Prologue, in which two are born and two are reborn

Georgia, 1976

The night was thick with humidity. The limbs of beech trees waved slowly in the southern wind, crickets warbling their summer choruses in the grass beneath them. It was early in the season, storms around every corner. That night was no exception.

The sky blew powerful gales, shaking birds from their branches and forcing children to take cover indoors. Beneath the onslaught of the storm, there was a dram of sunshine to be found. Though, if you asked the nurses on call, they might have a different recollection of what took place that evening in their provincial hospital.

The mother had gone into labor with an eerie punctuality; she and her husband gliding through the hospital double doors no more than five minutes before her water broke, silently pooling on the reception lobby linoleum. When the nurse behind the desk asked how they’d timed it, he had flashed a dazzling smile.

 “We’ve done this a few times,” was all either of them would say, and it came in such convincing tones that soon the nurses left it alone. It was a rare blessing for parents to be this calm and collected in the face of an incoming child. This was a couple who knew their business, they thought.

And they were beautiful — not only in their perfect features, smooth skin, and kind voices, but in the way they moved; like synchronized swimmers, dipping and dodging the hospital workers around them, who seemed fumbling clumsily in comparison. When asked to sign her name in, he had produced a pen and slipped it into her hand before she had finished reaching for it. And though she kept her eyes locked on his the entire time, she penned a single word on the dotted line with impeccable handwriting.

 “That’s a lovely name!” exclaimed the nurse behind the desk, “Is that Spanish?” The mother’s smile was radiant.

 “You know, I’m not sure I remember. Isn’t that funny?”

The couple settled into their room with an air of calm at stark odds with the impending life event. The nurses saw none of the nerves usually associated with bringing a new life into the world, so much so that they saw fit to leave them to it, rather than get in their way. Neither of them said a word once they settled in; him sat next to her bed with her left hand clasped in both of his, and her laying back in bed like she might drift off to sleep. They looked picturesque; two lovers taking a date to a hospital, rather than hospitalization for a birth.

There was no inkling in the heartbeat, no changes in the vital signs that the nurses monitored to warn of the baby’s coming. One moment there was serenity, the next there was chaos.

The mother went from silent to screaming loud enough to wake the devil himself in a blink. Her jaws unhinged to force out more air than could fit in her body, teeth snapping together and apart, trying desperately to rend relief from the air itself. The nurses, bless their hearts, rushed to aid her, but were batted away. She swiped at any hand that reached for her, possessing a strength wildly unfitting for her size. The nurses realized they should have insisted when she refused an IV, because when four of them finally wrenched one of her arms down long enough to aim a syringe, her muscles were flexed so tight that the needles snapped against her taut skin.

Her husband remained calm, planted in a chair in the corner of the room, watching the nurses struggle. They couldn’t hear over his wailing wife, but he hummed quietly to himself.

The doctor arrived, only mildly concerned for the thrashing woman in the midst of labor. She had not been present when the couple had arrived, and so took this to be little more than a stubborn mother with lofty ideas of her own pain tolerance. The doctor could not know how departed this reaction was from the woman’s original demeanor. The attendant nurses breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of the doctor, a much-needed guiding light. Her stern face said, No pregnancy is without complications. We will simply have to give it our best for mother and child.

Unfortunately for these nurses, even the most experienced resolves can be shattered by the unknown.

It took a single look at the emerging child to disconnect the doctor from her rational moorings. There was a deformity to the skull, a sharp point at the top of the crown, like a cone was pushing through the scalp. The whole head, as she placed hands on it, was hard, almost sharp at its edges. Her patient on the bed still thrashed wildly, and the nurses had to resort to piling themselves on top of the woman to keep her still. The doctor’s hands were slippery with blood and feces, and the danger of losing hold of the child’s now slick head brought her briefly back to the task at hand. Then the child was out, and the extent of the malady became clear.

The doctor had to swallow hard to tamp down the bile rising in her throat. This was the most hellish. She wanted to try and find words of comfort, something, anything to prepare the mother for what had happened. She had no explanation for the nightmarish child she held in her hand. Yet when she looked to the mother, she was shocked to see a beaming smile. Teary eyes looked straight at the bundle in the doctor’s arms.

 “He’s…beautiful,” her voice sounded like dead leaves, hoarse from screaming. The rasp of her voice seemed to unlock something in the room, and the body jerked into motion in the doctor’s arms.

Then the mother’s head snapped back again, this time howling with a pitch and volume that sent one of the younger nurses running from the room.

There had been no indication of a second child. The doctor was spurred to action, pushing the wriggling malformity into the arms of one of the remaining nurses. There was another child making its way into this world, and she could not afford to freeze in the face of a continually unfolding nightmare.

The doctor knelt to assess the situation and was instantly blinded. She thought it was blood, but it was too dark, near black, and no matter how much she wiped her face, she could not get it out of her eyes. There was a writhing shadow that grappled her head, and it blinded her completely, replacing the room with impenetrable nothing. Then there was quiet, and the doctor slept.

