The Narrows, page 18
Oliver was thankful for the light conversation as they drove. Somehow, now that they were fast approaching their thirties, driving around their hometown reminiscing about the past was a nostalgic event in and of itself.
After half a minute of silence, Ash leaned over and whispered to Oliver, “If we get Eric’s gem back, that means we could save him too, right?”
Eric’s blank face, floating and slightly bloated in the filled drainage ditch, flashed across Oliver’s mind. The guy seemed too far gone, but Noah was dead and buried in the ground. If he was holding out hope that they could revive Noah, then why not Eric, too?
He nodded. “I think so,” he said. “But I can’t be sure.”
A small smile graced Ash’s face and she leaned back toward the window.
For the remainder of the drive, Oliver daydreamed about what his own gem looked like.
~
At Oliver’s behest, Davontae parked on the other side of the neighborhood, next to his car, though no one was happy to learn that they’d be required to walk several blocks over.
Everyone piled out of the car, bracing against a harsh wind. All of them were bundled up in dark-colored jackets and hoodies. Sophia had slipped a jacket over her sweatpants and pajama shirt, obviously not having anticipated the night being anything more than a late-hours trip to Waffle House to perhaps console a mourning friend.
“This sucks,” she said, teeth chattering.
“It’s only gonna get shittier,” Oliver said.
“Maybe I’ll stay in the car.”
He grinned and asked, “Do you have the earplugs?”
Sophia answered by pulling a plastic baggie out of her hoodie’s front pocket, filled halfway with tiny purple cylinders. She shook it in the air, jostling the earplugs.
“What do we need those for?” Davontae asked. He was still huddled by the driver’s side door, hunched over in a feeble attempt to conserve warmth.
“You’ll see. Trust me, you’ll want ’em. Ash, do you—”
“Can we get moving?” Sophia asked, shifting in place, trying to generate her own heat. “Walk and talk, walk and talk.”
“In a second. Ash, do you have what I asked you to bring?”
“Of course,” she said, then flashed her gun with a grin on her face.
Davontae and Sophia were taken aback. The former uttered a surprised swear while the latter stopped moving.
“You were carrying a gun the whole time?” Davontae sputtered.
“Yeah.”
“That ain’t cool, man! What if we’d gotten pulled over?”
“I’m licensed, relax. And I could’ve just shot the cop, no problem. ACAB.”
Oliver chuckled, then said, “If the knave tries to fuck with us, I think we’ll need some firepower. Ash is the only person I know who could provide it.”
“Ah, so I was just invited to the party by default,” Ash said. “A pity invite. You just like me for my gun.”
“Exactly right, you nailed it,” Oliver laughed, surprising himself. Everything had felt so grim only an hour before. The situation was still exceedingly grim, but his friends’ presence was helping to lighten his mood. There was still anxiousness, but of a different sort. An excited anxiousness rather than one of stress or hopelessness.
I think we can pull this off.
“Okay, well, can we get going?” Sophia asked again, clearly uncomfortable with the firearm. Oliver knew she’d never been around one before—he hadn’t either, before the other day with Ash—but there was no time to put her at ease. Hopefully Ash wouldn’t need to use it, but if she did, they would all be appreciative of it later.
They set off toward the back of the neighborhood, for the last row of houses that backed up to the empty field and drainage ditch. It wasn’t where the knave’s house was located, but Oliver thought it might be the place where the “distance” between their world and the Narrows was shortest, making it easier to cross over. It was only a theory, but he didn’t have much else to go on.
Nobody spoke as they marched through the darkened streets, illuminated by sparse streetlights and the pale moon. Colorful Christmas lights were strung up along the rooftops, and Oliver was eerily reminded of the knave’s collection.
Ash’s demeanor seemed to have mellowed out again, and Oliver was sure she was contemplating Eric’s fate. She stared at the ground as they walked, her face scrunched up in thought. He hoped she wouldn’t harbor a grudge against him for withholding the information for a week, but he wouldn’t blame her if she did.
