Authors: Autumn Christian
But the darkness was her darkness and I wouldn’t be able to
follow. It would sew me in a bubble, separate our fingers, split my nails
apart. Out there, I could be destroyed in any way The Nightcatcher pleased. I
imagined her laughing, but there was the only the terrible sound of rushing,
boiling, gushing, incoherent noise.
She’d collapse the earth on us to get the demon.
The darkness swallowed my demon in pieces. It could’ve taken
her all at once, but it taunted me. It wound up her legs. I wouldn’t let her
go. It wound up her waist. I wouldn’t let her go. This was a bad horror movie,
baby. Let’s wake back up in our tree. I promise, this time I won’t run when you
show me the glittering insects in your lap.
I won’t let you go let you go let you go.
Her face transformed into a rigid mask, her mouth half open
and her eyes burning red. Her face didn’t even belong to her anymore.
Nobody could endure that much fear and keep their face.
The darkness, like a molten case, crawled up her spine. I
tried to tear it off her. It burned my fingers. I tried to pull her back from
the invisible grasp by the hair, but her hair was a dead thing without magic,
and it wouldn’t respond to my touch.
As The Nightcatcher dragged her further across the floor,
the demon left behind dead spiders, smeared beetles, mottled feathers spattered
in dried blood.
She was slipping through my fingers.
I couldn’t hold on.
I fell to my knees, skinning them on the concrete floor. And
I started to beg.
“Please,” I said, “I’ll give you anything. I’ll be your
slave. Please. Anything, just don’t take her away from me.”
But there was no response except the howling noise.
Please.
I never got to tell you.
Anything at all.
The demon opened her mouth to speak.
But she couldn’t speak. The darkness spilled down her throat
like the silt bottom of a river. Even as it burned away my muscle and exposed
the bone of my ruined hand, I didn’t let go.
See Nightcatcher, I won’t let go. See.
The Nightcatcher grabbed the exposed bones of my hand and
squeezed until they snapped.
I let go.
She pulled the demon away.
I tried to run after her, but the concrete walls slid back
into place. The boiling noise rushed away. I slammed my hands against the wall
once, before collapsing.
I was left alone, on my knees, panting,
surrounded by the shells of dead insects
. I wanted to scream, give her
back, give her back, but I couldn’t even speak.
And I knew they wouldn’t have been able to hear me.
What was that throbbing? Was she back? Wait, no, it’s only
the blood rushing through my ears. If adrenaline had a noise, it would be white
noise, searching for a way to burst out of my throat.
I crawled up the stairs I’d floated down. I walked through
the empty hallways of the hotel above the boiler room, dragging my feet,
squeezing my hand to feel if the bones were broken.
I felt them shifting, fragmented, but no pain.
I hoped to catch a glimpse of the demon upstairs. A sound.
A strand of hair.
Some reminder.
One last
chance for me to save her.
But she was not there.
I walked out of the hotel. I stood still for a long time on
the street, shivering and shaking, my hands drained of blood.
Nothing we’d done to keep The Nightcatcher away had worked -
running away from home, the sigils, the rituals, the hunter’s bow.
My demon was gone.
I walked away from the hotel. I turned the corner.
In the middle of an empty street, in broken shadow and
glass, waited the machine.
WHEN
THE MACHINE SAW
me, it opened its mouth, a rusted jaw on springs, a black
Hades of a mouth, and it roared.
I ran and it chased me.
It was so cold
,
I
couldn’t feel my legs
. There was a great emptiness underneath me. I
called for help. I called and called, but nobody came. The machine screamed
behind me, the
sound of its gears like
a locust swarm;
I kept running. This lone street wasn’t the only thing I found abandoned; it
was the entire city. Neither a person nor a car passed me. The streetlights
exploded. The skyscrapers shut off their lights, covering the city in greasy
pools of shadow. This wasn’t a city anymore, but a facsimile of a city, a
stage-set after hours. A fog overtook the streets, obscuring any sense of
direction I might have had.
