#max shaw

It was not a child's cry, a sound the walls of that room long since memorized. The tone was deeper than that, but not by much. He was terribly upset.

Gwen's sock feet made quiet patters on the floor as she turned, the sound drowned by a man on the bed. He was curled up and whimpering, the long axe handle extending beyond his covered face.

Not knowing what else to do, Gwen spoke up, interrupting his emotion. "Hello?"

He shuddered in fright and sat up quick to see who was there. "Oh... oh!" If the tears he shed could even exist, he wiped them from his eyes. The blood around them did not smear. His kind face was gruesome. "Hey, uh... What are you doing back here? You shouldn't... It's not a good place, okay?"

Not knowing what to say, Gwen could only nod in agreement. He was right. Only bad things happened there. So why would he stay?

"Why were you crying?"

It was a dumb question, and when the man gestured to the basement around him and the axe in his head, it was good as any answer. He had reasons aplenty.

Gwen was afraid of him at first, but she knew the only reason was his appearance, his manner of death. The boys at Camp Alpine Lake taught her to overlook that. It was none of their faults. He did that to them.

Having no better answer for her presence in that place, Gwen wondered if she was there for him. She remembered what Finn said, how the man died trying to defy the Grabber and save his victim. He did not deserve to be there. None of them did.

Moving from the center of the bed to its side, the pitiful man swung his legs over. "I wouldn't mind some company," he admitted. She was already down there. "It's... why I was crying actually."

He was lonely.

"What's your name?" It used to be in all the papers, the Grabber's final victim: his own brother. After so much time, Gwen drew a blank on what was reported. She felt guilty for forgetting him, but that made two of them.

"I didn't remember at first," he said. "Which is so weird, right? How the hell do you forget your own name?" Finn once told her that ghosts did odd things like that. "I had to be reminded. He had to tell me." The person who gave him back his name was an inevitable sore spot between them. "I'm Max," he told her. "All my friends would call me Max. At least I think they did."

"Okay, Max." She would be his friend of a sort, for the night. "Gwen, by the way."

"Hey, Gwen." He waved at her.

Deciding he was harmless, the great opposite of his brother, Gwen sat on the edge of the mattress beside him. "I guess no one comes down here." Who would? The investigation was over, the house all but condemned. No one had reason to go into the Grabber's basement unless they had a can of paint, and Gwen did not see any of that artwork in her dream. The room looked as it must have when Finney was there.

"No, not anymore," Max said. He did not want to tell her and hesitated, but it was worse to keep secret. "He was visiting me sometimes... my brother. I don't know if I really liked it or not, but I guess I needed it more than I thought. He hasn't been back in several weeks, and it just... you know." He gestured at the mattress, his weeping place.

Scrunching her face unpleasantly, Gwen had to remark, "I think I'd rather nail my goddamn tongue to the wall than visit with that asshole." Max laughed like he needed it and nodded in agreement. "He killed you."

"Yeah, but..." He stopped before defending the man or even the importance of his presence. "Yeah." Gwen could not imagine the loneliness Max felt, but it was not worth having to make nice to a murderer— his murderer. "He never apologized." Maybe that upset him most. Max was the sort of man who might have done something stupid like forgive his murder, but the perpetrator had to apologize for it first. "He kept saying it was Finney's fault. We were both Finney's fault." The boy killed them. It was the boy. "Said he would settle that score. God, is..." He was afraid to ask. "Is Finney okay? Are you okay?"

Gwen nodded. "Yeah," she said. "Yeah, we're fine." She did not know how he would take the news, "Your brother, not so much." He wanted to know what that meant but was too nice to ask, thinking he might offend Gwen with a brotherly concern that could not give up. She told him. "He's back where he belongs... in Hell."

Max's face broke a little, upset to hear that, despite everything. "He wasn't as bad before that place," he promised. "I mean..." He was a killer, a monster. "He was but... it made him worse. I hated being alone in this goddamn hellhole. I hated it even more when he finally came back. He wasn't Al anymore. He just... looked like him, talked like him. It made me miss him more, but he was still all I had." He confessed that even before death, they were all each other had. Max loved his brother, and he missed the ignorance which let him do that. "But if he's, you know, 'there' again... I guess that explains why he hasn't been back."

