Edge

by Serena Sallow

  edge

  a novel by Serena Sallow

  Published internationally by Serena Sallow

  © Serena Sallow 2013

  Terms and Conditions

  The purchaser of this book is subject to the condition that they shall in no way resell it, nor any part of it, nor make copies of it to distribute freely.

  All Persons Fictitious Disclaimer

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.

  Sequel out now!

  For my editing partners in crime, and for Joel, always.

  Contents

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  one

  It’s always fascinated me, since before I started getting trapped here, how there are hundreds of ways of seeing anything. There are different words you can use, different thoughts. There are ways to leave out important points and focus on little ones. No one sees life the same, nor death, and I think the strength in our species is that we’re all so different and yet so similar. On the one hand, I am sitting on top of a singular stair gazing at the sky. See, that sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Nothing particular is going on – the waves are crashing beneath me, the wind is howling as it goes by. All is still, and almost silent, and perhaps by a certain way of describing it we could believe it’s peaceful.

  But on the other hand, I am sitting on top of charcoal, ash, dust, and death. The sky is blood red and the sea smashing beneath me is reflecting the color. Every now and again a pale flash of limb appears, limbs that have been separated from the rest of their bodies and are so pale from blood loss that they don’t even look like skin anymore. The wind holds whispers and screams and begging of voices, and they screech and claw and tear at my lone silhouette.

  Two sides to everything. Sometimes more. Sometimes much more.

  Perhaps you think the fact that I am sitting here, not moving, staring at this vast sky, strange. Many expect a more emotional response – screaming, crying, terrified shaking. I’ve been here so many times, though. I am not desensitized – no, that doesn’t happen to me – but I have learned. No emotional reaction changes the facts. I can shout and sob and tremble all I want but the world around me will not change. It will continue.

  So I sit in a silent restlessness, my body aching to move but being too afraid to.

  Besides, what’s the point in moving, really?

  I’m not going to get anywhere. Just another section of another step of an endless space.

  It can’t hurt to wait it out, I guess.

  There’s something small moving towards me. Through the thick veil of red mist, I can hardly make out the swaying figure until he’s close to me. He’s really tiny – a child – with jeans and no shirt on, with dark, sun-kissed skin below messy brown hair and green eyes, I think. His eyes are too squinted and too hesitant for me to read directly.

  The blur of distant lines turns into a figure stationed directly in front of me, eyes cold and almost distant as he takes in my own relaxed, reclined posture.

  A moment of silence, and the wind whistles and bites at us.

  I smile at him.

  “You’re young,” I say.

  He looks at me suspiciously. “You’re old.”

  “Not really.” My eyes turn up to the sky for a moment, and his gaze follows, jumping a bit. It’s a bit hard to make out the sky from the fog, and I can’t imagine that he spent the time walking up to my location staring upwards, but rather looking at his own two feet, as there’s no railing on the staircase.

  “Where am I?” he asks, his voice low to hide the emotion of fear that wishes to edge into him. I’m impressed by his reaction, how calm he’s being, especially for his age.

  “You’re on a staircase.”

  “Duh.” The attitude in his face and voice makes me grin slightly. Then he changes his expression into a mask of composure and tries again. “What staircase? Where?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. I don’t know much except the fact that I am here sometimes. And, sometimes, I’m not. Sometimes I’m in another world with streets and cars and people that grin and have brown hair.” I’m rambling, yeah, but I don’t really care. Anything that reminds me of the place I can’t remember totally might bring me back. And there, I’m happy…

  “I’ve never been here before,” he muses, voice distant.

  “What’s your name?”

  He looks at me, as if considering, and suddenly then there’s this fear in his – are they blue? I think they’re blue – eyes. “I... I don’t know.”

  I smile, again. “It’s okay. I don’t know mine either.” I earn a blank stare from the new arrival for a few moments before, enjoying the rare company, I scoot a little bit to the side, careful not to get too close to the rail-less edge, and pat out a space for him. Tentatively, he sits next to me.

  “Where does this staircase lead to?”

  “No one knows.”

  He’s staring at me. His gaze is razor sharp, almost jagged, as if prodding me to continue, and undaunted by his glare – I mean, obviously. If I were to be frightened of anything in this world, it wouldn’t be a little kid who looked at me funny – I continue. “Some think at the top it’s a way back to our old lives permanently. Some say it’s heaven. Some say there’s nothing there.”

  “Some?” He looks at me, still guarded. That’s okay, though. He’ll warm up eventually or he’ll fall or he’ll climb. It’s what happens. “There are others here?”

  I nod.

  “Where are they?”

  So many questions. “Some didn’t climb up with me. Some kept climbing passed me. Others fell.” The face of the boy next to me goes a bit rigid, and he asks a question that his voice says he doesn’t want to know the answer to.

  “What happens to the ones that fall?” I glance down at the water and, carefully, he follows suit. We can just make out a head rolling within one of the currents.

