Page 3 of Seasonal Fears

“Yes, well, yours are further along,” says Dr. Cosgrove finally. “Further along, and designed to catch something that’s never been caught before. Mine are more like natural pitcher plants. Melanie seems to be attracting the season she’s intended for, but it’s hard to say for sure, without a Jack Frost at our doorstep or a coronation in the offing. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of—No, I didn’t think so. Pity. He’s long since ceased to be useful, although I suppose I can understand why you’d prefer to avoid the competition.”

Dr. Cosgrove’s voice begins to get softer then, like he’s moving away from the window. Harry stays where he is until he hears the office door pulled shut with a decisive click, and the ice in his limbs shatters. He starts climbing again, faster this time, less concerned about falling than he is about beating Dr. Cosgrove to Melanie’s room.

If they lived closer together, this might be the first of a thousand times he climbs this tree to her window, the first of a thousand times he comes sliding in to find her sleeping. But they don’t and it isn’t: after this, Harry March will never come in her window again. He reaches the level of the frame and tests it carefully, relieved to find that it’s not only unlocked but well-maintained enough to slide easily upward when he pushes, not forcing him to fight it.

There’s no window seat or chair on the other side. Melanie is delicate; she shouldn’t be encouraged to do things like crawling in and out of her bedroom window. So Harry boosts himself over the edge and hopes.

His hope is somewhat misplaced. Harry tumbles into Melanie’s room, all legs and arms and newborn bruises, landing on the floor with a thump he feels sure will bring her father running. He holds himself in frozen stillness for a long moment, as if Dr. Cosgrove could somehow fail to see the open window and the unexpected boy upon coming into the room. When that doesn’t happen, Harry slowly untenses and stands, brushing bits of bark off his hands. The room is dark, even though it’s the middle of the day.

“Mel?”

She sleeps in a big canopy bed, like something that ought to belong to a princess, something that should be in Castleview. When he’s grown up and owns the castle, her bed will be in Castleview, and she’ll be there with it. They’ll have sleepovers and watch movies every night, and whatever’s wrong with her heart won’t be able to hurt her anymore. His mom says machines are just helpers, made to do things people don’t want to do for themselves. So he can be her pacemaker, and keep her heart happy so she doesn’t have to stay alone in her room.

“Mel?”

Harry moves toward the bed, where the curtains are drawn and Melanie is, presumably, asleep. When she doesn’t answer, he pulls back the curtain.

For a long moment, he can only stare, expression absolutely solemn, not moving in the slightest. Neither is Melanie. She’s lying perfectly still, like a statue or a carved soap doll. She’s always been pale—she’s the palest person he knows—but she looks like someone’s stolen all the blood out of her body and replaced it with water, she’s that pale right now. It’s like there’s nothing left of her.

She’s not breathing.

Harry’s eyes get bigger and bigger, and wider and wider, until the skin around them starts to hurt. Finally, when it’s all too much, when he knows that if he doesn’t do something, anything, to make things different than they are, he whispers her name again, her whole name, like he’s a teacher calling on her during class and hoping she’ll have the right answer after all.

She doesn’t answer.

Harry leans forward and takes her hand. It’s cold. Of course it’s cold. He’s only seven, but he knows a dead thing when he sees one, and Melanie’s a dead thing. Dead things are only warm when they’ve been out in the sun, and there’s no sun in this room. It’s cold in here even for October, so cold. She isn’t breathing and her hand is cold and this is the worst thing that has ever happened, this is worse even than the movie with the man with the knives on his hand, and he can’t breathe, and this is the sort of terrible you can’t even laugh at, because it’s too big. It’s too big, it’s too big, it’s too much, it’s too big—

If he were older, or harder, he might think of fairy tales, the kind where the brave prince wakes the sleeping princess by kissing her, even though she’s in no position to give him permission. But he’s not older, and while he’s not the softest boy in the world, he is seven years old and his best friend is a girl who hits harder than anyone else he knows. He would no more kiss her without asking her first than he would jump out her bedroom window and expect to be able to fly. Some things are possible and some things aren’t, and kissing her for the first time when she can’t say yes is impossible.

(Seasonal creatures are by their very nature linear: they run in one direction and not the other, one foot after the other, progressing ever forward into the uncertain future. In another story, they may have played out another way, may have followed a different set of rules and possibilities. If it seems strange that Harry knows what not to do when he’s so young and so afraid, consider only that he has, on some level, been here before, as we have all been here before, over and over again, for so long as to beggar understanding.)

Still holding Melanie’s hand (Melanie’s dead hand), Harry starts to cry. These aren’t little, delicate tears: these are the great, braying sobs of a boy who has just been betrayed beyond all reason, who can’t understand how any of this can possibly be happening. Dr. Cosgrove comes thundering up the stairs only a few seconds later, slamming the door open. When he sees Harry in his daughter’s room, holding her hand and sobbing, he doesn’t react with fear or with distress: he reacts, immediately, with anger.

“Get away from her, you fool!” he thunders, and throws himself at Harry, slapping their hands apart. He glares at the boy, man in a rage. “Get out of this room right now! Do you have any idea the damage you could have done? Any idea how much research you could have just wasted?”

Melanie’s hand, once dropped, dangles off the edge of the bed, taking her whole arm with it. She doesn’t move. Of course she doesn’t move: she’s dead, and she’s never going to move ever, ever again. Harry keeps crying as Dr. Cosgrove drags him out of the room and down the stairs, keeps crying as Melanie’s father calls his parents, and is still crying fifteen minutes later, when the doorbell rings.

“Stay right there,” Dr. Cosgrove commands, and leaves him sitting, weeping, on the couch as he crosses the room to let Harry’s parents inside. His mother is the first through the door, distress clear and arms already open, and Harry doesn’t need any further prompting: he flings himself into them, clutching her while he sobs.

“Baby, what’s wrong?” she asks.

The look on Dr. Cosgrove’s face is complicated and terrible, the face of a man who dreads the words he’s about to hear. Harry barely notices. He looks into his mother’s eyes, takes a deep breath, and wails,

“She’s dead she’s dead Melanie’s dead!”

His voice is high and piercing and honest in its distress, as only a child’s voice can be. Maybe that’s why it does what it does. He’s standing with his face buried against his mother’s arm, sobbing his heart out as she demands to know what he’s talking about, when he hears the impossible. There are only four people in the house. Three of them are in the living room already, and he hears feet on the stairs.

Harry jerks away from his mother’s comforting arms and whirls to see a black-haired little girl in a red nightie standing with one hand on the bannister and the other hand rubbing her eye. “Daddy?” she asks. “Why’s Harry crying?”

Harry doesn’t answer her.

He’s already on the floor, passed out in a dead faint.

Runway

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 11TH, 2017: WINTER, UNDER THE WORM MOON.

TEN YEARS LATER.