X. Reflection, Peril
By night, it had rained inches. They made it to town, and, from the stolen purse of the owl hunter, the money of a corpse, Ambrose bought them a room.
Glitch wouldn't settle. He waited until Ambrose had eaten.
Monsters eat when their foulness is complete.
He wanted gruel; Ambrose wouldn't let him have gruel.
"It's for an ill person."
"It's for indigestion."
"It's a grotesque meal."
"And this is me, wishing you would shut up."
He heard the crash of dinnerware, silverware, against thick porcelain plates, as he left.
The town held no charms. It was dark, lit with firestones behind glass bowls, the bowls perched up high. Cheery spurts of orange flame that thawed Glitch. There went the matchstick boy, his ladder carried on his shoulder, one post to the other.
Glitch felt lost, confused.
Beguiled by his murderous lover. Mayhem was sure to follow. Perils began to string themselves about his neck. Each threat a pearl.
This was supposed to be an easy journey. Ambrose didn't want to go alone. "I'll go with you," Glitch had said, over bathwater and bubbles, scents and plashing. "I have to go with you."
One witch.
One spell.
Simple. One and one equals two. Two things to find.
Ambrose's anger, his madness—Glitch recognised them for what they were.
Anger. Madness.
Irremediable. Inexpiable.
To escape the inescapable.
To run himself into the ground.
For one witch, one spell.
How would he endure? What would he look like, at the end? Withered, weazened. His wisdom evanished.
His steps stopped over a large puddle in the middle of the road.
Beside the pub, the horse trough, the puddle at the tip of his feet.
He stopped only to meet his reflection, himself.
Unguarded for a moment, the wisdom in him unseen. He'd been held in their arms, coddled, appreciated, kissed, adored. And now he was here.
Here, where hell and its fury disembogued.
XI. Dent, Food, Simmer
Morning saw them back into the nothingness of the realm. Surrounded by trees and the dregs of winter.
Ambrose did the cooking of breakfast. It was more than breakfast. It was too late for it. And more than toast and jam. Nominal food. Not theirs. Just taken from anywhere.
One of them missed apple butter. Missed Raw's oat bread. Missed Wyatt's morning nuzzles, DG's insatiable desire. Laughing pleas and begs fell into his ear out of the memories conditioned there. DG, warm between them. If Wyatt rolled over at her longing, she had to have Glitch. Sometimes Wyatt would wake, surprise them. Sometimes they were so loud that he woke anyway, and took from the room his annoyed body, and the wolf-dog, Chimtu. Sometimes Glitch left them, in the soft light, when the suns were waking, when their bodies glowed the most. He'd leave them, and then he would hear them. He'd laugh and smile and shake his head. Wasn't that like Wyatt? Trying to steal his girl. His girl, trying to steal his spouse.
He missed them. Their hot bodies wrapped around his limbs. Their kisses, sending him into a simmer, some cold morning, some winter's morning long past. Yet near enough. He could feel them, still, the lines of them. If he closed his eyes right then, he could glide his arm, his hand, across the curves of DG's body, across the angles of Wyatt's body. He knew every divot, dent, plain and crevice.
His feeble grin hid a titter.
Ambrose detected the defect within.
A hunt for love.
"They hated you," Ambrose told him.
He was a dictator of a heart that knew suffering, forgetfulness.
Been repaired, defeated, derailed again.
Glitch reached for the stone on which his stolen egg cooked. The logs shifted.
He clutched his wrist, crying, crying.
Ambrose laughed. He had no thought of warm bodies, morning sex, people that missed him, people to miss.
Ambrose had burned Glitch.
"Out of the fire, Glitch."
"Into the frying pan."
"They hated you," reminded Ambrose. He shoved egg in his mouth.
And next he said the words that undid the world.
Pulled it by its string and folded it back, corner by corner, block by block.
Till the black umbrella unfolded. Rib by rib. The tiny bones, another show.
"They died hating you."
So that was why Ambrose had come.
It made sense. The worst of it.
DG and Wyatt.
Of course.
They were dead.
XII. Quiet, Noise, Loquacious
Ambrose wandered, not too far, not far enough that escape tempted Glitch. But far enough away to clear the air of his remaining pestilence.
The fire burned on, the flames continuing, the ones who had burned him. And out of the pain grew the gruesome in him.
In Ambrose, he expected it. To see it fasten to him—
Unbearable and unfair.
It tore. He wasn't sure where it tore. Serrations were already on his heart, patter after patter, threaded through broken glass, somehow.
His arm burned on. The wrist had its pain gagged by garbage wraps: an old handkerchief and a slice off a stolen tea towel. The skin was raised and reddish black, wasted and hurtful. He cringed to think of it, reliving it, too many times too many.
To the top of his head, the fingertips drizzled.
