The World You Desire Can Be Won
The air rushed by so fast it almost felt solid under his feet. It blew every coherent thought from his head except the big question of how many bones he’d break when he landed. What he landed on was worse. Wes realised he should have asked other questions before he jumped, like, what kind of creature lived in the well.
Silver silk wrapped him in a hopeless tangle as he broke into the funnel web feet-first, sending violent vibrations through the strands. He came to rest suspended in the funnel, arms coated in cobweb fine as baby’s hair, strong as steel ropes. It phosphoresced with its own weak light, bathing the walls of the well with a sickly moon-white glow.
He couldn’t turn his head. It held him fast, making anything impossible except futile struggle. The web encouraged that – the strands itched, and every slight attempt at movement set off the strings with the tinkling of crystal bells.
Dinner bells, Wes thought, heart pounding in his chest so hard he thought it would set off the web by itself.
There were other shapes caught up in the mesh – phantom husks of trinkets he couldn’t make out, boxes, necklaces, rings, coins. He wondered what had happened to them, how this worked. He thought he saw small skeletons, and he hoped they were animals and not – anything else. People really would sacrifice anything if they were desperate enough.
He tried not to look.
He took a slow, steadying breath, but the strands tightened around his chest. Wes told himself that, whatever happened, he wasn’t going to die. He managed a shallow gasp and listened out for company.
The creature made no sound.
The first Wes knew of it was a pale, translucent limb tapping his chest, the knee or elbow joint – who knows – crooked around his torso. It withdrew a little and Wes saw the hand, three stick-like fingers extending from the end of it, each triple-jointed and flexing. At the end of the fingertips, three eyes opened, blinking at him with crystal facets glittering in the light of the web.
Wes couldn’t find his voice. His throat was dry and sticky with strand-dust.
More limbs appeared around his chest, each with these blinking appendages, and Wes could feel the bulk of their owner pressing against his back. He wasn’t sure who he was meant to pray to right now. Grandad was out. He waited for Ricky to save him, but he knew Ricky wasn’t coming.
He tried to reach out to Ricky with a heart-summons, bone calling out to bone, heart-flesh to heart-flesh, blood to blood, but his chest only constricted with a pained stab, and he couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t reach anyone from here.
The creature moved under him, the presence easing, and he felt its weight moving around his head. A grub-like head with three orbed eyes and a small round mouth, puckered like a cat’s arsehole, craned down to look at him from above. Wes wanted to scream but his lips were glued shut. His muffled nasal shriek raked over his throat and resonated in his flared nostrils. The thing had no eyelids but very human eyes, round and popped, rolling in their soft sockets to take him in.
A soft voice whispered in his head.
Do you give your gift willingly?
Yes – I hate it, Wes thought, and the strands tightened.
Then you are no nourishment to me. Don’t you want your wish?
No, you don’t understand. I hate it, but it defines me. That’s what I’m giving you.
The creature clicked and the web rustled around him, ghostly objects caught in the strands tinkling and clinking together. A stray five-pound note rippled near his head, misty pennies scattered over the walls, outlines of antique snuff boxes glinting in the phosphorescence.
The grub-headed, bug-eyed thing considered him in silence, its bulk quivering like blancmange.
How does this work? Wes asked in his head, as it prodded him with those spidery, twiggy fingers. Their eyes blinked open and closed at the tips.
I feed, you receive.
Wes blinked, the only movement he could make.
Three wishes, right? It’s worth three, at least.
The creature finished probing him. State them.
This was it. He didn’t have Ricky’s way with words, but he hoped he could do justice to the phrasing of his heart’s desires.
I wish that Carrie would be restored as the avatar of the house, exactly as she was before – I wish that my lovers, past and present, would be free of any addiction to me and, I don’t know… immunised? Restored, definitely – and lastly, because I heard you can restore bodies as well as buildings… I wish that I would be fully restored for them, everything back to full working order. If you… get my drift.
The creature reared up, and Wes wished he had something to hold on to.
He was about to lose his glory for good.
Think of what it means to you, it whispered in his head. Give me a feast.
Wes thought about it, helpless on his back and unable to do anything else.
He owed everything to his glory. Money helped, but it wasn’t enough. His entry into the social circles he craved was conditional, and it was conditional on the understanding he would always be interesting. Lord knew he wasn’t useful.
Hugo was with him because Wes showed Hugo possibilities beyond the mundane, and it had blown the poor boy’s brains out. Since Wes couldn’t do that in bed anymore, that was about all he had left to hold that relationship together. If he was just the same as every fucker else, he was just another new-money wannabe in a fancy shirt, more money than sense and not enough breeding to spend it on the right things.
