Chapter Text
The first time Jon sees one of his soulmates, he’s eight years old and staring into his open closet. He fiddles with the patch his grandmother put over his skinned knee, picking at the medical tape until it’s peeled away, but he doesn’t look at it. Doesn’t for a moment glance down, or up, or any direction but at the dusty boxes and hung up collared shirts his grandmother makes him wear to church on Sundays. It doesn’t change. The door doesn’t move. No long, horrible legs emerge from its depths. Jon doesn’t trust it. He blinks one eye at a time.
“Who’re you?” someone says.
Jon yelps, jumps off of his bed, and scrambles into the wall. His bedside lamp wobbles dangerously, sending wild shadows all over the room. When it settles, Jon gets a good look at the kid sitting on his bed, who had not been there before. He’s skinny, a little shorter than Jon, with dull blonde hair that lies flat on top of his head. His clothes hang loose on his frame, no bright colors or characters on them at all. Jon wonders if the boy is a ghost. But if Jon was going to see a ghost, wouldn’t it be of Will?
“W-who’re you? Get out of my room!”
The boy looks around, seeming just as bewildered as Jon is. “I-- sorry, I dunno how... I was just in my kitchen, and then I was here. Didn’t do it on purpose.”
That seems suspicious and strange to Jon, and after the day he’s had, he isn’t in a trusting mood. He reaches blindly for something to defend himself with, and ends up holding a hardcover children’s encyclopedia about marine life. He gets to his feet and raises it above his head.
“I-if you don’t leave right now, I’ll--”
The boy looks Jon up and down. He crosses his arms, completely unimpressed. “You’ll what? Hit me?”
Jon scowls. Debates bringing the book down onto the boy’s head, but then he realizes something. Jon is standing, facing the boy sitting on his bed. That means that he has his back to the closet. Jon turns, violently, certain that he will be greeted by black spindly legs, ready to wrap around him and drag him into Mr. Spider’s house because Mr. Spider is hungry and he wants more--
The closet is the same as ever. Open, small, and a little dusty. Jon struggles to breathe around his panic. He’s frozen solid. He can’t look away from the closet door, he can’t, because if he does then Mr. Spider will get him, just like it got Will.
“Hey,” the strange boy says.
Jon ignores him.
“Hey.”
Jon blinks one eye, and then the other.
“Hey,” the boy says, firmer this time, and then he tries to touch Jon’s shoulder. Tries being the operative word, because when he grabs Jon's shoulder, he only feels the tiniest bit of pressure before the boy’s hand goes right through him.
It says a lot about the sort of day that Jon has had that the fact this strange boy can’t touch him is a relief. Jon doesn’t turn away from staring at the door. If the boy can’t touch him, then Jon’s going to ignore him. He has to watch the door. If he watches the door, Mr. Spider can’t get him.
“... okay,” the boy says in a quiet voice, the kind Jon uses when he’s talking to himself. He walks over to be in front of Jon, following his eyeline. “Is there something in the closet?”
Jon debates saying nothing, but since the boy can’t touch him, and Jon can talk without looking away from the closet, he decides that would be rude. Gran hates it when he’s rude to new people. “There’s a spider. It ate someone.”
He told his grandmother the same thing. She scolded him for making up wild excuses for being late getting home and getting all scraped up trespassing somewhere. Jon wonders if he should tell the police. Maybe when they come around, looking for Will. Someone will notice that Will is missing soon. He doesn’t think the police will listen to him either, but he still should try, shouldn’t he? Even if they don’t believe him.
Jon waits for the boy to laugh at him, or call him a liar, or say that spiders don’t get big enough to do that.
But the boy only nods, like that makes perfect sense. “Spiders are really bad. My mum says I should avoid them, until I know better.”
He almost turns to look at the boy, but then he wouldn’t be watching the closet.
“Did it come out of the closet?”
“No. It came out of a different door. And a book.”
