Chapter 30: The Simplest Thing

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a Chapter in which a feeling is named, wrapped, and handed over neatly, close this book now. Dear Reader, here is a riddle to carry down the porch steps. What is easiest to feel, hardest to say, and grows heavier with every word you use to carry it? Do not answer too quickly. The boy in this Chapter had the answer in his pocket all evening, and still could not find a way to take it out.

She was right, and Arthur knew it.

That was the first problem. It did not add up, Hadjer had said, and she had laid out the sum so patiently, so carefully, that he could see every line of her working. The lazy boy. The sarcastic boy. The boy who never did anything for free. She had checked it from every direction, and every direction came out the same, and she was ten years old.

She is very clever, he thought, and it made him like her more, which was the second problem.

He opened his mouth and found nothing in it.

The strange part was that the answer was not complicated. It had never been complicated. It was as simple as a light being on in a room. It was only that, the moment he tried to put it into words, it grew corners. Every sentence he built for it came out too small, or too large, or in the wrong order, or sounded like something a boy says in a film just before the music starts. He could not say because I like you. He barely understood it himself. A person who cannot find the first word of a thing does not get to skip ahead to the last.

So he sat on a porch, with a paper bag of cold popcorn on his knee, and looked like a boy who was thinking very hard. Which was all Hadjer could see.

She watched his face go inward. She watched him process, and weigh, and discard. She waited. The silence stretched, and it was not an angry one, and that was the worst part, because she was beginning to think it might be the answer.

"Arthur?"

He lifted a hand, wait, and began, "I’m trying to..."

Then he coughed.

It was a small, wet sound, and he looked almost embarrassed by it. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, and when he took it away it was red. He looked at it with honest confusion, the way a person looks at a bill for something he did not order. Then the boards came up to meet him, and the popcorn went everywhere.

Hadjer stepped back so fast that she hit the wall behind her.

She was not confused. That was the thing she would remember later, with a clarity she did not want. She had killed too many pets, in too many rooms, not to know exactly what she was looking at. The color of it. The cough. The way a living thing folds when something quiet has been working on it for a long time.

It’s me.

The boards around her feet had gone gray. The porch swing, behind her, had gone gray too. How long had that been spreading? She had been so busy trying to work him out, so busy building her archive and asking her question, that she had stopped looking at the one thing she never stopped looking at. Or perhaps she had not stopped. Perhaps she had simply chosen not to see it, because somebody near her own age had been sitting close enough to talk to, and he had kept coming back, and she had liked it so much that she had told herself it must be fine.

Why would he do that? she thought. Why would he sit there and say nothing? It must have been awful. It must have been so uncomfortable.

Her passive was not a nuisance, even to someone Awakened. It was a poison, and poison does not care how strong you are. Given enough time, it makes no distinction at all.

"Carter!" she screamed.

It echoed over the enclosures and came back unchanged. Somewhere in the dark, a bird complained. Nobody came.

She had given none of them her number back on the pavement. Nobody had ever wanted to call her before... Why would they start now? The thought hadn’t even crossed her mind, a lonely girl who had only just found a place for her generosity. She had never once asked for anyone else’s number, accustomed to a world where people always went out of their way to avoid her. It simply had not occurred to her that a day might come when she would desperately need to reach someone other than Arthur.

Arthur’s phone had slid from his jacket and lay on the boards by his hand, its screen still lit. He had not set a password; he had not got around to it. She snatched it up through her sleeve, took one more step back, and found the only other contact in it, a name typed in, without a word, by a boy who had been exploring settings on the pavement.

Carter.

It rang once.

"Arthur?" said a voice, wary and suspicious.

"It’s Hadjer. Come to the house. Now. Arthur’s..." Her voice cracked right down the middle, and she let it. "Please come. Please hurry."

The line went dead because Carter had already started running.

That was when the serpent moved.

It had been lying where Hadjer had left it, a curl of green and gold on the boards, with its head tucked down. She had half forgotten it. It lifted its head now, looked at Arthur, looked at her, and poured itself across the porch with a speed that made her flinch. It climbed his arm, crossed his chest, and wound itself twice around his throat, very gently, like a scarf put on by someone who had been taught how.

Then it began to glow.

It did not change color, as it had when she named it. It glowed. A pale, steady, golden light, like the one that comes from under a door when someone is awake in a room, spread from its scales across his collar and over his jaw. She watched it with her hand over her mouth. The gray, waxy look of his skin began to withdraw, a little at a time, like a tide. The red at the corner of his mouth stopped. His chest rose, and rose again.