He had no one, worse than before. Max's only companions were the bugs and any teenager who went down on a dare, if he could even perceive them.

Gwen knew she was too kind, but it was difficult not to be with someone so childlike and vulnerable, especially in his situation. "I don't know how it works," she told him, being honest, "but I can... try to visit." She would find more books about lucid dreaming.

The smile Max gave her was warm but sad. "You don't have to do that." He did not want her to, knowing the disgust and fear so present in his prison cell. He had no idea that Gwen was chased by the Grabber between those same walls as he tried to kill her. "I'll be fine." Max lied for her.

Gwen knew it was a lie, the same way she knew her dreams brought her there to be his comfort. After everything at camp was said and done and her heart finally stopped racing, her subconscious remembered the lone ghost in the basement who wanted her to leave for her own good.

"My dreams," she told him, "the ghosts I meet, they don't talk. Only he did... and you." She thought it was odd of them. She thought how much simpler the boys from camp might have explained their plight with a few words instead of horrid demonstration. Why was the Shaw family special? What connected her to them?

"Yeah?" Max replied. "I used to, you know, have dreams."

Everyone thought that. "My dreams, they're different," Gwen told him.

"No, yeah," Max agreed. "You see things that aren't real. Well, that aren't 'real' real. Like things that happened before or people who aren't there, like me." Maybe he did understand. "I didn't like them, so I used to snort—" He cleared his throat. "I did stuff," he amended for the sake of his teenage audience, "stuff that would keep me awake and in the wrong state of mind." Max drugged himself to outrun his dreams. It was an understandable thing to do.

Gwen had to ask, "But what if they could've helped?"

He sighed, not wanting to squabble about it. He did enough of that with himself. "There are too many times when it didn't." Dreams, even the sort of dream they might share, were too easy to misinterpret. Max lived a life three times the length of hers with so many opportunities to mess up what he saw, ruin lives because of it. He feared his dreams for different reasons than Gwen. "I'm sorry I didn't," he told her, thinking she was blaming him. "For your brother, I should have..." He wanted to cry again. "I'm sorry. Will you tell him I'm fucking sorry? For all of it. I should've done better. I should've saved him."

Hesitating, Gwen touched his shoulder, somehow surprised when it connected. "None of that was your fault."

"I was right upstairs the whole goddamn time," he argued. "Some dancing idiot doing whatever he said."

"And I had dreams that sent police to the wrong house," she stated. "You can do everything possible, but it doesn't mean shit when you're playing against some asshole who got away with it for decades."

She wanted her words to help him, and he wanted them to. Four years stuck in a basement of horrors and blaming himself like he committed them was not what Max needed. He had to break free from the cycle of guilt.

"Come on," Gwen decided, standing. "Let's get out of here."

Max looked at the outstretched hand that so benevolently wanted to lead him from the basement. "I don't... I can't," he said. "I've tried. I can't make it past the stairs." For four years, he was cursed to live in the worst space imaginable, a punishment he did not deserve.

"This is my dream," Gwen told him. She knew from her fight against the Grabber that she could do so much more than past limitations. "And you have been a ghost for four fucking years. I saw what he was capable of. I know you can climb up some shitty stairs."

He did not believe her, but he would humor her. Max raised up to his feet. He did not take the gesture of her open hand but waved his for her to lead the way.

The door was shut, and Gwen tried not to imagine her brother's plight as she pulled the handle.

"He would have to open it," Max told her. "I can't. I've tried." He pulled on the impotent interior handle just like every captive before him.

Letting go, knowing the grip was designed to be pointless, Gwen closed her eyes and took a deep breath. It was her dream. She was in control. There was a handle on the other side that worked, and she imagined it. The inner mechanics of the door had to twist or slide, and she forced them into duty. With a deep clang and a high creek, the door swung in.