Later that night, a man carried an exhausted woman to a station wagon parked behind the hospital dumpsters, laying her across the backseat with great care. He left for a moment and returned with two blanketed bundles, humming softly. He set his cargo down gingerly beside his wife, started the car, and drove his family home.

And so it was that the family welcomed Petal and Husk into the world.

A different area of Georgia, the same night

The house on the hill stood stoic in the face of the night’s violent unfolding, utterly unmoved by the winds pounding at its doors and windows. It was early yet, only just gone dark, and the house staff had yet to rise for the graveyard shift. All except one.

Gérard, the butler, groundskeeper, and head of staff, paced the halls with an urgency that felt out of place. He possessed no real reason to believe anything at all was amiss. There had been no noise to rouse him from his bed, no telltale clattering or hushed voices. He had helped the young master entertain those hangers-on who loved nothing more than to listen to a prodigy for a few hours before going back home to their own, more stupid children. He and the young master spoke briefly about school before he had set him pleasantly to bed. And still, Gérard had been awakened by something. Something that had plopped itself down in his chest and poured itself a cup of tea to kill time while he hunted it down. 

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So now he stalked the halls; flinging open doors to accuse empty rooms, shifting silently onward to scour for an intrusion that rang in his bones.

He had looked in every bedroom, peered down every dreary corridor, and yet the dread would not subside. In fact, with each room he cleared, his hackles rose higher, the tension mounting inside until he felt he might burst from it— the one cup of tea hadn’t been enough and the little bastard had put the kettle on! Gérard knew that there was something amiss in the house this night, even if he was incapable of finding it. 

What he found, when he found it, he could never have predicted. For years after this night, he would tell friends and confidants that he still hears the high-pitched tone that pierced his mind when he saw it. Like a whistling kettle.

The foyer of the house wasn’t austere, but it had a beautiful staircase that led down to a wide balcony in the center of the room. The balcony connected to the second floor before splitting into two separate staircases leading the rest of the way down. It was old and worn, letting out sighs of exhaustion when climbed upon, but the dark wood and curling railings maintained the beauty of their craftsmanship. The high walls were covered with old photos of a long family lineage in ornate wooden frames, interspersed with the occasional antique mask or ceremonial sword obtained on travels throughout the years. Looming double doors at the entrance to the home were inset with ornate glass, which spat twin spearheads of moonlight onto the rug leading from the door to the stairway. Through the doors set into the stair wall were the servants’ quarters, where soon the night staff would be rising and starting their shifts. 

Gérard worried what would happen once that door was opened and they saw what he saw now.

The blood had stayed on the rug, which was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it was lucky that there would be no stains on the centuries-old wood flooring; on the other hand, the antique rug would never, ever, be clean again. The blood was fresh, but it had already begun soaking into the ancient fibers.

The heap of viscera used to be a woman, at least from the details Gérard could see in the mess. A pearl earring here, a platform shoe plastered wet with maroon there, a discarded finger with painted nails. A curl of blonde hair clinging sadly to a flap of skin that was once scalp. That unmistakable, cloying smell in the air. While the air was full of the steel of blood that squirmed its way into Gerard’s mouth, there was another smell which confirmed his suspicion. His inhuman nose caught the hint of perfume in the air, like a bouquet of flowers deposited in a butcher’s bin.

And above the heap of body parts, a single, small figure. Gérard recognized him by the mop of curly black hair that covered his face. He stood almost three feet tall in gray cotton shorts and a short sleeved black button up shirt. The smart black loafers were irreparably ruined by the gore they stood in, incrementally more soiled by the blood dripping down on them from his upturned palms. 

He turned slowly to look up at the butler on the balcony, who was surprised to see his face blooming scarlet. The boy wept.

The violence was suddenly less disturbing for Gerard in the face of this sobbing child. He had never seen the young master cry.

 “Geddy,” his reedy voice came through hiccupping coughs, “I didn’t mean to… I wouldn’t...”

Then the doors to the servant’s quarters kicked open, and all hell broke loose.

Louisiana, the same night.

Stanley Skinner woke up on the inside of a dumpster, bruised and beaten. He felt, rather than saw, his thick-rimmed glasses askew on his face. He had been deposited here earlier in the day by his arch-nemesis at school, Theo Norman. Norman was a brute of an eleven-year-old, and enormous, to boot. Stanley would say his frame was evidence he was the last surviving neanderthal, but only when he was out of earshot.

Earlier that day, Stanley had taken the change he’d saved up over the past weeks to see if he could afford the newest issue of Doom Squad after school. When he found out he was several pinched pennies short, he was crestfallen. It must have shown on his face as well, as the store clerk behind the counter, with his bird’s nest of hair and the lip piercing which both fascinated and perturbed Stanley, reached under the glass countertop and handed Stanley the floppy issue completely free of charge.

The sun came out on the boy’s bespectacled face and he practically leapt out of the shop with joy (after a good few profuse, blubbering “thank you”s to the clerk).