Plus, how was he supposed to protect himself with it gone? He couldn’t hide behind his baby sister for the rest of his life, and she hated him. That left Ricky, and they’d just soundly established what the Soothsayer’s priorities were.
His thoughts bounced from worry to worry without a coherent thread. With his glory gone, Wes was on his own. And what if it wasn’t enough to fulfil the other wishes?
He didn’t know if Charlie would stay. Or if Hugo would, should she leave.
Does she even love me? Really? Do I even love her? Do I want to find out like this?
His skin was glowing, brighter than the web around him, his essence rising in silver steam.
You came willingly, the creature reminded him, a dribble of slick, viscous saliva burning through some of the strands that bound Wes’s torso and allowed him to breathe deeper.
Oh God, Wes thought, oh sweet fuck, what have I done?
But it was too late.
The creature’s puckered arsehole-mouth stretched wide in an inhuman, gaping smile, toothless and jagged, then extended into a perfectly circular black hole that sucked everything Wes was into it.
Wes felt his glory leave with an orgasmic flash, tearing away from him, unknitting itself from his body. Every cell of him, every fibre, teetered on the brink of exquisite, unbearable pain, and came all at once. Every nerve-end exploded with hard, sharp sensation, rocking him into ecstasy.
His mind went totally blank, brain on fire with the head-rush. Miracle of miracles, he was hard as a diamond, everything responding to the physical urgency.
He came for real just as the creature let him go, though how he managed that in these jeans was anybody’s guess, and he throbbed and ached with marrow-deep afterglow.
The web dissolved around him, and he was lying in mud at the bottom of a stone well, his hand on the rung of an ancient ladder.
“We have got to do this again,” he said, managing to stand, crotch increasingly uncomfortable. “Do I get your number, or something?”
But there was nobody there, and he was alone.
He wriggled out of his jeans before he did himself an injury and slung them over his shoulder as he climbed the ladder, throwing them over the top of the stone lip, and hauled himself out of the well. He was in the grounds of Fairwood House, and it felt whole again.
Night had fallen, and in the moonlight, he saw the shape in all its majestic slumber.
The uncharitable would describe it as ‘hulking’, he supposed, especially from this angle where the proportions were thrown out by the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century extension, whichever it dated from, enhancing her girth. The augmented bosom of the house was certainly an enhancement he appreciated.
Hulking was a good word, though. The more he looked, the less he could find a more suitable one. It wasn’t a petite building of delicate proportions and fussy details. This was a survivor of many centuries, a solid, dependable, bone-crusher of a thing, a building that had punished the unwary as a ruin and gave no quarter now fully restored.
Wes looked it over, acutely aware he saw it both with the appreciation his cousin had, but also in ways his cousin would never see her.
The gables pointed heavenwards, arrows directing his gaze to the chimney stacks that once pumped plumes of blue-black haze around the slates, still erect and Scout-Master-ready, waiting for someone to light their fire.
Every open window, every door, felt like an invitation, welcoming him into her secret inner parts. He wondered how snug its priest-hole was, how tight its secret passages were, and if he’d ever find out.
On the second floor, a pair of blue curtains fluttered coquettishly, like a wave.
He raised a hand and waved back.
I’d smash her back doors in, Wes thought, lightheaded, almost forgetting he was standing in his cum-stained underwear, jeans slung over his shoulder. He glanced down and remembered. Yeah, well, take that on account. Shows I’m good for it. You’re welcome.
Still aching from the after-effects of the creature, he wondered if his wishes had worked, and if he could trust Merlin to make sure they’d worked properly.
He started across the grass, then stopped.
He could remember himself.
He glanced back down to corroborate the memory, the shape of him under the stain, his legs, the turn of his calves, his knees – and found he was right. His head spun with the thrill of it. He could remember what he looked like.
Wes broke into a run, ploughing through the back door and trying to glimpse himself in every reflective surface in the kitchen, distorted images thrown back at him from polished pans and a memorable phantom in the window glass.
“Oh my god!”
He tore through into the living room, but the downstairs was deserted. Dumping the jeans, he jogged upstairs to the room where the blue curtains had waved at him, and found his cousin lying on the bed with the avatar in his arms.
“You all right?” Wes asked, bursting into the room. “Have you Changed?”
“Will in a minute,” Ricky said, muffled in Carrie’s embrace.
Carrie was stroking Ricky’s head, humanoid limbs cocooning him against her, and Wes ached with envy for that simple intimacy with someone who knew what he fucking looked like.
“He’s just milking it,” Wes said, hands on his hips. “He’ll be right as rain, just wants some attention.”
“What about you?” Ricky tried to turn and face him, but Carrie wasn’t letting him go.
Wes opened his arms. “See for yourself. How do I look?”
