Charlie walked through the purest and darkest scenery, the technicolour drained from the world now that winter had come to make him feel as though he wandered the grainy footage of a silent black-and-white film. Snowfall blanketed all of Eton, muffling every creak and amplifying every crack. The spindly trees were stripped bare, coldness swallowed the alleyways, and mist stirred through the cobbled streets like the season's ghost. His gloved hands swirled in circular motions around the snowball like a fortune teller hovering hands over a crystal ball to reveal his foggy fate. His brown parka and black blazer glittered with snow, shimmering brightly like a baker's sugar-sprinkled apron. A thin layer glazed the flat cap on his head, the peak bent forward to keep snowflakes from drifting into his eyes now that they fell as large as a fifty pence piece. No matter how hard he strained his eyes to look towards the end of the foggy street, he saw only ankle-deep mounds of sugary snow, the nondescript front of buildings with their glowing lights blurred, the cobwebby hedgerow bordering around gardens, and the stark black limbs of the sleeping trees, rising amongst the wintry lands at the edge of town like lamp posts left unlit. It seemed to him that everything was the lightness of good and the darkness of evil, a drowsy landscape found only in the pages of a fairy tale—or, for the briefest time, when alone in winter. It was a peaceful moment, a vast quietness at a sylvan border that appeared charred black, the nothingness of whiteness in the evening air.
When he spotted the nymphette boy waiting outside the cafe for him, he pelted his head with the snowball.
'Oi!' Iggy cried. He rubbed aggressively at his ear and brushed the snow from his shoulders. 'Was there really any need for that?'
'To be honest, I was going to sneak up and scare you by pretending to be a mugger,' Charlie confessed. He pulled his tartan scarf tighter around his mouth to shield it from the cold, sieving frost from his sparkly breath. 'How were rehearsals?'
'Since when were you any good at scaring anyone?' Iggy asked as he opened the door to the cafe and stepped out of the dark dusk. 'Do you remember when we used to hide on Seraphina so that we could jump out and scare her? I stopped including you because you kept bursting into sniggers as soon as she stepped into the room—effectively frightening her, yes, but not with the performance that I had intended.'
Once Charlie sat down at a table by the window and Iggy brought over two mugs of hot cocoa, he took a hip flask from his parka pocket and grinned widely at him. 'Just to warm up the old bones,' he said as he added a decent dollop to both mugs. 'I think Ciarán Quinn would be rather impressed with me for Irishing up hot chocolate, don't you?'
'It seems England's edification has fallen from your shoulders like a mantle,' Iggy commented as he knocked his mug against Charlie's and took a sip. 'I'm taken aback by how wily and wild-spirited you've become, a freed soul now that you've escaped the shackles of your virtuousness.'
'Kiss my rosy bottom, Perkins.' Charlie rolled his eyes and looked out the window as he took a mouthful of alcoholic cocoa, his mouth full of grins. He rubbed at his flushed jaws and ruddy nose to warm them, his face as pale as the snow elsewhere. He glanced outside to the abysmal night sky above, smouldering white and grey like milk and cigarette smoke, the black skeletal limbs of trees reaching across to frame his view of the stratosphere like webbing. There was something about the dark grey skies and darker buildings along the streets—the smudged orange lights of the lamp posts in the fog resembling a bombardment, perhaps—that made him think of London during the Blitz. 'Iggy, have you ever heard of a girl named Bethany Green?'
Iggy pondered the question for a moment. 'If my memory serves me correctly, I think Seraphina has mentioned her a few times.' He took another sip now that he was acquiring the taste for it and then took a minute to think back. 'I believe she is an old friend of the Rose from yesteryear, and some of the things she's said has me under the impression that she either died or disappeared from Eton quite mysteriously some time ago.'
'That's what I thought.' Charlie sighed glumly. 'Sadly, I think she died, too. For being a member of the Revellers, one of the most prestigious and select groups to ever have existed, I can't understand how they've managed to remain so secretive. There were only ever four members, but few know anything substantial about all of its founders. So, you don't know anything more about her?'
'I'm afraid not, chum. Why do you ask?'
'It's just ... when Trevor was at Frankie's house in Malta, he said some things—or, rather, it wasn't what cryptic things he said so much as it was how he said simple things to make you suspect there resided a deeper meaning behind them.' Charlie tapped the table with a coin and looked out the window. 'And now I can't stop thinking about this girl and her name. For goodness' sake, I even dream about her. I went to the library and looked through old newspapers and—'
'I'm going to stop you right there,' Iggy stopped him. 'Have you forgotten that Trevor Hamilton is the most conniving and despicable and beastly boy to ever have existed? With a flare of rather inspirational trickery, he's the same boy who somehow managed to manipulate an event that resulted in the prefects caning each other rather than him after he annihilated a trophy cabinet with a crossbow.'
'But is that true?' Charlie asked doubtfully. 'How could anyone accomplish such a feat?'
'Some say that he threatened to release some very sensitive information that would have brought down their entire empire. Dear Charlie, forget about his venomous words; that boy is nothing but poison.' Iggy lit a cigarette and marvelled at the fairy lights overhead. 'Why should this Bethany Green dame trouble you so anyhow? Do you see her anywhere? Does she sneak across the snow? Does she whisper in the woods? She is nowhere in sight.' Iggy blew on the frost-embellished panels of glass beside them and wrote her name in the condensation. When it faded, he added, 'See how it comes and goes? That's all Bethany Green is: a breath on the windowpane. A passing mention. I don't think that girl matters too much, or she'd have been mentioned long before now and long before that Adonis slipped between your legs.'
'It's particularly that reason why it worries me so: that she has never been mentioned before. Perhaps she matters too importantly to be mentioned.' Charlie looked out the window thoughtfully, the silent world stirring vaguely outside as steam smoked from the grates and his hesitant lips. 'This ghostly girl ... she haunts me so.'