The boy’s eyes go wide, and he gets even closer to Jon. “A book?”
“Yeah. It was a kid’s book. About a big spider.”
“Did it have a metal thing in the front? With ‘From the Library of Jurgen Leitner’ on it?”
“It, it did!” Jon says, almost turning to face him. “Do you know it? A Guest for Mr. Spider?”
The boy shakes his head. “No, but I know those books. My mum says those are the special ones.”
Jon cannot argue that a book that eats someone is normal, but special isn’t what he would call it either. “It’s gone, now.”
The boy’s nose wrinkles. “Good. I don’t want it. Mum already has too many.”
A bit of tension goes out of Jon’s shoulders. He’s still watching the closet, but he isn’t paying as close attention to how he blinks anymore. “Do you think Mr. Spider will come back? Since I don’t have the book?”
“... I dunno.” The boy turns to the closet, leaning slightly inside, checking the ceiling, the floor, trying and failing to shift the hanging shirts. “Probably not, but.” He turns back, and looks Jon in the eyes. He’s unsure. Jon thinks he looks the same.
“Can you watch with me?”
The boy’s eyes widen, not in fear, but in surprise. Jon stumbles to explain himself, “I-I mean, so we can watch better. We won’t miss anything if there’s two of us.”
Jon is still standing in the middle of his bedroom. It’s the middle of the night, a full moon sending thin and dim light through the window. The mysterious boy who appeared out of thin air and can’t touch anything stares at Jon like he’s the strange one, and suddenly Jon’s thinking about how his hair is messy, and his patch is peeled open and hanging off his knee, and he’s wearing ugly pajamas. He doesn’t know why he’s thinking about that while there are people-eating spider books on the loose, but he is. Just as Jon inhales to take it back, the boy talks first.
“Okay.”
“O-okay?”
“Okay.” He nods decisively, and then walks to Jon, reaching for Jon’s hand. The pressure is light, but Jon follows instead of resisting, and lets the boy lead him back to Jon’s bed. “Better than the floor.”
Jon follows, and sits on his bed with the boy. They both sit on the covers, and watch his closet. “Jon,” he says. “That’s my name. It’s Jon. Jonathan Sims. Do-- do you have a name?”
“Of course I’ve got a name. Everyone’s got a name.”
“Oh, yes, of course, obviously everyone, including strange boys that appear in my bedroom, has a name. Not that you’ve bothered to tell me it.”
It’s the sort of comment that makes the other kids annoyed with him, that made Will hate him, that his Gran constantly scolds him for. But the boy just laughs, a wry and quiet sort of laugh. “Alright, since you wanna know so bad. It’s-- it’s Gerry. My name’s Gerry.”
Jon nods. Then he turns back to the task at hand, watching his closet for Mr. Spider. But now, with Gerry sitting next to him, it suddenly isn’t as scary. His heart isn’t pounding in his chest. Slowly, over the course of an hour, Jon melts into his bed, each blink getting slower and slower. Gerry’s laying down too, but the opposite way. Sometimes his feet go through Jon’s feet. It’s strange, but not bad.
When Jon wakes up in the morning, Gerry is gone. He wonders if it was a dream.
He doesn’t tell his Gran about it.
--
The first time Jon goes for a visit, he’s not doing anything special. It's been a few weeks since he picked up A Guest for Mr. Spider, and despite everything, Jon’s life is normal. He didn’t bring Mr. Spider up with Gran again, or tell her about Gerry. If not for the hole where Will used to be, Jon could almost believe it was a terrible nightmare.
He’s walking home from school in a daze. The sidewalk in front of him doesn’t seem quite real. Jon’s teachers all sounded like they’re speaking through thick glass, and Jon doesn’t remember much of anything they said. He wonders if they’ve noticed. Probably, he’s not asking nearly as many questions as he used to. They’re almost certainly relieved.
