by Patrick Ness
ALSO BY PATRICK NESS
The Knife of Never Letting Go
The Ask and the Answer
Monsters of Men
A Monster Calls
Here is the boy, drowning.
In these last moments, it’s not the water that’s finally done for him; it’s the cold. It has bled all the energy from his body and contracted his muscles into a painful uselessness, no matter how much he fights to keep himself above the surface. He is strong, and young, nearly seventeen, but the wintry waves keep coming, each one seemingly larger than the last. They spin him round, topple him over, force him deeper down and down. Even when he can catch his breath in the few terrified seconds he manages to push his face into the air, he is shaking so badly he can barely get half a lungful before he’s under again. It isn’t enough, grows less each time, and he feels a terrible yearning in his chest as he aches, fruitlessly, for more.
He is in full panic now. He knows he’s drifted just slightly too far from shore to make it back, the icy tide pulling him out farther and farther with every wave, pushing him toward the rocks that make this bit of coast so treacherous. He also knows there is no one who’ll notice he’s gone in time, no one who’ll raise the alarm before the water defeats him. He won’t be saved by chance, either. There are no beachcombers or tourists to dive in from the shoreline to save him, not this time of year, not in these freezing temperatures.
It is too late for him.
He will die.
And he will die alone.
The sudden, gasping horror of knowing this makes him panic even more. He tries again to break the surface, not daring to think that it might be his last time, not daring to think much at all. He forces his legs to kick, forces his arms to heave himself upward, to at least get his body the right way round, to try and grasp another breath just inches away –
But the current is too strong. It allows him tantalizingly near the surface but spins him upside down before he can get there, dragging him closer to the rocks.
The waves toy with him as he tries again.
And fails.
Then, without warning, the game the sea seems to have been playing, the cruel game of keeping him just alive enough to think he might make it, that game seems to be over.
The current surges, slamming him into the killingly hard rocks. His right shoulder blade snaps in two so loudly he can hear the crack, even underwater, even in this rush of tide. The mindless intensity of the pain is so great that he calls out, his mouth instantly filling with freezing, briny seawater. He coughs against it, but only drags more into his lungs. He curves into the pain of his shoulder, blinded by it, paralyzed by its intensity. He is unable to even try and swim now, unable to brace himself as the waves turn him over once more.
Please, is all he thinks. Just the one word, echoing through his head.
Please.
The current grips him a final time. It rears back as if to throw him, and it dashes him headfirst into the rocks. He slams into them with the full, furious weight of an angry ocean behind him. He is unable to even raise his hands to try and soften the blow.
The impact is just behind his left ear. It fractures his skull, splintering it into his brain, the force of it also crushing his third and fourth vertebrae, severing both his cerebral artery and his spinal cord, an injury from which there is no return, no recovery. No chance.
He dies.
The first moments after the boy’s death pass for him in a confused and weighty blur. He is dimly aware of pain, but mostly of a tremendous fatigue, as if he has been covered in layer upon layer of impossibly heavy blankets. He struggles against them, blindly, his thrashing increasing as he panics (again) at the invisible ropes that seem to bind him.
His mind isn’t clear. It races and throbs like the worst kind of fever, and he is unaware of even thinking. It’s more some kind of wild, dying instinct, a terror of what’s to come, a terror of what’s happened.
A terror of his death.
As if he can still struggle against it, still outrun it.
He even has a distant sensation of momentum, his body continuing its fight against the waves even though that fight has already been lost. He feels a sudden rushing, a surge of terror hurtling him forward, forward, forward, but he must be free of his body somehow because his shoulder no longer hurts as he struggles blindly through the dark, unable to feel anything, it seems, except a terrified urgency to move –
And then there is a coolness on his face. Almost as of a breeze, though such a thing seems impossible for so many reasons. It’s this coolness that causes his consciousness – His soul? His spirit? Who’s to say? – to pause in its fevered spin.
For an instant, he is still.
There’s a change in the murk before his eyes. A lightness. A lightness he can enter, somehow, and he can feel himself leaning toward it, his body – so weak, so nearly incapable beneath him – reaching for the growing light.
He falls. Falls onto solidity. The coolness rises from it, and he allows himself to sink into it, let it envelop him.
He is still. He gives up his struggle. He lets oblivion overtake him.
Oblivion is purgatorial and gray. He is passably conscious, not asleep but not quite awake either, as if disconnected from everything, unable to move or think or receive input, able only to exist.
An impossible amount of time passes, a day, a year, maybe even an eternity, there is no way he can know. Finally, in the distance, the light begins to slowly, almost imperceptibly change. A grayness emerges, then a lighter grayness, and he starts to come back to himself.