Davontae and Sophia both felt uneasy sneaking around behind peoples’ houses, but Oliver ushered them along and finally they all came to a halt in the field, standing together in a misshapen circle. Oliver stood across from Ash, the ditch at her back, with Davontae and Sophia positioned on either side of him.
“Okay,” Oliver said, mostly as an effort to soothe himself. “This is where you guys will need the earplugs.” Sophia extracted the baggie from her pocket and began to distribute them as he spoke. “When we cross over, there’s gonna be a buzzing sound, and it’s gonna be really fucking loud. That’s what the plugs are for, to drown them out.” He shook his head, declining Sophia’s offer of earplugs as she handed some toward him.
“How will we talk to each other?” Davontae asked.
Shit.
He hadn’t considered that. Either the earplugs would drown out any communication, or the droning would. The knave had taught him how to cross into the otherworld, but not how to eliminate the horrible buzz of the Narrows. He then began to wonder if the effects of the knave’s touch would even still last when he returned. He may very well be debilitated too.
The three stared at Oliver, awaiting a solution.
All he could offer them was, “I dunno.”
“Great,” Sophia sighed. Her teeth still chattered and her nose was a light red hue.
“Do any of you know sign language?” Ash asked.
“No. Do you?” asked Davontae.
“Well, no.”
“Shit,” Oliver said out loud this time.
“Whatever, man, we’re just gonna have to deal,” Davontae said, fiddling with his earplugs, squishing each one with his index fingers and thumbs. “We’ll point and wave our hands and shit. There ain’t nothin’ else we can do, unless someone brought pads of paper and four pens.”
“We don’t have notepads, but we could type on our phones, maybe?” Sophia suggested.
Oliver shook his head. “That might work if we really need it to, but I think it’d take too long to type and we might have to waste time passing phones around to read them, which would not work well in a pinch. Let’s keep it in mind, though. I don’t have any better ideas.”
“Just do the hand-gun gesture at something and I’ll shoot it,” Ash said.
“Believe me,” Oliver said, “you’ll know what to shoot when you see it.”
They all nodded. That direction was easy enough.
“We’ll all be looking for Noah’s gem when we’re in there. I have an idea of where the knave’s storing it, but I might be wrong, so we’ll all need to look. Just wave your hand around when you find it. You’ll be able to feel him if it’s his, there won’t be any uncertainty.”
“I never met the guy,” Ash pointed out.
“It doesn’t matter, you’ll know anyway. I’ve never even heard of Elizabeth Ren, but I recognized her gem.” No one asked him to explain who Elizabeth was. They were all too cold and nervous to care.
“Then what, once we get it?” Sophia asked.
“Then we get the fuck outta there, run back here, and cross over again. I think the knave is too weak to fully cross over itself, that’s why it needed me to get Christopher Pedraza’s gem. It can appear here, but not really interact with anything. Once we’re back in this world, we’ll be safe.”
“You sure about that?” Davontae asked.
“Pretty sure,” said Oliver.
His friend sighed. “That’s good enough, I guess,” he smirked.
“It’s gotta be,” Oliver said, “because it’s all I’ve got.”
~
Any other more-complicated communication would have to be sussed out in the moment. There was no time to deliberate and think up gestures for every single thing they could potentially want to convey.
Oliver instructed each of them to insert their earplugs, then to all place a hand somewhere on his body. Davontae looked dubious, skeptical that any of it was real or would work, but he relented and wrapped his hand around Oliver’s upper arm. Sophia did the same, and Ash placed her palm flat against his chest.
“Y’all ready?” he asked. His words were muffled in their ears, but they could all still hear him fairly clearly and nodded their heads.
Just before they put their earplugs in, he had explained the weightlessness and flattening sensation they would feel as they entered the Narrows so that no one would be too alarmed. Some amount of alarm was expected and warranted.
