The Space between Atoms 18

 “What do we do?” Terah asked in a whisper.

“Ya don’t have to keep your voice down,” Mich replied.  He let go of his mattress and it slid down the steps emitting a serpentine hiss.  Patting himself down, Mich pulled out batteries and replaced them by sense of touch alone.  When the light came back on, the mattress was nowhere to be seen.

“There’s somebody else here!” Terah whispered fiercely.

“I been tellin’ ya that all along.  They ain’t alive, though.”

“Maybe it slid around the corner, out of sight.”

“You can go look if you like,” Mich said, thrusting the flashlight in his direction.  “I know it’s gone.  We can grab another.”

Terah took the light.  “It’s not that I don’t trust you.”

“You still don’t believe.  Go check it out.”

Gripping the mattress he was carrying, Terah made his way to the base of the pyramid.  The mattress Mich had let go was nowhere to be seen.  While he was still searching, Mich silently reappeared, another mattress with him.  Terah nearly dropped the light with the startle.  “Damn it, Mich!  You’ve got to warn me!”

“If you wanna learn the tricks of the trade, you gotta learn to walk quiet.  An’ see in what light’s there.”

“But there is no light!  It’s blacker than a cave.”

Mich took the flashlight back.  In the boiler room they stacked the two mattresses a safe distance from the fire.  “Better make a bathroom run again,” Mich said.  “You take the light and let’s see if you can find it.”  Following the symbols led to a few missteps, but Mich was proving himself a capable teacher.  When they found it at last, Mich took the light again and instructed Terah to go.

“I think I got it,” he groused, as Mich kept the light on him.  When he finished and zipped up he asked, “Aren’t you going to go?”

“I know my way back and I won’t get lost.  Wash up.”

Under his emergency blanket while Mich was gone, Terah considered his situation.  Mich seemed a nice enough guy, but Terah had known him for only a day.  The only way to assure yourself that behavior was consistent was time.  Mich could throw him out.  He now knew enough to turn him in, but given his reluctance to go to society himself, it seemed and unlikely outcome.  Still, he knew nothing about him.  He could infer plenty, but Mich confirmed or denied almost nothing.  He seemed young enough to benefit from adult guidance.  Terah had read how young people required longer parental care now.  Health care costs and a sickly job market.  Higher education costing more than a house.  Rent in even a reasonable-sized city was exploitative.  How do you care for someone who seems to know just what he’s doing, even if he’s too young to know that much?

“Lights out,” Mich said from the hammock.  The darkness was alive.  Although Terah drifted off as soon as his eyes closed, he startled awake what seemed like mere seconds later.  He felt someone watching him.  In the light of the banked fire he could make out Mich in his hammock.  No sounds filled the silence.  The kid was even a quiet sleeper.  Of the age when wet dreams weren’t at all rare.

The image of the ghostly couple wouldn’t leave his head.  Although not so young, the mirror neurons in his head hardened him.  The emergency blanket would make any rhythmical motion all too obvious.  With the urge insistent, Terah couldn’t sleep and couldn’t do anything about it.  Long ago the church had declared it a sin, although it was as natural as breathing or eating.  Biology could insist on it, but at his age nocturnal emissions were as rare as tax cuts, but that didn’t stop his dick from taunting him.

Once Danielle had taken him to meet her family.  They had a cabin in northwest Montana, on a remote mountain lake.  The romantic setting was foiled by the way sound traveled through the little cabin.  She wouldn’t go for a short drive with him in the rental car.  Worried about keeping it clean, she ruled out that option.  On a night like this, as the lay next to one another in bed and she refused to help in any way, Terah had crept outside and down onto the dock.  The dark was nearly as complete as in the asylum, but the stars themselves generated a surprising amount of light.  Each individual star in the Milky Way burned through the tenebrous sky, but picking out any individual in that band proved impossible.

Bathed in that subtle light, fear of bears kept him alert while part of him simply wished to die.  Needing something so badly, something completely accessible, but unwilling, was cruel and torturous.  Any sentient being gravitates toward its needs.  Breathing is automatic, but eating requires movement toward nourishment.  The drive to reproduce, among males, outstrips the necessity of eating.  Once initiated, the process returns to consciousness again and again and again.  Satisfaction lasts but a short while but the rewards of attaining it guarantee that it will come to mind again within hours.  Terah had sat out all that night, creeping back to the cabin at the cold light of dawn.  His passion was unrequited until they were home again in New Jersey.

Still unable to sleep, Terah tried not to roll and toss in his crinkly blanket for fear of keeping Mich awake.  Simply enjoying being warm and trying to appreciate an erection for its inherent pleasures,  he wilted upon seeing Wednesday materialize in the room.  Undressed except for his Bible, the ghost appeared—he hadn’t walked in—and now stood staring at Mich, fast asleep.

Terah froze.  He knew Wednesday’s intent, fully that of an incubus with is own version of hard-on.  This wasn’t about love or tenderness.  Alive or dead, Wednesday was a taker, not a giver.  The warning petrified on his lips, Terah watched as Wednesday glanced back at him with a reprobate grin and advanced on the sleeping boy.