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20.9.06

Lanterns And Shades - Part 7: Healing

"Shell smashed, juices flowing. Wings twitch, legs are going. Don't get sentimental, it always ends up drivel. One day, I am gonna grow wings, a chemical reaction. Hysterical and useless."

My dad was waiting up for me when I got home. Or maybe he was waiting up for news of the Curfew Bar and my fate. He ran into the hallway when he heard me coming through the door. He looked old and tired. He wore a mask of relief that failed to cover the belief I could see melting in his eyes and beginning to run down his cheeks. He’d been sure I was gone.

My exhaustion was beyond anything I’d ever experienced. His babble was just that, and I didn’t understand a word. I held up a weary hand and he fell into silence.

“JD…” I said.

“She got back,” he replied. “She told us what happened.”

And as if my desire for that knowledge had been the only thing holding me up, my knees buckled and I fell forward into my father’s embrace. He lifted me like the child I had once been. He murmured in my ear. He kissed my forehead and the side of my face as he carried me to my room and laid me down on my bed. I fell into a dreamless sleep as soon as my head touched the pillow.

Later, I was aware of further kisses, all over my face. These were from lips far softer than my dad’s, lips that were surrounded by smooth, warm skin. Through half-lidded eyes I watched JD straighten and strip to her underwear. She pulled back the covers and slipped into bed beside me. I lifted my head only to let it fall on her chest. She wrapped her arms around me.

“I love you,” she whispered, and I did not know whether those words came from memory or reality or the sleep that was dragging me down into healing oblivion.

I dreamed that The Daylight World went on without me. I was rumour and speculation. Mine was a name on the tip of every tongue. The Chinese Whispers went around, and by the time dark fell once again, I was a non-person. To mention my plight was to mention what had happened to us at the Curfew Bar, to mention the beings that had visited such devastation upon us, to mention things we do not talk about.

Darkness in my room. Silence broken only by the breaths of the girl lying spooned in my embrace. The fading tastes of whiskey and adrenaline are coppery and sour in my mouth. My entire body aches like a rotting tooth, various injuries competing for my attention while my muscles complain of the exertion I have put them through. One arm rests on the naked curve of JD’s hip, my hand flat on her belly, her fingers laced through mine.

“JD,” I whisper.

“Ken,” she says.

My eyelids feel glued together. It is an effort to force them apart, to see her face in extreme close-up when she turns toward me. In hope she is truly beautiful; hazel eyes and creamy skin and a full-lipped mouth waiting for a reason to smile.

“We made it,” I say.

“Shelley?”

I shake my head.

“I thought you were dead,” she says, touching my cheek, tracing the line of my jaw.

“I am. We all are.”

“How did you…?”

“Later,” I say. “Please. Talk later.”

We kiss, we touch, we undress. We make clumsy, delicate love. She sits astride me and holds my hands, moulds her mouth and her body to mine. For however long we are together like this, in the timeless darkness of my room, I think only of what she’s doing to me, what I’m doing to her, how she tastes and feels and smells. At the moment of her orgasm, I devour her mouth and her sigh rushes down my throat and into my lungs, making me feel resuscitated and finally alive. Consumed by the heat of my excitement, I lift my hips and say her name and then gasp as I am tensed and then released by my own climax.

We hold each other in wordless relief. I stare at the cracks in my ceiling and consider our reality as it all comes flooding back. When I am sure she is asleep, I gently disengage myself from her arms and walk stiffly to the bathroom.

My father looks up with a curiously childlike expression when I enter the living room. I feel clean and strong where he is dirtied and exhausted by grief and lack of sleep. For perhaps the first time in my nineteen years, I feel like a man.

“What happened out there?” he asks. “Tell me everything.”

And I do, starting with the moment Shelley told us the Lanterns were out and ending with my discovery of the mountain of clothing in the woods. He listens and does not interrupt, even when I pause to think or attempt to clarify those moments where I wasn’t in my right mind. He nods at my untidy narrative, looks puzzled and thoughtful at the moments of revelation, pins me with careful, sceptical scrutiny when I move from the events of last night to the theories and beliefs they have instilled in me.

“You look like hell,” he says, when he’s sure I’m done.

