Edge

by Serena Sallow

  But when you're alone in the middle of a staircase with nothing but an observant eight year old with multi-colored eyes and a weird as all hell personality, you take any truce given to you, even if it is merely a repeated affirmative.

  He looks away, a bare toe wiggling into the sponge-like staircase. I feel as if he doesn't really know what to say or where to go from here.

  “Listen, we gotta bunker down for the night. When it gets too dark we can't see anything.”

  “Night?” He sounds intrigued, but his body language does not change what-so-ever. “We get day and night here?”

  “Yeah. So, come on. Up a little further, see.” I nudge him, very gently, pointing out a small area of stairs where the gaps between the preceding ones were much larger than anywhere else. “We can lay down there.”

  “There's only one stair big enough to lie on comfortably,” he points out, his eyes only barely meeting the area for a moment before glancing down again.

  “Yeah. We lay down together. My feet next to your head and your head next to my feet.”

  He falls very silent, but makes no move to challenge my idea. By the time we make the short trek to the stair, the sky has gone nearly completely dark.

  We lie down and stare up at the starless sky, our hands on our stomachs as we watch the swirling darkness, so dark we cannot even see the clouds.

  “No moon,” I hear the child muse from beside me, quietly.

  I shrug, though I know he can't see. I can't even see. It's pitch black, so dark that I can not make out any forms.

  “Wow. When you said it got dark...” he begins.

  “Yeah.”

  It's so silent, save for the screeches of fear and horror of an eternal damnation that the wind holds. I can tell Scree is scared by the way he moves up towards me, his bare skin brushing my arm, his small body quivering slightly – and obviously, not from any sort of temperature.

  “What do we do?” he finally asks, after a few moments of staring at a blank, empty sky. “Do we sleep or something?”

  “Uh...” is my eloquent answer. Because I really don't know. Time passes strangely on the staircase. One minute you'll be lying down next to a young boy, staring at complete, total darkness and wondering if you're really alive or just dreaming or who or what you are as you slowly suffocate from the total lack of vision, lack of feeling, the overuse of thought, and the next...

  “Freckles?”

  We're standing side by side. The sky is a light pink – morning – and I'm brushing soot off my pants. They're light beige, very baggy, sort of the cloth-like substance used in clothing that nomads wear in the desert.

  I wonder if I'm a desert nomad, in my real life. I wonder if this is my real life, and the concepts I have of the real world are fictional, only seen in dreams, not even really comprehended or remembered enough.

  “Interrupting again,” I murmur to the boy with ruffled hair. I think he fell asleep, or maybe it's just the way the soot sits in his hair type.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” I shake my head and gesture for him to lead.

  three

  It's what feels to me like hours before Screech talks to me again.

  “We've not eaten.”

  “No.”

  He looks back at me, once, which still worries me endlessly, before turning back front again. “We probably should.”

  I shrug. “We don't need to eat. Nobody here needs to eat.”

  “Nobody here,” he repeats. I hate it when he does this – says something almost speculatively as if he's on to something, something that I can't see or hear or understand, and then leaves me in silence, nothing to ebb my fear and distract my mind but the sound of the staircase crunching beneath our feet.

  His small, bare feet are black from the soot by now. Every now and again I catch him wiggling his toes, trying to get accustomed to the feeling of the dirt.

  But still, he's silent.

  Finally I sigh loudly, prompt him. “What are you thinking?”

  “You talk like you've met enough people to know that nobody eats.”

  I nod, though I know he can't see, my gaze captured by the sickening ground. “Yeah,” I finally say.

  “Tell me about them.” He turns his body towards me, his suddenly blue eyes searching.

  “Why?” I glance behind him on the staircase, waiting to see a gap or something within it that will make him fall terribly. I'm not comfortable with him risking his own life like this just to hear a stupid story.

  “Why not?”

  My, my. He always has the best arguments to any of my statements.

  When I give him a look of failed submission, he turns back to the front, content, but his rail-thin body is straight and angled slightly towards me. It's obvious he's waiting for me to spew out a wondrous sort of tale. I'm not a story teller, though. Never have been.