Ricky awkwardly turned his head. He blinked once, deliberately, and his grip on her loosened. “Shit me.”
“What did you do?” Carrie sat up, not entirely human, proportions wrong. She made the effort to sculpt herself into something more approximate to her form when she’d been alive, but Wes didn’t mind either way.
“You can see me, right? You remember me?” Wes couldn’t stop grinning. His smile stretched across his face until his cheeks ached. “How do I look?”
“Unhinged,” Carrie said, as Ricky swung his legs off the bed. “What did it do to you?”
“You stupid bastard.”
There was a note of affection in that which Wes lapped up: Ricky sounded almost impressed. He still looked good with his top off, although the effects of the depression-binges were more obvious now, and the scar on his side was worse.
Wes slicked back his hair with both hands and rolled his shoulders. “You would, right? Well, not you. But people. People would.”
“Is that – is that what I think it is?” Carrie was looking lower than his face.
Wes chuckled. If she was avoiding the question with a question, that was probably a yes.
“I need a shower. Might join you when I get back.” He winked, blew Ricky a kiss that made him blush like fresh meat on the dancefloor, and headed off to find a bathroom.
worn off by the time Wes towelled himself dry, so he threw on Carrie’s dressing gown and returned to the room she shared with his cousin.
Ricky, sadly, had pulled his hoodie back on, but his own reflection was eye-candy enough.
Or – or was it? Wes realised he was bound by rules of subjectivity now, and that Carrie had never seen him before his Changes, or in the Outside, or with a veneer of glamour in the realm of the bard-prophet. When his image was immemorable, subjective things like type and taste didn’t matter. People filled in the gaps for themselves, filing him in ‘unusual’ and ‘fascinating’ and therefore, nine times out of ten, ‘attractive’.
Now, she could just see him. Everyone could just see him.
“Why don’t you tell me how I look?” Wes asked, a creeping snake of dread winding around his spine. “Honestly. Don’t bullshit me.”
Carrie and Ricky exchanged glances.
“You look – like a guy.” Carrie said finally. “Like a, like a, normal, tall, average kind of guy.”
“I’ve never been average,” Wes told her, insulted, but his chest was tightening. “Average, how d’you mean, average?”
“I mean…” Carrie faltered, looking at Ricky for help, which was not forthcoming. Ricky remained tight-lipped and slouched in the middle of the room, still staring at Wes with that thoughtful look on his face.
She gestured vaguely. “I mean, you’re good looking, obviously. It’s just that… well… I don’t want to say ‘anti-climax’, but—”
“But you just did.” Wes forced a wobbly smile. “Great.”
“No, it’s not you, though. It’s – I can still feel the other you. In me. In my bricks, in my mortar, little spores of that other you, and now there’s… nothing to attach them to. It’s like I had a patch of mushrooms growing in my walls, but now that’s turned into black mould, and I can feel it, spreading, but there’s nothing to – nothing to connect them anymore, no network, you know? And you’re so – so ordinary by comparison. So flat. You’re not a system, not layers, not… not whatever you were before. You’re just – a man.”
Wes tried to swallow but his throat was dry. “You… No, that must… that must be a house thing. Right? An imprint. Maybe you retain memories differently.” He looked at Ricky. “You don’t feel like there’s a bit of the old me in your head, right?”
Ricky raised his eyebrows. “I’m not sure, yet. It’s strange. Seeing you, I mean. It’s diff’rent.” He shook himself. “Yeah, prob’ly nothing to worry about. Transition period, maybe. Maybe it takes time for the old you to fade off, you know?”
“How are you?” Wes asked, eyeing him. “Don’t stand if you don’t feel well.”
Ricky shook his head. “Nah, I’m nearly better. I’ll Change tonight. That’ll sort it.”
Wes blinked. Ricky said it so casually these days, as if his metamorphosis was commonplace, as if anyone could tear their body apart and become some great, mind-bending, dimension-warping monstrosity that fed on auras and energies, and see the warp and weft of the cosmos. While at least he had – Wes stopped himself.
He didn’t even have that anymore.
Flat.
Ordinary.
You’re just a man.
He couldn’t remember what that was like. It didn’t feel the way he’d thought it would.
“What’s the matter?” Wes asked, as his cousin stared at him in silence. He could see exactly what Ricky was staring at; his reflection showed him a lean, skinny chest without much muscle tone, the towel wrapped securely around his waist and covering him down to his knees as he sat in front of Carrie’s desk and vanity mirror. He toyed with her makeup bag and emptied it out in front of him, but looking away didn’t remove the reflection from his mind.
He was sixty-five days sober from his drugs of choice, and all the mirror showed him was a stressed-out recovering addict who’d partied more than he’d ate balanced meals and was a decade deep into sleep deprivation, but that’s exactly what he was.
