by Patrick Ness
He stumbles down the front steps, barely able to stay upright, and then not even barely. He falls to his knees and can’t find the strength to rise again, as if the sudden rush of knowledge is a weight on his back.
He looks to the house in panic, thinking that something, someone must be coming after him, must be in pursuit –
But there’s nothing.
There’s still no sound. Not of machines or people or animals or insects or anything at all. There’s nothing but a quiet so deep he can hear his heart beating in his chest.
My heart, he thinks. And the words come clearly, cutting through the fog in his mind.
His heart.
His dead heart. His drowned heart.
He begins to shake, as the terrible knowledge of what he saw, the terrible knowledge of what it means, starts to overtake him.
This is the house where he used to live.
The house from all those years ago. The house in England. The house his mother swore she never wanted to see again. The house they moved across an ocean and a continent to get away from.
But that’s impossible. He hasn’t seen this house, this country, in years. Not since primary school.
Not since –
Not since his brother got out of the hospital.
Not since the very worst thing that ever happened.
No, he thinks.
Oh, please, no.
He knows where he is now. He knows why it would be this place, knows why he would wake up here, after –
After he died.
This is hell.
A hell built exactly for him.
A hell where he would be alone.
Forever.
He’s died, and woken up in his own, personal hell.
He vomits.
He falls forward onto his hands, spitting up the contents of his stomach into the bushes on the side of the path. His eyes water from the effort of it, but he can still see that all he’s throwing up is a weird, clear gel that tastes vaguely of sugar. It keeps coming until he exhausts himself, and since his eyes are already watering, it seems only a very short step to weeping. He begins to cry, slumping back down to the concrete face-first.
It feels, for a time, like drowning all over again, the yearning for breath, the struggle against something larger than himself that only wants to take him down with it, and there’s no fighting it, nothing that can be done to stop it, as it swallows him up and he disappears. Lying on the path, he gives himself over to it, in the same way that the waves kept demanding that he give himself to them –
(though he did fight the waves, up until the very end, he did)
And then the exhaustion that’s threatened him since he first opened his eyes overtakes him, and he falls into unconsciousness.
Falls away and away and away –
“How long are we going to sit here?” Monica asked from the backseat. “I’m fucking freezing.”
“Does your girlfriend ever shut up, Harold?” Gudmund teased, looking into the rearview mirror.
“Don’t call me Harold,” H said, his voice low.
Monica slapped him on the shoulder. “That was the part of the sentence you didn’t like?”
“You’re the one who wanted to come along,” H said.
“And what a blast it’s turned out to be,” Monica said. “Parked outside Callen Fletcher’s house waiting for his parents to go to bed so we can steal his Baby Jesus. You sure know how to treat a girl, Harold.”
The backseat lit up as Monica started furiously tapping the screen of her phone.
“Turn that off!” Gudmund said, reaching back from the driver’s seat to cover it with his hand. “They’ll see the light.”
Monica snatched it out of his grasp. “Please, we’re miles away.” She went back to tapping.
Gudmund shook his head and frowned at H in the rearview mirror. It was weird. They all liked H. They all liked Monica. But it turned out nobody much liked H and Monica together. Not even, it seemed, H and Monica.
“What are we going to do with it, anyway?” Monica said, still tapping. “I mean, Baby Jesus? Really? Isn’t that just a little blasphemous?”
Gudmund pointed out through the windshield. “Isn’t that?”
They looked out to the vast Christmas scene that blanketed the Fletchers’ front yard like an invasion force. Word was that Mrs. Fletcher was angling not just for Halfmarket’s local paper, but an actual TV news crew over from Portland, maybe even Seattle.
The display started with Santa and all his reindeer in bright fiberglass, lit up from the inside and strung from a tree near the Fletcher house out to their roof so it looked like the over-burdened sleigh was coming in for a landing. Things got worse from there. Lights sprang from every conceivable crevice and outcropping on the house to every tree branch and telephone pole within reach. Ten-foot-tall candy canes made a forest through which mechanical elves waved onlookers slowly into eternity. Off to one side, there was a live, twenty-foot Christmas tree decked out like a cathedral next to a lawn full of prancing Christmas-related animals (including, inexplicably, a rhinoceros in a Santa cap).
In pride of place was a Nativity that made it look as if God had been born in Las Vegas: Mary and Joseph, complete with manger, hay, lowing cattle, bowing shepherds, and rejoicing angels who looked like they’d stopped mid –dance routine.
Right in the center, surrounded by them all, was the spotlit, golden-haloed infant, lifting his hands beatifically toward the peace of all mankind. It was rumored he was carved from imported Venetian marble. This would turn out to be tragically false.
“Well, he’s small enough to be portable, is your Baby Jesus,” H explained to Monica, who wasn’t really listening.
“Easy to grab in one swoop,” Gudmund said. “Easier than that rhinoceros anyway. What the hell’s up with that?”
“And then you bury him waist deep in someone else’s lawn,” H continued, raising his hands like the Baby Jesus statue as if he were sticking halfway out of the ground.
“And voilà,” Gudmund finished, smiling. “A Christmas miracle.”
