Worlds of Hurt Read online

  A flash of memory—not her whole life but right now it seemed representative enough, and wasn’t that a sad statement—the second or third day she’d had a car of her own to drive to school, and even though she’d been accounted a nothing by the irrefutable standards that divided people like her and Ethan from all those who mattered, her new mobility must have caught someone’s eye and imagination. Because they’d snapped off the radio aerial halfway, then skewered three dead bats onto the sharp end.

  The feet were still mucking across wet earth, closer now, coming to a stop a few moments before she saw the dull gray flicker of a blade.

  Ever since that day, she’d never stopped wishing she’d had the stomach to clean up the mess unfazed…slide the dead bats free like papers off a spindle and continue on her way, giving as little satisfaction as possible to the assholes who had to be watching from afar, braying their stupid laughter over how they’d put another one over on the resident spooky chick they all loved to revile. But she’d been unable to do it without getting sick, possessed by a dread that the bats hadn’t been dead first, that they might come to twitching life at the touch of her fingers.

  She wouldn’t have ducked the blade even if she could’ve, preferring it to a slow death by suffocation. But it flickered past, inches from her eye—hurled, she realized; no one had arms this long. She heard the sharp woody whack as the metal edge bit deeply into wet bough—thrown with such ferocity that it must have encountered no resistance from the rope at all. The pressure on her neck suddenly eased and she plummeted.

  In the end, she’d found Ethan, still at school because the bug for drama had bitten him and he was volunteering for the spring play’s backstage crew. Reviling herself for needing his help, needing anyone’s help, she’d led him out to her car and turned her back until the cleanup was done, the small skewered bodies stuffed into his book bag. There were no words, of course, and he’d understood that so purely, Ethan turning shy and awkward because he knew, he knew, that the bats weren’t the half of it. He could’ve said so many wrong things right then…yet he had avoided every single one of them.

  “You’re my angel,” she’d told him, and that day, he was.

  But look at him now.

  Just look at him now.

  She’d already seen the dead speak tonight. Was it any worse a miracle to see them walk now, as well?

  Pandora lay sprawled across wet grass, spongy soil. She whooped for air, like vomiting in reverse, hands clumsy as she tugged the noose wide enough to slip over her head. She raised herself on an elbow, tipped her face to meet the rain, and watched him in the gloom as the first gray of dawn crept down through the gutted clouds.

  Neither she nor anyone else had ever thought of Ethan as a towering figure. He hadn’t lacked for height, but he’d slouched something awful, trying to melt below the notice of the world. Now, though, from where she lay, he brushed his shoulders on branches and scraped his head against the sky.

  Last week’s clothes hung from him in tears and tatters, stained with mud and blood. From head to toe he streamed with water; his hair was a plastered veil. And yet he stood so tall. His pride was the pride of angels, and his remaining weapon that of a reaper. Dangling from his hand was a sickle, until this night used for someone else’s lifetime of cutting wheat, oats, barley.

  She tried her voice but it failed her. Did he expect thanks? Would he even know the meaning of the words?

  Back up a bit: Was there anything of Ethan left to hear her at all?

  There must be—they had hung her, and he had known. They’d betrayed her and then hung her, left her to awaken soaked and choking in the last gasp of night, echoing his suicide, and he’d been drawn…by what, her distress? If all that lived within and moved him were an avenging angel, would he have cared? Would he have bothered to pause and save a life instead of taking one more?

  She sought his face for answers, anywhere behind that cold, blank stare.

  He gazed at her, his wonderful downturned eyes lending pathos to an otherwise pitiless face. His lips slackened and parted, then dribbled over with rain. And there was recognition there, wasn’t there?

  What do you think, Patrick? she asked silently. One mass murderer in the presence of another…

  But he was no help, pooling like sludge into her darkest recesses, and she wondered if he could feel that her keenest wish was that she’d never heard of him. Even more than she hungered to breathe without pain, more than she wanted Ethan living, she wished she’d never heard of Patrick Malone, never let herself fall under his undeserving spell. Because that would take care of the rest.