Tooth for tooth, the zipper removed, but had left a hairless scar, just a fraction of an inch. He knew it was there. Wyatt used to kiss it. DG never noticed: it wasn't a scar but a part of him.
He wished to the gods and stars that now,
Now, now,
He had a chance to tell her what he hadn't then.
I'm full of scars.
Inside, outside, oh,
Oh, DG, my doll with the sapphire eyes,
The pearl mouth,
Scars across me,
everywhere.
The blanket reset across his shoulder.
His eyes moistened with the agony of loss.
What a hellish sarabande it made.
DG had loved one man without a heart,
One man without a brain.
Love without complaint.
The fault was surely his that they were no more.
He squeezed his eyes shut, so, so tight. Stars came through.
The fire swirled and sparked.
Without Ambrose around, filling the void with the rasp in his voice,
Glitch could hear it:
The noise,
The buzzing,
A million angry bees locked inside the backlogs of his memory.
It had been quiet for ages.
It was the reason that he talked so much. He believed this as it occurred to him.
Loquacity, garrulity, grammatolatry, verbolatry:
The requiescat items hummed over the adverbial grave.
XIII. Moxie
By the slant of the suns, the hour of the day according to his watch, Ambrose knew it was spring. They were so far north by then that it seemed like winter. Endless grey dominated the sky. It moved itself, liquid smoke, but not pellucid—
solid in form, solid in intention.
Ambrose wore one coat. Glitch still wore two. At night, wherever they stopped, a fire kept them warm, one blanket between them. Hours of stagnation. No conversation. No hate. No love.
Ambrose turned against the defects in Glitch. Weak, simple, indirect, passive. He flung these words, spear after spear, hoping to ignite the heart and ignore the wound. And when Glitch cried, Ambrose saw it and cheered. "I did this," he said to himself. "I did this." The power he felt was monumental. It takes a scholar to kick a gentleman when he's down. And it takes a madman to know the absence of moxie, the indignation in a frown.
He didn't know, just yet, that contempt builds a hollow.
From it, revenge would leap,
Formless, shapeless, secretive, provocative.
Solid in form. Solid in intention.
Like the lonely cloud lost above the lonely world.
Not forgotten, but not looked for.
When found, discounted.
XIV. Market, Myth, Kooky, Cards
Wilderness wound its will into an inconsequential village. Nothing surrounded, then, at once, trees cleared, grass shortened, lawns fanned behind fine fences, with flagstone paths up to find homes. It was market day, everyone crowding the lanes for goods, for selling, for pick-pocketing. Those with sticky hands strode round Ambrose. He stalked tall, proud, foreboding, in his dark red long coat, his silent growl. Glitch reminisced, later, that Ambrose had the sort of eyes that spawns of mythical demons held, beyond the definition of gelid, of frigid.
They bought strange bread, flat but full of taste, a sweetness, like cream and butter, at the back of it. They bought wine, homemade, from dandelions and clover, so it was both insipid and syrupy. From the merchants, Ambrose asked after the myth. Not the beasts who held his eyes, but of the bone path spoken of, weeks ago by then, the man in threadbare galligaskins.
"Don't know no bone path," arrived and died on the pale faces of gaunt merchant men. "Is it a witch you're looking for? We have a witch. Mother Kooky, she goes by. No one knows her real name. And, after a while, names are misplaced and replaced. Easy things to fix."
Then, this man who sold them tarts, sold them to the tarot harridan. Her booth was wrapped in thin sheaves of scarves, not made but unmade, filled with beads and baubles at the holes she'd pulled, thread by thread. Glitch wanted to play, take one into the sunbeams and watch it trick the light, make the colours waltz across the faces of passers-by, but it was his turn to keep still, silent, away.
She was batrachian, in all the classical sense: warts in tandem along her jaw, wide, belligerent eyes, stained yellow and brown, the bottom of a brook in daylight. She took their coins, and referred to one man as two. She knew the shadow behind the one. Some shadows breathed, had a life of their own. Stormed off when angry, left you when you were sad, returned to rejoice with you, shed tears with you or mocked you for them. All shadows potentially breathed, but only a few of them lifted their masks and inhaled.
She squatted to her stool, her scarves flowing in a wind indifferent and cool. She had him touch the cards, break them into three piles, and counted them off as he did. "Once, twice, thrice… Ah, The Fool." She had turned over the first card. It lay before them. A man in tatters of hose and stained jerkin. Upside down, by his toes.
Glitch winced, thinking of toes.
The bones in them.
The bone path.
The bone.
The path.
The harridan laughed, and when her laugh faded, it resorted to its natural cackle. Ambrose saw her white mane turn black, her warty nose turn to a beak, and feathers sooty and smooth, black and blue, sprout across her.
"You're fools who will own the world, if you find the right path," she told them, before flying off. She folded up her scarves, her sticks, into one suitcase. Feathers moulted from her back. A trail of black was left behind.
They set on again.
