‘We would be kings, you and me,’ he says. In the words there’s a concept of a fantasy of a world where words really mean something, and things are safe and true and good again, if they ever had been at all. They are watching. ‘Go on. Don’t be a pussy. Shoot it.’
Above, the barn’s rafters creak and crack with every pummeling blow of the wind from wide plains beyond sheet-metal walls. The doors, big and red if they were visible in anything other than darkness, seem to her to rather be keeping all of them in than guarding against anything outside. Would. Could. Should. The words she knows have distinctions, but she can’t gauge what they might even be or mean right now. The gun quivers in her hands. Could she even do it?
‘I…’
His leathery fingers close around hers. The quivering stops. Five staccato breaths, between the three of them.
A moment later there’s only two.
‘Why do we kill?’ she asks one day. His answer, like everything else about the person who trained her and raised her up from nothing, is vague.
‘Because lives are lives, just as words are words and money is money. You and me, we’re living because we’re supposed to be.’
‘And them?’
‘Which them?’
‘The ones we kill.’
‘They’re not. They’re not supposed to be at all.’
‘What?’
‘What do you mean, what.’
‘To be what?’
‘You stupid or something?’
‘No. Yes. I don’t know. What if we become the ones who aren’t supposed to be?’
He grins. He has a yellow-black mouth, teeth stained from years and years of nicotine. She’s reminded of the initial fear she found in her gut when he had first walked into the staffroom to steal her away. She couldn’t understand at the time why he wouldn’t take what’s his. Then she’d stepped outside, and found a bloodbath.
I came for you, he’d crooned in some queer attempt to soothe, or perhaps deride? Only you.
She could only follow.
‘We’re not sloppy. That won’t happen.’
‘But what if it-’
She cries out. His hand’s locked on her throat. For a moment she feels so small, and him so big, so horrible. She’ll kill him someday, she thinks. But the moment passes, and he fists a crumpled piece of notepaper out of his pocket. He stuffs it in her hand, and starts gathering his bags.
She looks at the paper. There’s nothing there but a string of numbers and letters.
‘What’s this?’
‘We’re going, d’you hear me?’
‘Expect me to get anything out of this? Means nothing to me.’
He bends down to her, and his distant eyes grow almost soft and hard all at the same time. ‘It’s a cypher. One day, you’re going to replace me. When Wong accepts contracts, he gives details in a cypher, cuz that’s just what he does. He’s crazy. I already told you he’s crazy. But we’re his arms, and he’s the brain. Get that in that empty head of yours. Do you even know how to crack cyphers?’
‘We’re not in a stupid mystery book-’
‘Well, start. Christ, you’re useless.’
‘You have me. You won. So what are you gonna do? Because it's been months. Do you even know what you're doing?'
He doesn't reply. She scoffs.
'And you call me useless.’
‘In my day, you'd have been grateful-’
‘Well I’m not.’
‘Yeah?’ He pauses, daring her to go any further. 'Keep pushing, see what that does for you.'
‘You took everything.’ She clenches her fists.
‘I told you already, kid. She told me to get you. I didn’t fucking want to, did it look like I wanted you? She didn’t say you’d be such a little shit, of course. Lying piece of-’
‘Who?’
‘Just pack your garbage.’
‘How’d you even get details from Wong?’ she asks, her voice small. She’s never seen Wong, only heard his name. He’s a ghost, a shadow of a shadow, but the one who stole her seems to find marginal value in shadows of shadows, so in darkness she trusts. The humming of the motel minifridge grows louder. ‘You destroyed our phones.’
‘Can’t have them finding us,’ he says with the conviction of a priest. ‘They’re in the wires, you know. In the air. You can hear it, can’t you? The humming, the choking strings. They’re even in fucking dreams. They’re everywhere, and their eyes are on us, so we can’t fuck this up. Just pack. We’re leaving tonight. And open the goddamn window, it smells like shit in here.’
‘Where?’
‘Laughlin.’
On those odd days in the city where it snows, she had liked to look out all huddled in blankets. Those were the days her mom hadn’t been shooting up, and was clear enough to talk; those long days she didn’t have to steal, because there was always just enough to get them by. Most nights, she’d been tired – so tired she found it hard to sleep, so she just didn’t. She’d look out, and look at the prettiness, no matter how cold she felt and was and would be. She’d look out, a little girl wondering where her big sister had gone for the week. What she was doing. How they’d be protected this time, just a little longer.
