a not-too-distant memory. As I float suspended in the frigid water, I let my mind wander back to one day in January, when Troy and escaped the iced-over New England campus for a spa day in Springfield …

  The Jacuzzi water simmers around us. On the opposite side of the small hot tub, Troy lazes back against the tile wall, his eyes closed and his arms splayed out to either side. I’ve swum with him plenty of times before, both at my beach house and the Daedalus pool. But this time is different.

  Back in Patchwork, the water around me loses its frosty edge.

  Through the curtain of steam rising off the surface, Troy opens one eye, then the other. I feel a redness tinge the tops of my ears that has nothing to do with the 104-degree water. I shouldn’t feel embarrassed that Troy has caught me admiring his half-naked form—he’s my boyfriend after all. But I must have looked like a lioness leering at an antelope carcass. Still, he laughs and wades across the pool, coming for me. I’m the prey now …

  I hear the ice crack overhead. The previously still water tickles my skin as bubbles rise around me, like a geothermal vent has ripped open the pond floor. Still, I keep my eyes shut, languishing in the memory.

  Troy finally stops in front of me, floating so that we’re at eye level. Something animal comes over me, and suddenly I don’t care that we’re in a public spa, that anyone could walk through the tile foyer at any moment. I drape my arms over his shoulders and wrap my legs around his waist.

  Troy brushes a wet strand of hair off my forehead and leans in. He presses his cheek against mine. “If my restraint were an ice sculpture,” he whispers, his breath warm against my tingling ears, “then you’d be a blow torch.”

  “Troy Bridges,” I whisper back. “You might be the only seventeen-year-old boy who actually gets more poetic when he’s horny.”

  Beneath the water, I feel one of his hands find the inside of my thigh, and I gasp in pleasure as it slowly traces its way up, up, up …

  My eyes spring open. With a final resounding crack the ice above me splits in two. I sink down far enough that my feet touch the pond bottom. Then I kick off.

  As I soon as I breach the surface, I crawl out onto the melting ice and draw in a long breath. The steam rises in curtains around me. My memory may have warmed the waters, but I’m quaking with hypothermia. I clap my free hand down over my frozen ears.

  It takes all I have left to drag my half-thawed body across the snow to the tree line. Predictably, the earth behind me begins to quake and the lodge crumbles away, the crackle of snapping wood and buckling rafters echoing out into space. The gaping void devours the stone patio before spreading rapidly toward me.

  I don’t stop until the Maine cedars abruptly give way to a snowless orchard, where I collapse on the gnarled roots of an apple tree. Oblivion has devoured Slade’s entire compound and the mountain beyond. Another day of my life, spinning around the cosmic toilet drain before it gets flushed completely.

  I pull my cold, battered body out of the bed of rotting apples. I’m tired, but there will be plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead.

  With a gaping crater where the ski lodge used to be, I head deeper into the orchard. I need to find an alternate route back to my old neighborhood, to my house, because I’ve had a stroke of inspiration. So far, I’ve been returning to memories where I’m surrounded by friends, and in doing so, I’ve been serving them up to Osiris like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

>   What if I faxed myself back to a time when my friends weren’t around? The ski trip was in early February, which means that if I hop back another month and spare change …

  I could reengage with the timeline during Christmas break. Most of my friends will have shuttled off to their hometowns for the holiday. I can pack up my mom’s car and just start driving, driving until I find some place Osiris can’t find me.

  And even if he does manage to sniff out my trail, at least I’ll only be responsible for my own life. Osiris against me, one on one, for better or worse, winner takes all.

  My teeth chatter nonstop as I climb the gradual slope of the orchard, searching for a way out. As if Patchwork weren’t already plagued with enough deathtraps, those awful yellow frogs have returned, clinging to the apple trees and scampering over the gnarled roots. The whole way through, I have to alternate between keeping my head down to make sure I don’t step on any of them, and looking up to make sure that one of the poisonous bastards isn’t going to swan-dive onto my face from the branches overhead. How bizarre that, out of all my fears, this deadly amphibian is the one that Patchwork keeps revisiting.

