Chapter Twenty-three
Voices in the Undertow
Shelter was a set of old walls covered in peeling yellows slick with grease and torn by idle hands to bare cold, mouldy concrete.
They roamed the space between the walls. Two light feet, one step in front of the other, the wood under their soles warm. It'd be warmer still below, in the tight comfort of the nest.
But they roamed the space between the walls instead. Searched. Not knowing what for.
She knows.
She's adrift from the others; the odd one out in an otherwise neat pattern.
Sometimes, the pattern breaks. Sometimes, she's her, but it's a moment which never lasts. A moment which always brings the same demons. Confusion. A bottomless panic. A great wishing for an end to it.
It's when words return to find meaning. When names clot.
Names she always chokes on.
Then she fits herself back into the pattern; the murmur, the ever-dragging undertow. Her demons never followed.
They were in agreement just now, even if estranged by a few thoughts that might have been too complex for the whole to understand. Such as what they were looking for. Searching for. Why they roamed the space between the greasy walls.
But what if what they she is looking for isn't here? What if it's beyond the walls?
Then she won't find it, because she doesn't dare go further. Not with her feet. Not with her thoughts.
Out beyond—beyond the shelter, beyond the undertow, up from the deep—the imposter waited. Their would-be-goaler. The shriek in the static, in the rush; the constant, painful summons snagging like claws in their mind.
obey.
obey.
obey.
Every time they dared to rise, to break the surface, to breathe beyond the tight knot of this one small grouping of thoughts, the static swelled and the yanking, pulling, tearing, calling started.
Like right now.
She's gone too far.
The pretender's voice scratches at her mind and screams her obscene claim to them into the blood alive in her veins.
She dives.
Shelter was a set of old walls.
Shelter was the undertow, where dreams roiled side-by-side, stitched together by something insatiable, inexplicable.
Where she'd forget.
They bumped into wood.
(There was a lot of wood around. Furniture. Old. Solid. Once tended, polished. Loved. Not anymore. Like her; like them.)
This wood made a bookshelf. Jostled, one of the shelves dislodged with a light crack. An avalanche followed. Paperbacks. Hardcovers. Someone's taste mapped through a lifetime; it all came falling down, all loud thumps.
Alarm pulled through them and turned their attention to where she stood. Noise, in the nest. Noise, in their shelter.
But there was no threat to be found. Only a pair of light, bloodied feet picking their way through an upended life.
She can't read the titles or find familiarity in what stares back at her from thor faces, but when her eyes catch on a busted open carton—its guts spilled in the shape of small figurines—a memory snags at her.
(She's meant to have shed them, not kept them. Why has she kept them?)
It brings a picture. A voice.
"Look, Fi," he says, his voice carrying a smile so impossibly familiar, so deeply folded into her, it'd take another life before it allowed itself to fade.
She can't reason why she's trying so hard to forget it. She simply does.
He's pulled a cardboard box from the top of a tall shelf, one she'd have had no hope of reaching without climbing a chair. The box is covered in a sticky layer of dust.
He wipes at it with a dirty sleeve. "Monopoly, Star Wars flavoured."
"You put this down right now or we're getting a divorce," she says, not meaning a word of it.
Chapped and bleeding lips repeated the words in a whisper so quiet, a lick of air might have carried it away, before the whisper turned into a pained hiss. The bruised lips twisted.
A hint of pain bit at them. It was a sharp lick at their skin, not overly severe but deeply uncomfortable. They cringed to the left, away from the slice of daylight pouring through a gap in a set of tattered, mildew-covered drapes.
Why were they here?
Up where the sun reached.
Away from the whole.
Away from the warm comfort of the hive?
Why were they searching when there was nothing here for them to want. Or need. Nothing here would feed them. Nothing here was of any use. This old life—contained within a broken room—and the pieces strewn across the floor held no meaning to them. No significance.
A lie.
They wandered at the edge of the light and passed through the field of old books.
Deep within the undertow, a deep, scratchy voice she's wholly unfamiliar with reads words in a language she knows just as little. They're cushioned by the backdrop of clinking cutlery and a medley of overlapping conversations. Dim light. Dark walls. The stench of cigarette smoke.
It vanishes as quickly as it'd come.
They didn't dwell. With a shiver of their shoulder, they wandered on, padding over ruined floors until their eyes finally caught on what she'd been looking for. A row of oddly shaped things with holes at the top.