'Give it a rest, Charlie,' Iggy scolded. 'You're only waiting for something to come along and destroy what you hold precious—that is why the name worries you, a general fear that too much goodness eventually rots, that surely there needs to be some sort of badness that follows to balance it out. The only good thing about the fear of loss is that it puts things into perspective and reveals what you cherish most. Enjoy the ride, Charlie, even if the road gets rocky. Maybe it won't be taken from you, for sometimes the good lasts. Don't let your doubts taint it, or it'll be you who'll be the destroyer, not this Green bird. Right now, you and Frankie Carrozza are on either side of a book cover, and all that lies between you is the ages and the pages. Maybe it isn't that Heaven doesn't exist,' he said pensively, 'but doesn't exist ... no more, shattered into a billion shards for us to find here on Earth like lost pieces of treasure, perhaps.'
'How very insightful of you,' Charlie commented, raising his eyebrows and folding his arms.
'I may have paraphrased most of that from parts of the play I'm in.' Iggy sniffed.
'You're rehearsing?' Charlie laughed. 'Of course, you're rehearsing.'
'Forgive me,' he insincerely said, 'but it was relevant.'
'What's become of us, Iggy?' Charlie said as he glanced out into the street and watched Etonians and children from the neighbouring houses throw snowballs at one another. 'We used to talk about silly things—of books, of boys, of music, of gossip, of what we did at the weekend, of what we'd do in the next one—and now all we discuss is matters between the heart and Heaven.'
'Growth and maturity, Charlie. They're the paving steps into adulthood,' he answered. 'That is what's happening, and that's all that is happening, always. We're only getting older, darling.'
'I don't believe I like it very much. Though, I reap its rewards. Something about it saddens me with such melancholy, the thought of change,' Charlie replied glumly, still watching the evening spread over the roof tiles outside. 'You know, it's just occurred to me that it has been a long time since it was just you and me. A very long time, indeed. Isn't that terrible? I've neglected our friendship.'
'You've been preoccupied with another one.' Iggy sniffed. 'Truthfully, I didn't mind the mid-term recess from you.'
'Piss off.' he snorted.
'No, it has been much too long if you ask me.'
'Agreed,' Charlie affirmed. 'After all, we were planted into the soil of Eton at the very same time, we sprouted and seeded simultaneously, so it is only right that we bloom at the same time, shed our first petal at the same time, and wilt in the winter together. I've missed this. I've missed you. I'm happy we have this evening.'
'At much as it pains me to say it, I've missed you being a barnacle, too.' Iggy took a long sip of his cool cocoa. 'How is Frankie anyhow?'
'I don't know.' Charlie averted his eyes. 'I haven't seen him in days.'
Iggy fell back in his seat, eyebrows jumping up his forehead. 'Is that so?'
'Yeah.'
'He hasn't rung or visited?' Iggy asked.
Charlie shook his head and took a long sip of his own drink. When he'd wiped the foam off his lip with his bottom one, he quietly said, 'He hasn't attended classes in ages either. I've rung Empyreal House countless times since, but he never answers.'
'And just when was the last time you seen him exactly?' Iggy asked.
Charlie took another nervous mouthful of cold hot chocolate. He remembered that last night trying to help Frankie revise by removing articles of clothing for each of his correct answers or outcomes—a tie looped the banister for completing his English essay; his trousers draped over the chair for his conclusion in the Classics; his shirt hung ghostly on the bookcase for his hearty re-enactment of the Storming of the Bastille for History, and so on. Visions of Frankie's smug smirk visited him, and how he'd placed his hands behind his head to make wings out of his elbows. He recalled feeling the cold creep through the frosted windows as they walked naked through the loft to exchange Christmas presents; how afterward, he'd sprawled on his front across Frankie, forcing him to spread his legs as he opened Brideshead Revisited across his abdomen and Carrozza rolled a spliff under his chin. Though he couldn't recall the words exchanged, he remembered Frankie glancing back at him lazily before letting out a squeaky sentence of babbled words, his face scrunched up to mock Charlie with a voice and expression that looked and sounded nothing like his. Charlie had taken the spliff from his fingers and inhaled. He then kissed him with his eyes opened and blew most of the smoke into his mouth until Frankie's cheeks puffed out. They'd laughed and laughed and laughed themselves into hysterics beside the roaring fireplace. Aside from a mysterious square box that was wrapped in quaint, seasonal wrapping paper, Carrozza had given him another painting: The Fall by Alan Stephens Foster. It was a dramatic piece, depicting two boys in shirts, knickerbockers, breeches, and waistcoats. One boy, the lad without his sleeves rolled up, was leaping from a very old car (from the Brass Era, perhaps) to grab the back of the head of the boy in the waistcoat, intimately pressing his face close to his mid-dive as two older men looked on sinisterly, shocked and appalled by the demonstration of affection being presented from the other side of the automobile.
'A fortnight or so,' Charlie answered as he picked at the table.
'Good Lord!' Iggy cried. 'You ought to go to him. What if he's lying on the floor, his back broken over the rim of his bath and calling out your name for his last words? "Charlie! Charlie! Oh, Charlie! My Charlie!"'
'Do you think so?' He glanced up at Iggy.
'I know so,' he answered. 'You'd better go and see what's up—if not solely just to make sure that the boy is still breathing. Very strange, very mysterious.'
'He's probably just very busy with his studies,' Charlie assured himself. 'It's Christmas, after all. And his final year. I can't be taking up all his time—'
'But you said it yourself: he hasn't been going to Eton. So, what work has he got to be doing?' Iggy shrugged. 'If you ask me, I think you should go over to Windsor.'
By the time it took Iggy to convince Charlie to pay Frankie a visit, the roads of Windsor were overburdened with snow and deserted of people. Most of the lamp posts were faulty from the strong blizzard earlier so that the majority of streets were in utter darkness. As he hugged into himself for warmth, Charlie trudged through the weather and the eerie silence until he reached Carrozza's gaff. Like every other night he had come here over the past two weeks, the fairy lights in the courtyard were off and Empyreal House was in darkness. But this time he ventured closer. Macabre and gruesome images visited as he approached, given rise by Iggy's words of warning that worried him. He knocked on the door and waited. He rang the bell and waited. He called out his name and waited. He tried the door handle. I'm going to find him dead. I'm about to find him dead.
