Horror-Fantasy short. After a man is widowed, his husband begins to appear at the foot of his garden every night.
Happy Halloween, here’s something a little spooky! Rated M, 12.5k.
Content warnings for horror, violence, trauma, infidelity, nasty guys being nasty. All the usual fun stuff. Enjoy!
It didn’t start until some weeks after Doug was cold in the ground in the cemetery on top of Fan Hill. The grass was just beginning to grow again, covering up the seam between the disturbed ground and the rest of the graveyard’s ground, when Mel looked out of the kitchen window, saw him standing there, and thought he was losing it.
He took himself to bed, and convinced himself it was just grief, just mourning, just the natural insanity of a widower’s mind.
But Doug was there the next night, and the next one after that.
He wasn’t doing anything. He wasn’t moving around, wasn’t waving, he was just standing there, his hands at his sides, his gaze on the house, on Mel. Just — there.
He was greyer than before and around his edges there was a sort of filmy nothingness, a lack of definition where he almost faded into the shadow of the woods behind him, the unnatural darkness of them threatening to swallow him whole.
The widower knew not to step into those woods at night. They were a place where nothing living still belonged.
When he walked down, his husband smiled at him. They were separated by the line of the yard’s edge, where a little picket edge had been dug into the ground by Mel’s grandparents, maybe his great grandparents, years ago, and it felt as though that six-inch fence was as insurmountable as one of six feet.
“You’re dead,” said the widower thickly, because someone had told him once you had to be blunt with ghosts, that they were sometimes too stupid to understand anything else. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I want to come home,” said Doug softly. His kind eyes lacked the light they once had, and now they seemed dull and dark. “May I cross over?”
“No,” Mel told him, and walked inside.
Doug was there each night after that.
Mel tried his best to ignore it, whatever torture it was intended to be, because he knew enough about ghosts to know that they didn’t linger at the foot of your garden and stare at you from the midst of cursed forestry, but as month after month ticked on, it was hard. It was hard, to keep seeing him — it was even harder not to look, and to know that he was there, waiting.
There was never any sign of the ghost as he walked in the daylight, when he picked hazelnuts or blackberries under the shade of the trees as the autumn slowly slipped through his thorn-pricked fingers, but that wasn’t a surprise. The woods were always perfectly clear at night, so long as you didn’t go too deep, to where the old boundaries still were.
He’d heard things beyond the treeline before, when night came along and the woods got darker than was really possible — more so when he was a child, but once or twice as an adult. This, though, this sort of stuff, this was beyond the pale.
Mel distantly thought he should report it to one of the magical forestry commissions or woodland trusts, but this forest wasn’t exactly the same as the average happy glade in Llallwg, and he doubted even an expert would have much more idea what to do about it, if anything, than he had.
As a child he’d been told very strictly to never go near the woods at night, to be far out from them at least an hour before sunset came along, and to never listen to any voices he heard from them, to obey any instructions, no matter how polite they were. Sometimes, during the day time, strange people would walk through the woods on their way from further north — humans or fae or sometimes, the People, and maybe some of them could be a bit spooky or off-putting, but that was different.
Even they didn’t walk the woods at night, and if the People were too frightened to walk somewhere, you’d have to be really fucking stupid to think you shouldn’t be frightened yourself.
When Mel was a kid, Ben Hitchins and his sister had gone missing, and after that, they’d all been told even more strictly than before. They’d found Myrtle’s body a few months after they disappeared, or pieces of it anyway, but he knew it wasn’t always… violent.
His grandmother had taken him to the edge of the wood one night and they’d stood on the very threshold of the path boundary, where the shadow of the nearest trees almost touched their feet. They’d stood so close that he’d been able to hear it — perhaps hear wasn’t the right word, because it wasn’t a sound, not exactly.
If it had been a sound, perhaps he might have been able to bear it.
Instead, it was a cold, ringing silence, like the silence after a door closed, after a bell stopped pealing. It was a silence that echoed, that permeated every part of him and rang cold in his rib cage, in his skull, in his soul.
There was no sound from the rustling leaves, no sound from the town behind them, no sound of his grandmother’s and no sound from his own, either.
When the screaming started, a cacophony of primal howls, he’d screamed too, but his grandmother held him still and wouldn’t let him run. The shadows in front of them swam and moved, wispy claws and grasping hands reaching out toward them but not able to reach that far.
He was sobbing his eyes out when she finally led him back up the length of the garden and into the house, and he hadn’t been able to believe at the time it wasn’t yet eight — it had been winter, and the darkness had set in early.
“You never go in those woods,” she’d told him. “You don’t end up like those Hitchins twins.”
“No, Gramma,” he’d choked out through his tears, and she’d apologised and kissed him and held him so, so tightly —
Doug, or the thing that wasn’t Doug, didn’t do anything like that, didn’t reach out and grab for him, claw at his clothes, howl an unnatural howl no human throat could manage. He just stood there, patient, waiting.
If anything, it was more terrifying than the alternative.
Life, it seemed, went on after your husband died.
It didn’t seem as though it should. The house he’d lived in all his life, the one that Doug had come to join him in, felt empty in a way it never had before now. The bedroom felt half-full, and the kitchen felt half-empty.
It had felt hollow for a while after his grandmother had died, and it was just Mel and Douglas together, but they’d been ready for it, and they’d said goodbye, and it had been… Oh, of course he’d missed her, still missed her, would always miss her.
But somehow, this was different.
The house felt like… dead space. Empty space. Space.
Sometimes he felt like the ghost walking around in it, like he was the one dead, and it was a relief to go to work, but coming home again always hurt. Every time he felt as though he was pouring some of the world back into himself, he would come home and feel it hollow him out again with the force of its emptiness, but where would he go, if not here?
How could he go anywhere that wasn’t here, when he’d been here all his life?
Mel didn’t mention it to anybody. No one liked to talk about the woods, and it had been a good few years now since someone from town had gone missing. They’d found a backpacker six or seven years back, but no one had known who they were, and they’d not been able to identity the body, or at least, the clothes, and the bits of body left in them.
There were signs, of course, but who read signs?
He walked down to the end of the yard after the sun had set, and Doug smiled at him.
He wasn’t wearing the clothes he’d died in, more the ones he’d been buried in. He was wearing an old shirt, one with stars on — it had been Doug’s mother’s before it was his own, and Gramma had tailored it to fit him better. They’d lost it in Ibiza, so long ago, they’d lose it, and he almost wanted to cry looking at the bright yellow contrasting the dark blue of the blouse, because he would have forgotten it completely, if Doug wasn’t wearing it now.
“Hello,” said Doug. The voice sounded right. Mel thought it sounded right, but he wasn’t sure — how long did it take before you couldn’t tell anymore, before you forgot what the love of your life’s voice sounded like?
“What’s my name?” asked Mel.
“Melrose,” said Doug. “Stupid name. You tried to keep it secret, until I took your license so I could see.” He laughed, and the sound of it cut Mel open, because it didn’t sound right at all. The voice was right, but not the laugh.
The ghost saw his face, and even as Mel stared at him, he adjusted it until suddenly it was perfect, exactly the laugh Doug had always laughed, and Mel wanted to be sick.
“No,” he croaked out, and went inside. He closed the curtains so that he couldn’t see anymore.
He’d told Doug, he remembered, about his grandmother and the woods — they’d had that conversation in Ibiza too, far away from Little Harken, and even then they’d spoken in hushed voices in the middle of the day with the sun streaming in through the windows, curled into one another.
“I used to be friends with the Hitchins,” Doug had said.
“Really?” Mel had asked, and Doug, his gaze far away, had nodded his head.
“It’s a deadland, you know. The woods. It just… it leaks over, and it isn’t meant to do that.”
“I don’t really know what a deadland is,” Mel had admitted, and it was true — he’d only heard them mentioned in stories or occasionally on the radio, but had never gone to the effort of really trying to understand.