They didn't understand what she'd need them for, or why she'd start pushing her bloody feet into them one by one, and to be honest, she hardly did, too.
Noise.
Their head was heavy with it.
The noise had purpose. A neat pattern. Meaning. Direction. She'd struggled for so long to translate it, to find words folded into the noise, but over time she'd come to understand that'd been where the trouble lay.
Words liked to grow senseless with neglect.
Intent and instinct did not.
Once she'd stopped trying to understand, she'd understood. They had no need for words. Words belonged to voices. And voices had an edge, a thin and ripped line. Separation.
A voice belonged to someone and there wasn't one any longer.
A lie.
As the world beyond their shelter darkened and a cacophony of sounds filled the air, the noise in her head fit together into clear intent. Ignore the sounds out there. It wasn't meant for them, but for their prey, a signal for those who ruled the day to go cower behind their walls of nightfire.
Wait for the darkness to grow thicker. Heavier. And only then they'd part from the nest, leaving behind a few of the young to stay behind and guard its warmth. The rest would roam. Hunt. Feed.
Protect.
She's puzzled.
Protect what?
A frigid night touched their skin as she slid down a slanted roof slick with rain. Her movements were a whisper. The others, less so. Their steps were heavy, careless where they fell. They had no need to conceal themselves.
There was nothing for them to fear.
A lie.
What about the imposter? The scratching inside their skulls?
Yes. Once.
But they fear the imposter's clawing less now than in the moments before. Now they are a solid presence in her mind as they surrounded her; six separate thoughts she's having at the same time. They're closely knit. Not a one apart; they each know the thought of the other.
There's no more room for the imposter.
But what about the others? There are so many more—
Countless. Out there.
Where they can't reach, for every time they yearn to, their would-be-goaler sinks into their midst. Uninvited. Unwanted.
A trouble for another time.
Now they'd roam. They'd hunt. They'd feed and protect.
They reached the edge of the roof and one by one they leapt, until there were two still holding at the ledge; one a gargoyle made from flesh and bone, the other the odd-one-out voice pinned to their midst.
She's still fighting to belong to someone.
Stop. Let go.
Why.
Can't.
She.
Let.
Go.
She's frozen at a stiff angle, her eyes fixed on her hand. There is blood smeared across it. Still wet.
She shivers. The hand clenches.
A hoarse scream cracked by fury slides by in the undertow. She catches it, rides with it. She sees another set of bloodied hands entirely, their knuckles split. Those hands drive the life out of a face blurred by forgetting.
They're not hers, the hands. But she feels every impact. Feels skin split. Knuckles bruise. Feels the scream rip from her throat and the fury burning up her chest. An endless time later, when the fury tapers off, the punches and the scream turn to the agony of grief.
There's a second face nearby.
It still holds shape. A woman. Loved. Now dead.
What follows is knowing he'd be next.
An odd sort of understanding solidifies in her gut. Next had not been what he had expected. Death hadn't taken him—her, them—as it should have. They'd been abandoned by it.
Left behind.
Still, she wonders, why can't she let go?
She sees her own hand again. Knows it's hers, because the blood is fresh. She's put it there. On a dusty floor, a twitch away from sunlight, surrounded by the spilled guts of a colourful carton and the open pages of books in languages she can't fathom.
Lines are scratched across her skin, jagged. They try to spell a word she hadn't managed to finish. A word she clings to more than any other, but words are for voices and voices belong.
Curious clicks stuttered at her flank. The gargoyle shifted where he stood, a single mandible twitching and flaring. Beyond the roof, the night teased them with the promise of a hunt. They might not have been able to navigate the surface above, to ride far on the minds of others. But they could still listen to what the air carried their way.
Right now, it carried whispers and footsteps and things which did not belong into the night.
A hunt?
If she willed it.
Her hand curled, the skin across the back of it stretching and stinging as the letters forming the name she wanted to shake so terribly pulled open. The pain faded, dragged from her mind by the undertow.
She leapt. The gargoyle followed. And with an ecstatic ease, the hive fell in line.
Taffer Notes: Hi! I hope you've been having fun with Monsters, We. so far and I'm so excited (and grateful) to have you here. But pssst I have a secret for you: If you want to read it with pretty header pictures and much better editing and formatting, head over to Archive Of Our Own.