Dreams of green grass and sunlight and a little girl that danced around with a smile and streamers.
Would I really have named her Marie? I don't even know what my first name is, let alone my last, let alone Todd's. I had no reference to put her first name to.
“You think people get born on the staircase?” I ask aloud, quietly.
“What?” Screech's mind was obviously preoccupied judging by the heavy way the word falls out of his mouth.
“Well, I mean... you said I probably lived my whole life on the staircase. So where are my parents? Did they fall? Was my mom in labor on some distant stair somewhere?”
He's silent for a while – too long, I suppose – before he finally mutters, “I don't know.”
I hesitate, remembering the words he said in his dreams so long ago. “Come back, Mom.” But once again, it's stupid to mention that. What's the point? To get him upset? To get him mad?
I'm not really looking up at where I'm going, more at the ground that's huffing out puffs of black smoke on my every footstep, so when I knock into Screech I almost push the both of us tumbling over.
“Hey!” I say, more in surprise than upset, and I step backwards, stumbling slightly before I get a grip on myself. “What is it?”
“This is it.” His voice is low, hoarse. “This is where I lost Shadow.”
I put my hand on his shoulder comfortingly and come up behind him to look at where he's staring. What he's looking at makes my stomach turn so violently I almost lose it all again.
No longer is there a staircase, but a long, straight line, thin as a twig, that leads out from the staircase and disappears into surrounding mist.
twenty-one
“Are you kidding me?”
“I knew you'd be upset.” His voice is achingly shattered and horrified, and he's looking at me with fear in every inch of his colorless eyes.
“Upset? Of course I'm upset! How the hell are we supposed to get across that?”
“It wobbles.”
“What?” In my sudden burst of anger that boils my blood and makes me shake, I hardly understand the irrelevant words he's saying.
“You can't walk on it, because it wobbles.” He puts his foot out to where the staircase abruptly ends and the large, black, narrow stake begins, shaking it slightly. The thing nearly keels beneath his slight intrusion, the entire structure wobbling and jumping as if its not supported by anything.
“Perfect, Scree.” I walk away, running my fingers through my hair, my attention not on him. “Just perfect.”
I know my reaction isn't quite what it should be, but I think the stress of everything is beginning to pound on me. Hours ago, I was almost raped... I thought I was pregnant for months... and I was only gone for weeks. My world makes no sense, when one thinks about it – it's all shrouded in dreams and illusions.
The thought makes me freeze, turn towards Screech, an idea biting at my brain. Maybe... just maybe...
“You said you see things, Screech. You said... I might see things. You meant hallucinations, didn't you?” He's shaking his head, but I know that's at my theory and not at my question. “That's what this has to be. This is a hallucination.”
“No.” The word and the gaze he gives me is firm, and he sets his mouth into an unforgiving line. “Hallucinations don't kill.”
“Well, mine gave me hope for a false life. Maybe yours just took one away.”
“That isn't funny.” His voice is charged, angry.
“I wasn't trying to be.”
We stand in silence for a while, and finally, I step in front of him on the narrow passageway, eying our new challenge. I test it with my foot and it careens and shakes, once again.
“Doesn't seem to slope up,” I note, kneeling down so I can be at level with it. “Just goes straight across. Like there's something on the other side.”
I glance up at Screech and he nods, face hardened, though there are tears making tracks against his dark skin.
I turn back to the horizontal pole, unable to watch him cry. “So how would we get across?”
“Hands. Like... grab onto it and hang down.”
Nausea settles into me at the mere thought. I glance straight down and notice the thousands and thousands of miles that stretch endlessly, mark our probable death. One hold too loose... one distraction... one instant of exhaustion and we'd fall straight down.
“We don't know how far this thing goes on for. It could go on for miles and miles. And we're not gymnasts, Screech.”
He nods, but his gaze is obviously still waiting a concrete decision. When my speculative glance lends him some insight, he says, “We can't go back, though.”
“Why not?”
“We know what's back. Todd. Madame Veneera.”
“They both fell. And I thought you thought they were the same person.”
“It was a theory, but I dunno.” He shrugs helplessly. His face is so frightened, so soft, and I wonder if it's because of age or tears that he's currently giving me that impression.
“Screech, if we go on this thing, we're going to fall. There's no way we could hang on for too long.”
“But maybe... maybe it's the end.”
“What?”
“Well... if you were making an obstacle course... wouldn't you put something like this at the end?”
“Wait, an obstacle course? Since when has this been that? I thought you said – ”
“I have a lot of ideas, okay!” His voice is defensive and he's backing up, as though avoiding physical strikes. “I'm just waiting for one of them to be proven wrong.”
“Calm down,” I soothe gently before throwing a wayward glance behind me at the beam. It seems so tiny... could it even hold our weight?
“We don't have to go back,” I consent, letting out a sigh. “But we can't go forward, either. Let's just... sit here.”
He's staring at me as if I kicked his late wolf. “What would be the point of that?” he questions, words itching with venom.
“Living,” is my simple response.
“But living for what?”
“Each other, okay? Just you and I.”
