May was struggling to reach up, to the light. It took every inch of her to break out of the shell that had formed around her; every ounce of strength she could muster just to open her eyes and see. The shadows made her sick. They sucked her in, into an endless cycle of dark and cold and a terrible thinness, and swallowed her whole. In there, May couldn’t see. There was nothing. Nothing but the endless yanking on her mind, and the vocalist’s calmer tugging somewhere in the distance. Sometimes she tried to breathe in that darkness, or scratch, or move, or scream. Whenever she tried that, they spat her out, and it’s wasn’t always in the yellow light of the vocalist’s apartment. Some days she opened her eyes in the forest. Once, in her old room in Erika’s house. So she learned to pretend she was nothing but a soul, an entity without body to reach for. To believe she was nothing but a bundle of thoughts, whenever the inky darkness required it of her; to travel through them without losing herself.

She was humiliatingly thankful when she opened her eyes on the couch one morning, and could move. May had her body back. It was cold, tired, and unwilling, but it was hers. It was safe. No matter the tugging at the back of her mind – she could get used to that as long as she could finally stretch her sore muscles.

It was then she started to remember things. Erika. Asrun, her sister, her father, the blood. Gods, what had she done? There were a thousand images pressing up against her, and yet May felt as though she had lost things. She could not recall the exact shade of red of their blood. Had they had carpet on the living room floor? Did they have a separate shower, or just a bath? Had they cared – had they really, honestly, cared?

‘Are you back?’ someone asked. May turned her head.

Of course. The vocalist. What had his name been – Thorn. A stage name, probably. She shrugged it off. He thought she’d shrugged at him, and he smiled.

‘Take your time. Got plenty of it,’ he said.

May wanted to smile back, but her body wasn’t used to answering to her anymore.

‘You want something?’ Thorn asked.

‘Thirst,’ May said, although she knew that wasn’t the right word. She’d been supposed to say something else, but-

‘I’ll get you something,’ he said. She watched him walk away, tangled hair and unwashed jeans. She assumed it was early morning. It was dark out.

It seemed like hours before Thorn returned with with a glass of water.

‘There you go,’ he said. He sat down beside her. The girl took the drink from him, and sipping on it, she started crying.

‘Why am I forgetting everything?’ she said. The man beside her pulled his knees up to his chest. He looked younger than he was.

‘I don’t know. It’s the way it is. It’ll stop, soon,’ he hesitated, ‘I promise.’

‘Can you remember for me? I’m afraid I’ll lose them,’ May said. ‘Especially Asrun – I can remember being fourteen, it’s so fucking young. I hated it, and I bet she did, too, but you’re supposed to get through that. Or was she fifteen? Gods, I can’t remember.’

She curled up, shoulders shaking, holding onto her blankets with white knuckles. What if she’d fall away into herself again? She couldn’t do that. She mustn’t. It was so dark in there, all the time. How much time had passed?

‘How long has it been?’ she demanded.

‘Nearly five weeks, now. It’s winter.’

‘It’s always winter up here,’ she said. ‘Will you remember her for me? Her name was Asrun. Asrun. When I was fourteen I wrote terrible poetry and – I killed them!’

She was wailing now, with a terrible high-pitched sobbing.

‘I killed them – fourteen felt like forever but it wasn’t supposed to be the end – I felt terribly grown up because I didn’t smoke. I kissed that idiot boy because he could tell Black Sabbath apart from Iron Maiden – Gods, I don’t even know if she had that. Will you remember it for me, Thorn? Her name was Asrun. She was fourteen. I think.’

May crawled against him, crying into his shirt, desperate for some shard of warmth, of life, of something other than that endless dark. He let her.

‘It’s all fading,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all fading, and there’s nothing I can do.’

‘It’ll pass,’ he lied into her hair, ‘It’ll pass, it’ll pass. I’ll remember for you. It’ll pass.’

She was so, so tired. She believed him. He was like her, after all. She could feel him on the edge of the shadows, her consciousness, him and only him. He was better with them than she was – he was like the tide, natural and subtle. She felt like a child with a bad temper. Around them, the rhythm of the city twisted and turned; the heartbeat of thousands merged into one.

‘Don’t make me do it again,’ she said, and she felt his body getting tense. ‘Don’t make me kill anyone again, Thorn. I can’t.’

The vocalist didn’t answer. Something inside her screamed of betrayal, but that something was disappearing fast. She wasn’t tired - she was exhausted. Before she finished her thought, she was asleep.

