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The last place Pete had expected to see his friends was in his nightmares.
He knows he’s dreaming because he’s running that sickly molasses-slow jog that only seems to happen when he’s asleep, plain doorway after plain locked doorway inching past as he rounds endless corners at an agonising pace.
Pete has only ever been to CCRP twice, once when he was a little kid and too young to remember anything about it, and once only a few years previously when he’d needed Ted to give him a ride to some convention over the bridge. The latter time he remembers more clearly. The drab, beige interior had almost made him want to rip his eyes out, and from the looks of the few people he passed in the mere minutes he was there, he wasn’t the only one.
Now, though, the halls are empty, abandoned. Every wall is painted the same brown, every door chipped in exactly the same places. The only reason he knows he’s in the office building is the occasional company policy poster that’s hung up every third or fourth turn. The details under the CCRP heading are indecipherable, written in a language he can’t understand.
His heart pounds in his chest, emptying his head of blood and sending it all to his useless legs where he can feel every swollen beat. Something is following him. Has been since he fell asleep. He can only catch glimpses of it in carefully chosen glances behind him and it’s never moving, but it’s always there when he turns. Waiting for him to slip.
At some point, he’d been trying to find Ted’s office, expecting to pass through the open bullpen he can’t even picture but remembers standing between the maze and his destination. He’s good with directions, but when he’s wandering in and out of the same halls lit by the same flickering yellow light fixtures…
He doesn’t know when he lost his way, or when he stopped searching for the office. It might have been years ago. Everything hurts and he’s still moving, that something behind him still lurking in every corner, in the darkness when he closes his eyes. His left hand is raw from dragging it along the wall, a painful reminder to keep left whenever he meets a fork, which is rare. Does following the left even help? If he keeps to one side, he should find a way out. He thinks the first fork he came across he might’ve turned right, but everything bleeds together (his hand started bleeding at some point but the carpet simply swallows whatever drips down to it as though it’s hungry).
Rounding yet another corner, Pete comes to a sudden halt. The endless maze has been replaced by a dead end, and stuck resolutely in the wall in front of him is one of the nondescript brown doors that have lined his path thus far. The only difference is that this one is in his way. Now that he’s not moving, he feels as though he’s sinking slowly into the threadbare carpet, like it's swallowing him too, and his chest is vibrating from the exertion.
The door is locked. Any brief hope he had managed to gather in the moments it took to walk up to it dissipates. He’s not sure what he expected, all the others have been exactly the same, but as Pete rattles the handle, examining it for a lock he can try to pick, he wonders if this means he’ll have to turn back. He knows the answer.
He cautions a brief look back over his shoulder at the hall he’s just come from, but immediately wishes he hadn’t. The thing following him has stopped too, and in the dim light of the bulbs above, he can see it clearly.
Standing hunched on its hind legs is a decomposing yellow goat. Four arms that end in long-clawed fingers tangle in front of him and a stretched blue tongue dangles from his unhinged jaw. Horns built out of tesselating discs spiral from his half-melted face, exposed skull covered only in places by the same matted patchy fur that plasters the rest of his emaciated body. Where his joints are visible, his bones seem to have been replaced by rusted gears that tick with every movement.
Instantly, somehow, Pete knows he’s kneeling before T’noy Karaxis.
Hurriedly, he gets to his feet, shoving himself so hard against the door that it rattles on its hinges. He’s spent so long running, trying to get out of the stupid maze, but somehow he’s never felt quite so trapped. There’s no way he’s getting any closer to that goat.
When Tinky speaks, it’s with a shrill, piercing voice. “It’s good to finally see you here, Peter. I thought I would be waiting forever.”
Pete freezes. He's heard that voice many times since the gym, in his head whenever he loses his train of thought, when he lays awake at night waiting for sleep to claim him, when he looks at Steph. It never says anything he can understand, but he's heard it before.
He can’t think of how to reply. Every nerve in his body is on fire, every muscle tense and close to snapping. If he moves any further away from Tinky, he'll be in danger of clipping through the wall like a bad videogame character. Something tells him that splitting the atoms of the wood is a bad idea.
Two of Tinky’s arms are now untangled and hanging loosely by his side, the other two gripping what Pete recognises as a small puzzle box, the kind with a marble maze that spans across all six faces, turning it over and over.
