More Than This (10 page)

There’s a coffin sitting in the middle of the floor.

And it’s open.

Everything else is the same.

The crescent-moon wallpaper is still on the walls, the water stain still spreading through it under the skylight in the sloped ceiling. He thinks he can even see the face patterned there that he always used to scare Owen with, telling him that if he didn’t fall asleep in the next
one minute,
the face would eat him alive.

Their beds are there, too, unbelievably small against two corners, Owen’s little more than a cot, really. There’s the shelf with all their books, very roughly used but still favorites. Below it is their box of toys, piled with plastic action figures and cars and ray guns that shot out little more than loudness, and on Owen’s bed is a whole array of stuffed toys – elephants, mostly, they were his favorite – every single one of which Seth knows is across the ocean in his brother’s bedroom.

And taking up the middle of the room, on the floor in the space between the beds, sits the long black coffin, the lid opened like a giant clam.

The blind is down over the skylight, making the light vague in here, but Seth doesn’t want to step past the coffin to raise it.

It takes him a moment to remember that the torch has other uses than as a weapon. He shines it on the coffin. He tries to remember if he’s ever actually seen one in real life. He’s never been to a funeral, not even in ninth grade when Tammy Fernandez had a seizure on school grounds. Nearly everyone went to that one, but Seth’s parents weren’t going to be swayed from an overnight trip to Seattle. “You didn’t even
know
her,” his mother had said, and that was that.

This coffin, though, is definitely shining back at him, and not like polished wood might. It shines back almost like the hood of a really expensive car. In fact,
exactly
like the hood of a really expensive car. It even seems to be made of a kind of black metal. The corners of it are rounded, too. Seth’s curiosity gets the better of him, and he moves closer. It’s strange, stranger than even at first glance. Sleek and expensive looking, almost futuristic, like something out of a movie.

Definitely a coffin, though, as the inside is all white cushions and pillows and –

“Holy shit,” Seth says, under his breath.

Crisscrossing the bedding are streamers of metallic-sided tape.

They look as if they’ve been torn and pulled against, as if someone was tied down by them and that person struggled and pulled with all their might until they were free.

Free to stumble blindly down the stairs before collapsing on the path outside.

Seth stands there for a long, long time, not knowing what to think.

An ultra-modern coffin, big enough to hold the nearly fully-grown version of him, yet here in the room he left as a child.

But no coffin for Owen. And nothing for his parents.

Just him.

“Because I’m the only one who died,” he whispers.

He puts his hand on the open lid. It’s cool, just how he’d expect the metal to feel, but he’s surprised to find a thin layer of dust on his hand when he takes it away. The inside, though, is almost a blazing white, even in the low light from the blind-covered window. It’s cushioned with contoured pillows on all sides, vaguely in the shape of a person.

There are torn metallic bandages –“conductive tape” – all the way down the length of it. And tubes, too, big and small, some disappearing into the sides of the coffin, their stray ends having left stains here and there against the whiteness of the pillows.

He thinks of the abrasions along his body and how it hurt to pee.

Had the tubes been connected to
him
?

Why?

He crouches down, shining the torch underneath. The coffin sits on four short rounded legs, and from the very middle of the bottom of it, a small pipe goes straight down into the floor. Seth touches it. It seems slightly warmer than the rest of the coffin, like there might even be power running into it somehow, but he can’t be sure.

He stands up again, hands on his hips.

“Seriously,” he says loudly. “What the
hell
?”

He angrily flips up the blind on the skylight. Annoyed, he looks down again to the street below.

To all the houses that line it.

All the houses that look as closed up as this one.

“No,” he whispers. “There can’t be.”

The next instant, he’s running back down his stairs as fast as his exhaustion will let him.

He heaves a garden gnome as hard as he can at the front window of the house next door. It flies through with a satisfyingly loud smash. He clears away the remaining shards with the torch and climbs inside. He remembers nothing about the people who lived here when he was a child, except maybe they had a pair of older daughters. Or maybe just one.

Either way, there might have been people here who died.

Their front room is as dusty and untended as the one in his own house. The layout is more or less the same, and he walks quickly back through their dining room and kitchen, finding nothing out of the ordinary, just more dusty furniture.

He runs up the stairs. There’s only one landing in this house – the owners not bothering to make the attic conversion – and Seth is in the first of the bedrooms before he can even stop to think.

It’s a girl’s room, probably a teenager. There are posters for singers Seth’s distantly heard of, a bureau with some tidied-away makeup on it, a bed with a lavender bedspread, and an obviously much-loved and cried-upon Saint Bernard plush toy.

No coffin, though.

