Killifisher, Killifisher

Under the early spring evening's burnt umber sky, a dozen mallards milling by your feet, he presses his lips to the arch of his hand and asks if you've ever met a devil before. This stops you mid-sentence. Your bi-daily rant on admissions and scholarship essays cracks off in your gums. You forget half of what you were complaining about.

His jagged smile suggests an offer. A ticket off on one of his personal adventures. You tell him he can't be serious, but the sun catches that old, familiar glint in his eye—the same one he wore on the first day of Primary, when you offered to show him your animal sketches if he stopped crying for the Sisters to send him home, or that time he smuggled a cat under the pews, or when he almost burned down the mealhouse with his fire-eating trick—and there’s no mistaking that he is.

When your parents write to you, they speak of it as a privilege to have connections to a family as wealthy as his. An opportunity. You don’t remember much of their faces. You haven’t seen them since you were three years old. The Lamb’s Own Young Men’s Academy is renowned for its name alone, unparalleled in branching opportunity. Attendance is all but mandatory for families with the money to afford it. For yours, it’s a Lamb-blessed miracle, one that the long course of your one and only friendship has taken too many liberties threatening. If they only knew the sort of influence they were enabling. The selfish part of you hopes they never do.

Hiding your words from watching the Sisters behind your cupped hands, you tell him the last thing either of you needs is trouble. Especially this close to graduation. You bite back the lashing that he might be able to afford another mark on his record but you sure can’t. It sounds petty, even in your own head. He tells you nothing happened to the student he heard about the devil from, and you reply that most things that will ever happen haven't happened yet, and his assurances mean less than air. The corners of his lips twitch, tighten. He says he'll search for the thing tomorrow after service, whether you'll join him or not. Don’t be a baby.

For a moment, you itch to pin him down by his arms and legs and throttle him until he changes his mind. Scream. Beg him if you have to. Why does he bother asking if he never listens? He’s a train barreling along with you tied to the carts and scrabbling over the rails. He’ll get you both killed. You hate him in that moment, but only as you might hate a bird soaring up and out of here. Mostly you hate that he acts like he knows what you’ll do better than you do yourself and that, unlike with so many other things, he’s probably right.

#

When you were twelve, the Brothers hung a devil's thrall from the statue of Saint Rammis’ Horns in the chapel square.

Typically, the hangings are conducted down in the Shops, where anyone can gather and see. Most people come to gawk. Some to hurl stones. But the chapel square is reserved for thralls made of Sisters, or Brothers, or students. People whose execution justifies a solemn event. People who should've known better.

You'd never seen someone die before. You didn't think to ask if he had.

The two of you watched it happen from your dorm’s balcony. The crowd’s silence was so absolute that even from that distance every sound carried: the thunk of the stool kicked free, the creak—then snap—of the rope, the wet squish of a crushed throat.

Afterwards, you and he swore to stick together with cut palms and a branding handshake. Always. Then you huddled on the edge, your fingernails mapping the mountain valleys of his spine, and watched a corpse keep time in the breeze.

Your chest clenches remembering the sweat on your palms, how little you thought of the real future and your real responsibilities.

No promise can last forever. You’ll find yourself alone again soon, off to make something of the rest of your life. There’s nothing either of you can do about it. You don’t have a choice. You must make your parents’ sacrifices worth it, even if it means losing what sparks of freedom and joy remain inside yourself.

It helps quell the empty-stomach sensation of tipping forward and over into the great, perilous unknown if you pretend that each moment you have in the present is the only one that matters. No tomorrow, no next year, nothing but today forever and evermore.

You swore. You’re allowed to keep your promise until you cannot.

#

After service, you follow him through the chapel’s open graveyard and into the tiny spare tool shed beyond. Clouds of angry dust motes crowd your face, and you sneeze. Twice.

He snorts as he rolls off his waistcoat and kilters his suspenders.

You ask him where you’re both going, lightly, as if you’d agreed to it all along. He says in a tone as cryptic as it is infuriating that you’ll see soon enough, but you look too uptight. He ruffles your dress shirt, steadying you by the hip while he half untucks it. Neither of you breathes a word until he says it's time to go. Your heart glues to the honey in your throat. All you do is nod.

The Academy spills out into Old Town on one side and the Shops on the other. A fire tore through the former some decades ago, and half the houses remain blackened and empty. Too expensive to rebuild, too much of a nuisance to tear down.

It's the burnt-out shells he leads you through, weaving around broken bottle constellations and smudged-out opium sticks. Tired eyes trace your progress from the shadows. More out of fear, you think, than anything else. Even with your uniforms rumpled, you’re sure you carve strikingly formal figures in the dark. Beside you, lightless streetlamps hunch like giant crows, cold metal feathered with greening copper. Scavengers have long stripped them of value, taking most of the plating and all of the wires. You wonder when these streets last experienced daylight under anything but the sun.