  “Well, I met a lot of people.”

  Apparently it's okay that I can't speak – because he's good at interrogating. “Ever walk with any of them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How many?”

  “Five, but all at once.”

  “All at once?” His voice is incredulous. “You walked with five people at once? Isn't that... dangerous, or something?”

  “Or something,” I say, a bit jestingly, but as I've found out earlier, he has an awful sense of humor. Which is sad, because I'm really just comedy gold.

  “Did you name them, too?”

  Oh. Perhaps that's why he didn't react to my before joke. His voice kind of sounds... hurt. I wouldn't know why, though. I glance up, look at his pale figure moving against the vermilion sky, black clouds seeping in his body and being ejected on the other side. And all the while he still moves, up the uneven staircase, his form swaying back and forth, back and forth, his hands clenched into loose fists as he moves.

  “No. I didn't name them.”

  “Tell me about them.” His voice sounds relieved, I think.

  I shrug. “They were five people I met and started walking up with.”

  “Describe them to me,” he prompts.

  I sigh, take a moment to enjoy the scenery. The mist is extra thick today, so much so that I cannot see the ocean below. Or is that merely because I am so high up? I cannot tell. But it gives a weird sense of being... nowhere. Of being in the middle of nothing, and going to aught, just trekking uselessly, higher and higher into the unknown and getting further and further and further away from what one is sure about...

  I start to panic. My heart begins to race, my palms get sweaty, and I feel dizzy. My mind continues walking but my legs do not comprehend and I stop in mid-stride. Unable to do anything else, I shakily sit down on the stair where I am, feeling at it as I move like a blind man, so afraid of falling suddenly that I'm inches away from sitting when my legs give out, dropping me those extra few inches.

  My chest is throbbing from the weight of my heart's fear at the tiny drop. I am fine, but for some reason, my mind has decided to grab and replay that scene and all I can feel is me falling for real, off the side of the staircase, falling and falling and never ever ceasing...

  Screech walks up a dozen more steps before he notices the lack of my presence. He turns around, for a minute his gaze in a feverish sort of horror, before he notices me. His posture and face relax, and by the time he's padded back down and sits next to me, his face is its usual nihility.

  I need to tell him about the others now. Not just to cover for my fear, but to distract myself from it.

  “It was just me, when I started. And as I climbed up I met people, and made them follow me. There was this girl, spiny, curly black hair, big green eyes hidden behind huge glasses. Always sniffing loudly through her huge nose. A bit hunched, very skinny. Very skittish. There was this really little kid... two or three. Silent, wouldn't say a word. Blonde, with uh... light eyes. Hazel or something? I don't remember. Short, baby hair. Soft skin. Didn't like to be touched or held. There was this man. Much older than me, like fo
rty or something. Large. Dark hair and eyes, and a bit of a beard, like, not clean shaven. Really odd expression, always. Made jokes about everything around us. Tried to eat a bit of the staircase once.”

  “What?” Screech interrupts, obviously surprised by this.

  “He was weird,” I agree, quietly. “There was a girl my age. Red-headed. Really skinny and tall. Very long hair. Smooth face, smooth skin. Her eyes were black, though. Deep, deep black. She didn't like us, much. She didn't like anything much. She didn't seem disturbed.”

  And back then, it was so much more natural to be disturbed. I remember I used to hold onto the girl with the curly hair, the girl I liked, and we'd freak out quietly, together, while the bigger one laughed, before we found the little girl and the red-head.

  “She also had this cool talent. She used to be able to fashion things to look like exact likenesses of other things. Like, she used some of the staircase to make a chicken pie. And she could do it with her own skin too.” I'll never forget when I looked down and she was touching me with my own hand. “In fact, I don't remember much of her. She wasn't there all of the time. She was only there sometimes, and other times, it was like... she wasn't.”

  Screech listens in silence, not contributing a word.

  “Anyway. Then there was Todd.”

  “Todd?”

  I understand the confusion in his voice. The first name I've mentioned. “He remembers his name, but not his age.”

  “Odd.”

