I learned how to cry with stolen eyes.
I reach the journal’s end in time to see those words inscribe themselves on the white paper. The period lands as emphatically as a knife in my guts. My tears have splattered all over the place, but one fucked-up thing about Catherine’s magical writing is that it’s not really ink and water can’t dissolve it. The paper buckles but the words are still there, crisp and unyielding.
“Yeah, well,” I tell her. “Me too.”
Without action, your tears are nothing. Only the pretend grief of a pretend boy. The words write all by themselves in the emptiness at the text’s end.
Yeah? My grief feels plenty real to me, but nobody cares about that. “Lore told me not to limit myself to pretending.”
I know she did. I was there. You don’t appear to have taken her advice.
“And shit, it was you! You attacked me, you bit me with those sidewalk cracks. What, just so I would trust Lore? So I’d wear her stupid pendant?”
And to fracture the wall Gus erected around your history. Why is this worth discussing? Lore and I have been hunting you for a very long time. We did what we had to do, to bring you to bay at last. Do you think we owe you our pity?
I think about that. “I mean, it would be nice.”
Beneath the word pity, the paper stays white. Unmarked. What, she won’t deign to respond?
“Or if pity’s too hard for you, it would be great if you’d at least shut up.”
There is only one way to silence the dead, Angus Farrow.
Somehow I’m not in any hurry to find out what that is—though of course I already know. “What happened with you and Anura, anyway? Did you ever see her again? It’s not like you could have had much of a relationship or anything, when you don’t even have your own body and she’s a frog.”
No answer.
“Are you still in love with her? Doesn’t that make you sympathize with me at all?”
It does not.
“Yeah? It should. You sound pretty hung up on Anura, so where do you get off thinking I’m the one who deserves to die?”
Once I understood Anura had turned away from me, I grieved. I grieved, and then I let her go. Because of that choice, I have the right to say I loved her.
“Oh, so you think my loving Geneva is only pretend? The pretend love of a pretend boy?”
The projection of a projection. An image whose beams bounced off a mirror and shattered on a wall. You never loved Geneva.
“Yeah? Because really it was all about you? Just because you’re the one Gus Farrow loved, it doesn’t mean I have to!”
Gus never loved me. I thought that was quite clear by now. If he had, I would have lived my natural span, and on my own terms. If he had, I would have died a full and true death in my own time and resolved into unbeing. You know what I am. Can I be considered the product of love?
If only Lore’s pendant wasn’t clinging to my throat, pelting me with feeling, I’d be able to brush off everything Catherine’s telling me. I could say something snide like, Well, don’t you have high standards? But the pendant won’t let me get away with that. Every last word ricochets off the pendant and bores into me. It’s like I’m riddled with tiny, twisting, bloody burrows, and every one of them is what I did to her—
And to the rest of them, don’t forget about that.
Because I guess I’m Gus Farrow, cuted up and padded with denial, but basically the hoary scumbag himself. Talking to Catherine makes me feel that, because she sees nothing in me that isn’t just more of the same. Him, her serial-killing, drama-mongering, smug-ass old enemy. And all my dreams of being distinct from him, different—that’s what’s pretend.
But Lore said it doesn’t have to be pretend. I keep coming back to that. Lore might be a bitch and a liar, but that doesn’t prove she never told me anything true.
Does it?
“It’s not like I wanted to be—Gus’s beamer! He didn’t leave me with a lot of choices.”
No. No more did I choose to be a ghost. But here we are, and only one question remains to us. What will we do with what we are, however unchosen that might be?
I get up, even though I’ve got nowhere to go, and stomp around the room. Now that I know how Catherine’s been a stowaway in my head all this time, can I feel her bobbling around and despising me? Or is that just my imagination? I want to start smashing everything in sight, tear the door off my mini-fridge, go full-on cocaine-addled rock star. But the consciousness of her sitting there and judging me, like she’s holding up a scorecard every time I shit—I don’t know why I care. But it stops me.
“So what do you want from me? I’ve killed you so many times, and you still won’t leave me alone. It’s like there’s just one lousy person I have to hunt to extinction, but you keep reappearing and not loving me, over and over. You could end this, too, you know. It would be so easy. And you won’t, you just won’t!”
I’ve been suppressing my feelings, holding them in, and when they come out—I turn into Gus Farrow, like he boils over my lips. Even to me the taste is foul.
Gus said I could not teach, but I am here to instruct you. I was denied words, but secrets dug their holes in the silence behind my scream. You kill again and again, but none of those girls are me, not in the slightest. Listen, then: you are hunting in the wrong woods.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The deer you seek does not dwell among those girls you have laid low. Indeed, there is a baying in the underbrush behind you. You grow slender legs, cloven hooves, a glistening coat. No massacre, not even one centuries in duration, will ever save you from me.
It isn’t just Catherine’s voice I’m hearing now. Geneva’s slips beneath it, both harmony and undertow. And there are other voices, too, getting louder by the moment, splitting off into currents of cacophony. I only have names for a few of those voices, but every one of them knows me.
If you wish my death to be finalized, my voice to be silenced, there is only one way to achieve your goal. I grew in my death undying from a lost girl to a sorceress, and then to a sort of god. A small god, I admit, but yours. Now, Angus Farrow, I demand a sacrifice. Can you guess whose?
I’m curled in a ball now, shaken by a chill racing down my limbs. Look, I’m sorry, I want to say. Isn’t that enough?
It isn’t, of course. Catherine’s derision that I could even think it’s enough reverberates through my head. Shit, why am I sobbing?
“Okay,” I say out loud. Tremors break the word into a staccato, tripping over the edge of my chattering teeth. Sweat crawls down my back. “I get it. How?”
Return with me. To Nautilus. To the source of your beam.