Seely, Part 4

A serialized short story by W. McCrae.

Guest posts by

W. McCrae

continue this week. This is Part 4 of her original short story; you can find Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.

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Charles spent most of the next week orchestrating a plan to confront Seely with proof of her own strangeness. He thought about it obsessively—composed a whole speech, even stowed a flashlight and a Swiss Army Knife in his backpack, just in case—but each night when sunset came, his nerves failed him, and he holed up in his room with all the lights on. His own sense of inertia insisted that these fantastical notions would surely work themselves out in time, smooth over like sand exposed to the westerly wind.

That didn’t happen.

With each passing day he only felt more impossibility heaping inside his head, forming a dune, casting a shadow that darkened the whole landscape. 

He didn’t sleep well that week, and ate very little. He got a B- on a math test. Worst of all, he forgot about Mother’s Day on Sunday until too late to buy a gift. Mom took that pretty hard.

The afternoon following the greeting-card holiday, Mr. Salvatore asked Charles to stay after the last school bell, and spent a few minutes shuffling papers around on his desk without saying what he wanted. Charles waited with his eyes on the ground, consumed with bilious anxiety. When Mr. Salvatore finally said his name—“Charles,”—he jumped. “I wanted to ask you if everything’s… alright?”

Charles looked back down, trying to obscure view of the bruise beneath his left eye. “Yes,” he said.

“At home?” Yes. “And at school?” Yes. “Because I noticed…” His teacher gave him space to respond. Charles said nothing. “Was it Reggie and the boys?”

Reggie and company had mostly gotten bored with him in the last couple weeks. They still laughed amongst themselves when he passed in the hall. “No,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

“Charles, I’m sorry to ask. Has your father ever—?”

“No.” This time, Charles raised his eyes to answer with conviction: “No. Not ever.” Still, Mr. Salvatore looked concerned. “It was a tree,” he explained. “I was in the backyard and—it was a branch.” That didn’t make any sense. He prayed he wouldn’t be asked for elaboration.

Mr. Salvatore told him, “You know you can come talk to me. About anything,” in the same tone Dad used when he said he would always keep his boys safe. So he probably didn’t mean it. Charles said thank you, and that he knew, and finally he left to pick up his little brother from his classroom.

The mid-May afternoon was low and hazed by heat, thick enough to scramble the air above the streets and parkways. Howie tried to touch every piece of metal in arm’s-reach out of some determination to burn himself stupid, and Charles struggled to keep him reeled in. A lump was growing in his throat, large enough to choke on. His head hurt with every step closer to home, pounding-hot anxiety.

All the curtains on the house were drawn when it came into view from the corner of Ocotillo Street. Mom usually had Mondays off, and her car was still out front just as Charles had feared it would be. He stopped at the end of the driveway, watching their parents’ darkened bedroom window; even though Howie started to fuss in the sun, he found he couldn’t quite get himself moving again. This was the last place in the world he wanted to be. And yet his feet seemed planted here, maybe by roots, maybe by melting rubber. At his elbow, convection rustled a brittlebush in the parched garden bed.

Charles made a decision. He wrenched himself free, told Howie that Mom was sleeping, and brought his brother next-door to Mrs. Schneider’s house instead. He didn’t know where he would go, himself. Just not home.

Rather than trek back to the air-conditioned library or deli, Charles wandered slowly, slowly toward the east end of the neighborhood, following his shadow down the road which disintegrated into powder as it became Lime Slope. He made his way to the quarry entrance, under the fence, around the grassy shore, and finally sat himself on the big boulder cast in shade. It was blessedly temperate, even a little humid, on the bank, and for a long time he did nothing but cool down and listen to the frogs. In a desert-doze, he came to distinguish them all by a unique timbre. Their concert had six parts.

Dreamily, he identified the spot where shore and shadow would first overlap, and waited for that spit of water to be overtaken by darkness growing larger with each half-hour. He took off his shoes and went wading in the shade, sunk up to his anklebones in the silt and the sucking cold. Even in afternoon sunlight, the pond remained impenetrable black to the eye, icy to the touch. Charles stayed like that for a very long time, contrasting his skin’s contact with the hot wind and the cutting water and the deep soft mud. He wondered what the crickets and dragonflies were saying to one another. He felt the current, the patient undine draw, trying to pull him in.

