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THE SKELETON’S SHADOW
Copyright © 2009 Anastasia Rabiyah. All rights reserved worldwide.
ISBN 978-1-936165-14-8
Cover Art Designed By Anastasia Rabiyah
Edited By Traci Markou
Published by Purple Sword Publications, LLC
Except for review purposes, the reproduction of this book in whole or part, electronically or mechanically, constitutes a copyright violation.
The Skeleton’s Shadow
By
Anastasia Rabiyah
To the shadowboy who visited my dreams to tell me his story.
CHAPTER ONE: HOUSE OF DREAMS
Thirty miles outside Elephant Butte, New Mexico
Even though the sunflowers waved at her as she passed them, tears still dribbled down Rainee Chambers’ cheeks. She drove on an old, worn, nearly forgotten highway that was being grand-fathered out by the new I-40. There were no people so far out, only the fields of cheery flowers that failed to catch her attention and pull her from her sorrow. She ran the fingers of her left hand over the crack in the DeSoto’s steering wheel and bit at her lower lip. Her dad had held onto the old car and so many antiques. He had an affinity for old things, and she did as well. Such things spoke of times that would never be again. They made her feel connected to the past and had a magic all their own. It was for that reason she had decided to go to her great grandparents’ house to be alone and work through her sadness. Life could wait. She needed the comfort she had found there as a child—so very long ago—a shadowy comfort she remembered as an imaginary friend. She was sure now that’s all that it was.
Rainee found the house before sunset and parked the car beside the fraying porch. The engine sputtered a bit after she turned the key. She ran her hand across the steering wheel once more, remembering how her dad used to sit her on his lap and drive her in the alley behind her parents’ home in the city. They’d coast up and down that alley for hours, sometimes so long that her mother would come out and stand by the gate with her hands on her hips, scowling. Mom hadn't approved of the old things her father kept. She had affectionately called her dad a packrat, smiling behind the insult. Rainee wiped her eyes and gazed up at the plantation style house. The white paint was peeling, and birds had nested along the beams of the porch. Hornets had built a considerable nest by one of the larger windows which, she was surprised to notice, were all intact.
She got out and walked up the cement steps to the front door. She found the key on her key-ring and set it in the lock. The door creaked open. As she stepped over the threshold, the scent of the place swept over her. It spoke of age, of secrets and stories that she regretted she felt no reason to explore at the moment. Weariness weighed on her. Tomorrow, I’ll look at everything in the morning.
The setting sun lit up the main room, revealing furniture wearing dust-covered sheets like old ghosts. A large spider web hung over the tarnished chandelier. Dust silted the floor, but as she drew her shoe across it, she saw shiny wood beneath she remembered from her childhood visits.
Rainee walked up the stairs to investigate. When she reached the top, the sun had gone down so much that she had to go back for a flashlight. She lugged up her belongings and placed them in the bedroom she used to sleep in. The old, wrought iron, four post bed was covered with linens. She pulled them off and dust billowed into the air. Though the mattress was yellowed from age, it appeared clean enough. She took in the old smell, musty and familiar, like the scent of her parents’ attic. How she loved to go exploring there when she was young. There were always treasures to find: hat pins, velvet dresses, newspaper clippings that were crispy and faded.
Her eyes hurt from crying, and she wanted nothing more than to sleep. She unwrapped her thick comforter and placed it atop the old bed. After fluffing her pillow, she set the flashlight on the bedside table and climbed onto the creaking bed.
She stared up at the ceiling, her mind numb, and thought about the shadowboy, her imaginary friend who used to talk to her when she couldn’t sleep. He had only ever appeared to her in this room. She closed her eyes and wished he were with her now. He used to tell her stories about times long ago before electricity when men had to hunt wild animals to survive.
Sleep took her in its dark arms and held her close. She dreamed she sat in the same bed, only it was covered in cotton linens and an old, pink quilt. She was a child, and her tiny hands grasped a wooden box with scratches across the unfinished pine top. She opened the box and pulled out its treasures one by one. First there was a raven’s feather, old and frayed and bent near the top. Her tiny hand laid the item on the quilt. The dim room smelled fresh, devoid of dust. Next, she produced a sachet of lavender, tied neatly with a red ribbon. She reached into the box and found an arrowhead. It rested in the palm of her hand, cold and auburn in color. She traced its mottled edge.
An icy hand touched her shoulder, and she turned to see a shadow, a ghostly creature with a skull for a face and glittering eyes deep in its sockets. “Do you like my gift?” it asked her.
