#fytheuntamed
Xue Yang and Xiao Xingchen arrive at quaint, beautiful Innsmouth, a decaying old fishing town that’s not at all creepy, disturbing, or dangerous. Or: The boys go roadtripping through scenic New England, where absolutely nothing weird ever happens at all.
xuexiao - M - Ch. 1 Ch. 2Ch. 3 -AO3
Chapter 4: Innsmouth
Xiao Xingchen is cradling Xue Yang’s head in his lap when he opens his eyes.
“You gave me quite a scare,” murmurs Xingchen, running his thumb over Xue Yang’s cheek. “For a while I feared the worst…”
Xue Yang sits up, the world spinning. Xiao Xingchen reaches out to steady him, gazing at him with foreign green eyes.
“Try not to move until we can figure out how badly you’re injured,” Xingchen tells him. “I bound your wound as best I could, but—”
Xue Yang pounces on him, knocking him back to the grass. Runs his hands over his arms and legs and chest, assuring himself of their solidity, then covers his mouth with his.
It worked it worked it worked—
Xingchen laughs as Xue Yang releases him. Giddy, Xue Yang sits back on his heels, hyperventilating, devouring every inch of the doctor with hungry eyes. Xingchen is dressed in the clothes from the satchel, talisman tucked away, only the wrinkles in his clothes and hatless head betraying anything unusual.
He’s alive he’s alive he’s alive—
“What happened?” Xue Yang’s heart is beating so hard it’s all he can do to form coherent words. “How did we get here?” The stone-crowned hill is nowhere to be seen. “We were on the hill, and then—where are we?”
“Shouldn’t I be the one asking that?”
Xingchen’s voice is a little raspy, not exactly as remembered, and Xue Yang reaches out to make sure he’s not imagining the doctor. He’d taken off his glove to perform the ritual, but it had been replaced while he was unconscious. Tentatively, he lays his gloved hand on Xingchen’s arm.
His warm, solid arm.
He’s real he’s alive he’s real it worked—
Xiao Xingchen looks apologetic. “I’m afraid the bandages on your stomach aren’t my best work. I can’t see very well…”
“You what?”
Xingchen sounds as if he wishes he hadn’t said anything. “I can see the moon, a kind of smudged yellow glow, but I’m afraid everything else is a blur.”
It’s alright. It’s fine. He’s alive, that’s all that matters. He’s back…
And he needs you. If he still can’t see, he’ll need you—
Yes. Even better, this outcome. Xue Yang wants to kick himself for not having thought of a way to blind Xingchen intentionally. Now Xiao Xingchen will need him as he never truly had before—
“It’s alright, doctor.” He takes Xingchen’s cold white hand and gently kisses the knuckles. The doctor’s skin is soft and smooth, without a hint of the usual coarsely-knit texture or gray hue of the other reanimated corpses. Perfect, as everything about him has always been. “I’ll take care of you.”
Xiao Xingchen lays back in the wildflowers as if suddenly exhausted. “Where are we? This isn’t Arkham…”
“Upstate. I brought you here to bring you back.”
“Back from…”
“That doesn’t matter.” Xue Yang rubs at his chest, his pounding heart starting to slow as the euphoria of the doctor’s return mellows into a soft glow of joy. It’s cold and hollow inside his ribs, as if the ritual had taken more out of him than he’d thought, but he barely notices it through the glow. Suddenly exhausted, he lies beside Xingchen, drinking him in through the thin curtain of grass that separates them, trying to get used to the startlingly green eyes. He prefers Xingchen’s old brown ones, misses their warmth and gentle humor, but nothing can take away from the beauty of the doctor’s face.
“Xue Yang, I was…” Xingchen sits up abruptly, as if things have only just sunk in, and Xue Yang, who had begun to drift off, jerks awake. “I was…I was…”
Xue Yang pulls him back down. “Just forget it. You’re back now.”
“I was dead!Dead like…like…” Xingchen’s breath catches in his throat, and a shaking hand covers his eyes. “I…he…”
Xue Yang chooses his words carefully. He’s wide awake now, but he keeps his voice low and sleepy, as if he’s too tired to be speaking anything but directly from the heart. “I’m sorry about what happened to Song Lan, doctor.“
Xingchen digs the heels of his palms in his eyes, hyperventilating. “It wasn’t your fault,” he manages to get out.
“I was there. I encouraged him to drink the tea. I thought it would help…”
Xiao Xingchen finds his gloved hand, squeezing gently with a cold, trembling hand. Comforting Xue Yang seems to calm him in turn. “You can’t blame yourself, Xue Yang. It was my fault, all my fault…”
“You didn’t mean for it to happen. Here, doctor. I thought…I thought you might want to keep this.” Xue Yang draws Song Lan’s watch from his pocket and closes Xingchen’s fingers around the cold metal. "A little keepsake.”
And if thatdoesn’t clinch it—
Still shaking, Xingchen slips the watch into his pocket and rolls into Xue Yang.
Xue Yang slides his arms around him, holding him close. Relishes the doctor’s solidity. His warmth. The faint flutter of his pulse when Xue Yang brushes his throat and faint sound of his breath.
Xue Yang could lie like this for the rest of his life, just the two of them miles from civilization, surrounded by stars and warm breezes, but he’s never been one to leave well enough alone and he has to bite his tongue to keep from blurting out What do you remember? Do you remember every incriminating thing I said?
Do you remember how you died…
He dozes off soon after, days of strain having wrung every ounce of energy from his body, and dreams of stars falling to earth in a riot of violet flames. He’s woken by the brilliant orange sun pouring honey-like over the distant hills, illuminating the meadow in a golden haze.
“I wish you could see this,” he murmurs, gazing out from under heavy eyelids. “It’s like something out of a fairytale painting…”
Xingchen sits up, rubbing his eyes. “I can, a bit. Shapes and blobs and colors…”
“Can you see my face?”
“I can see your smile.”
“I guess I’ll have to take that.”
“You did this, didn’t you.”
Xue Yang freezes. “Did what?”
“Made sure I could see, a bit.”
Xue Yang relaxes. “I included it in my incantation. Didn’t expect a whole new color iris, though I should have expected it from what I’ve read…”
Xingchen touches the corner of his eye. “I look different?”
“They’re a nice shade of green, don’t get me wrong. Just takes some getting used to. Here.” He rises, extending a hand to help Xiao Xingchen up. He doesn’t want to leave, but they’re far too close to the Vermont border for his liking. He’s mulled it over and decided that he’d overestimated the cooperation between the Vermont and Massachusetts police, but he doesn’t want to be anywhere near Miss Baoshen’s farm. “We should be getting you back to Arkham.”
He helps Xingchen to the automobile, where Xue Yang, feeling more than a little faint, eats some cookies and cola he’d bought the day before. Xingchen doesn’t touch the food, sitting in the passenger seat with his head resting on the window and his unsettling green eyes focused on nothing, or perhaps on something Xue Yang simply can’t see.
