Part 6 ~ Nothing At All

When she woke the next morning she couldn’t remember anything of her dreams, except that there had been many of them, and long, and all about Bromia.  She lay on the ground feeling oddly lost and nostalgic, as if an entire lifetime had been lived and then forgotten overnight.  Also, her mouth was dry.

The sun was out, in that particularly bright and menacing way it only manages in the early morning.  Sidonie had never been one much for early mornings, her bedroom had faced the east and she did everything she could to block the light from disturbing her before she was ready.  Now there were no curtains or blankets to guard her eyes, and she rolled over to squint at her surroundings.  She felt stiff and sore all over.

She was at the edge of a forest, half on the road and half nestled against a hillock at the base of a tree.  Down the road to the north there were empty fields, and along the road on one side was an ancient and crumbling stone wall.  Luckily for Sidonie, it was not the side where she had fallen.  She sat up, only then noticing the body hanging above her.

She scrambled to her feet, stiffness forgotten, and backed up down the road.  From the tree branch swayed a rope, and from the rope swung a boy.  For a moment she knew she recognized him but didn’t know where from; in the next moment she remembered it was the boy she had been following the night before.

Only, he did not look just dead.  He looked very dead, quite dead, decaying and eaten away by flies dead.  Another moment made her wonder why she recognized him, but the thought was stuck in her mind that it was him, and no one would be able to dislodge it.  She could not stop staring.  His eyes were open, and a flutter of morning breeze turned his body slowly, letting her see how one side of his head was bashed in and one eye stuck partially out of the socket.

She supposed that she should throw up.  The feeling did not come, though.  She didn’t know what she was feeling — she had a few ideas of what she ought to be feeling, but none of them applied.  Perhaps it was shock, then.  Or perhaps there was something wrong with her.

Sidonie turned away from the boy in the tree, and looked at the bike.  The morning light revealed it to be in even worse shape than she had thought.  The front wheel was bent almost double and the handlebars twisted completely out of shape.  She thought it odd that she could have so badly wrecked it just from her topple to the side.

Despite its uselessness, she didn’t want to just leave it, so she hauled it up and tested a few different ways to roll it on the back wheel before staggering off down the road, heading north to Rivalie.  She held the bike by its center, holding the front half high enough off the ground so it wouldn’t interfere.  I don’t know why I’ve gotten it into my head that you can feel things, she thought to it.  In the daylight you don’t seem alive at all.  Just a heap of bent metal.

She had gone down the road about a mile before she heard the rumbling of a car engine.  She paused, and soon enough saw the Cadillac appear over the hill.  It bumped along the dirt and weeds, seeming put off by the bad road, as if a car could feel anymore than a bike.  Sidonie stood to the side of the road and waited, not knowing quite what she should expect.  She didn’t know broms.  She didn’t know how they felt about sisters disappearing into the night, or rotting bodies hanging from trees.

The car came squeaking to a stop, and Alex popped out of the passenger door immediately.  Sidonie decided that broms felt angry about sisters disappearing into the night.  She couldn’t help noticing that the sunlight made his hair glow a bit and his scalp show pink.  His eyebrows, however, had seemed to grow even blacker, and furrowed together ominously.

“What the hell?” were the first words out of his mouth, and, “What the fucking hell are you doing?” were the second.

She told him.  “I’m rolling my bike home.”

Bobby came slinking out of the driver’s side, venturing a, “Alex, dude, just be glad we found her,” that went unnoticed by his . . . well, whatever it was exactly that Alex was to Bobby.  Sidonie wasn’t quite sure.

“You take off in the middle of the night, Dan goes apeshit, he had us searching the entire fucking Ghetto the entire fucking night.  He’s out of his fucking mind thinking someone hurt you and he’s got everyone praying to every god they can think of that there’s no way Dan can blame them if something happened to you.  He just about swore on his family’s name that he’d kill me and Bobby both if we couldn’t find you in one piece.  So what, exactly, the fuck, were you thinking?”

Alex waved one smoking cigarette back and forth in the air as he got his diatribe on, and he finished by shaking it in her direction.  The smell made her want to cough, badly, but she kept her mouth shut.

“You’re making her cry,” said Bobby, walking around the hood of the car.

That was worse.  “It’s just the smoke making my eyes water,” she said, then coughed.