Rainee woke from the dream, turned over, and sighed. She thought she ought to have been afraid of her nightmare, but the shadowboy didn’t scare her. He was an old memory, a good one, a friend in the darkness of long ago. The scent of the mattress wafted up to her: lavender. The darkness was too strong against her weariness, and she slipped back into sleep, feeling safe.
She woke a second time after tossing, turning, and dreaming that her mother was sitting at the foot of her bed, massaging her feet like she used to do when Rainee had bad nightmares. She blinked at the unfamiliar shadows in the room. Her mind slowly recalled how she'd gotten there, and where she was, and that she was full grown and her mother was dead. However, her feet tingled with the firm press of someone else’s fingers.
“Mom?” she whispered, thinking maybe a ghost sat there.
She swallowed hard. Her father had always warned her not to go out alone, to be careful, and to take precautions. Only a fool would've come all the way out here alone. What was I thinking?
She squinted, but could discern no more than a shadow, one of many in the room, but the only one that moved.
“What are you doing in my house?” she accused. Rainee stiffened, trying to gather her courage.
“Oh, this is...your house now,” the voice crackled in the darkness as though it hadn’t been used for ages. “I’ve been here…so long.” There was a pause with no drawing of breath, only the silence of the room. “Years and...no one has come since the old woman got sick and left.”
Rainee sat up. The man’s broken voice held a strange accent, almost Irish but slurred and slow. “Have you been living here?”
“Living? I wouldn’t...call it that. I've been here, taking up space, waiting and waiting for my…existence…to end. I can't go to a city...or any other place where...people are. I’m a danger to them. I hoped if I did not...eat any more souls, that I'd die. But I’m still here, still...continuing.”
His fingers continued to delve into the arches of her feet, sending tingles through her body. In a strange way, she was calmed by his ministrations. Rainee listened closely, but still couldn't hear him draw a breath.
“Is this a dream?” she asked. She ran her hand through her hair and closed her eyes tight only to reopen them and find the shadow still there, steady as ever, and rubbing her feet and ankles with warm, strong hands.
"You used to call me your shadowboy. Do you remember me, Rainee?”
“Liam,” she whispered. “You’re not real.” She was certain now that she was dreaming. The darkness clinging to him sucked toward his shape. Her thoughts drifted back to her memory of him. A pink bedspread, an imaginary friend hiding under her bed. Stories. So many stories of running and trees, wild places. Fingers holding hers. A soothing voice spinning stories until she fell fast asleep where no bad dreams could touch her.
The shadow whispered as if talking more to himself than to her. “My mother was born in the hills...” Those same words had been whispered to her before, long ago. She knew the story, knew how it went and how it would end, but she had never grown tired of hearing it, of learning about her shadowboy.
“My father was Irish. He traveled across the sea when he was a boy to find a new life in the Americas. I’m named after him. William.”
She closed her eyes and ran her hand across the thick comforter, remembering the feel of the pink quilt that used to adorn this old bed, the precise stitches, the puffs of fabric that edged the corner of it.
“I lived in the hills after my mother’s people left. I stayed there,” Liam went on. His voice was inconsistent, sometimes garbled and childish, at other times strong and manly.
“The world has changed, Rainee. I fear it.”
She opened her eyes, trying to let the haunting memory slip away. This has to be a bad dream. It can’t be real. He was never real. Was he?
He paused again; his fingers stopped. She wanted them to press into her skin again, to soothe her, to heat her through and through. "Do you remember when you found me? You were catching lightning bugs.” His hands moved again, the feel of his palm against her heel and then the ball of her foot so much like her mother's touch that it was eerie. Maybe it hadn’t been her mother massaging her feet. Maybe it had been Liam all along. “I cried the day you left. I’ve been here ever since that day…waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” she asked, falling under his spell.
“To die.”
Rainee pushed the thick comforter back and pulled her feet away from his hands. She stood up, and felt across the bedside table for the flashlight, but the batteries were dead from leaving it on all night. She edged to her duffle and fished around in it until her hand met the cold wax of the Christmas candle she’d snatched from her closet. She lit the wick with a match from the small box in her bag and raised it up to see.
The candlelight banished the darkness. She turned in a circle, but there was no one in the room but her. Goose bumps prickled her skin as she called, “Liam?”
CHAPTER TWO: MORNING STAR
Liam watched her bare feet from his hiding pace beneath the bed. He couldn’t believe she had come back after all this time. His only friend, a little girl when they met in the shadows under the pecan tree where fireflies danced, had returned. He could only hope he would be strong enough not to hurt her or that with her age she had not learned to fear him. She padded out of the room and down the stairs, searching the house and calling out, “Hello?” every so often or his name. He didn’t want her to leave this time. He never wanted to leave him again.
