Archive of Our Own ^beta

It starts with nightmares. He doesn’t call them nightmares. 

It starts with sitting up in his bed and staring at the frame of his door. The door is closed, woodgrain clogged and choking on white. The jams are pressed firmly against the wall. Light from outside his window bleeds in. The door is closed. 

The outline skews the longer he looks at it—as if it were measured and nailed together incorrectly. The outline creeps up and up until it gnashes with the corner of the room, off set. It didn’t use to sit this way, he’s sure. The door is closed.

The dark at the corners of his room fuzz like static, growing darker, ripening like a tomato on a hairy vine. At some point the skin splits and heals over and heals over and heals over. The longer he stares the more swollen it becomes. The skin ripples. 

The door is closed. 

—

Sam pulls her hair back into a ponytail; her fingers thread between the strands of black. You look like shit, she says. Have you been sleeping? 

Same as usual, he says, he lies. 

Her hands are smudged blue-black. When she moves he smells the department store box dye. 

The grass under their feet is yellowed in its dormancy. The table creaks when Tucker sits down. His cargo pants sag under the weight of full pockets.

What’re we talking about, he says.

About how Danny is determined to kill himself again by not sleeping. Sam has this way of saying sharp things in a way that doesn’t hurt.

I’m fine; I’ll catch some sleep in history.

And then in detention?

Yep. 

Tucker chews his food slow. 

Sam taps her chipped nails on the table’s surface, one after the other, before she starts again. Tap, tap, tap, tap. The surface is weathered, pounding sun and snow. Slivers of wood sticking up and waiting like teeth. Tap, tap, tap, tap. 

—

What is a haunting, really? Mom asks her imaginary audience. From what we know, it’s highly varied and dependent on the circumstances of death. 

Light fights for its place in the space of the living room. The glow of the TV, eating away at the dark like acid.

Ghosts are echoes of the self—they are the things left behind after tragedy. 

Mom’s hair is chopped in a razor sharp line at her chin. The goggles on the top of her head reflect like a fluid. 

We’re forced to wonder about the nature of life itself. We know that the dead are tied here through desire.

He stares at the TV. A shadow hangs in his peripheral, the slope of a head and shoulders. When he looks, it’s gone. Never there to begin with.

So that leaves the question, how do we get rid of ghosts? What’s the most effective way to deal with a haunting? Her voice floats down and hangs low like fog.  

—

The portal stretches its mouth wide. Its teeth are black humanoid shapes that go up and up and up and down and down and down. 

It exhales a breath of cooking flesh, a smell that puckers up at its corners and bubbles as water escapes to its freedom. Bolts and fastenings warped.

Its throat starts at the stairs, the way down into a heaving pit of steel and the color green. The teeth go all the way, follow him, as if he’s the only one they want.

He is… home. 

—

Jazz is warm. When she whispers she sounds like rain—like the ginger lemon tea that she makes when she studies for the SATs at the table. 

She takes his hand—she has been holding his hand. 

Are you sure there’s nothing you want to talk about? I’m here for you. 

What could he say? That he’s been having trouble figuring out if he’s awake or asleep? Alive or dead? 

Her answers will only help one of them.

There’s a shadow that drifts along the ceiling, behind Jazz’s head. 

I’m tired, he says. That’s all, he says. 

Jazz does this thing with her face. She has to be wrong sometimes. It’s not his fault. It’s not anyone’s fault. 

—

Sam is holding him and crying, she’s—

—

The shower water bears down on him. Blood seeps. Seeps thick at his wounds and then thin when it mixes with the water. Swirling ribbons of red on white—strawberry ice cream dribbling down, sticky.  

This is the way things are. 

The sting brings to him a clarity that he’s been feeling less and less often.  Jazz, Sam, and Tucker. They’ve been looking at him in that way more and more. Like he might be someone else and he doesn’t remember changing.

But hasn’t he?

Dull heart beat sensation. 

—

The bottom of the stairs. The basement. The lab. 

When he opens his eyes he is at the bottom. The cold metal embraces his cheek, his chest. Light upstairs clicks on. Humming brown noise. Angular shadows, fractals. Inside are ant bodies. They clamber over each other. Swarming. They smell like bleach—like almonds. Nowhere light, dull on their thorax, abdomen. 

Light upstairs flicks off.

A car rumbles down the street. The floor tells him. 

The ants are free now, spilling like liquid up the stairs. With them are mama spiders, carrying so many children on their backs like a warm wool coat. 

—

Danny, if the nightmares are getting worse, you have to tell me. Jazz is standing on the other side of his door. She’s wearing blue socks. You have to tell someone. Sam and Tucker are worried. I’M worried. 

Okay. 

I don’t know how many more excuses—

—

He becomes, as the days move on without him, the house at the end of the street that kids tell rumors about. His bones are support beams, holding up his weight to keep him from collapsing down into himself like a black hole. 

The blackholes are external. Shadows that kiss his heels. They pool underneath him at night where he sleeps.

If he sleeps. 

The nights when he dies are the loudest. 

Mom and Dad are here in his room. Their hands shake in the cold and they pull their pajamas closer, tighter, twisting.  

Danny, baby—

—

The bulging ceiling sticks to itself by way of surface tension—a perfect parabola. 

—

Mom and Dad sit at the kitchen table. Its legs, its feet, have chewed divots in the linoleum. He hangs above them from a rafter. The tops of their heads bobble when they speak.

We have to do something. 

Maybe it’s not a ghost. Maybe Jazz is right, maybe—

He’s not afraid. The trembling shape in the corner—the ceiling. He lives here. All of him. He died here. 

He dies here? 

He dies——

The mirror reflection shows him the fullness of the bathroom. The shadows. They lean in to see. The faucet drips. The sound is sharp. Tap. 

Tap. 

They’ve always been here. At the edges. In the dark.

None of the lights work. He doesn’t want them to work. 

—

Door closes.

—

When the skin finally splits, the bodies spill out. Tumble out like organs from the cavity. Slap against the floor and start bleeding, oozing. Black mass limbs, eyes flickering and attracting moths to the windows. 

There are no voices. 

There are no windows.

There is quiet. 

There is him, drawn out and repeating, firing like nerve endings. Fanning out and growing roots into the walls. 

Dull heart beat sensation.