There’s something…remoteabout the doctor, as if Yog-Sothoth kept a part of him in the Outside…
A sticky, creeping anxiety forces Xue Yang to stop eating.
What if the lack of a human sacrifice meant that something had gone terribly wrong?
What if this isn’t Xiao Xingchen at all…
He sticks the key in the ignition, trying to banish the uncharacteristic self-doubt, but that cold hollow in his chest is throbbing and all he can think about is What if it’s not him, what if he’s gone for good and it’s all my fault…
He thinks back to the previous night. Had the doctor said anything only Xiao Xingchen would know?
Xingchen had accepted responsibility for Song Lan’s death…or had he? Last night is all a blur of exhaustion and euphoria.
He starts the engine and begins to drive.
“How bad is your wound?” Xiao Xingchen asks after about fifteen minutes of rattling over the bumpy dirt road towards Aylesbury. His voice is clearer, more like Xue Yang remembers. “I couldn’t see much in the darkness.”
Xue Yang lays a hand on his blood-stiffened waistcoat. The cuts on his fingers have stopped bleeding, at least. “I cauterized it, but it tore a bit and bled like the dickens. Seems to have congealed, now. I was a poor substitute for your magic fingers.“ He waggles an eyebrow at that last bit, grinning to himself…
But Xingchen just nods.
The old Xingchen would have fussed over him, demanded they pull over so he could check the dressing, blushed at the suggestive eyebrow waggle or demurred at the compliment…
Not just satthere.
Tension mounts as they drive over the dilapidated wooden bridges stretching perilously across the river gorges and deep ravines, under ancient trees grown so thick and heavy that their drooping branches half-obscure the road.
He has to ask. Has to find out. Anythingwould be better than not knowing…
He turns his head slightly. Xingchen has put the tinted glasses back on.
“Doesn’t that make it harder to see?” Xue Yang asks. Light. Casual.
“The sun is giving me a headache.”
“Maybe you need to drink something.”
“I don’t think I need to drink anymore…or breathe; I think that’s just habit. I’m not…” He turns his face away from Xue Yang, gazing blindly out the window.
Xue Yang’s fingers tighten on the steering wheel. Tears of blood are slipping down the doctor’s pale white cheeks.
He’d never seen the olddoctor cry…
“I don’t want to go back home,” Xingchen says.
“…to Vermont or to Arkham?”
“Either.”
“Your degree…”
Xiao Xingchen’s voice is muffled by his handkerchief. “I don’t deserve to become a doctor. Not after what I did.” His voice cracks. “ ‘Do no harm…’ ”
“That was an accident,” says Xue Yang, and he has to hide a smile despite the unsettlingly red tears staining Xingchen’s handkerchief. He’s always relished being the one to comfort Xiao Xingchen, make him laugh when he was struck by his occasional fits of melancholy and raise his spirits after shifts in the hospital’s pediatric wing.
“Doesn’t matter,” says Xingchen, so low Xue Yang can barely hear him over the sputtering of the motor. His hand is in the pocket holding Song Lan’s watch. “I killed someone under my care, my best friend, and as I can barely see, I’m bound to do it again.”
Xue Yang has to turn away to prevent Xiao Xingchen from seeing his smile stretch into a grin that nearly splits his face in half.
It’shisdoctor.HisXingchen…
Then the grin shrinks. If he remembers what happened with Song Lan, he might remember the night he died, too, and all the idiotic things Xue Yang had said while showing them the farmhouse vaults…
But Xiao Xingchen doesn’t say anything more.
Xue Yang turns left at Aylesbury pike. Aylesbury isn’t much of a town by Arkham standards, but there’s a main street with a grocery, post office, cinema, drugstore, and even an optometrist.
“Do you want new glasses?” The words slip out before he can stop them, before he can remember he wantsXiao Xingchen dependent on him. “They might help you see better. Here.” He pours Xingchen some water he keeps to fill the radiator. “Wash that blood off your hands.”
Xingchen obeys without a word. He seems to be drifting, vibrating on a different frequency from the rest of the world, and Xue Yang has a sudden mad thought that if he took his picture, he wouldn’t show up on film.
It takes a few hours, but by the time they drive off, Xingchen’s round silver frames are filled with fresh lenses that don’t fully correct his vision but still help him see, and they have a fresh supply of bandages scrounged from grocery, as the drugstore was closed. Xue Yang would prefer a shirt and waistcoat not stiff with blood, but there are no clothing stores and the black fabric hides most of it, at least.
Xue Yang feels better as they leave the local diner, largely thanks to his first real meal in days. There’s a bounce in his step as he escorts Xingchen to the car, opening the door for him like a gentleman.
Since when is he such a worrier? If Xiao Xingchen hasn’t confronted him about that awful night yet, that means that he doesn’t remember all the things Xue Yang had said.
And of course he’s a bit off. Who wouldn’t be, after being brought back from the Outside?
The world is open to them. They can visit the Grand Canyon, New York, Yosemite…two fugitives on the run…
Well, one fugitive, anyway. And only if the car has been reported stolen or if Miss Baoshen had reported Song Lan’s death as a murder.
He half-hopes she has reported it.
“We’ll stop in Arkham for a few minutes,” he tells Xingchen, because, fugitive fantasies aside, there’s little chance Arkham holds any danger. “Pick up some of your things before we leave.”
Xingchen doesn’t ask where they’re leaving to. “Pay Mrs. Dombrowski the last of the rent.”
Xue Yang rolls his eyes. “Sure.”
Xue Yang talks most of the way back to Arkham. Usually, he likes speeding, but he drives slowly, aiming to get back after dark. It’s ten p.m. when he parks around the corner from Xingchen’s house and leads him inside.
“The police were here earlier,” says Mrs. Dombrowski as she opens the door. “Looking for…”
She hesitates, looking at Xue Yang, who tips his hat and bows politely. Dammit. Had they been here for the car or Song Lan?
Xingchen ducks his head. “All is well, Mrs. Dombrowski. You can assure them of that…”
Xue Yang accompanies him to the garret. He’d prefer Xingchen to stay downstairs while he packed for him, but the doctor stubbornly insists on gathering his own belongings.
It’s fine; Jim cleaned up the blood…
But Xiao Xingchen stiffens as they step into the room, standing very still in the doorway.
Xue Yang looks at him, waiting for him to burst out with a torrent of recriminations, angrily accuse him of being a monster, but Xingchen just says, “Go downstairs and pay Mrs. Dombrowski, please. I’ll be down in a minute.”
Xue Yang has to resist the urge to slam the door, though he doesn’t know why.
He should be happyXingchen doesn’t remember—
Not that he’d done anything that needs forgetting, not that Xiao Xingchen knows about anyway.
