Near Touch

Chapter 14: Sex and the Spectre

Firmly lacing her beliefs with self-proclaimed lies and a fear of being unaccepted so deeply ingrained that it was almost unknowable from the outside, Amy paced around in the room.

She cut her path through the corn maze of her scattered possessions and tried, like a marooned buccaneer near his sinking ship, to find the bits of wreckage that would help her survive the open sea. Any damn piece of incidental sign that would keep her afloat, away from the depravity of the abyss where the great whites lay in wait. Their powerful teeth would sink into her flesh and everything that she believed was true would be torn, mercilessly, limb from limb.

I am not a science junkie.

Amy repeated this mantra over and over again until she could hardly say it wasn't true. She couldn't bear the thought of being anything close to a researcher when she was older, even if all her instincts and the damn aptitude tests in school kept mockingly reminding Amy of her 'calling'.

Amy couldn't repress that curiosity-bitch, like she couldn't keep herself from devouring coffee ice cream whenever the mere hint of it came floating in her mind's eye or from picking the wings off butterflies just to make sure that they were just caterpillars after all, pretending to be more.

In solitude Amy thrived, the sped-up recordings of her standing and messing up her room, talking to the air – rewind a little – laughing with it, and back again, flaking ash like a sketch made from charcoal. Something created from the intense combustion of something else. After everything that she had done before the very late lunch or the rather early dinner, she wasn't quite sure which; Amy was certain of one fact.

Something doesn't feel right.

Amy was trying not to host fear. But something about being human or being alive on this earth made her so frightened of the fact that she might one day lose that status. Dead and gone, like that one leaf the tree decided it didn't need anymore, and just tossed, useless and betrayed. 

It all just felt so impossible. Caleb Dawson made her afraid. Wesley Broad had been afraid of him. In his delusion, he could have screamed any name in the world; but in the severest of pain, he chose to say, 'Caleb! Stop, please!' He was the one hurting him, and not Amy. How long before he hurt her or someone she loved?

I can't go on like this.

What had depression been reduced to anyway? A fashion accessory people tried on for a couple of days, months, or years, till they suddenly were bored of it, moving on to better and bluer trends. But Amy knew what its wisps felt like, tasted them on her tongue, like the heat of a sacrificial knife coated with the blood of her comrades, about to grant her safe passage to the gates of hell. Amy needed to be saved from herself, to save him from her.

She fell onto her bed. Closing her eyes, she willed the anarchic ebb and flow of her thoughts to come to a halt. Confusion reigned supreme. Caleb had done nothing to merit her fears. Not yet anyway. An hour passed, or a minute, maybe even a second. When Amy's eyes fluttered open, Caleb was standing in her doorframe. 

A demon with a halo, he cast no shadow.

"When I was hitting Wes, why did he think it was you?" Amy asked, her voice quivering.

"I don't know, maybe I terrify him," Caleb said. "I have hurt him before."

Amy's mouth dried. "You ran away before I could finish the whole set of experiments," she said, running a hand through her rumpled hair.

"Haven't you done enough?" he said, bitingly. "I need to talk to you."

Staring at the ghost in her room, Amy wondered if it was a spell. A curse on her to think and think and think, till the scratches on her brain bled grey.