Patchwork

by Karsten Knight

  The undying threat of Thanatos and the promise of warmth give me the will to continue my journey. I don’t have to travel far, either—after I cross the dam and pass through a thin ribbon of trees, I find myself back on the street where I grew up.

  I’ve tried to distance myself from the house where so many of my father’s memories remain—yet all roads in Patchwork seem to lead back to it.

  As far as I can tell, my old home sits at the very center of this world.

  Now I’m finally returning to it, only to immediately run away.

  I walk up the stone path, between the walkway lights. I enter the house, which doesn’t immediately send me back to reality, so I continue up the steps to the second floor.

  Outside my bedroom, I linger with my hand on the doorknob. Osiris has been hunting phoenixes for centuries. What chance do I have? What makes me any different than those who have fallen before me? They were fighting for their loved ones, too, and look how far that love got them.

  No, a voice inside me whispers. Look how far your love has gotten you.

  Then I throw open the door to the bedroom and feel my body being whisked away, even as I dive into the comfortable familiarity of my bed. When I get back to reality, I’m going to hit the ground running.

  Catch me if you can, Osiris, I think.

  We’ll see how your little game of Mousetrap works out this time.

  Yuletide

  December

  My first instinct beneath the covers of my bed is to stay here and never get out.

  Even though my frigid, soggy clothes have been replaced with dry—wonderfully dry—silk pajamas, the internal cold is still unbearable. My heart could have been replaced with a sphere of ice for all I know. I gather the quilt tightly around me, but it does nothing. I need to get up. I need to move.

  I need fire.

  My knees obey long enough to get me down the stairs. At the bottom of the steps, I make a sharp turn into the pitch black den. It takes some groping around on the bookshelves to find the fireplace remote. Thank God for technology, because if I had to channel my inner Eagle Scout and ignite the logs and newspaper the old-fashioned way, I’d probably end up lighting myself on fire. Though I’m cold enough that even torching myself might temporarily provide welcome relief.

  Fortunately, there’s no self-immolation required. With an easy click on the remote’s “ignite” button, a fire springs up in the natural gas fireplace.

  I lunge toward the flames and fold my body into a ball on the brick hearth, absorbing every last fiber of warmth the furnace has to offer.

  Once I’m convinced that I’m no longer in danger of losing my extremities to frostbite, I roll onto my back and look around the room. The long leather couch rests where it always has, covered with a mass of pillows and quilts for our incoming family. That must mean it’s before Christmas.

  When I reflect back on the year, I realize that holiday vacation was the last time I went home. Five months on the Daedalus campus, a ten-minute drive away, and I haven’t even visited my mother once during the new year. Those few days I spent here for Christmas, being fawned over by my relatives, interacting stiffly with Mom in those rare, unsure moments when we found ourselves alone in the kitchen—I’d wanted to escape back to school, to bury myself in friends and Amaranthine rituals just to get rid of the bad aftertaste of Dad’s absence.

  Now, after everything that’s happened with Osiris, I want nothing more than to hole myself up in this old house, and pray for my father’s spirit to shelter me. But only I can protect myself now. The longer I stay here, the more I put my mother at risk, and Osiris has sullied my life enough already. I’m not about to let him invade the last stronghold of my father’s memory.

  When my mother redecorated this placed as a bed and breakfast, she didn’t entirely erase my father’s fingerprints. There are still pictures on the walls of clipper ships. Dad loved them. I bought him a ship in a bottle for his birthday, but he died before I could give it to him. It’s still in the gift wrap somewhere in my closet upstairs.

  There’s also the Christmas tree in the corner, the same artificial one we’ve been using since I was a toddler. The fake branches and synthetic pine needles used to scratch the shit out of my skin whenever we put it together, but I have fond memories of assembling it with my parents.

  That’s why I pleaded with Mom not to put it up this year. It didn’t feel like Christmas without him. But when I came home from Daedalus for holiday break, there it was. Mom claimed that she put it together to make some of the bed and breakfast guests feel “more at home.”