Thegood doctor had been the one to betray him—
He waits for Xingchen outside, leaning on a lamppost, one hand on the gun in his pocket. He knows he shouldn’t wait where the police can find him but he doesn’t want to risk straying too far from the house.
A slight breeze is blowing salt air in off the ocean, plastering a newspaper against the fence across from him.
WINGED CREATURE SPOTTED IN SKY OVER ARKHAM, blares the headline, and he thinks of the escaped Elder Thing soaring through the Arkham sky, wings outlined against the moon, and grins to himself.
Then the paper flutters down the street, taking his smile with it.
Trying to distract himself, he thuds the back of his head on the metal as he waits. That cold empty feeling is back in his chest, coupled with a sudden tug towards the attic room.
Towards Xingchen, as if the doctor has an electron that’s missing from Xue Yang.
That’s just exhaustion talking.
“Was Mrs. Dombrowski happy to receive the rent money?” Xingchen asks as they get back in the car. It might be Xue Yang’s imagination, but there’s something different in his manner, a certain reserve.
“Of course,” Xue Yang lies as he starts the engine. As if they have any money to throw away on back rent after buying those new lenses.
“Are we going to the farmhouse? Pick up your things?”
“I have the valise I took to Vermont in the back seat.” He pulls into the street. “We can’t risk the farmhouse. Coming here was a stupid risk in itself.”
“What do you mean?”
“The cops.”
“The police cleared you of all charges. They were probably just looking for me, as I…went away quite suddenly.”
Xue Yang shakes his head. “I didn’t want to say anything, but…” He stops, as if hesitant to speak. “Miss Baoshan didn’t report you or anything. You don’t have to worry about that. She believed in you. But I guess the coroner had some questions, and the inquest might have spiraled. We can only guess.”
Xingchen’s face changes expression fully for the full time since his return. “I need to turn myself in!”
“For what, manslaughter? It wasn’t your fault.”
Song Lan’s pocketwatch is in Xingchen’s hand. “I need to pay for my mistakes!”
“By what, rotting away in jail and being of no use to anyone? You killed yourself out of guilt! You’ve suffered enough. Give back to society by keeping me company on the road.”
That last part is meant as a joke to make up for bringing up his suicide so abruptly, but Xingchen swallows hard.
“You mean that?”
Xue Yang swallows a When have I ever lied to you? though in truth he’s never really lied to Xingchen, just bent the truth a little for everyone’s good. “I need someone around to laugh at my jokes,” he shrugs instead.
Xingchen doesn’t speak again, settling back against the seat a bit stiffly, as if he’s forgotten how to sit, and Xue Yang has to tell himself that it’s a good thing the doctor has agreed not to turn himself in and that it’s not wildly out of character.
Or even if it is, it’s understandable for someone who has gone through what Xingchen has gone through.
He’ll adjust soon, get back to himself, actually crack a smile…
Xingchen still doesn’t ask where he’s heading, but his face relaxes as they drive on the high road running along the shore, windows down, inhaling the salt air as they coast through the salt marshes surrounding the city. No other cars on the road, Xue Yang is relieved to see. He’s still not sure if the police were looking for him because of Song Lan’s death or simply tracing the stolen car, but either way, he’s lost Mr. Wen’s protection and can’t afford so much as a jaywalking ticket.
The only light on the road comes from the moon. It’s barely half-full but its brilliant light floods the countryside, gleaming off the marshland and illuminating the rising mists with silver radiance.
It’s desolate country, if starkly beautiful. Far worse choices for a moonlit drive.
Deserted as it is now, this was once a thickly populated area, going by the abandoned farmhouses and sunken fences. Xue Yang has heard rumors of a great plague and riot in 1846 that had wiped out half the local population, a not-quite-fully-explained disaster connected with dark rumors about nearby Innsmouth.
He glances at Xiao Xingchen out of the corner of his eye a few times, wanting to say something, but Xingchen’s earlier consternation has vanished and it’s as if he’s only half-present. The doctor is facing the ocean, seemingly soothed by the faint sound of the waves. He’s tucked the ugly silver pocketwatch away and is playing with his necklace, running his thumb over the talisman’s strange engravings, pressing it to his lips almost unconsciously.
The car runs out of gas around midnight. Xue Yang pulls off the road as the engine sputters to a stop and together they push the car behind a screen of stubby trees.
Xingchen faces the ocean as Xue Yang pries the license plates off the car with tools he found in the trunk. “I hear the ocean.”
Xue Yang grabs his sleeve. “Don’t go running off—”
Xingchen breaks free, stumbling down towards the ocean like a sleepwalker.
Xue Yang grabs the satchel and hurries after him, breaking into a limping run as the trees thin and the beach opens up. They collapse on the rocky sand, gazing out at the waves as they break on distant cliffs illuminated by the blazing silver moon.
Xingchen gazes blindly out at the ocean. There’s a touch of melancholy about him that, coupled with his ghostly white skin and strange green eyes, lends him a haunting air.
“Describe the sea to me,” he says quietly, wrapping his arms around his legs, chin resting on his knees.
“Deep blue waves, crested with silver foam…” Somehow Xue Yang doesn’t mind saying stupid things like this to Xingchen. “Sky like a black velvet bowl of diamonds turned over the earth, blue light still bright on the horizon…”
Xingchen smiles for the first time since his return. “I always thought you should have been a writer.”
Xue Yang tucks the compliment away. He wants to keep talking but Xiao Xingchen, almost as if ashamed by the smile, lies down in the sand, face to the ocean and back to Xue Yang.
It’s impossible to deny. The doctor has been different since his return to his boarding house. Distant in a way that has nothing to do with the otherworldly remoteness still clinging to him…
He doesn’t remember. He’d have said something if he had…
But Xue Yang can’t deny that if Xiao Xingchen remembered that Song Lan was dead, and how it happened, he must also remember everything else that passed between him and Xue Yang the night he killed himself.
He’ll forgive you.
After all, you’veforgivenhim…
“We can go wading,” Xue Yang suggests, trying to get Xingchen to lookat him, at least.
“I’ve never stepped foot in the ocean,” Xingchen finally admits a few minutes after Xue Yang gives up hope of a response.
“Never?”
Xingchen’s response is so quiet Xue Yang’s not sure he hears it properly. “I knew that if I went in, I’d never come back out…”
“I’d drag you back out.”
More silence.
“I saw a headline about the Elder Thing that escaped from the vaults,” he says, trying to pique Xiao Xingchen’s interest, get him to talk, say something, anything, and immediately wishes he’d kept his mouth shut. Best not remind the doctor about anything that had happened that night in the vaults. But it’s too late now.
“Thatthing is still alive?”
“Probably trying to fly home to the South Pole. The Elder Things had vast cities there, thousands of years ago. In for a shock, coming home to find everything dead and covered in the ice. Wen Ruohan sent me a preserved corpse, dug up by that Antarctic expedition that professor went missing on.”
