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“You’re going to have to choose at some point,” Rachel says, sounding reasonable. Rachel always sounds reasonable, that’s the problem of her. Nights and nights and nights ago Sarah woke from a dream to find herself in the kitchen, holding a knife – Rachel right behind her in a dress the color of clouds around the moon. Rachel’s whispers still echoing in the kitchen.
She always sounds so reasonable. It would be so easy, Sarah, just do it. Bite down on my throat. Slit your wrists. Lock the door, when Helena comes calling.
As usual: Sarah doesn’t answer her. She swirls the red thick tea in its cup. She looks around the greenhouse. As usual: everything is dying, except for the two of them.
Or maybe only one of them. Helena and Rachel won’t tell Sarah the particulars. If they are dying. If she is dying. What sort of things they are. What exactly they want Sarah for – only they want her, so much they’re starving with it.
“I know,” Sarah says, after a time. She keeps on not drinking her tea.
She can’t eat the food that either of them give her – such are the rules – but Helena tries harder to get Sarah to eat. Rachel never seems to feel the need to try anything. Rachel is a firm believer in her own inevitability.
“You have to eat, Sarah,” Helena says, her desperation by now familiar. Helena doesn’t believe in anything. Like a baby: object impermanence. Sarah leaves the room and Helena eats the wallpaper. Sarah comes back and Helena vomits it up and tries to persuade Sarah to eat it – you have to eat, you have to eat, you have to eat.
On the plate is a perfect Sunday roast. It smells like home – and Sarah has no idea how long it’s been since she was home. Maybe it’s only been months; maybe it’s been decades, and she’ll walk outside of this mansion to a world of flying cars and the deaths of everyone she has ever loved.
Her stomach growls, empty and lonely. Just because she doesn’t have to eat doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to.
“Sarah,” Helena says, empty and lonely. “Just a bite. Won’t hurt. Promise.” She crouches in front of the table, she gets on her knees. She rests her head on Sarah’s knee like a dog. She could be a dog. Dressed in a pile of dirty furs, she could be Sarah’s dog. Dinner steams on the table. Sarah scratches behind Helena’s ears and Helena hums, like an earthquake played in reverse.
“I’m not going to eat, Helena,” Sarah says. “Don’t you want it? Aren’t you hungry?”
“I made it for you,” Helena says, in her broken-up voice.
“I’m not going to eat,” Sarah says. Her stomach growls. Helena’s eyes, previously lidded, open all the way; her mouth opens too, like she’s eating the sound whole.
Nights and nights and nights ago.
“You have to let me go,” Sarah says. The mansion has a huge front hall, a stairway that is one big luxurious stretch towards the second floor. The curtains all closed, motheaten, heavy velvet. The front door locked. Solid wood. Locked.
Helena sitting on the stairs. Rachel standing above her, hands on the rail. Their eyes like cats’ when the light hits: reflective, blank.
“You have to let me go,” Sarah says again, but weaker.
Rachel tilts her head to the side. “Why?” she says. It comes out heavy, like a promise.
“You can’t just – steal people,” Sarah says, “yeah? Someone’s gonna notice I’m missing.” She tugs on the doorknob again. It continues to be locked.
“No they won’t,” Helena says.
“Yeah,” Sarah says, “they will.”
“No they won’t,” Rachel says.
“You’re insane,” Sarah says, almost a laugh. “You’re both bloody insane, let me out.”
“Okay, Sarah,” Helena says. “Just pick.”
“What?”
“Choose,” Rachel says. “One of us. Then we’ll unlock the door, and let you out.” She smiles: candy red, artificial cherry lips.
“Promise,” Helena says. Her smile just looks like meat.
Sometimes after nightmares Sarah wanders the mansion and tries all the doors. She doesn’t know if Helena and Rachel go around locking and unlocking them, or if the mansion somehow does it on its own; she only knows that the locks change, the rooms change, the anatomy of the house rocks and shifts and stretches.
Tonight she dreamed about Kira, and these days that is a nightmare.
Her stomach growls.
