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:
YOU ARE READING
The Taming of Frankie Carrozza
RomanceEton often said that Frankie Carrozza was dangerous. But of course he was dangerous: he was a teenaged boy, after all.
