In Stone (2 page)

“I found you.” I think he sighs. 

“Yeah, you found me,” I say. My ears are flooded with the sound of my heart hammering.

“You see the blade? Beau, you must take it and run with it,” he croaks through labored pants.

“I’m not touching anything. We need to get you to a doctor. Let go of me, and I’ll go get help.” He ignores my request and starts leading my hand toward the knife handle.

“Please, you’re hurting me,” I say as he unhooks my fingers from his and wraps my hand tightly around the handle. He places his hand on top of mine. My knuckles turn white under his squeeze.

“You must do this,” he urges. His giant voice is dead. His words are now limping past his lips. “Take it.”

“My mom’s a doctor,” I lie. Not that it matters. I’m pretty certain this guy is beyond saving. “We live just across the street. She can help you.”

“No! No one else. Just you.” The blade starts to rise. It’s like watching the approaching fin of a Great White. Coincidentally, my heart is hammering out the opening of the Jaws theme tune. The further out the knife comes the more stained with crimson it is. It doesn’t look like any blade I’ve ever seen before. Not that I’m blade savvy or anything, but to me it looks more like I’m pulling bone.

“This is nuts. We need to stop.”

“My time is up,” he says. I’m grimacing, making squeaky sounds and tearless whimpers, as the knife slurps its way back through tough flesh and contracting muscle. It slips all the way out amidst a trickle of blood. The Lasagna I had for dinner sloshes about in my stomach. 

“Listen to me. Listen,” he chokes. “You must do this. You have to take the blade and hide it where no one will ever find it. You have to do this.” He gasps. “Before he comes.”

“He?” I ask. I can’t pull my eyes away from the knife. An onslaught of drool is collecting inside my bottom lip. Wonderment. Can I say wonderment when I’m not a kid dreaming of sugarplums and warm, woolen mittens? I don’t care; wonderment is what’s got me when I look at the knife. 

“He wants the blade, but you can’t let him have it, understand? If he has it the Gargoyle will become the hunted.” The almost-corpse exhales a long sigh, and his hand falls from around mine. The knife is in my hand now, only my hand.

I’m holding it.

It looks old. There are several lines of inscription carved into the handle. I can’t read it;  I can barely see it through the blood, but I can feel the swirling, intricate lines like brail under my thumb.

“I don’t understand. I don’t understand at all. This is insane,” I exhale. “Who are you? What is this?”

“I am one of the Gargoyle. At least, that is what I was,” he replies.

“A Gargoyle? Is that some sort of gang?”

“It’s my job to protect you,” he says. He’s delusional, exhausted, sucking on his bottom lip in search of some moisture. I’m not sure he knows what he’s saying anymore. “But alas, my life has become a lie.” He groans. Then his cracking face starts to dissipate and blow away in the wind. I think some of it gets in my eyes because they start to sting. When I blink, the world is dressed in a fuzzy black haze. I try to rub my vision clear, but am unsuccessful.

“You must go now,” the man exclaims in a sharp breath. I quit rubbing my eyes and look back down on him. His stare swells. Something about my face makes his lower lip quiver. The way he’s glaring has me craving a bath of boiling water and some antiseptic scrub.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“What…what have I done?”

“I don’t know. What have you done?”

He doesn’t answer. I know it’s time to run when the atmosphere starts to shake again, and the almost-corpse flicks his eyes toward a thick congregation of trees.

I’M RUNNING. I’M RUNNING
so fricking fast that the ground is a smudge beneath my feet. The icy air is razor blades hacking at my face. It stings, but I don’t stop. I can’t stop. With the blade in my hand, and without a coherent thought in my head, I bound through our garden gate. I meant to drop the knife, let it slip from my hand and get lost amongst dead leaves and dirt, but I couldn’t. Some strange hesitation has locked my fingers tight around the handle.

The “He” is hot on my heels; I’m sure of it. I can feel his breath on the back of my neck. Hear the thump of his footsteps on the pavement behind me. My heart is slamming against my ribcage as I throw myself at the white, wooden trellis that crawls up the side of our house. I climb it faster than I’ve ever climbed before, crushing the crap out of the thick vines of ivy that I’m usually so careful not to disturb.