“Yeah, but... what would we do? Day after day, without the staircase, without moving? Dream? Talk? Stare at nothing? No. This could be the end, Freckles. This could be the very end.”
“Yeah, it could, or it could be the end of our lives. Let's just play it safe, okay?”
“No!” His eyes are wide and wild and I can taste his distaste, his fear in the air. “We have to do this, Freckles. We can't just sit here.”
“Remember how you first convinced me to walk with you? You said, 'We should walk.'” I'm honestly surprised I remember the conversation, remember the day so well – when he was too frightened to speak to me properly, when I was too frightened to think properly. “You never said that we should Olympic-style high-beam hang expertly across the staircase. Because this is a whole different ball park. This puts our chances of survival from slim to none.”
“It's better to fall than to be still, to not have anything happening, to just... stopping.” There's a sadness to his eyes which is both captivating and terrifying, almost as much as his words.
“Why are you not afraid of dying?” my voice pushes, colored with shock and confusion.
“Why are you so afraid of it?” I think his voice was raised, but I can't really tell, because the magnitude of his question has sort of hit me, in a way where I know that what he's said is infinitely important but my mind can't quite get to where it needs to to understand why.
“I mean, what more is there to fear?” He continues, voice both broken and sharp, both devastated and argumentative, as if those two emotions are so closely intertwined that he cannot even get at one without the other latched on. “If we die, it might just end. Or we might wake up, back in a real life. But either way it can't get worse than this. Nothing can be worse than this.”
“It could be worse,” I whisper.
“How?” Apparently my pause i
s too long for his liking, and he shrieks at me, “HOW?”
“We could not have free will. Or not be able to move, be chained to a wall. We could be bleeding or dying.”
His laugh is one of the worst things I've ever heard – far too twisted and fragmented to belong to the child with the bright eyes I got to know by the water. He turns away from me momentarily before coming back, his stance predatory and ready for confrontation. “Just because we're not physically chained to a wall doesn't mean we're not captives, Freckles. We have three options – walk, fall, sit. We don't have free will, we don't have... anything we should. And we do bleed and die, all the time.” My eyes go to his lip, his eye, his palm, my memory to eight long scars across his back and now new ones to accompany them littering his front. I close my eyes and shake my head, my mind rejecting the facts he's given me.
I'd never really seen it like that. Us, as captives. It'd never really occurred to me.
“It's different – ”
“How?” His voice is clearly arguing, and his words are clearly winning. “We get exactly what we need, not a bit more. We don't get anything we want.”
My hands, absently, travel down to my stomach.
“We're just rats in a cage, Freckles. So we can't quit.”
“Maybe that's exactly why we can quit.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don't we want to show them we're of higher intelligence than them? Because we're done, aren't we? We're done playing their stupid little game.”
“It's never been a game, Freckles!”
“Yeah, not to us! But if we are some rats in a cage, it is to them! And I...” I swallow back my revulsion as I think of watching Veneera fall. “I don't find this funny. Because people have died.”
“They weren't good people,” is his dark mutter.
“How do you know?” I stand up, back to full height, so I can tower over him, show him my side as well. “Maybe Madame Veneera was a fantastic person before the staircase ruined her, turned her into a shell of a human being. Maybe Todd never was a rapist back home – maybe something on the staircase turned him, maybe the people who control it, and maybe that's all he knows now. Maybe his life is a lie. Maybe that's why I don't remember my life, because my mind refuses to accept the lies that it throws at them. How do you know, Screech? How does anyone know?”
He's really quiet, now, and I think it's because I've finally said something intelligent enough to make him stop and wonder. Perhaps I'm right. Perhaps all that's happening is that we're being ruined by the staircase. The pieces certainly fit together... but not any more than any of Screech's theories.
Screech moves passed me, towards the thing that instigated it all. He sits down, hanging his feet over the edge of the staircase, and begins to put his hands on the beam.
“Woah!” I grab him back, dragging the light child away from the edge. “What are you doing?”
“Shadow didn't die pointlessly.”
“No, but–”
“She fell to teach me how to get across this thing. And I'm not going to sit here and wait until I grow too old to breathe. That could be the end, Freckles. The light at the end of the tunnel.”
My smile is dim and sad. “How do you know it's a light?”
“How do you know it's not?”
Rock solid arguments. Just like always.
“You're not going alone,” I say, as he tries to re-situate himself. “No, I promised. You and me. Thick and thin. Just the two of us.”
He looks up. “But you don't want to go. Dying, and the like.”
“Better to die with you than alone.”
The grin he gives me is almost as happy as it used to be, back when he seemed so much younger, so much littler. I settle down next to him and push him away.
“Me first. That way when we get to the end, I can help pull you up.”
His smile fades, slightly, turns faint, because of my choice of words. When. Not if. And I think he likes that, my stupid, illogical devotion to optimism.
It's really all we have in a world like this.