“What are you?” he asks, stupidly. He doesn’t know what else to say and Tinky is just standing there, watching him with his tiny yellow eyes like he is his most prized possession. Maybe he is.
The goat laughs and it makes his spine go numb. Shrieking giggles bounce off the walls, reverberating for minutes on end. “You need to learn your manners, Petey. That’s no way to speak to your best friend.”
“We are not friends,” he sputters, the words taking far more effort than they usually did. They don’t echo in the same way the goat's had, though, and Pete isn’t really sure he said anything at all.
Still at the other end of the hallway (he’s surprised he hasn’t been eaten already, or been… whatever they’d done to Max) Tinky holds out the box, arms stretching further than what should be possible.
“This is my favourite game to play.” Tinky tilts the box in his clawed hands, rotating and twisting it. The marble inside clatters dully against the plastic walls. “Because it doesn’t matter how much I try, that little marble is never coming out.”
He looks up and catches Pete staring at him. Smiling, his tongue flickers like a snake’s.
“Do you want to see it?”
Against his will, against every fibre of his exhausted being screaming at him not to, Pete pushes himself off the door. He can’t help it, the numbness in his spine has spread to his extremities and he can’t even feel himself take the agonising steps forward. Even his bones feel like they’re bending in their attempt to get him closer to that box.
It starts to glow when he reaches it, illuminating Tinky’s dirty fur and casting long shadows over his face that are exaggerated by the lights in the hall dimming.
Pete knows he can’t look into the maze, knows that somehow, whatever he sees in it will break him, but his eyes are wandering towards it and they shake in his effort to keep them away. After a moment, he clamps them shut, willing everything in him to turn away.
Tinky laughs and again it fills the room, fills Pete. He wants to scream, to grab the box and shatter it against the wall but he can't move. Something else is doing it for him.
They stay like that for a moment, Pete staring resolutely into the darkness of the backs of his eyelids and Tinky with the box outstretched, for hours. The noise never dulls, instead seeming to almost grow exponentially with every passing moment, getting louder and louder-
A small clatter shocks Pete into opening his eyes. Tinky is smiling again as he retracts his arm, the little marble in the box rolling around with a kind of furious fervour. He tosses it over his shoulder without another glance in its direction, and it disappears before it hits the ground.
“I'm impressed, Spankoffski. You've already done far better than your brother did.” Pete's blood runs cold. Ted isn't there, Ted has nothing to do with- “He was much stupider.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he chokes, barely loud enough to be heard over the resounding shrieks of Tinky’s laughter that still bounce around the walls.
Tinky’s eyes widen and Pete is sure for a moment that he’s said the wrong thing, but now that the box is gone, the goat makes no further moves toward him. Instead, his expression is almost… excited. He gestures one of his arms to the space behind Pete.
“Want to say hello?”
Confused, Pete turns back to the door and sees a new sign hanging from it. He takes a step closer, reading Section Nineteen , and knows that this is where he is meant to go.
In spite of himself, in spite of every other attempt he’s made to open this stupid door, to open every other door in this maze, Pete tries the handle. He pushes once, twice, three times, and is almost about to give up and sink to the floor, when it clicks. It swings open, a dark abyss stretching into the gap on the other side.
Pete glances back at Tinky, who simply shrugs, an awful grin stretching across his gangrenous face. In an instant, he decides that he would much rather risk whatever is behind that door than stay with that beast for even one more second.
He walks into the darkness, closing the door behind him.
After only a few cursory steps into the room, it becomes flooded with light so bright he has to squint to avoid being blinded. The walls are painted grey, and the tile underneath his feet is chipped and cracked. In the middle of the room, a table sits flanked by three chairs.
A deep sense of unease filters through him, as though he’s just walked into a place he is never supposed to set eyes upon. Another unreadable poster is pinned to the far wall, right next to a long mirror that doubles the painted walls and Pete standing incredulously by the door. He tries the handle for good measure, but it’s once again locked. He has no idea if he’s still in CCRP - the room looks like something straight out of a cop movie - but wherever he is, there’s no way out.
Ignoring the handcuffs on the table and the camera high up in the corner, Pete walks over to the mirror.
