Page 89 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
When he got to Thornchapel, however, his courage quailed, and he stared up at the forbidding edifice with something beyond trepidation, something more like certainty that if he knocked on the door, he’d be knocking on his own fate, and he didn’t know if he was ready. Was he ready to say sorry? Ready to set aside his anger?
Or could he just drop to his knees and let Auden exorcise it all from him with kisses and pain? Could he just lay it all bare—his love, his guilt, his shame and resentment—and trust that Auden would know what to do with it?
God, he hoped so. He prayed it would be so, that he could use Auden like he used the saints of the Church—for intercession and exoneration, for protection and clarity.
And maybe, just maybe, Auden would use him back. Then all the needy, hungry chambers of St. Sebastian’s heart would be full.
Holding tight to this, St. Sebastian stepped forward to the wooden double doors that marked the entrance to the house. The right door was decorated with a knocker styled into a large face, a grinning man with a thick ring clenched between his teeth—all of it cast in verdigris-covered bronze, which showed its age in every shade of green imaginable, leek and chartreuse and olive. When St. Sebastian reached up to rap the ring against the door, he noticed that the man’s face was made of leaves—layers and layers of them, delicately veined and variegated for all that they were made of thick metal. He must have seen this front door uncountable times that summer as a child, and a fair few times this summer with Auden, but he’d never noticed the leaves before. He’d never recognized the figure they comprised before now.
The Green Man.
It seemed rather improper to have such a cheerful figure on the door of such a stern house, but he didn’t have much time to wonder about it, because only a few seconds passed between him rapping the door and it opening. He didn’t even have time to panic.
Which was good, because the door wasn’t opened by a servant, like he’d planned on, and it wasn’t opened by Auden, which he’d hoped for.
It was opened by Ralph Guest.
St. Sebastian tried to speak, tried to say hello, explain why he was here, but nothing came out.
Ralph frowned down at him. “May I help you?”
Auden. You’re here for A
uden.
You’re not allowed to run away again.
“I wondered if Auden was home,” he forced himself to say.
The frown deepened. “Auden is still in hospital.”
“Oh,” St. Sebastian breathed, feeling this like another kick to the ribs. “Oh.”
“There was some internal bruising to the organs,” Auden’s father explained matter-of-factly. “They want to monitor it a bit longer before they send him home.”
As an adult, St. Sebastian would have known all the right questions to ask. He would have asked which hospital, what room? He would have asked if he could visit, and as an adult, he would have had a car to drive there. But as a newly-turned sixteen-year-old boy, this felt like a stone wall right in his path, too high to climb over, too smooth and formless even to try. It felt like the end of all possibilities. Even more so with the following exchange:
“Will…will he come back here? When he’s well again?”
“I think not.”
Ralph’s voice was clipped. To the point. And with every cold, cultured syllable, St. Sebastian felt smaller and stupider.
“O-okay,” St. Sebastian stammered. “Will you tell him I came by? I’m St. Seb—”
“St. Sebastian Perth Martinez, yes. I know who you are.”
Uneasiness—unrelated to his earlier nervousness—whispered up and down his back, prickling at the skin at the back of his neck. It was unusual to know someone’s middle name, right? He could barely even remember his own mother’s middle name, much less rattle off the middle names of strangers from the village.
Ralph said, abruptly, “You were with my son when he got hurt.”
“Yes,” St. Sebastian managed, his face aflame, his whole body itching to run away. He didn’t know where this was going. Was Ralph angry that his son was spending time with another boy? Did he think that St. Sebastian had—he didn’t even know—corrupted Auden or something?
“Don’t look at your feet,” Ralph said impatiently. “I want to see your face.”
Ralph’s displeasure was its own command. St. Sebastian dragged his eyes to the older man’s face, and then wished he hadn’t. He looked so much like Auden—long, elegant nose, high cheekbones, a jaw that came only after centuries of breeding beauty with money. Even the silvering hair and lines around his mouth didn’t hide how handsome he was, nor how much his son resembled him. St. Sebastian had a floating, disassociated bubble of a thought—a thought that must have floated in from a parallel universe where the beating had never happened and he and Auden had been spending the last few days having sex and drinking wine—and the thought was this:
This is what Auden will look like when he gets older.