He glanced around the circle at them, and saw that Davontae’s skepticism had understandably spread across the entire group.
“You might wanna close your eyes,” he told them. They obliged.
He clamped his eyes shut as well and began to visualize the Narrows. He saw the crumbling buildings, the death-filled sky, the piles and piles of glittering gemstones in the knave’s home. He saw the knave’s wicked grin, its sharp teeth glistening as its arm slithered into his mouth, stretched open, cracking, snapping.
Sophia and Ash both gasped in surprise the same moment a tingle scurried up his legs. It had to be working for them too, though Davontae remained quiet. The prickling enveloped him, enveloped them all, and Sophia uttered a soft, “Fuck, fuck.”
Suddenly he felt like he was being squashed by a spatula, his body seeming to mutate into something that was distinctly not him, until it stopped as abruptly as it had started.
He opened his eyes and saw the Narrows.
Everyone else rightly made the assumption that, now that their bodies had stopped doing whatever the hell they were doing, they could open their eyes. They looked around in awe at their surroundings, and Oliver granted them a minute to soak it all in, to try to accept it.
Sophia’s eyes widened and her hands covered her mouth as she rotated around, absorbing everything within sight. She blinked rapidly, as if to dispel some sort of illusory magic, to banish whatever hallucination she was experiencing, but the Narrows remained. She was speechless.
Ash, however, was not. “Holy shit,” she gasped, placing her hands on her head. She swung her head side to side, flinging her ponytail around. “Gross. Gross.” Her gaze was locked on the decrepit houses that ostensibly belonged to her neighbors. She took a step forward, crunching the dead grass underfoot.
“Fuck me,” Davontae muttered, his eyes wider than Oliver had ever seen them in over a decade of knowing him. “It ain’t bullshit.” He stood motionless, his hands in his pockets, mumbling more swear words to himself as he gaped at the haze on the horizon.
While everyone else gawked, Oliver scanned their surroundings in search of Orrum. Facing an Eidolon was not something any of them were prepared for; they likely weren’t even ready to face something as small as the knave. But the ghastly monster was nowhere to be found.
Luckily, the buzzing had not come back; whatever the knave had done to his ears had permanently cured him. That, or its effects lasted more than a few hours.
“Can you hear me at all?” he asked as a test.
Whether she had accurately read his lips or simply assumed what he’d asked, Ash shook her head. Davontae and Sophia followed suit.
It was unfortunate, and Oliver felt foolish for not realizing it’d be a problem despite his foresight to request that Sophia bring earplugs, but he was confident they would be able to make it work. They would have to.
It was another minute before everyone could rein in their bewilderment and focus on the task at hand. Once they were all looking at him, Oliver turned on his heel and started toward the knave’s house.
“Here we go,” he said, though no one could hear him anyway. “Let’s get this over with.”
~
“Why are you doing this for me?” Noah asked him in his head as they walked.
“Because I don’t want to lose what we had.”
“Hadn’t we already lost it?”
“I don’t know. But maybe I can save it.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But maybe.”
~
Oddly, a sense of calm washed over Oliver as he and his band marched through the deserted streets of Not-Shumard Springs. The haze was in the distance, obscuring his view of anything at all beyond the neighborhood, adding to its otherworldliness.
He felt a tap on his shoulder that almost made him jump. He turned and saw the group had stopped, and it was Davontae who had gotten his attention.
Davontae pointed at his own ears and said, too loudly, “Does the noise go away?”
Oliver shook his head.
“Then why don’t you need these?” Pointing at his ears still, referring to the plugs.
Oliver shrugged. Easier than attempting to pantomime a more accurate explanation.
But there was one piece of information he needed to get across. If they were going to be sneaking up on the knave at its own abode, they needed to be way quieter. Oliver mouthed some gibberish while simultaneously opening and closing his hand in front of his mouth. He then flattened his palm and lowered his hand toward the ground. He hoped the message you are talking too loudly was understood. Everyone nodded.