It opened.
The air inside the loft wasn't much warmer than outside. For about a minute, he waited until his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Gradually, the black clutter cutting shards out of the window edges turned into furniture in the lilac evening light pouring in.
'Frankie?' he called, his voice barely louder than a whisper. With a heart stricken with dread, he watched the breath of the words edge into the apartment and disperse into steam. 'Are you home?'
Determined to find him, even if that meant deceased, Charlie stepped inside. Snow spilled in behind him. He closed the door and took a few more steps further into the loft. He squinted at the gloom to distinguish a safe route through to turn on a lamp. Careful not to knock anything over, Charlie manoeuvred between the bookcases and sofas and chairs, nothing but vague shapes in the dark. His calf whacked against a table and he heard something jingle. 'Ow! Shit!' he gasped, hands fumbling for the chain of the lamp.
'Don't,' a voice murmured from the darkness.
Charlie flinched. He peered through the black in search of the speaker, but saw no figure cutting a jagged shape out of it. Then, he noticed in the subdued twilight streaming in that there was a mound on the bed. 'Are you awake?' he asked, though he knew he was.
There came no reply.
'What—what are you doing in bed at this time?' It was a silly question, as it was a reasonable hour to be in bed if one was extremely tired, but his strange nervousness made him speak. He approached the bed. 'Are you alright? It's freezing in here. I'm going to light a fire.'
Still, there was no response. Instead, he heard the blankets rustle as Frankie turn away from him on the bed to face the window.
As he lit a fire and smothered it with coal, he tried to tell him interesting facts, things that he knew he was interested in, things that he probably already knew, but he just wanted to hear him speak more than a word or two to him. To tell him that he found them fascinating. To even tell him that he already knew them. As he committed himself to labour, Charlie told him that Oxford was built and operational as a college before the rise of the Mayans; that Cleopatra lived in a time closer to Pizza Hut's invention than to the pyramids being built; that Mongols were fighting the samurai in Japan and knights in Europe at the same time; that Star Wars: A New Hope came out the same year as the last execution in France by guillotine; that Abraham Lincoln and Edgar Allen Poe were friends in their early twenties; and that the Great Pyramids were being built while there were still areas that had woolly mammoths roaming about. He told him that when Emperor Honorius heard about the fall of Rome, he cried out thinking his favourite chicken, named Roma, had died. Upon hearing that it was instead the city of Rome that had fallen, Honorius breathed a sigh of relief. He waited for Frankie to snigger, but the bed never made a sound. As he poked at the coals, he talked about Alexander the Great and his friendship with Hephaestion; how Alexander spent almost one and a half billion pounds on Hephaestion's funeral when he died, which was a conservative estimate; how he spent all night weeping over his body until they dragged him away; how he extinguished a light only reserved to signify the death of the king (ie. himself, Alexander the Great); how he went to the oracle and petitioned to have Hephaestion granted the status of a god, but was denied; and how nine months later, he was still planning expensive monuments dedicated to his "friend", except that he died, too.
'People say that the only thing that ever defeated Alexander the Great was Hephaestion's thighs. What do you think?' Charlie stood and wiped the soot from his hands on a dirty cloth, certain that he could not revive the flames from underneath the coals that he'd buried them in. When he didn't receive an answer, he continued, 'I think it reminds me of Achilles and Patroclus, whom they themselves also compared themselves to. I've a theory about them two myself. Since it is naturally impossible that Achilles was killed by an arrow to his heel, and since we know that his heel was supposed to be his only weakness, we can say that the Greeks, as usual, came up with a myth to explain the death of such a hero. So, the main question is: what caused Achilles to die?' Charlie started to walk towards the bed, trying hard to keep trepidation from his tongue. 'I think we ought to focus on the truth behind the myth. We take into consideration that the oracle says Achilles dies after Hector has done so—the man who killed Patroclus, as you know. Now, let's think of the parallels of myth and reality. According to the myth, Achilles is immortal—except for his heel, which Thetis was holding him by when she dipped him into the River Styx. No one can defeat him, he can't die, but his heel is vulnerable; his heel is his weakness and he knows it, and he finally dies by an arrow to the heel. According to reality—or, rather, what's more likely to be the reality—Achilles is the perfect warrior: tough and strong in battle, killing the Trojans one after the other. And the only time he gets to be soft and calm is when he is with Patroclus. Patroclus dies, and Achilles grieves so hard and so much that even the gods hear him. He kills Hector savagely in revenge, knowing that he will soon follow. Then, as the fates commanded it, Achilles dies because of his weaknesses in both cases.' He stopped beside the bed and stared at the shapeless form underneath the blankets. 'Basically, what I'm saying is that the famous Achilles' heel was actually Patroclus all along.'
Still, there was no response. Ever so slightly, Frankie might've shifted in the bed to stir the sheets. But nothing more. In an attempt to rouse his interest in storytelling, Charlie began to tell him about The Monster in the Cellar, a short story that he'd written for the school newsletter about a watchman who had to feed a monster in a cold and dank basement once a week, and how each time it frightened him despite how many times he did it, but his voice might as well have been the wind outside. He stood there and waited for a long time. For what? He did not know. Finally, without another word, he lay down beside the quiet shape in the bed and linked his hands together against his navel. He looked up and watched the sinister shadows of the tree branches scrape long, jagged, and spindly fingers across the ceiling plaster to seize a handful of the ornate roses moulded there.
Although bouts of fear and concern squeezed his heart, Charlie didn't fully understand what it was he was seeing, but he knew he was looking upon Frankie Carrozza's fabled curse.
