I shook my head. The cotton was back, slowing my thoughts. I felt slow, stupid. Confused.
My name is Joshua Mallory. I’m twenty-eight. I’m from Decatur, Alabama. My mom died on the third of August, 2003.
I’d seen him die. That night in the clearing, in the box canyon. I’d watched the pool of rust red spread beneath his body, dripping from the ragged ruin of his throat.
Appletree’s brows furrowed in cartoonish sympathy.
“What’sa matter, bud? You look like you’re having a tough go of it.”
“I—I—” My mouth was so dry it could have cracked. I swallowed with difficulty. “This isn’t real. It’s not real, it can’t be. I’m—I’m dreaming, I’m asleep, this is all a dream.”
Appletree laughed. The sound echoed from Mike and Andrew’s lips, hollow and dull. They stared at nothing. He stepped closer. His pupils were huge and black, frayed at the edges. “Oh, it’s happening, brother. Believe it.”
“I don’t understand.” My arms and legs twitched almost of their own accord, trying to pull me from the iron grasp of the men behind me. “You’re dead, you’re dead—”
“Of course I’m dead!” His sudden bellow made me jump. He threw his hands into the air, spun in a delicate pirouette. The hilt of my knife still stuck out from his stomach, drooling maroon stains down the front of his apron. He was all smiles, radiating joy.
“Or I’m not. Or I never existed in the first place. Or I’m inhuman, or a nightmare. You all ask the same pathetic meaningless questions instead of the big one, the one that matters. Even if you saw me die, Switch, you have to ask yourself—for you, for your circumstances, does it matter? Do I need a pulse for you to believe what’s happening? Hmm? Would that help, bud? Here, here, touch me—touch my skin!” He seized my hand, heedless of my desperate thrashing. He pressed my fingers against the skin of his neck. Hot, fevered. My fingers pressed the skin inward like it was warm wax. I recoiled with a cry. The indents stayed for a second before disappearing.
“There you go, I’m real enough for our purpose here. Better?” He bared his yellow teeth. The humor faded beneath a hyped-up maliciousness. He dropped my hand.
A flash of bulging eyes, staring at me from the water. Green-Eyes. He’d broken his leg, running.
“The body—the body in the woods I told you about.”
“A waste.” He turned and spat, thick and rust colored. Matching the stains crawling down the apron still tied around his waist. “Spilling the gift of his blood on the rocks. He tripped, the clumsy idiot, fell and reached out for my hand. Saw the truth and fled. Before the kin could snatch him, he tumbled. Dead before we could taste his fear.” His face puckered, and he closed one hand tight enough to make the veins stand out against his papery skin.
Appletree had walked out of the storm. When I met him in the high mountain pass, in the rain and thunder—he’d materialized like a wraith. I didn’t see where he came from, he was just . . . there. He didn’t help gather logs, didn’t help build a fire, didn’t shake my hand . . . didn’t touch anything real, anything we shared. A trick of the light, a sleight of hand. Don’t look too close, you’ll see right through it.
“You told me to go to Bedal,” I whispered. The dead buck on the trail, with the hunting knife buried deep in its throat. The eyes, watching me from the trees. Waiting for me, just off the trail.
His lips stretched wider. His eyes never left mine. “Ding ding. Amazing the difference one of the kin can make on your state of mind, ain’t it? You know, I thought you got him that night, when you went up to piss. Thought we were done for.”
That high-pitched giggle, floating from the trees.
Bedal, where I met Ronnie, Ronnie who’d paid for the access trail leading back to the PCT. The trail leading to the ridge, where the scarred boy found me again, corralled me in the valley.
The valley. Everything led back to the valley.
“You did this. You did all of it.”
Appletree gave me a mock bow. “Thank you, thank you—no, please, hold your applause.”
The men holding me were silent, still. I wanted to rip the grin right off his face. I wanted to skin him alive.
“So . . . so the story that night? About your . . . I mean—?”
