The Faceless Thing We Adore, page 25
Or.
My fingers twitch around the scissors in my pocket. The guests would take some of us down, but we’d buy time to end this on our terms.
It’s calm for now. Oscar’s offering the guests biscuits, Frida’s tossing her plaits and smiling, Larissa’s chatting. People watch, trying to look unthreatening. But we’re a few bedsheets away from final disaster. One gust of wind blowing the smell of rotting meat in the wrong direction, and we’re over.
One of the officers steps aside. I see the fourth figure, and it makes sickening sense.
Craig’s eyes meet mine.
I see the subtle shifts I’ve learned to read. Relief painted on, righteous anger hiding a more twisted rage. And underneath, where only I can see, a flicker of smugness.
Weird; even when I last saw him, there was love. Even as I walked away, he was my Craig, who kissed my neck and wrote me songs and sat with me on a suburban rooftop, spinning fantasies of world tours.
Now it’s like a veil’s torn away. There he is, laid bare.
It would be him. It fucking would be. Here to take the last, precious shreds of another thing I loved. Because that’s what he does.
“That’s her.” He speaks over the woman from the café, who’s elbowing one of the officers and saying something in the local language. Craig’s not running toward me, not calling my name, because this isn’t a rescue: This is revenge.
“What’s going on?” I have to keep their attention. If they’re there for me, it’s down to me to stop them. Who am I to do that? I’m so horribly small.
The waitress looks suspicious, of me and for me, weighing me up. “Your boyfriend reported you kidnapped.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I snap. When have I snapped before? I feel it inside me, fire, rot. I swallow it back. “I chose to come back here, and that’s not his business.”
One of the policemen grumbles something she doesn’t translate because it’s obvious: Oh great, another lovers’ row. He’s older, uniform straining like he rarely bothers with it, moustache unkempt.
The younger officer examines me. “Are you okay? You look sick.”
God, I can’t imagine. Pale, disheveled, unhinged. “A bit. Might be to do with someone dragging me around the island in the middle of the night.”
I want to look at the others, but one wrong move could send everything spiraling. One glance and they’ll wonder, am I afraid, am I hiding how badly I want rescue? So I glare at Craig. He keeps the smugness buried, but it shines out of his eyes. Gotcha.
The waitress crushes her cigarette in the sand. I twitch like she’s driven it into my flesh. I’ve seen plenty of Farmstead people do that, but this feels different, like deliberate pollution. “Would you like to talk to someone alone?”
Don’t go near the house. “If you want. I just want to go back to my nap.”
I dare to glance at Jonah, a little “sorry for all the stress” smile, the slightest eye roll. Part of me is laughing, delirious. I’m not acting exactly, but I am, and I am good at it. But I’m tightrope-walking, and if I fall, everything falls.
“This is bullshit.” Craig’s smugness falters. “She’s drugged, look at her. You’re not going to search the place? They killed a guy.”
That weird stirring in me strikes up again, but it doesn’t feel like sickness. It’s pleasure, rippling like music on strings.
I’m on the brink. This feeling I always denied is all I have left.
“You told them a lot of things, didn’t you?” I look Craig in the eye. “You’ll tell them anything if it means you get to drag me home, won’t you? Because when I’m not paying your bills and making your bed, you realize you can’t look after yourself?” Even teetering above disaster, it feels good to say this. Something pounds in me, louder and louder. “Or because when I’m not around to tell you you’re special, you realize you’re not?”
Craig only snaps for a second. But in that second, he steps forward, fist raised, and that’s what everybody sees.
The older policeman puts a hand on Craig’s arm, sharing a look with Jonah, before chuckling something to the waitress.
Teresa translates, fixing a crooked smile on Craig. Her voice is dry, clarity born from desperation; you’d never guess the broken thing she’d been these past hours. “He says they’re not a free service for getting your ex back.”
The tension snaps. The waitress and the young policeman laugh, and Jonah and Frida laugh too. I shape my smile carefully to match theirs.