  Ethan closed the last few steps between them, then dropped to his knees. For a few precious moments she could imagine he was still her friend, and that the dawn tried a little harder to break through.

  Naïve as ever, naturally.

  Though he’d dulled his blade on the bones of others, it was still sharp enough to wield in one final assault. He scarcely needed longer to hack away her clothes than he did to remove what remained of his own.

  She didn’t lack the will to fight, only the breath, the strength. When he forced his way inside her, it didn’t hurt as much as she thought it would. Perhaps she’d passed the point beyond which she could feel much more…or it mattered less because, as far as she was concerned, she’d been raped once tonight already. She found a bitter comfort in realizing that while she no longer knew which side of this jihad she was on, it no longer seemed to matter.

  He was a cold, slick weight upon her, exuding a strangely sweet fragrance that made a mockery of his corruption and the god from which he fell. She mourned the Ethan she’d known, loving him because she knew that he, at least, would never have done this…even if his old desires may have fueled the attack. They work in harmony with what they find. Still, the wrathful thing that had been made of him seemed to take no satisfaction in its battering thrusts, neither cruel nor carnal, and so she couldn’t tell which carried the greater guilt here—the avenger itself, or the deep remembered longings of the body it exploited. This could’ve been punishment, or lust, or both.

  And Heaven was well served.

  The Sisters, according to Patrick’s account, had been transformed by a kind of sacrosanct rape in an Israelite palace. She hoped that this was to be her fate as well—anything to bring meaning to something so ugly—but could not sustain the belief. No, this felt so base, so low. It had begun in mud and in mud it would end.

  Arms pinned wide, nailed through the middle to the ground beneath her, she sucked blood from her tongue and spat it into the face above. He took it impassively; it diluted in the runoff to rain back to her eyes.

  No dawn had ever taken longer to arrive. He had to weary of this sometime. She imagined the end as if seeing it through someone else’s eyes, happening to someone else’s body: He would rise and leave her to abhorrence and memory; or he would take up the sickle again and reduce her to one more bleeding carcass.

  She couldn’t settle on which would be worse.

  But whichever it would prove to be, it was moments away—she could feel it as surely as she’d felt Patrick, cowering and unworthy as a thief. While Ethan, or the thing inside him, had found ecstasy elusive, it was not altogether absent. Pandora sensed the buildup the same as she had with any guy she’d ever given her body to. They’d never had to gasp that they were coming for her to know. As long as they were inside her—not merely her mouth, but inside her, so resolutely connected—she knew. It was more than hardness and spasms and breath. It was power, a welling force that overwhelmed flesh and cried out in triumph across time. Even if the rest of the sex was a wretched, mechanical mistake—and it usually had been—she’d always found this moment to be somehow sacred, a breach into the innermost core.

  So who could’ve guessed it was what Patrick had been waiting for?

  It abruptly felt as if he gathered deep down in her belly, as full as any pregnancy come to term, straining to be expelled in blood and pain and…


  And then he was gone, just…

  Gone.

  Ethan reeled from between her legs, falling backward onto his ass as his face was overtaken by surprise, by a toxic disgust—but anything was better than its indifferent devotion to duty. He sat in the muck that their thrashings had dug, then reached for the sickle. As the blade lifted, dripping purest morning rain, his face had never looked so much like the Ethan of old as it did now—so stricken and so torn.

  She lunged to stop him, felt herself caught from behind.

  The first cut was slow, methodical, disciplined. He stood even as entrails burst out across his lap, then raised the sickle again and again, chopping it down and down as if chasing a nimble mouse, until he and the frantic blade achieved a blur of terrible speed and fouled the rain with blood.

  She reached for him and screamed with all the voice their rope had left behind, knowing it was Maia’s hands that held her even before she saw the face pressed over her shoulder. Pandora struggled until she conceded the futility of it, toppling onto her side with Maia’s arms wrapped around her from behind in a perfect imitation of someone who actually cared.