Nights and nights and nights ago the green door with the glass handle led into a bedroom half the size of hers. A pair of child’s shoes left discarded by the bed. Tonight the door is unlocked, and it opens; inside is a parlor, stuffed couch, roaring fire, table with a bowl of fruit that’s too dark to distinguish. The whole room smells like cinnamon and dust.
On the couch Rachel is sitting and reading a book. Helena’s head is in her lap, and Rachel is running her fingers absentmindedly through Helena’s hair. When the door opens both of them twist towards Sarah, break-bone motions, eyes wide.
“Did you choose,” Helena says. “Sarah, did you choose.”
“I thought this was her room,” Sarah says. She didn’t realize she thought that until she opened the door and was disappointed. Her hand is still on the doorknob. Her breath shakes and her chest jumps and: she’s crying. She closes the door before Helena can try and lick the salt water off her face.
Nights and nights and nights ago.
Rachel sitting at the table with Sarah and wrapping a bandage around Sarah’s wrist with precise motions. Helena holding Sarah’s other hand in her hands, head bowed over it like praying or grief. Wind whistling in through the shattered window. Sarah looks past the two of them to the ground outside the mansion, the wreckage of the armchair. She says nothing. The wind keens. She is so tired.
“You can’t do that again,” Rachel tells her, chiding. “You’re scaring her.”
Helena shudders and says nothing.
“I need to leave,” Sarah says. “You don’t understand, I need to leave.”
“Why?” Rachel says.
Sarah doesn’t say anything. Helena’s neck slowly bends, and she looks up. Her eyes are flat saucers of milk, her eyes are the sky after a storm, her eyes are impossible. “Why,” she echoes.
“What will you give me for it,” Sarah says – tongue clumsy and slow with words from a language she doesn’t really understand.
Rachel finishes her work with the bandage, presses her thumb up against Sarah’s pulse. “Interesting,” she says. “What is it worth?”
“I think you’re starving for it,” Sarah says. “I think you’d give me anything to know what I love more than you.”
Rachel looks at Helena. Helena looks at Rachel. Sarah closes her eyes, just for a second, she is so tired, and then she snaps her lids open again out of fear. No surprise: they are both staring at her.
“We’ll let you sleep,” Rachel says.
“All night,” Helena says. “Promise.”
Sarah shudders, despite herself. Imagine: sleeping. Imagine lying there in the dark without Rachel’s whispers sending her stumbling towards sharp edges. Imagine a bed empty of Helena.
“Deal,” she says.
“Deal,” Helena echoes, lovingly. “Now you have to give it to us.”
“I have a daughter,” Sarah says. “She’s eight. I’ve been shit to her, but that’s changing – or it would, if you’d let me out. Please. I’ve abandoned her half her bloody life, I can’t do it again.”
Rachel lets Sarah’s hand go. Sarah pulls it in towards her chest, presses her fingers to her wrist to wipe Rachel’s fingers out. The two of them are staring at each other again.
“A child,” Rachel says, and they both look back at Sarah. Eyes like:
“We could get her,” Helena says.
“You could have her back.”
“Just tell us her name.”
“She could come here and stay with you.”
“We could make a family,” Helena says, leaning in too close. “Sarah, what’s her name?”
Sarah stands up, fast. Her chair shrieks back across the floor. “No,” she says. “No, let me out.”
“She must be so lonely,” Rachel says. The wind sighs through the shattered window.
“We are very good with children,” Helena says, and smiles.
“Don’t you miss her?”
“Aren’t you scared? That she will grow up without you?”
Sarah backs out of the room, stumbling. They let her leave. Of course they let her leave: she has nowhere else to go except back to them.
Helena and Sarah, wandering through the empty mansion. Sometimes there’s howling from strange distant corners, and sometimes that howling isn’t even Rachel. The only other sound is Helena whistling – sound like wind caught between her teeth.
“I want to show you something,” she says.
“Helena,” Sarah says, “I told you, I’m not gonna eat. ‘specially not your wolf meat.”