He looks worn, bow tie loose and hair sticking up at angles he’s never quite seen, but deeper than that, he’s… hollow. His cheeks are sallow, his jaw is more angular, and his eyes are bagged and sunken. Sunken and yellow. But then, he begins to change. As he watches his reflection, wrinkles slowly begin to creep out from the corners of his mouth and deep valleys appear on his forehead, his hair recedes into his scalp until it’s shorter than he’s ever worn it and suddenly he’s starting to look like-
Ted, or at least a man who looks an awful lot like how Pete imagines Ted would look if he completely let himself go, appears on the other side of the mirror, wandering the halls Pete was just in in a big trenchcoat and beanie. He’s gaunt and his beard has grown out, obscuring the pedo stache his brother usually keeps immaculate. He looks a lot like the homeless man Pete always gives a wide berth. An awful lot.
He stares, empty and broken, into a distant fog that's crept into the hallway, jaw slack. He mutters something about being “too late,” the name Jenny dying on his lips.
“Ted!” Pete calls out, his voice rattling around in his throat as though he'd never used it before. He tries to bang his fists on the glass, but it ripples underneath them. Ted doesn’t seem to have heard him, but even so, his eyes wander and lock on Pete. Something seems to click in him and he lurches forward in outrage, yelling something unintelligible and startling Pete so much that he takes an involuntary step backwards. He can only wonder if Ted can see him through the two-way mirror, or if he’s instead staring horrified at his own reflection.
Before Ted can reach him, the grey room melts away and in its place is the rotting basement of Waylon Place. Pete’s eyes take a moment to adjust to the sudden darkness and he stumbles slightly on the warped hardwood floor, ankle twisting in a way that should be painful. A few feet ahead of him, where Ted had been only moments before, is Grace Chasity. Her shirt is untucked, her hair frizzy and knotted, and a smoking cigarette hangs from her fingers.
From the darkness that surrounds her, thousands of jaundice-yellow eyes with violently purple irises stare down at him.
She grips the Black Book in white-knuckled hands and wind that Pete can't feel whips her clothes and hair into a frenzy.
“We've been watching you, Peter,” she says, echoing the exact words Bliklotep had uttered to her when they had first called on him. “Someone's been a little naughty… ”
When she speaks, Grace's voice sounds nothing like her own. Instead, it's as though it’s coming through a live filter: rippled, deep and growling.
“What are you talking about?” he squeaks out, his voice high and piercing in stark contrast to hers.
Grace laughs, making his blood run cold.
“Don't think we haven't seen you and Steph getting all cozy-”
“Who is ‘we?’”
The Black Book in her hands shines so bright Pete is forced to cover his eyes. He stumbles backwards, tripping over nothing and only just managing to keep himself upright.
Squinting, he notices with dread that she seems to have grown somehow, towering over him and his tiny bowtie. He cranes his neck to keep her in sight.
“The Lords in Black, silly.” She inches closer to the bottom of the darkness, big enough to consume him now. The surrounding eyes grow with her. As his vision adjusts to the light, he spots the walls of the mansion’s basement and the dark stains they're covered in that can only be blood.
Late, so late, he truly clocks the book in her grip, its pulsating light and rippling pages blowing in the gale that disturbs only Grace. He'd never stopped to think about where it had ended up after Max had been destroyed, too busy trying to wrap his head around the previous hours, and Steph hadn’t mentioned it either.
Of course they had left it with Grace. Of course they'd abandoned the most psychotic eighteen-year-old girl he'd ever met with a book that would allow her to summon five eldritch gods at her will. From the looks of it, she'd already tried.
No, not tried, he thinks, remembering the news report listing Jason Jepson as yet another missing Hatchetfield High teen, not seen since homecoming. Succeeded.
Grace is gone and a silver figure in a blue pinstripe suit snaps his fingers. Pete stares around the small yet grand Starlight Theatre. The stage he stands on has been decorated to look like Beanie's cafe. At its other end is the crabby barista who works in the real cafe and Richie's uncle - Paul, he thinks - who he often sees when he's there after school. Decorating the ceiling are thousands of bright stars, which Pete swears he spots blinking.
Pokotho watches the scene in silence from the empty front row, his mask of concrete carved into a permanent frown that makes him impossible to read. Neither of the two other people on the stage make note of Pete, simply idling in their respective positions at the counter as though they're waiting for their scene to begin.