She finally returned to the room. The bed frame squeaked above him, and he smiled. She was not a child now, but a young woman. He wished he could see her in the sunlight, but such wishes were frivolous. Liam Morningstar knew what he was. A dead thing walking among the shadows of the living. Forever in darkness, forever bound to a penance he knew not how to escape or fulfill.
When she had tossed and turned in the bed, he had tried to soothe her back to sleep as her mother used to do. He knew it was her when he stepped into the kitchen from the cellar after night fell. He knew the feel of her presence, sweet and light like summer. Although with time, that warmth she filled him with had changed and grown into a warmth he longed to touch. And not the gentle touch of a friend, but something more, something he used to want when he was a young man in his mother’s village so many countless years ago. Something he didn’t think he would ever have.
After her breathing steadied and he was certain she was asleep, he crawled out from his hiding place to stand over the bed. With skeletal fingers, he touched her face and memorized its shape. Her hair was soft beneath his skin. Her every exhale was a ticklish whisper across the back of his hand.
He felt the other stir within him. It wanted to force his hand over her nose and mouth. The other wanted to choke off her breath and steal her soul when it left her body. But Liam ignored its will. He pushed it back into the reaches of his consciousness, turned from the bed, and went to walk in the house he’d been alone in since Rainee’s grandmother left it.
He blended with the darkness, walking down the stairs to the living room. He remembered one night when Rainee had snuck down there to find him. She had called for her shadowboy and he wanted to come out from hiding, but her mother had walked in. Her mother had carried her past her grandparents’ bedroom and the frail shape of her great grandfather in his sickbed, silent and lost in his old age.
Liam supposed he ought to be thankful he hadn’t died in such a way. But he didn’t truly think he could die now. He had lived more than three lifetimes. He had leaped from cliffs and tried to drown himself in lakes. Once he stood on a train track and a locomotive passed through him as if he weren’t there at all. Nothing could wound him. Pain didn’t exist. Life was an endless span of nights spent walking and searching for an end to it all, or a way to feed the other.
But now he had Rainee. She would want to hear his stories. She would keep him company.
He turned the crank handle to open the window in her grandparents’ old room, remembering the day the old man’s soul had come free from his body. The silver thread circled the room and then Liam had taken hold of it, causing it to vanish, to mingle into his darkness. He regretted having taken that soul. But he hadn’t killed the old man. He hadn’t killed anyone since finding Rainee, since she had walked right up to him on that dark night and asked him to catch fireflies with her.
Stars twinkled above him in a black blanket of clear sky. He walked through the rumpled earth where Rainee’s grandmother used to keep a garden. Weeds covered the rows now. He tried to remember the smells of nature, of the moist earth beneath his bare feet and the crisp perfume of crushed grass. Heat, cold, pain, all meant nothing to him any longer. They had passed the way of his prior life when the skeleton changed him with its evil touch.
Liam crossed the fields of blackberries and wild plum bushes, pushed his way through the high grass and went into the trees to find the stream. There he stared down at himself in the moonlit water. The shape of his face wavered, unsteady and unclear, but he saw the silver color of his eyes the very same silver of severed souls. If he were to let her see him now, he doubted she could accept him like she did when she was an innocent, fearless child.
“I’m a monster.” He sat back on the bank and picked at his leather pants. He closed his eyes and listened to the secrets of the wind. Far away, the call of the city tried to lure him to where people lived. There would be plenty of souls to harvest and lives to end. The other inside him wanted to go to the city and kill. But Liam feared the lights and the sounds. He didn’t like being anywhere but here in this plot of wild land near the house he called home although it wasn’t his.
He hummed to himself and remembered his mother’s face. He prayed that wherever her soul was now, she had found his father and happiness. “Please, forgive me.” He cried but no tears fell from his eyes. His body heaved with sorrow, loneliness, and regret.
He remained in the stream longer than he ever dared before. Birds called through the trees for mates. The crickets stopped their night chirping. Above him, the stars faded, and Liam stared up at the sky to wait for the sun to color it blue, but he knew he would miss the sunrise. He often wondered if it happened at all anymore, and if Raven would have to sneak through the sky to steal the sun back again.
His body became heavy. He stood and ran as fast as he could. Through the field and the garden, he felt the familiar thickening. He didn’t understand why this happened just before each dawn, or what his body did during the day. He wondered if the other claimed him then.