“I know,” Helena says sadly. “All the wolves run too fast, now, and this is not that. Look.” Although they’ve been wandering at random, she leans into the next door and opens it. It’s a room full all the way to the brim with dusty records, Bowie and Queen and The Clash. Helena picks up the last one and blows it off; dust rubs up against her like a cat before it goes.
“Look see,” she says. “Because of your shirt, when you came.”
Oh. That’s right. When Sarah arrived here she was wearing a London Calling shirt. She doesn’t know what happened to it; she’d sort of assumed Helena ate it. She has mostly been taking things from the closets. Taking clothes isn’t like taking food, she doesn’t think. It’s not like she takes the clothes they leave for her – ballgowns and white dresses that bare her collarbones, sweaters so soft she’s afraid they’ll fall apart if she puts a hand to them. She just takes shirts and pants in dull colors. It’s not like – it’s not.
“Oh,” she says, and steps forward, and takes the record. There’s a record player over in the corner, by a couch that looks comfortable. A steaming mug of tea that smells like tea and not whatever Rachel always serves her. “Oh,” she says again.
“I’ve never heard music before,” Helena says, eyes wide and hopeful and victorious. “Can you show it to me.”
“I want to go home,” Sarah says. Her voice breaks. The record in her hand is just close enough to the one she has at home, her home, the home whose address she can almost remember.
Helena rests her chin on Sarah’s shoulder. “Pick me,” she breathes. “Choose me. Love me.”
“Let me go,” Sarah says, desperate and strained. Helena doesn’t answer.
Here is a terrible secret: Sarah already loves both of them.
Now every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world, sighs the record player, and Sarah closes her eyes and rides the instrumentals like a wave that would carry her out of here. Maybe through the wall. The doors are all locked, unpickable, and the one time she tried getting out through a window—
Her bones ache. She opens her eyes. Rachel is sitting on the other part of the sofa, reading, thigh almost touching Sarah’s feet. Sarah regrets lying on her back now, because it makes this feel intimate. She tilts her head to look at the spine of Rachel’s book. Irish fairy tales. Fuck her.
“You know I can’t even find books in this house when I’m looking for them,” she says.
“You only have to learn to ask,” Rachel says. She turns a page. “Are you familiar with Tam Lin?”
“No.”
“The fair folk,” Rachel says. “Bargains. Love, or something like it. A girl holds onto the person she loves, even when they attack her – thorns, teeth. Snakebites, at one point. Still she holds on. Eventually she is rewarded for her pains.”
She turns another page.
“So which one am I,” Sarah says, and Rachel smiles. Sarah has never seen her put on lipstick but her mouth is always poppyred, always just a little bit wet. There’s a nasty little Pavlovian jolt of pride that goes through Sarah whenever she sees that smile, and she hates it, and she wants it from Rachel all the time. Look at you. Clever girl.
“Which one do you think you are?” she says.
“Let go,” Sarah says. “Let me go.”
“Hm,” Rachel says. She closes the book. We gonna fight ‘til you lose, croon The Clash.
“Maybe you’re the one who needs to let go,” she says. “Have you considered that?”
Here is a terrible secret: the other night Sarah woke up from a nightmare about Kira. Again. Twelfth one this—
—this—
—however long it’s been. She woke up and she was reaching an arm out and she didn’t realize she was going to say a name until her mouth was already curving around the first consonant, the breath of that vowel. Names have power; that’s why Rachel and Helena both want Kira’s name so desperately.
If Sarah had said the name, she would have come. All the way from wherever in this mansion she sleeps. She would have climbed into Sarah’s bed.
It’s the wanting, that’s terrifying.
“No,” Sarah says. The record pops and clicks onto the next song. The money can be made if you really want some more.
“You’re lying.”
Executive decision, a clinical precision.
“You lie all the time, who gives a shit.”
The record stops.
“I don’t lie to you,” Rachel says, sounding cold and furious. “Only the once.”
Sarah sits up, abruptly. “What do you mean once.”
Rachel’s eyelashes flicker in a blink, zoetrope eyes. “What is it worth?” she says.
“I’ll tell you if I was lying,” Sarah says, “just now.”