I touch my face and wince. “It was a table or a chair. Something fell on me. When I ran through the woods, I guess I wasn’t too worried about the branches. I guess I fell a few times.”

“I didn’t think you were coming home. I really didn’t. I’m…sorry for that.”

He lowers his head. He won’t meet my eyes.

“I know you didn’t, dad. It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Last night is…it’s over. It happened, but it’s over. Nobody wanted to go to the Curfew Bar, did they? No Lanterns, no safety. I get it. I wouldn’t have gone either.”

It takes him a long time to look up. When he does, I see in his eyes what is almost an acknowledgement of the experience I have had and the change I have gone through. What he sees, I think, is that I am no longer afraid, and that I am quite prepared to go out there and walk amongst the Shades to prove it.

“So what now?” he asks me. “I believe what you’ve told me, but I’m not sure how it helps us.”

“To be honest, neither am I. I have an idea, but there are a lot of holes in it.”

“You want to share it with me?”

“Not yet. I need to talk to Mr. Cartwright. I also need to go back up to Witches Path.”

“Christ, why?”

“An experiment. I need to know that last night had nothing to do with those specific circumstances. That’s the most important part of my idea.”

“Ken…please,” he says, staring at me.

“If it doesn’t work out, I can always run. I’m not afraid.”

“That what worries me. I don’t know how it was for you last night, not really. But don’t get carried away, okay? I don’t want to lose you.”

“I don’t want to lose me,” I say.

“Janey still upstairs?” he asks, relaxing a little.

“Sleeping.”

He nods. “She’s a good kid. I’ve always liked her.”

“Is that your blessing?” I feel my face colouring, even after all this.

“You need my blessing?” he asks, and a genuine smile finally cracks the mask of his face.

“Need’s a…funny word. It means a lot that you approve of me.”

He takes his cigarettes from his breast pocket, pulls one of those slim, white sticks free with a trembling hand. As he lights it and the room is filled with a smell that will always remind me of my childhood, I take enough of my uncomfortable pigeon-steps that I can fall down onto the sofa beside him. He sighs and a thick cloud of smoke forms before us, hanging in the air like words unspoken.

“Since your mother…since then…I’ve tried hard. I think you’re turning into quite a…into quite a man. I don’t know how much of that was me, but I’m proud. I’m really proud of you.”

Tears standing in his eyes, his stare fixed on the wall opposite, somewhere just above the photo of my mother that’s been gathering dust on the mantelpiece for as long as I can remember.

“I’ve never resented you,” I say. “I love you. I can say that and not have to worry that it might not be true, dad.”

He nods, smiles a little, closes his eyes and takes another huge drag on his cigarette. He turns to look at me.

“Do what you have to,” he says. “You’re not a child anymore.”

“I know. It would take forever for me to tell you everything. And maybe…maybe I don’t really have the words. It’s so hard to explain. I know what I think, but it’s so fucking hard to explain.”

“Go on,” he says. “But mind her. She’s fragile.”

I get up and leave the room, go straight out the front door before how it is to be in the same place as my father and JD overwhelms me and all the things I must do become too much to bear.

Abbot Street is darkness and silence. The Lanterns glow and bring a warmth that is all metaphorical. Winter is coming hard now. Every surface glitters with frost and the warm vapour of my breath parts the night and is dragged away into a purple sky. I watch my feet and concentrate on walking, feeling trepidation overcome with the relief of using these muscles again, of warm blood flowing into my tired limbs. It is another healing, and while it is nothing so satisfying as finding my place with those I love, it signals what is almost a defeat of the ghosts I now seek to confront. I have been amongst them. I have seen them in a way no-one else alive can claim. Yet still I walk, still I have substance. I am not afraid.

I walk Abbot Street and the fringes of Quarter B. I stray beyond the comforting blanket of Lanternlight and out onto the main road. My feet find Witches Path and stop only when I reach that spot where I was Shaded, where terror made me quick enough that they could not finish what they started, where this story began. I remember that icy touch, but it feels distant now. In my body, I am sure, that cold has spread and numbed me in ways my senses cannot comprehend. In my mind, it has faded and become a memory. I will never really forget it, I know that, but it has receded far enough that terror seems a distant, powerless emotion.

