Shards

Chapter 3 - (Eoin/Eden) - Behind The Window Glass

DH Lawrence: At the Window

THE pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind as it mutters

Something which sets the black poplars ashake with hysterical laughter;

While slowly the house of day is closing its eastern shutters.

Further down the valley the clustered tombstones recede,

Winding about their dimness the mist's grey cerements, after

The street lamps in the darkness have suddenly started to bleed.

The leaves fly over the window and utter a word as they pass

To the face that leans from the darkness, intent, with two dark-filled eyes

That watch for ever earnestly from behind the window glass.

     Eoin coughed, and sputtered more of the viscous, grey mess into his handkerchief. His throat was raw, his eyes stung like nothing else, and the few, frayed breaths that he managed to rake in between the violent coughing fits tasted like congealed smoke.

It turned out that dying hurt. (Who'd have thought it...?)

     Slowly, he slid down the wall, pressing its cold, unyielding surface into his spine, trying to coerce it into exuding some comfort, any comfort...

     Eoin knew exactly where he was; but it was somewhere he had never expected to be, a place he had hoped he would never have to tread.

Because if he was here, then Jonjo was not. (Not just "not here"; but 'was not', in its most dreaded sense.)

     Eoin hugged his knees tightly, as if trying to knit himself back together by exerting physical force, alone.

Ha.

Fat chance.

No amount of knee-hugging or squeezing would ever fix this. It was a new kind of brokenness; different, somehow to when mum had died. Eoin felt empty. Vacuous. Like a walking, talking abyss.

Numbness.

Nothingness.

Quiet.

     It was actually kind of oddly... peaceful. A heavy, desperately sad kind of peaceful, something akin to the stillness which precedes a heavy rainfall in that the very air seemed to weigh down with the startling power of his imminent grief. Eoin was so caught up in breathing under the burden of this nothingness that he almost didn't have to think about what he had lost. He felt as if he was teetering on the brink of a volcano, just trembling on the lip before the inevitable fall. He supposed that he should be grateful that he was alive, if that is what you could call it... but he wasn't sure that he really wanted to live. 

     Eoin knew what had happened. Jonjo had been the last shadow walker. When he died, it had passed onto Eoin, meaning that he could merge with his own reflection, becoming one with it.

     This was how Eoin had escaped the flames of the car; but, he supposed with a dry laugh, he might as well have died, because he had no way out of this 'reflective existence'... Jonjo had always needed a root, someone to connect with on the outside world, in order to return. Eoin had no-one. He didn't even know any other shadow-walkers, which meant that communication with anyone else was impossible. He would be invisible, silent, untouchable, as he walked among the living, as if trapped behind glass.

Little better than a ghost.

***

     Eoin had been fourteen when his mother had died. Gangly, awkward, in the first strain of adolescence... he hadn't even needed to shave yet, although Jonjo had taken to tugging the fine blonde hairs on his chin gently.