Monica rolled her eyes. “Can’t we just do meth like everybody else?”
The whole car laughed. Yep, everyone was going to be a lot happier when she and H broke up and it could all be normal again.
“It’s almost eleven,” Monica said, reading her phone. “I thought you said –”
Before she could finish, they were plunged into darkness as the entire Fletcher display shut off in obedience to the county-ordered curfew the neighbors had gone to court to obtain. Even from where they were parked down the gravel road from the house, they could hear shouts of disappointment from the last of the chain of cars that had spent the evening driving leisurely by.
(Callen Fletcher, a tall, awkward boy, spent the time from Thanksgiving to New Year desperately trying not to be noticed in any way at school. He was usually unsuccessful.)
“All right, then,” Gudmund said, rubbing his hands together. “We just wait for the cars to clear, and then we make our move.”
“This is theft, you know,” Monica said. “They’re bonkers over that display, and if Baby Jesus suddenly goes missing –”
“They’ll go apeshit,” H laughed.
“They’ll press charges,” Monica said.
“We’re not going to take him far,” Gudmund said, and then he added, mischievously, “I thought Summer Blaydon’s house could use a holy visitation.”
Monica looked shocked for a moment, then seemingly couldn’t stop herself from grinning back. “We’ll have to be careful that we don’t interrupt some late-night cheerleading practice or something.”
“I thought you said it was theft,” Gudmund said.
“I did,” Monica shrugged, still grinning. “I didn’t say I minded.”
“Hey!” H snapped at her. “You gonna flirt with him all night or what?”
“Everyone shut up anyway,” Gudmund said, turning back. “It’s almost time.”
There was a silence t
hen, as they waited. The only sound was the squeak of H rubbing his sleeve on the window to clear it of condensation. Gudmund’s leg bounced up and down in anticipation. The cars thinned out to nothing on the road, and still the silence ruled as they held their breath without knowing they were doing it.
At last, the street was empty. The Fletchers’ porch light clicked off.
Gudmund let out a long exhalation and turned to the backseat with a serious look. H nodded back to him. “Let’s do it,” he said.
“I’m coming, too,” Monica said, putting her phone away.
“Never thought you wouldn’t,” Gudmund said, smiling.
He turned to the person sitting in the passenger’s seat.
“You ready, Seth?” he asked.
Seth opens his eyes.
He’s still lying on the concrete path, curled up into himself, feeling cramped and stiff against the hard surface. For a moment, he doesn’t move.
Seth, he thinks. Seth is my name.
It seems a surprise, as if he’d forgotten it until the dream or the memory or whatever the hell it was that just happened. It had been so clear it’s almost painful to recall it. And the sudden rush of information that comes with it is painful, too. Not just his name. No, not just that.
He had been right there, so much more vividly than any memory or dream would have been. He had actually been there, with them. With H and Monica. With Gudmund, who had a car so always drove. His friends. On the night they stole the Baby Jesus out of Callen Fletcher’s front yard.
Not two months ago.
Seth, he thinks again. The name slips from his brain strangely, like sand held in an open palm. I am Seth Wearing.
I was Seth Wearing.
He takes a deep breath, and his nostrils fill with a gag-making smell from where he was sick in the bushes. He sits up. The sun is higher in the sky. He’s been out for a while, but it doesn’t feel like noon yet.
If there is a noon in this place. If time means anything here.
His head is pounding badly, and even in the confusion of memories laying heavily on him, he becomes aware of a powerful new feeling, one he realizes he’s felt all along but can now put a description to, a word, now that things are clearing, now that he knows his own name.
Thirst. He’s thirsty. More thirsty than he can ever remember. So much so it drives him almost immediately to his feet. Once more, he’s shaky as he stands, but he steadies himself and manages to stay upright. He realizes it’s what had driven him into the house before, an unnameable, undeniable urge.
Now that it’s named, it feels even more undeniable.
He looks again at the strange, silent, empty neighborhood around him, with its layers of dust and mud. The familiarity that had hinted itself before is much firmer, much clearer now.
His street, yes, where he’d lived when he was small, a street that had been his home. To the left it led up to the High Street with all its shops, and he can remember now, too, the commuter trains off to the right. More, he can remember counting them. On those early mornings, just before they moved from this little English suburb all the way across the world to the freezing coast of the Pacific Northwest, when he used to lie awake, unsleeping, counting trains, as if that would help.
His younger brother’s bed empty across the room.
He winces at the memory of that summer and pushes it away.
Because it’s summer now, isn’t it?
He turns to the house again.
His old house.
Unmistakably, his old house.
It looks weather-beaten and untended, the paint peeling away from the window frames, the walls stained from leaky gutters, just like every other house on this street. At some point, the chimney has partially collapsed onto the roof, a small rubble of bricks and dust scattered down the slope to the edge, as if no one ever noticed it falling.
Which maybe no one has.
How? he thinks, struggling to organize coherent thoughts against his thirst. How can this possibly be?
The need for water is almost like a living creature inside him now. He’s never felt anything like it before, his tongue fat and dry in his mouth, his lips cracked and chapped, bleeding as he tries to lick them damp.