  I laugh, once, gaining Screech's attention in the nature of confusion.

  “Odd Todd,” I chuckle.

  But, as per usual, Screech is unamused, and seems to be in deep thought about the fact that Todd does, indeed, know his name, so I merely allow him to contemplate before I continue.

  “Todd was a lanky boy. Bright blue eyes.” I gesture, off-handedly, to my own eyes, the color of which I do not know. “Rather limp hair. Tall.”

  “How old would you guess?” Screech asks, jolting me into the words I was saying.

  “Uh. I dunno.” I shrug. “Early 20s or something?” He nods, motions for me to continue.

  “He was sort of friends with everyone, y'know?” Even I'm not too sure what I'm saying anymore, so I don't expect him to know. “Even the creepy girl sorta liked him, I think. Everyone loved Todd.”

  There's a silence. Kind of long, kind of threatening. Screech seems to be deep in thought about all of this.

  “What happened to them?”

  I don't like this question. I elect to ignore it, stand, stretch out my back. It pops and cracks happily in response as I turn, allowing all my bones to settle in their correct place. I catch Screech's eyes, and his face is kind of horrified, for some reason, and I look to where he gestures, and I see that one of my feet is literally half-way off the edge.

  For some reason, I'm not at all frightened. I shrug nonchalantly in response to his horror, sit down next to him, scoot a bit closer for his sake more than mine. It's funny how I went from overreacting to emotionless in less than two minutes while talking about my dead friends.

  Could I really call them friends? They weren't, really. They were my walking mates.

  I look out over the sky, the long, never-ending sky. Screech has realized I'm not going to answer, and he says, “Do you think it's blood?”

  “What?”

  “The mist. Do you think it's made of blood?”

  I hesitate. With all the blood in the ocean – or maybe the ocean made of blood, who really knows? – it's totally possible, I presume. I shrug to Screech in silence.

  But he doesn't rise to walk, and though I'm older, it feels like there's some sort of designation in which he is the driver of this operation. I wait for him to speak.

  “They fell,” he finally says. I think he meant to ask that, but it sounds like a statement.

  “Well, not all of them.”

  “But some of them,” he points out.

  “Some didn't.”

  “But some did.”

  I turn to him, look over his young face, focused and ready for debate. But he isn't wrong, just is looking at it too sadly, so I merely shrug in reply. “Yes. Some fell.”

  He looks away, and I do too, sitting there quietly. I glance down to the sea, still too covered by the apparent blood mist to make out. I strain my ears, trying to hear it. It never really sounded like oceans are supposed to, you know? Not that I know what oceans are supposed to sound like, but I've imagined it sounds like waves going in and coming back out, over and over, steadily. That's not what it sounds like. It sounds... clogged, somehow. Broken. It sort of sounds like a kind of terror, and pain, though I don't really know how those can be sounds. Maybe just because that's my basis of horror, that's my interpretation on the matter. I don't know.

  Maybe my imagination is just too insane, but when you're in a place like this, you start forgetting what's imagination and what's fact. It's just what you see, and there's no difference between how real it is, only how it makes you feel.

  “The baby fell,” he guesses, always interrupting. I smile at his interruption but he thinks I'm smiling about the baby and looks a bit disgusted for a moment. I flatten my mouth and shake my head.

  “No. Well, I mean, yes. The baby did fall. But that's not why I was smiling.”

  He still looks suspicious – I think he always does, on some level – but he lets it go, glances away. “The older, chubbier man.”

  I nod my allowance of the truth.

  “And Todd, too.”

  I shake my head, smiling properly this time, because I'm glad he didn't get it all right. “No. Not Todd.”

  “Who else fell?” I guess he's sick of the guessing games.

  “The lady.” My friend. She wasn't just a walking mate... she was a crying-freaking-out-holding-hands-sleeping-on-the-same-stair-together mate. I still feel queasy thinking about when she fell, the look of horror on her face, the way her hands had reached out to grab mine like they had so many times, but missing this time, missing and coming against nothing but empty air that readily pushed her over the edge, threw her further and further and further and –

  “Then where are Todd and Creep?”

