Chapter Text
This room has a window. Outside of the window, rain is falling; it’s dark and thick, like a pond flipped upside-down and shaken. If Sarah looks at it too long she gets dizzy, so she isn’t looking at it. Instead she’s crouched in front of a green wooden door, working at picking its copper lock.
She hasn’t seen Helena or Rachel in—
—in—
—it’s been a while, and she’s managed to shove a couch in front of the other door into this room, so even if they could find her they couldn’t get through and maybe this time, maybe this time, maybe this time—
The lock lets out a noise like a breath, and Sarah yanks out her bobby pin to find that it’s dripping with something clear and liquid. “Shit,” she tells the bobby pin. The bobby pin does not respond.
She’s got a pocketful of bobby pins, because when she’d rolled out of bed the house had vomited up a vanity with a shining silver brush and a pot full of sticky pomade and an absolute army of bobby pins. Like it was hoping for something. The wardrobe keeps filling up with tissue-thin white dresses and matte-black suits with edges like papercuts; embroidered velvet jackets, ballgowns, fur coats made of animals Sarah doesn’t recognize. She hates all of them. She won’t wear the thin glass stilettos with their needle-points, and she won’t use the bobby pins for anything except getting out of this goddamn piece of shit house.
Sarah wipes the bobby pin off on the knee of her pants, but it doesn’t get less wet. More and more teardrops are beading up on the end of it; they smell like old dirt and pine. This doesn’t even make sense, whines a high voice in the back of Sarah’s mind, but she ignores it – chucks the bobby pin in the puddle of other bobby pins – grabs another one, shoves it back into the lock.
“Let me out,” she mutters. “Let me out, come on, just let me—”
The bobby pin snaps in half; she hears it falling out of the other side of the lock, but she doesn’t hear it hit bottom. When Sarah pulls the bobby pin out there’s a drop of something black-brown on the end. She chucks it in the pile. She grabs another bobby pin.
She’s been here for—
—for—
—too long. Is Kira worried about her? Does Kira think that Sarah has left her again? Is Kira staying with S, and has S called the cops, and is she calling the white-light building with its row of sick beds and the red cross on the door,
which is called a hospital, and Sarah knows that, and she feels the tumblers of the lock shifting and muttering against the pin. Is S calling the hospitals? Where does she think Sarah has gone? How can Sarah explain any of this, if — when she gets back? Has Kira graduated elementary school, in the time that Sarah has been gone?
How long has Sarah been gone?
The bobby pin is sucked out of her fingers like a strand of spaghetti vanishing into a mouth. She picks up another bobby pin, she sticks it in. The resolve that kept her going this far is starting to wobble and melt into raw, animal panic. Sarah looks out the window and sees that, outside, it is still raining. The drumming of the rain against the windowpane sounds like an army of fingers tapping, impatient and starving.
Behind her, the knob of the other door rattles.
Sarah whirls around, clutches her fistful of bobby pins so tightly that they claw blood from the skin of her palm. She stares down the massive ugly velvet sofa she’d dragged in front of the door. Don’t, she thinks at it. Don’t you dare. Don’t move. The room feels startlingly small, claustrophobic. The dark green wallpaper and the dark wood bookshelves that are throttled with vines; the smell of decay, the heartbeat thrum of the rain outside. Don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t you dare.
The doorknob is rattling louder now, frantic. Something slaps against the door on the other side. Then again. Then again, Sarah’s hands are shaking, she shoves another bobby pin in the lock and whispers “please, come on, just bloody open.” Part of the lock shifts as she jabs at it, but it’s not enough. A little more give, a little more give, a little more give, the sound of something ramming against the other door over and over, the rain, the slow unfurling of flowers off of the vines that are growing quicker up the walls and over the ceiling, reaching towards Sarah like grasping hands — bang bang bang bang and the rat-a-tat-tat of the rain and the metallic snap of the bobby pin breaking and the other bobby pins leaking pinewater over her shoes and bang bang bang bang—
The lock clicks open. Sarah drops the dripping bobby pin on the ground and throws open the door, stumbles through, shuts the door again. She presses her back to it, splays her palms against the walls on either side.
She’s not outside. There is no rain.
There is no rain. Why is it wet?
Why is the wall wet?