Witches Path, then. A winter’s night. The moon is full and powerful, casting its ghostly light through the trees and down onto the glistening asphalt. As I walk down the hill, I wonder if this is the sight Judy Nicholls saw before she died, if she had time to appreciate the desolate beauty of this place before its shadows stole away her young life. Even now I see them floating between the scattered spotlights of that stark luminescence, lifeless bodies constantly struggling against old definitions as though trapped in the memory of what they once were. Witnessing them like this, I feel something akin to sympathy, almost an understanding of what it is to be dead. I remember Shelley’s words and wonder if she had something, if her definition of these spectres wasn’t closer to the truth than any I have heard. I do not believe that there is a God in any scripture that could turn his back on these tormented souls. Such cruelty could surely never be. But the Shades are dead, of that I have no doubt, and I sense that if there is anything at all that they want, it is to finally be at rest.

I stop at the edge of this small wood, standing close to a tree I’ve come to think of as my own, its branches offering the same shelter they’d given when I was alone and wounded. I watch a Shade drift silently out onto the path less than ten feet in front of me. My heartbeat accelerates, empathising with memory, recalling all the times I ran and all the fear I have experienced.

“I’m here,” I say, and my voice is loud in this place of silence.

The Shade, of course, does not respond. It is facing me, drifting towards me. Perhaps it senses the light against my clothes and my hair. I really have no understanding of these things. Perhaps it is curious of motion. Perhaps it is knows that there is a solid object where previously there was nothing. But it does not see me in the way they could see me before. If it could, I feel sure it would already be too late.

“See me,” I say. “I’m right here.” My voice rises to a shout. “I’m right in front of you!”

The Shade moves closer and a shiver runs up my spine, as though I can sense the proximity of it, of its absence. At this distance, it doesn’t seem so much a thing as a hole. It is almost as though a human shape has been cut from reality, leaving a dark vacuum that exerts its own cold gravity. I remember my fascination at the Curfew Bar, how it had seemed like I was in shock. I feel drawn. I feel I could walk forward and just step into that shape, disappear into a world where all is lifeless shadow.

I blink. I take a clumsy backward step. This is the glamour. This is the pull they exert over us, the fascination that gives rise to The Daylight World. Beneath sunlight, we dream of their dark mystery and conduct our daily business in a sort of hysterical daze. We kiss our loved ones, we talk about the weather, we hang out our washing and go about our chores. All the while, they haunt us and taunt us as though they were an ambition and not a fear. Their great power is not their speed or their touch. It is the fear we have of what we are, and a feeling that perhaps the only reality is the darkness of this embrace.

Now I take a sideways step. The illusion that the Shade was somehow watching me is dispelled. It passes over the spot where I was standing without pause or curiosity. It simply drifts with that same blankness, that same absence. I turn and see so many more hanging between and behind the trees. I see them, but they do not see me.

I can still be Touched, though. That they are blind to me does not change what they can do. I am careful to give the Shade a wide berth when I rejoin the path and head for home.

The house is in darkness. In my bedroom, JD is an untidy shape beneath the covers.

“Where’d you go?” she murmurs, as I undress.

“Witches Path,” I reply.

“What?”

“They can’t see me,” I say. “The Touch. They don’t see me anymore. They were chasing you.”

Silence, and then: “You went out to…what…test this out?”

“I had to know.”

“You’re insane. What…I mean…I don’t know where to start. You haven’t told me anything…I’m…I don’t know.”

“In the morning. I’ll tell you everything in the morning, I promise.”

“You’d better.”

I laugh, and it feels natural and good.

“Ken,” she says.

“Nothing. Really, it’s nothing.”

I slide beneath the covers, wriggle into her arms where it's warm and safe and wonderful. She kisses my forehead and my cheeks and my lips. I touch her naked skin and she wraps her legs around my waist.

“Promise me you won’t do things without telling me anymore,” she says.

“I promise,” I say. “I want you with me.”

“You’d better,” she says, and then: “I want you in me.”

And then all is kisses and sighs and the delirious warmth of her embrace. For now, at least, I am home.

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