  Even now, with the flicker of firelight washing over the tree, it looks like a tombstone. Mom couldn’t bring herself to put up any of our ornaments, so it stands bare except for a single strand of red lights wrapped around it. I remember spending most of Christmas vacation wanting to destroy it. A shame metal trees don’t burn.

  I’m feeling slightly feverish now so I retreat from the fire. My current plan, as far as Osiris goes, is to sprawl out on the couch just long enough to develop a real plan.

  When I drop heavily down onto the nest of blankets and pillows, the blankets yell.

  I let out a shriek myself, expecting to find Osiris lurking under the pile, ready to pull the trigger.

  Instead, when the phantom hands finish clawing away the tangle of bedding, Troy’s face emerges.

  “Troy!” I shout, then glance up at the ceiling—my mother is up there asleep somewhere. I lower my voice. “What in holy hell are you doing down here?”

  A quick mental revisiting of my Christmas break provides what the mental cobwebs prevented me from remembering before.

  Troy stayed with us through Christmas Eve Day, before driving home to his family.

  Of course, Troy misinterprets my question. He rubs his face and clears his throat. “Um, I’m couch-bound down here because you said absolutely no sneaking upstairs and into your bed.” A jack-o-lantern smile creeps across his face. “I guess you didn’t specify anything about you making midnight visits down here.” He pulls me down on top of him.

  Our lips meet. The kiss is like a pair of golden scales, tipped to one side. His lips work with the lightness of a boy freshly in love, on Christmas Eve morning. My lips feel heavy and clumsy. Older. Tired.

  Troy must notice, because he holds me at arm’s length, my body still trapped between his knees. “What’s the matter, Nata?”

  What’s the matter? We both cheated on each other in a reality that no longer exists and I’m not exactly in the romantic mood. “Nothing,” I mutter.

  The New Year’s Eve party where I’ll drunkenly make out with Wyatt isn’t for another week. If I were to fight off the temptation this time around, then theoretically Troy would never have sought retaliation by hooking up with Marcie. Does that make us both any less responsible? I’m a week away from tarnishing one of the most important relationships in my life, with the man I supposedly love. What was so wrong, so broken, between Troy and me in December that I risked throwing it all away for a stolen kiss with someone else?

  Troy tugs on the drawstrings of my pajama pants, which are tied in a bow. “You’re definitely better than any present I could have found beneath the tree. Is it too early to unwrap you?”

  I pull away and sulk over to the Christmas tree, where I flick on the red lights. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep going back in time and acting like everything is okay. I can’t keep having conversations when the words will eventually all be erased.

  I can’t maintain a relationship with a boy who’s slowly forgetting everything we’ve been through.

  I’m like a little girl building sandcastles on the beach every morning and expecting the tide not to wash it away.

  “Hey.” Troy comes up behind me. His fingers settle on my hips and he kisses my neck. “That was a joke. We’ve talked about this—I’m not trying to rush you.”

  We’ve already had sex! I want to scream at him, even though I know it’s unfair of me to be
angry. Troy has always been good at reading me, but expecting him to interpret “time-traveling serial killer is on the loose” from my expression and body language is a little much.

  I spin around and rest my hands on his shoulders. “I need to ask you to do something really crazy with me, blindly, without asking me why. Do you think you can do that?”

  Troy squints. “Does it involve either caffeine or going back to bed?” He glances at the sofa. “Whether it’s one bed or two.”

  I force him to look directly into my eyes. I don’t need to fake the sense of urgency radiating from them. “We need to get in your truck and start driving. It doesn’t matter where, it doesn’t matter what direction. As long as we go real fast and don’t stop.”

  With the way Troy’s face is bathed in the spectral red light from the Christmas tree, I feel like we’re trapped in a submarine. “Your relatives are going to start pouring in tomorrow—today,” he corrects himself when he checks the clock over the mantle. “As much as I’d love to do something impulsive with you, I think a romantic getaway on Christmas Eve might piss off your mother. Especially when I promised to help her with the bread pudding.”