Gwen was proud of herself and laughed for the accomplishment as she pulled the heavy door the rest of the way open. Max did not want to rain on her parade, but he did not march in it either. He looked at the long staircase. "I can't..."

"One at a time," Gwen coached. She walked up a few steps and watched him hesitate to take the first. "If your ghost brother can break through ice and maim people with an imaginary axe miles away from here, you can walk up a flight of goddamn stairs."

Max did not want the details of what she said, but hearing the vague description made him angry. It was a new emotion for him but one that lit a fire of determination. He swung his foot forward... and met the step. Laughing in excitement but not wanting to loose his concentration, he focused on the next platform and the one after. Gwen walked ahead and he slowly followed, all the way up until they were in the kitchen.

"I did it!" he exclaimed, bubbling over with revelry and a smile. He turned back towards the staircase and looked down. "I beat you, you goddamn pit." The upstairs door slammed at his hand, shutting that room away. "Good riddance."

"Now let's leave the whole place behind," Gwen urged.

She was only in the upstairs once, when Finn led her out of the basement after sleepwalking. That was the only reason she knew the path to the front door, despite everything looking different. Furniture and walls were undisturbed and still in one piece. She wondered if they were stuck in Max's last impression of the place. She wondered what he would think to see the wanton destruction of the present.

Max opened the front door and held it for her like a gentleman. He closed it after, still stuck in some mindset that it was an ordinary house deserving of ordinary treatment.

The night air was brisk but fresh, and Max nearly tripped down the front stairs in his awe of it. Something besides a dank basement filled him. He laughed and whooped at the open air and every star above. He ran across the grass with open arms and did not touch a single stone wall.

With a big grin on his face, Max walked back to her and asked, "Where do we go?"

Gwen smiled at his contagious happiness. "I don't know," she admitted. "It's night, so everything's closed." If she could change time of day, she did not know how. So often, the backdrop of her dreams played out in real time. The greatest suggestion she had was, "We can go to my house."

"Yeah," Max agreed, up for anything, wanting anywhere that was not underground. "Lead the way."

It was a decent walk on foot, but Max did not mind. He spun in circles, looking up at stars and moon and every little tree. Once, he got dizzy and fell down on the grass of someone's yard. He wanted to lay down for a moment and stare at the night sky, but a wooden handle stopped him, reminding he was dead and fratricidal violence killed him.

"Here." Gwen motioned for him to sit up a little.

"What are you doing?"

"This is my dream," she stated, determined nothing would stand in the way of her new sense of strength. "I can do this." Putting both hands on the unnatural extremity, Gwen felt like King Arthur pulling Excalibur. She wished the axe came half as easy. She tugged and Max whined, holding his splitting head. Her efforts hurt, but he did not complain. Putting a foot on his back was crude, but it gave her weak arms better leverage. Slowly, so slowly, she felt the weapon give up. Then it pulled free all at once, sending her falling on her bottom in the grass, almost hitting herself in the face with the blunt side of the axe.

Beside her, Max felt the concave but empty space in his head. He laughed. "Holy shit, that feels so much better!" He shook his head from side to side, feeling how an extending weight did not follow for the first time in years. "Christ, you're fucking amazing." His smile had all the simple innocence and love of a child. Gwen did not know what to expect when he crawled across the grass to her, but a hug was so obvious. Max held her tight, and she was surprised how well she felt it in a dream. His body was so real to her. His hands on her back were firm. His cheek rubbed against her hair.

When he pulled away, Gwen stared into his bloody face so close. He stared into hers. Then he grinned and fell back in a stranger's front yard, laying down like he wanted, like he could. Gwen laid next to him, unable to recall the last time she did something so pointless.

"I don't know shit about stars," Max expressed, "constellations, I mean. But they look nice."

"Yeah." They were pretty, even in a dream. "Finn knows a lot. He used to anyway." Gwen wondered if she would remember to ask when she woke up. "I think winter is supposed to make them look better." It did. It also made the bright air frigid. Spring was on its way, but the ground that was soft with grass was also frigid with frozen soil. Gwen shivered. "Cold as shit," she muttered.

