Ascent
or, the Risen and Fallen on the Seventh Floor
by Kirryn Lia Todd
I told Mephisto all this as I lounged against the stairwell banister in the hall, stinking of tobacco, inhaling smoke as Mephisto swallowed down a mysterious clear alcohol in one of my whiskey tumblers (eighteenth birthday present from my Dad). What this was and where he had procured this from I had no idea, since the only alcohol I had in my apartment was 100 Pipers cheap and nasty whiskey. When you lived on Money for Crazies as funded by the government, you took what you could get. It got me drunk when I needed to be drunk, that was the main thing.
I was sitting on the floor; the demon was standing, looking pensive. Even as dangerous as he looked, with his brow almost but not quite furrowed, the hard set of his lips and the glinting of his eyes in his alabaster face, he still seemed stunningly beautiful.
“No reason,” he murmured, to himself or to me, I wasn’t sure.
“I mean it,” I said, breathing out a cloud of noxious fumes. Undoubtedly I was probably getting cancer as I sat here. I wished that I could care a little more, sort of. “Nothing…everyone was good. To me. No one hurt me. I just…went mad.”
“Your stepfather hit you,” Mephisto said, tightly. I was surprised at that. Wouldn’t a demon approve of someone hitting someone else?
“Elouise.”
The razorblades in his voice made me look up, and I was startled at the look in his eyes. Perhaps human beings hadn’t reached that emotion beyond anger, quiet and cold and yet burning like the bush in the summertime, but demons had — Mephisto had. His eyes felt like someone driving nails into the soft places just beneath the hollow of my collarbone. I couldn’t look away.
“You would be doing yourself a great favour if you stopped making any assumptions about my nature in general,” he said, quietly. I turned pink, tried to scowl up at him. I didn’t quite have the guts to do so.
“You read my mind!”
“Correction. I read your face.” He took a sip from the tumbler, and again gazed off into nothingness, pensive once more. “And your stepfather hit you. Something I am not sure I approve of.”
“He didn’t do it to hurt me,” I insisted, taking a deep drag on my cigarette and scowling, finally, although not at him. I wasn’t as insane as all that. “He just did it to shut me up. I was screaming like there’d been a homicide or something. The neighbours were probably scared half to death.”
“Hm,” Mephisto replied. “Did the neighbours complain?”
“Don’t think so,” I said. “Mum or Jayme or one of my sisters probably went over and explained that I’d lost my head again, no reason to call the police or ambulance or anything.”
“Jayme?”
“My stepfather. Mum’s new husband. Well, he’s not really her new husband anymore. But I kind of still think of him that way.”
“Hm,” said Mephisto, and consulted his (my) tumbler again. “And none of this was brought on by the divorce?”
“Told you.” I huffed out a mouthful of smoke. “The divorce wasn’t a trauma or anything. Me and my sisters kinda knew that it’d happen sooner or later. ‘When the sex gets boring,’ Ruby used to say. Ruby’s one of my sisters. She was probably right.”
“Sex can keep two people together when nothing else will,” Mephisto’s grin into his drink could have been a smug sneer, had his eyes met mine. “Even moreso than children.”
“Since when do children keep people together?” I snorted.
“Hmm, good point. I must be getting old, losing touch.”
“How old are you?” I asked, genuinely curious. I stood up and stretched, throwing the butt of my cigarette onto the dirty floor and smothering it with the heel of my shoe. It joined many others, long since flattened, out there in the hallway. We were so weird, us on the seventh floors. Smoking was forbidden in our rooms, which were outfitted with smoke alarms, so we leaned out windows and gave ourselves cancer in the hall. Smoking wasn’t encouraged in the hall, either, so there were no ashtrays. Long before I had made my appearance at the hotel, someone must have decided that meant that the only way to dispose of the butts was to fling them on the floor. I was following suit. Vaguely aware that it was a bad thing. Vaguely aware that I should care. Vaguely.
“Can you really not simply walk to the window and flick that out?” Mephisto nodded towards the now-flattened end of my cigarette, amusement sparkling in his eyes.
“I could. But I don’t want to. You bite me, devil man.”
He burst into laughter, mirth enough to bring tears to his eyes.
“You are the most extraordinary girl. Where I come from, you could be raised higher than a queen, did you know that?”
“I didn’t. I’m not quite sure if that’s a compliment, either.”
“It is a compliment. I’m extremely impressed.”
“Thank you, then,” I replied. I could feel one of my better moods hovering around my conscious, ready to settle in at the slightest word. From Mephisto? From anyone. I looked forward to when it decided to click in, geared myself up for it.
“You’re a question dodger, though,” I said, turning to look the demon in the eyes. He quirked an eyebrow at me. “I just asked you how old you are.”
