17.

I’m starting to see.

These shards beneath my feet. The case in his office. The cocoon, cushioned in white cotton. It sounded like snow. I know now. Like an eruption. An earthquake. Detritus after the great shake. My glass ceiling… shattered.

Tell me, the others in this place. In the wooden rooms I just passed. They weren't quite like me, were they? I thought they would be. Same eyes, same way of seeing. Will my story help them too? It seems cruel to leave them where they are. I can't stop thinking about them. Are you helping them, like you’re helping me?

When I got back to my flat, there was another package waiting for me on the doormat. This time I didn’t even pick it up; I just kicked it into the corner and locked the door behind me. A sharp pain shot through my big toe. As soon as I dropped my things onto the floor, I pressed my face up to my window and peered down at the street below, searching for a flash of blue.

Perhaps they knew where I’d been. How close I was getting. They weren’t going to take me. Not without a fight.

After sliding down the wall, I removed my shoe and peeled off my sock. My toes were grey. I began to rub them between my fingers, but no amount of squeezing brought life back into them. They felt icy cold. I leaned in closer to get a better look at what’d caused the pain. My big toenail was turning black at its edge and was beginning to peel away from the skin.

What was happening to me? Was my time running out? I pulled my sock back on and tried to forget.

I kept Michael’s card safe, tucked away in Hidden Worlds. The card detailed Michael’s name, address, phone number, and email. I Googled the address while lying on my mattress, and Maps brought up a huge block of flats just outside Watford. It wasn’t what I expected, but then I couldn’t tell much from the roof.

Abandoned for over a week now, my project had started to rot. Up close it smelled like decaying fruit, and on the floor beneath it lay a shatter of dried leaves and a decomposing wing from a sparrow. Mud had turned to dust. Bits of animal hung from its bones.

I climbed through the opening and sat amongst the dust, hugging my knees to my chest. Both feet were freezing now, my toes numb. The walls of the cocoon were much wider than me, wide enough for two to squeeze in comfortably, if they stood wrapped around each other. Sitting there, it was like crouching within my own self. It made everything quiet. Even though I now knew that I’d never finish it, it still felt right to be there. I’d spent such a long time collecting the parts to make this bed – both living and dead. And by Midwinter, when the ice forms and the creatures sleep, I had planned to be ready to start growing my new skin. Becoming who I was meant to be. I stroked my fingers down to my ankles, poking from the bottom of my jeans. Lumps and bones. Now I understood that this body, strange as it was to me, would make sense when I stepped into a new world. And Midwinter would be the perfect time for that, too. It was when Grandad left too, after all. At the pause “between endings and new beginnings.” Wasn’t that what he said? It seemed so perfect that it’d been my plan too – perhaps for different reasons, but that we had the same goal.

Under two weeks to leave this world forever.

Over the next eight days, my door knocked seven times. I wrote the time and number of knocks in my little black book. Sometimes there were even knocks up through the floor. I counted thirty-six, and I wrote those down too. Only four times were there knocks through the wall, always the left-hand wall, but I counted and wrote those down, in case they were important. Knocks and clicks. Clicks and knocks.

My face had started to itch, just like my wrists. A few days after the gathering, I’d noticed that my cheeks were red and flaking, and I fought to not constantly scrub it all away with my sleeve. I stopped looking in the mirror in an attempt to stop noticing the itch. To not start tearing at it with my nails.

My door had been locked since returning from the gathering. No one was getting in or out. Every moment was precious, and I needed to concentrate. To prepare. The day after I got back from the conference, I scraped together the total sum of what I could pay Michael, adding up my meagre bank balance with guesses for things I could sell. I didn’t have much, but it would help. I wouldn’t need ‘things’ once I was a nomad anyway. And I’d need to be out of the flat before the next rent was due at the end of the month. Only after I pressed ‘send’ on the email did I wish I’d chosen to receive a read receipt.

