MaximusJ07

HOUSEKEEPER - A new Psycho/Cosmic Horror novel by Darby Machin

This is not her house. These are not her rules.

When recently divorced Margot takes a position as housekeeper at the House on Lakeview Drive, she's desperate for stability and a fresh start. The salary is generous, the work familiar, and the house itself seems perfectly ordinary. But from the moment she steps in the door, something feels wrong. Distances between rooms shift overnight. Doors appear and disappear without explanation. The red light that pulses on the other side of her bedroom door at 1 AM brings with it sounds of grinding metal and shifting flesh. And her fellow staff members seem determined to act like nothing’s wrong. As her questions pile up, and the bodies begin to drop, Margot becomes determined to uncover the truth behind the House on Lakeview Drive. But there are dangers in its halls, in its carousel of strange rooms, behind the unending peach wallpaper. Margot has to be smart if she wants to out-think the house, but her investigation won't go unnoticed for long. Someone, or something, is watching her every move. A haunting, literary exploration of identity, memory, and resistance, HOUSEKEEPER combines psychological dread with cosmic horror to create a disturbing vision of what might lurk behind the façade of domesticity.

Happy to announce the next TTRPG project from DoneNotPerfect. Storeys is a solo horror TTRPG about exploring one incredibly messed up apartment building, uncovering it's dark secrets, and trying to get out with your life intact! Coming this halloween! Follow for updates and info~ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/donenotperfect/storeys

He’s done! Presenting Nicholas “Frankie Scabbs” Coen, former co-leader of The Bread Street Maffickers gang. I love himb 🥺

Content Warnings:

Body Horror

Brief mention of Mental Illness/Suicidal Ideation

Sexual Themes

Violence

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was the sixth time I’d seen him. I’d been counting.

The first time was Leather Night, at The Pit across town. I’d thought he’d been going for some kind of leather-punk, biker-goth, 80’s throwback thing. Black string vest – low-cut to better show off a thicket of walnut hair – under a sleeveless black denim jacket; leather trousers laced at the side; a wide, flaccid black mohawk turning electric blue at the end like some exotic bird.

By my third sighting of him, at Drag Queen Bingo here at Charlie’s, I realised it was a committed style. Tonight was no different. All leather, denim, and black as sleep, save for the electric blue plumage which was now bleached a ghostly white. It caught the club lights as they flashed towards him, dancing through the rainbow in time with the music.

Each night I’d seen him on the periphery, dancing through the crowd or standing in a doorway. I’d watch for a while, weighing up if my fascination was piqued enough to make a move. By the time I came to a conclusion he’d always be gone, dropping out of view like shadow into shadow.

Tonight, he seemed content to stand vigil at the bar. Sharp blue eyes like the base of glaciers scanning a crowd of sweating, leaping bodies.

I wiped the few errant beads of my own sweat off my forehead and began pushing my way to my latest potential conquest. The bar was abandoned by patrons in favour of the dance floor, and taking a seat next to him was a deliberate move.

‘Sazerac, please,’ I barked through the din.

I waited until the drink was in front of me to turn towards him. When I did, I found him pointedly turned towards me. Pushing from the hips, leaning back like a cat. Nursing his own drink between two hands, in a way that pressed his pecs together in a masculine cleavage.

I was in.

‘Looks like I’m stood up again,’ I said, brushing my hair from my face, flexing slightly. ‘Fucking app twats, always wasting time.’ A frequently used opening gambit that paid off more than it should.

He smiled tightly and lidded his black-lined eyes. ‘Yeah, we’re not doing that.’

‘Doing what?’ I asked, innocently.

‘That tired game where you pretend to have been interested in someone else, but oh no, they ghosted me! Please, save me from a night alone!’ He tapped a fingernail on his glass as he spoke. ‘Bit sad, don’t you think?’

I thought about walking away right then, sure I’d completely fucked it. But something in the way he looked at me, a patient teacher watching his student stumble over the first answer, made me think I had at least one more shot.

I took a drink. The bitter liquor hit me harder than expected. Burning to a comfortable weight in my chest and spinning my head.

‘James,’ I said, extending a hand, which he took and turned palm down, with an unexpected delicacy. A regency era politeness in a venue where guys were getting blown in the bathrooms as we spoke.

‘Vox,’ he said, and I wasn’t sure if that was a name or some kind of old-world insult.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Vox,’ he repeated, turning to the bartender to order another whiskey with a series of simple, but unignorable hand gestures. Like carving runes into the air. Within seconds a fresh drink was placed on the counter.

‘Thank the devil you finally came over,’ he said with a lilt. ‘All that staring through the crowd. Ducking through shadows. You started to seem a little…’ he trailed off, head tilting quizzically as his eyes scanned me. ‘Stalkerish.’

‘Did it work? Do you feel hunted?’

‘Like prey?’

‘I could be the predator.’ I pushed, enjoying the banter a little too much; whiskey clouded, and straining at the edges of good taste.

‘Nah,’ he said, swirling ice cubes in the brown liquid with a sharp scraping somehow still audible over the bass. Fingernails black. Chipped lacquer that showed pale underneath. ‘That’s straight people shit. I don’t do prey.’

‘So, no games. No carnal pursuit. What do you do, Vox?’

‘I never said no games.’ A flash of teeth like a circus showman. ‘Just not the kind that bore me.’

My tastes typically leaned more towards the preppies and gym bunnies. The boys-next-door – if next door was a 24-hour gym with adjoining GAP outlet. I’d pick up a new one most every night I went out. An endless parade of stout, tan men with identikit haircuts and personalities in various shades of beige. Easy conquests. Easy prey.

This guy wasn’t my usual type. But there was something about his Doc Martins, and painted nails, his anachronistic sideburns and soul patch. A smattering of piercings on his face and ears, black ink tattoos peeking up under his collar and above his waistband, which told tale of a penchant for pain that I didn’t find unappealing.

And his name. The way it tasted as my tongue pressed to roof of my mouth. Old in a way I couldn’t place. An incantation.

‘Tell me then, Vox,’ I shifted a leg, grazing his knee with mine. He looked down at it pointedly but didn’t move away. ‘What kind of games do you like?’

‘The dangerous kind. The old kind.’ His voice was cold on heat. Icicles forming from sweat.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know any games like that,’ I said, sinking deeper into his glacial eyes. Head a fog of etiquette and desire. My words came out in slow bursts. Metered and unrhyming. ‘I’m more an Uno and Scrabble guy. But I’m a quick study and down to play. Maybe you could teach me the rules?’

The look he gave burned through me. He downed his drink in one gulp, eyes unflinching, and grabbed my wrist like an adder’s bite.

In that moment, something was decided. Something I wouldn’t understand until later. Until it was too late to take back.

+

He led me from the bar and into the chill of the night. A world washed in cold blue, moon thick and languid in a cloud splattered sky.

