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The Art of Self-Destruction

Time passed after they pulled Owen from that room and into the crawlspace. He was soaked in red—his own blood. Oozing from his chewed fingertips, but worse, from the sores and scratches in his arm. In one spot, he’d literally pulled a Band Aid–sized strip of skin clean off; the muscle lay exposed, glistening crimson. It took everything she and Hamish had to get him into the wall.

They didn’t have much by way of first aid—just a bit of gauze, a bunch of painkillers, a tube of off-brand Neosporin. Stuff they’d gathered over the last few days since seeing the copy (because that’s how she thinks of them, as copies, not as ghosts, copypasta, creepypasta) of her mother in that room.

They did what they could with his injuries. Thankfully, all the screaming and thrashing about stopped as soon as he came into the crawlspace. Like one of those videos where a tornado appears, rips shit up, and thirty seconds later is gone again, replaced by the serenity of clear skies. He hit the crawlspace and his body sighed and sagged; he moaned and fell into an unconsciousness so deep Hamish said, “I think he’s dead.” But a pulse still fluttered fast in his neck.

Hamish offered to go out and look for more medical supplies, but that was a fraught mission. Already Lore knew you couldn’t go alone out there—and worse, though you could always make it back into the crawlspace, the passages between rooms were themselves a labyrinth, and so Hamish might have a hell of a time finding her and Owen again. And they couldn’t leave Owen alone, could they? Maybe they could’ve. But she didn’t want to.

So, time passed. They waited. Slept when they could on the pillows and blankets they’d pulled in here. At one point, they found a string of Christmas lights on an old dead Christmas tree in a nursery, and Lore pulled them in here, and plugged in using an outlet on the other side of the wall—the inside of the house.

The lights twinkled.

Owen stirred, moaning, but not waking up.

Hamish said, “Where do you think Nick is?”

“I dunno.”

“You think he’s okay?”

“I dunno, Ham. I really hope so.”

—

While Hamish slept, Lore stayed up. She was a natural night owl, a habit born from years of insomnia—her brain would not quiet itself and so she often used it to work. It was trained to stay awake, to remain ever vigilant, especially when there was some kind of game design issue or story question she was working on. Her mental teeth worked every problem like gristle, at the cost of rest.

I’ll sleep when I’m dead, she always said.

Blatantly, vibrantly awake, she talked to Owen. Not because she wanted to work out the house’s puzzles or win this game—rather, it was just because she needed to say some shit . Needed to talk it out. And okay, fine, it was easier for her when he was unconscious. And she was awake anyway, right? So she sat down, plopped his head in her lap like she used to do sometimes, and babbled.

“So, I saw my mom. Not my real mom. She’s still alive outside this fucking place somewhere. But the mom I saw here was…just like her, the real her. For so long she left me alone and it fucked me all up. And now she’s alone because she pushes me away, hates what I am because the TV tells her to, and…it’s bad for her, dude. Being alone like that. And it was bad for you in the house. And I bet it was bad for Matty. Fuck. Alone. Alone, alone, alone. Always thought that was my superpower. Latchkey kid. Didn’t need anyone or anything. Didn’t need Matty, didn’t need you, didn’t need the Covenant.

“But the Covenant, it was everything. We were interlocking pieces and it made the whole of us stronger, I think, but then…I pissed off Matty, or Matty pissed off me, or whatever, and he went up those stairs and then, that was it. He was gone. The Covenant…” Her voice gave out. The words, dissolving.

“Friendship is like a house,” Lore finally managed to say, Owen’s head cradled in her lap. “You move into this place together. You find your own room there, and they find theirs, but there’s all this common space, all these shared places. And you each put into it all the things you love, all the things you are. Your air becomes their air. You put your hearts on the coffee table, next to the remote control, vulnerable and beautiful and bloody. And this friendship, this house, it’s a place of laughter and fun and togetherness, too. But there’s frustration sometimes. Agitation. Sometimes that gets big, too big, all the awful feelings, all that resentment, building up like carbon monoxide. Friendship, like a house, can go bad, too. That air you share? Goes sour. Dry rot here, black mold there, and if you don’t remediate, it just grows and grows. Gets bad enough, one or all of you have to move out. And then the place just fucking sits there, abandoned. Empty and gutted. Another ruin left to that force in the world that wants everything to fall apart. You can move back into a place like that, sometimes. But only if you tear it all down and start again.”

