The front lawn was cast in silver ice and each blade of grass caught the morning sun a little differently, slicing the light into sparkling fragments that lingered in the sleepy eyes of those who were already awake on this early Sunday morning. A spider’s web at the corner of the porch sought to craft the frost into something more meaningful. The squirrels and birds were making the most of their remaining time before they would have to huddle away from the elements in burrows, or perhaps the attic of the house if they found a way in.
Breath coiled visibly in the air, some small bit of life escaping with every exhale passing cold, chapped lips.
A door opened, somewhere far away and the scent of frying bacon wafted out, a sacrifice to winter’s claws.
“Nick?”
Warm hands touched colder ones and withdrew for a moment, before clasping them.
“Jesus, you’re freezing. How long have you been out here?”
Crystalline shapes hovered just at the edges of my awareness, frost caught between lashes.
“Come inside. Tom’s making breakfast.”
Fingers raised in front. Snap.
I blinked rapidly, realizing that these comments had been directed at me.
“Um…”
Daria studied me closely with a look of obvious concern. Then she just grabbed my wrists and pulled me to my feet then led me back inside.
Stepping into a wave of warmth from inside was enough to thaw my awareness out of whatever sleep-deprived stupor I’d just been in.
Tom was showing Nell and Wire how to flip a pancake. AJ had discovered he could hook his feet into the alcove above the fridge and was doing hanging situps with punches between each rep. Neve was video chatting with Graham on her laptop while she pushed a pillow along the floor with her foot until it was below AJ.
“Nick!” Graham said, leaning closer to the screen. “Good to see you. I was just making sure your group knew about the change in government.”
I touched my hair absently and realized that the ends were frozen stiff.
“Hi Graham.” Something about my voice felt off. “I’m glad to see you too. What’s changed?”
“A no-confidence vote led to the prime minister’s resignation. The people demanded it. There were riots from coast to coast about how much our government had hidden from them. My fear is that the position will be filled by someone who exploits and aggravates the Shaper panic to gain power.”
Nell plated a stack of pancakes and set them down at the table.
AJ excitedly dropped into an attempted handstand that ended up with him smushing his face into the pillow. He popped up and grabbed the top half of the stack of pancakes with his hands to place on his plate.
Neve just rolled her eyes and handed him the syrup.
I had caught some of the headlines during our stay at the safehouse, but my memory was pretty foggy. Some places were demanding Shapers register themselves in the name of protecting ‘normal citizens’ and Canada wasn’t the only place where conflict had turned to violence. Many countries were turning inward, becoming insular as they dealt with scandals and conspiracies stemming from Shaping. The news was doing a terrible job of telling what was fake and what was legitimate, as online forums were flooded with footage and there was no surefire way to tell what was A.I. generated.
Nell’s made her presence known through our connection. A burst of emotions that my tired mind couldn’t read.
I just gave her a smile and sat down at the table. Soon everyone was seated and the table was cluttered with pitchers of milk and orange juice, crispy bacon, and fluffy pancakes.
The conversation washed over me as I bit into a warm, syrup-drenched pancake. Sweetness, warmth, and laughter drizzled onto my thoughts, coating everything in a comforting dreamy haze.
I’d lasted another night. I could relax.
…
It felt like I’d just closed my eyes for a second, but when I opened them again, the sunlight was coming from the opposite side of the house. Nell was sitting across from me, reading a book. It sounded like the rest of the group was either outside in the backyard or downstairs.
Another emotional bump from Nell, like she was just trying to elicit any reaction out of me. Then she sighed and placed the book down.
“Sorry.” The word just slipped out of my mouth.
She crossed her arms. “Why?”
“I dunno. Just… falling asleep a lot.” I gave her a self-deprecating smile.
She stared me down, unimpressed.
I stood. “I’ll do the dishes. Sorry for not being more helpful.”
“Don’t worry about that right now. Hey, have you heard of this book?” she asked, showing me the cover. On it was an odd-looking plant drawn in greens and reds. “It’s called the Voynich Manuscript.”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“It’s my favourite book that I’ve found since leaving Organ. This is just a scanned copy of the real deal. The original has an unknown origin. I can’t actually read any of the words. No one has been able to decipher what language it’s written in. It appears to be a manual of plants, but intriguingly,” she showed me a page with another illustration on it, “I don’t recognize a single one of them.”
“Huh. So it’s fiction?”
Nell shrugged. “No one knows. But sometimes I can’t help but imagine that it was written by another Witch. Someone who shared some of my experiences. A person that I could follow in the footsteps of.”
She stroked the cover fondly. “It’s just a fantasy, but I feel reassured thinking that someone’s been through what I have.”
“You said before that you wanted to change. I can see you’re serious about it.”