He climbed through the window and pushed it shut as he turned the crank. On silent, bare feet, he crossed the great room and opened the door to the cellar. Down into the darkness he descended, knowing the way by heart. His usual place was a niche between packed boxes where he kept a blanket on the floor. He curled into that space and waited. Shadows closed over him, blacker than the darkest night. Liam waited for them to recede, for the thickening to halt his movements and his mind. He hoped Rainee would still be there when he was able to move again.
CHAPTER THREE: CLEANSING
Rainee overslept, riddled with dreams about her childhood and the shadowboy. When she finally opened her eyes, the sun had bypassed the window in her room. She rubbed her eyes, sat up, and stretched her arms high. Her back cracked. Grumbling, she made her way out of the bedroom and down the stairs. “Coffee,” she said to herself. “God, I hope they turned the water on.”
Everything in the old kitchen was filmed over with dust. She stood at the sink, eyeing it with suspicion. Rainee turned the faucet. Water gurgled out brown at first, but after running a while, it came clear. She doubted it would get hot, and she was right about that.
In one drawer she found a set of folded washrags which she depleted to wipe everything down. The stove was electric, and she’d called to have that turned on too before she came, but much to her bad luck, the burners didn’t warm up at all.
The phone was dead, not that she really cared. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She needed this time alone to get a grip.
In a side closet off the kitchen, she found a worn down corn broom and a mop that had seen better days. She spent hours sweeping and mopping until every floor on the lower lever of the house shined clean.
She hadn’t been here since she was a little girl, and after her grandmother died, her mom hadn’t wanted to come back. As a result, the place was something of a mausoleum, a tomb for belongings from her grandparents’ lives. Rainee wanted to find clues to the past.
She opened the door to the cellar. After running her hand along the wall, she flicked the light switch on and sighed, remembering the power wasn’t on yet. Upstairs to her room she went and found the Christmas candle, hoping for a box of old photos to thumb through.
The sky lit orange in the picture window off the main room. Rainee walked slowly, balancing her lit candle so as not to spill any wax on herself or the floor. Even the candle brought back memories. It smelled like countless Christmas evenings past. Times when her parents gathered at the dinner table. Happy moments long gone.
She descended the stairs, careful in her steps lest any of the boards give way. They creaked, but didn’t fall through. In the darkness, she found an old linoleum table with four vinyl chairs. Rainee set the candle in the middle of it and glanced around the cellar for something to look through. In one corner, she found three cardboard boxes labeled: Mary.
“Mother’s things.” She pulled the first box down and set it on a chair. Rainee wiped the seat of another chair and sat down to see what treasures of her mother’s childhood she would find.
The dusty cardboard pulled open. She reached in. Her fingers closed over a shape that felt familiar, a box, wooden and old. Scratches marred the box’s surface. Her eyebrows furrowed. The dream came back to her…and the memory of the first time she had seen the keepsake.
“Shadowboy,” she whispered, and opened the lid. Inside she knew what she would find. A raven’s feather, a dried sachet of lavender, so old it fell apart. Last, there was the arrowhead. “Death, life, and the point that brings about the end.”
Something rustled near the opposite corner of the room. Rainee shivered. She set the box atop the table, took up her candle, and started toward the steps.
Flickers of light twinkled in the shadows—shadows that began to grow and shift. The figure that approached could not be denied. She knew him, though he seemed smaller now than he had when he appeared at the foot of her bed. Torn between running up the steps and confronting her memory, she took a step and held the candle up to shed light on him.
The figure held his arm to his face to shield his eyes. Rainee gasped at his haggard form, thin and frail, almost bone-like. The candlelight played on his glossy black hair which fell straight and long past his shoulders. He lowered his arm. His eyes were silver, glittery, watery, and completely inhuman.
“What are you?” she asked as she stepped back.
“Don’t be...afraid!” He gasped. “It’s the most dangerous thing to be...around me. If you’re afraid, I might hurt you. I can't help it! I’m driven to do it. If you stay calm, I’m harmless. I’ve been trying to control...the other. I hoped that by not hurting anyone, the Great Spirit would take pity on me and...let me pass.”
Rainee concentrated on her breathing, slowing each intake of air. She studied his face. It didn't reflect the light as a normal person’s would. Shadows clung around his glittery eyes, and his cheeks seemed hollow and deep, giving him the appearance of an emaciated, skeletal corpse.
I've seen him before, she thought. I know him. Liam. The shadowboy…my shadow…
“Rainee…do you remember?”