“That poor creature, waking up in another millennium, returning home to find everything gone.”
“I guess so.”
“The last of its kind, no family, just utterly, completely alone…”
Xue Yang shrugs. “Not quite alone. According to the Necronomicon, the Elder Things bred monsters called shoggoths and used them as slaves. Thousands of years ago, they rose up and wiped the Elder Things out. Poetic justice. Hooray for the Thirteenth Amendment and all. Anyway, legend has it the shoggoths still haunt the Elder Things’ old cities, so it’ll have company.”
“What will the shoggoths do to the creature?”
“Nothing pleasant. Shoggoths are said to be…well…” Xue Yang trails off. Even the dread Necronomicon had tiptoed around the subject.
“Let’s talk of something else. How is your leg?”
“Fine. The bullet passed through cleanly.”
Could have used tending at the time, he wants to add, but instead just says, “I’m used to pain.”
“And—” Xiao Xingchen hesitates. “Your stomach wound?”
“I’ve had worse.”
“That doesn’t make it good,” says Xingchen, glancing at him briefly over his shoulder before turning back to the ocean.
See, he regrets what he did. I knew it. That’s why he won’t talk about it…
At least he held a conversation, even if it was just about Elder Things.
Xue Yang sits up for a while longer, watching the ocean, watching Xingchen sleep.
Xiao Xingchen is even more beautiful asleep, skin frosted with moonlight, horrible green eyes hidden beneath his milky white lids. Xue Yang can easily pretend like he’s the same old Xingchen, the same Xingchen who had shared countless lunches with him and shyly returned his kiss that night in the graveyard.
Heisthe same old Xingchen. He just needs time to recover…
That’s all.
He rests his cheek on his knees and tries to avoid thinking about everything that’s happened in the past week.
He doesn’t needto think about it.
Gradually Xue Yang finds his gaze being drawn by a single bright star on the horizon, hanging low over a malignant black island that sends an inexplicable chill down his spine. Stupid, after everything he’s seen and done, but he can’t deny the island’s effect.
He wants to look away but finds that he can’t, eyes fixed on the star, its light assuming a violet tinge as the night wears on. He has a vague feeling of the beach falling away, of the starry sky bending around him, wrapping him and Xingchen in a cocoon of stars, but he can’t tear his gaze from the burning violet star.
He’d swear he never went to sleep at all but wakes with a mouth full of sand and a crab three inches from his face.
Xingchen is already up, washing his hands in the ocean. When he sees Xue Yang looking at him he yanks his sleeve down and quickly buttons his cuffs, as if ashamed of being caught looking unkempt.
Xue Yang finishes the cookies in his pocket as they walk along the beach. The last lingering strangeness from the dream is gone, and he’s feeling light and airy and ready for anything.
So Xingchen came back a little different. So what? All of the people he raised had their peculiarities, though it was usually physical instead of mental. All that really matters is that he’s here beside Xue Yang, leaving footprints in the wet sand. Everything else will straighten itself out in time.
Xingchen walks slowly, playing with his talisman. Dark circles surround his red-rimmed eyes, the redness making the green shockingly bright.
Xue Yang rests a hand on his back. “Bad dreams, doctor?”
“Notbad,”says Xingchen, but there’s hesitation in his voice. “Swimming deep under the ocean past temples gleaming with gold and shining with purple light…”
Xue Yang frowns. “Violet light?”
“I tried to resist, but the current was pulling me towards it, burning my eyes with a light that I knew was…was…” He hesitates, as if he knows how his next words will sound. “Was evil. Zichen would say unholy…”
Xue Yang glances out at the sea birds wheeling and cawing over the waves, avoiding looking at the ominous black island. “You’ve always had strange dreams about the ocean.“
“Never this vivid, and Zichen was there too this time. Drowning, calling for me, but I…” Xingchen’s voice falters, sounding the most human he has since his return. “Finally I swam away, past coral palaces and terraces bathed in…in that unholyviolet light, vast cities of gleaming white stone. And you…”
“And I?”
Xingchen looks away. “You weren’t there.”
The dismissal irritates Xue Yang more than if he’d been stalking Xingchen with a knife in the dream.
Song Lan, taking center stage in Xingchen’s dreams, even now that he was six feet under!
Ignore it. You can sneak that stupid watch away from the doctor eventually, and he’ll forget all about that bluenose soon enough…
Xingchen’s spectacles gleam in the warm afternoon light as he gazes out over the water breaking on the rocky shore. The beach has begun to curve, bringing a jumble of rotting wharves into view. A handful of fishermen and several women digging for clams are the sole signs of life.
There’s something unsettlingly abnormal about the people, even at this distance. He can’t put his finger on it—is it how they move? How they stand?—but it’s the same uncharacteristic chill he got the night before while gazing at the black reef, and he doesn’t like it.
“We should avoid the town,” he tells Xiao Xingchen.
Xingchen shakes his head. “We need to buy supplies.”
He’s right, but Xue Yang can’t shake the sense of his aversion. “Look at it. You can tell it’s a decrepit hellhole even from here. Well, maybe you can’t, but trust me. There’s hardly any smoke in the chimneys, hardly any people, the roofs are all caving in—”
Xingchen’s smile is crooked. “How prosaic, for a storyteller.”
Xue Yang takes his arm. “I’ve heard…stories about Innsmouth.”
“We’re going there.”
“What, to find a Y.M.C.A to stay at? I don’t think—”
Xingchen pulls away.
“Doctor—”
Xiao Xingchen continues down the beach.
Xue Yang limps after him. He’s always known Xiao Xingchen was stubborn, but he’s never been on the receiving end of it as frequently as this.
He doesn’t completely hate it.
An overwhelming fishy smell rises up around them as they near the crumbling waterfront, threading around the mossy stones on the shore and avoiding the crawdads washed up on the beach.
“I didn’t know high tides smelled so bad,” says Xue Yang.
“I don’t smell anything.”
Xiao Xingchen has had no need for food since being brought back. Has his sense of smell been affected too?
Xue Yang opens his mouth to tease him but is interrupted by a whispered cry.
“Hey!”
It’s a small girl, perhaps eleven or twelve, though she’s still wearing pigtails as if in an attempt to look younger. She’d been splashing barefoot in the shallows but waded her way over to them when she saw them.
Or perhaps not seen them. Her eyes are pale gray and in her hand is a long thin cane.
“Is someone there?” she asks, squinting. “Sir—? Ma’am?”
Xiao Xingchen stops. Xue Yang has seen that sympathetic baby deer look on his face before turning out his pockets to beggars. “Miss? Are you lost?”
“I live here.”
“Here being?”
“Innsmouth, of course.”
“I mean—”
“Ah. The poorhouse, technically, but I don’t like it there.” She hesitates. “Follow me, but don’t be obvious.”