He closed his eyes.

Seely arrived just after sunset, or maybe appeared; one moment he was surely alone, and the next he caught her at the corner of his vision, as though she’d just stepped in from offscreen. He was back on the boulder by then, reading by flashlight, and she looked surprised when he trained the beam on her face. In the incandescent light, he could see clearly for the first time that she had red hair. 

“Came back for your precious library books, huh?” Seely asked with typical carelessness, dropping Earthsea on the stone between his ankles. “That was a good one. You said it’s a trilogy, can you get the others? I’ll be done with the McCaffrey book by tomorrow.”

“Yeah, alright. Hey, listen—” 

“I’ve never heard of dragons and spaceships in the same story.”

“Are you…?”

“Don’t you think F’lar is an asshole?”

For hours—all week, even—Charles had been preparing to ask her a very particular question, but it didn’t come out as intended. His mouth remained uncommitted to the bit, and chose of its own volition to swerve at the last second: “Are you… Why don’t you go to school?” he blurted. 

Seely stopped chattering. She looked back at him from where she’d been drawing little birds and bugs in the muddy shore with a stick. “Do you have a family?” Charles continued, choked on stress. Her confusion turned into a frown. “D-do you have a last name? Why don’t you ever wear shoes? Or a jacket when it’s cold? Do you know how weird that is?”

Her tone landed somewhere between worried and offended: “What do you care?” Uneasy, either way.

“You didn’t swim to get me out of the water, that night.” There it was—that was the important thing, finally exposed, and accordingly her expression darkened. Charles suddenly wished he had his Swiss Army Knife on hand. It was still in the backpack. On an instinct, he rose from the boulder and squared his weight, in case he needed to sprint. 

Lowly he repeated, “You didn’t swim, did you?” The steely determination in his voice was pure bluster. “You were dry afterward, I remember. You… you walked. On the water. Howie told me—”

Now she sounded defensive. “What are you trying to—?”

But Charles had too much momentum to stop. “Are y-you a vampire?” he asked.

Immediately the angry resignation on Seely’s flashlight-whitened face was supplanted by disbelief. For a moment neither of them spoke, each waiting for an argument from the other. A nightjar mocked Charles’s stutter.

“...You ass.” She broke the silence first, glaring into the beam still trained on her face. “Vampires aren’t real.”

Charles was too canny of supernatural tricks to let his guard down. “That’s—” He had to stop when his voice broke. “That isn’t an answer.”

“Yes it is! No, I’m not a vampire. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Slowly, Charles lowered the flashlight so that only its weak halo reached her face. She sneered to show teeth. No fangs. No sudden lunge to tear out his throat. 

Finally, the fearful string that had been holding him taut broke. “But you didn’t swim,” Charles faintly repeated, and then slumped and clicked off the interrogatory flashlight. Blindly he dropped back onto the boulder, to blink and wait for his night vision to come in. In the blotchy twilight, Seely moved to take a seat next to him. They weren’t touching, but they were close.

“A vampire would have just let you drown, you know,” she told him after a while. She sounded a bit resentful. “Easier to suck the blood out of a dead kid.”

“No. Then the blood would be cold.” The air around the quarry usually had a chalky grit, but the wind was up tonight, full of the spring scents of creosote and sage. After a few deep breaths Charles ventured, “I thought for a long time you must live somewhere up near Parsley Street.” He jerked his chin toward the quarry’s north face. “But… you really do live right here, don’t you? Here on this rock.” 

Seely sniffed dryly, and did not answer. He very nearly wondered aloud if ‘lived’ was the right word, but decided that would be crass. What he asked instead was, “How many kids drown here every year?” 

At his side, Seely appeared to shrug, but then she answered the question anyway. “None, anymore.” There was a new hoarseness in her voice. “Not since…” 

He waited for her to finish the sentence, but it flagged away on the evening breeze. Charles had so many questions, and no idea how to satisfy them. He fell deep in his own tangle, so that when Seely spoke again the suddenness chilled him:

“Do you have any idea what drowning is like?”

