Skyglass: Chapter 4

MOSS

I willed my eyes open. I had to get up. I didn’t want Marko to find me like this, in a halo of vomit. He would worry, and panic, and then insist on carrying me to the van. Which would really piss me off.

“Help me up,” I croaked to Phoenix. I didn’t want her assistance, but I needed it.

She wiped my drool-smeared face clean with her bare hands, then leaned down ’til we were nose-to-nose. “You need sleep, and a big bowl of fructose and grease.”

“Please,” I said. After a breath, I added, “Marko’s gonna be back soon,” hoping I wouldn’t have to explain.

“Ah,” she said, and hauled me up by the scruff of my hood. Ignoring her lack of clothing, I leaned on her until my legs felt usable. I straightened. Breathed once, twice. Took a step, didn’t wobble.

I made it to the passenger’s seat of Marko’s van without stumbling, and managed to shut the door and control my gasping before he and Phoenix climbed in. “Thanks,” I said. “For loading everything.”

“Piss on that,” Mark said with a grin. “Thank you. For the show. Not that you were performing for me, obviously, I mean…uh… Yeah. Obviously. But anyway, you guys were great, despite, you know…” His hands tightened on the wheel.

I was glad for the darkness of my hood. He couldn’t see how snarly my hair was with sweat, how tight my jaw was. I wrapped my fingers around a pair of sticks to keep them from shaking.

Behind me, Phoenix let out a snort. “Yeah, yeah, stop pissing at the mouth, Marko. Pour too much sugar in his ears and he might just rot from the inside out.”

“I’m just being honest,” he muttered, but shut his mouth and started the van. He eased it out through the canopy and into the busy airways of Raith.

I pressed my forehead against the window. All I wanted was to be alone–to find equilibrium after the hype of the show, regain control, and drag myself through this weak spell in the dark of my own room. I needed time away from everyone, but knew that I wouldn’t get it. Phoenix lived in my own rotting apartment, too close, too constant. She was relentlessly suspicious. Pretending got tiresome, so I didn’t really bother around her anymore.

But being honest all the time wore me down, too. I longed for the apartment I’d once had–mine, and mine alone. The windowless, unoccupied guest room, for the times when even the green murk of my room got to be too much, when I could drag all my bedding into the empty room and sleep beneath ten layers of inner and outer darkness. It was all gone. I’d lost it when Phoenix had installed herself and a fireplace into the guest room.

Ha. Guest room. If only.

Later that night, while Phoenix slept in her stolen space and Raith was as dark as it ever got, I went to the Gut, where I kept my casket. The walk was long, but I wanted silence and solitude, and the old, broken astro-coffin was the only way I was going to get it.

I’d found it three years earlier, on the one-year anniversary of my parents’ suicides. The light-sucking black box was long and loam-covered and half-sunk into the earth. Gnarled tree roots hugged it. I didn’t know where it had come from–maybe someone had meant to send a body into space with it at some point, but that obviously hadn’t worked out, because it was in the Gut instead of starbound. And there was no body, except mine.

I kneeled beside the coffin, dug the toes of my boots into the mud, and dragged the heavy lid open, panting weakly. The task wasn’t exactly easy, but after a prolonged squeal of protest, the top slid back on its uneven, dirt-eaten track.

A light rain fell through the snarled forest. Intermittent drips tinked against my refuge. I slipped inside before too much water puddled on the floor, and settled back against the hard interior, squeezing my eyes shut tight. Rain sprinkled against my cheeks as I reached up and hauled the protesting lid shut. I was closed in, near buried–shut away, but not trapped. The lid’s track was weathered enough that I didn’t have to worry about suffocating, but the seal still kept out water and sound and light, and that was all I wanted.

I turned my phones off and nudged them down around my neck. Music didn’t belong in here, because music didn’t belong in death. I was in the coffin because I didn’t want to feel. I wanted to be suspended–as close to death as I could be without actually being dead.

I squirmed around, trying to get comfortable, telling myself not to bother. I wasn’t there to relax. Still, something was off. I felt restless, and the coffin felt wrong–abnormal. Warm. Like I wasn’t alone.

My foot twitched and I felt heat, a slow-beating heart against my shin. I listened under the rain and heard faint, feathery breathing. A shift of muscle and bone grazed my leg–whatever had joined me in my coffin was on the move.

I could feel it creeping closer.

 

PHOENIX

Undoubtedly, Moss thought he was the cleverest of shadow-sneakers, creeping without warning into the middle of the night. But I often liked to sleep in my catskin, so the moment my pointy ears heard the misery-laden trudge of his big boots, I woke at once, knowing instinctively that my housemate was up to no good, and snuck after him–because naturally, if there was mischief to be had, I wanted a piece of it for my very own.

I followed him into the drippy night in cat form, past the tumbled-down outskirts of Raith, crumbling and half-digested by the Gut. Moss plodded into the trees with his hands stuffed into his pockets, mud spattered up the legs of his pants, his hood ballooning his head into a monstrous cloud of gloom. He was a paradigm of slow, self-destructing despondency.

He needed help, the poor, bitter boy–though not from me, obviously. I still had an evil father to hunt, a broken satellite to find. But when your roommate dashes out on a midnight escapade and forges into the rainiest, most miserable of tree-tangles, you simply cannot not follow him.

Even into a coffin.

Moss jerked into action when he felt me creep toward the tempting warmth of his pelvic region. Despite his earlier weakness, the coffin lid was open in seconds. He scrambled and flopped from its confines. Crouching in the relative dryness of the casket, I could hear him squelching about frantically in the ooze, and then–silence.

For a few moments, I tried my best to bide my time, but as always, curiosity gnawed gnawed gnawed at my resolve like acid in a lollipop. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I peeked my head over the side–and found myself nose-to-nose with Moss, who was doing the very same.

“Rot it!” he hissed, tripping backward in his shock. He fell on his back and didn’t get up. “You.” He spat mud up into the rain.

I trotted over and sat on his chest. I changed form in a puff and he whimpered at the multiplied weight. He refused to look at me, so I put our faces nose to nose, and said, “Coffins are for dead people.”

“I feel dead,” he said.

I could feel his fluttery heartbeat beneath my palm, so I gave him a smirk. “No, you don’t. Tell me, my flavorless little mud-grub, just why are you crawling about in broken astro-coffins?”

“Go away.” He tried to roll free, but I had him pinned. He was scrawnier than a baby flea, while I was all bone and fire-blood, fat and muscle. He didn’t stand a chance.

I put my mouth by his ear. “Why are you like this?” I asked him. “Why do you starve? Why do you hide? Why do you want to be pretend-dead, but not dead-dead? Why do you love corpses so much? Why–”

“Shut up.” He spoke with his gaze astray–distant, fixed on a point somewhere irritatingly in la-la land.

I fired more questions at him, but got nothing more from my glaze-eyed housemate, which bored me in record time. I un-straddled myself from the bony seat of his chest and left him sprawled by his coffin, in the rain.

Continued in Chapter 5.

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