He shrieked, laughter so raucous it must have splintered in his throat like rusty nails . . . unless the nerve endings were dead and long-gone cold. Unless the body he used was nothing but a shell, covering up the malice inside.
“Wasn’t that the funniest tale you’ve ever heard? The first time the old man told it to me it was all I could do not howl in laughter on the spot. So much there, so much to use. He’s become my favorite, now. Everyone likes him, everyone trusts him without even thinking about it. You did, just like all the rest. Sheep, slow and stupid, waiting for the slaughter.”
The parking lot. I couldn’t link the facts together. I didn’t have perspective. I wasn’t thinking about it right.
He circled me, quickstepping. “Now ask the question. The big one, the one they all ask. Go on, do it. It’s my favorite part.”
His voice floated in the corners of my head, stabbing, mocking.
“Why? God damn it, why? Why didn’t you kill me and get it over with? Why did you have to play all these fucking games?”
He closed the distance between us in a blink. He smelled like iron and salt . . . and rot. The same smell from the clearing, from the cave. The edges of his eyes grew jagged. It might have been my imagination, but the pupils seemed to be growing, taking over the red-rimmed whites.
Sitting in front of the fire, telling stories. Whose idea was it, to tell the story about my mom? I’d forgotten it, pushed it away, deep down. I never breathed life into those words. What brought it screaming back to the surface?
His voice floated back to me over the smoke and flame. He’d reached in and pulled it out of me. He’d asked me why I was on the trail.
Running from my problems, I’d said. He wasn’t surprised. Because he knew.
Sitting on a petrified log, shedding a filthy flannel. A deep-oak tan, gaunt cheekbones.
“Boots?” I whispered.
“In the flesh, dah-lin.” That same drawling, good-old-boy accent. A single wink, a stretching of a sick smile. I told him. I told him I was running from my problems.
I closed my eyes. There had to be something I missed. Some piece of information that made this make sense. I needed perspective, that’s all. I needed to see it differently.
My knife, still buried in his gut. I remember the tactility of it, punching through flesh, muscle, and sinew. It wasn’t a parlor trick, done with acting and makeup; it was as real as the moment I’d touched it in its packaging. His skin, hot to the touch and stiff like Play-Doh.
“What are you?” The words came out as soft as a prayer, and every bit as hollow.
His grin turned stone cold. I watched the inked black tendrils move and take over his entire eye.
“I am the Plaguebringer. The All-Seeing. I am the One Who Came Before, the Absolute.” His voice changed, losing its dusted-off flower-power vibes. It grew high-pitched. Like glass, shattering in my eardrums. “I am He, the one the children call Feast.”
The skin above his left eye bulged. Something beneath it swelled, pressing the skin outward before slipping back down into his skull. Something lurked inside the mask he wore. Always there, laughing at me. The mass of wriggling shadow, buried not deep enough beneath the granite slab in the clearing.
Movement in the corner of my eye. I turned to look.
The man called Father, crossing the bridge coming from the forest. His face hit me like a punch to the gut, pressed the wind out of my lungs like a vise—his twisted and gnarled face, the scar pulling the corner of his mouth in a perpetual frown. His eyes were chips of stone. Behind him came the priest, limping and hacking into a half-clenched fist speckled red. He looked like he’d lost weight. Behind him, the rest of the split-faced faithful. They were here, all for me, walking across the bridge between the diner and the Shell station. Crossing into the real world.
“Can you smell it?” Appletree inhaled, his thin and blood-drenched chest swelling with the morning air. The smell came back as soon as he said it; a bittersweet sting of ammonia and woodsmoke.
I needed time. My heart trip-hammered a million miles an hour. He killed himself, I watched him die . . . and what happened next?
The beast of the black shadow.
The grin on his mouth spread, the skin at the corners ripped like wet cardboard, stretching from ear to ear, splitting his face in two hanging flaps. His teeth were needles, jabbed into his lips, which welled and filled with blood.
“Fear,” he whispered. More blood dribbled over his split lips, down the gray-and-white beard. “It smells sweet, doesn’t it? So sweet.”
