ManicWorld Magazine

The night passes almost as normal, except, he can hardly sleep. Every time he raises his head, her eyes are fixed on him, although she’s always the first to look away. And he realises he’s never seen her sleep. Ambrosia sits at the loom all night long, and, as usual, she’s not there when he wakes, and all the roses are dead again.

She’s waiting for him outside.

Dyl tenses, but she just says, “Come,” and climbs up to his favourite spot.

Sticks and branches have been arranged like a collapsed tent, and she kneels, two stones in either hand. She teaches Dyl how to strike flint and steel to get a spark, and how to blow tinder until he can lay sticks over a small fire. They layer it so it smokes, thick and black and reaching to the sky. So ships will see. After they’re done, Ambrosia stands back, arms crossed, evaluating Dyl’s work. Then, as if remembering, her face blanks and she heads down without another glance. There will be no more lessons, no more conversations.

Dyl’s overcome with a pang of terrible sadness for her, for what she lost and is losing.

“Wait, Ambrosia,” he says, scrambling quick behind, and she tilts her head, bright-eyed. “I…” What can he say? That he’s sorry? He is, but it sounds too trivial and awkward to say so.

“I just think…” Dyl trails away, hoping the silence would speak for him. He stares into her eyes as if he can see beyond the white sclera to the pink socket they writhe in. He gestures helplessly, expansively. At the ocean beyond. At the air between them. “I mean, you… you should get off the island. You don’t deserve this lonely existence.”

“Let me show you something before you decide that.” Ambrosia’s voice is metallic, like the scrape of a grate against its gutter. She’s shifted her position. She’s no longer friend and protector. She’s back to whatever she was before he washed up, and lets him hear it, see it in the way her feet touch and push against the ground silently, the set of her jaw, the way he trails in her shadow, which ants scatter and flee from, breaking perfect file.

They come to the furthest side of the cliff, at the very bottom. Dyl stares up at its face, overgrown with moss and other climbers; turns to ask what he’s supposed to be looking at, but Ambrosia’s eyes flick away, and she goes forth to tug the great green curtain apart. Gaping darkness yawns. 

Ambrosia leads.

The parted fronds let bright sunlight through, but the cave clings to Dyl, and white-grey dust puffs up as his feet hit the surface. A softly cloying scent rises all around, must and musky, somewhat floral perfume. Roses creep up the walls, fresh and winding. This must be where she gets them from.

A little ways in, Ambrosia jerks to a halt and he bumps into her.

He darts back a step, coughing, trampling roses. The dust’s properly disturbed now, everywhere, on everything. But she’s still as a statue, eyes cast straight ahead, and Dyl’s about to whisper her name—whisper, because this place is coated with a layer of secrecy—when his eyes alight on what lies beyond.

See, Dyl’s been to the catacombs in Paris, a few summers ago. Or more accurately, spent a few minutes in them before running out.

This is pure chaos. Death in its true form. The ground is littered with bones. He flinches, and the movement allows a ray of light to bounce off a grey skull, a human one. Its jaw is half-missing. Fresh rosebuds sprout through its right eyesocket. They’re all over the place, sprawling skeletons of varying states of freshness. No order or organisation to them, just decaying bones of humans where they collapsed or were dumped. The one lying before Ambrosia’s feet is almost a shining white, all limbs but one leg still attached, the shadows of pale blue rags clinging to the chest. Further away are remains sunk into the ground, deep brown and muddy. Ancient, as if from the era dragons roamed the earth.

Dyl finds it really, really hard to breathe. It’s like he’s forgotten how.

“Now do you see?” Ambrosia asks, and the sound of her voice makes him jump near out of his skin. It echoes, none to hear it but him and the dead. “Here I am, the real me. ‘Look upon my Works and despair.’ Did you know who said that to me? An English poet, shipwrecked, safe, until I grew hungry.” Bitterness coats her tone. “This is why I can never leave this place.”

“Why… why not me?”

“I ate the night before your arrival. Besides, you’re a child. It’s bad manners to hurt a child, much less kill them, and devour their life from their bones.”

He fixates on the clean white bones she stands before.

“The current drags vessels aground rocks and forces sailors ashore. From the side you washed up on, that is. You needn’t worry, though, as long as vessels approach the side you built the fire on, they’ll be… peachy.”

They both startle at the laugh bubbling out of Dyl’s throat.

“What?” she asks, crossing her arms. She looks down and away when he walks around to face her, as if ashamed.

Shakily, “Peachy. You’re referring to this as… as…” and he laughs again although it’s not even really that funny, but he must, he must laugh or he might desecrate this place with bile and the scream that rattles in his stomach, begging to spill out. He’d taught her that word. It’s proof of something human, isn’t it?