Her mom would just stare at the wall, glass-eyed. Eager bullets hit wood in the apartment across the street. The radio of the neighbors next door would do the same as it always did: static, distorted noise that meant nothing. She’d often wondered why they’d listen to a broken radio voluntarily. But maybe some kind of noise was better than nothing. And a broken radio was still something to have when you had nothing, too.
You have beautiful hair, her mother would whisper, running her withered hands through it. And she’d let her. On those cold, winter nights, by God she’d let her. So beautiful. My supermodel. My gypsy princess.
She was freckle-faced with a birthmark covering half her neck and warts on the side of her nose with crooked teeth, but she let her mom have her fantasy. For a time, she was Rapunzel in her tower. She was Briar Rose in her castle of thorns. She was Snow White, Esmeralda, Anastasia. Then her sister died, and she found out what her sister had to do each week. Then she had to do it in her place. And when the Prince came at last – too late – he was nothing like in any of the stories. He didn’t even love her. She was a chore, or something worse. Destiny, if such a thing could even be believed.
We would be kings, you and me, he’d tell her, though now she knows it wasn’t her at all but someone or something else in his head, over and over and over again. She never knew what he meant, for of course he’d never tell her any of his reasons. But every new place they go he’d say the mantra, and then he’d teach her something: how to pick a lock, how to fight. How to read lifelines on palms, to hear whispers through walls, to make a bezoar from human skin and hair, to see people in rooms ten towns over.
So long as she never dwelled on why.
They’re talking to the man with no eyes, who proclaims he has answers even though everyone else on the streets says he doesn’t. He hops about like some sad fish, but he grins like a jackal anyway. He’s the king of his castle, though what little he has left is sand. They meet him in a dumpster behind a drive-thru liquor store. He stinks of gin.
‘Ah,’ is all the old thing says when he first sees them. He sucks on his thumb, dragging the spittle over each lump where his eyes should be like scales on a Pharaoh's. ‘You.’
‘Nice to see you too,’ her captor, handler— or is it teacher? – says. ‘Get up you lazy sack of shit.’
‘No. I like it here. It’s warm.’
It’s not warm. It’s a cold desert night, and she finds her blood near freezing.
‘Don’t do deals sitting down,' he says, with the likely aim to project some semblance of flippancy. The problem, she almost finds herself lamenting, is that he simply cares too much. ‘Too close to the dirt.’
‘We’re on asphalt. Dirt’s that way,’ the man with no eyes points.
‘Your sister’s less difficult.’
‘She has no ears. She can’t even hear what nonsense you spew. Of course she’s nicer,’ the old man drawls, pausing. He sniffs the air. ‘You. Come to me.’
‘…Me?’ she asks.
‘Who else? You’re new. Fresh, untested. I smell it on you.’ He sniffs the air again, giggling.
‘What’s it you smell?’
‘New blood smells clean, like spring. Old blood is winterfrost. It’s dead with nothing in it. Your daddy smells of winterfrost.’
'He’s not my-’
‘Course he is. These eyes never fool me, swear it six ways to Sunday. Same blood, you’s and his. His is all over you, now and after.’
And he's not lying, she realizes. The lumps on the old man’s face are moving, always searching, always finding. His eyelids might be sacks of skin, but he sees.
She’s never had a father. Not a present one, anyway. Far away, that’s what her mom had told her. He’s far away, but he loves us. He loves us so much.
‘Enough bullshit,’ her handler growls out, stepping closer to the strange old man. ‘Gimme the key.’
‘You never mind your P’s and Q’s, jack. Always to the point. Little soldier. One might call it a flaw, if they knew you.’
‘If they knew me, you say.’
‘You think you’re so smart whenever you come down here to throw your weight around, don’t you. Think you’re a big bad man, but I know your type. You’ll die on a floating mattress I say, and the moon will swallow you whole. I seen it.’
‘No one knows me, only me.’
‘I seen it, jack. I know you.’
‘You cheat.’
The old man wraps his hands around his knees as he warbles. He tilts his head up, bulges twitching as his thin papery lips widen to form a jagged, dangerous kind of smile.
‘She knows you.’
First she thinks the old man’s talking of her again, but he’s not. It’s someone else.
‘She who?’ she interjects.
‘She who hears the voices in the dark, the frequencies in the wires, the shadows in the light. Sis is a strange woman. No ears at all, but eyes wide like a cave-fish’s. She’s a witch. But you don’t choose your family, that’s what they say, yes, that’s what they say. She’s all I had growing up.’
Her handler palms his scalp, sighing.
‘She’s our benefactor, kid. She’s who finds out who’s not supposed to be.’