He was close, too close; he leaned forward and laid a single, dainty finger on my forehead.
Mother, screaming in the kitchen, thrashing. The shattering china, lancing her skin as she writhed over it, trying to get to the door. Why, why did he do this? The stupid, idiot boy. He killed her. It was his fault. Fire spread everywhere—it licked her skin, spreading red-hot blisters over her flesh like melted wax. She screamed. She didn’t want to die, not like this. Not in fire and pain.
I didn’t realize I was screaming until he pulled his finger from my head—it echoed in my throat, pulling my vocal cords tight.
Don’t tell my father, please don’t tell my father . . .
“Fear,” Appletree repeated, savoring the word. A different intonation now—intimate, hushed. I sagged against my captors, the ragged edges of my scream turning to a sob. He stuck a finger beneath my chin, raised my head to stare into my eyes with his black, dead ones. Measuring, weighing.
“He’s ready. Bring it to me.”
I knew what they were going to bring before they stepped into the sunlight. I heard their slow footsteps and felt cold in my gut.
The massive buck skull looked somehow more macabre in the daylight. Its curled shadow followed the Woodkin from a distance as they walked it down the porch. Behind them came the priest. He chewed on something, the muscles in his jaw flexing, trying to keep whatever was inside down. I knew what he was forcing into his stomach. Each time he took the mushrooms, he unchained the beast from his cellar grave . . . and took another step closer to his own.
A touch of air moved through the street. It smelled like gardenias. Gardenias, and fresh, acrid smoke.
“Are you ready?” Appletree looked at me and whispered.
It started with the skull. The connection to the ravine, to a box canyon not enough miles away. A tendril of black, pooling from the bleached jawline still frozen in its last scream. It moved of its own accord, writhing along the chipped and worn asphalt like a snake.
Coming for me.
I writhed, but the breathing statues clutched me tight. They hadn’t made a sound, hadn’t blinked.
“No, no wait, just wait.” The words poured from my lips like water, unbidden and frantic. “Please, wait a second, I don’t—I’m not ready, I—”
I sounded like Ronnie.
The smoke crawled over the streets, consuming the bottoms of signposts, the roots of trees. It moved between cars, curbs, and the chalk markings of children at play.
Appletree held out his hands. The muscles in his forearms bulged as the skull’s huge weight settled in his hands, but he hefted it without a problem, lifting it like I would lift a basketball, holding it above his head. The black tendrils dripped like fat raindrops from the beast’s jaw.
“Look at me.” Appletree’s voice sounded far away and close, too close. I stared at the ground, at the fingers of black shadow on the street as it surrounded me, closed me off from the rest of the world. This was it. My last few minutes.
“Look at me!” The high-pitched voice sounded like china shattering on floorboards. It boomed in a huge echo. One of the men who held me gripped my jaw with a hand stinking of sweat and sour ammonia and lifted my jaw.
Appletree stared at me with those black, unblinking shark’s eyes.
I didn’t want to watch, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away. He forced the narrow opening of the buck skull onto the crown of his head. Tighter and tighter he pressed. Bones broke with a deep snap and spray of blood. He finished with a huge, final push, and his head crumpled and fell away. The buck skull was buried deep into his ragged neck, splintering cruel shards into the paper-thin skin.
The air stank of bittersweet smoke.
In the early-morning sunshine, the thing that I used to think of as Appletree turned to me. The skull hollows bore into my eyes, empty nothingness calling my name. The shadows expanded, pooling, growing, until they were deep enough to fall into. I felt my knees shake, felt my balance shift. I couldn’t move.
Run, run, you have to run, the lizard part of my brain screamed at me in cold, skin-wrinkling fear. But my muscles locked up. I felt a cold touch on my legs—the shadows coming for me. They wound their way up my arms and shoulders, heavy as chains.
“Please don’t,” I whispered. I didn’t want to know what waited for me in black shadow.