The machine called my name. In its rusted tongue, my name
sounded like a bleeding pet.
Lily.
I ran down alleyways, thick with fog. My heart pounded my
rib cage until it ached and cried out. My body wanted to curl up and tremble on
the ground. I’d had too many sleepless days, too many bleeding days. There was
only so much blood that could be bled, only so many veins that could be ripped
apart, before they couldn’t be put back together again.
“I don’t have her anymore!” I called out, but it didn’t want
the demon. It wanted.
Lily.
I lost my way. Every skyscraper and storefront I ran past
loomed dark, blacked out, the fog obscuring every window, every street sign.
The machine always stayed right behind me. If I turned to look, I would see a
nightmare - maybe my mother’s face in the center of its crooked machinery, her
eyes gouged out, on leaden spikes.
Or the dark river, boiling
red, in its metal stomach.
I couldn’t look behind me. I couldn’t slow down. I’d seen
its mouth open, and knew it wanted to swallow me.
Lily.
A thing that said my name like that would know all the right
ways to hurt me.
I found the ocean sitting in cold lightning. It would’ve
fried my skin if it touched me. I ran down the middle of the city bridge,
usually congested with traffic, now abandoned. My shoes fell apart. I ran onto
glass and rocks, and through dirty water.
When the machine rolled onto the bridge, the bridge swayed.
It swung me from side to side. My back hit the railing, and I had to grab on or
else be thrown over. The machine breathed heat through its rusted gears.
The bridge swung again, pushing me off the railing. It would
outlast me. It was a machine, and I was a broken girl with half her guts
spilling out of her chest.
The
entire city shut down for it to chase me. There was no demon to save me. No
Saint Peter. No witch.
When the machine screamed, my organs twisted. Its infinite
hunger shrieked through my blood. It was Lily shaped hunger. Maybe The Witch
thought she’d been building this machine to protect me, but The Nightcatcher
slipped inside her head. It fed her the hatred of me. She never knew she was
building an insidious mechanism to destroy me.
I imagined that inside its stomach was a rotting pool, a
prison for me. The machine would carry me around inside its stomach forever,
roaming the world as I dissolved. Just like one of Phaedra's carnivorous
plants, once you were swallowed, there was no way to get out. “Crawl into me,”
the machine whispered, crane-head, breaking sockets; “Aren't I seductive enough
for you? Crawl in.”
It wasn't only the machine bearing down on me, but the
entire city. I felt the skyscrapers close behind, windows snapping like teeth.
They'd fall on top of me and tear me apart.
They'd speak:
“Without your demon, you really are so very weak.
“The first thing to go will be your feet. Sore feet,
blackened on the bottom, stuck with glass and dirty needles. They'll disappear
right out from underneath you.
“Then your hair.
That red hair
boys
want to snort like Adderall. It'll come off in patches as you run, because the
wind touches you like an acid.”
I made it across the bridge.
It groaned and its cables snapped. I ran toward the sea,
through a maze of buildings. I reached the warehouse district, gray buildings,
shuttered windows, lonely metal cranes.
Momma would never know what happened to me. She'd never
know.
I couldn't run much longer.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. For everything I couldn't
do.
I ran through an open garage door of a warehouse. I saw the
garage button on the wall, and slammed my palm down on it. The garage door
began to close. The machine screamed.
I turned away from the closing door. In the dark, I struck a
railing and my body vaulted over it.
I hit the bottom of the warehouse's empty concrete floor
with a crack. The garage door closed. I lay still, my arms clenched, waiting
for the machine to crash through the building.
But there was only silence.
MY
PANICKED BREATH
drifted through the empty building. It'd been abandoned and
all of its stock cleared away.
No one would come for me.
I didn't want to move and discover I'd broken my spine. For
a long time I waited for the machine that didn't come, choking on dust.
I thought something moved in my periphery, shifting near the
wall.
"Hello?" I called out.
I started coughing again.