Jon’s daze is thick enough that it takes him several steps to realize he’s not looking at the familiar sidewalk anymore. His dirty sneakers are walking over a glossy hardwood floor. He blinks, and looks up.
It’s a hallway. A cramped one, with bare walls. The plaster is an ugly off white, and it’s stained with uglier splotches of grey. Jon rubs at one, and it feels grainy beneath his fingers, a bit like dry sand. It doesn’t move when he brushes it. As he’s examining it, a scream bursts from the end of the hallway. Jon just about jumps out of his skin, hand going up to clutch at his chest. The scream was loud, frustrated, shrieking, like what Jon heard at school when someone got really mad.
The daze wiped away by all this strangeness, some part of Jon thinks he should be scared. He isn’t. It’s odd, but he feels very sure that nothing can hurt him here. Maybe that feeling is a trick? Jon doesn’t know. But he does know he is very curious about whoever had screamed like that. He walks down the hall, and peers through the cracked open door.
He sees the girl first. She sits in the middle of the room, arms crossed, pouting like she had sat down and refused to get up again. Her hair is reddish-brown, auburn, Jon learned that word just recently, and done up in a messy braid that hangs crookedly from the back of her head. Her dress is blue and covered in dusty black stains, like she’d been rolling around in the dirt. Jon’s nose wrinkles despite himself. His Gran would never let him run around looking like that. The room around her is as barren as the hallway, no pictures or toys or books; only a bed done up with blue sheets and blankets, and a table. It’s a metal and plastic one, the kind Jon saw at school, and it looks very out of place here. Nothing is on it.
As Jon watches through the doorway, the girl’s expression twists, until she’s red faced and looks like she’s about to start crying, or throwing things. As she inhales, Jon realizes he really doesn’t want to listen to someone scream, so he interrupts. “Don’t do that.”
The girl turns, surprise knocking her right out of her building tantrum. She squints at Jon. “Did Arthur send you?” she asks. Her voice sounds rough, croaking like she needs a long cough and a drink of water.
“No,” Jon says. “I’m Jon, and I just… I don’t know how I got here.”
The girl frowns, looking Jon over. “You’re a lot smaller than the other people Arthur brings me.”
Jon frowns right back at her, and throws in a furrowed brow for good measure. “I’m not that small.”
“Yes you are.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are.”
“No I’m not!”
“Yes you are. Look,” she says, getting to her feet. When she stands, she’s just the littlest bit taller than Jon. “You’re small.” She says it like she’s delivering a proclamation, the same way someone on TV expects everyone to listen to her because she’s the one that said it. Jon dislikes her immediately.
“Just because you’re taller than me doesn’t mean I’m small. You could be unusually tall. Comparison doesn’t mean anything.” Comparison is a nice big word. Will used to hate it when Jon used big words, and the other kids get confused when he does.
The girl seems to be one of those kids, her frown deepening as she tries to puzzle out what Jon means. “I’m not tall. Everyone around me is taller. You’re one of the smallest people I’ve ever seen. You have to be small.”
“Haven’t you ever seen a baby? They’re smaller than me.”
Her frown deepens. “Stop talking. I don’t like it.”
“Why? It’s because I’m right, aren’t I? You just don’t want to admit it.”
The girl looks at Jon, up and down. And then, without another word, she reaches out and shoves him.
Or, tries to. Her hands go right through him. Jon looks down and sees her arms sticking out of his chest, like he isn’t even there. It doesn’t feel like much, except the girl's hands feel a tiny bit warm. They both take a moment to blink and be perplexed.
Then the girl waves her hands around inside Jon’s chest.
“Hey!” Jon says, for lack of anything else. It feels weird, the warm hands flailing around where his guts should be, but clearly aren’t. “Quit it!” He steps back, and tries to smack her arms away. They go right through, but taking the step back removes her fingers from his chest regardless. The girl stands there for a moment, blinking like she doesn’t know what to do and is very unused to the sensation. Then she looks up at Jon.