Doug had sighed, and he’d squeezed Mel’s hands under his own, kissed the backs of his knuckles. “You know how fae land is often in the same place as human land, but not exactly? How the different dimensions layer over one another like pieces of cloth, and that’s why you don’t cross over the boundaries in the wood? You don’t cross mushroom lines, you don’t cross moss rings, you don’t go through stone arches.”
“Sure,” Mel had replied. “But there’re no fae around us, at home — when they walk down from the mountains, from Llallwg, they have to hike for hours, and even then, they don’t even stop in Harken, just keep going.”
“There used to be,” Doug had said. “That’s what deadland is.” Dropping back on the bed, sitting more in the sun with his head back so that the golden light could pool at the base of his throat, he’d kept their fingers intertwined, his thumbs rubbing over the sides of Mel’s hands. “They mark out their land themselves, and normally, it’s land that joins together… A millennium ago, it used to be that you could walk from Cornwall all the way up to Edinburgh — or whatever they called everything then, from the midst of Cernw to the north of Alba, anyway — and never tread out of fae lands. But the way that fae land is marked, or was marked, all those years ago, sometimes, when all the fae in the… In the line of inheritance, I suppose you’d call it, die…”
He’d sighed, swallowing. “It makes the land go bad. Because of how connected fae are to their territory, their land, all their ancestry there, that’s one thing, but it’s not the land itself — it’s the magic that they weave around it and through it, to create the boundaries, to make the land itself thick and rich with magic, it needs anchorage, you know? It needs living anchorage. It doesn’t happen so much for new places, but when it’s land that’s been maintained in a dimensional pocket for years and years, for centuries, and all the blood dies off with no transference, the magic sours. It splits, becomes unstable, and suddenly it isn’t just a walled-off dimension on top of another — suddenly those walls are all gateways instead, to places that are so weird they can’t really be called places. Afterlives, according to some mythologies and stories — and so, deadland.”
“You learn that at school?” asked Mel.
“It was like… a footnote in an introduction to fae enchantment styles. An offhand comment a lecturer made — it freaked me the fuck out, because it sounded so familiar, and I looked into it after.”
“Why does it happen? Like, why exactly does there need to be anchorage?”
“I don’t know, there’s different theories. It’s all to do with, um, dimensional transition and magical flow and spirit dynamics, it’s a bit above my paygrade. It’s always fucking dangerous, I know that, but deadlands aren’t normally as bad as ours. Most deadlands are fucked up all times of the day, and are only more dangerous at night because of the darkness or the phases of the moon, but ours is almost completely safe in the daytime — but that extreme transition, it’s, uh. It’s more of a sign of greater instability than anything else.”
Doug had been shaking.
His hands in Mel’s had begun to tremble, and even whispering to each other, sitting in the sun, when a door had slammed downstairs they’d both jumped a mile.
“Breakfast?” Mel had suggested, and they’d put aside the deadland for the time being.
It was there again.
Mel stood at the kitchen sink, watching the end of the garden. The Doug-thing in the shadows of the wood’s edge looked back at him, smiled, and waved in a friendly, casual way.
Mel went to the pub.
“We’re not meant to serve triples,” said Clint, but he poured the vodka into a pint glass anyway. As if to somehow make it in line with drinking regulations, he poured a bottle of pink lemonade on top, and garnished the glass with a pink cocktail umbrella.
“Do you do this for everyone?” asked Mel as he slid a bill over the bar.
“Just you.”
“Kinda homophobic, isn’t it? All the pink?” Clint blustered, obviously not knowing how to respond, and he only deflated when Mel smiled a tired smile at him. “Thanks,” he said.
Clint exhaled, crossing his arms over his chest. “Doing okay?” he asked haltingly.
“No.”
Clint was quiet for a second as Mel sipped at his drink, dipping glasses into the brushes over the sink before he set them onto the tray to wash. There weren’t many in the pub — it was always quiet on a Monday.
“There’s no timeline for drink, you know,” said Clint gently. “Especially not when you’re married, when it’s your spouse. That’s… you know, it’s a big thing. No one expects you to bounce back right away — honestly, I think everyone’s surprised you’ve gone back to work so quick.”
“It’s not that,” said Mel.
“Oh,” said Clint frowning, and looked at him very seriously. “Shit, then — ”
“We shouldn’t talk about it,” said Mel.
Clint looked even more alarmed. “Oh, Mel,” he said. “Are you okay? Is there anything I can — ”
“Um,” said Mel, and cleared his throat. He spoke a little slower, more emphatically: “I mean, we shouldn’t talk about it, Clint. You’ve been in my house, you know what the yard backs onto.”
Clint went a little pale. “You went in?” he asked.
Mel shook his head.
Clint looked a little sick, and asked, “You hear… you hear the music?”
Mel frowned. “Music?”
Clint shivered, and shook his head hard, like if he did it hard enough he’d shake out the memory. “I always hear music when I have to go too close. Like, uh, like fucking… You know whenever the carnival is in town at Harken racecourse, and you can hear the music on the wind? It’s like that, distant and distorted. Fucks me right up.”
“I never hear music,” said Mel quietly. “I haven’t heard anything in years — I don’t go to the end of the yard at night, and so long as I don’t look too hard, it doesn’t normally bother me.”
“Don’t know how you can live there, so close,” muttered Clint. “Even when we were kids, it scared me. I used to be terrified you’d want to host a sleepover, same as when you slept over at one of ours.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Mel. “That’s why I never offered to host.”
“Oh,” said Clint, looking ashamed. “Sorry. That I never said.”
“You never had to,” murmured Mel. “I didn’t want to make any of you guys feel bad.”
Clint sipped the glass of squash he had behind the bar, and asked, “So… so what is it?”
“I don’t know,” said Mel. “You know what the woods are? You know what deadland is?”
“In Final Fantasy XII there’s this level where, okay, so the whole game is a metaphor for Western imperialism and the oil trade following on from the Gulf War, and there’s this metaphor for nuclear weaponry that — ”
“It’s not that,” interrupted Mel.
“Okay.”
“Harken Woods, they’re a deadland. That’s… what it is, apparently. All the magic goes haywire because it gets stuck in like, a loop? Because the fae that used to be connected to the land die, it’s almost like the magic can’t flow anymore, and because it starts this feedback loop, it breaks boundaries between dimensions, between, fuck, ideas of dimensions. It frenzies spirits and latent energies, and other shit, too, so you end up with… With twisted shit. That’s why it’s so… bad.”
Clint looked like he very much regretted asking, and would like to go back to talking about his videogames. “Okay…?” he prompted in a tiny voice.
“It’s bad,” repeated Mel. “It’s not meant to be… intelligent.”
Clint stared at him.
“It’s… It’s like a mirror, right? It feeds off of fear, and uncertainty. It’s hungry, it’s primal, it gets right to the core of whatever your deepest fears, passions, urges are — that’s why it’s usually violent, and why most people get killed, because that’s what they’re most scared of, and deadland craves life, most of all, which means craving magic, it means craving strong emotions like terror and rage and love. That’s why most people end up getting killed. And when they don’t get killed, they end up like Dicky Diggory.”
“I love Dicky,” said Clint.
“So do I,” said Mel. “But you can’t deny she’s not like she used to be, and it’s not just ’cause her hair went white.”
Clint drained his glass. Mel watched the slight tremble of his fingers on the glass, the bob of his throat, which was shining with sweat. “So it’s… Is it intelligent? With you?”
Mel swallowed, and drank some more. The vodka was strong, even with the pink lemonade watering it down, and it burned as he swallowed.
“That’s kind of a compliment, right?” asked Clint shakily. “I mean, if it mirrors you, and you made it smart.”
“I don’t think I made it smart, Clint,” said Mel. “It’s fucked up.”
“Maybe you should move.”
“I can’t move, It’s my house. I couldn’t live anywhere else.”
