Sean

Help.

Please help.

Íde

I had to leave them, because I need the captain and her crew to save them.

I had to leave them.

I don’t think about the look of betrayal on Iseult’s face when I fled the room.

I don’t think about Sean’s ragged chest, or his closed eyes.

I don’t think about the gory hole where the back of Mister Tumble’s skull used to be, or the blood, or the way I am suddenly myself again now that he is dead.

I don’t think about the foreign ideas that skitter, uninvited, between my thoughts.

I sprint through the abyss.

When we entered this hall, this moon-maze, we trod carefully and quietly. I cover the same ground again, twice as fast, running through a blackness so absolute and so crushing that if I were to stop it would surely swallow me whole. My heaving breath echoes loudly through the neat passage, and it is that fact alone that convinces me I am still alive. I have to find the Oxenfree. I have to find help.

The rent, the tiny fissure in the flesh of the moon that bled violet light- it’s not here. I do not understand. I could not have taken a wrong turn because there were no wrong turns. It was a straight, inclined line.

Don’t panic. Sean told you not to panic.

I panic.

I sprint further, trying to see something. Anything. My breath, absurdly, lets me feel the space around me. I can hear the echoes change when I pass a kink in the path. I was not tracing the walls with my hands, because I did not think it necessary- now I slap my palms against the corridor, trying to convince myself I’m still alive. It should not be possible for me to be lost. But I am lost.

Both of my friends are going to die.

I take a random turn. A stray thought tells me to do so, and lacking any other alternative I follow it, because at this point my instincts are better than succumbing to my fear. I am not on the path we started on. My bare feet slap loudly in the dark, on painful metal tiles.

At first it is not obvious that there are people watching me. It takes me a moment to realise I can actually see them, flanking both sides of the corridor in neat, single-file.

My eyes could not possibly adjust to this lack of light. I do not know why I can see, and yet- at the edge of my vision, in the deepest red imaginable, they are there. Stock-still, swollen. Limbs dangling like a marionettes’. Not people, then. Something horrible, something person-shaped but wrong. Impossibly thick-fingered. Decapitated. I am shaking, from exhaustion and terror, and I have stopped running.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Cold, headless moon-men line every wall of this room, standing with a frigid patience. Dread pools in my chest and I am standing in front of one of these behemoth forms, easily six and a half feet tall and wider than any man. I dare it to move, panting wildly from exertion. It does not.

I shove its chest.

It still does not move. It is heavy. Tough and smooth, like ivory. Not people, then. Statues. The ring of its severed neck is too high for me to peer at. I dare not run a finger over that ruin.

I don’t have time for this. My friends are dying.

Through this chamber, then into the next one at a breakneck pace, past row upon row of statues. There must be dozens, all hung neatly on hooks that protrude from the wall. It is nonsensical. Offerings, perhaps. Or sacrifices. I realise that there may be Saints in the sky, and they may be as cruel as some of the ones down here. Perhaps they demand these bloodless, decapitated bodies of gruesome men. Perhaps these bodies were Saints.

The room is gone. My vision is not. I’m seeing things that I could not, before- outlines, in crimson and deep, deep violet. I am also at the limit of my running, and my sight darkens, losing its lustre, fading to reds and blacks.

I slow to a run, then to a torturous jog. My eyes are filling with scarlet. I’ve never been this tired before, and all I want to do is curl into a ball and die. I see red swimming on the blank wall in front of me. I hear a crackling in my ears, and my blood splashes in my head like a lapping sea.

I don’t realise where I am until I hear the voices, calling in panicked Irdcheol.

Iseult would laugh.

I’ve found the scarlet halo-light of the Oxenfree. A sailor seizes me about the arms as I collapse.

*

Captain Holofernes waits for approximately thirty seconds before she decides I have had enough rest. It is not solely a concern of physical exhaustion. My head is being pulled apart, separated like slow-cooked meat. I am still breathing, heaving. My feet are minced. She rests a hand on my shoulders.

“Get your shit together, girl. You look like you’ve seen a Saint returning.”

Our group, for it is now comprised of not just me but also the Captain and all but one of the Gundog Walking’s skeleton crew, move rapidly through the darkness. I do not know how we will find the room with Sean and Iseult. I just know that we will.

There is no rancour from the captain. She had directed the crew to collect arms and lights before I even finished my story, and had barked an order for medical supplies soon after, when I told her between wheezes what happened to Sean and Iseult. She didn’t seem to care at all about the statue hall, and she seems entirely convinced that Mister Tumble had no accomplices. I had felt the knifelike focus of her full attention even through my exhaustion. After I’d finished, she had pointed at the cutlass at her waist and asked if I thought it’d work against moon people.

She shrugs, before I can even answer this insane question. Maybe she read the look on my face. “Can’t hurt, though,” she mutters.

Our first journey through these halls was patient and silent. Our second is loud and lethal. Equipped with enough weapons to murder a whale, the lantern-lit sailors rush through the moon hall. My own strange, temporary phantom-sight is gone. I see nothing beyond the lanterns’ glow.

We find the chasm in the floor. The sailors step over it. One does something to her lantern, slotting down little sliders so its radiance is shaped into a cone that streams solely out of one flat face. When she manoeuvres to shine the light down the hole, Captain Holofernes snarls back an order and the sailor immediately straightens and follows the rest of us.

Time is hard, in the dark. It can’t have been more than ten minutes since I left the room. We break into a sprint when we see oil-light glimmering at the end of this hallway.

Iseult is standing over Sean, crushing the bicep of her ruined arm with her one remaining hand. The empty space where her forearm should be is sickening. She gurgles when we enter. I think she’s speaking Mutafasih, until I really parse the syllables.

“Help me carry him.”

The captain sends one of her men to Iseult, who does not bat him away as he pulls her aside and starts wrapping the nauseating stump of her arm. The rest of the sailors crowd around Sean, and curtly report his condition to the captain.

“Intestinal puncture. Might be a kidney as well. He’s in shock.”

They’re efficient. A brace of sailors support Sean’s limp torso as a third crushes cloth over both sides of his wound and a fourth wraps a length of bandage around his wide torso. I stare at Sean, ignoring everything else in the room. There’s just so much blood.

“Get him up. We’ll worry about blood poisoning later. Hey. Íde. Iseult.”

She snaps her fingers at me. I look away from Sean just as the sailors haul him to his feet, sharing his weight between the two largest crew. Iseult looks dreamily between the captain and me.

“Is there anything else in this room?”

So much. There is so much.

There is Mister Tumble’s body.

There is the sculpture, still floating, halfway up the star wall.

There is what Mister Tumble called the door of the Saints.

There is whatever lies beyond.

“Nothing important,” I say.

Iseult begins to speak, but the captain overrides her, immediately barking orders to her crew. Quick-stepping sailors drag Sean out of the room almost as quickly as if they weren’t carrying him at all.

I am the second last to leave. Iseult, protesting gently, is being led down the hall by Captain Holofernes, who has clamped one sinewy hand around my friend’s now bandaged arm. The sailor behind me is looking not at Mister Tumble’s shattered corpse, nor the majesty of the moon’s designs around him, but dead at me.

He’s making sure I don’t do anything. I slink out, and the sailor nods, his forearms relaxing as he eases his grip around the base of his cutlass.

I slip my hand into my coat, loosely cradling the thumb-sized sigil sculpture that I had already plucked from Mister Tumble’s still-warm pocket.