  It’s not long before I hear a whooshing sound. The white noise grows more deafening, until it becomes clear that I’m approaching something powerful, something earth-rending … something liquid.

  The Reverie River.

  The Reverie Dam.

  And the Hellhole.

  Patchwork’s version of the Reverie River is even more frothing and violent than its real-life counterpart, a stretch of whitewater rapids that adventure seekers show up in hordes to raft every summer. A few years ago, the energy company built a massive hydroelectric dam across it. The narrow bridge that runs along the top of the dam is a favorite nighttime escape for Daedalus students. As much as I’m terrified of heights, there’s always been something awe-inspiring and majestic about the eighty-foot drop and the view of the evergreen valley beyond.

  But the real sightseeing attraction, the thing I’ve always been completely mesmerized by, is the Hellhole. In order to prevent the reservoir behind the dam from overflowing, the contractors built an enormous concrete funnel, sixty feet in diameter. When the water level rises too high, the excess pours into the funnel and down the concrete chute until it spouts safely out the bottom of the dam. The Hellhole looks like a pair of jaws big enough to swallow a car just opened up in the middle of the river. It would crush anything—or anyone—unlucky enough to get sucked into its inescapable tide and down its stone gullet.

  A little walkway encircles the Hellhole for thrill seekers, but I’ve never had the balls to go out there. Even safely on shore, right now, it feels like it could vacuum me right over the rickety wooden railing.

  The friends in my memories, however, are far more daring. “Don’t be such a pansy,” Slade’s voice says to me. The air in front of me shimmers with light. Ivy, Slade, and Troy each coalesce from my memory right as they hop the fence guarding the Hellhole. Troy turns after a few steps and holds out a hand for me. I didn’t take it then and I don’t take it now—I stand rigidly on solid ground until Troy finally shrugs and joins the others on the walkway at the Hellhole’s edge.

  They stand out there in awe, their eyes glued to the gaping spillway, gazing down into the liquid tornado. “This would make one hell of a water slide,” Troy says.

  “Yeah,” Ivy says, “only one ride down that thing, and you’ll come out as oatmeal at the bottom.” She suddenly lunges at Slade pretending like she’s going to shove him over the edge. He lets loose a high-pitched shriek, and both Ivy and Troy convulse in laughter. I even hear a fleeting glimpse of my own nervous giggling before the memory melts. The particles of their imaginary bodies drip through the walkway boards to be swallowed by the Hellhole.

  Alone again, with only the roar of flowing water, my hypothermia returns in full force. I tighten my arms around me as I begin the journey across the dam. The cold mist billowing around me freezes the skin on my cheeks all over again.

  “I sh-should have g-gone to m-more b-bonfires,” I mutter to myself, my teeth chattering. It will be difficult to run away from Osiris when my feet are blackened from frostbite.

  The thunderous falls are so loud that, by the halfway point across the dam, I feel like the cold mountain waters must be seeping into my brain. But deafening as they are, I realize that I can make out another pattern of sounds.

  A splash.

  A scratching.

  Stone crumbling.

  Then the cycle repeats.

  I edge over to the dam railing. The strange noises seem to be echoing up from the valley below, on the side of the long drop. If I didn’t know any better, I’d almost say that something was trying to scale the nearly vertical wall of the dam. I cautiously lean out over the railing to get a better look.

  The blade of the axe arcs up over the edge, passing so close to my face that I see my own horrified reflection distorted in the warped steel. The axe head sheers through the railing and sticks. I try to back away, but trip over my own feet. A scaly red talon latches onto the mangled railing and a spiky mane emerges over the lip of the dam.

  Thanatos clambers onto the bridge, effectively separating me from my destination. His bulky truck-sized body hardly fits between the two railings. The route back to my house disappears behind his mountain of quills, scales, fur, and teeth.