The house looms there, as if waiting for him. He doesn’t want to go back inside, not even a little bit, but there is nothing else to do. He must drink. He must. The front door is still open from where he ran out before, panicked. He remembers the shock of what awaited him above the mantelpiece, like a punch to the gut, telling him just exactly what hell he’d woken up to –
But he also remembers the dining area leading on from the sitting room, and the kitchen beyond that.
The kitchen.
With its taps.
He moves slowly to the doorway again, coming up the three front steps, now recognizing the crack in the bottom one, a crack never quite serious enough to get fixed.
He looks into his house and the memories keep coming. The long hallway, still shrouded in shadow, is one he crossed countless times as a young boy, tumbling down stairs he can now just barely see in the deepness of the house. He remembers that they lead up to the bedrooms on the floor above and continue up farther still, to the attic.
The attic that used to be his old bedroom. The one he shared with Owen. The one he shared with Owen before –
He stops the thought again. The thirst is nearly bending him double.
He must drink.
Seth must drink.
He thinks his name again. Seth. I am Seth.
And I will speak.
“Hello?” he says, and the word is sharply painful, the thirst turning his throat into a desert. “Hello?” he tries again, a bit louder. “Is anyone there?”
There’s no answer. And still no sound, nothing but his breathing to let him know he hasn’t gone deaf.
He stands at the doorway, not moving yet. It’s harder this time to go in, much harder, his fear a palpable thing, fear of what else he might find inside, fear of why he’s here, of what it means.
Of what it will mean. Forever and ever.
But the thirst is palpable, too, and he forces himself over the threshold, stirring up the dust again. His bandages are no longer anything approaching white, and his skin is streaked with dark stains. He heads deeper inside, stopping just before the bottom of the stairs. He tries the light switch there, but it flips on and off pointlessly, no lights coming on anywhere. He turns from the stairs, not willing to brave the darkness of them just yet, not even really wanting to look at them, just gathering his courage before entering the living room.
He takes a deep, dry breath, coughing again at the dust.
And steps through the doorway.
It is as he left it. Scattered rays of sunlight are the only illumination, since the light switches don’t work in this room either. A room filled, he now fully realizes, with the furniture of his childhood.
There are the stained red settees, one big, one small, that his father wasn’t going to replace until the boys got old enough not to mess them up anymore.
Settees that got left behind in England when they moved to America, left behind in this house.
But here is a coffee table that didn’t get left behind, a coffee table that should be thousands and thousands of miles from here.
I don’t understand, he thinks. I don’t understand.
He sees a vase of his mother’s that made the trip. He sees an ugly end table that didn’t. And there, above the mantelpiece –
He feels the same stabbing in his gut despite knowing what to expect.
It’s the painting made by his uncle, the painting that came to America, too, with some of this furniture. It’s of a shrieking, wrongly proportioned horse with terror in its eyes and that awful spike for its tongue. His uncle had patterned it after Picasso’s Guernica, surrounding the horse with broken skies and broken, bombed-out bodies.
Seth had long since been told about the real Guernica by his father, long since understood the
story behind it, but even though his uncle’s version was the palest of pale imitations, it was the first painting Seth had ever properly seen, the first real painting his then-five-year-old mind had tried to figure out. For that reason, it loomed larger for him than any classic ever would.
It is something out of a nightmare, something horrible and hysterical, something unable to listen to reason or understand mercy.
And it is a painting he last saw yesterday, if yesterday still means anything. If time passed at all in hell. Whatever the answer, it was a painting he saw on his way out of his own house on the other side of the world, the last thing his eyes had glanced over as he shut his front door.
His actual front door. Not this. Not this nightmare version out of a past he’d prefer not to remember.
He watches the painting as long as he can bear, long enough to try and turn it into just a painting, nothing more than that, but he can feel his heart thudding as he looks away from it, his eyes avoiding a dining-room table he also recognizes, and the bookcases full of books, some of whose titles he’s read in another country than this. He shuffles as quickly as his weak body will carry him into the kitchen, keeping his thoughts only on his thirst. He heads straight to the sink, almost whimpering with anticipated relief.
When he turns on the taps and nothing happens, he lets out an involuntary cry of despair. He tries them again. One won’t move at all, and the other just spins in his hand, producing nothing, no matter how often he twists it.
He can feel a weeping rising in him again, his eyes burning at how salty the tears are in his dehydrated body. He feels so weak, so unsteady that he has to lean forward and put his forehead against the counter, feeling its dusty coolness on his brow and hoping he won’t faint.
Of course this is what hell would be like, he thinks. Of course it is. To always be thirsty but have nothing to drink. Of course.
It’s probably punishment for the Baby Jesus thing. Monica had even said so. He feels a rueful flutter in his stomach, remembering that night again, remembering his friends, how relaxed and easy everything usually was, how they liked that he was the quiet one, how it hadn’t mattered that the differences in English and American curriculum meant that he was nearly a year younger than them all despite being in the same grade, how they – but especially Gudmund – included him in everything as only friends could. Even the theft of a deity.