It is unfortunate that altruistic good so often attracts miserable little bastards, like sharks to blood. Theo Norman had been waiting around the first corner Stanley turned, and if he hadn’t planned on assaulting him before he saw the free and easy grin skipping towards him, that had quickly changed.

And so now Stanley was awake, covered in garbage juice, and so sore he thought his mother might forgive his usage of one of the softer four letter words.

With plenty of wincing, in both pain and disgust, Stanley slipped and skidded his way out of the large dumpster. He had just touched feet to the tarmac in the alleyway when he realized what was missing: where was his comic? He had to spend another fifteen minutes back inside the dumpster, which was much harder to get into voluntarily, until he finally found where it had landed.

He slowly pulled the comic out of the trash. One staple of the binding hung dangerously loose to the pages, bottom corner dripping with that same, indefinable liquid that trash bags create. 

The cover, with its fiery title font, and an image of two heroes laying side-by-side in some sinister lab, looked like… well, it looked like shit, in Stanley’s opinion. Gone was that crisp, untouched sheen. It had been soiled.

He dove back into the dumpster with practiced ease, just long enough to find the least-disgusting plastic shopping bag. He gingerly placed the comic's remains inside for safekeeping. 

Stanley was wondering how he would explain his garbage-drenched state to his mother without sending her into a rage to the Norman’s household, when his eye caught on the other dumpster, deeper in the alley.

It was very faint, he wasn’t even sure he was seeing it, not really, but it looked like a sliver of green light was eking out from under the lid of the other dumpster. There was a smell, separate from the stench he’d been surrounded by before, something sweet; if sugar could go rotten with the same intensity as spoiled meat.

Now, a rational person might decide this was the appropriate moment to retreat from the alleyway altogether, escaping the glowing, stinking trash, and call the police. Or maybe the CDC, or some other appropriate government agency to go do their job and deal with what lay in the garbage of a strip mall in that town in the South. Anyone rather than one of the town’s children. 

But eleven-year-old Stanley Skinner was not, in that moment, his normal rational self. He was a sad young boy, defeated and disheartened; he had experienced such highs and lows in such a short amount of time that he no longer knew which way was up. To a boy like this, with tears in his eyes and hurt in his heart, the ruined story of his superhuman heroes still drying in a bag in his hand, a glowing dumpster might seem to make a certain sick, cosmic sense.

-

Stanley would later tell his mother, tears soaking through bandages in his hospital bed, that the moment he had lifted the lid of that dumpster, it had “‘sploded.” He would beg her not to be mad at him. His mother would weep tears of joy that her sweet little man was safe, saying she forgives him for being so silly, if only he promised to never do it again.

And when the doctor came in to tell them it seemed very likely that his eyesight would heal perfectly, mother and son clutched one another and wept with joy again, thanking the Lord for the miracle.

And even when the doctor pulled her aside and made her very nervous talking about impossibilities and things they didn’t understand in an attempt to prepare her for possible complications once the bandages came off, his mother knew he would see again. She swore to care for him through whatever recovery would bring.

But even that didn’t seem necessary. After a few more days of rest, Stanley had his bandages removed to find that he could see perfectly fine. Moving his eyes was somewhat strange; ticklish, but not painful.

His mother thought at times they seemed to reflect flat, slate gray, but didn’t want to alarm anyone by mentioning it.

He would still need new glasses, but colors seemed somehow brighter, the fuzzy forms more defined in some way; he couldn’t tell quite how. The doctor said he would spend one more night in the hospital, just to be sure, and his mother could get him in the afternoon, if he felt up to it. They could even get his new glasses on the way home.

That night in the hospital, Stanley realized his dreams of an origin story, in a sense. The thing in the dumpster that had so spectacularly “‘sploded” and sent shattered pieces of Stanley’s glasses shooting into his eyes was a certain type of thing, something profoundly weird and not of his world. As it escaped our world through the reflecting panes of glass in Stanley’s frames, it left in its wake twin spirals of gnarled refraction, like horrible non-Euclidean hallways stretching the space from pupil to retina. The resulting detritus was not physical enough to harm his eyes in any way, but it was physical enough that it caught the light differently. The leftovers bent the light as it entered, reflecting and refracting it back onto Stanley’s optic nerve in new ways, unveiling to him things that would to other people’s eyes stay hidden.

And in the dead of night, among the ill and broken, the dying and the newly-born, a hospital is full of things most people should never see.

When Stanley Skinner’s mother picked him up the next morning, he was a different boy. The doctors warned her of the possibility of nightmares following his accident. While no change was evident in his sight, he’d had a rough night. He had wet the bed.

When she walked him to the car, she noticed how he refused to take his eyes off the floor, how he trembled with every breath, and went to great pains to avoid people in the parking lot as they walked out. When he got his new glasses, he didn’t put them on for a good while. Once he had, he studied her face, as if testing her, as if she might be someone different than his own mother. And though his mother passed his scrutiny and he made it home safely, Stanley Skinner’s life was never the same.