She didn’t sound like herself. Not flippant or rude, but quiet, cracked like the badland horizon. Charles couldn’t clearly see her face, but it didn’t sound like she was exactly speaking to him; she might have been asking the pond. Hesitantly he shook his head.

“It’s the worst thing in the world,” Seely told the water. Still parched-sounding, and still barely louder than the rustling grass; Charles emptied his lungs, the better to hear. “How you figure—you only need a few more seconds to break the surface, but the seconds keep adding up. Air is… the air’s just always been there, you know? So when you finally give up and take a breath, you, you still have this hope… ”

She stopped to inhale. Her pause opened a musical interlude for a toad on the bank.

“It burns. Like—like hot nails in your chest and all the way up and down your throat. You want it out and you try to cough but it just keeps pulling the water d-deeper and deeper ins-side you, until—you—”

Abruptly she stoppered the words in the palm of her hand. Seely hunched over her knees and held herself there, as rigid as the stone beneath them. Only a thin wheeze escaped from between her arms. Charles’s heartbeat fell back into motion with a slam.

He had no idea what to say.

He’d taken far too long to say something.

“I’m so sorry…”

It wasn’t nearly enough.

“Whatever.” Some of her rudeness was back already, echoing in the hollow of her body. “I don’t want you feeling sorry for me.”

“I don’t,” he lied. “I’m just sorry.” 

He still couldn’t see her face, but he heard her sucking snot. Charles waited for her to be done, clasping his hands tightly so that every finger registered how cold the others were. He could so vividly imagine it, the numbing pond tearing up his nose and throat. He felt the water in his own sinuses. He felt—

Seely let out a howl into her arms: “Kids are so s-stupid!” Her shoulders shook, and without thinking, Charles reached out to her. For a split second he thought his hand might pass right through. But no. She was solid and warm to the touch, as she’d ever been. Her cotton sleeve barely made a cushion against his palm, and the brush of her hair was as soft as it looked.

They stayed on the bank like that for a long time. The very last twilight unstained the sky; the stars turned out; crickets sang a littoral canon on the beat of tiny waves, broken again and again on the muddy shore. Seely remained with her face mashed into her knees, curled defensively against the sweet wind, no longer speaking or making a single sound.

Maybe she wanted him to leave. Charles tried drawing away; she didn’t react to that, and so he rose to his feet. Only then did he become conscious of the book still tucked under his arm. He’d been reading it when she arrived. 

On a whim, he piped up, “Hey.” She seemed to stir at the sound of his voice, but it was hard to tell. “Listen. This is for you, okay?” Still she didn’t look up, so he awkwardly laid the paperback on the stone next to her. “Do you know about The Lord of the Rings? It’s kinda where everything started. In fantasy. This is the first book, and I, uh… want you to have it.” It was just a garage sale copy, a ten-cent investment. A meager gift. “Oh yeah, and—” 

Charles’s flashlight had rolled off somewhere in the dark, and it took him a moment to locate. “You should take this, too.” He held the flashlight boldly against her arm, then gave up and set it atop the book instead. “So you can still read, even when it’s cloudy.” 

Finally, Seely’s dark outline raised its head. She didn’t respond, but she was definitely listening. Her breath sounded wet. “I’ll come back soon with the next Earthsea,” he said.

At last she spoke, only to say, “Okay.” Her voice was very small.

“And more Lord of the Rings, if you like that.”

“Okay.” 

“Okay.” Charles stopped there. When no easy transition out of the conversation presented itself to him, he just repeated himself, “Okay,” and started to walk away.

The flashlight switched on behind him, and his silhouette flared jaggedly across the spindle-grass ahead. Seely was playing with the light, turning its beam along the ground and up into the sky. In its glow, her expression looked a little swollen and full of wonder. When the flashlight landed on him, Charles stopped being able to see her at all. He waited a second for her to speak, maybe to say something about the bruise on his face; then he just gave an awkward thumbs-up.

“I’ll come back,” he promised one last time before starting on his way. The flashlight followed him wordlessly for a while and then went back to dancing along the ground. From the quarry entrance, he could still see her as a roving spotlight on the farthest shore, playing a one-woman show off the white-lime walls and the water, black as tar.

He came back the next night, as he said he would. And the night after that as well.