“I think it’s okay,” the young policeman says. “If you come back to the village soon so we can see you’re safe?”
Hope gleams. They don’t want trouble; Oscar’s money, Teresa’s relatives. And there’s two officers, dozens of us. They don’t want to find anything. “Of course. If you make sure he”—I jerk my head at Craig, smile apologetically—“leaves me alone.”
The waitress’s face is still suspicious, but there’s warmth, too, solidarity. The young policeman eyes us all, earnest, but knows the deal. Out here, we’re the law.
Only Craig doesn’t accept it.
He gives me that look that comes before something I care about, a sketch, a gift, a friendship, is wrecked. He rips his arm away from the policeman and shouts, “Fuck this!”
And he’s striding up the beach, crossing the short distance to the farmhouse, the hanging sheets.
“Not even going to look?” Craig shouts, as everyone moves to cut him off, hands moving to hidden weapons. “They told me the police here were lazy, but this is something fucking else.”
“Stop!” I yell, and that’s the wrong move, I’ve fucked it up, again, but it’s too late now. “I’ll come with you.”
Craig’s eyes find mine and flare with triumph. He’s seen my gaze flash to the sheet. That’s his goal now.
When I love something else, he breaks it.
I expect fists and knives, but Jonah’s shaking his head. Show that we’re hiding something, and it ends the same.
Jonah looks resigned. Jonah, defeated. There will be blood on the sand soon. There will be bodies and silence in the groves tonight.
The bubbling in my veins escalates, something stretching through my sinews. No.
Craig rips the sheets aside.
CHAPTER FORTY
UNFURL
THERE THEY ARE.
Two trees smeared with blood. Two bodies mangled beyond recognition. Half-concealed under a kicked-aside sheet, a sigil drawn in organ and bone. The words what have we done rendered in gore and gristle.
There’s absolute stillness.
A calm comes over me. It’s like my awareness is spread out. I see everything, feel everything.
The older policeman breathes a local swearword; the younger one’s struggling not to throw up. The waitress swallows a moan of horror. My friends, family, exchange glances, seeing through strangers’ eyes how monstrous we’ve become.
Craig, though? The shock hasn’t hit him. Maybe there will be horror and disgust later, but right now his face sings with vindication.
He knows he shouldn’t smile. He wouldn’t get away with that.
Golden sunset through thin clouds, the trees stirring, not with the wind. Something thrumming in the soil, waves crashing with more urgency. Shock rippling out through the island, like it’s seeing this for the first time, too.
Not shock. I know what’s spilling and spreading. It’s coming from me.
It’s rage.
I had something beautiful. I was quiet all those years, let the anger simmer deep, under layers of fragile daydreams. But then there was something better, something beautiful, and it was rotten and dangerous, and it unraveled brutally, but it was mine and I was happy. It is not theirs to take. It is ours, to destroy or to somehow save.
I never allowed myself rage. It wasn’t for me. I didn’t know how to hold it, just embarrassed myself with it. But now there’s nothing else and a lifetime of fury rises.
It chimes with the stirring inside me.
The stirring of the thing that’s lurked in my core, feeding on swallowed anger and pain, waiting to emerge.
The thing I misread as sickness, emotion, hunger. The thing that was perfectly disguised by the turmoil, hidden in plain sight.
It wakes up. It unfurls.
Once the universe was infinitesimally small. An expanse of fire and gas and light coiled up tiny. Think: We all contain universes, safe inside our skulls. Bend the rules and why couldn’t you compress something vaster than galaxies and hide it inside a girl’s body?
In the dark, as the cave collapsed, there was a door in me, and I chose to open it. I let it in. In the chaos, I snatched up something half-awakened and took it into myself for safekeeping.
Even now it’s still newborn, hatching bloody out of my ribcage and belly and spreading its wings.
Sort of. Those aren’t exactly wings, just like those aren’t quite tendrils, eyes, or any of the things they see. It, I, it is me and I am it; it isn’t something human senses can process. Their visions draw angels and monsters so that they can half-comprehend it. Me.