Tapping in front of her with her cane, she heads down an alley reeking of rotting fish and low tide.
She stops several times, listening, before waving them after her. Finally, she stops in a spot where all sunlight is cut off by the sloping Colonial-style buildings that form a half-tunnel over the street. Too dark for the doctor to see, Xue Yang thinks, and he looks around to make sure there are no uneven cobblestones to trip over.
“Keep on going straight,” the girl says, pointing with her cane, “and don’t stop. Follow the road to Arkham or Ipswich, even Kingsport. Anywhere but here.”
“We’re not leaving,” says Xiao Xingchen. He’s still got that sad fawn look on his face, as if he’s about to offer her the last of their money.
Xue Yang wants to slap and kiss him at the same time. Logically he knows he should be jealous, but things like this also make him certain that Xiao Xingchen’s attentions to him hadn’t been just because he found Xue Yang attractive.
On the other hand, that could also mean that Xue Yang was in no way special to him. That he had merely been collecting one more charity case—
Thatwouldexplain how he could turn on him so fast, run back to Song Lan—
No. He had chosen Xue Yang in the end. Chosen to go on the run with him…
“I wouldn’t stay here, if I were you,” the girl continues. “Strangers tend to…disappear.”
Xue Yang knows she can’t see him, but he grins at her anyway. “As in, they get killed by the locals? Some kind of ritual sacrifice, perhaps?”
Her eyes widen. “A little louder and you’ll get dropped off Devil Reef with the rest of them!”
“That was a joke. Humor. Heard of it? Will Rogers? Groucho Marx? Do you live under a rock?”
“She lives in a poorhouse,” Xingchen whispers reproachfully.
Xue Yang rolls his eyes.
The girl is still indignant. “What happens on Devil Reef is no joke!”
“Is that what that island is called?”
“It’s a reef, not an island.”
“Says who?”
“It’s called Devil Reef, not Devil Island.”
“It sticks up over the water, it’s an island.”
“What are you, the reef police?”
“I think we’re straying from the point,” says Xiao Xingchen, coughing politely. “Miss—I didn’t catch your name?”
“A-Qing.”
“Miss A-Qing, is there a hotel in town?”
“People tend to go missing from that hotel. Government men, census takers, factory inspectors…” She glances over her shoulder through sightless gray eyes. “It’s not safe to be seen sniffing around the churches or old Masonic Hall or the warehouses, either. Or to be out after dark, anywhere.”
“We thank you, miss, but we’re intent on staying the night, at the very least.”
The girl hesitates. “I can show you where I stay when I can’t take being around themanymore, if you’d like. Getting harder and harder since Old Zadok disappeared…”
Xiao Xingchen tips his hat at her. “We don’t dare intrude.”
“Yes, we can,” says Xue Yang, who has had one hand on his revolver the entire time. Worse than the overwhelming fishy odor is the sense of being watched despite the crushing isolation. “We can and we will,” he says when Xingchen hesitates. “We don’t have enough to pay for the hotel,” he adds. “Not if we’re planning on buying any food.”
Xingchen ducks his head reluctantly.
They follow her through the dark alleys, winding up and down narrow cobblestone-paved streets, passing decaying warehouses and boarded-up fish-packing houses with collapsed roofs. The only thing that seems to have changed the buildings in over a century is the hand of rot and decay.
The oppressive sense of being watched intensifies. Too many empty black windows, too few people.
No people, in fact. Just furtive, shambling figures glimpsed down alleyways and the occasional footstep heard but not seen.
Rustling sounds come from the abandoned warehouses, stopping abruptly as they pass. The gaping black windows are like eyes, making the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, and for the first time in his life, he wants nothing more than to turn and run.
He almost envies how little the half-blind doctor can see of the town before kicking himself. What is he, an infant? He’d survived an Elder Thing, wrestled failed experiments into their prisons, called upon Yog-Sothoth. And here he was twitching at a few abandoned buildings!
But he keeps his hand on his revolver.
Even outside the industrial district, the town is largely abandoned, rotting roofs caving in, windows stuffed with rags, yards choked in weeds. Occasionally a house will show signs of habitation, but, Xue Yang notices with a twinge of discomfort, those houses all have boarded-up attic windows…
A-Qing’s hideaway is in a funeral home on the edge of town, where the air is purer and the oppressive feeling of being watched is lessened thanks to the wider streets and well-spaced houses. Innsmouth town is built on a gentle slope down to the sea, with the funeral home at the top, between a hilly old cemetery and a river bisecting the town on its way to the ocean.
As far from the ocean as they can get without leaving town, Xue Yang is somehow relieved to note.
The funeral home is an ivy-covered red-brick building with discolored pillars framing the peeling front door and a dilapidated cupola rising from the gabled roof. The courtyard inside the rusted iron gate is overgrown with weeds and several windows are boarded up with wood long since warped with age. The inside is in as bad a state of repair as the outside, with severe water damage, rotting floorboards, and several rooms completely charred by a long-ago fire.
No hint of rodents, though. Odd.
Come to think of it, there had been strangely few seabirds at the shore, either, and no cats, no dogs, no horses in town. The occasional automobile, but you’d expect at least one horse-drawn wagon in an old-fashioned town like this.
Another strike against this rotting hellhole. Xue Yang knows first-hand why animals might have an aversion to the town.
Even the whip-poor-wills have fallen silent.
He misses them, somehow. They’ve been his faithful companions since he’d started his work for Wen Ruohan.
“I sleep in here,” says A-Qing, tapping her stick on a large metal coffin that’s withstood the worst of the house’s decay. “You’re welcome to choose ones of your own. There’s a bed upstairs where I guess the undertaker slept, but it’s creepy up there.”
Xingchen gives her an old-fashioned little bow that Mrs. Dombrowski must have loved. “Thank you, Miss A-Qing. No electricity or plumbing, I’d presume?”
The girl laughs. “We’re lucky the doors lock and the roof hasn’t caved in.”
“Any food? We’ll pay you, of course.”
Xue Yang, who has been growing increasingly nettled at Xingchen’s attention to the girl, is slightly mollified by this, as Xiao Xingchen doesn’t need to eat.
“Just what I was able to steal from the poorhouse,” A-Qing shrugs. “You’re welcome to it. A dollar a pack.” She dangles two packets of cheese crackers. “Take it or leave it.”
“Pay the young lady, Xue Yang.”
“We can buy them cheaper in town.”
Xiao Xingchen sighs. Too late Xue Yang realizes this is his way of trying to give the girl charity.
He smirks to himself as Xingchen shakes his head, giving up on his good deed for the day. If the girl wants any of the ten dollars he has left, she’ll have to lift it out of his pocket himself.
In the end, the girl agrees to lead them back to town to buy their own supper, warning them both not to ask the locals too many questions.
