Chapter 2 - Sparks.
Named after the song by Royksopp, this chapter doesn't have too many sparks. I hope you like my offering. It's a lot longer, and I think it's better than the first. It doesn't read that well, but as I'm new to the genre, you're going to have to forgive me. I've written plenty before, it's just I always seem to regress when I move to a different genre, trying out all the things I would never do in another genre (and usually finding out why in the process).
But otherwise, I think it's nice.
**********
Jane stepped towards Edward, and enquired, ' Do you live up here?'
He nodded.
'Are you all alone?' she asked.
He nodded again. Jane leant over, and taking his wrists he helped him stand up. He looked at her with an expression somewhere between relief and apprehension. Jane looked at his face to see a fresh cut he had obtained when he fell over. She held up one of her hands and gently touched his face. He flinched, and clicked his razor sharp scissors, but Jane didn't even notice. 'You're bleeding,' she said.
Edward looked at her as if he was ashamed. Jane looked him up and down. When you were this close to him, he didn't seem that frightening. The onyx coloured metal of his body was dull in the light of the storm. She smiled at him and opening her school bag remarked, 'I must have something for a cut.'
As she knelt on the floor, Edward watched the way her wet, limp hair moved. He gave it a look of miscomprehension. Then, reaching towards her gently he snipped off a small piece of hair. She gasped, and quickly grabbing a tube out of her bag she said, 'Edward! '
'I'm-I'm sorry.' He stuttered stepping back from her.
'Look, I didn't mean to come into your home, you have every right to..' She stopped garbling, and ran to the door.
She managed to get it to open with an ear piercing squeak, but before she could leave she heard a voice say, 'Don't go.'
She turned around, and asked, 'I don't mean to be rude, but what happened to your hands?'
He looked down at them, almost as if he didn't know what she meant. Then looking up he said, 'I'm not finished.'
She looked at him, and flashing him a grin of relief and replied, 'Well, I think I'm going to have to stay here for the night. There's no way I can get home in this rain tonight.'
There was a strange look on his face and if Jane hadn't have feel so afraid of him; she might have called it a smile. But replacing the bag on her back, she put the cream she had found in her bag in her pocket, and before he could notice she grabbed a compass from her pencil case, stuffing it into her jeans pocket.
He raised one of his razor bladed hands and pointed at the rickety looking staircase and said, 'I sleep up there.'
'Well,' she said, laughing nervously, 'I could sleep down here!'
'No,' he urged, 'Sleep up there in the old bed.' He held out his razorblades, as if to ask her to hold his hand. Jane nervously held him by the wrist as he led her up the stairs. He led her up to the attic, where the roof had caved in. Rain poured through the broken roof, and didn't look that comfortable to sleep in. Jane wondered if Edward, as he called himself, knew that he shouldn't be sleeping in a room where the rain came in. He pointed again at what looked like a Hessian sack stuffed with straw in a fireplace. She walked towards it and looked at the pictures. They were all of people with hands, or doing something interesting with their hands. There was even a boy without eyes reading Braille there.
Jane sat down on the sack, and lying down on it, gave Edward a quick look and said, 'Good night.'
Edward gave her another slightly manic smile, and sat on the other side of the room, just under the roof. Jane fumbled for the light on her watch, and saw it was about nine o'clock at night. As some straw dug into her back, she wished she was back home. For one thing, she hadn't eaten since breakfast as she had left her lunch money in her bag at school, and later found that some joker had taken it. Another thing was that at least it would have been warmer than this. But most of all the way his big dark eyes stared at her made her feel nervous. If she had been at home, she wouldn't' have to go to bed for at least an hour, but right now, as rain poured down, all she could think about was sleep. She felt her stomach knot up with a pang of hunger, but kept her eyes on Edward at all times. She watched him for at least half an hour before she fell asleep, watching his deep, dark eyes gaze into her soul..