I rolled onto my back. Pain, pinching and hot, shot through
my body. But, I managed to stand and stretch. I hadn't broken my back. Maybe a
pinched
nerve, some bleeding, but that wasn't anything new.
I stretched until my joints popped.
Maybe the machine was gone.
I made my way along the wall in the darkness, feeling with
my fingers until I grasped the stair railing. I climbed the concrete steps to
the second floor. I skirted along the wall until I moved past the garage, and
found a window, its metallic blinds pulled down.
I reached out for the blinds. Hesitated. My fingers shook.
I touched the blinds then slowly, carefully, peeled them
back from the dusty window.
The machine sat outside, silent, head extended. Waiting.
I reeled back from the window. I sat on the concrete floor,
or else I would've fallen.
The cold came. Fear-cold that couldn't be taken away,
because I had no demon to comfort me. It started in my fingers and toes. It
worked its way to my chest. I could've been sitting underneath a glacier.
I pressed my hair against my eyes and mouth.
Already my tongue felt dry. I had no food or water. I had no
phone. No way to contact anyone. There was no way to get out of the building
without the machine knowing and coming after me. Grabbing me. Crushing me.
Eating me.
This was the end of the story, then. The hunter goddess
never gets to her palace in the forest. She never prepares a feast for her
demon and gets to whisper, "eat of these blood and jewels,
eat
of me." She never gets to lead a trembling fawn to
water and snap its neck for the wolves to devour.
Instead she forces her saint away and her demon dies in the
boiling water of the Hush Place. Carnivorous plants eat her childhood friends.
Her friends waited for her to come and save them from The Nightcatcher, but
instead, she collapsed and died on the floor of a warehouse, hiding from an
overgrown robot.
Didn't you remember you had schizophrenia, idiot?
You don't get to have a happy ending.
"Help," I whispered, my voice small. "Help
me."
I slept and dreamed the kind of dreams where I didn’t even
remember being human. Time warped around me, and the warehouse ceiling
exploded, propelling me beyond the grasp of gravity. These were the kind of
dreams, I imagined, that you’d have when you knew you're going to die.
In my dreams I searched for my demon. I'd forgotten myself,
but I remembered her. I’d see her silhouette rushing past a window, her dark hair
clogging up a still-wet shower drain, but I could never catch up to her.
When I woke, I crawled to the window.
In the wet and gray daylight, the machine still waited.
I huddled at the bottom of the window, hoping for warmth
from the sunlight, but there was none in that overcast sky. My blood labored,
sluggish, veins clenched. Lack of food had me shaking from low blood sugar. I
sucked on the lapels of my jacket, trying to get some moisture, but it didn’t
seem to help. I’d never been thirstier.
Night came again, colder than before. I slipped in and out
of sleep. I felt my heart slowing. If the machine came crashing through the
walls, I wouldn't be able to run. I could only hold my arms out, like a child,
and let it devour me.
"Help," I tried to whisper once more, but only
rasped.
A dirty, dim sound.
Something scurried through the walls. Demon? Nightcatcher?
No, something smaller, coming out of the walls.
Spiders.
Tiny baby spiders.
They
ran across my arms and my legs as I lay on the floor.
There were thousands of them scurrying past me, trailing
behind them little strands of webbing that dragged across my skin. I resisted
my first impulse to pull my hands away and scream. The machine would hear me
and come bursting through the warehouse walls.
I closed my eyes and shuddered.
Be somewhere else. Be somewhere else.
No, try to remember that moment in the sunlight when the
Daddy Long Legs crawled from the demon’s fingers to yours, and you laughed.
“I used to be so afraid of spiders.”
I sighed and turned my hands upwards. They rushed over the
palms of my hands.
Where were they going? Surely they knew a way out, a warm
place I could hide. I grabbed the railing, pulled myself up, and followed them
down the steps.
Fatigue strained my limbs. I'd gone days without eating
before, but never days without water, without drugs, without sunlight. My bones
curled from a cold that might never go away.
I reached the bottom of the steps.