A choking, hollow sound echoed from the buck skull. The monster beneath the rock, laughing at me. The last sound to reach my eardrums before the black smoke wound up my neck and forced my jaw open. I tried to fight it, but it wound tight around my chest, squeezing the air out of my lungs, painfully pinning my arms to my side. Something pressed against my eye, insistent, urgent. I breathed in, and smelled the first touch of ash—
The blackness behind my eyelids swallowed me whole.
I didn’t go alone.
The details of the house I grew up in surged from their long-lost grave in my memory, buried beneath years of nightmares and blackout drinking. The flowers on the wallpaper. The too-short door beneath the stairs that opened to a coat closet. The framed pictures, marching up the wall. A sideboard with a clay bowl I made in kindergarten. It was a miserable thing, crooked and misshapen to the point of barely standing on its own power, but she loved it. Rose red and cracked because I did a predictably shitty job glazing it. I’d forgotten about the bowl. Mom kept her keys in it.
I was standing in the hallway. Just in front of the door. Exactly where I stood the day she died. I could see my reflection in a mirror hanging on the wall.
This day.
Don’t worry about that. The voice sounded different—calming, soothing. It sounded like a neighbor I recognized but couldn’t put a face to, but I didn’t worry about it too much. A neighbor, always there to help me.
She’s in the garden. You can see her, there. The voice was right—the door to the kitchen stood open, I could see through it to the backyard. It moved my eyes, it showed me. She was trimming the flowers. Always trimming the flowers. I couldn’t see her face, but I got a glimpse of what she referred to as her “gardening couture”—a big hat and denim jacket. I laughed when she said it because she laughed, but I didn’t know what she meant until long after she’d left.
It’s going to happen any moment now. The voice whispered, deep in my ear like a wriggling worm. You can smell it, can’t you? You knew right away and did nothing. You didn’t tell the firefighters. You didn’t tell your dad. You didn’t tell anyone.
I could smell it—ash at first, but then it changed, lightening, shifting. Smoke cut with something bitter. It smelled like burnt sugar and hot wires.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. The eyes of the boy in the mirror watched me, boring into mine. I knew what that smell was. The urge to act was instantaneous.
“Mom! Ma!” My voice scratched my vocal cords raw and echoed down the hallway, but she didn’t look up. The door stood open, the window hung ajar, she should have heard me. I tried to step forward but didn’t move. I stayed where I was, frozen in the hallway. I looked down. My legs, still in my tattered and bloodstained hiking pants, but immobile. Frozen in place.
Sorry, Joshie, the voice whispered. It’s not that kind of dream.
I hadn’t heard the name Joshie in twenty-two years. The only person who ever called me Joshie stood outside the window. Trimming her gardenias with deaf ears. I hated the nickname; it reminded me of . . . here. This house, reeking of flowers and ash. This house, where she lived. She called me Joshie, and she was nothing but a dirty urn sitting on Dad’s mantel.
She smells it. Here she comes, watch.
The jean-clad shoulder froze in place, moved an inch, then froze again. A dull clatter heralded the heavy-duty shears, dropped against the deck. Dad had built the deck for us with his own two hands.
The screen door slammed against its frame, and the hinges of the back door squeaked in sharp protest. Her feet against the floorboards, and then a flash of white and blue in the kitchen. She went for the stove. I didn’t see her face, but I could imagine it with painful clarity. I caught glimpses through the open kitchen door.
A three-note electronic chime floated down the stairs from the upper level. Twelve-year-old Josh, sitting on his bed staring at the TV screen on the wooden bookshelf against the wall. Playing Final Fantasy with the sound cranked all the way up, not a single thought in his head except how to stick it to a pixelated dragon. He wasn’t thinking about the crash his mother made, sprinting into the kitchen.
Ten feet. The distance from his bed to the banister, where he could have leaned over and heard the footsteps. Smelled the already-sharp scent of burning electrical wire. Ten feet, and he could have done something.
“Josh! Josh, God damn you, get up!” My voice echoed against the walls and stairs, but no one moved. No one cared.