*
Charlie returned every night afterward to find the boy still there, as quiet as the snow, as still as the dead. They lay in bed together for hours without speaking, and Charlie studied the nuance of his breathing to recognise when he was sleeping or awake. Mostly, in the long periods of silence that Frankie just slept away, Charlie laid awake all night until the walls darkened and the soft blue glow of the moon and snow returned to smother the land in silence, listening to the hoots of owls and watching the shadows of the snowfall fall down the walls and across the floors.
Trapped in that perpetual darkness and light-blue nimbus of night, it seemed to him that Frankie Carrozza was in hibernation. All of his lustre had vanished, and he lay like Endymion asleep in the woods. Charlie had watched him light up a room as soon as he walked in countless times before, but now he only served to darken an already lightless bedroom. The boy had retreated deep into himself, somewhere among that void inside himself that he'd once spoke of. Before, that place had seemed a realm as bright and startling as fireworks, but this place now seemed to have died into a dark oblivion, a hushed space as shadowy as the blackened fireplace on the other side of the room, a gaping black hole staring back out at him. Carrozza appeared as dead as one could be with only a little bit of life still left in the lungs. From time to time, Charlie felt a tug of desire to speak, but he knew no words to break this melancholic spell. Yet, even if he was to attempt a word or two, what could he say to a person who seemed determined to let life slip by? He feared that the boy might just lie here forever; until generations upon generations passed; until the leaves and ivy grew up thickly over the windowsills; until their rambling roots roved over the walls like wispy locks of hair; until the outside world was hidden from view and the loft was darkened tremendously by curtains of bramble bushes; until layers of dust lay thick as carpet around him, while he stayed statuesque and slept the centuries away like a boy from a fairy tale. When the desolated ruins of Empyreal House crumple in around him many years from now, Etonians will point it out and whisper as they pass that an immortal demigod slumbers in there, lost to the ages. Many more centuries will pass, until, finally, the ageless boy with a dormant soul will lay forgotten in his overgrown temple as a myth in the mist.
No, rather than speak, knowing Frankie didn't want him to, he just watched over him and waited instead, hoping that his being here would bring some sort of comfort to ease his pain, hoping that one day soon he would return to him. As he listened to his deep breaths that proved that he had fallen into a deeper sleep again, Charlie turned on his side and fixated on a wayward curl coiling out from above Frankie's ear, a simple strand of twisted hair that somehow broke his heart all the more. He desperately wanted to reach out and touch it, to rake his fingers through his hair, to stroke the bare skin of his back, to soothe his inner turmoil somehow. More than anything else, he wanted to turn him over so that he might see his face again at last, to stop his dead eyes from boring into the wall opposite or hiding behind his eyelid—with only his back and shoulders to recognise, the boy had become a faceless phantom, a silent shadow on the wall.
Charlie reached out, but instead of touching the ghost, he petted the blankets between. Are you coming back? he wondered as he watched the snowfall dapple Frankie's arm and veiny hand with bits of shade. Are you ever coming back? I'm waiting. Know that I'll be waiting. But come back when you can.
'What did you dream of?' Frankie had asked him the last time they were in bed together, his sleepy face full of sunshine and smiles like a child. 'You looked so at peace.'
'I didn't dream,' Charlie had answered, turning on his side, too, and sliding his knee between his legs to feel his warmth. 'I don't dream anymore. I haven't needed a dream in a long time.'
From subdued golden sunsets leaking through the windows, heavenly shafts of light that were mottled with dust and winter bleakness and poured heavily against the wooden panels, until pink daybreaks approached, Charlie wondered what reality Frankie Carrozza was escaping from until he rose quietly to leave the slumbering boy there each morning, in a place very far away that he could not reach, a place where he could not follow him to, where he was lost in a dream.
*
A week later, Charlie sat at his desk with his head in his hands. His bedroom was mostly in darkness, as though he'd been followed out by a piece of the eternal darkness that Frankie kept himself shrouded in. He contemplated by the candlelight, wondering what sort of ailment could afflict Carrozza like this and what to do about it, how to save him from it. There were no books on situations like this; for the first time in his life, he'd scoured the library and found nothing to help. He lit a cigarette and looked beyond the window to think, his mind almost as troubled as the subject.
The exhaustion of the past few weeks weighed upon him and caused him to doze off in his chair. When his body grew limp and moonlight bathed the room, his pen dropped from his hand onto the floor and his head fell over the back of the chair. For the first time in a long time, Charlie dreamt up a nightmare, a contorted concoction inspired by his most recent reading of Dante's Inferno and the ancient legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. In his rendition, Frankie, representing a modern-day Dante, ventured into Hell to rescue Bethany from its clutches, his version of Beatrice. Once the depths got darker with every step of his descent, Bethany's Beatrice had been moved to aid him. Encouraged by Seraphina posing as Saint Lucia in light armour, Bethany sent him Virgil in the form of Charlie, who hurried after him into the underworld to be his guide through it. The two boys met in Limbo, and together they descended. To the sounds of rattling chains and various tortures, Frankie and Charlie, Dante and Virgil, spiralled down through the nine circles of Hell to find Bethany at its centre. Once they'd exited Limbo, they successfully conquered their way through the others—Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery—each ring in each chamber of the cavern denoting worse crimes and punishments the deeper they travelled, unimaginable sufferings and disturbing views too horrifying and harrowing to be clearly perceived in the dark. However, the further they travelled into it, the more it took its toll on Frankie; his costume armour and crown weighed heavier and heavier upon him the deeper they got; so much so, that Charlie had to carry his weight on his back sometimes when he became too weak to go on. With Frankie's arm draped over his shoulders, Charlie dragged him through a warren of shadowy passageways that sloped ever downwards, snow clogging in the cold burrows like fat thickening in wide arteries. When skeletal demons crept up upon them from time to time and tried to steal them away from one another, the fiery torch in Charlie's hand kept them back until Frankie's sword could cut them down. Following this method, they finally reached the centre of Hell, where a monstrous, demonic body rose up through the middle of the entire nine circles of the infernal pit, frozen mid-breast in ice. It was the great winged Lucifer, of course, all three faces belonging to Trevor Hamilton. Each one of Satan's three mouths chewed eternally on a great betrayer: Jeremy Strudwick, Vincent