The glass moved without the need for a question. Keeping their fingers on the upturned bottom was hard as it flew from letter to letter.
“Stop,” Edward shouted at the board, a large vein bulging across his forehead. “Stop it!”
But the glass ignored him. It happened so fast that William couldn’t tell what it was spelling. It finally came to rest on the letter R.
C.A.R
Edward was breathless, his chest rising and falling, his skin tinged with a slight green tone. He looked terrible. The whites of his eyes had stained red, his spare hand tugged at the collar of his T-shirt, his proud Adam’s apple bobbing up and down with each dry swallow.
“Close the board,” William said, wanting nothing more than to gather Edward up in his arms and offer him a lick of comfort compared to what he’d given him. “Close it now.”
But Edward couldn’t speak. Didn’t move. He could barely do anything but just look, dumbfounded, at the board. William took matters into his own hands, remembering that he just had to say goodbye to the entity and move the glass to the respective word.
“Goodbye–”
The glass shot out from both of their hands, moving to the word “no”. It was refusing to leave. There wasn’t even a point trying to grapple for it back. Because as William jolted over the board, trying to catch it, the glass continued to move.
“Please, please,” Edward began to scream. His broken pleas soaked up by the manor, then spat back out. “Please, stop it. Don’t do this to me!”
William spelled the letters out, whilst Edward begged for it to stop. Out of everything he expected it to spell, the word that followed was at the bottom of his list of possibilities. No – not a word.
It was a name.
“A.R.C.H.I.E.”
It was like William had been devoured by the vacuum of space and time. The world – no, the universe pressed down on him, swallowing him. All sharp teeth and lashing tongues, until there was only silence interrupted by the beat of his heart caught in his ears.
“Archie?” William spoke aloud, although it sounded like he was deep beneath oppressive water.
Edward had stopped shouting. The glass had settled. All the while, William couldn’t tear his eyes from the board as the impossible name rang out in his mind. Taunting him, it was as if his mind screamed the name. Over and over, building in volume and deepening in tone, until the voice in his head belonged to someone who should never have had the ability to speak.
No one replied. For a beat, it was as if nothing had happened and the glass had never moved – never spelled out that name. But then it moved again, awoken and sentient. William didn’t bother to try and keep his finger on it. Edward was too stunned to move. They simply allowed the glass to slither across the board where it came to a stop over the word:Hello.
With his eyes still glued to the glass, William scrambled back on his arms until the hard press of a wall stopped him. His heart thundered in his chest so terrible that his eardrums rattled, and his lungs ached. No matter how frantic his inhales were, his body rejected the air.
He was suffocating from the reality before him.
“Close. The. Board,” Edward forced out, his command meant for William, who was just out of his line of sight. “Now.”
William didn’t act. He didn’t so much as speak. The only noise he made was the rasped and broken sobs that seemed to crack out of his chest. In a way, he didn’t want to stop this from happening.
“William, do it… I beg you.” Edward looked up to his companion, thinking nothing else could be as horrifying as what had just happened. He was wrong. As William’s eyes trailed from the board up to where Edward sat, he saw something that turned his blood to ice.
A figure was standing just behind Edward. Where the chair had been was now blocked by clear outline of a body. Even if William wanted to look up more and see the figure’s face, his eyes refused him. All he could do was see the glistening wet material of a red coat skimming the shins of two grey legs. Mangled skin ruined from gravel, blood running from gashes and vicious cuts…
“No,” William choked. “No, no.”
Even at the distance, he could make out every droplet of rainwater that ran down the coat’s shining material. It gave the impression that it was bleeding too, soaking down the figure’s dark trousers and the floor beneath where he stood.
Edward hadn’t moved a muscle. He looked to William, concern and pain pinched into every line across his face. It seemed that William’s reaction was enough to snap him out of his strange spell of panic. And yet he didn’t know what loomed behind him, impossibly tall, impossibly real.
Edward didn’t see the mottled and bruised hand reach slowly down towards his shoulder – but William did. He witnessed everything.
Fuelled by sheer unbridled panic, William scrambled back to the board and slapped the glass from the word it rested on. The glass bounced into the side of the room, disappearing beyond boxes. The smash sounded, and yet the figure was still there, reaching down, ready to touch Edward, to claim him.
“Leave him alone,” William screamed, fear becoming anger. Spittle flew out of his lips. His hands balled to fists as the violent urge to protect Edward overcame him. This was fight – the mode he never found himself drawn to. And yet, seeing the horror become such a threat, he knew he had to act. So William drew up the board, a side in each hand, and ripped it in half. Edward sprang to life, shouting for William to stop. But he couldn’t – he wouldn’t. The folding seam tore, the most beautiful sound he’d heard in the world.
When William looked back to Edward, it was to find the chair behind him once again. The figure in Archie’s red coat had faded back into the shadows, severed with the tearing of cardboard.