“I don’t care!  I want to know just why my ass came this close to being fried just ’cause Miss Sidonie Ardash of Rivalie felt she had to take a bike ride!” Alex’s voice dripped with derision when he said her name.

Sidonie clenched her jaw shut.  Alex was frightening when he yelled and she did not yet know whether it scared her or just made her angry.  She would find out when she tried to respond, so it was better to just not say anything.

Bobby said it for her.  “Back off, Alex,” he barked, giving Alex a shove toward the car.  “She’s just a girl, and her parents just died, so you think can cut her a break?  No one gives a shit about your ass being fried anyway.”

“Just get in the car,” Alex growled, throwing his cigarette to the ground and crushing it with his shoe.  “The sooner we get her back to Dan the sooner he’ll stop tearing the Ghetto apart.”

Once Alex had ducked back into the car and slammed the door shut, Bobby turned and smiled at her apologetically.  “Are you alright?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

“You biked almost twenty miles in one night, without eating.  Are you sure?”

She was surprised that it was twenty miles, but said nothing about it.  “There’s a body in a tree up there,” she motioned toward the forest.  “It’s rotting.”

“Oh.”  Bobby took a moment to process that bit of information before saying, “One second,” and sidling around the car hood to duck inside the driver’s side door.  A moment later he popped back out again.

“Get in the car, we’ll see about the . . . .”

There was a moment of silence, and several synonyms for “body” and “corpse” ran through Sidonie’s mind.  “I’d like to take the bike,” she said.

“Uh . . . .”  Bobby seemed at a loss for a minute, then shrugged and leaned in to pop the hood.  “Okay.”

They rode down the silent mile and stopped next to the gallows tree.  Alex got out of the car and lit a cigarette, peering up at the boy with a look of mild disgust.  Bobby took off his sunglasses and ran a hand through his dishwater hair.  “Recognize him?” he asked.

Alex shook his head, but said, “Maybe.  I know someone whose little brother disappeared a few days ago.”

“I saw him last night,” Sidonie spoke up, climbing out from the back seat.  “He was riding his bike.”

Alex turned around, one black eyebrow raised in disbelief.

“The bike in the trunk?” Bobby asked.

“No.”

They stared at her silently.

“I don’t think so.”

Bobby put his sunglasses back on and sighed.

“It came out of an alley.”

Alex took a deep inhale and then flicked his cigarette away.  “Alright, let’s get it down and put him in the trunk.”

“We taking this back to Dan, or the family?”

“Dan,” Alex answered without hesitation.  “He, uh, knows the family.”

Bobby took his sunglasses off again.  Sidonie thought that the blue eye looked surprised and the brown looked as if it had suspected something.  “Alex,” he said, “are you saying something?”

Sidonie slowly sat down, trying to remain inconspicuous.

“What?  C’mon, I did not have anything to do with this.  I don’t do this sort of shit, Bobby,” Alex sounded honestly affronted.

“So who did?  There’s you and me and that’s it, and I know I didn’t—”

“Look, I’m not saying Dan had anything to do with this, I’m just saying, it looks bad.  We’re taking it to Dan.  I’m not saying anything else.”  Alex slammed his car door shut, and glanced down at Sidonie hiding in the backseat.  “And I don’t appreciate the conclusion you just jumped to, right in front of Dan’s sister.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry; think for a change.”  Alex shook his head as he walked over to the tree.  He scouted out the branches for a moment before beginning to climb.

Bobby bent down and looked at Sidonie.  “He gets cranky when he loses sleep,” he said.

“Have you been searching for me all night?”

He shrugged.

“Anyway, this is nothing compared to if you take away his smokes.  Then it gets scary.”

Sidonie looked up at Alex making his way toward the knot that held the rope that held the rotting boy, and nodded.

“Hey, shithead, give me a hand,” Alex called, and Bobby slid his glasses back on before hurrying over to the base of the tree.

Sidonie watched as Alex gradually loosened the rope and carefully lowered the body towards Bobby, who grabbed the legs.  She thought the Sidonie Ardash who lived in Rivalie with her mother and father would probably be scared and disgusted by now.  Or maybe not.  Maybe the Sidonie Ardash who lived in Rivalie with her mother and father had never been real, had always been a skin covering the Sidonie Ardash who now sat in a car in Old Bromia watching two broms take a corpse down from a tree.  And that Sidonie Ardash felt nothing at all.