Carlyle, and Trevor Hamilton himself. A girl lay at his gigantic feet, scratched bloody and bruised. The iron-willed maiden had her own sword in one hand and grace in the other, using both blade and bright light to fend off his fiendish minions rather successfully. When Lucifer was charmed by Frankie Carrozza confessing his greatest sin, which he admitted to be the demise of Bethany Green that led her here, he agreed to release her soul to them from damnation on one condition: that throughout their journey back up to the surface, Frankie's devotion must remain hers until they reached the end. Both boys accepted wholeheartedly, of course, and her shade was freed into their possession. With a hand clasped in hers, promising never to let go, the trio escaped by climbing down through Lucifer's legs, carefully avoiding the submerged souls trapped and bent out of shape inside the ice. Eventually, the light of the southern hemisphere emerged at the end of the tunnel—the other side of the world. As they approached it, Charlie stopped and pointed towards the light. He explained to Frankie that he had shown him the way through, but that he cannot lead them to the way out and that he must remain in Purgatory. Loath to leave his escort behind after enduring such an ordeal together, Frankie begged him to come with them. Charlie shook his head sadly. He told him that he cannot save one and keep the other; if he brings out one, the other must stay. Resigned to such a fate to lose a piece of his heart forever, Frankie's Dante released the hand of Bethany's Beatrice so as to kiss Charlie's Virgil in the light of the end—be it in farewell or in resolution, not one could tell. Since his deal with the Devil was broken, either accidentally or intentionally, dark little claws reached out from the shadows and grabbed onto Bethany Green, long nails tearing scars into the wispy material of her white dress. With their hands raised out to her and hers to them, their agonised screams of protests scattered ghostly echoes that lived loud and died quietly throughout the hole as her soul was dragged back into Hell and into darkness.
Charlie woke with a violent jerk, thumping his knee off his desk. He groaned and rubbed the aches in his neck from the uncomfortable sleeping arrangement, the nape of it slick with sweat. A noise had startled him out of his sleep, a noise that he'd initially thought to be the beating wings of Lucifer below, a noise that had come from the waking world to find him in the sleeping one. He rubbed his eyes and checked the time on the clock as the dream gradually faded into nonsensical images of a meaningless memory, leaving only a vague, residual sense of trepidation behind as a reminder. When he glanced around for what might've made the sound, he found that a piece of paper had been slipped under his bedroom door and wedged beneath the carpet. By the time he'd got out into the hallway, whoever had slid it in was long gone. He inspected the piece of paper as he walked back inside and closed the door: it was a playbill made of fancy black card and decorated with red fabric that bordered it like miniature show curtains. Charlie rubbed his finger across the risen little white illustration of a boy asleep in a bed, stars sprangling around the bars of the bare frame. The writing above it shone just as bright white, almost silvery like starlight, and was framed by winter snow, stark trees, and an eerie graveyard. He touched the pinprick holes poked out of the black backdrop to resemble constellations above the illustration, marvelling at the beautiful craftsmanship and artwork. It was an invitation to see The Sleeping Prince tonight at midnight in Empyreal House. Beneath the title, a poem read:
When winter comes and wakes the dead,
The Sleeping Prince returns to bed.
Once ghosts come to haunt his door,
The lion will lose his mighty roar.
When winter comes and the people look,
The Sleeping Prince flees to his nook.
A soul dwindled like a stifled fire,
No heart left for a single desire.
When winter comes and his sorrows stay,
The Sleeping Prince and his head must lay.
Darkness brings his old melancholy.
Good Lord! The King, he's off his trolley!
When winter comes and his manias transgress,
The Sleeping Prince needs a place to rest.
As his madness resurfaces without the owl,
he hears the wolf's long moonlight howl.
When winter comes and his sins must bide,
The Sleeping Prince runs off to hide.
Jack Frost, freeze the life in his lungs.
For the prince must die once winter comes.
Curious, Charlie thought as excitement stirred in him. How queer!
The elaborate delivery made him assume that Frankie had arisen from his quiescent period, perhaps. That he would showcase his return in such an eccentric way seemed highly likely of him. At eleven o'clock, Charlie prepared to perform some of the Five Point Challenge to get to Windsor. The Five Point Challenge was a dare that he hadn't attempted before. Basically, the night before the 4th of June—the big school celebration day, effectively—students have to escape from their houses at night and get to five points around the school without getting caught by the teachers and pop and security patrolling the various five spots. Despite it being December, Charlie was determined to complete it tonight—mainly because several of the markers were between him and his destination, coincidentally.
At thirty minutes to midnight, Charlie clambered over his window sill and climbed down the other side. He winced when his feet smacked the pavement, sending a gruff echo of his landing throughout the empty streets. The sky was as black as coal outside, dark in the heart of winter, but a full moon bloomed above like a snowdrop, causing Eton to sparkle like a thousand crystals shattered in powder as blue as frost. He looked to the sweeping quilts of snow, thick on the roofs of the gables beneath the inky midnight, making the lodges, cottages, and cloisters look like little fat puddings coated in glazed icing. The glittery tarmac made him remember the time Frankie had told him that Earth was peppered with about 20,000 tons of stardust each year. In the distance, draped over the trees and gates and narrow alleyways like bunting, he could see the fairy lights streaming through the trees, bushes, and thoroughfare cobbles like fireflies and fairies to match those hanging between the tops of the buildings in town—corridors of lights to lead the way. Once he'd yanked up the hood of his parka, Charlie followed their guidance at a brisk walk that quickly developed into a half-run over frozen puddles, sparkling underfoot like shattered glass. He found Frankie's punt half-buried under dry wood and bushes by the side of the rushing river. Once he'd recovered the punt's pole from inside a hollowed tree, he used the boat to cross the freezing river, gliding quietly across the width so as to not alert teachers on patrol. By the time he reached the other side, his hands were chaffed from using the pole to propel himself across and cut red raw from splashes of the cold water. He dragged the punt underneath the bridge to hide it, stuck his hands into the gloves that he'd discovered in his coat pocket, and darted into Windsor. As Charlie shuffled through the snow towards Imperial Boulevard, the snowfall blurred his vision until the twinkling Christmas lights in the road splattered into diamond-shaped designs like those from a kaleidoscope. Drunken carolling streamed from the pub doors and three men followed it out, stumbling into the streets and belting out jolly Christmas hymns as they toasted to the season with the last of their mulled wine and cider.