The buildings loom differently in the moon-graced dark. Collapsing walls sharpen into brick palisades. The corners cloud with shadows. Tree branch silhouettes rake ghostly fingers down your back. It's a nightmare. Nothing is half as it should be, and nothing should be half of what it seems.

He tells you you're trembling. You check your hands. So you are. He says you can turn back if you want to, but his expression darkens with disappointment, and your throat snags on a yes. Barely. The Lamb your God did not flee from the den of all evil, after all, and nor can you abandon him here.

The house he points out is squat and lopsided, slanting back as if surprised. The windowpanes lie in ragged chunks around each boarded-up frame. The porch slumps to a treacherous degree, and the air swims with rot. Animal rot. Death scents.

Your legs hold fast, rooted in place. You search for discomfort on his face—some sign that you’re not a coward, really, only reasonable—but he brushes past you and climbs as if he comes here every night. Swallowing hard, you are not long after.

Your heart leaps and stings with each creaking step, convinced at any second the stairs will split and turn to dust and send you both tumbling into a pit of bones and splinters. Disturbed ash clings to you, powdering the ends of your black slacks white.

He flips up the latch and gives the door a gentle push. Nothing. He gives it a shove. Nothing. He leans up against it with all his weight, huffing through his nose like some raging bull. Nothing.

You start to ask if his source ever went inside when the door slams open, banging against the inner wall so hard the entire house shakes. It rattles up your jaw and skips your stomach like a stone. You yelp, or he does. Everything sounds equally far away.

Past the door, it's cold. Burning cold, like an ice box cellar or the great pale beyond. The house condenses into a single long hall, moving and stretching before your very eyes, and at the end of that hall crouches a giant standing mirror, and the mirror's glass fogs over and steams.

You stare at it, open-mouthed, helpless as creeping tendrils of ice shoot through the roots of your teeth and up the bridge of your nose, snaking back through the arteries pumping blood through your brain. It throbs. You try to claw it out, but empty space replaces your hands, your arms, your entire body. Gone.

The porch shimmers, the stars fly down to greet you, and you fall. Wind hisses through your ears. Fireworks crack out the crown of your skull. You can't breathe; you can't remember how.

Your legs float above your head. The trees dig down toward the stars. A dark figure hangs between them, fuzzy and indistinct. A sphere in the air where the sky disappears.

Abruptly, the cold leaves you. You wheeze out rasping gasps that scrape the iron from your lungs, metallic bubbles clawing their way up your throat. You move your hands, blink, and feel along the back of your head. Dry.

He helps you to your feet and asks if you're all right—hands on his knees, eyes round as an owl's.

You say that you think so. You are lying.

#

Neither of you mentions that night in the short months that follow. Not the house, not devils, and not their cursed thralls, either.

You attend chapel sermons, give witness to the Sisters, and keep up with the war news overseas. You chain yourself to your dorm’s study desk and pen admissions essays to every university with a biology program—and then some others that don't. Anything to make your life worth it, to justify your parents’ struggles to send you here, to haul your family up the social pecking order one accomplishment at a time. You answer your mother’s letters with a bubbly cheer you only wish to feel, enthusing about your studies, expressing how little you can wait for your chance at a higher education.

He keeps busy, too, in his own way. For years his outlines of the future consisted of lying on the grass, letting butterflies land on his fingers and talking about being a writer some days. Then a painter on others. Then a photographer. It's photography that sticks, for a few months at least, and the end of your final year rolls by with him dragging you around the chapel square, the woods, the hills behind your dorms, and finally the pond—snapping photos of the ducks and you against the gold-glitter ripples.

He names you his muse, which makes you grin even if you’re confident he’s joking. Doubly so when he swears to spirit you away to some remote cabin up north, leaving everything behind. You belly-up your wrists and tell him he better slap some bangles on you soon if he’s raring to propose.

It's all near enough to normal you can imagine how it'd feel to forget that house. That mirror. That sphere eating up the sky.

You don't.

Frost fills the gaps in your silences. It creeps through your blood whenever you see him. If the devil’s house was a test, you failed it. You swear your weakness is tattooed plainly across your face. You lie awake at night and wait for the Brothers to come drag you away.

When sleep finally conquers you, you're a lion, and he's a skinny lamb, and when you catch him, you pin him, and you eat him alive. You thrash awake with snowflakes of sweat stuck to your back, rub your arms with hands that pierced sinew, pant through a mouth that crunched through flesh and bone.