Heat sizzled through her body, undeniable. She closed her eyes to clear her head, and then opened them to start up the stairs. “Not real,” she repeated. “You’re not real. I made you up then. I’m making you up now.”
“Don’t go…”
At the open cellar door, she didn’t turn back. She wanted to, but she knew she shouldn’t. Rainee took the handle and closed the door. Fingers shaking, she managed to set the hook into the eye to lock the past in its darkness. Her mother always told her that she had an overactive imagination, and that she needed to keep her feet firmly planted on the ground and her mind in reality.
She marched upstairs and blew out the candle. Crawling into bed, she wished she cpud block out her shadowboy, that she could forget the being she had made up when she needed a playmate. He wasn’t so scary before—nothing was. As she lay there staring up at the ceiling, she remembered the cold feel of the arrowhead in her palm.
The next morning, dim early sunlight shined through the hazy window. Birds began to wake and twitter in the nearby fields. She rose and ran out of the room and down the stairs to the cellar door. Lifting the hook, she cursed herself, but rushed into the dark. One small cellar window, bleary with mud stains, struggled to let in the day.
“Liam?” she whispered, dreading an answer. She surveyed the room, checking every shadow for him. The light grew brighter. She edged to the corner where she had seen him the night before. Darkness pulled in on itself and he stood, as real as he had been the night before.
She stared, disbelieving, at the strange creature before her. His movements slowed. He opened his mouth and tried to speak.
“Don’t…” he began but didn’t finish his sentence. The sun’s rays reached through the small pane of glass and touched his skin. He froze. His glittery eyes became hard and cold as his body turned to stone. He transformed. His body became a statue, chiseled from marbled brown stone, not the body of a monster, but the well-formed, bare-chested body of a young man. He had a strong jaw, slightly flat nose, and deep-set, eyes.
Rainee walked up to him and touched his outstretched hand. He had turned to stone, cold, unfeeling, a living memory from her childhood, the creature that used to hide under her bed or in the closet of her grandmother’s home.
She marveled at how different he appeared from the wraith-like creature he seemed to be moments before. Rainee circled him, surveying his build, his sculpted muscles. The carving entranced her. She longed to speak to him again, if indeed he would awaken. She remembered his voice used to be steadier, low and kind in its cadence when he told her bedtime stories long after her mother had left her room.
Rainee turned her back on this new realization.
She remembered her grandfather in a tiny bed, his faded blue eyes set on the window. He never spoke. Old, gnarled skin and an emaciated body. Shallow, strained breaths. She had been afraid of him, but not of the shadowboy. Not of Liam.
CHAPTER FOUR: BLACKBERRIES
Rainee went outside to wander in the fields. She found a patch of blackberry brambles several yards from the house, picked some, and ate them. They tasted sour and sweet all at once. She held up the hem of her t-shirt and piled more berries in the makeshift pocket to bring back to the house. The taste of the berries brought back more of her time as a child. She closed her eyes. Tears pushed out from them and followed the wet path already there on her cheeks. Another memory surfaced.
She was in that same field, her hair tight in pigtails, her father’s leathery hand in her own. His voice mingled with the wind as he sang. “The itsy bitsy spider crawled up the water spout…” She saw her tiny hand reaching out for the berries.
She drew in a deep breath and rubbed her eyes dry against the sleeve of her t-shirt. For some reason, she had shut out that time in her life. She wished she had more time with her father now, hat she hadn’t left for college.
When the sky began to dim, she sprinted back to the porch, took the stairs two at a time, and sat upon the cellar floor. The sun took its time, so she placed the bundle of berries beside her and set her candle on the floor. She lit it and waited, impatient.
At last, the sun went down. The room was quite dark and she kept her eyes focused on the shadow of the statue before her. Something rustled. The shape shrank, and Liam’s metallic eyes peered at her.
“You stayed,” he said. “I can’t believe…you stayed. You’re not afraid.” He sat before her, some sort of mysterious creature from nightmares. Liam smiled at her, revealing sharp, pointed teeth.
The sight choked off Rainee’s breath. In that sudden moment of fear, his eyes flashed and he leapt on her, pushing her to the floor with a blind fury, an uncontrollable rage that she hadn’t expected. His scraggly hands gripped at her throat tightening and loosening as though he could not decide what to do next. Fingernails tore into her flesh. She closed her eyes and welcomed death, wondering if she would hear her father’s voice soon. As he choked her, she remembered Liam’s words. Don’t be afraid.
