Max and Sebastian - Chapter 29
Contemporary young adult horror fiction
Dearest Penguin People.
Thank you for reading Max and Sebastian, my evil kid/ghost story. We start this chapter with Autumn Teaberry getting a better idea of who Max really is.
If you are new to Max and Sebastian please start here…
And as always a special thank you to P.Q. Rubin for little penguin guy up top…
May drifted closer to Max. “How is it that you can see me?”
Max paused and thought about it. “A rude gray man told me that I’m almost dead. I didn’t like him, but I think he was right.”
Autumn grew pale. “Why were you in the hospital?”
“I have a mean little lump in my brain getting ready to explode.”
“Oh Lord, I’ve really done it this time.”
Max hugged her knees. “Are you going to make me leave?”
A moment of silence as they all stared at each other. Autumn took a deep breath. “It’s late. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”
Autumn tucked soft blankets around Max’s shoulders and gave her a brief peck on the cheek. “Goodnight, dear.”
Max sat up. “Mrs. Teaberry, wait.”
“Yes?”
Max kneaded the blankets in her hands, a slight quaver in her voice. “Can I stay with you? I won’t be any problem at all.”
Autumn hesitated, then sat on the edge of the bed. “If there were any way at all, I would let you.”
“I don’t want to go back.”
“You’re a child, and you’ve gone missing. Lord knows how I’m going to explain that.”
Max’s eyes, rimmed in shadow, stared up at her.
“And you’re ill.”
Max nodded and reached up to touch the downy fuzz on her head.
“The best place for you is the hospital. You see that, don’t you?”
“But I’m going to die whether I’m there or not.”
“You’d rather die here?”
Max threw off her blankets. “You’re right. I’ll go somewhere else.”
“You’re not listening. We’ll work this out together.”
“No, I’m done listening.” Tears streamed down Max’s face. “People always say that bad things don’t happen to good people, but that’s not true. When I try to be good, my life sucks. And when I don’t? Life is almost bearable. I bet if I kicked a nun or set the world on fire, I’d live to be a hundred.” She gazed up at the ceiling. “And you can bet it would be more fun.”
Autumn’s voice grew quiet. “You don’t believe that.”
“I do. And I’m not going to spend my last few hours in a hospital being someone I’m not.”
Autumn turned away from Max, trying to compose herself. Sebastian’s face emerged from a swirling gray cloud, his scaly snout pulled back in a faint snarl, his resemblance to the creatures in the emergency room unmistakable. But unlike those monsters, she saw an underlying sadness in him that only made the situation so much worse. Her lips trembled. If anyone needed a hug, it was him.
Sebastian’s yellow eyes dimmed. He disappeared back into the fog.
Max was facing the wall, her feet dangling over the side of the bed.
It struck Autumn just how very, very small this child was. In the lamplight she resembled an abandoned doll or teddy bear, hunched and teetering over the edge. Autumn’s expression softened the tiniest degree. “Let’s get one thing straight. Kicking a nun isn’t nearly as much fun as you would think.”
Max stopped swinging her feet and looked over her shoulder. If Mrs. Teaberry was joking, she showed no sign. “You did not.”
“In all fairness, she kicked me first.”
A faint smile crossed Max’s face. “Can I ask you something?”
“Please.”
“If you were dying right now, what would you do?”
“That’s simple. I’d make amends.”
“Amends?”
“I would make things right with the people I care about.”
Max snorted. “That’s not going to happen.”
“Tell me then, what are you going to do?”
“Maybe I won’t leave at all.”
A chill wind ripped through the room. Sebastian reappeared in tattered swathes of mist and shadow; his mouth stretched in a silent howl. Max folded her arms and looked away.
Autumn gazed at the pair, a battered spirit and another sliding closer to death, connected by — what exactly? She cupped her hands over Max’s. “I don’t think your friend agrees.”
Max squinched her eyes shut. “Don’t care.”
“I think you do.”
“He does the caring for both of us. He always has.”
“Look me in the face and tell me that.”
Max closed her eyes tighter, rocking slightly in place.
A tentative plink of a piano key filtered into the room. It was followed by another; the note lingering under a heavy thumb. They heard Larry clear his throat. Then he began to play in earnest, the soft plinks evolving into a rousing round of Chopsticks.
“Oh, dear Lord.” Autumn stalked toward the door, elbows akimbo.
Abruptly, the music came to a jarring halt, leaving the room breathless. Then the notes began again, falling one into the other, born of hush and stillness, like drops in a moonlit pond.