He chuckled. “Probably a lot older than you could guess.”
“Hm. Probably.”
The door to 7F opened then, and Nutmeg stepped out of her apartment. Her hair was tied back in an elegant twist at the back of her head, and she tucked a stray wisp of hair behind her ears as she locked her door after her. She was wearing her veiled look, the one she kept on her face when she was going to leave the hotel to go shopping or to go to work, or what-have-you. It faded slightly when she saw me and her eyes lit up a little.
“Hello there, sweet pea,” she smiled, and I raised my hand to wave, somewhat shyly. It was funny how Nutmeg could make me feel like I was greeting a queen or a princess, not just another resident of the seventh floor. She really had that something. “How are you feeling today? Did the headache pass?”
“Yes,” I answered, with a smile. In a way, it had, hadn’t it? At least, I thought so. “Thank you for the Panadol.”
“It’s not a prob…lem…” Nutmeg trailed off, her smile falling from her face like a hot drop of wax from a candle. Her eyes turned brittle and cold as chips of cerulean ice, and all the colour seeped out of her. Even her hair seemed paler. She stared at me like she was seeing the Apocalypse unfold upon my face, or perhaps worse. She opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again.
“Elouise,” she choked out.
I just stared at her, bewildered. Unable to be seen, Mephisto shifted beside me, put his hand on my shoulder. Protective? Wary? That seemed at odds with him being a demon…but he had just told me in no uncertain terms to stop making assumptions like that.
My head spun in circles. My encroaching good mood was evaporating like a morning mist in the sunlight. What the hell, I thought. What the hell?!
“Elouise,” Nutmeg said again, her voice turning into icy coolness to match her eyes, even as the veiled expression — and then some — slipped over her face yet again. She touched my cheek with her long fingers as she passed me, making her way downstairs. “Make sure you lock your door, won’t you?”
“My…apartment door?”
“Yes. See you this afternoon, sweet pea.” Her call came up the stairwell like the sound of a shard of broken glass falling onto the pavement.
“See…see you…” I muttered, giddy from confusion. I think the only thing that kept me from sprawling down onto the floor out of sheer perplexity was Mephisto’s hand on my shoulder. And, speak of the devil…
“So that was your famous Nutmeg,” Mephisto mused, staring down the stairwell as if he could still see Nutmeg, although she had to have been on the fourth or third floor by now. “How…intriguing.”
“She was wigging out,” I said, once again showing off my penchant for stating the very obvious. “She’s not…usually she’s pretty…she’s calm…sort of, more calm with this hidden rage, but that’s…I’ve never seen her like that before! I must’ve done something wrong, but…I didn’t, did I.”
Mephisto chuckled. “It’s all about you, isn’t it?”
“Not that way! I didn’t mean, I just — people don’t freak out on their own, not like that. And it wasn’t like at me personally. It was like she saw something awful coming out of the top of my head.” I patted my crown gingerly, then looked worriedly at Mephisto. “There isn’t, is there? Something I can’t see? You’re a demon, if there’s something there that you can see, tell me! You will, won’t you?”
Mephisto burst into laughter at that. “There’s nothing there, my dear. What I think–”
“Elouise! Good morning!”
I whirled around, startled. I hadn’t even noticed that the door to 7C had opened and shut while I was wondering about the state of my head.
“You’re up early. I didn’t wake you up, did I? Vince said that he heard you wake up around about the same time I was playing the Desert Bastard. I’m sorry if I did. Forgot it was Monday morning, naturally.”
I couldn’t breathe.
This was Killian Lanois of 7C, across the hall from me. He was perhaps twenty-something, mid-twenties at the latest. His face was fair, friendly — and yet strangely darkly beautiful, as if storms could gather in his eyes in a flash and change his mood like the weather. Something about his smile drew me in, a gentleness and a reckless tenderness that lit up his face, up to his eyes which shone bright blue like summer skies. Something about him was summer, dry and hot and slow dying days and too lovely for words, the kind of day where you lay back as the sunset turned the sky purple and you realised that you were more content than you’d ever been before in your life. I wanted that summer so badly my hands began to ache. I wanted to twist my fingers into his dark hair, gathered messily at the nape of his neck in a ponytail, strands escaping the band — not quite long enough to scrape all the way out of his eyes, not yet. There was a tiny scar along the left side of his nose, hardly more than a scratch from a fingernail’s width, but it had obviously come from a gash that needed to be stitched, at some long-ago point. My throat swelled, started to hurt.
The world turned itself inside out with a shock of sparks like midsummer fireworks.
“Elouise,” the demon at my side whispered into my ear.
Killian’s face was identical to Mephisto’s.