“I could sleep over,” offered Clint shakily, and Mel smiled.
“You don’t have to sleep over, mate.”
“Oh, thank God.”
“How well did you know the Hitchins twins?” Mel had asked when they were on the breach together, both of them fucking exhausted because they were too old to rave like they’d used to, and it had been years since either of them had taken E. The hangover was hard-hitting, and the two of them were synchronised in their struggle through the resulting fog.
“We were best friends,” Doug had replied, pulling the beach umbrella further over their faces, although it did little to block out the painful brightness of the sun reflecting on the yellow sands. “We went everywhere together?”
“Everywhere?” repeated Mel. “Even…?”
“I left,” said Doug. His voice had been quiet and laced with regret. “He… God. Fuck. Do you remember that their dog went missing?”
“No.”
“It got forgotten in everything else,” said Doug softly. “Their dog got out on their way to the vet, slipped its collar because it saw a rabbit or something and ran off. They ended up finding him a week after… He was fine. It turned out he’d run right up one of the field paths toward Llallwg, and he’d ended up on that farm, you know the woman with the alpacas? He ended up staying with her, in the end.” He’d picked up a bottle of sun cream, tapped it with his nails. “Because, uh, because she didn’t see the posters ’til after, and you know, the Hitchins wanted to move after, and. Yeah. But the dog was missing, that was why we were in the woods. We were calling for him, looking for him. We were terrified what would happen to him if he was in there when night came along.”
“You’re gonna burn,” said Mel, and Doug had handed him the bottle, let Mel top up his shoulders as he kept talking.
There were animals in the Harken Woods. He’d never seen any, even now, but Mel knew there were birds, squirrels, deer — but they didn’t live in the woods. There were no fox dens, no rabbit burrows, no nests, no badger setts, and pets and livestock almost never strayed into the woods on overcast days, let alone at night. He’d heard all sorts of stories about backpackers who weren’t looking at the signs being saved by their poodle point blank refusing to go into the woods.
“I had an alarm set on my watch, and it went off like half an hour before sunset, and we walked out of the woods, came out by the garden centre. But… Fuck.” Doug’s head had dropped down to his forearms, and Mel’s hands had gone still where they were gently working cream into his back and his shoulders.
“You don’t have to tell me, you know,” he said softly. “I only asked ‘cause… You don’t have to — ”
“I want to. I just haven’t told anyone before- do you mind if I tell you? I can stop if it freaks you out.
“No,” said Mel quietly, dimly aware of what that meant, that he’d never told anybody before, but that he wanted to tell Doug now. Even if Mel wasn’t shivering at the thought, even if Mel really didn’t think he could take hearing more, he’d have told him to keep going anyway. “Go ahead, babe.”
“We came out and it was… evening. The sun was setting down, and the sky was so red, Rosie, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Maybe that’s just the way I remember it, because of what happened, but I swear as we came out of the woods I looked up at the sky, so red it was almost not red anymore, red with depth in it, that I knew it was all going to go wrong, except I didn’t, I can’t have, or I never would have let them…”
Mel had been barely able to breathe, listening to him, almost scared to let out the breaths he was holding, in case he broke some kind of spell, in case he made it so the things in Harken Woods could hear them across the English Channel.
“Ben stops, right? Me and Myrtle are already halfway down the hill, down that field that used to be wheat but now they only use it for pasture, and we look back at Ben and he’s just… standing there. Stock still, still like how a deer or a rabbit goes when it’s listening for something, when maybe it’s heard something you can’t. I felt so sick, my heart was pounding in my chest. We say, hey, Benjy, come on, we’ve got to go.
“And Benjy, he says, No, no, I think I hear him — that’s him, right? And he turns around, looks over his shoulder. That’s Dash, he says.”
“You couldn’t hear it?”
“Couldn’t hear a damn thing,” whispered Doug. “If there was something to hear at all. Myrtle couldn’t hear it either, and we looked at each other, and I could… I could see him as he turned back toward the trees, turned his whole body, and I could feel my heart in my throat, in my ears, because I could see it. The darkness getting… getting darker. You know, how it starts off deep in the woods and you see that really thick, plummy darkness just spread outwards, come closer and closer, like a shot in a movie where the lights start going out along the corridor?”
“I’ve seen it do that,” Mel had said quietly. “Used to glance out of my window while I was going homework in the evenings and it was like I’d be hypnotised by it. There’s nowhere else you ever see darkness go solid like that.”
“Yeah,” said Doug. His voice sounded hoarse, even more so than from just the hangover, but when Mel offered him a bottle of water, he shook his head. “So I say, Benjy, don’t. You know it’s not real, you know it’s a trick. That’s not Balderdash. He’s freaking out, jumping on his feet, his eyes all wide and scared, his hands trembling, he says, No, Doug, no, I hear him. He sounds hurt, like he’s fallen, like he can’t move, we have to help him.”
Sniffing, Doug reached up and wiped at his red-rimmed, tired eyes, now shining with tears. “He fucking ignores us. Me and Myrtle. He ran in, and he was just gone. We stood there for a long time, me and Myrtle, away from the trees, and she’s crying, tears dripping down her face, just has her hand over her mouth. I said we had to go, that we had to tell somebody, and it was like I broke a spell, because she started shouting for him — shouting his name, shouting Balderdash’s, screaming for him to come back. And every time she shouted, she stepped forward, leaned forward, like it would help her see, like she was craning her neck to see, as if being closer could help you see through darkness like that.”
Mel leaned in, put his body half on top of Doug’s, his forehead against the side of his neck, his shoulder.
“It grabbed her,” whispered Doug. “Every step I took further away, almost falling down the fucking hill, she got closer, screaming his name, louder and louder. She wasn’t by the tree’s edge, not under the canopy, she must have still been four or five feet out from under it, and it was like it just… widened, like an opening fucking maw. Swallowed her whole. She was halfway through his name and it cut off like she’d been dunked in water, went completely silent. Everything was silent, for a second, so quiet I thought I was maybe dead too.”
He heaved in a harsh, wet breath, gripping tightly at Mel, one of his hands wrapped tight around his forearm, the other reaching back to grip his shoulder.
“The trees started fucking screaming, then, all of them, and I fucking rolled down that hill, strained my ankle and ran limping all the way to their parents’ doorstep sobbing that I’d tried to tell Benjy not to, that I tried to stop them.”
“They didn’t blame you, did they?”
“God, no, no, I don’t think so,” said Doug, swallowing hard. “But they were weird with my parents. After. And with me. My mother never liked to talk about it much, but I guess it’s weird, knowing your friend loves your kid, but wishes it had been them instead of their own.”
“Yeah,” said Mel softly. “I get that.” He couldn’t remember how long they laid that for, Mel wrapped around Doug and the two of them crammed onto one lounger, their legs tangled together, Mel’s lips against the back of Doug’s neck, Doug’s head turned in toward him.
“You’re gonna give me a funny tan lying on my back like this, Rosie,” said Doug.
“Fuck off, then,” Mel retorted, rolling off him. “I know where I’m not wanted.”
Doug laughed through wet eyes.
When Mel finally went home, stumbling as he went, Doug was there at the bottom of the garden, waiting.
Mel slept with every light in the house on.
A few weeks later, weak and lonely and full of grief — he’d had two nightmares and a wank in that order — he dragged a plastic chair down to the end of the garden and sat his arse down.
“Hi, Mel,” said Doug.
“What are you?” asked Mel.
“Good question. Not sure. Ghost, maybe? I don’t think I classify as a revenant. I didn’t take the haunting and manifestations module at uni, so I really don’t know.”
“Liar,” said Mel. “Try again.”
Doug did that little confusing moue he always used to, and Mel wanted to slap it off his face. “Mel, I — ”
“You’re not a ghost,” said Mel. “I know you’re not a ghost because you’re inconsistent — ghosts are when a spirit is imprinted on by a human’s energy and ends up unconsciously or unknowingly mirroring what that energy was in life, not when a spirit — or ghoul — puts on a human imprint to try to trick someone. Doug knew that, by the way. He didn’t take the module, but that nerdy prick still did the reading.”
