Chapter Text
How long could a person go without speaking to anybody? Both Cosima and Delphine were testing that, communicating with just eye contact. A burning hatred was in Cosima's. Delphine's was simply upset. They met in hallways now, not at a glass door, because both ate in the dining room. Cosima was sick of relying on Delphine for anything, cloaked or not. They collided for the first few days, but once they had learned each other's schedules, they could reasonably go days without having to face each other.
Cosima wanted this entire thing to be a lie. While Delphine spent hours tending to her uncle in his room, Cosima rummaged through hers. She just wanted proof. If she found evidence that Delphine's whole story was fake and she just enjoyed killing people, Cosima knew she would leave immediately. No matter what, if that evidence could not be found, she decided she would have to stay. Because if it was all true, and she left, the man would be dead and Delphine, well, who knew what she would be capable of, a serial killer now free to leave? She presumed she'd be first on the hit list.
For now, everything appeared safe enough. Cosima generally avoided rooms she hadn't been shown by Delphine, to save herself from accidentally walking into a second slaughterhouse. It was a big place. Her curiosity was overwhelming, though, so occasionally she would crack open an unfamiliar door and peak inside of it. She never struck gold. It was always a storage room, or the door led to another door that was locked.
She found herself drawn to the cellar every time she walked past it, and usually went down there to sit a couple of times a day. Gradually it, and the smell of it, became less horrific. Gradually she feared the sixteenth noose, her noose, less and less. She attempted to identify the other clone, or remember her enough to find a name for her one day, but there was nothing notable about her. No hair dye, no piercings, no distinguishable markings on the half decayed skin. It was despairing. These were bodies without identities, left to rot. It couldn't have been good to remain down there too long for a living person, but Cosima didn't really care anymore. All she felt like doing was pondering this whole situation.
It wasn't as if she had a lot else to do. Delphine had practically claimed the dog. It followed her everywhere and rarely sat by Cosima's door anymore. It was probably picking up on her dropping mood, and sticking around Delphine's happiness. When they saw each other, her step was definitely getting bouncier. Cosima supposed her uncle was recovering. She didn't want him to. She couldn't shake the feeling that he would string her up himself when he found her still alive.
She didn't know how much of a life she had left to live, so yes, she made the most of it and the living house. She took four or five meals a day and each one was twice that she would've had back in the real world. Calorie content was still a thing here, unfortunately, and as she gorged on her third brownie of the day, she mused over Delphine's figure. How she had managed to remain slim when her whole life was an all-you-can-eat buffet that didn't even require standing up was far beyond Cosima's understanding.
Over the next week, she remained inside the house, not initially wanting to appear to be trying to leave again. This grew thin and she started taking herself outside, gradually further from the house, but never approaching the wall to avoid a crowbar to the back of the head or a strangling again. Delphine could usually be spotted within a reasonable distance in case it became necessary, or, if she was with her uncle, would glance out of the window periodically.
One day, Delphine remained inside, and didn't appear to be babysitting Cosima at all. She supposed her uncle had worsened. She didn't try to escape, knowing she wouldn't make it anywhere. She just kept exploring. It was a ghost town. Most houses were boarded or bricked up but a few weren't, and she found herself going into these. What for, she didn't know. They were dusty and quite empty but fascinating. The majority of people had taken their furniture with them when they left all those years ago, but a couple of houses, presumably once owned by people who died and were forgotten, were still full of stuff which Cosima dug through. In one there was even a rotting diary, filled with two years worth of entries and left at a bedside with a fountain pen still resting on top of it. She pocketed it for later. Maybe it could prove Delphine had lied.
A little while away she found what was probably once a town square. The buildings were falling apart, like they were almost everywhere else, and the paving stones on the floor were so cracked she had to watch her step to avoid tripping on them. Still, somehow, in the centre of this there was a part untouched by the passage of time.
A circle of rose bushes surrounded a mosaic floor which depicted a few hundred faceless people running towards the centre, away from the roses and towards a birdbath. Cosima walked in, stepping on as many of the people as she could manage, feeling that they were probably the villagers and therefore the reason she was stuck in limbo. The roses were peculiar things - deep red on the edges and white in the centre, with a pink gradient. Inside the birdbath was another rose, cut from the main plants. It must've been old, it was falling apart, but the petals remained intact and as fresh as those that could still live on the plant. Cosima reached in to take a petal to inspect. The birdbath was bone dry but burned her fingertips on contact as if it was full of acid. This sensation stopped when she jerked her arm away and, slightly spooked, she returned to the house.