She steadied her breathing though it was hard to do. For whatever purpose, she had been brought to him and he to her. She opened her eyes to face the fear and concentrated on his molten pupils which had gone a shade of orange, like lava. She reached up and put her hand on his hollow cheek. She felt the skin there, soft and supple not like the hard, shrunken face hovering over hers. The skeleton was an illusion. Her fear slipped away.
“Liam,” she forced out, “don’t hurt me.”
He let go and staggered backward, apparently horrified by his actions—as if he had not been aware of what he was doing. He cowered in the corner of the room. His large eyes faded from orange to gold, and finally to silver.
“I want to help you,” Rainee said as she walked toward him. She felt driven to touch him, unsure if what she had felt was real or a delusion. “You’re my friend. I remember you.” She reached out to him, and he turned to face the wall, his whole body balling up like a frightened child’s. Her hand came against his back and instead of meeting bones, her touch met bare skin. She rubbed his shoulder, comforting him as he whimpered and began to cry.
“I'm sorry,” he muttered between sobs. “You cannot be…afraid. I told you… I warned you… I never wanted to hurt you.”
Her racing heart started to slow. The rush of adrenaline caused by fear lingered in her system, making her edgy. “I’m not afraid now. Let me help you, Liam. How can I help?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how to do it. I want to die. I’m so old, so wretched. I have done so many terrible things, hurt so many people. I want it to be…over. I want to be done with it. I did not ask to become this…thing.” His body shuddered in a violent wave before he finally stopped crying. He turned to face her and pursed his lips. His long, thin arms reached out and she took him in an embrace. When she closed her eyes, she felt the true shape of his body—that of the statue’s, well muscled and firm, not the bony creature he appeared to be.
“I’m so tired,” he whispered.
“In the daylight, when you turn to stone, aren’t you sleeping then?”
“I turn to…stone?”
“Yes. I saw you. You were young and, and…”
“What?”
“Handsome.”
His hand flew up to his mouth, hiding his monster’s smile. “Handsome? Can’t you see what I am, Rainee?”
“But when the sun comes up, you’re different. You change.”
“What happens to me?”
“When I found you in the cellar, you were a statue.”
He held out his hand to her, as she remembered him doing a thousand times before. “There are periods of…blankness, when I can’t move, can’t see. I hear things and feel time is passing, but it’s not sleep. Just before, I feel the thickening, as if my blood stops moving in my veins. Everything slows for me, and then I stop.”
She took his hand in hers, and tingling sensations shot through her body. She couldn’t help but feel that they were connected somehow. “Come upstairs like old times. Tell me your stories.” She led him out of the cellar and across the living room to the stairs. “You could lie down for a while and try to sleep after that.”
His bony brow furrowed in confusion. “Try to sleep?”
“Yes, it’s night. Most people sleep at night. Haven’t you tried to sleep?”
“I haven’t slept since the night I went to find my father.” He climbed up the stairs with her. In her room, he sat atop her bed, fidgeting with his fingers. She had held his hand and she knew that what she saw before her was not quite right. The façade of his appearance was thinly hidden. Touch revealed the truth.
She sat down next to him. “Liam, you always made my nightmares go away.” Rainee touched his arm. Heat sizzled through her fingertips. She pulled her hand back into her lap, startled.
He frowned when he reached to cup her cheek. “You used to dream about monsters. You used to cry. Your mother…she would sit with you. Rub your feet until she thought you were asleep. But you’d call to me after she left, and I would take her place.”
His palm was soft and warm against her face, though his appearance was entirely the opposite, like a horrible optical illusion, one she was still trying to accept. He watched her with apprehension in his gaze. “You asked me to tell you stories then. You were never afraid of me. The first person since my change who didn’t fear me. You gave me hope.”
“You…did the same for me.”
He nodded, pressing his lips together while he thought. “When I was young, I would hunt at dusk when the air was cool and crisp and the woods smelled so alive. I could run faster than most, and I was good with a bow. But there was no woman in my mother’s village who favored me. I was different. Not like the others in her tribe. One evening, I went into the forest to ask the Great Spirit why. I traveled along the river to the waterfall. There I sat on the rocks and watched the sun move across the sky until it reached the middle.”
He drew pictures in the air with his skeletal fingers, and Rainee saw the place he had gone too, a perfect vision of trees at either side of a frothing sheet of water—the image floating in midair like a hologram. She breathed in and tasted the forest, the cool scent of fresh water, and she smelled magic—a burning scent that awakened her childhood. Liam was pure magic, raw and impossible, and she shivered to be near him again.
“‘Great Spirit,’ I asked in my mother’s language, ‘Why have you made me walk my path alone?’ And there was not an answer for me then. I had to wait. Far off in the trees I heard a bear calling. It was alone too, as alone as I was.”
