Edge

by Serena Sallow

  She stares at us for a moment, not speaking. The longer she looks at us, though...

  “Freckles, do you…?”

  “Yeah,” I cut him off, glancing around for a bit. The alizarin sky begins to turn maroon, then burgundy, getting darker and darker despite the fact that no day has changed, no time has gone on. It's still early morning, but in seconds, it's nearly pitch black.

  We both look back to her and jump – she seems to be exuding some light of her own, white, and it outlines her face, extenuating every angle and color of her body, startlingly.

  I feel a tight grip on my arm and I tense until I realize it's Screech's hand, searching for comfort. I smile slightly, pat him, allow him the feeling, placing my hand over his. His hands are so small… so soft.

  I think, briefly, about a mother holding those hands, when he was first born, little and delicate, and then later leaving them, with no reason, just packing up and going.

  I shiver, but it has nothing to do with the temperature or the creep in front of us.

  “It is time for your water, children,” she says, and hands us two small, wooden cups. I release Screech's hand to hold onto the small carving, gently. I try to look down in the water, suddenly curious about my reflection, but I can't see it. Inside the cup is too dark – everything is too dark.

  “Why did it get so dark?” I ask her.

  “Dark, dark? Indeed.” The smile has moved in, made a permanent residence, and it frightens me.

  I look back up at her and then, trustfully, go to put the cup to my lips.

  “Freckles!”

  The shout echoes across the field, from far away, too far away, and I jolt, pulling the cup down and looking next to me where Screech was, where he is no longer.

  I jump up from my position on the ground, backing up, looking at the indent his body had made on the rustled black grass.

  He's gone. There's no Screech, not anywhere. No bright smile and eyes, who I had to drag into the water with his pants, who had soot in his hair and coal in his heart, but so much more light, if only one helped him see it.

  Screech is gone.

  I've dropped my cup by accident, and though I can't see the color of the drink because of the color of the surrounding sky, I do see bits and pieces of flesh and a smooth, white, circular thing that –

  “Is that an eye?!” I cry out. My hands are around my mouth as I back up. I was gonna drink that. I was honestly going to drink that. Somebody else's body, their eye, was going to be digested by me without my own knowledge. I feel sick to my stomach, imagining what – or rather, who – it was in that cup that I had almost just digested.

  If Screech hadn't called out...

  And then my heart's racing, because my mind is being stupid and jumping to silly conclusions, and I'm trying to see the color in the eye even though Screech never really had an eye color, because I need to know it's not him, because for some reason my mind is promising me that it is, and he's dead, and I've almost just digested him.

  “Where's Screech?!” I scream, whirling around to the culprit, the smug Madame Veneera.

  But when I'm turned, I'm greeted with nothing but an empty chasm of dark.

  There is no Madame Veneera. There is no Screech.

  There is no anybody, because I am alone here.

  eight

  I think I'm panicking again – I don't really know. All I know is that I'm spinning around in a dark, empty field, and I can't find Screech, and I can't really breathe.

  “Screech!” I think I'm screaming, but I'm not really sure. Perhaps I'm whispering his name, because there's no air coming in or out of my lungs, and because I'm shaking and my body's protesting all of this living. “SCREECH!”

  I'm screeching his name – and the irony does not go unnoticed, of course – but he's gone. He's nowhere. I'm trapped in an endless, loud field and I think the loud noise that's sounding over and over in an evenly distressed rhythm is just my heartbeat and I'm spinning around and I'm alone and I wish that someone's there, even horrifying Madame Veneera with her odd smile and standard replies, because at least someone would be there, at least I wouldn't be alone, even if she did murder me.

  I can't breathe. I think I'm dying, and I bend over, nearly collapsing, hands on my knees as I try to catch my breath.

  Oh, God. Where is Screech?

  “Screech,” I whisper, brokenly, between desperate gasps of air.

  “Freckles!”

