It's a Friday night and Aickman is glaring at me. His Coke-bottle glasses flash in the half light of the workroom and his brows draw together.
"What?" I consider drawing the word out into a whine, just to make him madder, but now isn't the time. He sighs, irritated, and the scalpel in his hand curves through long dead flesh, writing out the spell of binding in the cadaver's skin.
Usually, Aickman's fuse is pretty long, but when we're short on time he can get touchy and irritable. With the clock ticking steadily toward midnight and the runes nearly done, he's in finest form, but it's not as much time as he would have liked.
"Go and get a shroud," he says sharply, and I obey without a word. I walk over to the bolt of muslin in the workroom and pull off enough, not too much, not too little, to wrap the body as he likes. It's important to start at the feet and work up; I lay the ragged cut edge of the fabric against the intricately carved skin and note that it's already begun to fray. This has been a slow month. Place the edge, wrap over it to keep it in place. Just like always.
"Selvage edge first, Jonah."
My head tips up and I blink. "Huh?"
"Selvage edge," he says clearly. "Where the mill smoothes out the edges of the fabric so it won't fray. It keeps the weave from unraveling, keeps the fabric from coming undone." He nearly misses a rune and gives me a wide-eyed, accusatory glare, but I've already ducked down to fix my mistake.
As he works on the face I wonder about the word, why it sounds a lot like "salvage", the lilt and shape of it. The selvage edge keeps the fabric from coming undone…
And suddenly, in a rush, I remember the street. Cold and dusty, lonely, sticks, stones, starless city nights. One day I ran smack! right into Aickman, and he jumped back, startled, an old man who then wasn't used to such things. He gave a muffled yelp and blinked down at me, and I held his gaze. I knew better but did it anyway. And as it happened, somehow, he let me follow him. And follow I did, like a twist of wire after a magnet. When he told me I'd need to earn my keep there were no better words eh could have said. Even sneaking out to the cemeteries, graveyards, filled with fog and moonlight, it didn't matter. Not at all.
The selvage edge… I look up briefly at Aickman, hands following the fabric to make it lie smooth, and think. The selvage edge. Where would I be without him? Hopeless, cold, quivering in the shadows—battered, bruised, hungry, my spirit broken beyond repair? Filthy and aching?
…Guiltless?
Would my dreams have worse monsters to offer me than the glaring lidless eyes of the undead, the shocked faces from seances gone right, the blood clotting, scalded, in my burnt and bleeding throat when they do? The worse, the knocked-flat, buzzing, ragged-voice weakness and searing pain when they go wrong? What kind of a selvage edge remains whole itself, but rends the fabric it keeps?
"…is something wrong?"
His words are clipped like always but his voice is not angry any more. I look up and Aickman is nearly done, he's not glaring. He blinks, genuinely curious, and I shake my head from side to side—no, nothing is wrong.
"No-sir." A single, hyphenated word, automatic by now.
"Good." As automatic as a mill smoothing and forcing a selvage edge?
"…Aickman?"
He flickers his eyes back up and they're distorted through the glasses. I never use his name.
"Hmm?"
I wonder for a second.
Think carefully on what I'd say.
He keeps me from coming undone…
"Ah, uh… nevermind."