Xue Yang is starting to get suspicious about her ability to find her away around town with just a cane. True, she asks him to read the street signs on occasion, but what does she do when she’s on her own?
“This is as far as I go,” she says as they reach an alley leading into Town Square, and she melts into the shadows and disappears.
Town Square consists of a circular green of overgrown grass and gnarled trees, a statue of a Revolutionary War soldier on horseback, several parked motor trucks and automobiles, and a few dozen empty shopfronts.
Several shopfronts appear to be operational—a grimy-looking restaurant, a drugstore, a wholesale fish dealer’s office, a grocery belonging to the First National chain, and a curtained brick building with a sign reading “Marsh Refining Company.” Through a gap between the buildings, he catches a glimpse of the muted blue of the harbor, a sight more ominous than peaceful despite the beauty of the water.
He can’t see Devil Reef from where he’s standing but he knows it’s out there, a dark scar on the soft blue.
In any other town, the area would be crowded with busy shoppers and playing children, but only ten people are visible, lounging furtively around the fenced-in green. All under thirty, all silent and unmoving. None of them look in their direction but he can feel their eyes on him.
There’s something…wrongabout them that he can’t put his finger on at this distance.
The scientist in him wants to examine them more closely.
The rest of him is seized by that same uncharacteristic urge to turn and run until Innsmouth is a dark shadow on the horizon.
“Drugstore first,” says Xingchen. His voice is tired, as if he hadn’t slept the night before. “You need to take better care of yourself, Xue Yang.”
Xue Yang smirks at A-Qing’s alley, just in case she’s still there and can see, after all, and hooks an arm through Xingchen’s. The drugstore is on the other side of the green, past the loitering townsfolk.
Aversion he can’t control rises up as they near the loiterers. The sense of wrongness only heightens with proximity, though he can’t put his finger on what’s actually wrong with them. There are a few wrinkled necks and strangely wide mouths and narrow skulls, flat, chinless faces and nublike ears, but nothing that would normally cause him to look twice at someone on its own.
They watch them pass with unblinking eyes and he’s seized by a sudden desire to strap one down to the stainless steel table beneath the Curwen farmhouse, slice it open, and rip out its insides.
It. Not him or her, he instinctively knows. It.
See if itsinsides match itsoutsides…
The drugstore is poorly stocked, but it has iodine, bootleg liquor to use as a disinfectant, and basic toiletries, mostly expired. The man behind the counter is older than anyone they’ve seen so far, without what Xue Yang has labeled the “Innsmouth look.”
Xingchen thanks the man behind the counter even though all he did was make change and stare at them with eyes that, while not unblinking like the people outside, bulge strangely.
They’re about to leave when a squeal of tires splits to eerily silent air and a car hops the curb outside. A jingle of the bell and a woman rushes inside the shop, a little girl in her arms. Blood drips after them, splattering the dirty floor with red.
“Lucy was—” The woman stops when he sees them. Her wet, croaking voice has a curiously hateful quality about it, and there’s something off-putting about her stooped posture and tapered skull.
The little girl whimpers.
“I have some medical training,” says Xiao Xingchen, coming to life. “May I examine her?”
“He’s a doctor,” Xue Yang corrects him.
The woman glances at the shopkeeper. Despite her pronounced Innsmouth look, there is genuine concern for her child in her fishy eyes.
Eyes that haven’t blinked once.
The shopkeeper nods, and five seconds later Lucy is on a stained Civil War-era cot in the backroom while Xiao Xingchen examines her arm.
“She just needs a cast and some stitches,” he says soothingly once he’s stopped the bleeding. “I’m afraid I can’t…” He trails off, hands trembling, and glances up at Xue Yang
Which is how Xue Yang finds himself stitching and setting the girl’s arm under Xingchen’s direction. He has steadier hands, Xue Yang tells Lucy’s mother before Xingchen can blurt out anything about his impaired vision.
Somehow he doesn’t think it wise to reveal any weakness to the Innsmouth folk.
He works as fast as he can, anxious to get away from Lucy’s mother, skin crawling at her proximity in a way it never did around his malformed experiments or monstrous summonings back at the Curwen farmhouse. He couldn’t care less about the dirty little kid’s injury but is interested and to confirm that her bones and muscles appear to be the same as any ordinary human’s.
A bit disappointing, actually.
Wordlessly the woman tries to pay them, but Xingchen shakes his head, looking her full in the face for the first time. Normally overly polite, he’s been trying to avoid eye contact with the Innsmouth woman.
“We couldn’t possibly accept—” he begins, but Xue Yang interrupts him.
“We’ll take gasoline,” he says. “Any spare gasoline in your car?”
Xingchen gives him a disapproving look but lets him accept a can of gasoline. The doctor sits on a dilapidated bench outside the grocery guarding the gasoline, looking like a child who had missed the bus to Grandmother’s house, and waits for Xue Yang to buy groceries.
Xue Yang had hoped to find a First National representative from somewhere outside Innsmouth, but behind the counter is a chinless young woman with flat, clumsy hands with strangely short fingers. She doesn’t speak to him as he buys an assortment of non-perishables and a camp stove.
It takes them a while to find their way back to Gravesend Lane thanks to A-Qing’s abandonment, but the only time Xingchen speaks is to veto Xue Yang’s idea of crossing the half-decayed wooden bridge spanning the river, as if he doesn’t remember all the nights they’d spent on the bridge over the Miskatonic and has no interest in recapturing them.
And he insists on sharing Xue Yang’s food with A-Qing even though she’d run off on them, and all he’ll talk about at dinner is whether or not there were other needy children in town, if there was a school, and how long A-Qing has been on her own for.
He’s never once asked me any questions about mypast.
Xue Yang speaks little, for once. Let the doctor and his prying questions alienate the little runt all on his own.
But, irritatingly, she doesn’t seem to mind. She’s the only orphan, according to her, as orphans tend to go missing, there’s no real school, and she’s been on her own since her parents, Arkham natives, had died four years before.
“They don’t bother me much because I’m blind,” she explains as she licks cheese cracker dust off her fingers, “and because my mother took the first and second Oaths while expecting me.”
“Why would being blind protect you?” Xiao Xingchen asks.
“They only want ‘complete’ people.”
Xiao Xingchen frowns. “Being blind does not make you any less of a person, A-Qing.”
Xue Yang rolls his eyes. “You’re missing the point, doctor. Whom were the oaths to, and who do you need protection from?”
But A-Qing won’t respond.
Xue Yang remembers what she’d said when she first met them—“You’ll get dropped off Devil Reef with the rest of them!” and how none of the Innsmouth folk know that Xiao Xingchen is half-bind.
He takes the revolver from his pocket and checks the chamber with a loud click.
Xingchen rises. “It’s getting dark, A-Qing. Are there any candles around?”