  Someone, something, like this—would she laugh at you if you told her she’d done to you the worst thing anyone ever had, or ever could?

  Or would she wither you with her aloof wisdom and tell you to live with the consequences you’d brought upon yourself?

  Whichever it might prove to be, Pandora didn’t want to hear it. So she held her bitten tongue as Maia held on to her long after the frenzy of blade and blood was over, clinging to her like a long-lost daughter as the dawn gathered strength. One of them was trembling, but she didn’t know who. She contemplated the enveloping arms that she’d dreamt of for years, so sinuous and strong, marveling now at how powerful they must be to bear so much hollow desolation.

  If I tried to leave them, Pandora thought, I think she would kill me…

  So she lay within them as long as it took to survive, until once more she heard feet crossing the sodden turf. Villagers, she reasoned, welcoming the easing of Maia’s arms almost as much as she had the cutting of the rope. Two figures emerged from the mists—not villagers after all.

  She’d never seen them, not even in her most hopeful dream…but now that she had, she would know them anywhere:

  Lilah, the eater of flesh.

  Salíce, the eater of seed.

  Even knowing now what they truly were, and not what she had hoped, how could she feel anything but diminished by knowing she was something else?

  They said nothing to her, or maybe it was nothing she wanted to hear, staring down at her in her wounds and squalor as if she were a creature both lesser and greater than they could ever be again.

  “You should’ve been content with the Patrick you imagined,” Maia said, lips soft and breath warm upon her ear. “Then you never would’ve had to know what he’s become.”

  Maia rose and joined her Sisters. They gathered up the raw litter of remains, as it must have been done once before, long ago, and cast them into the mausoleum at the heart of the yew. Then, with a reproachful look at Maia, her Sisters took her with them into the mist from which they’d emerged, and if she spared a pitying glance behind, it went unseen. Pandora no longer wanted to see their backs.

  They were not born, she knew. They were made, remade, from the insignificant lives with which they’d started. Knowing this had felt like such a whisper of possibility.

  As late as a few hours ago, she wanted nothing more than to be one of them. But now it was not enough. Now she wanted to be better than them, and worse, more beautiful and terrible in every way, if that was what it took to matter.

  She lifted her gaze again, higher than Ethan had ever stood, and held nothing back—not rage, not sorrow, not bitterness or spite or disappointment. She unleashed them all on whatever might be listening.

  And the rain fell, as always.

  “I never slipped and fell from grace,” she said, in a whisper now, then pounded her fist in the draining slick of Ethan’s blood. “I jumped.”

  But the god she cursed was silent, as if having decreed long ago that the flesh she knew, and its slow wilting decay, would be damnation enough.

  WORLD OF HURT

  “The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, and a Hell of Heaven.”

  — John Milton, Paradise Lost

  I

  U never told me how u died.

  The cursor blinked in the empty text field, beckoning him to begin. It would wait forever, or at least until the next power failure, and Andrei had a feeling that the girl half a continent away would too; that as long as he didn’t log off, just sat staring at the dangerous keys, so would she, maybe prompting him now and then but never giving up, waiting out the standoff until another night was over and both their time zones had greeted the dawn.

  Fingertips to keys—did it have to be this hard? Just tell her what happened…

  I drowned.

  Two simple words, a fact of life that nobody could take away from him. No, he owned it. Owned his death the way Midas owned gold.

  Im sorry. That mustve been awful. How old were u? How long ago?

  Easy questions, time and demographics. He could handle these.

  14 years ago this past winter. I was 17.

  He knew what was coming next, had braced himself for it the moment he’d started down this path.

  Howd it happen?