I followed behind, whiskey drunk and shuffling. Heartbeat rhythm of hook-up anticipation. A stirring in my jeans and warmth under my armpits. The few late-night stragglers disappeared behind us. The bass of the club giving way to the clop of his boots on stone.

Outside of the dry smoke and dancing lights, he seemed larger. Pulled at the edges, silhouetted in the alleyway, flanked by shadows.

The colouring of him looked different in the moonlight too. The white stripe of hair a natural warning. Skunks and poisonous frogs. Things that sicken and kill.

I was past the point of warning now.

His grip on my wrist was iron. He walked with a purpose I didn’t understand, and my head swam in the movement, lulled to a fearless resignation. A crying baby coddled by a late-night ride.

‘Hey, what’s the rush?’ The words dripped out of me in slow motion. Distant in my own mind.

He didn’t answer, leading me further down the alley without word or pause.

I didn’t recognise the street anymore. The redbrick townhouses giving way to black, soot-stained buildings. Victorian. Almost industrial. Tall windows with hidden shadows and overhanging roofs that bent in like a copse of trees.

I imagined worker children in Dickensian fashions, dragged by ears to death-trap factories. I imagined pigs, bellies distended, food drunk and stupid being led to slaughter.

‘My place isn’t far,’ I said, not sure if that was true anymore. Processions of shadows danced closer, narrowing the alleyway as he grew taller.

‘Mine is closer,’ he said, and the words hit my ears at once. An inorganic stereo sensation. I nodded grimly, and followed on, barely noticing that the narrowing darkness now snatched at my heels.

+

I still remember my first time with a man.

It came late, all things considered. Twenty-three and three months to the day. I lie and tell everyone I first did it when I was fifteen, with a builder who’d been helping put up an extension for my parents. The builder was real, and the extension happened, but everything else was just fevered teenage fantasy.

My real first time was with a counsellor I’d been seeing to cope with what my parents called “Post University Depression” which I suppose was partly accurate. The biggest issue, however, was that I was a fag, and a coward.

It’s cliché to say, but it really did just happen. He’d given me his number in case of emergencies, and I’d called one night, staring at a bottle of pills, and hoping to see oblivion.

He came over and a three-hour talk turned into something else.

I remember the act itself felt incredibly sudden and yet oddly formal. Showering after the first tentative kisses. Discussions of position and choice of activity. Flesh yielding to force and patience. A chorus of grunts and sighs, strange bodily scents, and a guilt-laden aching that felt like shooting up liquid sin. Afterwards, collapsing, quivering on my back, my entire body an exposed nerve.

Every night since had been a hunt to feel that again.

+

Something cold twisted at my naked thigh. A swift, slick motion and I awoke in fits. I thrashed and flopped like a fisherman’s catch and when my eyes came to focus in the dim light, I saw something black coiled around my leg.

I slapped it with a hand and felt soft, cool silk.

Looking around, I noticed a few things; firstly, my lack of clothing; secondly, that I was somewhere in a Meatloaf music video.

The room was palatial in scale, with high vaulted ceilings, disappearing into shadow. Chain suspended black iron chandeliers hung from the cross beams, candles bulbous and nobbled from overuse. The light generated by them – and the handful of candelabra scattered about the bed, and more near the strange, circular, curtained-off area in the centre of the room – seemed to be contained. Diffused and unable to touch the shadows that clung, heavy as blood sated bats to wood-panelled corners and beneath French provincial furniture.

Everything seemed out of scale. A dollhouse with the wrong dolls. The bed I was lying on could have comfortably held five. The full-length mirror, smoky at the edges, stretched a good fifteen feet up the wall. Next to it a tapestry, old as dirt and with a strange paper texture snaked its way around the room, disappearing out of sight behind the curtained off section, and reappearing on the other side.

The colour was faded, pictures indecipherable in the dim light.

The last thing I noticed, was him.

Vox sat at a vanity – oddly to scale for his size – back towards me, facing what might have once been a mirror but now held a scant few shards, like teeth in a screaming maw.

His back was bare, showing a tapestry of its own, scarred in black ink that spread like sickness over one shoulder. He busied himself pulling jewellery free from his face and ears that he dropped one at a time on a plate. Each piece hit the surface with a muffled, wet tap.

Fear and confusion pushed me to move and as I rose a wave of sickness gripped my stomach. A crunching twist like bad street food doubled me over, beads of sweat pricking on my back.

‘Don’t try to move,’ his voice, clear as a bell in the cavernous room.

I curled pathetically, pulling the sheets in bawled fists until I heard the tear of fabric. The pain was unbearable, stealing my breath and pounding in my blood. Something slithered inside me, contracting, and pulling at all the vital parts, making shapes no human organ should be suffered to endure.

Cool fingertips traced a pattern on my neck and the pain faded, quick as it had arrived, slipping free like a retreating invader.

I gasped and hacked; some black residue expelled into my palm.

‘Breathe,’ he said. A mother comforting a child. ‘That’s it, James. Just breathe.’

‘The fuck did you do to me?’ I hacked between sucking breaths. A hand the size of a shovel, segmented with too many knuckles tilted my face up, and I saw him. Truly saw him.

Childhood fears of grinning men. Of clowns and child-catchers and toothpaste ad teeth that sat in wide, fat gummed mouths. Skin split, liquorish blood at the corners of his rictus grin, eyes wrinkled at the sockets so deep they sank into dark pits, where glacial blue stars twinkled and faded in a grim mockery of blinking.

‘I’m teaching you the rules,’ he said, mouth unmoving. Fingernails like bevel edged chisels curled under the flesh of my cheek and gripped me in place. ‘We’re going to play that game now. You remember. The dangerous one? The old one?’

I blinked a response. A plea, I suppose. Choosing not to form words for fear of my face being torn from my skull.

His hand receded, each nail pulling from the meat of my cheek with a sickening pop.

‘It’s a simple game. One of the first, but not the first,’ he strode to the curtain in the middle of the room, back hunched and legs bowed in strange angles, the white streak of hair stretched and ragged, hanging like a tattered banner over one sinewy shoulder.

A hand still dripping with my blood snatched at the curtain, pulling it into the shadows and revealing a large circular area.

It was stone. Old and porous. Grey in the way only ancient things can be. Colour stolen by millennia. Hollows and tiles swirled into the centre in a checkerboard pattern that formed a large, coiled snake.

The Vox thing circled it with hands flourishing. A ghastly gameshow model presenting my prize.

‘You make it to the mouth of the snake, and you make it back. Can’t get much simpler than that.’

I wiped tears and blood and stared at it. It was hypnotic, seeming to move and shift in my vision. Slowly spiralling in place. An optical illusion, surely, but one accompanied by the sounds of grinding stone.

‘I don’t want to play,’ I said, eyes downcast for fear of its response. I expected screaming. I expected death.