He wonders what this is supposed to mean. Why is he looking at the woman who always forgets his hot chocolates, who he could swear spits in them on the regular? At the brown-suited businessman who, had Pete not known who he was, he wouldn’t have looked at twice?
He tries to speak, to ask them what they're doing in his head but Pete finds that his voice is gone. Throat closing suddenly, he can't make any noise except for a choked gasp which nevertheless seems to finally get their attention.
Their heads snap to look at him, unblinking and silent. Somehow, they start to glitch, flickering like they're the stars of a movie on a scratched disc. They hover somewhere between regular people and masked figures with bloodshot electric blue eyes, glowing blue sludge oozing from the holes where their mouths are meant to be.
The theatre disappears suddenly and Steph is standing in the intersection of several rows of packaged toys on high shelves. In front of him, she has a gun raised and aimed squarely between his eyes. His knees ache from kneeling for so long (he can’t remember when he fell to them), and she grins, pleased.
“They know what we want, Pete.” He searches her face for any sign that she’s lying, that she’s not real, but she only seems vacant. “They know…”
Steph trails off and her words echo, bouncing off walls he can’t see and settling in his chest. They know… they know… Someone laughs, something shrill and alarming, adding to the weight in his muscles as he struggles to hold himself upright, as gravity tugs him closer and closer to the cold wooden floorboards.
He blinks and Toyzone is silent. Steph is standing behind him, the barrel of the gun pressed against the back of his head. Pete can feel the torturous warmth of her hand on his shoulder.
“I want to live, Petey,” she whispers cooly. Those words too clang around inside of him, occupying the empty space where he’s sure his organs are supposed to be. “I want to live, and that means you have to die.”
For a moment, Pete hopes she would drop the gun and leave him alone, even though she’s never sounded so sure about anything in the time he'd known her. He's only known her for a few months though, and that's not very long… god, he's only known her for a few months, they were supposed to be a team and he's abandoning her when they've only just crossed the starting line. He’s never been good at track.
A gunshot rings out, deafening him and leaving only a high-pitched squeal in his head as time slows. He waits for the darkness.
It never comes.
Max appears in front of him, pale as ice and covered in shredded plastic and cobwebs. Pete expects a snide jab, a kick to the groin. He even dares to hope for Max to get between Steph and his certain death like last time, but Max simply drops to his knees and shuffles awkwardly close. Reaching out, he touches Pete’s face, hands far softer than he had expected from a ghost-corpse. When he speaks, his voice is too gentle.
“Pete, you’re okay.” A rogue thumb strokes his cheek. He sinks into the comfort. “I’m right here.”
He tries to reply, but his mouth is full of something that tastes like being shoved face-first into a locker. Blood covers his hands and Max disintegrates. Pete wishes he wouldn’t go. The company was nice.
Now in his place, Tinky bleats deeply, gripping Pete’s shoulder. “One day, you Spankoffskis will learn that there is more to this world than your own pitiful little lives.” At the edges of his vision (when did the store get so dark?), purple eyes blink in sync. “But until then, you're mine to play with.”
Metallic blood pours out of Pete’s mouth. “Leave me alone, you bovid fuck,” he chokes, red splotches seeping through his shirt right at the collar. That doesn't make any sense, Steph was aiming for his head -
The yellow goat only watches, smiling with some horrific glee as something else, something far bigger, looms from the darkness. What once had seemed fallible, as human as a faceless figure in an old memory, that night in the gym under the glow of the Black Book is no more. The crown, the emerald cardigan, any trace of humanity are gone and rearing above Pete is instead a monster. At least ten feet tall, glowing white eyes send a spotlight down on him, illuminating the marked and dirty toy store floor for miles in every direction. His skin is a sickly green wrinkled mass of loose folds that are stretched in all the wrong places, making his head look three sizes too big for his body and his neck three sizes too small. His shapeless torso disappears in shadow and across the visible parts of him, Pete can see sparse tufts of acid-green fur like one of those ugly hairless cats. From underneath his gargantuan maw, six tentacles covered in warts and suckers stretch down towards Pete, twisting and leaving a sticky residue on his clothes.
“Get away from me,” he moans pitifully as one of the tentacles caresses his face. Recoiling, his hands slip on the blood covering the floor and he tumbles onto his back. His suspenders dig painfully into his shoulder blades.
