Hapi by Cari Waites

Jayden didn’t go backto the shed. He spent most of the morning watching TV with Hapi and then, when the sound of a spluttering quad bike engine from outside signalled the arrival home of one of the brothers, Hapi took him back into his bedroom and left him there. He came back in shortly afterwards with a sandwich and a can of Coke, and in the brief moment the door was open, Jayden heard sharp voices from the direction of the kitchen.

Hapi left him alone to eat.

Jayden knew without being told that this was his last day. Hapi’s strange tenderness, the shower, breakfast and lunch… these things weren’t rewards for good behaviour—not given that Jayden had tried to escape the night before—these were small signs of affection from someone wanting to indulge in them before their time together ran its course. This was Hapi’s last chance to spoil him. Jayden supposed he was at least glad Hapi had chosen that over his last chance to punish him.

He looked outside Hapi’s window at the falling rain. One of the massive dogs prowled the area between the house and the shed, its black coat shiny and wet and its ears pricked. It vanished like a shadow into the rain. Jayden watched the rain a little longer and then, seized by a gnawing restlessness, he went to Hapi’s cupboard and opened the squeaking doors. It was an old-style cupboard, half hanging space and half drawers. Jayden pulled the top drawer open and dug through the odds and ends there until he found a pen. He turned it over and over on his injured palm, almost enjoying the sting of the flesh that tugged around the cut. Then, he lay on his stomach at the foot of Hapi’s bed and reached under the bed to write his name on the wall.

Jayden Michael Sanders

Then,not satisfied with the faint lines left by the pen, he dug over the letters roughly with the nib, gouging his name into the wall.

Maybe Hapi would move his bed one day and see it and think of him.

Maybe someone else would, if the police ever raided this place.

Jayden didn’t know if it was a remembrance or a clue for any future investigators. Maybe he’d just wanted to leave his mark somewhere. He doubted that he had, in any tangible way, in the almost two decades he’d been alive.

He put the pen back when he was finished and curled up on Hapi’s bed.

Living in the seconds had been a lot easier when it had meant a respite between bouts of pain and fear. But Jayden was fed and dry and comfortable, and it was suddenly a lot harder to turn his brain off.

He thought about the people who’d come before him, the other souls. He wondered where they’d wished they’d been on their last day. He wondered if they could pinpoint where their lives had taken a wrong turn because Jayden couldn’t.

He wasn’t a good kid who’d made bad choices. He hadn’t been running from anything and fallen into something worse. And there was no bright point in his past that he could focus on now and wish with all his heart that he could have back. His life had been small and unremarkable, battered at the edges with casual neglect and indifference, and nothing special or good at all. Hapi said that his heart was lighter than a feather, but Jayden wondered if his soul was bright as well, or if it was nothing more than a smudged, dim glow while all around it others blazed like stars in a moonless night.

The life he’d lived wasn’t worth much, but Jayden had had cautious plans to make it better. He sure as hell hadn’t done anything to deserve ending up like this. But he also knew better than to rail against the fact that life was unfair. He’d always known that.

He stared at Hapi’s ceiling. There was a water mark in one corner that spoke of a roof that had leaked at some point and, in the other corner, the remains of a spider’s web.

He didn’t want to be here.

He wanted Hapi to save him.

But he knew wishing for either of those things was hopeless.

* * *

The day draggedon and Jayden dozed to the dull roar of the rain on the roof. He slipped in and out of dreams of flooded rivers and reeds, of crocodiles snapping at his heels and cats slipping away from him when he tried to grab them. He jolted awake when Hapi touched his arm and blinked up at him.

“Is it time?” Jayden asked softly.

“Soon,” Hapi said. He lay down beside Jayden, and Jayden rolled into his embrace.

“I feel like I should say something,” Jayden said, “but there’s nothing to say, is there?”

Hapi didn’t answer.

“I wish I’d had bigger dreams,” Jayden said. He splayed his hand against Hapi’s chest, feeling the softness of his worn T-shirt. “I wish I’d done more things, but even now, I don’t know what they might have been. Just bigger and brighter than anything else I ever did, I guess.”

His hand rose and fell with Hapi’s deep breaths.

“Because….” His voice cracked. “I don’t think I’m ready to go. And don’t—” He sucked in a shaky breath. “Don’t tell me I’m already dead, please. I have to feel this, okay? I have to.”