‘Well, I’m sorry, but that’s just not good enough,’ it said. The offence in its words was jarring. ‘A couple of hours ago, you were falling over yourself to play with him.’

I raised my head and saw him. The man from the bar, stood naked next to the Vox thing. He eyed me with a look of seduction, painted nails stroking at his chest. Lip bite and a widening stance.

‘You can have him, if you want,’ the Vox thing purred through its unending grin. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice? All the things you could do. Use him up until you’re bored like all the others.’

The man shivered and split, briefly flickering to shadow before reforming as two. One the man I met, the other different. Tan skin with a hairless chest, the suggestion of abs beneath a slight paunch. They pressed against each other, lips, and tongues on flesh in a stilted eroticism that felt like theatre.

‘I could get you more. As many as you desire. That could be your prize.’

Would that be so bad? I thought. My life had been just that, so far. A string of men. Conquered and won, used, and discarded until the next and the next and the next. It was something I was good at, the hunt. But would I be happy without it? If they were handed to me like packaged meat? No danger of defeat?

I shook my head, dismissing the thoughts. Willing a civilised mind to prevail over base desire. ‘I don’t want to play I just want to leave.’

‘Enough!’

With a swipe of its hand the Vox thing rent the men into pieces, blood heat and pink flesh cascading into shadows that hit the ground and scuttled away into dark places.

‘You don’t seem to understand, James. You’re already playing, sweet. And the longer you wait to make your move…’ its voice trailed off, head tilted. ‘Well, let’s just say you’re not the only piece on the board.’

A morbid wave of inevitability hit me. Sudden clarity of what the Vox thing meant. I had been playing. Longer than perhaps even it knew. It was all a game, in the end, wasn’t it? Snakes and ladders. Snakes and men. Men and snakes and ladders and each one with its own unique poison.

There was death waiting out there as much as it was in here. Different guises, yes, but death the same.

I walked towards the board, knowing somewhere deep that it was not the first time. Late night hook-ups. Fumbling in the dark with strange men just to feel the thrill of life and the danger of it too. It was all a game. Get to the snake and get back safely.

I was good at that game.

My foot found the first divot in the stone. I looked at the board. There was no difficulty to the path. A few tiles marked with symbols immediately recognisable as warnings in some deep, ancient way that lived in the blood of man. A few pits that sunk deeper than the others. The route was clear, and no danger of getting lost when the path was so singular.

I could do this. I had done this.

Bare feet found purchase on the porous stone, one after the other and in my mind, I saw images of a lion and a gazelle. Sat around a board like this, nudging pieces with hoof and claw.

A game as old as man, and older still.

The gazelle placed a winning piece and the lion, incensed at the move, sunk rending teeth into yielding flesh.

It never once occurred to me that I was not the lion.

Outside the board something in the darkness laughed.

I looked back, the path I had taken stretching out like time. Something crawled up the snake’s back. Something large, and black. Body of lion, mane thick with shadow and a head of long, snapping jaws. It padded across the tiles, following my footfalls, bounding across time like an approaching comet.

The second piece.

#Content Warning for spooky stuff and mild body horror#

I recognise Xander the way I would a wax figure. An uncanny approximation of my friend standing in my kitchen, familiar in ways both unnerving and kindly. He is Canadian by catabolism now. His long British vowels drowned in maple; the sharp gravel of his bass notes softened to a pine-fire purr. Even the mass of him, his imposing granite shape, square shouldered and reaching the height of the doorframe, is softened at the edges. Smooth and autumnal, with an un-English gentility.

He is back for the winter, he tells me, and leans in for a hug. His body is a thick, rustic object, made for labour, but his eyes show the softness that kept him indoors; molasses brown with a ring of cinder toffee, cracked and dispersed into the surrounding syrup. Raised eyebrows and the flash of a canine in his smile as he pulls me into him. Skin prickles at the warm-stone kiss on my cheek, campfire and salt on his collar as I breathe him in, and something else. A dryness like mould on bread that catches in the back of my throat.

I raise my arms and hold him firmly, unsure for the first time in my life of his solidity. I press the flesh of my cheek into the buttons of his coat and my fingers find warmth beneath the green corduroy and I know, inflexibly that he is here in my kitchen, holding me. The evidence of his hands, large and square like paws on my neck and lower back, and the soft purr of his comforting coo that vibrates in my hair, is unshakable against the equally inflexible truth that Xander Hollinsworth – my best friend and great unrequited love of my life – had died a week prior.

I step back from the hug and begin to ask him how he got in, appearing as he did seemingly from nowhere in the doorway of my galley kitchen as I absentmindedly finished making two cups of tea instead of one. As if some part of me expected this strange company. An odd behaviour made odder by the knowledge that I don’t get much company – undead or otherwise – anymore.

He waits for me to finish, one eyebrow cocked in anticipation, but the words stick in my throat and instead I turn my gaze to the counter. I stare at it for a while before quietly handing him the prophetic second mug of sweet, milky tea.

‘Cheers, darling,’he says, and my chest blossoms.

In the past, my friends in the know had scolded me for letting him call me that. Tutted their tongues and shaken their heads when I explained how it made me feel like a wildflower shrapnel bomb had exploded in my gut whenever he called me darling, or sweetheart, or handsome.

‘He’s leading you on. And what’s worse, you’re encouraging it,’ they would say, exhausted by the repetitive, futile explanation, like the tired owner of a dog that won’t stop pissing on the rug. ‘It’s not healthy. He’s never gonna fuck you, Ben.’

I would agree with them, only in part to keep them quiet but also firm in the knowledge that they were right. Then later, in the proximity of him and his all-encompassing solidity, all such pretences would be shed, and I would go out of my way to be dutiful and attentive enough to illicit those words.

When he announced his permanent departure to Canada, more than four years ago now, there were some among my friends who couldn’t contain their glee at being proven right. He was never going to fuck me, and now he’d be too far away for me to keep pretending like he would. This, for reasons I could never quite explain, would not be the case. My imagination, despite my own protestations, knew no obstacle it couldn’t overcome, and I pined and hoped harder in his absence than I ever did in his presence.

Weeks turned to months and years, and I still held out a childish hope that he would one day return and sweep me off my feet and we would fall madly in love somewhere with green mountains and caramel doughnuts; the scent of sandalwood and acoustic guitar following wherever we went. This was not – as I was reminded for a time until my friend’s patience depleted – a healthy way of being for a thirty-three-year-old man.

There is a significant part of me, standing in the kitchen, watching my dead but not dead friend sip his tea in awkward silence, that feels a grim smugness at being proven right.

Conversation is stilted as I ask awkwardly how his journey was and he laughs dryly. I join in the laugh after a few moments of quiet shock, shaking my head as I try to rationalize the situation. Xander is dead. He is also in my kitchen, swirling the dregs of his tea in a Starbucks Pumkin mug, and shooting me glances with those molasses eyes of his. Both things are true. I decide that to examine things much further is a waste of sanity, and lead him to the living room to sit on the sofa.

