At two in the morning, Felix's phone rings, and even before he's pulled open his weary eyes and fumbled around for it until he finds it under his bed, he knows it can only be one of a few people. His mother, who is usually asleep at this hour but is known to call him with peculiar "revelations" at whatever hour they accost her, or Quincy, because she is Quincy.
"Help me move this couch," Quincy says. No greeting, no explanation. This is the way of the world, or at least the world as Quincy French knows it.
Felix sits up and stares mutely into the murky dark of his bedroom for a second. The jagged stacks of papers and textbooks on the desk in front of his bed cast grotesque shadows, the vague silhouettes of beasts lurking there in the dim light. He scratches his head, hoping somehow the grit of his fingers digging into his scalp will wake him fully. "What couch?"
"I found one on the street and I think it'd look nice in the living room but I need a big strong man to come help me carry it in."
As far as Felix knows, he is neither of those adjectives. He sighs. "Somehow it makes even less sense why you called me now."
"It's not a big couch. Please, Felix? We have to get it before someone else does!"
Felix considers hanging up and going back to sleep, but the worst case scenario plays out in the catastrophic and often melodramatic theater of his mind. She'll just try to move it herself if he leaves her be, and then he'll be getting a call from the emergency room. "Fine, Q," he says at last. "But you have to come pick me—"
"Yes! Thank you thank you. Be there in five. Sit tight!"
The phone call ends. Felix lets the phone drop from his hands and slumps back against his pillows, savoring another thirty seconds of surface-level pseudo-sleep. When he can pretend no longer, he grabs his eyepatch, and by the time he hears a honk honk outside, he's entirely awake.
To Quincy's credit, it is a nice couch.
It's more a loveseat, really: a soft leather two-seater in a unique deep emerald hue, the color of the surface of a lake. Quincy pulls up in front of where it rests on the curb between a trash can and a stack of flattened IKEA boxes, hops out of the car, and stands there looking pensive with her hands on her hips. She's in hot pink Barbie pajama pants and a vintage Disney sweatshirt, both of which Felix is pretty sure she's owned since middle school, at least. Her hair's swept back into a short ponytail, big highlights of blond sneaking out beneath the red.
After a moment to wonder how he has allowed himself to arrive here, Felix joins her outside. The night is cool but not cold, perfect stand-outside-in-your-pajamas weather, which both of them are now doing.
"So?" Felix says.
"So," Quincy says, and looks at him. There are mascara smudges beneath her eyes, but somehow on her it looks artful, intentional.
Felix steps over the curb, crouching down on one side of the couch. He nods his head at the other side. "Let's get this over with."
Quincy does, matching Felix's posture, her head barely visible over the couch's arm. "Your mom called me today, you know."
"Lift with your legs," Felix says, tightening his grip. "Ready?" Quincy nods. "Up!"
The breath all but bursts from his lungs. It's heavy, and he knew it would be heavy, but actually lifting it is making him regret all those gym subscriptions he gave up on.
"Felix," Quincy says as they start back towards the entrance of Quincy's townhouse. "I said—"
"Did she?" Felix gasps. "Just to say hi, or..."
"What do you think?" Quincy snaps, and in the moments after her eyes dim with shame and she ducks, hiding her head beneath the sofa arm again. "She was looking for you, and I guess she thought you were with me."
"A good guess." Felix has a bad feeling the stairs are looming behind him. He's focused very hard on trying not to eat shit and the words aren't coming easy.
"When's the last time you went home, anyway?"
"I don't know, like last month? Q, can we—"
"Stairs," Quincy says calmly just as Felix's heels nail back into the brick stoop. It's a miracle he doesn't topple backwards.
"Shit."
"Sorry."
"It's fine."
"Felix, I just think—"
"Up we go."
Felix strains, hefting the couch further into his arms; the great weight of it sinks back against his elbows as they begin their awkward hobble up the uneven steps.
They've just reached level ground again and Felix's arms are shaking when Quincy starts once more, "Felix—"
He ducks to avoid being whacked in the face by one of Quincy's million and one hanging ferns by the front door. "Is the door open?"
"I left it unlocked," Quincy calls back with a sigh. "You should be able to just bump it in with your hip."
Felix pauses, considering both how grateful he is for this information, and how much he deplores it. "You what? Quincy. You left your door unlocked?"
Quincy shrinks lower behind the couch, until he can't see her at all. "I knew I'd be right back."
"Christ. We'll be lucky if there isn't a serial killer waiting in here the second I open the door."
Felix opens the door, and they spend a stressful five minutes trying to shimmy the couch through the gap, and by the time Felix's back is about to give out on him they are inside, and the door is shut, and there is no serial killer waiting to strangle them—at least not in immediate view.
They collapse onto the couch where they've left it in the middle of the room, knowing full well there is no way to know what has last touched it or what is now living in it, but far too exhausted to care. Now that Felix is here, he agrees. It does look nice, settling in like a long lost family member against her cream shag rug and between her glass shelves of young adult romance novels. It's no doubt the oldest piece of furniture she now owns, but it's refreshing.
