As morning sunlight snuck through the window blinds, illuminating the white duvet beside it, the quiet breathing of a teenage boy broke the silence.
His dark brown fringe separated like curtains, resting on his sweating forehead. From his sleep, words slipped from his dream into reality. ‘Please,’ the boy begged, ‘please don’t leave me here. Don’t leave me with them—’ A snore interrupted his pleads before rolling over on his side.
In the corner of his room, watching from the darkness, a spirit hovered. Her eyes danced up his body and watched his nose expand with every breath. Her focus trailed down to his chest, watching it rise and fall. Life, the spirit thought. How precious.
Within the next moment, the spirit frizzled away. The boy was sitting up, staring at the clay wall in front of him. So I’m still here, huh? He thought to himself.
The boy glared down at his duvet before sighing. Small pieces of clay and stone sat on his duvet. His eyes darted towards the ceiling where chunks were missing. What did I tell him? Every time he thumps his bed or dances like an idiot, shit rains from the roof—but does he listen?
Through another sigh, he said, ‘No.’
He stretched his arms out and slipped from the comfort of his bed, the sheets flopping to the floor.
His room was small, taking about two or three seconds to walk from one end to another. In it was a bed, a dresser and a small table and chair which he rarely used. Micah knew that he could expand the room a bit further if he wanted to, but the clawing away at dirt did not sound appealing to him. Everything in his room was plain and uncharacteristic as if it was ready for rental. He did not go through the bother of adding anything unpractical, as it would mean he had to clean it.
Micah went through his door and shut it behind him, looking at the front of it. Engraved in the wood, highlighted by a slick coat of white paint, was a drawing of his face, looking disinterested and gloomy. While it was pretty well drawn, he hated the guts out of it. He asked Clara why she painted him to look like a miserable git that wanted nothing to do with the world.
She replied with, ‘Because you are a miserable git that wants nothing to do with the world.’
While he could not help but agree with her, he still despised the drawing. Damn you, Clara. It’s not like a rain cloud follows me everywhere I go. He began the journey up the thin spiralling staircase, feeling the clay against his fingers as they trailed the wall.
When he reached his neighbor’s door, Micah grimaced. In contrast to his, the drawing on this door showed its occupant smiling. Not wanting to torture himself with his grin, he burst through the door with, ‘Brown-Face, what the hell did I tell you about—’ Micah’s mouth glued shut when he saw the bed in front of him.
Micah was alone in the room.
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Micah remembered the two detective novels he read awhile back. He borrowed them from Molly, the Arch’s Bookworm. Both, while written by two different authors, were set in the 1940s Manhattan and followed a detective trying to solve a murder. Micah hoped that his little investigation will not end with a dead body.
Brown-Face’s room was a jarring opposite to Micah’s. Beaten into the hard dirt walls are posters of women, a soccer team and a strange painting Micah did not recognize. Personality was dripping from this place.
First on the list: Search beneath the bed. The bed is the most obvious place where an alive—or dead—person would be hidden. So Micah knelt on the hard wooden floor and dipped his head. Micah repulsed from the bed, the smell of rotting flesh scratching his nostrils. As he took a second glance, he found a dead rat lying on its side, flies rubbing their tiny legs on its coal black fur.
Dead carcass found. Not human, Micah concluded in his head. Close, but no cigar. He felt that a smoking pipe would manifest from his mouth and thus, the beginning of a new career as Detective Micah.
He spent the next ten minutes scouring Brown-Face’s room for clues. After his thorough search, he saw nothing out of the ordinary apart from some dirty magazines stuffed in the back of the wardrobe and left the crime scene hanging up his deerstalker. Before closing the door, he stared at the space beneath the bed, pondering about the rat.
Micah shrugged it off and closed the door. His problem, not mine, he thought. He began thinking about all the possible locations the bastard could have gone off to. Did he go outside? To someone else’s room? His mind wandered off course. He could go back to bed and sleep his worries away, but what kind of friend would do that?
He took the first step back down to his room when he remembered the most obvious location Brown-Face could be if he was not in his bedroom: the Commons Hall. Micah turned around and began making his way to the top of the Arch. As he climbed the steep steps, a thought lingered in the back of his mind: Someone’s birthday is soon. He remembered Clara talking about getting things ready for a party and the last time Micah checked, Christmas was months away.
Shit, whose birthday is it? He could not put his finger on it. He was sure it was not Brown-Face or Molly as their birthdays were celebrated weeks back. Is it one the younger ones or maybe Clara? He forgot all about Molly’s birthday when it came around and he did not get her anything. He still felt guilty about it. Brown-Face made damn sure that he would remember his. I’m a terrible friend, Micah thought as he reached the staircase’s end.
A line of windows exposed Micah to the glaring morning sunlight. He saw the rolling hills disappear into a thin bluish fog where distant mountains could be seen exposed. Around the Arch was a forest that was shaped like a C, where wildlife was plentiful from strawberries to herds of deer, enough that the Children of the Arch had a steady supply of resources.