I’m as much the ground under their feet and the branches above them, the air in their lungs and blood, as I am the creature they perceive. I’m stretching, it’s flexing, through everything. Spreading, finding its way through matter.
Reality flickers, struggling to adjust to something it wasn’t made to contain.
All of this is me, all of this is mine. Mine to play with. To break.
Lives are bright, pulsing things, the panicked flutter of hearts, the dance of electricity inside cells, the glorious expanse of minds, wonderful constructions of energy. So many laid out in front of me. So much to toy with.
I am new and I am hungry. And I am so, so angry.
Angry enough to go slow.
Once there was a boy, and I was afraid of him; I thought that was what love was. But what is a boy, really? Muscle and organ and tattooed skin, neurons and nerves. What is a boy’s body but a temporary arrangement of energy? Energy is neutral.
Energy is food.
I take the time to explore him first.
I swim through his veins, nestle in his lungs and guts, see the world through his eyes, feel the plunge of terror as the world reveals something he was never ready to see. Such a breakable, fascinating thing, a boy’s body, a boy’s mind.
Desire creeps through everything. This will be an intimate, indulgent death. The last beats of a heart I once slept with my ear to, seeking the sound of home.
I understand those jolts of energy, the rushes of emotions that weren’t mine. The presence inside me was feeding, growing fat off grief and dread and desperation, growing greedy for more. I just take more this time. I take it all.
I whisper inside his skin, Despite it all, I love you, and I unravel him.
He howls as he comes apart, unspooling, and I draw him in with relish, waves of sound and light, dissolving him and delivering him into the air and soil, into my core. The stuff that made up Craig Bauer returns to the stuff that makes up the world, and I drink it, body and mind, an exquisite elixir.
So tenderly. Shhh. I bring him home.
His terror persists for a moment, then there is nothing. He pumps through me like a drug, and the groan of ecstasy rings through everything. I’m laughing and laughing beyond sound; look at this. Craig finally made me happy.
But this newborn thing is hungry, still.
More.
The burly policeman is on his knees, sobbing; he knows the legends. He whispers a name in an ancient tongue, and I say yes, and he surrenders his body. If Craig was hot and sharp and sour, this morsel is stolid and warm. Their tastes mingle, and everything shivers with pleasure.
The younger officer bolts for the boat, but poor thing, space expands and contracts at my will. His screams are gifts taken in gratefully; the rest of him goes with them.
I pulse, drunk on flesh and despair. The sea sighs, the wind moans.
I am half-seen, moving, there and not there, aglow. A human is a potent little thing, and inside me they are transmuted into power, shuddering and ready.
The waitress didn’t bother to run, or believe, just shut down. I like her. Cynical and rude and tired, but not unkind. She brought me a lemonade when I was trapped. I desire her, too; I can make beautiful things of her matter, soak her up like sun on leaves and let her flower somewhere. But instead, I whisper Go, tell them all to stay away, and she runs.
I could keep going, gorge myself. But there’s time. To savor the feast laid out before me, a feast shaped like a world.
For now, I am sated, and I know what to do with this thundering power.
I flow, find what I’m seeking, pour out the energy of three lives and get to work.
Bones knit together. Ruptured flesh solidifies, dried blood liquefies, feeding insects come apart and give back what they’ve taken. Skulls heal, eyes settle back into sockets, organs squirm into place and the fluids spilled from them rise from the hungry earth. Brains regrow their folds. Ribcages close back around lungs and hearts, and there, heartbeats, breath, life.
What is a girl’s body but cells and atoms? So easy to rebuild.
And there are two girls under the trees now, a snub-nosed girl staring with huge eyes, a freckled girl screaming, stunned, whole, alive.
Not everything can be undone. Sage is dissipated through dozens of bodies, burned away as energy. Where or what Myri is now, I don’t yet understand.
But I return two lives, the first of my gifts.