Her longer walk had left her hungrier than usual, so she went straight into the dining room and was faced with Delphine, who was eating a kind of broth while silently flicking through a book. She glanced up at Cosima as she entered and twitched a smile, which was awkwardly returned. There was nothing to smile about in reality except the calmness of the house that inevitably occurred in the silence.
Cosima really didn't know how to feel about her. She almost entirely believed the story that was keeping them here, but still had a hope in the diary. She understood to some degree why Delphine was killing people, but wanted the special treatment to be over. She knew she should've been hanging. She also genuinely missed the luxury of simple conversations. Being alone as she was, was proving intolerable. Delphine broke the silence first, however.
"Have you been comfortable?"
She almost choked at the simplicity, and responded similarly, "It's fine."
"Anything else we can get you?"
"I was wondering something, actually." There were a few things she wanted in reality, but she thought she'd start with what seemed small. "Can I borrow a phone?"
"There won't be any point. Once you enter here you become a ghost to everybody outside. Nobody remembers you. You don't exist anymore." She spoke without emotion, as if reading from a menu. After a momentary pause, she continued more quietly, "I learned that a few months after the night the curse was set, when I started exploring. My parents, as far as they know, never had a daughter. There's a phone hidden under the back desk in the library if you really want to call somebody, but I wouldn't recommend it."
"Library?" She became immediately more excited, and Delphine mirrored it, finally putting her book down and openly grinning.
"Yes, best room in the house, honesty. It's through the door opposite to the cellar."
"I think that door was locked."
"Not if you ask it politely."
After a few hours, the rift between them had somewhat cleared, although Cosima was very unhappy that Delphine hadn't shown her the library earlier. It was a ridiculous room, three floors high with every wall acting as a bookshelf. Just thinking of a topic brought as many as hundreds of books flying towards her, and she simply picked one she wanted and the others flew back. To return, they could be thrown into the air and would make their own way back to their rightful place. The room was lit with a chandelier similar to that in the dining room though, owing to the vastness of this room, it was a lot larger. Around the library were chairs and hammocks of every description, just waiting to be used. Under the desk furthest from the door was a phone, camouflaged with a piece of loose carpet, but Cosima avoided it. She wasn't ready to test reality in this way.
They didn't have much choice - they had to live together, so it made sense to at least speak. The major problem was the body collection downstairs, but Cosima found across the hours that with the development of the library, a worthy distraction at the best of times, she hardly worried about it. The diary sat forgotten about in her coat pocket.
She skipped dinner to remain alone in the library, and at around 10:30 Delphine brought her in some snacks which were gratefully accepted and consumed. She worked her way through books she enjoyed as a kid and ridiculously boring books the width of a brick and a few random picks she could reach herself from the ground. Eventually she got so tired that one of her hands was tingling, so went to bed, a plan of action for the next morning whizzing through her mind.
Cosima woke in the early hours, her entire right arm throbbing while the same fingertips she touched the birdbath with feeling as if they were being sliced apart with a hot knife. She practically fell out of the bed and stumbled into the bathroom, hitting the light switch on with her forehead. In front of her eyes the hand turned pink, then red, then black, as if the burn had delayed by a few hours. The blackened skin flaked away to reveal the underlining layers, which started to burn off too, but slowly, allowing her to feel the full affect more with each moment. It visibly spread up her arm but stopped just below the elbow. She wasn't stupid. This was no ordinary burn. Still too half asleep to think clearly and knowing nothing but pain, she found herself running to Delphine's room, tripping and falling twice, her entire body shaking.
She hadn't seen a bedroom in this house other than her own at night before. She almost forgot that she didn't have the luxury of windows. Delphine did, so the moon softly illuminated everything. Cosima practically fell on top of the figure in the bed and it shot up immediately. The room appeared colourless from the relatively poor lighting, but even without this, Delphine seemed to know exactly what had happened as soon as her eyes met Cosima's arm. She grabbed the opposite hand and, without a word, calmly walked the both of them downstairs.
She lead her into the dining room, then straight through into the kitchen. The lights came on automatically. It was surprisingly basic for the extravagance it could quickly produce with a mental request, and very, very cold. Delphine sat her on a wooden chair in the corner and began filling a jug with various foodstuffs from the cupboards.