*****
It must have been late when she woke up again. The rain had stopped, and the world was cold and damp. She lifted her head gently from the bed and wondered if she should (or could) leave. She looked out to see if she could find Edward. She had, for whatever reason, thought that she would see Edward sitting exactly where he was, just asleep. Instead he was standing up, looking out of the gaping hole in the roof.
He looked, in absence of a better word, rather forlorn in the moonlight. His blue purple lips were formed in a miserable pout, his skin seeming even whiter than it was before, as if any of the colour had been lost. His scissor fingers snapped dejectedly, as if they could express a sorrow he couldn't. Jane sat up, placing her feet on the wooden floor. Then, straining her hair backward with her small hands, she stepped onto the floor, each floorboard squeaking as she went. She placed a hand on his shoulder, and said gently, 'Hey Edward.'
He turned around mechanically. He was crying. Jane looked at him, her mouth open a little. He looked at her through his watering dark eyes, and bit his lip. As Jane looked into his eyes, she could feel his pain. Sure, she didn't know what it was, but his eyes said more than she ever though eyes could. As she looked at him, all she could see in his eyes were tears of pain, of bereavement, of loss that she could not possibly understand. He sniped again, and turned away. Jane stepped towards him again, and asked, 'why are you crying?'
Edward looked at her, as if weighing her up. Then, as if he knew something about her from the look of concern on her face he said, 'Tomorrow you're going to leave me.'
'So?' she remarked unfeelingly, 'I'm not meant to be up here! I shouldn't have come up here. You're usually on your own, so why does it matter?'
He let another tear role down his face, and his speech fractured between silent tears he said,' I don't want to be alone.'
Jane looked at him uncomprehendingly.
He looked her in her grey eyes and said, 'I've been alone for a while now, ever since they ran me out of town. '
'Why did they do that?' she asked, 'Did you kill any one?'
He shook his head and said, 'Jim didn't wake up. Like my father. They both went to sleep, and didn't wake up. '
Jane pushed a stray strand of hair out of his face and asked, 'But you've been on your own for so long. ' He snipped his blades again but she continued saying, 'why don't you want me to go?'
'I don't like being on my own.' He replied, tears running down his pail scarred face.
Jane gazed into his eyes, her own heart breaking. How could she leave someone up her on their own? There couldn't be any food, no heating, what if he got sick? Or his cuts got infected? All those thoughts rushed through her head, but one main thought screamed out NO, YOU CAN'T HELP HIM! HE HAD KNIFES FOR HANDS! YOU'LL BE LUCKY TO SURVIVE THE NIGHT! But as she looked at his face, the little frown, the dark eyes, the pail skin covered in cuts and scars, she though, * If I leave tomorrow, I'll never know if he WAS alright, or if he's still around. If you leave, you'll never know if all this is real. * But another though in her head told her, *you can't stay up here forever, even if you wanted to, which you don't. * No, well, I suppose.now she came to think of it, the bizarre stranger in front of her didn't seem to bad. It was hard to imagine a monster crying, let alone being lonely.
All of this rushed through her head before she said, 'I can't stay tomorrow, but.but..' She thought for a second. Did she know what she was getting herself into? What if he was a psycho or something? But if he was, she thought to herself, wouldn't see be dead already? And anyway, Edward couldn't look after himself. He didn't have hands; he didn't seem to have anything up here that made life easier to live, and she was sure that she was pretty much the first contact he had with the outside world for a long time. She decided what she had to do, what everything inside was telling her to do.'.. But I can come after school tomorrow, I promise. '
Edward smiled. Jane, despite her tiredness, pulled a tissue out of her pocket, and wiped his eyes with it. She beamed stupidly at him, and said, ' do you sleep?'
He nodded. He sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall. Jane sighed and looked at the, in search of a better word, bed. She really didn't want to go back their. She wanted to talk to Edward. She wanted to know about him. He can't have talked to many people, and she wanted to know what she had got herself into. She slid down the wall, and asked, 'Edward, what happened to you?'