By the time May woke up, the short period daylight had come and gone. She didn’t recall what she’d told Thorn. All that was left in her was a feeling that something was off, that there was something very, very wrong – but for now, she’d let it rest. She got up. Stretched the sleep out of her muscles. She realized she was still wearing the same clothes as she had – that day.

Thorn was staring at her from behind his laptop. Of course - he was used to having a motionless shell of a girl curled up on his couch, not a moving, thinking one.

‘Can – can I use your shower?’ she asked. There was a thin silence between them, the girl now suddenly a person and not just a ball of misery on the couch.

‘Of course,’ Thorn said, ‘It’s into the hallway, door on the left- right, from here.’

May hesitated, then asked:

‘Do you maybe have something clean for me? To wear?’

‘Fuck, yeah, sure, I’ll – let me see if I’ve got something.’

He got up, shut his laptop, and left the room. May took the chance to look around.

In short, the vocalist’s apartment was a mess. There was no bookshelf, but there were piles and piles of magazines and books scattered around. The walls were covered in old concert posters – the oldest May could see from a Norwegian bands’ tour in the nineties. The place looked as if it were inhabited by a teenager. May wondered how far off from the truth that was. She was still shaking, unable to control her trembling muscles. Did she trust him? She didn’t know. He seemed harmless enough, but the girl now knew there was more to this world than she could know. When he returned with worn clothes, oversized and obviously his own, she thanked him. The vocalist directed her to the bathroom, where she promptly locked the door. She listened for his footsteps. Didn’t undress until she was certain he’d left. By the sink, there sat a battered first aid kid, and the walls’ tiles looked like they came straight out of the seventies. Tentatively, she turned on the shower, steaming up the mirror so that she wouldn’t have to look. Her body felt the same, after all those weeks. It seemed wrong. So much had changed – there were supposed to be wounds, she’d expected to be marked with new scars and bruises. Something physical to represent what had happened to her, how hard she’d come crashing down. But there was nothing; so instead she scrubbed herself clean until her skin was red and devoid of anything from before. She scraped old blood from beneath her torn fingernails. May shivered. The shower didn’t seem to get as hot as she needed it to be.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

The vocalist’s towels were old, well-washed and worn, soft and faded. May wondered how long he’d been using them, how much of his routine had become permanently transfixed in his life. His clothes were simular, old but comfortable, frayed at the seams. All of it was black, most of it was band merch. Honestly, it did not surprise her. The man was a walking stereotype, and she wasn’t sure if he was even aware of that.

She hugged herself, still cold, unwilling to go back into the living room yet and talk. May knew she should cry, scream, wail. If not over herself, then over the people she’d left on the floor of their own house to bleed out. She found, instead, that she could not. Something had dug out her insides and stuffed her with cotton to absorb bits of her she’d never wanted to lose.

‘What the fuck am I?’ she said to her mirror image, as she morphed the shadows on the wall behind her, distorting them with the ease of breathing.

By the time May got out of the shower, Thorn had sat down on the kitchen counter, mug of tea between his fingers. All these past weeks he’d been pondering what to tell her. He still didn’t know what to say. When she returned from the bathroom, she let a hot cloud of steam into the rest of his apartment. Clad in his old clothes - oversized, giving her the appearance of a teenage boy - she made a cautious entrance into the kitchen. She clung to the walls and the furniture, like an animal of prey guarding its back. It stung.

‘They’re all dead, right, that wasn’t a dream?’ she said.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘And you said we are the same?’ she said, arms around herself, knuckles turning white with stress.

‘We are.’

‘We kill?’ she said, now cold, not the crying girl that’d surfaced yesterday night.

‘We do,’ he said, and May was shaking and avoiding his eyes, and he knew he couldn’t die on her tomorrow like Helga had died on him. Hell, that skinny thing in his clothes didn’t even have Sigrin to fall back on. Just Abigail, and her misunderstandings.

‘It’s alright,’ he lied, and sat her down on the couch again, handing his tea over to her. She clung to it, that bit of heat. ‘It gets easier. You’ll care less.’

‘I already care less,’ May said, ‘I misremember things, all the bits that made Erika Erika, and Asrun Asrun.’

‘It makes it bearable,’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t want it to be. I don’t.’