  Despite the fact that he pulled me out of a heart-wrenching memory, I can't help but offer him a weak smile. A nickname for her – though I'd come up with another, long ago, one I'd never voiced aloud. Screech smiles back, a bit awkwardly, his grin tight and as if he hasn't worn it on his face very often.

  I wonder very suddenly if he is ticklish, but finding out is risking him plunging over the edge, and I don't like that idea.

  “Creep stopped walking, after a while. And Todd kept.”

  “You mean he went on without you?” He sounds a bit shocked and almost upset, like Todd did something to hurt him personally.

  I nod. It'd been just after we'd lost the woman. I had been so sick, and was pacing back and forth between these two stairs before I sat down. We were so low to the water... I had been able to hear her last screams to the moment, hear the crack, see her body fall apart against the rushing waves. I'd leaned over the side of the staircase, clutching at the edge which had been much more substantial back then, which had not crumbled in my grasp. I think I was crying, but I was so sick and frightened and out of it that I couldn't remember. There had been six of us – six – and now there were two. Still pretty much kids, even if he seniored me. And now we were alone. Young. Frightened. Lost.

  At least, I thought he was too. All that changed when he rose and turned to leave.

  I must have watched him walk away, but I only remember that one moment he was there and the next he wasn't. Not at all in my eyesight. I thought for a while that he might have fallen, too, but I'd have noticed that.

  I remember the terror that welled up inside me, and I remember screaming for him. Screaming until my throat was hoarse and dry... oh, I'd screamed.

  It seems so far away, though. That memory. It's funny how memories fade... slightly, as if still trying to hang on, and
then completely in a rush, all at once, until you remember the words like it was a book but not a movie, a tale but not your own. It's scary, memory. I wish it never faded – not even slightly, not even the bad ones.

  Even now, I glance at Scree, and I know this moment, the two of us against a red sky, sitting motionless, won't last. One day, I may totally forget it. One day this might be a book filed in fiction, not fact.

  And that's horrifying. Completely horrifying. Almost more so than the staircase.

  “You miss them?” He's not looking at me anymore, but looking around, contemplating life, or maybe whatever our version of it is. Perhaps he can't look at me, because my story's upset him so.

  “If I think about it.” I get my customary playful grin. “Never Creep, though. I never miss her.”

  “No,” he agrees, in that thoughtful voice, not catching on to my attempt at cheerfulness.

  Fortunately, my recollections have left me too tired to care what he's on about now. So in silence I rise, taking the designation of driver away from him, and he follows, and then I force him into the lead and we continue walking.

  four

  We keep walking.

  I mean, that's what we're supposed to do.

  The staircase seems to be getting narrower and narrower the longer we go up it. I promise against promises to Screech that it isn't actually getting smaller, it's just some sort of warped perception thing from us climbing up too long, that it happens all the time, but I'm honestly really concerned about how minute it seems to be getting.

  I think the most surprising thing is not the fact that Screech believed me about the staircase not actually being smaller, but the fact that I was actually protecting him from something horrific. Usually he sees things that I can't and there's no way to stop it, but with this... it's obvious.

  I guess too obvious for him to catch it.

  Walking with Screech is not like anything I've ever done before. It's not like walking with curly black haired friend or baby or fat man or Todd or Creep. With friend, we were always holding on to each other, offering words of support and comfort. With fat man, there were always words we had to ignore, cynical laughing and darkness. With baby, we always had to watch her, though she mostly cried and pulled away from us and threatened jumping over the edge just to scare us. With Creep, we had to attempt to pretend that no, she did not actually look like a chicken, and will you cut that out and just walk now please? With Todd, it was like walking with someone much faster than you, who made jokes and jests to lighten the mood, but so frequently that he began to seem... well... insensitive, which is really what he turned out to be, leaving me when I was crying and all. But with Screech, it's almost like an equal. He's quiet, and he's sure-footed, but he'll talk and he'll stop when asked to. And he's younger, so I feel have to guard him, and he's smarter, so he feels he has to guard me.