Hangman Chapter 20

Chapter 20-

Drops of Springwater doused Janna’s leg and shoulder. Despite the sizzling sound and thin trail of smoke that arose from her wounds, she felt only the relief of pain. After a moment of waiting for her muscle and tissue to regenerate, she slowly sat up and touched the spots where she had been injured.

“Pretty good, huh?” Gallow attempted to add some charm to his voice, but it was a hollow effort.

Janna turned so that her feet hung off the bench in Gallow’s office; there wasn’t much to say, so she looked over at his makeshift bed, where Sonsee lay, unconscious.

“This is the real Springwater?” Daso asked gruffly. “How much longer until she awakes?” He was standing up against the wall, arms crossed.

Gallow contemplated for a moment.

“Well,” he began. “I haven’t used it to treat anyone in this poor of a condition…”

Daso blinked at that statement. In a subtle way, it was his uncontrollable reaction, a kind of wince at hearing the assessment of the damage he’d dealt to his sister.

“All of her wounds have been healed,” Gallow continued. “Any poison in her body should be purified as well. I don’t think she’s in any critical condition, it’s pretty hard to be after this stuff.”

Sitting atop Gallow’s desk, Gideon chuckled. “I’ve never gotten a better treatment than that stuff…”

“She’s just unconscious from shock and exhaustion,” Janna spoke up. All three young men turned their attention to her, surprisedly. Janna was a little embarrassed by their looks.

“W-well-” she stuttered. “It’s just a basic medical fact- the human body can only take so much nervous system trauma before it shuts down- it’s more of a defensive reaction, really-”

“Are you looking to be a doctor, little lady?” Gideon asked, playfully.

Janna gulped. “Why- why yes, Mister Captain, I’m studying because I’d like to be a doctor.”

Gideon’s eyebrows raised, he kept his playful smile. “You know the aptitude test is in only a few months, the one in Hilltop?”

Janna’s eyes sparkled a little bit more. “Yes, Mister, I’ve been studying for the test for years…”

“And just how are you going to get all the way to the Eastern Coast?” he ribbed her.

“Well,” she began. “Father was-”

She stopped abruptly in her the middle of her sentence. The room was quiet; Gallow tried his best not to look nervous as he glanced once at Gideon, then back at Janna.

“We were… going to take the train.” She spoke softly and slowly. “He’d been saving up money for us to make the journey…” It was clear that she was done speaking, there wasn’t enough strength left in her voice.

Gallow looked down at his boots and sighed. His heart hurt.

Janna found a focal point in the floorboards and concentrated on it as hard as she could to hold herself together.

“What’s worse: breaking down and crying, or holding yourself on the brink?”

---

The ground opened up beneath Warren’s body.

“--?” Tears were slowly rolling down Gallow’s face, but a sudden confused expression befell him as the waters swallowed Warren up. Gallow ran to the bank of the Spring, but he couldn’t make anything out in the water. It was as if the blue depths had turned pitch-black all at once.

“W-Warren?” he asked, but asked to nobody. Gallow plunged his hand into the water.

“[NAVIGATOR]!”

His spirit form leapt out of his body and into the water.

“What’s this-?”

Deep below, and quickly drifting away, he saw Warren’s body floating down into the abyss. Faintly, he saw a shape swirl around him, ethereal wisps curling together and forming-

“Spirit?” he called.

She was behind Warren, holding him in her arms at his waist. Her hair flowed infinitely out into the water around her; she gazed at the young man with a kind, motherly expression before they both disappeared completely into the blackness. In the final moments he could make them out, Gallow could have sworn he watched her whisper something into his ear.

When his soul returned to his body, he sensed a change around him. Within moments, he watched the green grass that covered the rolling hills turn brown and wither away.

“No!” he didn’t know what else to think, besides horror at what was unfolding before him. In a short span of time, all plant life had begun to die off and shrink. The sky turned a moody overcast, leaves simply disintegrated off the branches of trees.

“[NAVIGATOR]!”

He fell to his knees and slammed the ground.

“I can- I can do it again!”

Spirit energy flowed from his hand into the ground; the grass around him returned to green and flourished.

“Yes! I’ve got it”

His enthusiasm was short-lived, as within ten seconds of his attempt he felt an incredible fatigue wash over him. It hit his spirit with such intensity that he became dizzy and almost collapsed. The moment his hand left the ground, the decay swept in once more.

“Damn it… damn it!” he cursed himself while struggling to get to his feet. Tears were still fresh on his face, and now he was forced to confront the death of the Garden. He wasn’t quite sure what he was cursing. Himself? But it wasn’t really his fault, right? Maybe he was cursing the world, when there’s no one person or thing to be a lightning rod for anger, the world at large was a good substitute.