Wiggog Y'rath does not speak but instead rumbles a bubbling rhythm that somehow turns into words in Pete’s rattling bones.
You wanted someone to play with, well here we are, Petey.
The other Lords in Black emerge from the darkness of the shelves, none as tall as Wiggog Y'rath and all hiding in his shadow. They stare.
For a moment, Pete freezes. Is this what he had asked for, those long nights awake staring at the ceiling? To be held at the mercy of five eldritch beings?
They've missed you, little Pete. Your dear friends, Ruth and Rich-ie…
Wiggog Y'rath puts a horrid emphasis on Richie's name like he's making a mockery of something Pete doesn't understand.
Do you want to see them?
Pete tries to shake his head, knowing what's coming next, but he can't move. Glued to the sticky wood, blood still seeping from his neck, he knows that like Tinky had been in the hallway, something else is controlling him. Instead, he nods. Impossibly, Wiggog Y'rath smiles despite having no visible mouth, and his tentacles retreat from Pete’s body.
The room goes black for only a moment, then flashes another blinding, painful white light that makes his head spin. He closes his eyes, wishing to sink into the depths of the black and the white, but he remains firmly planted to the ground. When he opens them, he vomits.
The gods are gone, and in their place are two bodies strung up by invisible rope, dangling from the endless ceiling like puppets at rest. They rotate slowly, another imperceptible breeze rustling the shelves, and Pete can't look away.
Richie's top half is drenched, dripping water onto the floor below him. Mixing with it, blood pours from deep wounds that have matted his brown hair and stained his dark shirt. His bright blue socks are barely recognisable for all the grime covering his legs. Ruth is dry, on the other hand, but almost invisible under crimson-soaked underwear tugged high up over her head. Pete can just see the outline of her headgear underneath it.
They speak with voices that ooze concern and worry. “Pete, please wake up.”
From next to where Pete remains on the ground, a spare arm scratches an itch on a hard to reach corner of Tinky’s back. “You really have no idea, do you, Spankoffski?”
“What?”
Richie and Ruth call out again, now sounding urgent. “Pete, please!”
Suddenly, he notices that he's not in Toyzone anymore, but instead sprawled out across the polished basketball court in the darkened Hatchetfield gym.
Tinky giggles. “There are billions of you out there. Alive, dead, everything in between. Your brother knows that now.” He shakes the yellow box that is back in another six-clawed hand. Pete swears he hears it scream. “Little Teddy-bear knows that very well…”
He remembers Ted wandering in the trench coat. Trying again to sit up, Pete’s arms shake so hard that they give out, forcing him back down to his most vulnerable. “What did you do to him?”
“He deserves it, don't you worry your pretty little head. He always deserves it.”
Before he can wonder what that’s supposed to mean, a stench so horrid he feels bile rise in his throat once again invades his nostrils. It reminds him of the garbage heap behind the Cineplex except if the whole dumpster had been taken up by the rotting seafood the fishmonger in the mall dumped every Friday night. It was the only word he could think of to describe it. Rotting, rotting-
Nibblenephim limps into clearer view. Two wet arms grip Pete’s shoulders where he’s still lying down and he gasps out at the sheer heat of the horrific being standing over him. Up close, he can see the fuzz covering Nibbly’s pink body, the layers of bubbling skin, the yellowing tusks that bookend dozens of sets of gnashing pigs’ teeth.
He shakes Pete hard, his high-pitched laugh piercing the air and sending shivers down his spine that are so violent he spasms. He tries to roll away from Nibbly’s claws, but this only makes his grip tighter, holding him down despite Pete’s kicking.
“You're okay, Pete…” Nibbly croons, tossing him so hard that his head slams into the floor of the gym, causing his eyes to clamp shut. When he's lifted back into the air, the hands holding him have doubled and the rancid smell is gone. He forces his eyelids open and Pete stares instead into Tinky's bugged yellow eyes as his blue tongue licks the exposed skull surrounding where his lips should have been.
He holds Pete high in the air by his bleeding throat, grinning maniacally, and suddenly he can't breathe. No matter how much air he sucks into his broken and heaving lungs, he feels empty, as though the oxygen is dissolving before it reaches his bloodstream.