Ambrosia shakes her head and scoots around Dyl. “Come. We must keep eyes on the horizon so you don’t miss your ride out.”

They spend the next two days keeping watch. Ambrosia is hungry, and he sees it in the way she watches him, although she never really looks him in the eyes again. She leaves the hut when he sleeps. She does not decorate the hut with roses anymore, but spends hours on a piece of weaving she eventually gives him. In that, the roses never die.

And on the third day, one of the passing ships heeds the smoke signal and comes for Dyl, and Ambrosia tears helter-skelter down to the hut, yelling for him.

He stumbles down to the shore, brushing soil from his hands with fervour. Upon seeing the ship rapidly approaching, and the sunny-yellow skiff that detaches, and a brown face he can clearly see, Dyl whoops and waves his arms.

The man comes ashore and calls something out in his language. He turns out to be a fisherman, and he can speak some English, and so Dyl excitedly babbles about the storm, and Aunt Kath, and… “Ambrosia!” he exclaims, whirling. “The girl that took care of me! We need to take her, too!”

And then he’s off, darting back to the hut, the fisherman struggling to keep up.
But the birdsong rings well and true in the clearing that housed him and Ambrosia, and when he breaks into it, there is nothing.

No hut. No garden that he ate from. No girl with honeyed dark hair, nothing but undisturbed wildlife crawling and flying across. He turns in a hurried circle; perhaps he’s in the wrong place. But no, he sees the smoky spire in the exact same spot, now dying down, a mere wisp of itself.

He screams her name, loud and raw, the way he’d done that day when he’d first tried to get a ship’s attention. The fisherman, worrying, tries to put a large hand on his shoulder, but Dyl flinches it off and runs for the cliff on the other side, where Ambrosia’s hoard of skeletons lie.

He parts the fronds. No cave beckons, no darkness looms. Nothing but bare cliff-face, empty of everything but pure, solid rock.

“But, but, but,” Dyl gasps, spinning to the fisherman. “There was a cave here! With roses! And a girl, who was sent here, exiled from humanity.”

“Roses don’t grow here,” the man says, very seriously. He points to the sky. “See: wind coming. We must return before dark. Come now.”

He hustles the boy ahead of him. Dyl is too numb to protest, and hardly acknowledges it when the fishing crew help him into the ship. It takes a while to attach the skiff, and he watches the misty black spire as it fades into the sky, scanning, scanning the island for movement.

There’s none. Somebody wraps a blanket around his shoulders.

They set off towards the mainland, back to Aunt Kath, whom he’s half-sure won’t be obliged to rip into him like a wolf… he shudders to think about the wolves he’s faced. And a dreadful thought occurs to him then, and Dyl bolts up, the blanket slipping off his shoulders.

He seizes the man who’s rescued him by the arms and shakes desperately. “Don’t go back there! Promise me you won’t, she’ll kill you, she’ll eat the flesh straight off your bones!”

The crew murmurs amongst themselves. The fisherman reassures him they’re going straight home, but Dyl’s not utterly convinced, and he hasn’t the energy to drill it into him. They check his temperature and feed him a lot of water, and determine he’s feverish. He isn’t. He’s just been working all day under hot sun in the garden, and the soil in his fingernails attests to that. Using the upraised edge of his pocket to try and remove some of it, Dyl’s hand freezes and he turns away from the crew, dipping into his pocket.

Sure enough, it’s there. Ambrosia’s woven roses, the piece edged in Persian blue, his favourite colour from her collection. Her gift to him. The only proof that she exists. And there’s no way he can show the fishermen, or anyone, for that would mean people would hunt for her, then hunt her. So when they dock, and rush him to hospital, Dyl accepts it when they say he hallucinated Ambrosia as a way to cope with the impossible, terrifying situation he found himself in, all alone. The only thing the doctors never really understand is how he stayed hydrated the entire time (two and a half weeks!) he was away. Their theory is there’s a pond on the island. Dyl just nods listlessly, half-beginning to believe he just conjured Ambrosia up. That is, until he looks at her weaving, the roses, again, and it all comes back, realer than ever.

He always tucks the piece away before anyone can see. Not even Aunt Kath, who isn’t angry at all, but in tears, can ever know.

Ambrosia protected him, kept him safe from the wolves and from herself. Now it’s his turn to repay that debt. To keep her safe from the world, and the world safe from her.

And far away, a girl with curls past her waist sits atop a cliff on a lonely island, beside a fire long gone out. She snacks on blackened flesh, more of which dissipates into the air rather than into her stomach, finally settled, finally peaceful.

Pieces of a bright yellow skiff, dulled by the night, drift past.