*****
This question continued all night. He told her. Everything. He told her how the professor had made him, he told her about when the professor died, and the time spent alone. This had been interrupted several times by Jane, who wanted to know every detail. But Edward persevered, answering her questions and continuing to when Peg Boggs had found him up here. He told her about being taken from the mansion to suburbia, where no one could be prepared for him. He talked about how he had been accepted, then rejected. He talked about a girl called Kim (although the only word he used to describe her was beautiful). He talked about a robbery she asked him to do, and then he talked about how he had run from town, and returned to his home here. All alone. He talked about how Kim never returned to see him, and how all he had done since she left was think of her and sculpt her in ice and want to return to the world he had been discarded from.
And strangely enough, she had listened. She listened about when he had first arrived, excited and full of wonder, she had heard about the incident in the salon and she had heard about why Jim 'hadn't woken up.' As she listened, she felt uncomfortably close to him. She felt as if she could understand what he had been through, even though she couldn't. She had never had the chance to be accepted, let alone have it thrown back at her. She didn't have a talent and even if she did, no one wanted to know about it. All she felt as she listened to his story was compassion. Complete compassion for the way he spoke, for the story he told. As the story went on, Edward had place a gentle knife-like claw around her neck, and she had lent on his shoulder. Even later, as he got up to the bit about the mob, he had placed another hand around her, but not for one second had she felt scared. As she listened to his innocence and naivety, she couldn't ever belief that he would ever use his claws to hurt people. Even when she heard about Jim, she knew that it was self-defence, and by that time she knew that he had it coming to him. It was just a pity that he had to be the one to do it.
Even later, both of them had fallen asleep, Jane leaning her head on Edward, as he held her gently to his cold chest. Sunrise softly crept up on the two people sleeping together, almost as if it didn't want to rise over the two of them, waking them up from this blissful situation. But the sun had to rise, and as weak morning sunlight skulked over them, Jane woke up. Blinking delicately in the bright light, she remembered where she was, and why. She took Edward's arm off her, and moving the blades away, stood up after a few tries. Jane didn't know whether or not to leave a note or not, but in the end, after seeing that it was seven o'clock in the morning, she decided to wake him.
Shaking him softly, he woke up; his black eyes springing open like a Doll's. He held out a hand, which Jane swiftly avoided. 'Edward, it's just me,' she said, 'I just thought I should say that I'm leaving, but I promise I'll be back. I'll bring some food this time, maybe some antiseptic for your cuts.' she ran a finger along a cut, which made him look uncomfortable, and snip like crazy. Jane stopped it and said, 'Please Edward, I'll be back.'
Edward, fixing her with an innocent gaze, nodded as if to say, * I understand. * She smiled. It was more than she could have hoped for. She wasn't lying. Even as she walked down the steps, she wanted to ask him more questions. She wanted to know more about his life in town, more about the inventor, more about everything he had talked about. All she wanted to do was return, but she couldn't. She had to go to school, she had to go home, but all she could think about as she left, closing the heavy gothic wooden portal behind her was the man inside, the man who had no hands, but scissors. The man, who could have killed her on the spot, but didn't.
She walked through the garden, enjoying the fruit of Edward's handiwork. Just one night, just one night with him, afraid for her life and terrified, she had learned how gently a blade could be. There was a man behind the hands, a man who had made a loch ness monster out of a bush. As she walked out the gate, she felt as if she had lost something up there. She ignored the feeling, and walked down the hill.
Back in town, a search party of police looking for her met her. Her parents had got very worried when she hadn't come home, and had phoned the police to look for her. The gave Jane a lift back home, where she was greeted by her mother with lots of hugging and kissed, while her father, stand-offish of course, had shook her hand, and gave her a lecture. Her mother joined in with the lecture as well. Jane wasn't listening. She was thinking about Edward. It was like she had seem something in him she had to see again, just to know if it was real, and not something brought on by the cold. She knew the old stories about him, and she knew his side, but something in her was still denying that it had ever existed. ]
After her parents had finished with the lecture, Jane had returned to school, but made sure to make an excuse about coming home late again. She had to be more careful. She couldn't be late again for a long while.
******
Ahh....home. Please R and R an old fool!