“Why am I still here?!” he yells out, now starting to sob violently, body shaking in Tinky's many arms. He remembers Richie's funeral, held only two days after his body had been found. He remembers how short it had been, how much Richie's mother had cried. “Why are they gone and I'm still here? Why didn't you let me go?!”
It’s not Tinky who replies, though. Instead, Pokey laughs from somewhere behind the beams of Wiggog Y'rath’s still-shining eyes.
“Because it wasn't what you wanted, Pete,” he leers, his voice oddly proud, and frosted.
Tinky cackles. “You could lie to poor Stephanie ‘till the end, but you aren't ready to die. There's still plenty of fun to be had right here."
Now next to him, Ruth spins enough so that her back is facing Pete. Immediately, he wishes she hadn't because all he can see are her pants that have started to come loose and her sweater that's hiked up under her underwear. One long wound splits her in two.
He screams.
Yet again, he finds himself somewhere he hadn't been a moment before, but this time Pete has no idea where he is. He thinks he's landed on something soft, but Tinky has finally let him go and the only thing he's sure of is that he isn't in the air anymore.
Something’s tangling his legs together and he reaches down to rip whatever it is off him, gasping in a desperate attempt to get any air into his shredded lungs. He struggles in earnest, only seeming to make it worse, before a face - Steph, he recognises - appears in front of him.
He remembers her warm hand on his shoulder, the gun pointed at his face, and he recoils instinctively, careening backwards until he collides with something hard and sharp.
“Peter!”
She's yelling at him. He blinks.
Heart racing, Steph's bedroom comes into a blurry focus. The lamp on her bedside table is on, casting a dull yellow glow across the wall and over the bed. Sweat drips down his face, catching in his eyebrows and tasting salty in his mouth. His sleep shirt is soaked.
Voice low, hesitant, Steph swerves back into the corner of his vision. “Are you awake?”
He nods, though he's not entirely sure he's telling the truth. Looking relieved (or maybe afraid: without his glasses, it's impossible to tell the difference), she takes his arm and he jumps in spite of himself, feeling claws digging into him. This only makes her grip tighter, though, and she tugs him into an embrace that makes his skin crawl.
They stay like that for a moment, Steph whispering something into Pete’s ear that he can't understand over the white-hot pain her body leaves wherever they make contact. His thoughts spiral faster than he can keep up with, but the lasting sentiment leaves him wanting nothing more than for her to let go of him.
He's not sure what the fuck is making him feel so angry (the purple eyes that peer at him through the darkness where the lamp doesn't reach wink), but his brain pulses and his lungs still don't seem to be working. His legs ache from their awkward position and fire traces up and down his back. Up and down. Up and down.
“Pete, you’re shaking…” she says, loud enough that he can hear it over the blood pounding in his ears. He can feel her start to say something else from the way her head is held against his, but she must change her mind because she closes her mouth.
He takes one shuddering, gasping breath as the claustrophobia envelops his muscles, invades his already malfunctioning respiratory system, silently begging her to let him go, to stop touching him.
“Steph…” he manages to gasp out. His voice is raspy and painful to use. “Please-”
“It’s okay, Pete. I’ve got you.”
Tears mingle with the sweat and he tries to reach up to wipe them away but she’s holding on to him too tight. Every thought he tries to formulate ends in a blazing trail of let me go-
“Please let me go,” he whispers, surprising himself with his admission.
Steph doesn't hear him, at least not properly, because her grip only slackens slightly and she makes a half-committal noise of confusion.
He repeats himself, louder this time, and as determinedly as he can bring himself to. “Let go.”
Finally catching on to his silent protests, she jerks back as though she's been burned and almost tumbles off the edge of the bed. Instantly, his mind quietens.
With neither of them having anything to say, the room goes still. There is no laughter, no taunting, no rumbling of voiceless gods. The wind outside whistles through the leaves of a great oak planted by the window and branches smack against the glass. The only other time he stayed at Steph's house, the noise had startled him so badly that it had taken hours to fall back asleep afterwards. She had been there the whole time, one arm wrapped around him and her head tucked into the crook of his neck. It had once felt good.
Steph's grandparents live interstate, and so she's been sleeping in Pete's guest bedroom for the last few weeks. They'd come back to her empty house the day before in some attempt to clean up Solomon's belongings before the lawyers could come picking like vultures. As it stands, they haven't made much progress, documents and folders and suit jackets lining almost every surface in the massive house. Even her bedroom is covered in clothes and books in half-assed piles as they figure out what she can take back to his parents’ house.