  I shuffle backward. I’m in no shape to run, and if Thanatos is agile enough to scale a vertical wall, he can surely slice me open with his claws after a few easy strides. He patiently lumbers toward me on all fours. While his lupine eyes glisten hungrily, I see just how marginally human he really is. His mutated body is a demonic hybrid, equal parts lion, bear, and gorilla, with a little carnivorous dinosaur thrown in for good measure.

  There’s something else, though. His mere presence awakens this bottomless dread in me. With each step he takes, dark memories from this past year resurface. Memories of the mistakes I’ve made, and the feelings of self-loathing that followed.

  This is what my fear looks like, personified, I realize. Seventeen years of insecurities, guilt, and poor life choices, molded into a homicidal Frankenstein.

  Thanatos leaves the axe embedded in the dam wall. Apparently he intends to end me with his more natural gifts.

  There’s no way out. There’s an eighty-foot drop to my left, the rapids and the Hellhole to my right, and an easy chase for Thanatos if I turn and run back the way I came. My life has transformed into a deadly compass, with certain death awaiting me in every direction.

  I stumble again, only this time I catch the railing before I wipe out completely. A glob of saliva falls out of Thanatos’s open mouth and splatters on the bridge. The stink of blood and decaying flesh washes over me.

  I’ve used my memories before to get out of scrapes in Patchwork, but those had been little things. What I need now is something bigger, something intense enough to overpower this enormous demon …

  Thanatos’s sauntering loses its patience and now I’m backpedaling to keep pace. His stomach growls from hunger. I’m frantically rifling through my memories, struggling to figure out which one I could tap into, anything that could possibly save me.

  Then I think of this dam, and one of the last times I visited. It was September, right after Hurricane Evelyn slammed New England with three days of torrential rain. The Reverie River had becoming something monstrous of its own then, a raging, uncontrollable flood that wiped out bridges and ripped trees right from the riverbanks. Troy, Slade, Ivy and I had stupidly come to the river with little toy sailboats we made out of milk cartons, so we could sadistically watch the rapids tear them apart.

  And when the memory starts to play in the theater of my mind, something strange happens. I begin to feel like I’m actually there, on that day in September. The memory tugs at the fabric of Patchwork, pulling it, contorting it.

  I feel the air in Patchwork snap around me. A second whoosh hisses upstream. A mist billows up from the surface of the water
.

  Thanatos must see that I’m distracted, because all at once, he pounces forward. I’m not quick enough and his heavy claws bear down on my shoulders, flattening me to the bridge. His head bows low until his teeth press against the tip of my nose.

  Somehow, even with a big red mutant about to literally bite my face off, I find the courage to smile. And I repeat the five words that Osiris texted me right before he plowed my bus off a cliff. “It’s a long way down.”

  The whoosh grows so loud that Thanatos can no longer ignore it, but it’s too late. The hurricane floods reach the dam and steamroll right over it. I take a deep breath right before the muddy water rushes over the bridge.

  The rapids connect with Thanatos like a freight train. Even his elephantine size is no match for the flood, which carries him right off the edge.

  Somehow, with the torrent battering my body, I find the railing and latch on. I wrap my arms around the metal handrail with all my remaining strength, lest I plunge off the side of the dam with Thanatos.

  With my concentration shattered, my connection to the memory of the hurricane severs. The maelstrom dies to a trickle and then relents altogether. I release my panicked grip on the railing and fall back onto the puddle-covered bridge.

  I slowly gather my soggy, frozen self and stand up. It’s silly, but despite being miserably drenched and frozen, I have a random thought and start to laugh. Maybe I’m losing my mind, but all I can think is that, between my fall through the ice and those hurricane floods, I finally got to take a bath. If I went any longer without one, all the perfume in Sephora wouldn’t stop Troy and the others from noticing my unbathed scent.

  I bet no phoenixes have survived long enough to worry about hygiene.

  I sober when my eyes land on Thanatos’s axe, which the torrents failed to rip free from the concrete. What are the chances that the red circus freak survived the long fall?

  The thing with fear, I realize, is that you never kill it completely. The best you can do is conquer it for a time. So long as my friends are in danger, there will never be a shortage of fear.