The silence here is gentler. A warm, familiar thing that was always easy to come by between us. We could sit for hours in each other’s company, never saying a word. I would sometimes, as I did now, count the freckles on his neck, imagining constellations in the flecks of brown, and he would, as he did now, pull my legs onto his lap and make cat-like biscuits on my calves in a feeble half-massage.

As I chart high-sailed ships and bears swiping at salmon and juggling jesters, I notice the skin between the freckles is paler than I remember, with a shimmer of oyster shell like spoiling ham. I hear the tendons of his fingers, mashing into the flesh of my calves, crack, and grind like stones in sausage casing. I choose to ignore these things, for now.

+

I don’t remember how we met. We seemed just there, in the periphery of each other’s lives. Planets in the same system. Friends of friends of friends. Over the years the Venn diagrams swelled and contracted, twisting in a spirograph pattern until we became our own little circle in the middle of the page.

I do remember, however, the moment I fell in love with him. It came long before our planets fully collided; long before we were the one person the other would call in a crisis. I suppose there was a perversity in me allowing us to grow so close in friendship, knowing what I did.

It was the week before my Birthday, not one of the big ones, and I had been a sulking child for the better part of a month. I hate Birthdays, specifically my own, and had been oscillating wildly between not wanting to bring it up for fear of anyone making a big deal of it, and wanting to tell everyone so I could demand they didn’t.

I’d just finished work, an evening shift at a massive arts and crafts store. I walked to the bus stop in a grim silence, rubbing at the knots in my shoulders, and didn’t even notice him until we were separated by a mere few feet. He stood by the bus stop bench, just under the shelter. The structure was dwarfed by him. His height, his breadth. The measure of him made everything around him look so small. But it wasn’t just his size. It was something else. A weight of being. The world was smaller for him being in it.

He held a golden balloon decorated with white smiley faces in one hand, his other behind his back. A dopey grin spread across his bearded face, flash of white in the dull glow of the streetlights, and I couldn’t help but smile in response.

He started singing Happy Birthday. Loudly. Voice like coffee grounds and whiskey. I cringed, eyes rolling. I turned on my heel and started to walk in the other direction. He rushed to follow, feet dancing on the pavement, balloon bouncing against his wrist as he continued his song. Hot breath on my cold ear. I started laughing, calling him a dickhead and swatting at the balloon when it flew too close to my face.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked, slowing to a stop as he circled me. He didn’t answer until he’d finished the song, ending with a bow and a flourish, revealing a gift-wrapped rectangle in his free hand.

‘Happy Birthday, Ben.’

‘It’s not my bloody Birthday, Xander,’ I said, taking the present and the balloon offered to me. I felt foolish, stood on the pavement of an industrial estate, clutching childish party favours.

‘I know,’ he said, pulling a menthol from a half-crushed packet and lighting up. ‘But, I’ve heard you don’t like to celebrate your Birthday.’

‘I really don’t,’ I said, breathing in the smoke as it drifted towards me.

‘Well, that’s a problem for me. Because I always have to make a big deal about my friend’s Birthdays. It’s a sickness. I’m a sick man, Ben.’ He paced the narrow pavement back and forth in front of me, gesturing like Columbo giving his final thoughts. ‘So, if we celebrate it today, when it’s not your Birthday, I get to fulfil this admittedly selfish, irrepressible need I have, and you can’t be mad about it.’

‘Oh, I can’t?’ I asked, with as much impunity as I could muster through a smile.

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head grimly. ‘It would be completely unreasonable of you. And rude. And possibly homophobic? I’m not sure, but just come with me for one drink, which I will buy, and we won’t have to speak about your day-of-birth again. For exactly one calendar year.’

I laughed, tapping the present against my thigh, and weighing up his disturbed logic.

‘One drink,’ he pleaded, eyes catching jewels of amber from the streetlamps. ‘And you have to be very pleased with the present or I’ll cry. It’s a copy of Frankenstein. One of the posh ones. The book is posh, not the monster. Or the Doctor. Scientist? Creator.’

That was the moment. Him stumbling over his words in the middle of nowhere, in the dusk of an unremarkable day in April, pleading for me to celebrate my existence solely for his benefit.

+

He asks me how I’ve been since we last spoke. It’s been a little over a fortnight since our last call. A week before I heard the news. He’d said ‘Love you, buddy. See you soon.’

I look around the room, at the collection of coffee and tea mugs, two dozen strong; the Pot Noodles with forks still embedded in the crusted remains; torn scraps of brown envelopes, notes and numbers scribbled, languidly. Pen strokes dragging across the paper. Details for his funeral in Canada that I couldn’t afford to attend. An appointment date for free grief counselling.

‘Stupid question, I guess,’ he says, and I’ve missed his smile so much. I’d thought about it often the past week. Imagining it in my mind. Picturing the way his mouth pulls up unevenly, higher on the left side. One rogue canine sliding out from his under his upper lip. I’d gotten it almost perfectly in my memory, though his lips are darker at the corners than I remember. An aubergine purple, almost fading to black.

‘You need to look after yourself better,’ he says, drumming an arrhythmic beat on my shins. If he knows he’s dead, he hasn’t yet mentioned it. ‘Honestly, I go away for a few years, and you really let yourself go. Hideous.’

It takes me a moment to realise he’s joking. His voice is flatter than I remember, the edges round and indistinct.

I wonder why I’m not scared. Shocked, yes, but searching my body I find no trace of fear. Even the shock is a dull emotion, tempered by the nearness of him. The weight of his forearms resting on me. The sound of his breathing. I’m crying. Not a hysterical thing. Tears, thick and heavy roll down my cheeks and collect in the scruff of two-week stubble.

I pull myself closer to him across the couch. My hands moving under his jacket to grab at him hungrily. Xander yields and shrugs himself free from the extra layer. He shushes me gently, stroking my neck and thumbing at the dampness in the corners of my eyes, but does nothing to stop my grasping.

‘Hey, it’s okay,’ he whispers.

I push my face into his chest, breathing him in. Fire and ash. Wood and leather. Dry mould.

‘Xander?’ I start. Unsure of where I’ll end. ‘Why? Why are you here?’

He holds me for a long time in silence. My salt tears dampening his chest hair and the ribbing of his shirt. Eventually, he answers.

‘I owed you that much, I think.’

He doesn’t elaborate, and he doesn’t need to. We both know what he means, in some way. ‘You don’t owe me shit, dickhead.’

Fingers firmly on my chin, he raises my head. Our eyes search for each other’s in the dim light. His dart rapidly, as if struggling to focus on mine. Carousels of brown and gold, flickering like tracking on a VHS. The edges are cloudy, like cigarette smoke.

I remember the last time we were this close, in this way. The electric anticipation of possibility that went unfulfilled.