And now my own body is my focus, singing an unfamiliar pleasure as the thing that hid inside me slides back in, neat as a hand into a pocket, and flesh heals up around it.
Hello, I say to my new self, as it snuggles back into the hidden spaces in my depths, delivering the nutrients of its feast into my blood. I feel it, throbbing, electric.
I look up.
My whole family is on their knees, faces pressed into the sand, or arms flung to the sky, shining eyes, eyes that dare to stare at me, or don’t dare, averted, dripping tears.
They’re chanting, exultant, crying: Adore, Unseen, surrender.
My consciousness disintegrates, and I fall onto the sand.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
VESSEL
I WAKE AMONG FLOWERS WITH THUNDER IN MY BONES AND LIGHTNING IN MY nerves.
I do not know who or what I am.
I lie on sand. The flowers are monstrously huge: roses and frangipani the size of my head, fist-sized jasmine. Hideous, vast hibiscus and lilies pile over my belly and breasts.
Things move among them. Insects, snakes, weirder things. I feel them as though the petals are my skin. My shiver is confused pleasure, gathering in the hot flesh at the core.
Stars spread like pollen. More than before.
All is thrumming potential, dreamlike and soporific. My smile is wider than a smile should be.
I savor a strange tenderness, pliability, in my body. My perception spreads into the sand and trees and air. I could mold them too, like putty.
There are screams, intimately close. Resounding in the hollows and passageways between my collarbone and pelvis, from the flowers and stars.
Distressed and disintegrating, lost in a labyrinth. My body is a labyrinth. My body is soil and sea and flowers and starlight, and they are a labyrinth. The energy that was people is rich; its struggles to remember itself feel like a luscious caress. The labyrinth giggles and stretches in bliss.
I could name those teasing flutters in my flesh. Two were men who tried to enforce human order, bless them, against the universe’s unknowns. One was a boy who adored making someone small in his shadow. One was a girl who was small in his shadow but she stepped into the light and—
My mind coalesces. I open the labyrinth’s mouth and shriek.
The flowers scream. The ocean screams. The stars scream.
I jolt up, and I’m yelling, “Craig!” and there’s no answer; no, worse, there’s an answer, pleading shudders through my flesh and flickers among the trees, he isn’t gone, he’s in me, the screams are light and the shaking ground, and my mouth, oh god, opens wider than a mouth can and I still can’t scream loudly enough—
The scream dies. The remnants of Craig and my other meals fall still.
In the stillness, an alien euphoria rises. My mind’s terror; my body’s bliss. The contrast screeches, broken.
Pleasure eases in the understanding.
The Unseen.
The Unseen is in me, and the petals rustle, the weird pain of something feeding on a stem. Stars dance on my skin and the Unseen is awake and free.
The ritual worked.
The Unseen was released, and sought a place to hide from the tumult, and I welcomed it into me. It waited dormant, tangled up with my buried fury. When that fury burst, it woke.
Awe. Horror. Joy. I want to run and run, building energy like a storm, the beauty of this is so much vaster than I will ever grasp and I’m scared, oh god, I’m scared.
How to hold something this vast? I’m so small. I fuck up everything, I—
A force raises my hands; is it me? My fingers stretch, spindly. Shadows move under my skin, my flesh growing translucent.
I gasp in revulsion, and my hands return to normal, easy as molding clay. And through my parted fingers, I see that I’m not alone.
Distressed and intoxicated by the new workings of my body, I hadn’t seen Jonah. But now I’m viscerally aware of him, in new ways.
I’m knitted into him. I’m the air slipping through the membranes of his lungs, the blood caught in the satisfying thud of flesh in his heart. I crackle through his brain; that electric shudder is his thoughts.
A disgusting, overwhelming, fascinating communion.
Jonah’s afraid, too. It’s written in the throbbing of his body.
He’s cross-legged on a rock, staring. When I look at him, panic spasms; he bows his head, like suddenly it’s dangerous to behold me.
“Jonah.” My voice is thunder and subtle music. It’s too much. We both wince.