Go ahead. Try all you want.
Whatever hold gripped me released; I surged away, nearly doing a face-plant on the floor.
“Hey! Anyone!” I lurched to my feet and spun, going for the door handle. There were neighbors on their lawn, watching the blaze. But outside, the street was pixelated. Blurred, like a video game unrendering before my very eyes. The neighbors on their lawns, nothing more than suggestions of smudged color.
Where are you going, Joshie? the cold voice in my head whispered. The show’s just about to start.
From the kitchen a sharp cry of surprise and pain, and a ringing sound of metal on stone.
She burned herself. The voice inside my head whispered. You heard it. You heard it and did nothing. What did she burn herself on, Josh?
A snack. Twelve-year old Josh just wanted a snack after school. A secret buried so deep he’d never let it see daylight, no matter how long he lived. The smell of burning electrical wires as the pot of Ramen cooked down to nothing on the stove. Started to burn as the last bit of water evaporated. “No. No, no no no.” My groan sounded weak and far away. There were too many details for this to be another nightmare—the gardenias, the clay bowl. This was a memory, come back to exquisite, agonizing life.
A memory a boy did everything he could to bury deep. His fault, his fault. He heard the words like a chant, every time he closed his eyes to sleep. Just like he heard her screaming.
A whoosh from the kitchen, the sound of fire exploding into life. The smell of burnt sugar changed, morphed into charred paint. Peeling away from the burner in fractured curls as the gas pipes running through the decades-old range groaned and hissed apart.
I could see seams running the lengths of the pipes, spots where invisible gas seeped through in harmless increments. Clear as a documentary, a micro-camera zooming through the cracks in the enameled-steel stove.
Here, it said, that nameless neighbor I’d known what felt like my whole life. See here? A ten-minute replacement of the valves, and your mother would have been fine.
She backed up, clutching a hand to her chest. Her hair the way I remembered it, wavy in undefined ringlets, framing a face I still couldn’t see. I craned my neck, but my view didn’t change.
Please. Please just let me see her face. It had been sixteen years since I’d seen her face outside my ash-steeped nightmares. The fire reflected against the curtain of dyed-blonde hair, dull orange and red. It grew, alive, clawing at the ancient fan above the range, consuming the faded and stained wallpaper behind the backsplash.
The cabinets are next, the voice whispered. Breathless, eager. There’s a package of black tea in the corner that burns like uncut diesel.
For a second, something grazed against the skin of my arm—a flash of heat, maybe from the fire already spreading in the kitchen.
Red boils surrounded by livid flesh. I remembered them, rising in dime- and quarter-sized pustules, bulging and full. They had started in his arms.
It’s happening to me. The thought came, small and distant, a sentence spoken in a mumbling crowd. In the real world.
But the real world was out there, far away, turned down to a tiny dot of noise and anger and light. Only here and now mattered. Because the kitchen door slammed shut, slipped from its butcher-twine mooring my dad had improvised to keep it attached to the wall. An old door, heavy. The door would trap her in the kitchen. Little Josh would come down and stare at it and know. Know that something was wrong.
The smell was exactly as I remembered it. Sweet at first. Sweet from the white flowers outside the kitchen window, already wilting and curling into brittle carbon from the heat.
“Hello?” There I was, too late, poking my head out of my room, guilt written all over my face. I wasn’t supposed to be playing my PlayStation on a school night. “Dad?”
The door slamming shut alerted you. Too late. You were too late.
I was too late.
“Call someone! You little shit!” Nails scraped against my throat, my screams shaking the walls of the house. “You bastard! Help her!”
But of course, the boy did nothing.
I did nothing.
I remembered this part. This is where the nightmares started. Coming down the stairs, wondering why someone closed the kitchen door—it wasn’t supposed to close. I wondered if Buster caught the corner zooming around the house . . . but then the smell touched my nose.