Hapi put his hand over Jayden’s.

“I wanted so many things I never put into words, and I can feel them all now. It’s really big and it hurts, and, Jesus, I wish you could get that, Hapi.” He tugged his hand free and made a fist. Punched Hapi ineffectually in the chest. “I wish you could get that, but you never will, will you?”

Hapi stared back at him.

Jayden snorted. “Fuck, if there was a time for you to talk, it’d be now, but of course you have nothing to say. I don’t even know why I’m surprised.”

“There’s nothing I can do.”

“I know that!” Jayden squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and when he opened them his vision was blurry with tears. “I’m not asking you to do anything. I just want you to try to understand. I’m scared, Hapi. I’m fucking terrified, and you think you’re doing me a favour because some stupid Egyptian heaven is waiting for me! But even if that was true, I still wouldn’t be ready to go!”

Hapi opened his mouth and closed it again.

“And now you’re looking at me like I’m the crazy one,” Jayden said, a bitter laugh escaping him. “You can’t even see how fucked up all this is because you’re right in the middle of it.” He shook his head and then said, “I just want you to understand how I feel, and I want you to let me feel it. I’m so scared, Hapi.”

Hapi wrapped his arms around Jayden in response and pulled him tightly to him. He kept one arm on Jayden’s back, trapping him in close. He carded the fingers of his other hand through Jayden’s hair, a little too clumsy to be properly gentle, but the roughness reminded Jayden of the few times he’d been a kid and his mum had rubbed his hair dry after a shower. Sometimes he’d thought he could feel his brain rattling in the skull, but he’d like it all the same.

All of this would be so much easier if only he could believe in heaven. Hapi’s weird Egyptian one was probably full of cats and pyramids—what the fuck did Jayden know about ancient Egypt? He wondered if there really was a journey after death and whether or not his mum had been judged. Her heart, he imagined, had probably weighed exactly the same as a syringe.

Jayden had been fifteen. He hadn’t gone to school that day. He’d gone and hung out at the shops with his mates instead, using the car park ramps to skate and dodging pissy security guards all day. It had been late when he’d gotten home to the flat. The lights had been off, even though it had been dark already, but that hadn’t been so unusual.

Mum had been lying on the couch.

Jayden had walked straight past her into the kitchen to get a drink. It hadn’t even occurred to him until he’d been rinsing his cup out in the sink that something had been wrong.

Even now, he could still remember that it wasn’t the way she’d been cold that had been the strangest thing. It was the way she’d looked like nothing—like a saggy plasticine model of a person—because all the muscles that usually held her expressions in place, even when she’d been sleeping, had stopped working. Or maybe what he’d noticed was the absence of her soul.

Would his face look so slack and strange once they killed him?

“Tell me what will happen,” he whispered.

Hapi’s hand stilled for a moment and then tugged gently on Jayden’s hair. “We will cut you, under our father’s instruction. Qebehsenuef will take your intestines. Duamutef will take your stomach. Imsety will take your liver. I will take your lungs. We will place them in jars, and then your heart can be weighed.”

Hot tears ran down Jayden’s face. “You said it wouldn’t hurt me.”

“It won’t hurt,” Hapi said. “I promise you.”

“You’re talking about cutting me apart!” He struggled against Hapi’s hold, but Hapi was too strong for him. “Of course it will hurt!”

“No,” Hapi said firmly. His fingers brushed the soft hair at the nape of Jayden’s neck, and then he pressed firmly against the side of his throat, and Jayden grew dizzy. “Remember this?”

Not his lungs this time, Jayden thought. His carotid artery. The pressure made him woozy. It wasn’t unpleasant. He tilted his head to relieve it when his vision grew spotty and rested his ear against Hapi’s chest. Hapi’s heartbeat sounded as loud as a drum. “You’ll knock me out, so I don’t feel it.”

“I’ll take your breath before the cut is made,” Hapi said.

Jayden exhaled shakily. “Is that what you did for the others, too?”

“No.” Hapi rubbed Jayden’s back. “They weren’t mine to claim. You are the first.”

A statement like that shouldn’t have filled Jayden with strange warmth, but what did it matter? He’d never been special before. It was fucked up, but why not believe that at least Hapi would remember him? Nobody else would.

“You promise it won’t hurt?”

“I promise,” Hapi said.