Thin starlight filters in through the curtains, weakened by striated clouds. It's just enough to see by as you lean over the bunk’s edge and count the seconds till sunrise in his sleeping breaths.

The dream clings to you all day. He sits next to you in lectures, and your legs go weak from running; he smiles, and your teeth carve furrows in his jaw. Guilt and disgust feed implacable nausea. A constant churn of sickness without being sick, pain without any release. You hunch over a blackthorn bush and will it all to end. The ice is in your veins. Your nausea stays.

#

You decide that none of this is normal.

The Sister in charge of the library rakes you with a glance through her white mask when you ask for help with a project on devils. What you can make of her lips tug into a thin, taut line.

You tense, bracing to run if she rings the bell for the Brother on guard to snatch you away for questioning. Not that you would make it far, mind, but you’d try.

She raises her index, and you back away—but it’s only to direct you to Section B.

Research is slow going at first. Your fingers spasm and shake, your eyes gloss over details, your thoughts spin adrift. It’s not until the second hour that you find your momentum.

Most of the basics you recall from class. Devils exist in hierarchies, occasionally laying claim to human souls in exchange for promised favours. Money, power, and influence are the most common, followed by deals involving love and passion. From the moment of making, the thrall is lost. It is only a matter of time until they are no longer a person—merely a flesh suit hosting a devil inside. Complete and total eradication is, at that stage, a mercy.

In mandatory education, that is where it ends. Not so with the literature.

You splay book after book across your lap. Chapters, charts, and complex calculations. The longer you read, the harder your lungs try to squeeze through your ears.

This can’t be right, what you’re seeing. It’s impossible. It isn’t fair.

But you keep reading. You leaf through essays and old newspaper clippings, cross-reference material, carve yourself a fortress out of glossaries and appendices. ‘Thralldom,’ ‘symptom,’ ‘process,’ ‘end.’

All it gives you are the same results.

Accounts of patients complaining of cold where none exists, waking up screaming from dreams of viscera and death, hurting themselves and others in fits of intense emotion. When the process is complete, the cold settles within the new thrall, residing in the touch, which stings like old ice.

The final book thumps against your thighs. You didn’t make a deal, not that you’re aware of. This should not, by any means, be happening to you.

And yet it is.

You nab a list of known devil names, complete with a glossary of tagged descriptors that help you narrow your search to spherical devils in mirrors. There is only one name that fits both criteria.

Killifisher. You taste the name on your tongue. Killifisher. The devil that haunts you against all reason and odds.

And you won't be its thrall.

#

Your desire to fight back manifests itself in careful, measured resistance. You write nothing down, lest some aspiring sycophant finds it and uses it when next giving witness to the Sisters, but you pay attention. For every nonsense sensation of frost, you step into the cooler. For every dream of flesh and darkness, you heap meat on your plate later.

You feel brighter. Lighter. Happier by a considerable margin than you have in a hundred days.

Your complaints grow infrequent, a change even he begins to pout at after a while. He wonders aloud if you don’t trust him with your thoughts anymore. You tell him you trust him with everything. He asks if you’ve been feeling all right. You tell him you plan on applying soon. He doesn’t ask you any more questions.

Finally, on the last Fasting before graduation, you drag the wooden box containing your admissions essays out on your way to mail them through the Sisters. It lifts with ease, lighter by half than what you remember. Frowning, you drop it on the bunk by his feet, unlock the lid, and dump out the contents.

Empty.

You check the corners, the floor, the lint-speckled space between your bedsprings and comforter. Panic envelops you. You can’t accept it, can’t comprehend it. All your hours of work, your months of research, your sleepless nights, your entire life.

Worthless.

He sprawls out on the half-made covers with a book spread open on his chest. It’s upside down. That morning you’d have laughed and asked how he planned on studying that way, but now his antics are too peaceful to fit your mood.

You snap at him to help you. By the seldom grace of the Lamb, he does.

Together you scrub the dorm, then the hallway, then every room you remember visiting in the past four months and more.

The search is the only thing keeping you standing. Then it’s gone, and you sit on the floor and stare at a flaking white crack in the wall.

He doesn’t speak the whole while, evidently content to trail along and poke his head where you order him to. The first time he opens his mouth, it’s to say he’s grabbing worms.

#

He summons the ducks with a cup of bugs and beetles over his head. Technically, it’s your turn this week, but you dragged your feet getting to the pond. You can’t say you mind him starting without you.

He says the ground’s still too dry for surface worms. You tell him that’s a pity. He says he took the opportunity to grab you something instead, and then he presses a fistful of caramel drops into your palm.