'CERRY MHRISTMAS!' one slurred loudly to Charlie on his way passed, dangling from the shoulders of his two equally intoxicated friends. His droopy face attempted a wink as he tipped his hat to him. 'AND A HAPDAY ... hic ... NEW YEAR!'
'Merry Christmas, Mister.' Charlie smiled apprehensively at them as he quickened his feet, his silhouette rushing across the building walls to live momentarily in the silvery moonbeams and die briefly in the shadows.
Once Charlie reached the alleyway into the secluded courtyard of Empyreal House, he stopped in the throat of it among shadows thick enough to swallow him whole. The gaps between the troves of a trillion stars above were as black as oil, and the snow fell heavily and heavenly white to die on stone, grass, leaf, water, or tongue. He breathed in the subdued scents of the season, smelling frost in the air. Aside from the soft glow of the snow and cascades of lilac moonlight, his only other source of illumination flickered a weak trickle that bloomed from somewhere deep inside the loft, splashing feebly over the walkway above like melted butter to soak into the dark metal bars. The hopeful sign of light and life was as warm and as inviting as the fireplace, whilst he stood in the shadowiest part of the courtyard and looked from one window to the next.
On his way across the courtyard, he stopped to pluck from the snow a rose that had been painted black.
When he looked around himself, Charlie noticed that there were many more black roses strewn about the area like blotches of ink splattered across a fresh page. Even more roses were scattered across the spiral stairway to the balcony and front door, the painted shell on the petals softly crunching underfoot as he ascended, and black thorns and pale grey lights were wrapped around the handrails and balusters to replace the yellow ones that had once shone brightly there. Something about the setting was unsettling to him, a macabre scene as if every aspect of Empyreal House had died or diminished, too, like Frankie had; it also no longer looked so healthy, so youthful, so bright, so beautiful. There was a sense of tragedy and malaise in the air.
Loud, muffled noises seeped out the gaps of the door from inside—music, movement, and several voices, too. As he had every other night, Charlie creaked the door open uninvitedly. But this time, he snuck inside unseen. The far end of the loft was lit by faint firelight and light from the TV screen, but the entrance was in complete darkness. The sounds of his movement were masked by the blaring television and rambunctious record player as he crouched down and slid behind cluttered furniture, gripping the rim to peek over the top.
On the other side of the loft, two shadows cut jagged shapes out of the light sweeping over the room. One shadow belonged to Frankie, easily identified by his Iron Maiden t-shirt and white long johns. He stood facing the fireplace, the backs of his legs resting against the armrest of a red leather chair. With his hands pressed flat against the armrest and his own arms down by his side, his head was bowed to stare at his bare feet. Even though it was a welcomed sight to see him out of bed, the boy still looked downcast like a wilted rose. His slight movements were sluggish, like a statue shaking the dust and weather and cobwebs from itself after decades of stillness. The other shadow stood looking out the window with his back to Frankie and Charlie, cigar smoke drifting from him.
As Charlie crept closer, one of them muted Caligula on the screen just as Malcolm McDowell was performing a vile and untoward act upon the buttocks of Proculus, causing Charlie to cringe and look away. Instead of the sounds of the bawdy film, the quietness was replaced by a college rendition of Miserere mei, Deus by Gregorio Allegri, a sad and haunting composition that floated through the stale smells of cannabis and alcohol in the loft to linger on the furniture like a ghost.
'And so, it has finally come upon you, it seems.' Trevor Hamilton turned away from the window, swishing the hem of his black greatcoat back rather dramatically. 'We both knew it would catch up with you eventually, didn't we? You can only outrun yourself for so long, Carrozza. What do you need me to do?'
'Leave!' Frankie grunted into his chest.
'Poppycock.' Hamilton smiled slyly. He walked towards Frankie and caressed his cheek with the hand holding his black cigar. 'You need me now more than ever, old friend. Whenever this ... sickness comes upon you, this derangement, you know as well as I do that it is only me you can rely on. After all, it is only me who'll never judge you. It is only me who will ever truly understand you.'
'You say you do, but you don't!' Frankie snapped back, his reply just about holding back the brunt of his anger and pain. 'There is choice in your madness!'
'Fine.' Trevor's fingers moved up to Frankie's fringe to unveil the dark circles underneath his eyes. He cocked his head to the side to stare at his face for a long moment, then he turned away. 'Perhaps I ought to just leave you here, confined to your bed, with only your melancholia and your mania and your mourning and your Max Mayvolu for company.'
'Do it,' Frankie muttered. 'See if I care.'
'Winter approaches, and as does your insanity with it.' Trevor turned around swiftly, pressing his forehead against Frankie's to force his chin up and off his chest. From afar, Charlie couldn't be certain whether it was an intimate gesture or a threatening one. Trevor started to turn his head left to right to graze their foreheads together. Charlie touched his own forehead, remembering how Frankie did the same to him. 'Where is spring, Frankie? Oh, how your weary soul must yearn for the blossoms. My, where is Frankie? Nobody has seen him in days. Poor Frankie has gone away again, of course. Just like Beth,' Trevor whispered. 'How long did you leave her body there, alone and empty in that dilapidated mansion, I wonder? Does her sorrow haunt the halls of Red Rose Manor, wilting the walls and ageing the brickwork? Does her grief linger in those old rooms, tearing wallpaper from the corners like dead skin and rotting the bare floorboards? Come nightfall, do you hear Bethany Green's misery flow like a banshee passed the windows, a cry full of tears as it searches Red Rose Manor for you and calls out your name?'