Doug smiled for a second, and his dull eyes flashed. It was wholly unnatural, and Mel did his best to suppress his shudder.
“I’m not a spirit,” he said coaxingly. “I’m your husband, Mel — I just want to come home to you.”
“Why him? Why me?”
“Mel,” said Doug, sounding wounded. “Mel, I just want to — ”
“Come home, yeah, I got that, I’m almost convinced, blah blah blah. Why did you pick that outfit?”
“It’s my favourite,” said Doug, his tone a little bit too hard, now, almost churlish.
“It’s wrong.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is,” said Mel. “Because we lost that shirt ten years ago.”
Doug’s lip curled. “It’s still my favourite,” he said, lips twisting. “Do you not love me anymore, because you lost me months ago? Are you done grieving already?”
“Well, look, Doug,” said Mel sarcastically, “why should I grieve at all? I haven’t lost you yet.”
“Let me come home, Mel,” said Doug, and he did wounded well, knew exactly what inflection to put on the words to make them really ache. “Won’t you tell me I can come home? Won’t you let me cross?”
“Why do you want to come to me?” asked Mel. “Why don’t you want me to come to you?”
“No,” said Doug, too quickly.
“No?” Mel repeated.
Doug stared at him, his eyes too hard, his face slightly wrong — it was the correct face but worn too woodenly, still in the wrong places and in motion in others, like he’d peeled Doug’s face right off and was wearing it as a mask but didn’t know how to puppet it right. Mel swallowed down the urge to gag.
“I don’t want you to get hurt,” said Doug. “You could die in here.”
“But if I died, Doug,” Mel said, almost simpering, “I could be with you.”
The thing in the trees shifted unnaturally, its shoulders clicking as it pulled them back, and for just a second its eyes and mouth were a solid black, fading into the darkness behind it.
“Oops,” said Mel. “You’re dropping character, sweetheart. Doug was always shit in school plays, too.”
“I miss you,” said Doug tightly, his eyes and his face popping back to what they were meant to be. “Let me come home.”
“I don’t know why you picked me or him,” said Mel, standing. “But — bad choice. Bet on a better horse next time.”
As he walked back to the house, the trees behind him began to scream so loudly he could feel it in his bones, and down the hill he could see other people’s lights turning on: they could hear it too.
He dug his earplugs out of the bedside drawer, and slept with the curtains closed.
“Did you hear that last night?” asked Clint the next night.
Mel didn’t say anything.
Clint said, “Fucking Hell. That’s — it’s to do with your thing. Isn’t it?”
“Guess so,” said Mel, staring into the depths of his cocktail. Clint had been experimenting, and the results were surprisingly palatable — so much so that it was maybe a bit of a hazard for Mel’s liver, which was already under pressure of recent.
“What did you do?”
“Put earplugs in,” said Mel. “You don’t normally hear it out this way, but it’s often enough in that house that I’m already prepared.”
“Jesus, Mel,” muttered Clint. “You know that’s not what I meant, but that’s fucking spooky as shit.”
“I don’t know what it is,” Mel said. “But it’s not right, I can tell you that. It’s… it’s fucked up, somehow. I don’t know.”
“You’re damn right it’s fucked up,” said Clint. “Hi, Dicky.”
“Hey, Clint,” said Dicky as she sat down next to Mel. “Can I get a gin and cranberry?”
Dicky Diggory was a big woman, a bodybuilder with freckles on her square cheeks. She’d had red hair when they were at school, but her hair, which she wore cropped short, was white now. Her driving instructor’s brake had broken at the top of the hill one evening, and they’d crashed into a ditch in Harken Woods just as the sun was setting.
She’d broken her leg and been knocked unconscious in the crash — they’d gotten her out in the morning.
The driving instructor had been dead. He’d managed to get out of the car, first, but then…
“You hear it last night, Dick?” asked Clint.
“Yeah,” said Dicky. “Never heard it scream before. It usually laughs at me.” Her hair was curly, and its white colour was pure and surprisingly bright. All the pigment had been scared out of it — her eyebrows, too.
“Do you remember the crash?” asked Mel.
“Mel,” hissed Clint sharply.
“Not really,” said Dicky. Her eyes weren’t really focused on either of them — they always seemed to be a dimension or two away. “I remember how black it was when we went in. The noise… It only lasted for a second, but it terrified me. I screamed when I woke up in the morning.”
“You were unconscious the whole night? Until dawn?”
“My doctors thought it was a survival mechanism. My, uh, magical instincts or whatever knew I was safer unconscious than awake, or some shit. Why?”
“It’s been bothering me lately,” said Mel. “It laughs at you?”
Dicky nodded.
“He does,” she said.
Mel swallowed. “Who?”
“Shane Hardy,” said Dicky quietly. “My driving instructor. It’s his laugh — he was laughing when the, uh, when I… I was trying to hit the brake and so was he and neither of us was… He stopped laughing. He started screaming. So now, the woods, they laugh at me.”
“Simple,” Mel murmured to himself. “Like a mirror.”
“Mel says the screaming last night was for him.”
“Jesus fuck, Clint,” said Mel. “You know a barkeep is meant to keep secrets?”
“You didn’t say it was a secret.”
Dicky, unmoved, sipped at her drink. “You had this before?”
“Nah,” said Mel. “It’s nothing like I’ve heard about before. It’s not just normal predation stuff. Normally the wood is like, uh, like an angler fish, gets people scared and close, and then bites. This isn’t like that.”
“It’s smart,” Dicky said softly. Her voice was a little hollow, a little separate to her body, her eyes staring forward. “It’s smart, and that scares you. It isn’t human, but it’s too smart.”
“Yeah.”
Dicky blinked, seeming to come back to herself. She said, after a moment of thought and deliberation, “Sucks to be you, buddy.”
“Yeah,” Mel muttered. “Tell me about it.”
“First boy I ever kissed was this guy called Sam,” said Mel. It was still pretty early days in their relationship, a few months in, and the two of them were out in Bristol for the day. Doug kept pointing out all the different kinds of stone, and saying where they’d come from, what they were called, what the differences were in their textures and weights and magical properties, even in the mundie buildings. “It was on this camping trip we took in Year 10 — well, not really camping. We were all in bunks in some shitty green prefab.”
“Mine was Benjy Hitchins,” said Doug.
“Oh,” said Mel.
“Yeah,” said Doug.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
They’d never talked that much about it, but Mel wished he had now, because in the dream he’d just had — and he almost never remembered his dreams — Ben Hitchins was kissing Doug right in front of him, both of them turning to shadows in places, and he couldn’t break them apart.
He’d booked his week’s holiday because twice they’d pushed him to use up the days, but he didn’t have anything to do, anywhere he wanted to go, and he didn’t want to stay here, either.
“I miss you,” said Doug. “I want to come home, Mel. I just want to sit with you and watch that stupid show, that reality bullshit with the cakes, and be home with you.”
“Who was your first kiss?” asked Mel, sitting back in the chair, way back from the boundary.
Doug didn’t like that question. He stared at Mel, face blank, for a few moments, and his voice was stiff when he said, “Benjy Hitchins.”
“Who was mine?” asked Mel.
Doug liked that one even less. He was still for a moment, unnaturally still with his wooden face that wasn’t his, and then he forced a smile. “What, like I’m supposed to remember everything? As if death doesn’t come with amnesia.”
“You’re so shit at this,” said Mel. “That’s the fucking pathetic thing about it. Whatever you are, you’re not even that good at being it, and yet you keep trying the same thing like I’m gonna get stupider or something.”
He did not regret saying it.
But when the wood went utterly black and tried to reach out toward him, screaming as black tendrils extended from the trees, way too far off to reach him and still terrifyingly fucking close, he nearly pissed himself and ran inside.