I’m shooting for something ninja-like as I dive through my bedroom window. Not even close. My body is clumsy from panic and totally devoid of stealth. I hit the floor with a thud. Everything inside me judders. The jolt loosens my grip on the blade, and with a strange sort of elegance it leaves my hand, skates across the laminate flooring, and glides under my bed. My right foot catches the leg of my desk. I don’t quite pull it over, but the tug disturbs the towers of CD’s stacked on top of it. I brace myself as eight years of solid compact-disc collecting comes crashing down. The din of falling plastic rings out like church bells in my shoe-box-sized bedroom. Biting back a sailor-worthy slurry of swears, I can only wait as a liberated Ramones album finishes its lengthy pirouette and collapses on the floor. I can’t help thinking this racket could have all been avoided if I’d bought into the whole music download revolution.

I look over at the window and exhale relief that there’s no “He” standing on my window ledge, waiting to pounce on me. Bonus, everything seems still and quiet in my mom’s room next door. The second my internal umpire yells ‘safe’, I’m up like a shot.

All sorts of images are tripping about inside my head as I scramble over to the window, pull down the shutter, and lock out the world with a little brass bolt. Then it’s a fight with my neck to lift my chin and look back across the road.

The park has become a stage. Under the spotlight of the moon are two silhouettes. I choke down a whole grapefruit. One of the silhouettes is standing up, tall. The other is on his knees. I can’t make out faces from this distance, but the one standing has to be the “He” I was instructed to run away from. He’s holding on to the lapels of the other guy, the almost-corpse that I’d pulled the knife from. He’s making no effort to defend himself, but that doesn’t surprise me. I figure what’s left of his bones are mostly there for decoration.

My hand is pressed against the window. The heat coursing through my veins collects in my palm, and a condensation haze grows around my fingers.

Death happens in the blink of an eye. The almost-corpse explodes into a cloud of dust. The moon catches some of the stray particles, and they shimmer like specs of glitter. It’s oddly beautiful. It makes me think of poetry or anything Picasso painted during his blue period. In the few minutes I’ve been watching, I realize I’ve picked a team. And the guy I was rooting for is now dead. Really dead. There’s no coming back from nothing. The man left standing punches the air. I flinch even though his fist is nowhere near me. With a roar that makes the walls of my room quiver the “He” vanishes through the trees. He’s fast, like lightning. I crawl up onto the window ledge and squint for a better look. A part of me is hoping that I’d imagined the whole thing, or at least that the almost-corpse would still be laid out on the ground. But the place is empty. There’s a patch of shadow on the floor, but it’s not him. It’s just the empty, broken space where he fell.

I stumble back from the window, CDs crunching under my feet. I kick the plastic debris out of my way without mourning a single broken disc. That’s not like me. The room has started to spin, and a dull buzz is manifesting in the bridge of my nose. I’m wasted, not on beer. But definitely wasted on something. Somehow I make it to the edge of my bed. My knees buckle, and my butt collides with the mattress. I tuck up, curl my body into crash position, and wait to pass out or throw up, whichever comes first. Neither does. Instead, I watch as droplets of blood drip like rain onto my floor. My nose is bleeding.

I pinch the bridge of my nose and grab the box of floral-scented tissues from my bedside table. The room stops turning the same second I plug my nostrils with wads of tissue that stink of Spring. Exhaustion pulls at my shoulders, and I flop back onto my bed, choking until I master the art of breathing through my mouth.

Maybe a millennium passes. Maybe a nuclear bomb goes off, and the world ends while I lie there, staring at the ceiling. Until a thought hits me, like a free-falling anvil, and I sit bolt upright.

The knife is still under my bed.

Dread infuses my movements as I lift up the overhang of my duvet. I recognize this feeling from when I was a kid, checking all the dark spaces for the Boogeyman. Sadly no Boogeyman -- instead something much worse. The knife lies dormant on the floor. It’s tip like the arrow of a compass, pointing straight at me. Deep breath.