"I'm not much better or I would..." Max stopped before some inappropriate offer of holding her close like all the old girlfriends he surely had. Raising up, he took off his silly jacket with the busy pattern, sitting there in nothing but a gray t-shirt. He extended it to her. "Maybe it'll help."

Gwen expected the jacket to disappear as soon as it passed between them, but it stayed, the same way the axe could be discarded on the ground. She covered up with Max's jacket, hoping the sharp impediment would similarly stay gone from his head. He deserved something good. He behaved like one night's reprieve was more than enough. It was something new and different, though not at all remarkable.

Max could have stayed all night where he was, lying on his back and looking at the sky while breathing fresh air he did not need. Gwen gave him an hour or thereabout. Even with his jacket, she was cold. She did not say that was why she got up and pushed to carry on.

"Here." She tried giving back his jacket, but Max told her to keep it. Apparently, temperature did not matter much to a ghost. He was always cold.

Gwen put it on and tried not to feel like one of those lame girls proudly wearing her athlete boyfriend's letterman jacket. She and Max were none of those things. He was a victim of the Grabber's that she was trying to help, just like the others. Unlike the others, she pushed on the front door of her home and invited him in.

The heat was on. "Feels good," she said, doffing Max's jacket. "Can you feel the warm air?"

Sadly, he shook his head. He wished he could. "Kinda all the same." Despite looking so alive, there was no blood pumping in his veins. Max was not a physical body, only looked and felt like one. He slid back into his jacket.

"We can go to my room," Gwen suggested, not knowing what else to do with him and nothing on television so late. She was not supposed to take boys back to her room, but Max was a special circumstance for so many reasons.

Gwen forgot to expect a person to be in the room: herself. It was startling when the door opened. Her body remained in its comfortable bed while her mind wandered.

"It's just me," she explained, "my body. What I'm doing now is a sort of astral projection... I guess."

"Far out," Max marveled, looking back and forth between two Gwens. "I never did anything like this in my dreams."

"What did you do?" She never met anyone like herself besides her mom, and when she was alive, Gwen did not know to ask.

"Mostly got scared shitless," he joked. When Max described what he saw, Gwen understood why he took drugs. "There would be these boys covered in blood, one all burned up and another whose head was..." He stopped before describing something too gruesome for a young woman, but the lingering hand motions said it all. "Sorry, you don't wanna hear that."

"It's okay." Gwen did not tell him, but maybe she would some other time, if they had another time. A night of merry freedom should not be weighed down by Max learning his brother's victims were asking him for help. "Speaking of bloody faces..."

"Do I..." Max ran a hand over his face, like she told him there was food leftover from dinner. No mirror could tell him what it looked like, and his own hands failed to blot it up.

"Let me try," Gwen insisted, not knowing if she would have any better luck. The chair from her desk was pulled out. "Sit down." He was not so tall, but neither was she. Gwen took a handkerchief dipped into a glass of water, then she dabbed at the blood on his face. Gently, she rubbed at his cheek and forehead, as high as she could go into the hairline. It came away. "That's so much better," she told him, almost a sigh of relief. As long as she could not see the top of his head, he seemed normal, human— alive. Big brown eyes looked at her with such gratitude, as if he did not deserve her efforts, despite it all being a dream where she wasted nothing. He would not have been a waste.

Gwen held him with a hand on either cheek and kissed his clean forehead as a kindness, as a way of saying he was beautiful and lovable and blameless.

Max shivered as she pulled away. "Gwen, can you..." He did not know how to ask and did not want to. She did so much already, and it was wrong to be selfish. At her insistence, Max showed her what he wanted— needed. He took her hands in both of his and pressed the palms back against his face where they had been. His posture melted into the touch. "You're warm." When he exhaled, it shook and shuddered, overwhelmed to feel warmth for the first time in years. 

She existed in the living world but walked in his, with enough of a bridge between the two to share body heat. Withholding from a starving man did not occur to her. No matter what some stuffy old person would say about impropriety, Gwen pulled his head to her chest and rubbed his outer cheek with her hand. It was so good for him. Max was like a dog with its tail wagging, such was his naked contentment.