  He starts shaking, and when he looks back at me, he’s crying. I don’t comfort him, I allow him to continue, staring around the world as if it suddenly got more interesting in the last ten seconds as he wipes his eyes bitterly.

  It’s minutes later before he returns to me, the edges of his eyes and face red and his expression a bit broken. “Sorry,” he mutters, as if he’d done something wrong.

  I shrug. “I don’t care.” After a few moments in silence, I finally nudge him gently, a bit afraid of accidentally pushing him off. “How old are you?”

  “Eight. How old are you?”

  “Eight.” I pause for dramatic effect, long enough to earn me a glare caught between confusion and anger, before I end, “teen. Eighteen.”

  “Oh.” He doesn’t hesitate long enough to appreciate my comedic genius. “Why aren’t you climbing?”

  “I don’t know what’s up there. I don’t feel like it. If I sit here, there’s a good chance I won’t fall. If I move, though...” He seems to have not considered that, and the thought appears to have alarmed him.

  A current of air pulls at us. This time it’s the screech of an old woman, I think. The boy cries out and pulls towards me, tears filling up his – dammit. Maybe it is green... – e
yes again. I take him in, take in the fact that he’s fighting so hard against emotions I allowed to fill me up when I had visited here originally.

  “What is that noise? Why does the wind do that?” he questions between violent shakes.

  I grab hold of him. He could fall. “Some say it’s the cries of those who fall from the staircase, trapped in the wind.”

  He goes strangely still, but I don’t release him. The colorless eyes seem to be fixed on his fingers as he considers this. “Do you think there are other staircases around here? And we’re hearing other falling people?”

  I hesitate a bit. I’d never considered that. “Perhaps. Do you think they all lead to the same place?”

  His gaze is harsh and his voice snappish. “I don’t know. How am I supposed to know?”

  I grin, a – probably bad – thought occurring to me. “I dunno, Screech.”

  “Screech?” he repeats, surprise seeping into the red on his face. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I don’t know your name. You don’t know your name. You have theories about the screeching in the air. Your name is Screech.”

  “That’s horrid,” his voice proclaims crossly as he narrows his eyes, which don’t appear to have a color at all anymore. “Screech isn’t a good name at all.”

  “It’s better than ‘hey you, kid’, isn’t it?”

  He’s thinking on something, real hard. His face is scrunched and his eyes are not looking at me. When they return, I can see the reflection of the red sky in his gaze.

  “Okay, Freckles.”

  “Freckles?”

  “Well, I don’t know your name. You don’t know your name. You have freckles all over your face. Your name is Freckles.” His voice is so painfully obviously attempting to mimic my tone that it’s almost funny.

  Almost. He doesn’t have my comedic genius, after all.

  “I do?” I’ve never seen my reflection. Sometimes, sitting in this world of black and red, I’ve pondered what my own face looks like. I’d decided ages ago that if it were actually that important, we would have been born with mirrors reflecting our faces attached to our heads on an outstretched pole. Still, I’ve always wondered. I touch my face, lightly, as if hoping my fingers could find what my gaze couldn’t.

  “Okay. I’m Freckles, then. Nice to meet you, Screech.”

  A slight smile brushes the corners of his face, for the first time since I’ve met him, and he outstretches his hand. When I take it with my own right hand, he makes a noise akin to a laugh as he works to his feet again.

  Suddenly I’m worried about him standing. I’ve met other people that fell, but I never named them. “Woah there.”

  He shrugs, a habit I pretend he picked up from me. I like shrugging better than explaining. “We should walk.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  His argument is rock solid, obviously. I make my way to my feet, a bit unsteadily.

  Screech glances back at me. “You first?”

  I shake my head. “If I tripped then I’d take you down with me. You go first and I’ll catch you.”

  He smiles, then nods. “Okay, Freck.”

  “Freck?” I laugh for the first time in what feels like years as I follow him, gaze on the stairs that seep out exhausted puffs of black soot when my bare feet step on them. “Are you nicknaming my nickname?”

  “Yep.”

  I bite at my smile, gaze still down. “Okay, Scree.”

  “Now it just sounds like ‘scream’.”

  “It means basically the same thing. Besides, my name sounds like ‘frick’.”

  “That’s a baby word,” is the reply from his back, distastefully.

  I look up, joking surprise on my face. “You’re eight!”

  And that’s how it’s started. Screech and Freckles – or Scree and Freck, when we’re being stupid. How we started walking.

  We both knew we needed to walk. What was the point in just waiting it out, really? You’re not going to get anywhere if you don’t go after it.

  And so we started going after it. Whatever that it was, we don’t know.

  Maybe we never will.

  But, after all... it can’t hurt to try.

  two

  “Ever see anything strange?”

  I'm honestly surprised by this question. Scree doesn't seem like the sort to say stupid things.

