joah dawson. d10 fin

beating biting chanting screaming the coffin is empty rats' blood red paint where is he it's just an illness eggshell cracked he's just sick splintered that's all shattered stained glass kaleidoscope where is he scratching varnish plaster ceiling marble pews columns burnt burning he's stuck dust ashen save him charcoal the rat can't get out starving faith save him snapped trap the coffin is empty the coffin is empty where is he where is he



Little Levi Dawson is much too small for his age, but he makes up for it tenfold in cleverness; too curious for his own good, he says very little, but he watches everything. He follows his older brother around like a particularly mischievous puppy, and his parents dote on him, but it scares them something fierce when Joah wakes up from another nightmare, bolting up and screaming hoarse that he's seen Hell and the Damned and the Dying, and instead of condemning him for it, Levi sits at the foot of the bed and begs him to recount it with all the authority a seven year old can muster.

Their mother brings stories home from the library, but none of them appease Levi the way these ones do. He turns demanding with it. He invites sickness, and so he turns sick.

It starts as an innocuous thing in the lungs, just a funny little tick in his breathing, and then a tick turns into a cough, and then one evening during dinner Levi spits a glob of blood into his glass of milk and he has to be put in isolation for a few days. And then for a few more days. And then he's been locked in his little one-windowed bedroom for over two weeks and no one quite knows what to do.

He screams when he's not sleeping and he cries when he's not screaming, he claws at the door until he's too weak to stand and anyone that tries to talk to him through the door gets drowned out by the sound of his little frantic fists against the wood. Father Garcia comes to pray for him a few times, but eventually the quarantine extends and no one's allowed in the house until the Devil finally decides to leave Levi alone.

Joah takes to sitting at the side of the house under the bedroom window. He tries to get the stories to Levi through it, but the sill's been painted shut and the curtains on the inside never even flutter. One of the clerics says it's because all the prayer is finally working, and all the evil leeching out of Levi means that he's tired and probably sleeping most of the time.

At least the screaming's stopped, they tell him, that's a good sign.

They still wait an extra three days to go inside. Just in case.

It's shockingly easy to push the bedroom door open, even with Levi's little body slumped against it. Someone makes the very crucial mistake of letting Joah see into the room as they discuss clearing it out. It looks like something from one of his nightmares; blood on the sheets, dried mucus and crusted bile on the floor, scratches on the inside of the door and along the bottom of the window.

His little brother looks like a little corpse because he is one now, missing four of his fingernails and over seventy percent of his initial bodyweight. His face is all sunken in and there's bruising along his throat. Joah stares at him for a long time until someone finally realizes he's there and ushers him away.

They debate burning the whole house, just so they don't have to touch it.

Levi becomes an it.

The simplest plan is to simply erase it from the household. It shouldn't be spoken of, not with how swiftly and easily the Devil took it, that must be some sign of the Dawson's devotion. They must've been raising their kids wrong, not praying enough, not warning them against losing Todd's favour.

That's hardly the image that the commune wants to uphold.

So, it's an easy thing to make the stain disappear. After all, it was not particularly impactful to the commune as a whole. Too young - all that dangerous potential, squandered.

(Saved.)



A son, a little child of unknown promise, is dead; a fragment of time has been lost. He might have turned out temperate and prudent; he might, with your fostering care, have been moulded to a better standard; but (and this fear is more reasonable) he might have become just like the many. Note the youths of the noblest lineage whose extravagance has flung them into the arena; note those men who cater to the passions of themselves and others in mutual lust, whose days never pass without drunkenness or some signal act of shame; it will thus be clear to you that there was more to fear than to hope for.




They don't burn the house though. They burn the body, to dispel the sickness, and the rites said over the pyre are significantly louder than usual.

Longer.

The house is scrubbed so thoroughly that the floorboards warp.

"That's Levi's spot." Joah says when they try to rearrange the kitchen furniture, never mind the fact that the chair they're trying to take is empty and has been for weeks. Joah is eleven years old and his heels don't touch the ground. He tells them that Levi still sits there for dinners, and that he still waits at the foot of the bed and asks Joah about his nightmares, but now he can supplement them with Hellish details of his own. He fills in the gaps of all the things Joah can't remember when he wakes up.

The Gods didn't like Levi. That's the truth he tells Joah in between the brushstrokes and the sketch lines. The Gods didn't like Levi, and so none of the other Toddists did either.

And that doesn't seem very fair. Joah liked Levi. The Gods couldn't stop him from doting on his little brother, even when they made Levi scream and thrash and cough up the pieces of his lungs that he tried to wedge under the door so Joah would have something to remember him by.

He was always sweet like that.

But now the Church tells Joah that he's an only child. He's in youth sermon more often than he's at home. It's like if they drill the tenets into his head hard enough, then he'll be safe from the thing that took his not-brother.

Levi thinks that's funny.

He always sits in the pew in front of Joah during sermon and whenever Father says something silly, he'll turn around to grin and cross his eyes.

Father doesn't really like it when Joah starts laughing in the middle of prayer.

Sometimes Levi will get bored of all the talking and he'll start to climb up the walls so he can sit in the rafters and poke at the nest of pigeons that have roosted up in the peak. Joah always has to watch him so he doesn't accidentally fall, because that's what a good big brother does. He makes sure Levi doesn't tumble, even when he gives up on poking at the nest and takes one of the little birds in his little fist instead.

Margaret Dawson gently guides her only son's head back down to focus on the sermon each time, carefully avoiding the gazes of the other Toddists. Levi never got fully erased. They all still know, even if most folks tend to stay discrete with their gossip. It's still not easy to convince the commune that the first son isn't as damned as the second.

Joah doesn't blame her though, he knows the madness isn't as hereditary as people say, because he knows that she can't feel the pat-pat-pat of the blood falling on all their faces when Levi slowly walks across the rafters like an acrobat, tearing off the little bird's wings as he goes. She can't hear the way his neck cracks when he turns it fast, without turning his body. She can't see how sometimes he doesn't appear quite right - like how his hands will be on backwards, or how his knees will bend the wrong way when he jumps, or how sometimes the dim light of the chapel's candles will make his body look grey and bloated like a flayed fish tossed back to float along the river.

Joah doesn't tell his mother this. It'd upset her too much, he knows that. He only says these things to partition in the confessional booth, when he can hear Levi clawing at the wooden walls and pulling at the curtain, begging to be let in. Joah shakes on the bench and tells Father about Levi hiding in the rafters while his brother, his sweet little brother, screams at him and calls him a traitor over the resulting prayers.

He always forgives him though - the one thing the Gods never do, Levi forgives him because he knows that Joah is good deep down, and he knows that he's just scared and even though he doesn't want him to tell the other Toddists that he's still around, Levi isn't mad.

He's never mad. He still sits with Joah as he sketches and gives him feedback, tells him that spines can't really twist like that and that he should brush up on his anatomy more. There's books on it in the library, but Levi says those wouldn't work as well as the real thing.

Joah has to remind him that they can't hurt anyone. And he's not allowed to interact with outsiders. It's against Todd's rules.

Levi's quick to find the loopholes, just like he always was.

Joah gets surprisingly good at drawing the human form.

In the middle of that balmy summer there’s a rat that gets stuck under one of the passing wagons. It bulges when the wheel turns, swells up, and then it pops like a water balloon. Lloyd Dawson walks home from stable repairs to find his only son sitting in the middle of the dirt road, finger-painting.