‘Can I?’ he asks, barely more than a whisper. I should say no, or at least think further. But before I can find protestations, something slick and warm in my bones moves, and I shakily nod my response.

His lips touch mine and I crack open. A tectonic shift of plates under pressure, finally yielding after years of friction. I am split in two. In this moment we are both of us dead men. I know this like I know anything. How to breathe. The sound of thunder. Universal knowledge that lives in the blood.

I am certain that beyond this kiss, the man I was, who waited and craved, will be no more, and the man who knows a hunger sated will continue. This dead man doesn’t know which is more cursed.

Xander’s mouth tastes like curdling milk.

+

I was always terrible at flirting. I came out too young and learned too quickly to fear the violence of threatened masculinity, and so I never felt comfortable around men.

Well, most men.

Xander had an ease to him. An assurance in the way he carried himself. I’d watch him flirt and seduce, casually slipping from relaxed, friendly conversation to something more primal without a hint of fear.

I wasn’t even jealous, most of the time, but fascinated by an aptitude that seemed impossible to me.

I remember seeing him strike out only once, though I’m sure there must have been other times. It was less a miscalculation through incompetence and more the effects of mixing Tequila and Prosecco.

It was New Years Eve 2015, and we’d spent the night hopping around house parties in Nottingham before finding ourselves outside some tiny black-box gay club down by the canal. The entry price was more than either of us had left to spend, and Xander instead had the bright idea of seducing one of the door staff; a stout, burly bald guy with ginger stubble.

Xander dwarfed him, practically having to lean at the waist to speak into his ear over the din of whistles, fireworks, and general homosexual commotion.

I kept my distance, steadying myself on a safety railing, swapping between swigs of water and drags from one of Xander’s Superking menthols. I expected I’d soon be watching them make out by the river. I was wrong.

I didn’t hear what was said, but I saw the shove. This guy with the stubble, not much more than five feet tall caught Xander off balance. He tumbled onto the cobbles, rocking like a see-saw on his head before crumpling into immobility. It was a strangely morbid spectacle, but oddly impressive. Like watching a tower block fall while a lone resident waved from a balcony. It wasn’t a fight. One push and it was done.

I stood frozen, as if unable to process what I’d just seen. By the time I’d summoned the courage to walk over and help, Xander had somehow already charmed the guy into apologising.

Throwing out some apologies of my own, I promised to get Xander home and waved off the forming crowd. His weight on my shoulders as I walked him down the street was a beautiful burden. My cross and my cause in one drunken package, slurring nonsense into the cold air.

Later, we sat together further down the canal. Shoulder to shoulder with a greasy slice of pizza between us, feet dangling through the safety rails over the still water.

‘Don’t think either of us is getting lucky tonight,’ he said, wiping blood from his hairline with a balled up pizza napkin. I ignored his commentary and took the napkin, and gently tried to clean up the blood that he’d missed.

He smiled at me, glassy eyed.

‘One of these days,’ he began. I could tell what was coming. Something that always happened when he was drunk, and horny with no one to shag.

‘Don’t say it,’ I said, wanting him very much to say it.

‘No, shut up,’ he said, grabbing my wrist and looking me dead in the eyes as though delivering some important speech. ‘Ben. Ben, one of these days, I am going to ruin our friendship so hard.’

‘Shut up, you’re drunk!’ I laughed, pulling away.

‘So hard! I’m gonna-‘ his voice dropped to a pantomime whisper. ‘I’m gonna do things. To you. Weird shit. Like, crazy animal shit. We’ll never speak again, and you’ll hate me, but it’ll be so good.’

‘You’re an idiot, Xan,’ I said, pulling him to his feet and he wrapped me into a hug.

‘One day, handsome,’ his voice, hot and wet in my ear. Thick and sour with alcohol. ‘One day.’

+

We don’t mention the kiss. We settle back into our comfortable silence, his hand stroking my head as I curl into a ball in his lap. The motion of his hand feels stunted. Mechanical. His fingertips are cold

‘Now what?’ I finally ask. The tears have stopped now. I can still taste him on my lips. Sweet and sour.

‘No idea, handsome,’ he says with a soft chuckle. He makes a strange sound that might be a yawn. I hear something snap as he does.

For the first time since his return, I’m scared. A cold, weightless fear that lives at the base of my spine and swims in circles.

I wait for the night to turn black. Then a little longer. Finally, I suggest getting some rest and reluctantly climb off of him. As he stands his bones and flesh crinkle and crack beneath his clothes. A cruel percussion that makes me wince. He cracks his knuckles and one of his fingers splinters like a cinnamon stick. Neither of us mention it, but he gives an apologetic smile and strokes my face with his remaining solid hand. I don’t even flinch at the cold.

‘Lead the way,’ he says, and I take him by the hand, across the hall into my room.

I haven’t slept in my bed in two days, curling on the sofa instead; sleeping with a mindless drone of YouTube playlists of our favourite bands for white noise. I’d forgotten the state I’d left it in.

Xander walks around me, beelining for the bed and the pathetic shrine I’d been sleeping in since his first death. Pictures of the two of us; the copy of Frankenstein, the gold leaf embossing almost entirely worn away; the wrapping paper it came in, unfolded and refolded a thousand times; postcards, letters, Birthday cards, and gift tags. A littering of desperation.

He smiles as he brushes his fingers across them one by one. I wonder what this must be like for him. His expression gives away nothing. He looks tired.

We clear the bed and undress. His feet and hands are blue now, pearlescent and shiny, with thick grey veins visible up to his knees and elbows. When he’s done he helps me peel of my last layers. Somehow still delicate with hands of stone.

We lay down and pull up the blankets. I curl instinctively into him, my feet finding place behind his knees and my hands snaking beneath his shoulders. It feels natural. A slotting of bodies that makes a strange sense, and I imagine a world in which we did this every day.

The cruelty of it pulls me back into the present moment.

As if sensing my mistake, he pulls me closer. Stone-lipped kisses on my forehead. I stroke his back and a piece of him falls away.

The fear snakes its way up my back and I know I’m not ready for what’s to come. I wish that pieces of myself would crumble. I wish that we could turn to dust together.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. His voice sounds distant, and hollow. Bouncing off the insides of him.

‘Don’t apologise. Don’t you dare fucking apologise.’ I whisper into his chest, stock still so as to not break him further.

His breaths grow quick and rough. A rumble of quiet thunder that feels like a lullaby.

+

‘Don’t apologise,’ I’d said to him, staring at the nauseating shapes on the carpet of the cinema lobby. Xander had just told me his latest trip to Canada would be permanent. He’d taken me to a Halloween horror night at the Odeon to soften the blow, and it ended with me crying into the dregs of a bucket of popcorn, skeleton facepaint smeared into a lopsided rorschach.

He hadn’t been able to look me in the eye since he told me. He was standing by the window. He never sat when he was nervous.