She smiled at me. “Very serious. I wanted to tell you about what that H.E.S.P. agent was talking to me about yesterday. There’s a small team of scientists that have been studying some of my work. They’re not Organ, don’t worry. They worked in the field of genetically modified plants and they’ve reached out because they have some ideas for projects that I could help with. Things that could really help people. Trees that produce drinkable water. Flowers that could repel insects. Food sources that would be resistant to the coming global climate changes.”
I smiled genuinely and it made my cheeks hurt. “That’s awesome.”
Nell’s eyes sparkled. “Yeah! It feels like I could do something similar to this book and make something entirely new and exciting.”
Then her smile faded. “There’s a project with some urgency starting. The flooding in eastern Asia has gotten really bad. People losing homes and livelihoods. The scientists think they could help. I’ve already thought of some ideas for plants with strong roots to shore up eroding land. But they would need me to travel for it.”
“Th- that’s cool.”
She stood and tucked the book under her arm. “Follow me for a sec?”
I complied, following her down the hallway towards the bedrooms. She stopped in front of the bathroom closest to my bedroom and pushed open the door.
There was a scratching sound of something rubbing against the other side of the door and it only swung halfway open before getting stuck.
Antlers bristled from within, like some strange outgrowth of thorny, leafless plants right in the middle of the bathroom. A few broken pieces rolled along the floor.
She raised an eyebrow as she asked, “Got an explanation for this one?”
I felt a pit in my chest as I shook my head. I didn’t remember doing this, but it didn’t surprise me either.
“Nothing? Are we sliding back to old habits? Hiding things from each other?”
My awareness of the pill bottle in the wastebin in my room burned like a brand in my head.
“The others are nice enough to not pry, but not me. I could just start guessing.” Her voice grew softer. “Is it the mirror that’s in there?”
It was hard to get the words out in even a whisper, “Yes and no.”
“C’mon Nick. Give me something more concrete than that. Why don’t you want my help?”
“I didn’t tell you because there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Nell just wordlessly let her displeasure spill out across our connection.
I sighed and felt the dampness of my thawing hair draped on my neckline.
“I picked up something in the manor, before you came. A… brain worm. Like an incorporeal Aberrant inside my head. It’s constantly trying to get to me. It makes all my bad thoughts so much worse, the guilt, the fear, the… body problems? I can’t sleep at night. It gets too loud, too close, like it’s breathing down my neck.”
Nell paused, horror on her face. “What the fuck, Nick?! You should have said something! That’s awful.”
I clenched my teeth together, swallowing the words that had risen unbidden: You decided to have a change of heart and now this curse is stuck with me.
Instead I exhaled and controlled my voice, “I’m really happy that you have this opportunity to do something new and exciting and restorative. It makes me feel worse knowing that I could hold you back from achieving this. So let me handle this.”
Nell’s eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”
“There’s a chance for me to pass it on. In about a week, there’s an event that I was invited to.”
“By who?”
“By… Chase.”
Nell’s presence suddenly felt huge, her emotions crowding up the hallway. I could almost feel the plants writhing in response outside the house.
“No. Fucking. Way,” she hissed. “You’re gonna blindly accept an invitation from the guy that unleashed the Crawling Skin?! That’s ridiculous. We don’t even know if that thing is really dead. It could be floating in space, waiting for something it can lash on to.”
I shivered at the thought.
“So?” I asked angrily. “What do you propose? Cause I know you don’t have the expertise with Shaping brains to cure me. And I know-” My hands shook as I grabbed Nell’s shoulders. “I just know if I let Chase run free, he’ll come back and hurt us when we least expect it. I might be walking into a trap, but at least I know he’s gonna be there. I can find him. I can give him this fucked-up thing in my head.”
Nell shook her head and pushed my hands away. “No! This is the dumbest thing you’ve ever suggested.”
I turned away from her, biting my tongue.
She quieted her voice, “Please, Nick. We can find a different solution. If you can just wait a bit longer, we can find someone to fix you.”
I shook my head. “I can’t. Something has to change or I’m gonna lose it.”
“Then I’ll help.”
I stared at the ceiling, tears pooling at the corners of my eyes. “You don’t mean that. I can tell. You said so yourself. You’re done with hurting people.”
Turning to face her, I said, “That’s good! I’m happy for you. I want to be done too. But I can’t. Not yet. I need to do this before I can join you.”
She was tearing up too. “You aren’t thinking straight. This is the brain-worm pushing you to do something drastic. We need to slow down and think about this carefully.”
“I don’t know if I can wait.”
She took my hand. “Please try? ‘Cause I promise you nothing good will come from taking the bait.”
The pads of Nell’s fingers felt like they were transmitting her sincerity directly, like a low electrical current. My heartbeat slowed. She was right, of course. It was a drastic decision. I took a deep breath and let it out.