No wonder the plumbing had packed up.
Carrie’s concealer wasn’t the right shade to hide the bags under his eyes, but the eyeliner made them look deliberate.
Ricky shook his head, hands in his pockets. “Just lookin’.”
Wes grinned, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Take all the time you need.”
“Have you called Charlie?” Carrie asked, still on the bed.
Wes realised what he was coasting on was pure adrenaline and fumes. He wasn’t thinking straight. The mere mention of Charlie drained him of all that, sucked him empty and left him raw. He put the eyeliner pencil down.
“No.”
“Do you need a lie down?”
Wes didn’t know if that was a real invitation or not. He looked to Ricky for clarity, or permission, or – something.
Ricky rolled his eyes. “There’s a guest room next door.”
“Would it – would it be all right if I… stayed here? If I had to?” Wes realised he couldn’t face going home. If Carrie thought he was an anti-climax, he didn’t want to see Hugo’s face when he showed up looking like everybody else. Huey was with him for the magic, the eldritch-ness, the fact he was a window into a different world of possibilities and power.
Charlie was with him because she had to be.
He couldn’t just show up, no warning, and expect them to be fine with him being just a man.
Ricky looked at Carrie. “I don’t mind, but—”
“If you’re okay with it, I’m okay with it.” Carrie gave them both a soft smile. “Sure. So you’re going to explain, right?”
Wes licked his lips, tasting Carrie’s blueberry lip balm.
“I just need to – figure out what the fuck I’m going to say.” He felt sick suddenly, his heart throbbing painfully in his chest. “I can’t just drop it on them, like, surprise!”
“No,” Carrie agreed, with feeling.
“I’ll talk to them.” Ricky held his hand out, and it took Wes a moment of staring stupidly at it to realise he was expecting Wes to hand over his phone. “I can explain.”
“Can you?” Wes wasn’t sure where his phone even was. “I mean, yeah, maybe… maybe hearing it from someone else first… But they haven’t met you before.” He was pinned to the seat, stuck. “I don’t know where my phone is.”
“In the kitchen.” Carrie cocked her head. “I don’t know how it got there, I can’t remember – it must have fallen out of your pocket when I—”
Ricky released a pained hiss of breath that cut her off.
Wes nodded. “I’ll, um. I’ll get it.”
“You really do look good, you know. For a – a normal guy. Doesn’t he?” Carrie looked to Ricky for corroboration, and Ricky shrugged. “I always thought you looked kind of like a rock star, you know, when I tried to imagine you. I think I was right.”
Ricky raised his eyebrows. “Sure, yeah.” He looked Wes up and down and Wes shrank into himself, weirdly self-conscious in his borrowed towel. “You know what, you look most like your Kieran. Bit of Kieran, bit of your dad. But you got Aunty Lottie’s cheekbones.”
Wes sagged. The comparison to his dead brother and parents hit him in the gut.
“I’ll get my phone.”
God, he needed a hit of something. Anything, really.
The buzz of the afterglow had worn off, and he was ready to throw himself back down the fucking well and beg the creature inside it to take the rest of him too, never mind wishes, just suck him dry of this flesh prison and discard his wasted husk in the cobwebbed dark.
He didn’t. He didn’t even look for booze or weed, which he was hoping Ricky had tucked away for self-medication purposes.
Wes shoved his jeans in the washing machine with the rest of his clothes, grabbed his phone from the kitchen counter – he didn’t remember putting it there either – and jogged back upstairs to hand it over to Ricky, unlocked and ready to call.
“Better call Katy, too,” he said.
“She’s with Layla, she’s fine,” Carrie said. “We gave her a head’s up about you, but we’ll call her next.”
Wes nodded. “I – I need to lie down. Can you tell them that? That it, that it took a lot out of me, and I need to lie down, and that’s why you’re calling? It’s not because I don’t want to talk to them. Right?”
“Got it.” Ricky hit call, distaste at using a mobile at all printed on his face.
Wes almost laughed, but his amusement was short-lived. “I really am,” he said. “Going to lie down, I mean. I’ll just…” He backed out of the room as Ricky watched him, Carrie behind him on the bed like a plaster-cast siren.
Wes winced at himself. That was his cousin’s lady, home, whatever, and Ricky didn’t share.
He headed into the guest room and crashed out on the bed in his towel, falling into a series of nightmares and waking horrors where his body decomposed while he was still wearing it, and every time he discarded one shell, there was another, identical, rotting body underneath.
What have I done? Wes screamed in his dreams, clawing at himself, but there was no escape, no way out, until he woke up and realised it was half true.
What have I done?