Neurotic questions like these were mental traps he often fell into.

“Invite calamity…”

Warren’s words entered his mind, only bringing him more anguish.

“I need to stop thinking about this,” he realized. Finally, he was able to stand up. “These questions can wait.”

After touching down outside, he found the rest of his acquaintances, bloodied and beaten from the ordeal.

---

Night had fallen, and Sonsee, while still alive, had shown no sign of awaking. She intermittently tossed and turned throughout her slumber.

“You can take a nap on the bench, I’ll get you some blankets,” Gallow offered to Daso. The two of them were the only ones left in the office, the native man refused to leave his sister’s side, especially in the care of Gallow.

Daso said nothing, but continued his steady watch on the floorboards, glanicng up every now and then when she made a movement, but never breaking his stony expression. Years alone in the wild had trained him to steel his senses for long night-watches.

“Do you have anything to say to me?” Gallow prodded to no avail. “Oh well,” he sighed, closing his eyes. “I can’t blame you for being so protective of her- she’s not half-bad looking-”

Daso broke his focus and shot him an icy expression, stepping one foot in Gallow’s direction.

“Hey- hey, it was a joke-!” Gallow pleaded anxiously, but Daso kept his glare fixated on him.

A moment passed between them, Gallow silently waving his hands, arms held up in a capitulating gesture. Eventually, the brother silently broke his gaze and turned back to Sonsee.

“I need to get better at dealing with these kinds of things…” Gallow contemplated.

---

Janna’s footsteps plodded up the stairs of her home under the cover of dark. The water had healed her body, but her heart and mind were exhausted. Upon reaching the top step, she got to her knees before laying down, her hair spread messily across the floor.

……

……….

…………

………

……

Sunlight broke through the window at the end of the second-floor hallway, bathing her in a kind of warm blanket she had missed in the night. Her eyes opened lethargically, covered in sleep. She rolled onto her back, splaying her arms out.

“I wanna go back to sleep…”

It had not been a restful few hours, her eyes felt sore and she struggled to even sit up comfortably.

In a half-hour’s time, she felt the rumble of hunger resound in her stomach. Perhaps her mental faculties had no need to get up, but her biological ones certainly did.

“What will happen if I don’t get up? If I don’t eat?” she wondered. “If I don’t move, I’ll starve.”

“If I Don’t Move, I’ll Starve.”

She repeated the phrase in her mind several times over as she reluctantly sat up. It became a kind of inspiring call to her, in a strange way. At such a depressive point, she supposed, sometimes it was a high enough goal to just survive. Living in and of itself was the next higher state.

This thought was replaced with another, much simpler one upon getting to her seat.

“I slept on this all night??”

The stiffness of the floorboards was a testament to the sheer exhaustion Janna had felt; that anyone could sleep the night on such old, uncomfortable wooden slats marked an achievement.

She got to her feet, lifting herself up by the bannister. Upon retracing her steps down the staircase, she arrived at the living room To her right, the open chest where her father had retrieved his shotgun. She didn’t think about that. The sunlight was blowing out the window, it was as if her house was floating in a void; there was no outside, only inside.

To the left and behind her spanned a short hallway; she trudged down its length and entered her kitchen. Still on the counter were ingredients to make grits.

“That’ll do,” she decided, and set to work preparing breakfast.

First, she heated the water and milk in a saucepan, then placed the raw grits into a separate bowl, mixing it with water. Grits were inedible with the chaff still present, so it was necessary to stir them thoroughly, causing the husks to rise to the surface. Janna carefully skimmed the chaff off the top of the bowl, then waited five minutes for the milk to simmer, mixing the two together.

For about ten minutes she waited for the meal to finish cooking, stirring regularly with a large wooden spoon. Eventually, she waited out the workman-like preparation process and was left with a finished bowl of grits. As she sat down at the table, she realized that she had forgotten to add any kind of flavoring.

“Just salt and butter will do,” she reasoned, and got up to check the cabinets. The salt was kept on the top shelf, which was too high for her to reach. Diligently, Janna grabbed a chair from the table and used it to raise herself up. With the chair, she was tall enough to reach the salt, but something caught her eye. Carved into the inside of the cabinet door were four letters, two sets of initials:

E.H.

M.H.

Eli Halloway

Maria Halloway

Janna took in a sharp breath, her feet fumbled beneath her. She lost her balance and tipped off the wooden chair. With a hard thudding sound, she hit the floor, enough to bruise her soft skin.