They resumed their journey. The knave’s home was now in sight, and that calmness Oliver had felt was starting to slip away. He suddenly felt very ill-prepared. Winging things was never his style, and their improvisation skills would need to be in peak form.
Oliver led the group behind the first of the houses on the knave’s street. Once everyone had ducked around the side of the house, he looked at them all and pointed over his shoulder, then held up four fingers. Four houses down.
They nodded and awaited further instruction. Ash’s right hand was stuffed in her jacket pocket, presumably wrapped around the gun’s grip. Ready to go.
The only idea Oliver could formulate without the group’s input—though he wasn’t sure how much assistance he would’ve gotten anyway, given they knew nothing about the Narrows or the knave—was to travel along the backside of the houses, hop the fence, and break through the back door. Even if the knave was in there, it might not be expecting an appearance from anyone, and especially not from the back of the house.
It was worth a shot. Nothing else sprang to mind.
He motioned for them to follow. The group trailed shortly behind as they made their way from one house to the next, finally coming to the knave’s.
Its fence was in unsurprisingly terrible shape, with a number of boards broken, rotten, or missing entirely. Oliver pressed a finger into one that was mostly unbroken, and it sank in like he was poking a wet sponge. The plank oozed a clear, viscous slime from the crater he had made.
Hopping this would be a bad idea, he thought, knowing that putting the smallest amount of weight on the fence would cause it to immediately collapse. Should be easy to tear them away and make an opening, though.
He gripped the top of the wooden plank with both hands and pulled on it. The wood (if that’s what the substance even was) tore away with ease, falling apart to mush in his hands. Disgusted yet fascinated, he squeezed the pieces of wood in his fists. It was as soft as mashed potatoes and conformed to his grip, its moisture leaking out between his fingers, dribbling down to the pale grass. A harsh, fetid stench was released and he dropped the material, kicking it away, covering his nose with his arm.
His friends similarly shielded their nostrils, Sophia coughing out a muffled swear. But each of them quickly got to work tearing down their own plank, each one in a row, to make a sufficiently-sized opening to slide through. Oliver continued working on his own board, nearly retching as the smell grew stronger with each piece that was stripped away.
They stepped back to admire their handiwork. The smell was beginning to somewhat dissipate, but it was still fairly pungent and mixed with the death-smell that the house exuded.
He turned to his friends and saw they were all already looking to him for guidance. His heart swelled.
“Ready?” he asked.
They understood and nodded.
Oliver turned back to the house with its caved-in roof and bare windows. Climbing in through those would probably be their best bet, to avoid being heard by the opening and closing of the door.
With the plan in mind, he set it to motion.
He crept through the dead backyard, vacant save for a rusty swing set close to the fence on their left side. The chains creaked as they drifted in the gentle breeze. His calm had completely dissolved by the time he reached the glassless window situated farthest from the back door.
With some effort (mentally noting he really should start going to the gym if he made it out of here alive), Oliver hoisted himself up off the ground and through the dusty rectangle. He perched on the pane, scouring the hallway for what they had to work with.
The wall’s paint had peeled like a gangrenous scab. There were some gems scattered throughout the hall, but it was not overrun like a large portion of the house; there was at least enough room to drop down without jostling any. He pushed through to drop as lightly as he could manage and landed with a soft thud on the carpet, pausing to listen for any sign of the knave. When he heard nothing, he gesticulated for the others to follow.
The first to enter was Ash. Her stomach scraped against the building as she clambered through the window, and Oliver internally panicked about the gun misfiring in her jacket, but given his total lack of knowledge about firearms he didn’t know if that was an actual possibility. Regardless, she dropped down beside him without any misfortune. She flashed him a brief reassuring smile before moving out of Sophia’s way, thumping a few gems with her feet in the process.