The next night, Doug was there as usual, and almost pretended nothing had happened.
“It sounds like a ghost,” said Clint.
“It isn’t a ghost,” said Mel. “A ghost is a specific phenomenon, and even when they’re intelligent, it’s just a spirit who’s gotten confused and taken up a dead person’s personality. It’s not like this.”
“A demon?”
“A de — Clint, you play too many mundie videogames. It’s not a fucking demon.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure, I actually paid attention in my magical biology classes, unlike you.”
“I paid attention.”
“Yeah, to Mrs Granger’s tits, not to any of the material.”
“There was some good material there,” said Clint, and Mel laughed. “They were boring classes, Mel.”
“Uh huh.”
“What do you think it is?”
“Something twisted,” Mel muttered. “Something that wants to hurt me, and me specifically, I think.”
“Well, what the fuck did you do?”
“I don’t know,” said Mel quietly. “I don’t fucking know.”
“I’m sorry I’m not what you wanted,” said Doug quietly. “I’m sorry I’m not the same as I was but I’m trying so hard to just… just come back, and the longer I’m here, the harder it is, Mel. Just tell me I can come home. Tell me I can come home to you.”
Mel pretended to hesitate.
He stood there a moment, two metres back from the forest edge, and he looked at the Doug-thing meaningfully, his own eyes wide. Leaning forward with his mouth open, his eyes flitting away, he could see the way Doug cleaned toward him too —
And then he dropped it, and scowled at Doug as usual.
“I’m not a fucking idiot,” said Mel bluntly. “Same as yesterday, you stupid little bitch.”
The Doug thing faded and bubbled in front of him, going between shadowed and raging and wooden at once.
“Guess this isn’t as easy as you thought it’d be, preying on a widower to take you in.”
The Doug thing scowled at him. “I thought you loved me,” he said, his voice a little wrong now, a little deep and thick and heavy with magic. “But you’re glad I’m gone, aren’t you, Rosie? Going to go back to fucking the bank clerks now I’m gone, fuck some twink in our bed again? In our shower? Over my desk?”
“Better,” said Mel. “I’m fundamentally a pretty angry person, so trying to lean on that anger, that insecurity, is definitely better than the soft grieving angle, and breaking out the nickname, that’s good. That’s an improvement. Interesting that you know about me cheating, but not the other stuff.”
Doug stared at him, his lips scowling, but his eyes full of uncertainty.
“You know we went to therapy after all that, right?” asked Mel. “You know he forgave me? You know we had a fucking threesome when we went on holiday the year before last?”
The Doug-thing did not know that, it seemed, because it looked pissed.
Mel took a sip of his drink. “You know, maybe if you told me the truth, then I’d let you out,” said Mel. “That’s what you want, right? It’s not about being let in — it’s about being let out.”
Doug, for the first time since they’d started all this, disappeared into the darkness.
“Huh,” said Mel, and went back inside.
When he went out to the grave that Friday, Alice was there, huddled in her coat and staring down at Doug’s gravestone. When she saw Mel, she gave him a small, tired smile, and he leaned in to give her a hug, squeezing her tightly in his arms.
His bouquet of yellow daisies was laid down against hers.
“How are you holding up?” she asked quietly.
“Not too great,” Mel murmured, putting his hands in his pockets. “Haven’t been sleeping too well. You?”
“Me neither.”
“I, uh — ” He didn’t want to torture her, didn’t want to make it worse for her, not when she’d lost Dane a few years back, and losing Doug had come so soon after. Mel had never wanted kids and neither had Doug, but he couldn’t imagine what it would’ve been like, losing Doug and their only kid in the same few years. “Could I ask you abut something?”
It was early in the morning, sun bright, the day surprisingly warm.
“Anything,” said Alice softly, and reached up to squeeze his shoulder. He wondered if he should feel guilty, not calling her more often, not talking to her much, but she was travelling a lot these days, did a lot of tours abroad, on her own, and he never knew when…
Maybe that was just an excuse. Probably.
“Doug was friends with the Hitchins twins,” he said. “When he was a kid.”
“They were popular,” said Alice quietly, “but yes, Doug was best friends with them. You’d not know, of course, you were only, what, eight or nine when they went missing? Doug had just turned thirteen.” She sighed, huddling further into her coat and shaking her head. “They were good kids. Myrtle was so protective of Ben, and Benjy, he was… He was always polite, but in a cheeky way, you know? Always pushing his luck, asking for seconds, sneaking stuff out of sight. He was whip smart, always kept Doug on his toes, and Doug used to love that as much as he loved telling him off.”
“Doug told me about their dog.”
“Balderdash,” said Alice, and sighed. “Oh, I forgot about him. Whenever Benjy snuck into the house, he’d do it by climbing on top of Dane’s compost shed, then onto the shed roof, and then through Doug’s bedroom window. Dash would always give them away — as soon as Benjy passed him through, he’d get so excited he’d start barking.”
Mel smiled, but didn’t laugh, even as Alice laughed to herself, staring into the middle distance, her eyes misty.
“They were looking for him the night the twins…” She trailed off. “He had such bad nightmares about it after, Doug. Ben calling him from the woods, Myrtle in pieces on the doorstep. He had such a vivid imagination as a kid, and he took sleeping pills for a while.”
“He still had insomnia from time to time,” said Mel. “Nightmares now and then. But never anything constant. Disordered sleep, he’d call it, instead of a sleeping disorder, but I don’t think that’s a thing.”
“Why do you ask?”
“The woods,” said Mel. “Nothing big. They just screamed this week, really loud. Made me think about it.”
Alice shuddered. “I don’t know how you can live so close.”
“I’ve always lived there,” said Mel, shrugging his shoulders. “He told me, you know, about Benjy Hitchins being his first kiss.”
Alice laughed, shaking her head. “That doesn’t surprise me,” she murmured. “He told me once his first kiss was when he was fourteen, but I never did quite believe it.” She slowly shook her head, exhaling. “I used to worry about him a lot, after all that, me and Dane even thought of moving, but he said we had to stay, that he loved this place, no matter what had happened here. He said he’d stay until uni, and then he’d go, really go… and then he met you.” She was looking at him with her eyes full of warmth, and Mel put his arm around her, giving her another squeeze.
“I miss him,” said Mel. “I never knew I could miss someone so fucking much. Does it get easier?”
“No,” said Alice. “No, it doesn’t. You just sort of learn to live with the pain.”
For a long time, the two of them stood there together, widow and widower, mother-in-law and son.
“You can always call me, you know,” said Mel. “If you ever need to talk.”
Alice laughed, leaned her cheek into his chest. “That’s funny, Mel,” she said. “You took the words right out of my mouth.”
“Hullo, Mel,” said Doug.
“How deep does the deadland go?” asked Mel, and Doug stared at him, tilting his head to one side, his lip curling.
Doug never made an expression like that when he was alive. “Deep,” he said, in a voice that wasn’t his.
Mel leaned back in his shitty plastic chair, and asked softly, “Were you human once?”
“Let me come to you,” said Doug, a little more desperately than usual, which told Mel he was on the right track.
“You’re not him.”
“But I’m almost him,” said Doug. “You’re alone — you feel lonely. You want him back, and you can’t have him, but you can have me.”
“I don’t want you. And I don’t want him back either, not enough to force him out of the ground because I miss him.”
“Then you never loved him,” said Doug.
“I do love him — I’ll always love him. I love him more than I love me.”
Doug curled his lip even more, almost snarling now.
“You believe in an afterlife?” asked Mel. “Is that what this is for you?”
“I’m not dead,” said Doug in a low and unholy growl.
“But you’re stuck in deadland,” said Mel.
“No,” said Doug.
Mel blinked. “No?”
“I’m not stuck,” said Doug.
Mel huffed out a low, derisive laugh, and spread his arms wide. “Prove it.”