The physical pain she experienced was ignored, slid beneath the anguish in her heart. Both the people who built this house were dead. She lay on the hard ground, lacking even the power to weep.

There was no outside, only inside.

Minutes passed on the floor, time stopped having a meaning to her; it only felt like she would stay there forever, holding herself.

“If I Don’t Move, I’ll Starve,” she remembered. “But I Can’t Move.”

The agony inside was incessant, waves of depression covered her in different parts. Once her leg, then her chest, then her stomach, then her head.

A knock at the door.

“W-what?”

Another knock.

She peered down the hall from her place on the ground.

There was a noise.

A person?

From outside.

She stood up, collecting herself for a moment, and walked steadily to the front door. Her hand wrapped around the knob and twisted. The door opened slowly for her, but it felt like a momentous action, like opening the hatch of a submarine underwater.

Light poured in. Standing casually, looking to the side, was Gallow. He turned his attention to her, and gave a weak smile.

“Hey, goodmorning,” he greeted.

“Goodmorning, Mister Gallow,” she replied quietly.

He straightened his posture. “Do you mind if I come inside?”

She was a little surprised by his offer, but answered with a timid, “No, not at all.”

“I was just about to eat breakfast, as a matter of fact,” she continued as he stepped over the threshold.

They entered the kitchen together.

“Sorry,” she began. “But would it be too much trouble to reach the salt up there?”

“Certainly,” he responded, grabbing it with ease.

“Thank you very much, sir,” she took the butter from the counter and began to mix the two into her grits.

“Would you like some?” she suggested.

“Nah,” came the reply. “I already ate at my place.”

For a few minutes, they sat at the table. He patiently watched her eat, glancing down at his thumbs every so often. Eventually, he decided he needed to state his reason for being there.

“So,” he began. “How are you doing?”

She stopped eating and looked at him with a blank expression.

“Yeah,” he offered, meekly. “I get it.”

It was too difficult to convey the state she was in.

He waited for her to finish her breakfast.

“So… was it good?”

“As good as grits can be.” She gave a half-hearted chuckle. “Hey,” she said suddenly and softly. “Can you take me to the Garden today?”

Gallow’s heart sunk, his jerk-response was to take a deep breath through his nostrils.

“Is something wrong?” she asked cautiously, reading the emotion in his reaction.

“Well…” he attempted to answer her, but it was a moment before he had collected himself enough to speak truthfully. “It’s just that… the Garden…” he struggled to pull the next few words from his throat.

“The Garden has died away.”

Janna’s eyes widened. “W-what…?”

Gallow could not look at her when he elaborated. “When Warren died, the Spring absorbed his body- or something, I don’t really know… but all of the life there just… withered away.”

“I need to see it.”

“You-?”

“I can’t believe that! I need to see it myself!”

Her voice was filled with desperation. Gallow realized then and there that he could not argue with her; this was something she needed to see, this was her growing up.

---

Janna fell to her knees on the blackened soil.

“No…” she protested what she saw before her. The grass was obliterated, the trees drained into fossilized husks, the water an endless inky-black. Vainly, she touched the dirt, wrestling with the affirmation it gave her.

“Not this too…” she whispered under her breath. “How much more…?”

Gallow couldn’t bear to look at her, so he turned his head to the dark gray sky.

“Why does this have to happen…?” again she whispered.

A teardrop hit the dry, charred soil. Two more followed, until eventually she could feel the blood rushing to her downturned face. Janna tried to wipe the running snot and tears from her face, but it just kept coming. Gallow gritted his teeth at the sound of her suffering, he grabbed the brim of his hat and pulled it down further over his eyes to hide the tears he knew were coming.

“Am I just going to stand here?” he asked himself. “While this little girl is crying?”

He slowly turned to her and took a few steps forward, the black dirt crunching beneath his boots. She looked up to see him sit down next to her. He felt his heart hit by another stroke of grief; her face was too sweet and young to be so tortured. All he could offer her was a little smile through his reddened eyes, nothing more.

To Janna, his expression was the dearest thing in the world. Without warning, she hugged him, causing a small “oh-!” to escape his lips.

“How can you…” she tried to ask. “How can you look happy?”

Holding her close to his chest, he replied, “I’m not happy.”

She looked up at him, teary-eyed and curious. “But maybe,” he continued. “If I can fabricate some of that feeling for you, I could be happy too.”

Janna’s eyes widened with heartfelt emotion before she could feel the tears coming up again, burying her face in Gallow’s shirt.

“Don’t be so touched…” he whispered, perhaps only to himself. “It’s really a greedy idea…”

Under the pale gray light of purgatory in the dead Garden, they wept together.