  “Fuck the bread pudding,” I blurt out. “I know I seem like a crazy person, but you have to trust me. We can deal with Mom’s reaction when we’re safely twenty zip codes away.”

  Troy’s hands fall slack off my waist, and that’s when I know I have him. “Right about now, I’m really hating that don’t ask why clause you tacked onto our agreement.”

  I kiss him on the cheek. “Grab some snacks for the road and start the truck.”

  While Troy rattles about in the fridge, I head upstairs and gather a few of my things in a knapsack. Before I’m finished, I take a chance and tiptoe down the hall.

  My parents’ bedroom door is partway open, only when I peer inside, I realize it’s no longer my parents’ bedroom at all. Not only has Mom completely redecorated it, but she’s designated it as one of the guest bedrooms, and moved all her things somewhere else.

  I find her sleeping in the smallest room in the house, the one beneath the attic door. She’s curled up on her side, her back to me. Even though the bed isn’t the one she shared with my father all those years, if I look real closely, she has her arm wrapped around an imaginary object on the mattress in front of her. It’s like my dad has left an indelible impression that no amount of home improvements or a revolving door of house guests can erase. For the first time since Mom turned this place into a bed and breakfast, I feel bad about being so tough on her for trying to move on.

  Outside, the engine of Troy’s Toyota rumbles to life. I wipe tears from my eyes, whisper “Bye, Mom,” and make my way down the stairs.

  It hurts to know that when she discovers I’m gone, she’ll never know that I was just trying to save her life. And as much as it’s a blessing that Osiris hasn’t involved her in his attacks so far, it hurts to consider that maybe she’s safe because I’ve given off the impression that she’s not important to me.

  As Troy backs out of the driveway, he keeps his gaze fixed on the road. When we get halfway across the Sunderland Bridge, however, he pulls the car onto the shoulder and shifts into park. “I know you’re looking to go anywhere but here, Renata … but do you at least have a preference on direction?”

  Through the truck’s back window, the first pink stains of sunrise leach into the sky over the trees, and beyond them, Mount Toby. If we drive toward Boston, we’ll only have two hours before we hit the Atlantic and can go no further. Three hours tops if we go to the end of Cape Cod, and then we’ll be trapped. North and we’ll eventually run into the Canadian border. South and we could get gridlocked in the madness of New York City, and the last thing I want to do is to go some place where there are millions of people living in a single metropolitan area. It would be like a playground for Osiris.

  I point straight ahead, toward Sugarloaf Mountain. “Go West. Get on the MassPike and keep driving until we end up somewhere that no one will find us … and then drive some more.”

  Troy sighs and shifts the truck back into drive. “I’ll follow your orders, but why do I have this bad feeling that we’re going to end up on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries?” As he steers back out onto the desolate bridge, he pulls something from the backpack beneath his seat: a Red Sox hat. “Can’t be a chauffeur without a chauffeur’s cap.”

  Despite everything, I can’t help but smile. I stay awake as we drive through Reverie and make a short drop down 91, but as soon as we’re safely on the MassPike, I let my head droop onto the cushioned door. Shortly after, sleep drags me off to a dark place. I sleep like it’s the last nap I’ll ever have, because there’s always a chance that it could be.

  But even in slumber, ancient memories find me.

  And so does Osiris.

  I’m standing in an ancient library.

  And it’s burning to the ground.

  Fire streams up the walls, devouring rows and rows of tattered tomes, a thousand years of knowledge committed to millions of pages that future generations will never see. The bloodbath of the raging Holy War has taken so many lives, and now it’s stripping humanity of its wisdom, of its legacy. Of its history.

  The thickening smoke makes it difficult to see, although I can hear looters rioting through the streets of Constantinople outside. The roof of the library could cave in at any moment.