She still hasn't spoken and is instead watching the bedsheets as though she might sink into them. He feels guilty, but more so about the relief coursing through him than the fact that he's clearly made her upset, which only adds anger to the melting pot of emotions boiling inside him. Mostly, he just wants to scream, but that would only scare her further, or at the very least earn him a weird look, and neither are things he can quite handle.
All at once, the silence is repressive, and he needs to break it.
“I’m sorry-” he begins.
Steph cuts him off before he can try to figure out exactly what he’s apologising for. “No, don’t… I’m sorry.”
And she looks so genuine even though she’s still not looking at him that he wants to throw up. He wants to rip up the sheets and throw the books and punch a wall and curl up in her arms all at the same time because he’s never felt safer anywhere else. But she had burned and he knows that he was the reason, knows that something is different now. Something is so deeply wrong.
Frazzled whispers and unfinished thoughts, strangled in their final moments, multiply like they had when she was holding him.
Fucking stupid, this whole thing is-
His fingers curl around his ankles, nails digging deep in some desperate attempt to keep him from floating away.
Just tell her you want-
Tell her you-
Steph’s raised her head and she watches him carefully. He knows she wants to reach out, but she looks almost scared.
Richie is dead.
They’re dead and you’re not.
Is this how-
Would they want-
Tell her you-
“Bathroom…” Pete mutters under his breath. He wants to say more, but there’s a fur-covered hand closing around his throat and he can’t find the words.
Steph only nods.
He stumbles to his feet, almost tripping on a rogue pair of socks while he puts on his glasses, and snatches his phone from the bedside table. It reads six past two. They’d only gone to bed around one, so he knows he’ll be out of it in the morning, but the time isn’t what catches his eye. A text from Ted blinks up at him from his lock screen, a candid picture of Steph he’d taken at the library early on a Thursday morning.
Pete txt me back when u get this. need to know ur ok.
Weird dream.
The message is only a few minutes old, and the hairs on the back of Pete’s neck start to rise slowly. He turns quickly back to Steph just to make sure she hasn’t disappeared, just to make sure they’re not back in Toyzone and kneeling amongst the shelves of overpriced dolls, but sure enough, she’s still waiting on the bed. Still curled up against the headboard, eyes far too wide and distant.
He puts the phone back. Ted can wait, he needs to go, needs… Pete isn’t quite sure what he needs, but he knows that standing in Steph’s half-darkened bedroom in sweat-covered pyjamas, surrounded by the relics of her ruined childhood isn’t helping.
Picking through the clothes on the floor and the dug-up pieces of fourth-grade artwork, Pete makes his careful way out of the bedroom and down the hall to the bathroom. He flicks on the overhead light, squinting against the sudden brightness, but preferring it to the crushing dark. The bathroom itself is nondescript. He has a towel hanging on the rack by the door, but no toothbrush, not staying in the house often enough. The shampoo she uses when they share is still in the shower, her ‘good’ products arranged on the counter.
Two mirrors hang on opposite walls; one above the sink, and the other by the toilet. Steph has told him that she uses them to make sure the back of her hair looks good. Pete has always avoided looking directly into them because the endless fracturing reflections freak him out. He approaches the sink without looking up.
The water that pours from the tap is cold, cold enough that it makes his fingers feel numb and his eyes sting when he splashes it over his face.
For a moment, he simply stands there, letting the water run over his hands. His left hand twinges in pain. His mind drifts again to Steph back in the bedroom, waiting for him to come back so that they can talk about whatever he’s feeling or simply go back to sleep without another word. The thought of doing either is paralysing.
Minutes (or is it hours?) pass while Pete washes his face, over and over as his eyes burn from the irritation, anything to make the image of the pieces of Ruth’s body hanging from the ceiling of the gym disappear.
He hears it before he sees it.
A clock ticking somewhere in the ether of space behind him. His spine stiffens and contorts, making it impossible to spin around and see where the noise is coming from, not that he wants to . Instead, he slowly lifts his eyes to the mirror.
In his reflection's place is a deeply yellow-tufted, bug-eyed goat.