The dot of the real world grew smaller, condensing. The touch of hot pain stayed with me the next time it brushed against my arms. It wasn’t a bother. It would all end soon. I had a vague impression of hot excitement deep in my head, stinging me as I touched on it, like the whirling blades of a fan.
China shattered on the floor in the kitchen, muffled behind the big door. Orange fingers crept along the space beneath it.
“Mom?” Little Josh stood in the hallway, staring at the kitchen. He sounded confused, but I knew better. He knew. We both did. As soon as the first plate shattered, as soon as the first whiff of smoke reached us, we knew. We knew it was our pot, sitting on the stove, forgotten over a computer game. Mother was in there, trapped, in need of help . . . and we did nothing. We stood there. Cowards.
I inhaled, but the air was shallow. Hard to breathe. The burning sensation broke the skin, seeping agony into my muscles. I swallowed, trying to pull my focus back on Little Josh. The memory flickered, grew dim. I didn’t want it to stop. This was the closest I’d been to her in two decades.
The door to the kitchen slammed open, its handle leaving a splintered dent in the drywall. Hot air burst out. The wallpaper crinkled and combusted.
A hand emerged from the angry, sullen light, slapping against the pale floorboards. The skin was split and bleeding, charred in places.
Little Josh started to scream.
“Help.” Her voice was hoarse, shot-through with rust but still loud enough to hurt my ears, rattling the walls and shaking the frame of the house.
She crawled.
Her teeth were bone-white against the black-red of her lips. Most of her hair was already burned away, leaving a charcoal frizz puffed around her ears. Her voice echoed in my bones, hot as molten lead. I wanted to scream with her, wanted to cry. Where her eyes should have been were empty sockets of heavy black smoke. The face I wanted nothing more than to see was torn and charred, bleeding, unrecognizable.
“Joshie! Josh please! It hurts so bad—”
I wanted it to be over. My heart could only break so much.
Little Josh turned and ran. He ran, leaving his mother to die in smoke and agony, alone. He ran out, screaming and crying, but I stayed. I stayed with her, so she wouldn’t be alone this time.
My lungs burned for air. Even this far removed from the real world, I felt the pain; it connected these two worlds. Pain, suffering . . . fear. I wiped my face with a nonexistent hand—tears in my eyes.
This wasn’t how it went. A single thought, clean and clear.
I remembered. I’d had the nightmares, waking me up every night for fifteen years. I’d lived through it, a thousand times and then a thousand more. This wasn’t how it went. It wasn’t my fault. It was an accident. Dr. K showed me, taught me the right way to think about it. Switchback killed his mom—just like the monster said—but Josh didn’t do anything wrong. Josh was just a kid, just a little boy. He couldn’t do anything. Brick by brick, stacked on the grave. Sealing it away. Sealing the truth away; it was an accident. Just an accident.
In a breath, two halves became whole. This is where they met, because this was where they split in the first place. A shearing of self, to seal away a trauma—a single thought so toxic it poisoned the depths of that little boy’s soul. Switchback, Josh. Josh, Switchback. The fire and fury burned my skin like molten drips of glass, but for a split second, I didn’t feel pain. I simply felt . . . whole.
Because I didn’t do anything wrong.
I inhaled, and beneath the smoke, the ash, beneath the ugly stink of gas and burning, I smelled the flowers, out in the garden. Waiting for me. There, in the still silence, waiting after the pain and hurt. That’s where she was. With her gardenias, and her bad mom jokes. I’d remember what her face looked like.
“See you soon, Mom,” I whispered.
The fire howling down the hallway stuttered and froze. The dark creature wreathed in ash and pain froze in place, immediately silenced. Streaks of wheat-gold light strafed across the staircase from windows that weren’t there. Outside the open door the street shredded, bits of color snatched by encroaching darkness, billowing like smoke. In the deep recesses of my head, a fury of motion and anger clawed upward, swirling up my spine in a series of writhing fingers.
Why would you say that? The voice sounded nothing like a neighbor, now. High-pitched, angry.
You stupid, pathetic human, why would you—
In a rumble of smoke and light, the memory dissolved.