At just over an arm’s reach away, I have to stretch my fingers to capacity before they grab it. It’s ice cold to touch. I hadn’t noticed that earlier, but then I was a little preoccupied with all the bloody slurping and sucking sounds. The blood on the blade has dried, leaving dark red stains that stand out sharply against the creamy-white. The swirling cursive script that’s been carved into the handle is foreign to me. I can’t even begin to guess what language it is, or what it says. All I know for certain is that the sight of the knife makes me feel sick. In a pointless protest, I march over to my dresser, pull open a drawer, and throw it in amongst a mass of odd socks.

****

My alarm squawks at seven a.m. I don’t need it; I’m already awake...well, my eyes are open at least. I slam my fist down on the snooze button, and my poor alarm clock coughs out a couple more notes before the digital display flickers and dies. My bones feel like they’ve been replaced by metal as I unfurl my body from the fetal position and haul my carcass out of bed, limb by limb. I head for the shower.

The shower is my sanctum, that quiet, calm place where I go to think and plan out my next artistic extravaganza. But this morning the water is too hard against my skin, the air too thick with steam to breathe. I try to think, organize the events of last night into some sort of cohesive explanation. Problem is I’ve been doing that for the last five hours, and all I see now is haze. There’s every chance all the overthinking has blown up part of my brain. That would definitely explain why I condition my hair before I shampoo and brush my teeth with Mom’s toothbrush.

“Wow! You look like something the cat just threw up,” Mom exclaims as I zombie-march my way into the kitchen.

“Awesome.” I know she’s right. Defending myself just seems like a giant waste of energy.

The small television on the counter plays away to itself as Mom burns breakfast. Au de charred food is a familiar fragrance here at chez Bailey.

“Rough night?”

I’m not even going to try and explain to Mom all the crazy that went down during the small hours. Firstly, because I can’t make sense of it myself, so I couldn’t possibly expect her to. And secondly, because she will actually kill me for sneaking out of my bedroom and hanging out in the park at stupid o’clock. Mom’s a little protective. Okay, she’s a lot protective. I’m the only seventeen-year-old at school with a ten-thirty weekend curfew. She makes me carry a rape alarm, a whistle, and a bottle of pepper spray. Sometimes I wonder if there’s more worry wracking around inside her tiny five-foot-three frame than internal organs. It would be nice to think that she could sympathize with my being-dumped trauma, what with the whole dad-ditching-us debacle, but that would be what they refer to as wishful thinking.

“The worst.”

“Has he been in touch since...you know?” Mom asks, putting a plate of cremated bread and a cup of fruit tea in front of me. Every morning with the fruit tea. “Just chew around the burnt bits,” she says regarding the almost pile of ash. She’s assuming my ex, Mark, is disturbing my sleep. Huh, I actually wish that were true. Mark, the boy that broke my heart eleven days, ten hours and twenty-six minutes ago, has well and truly been benched. For now anyways.

“No, but that’s okay because as of today, I am officially over it,” I announce. Maybe I’m lying, maybe I’m not. I can’t decide. Brain hasn’t yet recovered from recent explosion.

Mom gives my shoulder an affectionate squeeze and nuzzles the top of my head. The smell of burnt toast is drowned out momentarily by the bittersweet scent of spices in her perfume. She sits down beside me and stares deep into her coffee cup. Her green eyes glass over as her mind wanders off to another time. She is me in the park last night, only her heart has been breaking for over ten years.

At first, I was convinced that my dad would come back, and this look of absolute despair would only be a temporary thing. Cut to over a decade later and it’s still putting in an appearance. She hasn’t fallen in love since my dad took off, and now I’m suddenly wondering if my I’ll-never-love-anyone-ever-again revelation was perhaps a bit brash. I can’t imagine carrying the same heartache around for over a decade. I really don’t want to be curled up on frozen grass in ten years’ time, crying over Mark.

“Drink your tea. It’ll warm your bones right up,” Mom says when the memory has passed.

“What are your plans for today?” She slips on a black fitted jacket, fastens a white carnation to the button hole, and with her fingertips, fluffs up the curls of her raven hair.