He didn’t know what to tell her, and eventually went to bed. When he woke up, she was gone. He half expected a call from Abigail, asking why May’s body had turned up somewhere in town, but it never came. She stayed gone overnight, and returned early morning, clutching fistfulls of notes. The following evening, Thorn left an empty journal and an old coat of his on the couch, and they dissapeared with May. Abigail never called, not even for work. He pretended that didn’t hurt, making hot, bitter coffee, and drank it staring over Slakshaven, wondering why he didn’t feel any different. This was the point Helga had dissapeared with nothing but a few omnious warnings. He swallowed. There was peace promised to him, now. A way out, without killing anyone or condemning someone else to become his replacement. An end to the cycle of madness. But he didn’t want to let go, now. He didn’t want to die and leave the skinny girl that lived on his couch alone in this absolute clutsterfuck of inhuman misery.

The days shortened. Thorn chain smoked in Dyst, matching new lyrics to Skygge’s new bass lines. In the background, the evening news still droned on about May and Asrun the September murders.

He stared out the window. Snow had begun coating the streets, clinging to the cobbles in thick clumps. May’s younger foster sister was still missing, too, and Thorn assumed her lifeless body lay somewhere in the woods. He imagined an ever younger version of May, frozen blue and with snowflakes in her hair. Would he join Asrun, soon? Drop dead and freeze? Probably not. His body would fade into shadow, he supposed, or mummify the way Helga’s had overnight.

‘Hmm?’ Thorn said, as Skygge knocked on his arm.

‘I asked you why we never hang out at yours anymore,’ the bassist said. ‘Not that you have to invite me, but I haven’t really got the budget to come here every day.’

Thorn shrugged. ‘Been procrastinating on cleaning. Again.’

‘I’d invite you to mine but you know what my grandma is like.’

He’d have to coordinate with May. He could hardly tell Skygge that really, it was fine, but May fucking Schroder, wanted by police as either victim or killer, was camping out in his living room, would that be a problem?

‘How about saturday, after practice?’ Thorn said. ‘Invite the others, too. I’ll get some beer. It’s long past time, you’re right.’

‘Don’t let me pressure you into it,’ Skygge said. He stretched, showing off the shirt with their band’s logo. They’d printed a couple hundred only months earlier, as though a band like theirs had room to grow on Threoo, where Dyst was quite literally the high point of loud music.

‘It’s all right,’ Thorn said. ‘I’ll figure something out. Let the others know?’

‘I will.’ Skygge got up, shoving his music papers into his college bag. ‘I promised Thomas I’d look after his niece today.’

He winced as his hair caught in his zipper, pulled it out, and was out the door before Thorn could react. Ah, hell. He could very well be dead before saturday. Should he have said something, to Skygge? Thorn shook his head. Better not to involve him, in case the dark decided the bassist knew too much or came too close.

He zipped up his own backpack and shrugged on his jacket. Raising a hand to say goodbye to Oskar, he made for the door, and ventured out into the darkness. It was three in the afternoon, but in late October that meant the sun had sunk far below the horizon. Soon, it wouldn’t rise at all.

Thorn had nothing else that needed doing that day, and sitting at home and watching time tick away was about the least appealing thing he could do. Instead he turned towards the suburbs. The cobbles, slippery and coated with snow, passed too quickly beneath his boots. He shouldn’t be doing this, shouldn’t be going there, but for his own sake he wanted to say goodbye. It was an uphill walk, towards those bright white-brick houses, along all sorts of houses and playgrounds and shops that hadn’t been there when Thorn was young. He stuffed his hands a little deeper into his pockets. The wind picked up, blowing his hair into his face and snow into his eyes, but when at last he reached the right house he forgot about that. He didn’t ring the doorbell. He just stood across the street and watched, certain the shadows cloaking him would render him invisible to Terji and his family.

It had been the only kindness he was grateful for, the first few years, that his older sister had moved out before he’d been swept up by the shadows. She had lived, at least, and married, and had daughters she named after his younger sister and mother. He’d never visited her, and so it was a good five years after she’d had her only son that he heard she’d called him Terji.

Had named her son after him, the one who’d torn up their family. After him, the man no longer a man, who had no right to call her sister still. His own name now turned ashen on his tongue, catching in his throat and dripping acid into old wounds whenever someone spoke it.

Terji, in his fifties now, sat watching TV in his livingroom with a wife and son Thorn didn’t know. The vocalist looked at them for a long time, before finally turning away. Those things weren’t his. As he started home, he considered just laying down here and dying. The dark around him was oddly tranquil and welcoming.

But he hadn’t told May were he kept his spare keys, yet, or where exactly you had to kick the heater for it to work properly; hadn’t told her why Abigail might hate her, too.

‘Not yet,’ he told the shadows around him, ‘not yet.’