Named after the song by Royksopp, this chapter doesn't have too many sparks. I hope you like my offering. It's a lot longer, and I think it's better than the first. It doesn't read that well, but as I'm new to the genre, you're going to have to forgive me. I've written plenty before, it's just I always seem to regress when I move to a different genre, trying out all the things I would never do in another genre (and usually finding out why in the process).
But otherwise, I think it's nice.
**********
Jane stepped towards Edward, and enquired, ' Do you live up here?'
He nodded.
'Are you all alone?' she asked.
He nodded again. Jane leant over, and taking his wrists he helped him stand up. He looked at her with an expression somewhere between relief and apprehension. Jane looked at his face to see a fresh cut he had obtained when he fell over. She held up one of her hands and gently touched his face. He flinched, and clicked his razor sharp scissors, but Jane didn't even notice. 'You're bleeding,' she said.
Edward looked at her as if he was ashamed. Jane looked him up and down. When you were this close to him, he didn't seem that frightening. The onyx coloured metal of his body was dull in the light of the storm. She smiled at him and opening her school bag remarked, 'I must have something for a cut.'
As she knelt on the floor, Edward watched the way her wet, limp hair moved. He gave it a look of miscomprehension. Then, reaching towards her gently he snipped off a small piece of hair. She gasped, and quickly grabbing a tube out of her bag she said, 'Edward! '
'I'm-I'm sorry.' He stuttered stepping back from her.
'Look, I didn't mean to come into your home, you have every right to..' She stopped garbling, and ran to the door.
She managed to get it to open with an ear piercing squeak, but before she could leave she heard a voice say, 'Don't go.'
She turned around, and asked, 'I don't mean to be rude, but what happened to your hands?'
He looked down at them, almost as if he didn't know what she meant. Then looking up he said, 'I'm not finished.'
She looked at him, and flashing him a grin of relief and replied, 'Well, I think I'm going to have to stay here for the night. There's no way I can get home in this rain tonight.'
There was a strange look on his face and if Jane hadn't have feel so afraid of him; she might have called it a smile. But replacing the bag on her back, she put the cream she had found in her bag in her pocket, and before he could notice she grabbed a compass from her pencil case, stuffing it into her jeans pocket.
He raised one of his razor bladed hands and pointed at the rickety looking staircase and said, 'I sleep up there.'
'Well,' she said, laughing nervously, 'I could sleep down here!'
'No,' he urged, 'Sleep up there in the old bed.' He held out his razorblades, as if to ask her to hold his hand. Jane nervously held him by the wrist as he led her up the stairs. He led her up to the attic, where the roof had caved in. Rain poured through the broken roof, and didn't look that comfortable to sleep in. Jane wondered if Edward, as he called himself, knew that he shouldn't be sleeping in a room where the rain came in. He pointed again at what looked like a Hessian sack stuffed with straw in a fireplace. She walked towards it and looked at the pictures. They were all of people with hands, or doing something interesting with their hands. There was even a boy without eyes reading Braille there.
Jane sat down on the sack, and lying down on it, gave Edward a quick look and said, 'Good night.'
Edward gave her another slightly manic smile, and sat on the other side of the room, just under the roof. Jane fumbled for the light on her watch, and saw it was about nine o'clock at night. As some straw dug into her back, she wished she was back home. For one thing, she hadn't eaten since breakfast as she had left her lunch money in her bag at school, and later found that some joker had taken it. Another thing was that at least it would have been warmer than this. But most of all the way his big dark eyes stared at her made her feel nervous. If she had been at home, she wouldn't' have to go to bed for at least an hour, but right now, as rain poured down, all she could think about was sleep. She felt her stomach knot up with a pang of hunger, but kept her eyes on Edward at all times. She watched him for at least half an hour before she fell asleep, watching his deep, dark eyes gaze into her soul..
*****
It must have been late when she woke up again. The rain had stopped, and the world was cold and damp. She lifted her head gently from the bed and wondered if she should (or could) leave. She looked out to see if she could find Edward. She had, for whatever reason, thought that she would see Edward sitting exactly where he was, just asleep. Instead he was standing up, looking out of the gaping hole in the roof.