  From far away again, his voice, yelling, frightened, and an equal amount of hope and terror enter my body as I rise. “Screech?” I call back.

  “Look out!” from much closer. “Look out!”

  And the next thing I know, something's rammed into me, and I'm sprawled on the floor, and I look directly up and suddenly there's long claws reaching down from the heavens, about to peel my eyes out, and I realize it's not claws, it's nails, it's Madame Veneera, and I am, most likely, about to die.

  For a moment I feel her hot breath on my face, and a weightless feeling in every bone in my body forces me to look down. And suddenly all I see is smoke, wispy, white smoke, searing out of my body, my arms, my legs, my stomach.

  My mind goes back to the creature we saw running towards us, how Screech had held out his hand and he had disappeared, and I feel sick.

  I instantly realize what happened to that person. It was another one, just like Screech and I, on the staircase, a real, living one, and had probably tried to make friends with Madame Veneera, just like I did, and paid the ultimate price – skin and blood.

  And Madame Veneera had haunted it into a smoke body, and forced an eight year old boy to be its doom.

  In my now nonexistent stomach, I feel ill. I am more than positive that I'm about to lose it right there, even though I don't have anything to, technically, lose.

  So instead I attempt to center myself, get ready. I close my eyes momentarily, awaiting the death I know I deserve, then the creature that threw me to the ground jumps up and something pushes her.

  The two of them land on the ground near me, a tangle of limbs and flesh. Madame Veneera lets out something between a growl and a hiss but Screech's face is oddly set, and he does not seem to even notice her actions. He's on his feet already, his legs slightly bent and his arms out, jumping across the ground much like I'd imagine a crab would fight. When Madame Veneera rises once more, attempting to barrel into him, he moves quickly, allowing her to go past him, before grabbing her tulle – as there is more than enough to hold – and shoving her closer to him before throwing her backwards.

  Backwards, off the plateau.

  I'm on my nauseated stomach now, turning to see what's happening, but what I see makes me want to look away. Madame Veneera is teetering over the edge and, with a desperate cry, as what I presume to be a last resort, the lady in red tulle seeps her claws into Screech's back.

  He cringes and cries out, but it does no use. She has obviously won, because I can see by his shaky footing that he is just about to rock the wrong way and follow her to the grave he decided to award her – he is about to go over the edge, taken down with her.

  And from his wounds seep not red blood that stands startling against his dark skin – no. It is the smoke again, from his back, as if his soul were made of smoke and Madame Veneera was releasing it from its skin prison.

  All I know is that I cannot let him turn into the same phantom we had seen earlier. All I know is that his death is, eventually, unavoidable – but he must not die in this manner.

  I don't know how I do it. I think my body's reacting quicker than my mind. But suddenly, somehow, Screech and I are laying, me on top of him, on the staircase, and there is an ear-splitting scream of horror, begging for help as a truly horrifying woman begins to fall into a chasm of darkness and red.

  I'm hugging Screech so tightly that I don't even notice the blood that's staining my arms and hands, and he's hugging me back, and I think I might be cursing very loudly, but I don't really know.

  “Y-... you just sa
ved my life,” I say, stuttering, as I pull off of him. “Oh my God... what happened?”

  He shakes his head, his eyes wide and shocked, and it's about then that I notice the most essential thing of all.

  “We're back on the staircase!”

  A broken laugh falls from his lips as we look down at the sodden, ashen thing neither of us ever thought we'd miss. Still as slim and untrustworthy as ever – but a regardless constant once again.

  I reach up and grab him into a hug, and he lets me, with my hand wrapped around his head, my fingers in his soft, still-wet hair, pulling the shivering boy close to me.

  “Oh, my God... what... what happened?”

  I notice I'm shaking, very unsteadily, kind of wildly as I pull away and look at him.

  “I just... you weren't there anymore. And then you were, and Madame Veneera was going to kill you.”