“Invite me,” said Doug.
“Aw,” said Mel, putting his hands down. “Guess you’re trapped there after all.”
The sweeping tendrils almost got him, came within three inches of swiping his ankle, and he swore, shuffling his chair back another six inches on the grass before he abandoned it and walked back up to the house.
Doug’s face was just two eyes in the darkness as he shut the door behind him, his skin soaked with sweat, his heart beating hard in his chest.
It was raining the next day he was in the pub, and Clint was pleased when he only asked for one measure of vodka instead of three.
“Still getting haunted?” asked Clint.
“Yeah, mate,” said Mel. “I don’t think it’s just going to clear up on its own.”
“Fucking creepy,” he said. “You okay?”
“I’m okay,” said Mel. “As okay as I can be.”
“A marriage is a contract, you know,” said Dicky as she came to sit down. “’Til death do you part, in a Christian ceremony. Everything that comes after is just a gentlemen’s agreement.”
“Creepy, Dicky,” remarked Clint.
“What is?” asked Dicky, a sheen seeming to fade from her eyes.
“What does it feel like, when you zone out like that?” asked Mel, and Dicky turned to glance at him, surprised, her eyebrows raising.
“Feels… distant,” she said. “Like when you’re trying to pay attention but you can’t find your focus. Do you hear it?”
“The woods?”
“No,” said Dicky. “No, not the woods. The rest. The beyond. The deadland. It’s so loud sometimes, keeps me up at night, like I’m feeling the throbbing heartbeat of its very core. It’s so loud sometimes. Keeps me up at night.” She didn’t seem to realise she’d repeated herself.
Swallowing, Mel shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not exactly.”
“Have you ever been in the woods at night?”
“No,” said Mel. “But I’ve been close. Stood at the edge, or seen it reach toward me. Is everything in there dead?”
“Not everything,” Dicky said. “There’s a time for all things to die, but there are delays, too.”
“Ben Hitchins?” asked Mel.
Dicky’s lips parted, and she looked very far away now. “Benjy,” she said quietly. “I used to hang out with him sometimes — with Myrtle, really, but Benjy would be there too, and Doug. He was a nice guy.”
“Is he dead?” asked Mel, his voice a little louder now.
“He’s in the deadland now,” said Dicky. “Why, is he trying to call you in?”
“Something’s been asking to come out,” said Mel. “I don’t know what.”
“Oh,” said Dicky, and considered this as she nursed her drink, thinking very deeply. “I don’t think anything could come out, not for very long. Even invited, it couldn’t last — no more than a fish could last out of water.”
“Do you dream of the woods?” asked Mel.
“I try not to remember my dreams,” Dicky informed him sagely. “They’re not always made to be remembered — in the way that things can’t survive outside of the deadland, a dream can’t always survive upon waking.”
Mel realised that Clint had gone still, looking between the two of them with a look of horror and mild fear, and when he realised Mel was looking, he said, “You two are something else. Fucking weird as shit.”
“Sorry,” said Dicky.
“You can stay over mine one night if you want,” said Mel. “Get looped in, get some context.”
“Fuck that,” retorted Clint, and when Mel laughed, Dicky joined in.
“There used to be fae here,” said Mel. “You know that?”
The thing wearing Doug’s face and his old favourite shirt looked at him from the treeline, its mouth twisted in a scowl. “What would you know about it?”
Thinking about what Dicky had said, Mel said, experimentally, “Fae like contracts. Contracts have a lot of power between people, most of all in fae land. Even deadland.”
The thing that wasn’t Doug tried to keep its face neutral, but its mouth still twisted and its eyes still narrowed.
“You know Dicky Diggory, right?” asked Mel.
The thing stayed quiet.
“You know the Hitchins twins too? Benjy? Myrtle?”
The monster stared.
“You kill her?” asked Mel. “Myrtle Hitchins?”
“Let me in,” said the monster. “Please.” Its — his — voice cracked.
“I hear they found her body in pieces,” said Mel, trying to find the best point to put pressure on, and the thing in front of him stared out at him from its cloud of protective shadow, like a kid swaddled in blankets. “Just bits of her, torn to shr — ”
“Stop it!” hissed the darkness, voice thick and deep and echoing… and fragile.
Mel leaned back in his seat, taking a sip from his glass.
“He should never have married you,” growled the shadow. “You cheated on him and you never understood him and you died and you didn’t do anything!”
Mel should have been hurt by that, but there was something about the crackle in his voice, the pained expression that Mel couldn’t quite see under the shadow.
“There’s nothing I could have done,” he said, surprised by how gentle his voice was. “It was a blood clot. None of us knew anything about it until it killed him. You know that, right? You know it was just… random? That it wasn’t anyone’s fault, not mine, not yours, not anybody’s?”
The shadow didn’t breathe, exactly, but it seemed to exhale, seemed powerless and worked up somehow, and Mel didn’t know why it made his heart pang.
“Let me in,” said the thing.
“What will you do if I do? Kill me?”
A hesitation, and then quickly, “No!”
The darkness wasn’t very good at lying.
“I miss him too,” said Mel. “He was the love of my life, and I don’t think I’ll ever love someone else like I loved him — or be loved quite like that.”
“You’re not crying,” said the monster accusatively, his tone sharp and angry.
“I don’t cry much,” admitted Mel. “I want to, sometimes, but the tears won’t come. Doug used to say it’s to do with hormones, how some people cry easy and some people don’t.”
“Is cheating a hormonal thing too?”
“You want me to tell you?” asked Mel.
The monster hesitated again, for longer this time, like it didn’t know the answer — it didn’t expect it go like this, for Mel to control the situation. Mel controlled most situations whether he meant to or not, and in most of them, he did mean to.
“Yes,” it said. He said. His voice was soft and quiet.
“I couldn’t get it up,” said Mel. “With him. And I was embarrassed I needed a pill to get my dick hard enough for him, and that just made it worse, so I fucked other people. Thought it’d help.”
The darkness stared at him — he could only stare, because it was just eyes now, eyes in the deep darkness, and they weren’t Doug’s eyes anymore. They weren’t eyes he’d ever seen very closely before, he didn’t think.
“He didn’t find out or walk in or something,” said Mel. “He didn’t catch me in the act. I told him.”
“You argued,” said the darkness. “You — you shouted, and threw plates. Both of you.”
“Uh huh,” said Mel. “We did. Then, once we were done acting like fucking cavemen, we went to this couples counselling thing, uh, at the church, and talked it out. Reverend Pickering’s pretty good at stuff like that.”
“The werewolf?”
Mel laughed. “Reverend Pickering isn’t a werewolf,” he murmured. “That’s just a stupid rumour some kids like to spread around.”
“So you talked to the Reverend and your dick worked again?”
Mel snorted. “Not exactly. It wasn’t that quick. I got my prostate checked, made sure it was just psychological. I kept taking pills for a while. Worked through it until I didn’t need them anymore.”
“What made it? The psychological thing?”
“Uh,” said Mel.
“You said you’d tell me!” snapped the darkness, abruptly petulant.
“I’m telling you, I’m telling you,” said Mel. “I’m thinking, that’s all. Part of it was me. I was getting older and putting on weight and I felt like I wasn’t, uh, wasn’t sexy anymore, like I used to be. Kept getting so distracted by it that I couldn’t get it up anymore. We skipped Ibiza that year and we didn’t party as much anymore.”
“You got old and fat and your dick stopped working,” said the darkness bluntly.
“Sure,” Mel said, chuckling. “And, uh, we got really into this one… It was at a BnB in Blackpool a few years ago, and we got too into things, got carried away. I tried to pick him up and my back gave out, and I dropped him, too.”
“You dropped him?”
“He was okay,” said Mel. “But he knocked his head pretty hard — didn’t knock himself out, but it was a head wound and it bled a fucking lot. I felt bad. Old Rev said it probably triggered the worries I had after the, uh, initial trauma.” Mel spread his hands, and shrugged his shoulders. “There,” he said. “Still want to kill me?”