‘I thought Wong did that.’
The old man laughs at her confusion, before turning back to him.
‘I’m not giving you the key until you do what you promised me last time. Fate, jack. Only so long you can shirk it off.’
‘Price is higher and higher these days.’
‘I ain’t budging. My price, no other.’
‘Fine.’
A hand and a knife and then blood, blood, blood. The old man laps it up hungrily, like it’s worth his very own life.
‘Stay away from the water,’ the decrepit thing gasps out at last, tongue still slathering the other man’s hand even as it's wrenched away. Her handler almost looks disturbed, a rare blemish in his inhuman mask. But the old man only points behind them, and the dumpster opens into a hollow passage, a hidden dark. The key is in the latch, and the Way is wide open. ‘Stay away from the sea.’
‘Laughlin is inland,’ she points out.
But the old man only starts screaming hysterically. He grapples out at her. When it becomes clear he can’t even hope to reach her without her stepping away, he simply commits to writhing on the floor in front of her, frothing at the mouth, repeating words over and over she can barely make out. He can’t see, but she knows he’s watching.
‘Don’t go in. Don’t do it. The door. The-’
But she’s already been tugged into the hole, and the old man is left to babble alone in unchanging, unending madness, just as he had been before they’d found him. Only the world awaits.
Brothels and casinos and gas stations and used condoms and desert trash are what greet them in Laughlin. There’s palm trees, at least. The towers loom by the waterfront in the distance, or would have loomed if the town had not been so stretched out, so desiccated in the heat.
They stay in a motel the first night near the edge of town. It’s a run-down thing, overpriced for what it is, but it does them just fine. She counts the holes in the wall, and he’s curled up on the creaking mattress, shivering and jittering even though it’s a muggy kind of warm in their room. He’s saying words too, his special words.
We would be…
‘Why do you say that?’ The words slip out. She didn’t mean to, she wants to say, even though she knows she actually did.
‘Why do I say what?’
‘That we’re kings. We’re not kings. We’re nobodies.’
The fan rotates incessantly above them. His teeth chatter like beetle’s feet, and she almost thinks he didn’t hear her even though she said it loud as a damn rooster announcing kingdom come, and–
‘I don’t say that.’
‘Yes you do. All the time. Why?’
‘You’re a lying brat.’
‘No,’ she retorts, not particularly knowing what to say back. ‘You… are.’
He laughs.
‘Stupid, stupid, I tell you. Yes, I’m a liar. How else d’you think I’m alive, kid?’
‘I dunno. Won’t be alive for much longer though, will you. The crazy man said-’
‘To hell with what No-Eyes said. He knows jack-shit about me.’
‘But-’
‘Listen. I'll give you a tip. To survive in this life, you can’t go around asking questions like that all the time. About stuff like prophecy, fate, what have you. If you do, they’ll hear you. And they’ll do their damnedest to make it real, and they’ll fuck you up, hear me kid? You’ll be a body in the ground by the time they’re done with you. Some story for some romantic to lap up. You’ll be a worthless villain or some side character for a hero to save, or fail to save in time, all because you were loose with your lips and you didn’t know how to hide your own damn business. A whore, dead in the rain.’
‘I’m not a whore.’
‘Whatever helps you sleep.’
‘That’s why you say it, isn’t it. It’s a focus. So you can drown out their…attention. Right?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
She frowns.
‘Why do they want you? Us. Why–’
‘Go to sleep. Long day tomorrow.’
‘But-’
‘Hey,’ he whispers sharply. ‘Stop thinking so loud. Wait– d’you see that? Over there. Out the window.’
She’s stupid for listening to him. Her eyes strain, but there’s nothing but streetlights and neon.
‘Bang,’ he yells right in her ear, laughing. She jumps, scratching out at him. He stops suddenly, his eyes widening. ‘You actually bought it. Christ, kid. Jesus. Take a joke, will you?’
‘Wasn’t very funny.’
‘Was funny to somebody. Funny to me.’
‘Yeah, but you’re sick. Course you’d find that kind of thing funny.’
‘You need a good scare every once in a while, in our line of work. Way I see it, I just did you a favor,’ he trails off, the faint echo of his idiot prayer haunting his lips, stuff of kings and nothingness and other things that don’t matter. He snubs the butt of his cigarette, exhaling sharply. ‘They’ll get you if you’re too humorless, I know, oh, I know.’
She’s noticed his stray eyes searching for something when he thinks she’s not looking. Sometimes – with those eyes – he looks like the Devil himself was sitting on his chest and pressing into him, or perched on his shoulders, hugging onto his waist as if to collapse the lungs. Those eyes are never still. They always rove, looking for Theys. The Theys living in the radio and the TV and the Walkman. The Theys in the air, in the dark of the wood, in the springs of a bed, in the creak of a door, in the rushing of the water. The Theys are following him, following her too if he’s to be believed. The Theys who weave fate and strangle you in its strings. The Theys who give knowledge to No-Eyes and No-Ears, the Theys who that person named Wong she’s never met and probably never will meet is afraid of but abides anyway, the Theys who set him on his current path and set her to collide with his. But that’s all bullshit because he’s a sad, paranoid bastard, she’s decided. She’d hate to become him when she’s old.
‘Shut up.’
‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. Lights out, kid,’ is all he gives her in the end. The switch flips with a last forlorn flick, and dark is all they know.
The thing gasps beneath his boot, clawing at its throat with its ugly paws. Beneath matted hair, all she can see in the dim light filtering through the shutters are the wisps of a dirty beard, clammy scaly skin, bulging eyes. The locked door of the trailer shakes with each thump of a limb on the floor. He turns back to her, nodding.
‘Come on, kid. Just like we practiced.’
‘This who Wong says in his letters and numbers?’
‘Cyphers. Christ, pull the fucking trigger already.’
‘It’s a-’
‘Monster. It’s a monster and if we don’t get rid of it, they’ll know. They’ll be breathing down Wong’s neck, who’ll breathe down my neck, and then yours is next. Do you know what it’s like to not be able to breathe? Pull the goddamn trigger, kid. On five.’
‘Wait-’
‘Four’
‘Just let me-’
‘THREE-’
Four gunshots ring out in quick succession. There’s a roar in her ears like rushing water and lapping waves, a sea of blood pooling within her and before her and behind her. She doesn’t realize she’s out of breath until his arms wrap around her one at a time, and they’re sitting down against the wall, and she’s crying, by God she’s crying. Her hand grazes his face, rough with days-old stubble. It’s stone cold, like some corpse, maybe even the one in front of her. It’s too bad he’s still living.
‘You made me yell, kid. You made me fucking yell. I thought we were past this.’
‘What am I doing here?’ she asks herself, but of course she doesn’t get an answer. The world is shaking. Or is it her hands?
‘Come on. Think of the money, the fucking money. We’ll be rich, you just need to trust me. Come on, kid. Repeat after me, say the words, come on. We would be kings-’
She slaps him.
‘Shut up. Just- Shut up. With your stupid - your goddamn- Just- stop.’
He purses his lips in disgust at her hurried pants, but complies anyway. Good as a kept mutt is the only thought that manages to swim to the fore of her muddlesome mind. It’s no wonder he has the job she thinks he has if he’s like this.
‘Just saying. You’re fine with your hands. With poisons. With anything except- What’s the deal with-’
‘I just hate the noise, okay?’
He swallows, as if the very idea of limits is somehow preposterous. She knows he doesn’t take her seriously, but she honestly can’t find it in herself to care. They stay like that. Something wet soaks her sock. She wonders if it’s blood from the body in front of her, the monster she’s slain, but she doesn’t want to look. So she just sits there rocking back and forth, smelling metal and tasting ash and holding onto the one she hates most, hating that he grounds her just from the mere fact he’s a human body, hating everything he is and represents but can’t give up, not yet, because she’s too weak. She’s pathetic and vulnerable and he’s banking on it. She knows he is.
‘There, there,’ he pats her back, but there is no comfort in his settled grip on her shoulder, none at all. ‘Ain’t that just fine.’
In the city where it snows, there were some nights in the breakroom between serving that she had time to herself, and the guests were less needy. She'd dance the night away on those nights, under the stars that were lights and to the throbbing beat of the club music through the walls. And she'd tell herself stories.
Some stories were mundane. They were inconsequential to the course of events that is, that was her life. They are stories of someone she saw one day, but never the other: a man with a corgi tattoo, a prostitute with her hair done up with starfish pins, a girl, her face crushed up against the glass of the window, peering into a world so different to her own.
She'd imagine their lives and design a story for them. What they do when they get home. Where they go, once their paths no longer intersect. Who they are, what their values are, what things mean something to them but not to others, their loftiest virtues and darkest, deepest sins. Sometimes she would place herself within their stories as a mother, or a sister, a lover, a daughter. She would travel a life divorced from hers, and at the end of the road, the fantasy would break. She would go back to work with a heavy heart. And in the morning, it was like the story had never existed at all, wiped clean by snow. For the stories were not real. In them, she had control. She was the master, and no one else. In them, her words meant something. She mattered.
She swore to herself one day last year that it would be the last year in quiet decay. Her whole life she had been locked behind a door in a cave with no window or hole to see out of, and she hated herself, what she stood for, how no matter what she did her mother could not get better. Her time to mean something was now. She would become something to be heard, and listened to, respected. She swore it under the moon that autumn night, before God and pricked her thumbs.
A month later, he came.
'When does it happen?'
'When's what happen?'
'When the line is crossed. When you say and pretend and act like nothing matters and you don't care about anything and end up leaving people behind and losing them and then you wake up one day and realize that who you are and who you say you are are one and the same? When do you become the stranger?'
'You think too deep about this shit, kid.'
'I'm– I'm just passing time.'
'Are you?'
'I don't want to be afraid anymore.'
'You won't stop being scared of things if you become a stranger.' He kneels in front of her, his hand settling on her shoulder. 'I asked my guy the same thing.'
'Your guy?'
'Was just like you, once. Dad died. Didn't know what the hell I wanted to do with my life. We'd done everything together, and you know what he dies from? Lady at the clinic said pneumonia. Ten feet tall I used to think he was, and he dies of fucking chickenshit. Was the first time I realized that I had something to lose, and by the time I did it was already gone.'
His words are saying something, but he's thinking something else. He's a liar, he's such a liar, but she can't say anything. It's so damn typical of him. So she plays along.
'What'd he tell you? About… fear.'
‘We have three days. Things’ll be better then,’ he says, chuckling over nothing. 'That's what he said. And then three days later he was dead. Suppose it's better than being surprised about all of it.'
'Should have known you wouldn't actually have a point.'
'The point is he was a dead man and pretended it meant nothing and then he died. He didn't give me time to prepare. I could see he was sick, but I didn't know how much. But he was selfish. He wanted things to be normal, for just a little longer. He didn't want to die a stranger. He wanted to die a man, for whatever good that gave him.'
'Did he really die of pneumonia?'
She isn't even sure she's the one who said her thoughts aloud, but she must have, because he's gone silent. He's gone wistful. It's not a good look on him. Her question lingers in the dry air, the smell of gasoline and road-tar wallowing in the heat. He takes a long chug of the last can of beer, and tosses it out on the road. It hits a stone once, twice, then skids to a stop.
'They didn't want him to carry on. Died looking at his son like he was a stranger. I still think about it, the look in his eyes. That whole day was like a dream, kid. Was there and then poof. Gone. I don't even remember what we said to eachother, because who the fuck remembers anything from dreams? But I saw his eyes, kid. I saw his fucking eyes.'
Her own eyes trail the open sky. In the heat of it she sees the blue eyes of monsters in rooms behind locked doors and empty cupboards and shattered wood lodged with bullets. And above it all, a vision of him behind a street-corner, stony glare boring holes into a crumpled page sent to him from on high. And beneath his boot, a father choking on his own vomit with a bullet between his eyes.
'They took my dad from me, kid. They ripped him from my hands, choked me with their yarn like a horse with a bit stuffed under its tongue. He taught me everything I knew, and they made him their voodoo doll. They made me their bitch. So you know what I said? I said fuck ‘em. Fuck fate, fuck everything. I did things I regret, and they cut- I cut them off. I make my own bread. Me, not them. Hear that? Me. So I stick it out on my own. I stay here.’
'That how you got into all this?'
'There's only one way to move forward, kid. It's not becoming a stranger to yourself. It's simpler than that. Just make sure you never have a reason to look back when all's said and done. Then you'll be like me.'
'What, a soldier?'
He thinks she's not looking when his face breaks from stone to frail glass, and his eyes seem lost, lost, far away and lost. In them, there is enough leeway for her to do what she does best: construct a myth, an explanation for his unfathomable actions. In them, for a mere millisecond, there is a land where no Theys exist to justify actions given and taken away. There is only those few, flawed actors trying desperately to make sense of building blocks in some Dadaist nightmare. In that uncertain world, monsters are not monsters, Wong might not even exist, No-Eyes might be a bum who lies for a living, and him? He's a king, at least, but one of nothing but lint and beer and dust. He may work for someone or no one or many. He may not even have a plan beyond the present. But in them, she can see it: the fear he tries so hard to hide.
'No. Unstoppable.'