  “Stranger than being on a staircase made of God-knows-what going God-knows-where above a sea of blood with body parts that run in and out of the currents, a red sky and mist to match, and shrieks of dismembered bodies calling out to me in begging pleas? No, Scree. Can't say I have.”

  His look is cold – it always is. Maybe that's why I can't see his eye color. It's clouded and dark and, I think, frightened. I don't know what by – me? Where we are? The fact that he has no idea who he is or who to trust or what's going on – maybe all of the above? I'm still terrified, I think, when I allow myself to think about how I really feel.

  “Like... others. Other creatures.”

  “Other creatures?”

  “Yeah. Like animals.” He looks backwards at me, which makes me uneasy – he seems to be walking very fluidly on the staircase, but one could never be too safe. “Like dragonflies or butterflies or birds or cats or dogs or anything.”

  “Oh.” I'd never even thought of that. It never even occurred to me to look for other creatures. Perhaps because I sort of thought of this as all a dream, and people really don't dream about animals, do they?

  ... Well, I guess they do. But I don't, at least.

  “Uh, no. I've never seen an animal.”

  “Okay.” He seems to be deep in thought as he turns back to the front, walking. His small shoulders seem slumped slightly, his gaze turned downward.

  “Careful,” I warn, fretting. I always seem to fret.

  “You're not my mother,” he reminds. His tone is not unkind, just stating an obvious fact. Perhaps he's musing over that thought for a brief moment, wondering if somehow, we are related.

  I turn my gaze away from him and towards the sky. The red mist is beginning to grow thicker, the amaranth beginning to turn carmine slowly. Have we really been walking so long? It was perhaps midday when we began, and now night is approaching our two small forms, battling against the upward slope of a never-ending staircase.

  Never-ending. That's the big question. Does it have an end? And if so... where to?

  “You said you met others, right?”

  That was Screech, interrupting one of my brief moments of clarity. They're so rare and far between that he should know better.

  He should know better... Why do I presume that? We only just met, after all.

  “Yes.”

  “So there are other humans here.”

  “Yes.” I give his back an odd look. “I mean, I'm here, and you're here, right?”

  “Obviously.” I can't see his glower from behind him, but I can hear it. His slim figure straightens in some sort of indignation or something. “However, you could just be a figment of my own imagination.”

  “That would imply that all of my words would also be figments of your imagination,” I flatly reply.

  He's silent for a long time after that. I guess thinking it over. It is rare and gratifying that I catch something he hasn't. I guess he kind of thinks so firmly of his own theories that occasionally he doesn't even see the flaws in them.

  We walk in silence for what feels like a half of an hour. The carmine sky turns a deep burgundy. Long, sloping black clouds reach at the heavens, large but very poofy and unsubstantial looking, even from far away. It is as if someone had just smoked them and blew them there.

  All of a sudden, out of the clear blue – or, red, I guess – Screech stops.

  I don't know why, but I begin to worry. Maybe he got hurt, or something happened, or he remembered something and he'd go back to the other world and leave me alone on the staircase again. My heart begins to race, the low thumping in my chest reaching all the
way to my toes, which are sinking slightly in the staircase.

  “What is it?” I ask, leaning over to try to see his face, but careful to avoid the chasm below.

  “We've been walking for about four hours now.”

  Four hours? It felt like only a few minutes. I blink once, then finally say, “Yeah, okay. So?”

  He turns back towards me, and I am relieved to find he isn't bleeding or scarred or anything. His dark flesh is as smooth and unblemished as ever. “Well, we're not tired. We've been on an incline this whole time. And we're not sweating.”

  “It's not hot.”

  “Is it?” Screech steps down the few steps to me, and I adjust my head so I no longer have to look up at him. “Is it hot or cold?”

  I start humming a tune I don't quite remember under my breath, nodding my head in time with the imagined beat.

  “What are you doing?”

  I shake my head, shake away the melody. “Sorry. Uh. I dunno.”

  “This is important, Freckles.” His shining, multicolored eyes tell me it really is, to him. “Is it hot or cold?”

  I give him a bit of a look, I think, one that matches his usual despondent stare. “Why the hell are you worried about the temperature?” I gesture around at us, helplessly, at the blood sea and sky and ashen staircase.

  “Why aren't you worried about it?” He steps towards me, threateningly, but he is so much littler, so much more diminutive, that it is almost merely cute. When a smile flickers on my face he looks at me, narrowing his eyes, letting daggers grow from them before he gives a tiny shove at me.

  I step backwards, momentarily losing my footing. I think my heart was about to come out of my throat for a moment, my vision going white before my feet catch themselves. “Woah,” I scold. “Not cool.”

  “Then take me seriously. Why can't we tell the temperature?”

  “Because we can't, that's why! For God's sake, Scree! Just because I can't tell you in Fahrenheit or Celsius what degrees it is doesn't mean you need to murder me.”

  His eyes flash, then a new emotion meets his face. A sort of sincerity, a subdued, silenced apology. “Yeah... yeah,” is all he offers in form of a truce.