His first thought, more vaguely sensed than actually articulated, is that it feels as though he’s pressed against a cement block. He’s dimly aware of how cool it is under him, how solid it feels, like he’s clinging to it lest he fly off into space. He hovers around the thought for an indeterminate amount of time, letting it clarify, letting it connect to his body, to other thoughts –
The word morgue suddenly flashes somewhere deep inside him – for where else are you laid out on cool, solid blocks – and in rising horror, he opens his eyes, unaware they were even closed. He tries to call out that they must not bury him, they must not cut him open, that there’s been a terrible, terrible mistake. But his throat rebels against the formation of words, as if it hasn’t been used for years, and he’s coughing and sitting up in terror, his eyes muddled and foggy, like he’s looking at the world from behind many thick layers of dirty glass.
He blinks repeatedly, trying to see. The vague shapes around him slowly fall into place. He sees that he is not on the cold slab of a morgue –
He is –
He is –
Where is he?
Confused, he squints painfully into what now seems to be rising daylight. He looks around, trying to take it in, trying to see it, make sense of it all.
He seems to be lying on a concrete path that runs through the front yard of a house, stretching from the sidewalk to a front door behind him.
The house is not his own.
And there’s more wrong than just that.
He breathes for a moment, heavily, almost panting, his mind groggy, his vision slowly becoming a little clearer. He feels himself shaking from the chill and pulls his arms around himself, sensing a dampness covering his –
Not his clothes.
He looks down at them, his physical reaction slower than the thought that ordered it. He squints again, trying to see them clearly. They don’t seem to really be clothes at all, just strips of white cloth that barely fit the name trousers or shirt, stuck closely around him more like bandages than things to wear. And all along one side, they’re wet with –
He stops.
They’re not wet with seawater, not with the soaking, briny c
old of the ocean he was just –
(drowning in)
And only half of him is wet anyway. The other half, the half that was against the ground, is cool, but quite dry.
He looks around, more confused than ever. Because he can only be wet with dew. The sun is low in the sky, and it seems as if it must be morning. Underneath him, he can even make out a dry outline of where he was lying.
As if he had lain there all night.
But that can’t be. He remembers the brutal, winter coldness of the water, the dark freezing gray of the sky overhead that would never have let him survive a night out in it –
But that isn’t this sky. He lifts his face to it. This sky isn’t even winter. The chill is merely the chill of morning, of possibly a warm day to come, of possibly a summer day. Nothing at all like the bitter wind of the beach. Nothing at all like when he –
When he died.
He takes another moment to breathe, to just do that, if he can. There is only quiet around him, only the sounds he himself is making.
He turns slowly to look at the house again. It resolves itself more and more as his eyes get used to the light, used – it almost seems – to seeing again.
And then, through the fog and confusion, he feels a soft tremor in his blanketed mind.
A brush, a hint, a featherweight of –
Of –
Is it familiarity?
He tries to rise, and the feeling vanishes. Rising is difficult, surprisingly so, and he fails. He feels terrifyingly weak, his muscles resisting even the simple command to stand. Just the effort to sit fully upright leaves him winded, and he has to stop for a moment, panting again.
He reaches out to grab a sturdy-looking plant by the side of the path to try to rise once more –
And pulls his hand back immediately when short spikes prick his fingers.
It’s not a regular plant at all. It’s a weed, grown staggeringly tall. The flower beds that line the path to the door of the house have all grown extraordinarily wild, much higher than the low stone dividing walls on either side. The shrubberies among them look like they’re almost living creatures reaching out to him, poised to do him harm if he moves too close. Other weeds, enormous weeds, three, four, even six feet high, have blazed through every inch of dirt and every possible crack in the pavement, one of them crushed underneath him where he lay.
He tries again to rise, finally making it up, though he sways dangerously for a moment. His head is overweighted with grogginess and he’s still shivering. The white bandages around him are in no way warm, nor are they even – he notices with alarm – covering him properly as clothing. His legs and torso are wrapped tightly, his arms, too, and most of the width of his back. Bafflingly, though, the entire area from his belly button to the middle of his thighs is naked to the world, front and back, his most private parts unthinkably out in the morning sun. He frantically tries to pull down the too-scanty fabric to cover himself, but it sticks tightly to his skin.
He covers himself with his hand and looks around to see if anyone has seen him.
But there is no one. No one at all.
Is this a dream? he thinks, the words coming to him slowly, thickly, as if from a great distance. The last dream before death?
Every yard is as overgrown as this one. Some that had lawns are now sprouting fields of grass shoulder-high. The pavement in the road is cracked, too, with more weeds almost obscenely tall growing right out of the middle, a few approaching the status of trees.
There are cars parked along the road, but they’re covered in thick layers of dust and dirt, blinding every window. And nearly every one has sunk under four deflated tires.
Nothing is moving. There are no cars coming down the road, and from the look of the weeds, no car has driven down here in an impossibly long time. The road to his left carries on until it meets a much wider street, one that looks like it should be a busy, bustling main road. There are no cars driving there either, and he can see a gigantic hole has opened up across it, forty or fifty feet wide. Out of which a whole glade of weeds seems to be growing.