"Felix," Quincy says into the silence, and this time he listens, transitioning onto his back with his head resting on Quincy's lap. They've done this before, so many times before that he can almost imagine this is then and not now: that awkward stretch of afternoon left after their classes in elementary or middle or high school ended, the slow drain of it into butterscotch evening, spent on his couch or hers, his bedroom floor or hers. They talked about some things that mattered and everything that didn't, day after day, time after time—all permutations of the same moment. Different but always the same.
"You're scared of something," Quincy says, poking him squarely in the center of his head. "It's eating you. You think I can't see it?"
No. He knows she sees it, and he knows it's his fault that she does—if only he had the unfailing passivity of his mother or his grandfather, that stoicism, that powerful silence, then Quincy wouldn't have to worry at all. She wouldn't know his fear, would never have held it with him, no matter how many times he begged her to let go.
But Felix isn't quite like those who held the curse before he did. He's not good at hiding. He tells Quincy, "Everyone's scared of something."
"Yeah," she agrees, "but not quite like you. It eats you but you keep nurturing it anyway. Willingly feeding it, it seems like. Why?"
Felix turns his head, his eyes catching on a tiny spider in the corner between the doorway and an iron coatrack he remembers helping Quincy pick out from Goodwill. He watches it twirl about, making webs in the dust. "I don't know, Q," he says, and sighs. "I guess I just don't know anything else."
It's not a satisfying answer. He knows both because of Quincy's silence, a very loud sort of silence, and because he's not satisfied himself.
Finally, he exhales, meeting Quincy's eyes again. "I'll go see her soon, I promise," he says, his voice a low croak. "I just—needed some space."
Quincy nods, her fingers gentle on the cloth edge of his eyepatch, moving slowly, allowing him ample time to stop her. But he doesn't, and she pulls it free. Pure darkness disappears from his vision, replaced by rain-streaked fog, the intermittent crackle and burst of lightning. Quincy's face blurs.
"I wish you didn't have to cover it," she says, and her voice is barely above a whisper.
Felix closes his eyes, but he can still hear the rain, rushing like blood in his ears. "I wish it weren't there."
Lillie wakes with a pain like two tiny blacksmiths are hammering away at her temples and peels her eyelids open with the same effort she might lift two heavy stones. She sits up; moonlight filters in through gossamer patterned curtains, the shadows of swirling blobs and curlicues dancing across the wall ahead of her. Lillie groans, squeezes her eyes shut, lets them open. She rolls from the bed, almost tumbling over a stack of books she keeps forgetting to relocate to a shelf.
In the kitchen she holds a glass beneath the tap and watches it fill, tiny bubbles disappearing into clear. She turns no lights on, preferring this delicate balance of black shadow and grayish-blue light that arrives once the sun has left. She sets her cup down to free her hands for a second, hoisting herself up onto the counter, the cold tile of the backsplash against her shoulders.
It wouldn't be the first time she's woken in the night, and it's not even necessarily unwelcome—times like these are when her mind feels most awake, most malleable, the pen warm and familiar in her hands like an extraneous organ. Lillie turns her head; she keeps a journal on the counter next to the coffee pot for this precise reason. Taking it into her lap, she opens it, the low schwick of pages turning beneath her fingers filling the air. Years worth of words—the spider in the ink/crawls to words/to you—stares back at her. She stops at a blank page, takes the pen from the sleeve at the journal's side. Her fingers have started to tremble.
A flicker of movement in the corner of Lillie's eye makes her start, and she follows it to the corner of the wall, just in front of the pantry door. She sees nothing but shadow at first and attributes her concern to nothing more than insomniac delirium, products of a mind deprived of rest—but then the shadow moves, the shape of it splitting into one tendril, then two, four, eight. Lillie exhales a tense breath as the being at last separates itself from the wall, peeling away from it like molasses. Lillie curls her legs up onto the counter, her skin prickling over her bones. From what she can see the thing has no eyes. It is ink taken shape, stumbling around, leaving drops of black after each step, a trail of shadowy threat in its wake.
It slips behind the cabinet and disappears from Lillie's vision for a second, before it reappears again, facing her now from the other side of the counter. Lillie swallows hard, picking up the journal. The peace of the night is gone; her heart is in her throat like a dense, dense rock, hard to breathe, hard to live. Hard to do anything other than tremble.
The spider crawls toward her, each footstep like the sound of a small wet boot slapping against a floor. Lillie swings up the journal. Swings it down.
She will replay the sound for hours, for days, for much longer than her mind wishes to hold it, that ugly wet squelch of destruction. Lillie lifts the journal again and its leather face is ruined by a black blot of ink. One of the spider's legs twitches. She was right; the thing has no eyes.
Lillie lets out a choked sob, dropping the journal to the floor. She turns, her stomach curling into itself, and vomits into the sink.