The blinking stops. The eyelids lower. “I already know the answer,” Rachel says.
“Ask me something, then,” Sarah says. “And I’ll tell you the truth.” Dangerous game. Her heart ricochets around her chest, glad to finally be feeling something. Rachel’s eyes spark and her mouth curves red and pleased and dangerous.
“If you had to choose,” she says, “who would it be?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah says. Croaks. On the couch next to her Rachel’s nostrils flare, like she’s scenting. Apparently the truth passes muster; her mouth sours.
“Hm,” she says.
“When did you lie,” Sarah says.
Rachel studies her. “I said that if you chose one of us,” she says, “we would open the door and let you out.”
“What are you going to do,” Sarah says. “If I choose one of you, what – what happens then.”
The record player starts up again, whining through speeds until it settles. Jumping from the windows, filled with indecision—
“I don’t think I like this song,” Rachel murmurs, turning to consider the record player. The scars on Sarah’s hands ache. The one time she tried getting out through a window, Rachel found her after she’d hurled the chair but before she could work up the nerve to jump. Sarah’s hands bleeding from the broken glass. Oh Sarah. What are you doing to yourself.
“I don’t want to die,” Sarah says. Rachel reaches out and touches her face; Sarah leans into it, helpless.
“Hold fast,” Rachel says, “fear not.” She smiles. In the background The Clash keep singing, but none of the words sound real anymore.
Here is a terrible secret: Sarah already loves both of them.
It’s hard not to. Two desperate things gone all clumsy with love, Rachel’s fingertips tracing Sarah’s veins, Helena’s head on Sarah’s shoulder. Let me tell you about – let me give you – let me touch you – let me – and it goes on. There are beautiful things tucked into the depths of this house, and they are both so eager to give them to Sarah. Helena’s whole face lights up when Sarah smiles; Rachel’s flickers like a fire catching and starting. Both things feel good. Both loves feel good, when Sarah lets herself have them.
She lies in the dark and her stomach growls. They let her sleep alone, because she asked for it. Because she gave them the center of her heart and she is paying for it in nightmares. Sarah’s bed is huge and comfortable and entirely empty except for her and she lies there and hungers and thinks about it.
She’ll pick Rachel and Rachel will break down the entire world for her, explain it, give it to her. Rachel will know exactly what Sarah wants before Sarah even wants it, and when she delivers it she’ll have that perfect pleased smile on her face that Sarah can’t stop herself from wanting to coax free. Rachel will laugh, once, and it will be for her.
She’ll pick Helena and Helena will feed her until she is finally full. Animal hearts and tiny immaculate cakes, gold sunlight through the windows and all of the parts of Sarah’s heart that she is the most scared of. Helena breaking the bones of the world for Sarah. Helena ripping it all to pieces, because Sarah asked her to, because Sarah wanted it.
Heady to think about. Sarah could have anything, if she picked one of them. If that’s what happens when she picks one of them. Maybe they’ll eat her heart. Maybe that would be a relief. Sometimes on the bad nights she pictures it: Rachel’s red mouth, Helena’s sharp teeth. They love her, or they think they do. They would make it feel good. It would feel so good.
She would think it’s Stockholm Syndrome, but these days she’s less and less sure that Stockholm isn’t a place she made up in her own head.
Morning light pours through the windows like champagne from a bottle and they are all at breakfast in one of the parlor rooms. Glass everywhere. A table groaning with pastries and so many different kinds of meat. Honey, gristle, Rachel drinking blood from a teacup until it stains her lips red. Helena digging eyes out of animals’ heads, looking at Rachel while she pops them between her teeth.
Sarah, in the middle, empty plate. She has tried to miss breakfast three times, and none of those times ended well for her. She looks at the scars on her wrist. In the light she can barely see them, silvery and unreal.
“What do you dream about,” she says to her scars.
Both of them say: “You.”
Nights and nights and nights ago.
The only sound in the front hall is Rachel peeling an apple. The sound is a rasp; the edge of her silver knife ducks shyly under the peel, sends it curling down towards Sarah’s knee. Rachel could have sat anywhere, but she chose to sit next to Sarah on the stairs and peel the apple with her sharp little knife.