Jayden curled his fingers in Hapi’s T-shirt. “When you noticed me, what was it you liked?”

Hapi hummed and then said, “Your eyes. I like your blue eyes.”

“You don’t get to keep those, though, do you?” Jayden asked softly. “They don’t go in your jar.”

Hapi grunted.

Jayden shivered as he heard the tread of footsteps and the corresponding creak of floorboards in the hallway outside Hapi’s closed bedroom door. He waited, sick anticipation turning his blood to ice water, for the footsteps to stop and the door to open, but whoever it was kept moving and the sound faded.

He wished he’d never come here. He wished he’d never bought that shitheap of a car that had broken down. He wished he’d kept heading north with the sleazy truck driver who’d made the joke about blow jobs. He wished he’d never stayed at the River Bend Caravan Park and Tourist Resort. He wished he’d never left his cabin when the power went out that night. And he wished that Hapi had fixated on some other soul to be his victim.

And yet, Hapi was the only man who’d ever held him so gently.

Yeah.

It was fucked up, but Jayden wanted someone to hold him, now more than ever. Maybe he was like a shivering, slavish dog that kept crawling back to the guy who’d kicked it, but what did any of that matter? What difference would it make in the end? What was wrong with wanting comfort, however shallow it was?

He shifted and this time Hapi loosened his grip. Jayden propped himself up on his elbow. He studied Hapi’s face. The angles of his profile. The line of his mouth. His tanned skin and his dark eyes. Then he shifted his gaze to the armband of Hapi’s T-shirt where it sat tightly against his muscled biceps. He caught a glimpse of ink and pushed the band up to reveal the tattoo he hadn’t dared ask about before: the Egyptian-style eye.

Jayden traced the outline with his fingers. “What is it?”

Hapi exhaled. “The wedjat. The Eye of Horus. It protects against evil.”

Jayden widened his eyes. “Are you sure it’s working?”

“Watch your mouth,” Hapi said in a growl, but his lips quirked.

Jayden nodded but leaned down and kissed Hapi quickly to reward him for his almost-smile, when Hapi could have so easily responded to Jayden’s words with violence. Because if Hapi had fucked up Jayden’s head, he had no doubt it went both ways. With a little more time… but there was no point dwelling on that.

Hapi had said that it wouldn’t hurt. That was all Jayden needed to focus on now. Everything else had already been decided. Whether it had been decided the moment he fell in the river or the moment his car broke down or even the moment he’d walked into the flat when he was fifteen and found his mum dead on the couch, it didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered anymore, except curling up with Hapi and sinking into the sensation of fingers rubbing his scalp. Jayden’s eyes stung with fresh tears, so he closed them. Live in the seconds, he’d told himself at the start of all this. He had to live in the seconds.

“What is there is no heaven?” he whispered.

“Aaru is real,” Hapi told him, “and you are almost there.”

“But I don’t want to go alone.”

Hapi was silent, tracing patterns through Jayden’s hair. Maybe they meant something to him, like the hieroglyphs on the wall of the front room, or maybe he was just enjoying touching Jayden while he still could.

“You will not be alone in Aaru,” Hapi said. “Nobody is.”

“If you were really a god, you’d know there’s nobody waiting for me.” Jayden’s heart beat faster as Hapi pinched the back of his neck in warning. “There isn’t, though. There’s no one. I don’t think you know what it’s like to be alone. You have your family. Your father and your brothers. I always wanted something like that.”

“Quiet,” Hapi said.

Jayden swallowed down a rush of abortive anger. Quiet? Why the fuck should he be quiet? But he knew Hapi’s patience didn’t extend very far, and he didn’t want Hapi to be angry with him or to hurt him. A part of him also didn’t want to ruin the burgeoning connection he felt between them that was almost an understanding, and almost a shared regret that both of them were trapped in their roles of killer and victim.

It made his head ache.

“You were my first, too,” he whispered into Hapi’s T-shirt. “The first guy I slept with. The first one I kissed.” He swallowed around the lump in his bruised throat. “My last, too, I guess.”

Hapi swept his big palm down Jayden’s spine.

Footsteps creaked in the hallway and this time they stopped at Hapi’s door.

The doorknob rattled.

Jayden sobbed into Hapi’s chest.

“It’s time,” Hapi said, his voice low. He pressed a kiss to the top of Jayden’s head. “Come, it’s time.”