As in all stories, many roads have converged into one by the end of their long journey. They're now in the lands east of Eden, where nothing grows. Above them, the sky is a burnished bronze. Below them, the red earth oozes out like blood. He is a man possessed, and she is a fish caught in his current. To her it seems the earth is but a slow and steady decline before them, a body wallowing lower and lower as the air grows hotter and hotter.
'We're almost there,' he says. 'Just a little longer.'
'I'm so tired.' Her head's swimming. In the hollows of the mountains, she swears she sees ghosts emergent. The monsters they've killed, the hairy unwashed masses turned into marble statues upon death, unblemished and unfeeling but alive. The dead have come to watch their sojourn, and they're not asleep. She can feel their eyes on her. She can feel them judge.
'So am I. But we keep on, don't we?'
'I'm hot.'
'Say the words. It'll make it better.'
'What words?'
'We would be kings, you and me.'
'We would be kings.' But she feels nothing. The heat is only growing inside her as the world turns a bruised purple like a grape or a pummeled human head and the earth is left all swallowed up by redder darkness. She's in hell, she is. They're in hell, and there's no way out. The land is sinking further and further as they walk. Down, down, down, down….
'Just a little longer, kid. The dam's just ahead. Only one last person who's not supposed to be, then we can leave this fucking place, then we get paid, and, and- and all the sacrifice will be worth it. We'll be free then, got it? We'll be free.'
'Free?' Freedom sounds nice. She could open the door of her prison-cave, and look out into the world. The old delusion creeps up at her one last time, the one where he's a blessing and not the curse he's become. No, she shouldn't open the door. That was what No-Eyes said, wasn't it? He was warning her. The door. But what about the door?
'I'll see my dad again, and you'll see your… your…. your mom? Right?'
'My mom's alive.'
'Oh, right. Who do you want to see, then? More than anything.'
The ghosts swarm the hills now, slow yet constant in their marching. They are coming down with us, she almost thinks to laugh. They are coming to join us, and take our souls just like we took their bodies.
'Than…?'
'Come on. It's simple. You're not simple, you're smart. That's why I picked you.'
'I thought she picked me?'
'Just answer– just fucking answer me.'
'My sister?'
'Fuck it, sure. Yeah, we'll see her, kid. Fucking damnit.'
'I don't want her to see you.'
She doesn't want to see her sister, either. What would she think? Of what she's done with her life. With her mom's life. For all she knows, her mom could just be another faceless ghost in the gathering crowds around them.
Whatever you do, don't look back, another voice says, putrid with hate. She can only listen.
'Don't always get what we want.'
'The dam's up. it's not down.'
'We are going up, kid.'
'No. It looks like we're–'
'We're going up.'
'Don't you see them? The dead.'
'What?'
'The dead are dancing.'
"I don't know what– fuck it, fuck it all. It's all for us, kid. Hah! Don't you see it? They're celebrating us.'
'Why?'
'Because we're going to God soon. We're leaving this place. Isn't that nice?'
And last above it all, the Green Moon reveals his fullest face from behind the shredded clouds.
'Then why are we going down?'
'Where are you going?' her mom asked, the month before it all ended. The snow was terrible outside, so terrible, and everything was so cold too. She hugged her mom that night, hugged her and cried and cried and cried. 'Why are you crying?'
'I don't know mom,' she said, for however could she explain that premonition in her heart, in her very soul, that things would change? That if fate did not decide for her, she would have to make the very same choice. Whether to stay, or to go. And if she left… who would take care of her mom? Her sister's long dead. She was all that's left, and her mom couldn't even say her name right anymore. 'I don't know.'
To be someone, she couldn't stay any further. So her myths had become more and more elaborate, and the temptations more alluring. She wanted to be the star her mom always said she was, but she couldn't be that watching her mother waste away.
They stayed there, hugging in the dark cold room. Things felt right, then. Her mom was the one taking care of her, and not the other way around. The world was not so frightfully near. The allure of meaning and grandeur was not quite so strong.
She left after that, sobbing and retching and in tears, but she had to go, she needed to. She couldn't do it anymore alone. She'd find help - get things sorted, better for herself, then she'd go back for her mom, yes. She just needed time. Then she'd go back.
She never had the chance.
‘We would be kings, you and me.' The wind is strong now, stronger than all things she's ever known, and in the lapping water of the dammed lake below them the moonlight plays tricks with her eyes. 'See this ground, kid? It's holy ground. The people before us, and the people before them, unto the beginning of time knew just as I. Here's where the chains are not so constrained. Here is where the line between their world and ours is thin as the reflections on those waves. This place is a whatever-you-call-it– a phantasm, kid. Here, no one stands. Here we all float, float on the clouds.'