(“She’ll be touched,” Rachel had said, “that you’re waiting for her to come home.” Her eyes too bright in her head. Eyes like mouths, mouths like hungry.)
Sarah is watching the door. Helena left a few—
—a few—
—she left not that long ago, opening up the door like the handle wouldn’t even dream of being locked. Now she is gone. Rachel, in the corner of Sarah’s vision, is a constant patient hunger. Sarah can see her clearly without looking; she’s wearing a black dress that bares her collarbones, that has a slit up the side where Sarah can see occasional pale flashes of leg. Flirtation by way of vivisection. The knife rasps along, cutting skin, baring the white wet meat of the apple. Sarah breathes in through her nose, pretends she doesn’t. She is drooling a little bit in her mouth.
The door slams open. Rachel puts the knife and apple down on the stairs and tilts her head to stare as Helena comes staggering in with – Jesus Christ, with a wolf on her back. It’s enormous. Twice her size, head lolling, tongue apple-red. Its throat is ripped open by teeth and it bleeds sluggishly down the back of Helena’s dirty fur jacket. Outside the open door is an empty black expanse of sky but Sarah has been sitting in a runner’s crouch this whole time and she’s on her feet and—
Rachel picks up the knife, plunges it into Sarah’s thigh. Sarah hasn’t even finished standing; she staggers, falls all the way down the stairs and to the ground. She thinks she’s screaming. The air still smells like apples.
Helena drops the wolf; it crumples to the ground. “You hurt her,” she says.
“You’d rather she run?” Rachel says. Sarah can hear rustling behind her, but can’t tell what it is. God – her – leg, her leg is on fire, she can barely keep herself from sliding to the floor and never moving again.
“You hurt her,” Helena says again, two parts blank surprise and one part fury. Sarah watches Helena walk forward, slow, like a dream. Then Helena lunges and that’s not slow at all.
They collide into each other behind Sarah’s back. All Sarah can hear is screaming, and she doesn’t know how much of it is her. She pulls herself to her feet. She limps, slowly – god, too slowly – towards the open door. As she limps she pulls the knife out of her leg and holds it desperate in her hand.
Behind her, they are ripping each other apart.
She stumbles by the wolf and it opens one gold eye to watch her. Oh. Oh. It’s still alive. Its breathing is a nasty staggering mess and it’s still alive and it’s watching her as she claws her way towards the door.
“Oh god,” Sarah says, low, “oh god,” and she drops to her knees again in front of it. The sound it’s making is a low sad whine and it does not stop. Sarah will never, she thinks, be able to smell apples again without vomiting.
“I’m sorry,” she says, putting her hand behind the wolf’s ears. Dying and terrified, it doesn’t stop her. She likes to think it understands when she lifts the knife and stabs it in the brain. She likes to think it gets it: why it’s better to die fast.
The screaming stops, like a radio turned off. Sarah keeps her hand on the wolf’s head and cries, ugly and blubbering. She is so tired. How long has it been since she slept? The door right there but she is so tired, she is so tired.
Sarah pulls herself to her feet again, wrenching the knife out, holding it. They are both watching her and it doesn’t even matter. She limps towards the door, the black empty promise of the door.
It closes, slow and polite. Not even a slam. Just a frosty little click, before she can even feel a breeze. She stands there and sways and then lets her leg give out. She hits the floor. She watches the wolf’s empty eyes watch her.
In the back of the room, at the stairs, she hears the crunch of someone biting into an apple.
Afternoon, probably, and Sarah dozes on the couch. The record has started over, and started over, and started over, and maybe it’s been days. The two of them drift in and out. Things Helena has tried to feed her: two songbirds, beef jerky, a cake covered in spun-sugar flowers that crumbled to beautiful dust when Sarah tried to touch them. Rachel hasn’t tried to feed her anything, but – when she left, the patient mug on the table next to Sarah shattered into pieces. Now all the tea is gone.