He looked, in absence of a better word, rather forlorn in the moonlight. His blue purple lips were formed in a miserable pout, his skin seeming even whiter than it was before, as if any of the colour had been lost. His scissor fingers snapped dejectedly, as if they could express a sorrow he couldn't. Jane sat up, placing her feet on the wooden floor. Then, straining her hair backward with her small hands, she stepped onto the floor, each floorboard squeaking as she went. She placed a hand on his shoulder, and said gently, 'Hey Edward.'
He turned around mechanically. He was crying. Jane looked at him, her mouth open a little. He looked at her through his watering dark eyes, and bit his lip. As Jane looked into his eyes, she could feel his pain. Sure, she didn't know what it was, but his eyes said more than she ever though eyes could. As she looked at him, all she could see in his eyes were tears of pain, of bereavement, of loss that she could not possibly understand. He sniped again, and turned away. Jane stepped towards him again, and asked, 'why are you crying?'
Edward looked at her, as if weighing her up. Then, as if he knew something about her from the look of concern on her face he said, 'Tomorrow you're going to leave me.'
'So?' she remarked unfeelingly, 'I'm not meant to be up here! I shouldn't have come up here. You're usually on your own, so why does it matter?'
He let another tear role down his face, and his speech fractured between silent tears he said,' I don't want to be alone.'
Jane looked at him uncomprehendingly.
He looked her in her grey eyes and said, 'I've been alone for a while now, ever since they ran me out of town. '
'Why did they do that?' she asked, 'Did you kill any one?'
He shook his head and said, 'Jim didn't wake up. Like my father. They both went to sleep, and didn't wake up. '
Jane pushed a stray strand of hair out of his face and asked, 'But you've been on your own for so long. ' He snipped his blades again but she continued saying, 'why don't you want me to go?'
'I don't like being on my own.' He replied, tears running down his pail scarred face.
Jane gazed into his eyes, her own heart breaking. How could she leave someone up her on their own? There couldn't be any food, no heating, what if he got sick? Or his cuts got infected? All those thoughts rushed through her head, but one main thought screamed out NO, YOU CAN'T HELP HIM! HE HAD KNIFES FOR HANDS! YOU'LL BE LUCKY TO SURVIVE THE NIGHT! But as she looked at his face, the little frown, the dark eyes, the pail skin covered in cuts and scars, she though, * If I leave tomorrow, I'll never know if he WAS alright, or if he's still around. If you leave, you'll never know if all this is real. * But another though in her head told her, *you can't stay up here forever, even if you wanted to, which you don't. * No, well, I suppose.now she came to think of it, the bizarre stranger in front of her didn't seem to bad. It was hard to imagine a monster crying, let alone being lonely.
All of this rushed through her head before she said, 'I can't stay tomorrow, but.but..' She thought for a second. Did she know what she was getting herself into? What if he was a psycho or something? But if he was, she thought to herself, wouldn't see be dead already? And anyway, Edward couldn't look after himself. He didn't have hands; he didn't seem to have anything up here that made life easier to live, and she was sure that she was pretty much the first contact he had with the outside world for a long time. She decided what she had to do, what everything inside was telling her to do.'.. But I can come after school tomorrow, I promise. '
Edward smiled. Jane, despite her tiredness, pulled a tissue out of her pocket, and wiped his eyes with it. She beamed stupidly at him, and said, ' do you sleep?'
He nodded. He sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall. Jane sighed and looked at the, in search of a better word, bed. She really didn't want to go back their. She wanted to talk to Edward. She wanted to know about him. He can't have talked to many people, and she wanted to know what she had got herself into. She slid down the wall, and asked, 'Edward, what happened to you?'