  I realize, quickly, and I jump to my feet and step as far over to the staircase as I dare. There's barely enough room for him to get by, but he doesn't see what I'm doing and just watches me with big, confused eyes.

  “We need to get out of here!” I prompt, a bit wildly. “Screech, Madame Veneera.”

  And then he sees it. Sees what I do. That whole thing... her falling over the edge and all... it could have just been an act, a misdirection of light, and she could still be alive and prowling in the dark, waiting to kill us, and suddenly he's on his feet, and he's running ahead of me, and my larger hands are wrapped around his, and I wonder as we walk quickly, hands intertwined, with him in the lead, whether or not it hurts his scrape wounds to hold his shoulder blades that way, twisted backwards so he can grip my hands.

  It must, but I don't comment on it. I need the feel of his small, living hand in mine just as much as he probably needs it.

  We nearly run up the staircase. We move, as quickly as we can, taking the stairs two and three at a time, ignoring dangers momentarily. We run with shaky limbs that flash in the darkness and quickened breaths that seem to catch every few moments, hearts that are racing and jumping and running into throats and attempting to escape bodies. We run from the best fountains in the universe, because though we are still parched, we value our lives, even if it's just our bodies fighting to stay alive and not our minds anymore.

  And we run, and run, and run, until the light is bright enough again for us to see, and we're more than certain that we've risen out of her domain.

  The moment we do, I drop to my knees and Screech turns around and drops into my outstretched arms.

  I'm shaking, so wildly, and I'm panting with a pain in my side from moving so quickly, and the tremors in my body are beginning to envelope me because I'm so afraid of things that happened in the past, but the body still likes to remember how scary it was. Everything's fine, I tell myself – Screech and I are safe, and that's all that matters.

  But perhaps it won't always be like this. Perhaps Screech and I won't always be this close.

  No. That's insanity. We always will. Always.

  I think my newly cleaned pants have been sunk in the staircase soot for about twenty minutes before I finally ask about Screech's wounds.

  He cringes, as if I've mentioned a delicate subject, but then does nothing but turn and show me. There are eight long, bloody scrapes down his back, crisscrossing on his small body, and I touch them, gently. He sucks in breath quickly and winces, but he lets me brush my fingers against it.

  “Want my shirt, to bandage it up?”

  “Oh... no thanks,” he says, very awkwardly, so I roll my eyes at him from behind his back.

  “You're such a child.”

  “Yeah, kind of.”

  I stand and pat his shoulders, though my legs are still weak and shaky. My mind is caught on the past like fly-paper, and an anxiety is slowly beginning to suffocate me.

  I let out a deep breath, run my hands through my hair. “Let's keep walking, Screech.”

  He nods, and looks at me, before finally saying, “Yeah.”

  Of course, we walk a little more injured. We walk with the weight of goblets that have flesh and body parts and women dressed in tulle with water that try to kill us with smiles.

  And I'm as thirsty as ever, it seems.

  After about hour three or four of walking, my legs stop buckling every step and I can just focus on the moving forward part. I notice that Screech and I are still holding hands – just one, not both like in the beginning, like we needed a rope to connect us. But the grip is still there. His little, small, young fingers, scarred and dented, wrapped against mine... and my eyes keep lingering on his bleeding back, thinking of how that's the scar that proved he almost died, the scar that proved he was in death's grip, but escaped.

  And then I notice something. Something I am absolutely positive I never noticed before.

  The palm of his hand is completely red, still stained with the blood we had scrubbed off.

  “Screech,” I say immediately. “Your hand's red.”

  “I burned it,” he says without even looking backwards. Concern begins to ebb through me.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “When did you burn it?” And how? There was nothing that hot in this world – thankfully, whatever sun kept this planet warm did not heat the staircase so much that it hurt, but then again, we still had a ways to go. Who knew if that wouldn't be one of the end results? I wouldn't be surprised if it was.

  Now he stops, hesitates, talking to me, but not turning towards me. Turning is hard on such narrow passageways. It's a wonder we haven't fallen yet.