  I don’t see the tile mosaic of the howling sun-face until I’m standing right on top of it. It marks the entrance to the council chambers. The black and gold tapestry that’s supposed to conceal the hidden passage has been all but burned away. The brass ring to the door scalds my fingers on first touch. I have to wrap a ripped piece of my tunic around my hand to open it.

  I sprint down the dank, stone steps.

  When I reach the bottom and pass through the open doors, I enter a world of horror.

  Bodies lie everywhere. At least thirty of them, all scholars from the council, butchered in a spreading pool of communal crimson. Mouths open in silenced screams. Black robes steeped in fresh blood. I’ve seen plenty of violence before during this Holy War, unspeakable things—but this was no battle.

  It was a massacre.

  Not everyone in the council chambers, however, is dead.

  Under the torches on the far side of the chamber, three men in white tunics kneel in front of a dark trough. They have their backs to me, but as I edge closer, I can see that the black, inky tar they’re tending to is boiling over a small fire.

  I tighten both hands around the hilt of my sword. As the trio chants, the traitor on the left drops a bundle of black branches one by one into the bubbling liquid. At the same time, the man to the right lets a pile of obsidian sand filter between his fingers, sprinkling it into the muck.

  Lastly, the man in the center—who I recognize as the villainous Tantalus when I catch him in profile—lifts up the corpse cradled in his arms.

  No, not a corpse.

  A living body.

  The person, cloaked entirely in black, moves his gloved fingers just enough for me to see that he’s still alive, although he must be heavily sedated. It’s hard to tell either way, because his face has been hooded and concealed with a terrifying howling sun mask, one that matches the council crest.

  Tantalus rises to his feet with the masked sacrifice. “Rise, Osiris,” he whispers.

  Then Tantalus drops him into the vat.

  When the sacrifice hits the surface, the tar spreads over his body and drags him down. In a matter of seconds the cloaked man vanishes completely, swallowed by the liquid darkness.

  “No!” I scream out, unable to conceal my presence any longer. My sword screams metallic as I rip it free of its sheath.

  All three of the murderous scholars spin around, noticing me for the first time. I know I should jump back in time now, to unravel the bloodshed that’s happened here and undo the ceremony the trio just performed.

  Wrath takes over. I want them to suffer. To pay for this treac
hery.

  Even if they won’t remember it.

  The scholar on the left is the first to get to his feet, his hand already drawing his sword, but my blade pierces his heart. I rip it out in a spray of blood, letting his body fall to the stones, then I spin around and cleave the second scholar’s brain down the middle.

  Metal whistles against metal, Tantalus’s hidden blade sliding from its sheath. The dagger’s patterned Damascus steel is covered in some type of slick coating, probably poison. Clever, I think. Even if he were to shallowly wound me with the blade, the venom in my bloodstream would theoretically travel back with me to the timeless realm and finish the job there.

  I won’t give him that chance. The bastard slashes at me, missing my throat by inches, but I am bigger and stronger than him. I pin his arms to his sides and, with all my might, slam him down against the edge of the ceremonial vat.

  The bones in his back crack on impact. The cry that bellows out of him sounds like an airless wheeze. He crawls across the tile, his legs dragging impotently behind him.

  He only makes it as far as a pile of council books that they probably intended to burn. I flip him over with the toe of my boot. Lying on the mound of bloodied pages, he grimaces with pain.

  Then he smiles.

  “Your kind will never tamper with history again, Ignatius,” he croaks. “We’ve summoned the sphinx, a death demon who can bend the flow of time in ways even more powerful than your own dark sorcery. Our ceremony tethered him to a human host, but by feasting on your fear and your filthy phoenix souls, Osiris will remain forever young.” He coughs twice, speckling his chin with blood. “Now, no memory is safe for you, phoenix. No day shall provide shelter for you. And when you realize that there’s no haven from the sphinx’s deadly touch, then you shall truly know torment.”

  I lower the point of my sword to his neck. “One of the benefits of traveling back in time,” I say, “is that I’ll get to enjoy killing you not once, but twice.”