“Okay,” I said softly. “I’ll try.”
“Thank you. I promise we’ll figure this out. I can message the group that I won’t make it to this project, maybe the next.”
She did her best to hide it, but I did feel the tremor of disappointment in our connection.
I set to work cleaning up the bathroom. The antlers had been out too long and I couldn’t absorb them anymore. So I just broke them into small pieces and left them outside in the yard. Then I wiped down all the surfaces in the bathroom, making sure that it was spotless. Getting the stains out of the bathtub was enjoyably difficult and let me work out some of my restless energy scrubbing.
The few blood drops that had landed on the carpet in my room were even more stubborn. I only managed to reduce their appearance to barely noticeable. It wasn’t like we were renting this place, but it bothered me all the same.
Afterwards I played catch with AJ and Tom in the backyard. We built the antlers up into a little figure we could take turns trying to hit from a distance. AJ tried catching the ball with his Shape and ended up wincing as the ball bounced off thin air. Tom tackled him and then let AJ wrestle his way on top. I laughed as Tom pretended to struggle against AJ, who was probably half his weight.
When our fingers got too numb to hold the ball, we came back inside.
Neve was talking with Wire about going on a shopping trip tomorrow to get some winter clothes. The shops weren’t open on Sunday, but tomorrow we’d be able to check out what the town had to offer.
After dinner, we cleared the table and played a board game where we were all some kind of goblin collecting loot from a medieval battleground. Some of the game pieces were missing so I made replacements out of antler. Neve kept having to scold Daria for cheating and AJ for moving pieces with his Shape when no one was looking. In the end, Tom won by a landslide and he looked mildly disturbed by the thought that his Shape could have been helping him win.
Nell suggested we stay up late watching movies which AJ was happy to join in on. We took all the cushions from the couch and combined them in a pile with pillows and quilts so that everyone could lie on the floor to watch.
The movies of choice were a trilogy of supernatural thrillers about a strange summer camp that were revealed to be run by benevolent demons just trying to learn about humanity. By the end of the first movie the campers were traumatized by the ‘harmless’ games the demons were running each night. Around the halfway mark of the sequel, where the demons decide to hire some human staff, I heard Neve start to snore.
One by one, my friends started to fall asleep, the volume turned low enough to be just a comforting drone in the background. AJ nodded and jerked upright, trying to stay awake, but even he succumbed to sleep eventually.
By the third act of the final movie, it was just Nell and I.
Nell’s eyes flitted between the screen and the book in her lap whenever one of them wasn’t holding her interest.
The campers decide that sending the demons home is the only thing that will stop them from continuing to traumatize kids at the camp. So they paint various parts of a pentagram on their bodies so that they can all join hands and trap the demons in the middle. By chanting the demons’ names, they send them back one by one, with tears in their eyes from all the time spent becoming their friends.
The credits rolled along a black screen and I turned to Nell.
Her chin rested against her chest that slowly rose and fell. I gently slid the book out of her lap while trying to ignore the thundering sound of my heart beating in my ears. I wedged another pillow in between us so that she wouldn’t fall over and wake up.
Something stood in the shadows in the corner of the room.
Don’t look.
I pushed myself up with trembling arms.
Don’t look.
My eyes watched the floor as I carefully stepped around limbs and sleeping faces in order to go up to the T.V. and turn it off.
The black glass showed me the reflection of the tall man that loomed over me. His teeth crowded out his mouth like an overfull graveyard as his head swung from his neck.
I jerked upright and hurried to the stairs. Something cracked behind me and I looked to see the shadow of the man standing over Nell, his fingers creaking as he pointed at her.
I fucking get it. So come here. Leave her alone.
My feet padded softly on the stairs and the sound of something coming up close behind me on too many feet made me miss a stair and bang my knee on the final step.
I pressed my forehead against the floor and bit my lip. It’d be so easy to let out a scream, to just wake my friends with some excuse and delay the panic rising in my throat just a little while longer.
But I just couldn’t do that.
I blindly stumbled in the dark, feeling the walls as I navigated to my room. Gasping, choking on nothing, I fell to my knees and felt around in the waste basket until my fingers closed around the plastic pill bottle.
Unscrewing the top, I emptied a single pill into my palm. Pale yellow in the dark, like an old tooth to tuck under my pillow.
Raising it to my lips, I dropped it onto my tongue and let it sit, the deep bitter taste filling my mouth.
Bones emerged from my neck, wrapping around my face, carefully woven into an intricate mask. Staring out of the eyeholes, I wondered what kind of fearful expression it made.
It was hard to swallow past the lump in my throat.
I coughed, tears forming as the pill sank into my gut.
Sorry Nell. I can’t wait any longer.