The sounds of the busy lobby buzzed around me. They droned, distant and muffled, as if underwater, and for a moment I imagined I was drowning.

‘Say something, handsome,’ he said. He was keeping his distance. I wanted to ask him to come hold me, but I was afraid he’d think me weak. I was afraid he’d think I was manipulating him to stay.

God how part of me wanted to manipulate him to stay.

A bigger part of me knew I couldn’t, and that hurt somehow more than the knowledge that he’d be gone.

‘I’m happy for you,’ I said. And it was true enough. ‘I’m gonna fucking miss you, Xan. Really fucking miss you. But I am happy for you.’

I forced a smile. He was crying. I stood and it felt like the world was off its axis. I stumbled and he grabbed me. He held me. The solidity of him righted the globe. Soon that would be gone.

‘It won’t be forever,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back.’

+

I open my eyes and he is still. The world expands.

I must have fallen asleep, and for a moment I fear that I’d imagined it all. But he’s still here, in my bed. Pieces of him. Solid, but broken. His hands still hold me, unattached to his wrists. Cold stone fingers gripping me tight enough to bruise.

I whisper his name in the darkness, knowing there will be no response from his fractured face. His mouth and nose have rolled off the pillow. One eye, set solidly in place in a petrified lid stares at me sightlessly. No molasses. No cinder toffee. The sweetness of him a memory.

I leave him there in my bed for too long. Resting next to him each night, stroking at the remains of him until he turns to smooth edged stones that glitter like snow and smell of fire and mould.

#Content Warning for spooky stuff and mild body horror#

I recognise Xander the way I would a wax figure. An uncanny approximation of my friend standing in my kitchen, familiar in ways both unnerving and kindly. He is Canadian by catabolism now. His long British vowels drowned in maple; the sharp gravel of his bass notes softened to a pine-fire purr. Even the mass of him, his imposing granite shape, square shouldered and reaching the height of the doorframe, is softened at the edges. Smooth and autumnal, with an un-English gentility.

He is back for the winter, he tells me, and leans in for a hug. His body is a thick, rustic object, made for labour, but his eyes show the softness that kept him indoors; molasses brown with a ring of cinder toffee, cracked and dispersed into the surrounding syrup. Raised eyebrows and the flash of a canine in his smile as he pulls me into him. Skin prickles at the warm-stone kiss on my cheek, campfire and salt on his collar as I breathe him in, and something else. A dryness like mould on bread that catches in the back of my throat.

I raise my arms and hold him firmly, unsure for the first time in my life of his solidity. I press the flesh of my cheek into the buttons of his coat and my fingers find warmth beneath the green corduroy and I know, inflexibly that he is here in my kitchen, holding me. The evidence of his hands, large and square like paws on my neck and lower back, and the soft purr of his comforting coo that vibrates in my hair, is unshakable against the equally inflexible truth that Xander Hollinsworth – my best friend and great unrequited love of my life – had died a week prior.

I step back from the hug and begin to ask him how he got in, appearing as he did seemingly from nowhere in the doorway of my galley kitchen as I absentmindedly finished making two cups of tea instead of one. As if some part of me expected this strange company. An odd behaviour made odder by the knowledge that I don’t get much company – undead or otherwise – anymore.

He waits for me to finish, one eyebrow cocked in anticipation, but the words stick in my throat and instead I turn my gaze to the counter. I stare at it for a while before quietly handing him the prophetic second mug of sweet, milky tea.

‘Cheers, darling,’he says, and my chest blossoms.

In the past, my friends in the know had scolded me for letting him call me that. Tutted their tongues and shaken their heads when I explained how it made me feel like a wildflower shrapnel bomb had exploded in my gut whenever he called me darling, or sweetheart, or handsome.

‘He’s leading you on. And what’s worse, you’re encouraging it,’ they would say, exhausted by the repetitive, futile explanation, like the tired owner of a dog that won’t stop pissing on the rug. ‘It’s not healthy. He’s never gonna fuck you, Ben.’

I would agree with them, only in part to keep them quiet but also firm in the knowledge that they were right. Then later, in the proximity of him and his all-encompassing solidity, all such pretences would be shed, and I would go out of my way to be dutiful and attentive enough to illicit those words.

When he announced his permanent departure to Canada, more than four years ago now, there were some among my friends who couldn’t contain their glee at being proven right. He was never going to fuck me, and now he’d be too far away for me to keep pretending like he would. This, for reasons I could never quite explain, would not be the case. My imagination, despite my own protestations, knew no obstacle it couldn’t overcome, and I pined and hoped harder in his absence than I ever did in his presence.

Weeks turned to months and years, and I still held out a childish hope that he would one day return and sweep me off my feet and we would fall madly in love somewhere with green mountains and caramel doughnuts; the scent of sandalwood and acoustic guitar following wherever we went. This was not – as I was reminded for a time until my friend’s patience depleted – a healthy way of being for a thirty-three-year-old man.

There is a significant part of me, standing in the kitchen, watching my dead but not dead friend sip his tea in awkward silence, that feels a grim smugness at being proven right.

Conversation is stilted as I ask awkwardly how his journey was and he laughs dryly. I join in the laugh after a few moments of quiet shock, shaking my head as I try to rationalize the situation. Xander is dead. He is also in my kitchen, swirling the dregs of his tea in a Starbucks Pumkin mug, and shooting me glances with those molasses eyes of his. Both things are true. I decide that to examine things much further is a waste of sanity, and lead him to the living room to sit on the sofa.

The silence here is gentler. A warm, familiar thing that was always easy to come by between us. We could sit for hours in each other’s company, never saying a word. I would sometimes, as I did now, count the freckles on his neck, imagining constellations in the flecks of brown, and he would, as he did now, pull my legs onto his lap and make cat-like biscuits on my calves in a feeble half-massage.

As I chart high-sailed ships and bears swiping at salmon and juggling jesters, I notice the skin between the freckles is paler than I remember, with a shimmer of oyster shell like spoiling ham. I hear the tendons of his fingers, mashing into the flesh of my calves, crack, and grind like stones in sausage casing. I choose to ignore these things, for now.

+

I don’t remember how we met. We seemed just there, in the periphery of each other’s lives. Planets in the same system. Friends of friends of friends. Over the years the Venn diagrams swelled and contracted, twisting in a spirograph pattern until we became our own little circle in the middle of the page.

I do remember, however, the moment I fell in love with him. It came long before our planets fully collided; long before we were the one person the other would call in a crisis. I suppose there was a perversity in me allowing us to grow so close in friendship, knowing what I did.

It was the week before my Birthday, not one of the big ones, and I had been a sulking child for the better part of a month. I hate Birthdays, specifically my own, and had been oscillating wildly between not wanting to bring it up for fear of anyone making a big deal of it, and wanting to tell everyone so I could demand they didn’t.