'I thought we were to kill a monster.'
'We are. It's all arranged. I found it while you were sleeping.'
'You– what?'
'A monster was following us. It wanted your heart, but I got to it first. I wanted to be nice, see? We're east of Eden, kid. As east as east gets, plus an ocean. We're where dreams come true, if you try hard enough. Real fucking dreams. You want to see them again? We need a death. For Wong and No-Ears and God, we need a death. So why not make everyone happy at once? And I thought you would want to be the one to do it. Dreams don't come true for passive actors in this world. Isn't that nice of me, kid? Tell me it's nice.'
'You- I don't know what to say.'
'You don't have to say anything, kid. You know I care about you.'
'But you said–'
'I said I care about you.'
'Where is the monster?'
'In there,' he says, throwing his arm ahead of them. An old shed with sheet-metal walls. It's not quite the barn where he first showed her how to use a gun and kill something with it, but it's close. So close the hair on her neck is rising. 'The monster is in there. Behind the door.'
And indeed as they draw closer, she hears a frightful wailing, like a banshee hours before the moment of death. The door before them opens with a scream, and shuts behind them. He bars it with wood, and she's left to look upon the monster. It's small, so small and frail. There's barely fat hanging off its bones. Its eyes are watery and crusted, hair all covered in dust, and its teeth are chattering together like a nutcracker. It's wretched, and evil, and wretched.
'Well? We don't have all night.'
The gun is placed in her hand, that sword of darkness. She raises it, and the monster starts squealing and squealing about stupid things. She fires once, and a bullet pierces its shoulder. He smiles encouragingly, like she's doing something right for once. She matters. So she fires another, but this time the bullet misses. Because it's then that her brain starts to unravel the words of the monster before her. The stupid, silly words that she can barely understand as it is because it squeals so much like a pig it's not even funny.
Words about how it didn't mean to do some undefined this or that and that it was just so cold and they had a fire, how it saw the light and wanted to be warm and to be closer, how it would leave so long as they just said so but they didn't say so and it doesn't know what's going on and other such nonsense. She fires another shot in warning, and it's quiet.
'You're wasting bullets.'
'I–'
'Why now?'
'I don't know.'
But she does know, because it keeps talking. It's insistent, see, so it goes on again about all those things but also other things about how it'll do anything so long as they don't take it to its momma because its momma was a very scary monster that would skin it alive for going so far outside their borders at this time of night just to find 'fucking tires' again, but also not to tell her it's been swearing because than he's sure to get his hide skinned. And– what?
'Why did you leave her?' she asks suddenly. it's rocking back and forth, but somber eyes peer up at her through their finger-shaped prison. 'Your momma.'
'I was going to go back,' it warbles. 'I always come back.'
'Fucking shoot it already,'
'I'll be good,' it wails. 'I promise, I'll be good.'
'Shoot it.'
'I can't– I can't fucking think. Shut up. I can't think.'
'It's saying what you want to hear. Remember the death, kid.'
But she can't. She doesn't know why just yet, but she can't. And when he reaches over her shoulder to clench down on her wrists and again orient the gun where it should be, she elbows his neck and fires wildly out into nowhere.
'You don't want to do this,' he says, even though she really does want to. 'You don't want to-'
'We would be kings, you and me,' she snarls, pointing the gun wildly in the dark, into a direction she hopes is his. 'You never gave me a straight answer why you say that.'
'Calm down, kid. Just–'
'I won't. Tell me.'
'But-'
'Tell me!'
'Damn it. Christ, kid. It's a promise. It's a fucking promise.'
'To who?'
'To me. It was his. It was his to me.'
'His? Your– your dad?'
'Yes. My fucking dad. We had nothing but eachother. But every time we fucked up, he'd go on and on and on. About how if we'd just done this one thing different, or another thing different, we'd be farther than we were. If we'd just talked to the right people we'd be living in mansions. We'd be fucking kings. It was regret at first, but we had dreams of being bigger fish, so we'd go down those streets with those fucking houses with five million driveways that everyone knows now don't even matter when you're dead and he'd say it over and over. He didn't know about the places you and I know of now back then. He didn't know dreams could be made real. So he was sick and dying and said it, and it made me pity him so damn much I did what I had to so I'd never feel that feeling again.'
'But– pneumonia.'