He listens. He can’t hear a single motor anywhere. Not on this street or the next. He waits for a long moment. Then a long moment more. He looks down the other end of the road on his right, and through the gap between two apartment buildings, he can see some raised train tracks and feels himself listening for the trains that might run on them.
But there are no trains.
And no people.
If it’s the morning that it seems to be, people should be coming out of their houses, getting in their cars, driving to work. Or if not, then walking their dogs, delivering the mail, heading off to school.
The streets should be full. Front doors should be opening and closing.
But there is no one. No cars, no trains, no people.
And this street, now that he can see more of it as his eyes and mind begin to clear a little more, even the geography of it looks strange. These houses are crammed together, all stuck in a line, with no garages or big front yards and only the narrowest of alleys between every fourth or fifth house. Nothing like his own street back home. In fact, this doesn’t look like an American street at all. It looks almost –
It looks almost English.
The word clangs around his head. It feels important, like it’s desperately trying to latch on to something, but his mind is so foggy, so shocked and confused, it only heightens his anxiety.
It’s a word that’s wrong. That’s very wrong.
He wavers a little and has to catch his balance on one of the sturdier-looking bushes. He feels a strong urge to go inside, to find something to cover himself with, and this house, this house –
He frowns at it.
What is it about this house?
Surprising himself, without even feeling as if he’s decided to, he takes an unsteady step toward it, nearly falling. He still struggles to articulate his thoughts. He cannot say why he’s walking toward the house, why it might be anything other than an instinct to get inside, to get out of this weird deserted world, but he’s also aware that all of this, whatever it is, feels so much like a dream that only dream logic can possibly apply.
He doesn’t know why, but the house draws him.
So he goes.
He reaches the front steps, steps over a crack running along the lowest one, and stops before the door. He waits there a moment, not quite knowing what to do next, not quite sure how it will open, or what he will do if it’s locked, but he reaches for it –
It swings open at his lightest touch.
A long hallway is the first thing he sees. The sun is really shining now, filling the clear blue sky behind him – so warm that it must be some kind of summer, so warm he can already feel it burning his exposed skin, too pale, too fair to be under such harsh light – but even in this brightness, the hallway almost disappears in darkness halfway down. He can only just see the staircase at the end, leading up to the floors above. Before the stairs, on the left, is the doorway that leads into the main house.
There are no lights on inside, and no sound.
He looks around again. There’s still no drone of machinery or engines from anywhere, but he notices for the first time that there’s no buzz of insects either, no calls of birds, not even any wind through the foliage.
Nothing but the sound of his own breathing.
He just stands there for a moment. He feels hideously unwell, and so weak, so tired, he could almost lay down on this doorstep right here and sleep forever, just forever, and never wake up –
He steps inside the house instead. Hands on either wall to keep himself steady, he moves slowly forward, every second thinking he’s going to be stopped, that he’s going to hear a voice demanding to know what he’s doing trespassing in a strange house. As he stumbles into the shadows, though, his eyes not adjusting to the change in light as fast as they should, he can feel dust under his feet so thick it seems inconceivable that anyone has been here in a long, long tim
e.
It gets darker the farther in he goes, and this seems wrong somehow, the blast of the sun through the open door not illuminating anything, just making the shadows heavier and more threatening to his bleary eyes. He fumbles on, seeing less and less, reaching the bottom of the stairs but turning from them, still hearing nothing, no sounds of habitation, no sound of anything at all except himself.
Alone.
He pauses before the doorway to the living room, feeling a fresh thrust of fear. Anything could be there in the darkness, anything could be silently waiting for him, but he forces himself to look in, letting his eyes get used to the light.
When they do, he sees.
Caught in a few beams of dusty sunlight from the closed blinds at the front, he sees a simple, plain living room, merging into an open dining area on his right, leading to a doorway through to the kitchen at the back of the house.
There is furniture here, like any normal room, except it’s all covered in dust so thick it’s like an extra cloth draped over everything. The boy, exhausted still, tries to make the shapes match up to words in his head.
His eyes adjust to the light more, the room becoming more of itself, taking shape, revealing details –
Revealing the horse screaming from above the mantelpiece.
A crazed eye, a tongue like a spike, trapped inside a burning world, looking at him from behind a picture frame.
Looking right at him.
The boy cries out at the sight of it because all at once he knows, knows beyond a shadow of a doubt, the realization coming like a tidal wave.
He knows where he is.
He runs as fast as his exhausted feet will take him, staggering back down the hall, stirring up clouds of dust, heading toward the sunshine like –
(like a drowning man reaching for air –)
He can vaguely hear himself calling out in distress, still wordless, still unformed.
But he knows.
He knows, he knows, he knows.