“You still shouldn’t have done it,” said the shadow. “Cheated on him. You hurt him.”
“I know,” said Mel. “We made it good. He forgave me. But it was still the worst thing I ever did.” He stood to his feet.
“You’re going?” demanded the darkness sharply, wantingly. He did talk like a kid, the way he demanded, almost tantrumed.
“Need to sleep, kiddo,” said Mel. “I have work tomorrow.”
It wasn’t true, but he was fucking bushed.
“Let me in,” said the shadow.
“G’night,” said Mel.
The next night, it wasn’t Doug who greeted him, but two eyes in the dark. Mel was still careful to remain well out of his reach.
“Let me in,” said the monster. “I won’t hurt you. Or kill you. I promise! I just need to cross.”
“I’m told you can’t cross for long,” said Mel. He was smoking a joint, something he hadn’t done since he and Doug could share one, and the taste of it filled his mouth. He hadn’t paid attention to what the pretty little twink had been babbling as he’d told him all about the varieties, but this one had a herbal sweetness in it — Doug had picked some fucking candyfloss bullshit one time and it had made him gag, but this was nice, sweet without being overpowering. Nonetheless, the smell was thicker than usual in his nostrils, and it felt like every toke was only half-finished, like his lungs would only take it in halfway — and he was only halfway to being high, too.
It made sense, when half his heart was gone.
He considered explaining this to the monster, and decided against it, exhaling as he let himself relax back in the chair.
“I don’t need long,” said the monster wheedlingly.
“To kill me? Ha. I bet you don’t.”
“He was fifty. Doug. When he died.”
“That’s right,” said Mel.
“How old are you?”
“Forty-seven.”
“That’s too old.”
“Too old for what?”
“For anything,” said the darkness. “To get married, or, or do anything.”
Mel considered this. “How old are you?”
“Older’n you,” was the immediate retort.
“Uh huh,” said Mel, and tapped the end of the joint, letting ash fall away from the tip. “Say, did you kill Benjy Hitchins?”
The shadow was silent.
“They never found his body,” said Mel.
“Bet they barely even looked,” spat the shadow.
“You know,” said Mel, and again he was as gentle as he could be, even though he knew he didn’t have to be — really, he didn’t have to come out here at all, except that he did. He’d always been too nosy for his own good, not to mention too sentimental. “Doug told me Benjy was his first kiss.”
“So?” asked the shadow.
“So, Doug didn’t have his first kiss ’til he was fourteen,” said Mel. “A year after Benjy Hitchins disappeared.”
“Let me in,” said the darkness. “I just want to stop it now, all of this. I just want to finish it.”
“Finish me?”
“You’re basically finished anyway. You’re already ancient.”
“You prefer Ben, or Benjy?”
“I’d prefer you let me in.”
“Bet you were angry,” said Mel softly. “When you thought it was your dog Dash and it tricked you in, and he wasn’t there. How far did you walk, thinking it was him? How deep did you go?”
There was silence between them.
He knew that Benjy was still there because he could see his eyes unblinking in the shadow, but the quiet didn’t bother him much. Even a half-buzz was still a nice one, and Mel felt his muscles relax, his body settled comfortably in his chair. He was patient, kept still, kept smoking.
“Really deep,” said Benjy. “I went until I couldn’t anymore.”
“Why didn’t it kill you?”
“Don’t know,” said Benjy. “I crossed a border, but it wasn’t night anymore, but then… It’s all confused in my head, but I remember. It’s thick in here. Thick and quiet and dead and magic. It’s not right.”
“It’s deadland,” said Mel softly. “You’re not meant to be there.”
Benjy was in front of him now, in Doug’s old starry shirt even though it was too big for him. Mel remembered him being a tall boy, lanky and intimidating, but now he was just a little kid in a shirt that didn’t fit him, barely even a teenager.
“Let me in,” he said. “Please. He was wispy around the edges, just like when he wore Doug’s face, fading back into the darkness behind him, not as solid as someone else could be.
“Myrtle didn’t get in as far as you did,” said Mel. “Before the spirits in the deadland…”
Benjy shook his head.
“So, you’re not dead?”
“No,” he muttered. “But I’m not alive either, not really. And I can’t leave, and I’m, I’m stuck. And I can’t die either, because you ruined it.”
“Me? I ruined it? How?”
“Because you took him,” hissed the shadow.
“Because,” Mel repeated, “I took him. You want to explain that to me?”
“No,” growled Benjy, but even though his voice went dark and thick and echoed unnaturally, it was difficult to find it frightening anymore, knowing what was underneath.
“Okay,” said Mel.
“What do you mean, okay?”
“Well, I think I have an okay handle on it,” said Mel. “You gave Doug nightmares, right? Called to him until he came to the wood’s edge, and you… What, agreed that when he died, he’d come to where you are, so that you could be together? That wherever people who’re tainted by the deadland go, he’d go there with you, or end up as a half-ghost here in these woods? Was that his first kiss, huh, the seal on that contract?
“Only then he met me, and we got married. That was a real, binding contract, not the same as a verbal agreement, let alone a verbal agreement between one nearly-dead kid on twisted fae land, and a live kid on the other side of the boundary. The assumption that Doug would go with me to whatever afterlife I’m meant to go to took precedence.”
Benjy glared at him.
“Scuppered you something awful, I bet,” said Mel in mild tones.
“You were meant to die first,” said Benjy. “You were always fatter than he was, and less good at sports, and accident prone. You should have died before he did.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” said Mel sarcastically. “No one looped me in on that memo.”
“The fuck is a memo?”
“It’s when a grown man wants to marry me instead of a thirteen-year-old dead kid.”
“Fuck you!”
“So,” said Mel, “you come kill me, and then, what, it goes back to your first dibs?”
“I’d be your rival,” said Benjy, as condescendingly as any kid could. “If we fight a duel and I defeat you, and kill you, that means my claim overwhelms yours.”
“My rival,” Mel repeated, unable not to be derisive about it. “Jesus. And what, until you get your “claim” back on him,” the air quotes were by no means necessary, but they made him feel better, “you can’t die?”
There came that useful hesitation again. Was this bad at lying when he was 13?
“Oh, I get it,” said Mel. “You could move the fuck on at any time — you could die if you wanted. Go to where Myrtle is, go to where everyone else who died in the deadlands has gone, which might well be the same as where everyone fucking goes. But you don’t want to do that, because there’s a big chance you won’t get your way — that you won’t get to keep hold of Doug.”
“He promised,” hissed Benjy.
“He was fourteen, grieving, and you invaded his fucking dreams for months, you little prick. He wasn’t exactly compos mentis!”
Benjy blinked at him, not understanding. “Com — compass…?”
“It’s a legal term. Means sane. Means you fucking manipulated him and scared him and deprived him of sleep until he had to say yes just to get you to stop.”
“No,” said Benjy sharply. “No, no — ”
“Doesn’t mean you meant to,” said Mel immediately. “You’re a kid, too, just like he was.”
“Fuck you.”
“Kid — ”
“I’m not a kid.”
“Benjy, I’m not gonna let you fucking kill me because my husband crushed on you when we were kids.”
“You took him,” snapped Benjy. “You took him and he was mine and it isn’t fair!”
“I know,” said Mel. “I know it’s not fair.”
“No, you don’t, you don’t understand anything! You got to grow up and be someone and marry him and I didn’t get to be anything, I didn’t get to do anything — ”
“What about Dicky?” asked Mel. “Helped her, didn’t you?”
Benjy hesitated, crossing his arms over his chest, looking small for a second.
“You keep her knocked out?” asked Mel softly. “Make sure everything else in that place didn’t get to her?”
“It wasn’t enough,” said Benjy. “She still came out weird.”
“She came out alive.”
“It isn’t fair,” said Benjy.