Next, I scoured the forums for as much advice about survival in the mountains as I could find. Where to find budget weatherproofs. What to eat. How to prepare for the walking, the potentially endless walking. Each time I found a suggested exercise regime, I followed it. Star-jumps. Push-ups. Weightlifting with books. Pull-ups using a doorframe alone. But with each day that passed, I felt weaker, not stronger. My heart thudded through my ribs like they were as light as twigs. After exercising, I’d hold it in place with both hands, as if trapping a desperate bird.

Had Grandad fought with his own body this way, in his last days here?

As I clasped my chest, I couldn’t help but think of Agatha. I’d tried to limit myself to checking her social media accounts to just a few times every day. Seeing her interact with faces I didn’t know and pose all-smiling with her arms around drunks and dancers made my skin crawl. That should be me. I hadn’t seen her since a few weeks earlier, when I’d left her in the art shop. Our chain of messages had completely run dry. In that time she’d bloomed, her smile wide and white. In the photos posted online, she’d started to look directly into the camera more often when she grinned, less natural, but more direct. I couldn’t help thinking she was looking at me. Her hair was dyed as stark and red as a traffic light now. As red as a phoenix. Was that a sign? Was she doing that deliberately, so that I would see that she understood? That she, too, was ready? Red was the colour for transformation, for rebirth. And hers had already begun. My beautiful Agatha.

Emily distracted me further. Since the moment I’d stepped off the train from London, she’d been sending me more messages than she’d ever done before. Multiple times a day I’d receive something from her, asking how I was, what was I up to, had I eaten. Every message latched onto me like an anchor and made my thinking sluggish. I replied at first, but after a couple of days I couldn’t stand it and left my phone plugged in at the corner of the room. Occasionally, the grind of my phone vibrating across the wooden floor woke me from a doze, but otherwise I paid it no attention. Distractions. Distractions.

I didn’t have many supplies in the flat, but by the eighth day, I’d almost completely ran out of food. Half an orange, green and puckered, lay on the kitchen counter beside a third of a tin of noodle soup. But the truth was, I had so much to do and to work out that I didn’t feel like eating. I’d read that hydration was vital in the mountains, so I made sure I drank a full pint every hour. It made my stomach ache, but I couldn’t take any chances. Michael’s reply would come any minute now, surely. I’d have to be ready to go.

There were only five days left until Midwinter, and it was difficult not to panic.

Dark thoughts had started to creep in. I squatted under the eaves of my chrysalis, the tissue turning to dust above my head, and covered my ears with my hands to prevent anything else from burrowing inside. It was like that time when I was a child, fallen in the crypt, and the flies were everywhere. In my head. In me. I could hear them buzzing, but this time they were speaking in clicks, like thousands of little clicking voices weeping in my and Grandad’s language. So, lifting my face to the rotting canopy, I sang. I sang as loud as I could to burn out the ferocious energy inside my throat and to drown out the discord. But they didn’t go quiet, and now the walls were banging on all sides and I didn’t have my notebook to write them down.

Had I made a mistake? Turning away from my original plan?

I hadn’t heard anything back from Michael. The nights were long and cold, with only the forum for company. That night, the eighth night, the rain pelted against my windows like it was trying to break in. My breath hovered in the air above me like smoke. My fingers looked thin and grey in the light of the laptop. I crawled to my box of things. It was almost empty now; most of what was inside had been used for the chrysalis, but a few of Grandad’s clothes still lay at the bottom, scattered with a few pages of sheet music, Emily’s audition notes, and a little purple bundle in the corner, tied with string. But first, I reached inside for the thing to start my transformation. Something warm and knitted.

And hairy.

There it was: Grandad’s orange jumper. The one I always imagined him in. The one I’d searched for in the photographs of Glencoe. I hadn't wanted to touch it before; it was too much. But that night, I pulled it over my head and tugged the hem down. It was far too short and excessively wide. It still smelled like rust. The fibres scratched at my skin like the nails of a little creature, and each time I blinked I saw the bright orange phoenix with its wings outspread in the forum banner, at the gathering, on the spine of Hidden Worlds, in Agatha’s hair. And now on me. Connecting everything. It was everywhere. Reborn from the ashes. I'm not me, I thought. I don't have my wings. The bronze sparrow on the collar caught the light like fire.