A-Qing directs them to a large store of wax candles in a naval locker in the storage room, along with high-quality whale oil and storm lamps. They mount the stairs to the undertaker’s living quarters, a large, dreary chamber with a rusty iron bed, thick black curtains, and faded red carpet.
There’s a hole in the ceiling of the attached washroom, and the bedroom has been damaged by the rain and snow, but same as the ground floor, there are no signs of any vermin.
“I’ll bet nearby houses have better-preserved linen and mattresses, and we can use the car as a moving truck,” Xue Yang hears himself saying. “Spruce this place up a bit.”
“Steal?” Xingchen goggles.
Xue Yang can’t help but smile at that one. “These houses have been abandoned for decades. They’re crying out to be looted.”
“You want to stay here—?”
“No, but I think we should. At least for a while. This dump of a town is as good for lying low as the Rocky Mountains.”
Xiao Xingchen looks as if he knows he should ask a follow-up question, but he doesn’t. Silently he follows Xue Yang up the narrow stairs to the small cupola jutting up from the roof.
Xue Yang leans out over the roof, heedless of the fact that the rotting wood could give way at any moment. He can see the entire ocean from here, the breakwaters, the curve of the bay, Kingsport’s distant cliff…
Devil Reef, and its single bright star.
Xiao Xingchen stares out over the town as if he can actually see in the moonlight, green eyes fixed on the ocean. Xue Yang has to address him three times before he hears him.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said, ‘You should get a plaque for the door.’ ”
“A plaque?”
“The undertaker’s old office. It’s perfect. Doctor Xiao. Monday through Friday, nine to five.”
Xiao Xingchen turns away. “Don’t say that.”
Xue Yang squeezes his elbow. “Tuesday through Thursday, then?” He laughs. “Not that you’re much of a doctor, doctor. You haven’t so much as looked at my leg .” He wags his finger, tsking, and is about to be very witty on the subject when Xingchen, his face white, snaps, “Stop calling me doctor. I’m not a doctor!”
“What were you going to learn in your last semester that you don’t already know?”
Xingchen turns and heads back downstairs.
I guess being brought back from the dead is enough to make anyone touchy.
He’ll change my bandages tomorrow, look at my leg and stomach. He’s just waiting for it to be light out so he can see better…
Xue Yang stays on the roof until the moon is high over the ocean. He hadn’t noticed it all day, but little by little that hollow feeling has been returning, a cold empty cavity forming in his chest. He has a sudden urge to fling himself into the stars—pastthe stars—fill the void inside him with warm violet light—
He tears his gaze away from the sky and looks down at his watch.
Three a.m.
Three a.m.? Only five minutes ago it had been eight p.m.….
He looks back at the ocean. The sky is obscured by clouds that stretch from horizon to horizon.
No sign of the violet star.
He’s not sure if he’s relieved or disappointed.
He finds Xiao Xingchen asleep in a large black coffin. He considers looking for a blanket to cover him with before noticing Song Lan’s pocketwatch nestled in the doctor’s pale white hand.
Should have melted that damn thing in the furnace when I had the chance!
He grabs the gas can and starts down the road. It’s uncomfortably cool out and his leg throbs with every step, but the farther he gets from the town, the more distance between him and Devil Reef, the more his spirits lift.
Everything will work out. It will take some time, but Xingchen will forget Song Lan, forget everything bad from before they came to Innsmouth. If the doctor hasn’t yet mentioned what happened That Night, he never will. Everything left in the past, a fresh slate for everyone…
The hollow feeling in his chest seems to move as he walks, a magnet facing Xingchen.
No point in pretending it’s his imagination now. There’s a definite hollow feeling, a definite tug, both intensifying the farther he gets from Xingchen.
The farther he gets from Devil Reef…
The farther he gets from the violet star.
It takes a while, working by himself, but he manages to get the automobile back on the road. Sitting in the driver’s seat makes his back and legs hurt after having been in that position so many times these past few days, but he gets the auto to the Funeral Home without much trouble. The Funeral Home’s stable is filled with two enormous horse-drawn hearses, with just enough room to squeeze the Ford in.
Then he’s drawn back up to the cupola.
Eerily calm, the ocean. Barely visible in the darkness, like a sheet of smoked glass. Violet star still hidden by clouds…
Something moves out on the water.
He sits up.
Dark shapes are moving on Devil Reef—
Dark, not-quite-human shapes reminding him of something he can’t quite put his finger on—
And then the moon comes out from behind the clouds and the dark figures dive off the island.
They don’t surface again.
Xue Yang lies awake in the coffin beside Xingchen’s, revolver on his chest, finally dropping off sometime around dawn.
Xingchen is gone when he wakes. Gone for a walk down River Street, A-Qing tells him, where “he’ll be safe enough till dusk.” Xue Yang is cold and tired but devotes himself to tearing apart the house and rummaging through the neighboring ones, pressing A-Qing into cleaning duty. His stab wound still troubles him, but he barely feels the bullet wound in his leg, the entire thigh having gone warm and numb in a way that would worry him if he hadn’t survived so much worse in the past.
Wearing old clothes he found in the bedroom, he’s dusting a bust of Tennyson, which will have to do for Xingchen in the absence of Rilke, when A-Qing pops her head in to inform him that the doctor had found his way down to the beach.
“Is he safe?” he asks, in case her assurances about the river didn’t cover the beach.
She shrugs. “As safe as he’ll get. They don’t do much in daytime aside from getting drunk off moonshine and having swimming races out to the reef. The young people, anyway. Not a lot of older ones around…”
“Devil Reef?”
“No, the fifty other reefs in the bay. Or rather, islands.”
“Shut up. Do they go out there at night?”
“Amongst other things,” she says, then slips away, as if she’s said too much.
Xue Yang thinks about the dark shapes out on Devil Reef and wishes, not for the first time, that there was more than one bullet left in the revolver.
As soon as Xingchen is back, he’ll have to risk wasting gasoline to drive to the nearest proper town to buy ammunition. And have a little talk with the doctor about not running off on his own until they understand the town better.
He takes a break to change the bandages on his leg and fingers and stomach and eats lunch while strolling through the cemetery.
Odd. None of the graves are more recent than the 1890s…
He turns back towards the house. He’ll figure it out later. He has a house to fix up.
But what does Xiao Xingchen say when he returns home and looks around the kitchen?
“Did you steal these things from next door?”
“He did,” A-Qing tattles. “Like a kid in a candy store.”
Xue Yang resists the urge to trip her with her own cane. “These houses have been abandoned since the Civil War. It’s not stealing. Look. I found someone’s journal. Last entry is 1846.”
“The epidemic of 1846, followed by the riots,” murmurs Xiao Xingchen, latching onto the wrong part of his words. “I read about it. Half the town was wiped out…”
“You should see the fancy old linens I found, and I laid out some clean nightshirts. There’s a perfectly good mattress next door; tomorrow you can help me load it onto the car; I’d do it myself but—” He shrugs and shakes his bad leg.