'Yes. Pneumonia. So are you gonna kill it? Only one way we get paid. Shooting me won't give you anything. Wong only pays trusted folks.'
'You're lying.'
'What makes you think that?'
BANG!
She fires the gun without warning, but he jumps out of the way. Her heart stops in her chest, and she feels the sea of blood welling up within her once more. No-Eyes is laughing at her right now, she feels it in her soul.
In front of her, the monster lies dead on the floor. She'd been so distracted by his words she hadn't noticed him get in front of the quarry. It didn't have time to scream when it died. A perfect clean shot to the head. She chokes back a sob, because it's then that it all crashes down on her. In the crust on the little monster's lips, she sees herself peddling old parts on cold Christmas eves. She sees her sister putting on makeup in the darkness, covering up the previous night's bruises. She sees her mom on her good days, trying so hard to seem functional. And in its eyes, its fucking eyes, she sees herself, who she was and is and will be, and that and nothing else is what tears her in two. She can almost hear the faintest echoes of shuffling footsteps. Perhaps the ghosts are coming back. Or perhaps They have finally found them. But in the moment, all of that seems less important than the blood on her hands.
'At least you didn't kill someone you'd regret,' he says flippantly. The world turns red, and before she knows it they're fighting. It's not a clean fight, no constructed faux circumstances and clean errorless violence. It's sloppy fists and hands and teeth and nails and knives and skin and hair. It's animal. It's monstrous. And in the haze of savage redness, she knows after this that there is no coming back. Whatever is said and done, she will stand for something, even if that something makes her feel vile to the stomach. At some point in their haphazard scuffle the door that was barred is no longer barred, and it's creaking, slowly and slowly, moonlight invading their comforting darkness like poison. But he's stronger than her and she's already ran out of bullets from wasting them six times over and he's picking her up by the neck and she's choking and choking and choking and then-
His hold slips, if only for a moment, but it's enough for her to wriggle free. He's moaning softly, and breathing so, so heavy. Something's wrong. But she's seeing too much red to notice he's not fighting back when she claws at him and hits at him and kicks his balls in and then the light dies from his eyes as his body's a collapsed heap on the floor and she's covered in blood, his blood and hers and his again. He's already choking on his own blood but still she slams her foot down over and over and over again on his throat. The door is wide open now, and the moon stares back at her, verdant as a ripe, green apple. The Green Moon leers down over her.
In the end she's breathing and bloody and he's bloody but not breathing, but she knows she wasn't the one to kill him, not really. His heart was always frail. It gave out. All this time, all this pain on her road to freedom, and she couldn't even kill him. Even that was stolen from her. She screams and screams and screams, but no one real's there to hear her. Two bodies lie there, his on top of the monster's. She stands a while, and all she can hear is the intake of her own breaths. They're too fast, she knows, and her eyes can't focus on anything. They're roving, just like his used to, but why? Why? So she drags the corpses outside. It's slow, it's arduous, but her limbs compel her, the limbs that are not her own. Or are they? She's in a dream, she knows she is, or maybe she's not. Everything's so thin, so stretched out before her.
The dead are there too. Countless marble figures shamble through the creosote under the deathless Moon. They don't help her or even stop to watch her as she struggles to drag the bodies to the shore of the lake, that once-dammed river. She stands by the water's edge in the end. A ghost appears to her left and to her right - the sister she's not had a real conversation with for five years before her death, and the mother who could never even act like one for more than ten minutes at a time. But they do not look at her, even when she reaches out to touch them. Her hand only meets cold wind and lapping water, and tears that are too sweet to be real tears. There is no salt in them at all. The wind blows harder, and impossible little waves lap at the shore.
There's only one way to move forward, kid, he'd told her. Just make sure you never have a reason to look back when all's said and done. But he's looked back every day of his life since then, and constructed an entire world around the last thing his dad said to him before he died. In the final distal dreaming dark of her own memories that she filed away long ago she sees a man who killed his father but might have been a father himself in a different life leave a woman that's her mother alone, cutting every wire in the house with a boxcutter because he didn't want to be watched. He said at the time he couldn't stay either, because They find people who stay too long in one place, and then however could he find the place he needs to if They find him first? She laughs. It's a joke, a sick joke, and she's the punchline. No longer, she swears to herself, no longer. She dumps the bodies one by one in the lake, but they do not sink. Hell is too cruel to hide their faces, even now when all's said and done. They float, away and away, borne by some current not of any world of man. She's free, she's finally free, but inside she just feels rotten.
So it is at last that he leaves her, alone, to dance with her ghosts.