“Were you afraid?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I was never afraid when I lived in my mother’s village.”
“Did you ever find an answer?”
He touched her chin with his fingers and withdrew. “You are my answer.”
Rainee shook her head. “I don’t understand. None of this makes sense—what you are—how I see you here after all these years. I thought you were my imaginary friend.”
“You didn’t think that at the time. You believed.” Liam’s shut his eyes. His hand ran down her neck, across her arm, and met with hers before he lowered himself onto the bed as if he would fall asleep. Their fingers intertwined. He remained motionless, not drawing breath, silent as the grave. Tiny balls of light fluttered up from his body. She watched in for the rise and fall of his chest. It came slowly, almost invisible in the flickering light from the candle. His breathing grew stronger, steadier, and then, he started to snore. The dancing pinpricks of lights glittered around him.
He was not breathing when I first saw him, she thought.
She pulled her hand away from his and climbed onto the bed beside him. His eyes flickered open, catching on her. She snuggled in against his bare chest. Their legs touched, bodies warm and melding together.
She breathed in. The scent of him reminded her of old spices, thick, musky and enticing—scents she knew from long ago. His hand ran along her arm. Fingers circled her lower back, tested the line of her spine, and delved beneath the hem of her shirt to massage her bare skin.
She heard no heart beating within his chest, but his body drew in breath after breath. Warmth pressed to the top of her head in a soft kiss. Rainee held still.
With curious, trembling fingers, she explored his face without looking up, memorizing each curve. She traced his jaw line, not the boney jaw of a corpse, but the soft skin of a living man.
He moaned above her. “That feels good.”
Lower she surveyed, fingers curving over his shoulder, his chest, down the lines of muscle across his abdomen. She stopped and closed her eyes. As he had when she was a child, Liam relaxed her. His presence, no matter how monstrous and odd, pulled away her sorrow and set her at ease.
She dreamed that night of snow and trees. Wandering through a windswept forest, Rainee dodged flurries of snowflakes, searching for someone, someone she loved.
* * * *
Sunlight spilled through the window to warm her cheek the following morning. Rainee sat up and rubbed her eyes. Glancing over at Liam, reality came crashing down all around her. A stone man lay in the bed, frozen in repose. I should leave this place. I’ve lost my mind. This can’t be real.
* * * *
That night when Liam returned from his statuesque coma, he found the room empty. Saddened, he stood up from the bed and brushed the stray hair from his eyes. Soft music drifted from the lower level of the house. He descended the stairs and felt Rainee’s presence near, like a whisper or a hum just beside his neck. She didn’t abandon me. Not yet, he thought. He found her in the wide living space before a roaring fire in the hearth. She was wrapped in her thick comforter to ward off the cold, her long, golden hair spread down the back. Beside her, a small, portable radio caught classical music from the air.
“I thought you had gone,” he said.
She turned, her green eyes widening. “I was going to leave, but I don’t think I can go without helping you. I feel like we’re connected. If I leave you here, like this, I could never forgive myself. I like this house. It’s mine now. I think when I’ve settled everything, I'll live here.”
Liam felt a surge of joy, but he didn’t want to let on. He knew if he were to remain in the house with her, that his urge to kill her would eventually get the better of him. He crinkled his long, bony fingers into fists and tried to think more pleasant thoughts. “What are you eating?”
“Blackberries. They’re growing all around this place. I love them. I can’t stop eating them. Too bad there’s no electricity, or groceries. I’d be eating pie.”
“I remember the taste of blackberries.” He seated himself a few feet away from her.
Rainee stared at his eyes. He knew, that more than likely, their colors were shifting to reflect his mood. He used to sit by the stream when the moon was full and watch his eyes blaze.
“Thank you for staying. I am so…lonely. I promise to leave if I feel I might hurt you. We can be friends again.”
She smiled and reached her hand out to him. “Come and sit by me, closer to the fire. It’s cold tonight. Tell me where you came from, what you are. I knew your story as a child, but I want to hear it now.”
He slid across the wood floor, and she shared her blanket with him, placing it over his shoulders. Her fingers tested the back of his hand, but she didn’t look down at it.
“As I said, my mother was born in the hills, not far from here in the east. My father was a trader that lived with our tribe until he died in a hunting accident. I was coming of age then. It seems so long ago, ages.”
He paused to run his bony hand through his hair. Rainee looked away, deep into the fire.
