It Will Just Be Us, page 27
“Julian!” I shout, my voice ragged, as I let go of Clementine and kneel on the edge of the river, searching the dark water for a trace of him. He cannot be gone. He cannot be gone. I cannot return home without even his body to give back to Elizabeth. My heart hurts with a thousand shards of ice piercing it through, mourning not for Julian or the life he would have lived, not really, but for Elizabeth, for my sister, for what she has lost this night.
I try to reach into the water, but the cold is so profound that it shocks my fingers at once, almost like a shock of heat, the way something can be so cold that it feels hot again, confusing our nerves. I try again, but it’s no use; my hand aches dreadfully when I plunge it into the water, and Julian is nowhere besides. That is how I will lose the tip of my pinkie finger.
Then, thinking he has floated farther out to the center of the river, I trace my eyes along the surface, and I remember now the story of the Swamp Witch.
For I see her there, reflected in the water—her true, unfathomable form, beset by those blazing orange eyes that are not eyes, that stare out from an impossible face, from a face that is not a face.
Mercifully, that reflected figure begins to ripple, distorting the terrors that have been burned into my own eyes, and then the ripples grow larger and more insistent still, and at the center the water bubbles up like a fountain. Somewhere below, a shape is rising to the surface.
When it breaks the surface, Julian is there, rising from the water. He seems to float there, dripping little plinks of water back to the river, but I know, when I manage to chance a fleeting glance below, that he is not really hovering there, no, not really, but that she is holding him as if he is her own.
It is all so terrible, I think, my nephew’s corpse floating there in the arms of the witch, Clementine standing beside me, watching eagerly, and I think this is it, I cannot bear any more of this, I will leave him to these creatures and wander deeper into the swamp to die. My brain has just reached this conclusion, filling my heart with cold despair, with sick resolution, with the unthinkable, when the unthinkable has its way with me again.
Julian begins to cry.
EPILOGUE
Many years have flown by since that day, yet it feels as if no time at all has passed.
I would like to tell you this story ends with Elizabeth’s joyful reunion with her son, whom she raises into a fine young man while becoming the extraordinary mother she was always destined to be. I would like to tell you this story ends with those visions of the faceless boy dissolving, replaced now by a happy, smiling child.
I would like to tell you those things, but I am afraid to do so would be to tell another lie. If that is the way you want this story to end, then I will not stop you from pretending. Sometimes pretending is all we have.
* * *
It took me another hour to find my way back home that night. By then I was nearly catatonic, but Julian was safe and warm in my arms. When I made my triumphant return at dawn, I went all through the house searching for my mother and Elizabeth, calling out to them, expecting them to be tucked away in bed or huddling before the fire.
But I found them in the very room where I had left them. My mother sat at Elizabeth’s bedside, incoherently drunk, an empty bottle at her feet and tearstains on her cheeks.
Elizabeth lay, cold, pale, and still, an enormous amount of blood drying around her.
That is how my mother and I came to raise Julian.
We tried to love him; truly, we did. I thought if only I loved him enough, then I could save him. We tried to love him, even when he started killing frogs from the swamp, even when he spoke to ghosts who weren’t there, even when he insisted on sleeping in the room at the end of the hall. Who knows what he saw there—whether he ever stepped through that dark hole and saw what lay on the other side of the universe. Whether he was forced to watch his mother slowly bleeding to death in his very bed, over and over.
And how could I continue to love him when he said his mother still lived in the swamp? Even when I told him she was buried at the county cemetery, when I took him to her grave, he insisted his real mother lurked in the trees, with eyes made of fire.
Eventually my mother grew too ill, mentally and physically, for me to continue taking care of her while teaching full-time and caring for Julian besides, so I settled her into a lovely retirement home in the next town over, where she rediscovered the joy of other people and was able to cast off the worst of her social anxieties. I was very happy for her, that she had finally found a place to be at ease aside from this rambling old mansion where she had lived her whole life, but nevertheless, moving her out left me here alone. With Julian.
I have tried to leave this place, you know. But whenever I am out, I find myself stepping through doors that lead right back here, to the house. It won’t let me go.
He won’t let me go either.
It took me a long time to realize that whatever the witch took from him when she lifted him out of that water was something he could never get back. All the love in the world couldn’t get it back.
I won’t go into all the details, all the minor brutalities he unleashed on me, and all the greater ones beside. I have let it happen—have let him push me down and stomp my hands, have let him confine me to this chair, and when I talked too loudly for his liking, I let him glue my lips shut too, over and over again. I think soon he will do something to stop me looking; he does not like the way I stare at him, laughing quietly to myself as I realize the truth.
There was always something familiar about the old woman with Xs for eyes—something familiar about her face that I simply could not place. I think I would have recognized her sooner if only I hadn’t smashed all the mirrors.
But I did smash the mirrors. And I did bring Elizabeth to that cursed room. And I did give Julian up to the witch when I couldn’t bear to look at his cold dead face.
It is only in hindsight that I have come to realize the truth of it—come to see all my failures over the years made fresh in the memories of the house, laid out in a tapestry of disappointment, each attempt at atonement thwarted by the boy who has been to the other side of death and come back as something else—and I know, somewhere deep in my heart, that it wasn’t Donovan, after all, who made him what he is.
ALSO AVAILABLE BY JO KAPLAN
(writing as Joanna Parypinski)
Dark Carnival
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Jo Kaplan writes and teaches in the Los Angeles area with much encouragement from her husband and two cats. Her fiction (as Joanna Parypinski) has appeared in Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, Haunted Nights edited by Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton, New Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark edited by Jonathan Maberry, Vastarien, the Nightscript series, and publishers such as Chizine and Independent Legions. She teaches English and creative writing at Glendale Community College, where she also plays cello in the GCC orchestra.
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Joanna Parypinski
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64385-449-6
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-64385-450-2
Cover design by Melanie Sun
Printed in the United States.
www.crookedlanebooks.com
Crooked Lane Books
34 West 27th St., 10th Floor
New York, NY 10001
First Edition: August 2020
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Jo Kaplan, It Will Just Be Us
