Page 46 of Below the Shadow of the City

I delete it, as I did the last, and her name vanishes from my inbox with a little poof.

Nothing left to say, the casket has been closed, it’s being lowered into the ground as we speak. Maybe in this metaphor I’m clutching onto the pine box with all my might, refusing to let my past be fully buried, but I’m still here. Still above ground.

That’s not to say I’m entirely unaffected by her reemergence. My bottom lip is chewed raw and I don’t realize until I taste something hot and metallic and there’s a sting when I swipe my tongue over it.

In past relationships, I’d always made pro and con lists to settle my logical brain. Lists were easy and straightforward and didn’t complicate things. I could look at the list and make objective, rational decisions.

With Perrie, I thought I cracked the code. She had a list of her own, pros and cons. Positive attributes and faults. I made an informed choice, I thought I’d done things right this time around. I thought maybe, years later, I’d broken the curse.

It worked, for a while. Years, in fact. I let my anxiety rest momentarily. Things were secure and safe. Freddie’s words still lingered; they were much quieter now.

I hadn’t a singular clue what was about to happen in the moments before she broke up with me. And now, rereading her cryptic text that I’ve still left unanswered, I don’t know what would happen if I spoke to her again.

Any lingering feelings are long gone. I don’t love her anymore, and there’s little to miss. It’s not like she’d been so exceptional that I should’ve spent my days as haunted by her as I had.

I must be incredibly broken if I want to avoid talking to Maddox in the same way I want to avoid talking to Perrie. Because everything that Perrie turned into when things ended, Maddox is the complete opposite.

CHAPTER 19

SUNDAY, EARLY OCTOBER

My apartment is suffocating. Utterly so. Quite frankly, I don’t know how those fairy tale princesses managed. I have a one bedroom apartment to pace, I couldn’t survive locked in a tower.

I need air, or light, or something. I need to run away into the woods and never return. How does one overcome their feelings for someone? How does one allow themselves to feel? Why can’t I decide which outcome I want?

Rather than spend my time knitting together conspiracy theories about how Maddox and my relationship will crash and burn, I do the far more sane thing. I obsessively research this underground world he lives in and every monster I can think of off the top of my head.

Very quickly I find there’s an entire online community of more eccentric folks who believe in the realm’s existence. When reading the paragraphs of crackpot theories it’s hard not to be amused by how inaccurate they are, even from the few times I’d gone down there. Claims of bloodthirsty creatures haunting the streets at night, brazen accusations that they’re running a shadow government, even theories that certain government officials are monsters in plain sight. Which, the latter may be true, just not in the way these conspiracy theorists believe.

I’d asked Maddox an embarrassing number of questions, mostly to help me process the world he lives in piece by piece. I’ve learned every cryptid imaginable is apparently very, very real. Mothmen, Sasquatch, the Loch Ness monster. And so is every creature from practically every culture’s folklore. The facts of the situation are still somewhat unbelievable. His neighborhood feels so much like my own, I often forget that it’s deep below ground and a secret.

The most glaring thing these conspiracy theorists get so incredibly wrong is that all of these monsters, or people, rather, are fully sentient, intelligent beings. Mothman isn’t some imaginary creature of the night that lives under a bridge, he’s one of many mothmen who lives in a different part of town and is one of Maddox’s best friends.

Per Maddox, aliens and ghosts are very much not real. That feels especially hard to believe given the mental whiplash I’ve experienced in recent weeks. Plus, he surely isn’t an expert on UFOs given he’s spent his lifetime underground. It’s only a matter of his own opinion, and given his complete disinterest in my claims of magic in his realm, he’s a skeptic. Which is a hilarious thing for a mythical being to be. I didn’t believe much in the otherworldly until meeting him and being thrust into this world. Now, I fear that maybe I hold a stronger belief in that than I do in my belief that Maddox would actually want to be with me as badly as he says he does.

I click through multiple subreddits dedicated to theorizing and sharing the tiniest hints of proof. A blurry photo here, a strange door there. I think about how I could walk into my basement and down a few hallways and wind up in the exact place these internet sleuths dream of discovering. I swear I see a photo of Maddox, or someone that looks like him, taken in a dark alley. Exactly as I’d seen him all those months ago. I save it, in case I find out one day that it was him in the photos doing his best impression of the Patterson-Gimlin Film.

Despite the time I’ve wasted at my laptop, conventional internet searches come up with nothing. It’s almost a complete wasteland of results. If I Google the restaurant Maddox took me to, the closest result comes up in Chicago for somewhere with the same name. If I search street names or addresses, my screen flickers blank. From the perspective of above ground, none of what, or who, I’ve seen is real.

It would almost be easier to write him off as not existing at all. I could pretend his apartment, the restaurants, the bodega, and the streets themselves were all a mental fabrication. I could buy into the same conspiracies as the internet posters. Only maybe without the blatant absurdity. It would be much simpler than returning to him and making it up to him.

Instead, I Google “fae beast,” a phrase I’d never heard in my twenty-eight years until Maddox said it so casually the night we truly met. There’s more that appears under this search, pages of folklore and medieval art. From an academic standpoint, there’s actually something to research here, once I muddle through the fairytale nonsense.

There are stories of societies of monsters co-existing among humans in the Middle Ages, as well as harrowing tales about Maddox’s distant relatives kidnapping young women from their villages to bring them to their lairs. If only they knew that centuries later I would willingly go with one of these alleged beasts.

I am doing all this, of course, because I want to avoid actually thinking about the very real monster I’d left hanging. I have nagging anxious thoughts beyond curses and Maddox that I need to distract myself from. I was coerced (well, formally invited) into meeting the other bake-stagrammers and foodie influencers who are also supposed to be featured in this cooking anthology at a welcome brunch soirée of sorts.

Thoughts about the inevitability of whatever interactions I’m going to fumble through tonight could be easily thwarted by reading about more monsters. As I read an academic paper from an Ivy League school about an instance in Eighteenth Century Germany where a fae community was all but destroyed, I want to text Maddox and ask him about all of it. Only I don’t exactly think we’re on “casually text every fleeting thought” terms at the moment.

Instead I turn my attention back to the event I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about. I’d spied on the guest list by reading all the names CC'd on the invite. Food bloggers I’ve followed for years would be in attendance alongside aesthetic baking accounts who didn’t vanish from the internet for nine months.

Now I have to make an appearance as someone who fits in perfectly among this crowd. And get dressed for it.

It’s not my first time at such an event, I’d attended my fair share of influencer outings. Something has changed in me at a molecular level since then, something disappeared in me that I don’t know if I can find again. Doubt is telling me to skip, that I could quietly send in eight recipes I’d already posted on my Instagram account and participate with the smallest amount of effort required.

What good would that do me, though? I know what Margo would say if I back out, and I know I’d be mad at myself too. I dig through my closet, looking for something that might convince myself that I’m not the kind of person who backs out of professional opportunities like this one.

“I’m a complete imposter,” I groan when Margo’s face pops up on FaceTime.