Autumn closed her eyes.
Max bowed her head as the music fell like gentle rain. “What is that?”
“Clair de Lune. My Walt loved Debussy.”
“De Who See?”
Autumn smiled.
“Well, I don’t like it. It makes me sad.”
“It means you’re human.”
“All the more reason to hate it.” Max gazed beyond Autumn, staring through the wall to where Larry played. She whispered into the empty spaces of the room, “He is more than what he seems.” The air shimmered in response.
Autumn shivered, watching shapes grow along the walls. “And you,” she asked, “who are you really?”
“What do you mean?”
The music stopped. They stared at each other from across the room.
Autumn clasped her hands in front of her, feeling the change in the air, like the first hint of fall. “At the hospital, in the parking lot. You did something rather extraordinary.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“I’m positive I saw you…”
The temperature in the room dropped. A layer of frost formed on the reading lamp and spread across the table. “You were saying?” Sebastian whispered in her ear, sending icy needles down the back of her neck.
Autumn shook him off and leaned in closer to Max. “Those creatures at the hospital. I saw you send them away.”
Max’s face turned ashen.
“Dear, are you alright?” Autumn reached toward the child and then quickly stepped away from the bed, unconsciously crossing herself.
Max was gone. In her place lay a woman with eyes of stone and blood-stained lips curled over tiny sharp teeth. Her head turned to look at Autumn, stones spinning, casting off sparks like flint against steel.
“Where’s Max?” Autumn asked.
“One and the same.”
“I don’t believe you. You bring that poor soul back right now.”
“My soul is dust. It shriveled long ago.”
Autumn steadied herself against a wall, her heart pounding in her ears. “Sebastian, do something.” She saw the fear behind the yellow orbs, but he nodded and reached a tentative claw toward the woman on the bed.
“Lady Keres?” he whispered.
“The bottom feeder speaks.”
“Let Max go.”
“There is no Max. There is only me.”
“I worked hard to make sure that wasn’t true.”
“So sad for you that you failed.”
He jerked backwards as if slapped.
Then a crash of fists against piano keys. Larry appeared at the door.
The woman rose from the bed and hovered near the ceiling, her aura ablaze in indigo fire. A flick of her chin and a lamp hurled toward his head. Larry smiled and picked it up, adjusting the shade as he set it on the table. Screaming, she lunged toward him.
His hand shot out and took her by the wrist. “This is not you,” he said.
Their eyes locked, and she evaporated in a spray of burning mist. Larry caught Max as she fell and carefully tucked her back into bed.
Autumn brushed sudden tears away with an angry hand. “What’s going on?”
“Everything will be okay,” Larry said, placing a hand on her shoulder.
“Look,” Sebastian pointed toward Max. The grays, the sullen spirits from the library, had found them. They swirled around her as formless clumps of mist and shadow, slithering and whispering, their ghostly tongues licking her cheeks. “So, so shiny,” they hissed.
Max stared up at them in a daze. “What are you doing here?”
The grays pounced.
She fled her body. Sebastian reached up. For the first time, she felt his feathery touch. But then, like the others, he faded away. She floated up and out above the city to join other threads of glimmer and gray as they winked and darted across the night like shooting stars. Unlike her, they knew where to go.
From the darkness, a chameleon beckoned. He shifted between light and shadow, being everything and nothing at once. As she approached, she saw that he was huge, engorged on the souls of others, but even so, his hunger remained. He gave her a sniff. “Where have you been?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Of course, you do.”
“I want to go back,” Max said.
“Back to what, exactly?”
“I, I don’t know.”
The chameleon smiled. “You want to go back to live just so you can die?”
“But, Sebastian…”
“Sebastian doesn’t understand you like I do. Stay with me, and you’ll never be lonely again.”
Her eyes glowed as she extended a tiny hand.
A ripple coursed through the fabric. Sebastian’s light fingers plucked Max from her netherworld perch and nudged her back into her body of pain. She saw the anxious faces surrounding the bed, faces too accepting of a fate she didn’t deserve.
“Are you okay?” Autumn placed a tender hand on Max’s forehead.
Max threw off her covers. “I’ve never been okay. Why start now?”
If you are curious about what Larry was playing, here’s a link…
As a side note…none of this was written with AI and I kindly ask that no one use it for training purposes. Thank you :)
Go back just to die 😟
I like the play between life and death...actually two sides of the same coin.
Very existentialist...