Pathless, wordless.
Alone in a warming wind.
Sometimes, a crow followed them.
XV. Proximity, Redolent
Glitch's mind seemed to revolve the quickest at night.
He was forced to lie still. But he wanted to jump, climb trees, go, go, go, and never stop going, not even if he found Wyatt and DG, and they said "When!"
"Quit moving."
"I'm sorry. There's a rock in my thigh. I'm uncomfortable."
The answer to discomfort, if Ambrose's mood was amiable, and then it was,
Had Glitch in his arms, tugging his back to his chest. Fear paralysed Glitch. This wasn't what he wanted. This was the wrong proximity. Ambrose was too close. He could feel breath moving the strands of his hair.
But DG used to be there.
And if she was gone, Wyatt.
Wyatt, snuffling in his sleep,
With great, big breaths, deep and meaningful, the life in him.
None of that, now.
Ambrose's groans sounded beneath the hum of the blooming trees, as he ground his pleasure into Glitch. Hands moved in wayward directions, to moisten distant places.
"If you touch me," Glitch warned him, "I will kill you."
"Aren't you going to kill me anyway? What's a little harmless sex between friends? You loved me, once."
"I love only the sane."
"Then you love me."
"But I don't."
"If you didn't, a little bit, you wouldn't be here. Quit—" Ambrose moved to stifle Glitch, over him, a hand at his shoulder, knees pinning him at the legs, "moving!" He threw a palm against Glitch's trousers, expecting to feel hardness, but knowing only limpness. "You always were rotten at this."
Why was Ambrose so much stronger? They were twins. The same face, body, hair, eyes, everything—only the souls knew disparity, uniqueness. He wriggled to free himself. But Ambrose was too right, far too often: He was terrible at this.
"If you touch me," Glitch knew he would repeat himself, forever, as long as he could stand to hear the plea in his own voice, "I will kill you." And the danger in it.
"Fine," Ambrose agreed, saucily leaning back.
Glitch stayed still, pressured by one hand, while the other undid a buckle, some buttons, until looking at a penis, pale and pink in the firelight.
"I won't touch you," said Ambrose.
He grabbed Glitch's burned wrist. A piece of torture behind a bandage.
"So you'll have to touch me."
The smell of blood, from the murder of the owl hunter, long ago removed from Ambrose's hands, remained redolent, brilliant, stark in the intrusive odours of night. It replaced everything, his madness, and left the sting of dissent behind.
XVI. Fabulist, Paint
Glitch slept and saw the broken bones they were chasing.
Floating down in a stream of black, turning to haze at the end. He tipped over, to fall in after them. They needed the bones. Everyone needed bones, or they would ooze about, invertebrates, with their homes on their backs and their appetite for mossy old wood. And no tongues, and no speech. Just words printed in ooze and ripped across the ground with pine needles.
He fell, one passage after another as opaque ebony circles round and round him. "They've inverted the night sky," he thought, and was terrified. "Why can't they turn it back? What will happen if they don't turn it back?" He witnessed eclipses of moons and suns, of days long ago when the ancients thought the suns would die, or that there'd be only one.
He knew what might be waiting for him, at the end of his stumble.
One face, one name; his being, his life, his breath—his heart, his wedding ring.
"Wyatt!"
The invisible ground in his vision smacked him into reality. Alone, again, without Ambrose to loiter, to asperse.
His wrist ached. He unwound the bandages, kept them in a pile on his lap. While he found a pen knife, the owl hunter's, hidden in the back pocket of Ambrose's knapsack.
"What are you doing?" the thin nothing, the mask behind, asked him. His own, but his conscience, the accent that vibrated the strings of a marionette. "You don't want to do this."
He hovered the blade above the burn. The flames flickered in the fire pit, urging him to do it. Cut off the dead skin. Cut off the scars. You'll understand why when it's over, done—
Do it. For us, for the yearning we have to help you.
But DG and Wyatt were dead. He remembered that.
"Who is to say what you remember, Glitch?"
"I remember that tomorrow's Tuesday. I remember the merry month of May. I remember DG's birthday, Wyatt's favourite socks, Raw's laugh, Meria's recipe for cherry frosting on warm white cake." He swallowed, the blade kissing his flesh. "I remember their deaths."
The pinguid blade sank deliciously into his skin, and ripped off such a large portion of the scar. The eschar fled. The hooded actuary shushed. The fabulist in him remained. Fake red paint pattered to leaves and dirt.
Glitch lifted and angled the knife for one more scarification.
Then, across the meadow, in a field full of silvery moonlight, indulgent shadows, came a howl of despair.
He thought of Chimtu, his wolf-dog.
Living a solitary, feral existence on the face of a faraway mountain.
Two friends gone; one missing.
The knife fell.
He fell, curled on his bedroll, not caring if he died as he lay.
He cried with passion that rivalled the wolf's despair.