They’re warm from his pockets, globbed together with chocolate mortar. They’re beautiful. You tear a triplet from the corner and pop it in your mouth. It tastes like your childhood, and your childhood tastes like your months alone together between Academy sessions, playing outside in the pouring rain. His parents considered it a punishment; yours wrote of it as an honour.

Your mother’s last letter lies unanswered under your pillow. You’d drafted a cheerful response before today. It seems inappropriate now.

Despite the ducks and him and their twin promises of distraction, your thoughts whirlpool into conspiracy.

Killifisher is the only answer you come to. You picture that sphere dipping into your room, seeking your belongings, drawn to that which you guarded best like a hound to a marked fox. Or better yet, self-sabotage: Killifisher puppeting your hands to toss your future in the fire. It’s your own fault for not being strong enough to fight it. You both visited that house, after all, and you’re the only one in ruins.

It’s pathetic, but your throat chokes with acidic sobs. Frustrated tears. They boil up out of you, stick to the roof of your mouth. You can’t hold them back—can’t force them to spill, either. It mostly just burns.

He nudges you a little too hard, tells you to knock it off. You’re making a scene.

You shove him. Hard. His collarbones brand bruises into the heels of your palms. Frost lances your wrists and up into your elbows. The push registers no sooner than as he stumbles, mouth parted on a gasp, arms flying out before he joins the ducks on the grass.

Did you do that?

Your hands lift, absent of your permission, thrumming with a cold, hard weight in your chest. They’re trembling. The symptoms you memorized flash you by, one after the other: cold, dreams, hurt. Cold, dreams, hurt, and then the ice descends, and the process completes, and the thrall is a person no more.

He squirms, wheezing.

You did that.

What’s wrong with you?

You run. You run like Killifisher itself snaps at your heels. You run like you’ve been running all your life.

Your feet blaze a trail from the pond, through the Academy grounds, down to Old Town, past the rebuilt sections, across the nature-reclaimed streets, and stop outside the slanted house where it all began.

A square of darkness awaits you. The open door creaks in a greasy breeze, beckoning you forward. In.

The stench of rotting meat hangs thicker than before, but you will not give up. You will not fail yourself twice. You don’t imagine you’ll ever get a third chance.

You box your shoulders, snap off a blade of timber from the banister, and climb. Like the Lamb lost in the den of all evil, you do not commit yourself to acts of violence because you want to, but because you must.

The mirror shatters into a million tiny knives. The force of it kicks up the timber and buzzes through your arms, each strike numbing you, stripping you of feeling.

Killifisher does not give in without a fight. Its silver-sharp fangs slice into your hands, your cheeks, your eyes. Red swamps your vision, and you blink away viscous tears. Glass splinters burrow into your pores. Shards in your shoes bite and sting your ankles, and your socks soak through with blood.

You crush the larger chunks beneath your heels, grind the glass to dust, to dirt, and hope that devils are easier to kill than time and dreams and friendships and the mind.

The timber slips from your fingers and crunches on the floor. You have made a beach of the mirror. Not a fragment remains.

Your legs give out from under you. The world spins on, and you can't keep pace. You did it. You're dying. Your clothes hiss and scrape across the ground as you curl onto your side. It's warm. It's cold. You're shivering. You're burning alive.

Then hands are on your hands, ghosting your back. Questing nails chart your spine.

You mumble for the angels to carry you away. You ask why their touch is so cold. You ask, although you already know. It's not angels come to gather you.

Frost pangs your skull.

He calls you a fool. Ice-touched fingers kiss your forehead, eyelids, lips. Against your open wounds, they chafe like sandpaper sheets, but your body weighs one with the world. Easier to drink the sea than move your head. Easier to melt the poles. His voice is a sigh asking what he’s to do with you now.

You wish you knew the answer yourself.

You can’t kill Killifisher by destroying a mirror, he says. He made a deal with it. He made it trick you. He says he’s sorry, he didn’t know any other way to get you out of your head, to get you to stay with him, to force you to run away.

His invitation to this house, the ice, the dreams, your missing essays.

A frozen caress traces your cheek. The blood puddling beneath you thaws out your calves. Through a jagged gap in the black-rotted ceiling, there shines the moon.

You tell him you shouldn’t forgive him.

His smile cuts through your blood-coated blindness, all caramel drops and summer rain.

Leo Oliveira is a queer trans writer from Waterloo, Ontario, Canada (eh), with a bachelor's degree in psychology and an ongoing education in creative writing from the University of Toronto. His work is upcoming in Radon Journal. This year, he was also a semi-finalist in the 2nd Quarter of the Writers of the Future Contest.