“You think it’s fair from my side? You think it’s fair Doug went down so suddenly, where none of us could do a thing about it? You think it’s fair to be a widower? Think it’s fair to be haunted by some little prick ghost who keeps trying to trick me into letting him rip my throat out?”
“I was here first,” said Benjy sharply.
“Well, I was here second,” Mel retorted, and Benjy huffed. Mel couldn’t see in the darkness, but somehow, he knew that the kid had stamped his foot.
For a second, the two of them were together in the silence, and Mel finished stubbed out his joint, half-smoked, held it in his hand. Arguably, he wasn’t compos mentis himself, but he didn’t feel fucking terrified, so there was that.
“Why don’t,” he said, almost regretting it as he started, but knowing he couldn’t say anything else, “I make you a deal?”
“A deal?”
“I’m forty-seven. Despite what you apparently fucking think, that’s not basically dead. Alice is still alive, you know, Mrs Wilson. And she’s past seventy.”
Benjy looked at him suspiciously.
“If I remarry, what happens to the contracts between you and Doug and me?”
“You’re going to remarry?” demanded Benjy indignantly.
“Haven’t ruled it out.”
“I waited for years,” said Benjy bitterly. “I did my waiting, waiting for you to die so that we could be together again, and that was for years and years, and you couldn’t even do that right.”
“Give me time,” said Mel. “Let me grieve — let me be. I’m not going to let you kill me, not yet. Torturing Doug like this worked — it hasn’t worked on me, and it’s not going to.”
“It still could,” said Benjy.
“I’m not fourteen, and I’m not crushing on you. You start that shit up again, start screaming every night, invading my dreams, anything like that, and I won’t be sticking around here. I’ll go on rambling holidays with my mother-in-law and die far away from here.”
Benjy faltered.
“What happens if I come into the wood?”
“Don’t,” said Benjy hurriedly.
“’Cause it’ll kill me? The deadland, all those feral spirits?”
“I can keep them away, a little. I don’t… I don’t taste right for them anymore. They don’t want me.”
“If I die, you have no claim on Doug,” said Mel softly. “What happens if I die in there? What happens if I run in and in, like you did? What if I run in and cross a border?”
“I don’t want to wait anymore,” said Benjy. “I want him back.”
“Well, that makes fucking two of us.”
“Five years,” said Benjy. “I’ll wait five years.”
“Twenty-five,” said Mel.
“Five!”
Mel arched an eyebrow. “Twenty-five, he repeated.”
“… Ten.”
“Twenty.”
“Five!”
“Fifteen.”
Benjy, in the darkness shrouding him, nodded his head. “Fifteen,” he said.
“Want to shake on it?”
Benjy’s eyes lit up.
“Funny guy, aren’t I?”
Benjy scowled, and then the frown softened. “You’ll talk to me?” he asked in a tiny voice.
“Sure.”
“Every night?”
“Every night I’m home. You’ve liked talking to me, right?”
“I’d like it more if you were dead.”
“Well, maybe I’ll die in front of you. Have a heart attack right here in this chair.”
“I don’t want you to do that,” snapped Benjy. “I need to do it.”
“Then I’ll do my best not to, and in the meantime, we’ll talk.”
Benjy looked at him. “Yes,” he said. “But if you don’t remarry, you have to let me kill you. If I cross over and I kill you, that means I beat you fair and square, that means Doug’s mine again, instead of yours.”
“What if I died in the deadland?”
“If you died here, you’d be here,” muttered Benjy, wrinkling his nose. “I don’t want you here.”
Mel laughed, slowly shaking his head. “Fine, fine. I’ll do my best not to die out here or in here, and in the meantime, we’ll talk.”
“Yes,” said Benjy, looking at him intently. “But if you don’t remarry, you have to let me kill you. You have to. Promise?”
Mel inhaled, dropping the other half of his joint into his front pocket. “Sure,” he said, the fingers on his other hand crossed behind his back. “Sure, Benjy, I promise.”
In the shadows, Benjy smiled.
EPILOGUE
It was raining outside.
The pub was busy, and Clint poured him another vodka from the bottle they were sharing the two of them sitting at the same table.
“You want me to go with you?” asked Clint.
Mel scratched at his beard, which was getting greyer and greyer. “You want to come with me?” asked Mel.
“No,” Clint said. “No. To be honest, just the idea of it happening on the other side of town makes me feel like I’m going to shit myself.”
“Don’t do that,” Mel advised.
“You don’t have to do it,” said Clint — he said this, from time to time. Dicky, when they were together — she was on some kind of lesbian sex retreat in Durham — always said the opposite.
“Sure I do,” said Mel idly, stroking the rim of his glass with his finger. “A deal’s a deal.”
“Yeah,” said Clint. “But you’re a fucking liar, aren’t you?”
Mel grinned. “Not always,” he said.
The house was all sorted, was going to go to Doug’s cousin — more accurately, Doug’s cousin’s daughter, probably, although Mel knew they’d probably just sell it on. Alice had died a few years ago, so at least she didn’t have to hear about this.
“You never even tried to date anyone,” said Clint. “Didn’t even download an app.”
“I fucked a few guys,” said Mel.
“You fucked a lot of guys,” Clint muttered. “It’s not like that counts.”
They drank until sundown was an hour off, and Clint hugged him tightly, kissed the centre of his forehead and then both of his cheeks for good measure. He almost walked with him, but pussied out at the last second — and that made Mel smile as he walked home alone.
The summer air was hot and humid, and the skies were lingering red.
He wore nice clothes, although he didn’t think that would make much difference, and once settled in his place, he stood facing the edge of the wood, staring at the place where Benjy always appeared, the same spot he appeared every night.
He was scared.
It made sense, of course, to be scared. His heart was pounding, his skin covered in a sheen of sweat that had little to do with the sticky heat.
The skies were getting dark now.
For the first time since he was a little boy, he felt that horrible, dead silence begin to creep in.
Mel had cheated, of course — and he’d lied.
It had been twenty-two years, not fifteen, but Benjy didn’t know the fucking difference. It wasn’t like he had a watch, and even if Mel had bothered to toss him once, it almost certainly wouldn’t work in the deadland.
He’d have carried it on a little longer, but his most recent prostate exame had been even less fun than usual, and he really wasn’t interested in seeing that out to its conclusion, where it was medication or surgery or…
Nah. Not for him. A working dick was about all he had left.
The silence, that horrible, ringing silence he still remembered perfectly, crept in at the edges of his hearing, and he felt it come closer, felt the whole wide world go painfully silent.
The shadow that was Benjy Hitchins melted into view, lacking the usual haze around the edges.
He stood there for a second, waiting, watching Benjy shift on his feet and crane his neck as he searched for Mel, facing the wrong direction.
“Hey!” said Mel from twenty feet behind him, further into the deadland than Benjy was. His own voice sounded like it was moving through water, like he couldn’t hear it through the oppressive shadow of the darkness soaking in all around them, and Benjy turned to stare at him. “Other way, kiddo!”
He’d never seen the kid look so fucking livid and so taken aback all at once.
Mel grinned, because even as Benjy started to lunge toward him, the screaming started splitting him open on all sides, and fuck, fuck, it hurt, but at least he knew he’d be dead long before the bastards got at his prostate.
The dark woods went even darker and Mel was lost in the solid black.
“Piece of shit,” Benjy was saying. “Fucking piece of shit fucking lying bastard, fucking — ”
“Hey, Rosie,” said Doug softly in his ear. It was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard, and Mel would cry about it, if he could. “Benjy tells me you’re a fucking liar and a sonuvabitch.”
“Yeah, baby,” purred Mel, leaning back against Doug and grinning up at Benjy as he kept stamping his feet, swearing, cursing. “Guess you’re not the only one who goes back on his promises.”
“Fuck you,” whispered Doug in his ear, voice full to the brim of love and affection, and held him tighter.
FIN.
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