I’d just finished work, an evening shift at a massive arts and crafts store. I walked to the bus stop in a grim silence, rubbing at the knots in my shoulders, and didn’t even notice him until we were separated by a mere few feet. He stood by the bus stop bench, just under the shelter. The structure was dwarfed by him. His height, his breadth. The measure of him made everything around him look so small. But it wasn’t just his size. It was something else. A weight of being. The world was smaller for him being in it.

He held a golden balloon decorated with white smiley faces in one hand, his other behind his back. A dopey grin spread across his bearded face, flash of white in the dull glow of the streetlights, and I couldn’t help but smile in response.

He started singing Happy Birthday. Loudly. Voice like coffee grounds and whiskey. I cringed, eyes rolling. I turned on my heel and started to walk in the other direction. He rushed to follow, feet dancing on the pavement, balloon bouncing against his wrist as he continued his song. Hot breath on my cold ear. I started laughing, calling him a dickhead and swatting at the balloon when it flew too close to my face.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked, slowing to a stop as he circled me. He didn’t answer until he’d finished the song, ending with a bow and a flourish, revealing a gift-wrapped rectangle in his free hand.

‘Happy Birthday, Ben.’

‘It’s not my bloody Birthday, Xander,’ I said, taking the present and the balloon offered to me. I felt foolish, stood on the pavement of an industrial estate, clutching childish party favours.

‘I know,’ he said, pulling a menthol from a half-crushed packet and lighting up. ‘But, I’ve heard you don’t like to celebrate your Birthday.’

‘I really don’t,’ I said, breathing in the smoke as it drifted towards me.

‘Well, that’s a problem for me. Because I always have to make a big deal about my friend’s Birthdays. It’s a sickness. I’m a sick man, Ben.’ He paced the narrow pavement back and forth in front of me, gesturing like Columbo giving his final thoughts. ‘So, if we celebrate it today, when it’s not your Birthday, I get to fulfil this admittedly selfish, irrepressible need I have, and you can’t be mad about it.’

‘Oh, I can’t?’ I asked, with as much impunity as I could muster through a smile.

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head grimly. ‘It would be completely unreasonable of you. And rude. And possibly homophobic? I’m not sure, but just come with me for one drink, which I will buy, and we won’t have to speak about your day-of-birth again. For exactly one calendar year.’

I laughed, tapping the present against my thigh, and weighing up his disturbed logic.

‘One drink,’ he pleaded, eyes catching jewels of amber from the streetlamps. ‘And you have to be very pleased with the present or I’ll cry. It’s a copy of Frankenstein. One of the posh ones. The book is posh, not the monster. Or the Doctor. Scientist? Creator.’

That was the moment. Him stumbling over his words in the middle of nowhere, in the dusk of an unremarkable day in April, pleading for me to celebrate my existence solely for his benefit.

+

He asks me how I’ve been since we last spoke. It’s been a little over a fortnight since our last call. A week before I heard the news. He’d said ‘Love you, buddy. See you soon.’

I look around the room, at the collection of coffee and tea mugs, two dozen strong; the Pot Noodles with forks still embedded in the crusted remains; torn scraps of brown envelopes, notes and numbers scribbled, languidly. Pen strokes dragging across the paper. Details for his funeral in Canada that I couldn’t afford to attend. An appointment date for free grief counselling.

‘Stupid question, I guess,’ he says, and I’ve missed his smile so much. I’d thought about it often the past week. Imagining it in my mind. Picturing the way his mouth pulls up unevenly, higher on the left side. One rogue canine sliding out from his under his upper lip. I’d gotten it almost perfectly in my memory, though his lips are darker at the corners than I remember. An aubergine purple, almost fading to black.

‘You need to look after yourself better,’ he says, drumming an arrhythmic beat on my shins. If he knows he’s dead, he hasn’t yet mentioned it. ‘Honestly, I go away for a few years, and you really let yourself go. Hideous.’

It takes me a moment to realise he’s joking. His voice is flatter than I remember, the edges round and indistinct.

I wonder why I’m not scared. Shocked, yes, but searching my body I find no trace of fear. Even the shock is a dull emotion, tempered by the nearness of him. The weight of his forearms resting on me. The sound of his breathing. I’m crying. Not a hysterical thing. Tears, thick and heavy roll down my cheeks and collect in the scruff of two-week stubble.

I pull myself closer to him across the couch. My hands moving under his jacket to grab at him hungrily. Xander yields and shrugs himself free from the extra layer. He shushes me gently, stroking my neck and thumbing at the dampness in the corners of my eyes, but does nothing to stop my grasping.

‘Hey, it’s okay,’ he whispers.

I push my face into his chest, breathing him in. Fire and ash. Wood and leather. Dry mould.

‘Xander?’ I start. Unsure of where I’ll end. ‘Why? Why are you here?’

He holds me for a long time in silence. My salt tears dampening his chest hair and the ribbing of his shirt. Eventually, he answers.

‘I owed you that much, I think.’

He doesn’t elaborate, and he doesn’t need to. We both know what he means, in some way. ‘You don’t owe me shit, dickhead.’

Fingers firmly on my chin, he raises my head. Our eyes search for each other’s in the dim light. His dart rapidly, as if struggling to focus on mine. Carousels of brown and gold, flickering like tracking on a VHS. The edges are cloudy, like cigarette smoke.

I remember the last time we were this close, in this way. The electric anticipation of possibility that went unfulfilled.

‘Can I?’ he asks, barely more than a whisper. I should say no, or at least think further. But before I can find protestations, something slick and warm in my bones moves, and I shakily nod my response.

His lips touch mine and I crack open. A tectonic shift of plates under pressure, finally yielding after years of friction. I am split in two. In this moment we are both of us dead men. I know this like I know anything. How to breathe. The sound of thunder. Universal knowledge that lives in the blood.

I am certain that beyond this kiss, the man I was, who waited and craved, will be no more, and the man who knows a hunger sated will continue. This dead man doesn’t know which is more cursed.

Xander’s mouth tastes like curdling milk.

+

I was always terrible at flirting. I came out too young and learned too quickly to fear the violence of threatened masculinity, and so I never felt comfortable around men.

Well, most men.

Xander had an ease to him. An assurance in the way he carried himself. I’d watch him flirt and seduce, casually slipping from relaxed, friendly conversation to something more primal without a hint of fear.

I wasn’t even jealous, most of the time, but fascinated by an aptitude that seemed impossible to me.

I remember seeing him strike out only once, though I’m sure there must have been other times. It was less a miscalculation through incompetence and more the effects of mixing Tequila and Prosecco.

It was New Years Eve 2015, and we’d spent the night hopping around house parties in Nottingham before finding ourselves outside some tiny black-box gay club down by the canal. The entry price was more than either of us had left to spend, and Xander instead had the bright idea of seducing one of the door staff; a stout, burly bald guy with ginger stubble.