"I could stay like this forever," he murmured, so caught up in pleasure and comfort, he forgot to be humble and press Gwen to do something better with her time. "Makes me think of laying in the sun. You remember what that's like?"

"Yeah." Gwen had not done something so frivolous in very long, but he made her want to take the time, enjoy being alive.

They held position, barely moving, talking about everything and nothing. Max was good at talking about absolutely nothing and at a fast pace. Gwen did not think how someone so kind and effervescent could be related to a villain like the Grabber. She did not think about that man. Mostly, she was distracted by the clock on her nightstand, counting down to its alarm. Counting.

Ring!

Gwen groaned, dragging herself awake from a heaviness which could only come from REM sleep disturbed mid-dream. Her dream!

She looked around. "Max?" She saw no sign of him in the room, not that she would in the waking world. "Max, are you... here?"

Gwen waited in silence so long. Slowly, tragically, she understood that if he ever actually left the basement, her consciousness put him back there. He deserved somewhere nicer. It was unfair.

Then a pencil rolled off the edge of her desk of its own accord. Nothing could have done that but a ghost testing his talents— now that he knew he had some.

"Good." She grinned, unable to stop herself. He was out of the basement, forever. "Well, turn around towards the wall so I can get dressed for school."

Gwen gave him a moment to comply before pulling off her pajama top. Plenty of guys she knew— most of them— would have looked anyway. Somehow, she knew he was not only turned away but had both hands over his bloodless face and eyes.

As she made her bed, Gwen noticed the handkerchief from the night before, still covered inexplicably in a dead man's blood. She folded the cloth and put it away in her desk drawer.

It was all real.

"Max..."

Between bites of cereal, Finn prompted, "Max? Max who? What about him?"

"Max... his brother." There was only ever one 'him' in their family. He held power to overtake the word and fill it with fear, even now, after they thoroughly put him in his place at camp.

Finn swallowed, a little more nervous. The only memory he had of Max was him receiving the axe that Gwen pulled from his head. "What about him?"

"He wanted me to... tell you he's sorry... for not seeing it sooner, for not saving you."

Nodding his head, thinking about the words and how Gwen must have had a dream with him, Finn could only shrug. "It wasn't his fault. I mean, yeah, it would've been nice if he showed a little sooner and didn't get..." He could not mention the murder. "But that place was soundproof. God knows I tried yelling enough."

Hoping Max followed her into the kitchen and heard Finn's absolution, Gwen agreed. "He thinks he was supposed to be a mind reader or something." She wanted the man to forgive himself. Maybe it was what he needed most of all, more than the blood off his face or the axe pulled from his head.

After breakfast, Gwen went back to her room to grab her books and bag.

"Max?" she called, assuming he was there and listening. "You can come to school if you want, if you can. It's boring as shit, but it's something to do, right?" She imagined anything, even school, would be a thrill after four years in a basement with only the Grabber for company.

"Who're you talking to?" Gwen turned around and saw her dad standing in the doorway.

"No one," she said, a lie and the truth. "Just reciting something for school."

She tried not to think of an invisible adult man as a pet she was hiding in her room. Gwen had a feeling she stood better chance asking to keep an animal.

It was difficult to focus on school the way she wondered without confirmation if Max were nearby. Did he sit in the empty desk beside her during math class? Did he stand in the corner of biology? Did he have to get up from the lunch table when Ernesto slid into the seat beside her?

She would have to ask what his day was like when she saw him again— if she did.

"I'm going to bed."

Finn looked at the clock on the wall and then to her with an expression that said she was crazy. "It's 8:30," he stated, "on Friday."

"Okay, well... I'm tired," she said, giving the worst excuse as she left him alone with the television.

It was difficult falling asleep and not only because the early time meant she was wide awake. Gwen put too much importance on going under. She was too afraid Max would be gone.

Her eyes opened at ten and saw an empty room. They opened at eleven and saw a man seated at her desk, trying to turn the pages of an open textbook.

"Hey."

Notes: