How Runs the Oracle?

16 MARCH

Wes woke up with a start, sweat pouring off him, sheets in a frantic tangle around his calves. He’d hit himself so hard in his sleep that he’d not only woken himself up, but his cheek was sore and stinging.

LET ME THROUGH.

Grandad’s terrible demands echoed through his dreams and into his waking moments, skin crawling with grave maggots raining down from a sky boiling with blood.

It took him a few seconds to work out where the fuck he was; the damp patch on the opposite wall was unfamiliar, the bedclothes were cheap, and the whole room was a cluttered, narrow, low-ceilinged affair with a single window and a storage heater.

He wasn’t in his own flat in Chelsea. It certainly wasn’t his boyfriend’s Kensington penthouse, and his girlfriend wouldn’t be seen dead in a place like this.

It was Tina Harris’s bedroom, in her poky, rented cottage in Pagham-on-Sea. Shagging his oldest friend and unofficial sponsor was probably all kinds of stupid, but it wasn’t like they hadn’t had a bit of fun before.

He’d been friends with her since childhood. When her family moved away, she was his first pen pal. First lots of things, in fact. She’d kissed him once at the bus stop, a peck on the lips that nine-year-old Wes had been baffled but delighted by. Granny Wend had let their friendship be, encouraged it, even; she always said Tina’s family had old power in them. Maybe she’d only said that because even at that tender age Wes had been a sucker for power, but now they were pushing thirty, Tina was still his friend.

He checked his phone, and saw her text.

:Thanks for last night, stud. Call me if you need a check-in.:

He sent a heart back, indulging himself with a moment of self-satisfaction. He didn’t have to rise to the occasion for it to be an occasion. It was just temporary trouble, he reassured himself. It would improve with time, he was sure. Time, and maybe a clinic on Harley Street.

He swiped on something accidentally and opened a video he’d sent to everyone last month; the last thing he’d sent, as it turned out.

“You call me a fucking Judas?” his own wasted voice slurred at him as his face glitched and strobed violently, sliding in and out of his head before he could close it, “Just fucking – fucking kill yourselves. Do the job for her, why don’t you.”

No wonder he’d been thrown out of all the family chats.

He deleted it. There was no point in torturing himself with how much of an arsehole he’d been. He was twenty-two days clean, and the only way was forwards.

Don’t you want to be a god, in complete control of yourself? Don’t you want to have them worship you?

He struggled out of bed and tried to shrug off the Voice in his head.

“No, no, no.” If he said it out loud, he might believe it. “No.”

He could kid himself the Voice was part of the withdrawal process if he tried hard enough. Or he could face the fact it was Grandad, projecting into his sleeping mind while he was weak, probing his innermost desires.

Good luck with that, old man, Wes thought, applying his concentration, and grounding himself in his current reality.

Wes had already rejected the bastard once. There was no way he would allow that monster to enter his world and destroy the life he loved.

I do love it, Wes reminded himself, getting dressed and heading to the bathroom. I still love it. Things are tough right now, for everyone. They’ll get better.

And yet, the offer of worship, the idea of ultimate control, ate away at him, even as his subconscious poked him with warnings of maggots and death.

They threw you out of the family group chats, a spiteful, hurt part of him whispered. Don’t you want to make them sorry?

“That was my fault,” Wes reminded his reflection in Tina’s bathroom mirror. He forgot his own face each time he blinked, constantly confronted with a brand-new person, eyes bloodshot and mouth ringed with toothpaste like rabid froth. He grabbed a towel. “I fully deserved that. If I ever go back to that place, the only thing I’m using that power for is to cure Charlie’s addiction. That’s it.”

I’d make a great cult leader, though.

He shook that thought off with a splash of cold water and started his skin routine. You couldn’t afford to skimp on that, if all you ever made on people were a string of first impressions.

He whiled away the morning trying to quell the feeling of impending doom, but distractions only kept it at bay. There was no shifting the feeling that something wasn’t right.

By twelve thirty, nothing had happened, but that only made him more suspicious that life was saving the shit to be dumped on him all at once. He threw on Tina’s blue satin dressing gown which could wrap around him twice, then called his long-term girlfriend.

“Hello, gorgeous. Missing me?”

Charlie was at work, in her photography studio, but between clients. She tapped a pen against her glossy lips, frosted a delicate pink like the whites of her eyes.

“Hey baby. I really miss you.”

Is she getting enough sleep without me?

Wes hesitated.

“Am I gone too much? Do you need me home?”

He hoped she’d say it was fine, even if it wasn’t. He wanted the excuse to stay away for a while, where Tina didn’t make demands and there weren’t the shared responsibilities of a relationship approaching a decade, even though Tina was his oldest friend.

“Video chats aren’t… They aren’t the same.” Charlie dropped her gaze back to the screen, feasting on his face. There was a dull hunger in her gaunt cheeks that had nothing to do with food.

Wes took a longer breath in, guilt settling in his stomach like a familiar ulcer he knew how to treat. “Babe… if… if I found a way to make you remember what I look like, to – to cure you, would you want that?”

“No.” Charlie answered too fast, too hoarsely. “You don’t need to do that. I’m fine, I’m fine, really.”

Wes realised all she’d heard was him asking to remove the thing she’d relied on and built her life around for the past nine years.

“No, I know, but, okay. ‘Cure’ was the wrong word. I’d still be here, I’d still be me, but you would have me all the time, in your head. That’s what you want, right?”

I could have done this sooner if Queen Richard wasn’t so up himself.

Darling Cousin Ricky had refused to let Wes back in the house unless he was off the experimental hallucinogens their uncle had developed, which had the bonus side effect of allowing Wes to remember forwards as well as backwards, seeing glimpses of the future.

He’d removed himself from London and the party scene to detox, and Tina, who was more Charlie’s on/off squeeze than his, had let him crash at her place while he went through the withdrawals.

The cravings had lessened over the last week or so, and he marked the days jealously, like a stoic Sisyphus, doggedly rolling his stone uphill. He wondered how long it would be before he had to start again from the bottom.

No, it won’t be like “quitting” smoking. One day at a time, right?

Charlie chewed the top of the pen, and the plastic cracked audibly between her teeth.

“Babe?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She dipped her head, and he caught a glimpse of the scars on her eyelids, also nine years old. He’d left her only once, and she’d tried to cut her eyelids off so she could stare at his pictures forever.

If I could cure her, she wouldn’t even have withdrawals. It would be instantaneous. We could be a normal couple.

She changed the subject abruptly. “Are you still getting those side effects?”

That wrong-footed him. “Hallucination type things? Yeah. Sometimes. Only once last week, I think they’re going away.” He frowned. “Hey, I didn’t hallucinate that there’s a way to help you—”

“Are you sure you’re feeling better?”

He dropped it, recognising the hardness in her tone. “Yes. Yeah. I’m… much, much better.”

That was a lie. If anything, the hallucinations, visions, trances, whatever they were, were getting much worse, lasting longer, and he was pretty sure they were glimpses of the future. He was starting to worry that the drugs had irreparably opened his mind in that direction, and now he couldn’t stop those glimpses of what might be from invading his brain whenever they felt like it.

He hadn’t told her about the other dimension he, Ricky and Katy had entered a few months ago, or the Stone Circle they’d found there, which might contain some answers for controlling his own eldritch mutation and its effects.

He should try and go back, if Ricky would help him open the portal again. Maybe that would sort him out, and he could release Charlie of her addiction to his image at the same time.

He tried again. “If I did have a way—”

Charlie dropped the pen on the desk and shook her head, red ringlets bouncing around her face. “Babe, can we talk about this another time?”

“Why? What’s the matter?” Wes struggled into a better sitting position, satin gaping over his chest. “What are you scared of?”

She picked up the phone and brought him to face level, the forest green of her eyes glazed and vacant, jagged scars puffing her lids and cutting into her brows. He took that in, knowing what he needed to do for her whether she wanted it or not, and squirmed.

Charlie tilted her head, and the sunlight caught in the vibrant shades of her hair. He almost saw the woman he’d met nine years ago; naïve and earnest, sweet and shy, living her life through her camera lens. He wondered who she could have been without him, if she’d still have won awards for her bleak exhibitions, if her art would have more joy and life in it.

When she spoke, her voice was flat and tired.

“Babe… if you did that for me… I don’t think I’d ever want to see you again.”

Wes’s heart clenched. “Oh.”

There it was.

Total honesty, and the truth he’d always known.

He didn’t know what to say. An awkward silence extended between them, as he ruled out ever making Charlie better.

Fuck. If she left, Hugo would go with her. I can’t be on my own.

He told himself he was being irrational. Guilt roiled inside him, wrestling with the immoveable smile he aimed at the ceiling, which she’d forget was there as soon as she blinked or looked away.

Here it was: the shit he’d anticipated since this morning.

I’m not going to cure her, am I? I’m not going to cure my own girlfriend.

She backtracked. “But— I don’t— I can’t live without seeing you, I can’t imagine that. I don’t want to imagine that. It hurts. So just… leave it alone, okay? Come home soon.”

“Sure, yeah. I will.” Wes tried to change the subject, too stunned to push it. He couldn’t imagine his life without Charlie. “Um. How’s… how is Katy doing?”

“Settling in.” Charlie cocked her head. “I’m taking her shopping tonight. Huey’s getting her a new laptop. She’s missing her friends, you know, doing normal teenage stuff…”

“She’s technically dead,” Wes reminded her, more harshly than he meant to. “So absolutely no contact. Tell her.”

“She’s seventeen, she’s lonely, don’t be hard on her. She doesn’t need you being on her case all the time.”

She killed our parents and half our siblings in one go, don’t tell me how to fucking be.

But she was right. Katy couldn’t stay in the same town where everyone thought she too had been horribly murdered by some savage beast, her DNA and shed human tissue all over the crime scene, so he’d stepped up to take her in.

Should never have gotten involved, should have cut ties with her the second I left home. But I didn’t, did I? What a hero.

And now, predictably, the rest of his family were treating him like a pissing pariah for choosing her over them.

Wes clenched his jaw, then released it. He nodded.

“Yeah. No, you’re right.” He wished he hadn’t mentioned his sister. “Fine. Good. As long as she’s okay with you both.”

Hugo, his boyfriend, got on with Katy far better than he did. He trusted both his partners to look after his sister, and he knew she’d never hurt either of them.

He did not trust himself.

“I better go, Tina’s getting home soon. I love you.”

Charlie blew him a kiss. “I love you too.”

I love you. Why do we say that? he wondered, hanging up and staring at the phone. Does she mean it? Do I? Or is it something we just say to each other? If she left me…

Wes stopped that train of thought in its tracks, not wanting to find out what might be lurking on the other end. He was alone now except for the stuffed raven on the mantlepiece, which seemed to be leering at him knowingly.

He glared at it, hating the damn thing.

He also couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t the only bad thing he’d have to navigate today; the cloud of ill-defined dread continued to loom in the back of his mind, overshadowing any attempts to relax.

It’s the withdrawals, he told himself. Paranoia, anxiety, nameless dread. That’s all. Don’t look for patterns. I’m not the Oracle, that’s His Majesty’s job.

Wes helped himself to what was in the fridge-freezer; Tina had done a vegan-friendly shop, but it was a far cry from the London penthouse and his boyfriend Hugo’s choice of private chef. The sad selection from Pagham-on-Sea’s supermarket chain had to do.

He mashed an avocado onto a hunk of sourdough and microwaved some soup.

His phone rang again as he was looking for a clean bowl.

“Yeah, you’re on speaker,” he said, not looking at who it was.

“Wes?”

Wes nearly dropped the bowl. It was his cousin’s… well, he wasn’t sure what she was, but she never called him, no matter how much he wanted her to. At least, she hadn’t up to now.

“Carrie? Hey! Everything all right, darling?”

“No.”

Wes’s stomach dropped.

It’s probably nothing big. Trouble in paradise, that’s all. Maybe she needs a shoulder to cry on, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

He put the bowl carefully on the counter. “I’m just making lunch, nobody’s in. What’s up?”

She didn’t sound like herself. “Do you know where Ricky is?”

So it is trouble in paradise.

Wes softened his tone, although she wouldn’t remember the sound of his voice in the same way nobody could remember what he looked like. “I haven’t seen him in weeks, sorry. Not since I was last over.”

A pause. “Okay. Thanks anyway.”

“Hey, hold on. What’s going on?” Wes poured the hot soup into the bowl, trying not to scald himself anywhere crucial and wondering if he ought to get dressed. “I’m at Tina’s, so I can pop round if you want?”

“No, you don’t have to.” Her voice wavered. “Do you know about Bramble Cottage?”

Wes looked for a spoon. “What about it?”

Another long pause. “Maybe it shouldn’t come from me.”

“Maybe it should. Just tell me.”

“He was talking about death omens for days, and he just went out, and then… The cottage burned down last night. And he hasn’t been home since. I’m really worried.”

Wes set the spoon down, processing this. “Jesus.”

“Yeah, so, I just wondered if… you’d seen him, or… I can’t find him anywhere. He’s not any of the places I can think he’d go.”

A chill scuttled over his back under the satin in a wave of dancing ants.

He can’t be dead, can he?

The soup lost all its appeal.

“I know this is a – horrible thing to ask, but, did you check the cottage itself?” He grimaced. “And the cellar, if you can reach it?”

“That was the first thing I did. The police are all over it now. He killed his parents, Wes.”

Wes sagged in surprise, almost sitting in an imaginary chair, and caught himself on the counter. “Fuck.”

His soup jolted as he slammed his hand down, nearly slopping over the side.

“Uh. Sorry, right, how do you know he—”

“Trust me,” Carrie said, voice hard as brick. “I know.”

Wes wrestled with this unwelcome surprise, taking a moment to steady himself. It was just another couple of deaths. The family had been dropping like flies since Katy started the cull, what were two more to him?

I never liked them anyway. Get a grip.