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Micah always thought the group nickname ‘Children of the Arch’ was stupid. None of the members were children. The youngest of the group, Johnny, was thirteen years old—a teenager. Micah himself was seventeen, Clara was sixteen and Molly was fifteen. He did not know Brown-Face’s age, but it could not be any higher that eighteen because…
Ah, here we go. Micah inspected the mighty double doors in front of him. Etched into them were the names of the Children of the Arch. Some of the names were crossed out. The Commons Hall. He pushed them open to watch the crack of light spill into the pitch black room. Inside the hall, it was silent, the only real sound being the muffled wail of wind blowing past the Arch.
Micah sighed for what seemed like the eightieth time that morning. Being the first one at the Common Hall, it meant that he had to light each torch in the room. He glanced to the right where a small table with matchboxes stood. Nothing sat on top of it.
Wait, what? Where did the matches go— The sound of scratching interrupted his thoughts. Micah watched each wall-mounted torch ignite, tearing the darkness apart like cloth. At each torch—of which there were five—a person stood there, staring back.
All together they cheered, ‘Happy Birthday, Micah.’ They were all smiling, happy to see him. Micah, on the other hand, had a thick coat of dread lodged in his throat. Today was his eighteenth birthday.
Dammit, he thought. How did I forget my own birthday? Eighteen… I’m eighteen years old.
Two people ran at him, Clara and Brown-Face. Clara had her arms wide open like a bird. She swooped in and embraced Micah, saying, ‘Happy Eighteenth Birthday, Micah’, cementing the fact in his head. ‘You’re now an adult.’ She stepped back and a whiff of perfume tickled Micah’s nostrils. Clara rarely wore makeup, but her eyes were black with mascara and eyeliner. Her lips were glossed and a wide smile grew from them before mirroring Micah’s melancholic expression. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Hey, dude,’ Brown-Face said, slapping Micah on the shoulder, ‘you should be happy. You seem like you just witnessed a murder or, heck, a kidnapping, and have no idea what to do. What do they call that look… a deer in headlights?’
‘You can tell us, Mic. Did you have the dream again?’
‘Yeah,’ Micah said. ‘It’s not that. I’m just surprised—’ –that you guys have forgotten, he finished in his head.
‘Well, it’s just that you looked petrified. We have done this for like, what, fourteen years now?’
Fourteen years. That was as far back as Micah could remember. Waking up in the Arch, surrounded by complete strangers, not knowing why he was there. He cried that day too, in front of everyone. He was the only child that cried. He remembered what the lady told them before she disappeared: ‘When you are done being a child, you will leave the Arch and become an adult. Think of it as an incubator.’ After she was gone, the oldest at the time taught the younger ones basic Maths and English. When they turned eighteen, they vanished.
Now it was Micah’s turn. A shiver clung itself on his spine before climbing up it.
‘…Micah, are you listening?’ Brown-Face’s voice smashed through his daydream. As Micah read the two faces in front of them, it was clear to him that they were concerned.
‘Huh?’
‘We were just saying how much older you looked.’ Clara leaned in close to Micah. ‘You’ve been acting strange today, are you sick? We could bring the cake to your room and eat it there—’
‘No,’ he said abruptly, walking past the both of them. ‘We will have it here. I want to spend as much time with all of you as I can.’ Micah saw that their concerned looks have not yet dissolved. ‘I’m fine, trust me. You guys know me: gloomy as all hell. If that’s’ the case well—’ He span around and stuck his thumb up, ‘—I must be perfectly fine right now.’
Brown-Face and Clara exchanged looks. Then, Clara brought a smile to her face and said, ‘Okay, we’ll believe you.’
‘I don’t,’ Brown-Face interjected.
Micah and Clara both went over to the table and sat down. A frustrated sigh echoed from Brown-Face’s mouth, accepting that his interjection was ignored. He sat beside Micah at his usual spot. Clara sat parallel to them both. The other children surrounded the cake that sat in the middle of the table, blue icing on top saying, ‘Happiest Eighteenth Birthday, Micah’. Every year, Micah wondered where the icing came from. In fact, many of the ingredients used in the cake seem impossible to get from the surrounding forest such as chicken eggs and flour.
More specifically, where did Brown-Face get those posters and those… magazines?
As everyone began slicing off respectable chunks from the cake, Micah’s eyes wandered to the nearby tables. Ghostly apparitions sat around those tables, past members of the group, gone by either growing up or running away. Carlos, a name that stuck in his mind, was one of the people Micah got closest to. Quiet, like Micah, but had a devilish charm to him and absolutely loved playing games. From hide and-go seek to soccer; he always had so much energy. Micah felt something for Carlos, something he did not have for other people. He was still unsure whether it was friendship or something more.
Carlos, however, disappeared from the Arch about a year prior. He turned eighteen on the same day. Micah knew that this would happen to him too. His eyes began to water.
‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ he said, standing up immediately. He had not taken a bite from the cake yet. Before Clara said anything, Micah was out of the hall and running down the hallway. The sunlight beaming in from the windows flashed past him. A hard turn to the left led him to the bathrooms. He ran into a stall, slamming the door shut and locking it. Micah sat down on the toilet seat and stared at his knees, allowing his sadness to tear through his gloomy shell and out into the grimy bathroom.
Death was upon him.