“We were just kids,” came a groaning croak from Owen.

“Owen.” She pushed her forehead against his. He felt hot, like he was fighting off a fever. “You’re awake.”

“I guess.”

And he’s been listening the whole time.

“Sorry to have woken you.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m…” This was hard for her. She had to willfully unclench her jaw to get the next bit out. “I’m fucking up the new game. The one I was working on before we came in here. Our game. The one we came up with. I’m fucking it all up. I can barely get anywhere on it and they paid me money and I will have nothing to show for it. And part of the reason why is that I know deep down it isn’t just mine, it’s ours, and it needs you. And I hate that it needs you.” She sighed. “But it does. It really, really does.”

He grunted and pushed back against her a little, getting more comfortable but also allowing his head up, more. She gave him some water, then, from a plastic water bottle. He sipped weakly at it, then said: “We get out of here, we work on it together. Like we always said we would. That’d be nice. For me, anyway.”

“It’d be nice for me, too. We were hot shit together, man. Somewhere I lost that. I thought I had to do it all myself. That I was better doing it that way.”

“You were better than me. I couldn’t get my shit together on my own. I always needed a crutch. Someone to lean on. Someone to carry me.”

“It wasn’t like that,” she said, even though it was. It wasn’t that Owen was a burden. But he needed her more than she needed him most times and that started to sour how she felt about him. It felt imbalanced. Unequal. But she could’ve been less shitty about it. “I shouldn’t have just discarded you. Like trash. I’m good at that. Good at just moving past things. Moving past…people. Like Matty.”

“Like I said, Lore, we were just kids. Losing Matty and then having everyone think we killed him—the way people looked at us. Jesus. That would’ve fucked anybody up. We gave up on each other because it was easier than staying together and being reminded of what we lost.”

“We should’ve gone after him. Like Nick wanted.” She paused then. Asked the question she didn’t want to ask. “Owen. Where’s Nick?”

At that, Owen’s eyes pressed shut. In pain, but a different kind of pain. Something deeper. Something sadder. “He led us all here, Lore. The house had him. He was alone, and it took him.” He seemed in agony thinking about it. Owen’s eyes shined with tears. “Maybe that’s how we didn’t lose ourselves,” Owen said to her in a low whisper. “We weren’t alone in here like Nick would’ve been the first time. He asked us to help him find Matty and we never did. We all abandoned one another. And he came in here by himself and the house got him. But when we came in together, it was different. We weren’t alone. I know when it was just me, when he left me…the house had its chance. I could feel it, Lore. It wasn’t just creeping around. It was confident . It opened me up and walked right in. But Nick, though? How long was he in here? By himself? What did that do to him?”

Lore tried to imagine it but couldn’t. It was too awful to think about. Especially because though he led them here—they’d let him come in alone the first time. They just hadn’t realized it.

Shit, she thought.

This really is all our fault .

“We broke the Covenant,” she said.

“Yeah. We did.” Owen sighed. “Nick said Matty was dead. He found him. He died in here. I think that was what did Nick in, at the end.”

“We couldn’t save Matty.”

It pained her, saying that out loud. Admitting something was too late, that there was something you fucked up that you could not fix.

“We couldn’t save Matty, but you saved me. And we might still be able to save Nick. If he’s still here. If we can find him.”

“Then that’s the plan,” she said. “We find Nick. We free him from this place, somehow, some way.”

“The Covenant,” Owen said.

“Motherfucking Covenant.”

And with that, Owen passed out in her lap.