“Are you made of fog?” she asks, eyes wide but unafraid.
“Uh…” Jon glances down at himself. Now that she’s not trying to touch him, he looks completely normal. Trainers, his striped shirt with the collar, two buttons unbuttoned, backpack still on from school. “I don’t think so? I’m usually not, at least. Normally I’m made of blood and organs and things.”
“But you aren’t right now. So you could be made of fog.”
Jon can’t really argue with that, even though he feels like he should. When he touches his own chest, he feels as solid as ever. No matter what, he couldn’t put his hand through. The girl, not content to just watch Jon try, reaches out again, sticking a warm hand inside Jon’s stomach in a way that feels very strange.
“Quit it,” Jon says. The girl frowns, clearly considering if she’s actually going to listen or not, but in the end she relents. As she’s pulling her hand away, Jon realizes he recognizes the sensation. “Wait. I-- I’ve seen something like this before!”
“You have?”
“Yes! Except for me, it was another boy and I could put my hand through him. His name was Gerry, and I thought he might have been a dream, but…”
The girl nods thoughtfully. “Maybe Gerry was a fog person who’s made you a fog person now.”
Jon frowns. That doesn’t seem right to him. “Gerry didn’t know what was going either. Can fog people appear places? Out of nowhere?”
“They can.” the girl says, with absolute confidence.
“How do you know? Have you ever met a fog person before?”
“Arthur said.”
“Who’s Arthur?”
“He’s a grown up who takes care of me. He knows a lot of stuff.”
Personally, Jon has never met a grown up who explained the stuff they knew to his satisfaction. They always gave up and got annoyed before he ran out of questions. “Just because a grown up said it doesn’t mean it’s true. Grown ups say all sorts of foolish things. My Gran told me so.” His Gran was a very sensible grown up, who didn’t have time for nonsense like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.
“Hmph,” The girl says. She sticks her nose up in the air and crosses her arms. She doesn’t say anything else.
There’s an awkward moment of silence. Jon runs into those a lot, when talking with other children. He’ll say or do the wrong thing, and suddenly they won’t want to talk to him anymore. He’s about to slowly turn around and leave the way he came when she says “What’s it like?”
“What’s what like?”
“Having a Gran.”
Jon pauses. He’s not used to being on the receiving end of that question. Most kids have Grans, even if they don’t live with them the way he does. He’s asked kids before what it's like to have parents, and always been met with shrugs at best or bafflement at worst. He’s never understood that until just now. How does he explain what it's like having a Gran? Jon feels like the teacher has asked him to stand at the front of the room and describe his whole life to the entire class.
But… he always wanted the kids to at least try.
“Having a Gran is like,” Jon bounces back and forth on his feet, hands clasped in front of him as he tries very hard to put it into words. “Like having a house.”
“What does that mean?”
“She’s old. Very old. And you can tell.” Jon struggles a bit. “But she keeps the rain off you and the heat in and the cold out. She’s-- she’s sturdy. Important.”
The girl sits on the floor. She looks up at Jon, like he’s telling a story, and he keeps going.
“She makes food for me, and gets me up in the morning in time for school. She buys me books to read, and clothes to wear. Takes care of the grown up stuff like bills and taxes.” He struggles a bit for more to say. “She has grey hair.”
“Grey? Really?” the girl says.
“She does. It’s all curly and wispy, like mist from the ocean.”
“I’ve never seen a person with grey hair before,” the girl says, with a bit of wonder. “I’d like to see more people, but Arthur says I can’t until I can control myself better. ‘You can’t touch people Agnes, you’ll make a scene!’.” She huffs dramatically.
“Is that your name? Agnes?”
“Yeah. Agnes Montague.” She stands again, puffing herself up. “You should remember it. I’m going to burn the world someday.”
Jon isn’t sure what to make of her, but Agnes is at least interesting to talk to. “I’m Jon. Jonathan Sims.”
