INSIDE, IT WAS dark, but Calliope could see light in one of the rooms just off the front hall and continued forward. Her face was reddened and blotchy, but composed; the highs and lows of the night had left her calm, if not wholly at peace. The short hall opened into a living room with a dusty and broken couch in the center, facing a small fireplace.
Dark mold stains streaked the walls, but Calliope could still make out the wallpaper, exactly how Josh had described it to her years ago.
“Your mom put it up on a Sunday afternoon,” she murmured, “while you and your brother were in town with your dad.” She smiled, sad and distant. “She was so proud of herself that she never took it down or painted over it, even when she realized a few months later that she hated the pattern.”
She turned back toward the rest of the house, walking from room to room like someone visiting a museum; hearing her friend’s voice, seeing his wild gestures as he told her stories about his childhood.
Finally, she climbed the stairs to the second floor and turned to the room where two brothers had lived until the day their parents had died.
A slim figure faced the moonlit window of the room, looking down at the driveway where Josh had said good-bye. Things unseen gibbered in the shadows, whispering words in children’s voices.
Not everyone who disappears is kidnapped, she thought, and some things are worse than being eaten by a dragon.
“Hi, Mikey.”
“You made him go away,” he said, his words echoed by the things within the shadows of the room.
“Not exactly,” Calliope said, and the boy turned.
The right side of his face was perfectly normal. The left side was frozen, locked in a permanent scream, the skin a sickly, concrete gray. His left arm was knotted and brutalized, ending in a shredded claw masquerading as a hand. On another night, in another place, Calliope might have recoiled. Gasped. Here, she simply looked.
“He said you would,” the thing said. “He thought you’d do better than I did. It was the deal he made. If you let him go, I had to let him go.” His right eye blinked, and he looked down at the worn floorboards. “ ‘Round his brow encrimsoned laurels waved, And o’er him shrilly shrieked the demon of the grave.’ ” He looked back at Calliope. “I guess that’s me.”
The whispers in the walls of the house echoed his words, repeated them, and added in things he had never said, turning them into a kind of jump rope nursery rhyme, but clumsy and uneven, the voices of childlike things that didn’t exactly know how to be children.
“I never thought you’d give him up,” the boy-thing said. “You must have a lot of friends.” He sounded wistful. Envious.
“No.” Calliope folded her arms. “I don’t.”
“Then why did you let him go?” The boy’s left brow dropped into a confused frown. The echoes repeated the question. “You could have—”
“Josh is dead.” Even as she said it, Calliope felt the words take on the weight of reality for the first time. The whispering voices went utterly silent.
He searched her face with his eyes, one bright and blue, one bloodshot and pale. “You couldn’t—” The echoes began again. “Stop it,” he shouted, and the sounds cut off.
“I wouldn’t.” Calliope’s response drew his attention back to her. “They wanted something from me that wasn’t mine to give.” She watched him, seeing all the things she’d been trained to see in the guilty. “But you know that, don’t you?” He turned away from her, but she continued. “You did all this once, too.”
“I was the last one, before you.” He sounded like a child, caught doing something he knew was wrong.
“You gave up your companion.” Calliope watched the claw that had been his left hand flex in and out of a fist. “They need people to . . .” She shook her head, still not quite sure how the hidden things worked. “Remember them. Keep them from . . . fading. Whatever. You gave them up.”
“Magic goes away.” He was talking to the shadows, not Calliope. The words sounded worn out and flat, as though he’d used them many, many times. “It just happens. Piece by piece, it dies. It’s not my fault. People die and dreams die and hope dies and magic dies and the world just . . . comes in and covers it up.” His jaw clenched. He looked for all the world like a toddler about to throw a fit. “I gave up some of it, but it would have gone out anyway. It’s not my fault.”
“What was it?”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter if I tell you. You can’t remember it. No one can. I traded it away and it doesn’t exist anymore.” His face sagged. “She was so pretty. It was the hardest—”
“What did you get?”
He flinched, as though she’d shouted. The glance he gave her was more fear than anything else. “My parents were gone. Josh was—” He cut himself off. The mobile half of his face twisted into a sneer. “I didn’t want to be alone anymore.” He flung his clawed hand at the crawling shadows of the room, filled with giggling whispers—the sound of a classroom snickering at one child’s misfortune. “Jackpot.” He turned back to her. “I wanted my mom and dad. I wanted us.” His voice was an adolescent’s on the verge of tears. “Josh kept saying we had to be enough for each other, but we weren’t. I got a chance to fix it, but it was worse. And then Josh came.” His one blue eye was shining and wet, the other hard and staring. “I killed him. It was me.”