'Stop it!' Frankie shouted, shoving him off. 'STOP IT!'
He abandoned her! The horror of it all stroke a violent chill up Charlie's spine as he pictured the girl lying dead among the wreckage of that disused country house. Red Rose Manor filled his mind, an abandoned, ramshackle mansion left over from the Victorian era to become a cold and miserable ruin out in the most isolated spot of the countryside. Where Beth ended up, joining all the other ghosts that haunt that eerie, eerie place. Nausea quivered in Charlie's stomach as he imagined a pale arm sprawled across the floorboards, pearl-white fingers entangled around chestnut-coloured hair, bloody in the moonlight. Cold dread squeezed his heart like the teeth of an all-consuming monster, turning his blood into slush, as he wondered how long she lay there. Alone. He felt too weak at the knees to kneel anymore as morbid questions sprung into mind. Had her body tightened from rigor mortis by the time someone found her? Was her face shrivelled and pale and skeletal, no longer so heartbreakingly beautiful? Had her skin began to peel like the walls as she became a feast for Red Rose Manor? Did the stench of death lead them to her final resting place? Charlie swallowed the hot bile stinging his throat. His heart felt galvanised with zinc when it plummeted into the pit of his stomach, a cold and heavy organ coated in ice. Even if Bethany Green wasn't as pure as the stories would have me believe, still, she most certainly did not deserve that.
'I don't mean to distress you.' Trevor admitted. Charlie could hear him hushing Frankie, a soothing whisper of breath. He'd moved in close again, his chin an inch or two from Frankie's crown as he towered over his crumpled form. His wan hands were touching each of his elbows to pacify him. 'That wasn't my intention.'
'Tell me then, just what were your intentions of coming here tonight?' Frankie asked.
'To see if the rumours were true: to see if winter had finally come to claim you as its own.' Trevor put a finger to Frankie's chin and lifted it to meet his dark gaze. 'Let me help you at your worst.'
'You can't help me,' Frankie murmured. 'Nobody can. Least of all you.'
'You don't frighten me; not like you would everyone else,' said Trevor, the vague signs of wanton want in his breathing. He leaned down and kissed Frankie's neck once. 'You don't shine any less to me even now; not like you would to everyone else. We share the same fears, you and I, and neither of them includes each other.'
'No, we don't. I'm not scared of death. No, what I fear is only a life unfulfilled.'
When Charlie heard the words and their conviction on his tongue, he knew them to be the complete truth.
'Stop,' Frankie whispered.
'If you honestly wanted me to stop, you would have used your hands rather than your words,' Trevor hissed, running his hands through Frankie's curls as he moved in like a vampire towards his neck once more.
Frankie shoved him back again, causing him to stumble over the carpet.
'Is it that Chance boy?' Trevor demanded angrily, sneering back at him as he fixed his coat. Charlie didn't have to see him to hear the mad glint in his eyes. 'What—don't tell me you've fallen for the boy?' Hamilton laughed in disbelief.
'No!' Frankie quickly said, finally looking up from his feet. 'No.'
'You brought him to Malta,' Trevor challenged.
'Yes, but I also brought a book to entertain me. Stay away from him. Leave him alone. He doesn't need to be involved in this, whatever this is,' Frankie said coldly. 'He means nothing to me. I just don't have the energy to ... to do anything, or the urge to fool around right now.'
'Prove it.' Trevor stepped forward towards him.
He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. 'God's watching.'
Hamilton put his hand on top of Frankie's head. 'Then let's entertain him.'
He sighed heavily. 'Just ... just don't tell him. You've no need to.'
'Ah, you just don't want another Max Mayvolu on your hands and in your conscience, eh? Is that it?' Trevor asked, lighting another cigar. 'You don't want another ghost haunting your doors and the moors in your mind come winter?'
'Yeah. That's all.'
When the belt buckle clinked open, Charlie felt the blood drain from his cheeks, pouring out his chest and gushing hot down his arms to dribble between his fingertips and toes and pool on the floorboards. Frankie Carrozza on his knees was an image more perverted than anything that was transpiring in Caligula on the TV screen. The sight of surrender and submission made him feel sick to the stomach.
The cold night air was a godsend on his pale cheeks. Once he'd closed the door behind him, he rushed to the banister and vomited over the side of the balcony. The mush of the stew he had for dinner splattered over the courtyard, spewing brownish streaks over the snow and black roses. Looking to the door so as to make sure he wasn't overheard, Charlie wiped his mouth with his forearm and hurried down the spiral stairway. Much too blinded with confusion and shadow to see clearly, he ran straight into the man standing at the end of the alleyway.
'Oof!' the man grunted. 'Who's that?'
'Sorry, I—' Charlie glanced back towards that place where he'd stumbled into something surreal and out of this world, loathsome things that he should not have seen, much like the child up past their bedtime who happened to peek in through the keyhole to behold the utmost disturbing sights. He needed to get as far from that place as fast as he could, where a nightmare gorged on a dream, eating it from the innards out to dash them up the walls sloppily—where a darkness lived, surely only to grow.
'Chance, is that you?'
'Head—headmaster?' Charlie asked, already too shocked to be shocked.
'Whatever is the matter, boy? You look like you've seen a ghost! Is everything alright?'
'Y-yes, I—' His voice was hoarse and shook too far out of reach for his control, so he silenced it. For several seconds, he quietly fought the tremor and painful lump in his throat as much as he could, but his vocal cords felt like a heavy weight sliding across very thin ice before lodging thickly to strangle his words. 'I—I'm fine, Headmaster, I'm—'
'You're probably wondering what I'm doing here,' he said, wobbling back on his heels. A thick cloud of whiskey stench wafted from him. 'It so happens that I was in a meeting nearby with the Archbishop of Canterbury and thought I'd better peek in on my way home.' The headmaster glanced overhead towards the courtyard sternly. 'You were here to help our good friend through these ... troubled times of his, I gather?'