“I’m not a thief,” Xiao Xingchen responds instead of finally asking to see his leg, his stomach, tend the wounds he’d given him.
“And I am?”
“Among other things.” Xingchen heads for the coffin room. A-Qing, sensing something, has melted away in that almost supernatural way she’s so good at.
Xue Yang is on his feet, soup heating on the stove forgotten. “Like what?”
“You know like what.”
“Like being a witch?”
“You said it. Not me.”
Xue Yang snorts. “And Mother Zichen probably said it first,” he says before he can think. “I prefer the term ‘necromancer,’ just by the way. I don’t turn people into frogs and my nose is my best feature.”
He stops, grinning, keyed up for a big fight, but Xiao Xingchen just climbs inside a coffin and pulls the lid closed.
Xue Yang storms up to the roof, heedless of the soup. Let the stove burn the whole house down, for all he cares! Return Xiao Xingchen to the ash that he, Xue Yang, had raised him from!
He lies back on the roof’s creaking timbers. There’s a gaping hole beside him he can probably figure out how to patch if he planned on staying here one more minute with that hypocritical ingrate—
Taking off his coat, he huddles under it, the chill that’s been creeping up on him all day winding its ghostlike arms around him. Shivering, he closes his eyes, one hand on his revolver, and suddenly realizes he’s waiting for something.
Not just for the violet star to come out from behind the clouds.
For movement on the distant black island.
Stop being a superstitious idiot. He closes his eyes, trying to steady breathing that’s been erratic since his aborted argument with Xingchen. Just go to sleep…
An eerie chanting permeates his dreams, drifting up from the shadowed town on wreaths of radiant violet mists. The chanting pins him to the rotting rooftop, a faint, croaking chanting that would be strangely loud for such a depopulated town if this weren’t a dream…
He wakes at dawn, the horrible tones still ringing in his ears, the words forgotten but their lingering inhuman affect making him feel like scrubbing himself down with whiskey and steel wool.
Xingchen is collecting A-Qing’s plate when Xue Yang steps into the kitchen. When A-Qing sees Xue Yang she disappears, not eager to be roped into cleaning again.
“I’m going to the river to wash our clothes and bathe,” he tells Xingchen. Give him a chance to make up for last night. “Care to join me?”
Xiao Xingchen just shakes his head. Doesn’t bother to give him the courtesy of actual words, as if Xue Yang isn’t worth the effort.
Gritting his teeth, Xue Yang collects the old-fashioned clothes he’d found yesterday and goes down to the river with a bar of soap and a towel he’s cut the moldy parts off.
One more chance he’ll give the doctor. A few more days. A little time for him to adjust to being alive, to remember what he owes Xue Yang…
He spends the rest of the day alone, dressed only in his boots, a billowy white shirt, and a pair of old-fashioned trousers while his clothes dry, an outfit he tells himself would have been completely wasted on the blind Xingchen even if the doctor hadn’t chosen to abandon him for the day yet again. He feels a bit faint but he fights through it, somehow managing to transport a mattress all the way from the neighboring house and up to the Funeral Home bedroom by himself.
He’s always done well on his own.
Donebeston his own.
He’s the first to admit he could have done a better job on tending his leg, though. He should have just cauterized it, in hindsight. The stitches he’d hastily given himself at the Curwen farmhouse have burst, and a dark stain is beginning to spread over the back of his new-old trousers.
“And, what’s worse, I’m hungry,” he says aloud, looking down at the wet blood on his fingers.
A shame there’s no one around to actually laugh at his jokes. Well, that’s Xingchen’s loss.
He steadies himself against a sudden bout of dizziness and opens a can of corn, but he has no appetite. He tries to read but is distracted by how damnably quiet the house is.
Xiao Xingchen isn’t back yet.
Cursing to himself, he double-checks the gun in his pocket and pats his knife, freshly sharpened on the kitchen’s very serviceable whetstone. He goes out to the pump in the backyard, drinks some water, limps back inside.
Xiao Xingchen still isn’t back.
More cursing as he leaves the house, following the tug in his chest. Normally he wouldn’t go to town dressed like the hero of a Victorian romance novel running out onto the moors, but panic is starting to bloom and he hasn’t time to change.
He keeps cursing as he closes the iron gate behind him. He shouldn’t have waited this long; there’s no way he’ll make it home before sunset. The golden late-afternoon light coats the repugnant old town in a deceptively fairytale-like glow, giving the decaying steeples and rooftops a mystic feel.
The doctor should write one of his stupid poems about it.
He makes it all the way to River Street—a grand total of five hundred feet down Gravesend—before his leg gives out.
Dammit. He’ll have to take the car after Xingchen, waste precious gasoline—
He tries to get up but the world spins around him, knocking him back down to the road. On trembling hands and knees he drags himself out of the street, rolling into the tall grasses of the riverbank with a wounded animal’s instinctive need to find shelter.
He closes his eyes. He’ll just rest here a few minutes, then he’ll go find the doctor—
“What are you doing?” It’s Xiao Xingchen, staring down at him. The sun is setting, filling the air with a trembling blue haze.
“Counting ants,” he responds with as much muted sarcasm as he can muster. “Yep, they’re all here. Excellent.”
Xiao Xingchen’s lips don’t so much as twitch. In all fairness, it’s not Xue Yang’s best.
“What do you want, doctor? Come to keep tally of the ants?”
Xingchen shakes his head, raising his hand slightly, and it’s then that Xue Yang notices that his revolver had fallen from his pocket to find a new home in Xiao Xingchen’s grasp.
Oh, great.
Xue Yang struggles to his feet, sitting on a mossy rock, putting all his weight on his good leg. Blood still smears over the moss, but Xingchen doesn’t say a word, and after a moment he turns for the house.
Xue Yang would rather he had shot him. He grabs his arm, yanking him back roughly, heedless of the gun.“What is it already? Did I do something to offend you or what?”
Xingchen raises both eyebrows. “Did you dosomething?”
“Are you grumpy because I called you a doctor? Fine! You’re right! You’re not a doctor! I should be happyyou won’t treat me; you might poison me!”
Xiao Xingchen is very still. “I beg your pardon?”
Xue Yang laughs in his face. “ ‘I beg your pardon,’ ” he mimics with bitterness that surprises even him. “You’re right; you’re no doctor! Doctors save lives, and all you’ve ever done is kill people!”
“How can you say that—”
“I can say whatever the hell I want! I brought you back to life!”
“I never asked you to,” says Xingchen quietly, and it’s as if he’s drained all the blood from Xue Yang’s body.
“What did you just say?”
Xiao Xingchen gazes down over the town at the darkening ocean, one hand still on the gun in hi
HappyHanguang-June
wangxian x heartstopper au ❤️