Calliope’s heart twisted in her chest, trying to stop. Once. Forever. “I figured that.”
The boy-thing looked at her for another few seconds, then looked away. “I don’t know why he came.”
“You’re a liar.” Calliope swung the words like a club and felt a sad sort of triumph as Mikey’s head jerked back in her direction. The whispers in the shadows hissed. “He came because he found out you weren’t gone. He came because he wanted to help, because he promised.” She tipped her head, remembering one of Josh’s stories. “You put yourself on top of the jungle gym again and waited for him to climb up after you.”
“I wanted someone to stay with me,” he muttered.
“You wanted Josh.”
“Why not?” The boy sneered with the side of his face that wasn’t locked in a cry of pain. “He came, just like I knew he would. He always had to be so right all the time.” He flexed his clawed hand. “I couldn’t let him go.”
“And you couldn’t just leave?” she asked. “Go back with him?”
“Like this?” He gestured at his face. “With what I did? With what I know?” He shook his head. “I can’t leave.”
You won’t, Calliope thought, feeling a sick kind of recognition. You’re afraid.
Mikey stared at the ground.
“You knew he’d want to find you if he thought he could. He wanted a family.” Her voice was faint, even to her own ears. “That’s all he ever really wanted.” She looked back up at Mikey and waited until his eyes rose to meet hers. “For the longest time after he told me about you, I thought you were dead.” The young man-thing looked away. “The way he said he’d ‘lost’ you, it always seemed like you’d died, not disappeared.” She looked around the room, trying to imagine what it had been like when Josh had been a boy. “He loved you a lot. He used to talk about you all the time.”
“But he stopped.”
“He stopped,” she agreed. “Yeah. You left him with no family—”
His eyes widened. “You don’t—”
“He had to make a new one,” she finished, not even listening to his protest.
“He gave up.” The boy’s voice was bitter.
“He grew up.” Calliope wanted to slap him. “Things change. Everything changes.”
“We didn’t have to.” Mikey’s voice was stiff with anger, but behind it Calliope could hear a child’s cries of denial. “I didn’t.”
“You—” She looked around the room. Things both her mother and Vikous had said twined round one another in her mind, sounding very much the same. “Actually, I think you’re right, Mikey. That’s how you get to a place where you could kill your own brother for company—by never moving.” Her eyes traveled over his terror-twisted face, the knotted arm and grasping, clawed hand, seeing it as a whole for the first time. “You really are a monster,” she breathed. “More than any of the others.”
Tears ran from the boy’s one good eye. “So kill me.” His eyes drifted down to her coat pocket. “You’ve got a gun, you can kill me.”
The smallest frown creased Calliope’s brow at the pleading note in his voice. Her eyes narrowed, searching the half of Mikey’s face that was still human. “You . . .” she said, but her voice trailed away, her head tilted, as though she was trying to catch the faintest of sounds. The puzzle-image she’d assembled—which she’d thought complete outside her parents’ house—was still missing a piece, and as she stood there, it dropped into place. Her eyes refocused. Hardened. “No.”
Despair twisted the boy’s face, pulling it into an almost perfect mirror of the frozen left side. “Why?” he said.
“You didn’t want Josh,” she repeated. “You didn’t want company.”
“What are you talking about?” Mikey pleaded. “Why would I—”
“You wanted someone to kill you.” She cut through his protests, her voice flat and hard. “You wanted to end. You wanted to get away from what you’d done, because you broke everything and you’re too”—she shook her head, her mouth twisting—“weak . . . to fix it.”
“And you hate me.” The boy-thing’s voice was shaking. “Right? You hate me for what I did, for what I am.” Tears ran down the crags of his face. “I’m . . . Why . . .”
Calliope stared into his eyes. “I could lie, and say it’s because Josh loved you, and would want to give you another chance, but that’s not it.” She looked on utter despair in his face, and didn’t flinch. “The truth is you killed my friend.” She turned and walked toward the front of the house. “And letting you live is the worst thing I can do.”
The boy screamed as she left, until the echoes in the shadows drowned him out.