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I didn’t.
The darkness closed over his face, and then he was gone.
The chair opposite me stood empty, leaving no sign that he’d ever been there.
When I looked down, I saw that I’d pushed the salt into the shape of a figure with horns and a tail.
I might have laughed, but I wasn’t sure it would stay a laugh.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Rowan
It took me less than two days to admit what a huge fucking colossal mistake I’d made. At first, it was just a nagging suspicion that I’d let the emotion of everything that happened with Tyler get the better of me. Then the emptiness became unbearable.
The house had never seemed large before. Spacious, yes, but not cavernous. Now every room felt twice its actual size. Silence clung to the walls and followed me wherever I went, broken only by the sounds I made myself. The scrape of a chair against the floor. The click of the kettle switching off. The sound of my own footsteps.
Even the shadows seemed emptier. I kept looking toward them anyway.
Every darkened doorway caught my attention. Every movement in my peripheral vision had my heart leaping with anticipation before common sense brought it crashing down again. At night, I would wake convinced someone was standing beside the bed, only to find nothing there.
The bed was the worst part. It no longer felt as though it fitted one person. There was too much mattress, too much untouched bedding, too much cold space where something shadowy, yet solid, should have been.
The reminders of Caligo were everywhere. Four narrow tears remained in one sheet where his claws had punctured the fabric. I should have thrown it away, but I washed it and put it back on the bed like a complete masochist, sometimes tracing the tears in the early hours of the morning. The television remained on the channel where he’d discovered Eastenders and thought it was a documentary. A vase of daisies and dandelions sat dead and withered on the kitchen table because he wasn’t there to bring me more, and I couldn’t make myself throw them away.
His painting remained on the second easel in my studio. I’d tried moving it once. I’d gotten as far as the cupboard before changing my mind and returning it. The swirling mass of black paint seemed different now. Where I’d once seen a vortex, or perhaps the entrance to hell, I now saw Caligo. Depth hiding inside darkness. Hundreds of subtly different shades that most people would dismiss as nothing more than black.
I spent far too long staring at it, as if I expected to find answers to questions I couldn’t even put into words.
By the end of the third day, I’d had enough.
“Caligo?”
I stood in the middle of the bedroom, feeling faintly ridiculous as my voice disappeared into the silence.
Nothing happened. It was like rehab all over again. Still, I wasn’t about to give up that easily.
“I know I said I wanted you to leave, but…” I heaved out a noisy breath. “I made a mistake.”
The shadows in the corners remained ordinary shadows.
“I hoped that you’d only pretended to go away, that you were really still here watching me.”
No response.
“I was scared. Not of you, but of what being with you meant.” I gave a hollow laugh. “This would be easier if you showed yourself so I didn’t have to explain myself to an empty room.”
More silence.
“Caligo?”
I checked the bathroom, then the hallway, as if he might have been there all along and simply failed to hear me through the wall. I went downstairs and called for him in every room. By the time I reached the kitchen, desperation had stripped away most of my pride.
“I take it back,” I said. “What I said was bullshit, and I know I sound like I don’t even know my own mind, but…” I shook my head, trying to think more clearly. “What happened to my mum… Tyler… finding out it was him all along… wanting him dead. It was a lot. I think I thought I could at least simplify one area of my life. But I was wrong. I don’t want you gone. I want you here.”
The silence had never been louder. Why hadn’t I asked for time rather than telling him to leave for good? I could have asked for a few days, or even a week. At the very least, I would have known that he was coming back.
I called for him again before bed, and once more when I woke in the middle of the night. I tried again the following morning, louder this time, as though volume rather than distance was the problem.