He spoke again. “The elders in the tribe began to disappear. They would go out to gather berries and squash in their patches among the trees and not return. It became so bad the ones who remained only went out in large groups. Some said a bear was stalking us. They tracked the creature. Footprints were found near the camp. I wanted to go with them to slay the beast, but my mother forbade it. She said I was needed at home to protect those that stayed behind. The hunters went out early one morning in a large group. We watched them pass from the village and disappear one by one into the trees. Not one of them returned to us. We panicked.
“The shaman said it was a skeleton that stalked us. He warned everyone to pack their things together and said that we should leave before winter came, or else we would be stranded and the skeleton would kill the rest of the tribe.”
“A skeleton?” asked Rainee.
“Yes. The skeleton, or bakaak as my people called it, is a dead person that did not pass into the next life, a creature that can not completely die and longs to live. It prays on the living. That’s what I am, Rainee.” He paused for emphasis, then took up the thread of his story again.
“A council was made. Everyone decided it was best to leave. But the next morning, snow began to fall. The snow did not stop and became so thick that it would be impossible for us to leave. I remember my mother sitting by our fire, hugging her knees and praying to the Great Spirit. He did not hear her.
“For three weeks, we all waited in fear. Then it happened. Late at night, a whole family disappeared. In the snow, there was a bloody trail that led into the forest. I rallied the others my age and we went off after the creature. My mother tore at her hair and wailed as I left, but I didn’t listen to her.
“We followed the blood far into the hills, over the river which had frozen and past the barren granite boulders. We found a cave. To go into the darkness would be inviting our own deaths, so we camped outside it. We waited for the beast to rise.
“I fell asleep, sure that the others would wake me. I woke to their screams as the creature tore them down, one by one, unhurt by their arrows, unscathed by their axes. I think I was the only one to see, really see that the creature was not a bear at all.”
Liam stared at the fire, seeing the memory there. Rainee’s hand had become sweaty in his.
“Go on,” she urged. “What happened?”
“I got up and screamed at the creature. It turned on me, lunged at me, ready to do what it had done to the others. It pushed me down hard into the snow, knocking my knife away as if it were a harmless stick. It pinned my arms above my head and gazed at me with fire-like eyes. But, you see, I was not afraid. I wanted to avenge the deaths of my relatives and I truly felt no fear, so it could not kill me. Much worse though, so much worse, it knew me.”
“What do you mean?”
“It said my name. Three times it said my name as if I should recognize it. Its teeth were long and pointed. Its dried up, black tongue kept touching its front teeth and becoming pricked each time it said my name, dribbling blood across its lips. I can never forget it.
“There was no escape for me. It was so much stronger. It wore carved beads strung about its neck, my father’s necklace, the one my mother traded to him for blankets when they first met. I began to think that the creature was my father, for how else could it know my name?
“‘Father,’ I said to it. Then it took up a great boulder and thrashed my head. I remember nothing else. Not until I woke in my own village and found my mother’s lifeless body beside me. I don’t know if the creature killed her, or if I did. I cannot remember how I got there. All I have wanted since that moment was for the nightmare to end.”
“What happened between then and now?” Rainee asked.
“My village died. I don’t want to say how, but you should know I was the cause of it. The wiser ones left despite the snow. It was their fear that drove me to do it. I didn’t want to hurt them. I regret what I’ve done.” He drew his free hand over his eyes.
Silence spanned out between them until she broke it. “I remember other stories you told me. Ones where you used to hunt deer and rabbits. Stories about a raven that stole the sun.”
He nodded. “I used to tell you anything I could think of to get you to go to sleep. You are the only person who ever saw me and didn’t scream.”
“I was just a kid.”
“But you’ve come back to me now. You want to help me. You give me hope.”
Rainee shifted a bit, drawing the thick comforter closer around herself. “Yes. But Liam, maybe this is all just another dream, a way for me to escape reality.”
“What do you mean?” She shuddered and he scooted closer to her, worrying that she might leave him.
“My parents died in a car crash, just a few weeks ago. They left me this house. That’s why I’m here. I was attending classes at Bremont University last year, but I decided to take a year off. I wait tables at the Italian restaurant by my apartment, Paulie’s. Now that my parents are gone, I don’t know what I want to do. I feel lost without them.”
Liam patted her hand and nodded. He was sad for her; he felt her pain, and it strengthened his own.
She popped another blackberry into her mouth. “Want one?” she asked.
She held out a berry and he took it in his bony-looking hand. He let it roll around in his palm for a moment, uncertain as he watched it, his curiosity raging. He had not felt the urge to eat since becoming what he was.