The Terrible Awful. Part 2

CHRISTOPHER

Sara is dead.

Rachel used to say that if you look into the abyss for long enough, something looks back. She said that it was the abyss itself looking at us, but I was never quite able to swallow it. What do you do with something like that? What do you do when the darkness, rather than an alien presence, has been tracking your progress? It’s too big. You can’t get away from it.

If you didn’t grow up with this kind of shit, I don’t know how to explain it. Even I didn’t really get it compared to someone like Rachel, who was in it way before any of the rest of us found her. She was our window into all of the mystery that we, as children, knew was out there while which most adults never got to really sample.

We were innocent and hopeful, even at fourteen. Relatively untested by the world, we didn’t know that there’s a cost to everything you do. The darkness doesn’t care if you read the fine print though. While we became alien and beautiful, something forbidden and knowing waited at our fingertips, just far enough out of reach to keep us working. It lead us by our noses. The grand prize, that mysterious other, was right in front of us with none of the restrictions that all of the adults in Rachel’s family suffered under when they interacted with the darkness. We thought they were suffering. We thought they were shackled and bound. We didn’t know to stay inside the circle. The burdens that we each would face as adults weren’t real yet, so we bought, without restraint, against the credit of our souls and our sanity. We were all so sure. The universe felt fixed and destiny wasn’t just some idealistic crap that preachers and children talked about but something that was actual, something you could touch. Every day was a new adventure, a mission we believed in, and sacrifice was a game with no rules and no real costs. Even Rachel’s madness was a light thing, something to be emulated if anything, since it made her different and special. How we longed to be different and special. We would've given anything for it. In the end, we did.

It’s not like that anymore of course. Everything has a price, had a price, and always will cost three-fold what you expect it to. The books Sara used to read liked that phrase. Whatever you sent out into the universe you got back, three-fold, and if you lit your candles and said your prayers maybe the nightmares would stop. But she’s dead now. She’s dead, and no amount of chanting or dancing or offerings did shit to make it stop, and that’s on me and Rachel and Erika and Cassie and Ben. It’s on all of us. We killed her without ever thinking that that was what we were doing. We killed her under an oak tree in the thick heat of summer with smiles on our faces.

We played with fire, racking up debts we would never know how to pay, and how could we ever be that happy again when the measure of what we’d held was multiplied by our ignorance of what it would take out of our flesh later? How can any of us ever stop running? Except, now, for Sara.

Sara is dead, and it is not over. I will not let it be over. I will make it not be over, because there is nothing else I have to lose now. There's a cost, and I don't care. I don't care if I have to mortgage all of our souls against whatever fucked up things we have to do to fix this. We are doing it. We are going to make this right. 

Sara is dead, and I have in my hand four invitations to a funeral.