  Except he wanted it, deep inside. He must have. Why else would he be here? Nobody puts a gun to your head and makes you cultivate friends—well, friend was a stretch, more like an acquaintance here—that you would never set eyes on. Six months from now he’d be doing some computer housecleaning and would delete Kimmy’s name from his instant messaging buddy list, because a list of one wasn’t a list at all, but something to be ashamed of, and what would be the point of keeping it when he never used it anymore.

  My friend Ty got a new car for Xmas. It was a few days after, not even New Year’s yet, and we were still on break from school. I guess it was a dumb time to give him a new car. They should’ve waited for his birthday next summer. Middle of winter in Pittsburgh, all that snow and ice, and you couldn’t get Ty out of the car. But actually, we were from a suburb called Fox Chapel. It’s the kind of place where lots of kids get cars for Xmas.

  We were out drinking one night and he put us in the Allegheny River. It was over quick, probably, but it doesn’t seem like it, not when every little thing is so vivid. It was a bitterly cold winter and the river was frozen over pretty thick. We got the doors open while the car was still caught in the ice, kind of balanced there like if you’d pressed a toy car into a pie crust, but we’d barely gotten out when everything dropped from underneath us. Ty caught himself on the edge of the hole and managed to haul himself out. Good reflexes. I got pulled under the ice.

  It flowed more easily than Andrei had thought it would. Like ripping off a Band-Aid. The hardest part was getting started. The rest was just momentum.

  Jesus! How awful! What kinda car?

  He stared at the screen, feeling the vague gnawing of an insult until he realized Kimmy was joking.

  Sorry. Just thought u could use a laff. A jolt outta the Big Bad Heavy.

  Give her points for sussing him out through the couple thousand miles of wire between them.

  OK, seriously…what was it like, if u dont mind me asking?

  He hadn’t thought much about it for a long time, not in specifics, but he could still recall the way he’d described the experience to the psychiatrist he’d seen a few years ago. He’d fumbled for words then, dredging everything up like muck from the bottom of a river, but tonight found he could distill it to its essence:

  It was monumental. An accident like that, everything you’re up against is the size of a mountain. The cold: It’s so total, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Plus the panic. That’s as hard to fight as the cold. Maybe harder. You’re in the water and you can’t believe what�
��s happened, and at first you have that flash that everything will be OK in a couple minutes, you just want to be warm and dry again, and you’ve got just enough time to think something stupid, like, OH SHIT, Mom and Dad are gonna kill me. Then you realize they won’t have to. Because you’ve done the job on yourself. You’ve come up for air and all that’s there is ice, and more ice. You missed the hole. Your fingertips are numb but you’ve got just enough feeling left to realize they’re skimming along the underside of the ice, and you know you’re caught in the current. That’s when the panic really sets in. But you can’t fight it for long. 20 seconds or so? Then the water starts coming in and after a little of that the fight leaves you pretty quick. Except you’re not dead yet. You’re just sorry, and sad, in this distant way…or I was, at least. For the next little bit, it was like flying past a window and seeing my life disappear on the other side. A big white window because of the snow on the ice, and the full moon on the other side. And then even the sorrow was gone, because I guess I was too.

  Several seconds of a blank text field—he supposed she must’ve been processing it all. Not so rapid-fire on her response this time.

  4 how long?

  38 minutes.

  Wow. & everyone telling u its a miracle u survived, right?

  Until I was sick of it.

  & no brain damage!

  Well, that’s debatable.

  She didn’t say anything, just fired back a string of emoticons, faces that cracked open and shut as they laughed in perfect unison. He wished he could delete them, their subtle and regimented mockery.

  It’s the cold, he typed. Hypothermia. It preserves you for a while, a suspended animation kind of thing. You can get away with being dead and then revived a lot later than you can in the summer. They’ve pulled kids out of frozen ponds, dead an hour or more, and after they were resuscitated they were OK.

  Xcept u werent in a pond. Howd they FIND U?

  I popped out from under the ice downriver, at the lock and dam. The ice was broken up there. Some paramedics and other rescue guys were already there waiting, just in case.