“Nice to meet you!” Agnes says it like she hasn’t ever gotten to before, and is really excited to try it out.
“Nice to meet you, too.” Jon takes a moment to look around the room. There really isn’t much in here, aside from the bed, the table, and Agnes. “What were you doing, before I arrived? I heard you scream.”
“Oh,” Agnes says, good mood vanishing. “Arthur left me alone, without anyone or anything to play with. He said he would be back soon, but it's been forever.” Agnes stomps her foot on the floor. “And I’m bored!”
“I know what you mean. I hate being bored. That’s why my Gran buys me books.” For a brief moment, the memory of a long, hairy black leg reaches into Jon’s mind, but before he can think about it, Agnes talks again.
“I can’t play the same games with you I normally would, because I can’t really touch you…” Agnes says, thinking it over. “Do you know any games? Fog people have weird games.”
“I’m not a fog person! And…” Jon struggles. He knows the absolute basics, like tag and catch, but tag isn’t really fun with two people, and Agnes doesn’t really have a ball. “We could play… uh, hide and seek?”
Agnes tilts her head. “What’s that?”
For a long moment, Jon doesn’t know how to respond to that. “You don’t know?”
Her face scrunches up. “No. What is it?”
Jon flounders for a moment. “Uh, well, it’s a game. One of us would hide, and one of us would count to fifty and then seek the other one.”
Agnes nods. “A hunt game.”
“I guess? You try to find me, and when you do, I count and you hide.”
“You promise you won’t turn invisible? Or change shape? That wouldn’t be fair to the game.”
He blinks at her. “That’s silly. I can’t do that.”
“I can’t touch you! You’re silly!”
“No I’m not!”
Agnes sticks her nose up. “I’m gonna start counting, and you’re gonna lose the game.” She stands there, looking at him, and begins to count “One, two, three--”
“You’re supposed to cover your eyes! That’s the only way I can hide!”
“Oh.” Agnes covers her eyes with her small hands, and keeps going. “Four, five, six--”
Jon doesn’t wait another moment. He turns back into the hallway and frantically looks for a good hiding spot. The house doesn’t end up having many, but he and Agnes get creative until Jon finds himself standing on the sidewalk again, like he never left.
--
There’s always a palpable excitement in the air when the teacher rolls the tv cart into the classroom. A break from lessons is a rare treat, and everyone crosses their fingers and hopes as hard as they can that there will be no accompanying worksheet. Jon isn’t one of them. He’s always found the videos played in schools excruciatingly boring. At least the worksheets are something to do while being forced to watch them.
So he doesn’t join in for the classroom groaning when Ms. Feeney hands stacks of crisp white paper to the students in the front row of desks. The procession begins, everyone handing back the stacks, the pile is still warm from the printer when Jon receives it. He looks it over as he awkwardly hands the rest of the pile backwards, trying to figure out what sort of video this is.
Starcrossed Samantha, it says across the top. That doesn’t tell Jon much of anything, and the questions below are all too vague to get much out of. Who is this story about? Where does the story take place? What happens to the characters? How do you feel about the ending? Jon doubts this is being handed in for a grade; it's just something to force students to pay even the slightest bit of attention to the screen.
Ms. Feeney claps, and the class claps back at her, low level chatter falling silent. “Now,” she says sternly, “I expect you to pay attention, and to fill out your worksheets properly. Today’s video is about something very important, so I want a lot of good answers to all the questions.”
If she was going to grade these, she absolutely would have mentioned it. Jon’s confidence in his assessment of the situation (a phrase from a political thriller from the library) is accurate. That combined with it being ‘important’ leads Jon to conclude that this must be yet another video on the ever present Danger of Strangers, and he settles in for a long afternoon of being utterly bored.