He backs up and I settle down, sitting on the edge of the staircase, letting my legs dangle. I put them so that between them is where the beam juts out. Swallowing uncomfortably, I allow my hands to wrap around the rather jagged piling. I squeeze my eyes shut and, as quickly as I can, I drop my body over.
twenty-two
For the first few seconds, it's terrifying, because you're falling.
And it's so easy to fall now, to just tumble and let go and not hold on as tightly as you can, but the fear kind of makes your muscles seize and tense until you're nearly locked in a death grip as you hang.
I'm rocking slightly as dangle, my hands locked around the joist. The weight of my body seems to be amplified, dragging me down, and I'm more than positive I'm going to drop in seconds.
Anxiety takes over my mind and I begin to shake, my throat closing as I hang there.
“It's harder than it looks,” I say as I hear Screech get down to join me.
“It gets easier the further you go.”
“I don't think it will.”
“No, I know. I tried it.”
I tighten my grip automatically so I don't fall out of shock. “What? You tried to go across this thing alone?”
“To see if I could do it!” he says, defensively, though there's an obvious undertone of guilt. I can tell he's dropped onto it by a small grunt on his part, and the way the whole thing shakes and shudders. I'm nearly thrown off by the extra weight, and I let out a cry of terror.
The edges of my vision are turning a bit white, and I can taste sick in the back of my throat. “O... okay, Screech. Just... we gotta be careful.”
“Yeah.”
I begin to focus on moving, one hand in front of the other, just like walking with one foot in front of the other. Once I've dropped one hand and I'm shifting to go forward, though, it seems infinitely hard to get it back up, to make it grasp again.
The sound of Screech struggling behind me is loud, and I'm wondering if I'm making the same noise. I can't really tell, because I'm too concentrated on moving. Between my thoughts of how to move and promises to spur me on, tangible anxieties bite me. We shouldn't've done this. We're going to die here. This will be the end.
I attempt to ignore the words and put all of my energy and attention into merely moving ahead, yet there is nothing easy about it. I wonder how much I weigh, and I wonder how much I used to exercise, in my other life. Apparently, not enough, because I'm struggling to make it just one foot.
“Bad... idea...” I'm already panting. I think it's more out of panic than exertion, though, because my unused limbs are shaking, flailing slightly, throwing me off balance very often.
“Gets easier.” His voice, too, is strained, but less so than mine. I remind myself he tried this before, and I continue ahead as bravely as I can.
I twist backwards to make sure he's okay – I realize that I hate the fact that he's not ahead of me, because I can no longer keep a cautious eye on him – and I see the staircase behind us has hardly moved since I've begun.
“This... is... awful,” I decide. My decision to turn was a bad one, and I nearly lose my grip as my body begins to twist, doing a half cork screw in the air before it settles down enough for me to move.
I feel queasy as I push myself ahead, grunting slightly when my heart begins to twist.
I hope I'm not having a heart attack.
The mist is thick here, and I remind myself that looking down is illogical, because we can't see anything. I begin to try to trick my mind into believing that right below us is a soft, green field of sunflowers and poppies. Any time I get too tired or too frightened, I can merely drop between the plant life and weave my way through happily, laughing and giggling with Screech. I force it into my memory so much that I can smell things I've never smelled before – the scent of freshly cut grass after it's just rained, the perfume of the poppies as they tilt after a strong wind in bright
, blinding sunlight. I can taste sunflower seeds on my lips and tongue, naturally salty and tiny, and I get pieces stuck between my teeth. I feel the stones and pebbles of the world beneath me, and they're still wet from last night's rainfall. I teach Screech how to skip them over the cool, murky lake which smells of rain and cattails, and the two of us dive into the rather warm water for a dip, being careful to watch out for the large catfish that surround the pools. When we come out, soaking wet and shivering even though the air's warm, we sit in the thick, muddy sand and sink deep into it, so deep we're unsure if we can ever get out of the bank and back to our houses. Screech brought a plastic green bucket whose handles broke off many years ago, and we watch the sharp edges as we dive the structure into the water and catch black minnows which swim desperately against the edge of the now-green tinted water, searching for an escape. We stick our faces over the covering of the bucket and listen to the sudden stillness and softness of nothing but slightly rippling water, and it sounds like we're in a plane, or put conch shells to our ears. Finally Mother calls us up to dinner and we come back up, bare feet hitting against the soft yet dry dirt, but we have to eat out on the wooden, splintering porch because we're so dirty. She swears we smell like fish, but we can't smell it. All we can smell is a world frosted with dew and a bright blue sky with a blinking sun.
That passes the time, pretending we're in worlds that can only be dreamed of. It helps me ignore my aching, protesting arms as we swing. I'm sure once we're finished, I'll never be able to feel my arms again.
Our hands are bleeding – I know his must be as badly as mine. There are too many sharp edges on the stringer. I examine its small shaft, circular and stretching endlessly like some sort of overgrown twig. It's small enough for me to wrap my hands around it completely, but big enough to, apparently, support both of our weights. It's black like the staircase and juts out at random points, sharp edges searing themselves into my hands.
“I think my arms are going to be pulled out of their sockets,” Screech comments.
“I'm pretty sure of that, too,” I reply.
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