Sarah’s hands are pressed against the warm wet wall; she feels it moving very slowly against the skin of her palm, sweating out that thick earthrot scent. The entire room, floor and wall and ceiling, is the wet red-pink of a heart held in the hand. When Sarah looks high enough, she sees a row of teeth puncturing the red flesh of the ceiling. None of the teeth look the same. Some of them are sharp and thin and white; others are yellow molars the size of Sarah’s fist. Some of them are small enough to be human teeth. Some of them are the size of her whole spine. Behind the row is another row, and another row, and another. The teeth march on forwards. The room does not seem to end.
The room breathes around her like a slumbering animal. When Sarah takes another step forward, her foot sinks into the spongy floor; a pool of water forms around her foot. She lifts it up. She takes another step forward. The ground squelches obscenely around her as she goes.
She can feel whimpering in the pit of her throat, and god does she hate herself for it.
Forward. Forward. She keeps going forward. The room continues obligingly – forward and down, like a tunnel. Every now and then there are more teeth stabbing through the ceiling; they drip rainwater on her head in tearful silence. Sarah’s whole body is shaking. She thinks about Kira, viciously, violently: the drawing Kira made Sarah after her first art class, which was of course
(a drop of cold water lands on the back of her neck and licks its way down her spine)
a picture. That picture. The clench of Kira’s babyish fingers around the edges of the paper; Sarah counts each one of Kira’s imagined knuckles as she moves forward. Thirty-one, thirty-five, thirty-seven. The light is going. It’s getting darker in here. It’s so warm – humid as a jungle. The only sound is the fleshy suction of her feet against the floor. The walls press closer and closer around her as she goes.
She thinks about the picture Kira drew her. She holds it out in front of her like a talisman. The picture that Kira drew her, the one of. The tunnel is leading down and further down; Sarah’s starting to slide a little bit. She reaches out both hands and scrabbles at the wall for something to grab onto. There is nothing to grab onto, so she reaches up and takes a handhold on one of the teeth.
The walls let out a soft whining sound; more water pools up around Sarah’s feet. It’s up to her calves. She moves forward, she grabs another tooth. The whole world shudders and sighs. She can’t really see anything anymore, except for the faint white light of the next tooth.
What did Kira draw for her?
Warm water on Sarah’s face. Trickling down the curve of her cheek. Dripping off her chin: tears. She’s crying.
She stops in place. The throat she is standing in sighs faintly around her and mutters to itself as it settles. She can’t see forward at all; all she knows is that the ceiling is low enough that she can reach it, and the walls are almost close enough to touch. Water pooled almost up to her knees. What did Kira draw? What was the drawing? She can’t remember. There’s a hole in her brain where the thought should be, and she can’t reach it anymore.
Sarah takes a step backwards.
The walls shudder.
Another step; another tremor.
She turns on her heel and bolts back where she started from.
The walls make a noise like aaaoouuh, a wail of pain. The ground rolls like a bottled-up earthquake; Sarah jumps over it the roiling waves of floor-flesh, bounces off a wall, keeps running towards the faint light. Everything screams again. Sarah screams back at it, a shriek that’s part anger and mostly fear. The floor tries to grab onto her boots with uncountable small hands. She refuses to let it.
“A bird,” she yells, “a bird, a bird, it was a bloody bird—”
—and she sees the jarring image of the ornate wooden door sunk into the wall. The dark green of it, the worn copper handle and its worn copper lock. The hinges that sink into the flesh around them like a stapled-up wound. Sarah throws the door open, crashes through into the room on the other side, slams it shut behind her and collapses in a heap on the floor.
The room is silent, except for the hiccuping sound of her terrified breathing. “A bird,” she whispers to herself, “a bird, a bird, a bird.”
A page turns. Sarah jerks her head up and sees, first, the gaping splintered hole where the other door used to be. Plaster and dust lie around the remains of the door; the sofa has been hurled across the room, and now lies in a pile of shattered bookshelves and the remains of what used to be a fireplace. The vines are already growing, unconcerned, over the wood and velvet and bone.
Sarah turns her head to the right. Rachel is sitting in a stiff-backed black armchair, placidly reading a book whose spine says Anatomy. A small table next to the chair holds a single steaming teacup and nothing else. Vines are growing and flowering up the legs of the chair, teasing around Rachel’s ankles where they’re bared by her long gauzy silver dress. There are shreds of paint and splinters of wood jabbed under her fingernails.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Rachel says, without looking up.
“A bird,” Sarah says, jaw shuddering, teeth chattering. “A bird. A bird. A bird.” She looks past Rachel, back out to the window. Outside, it isn’t raining anymore.