Ms. Feeney calls on a student to turn off the lights as she starts up the video tape. The VCR whirs to life, and after the logos scroll by, Jon’s met with a bright and happy colored cartoon. He indulges in a bit of quiet, private groaning. He’s not a baby, he’s eight, and going to be nine soon. Jon doesn’t need talking shapes done up in primary colors to explain things to him.
He’s so annoyed, Jon almost misses when the story goes in a different direction than he expects. It starts off pretty standard; Samantha playing by herself in a park, next to a tall oak tree. But instead of the usual shady adult approaching and offering her drugs, a boy appears, very suddenly, from behind the tree. Jon sits up, and turns to face the TV properly.
“Who are you?” Samantha asks.
“I’m Maxwell,” the boy replies.
“How did you get behind my tree?”
“I do not know! I was just suddenly there!”
Jon can’t tear his eyes away from the screen anymore. Samantha and Maxwell become fast friends, playing together until the sky is colored orange, what the narrator describes as ‘all day long’. Maxwell vanishes while running around the tree, leaving Samantha a bit confused, but not at all concerned.
“If he appeared before, surely he can appear again,” she thinks aloud. Then she goes home.
But instead of Maxwell returning, something else happens. The narrator tells them that time passes, and just when Samantha worries she may not see Maxwell again, something peculiar happens to her. She finds herself in a strange place, with strange people all wearing strange clothes, and she does not know how she got there. At first she is lost, but she finds Maxwell quickly, and then they are so busy having fun the strangeness doesn’t matter at all. They run around a familiar looking park, but where the oak tree was before, there is only an empty hill.
When Samantha returns, she runs home, arriving just in time for dinner. Her mother spoons her up a heaping plateful of steaming cartoon mush and asks her about her day. Samantha excitedly describes her games with Maxwell, in a strange place with strange people.
The mother stops, then. She sits down at the kitchen table and, taking Samantha’s tiny hands in her own, says “Samantha, you’ve met your soulmate!”
“I have? Like you and father?”
“Yes, though just a bit different.” Jon leans forward in his seat, listening carefully to every word coming out of the slightly crackly speakers. “When your father and I met, as soon as we saw each other, we knew we were soulmates. So then we got married, and had you.” The cartoon mother runs a loving hand through her daughter’s hair. “But you and Maxwell, you’re a bit too far apart for that. You’ll visit each other instead. Isn’t that lovely?”
“Oh, yes! I love visiting Maxwell, and I love when he visits me! You mean we’ll get to keep visiting? Even when we get older?”
“Of course you will, my dear. You’ll both visit each other more times than you can count.”
After that Samantha is quickly tucked away into bed, and the narrator describes Maxwell doing the same, in a different place and time. The credits roll, and the tape ends.
Jon hasn’t filled out a single answer on his worksheet. As soon as the lights turn on, his hand is already raised and waving in the air, as high up as it will go.
Ms. Feeney sighs. “Yes, Jon?”
“Is it like in the video?” Jon’s question comes out breathless, urgent. “Is that real? You visit back and forth forever?”
“Yes Jon,” she says, leaning against her desk. She does that when she’s annoyed with him. “Starcrossed soulmates visit each other their entire lives, just like the tape just said.”
“Do they get to touch?”
“Ye--” Ms. Feeney says, and then stops. “I… I’m sorry?”
“Starcrossed soulmates. Are they always--” Jon struggles for the word, “Intangible?”
Ms. Feeney’s face is changing. She’s not exasperated anymore, but she doesn’t look happy either.
Another kid, sitting a few rows back, butts in. “What’re you talking about? They weren’t ghosts!”
“But that’s what happened with--”
“Jon,” Ms. Feeney says, very seriously. “Have you gone on a visit?”
He hesitates for a moment, and then nods. It feels personal, private, but he’s telling the truth, and he has to know the answers to his questions. “And been visited,” he adds.
That’s when Ms. Feeney’s face changes all the way. She’s not annoyed anymore, not at all.
She’s sad. She’s looking right at Jon, and she is so terribly sad.