I watched dawn rise up the wall of my flat like a wave. I lay flat on my back on the mattress. All poured out. Just bone. Beside me, the laptop lay open on the Institute’s login page, and the little string-tied bundle poked from my fist.

I felt very strange.

I’d been drowsing, slipping in and out of dreaming so that I hardly knew whether the bangs and clicks and singing were real or imaginary. Sometimes the voices turned chaotic and I bolted upright, but then they would drift away again to a distant and delicate hum. At one point I could hear voices, speaking in English, through the wall, but it wasn’t the grunting gravelly tones I was used to. The roundness of the words sounded like TV. I crawled to the wall and pressed my hands and head against it.

“Why did you go?” A plummy voice. Older, maybe.

“I didn’t know who I was. I floated, not connected to anything. And being in nature, helped for a bit. I felt more alive.” A man, young.

“What made you come back?”

“Because I felt more alive, I felt the loneliness even more.”

“And then you found yourself in a blue house. Did you commit yourself?”

Silence, or words so low that I couldn’t make them out. And then the plummy voice again. “And how do you feel now, David?”

“I’m not a new man. There are no miracles. But I’m less confused.”

“And what would you say to other people on the brink of choosing the same dangerous path? To walk away from responsibilities and those who love them?”

“If you’re unprepared, you won’t come back. It still happens, though it’s not big news anymore. Bodies on the side of mountains, their hair turned white. People floating in rivers and lakes like logs. It’s cold and dangerous. And you’re walking away from love, all to feel more human. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Why do some people never come back, David?”

A pause, in which the wall tremored. “They’re still searching.”

The words dimmed as the clicks in my head soared again. Every inch of my skin crackled, drying like a toad in the sun, tightening and pulling away from my fingernails, the corners of my mouth. My heart thudded against my chest and my stomach groaned. I hadn’t eaten since the day before yesterday. I filled my belly with three glasses of water, one after the other, and then lay back on the mattress and closed my eyes.

Where was Michael? Maybe he’d never come back. There was only one place to be. And I knew it would be the last time I ever went there.

On all fours, I crawled through the hole into the chrysalis. The world was so loud, so bright. It screamed at me. How could I make it out there, alone and naked beneath a stark white sky? Wouldn’t the mountain wind slice me into pieces? I wasn’t Grandad. Perhaps I wasn’t strong enough to do what he did. I’m weak. I’m nothing.

Perhaps changing my skin really was the only way for me.

Picking up a pair of kitchen scissors, I sliced at the scabs on my forearm and pressed my wrist to the sheet music and the audition script, pasting them as best as I could over the opening. Loosening the string on the tiny purple bundle, I pressed Agatha’s hair to my lips. There were only a few, taken from the back of her cardigan while she worked in the shop. She hadn’t even known they were there, those precious threads fallen from her head. I imagined her beside me in the chrysalis, where she was meant to have been. Wide enough for two.

Moving my body became an abstract concept. As if manipulating a puppet, I felt removed. Curling up into a ball meant folding myself, and folding myself, and folding myself again, until hundreds of joints were so tightly packed that I became something else entirely. A fossil. Stone that no hands could break apart on their own. The soles of my feet rub against the bits of broken twigs but I can’t feel a thing. My toes are pebbles in my hands, frost-bitten and grey. They look dead.

And something was happening to my legs. I could feel it, like bones gently breaking. The soft snap of old chalk. Coiled as I was, I couldn’t tell which way each joint faced anymore. Where were my knees now? My elbows? I didn’t want to look, because I was either being ripped apart and reshaped, or it was all in my head. I couldn’t tell which would be worse.

With a shaking hand, I suspended Agatha’s hairs from a protruding twig, before continuing to seal up the hole with blood and any scraps of matter that’d fallen from the roof of the cocoon. And finally, I embraced the darkness and the overwhelming sense of deep sleep falling on my scalp like snow.