Charlie nodded quickly and brokenly. 'He—he's asleep now, Sir,' he stuttered, unintentionally covering for him against his better judgment. 'You shouldn't wake him.'
'Listen, if you don't tell Carrozza that I've been keeping tabs on him for his mother, then I won't report you for being out of bounds after lock-up—just this one time, that is. Exceptional woman, Elena Rose. We attended Oxford together.' The headmaster smiled affectionately for a long time, drunkenly lost to yesteryears. Finally, he shook himself from his stupor and recalled where he was. He looked to Charlie austerely. 'It's after midnight. Run along on home, Chance. And don't let me catch you out after hours again, or I mightn't be in so jolly a mood next time.'
Charlie was sprinting up the street now, glancing back only the once to watch the headmaster look down the narrow alleyway into Empyreal House before shaking his head and walking on up the street. Despite his many slips and slides, he did not stop running until he reached the spot where he'd hidden the punt. Only then did he remember that he had left the playbill behind on the floor of the loft with his name written on it, but an angry part of him wanted him to know that he'd been there despite the worry. Now that he was no longer running away, his mind was given time to catch up with his feet as he rowed across the Thames. Confusion departed quickly like a cloak cast off his shoulders, and the grisly sensation gave way to dread and comprehension. Like the rose blossoming black, his insides were swallowed up by a dark void of growing heartache. For he fully understood now, he truly fathomed the unfathomable: all that he'd seen and heard that night.
Oh, but the pain! His arms thrust out into the water to propel himself further, to give the pain in his heart sensible manifestation in his limbs. He never knew it was possible to feel such agony as powerful as this, torpedoing its way to breach skin and spear through his innards like a gunshot or a knife wound. A hand clutched his chest in fear that his aching heart might crack, splintering through the flesh of his torso like ruby shards of broken glass to bleed him out dry and stain the wood under his feet with him and his horror.
Images of Frankie visited him—laid out like a cornucopia on a platter, waiting posed so Hamilton may paint his tortuously beautiful image on a canvas. The strokes of fingertips, their paintbrushes. Their sweat and blood, their paint. The headmaster had asked him if he was alright, but Charlie wasn't, and he wasn't sure if he would ever be right again after such a catastrophic gorge scored through the centre of him.
Once he'd reached the safety of Eton, he gasped in air and snatched a breath like a babe coming into life. Like a drunk, he stumbled onto the banks and fell into the frozen mud and snow. Yet, he could not feel the cold burn. He felt only gratitude that he'd left that corner of Hell on Earth behind, having got up and out of that loft like a breathless diver submerged in the crushing depths of the ocean. The vision of Empyreal House, dark and ominous now, loomed high over him like a tombstone. His body trembled violently—from frost or fright, he did not know—and his legs felt too much like twigs to bear the weight of him.
It was a surreal sensation, as though he'd crossed a magical bridge into outlandish lands through the use of that boat. The world was a strange place on the other side. And when he arrived there, it was to look back and watch a planet die, a world implode, an island sink, a love lost. The incident had engulfed the world as he knew it like a comet come to destroy mankind, obliterating it in waves of chaos and destruction. But perhaps he knew it had always been there, always rapidly approaching the stratosphere from the far-out distance, a fireball of misfortune.
Charlie removed his gloves and threw them aside carelessly. Then, he plunged his bare hands into the snow to feel—to feel something other than this crippling truth and to prevent himself from falling into the gigantic, bottomless rift that fractured through his core. He felt an eminently familiar feeling return deep inside himself again like an imaginary friend forgotten about since childhood: loneliness, an ancient emotion to an old soul that carved him inside out until his guts felt empty like a colossal cavern—or, rather, like the ruins of Red Rose Manor. His hand clutched his chest again to feel his heart wither and shrink, drained of colour and as pale and purple as a wilted rose. He felt where Frankie Carrozza's name had seared itself into the muscle of it, flaked with cinders and ash. Oh, how the bastard stung.
'I'll tell you something, Charlie Chance. And it can be our sort of something, for the Lord knows we need enough of some things. So, I'll tell you this, and here it is. Are you ready to hear it?' Frankie had said to him on the hood of a car one night, a lubricious thought whispered into his ear, the skin of their elbows touching in another night, in another world so very far away from here. 'The moon loves the sun so dearly, and he shows it each and every night. For he dies at the end of his watch at the turn of twilight, living fully only thrice just so that from his sacrifice, she can be reborn again anew like a phoenix come the morn.'
Unfortunately, the boy had slipped into despair as oblivion swept up to greet him like a black tide. The tears stung his eyes and scalded cold on his cheeks. The silvery trickles spilled over his lips and onto his wrists as he cried for the death of his heart. Yet, he could not understand why—much like a child attempting to fathom the intricacies of death and where it is our loved ones go beyond their final breath. Transiently, Charlie Chance abandoned the bounds of the mortal body. He left it to its unbearable sufferings, fluctuating emotions and sensations, with its fantasies too pretty live, dreams too broken to mend, and nonsensical sentimentalities threaded through them all that made the edges of its confinement much too sharp to live amongst inside and all else that had forced him out. He lingered detached underneath the yew trees to watch safely from afar as the perishable body of the ill-starred boy crumpled and curled on the ground like a stung creature, writhing pathetically in pain from insides soaked with venom. His disengaged spirit drifted ghostly through the riverbank as gently as the snowflakes whilst the pitiful boy bent in on himself further, half-buried in the whiteness gliding out of the endless black until the lamenting youth was little more than the quiver of forlorn shoulders submerged in snow and soreness like two broken birds due soon to die.
When he returned to the body, it was much too late to save him: the boy was gone. Once reunited with the well-worn peach vessel, he could feel the effects rather harrowingly now—the part of him empty of a piece of him that had died this winter night, left behind and buried underneath the snowfall.