"What did you touch, and when?"
"A birdbath with some rose bushes around it just before lunch. What are you doing?"
"This will help it." After a minute or two she stirred the mixture and then brought the bowl over to Cosima. The orange sludge that she began to coat the affected arm in resembled vomit, and didn't smell the greatest either. It also made the pain significantly worse, which was hardly possible, but Delphine's glances were stone and Cosima knew better than to try and wipe the stuff off.
Delphine watched the clock on the wall for exactly four minutes, then wiped off the excess mush, leaving just a thin layer that started to dry out. "You can go back to bed now." She walked out of the kitchen, emotionless. Cosima followed.
"Will it heal?"
"You'll be surprised come morning."
Delphine was right. The burn, if it could even be called that, had healed miraculously well, leaving Cosima wondering if she had imagined most of the horror of it. By sunrise all that was left was redness and blistering. She put another layer of the mixture on it after getting dressed and left it otherwise exposed.
She walked to breakfast via Delphine's room, which was not only unoccupied, but seemed untouched since the drama of a few hours ago. She was instead found hunched over the dining room table in her ordinary seat, but awoke with a start as Cosima entered.
"You look awful." She sat down and scooted her chair around the table to be barely a metre from Delphine.
"I couldn't sleep after your arm. How is it?"
"Yeah. Tons better. I put more of your orange shit on it this morning."
"Good. That'll reduce scarring."
Once Delphine had completely sat up, breakfast plates began to emerge from the kitchen, and they started to eat. Cosima had more on her mind than food, though. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Yes. If I can ask you one first."
"Deal."
"Who was that girl in the basement who looked like you?"
"Clones," she muttered absentmindedly. It wasn't as if Delphine could damage their anonymity while stuck inside the wall. She didn't stop to allow her any time to consider. "If the house was enchanted by somebody who hated your uncle, then why does it serve you?"
"The furniture serves him to keep him alive. If it means he lives to be tortured another day, the townspeople are okay with that. That's what they told me. We'll be his executioners if we walk out, so trust me, they love us."
"You see them?"
"I hear them. They were laughing when you tried to drive off. If you ever hear any whispering at night, it's just them trying to scare you away. Although I don't think they speak to anyone but me. There were a few of them in my room last night so I stayed down here."
That day became one of togetherness. Delphine took Cosima on a tour of outside. She found the diary to be missing from her coat pocket but didn't feel it was exactly right to stir up a fuss about it, so tried to forget the hope it had offered. It seemed Cosima's exploration had been brief to say the least. She was shown endless clues about the past in the next few hours. There was even a still fully functional, heated indoor swimming pool across the estate, which Delphine paired with a recommendation not to swim in a small lake nearer the house.
"What's wrong with the lake?"
"It's very cold."
"Can I test that?"
"If you want to die, then yes, because I'm not jumping in after you to get you out."
They skipped lunch, but came back in the early evening for a feast that more than made up for it. Their conversations barely touched on personal, but remained frequent. Afterwards they both grabbed a book or two from the library and Cosima found herself trailing after Delphine, who was heading for her uncle's room to check on him and then to read on an apparently unmatchably comfortable chair in there.
"He looks better," Cosima noted. She stood behind Delphine as if shielded here from a face that managed to appear angry, even in sleep.
"Do you wish he didn't?"
"I just... don't want to die. He'll kill me when he wakes up."
"Not necessarily."
"I don't think he'll wanna risk me running off again, Delphine, so yes, he'll kill me."
"We're a lot more powerful than he is, Cosima. You can be okay here."
The chair Delphine had spoken of fitted the both of them perfectly and they took this option, reading in full view of the owner's bed and a large window as the sun set. She was right. It was very comfortable.
"Did you ever try to leave this place?"
"Of course. Usually when I was very young, and frustrated, because I was full of childish dreams that couldn't happen. He used to lock me in the little plastic room that you were in. I learned to be calm."
"It's not a calming room."
"You have to be the source of the calm in there. I still hate it though. I am sorry that I left you there for so long."
Neither left for their bedrooms. They sat together into the night, only occasionally speaking, but in constant physical contact. It was almost pleasant. There was almost trust. The yellow candlelight flickered and the white moonlight remained whole as they dozed off, blissfully unaware of the danger they had uncovered.