Xander dwarfed him, practically having to lean at the waist to speak into his ear over the din of whistles, fireworks, and general homosexual commotion.

I kept my distance, steadying myself on a safety railing, swapping between swigs of water and drags from one of Xander’s Superking menthols. I expected I’d soon be watching them make out by the river. I was wrong.

I didn’t hear what was said, but I saw the shove. This guy with the stubble, not much more than five feet tall caught Xander off balance. He tumbled onto the cobbles, rocking like a see-saw on his head before crumpling into immobility. It was a strangely morbid spectacle, but oddly impressive. Like watching a tower block fall while a lone resident waved from a balcony. It wasn’t a fight. One push and it was done.

I stood frozen, as if unable to process what I’d just seen. By the time I’d summoned the courage to walk over and help, Xander had somehow already charmed the guy into apologising.

Throwing out some apologies of my own, I promised to get Xander home and waved off the forming crowd. His weight on my shoulders as I walked him down the street was a beautiful burden. My cross and my cause in one drunken package, slurring nonsense into the cold air.

Later, we sat together further down the canal. Shoulder to shoulder with a greasy slice of pizza between us, feet dangling through the safety rails over the still water.

‘Don’t think either of us is getting lucky tonight,’ he said, wiping blood from his hairline with a balled up pizza napkin. I ignored his commentary and took the napkin, and gently tried to clean up the blood that he’d missed.

He smiled at me, glassy eyed.

‘One of these days,’ he began. I could tell what was coming. Something that always happened when he was drunk, and horny with no one to shag.

‘Don’t say it,’ I said, wanting him very much to say it.

‘No, shut up,’ he said, grabbing my wrist and looking me dead in the eyes as though delivering some important speech. ‘Ben. Ben, one of these days, I am going to ruin our friendship so hard.’

‘Shut up, you’re drunk!’ I laughed, pulling away.

‘So hard! I’m gonna-‘ his voice dropped to a pantomime whisper. ‘I’m gonna do things. To you. Weird shit. Like, crazy animal shit. We’ll never speak again, and you’ll hate me, but it’ll be so good.’

‘You’re an idiot, Xan,’ I said, pulling him to his feet and he wrapped me into a hug.

‘One day, handsome,’ his voice, hot and wet in my ear. Thick and sour with alcohol. ‘One day.’

+

We don’t mention the kiss. We settle back into our comfortable silence, his hand stroking my head as I curl into a ball in his lap. The motion of his hand feels stunted. Mechanical. His fingertips are cold

‘Now what?’ I finally ask. The tears have stopped now. I can still taste him on my lips. Sweet and sour.

‘No idea, handsome,’ he says with a soft chuckle. He makes a strange sound that might be a yawn. I hear something snap as he does.

For the first time since his return, I’m scared. A cold, weightless fear that lives at the base of my spine and swims in circles.

I wait for the night to turn black. Then a little longer. Finally, I suggest getting some rest and reluctantly climb off of him. As he stands his bones and flesh crinkle and crack beneath his clothes. A cruel percussion that makes me wince. He cracks his knuckles and one of his fingers splinters like a cinnamon stick. Neither of us mention it, but he gives an apologetic smile and strokes my face with his remaining solid hand. I don’t even flinch at the cold.

‘Lead the way,’ he says, and I take him by the hand, across the hall into my room.

I haven’t slept in my bed in two days, curling on the sofa instead; sleeping with a mindless drone of YouTube playlists of our favourite bands for white noise. I’d forgotten the state I’d left it in.

Xander walks around me, beelining for the bed and the pathetic shrine I’d been sleeping in since his first death. Pictures of the two of us; the copy of Frankenstein, the gold leaf embossing almost entirely worn away; the wrapping paper it came in, unfolded and refolded a thousand times; postcards, letters, Birthday cards, and gift tags. A littering of desperation.

He smiles as he brushes his fingers across them one by one. I wonder what this must be like for him. His expression gives away nothing. He looks tired.

We clear the bed and undress. His feet and hands are blue now, pearlescent and shiny, with thick grey veins visible up to his knees and elbows. When he’s done he helps me peel of my last layers. Somehow still delicate with hands of stone.

We lay down and pull up the blankets. I curl instinctively into him, my feet finding place behind his knees and my hands snaking beneath his shoulders. It feels natural. A slotting of bodies that makes a strange sense, and I imagine a world in which we did this every day.

The cruelty of it pulls me back into the present moment.

As if sensing my mistake, he pulls me closer. Stone-lipped kisses on my forehead. I stroke his back and a piece of him falls away.

The fear snakes its way up my back and I know I’m not ready for what’s to come. I wish that pieces of myself would crumble. I wish that we could turn to dust together.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. His voice sounds distant, and hollow. Bouncing off the insides of him.

‘Don’t apologise. Don’t you dare fucking apologise.’ I whisper into his chest, stock still so as to not break him further.

His breaths grow quick and rough. A rumble of quiet thunder that feels like a lullaby.

+

‘Don’t apologise,’ I’d said to him, staring at the nauseating shapes on the carpet of the cinema lobby. Xander had just told me his latest trip to Canada would be permanent. He’d taken me to a Halloween horror night at the Odeon to soften the blow, and it ended with me crying into the dregs of a bucket of popcorn, skeleton facepaint smeared into a lopsided rorschach.

He hadn’t been able to look me in the eye since he told me. He was standing by the window. He never sat when he was nervous.

The sounds of the busy lobby buzzed around me. They droned, distant and muffled, as if underwater, and for a moment I imagined I was drowning.

‘Say something, handsome,’ he said. He was keeping his distance. I wanted to ask him to come hold me, but I was afraid he’d think me weak. I was afraid he’d think I was manipulating him to stay.

God how part of me wanted to manipulate him to stay.

A bigger part of me knew I couldn’t, and that hurt somehow more than the knowledge that he’d be gone.

‘I’m happy for you,’ I said. And it was true enough. ‘I’m gonna fucking miss you, Xan. Really fucking miss you. But I am happy for you.’

I forced a smile. He was crying. I stood and it felt like the world was off its axis. I stumbled and he grabbed me. He held me. The solidity of him righted the globe. Soon that would be gone.

‘It won’t be forever,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back.’

+

I open my eyes and he is still. The world expands.

I must have fallen asleep, and for a moment I fear that I’d imagined it all. But he’s still here, in my bed. Pieces of him. Solid, but broken. His hands still hold me, unattached to his wrists. Cold stone fingers gripping me tight enough to bruise.

I whisper his name in the darkness, knowing there will be no response from his fractured face. His mouth and nose have rolled off the pillow. One eye, set solidly in place in a petrified lid stares at me sightlessly. No molasses. No cinder toffee. The sweetness of him a memory.

I leave him there in my bed for too long. Resting next to him each night, stroking at the remains of him until he turns to smooth edged stones that glitter like snow and smell of fire and mould.