  “Remember that smokey thing we saw?”

  Coincidence. I mark it down to mere coincidence that he noticed that. There's no way he figured out that's what Madame Veneera does to people as well. No. He's so young, he can't know something like that...

  “Freck?”

  “Yeah, sorry, just thinking. Yeah, I remember.”

  “When I put my hand out, I like, stopped it somehow.”

  “Yes, I remember, Screech.”

  “Well, it burnt me then. And then my hand turned red.”

  I stare down at the small extremity that is grabbing mine, looking it over carefully. “But... it's not disfigured or anything. It looks like normal, like it always has, Screech. Just like you dipped it in paint.”

  “I know.” The look he gives me is one of pure confusion, of not understanding, and I'm suddenly hit by the fact that so rarely do I see any other semblance than his upset veneer, that even this change is drastic and surprising.

  “And when it happened, you didn't cry out in pain like you'd been burnt or anything. You just kind of... took it,” I said, recalling the scene. It feels like it has been so long ago... has it really just been a day?

  “Yeah.”

  “So you're just really bad ass?”

  “Yes,” he accepts, laughing, and continues to the next step before I drag him back down by his hand.

  And suddenly I hate that we're on the staircase, and I wish we were back on creepy field, just so we can bump into each other and shove and push one another without being worried of accidentally committing murder.

  “No, it didn't hurt,” he admits.

  “Then why do you presume it's a burn?”

  He shrugs. “What else is that color and stays on your skin forever?”

  I don't have an answer, but I allow him to continue walking. And when he does, he does it without the gentle grip of my hand.

  nine

  It's night time, and we're on our own steps again, lying side by side, staring up at the endless, black sky above us. It's too dark to see anything, of course, but it's still comforting, knowing no creeps lurk nearby, watching us and smiling.

  None that we know of, of course.

  I think we might have snapped, because we've resorted to making fun of Madame Veneera rather cruelly as a way of coping with her death.

  I imitate her voice – Screech says I'm very good at it, apparently 'spot on' – and he tells me what t
o say, because apparently he's good at that.

  Whatever “that” is.

  “Don't you think it's dark out tonight, Madame Veneera?” he asks, and then whispers my line to me.

  “Indeed, indeed, my children!” I say, imitating her rather shrieky voice, which has a sort of silence but a high pitch to it that is interesting to mimic.

  “Okay, okay, now say the line about the fountains!” cries the boy next to me, between the throes of laughter.

  “I don't quite remember it,” I admit, awkwardly, because I hate that fact.

  “You really do have a bad memory,” he muses aloud in the dark. The words hit me a bit hard, and we're left sitting in silence and darkness for many, many moments.

  “Well, it's not like you remembered the dream either, so.”

  “Dream?” I can hear the sound of him shifting, half-sitting up, resting on his elbow. “What are you talking about?”

  “The dream that you had in Madame Veneera's plain place.”

  Screech is strangely silent for a moment. “I didn't have a dream in Madame Veneera's plain place. You did.”

  “No, I didn't.” I'm up on my elbow too, now.

  “Yes, you did! You were with someone in your dream, some science thing or something.”

  I blink back at him, angrily, not that he can see. “Well, you were having a nightmare! You were calling for your mom, like a kid!”

  “I am a kid!” he calls back, seemingly appalled at the fact that I keep forgetting that.

  “Then why don't you ever act like one?” I shout back.

  “What are kids supposed to act like?”

  “I don't know! Stupid! Unobservant! Adorable, sweet, cuddly, bright, optimistic!”

  “So like you?”

  And it's quiet, after our yelling, as if our raised voices painted the dark sky. I look at all the colors of the blackness – the purples and blues and greens and oranges and reds and yellows, and I blink in silence, lying back down on my back, hands over my stomach.

  “I guess,” I finally say, now whispering, though I don't really realize it.