But Ricky would never have done that, never have thought about it, not even a couple months ago before Katy’s Changes.

What’s changed? Fuck, he’s really not all right, is he?

He exhaled slowly, refocusing. “Okay. And the barrows, in Barrow Field—?”

“Second place I looked after combing The Chase.”

The Chase was going to be Wes’s third guess, but that patch of woodland was hard to hide in. It wasn’t really big enough to vanish without trace, even for Ricky, who knew every inch of it backwards.

“Hate to say it, but he could be up on the Weald,” Wes said, thinking about the miles of rolling hills and steep-sided gills, woodlands, scattered villages and farms, and all the places Ricky might manage to get himself properly lost in if he had a mind to disappear. “Sometimes he’d go walking up there. I don’t know where he’d go, though.” He paused. “I’m happy to look, if you need a car.”

His two-seater was perfect for a blustery Spring drive, and it would be a good opportunity for her to get to know him sober. He had some ground to make up, since he’d been high most of the time she’d known him.

“Are you… okay to drive, or…?”

“God, yeah.” Wes gave a short laugh, flushing. “Haven’t touched any Silver Lining for a month.”

“You must be feeling pretty rough, Tee said you weren’t doing that well last week.”

“No, worst of it’s over,” Wes lied smoothly.

“She said you’re still having random hallucinations, or trances, or something.”

He clicked his tongue. “I can feel those coming on, it’s not happened in the car.”

“Yet.” Carrie didn’t sound convinced. “Well… where else would he be? I don’t know, how would we even find him by car if he’s off road? Can you summon him?”

“Me? No.”

“Well…” Carrie gave an exasperated sigh, but there was a quaver of panic in her voice. “I don’t know what to do.”

“He’ll be back.” Wes had no doubt what was going on; if Ricky had finally snapped and killed his parents, which no doubt they deserved, he would be wallowing in guilt about it and that meant he’d jumped into a chemical void. “He’s got his own way of processing things.”

“You mean, not processing anything?” Carrie snapped down the phone. “He’s had every opportunity to kill them for years, he never wanted to do that. He just wanted… Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it? Fuck.” She threw the expletive out with real venom, and Wes raised his eyebrows. She used that sparingly, as a rule.

“Hey. Hey, it’s okay. I promise. I’ll – all right, look, how’s this for a plan? I can’t summon anyone, I don’t have the clout, but our Katy does. Let me get her down here, and she can pinpoint him no problem. We’ll pick him up, it probably won’t be pretty, but if you’re comfortable with him being in the house and only if you’re comfortable with him being in the house, we’ll bring him home to sober up or come down or, you know, heal up from whatever it is he’s done to himself.”

“I’m coming with you,” Carrie said.

Wes nodded, drumming his fingers on the counter. “Fine. Yes. He’ll probably react better to you than to us, in all honesty.”

Carrie was quiet for a second. “Okay. Can you get hold of Katy and let me know, please?”

“Absolutely.” Wes hesitated. “How about I take you for a coffee? We can talk about it. Or, anything else you want. I know we didn’t get off on the best foot—”

“You deliberately pushed him into another dimension, and he could have been trapped there,” Carrie said flatly.

Wes winced. “Yeah, okay, but I did get him out again, so—”

“You were high as a kite pretty much every time I saw you. You literally did drugs in your bloody car on my drive, like I wouldn’t notice.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t… I should have asked, or… I’m sorry about that.” Wes found a soup spoon entirely by accident, fumbling through Tina’s dishwasher for something to keep his hands occupied. “Look, I’m really… I’m really trying.”

He didn’t mean that to come out the way it did, but the whine slid in and out of his own consciousness, too, and he forgot the petulance as surely as Carrie had.

“I mean. Just… it would be nice if we could start again. Get to know me when I’m not… like that.”

“Call Katy, please? And keep me in the loop? I just want him back.” Carrie’s voice cracked like plaster. “It’s like a whole room’s gone missing. Like I’ve lost a whole section of myself. Don’t tell him that.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Wes murmured. He desperately wanted to know what it was like for her to be part of her house, or for the house to be part of her, or however it worked. Ricky wouldn’t say, and Carrie had never explained it.

Out of nowhere – well, not quite nowhere, since it was never far from his mind – he wondered what she was like in bed these days, if it was like making love to a living sex doll, if he’d go down on her and taste copper wire and plastic.

I’d blow her fuse box out.

He smothered a snort and turned it into a cough.

“I’ll keep you updated, okay? Try not to worry. He can take care of himself.”

“Thanks,” Carrie whispered, and ended the call without saying goodbye.

Wes turned back to his lunch, the looming dread now almost dissipated but replaced with a dull, lowkey worry.

“Fucking hell, Richard,” he said to the soup and the congealed green spread on his sourdough toast. “What have you done now?”