It is healing him.

She had read about it in the fine print, in the part nobody reads: Pets bonded to an owner sometimes develop an ability of their own, unique to each. She had read it the way you read a warranty. She had not once thought it would happen to her.

Ouroboros, she thought. A symbol of renewal. She had picked it for the sound.

The relief that went through her was so large that her knees nearly gave out. She could do something. For once in her life, the thing she had brought near a person was making him better and not worse. And the snake, glowing in the dark, wound around the throat of the boy who had flicked it on the head not twenty minutes ago, looked like the most beautiful animal she had ever owned.

Then the relief turned over, and underneath it was something else.

What if I’m making it worse?

She took a step back. He was already out of her range, and she knew it, and she took another. Another. The gravel crunched under her heels, and the dark came closer around her, and with each step something in her face closed, like a window being painted over from the inside. She was not afraid anymore. She was ashamed, in the way a person is ashamed who has just caught herself enjoying something. I should not have been happy tonight. I should not have laughed. I did not deserve it, and look what it cost.

Down the path, a flashlight beam swung wildly across the enclosures.

She dropped the phone. It hit the gravel with a small, final sound, and she turned and ran into the dark, away from the light, the room and the boy, in the only direction there was.

By the time Carter reached the porch, there was nobody on it but Arthur and the snake.

He skidded to a stop and went down on his knees on the boards. He did not ask questions. He put both hands on Arthur’s chest, over the glowing coils, and shut his eyes, and the light changed. It thickened. It took on a second color, a warmer one, and Carter’s face went gray in a way that had nothing to do with the dark.

It took a long time. Long enough for the swing to creak twice in the wind. Long enough for the glow to fade, and the snake to loosen its grip, slip down onto the boards, and curl up in a tight, tired spiral beside Arthur’s head.

Arthur opened his eyes.

"Where’s Hadjer?" he said.

It was a rasp. It was the first thing out of him. Carter, who was sitting back on his heels with his hands shaking, gave him a long and unbelieving stare, and then reached over and hit him on the head.

"Ow."

"Are you crazy?" said Carter. "You sat next to her. For hours. She almost killed you. How did you not feel it?"

"I did." Arthur tried to sit up and failed. "A bit. Around the second handful. I thought I could stand it a little longer."

"Why?"

Arthur looked at him. He said it plainly, as though it were a perfectly good reason, as though anyone would have done the same.

"Because she was lonely."

Carter hit him again.

"That makes you sound crazier," he said. "Stay away from her. I mean it. That healing took everything I had. And your body needs time to knit itself back together properly, and it can’t do that with her anywhere near you." He wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. "You were almost dead again. Do you understand? That was not a figure of speech."

Arthur sighed.

"Fine," he said.

He meant it, or at least he meant to mean it. He turned his head on the boards, and his eyes went down the path, over the gravel, past the first enclosure, and found a small pale rectangle lying in the dust where a girl had let go of it.

Carter did not stop him from going for it. He was too tired to.

Arthur crossed the ten steps like a man crossing a frozen lake, picked up the phone, and brushed the gravel off the screen with his thumb. The last call was still there. Carter. Above it, in the list of two names, was the other one.

He pressed it.

It rang.

He stood on the path under the night sky and listened to it ring, and the sound was so plain and so patient that it was almost insulting. Once. Twice. Three times. Somewhere in the dark, behind a wall, in a house with a brass nameplate on every door, a screen lit up with his name and was turned face down on a blanket. He could not know that. He only knew that it rang six times, and clicked, and a pleasant recorded voice told him that the person he was calling was unavailable.

He pressed it again.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

The person you are calling...

Again.

Carter watched from the porch with the snake beside him and said nothing. He had the look of someone who had stood on the other end of a few unanswered calls in his time and knew that there was nothing to be said about them.

Arthur called a fourth time, and a fifth. He stopped counting after that, because counting it felt like keeping score, and he did not want to know what the score was. He held the phone to his ear and listened to it ring through the cold, and each time it rang out, something under his ribs went a little lower.

It was strange. An hour ago he had been coughing blood next to her. He had lain on those boards while something worked at him from the inside, and it had hurt, and he had been afraid, and he had survived it. And none of it, not one second, had felt as bad as the sound of a phone ringing in an empty house and nobody picking up.

He did not understand why. He had a very good idea, and he did not want to look at it.

He pressed call once more.

There are doors that stay shut because they are locked,

and doors that stay shut because someone has knocked.

TO BE CONTINUED...