*****
This question continued all night. He told her. Everything. He told her how the professor had made him, he told her about when the professor died, and the time spent alone. This had been interrupted several times by Jane, who wanted to know every detail. But Edward persevered, answering her questions and continuing to when Peg Boggs had found him up here. He told her about being taken from the mansion to suburbia, where no one could be prepared for him. He talked about how he had been accepted, then rejected. He talked about a girl called Kim (although the only word he used to describe her was beautiful). He talked about a robbery she asked him to do, and then he talked about how he had run from town, and returned to his home here. All alone. He talked about how Kim never returned to see him, and how all he had done since she left was think of her and sculpt her in ice and want to return to the world he had been discarded from.
And strangely enough, she had listened. She listened about when he had first arrived, excited and full of wonder, she had heard about the incident in the salon and she had heard about why Jim 'hadn't woken up.' As she listened, she felt uncomfortably close to him. She felt as if she could understand what he had been through, even though she couldn't. She had never had the chance to be accepted, let alone have it thrown back at her. She didn't have a talent and even if she did, no one wanted to know about it. All she felt as she listened to his story was compassion. Complete compassion for the way he spoke, for the story he told. As the story went on, Edward had place a gentle knife-like claw around her neck, and she had lent on his shoulder. Even later, as he got up to the bit about the mob, he had placed another hand around her, but not for one second had she felt scared. As she listened to his innocence and naivety, she couldn't ever belief that he would ever use his claws to hurt people. Even when she heard about Jim, she knew that it was self-defence, and by that time she knew that he had it coming to him. It was just a pity that he had to be the one to do it.
Even later, both of them had fallen asleep, Jane leaning her head on Edward, as he held her gently to his cold chest. Sunrise softly crept up on the two people sleeping together, almost as if it didn't want to rise over the two of them, waking them up from this blissful situation. But the sun had to rise, and as weak morning sunlight skulked over them, Jane woke up. Blinking delicately in the bright light, she remembered where she was, and why. She took Edward's arm off her, and moving the blades away, stood up after a few tries. Jane didn't know whether or not to leave a note or not, but in the end, after seeing that it was seven o'clock in the morning, she decided to wake him.
Shaking him softly, he woke up; his black eyes springing open like a Doll's. He held out a hand, which Jane swiftly avoided. 'Edward, it's just me,' she said, 'I just thought I should say that I'm leaving, but I promise I'll be back. I'll bring some food this time, maybe some antiseptic for your cuts.' she ran a finger along a cut, which made him look uncomfortable, and snip like crazy. Jane stopped it and said, 'Please Edward, I'll be back.'
Edward, fixing her with an innocent gaze, nodded as if to say, * I understand. * She smiled. It was more than she could have hoped for. She wasn't lying. Even as she walked down the steps, she wanted to ask him more questions. She wanted to know more about his life in town, more about the inventor, more about everything he had talked about. All she wanted to do was return, but she couldn't. She had to go to school, she had to go home, but all she could think about as she left, closing the heavy gothic wooden portal behind her was the man inside, the man who had no hands, but scissors. The man, who could have killed her on the spot, but didn't.
She walked through the garden, enjoying the fruit of Edward's handiwork. Just one night, just one night with him, afraid for her life and terrified, she had learned how gently a blade could be. There was a man behind the hands, a man who had made a loch ness monster out of a bush. As she walked out the gate, she felt as if she had lost something up there. She ignored the feeling, and walked down the hill.
Back in town, a search party of police looking for her met her. Her parents had got very worried when she hadn't come home, and had phoned the police to look for her. The gave Jane a lift back home, where she was greeted by her mother with lots of hugging and kissed, while her father, stand-offish of course, had shook her hand, and gave her a lecture. Her mother joined in with the lecture as well. Jane wasn't listening. She was thinking about Edward. It was like she had seem something in him she had to see again, just to know if it was real, and not something brought on by the cold. She knew the old stories about him, and she knew his side, but something in her was still denying that it had ever existed. ]
After her parents had finished with the lecture, Jane had returned to school, but made sure to make an excuse about coming home late again. She had to be more careful. She couldn't be late again for a long while.
******
Ahh....home. Please R and R an old fool!