The story is the same in the master bedroom, a stuffier, overcramped version of his parents’. A bed, a chest of drawers, a closet full of clothes. Nothing that shouldn’t be there.

He uses the torch to push open the access hatch to the attic. He has to leap a few times to catch the lower rung of the ladder, but it finally clatters down. He climbs up, shining the torch into the open space.

He falls back rapidly from a congregation of surprised pigeons, who coo in alarm and flap wildly out through a hole that’s come open in the back roof. When it all calms down – and Seth wipes the pigeon mess from his hands, suddenly less happy to discover there are birds here – the torch and the light from the hole reveal only packed up boxes and broken appliances and more startled pigeons.

No coffins with anyone inside.

“All right,” he says.

He tries the house across the street, for no particular reason taking the same garden gnome with him to smash through the front window.

“Jesus,” Seth says as he climbs inside.

It’s phenomenally messy. Newspapers piled in every corner, every clear space heaving with food wrappers, coffee cups, books, figurines, and dust, dust, dust. He picks his way through. Each room is the same. The kitchen looks like something from a hundred years ago, and even the staircase has things piled on each step.

But the rooms upstairs, including the attic, only have mess in them. No coffins.

The house next door to that one was clearly owned by an Indian family, with brightly colored cloths draped over the furniture and photographs of a bride and groom wearing traditional Hindu outfits.

But nothing else, no matter how many rooms he checks.

He begins to feel a harsh desperation as he heaves the same gnome through the house next door to that one. And the house next door to
that.

Each one dusty. Each one empty.

He is growing more and more tired now, the exhaustion getting harder to fight. In what could be the tenth or twelfth house – he’s lost count – he can’t even throw the gnome hard enough to break the window anymore. It bounces to the ground, its eyes leering up at him.

Seth leans heavily against a white wooden fence. He is filthy again, covered in the dust of a dozen houses. A dozen
empty
houses. Not a single one even making space for a bafflingly shiny coffin in any of their rooms.

He wants to cry, mostly out of frustration, but he checks himself.

What has he found out, after all? What new thing has he learned?

Nothing that he didn’t think before.

He’s alone.

However he ended up here, wherever that coffin came from and however he ended up inside it, there aren’t any for his father or his mother or his brother. There aren’t any in the houses up and down the street. There are no signs of anyone in the sky or on the train tracks or on any of the roads.

He really is alone in whatever hell this is.

Completely and utterly alone.

It isn’t,
he thinks, as he trudges back toward his house,
the most unfamiliar feeling in the world.

“Shit, Sethy,” Gudmund said, his voice as serious as Seth had ever heard it. “And they blame you?”

“They say they don’t.”

Gudmund rolled up on one elbow in the bed. “But that’s not what they think.”

Seth shrugged in an offhand way that more or less answered the question.

Gudmund lightly placed the palm of his hand on Seth’s bare stomach. “That blows,” he said. He ran his hand up Seth’s chest, then back again to his stomach and carrying on farther down, but gently, tenderly, not asking for anything more again just yet, merely letting Seth know how sorry he was through the touch of his hand.

“Seriously, though,” Gudmund said, “what kind of country builds a prison next to people’s houses?”

“It wasn’t really next to our house,” Seth said. “There was like a mile of fencing and guards before you got to the actual prison.” He shrugged again. “It’s gotta go somewhere.”

“Yeah, like an island or the middle of a rock quarry. Not where people live.”

“England’s a crowded place. They have to have prisons.”

“Still,” Gudmund said, his hand back up to Seth’s stomach, his index finger making a slow ring on the skin there. “It’s pretty crazy.”

Seth slapped the hand away. “That tickles.”

Gudmund smiled and put his hand back in exactly the same spot. Seth let it stay there. Gudmund’s parents had gone away again for the weekend, and a stinging October rain swarmed outside, spattering the windows and raking the roof. It was late, two or three in the morning. They’d been in bed for hours, talking, then very much not talking, then talking some more.

People knew that Seth was staying over at Gudmund’s –Seth’s parents, H and Monica – but no one knew about
this.
As far as Seth knew, no one even suspected. And that made it feel like the most private thing that could ever happen, like a whole secret universe all on its own.

A universe that Seth, as he did every time, wished he never had to leave.

“The question, of course,” Gudmund said, idly pulling at the hair that tracked down from Seth’s belly button, “is whether you blame you.”

“No,” Seth said, staring up at Gudmund’s ceiling. “No, I don’t.”

“You sure about that?”

Seth laughed, quietly. “No.”

“You were just a kid. You shouldn’t have had to face that by yourself.”

“I was old enough to know better.”