If she plays London Calling she can remember Kira’s face. Just for a second, before The Clash desperately ask Sarah to give them a smile. It flickers. She’s been trying not to chase the high of it. She’s been failing. The worst part is that every single second that song isn’t playing is another second that she realizes she can’t remember Kira’s face at all.
She keeps thinking that she should go tell Rachel about it, because Rachel would have something to say that would make it make sense. She keeps wanting to open the door and let Helena in – Helena, stinking in her furs, curling up with Sarah until Sarah stops feeling anything.
It’s the wanting, that’s terrifying.
Neither of them come in the room. You only have to learn to ask, Rachel had said, and then she’d turned the page.
Nights and nights and night ago.
Helena won’t let her sleep, even with the wound in her leg pulsing like a second sickly heartbeat. Sarah lies curled on her side and Helena pets at her hair with clumsy hands, sings her lullabies in languages Sarah doesn’t understand, jabs her fingers in the wound before her hands jump back like they’ve been caught taking from the cookie jar. Sarah shakes. Sarah’s eyelids pull closed and then they snap open again, over and over, a nightmare that does not stop.
“Sorry,” Helena says, helpless, “sorry,” but she won’t stop – all hands, all mouth, all teeth.
Sarah’s bed is huge and comfortable and Sarah could probably sleep in it if Helena wasn’t taking up too much space. She doesn’t know what the rest of the room looks like. She can’t find any lamps when she’s bumbling around in the dark, and whenever she shoves the curtains open they always slide shut again. She thinks if she asked, Helena would turn a light on for her. She does not ask.
“Sorry,” Helena says, after a time.
Sarah dangles over the edge of the bed. “You aren’t doing anything,” she says, reasonably. She is delirious from exhaustion and everything feels reasonable. Helena feels reasonable, when she isn’t doing anything.
“No,” Helena says. “Not for me. Sorries.”
Oh. “If she wants to apologize she can do it herself,” Sarah says.
Helena hums. “Rachel likes stretching the truth until it hurts and screams,” she says thoughtfully, “but not breaking it. She doesn’t like breaking things. So. She won’t say sorry. But I am sorry, for her.” Sarah hears the sound of furs rustling in the dark, animal ghosts. “We were alone for a very, very long time.”
Sarah blinks. Sits up. Looks at Helena, a tangled-up shape in the dark. “The two of you?” she says.
Helena blinks at her placidly. “Maybe,” she says. She smiles, teeth. “What is it worth.”
Sarah sighs and lies back down. More fur-sounds, and Helena’s whole weight is pressed up against her from behind. She smells terrible. It should be comfortable, the warmth, but instead Sarah is so awake that it hurts. It really hurts.
“But now we have you,” Helena says drowsily into her neck. “And nobody has to be lonely.”
Sarah sucks in a breath to say something – you don’t own me, she thinks, that’s what it’s going to be – but before she can Helena bites Sarah’s neck. It’s not hard; this is a terrible thing to think, that it could have hurt more, but Sarah thinks it. She remembers the ripped-open wreck of the wolf’s throat.
“Sweet dreams,” Helena says, and then her breathing changes and Sarah realizes she is either asleep or faking it. Probably the latter. Sarah shifts to try and dislodge Helena, but Helena’s arms are like locked doors and they do not shift for her. Sarah lies there and continues to be too awake to think through.
The door to her room opens. Outside is so bright, unbelievably bright. Sarah squints and sees Rachel’s silhouette, but can’t look close enough to see what face Rachel is making. She feels the flutter of Helena’s eyes opening against the back of her neck. The two of them watch each other, around Sarah. Then the door closes. The light stains Sarah’s vision, and she watches the vague afterburn of Rachel until it leaves her.
It’s dark now. The fire crackles. Helena and Sarah are wrestling sleepily on the rug – it’s soft, some sort of fur Sarah doesn’t want to look at too closely. On the couch Rachel is reading something in French. Sarah doesn’t speak it. Ce n'estoit que promenades, que parties de chasse et de pesche, que danses et festins, que collations—
“Which one am I,” Sarah says. Helena pins her to the ground, gets bored of it, drops to the rug next to Sarah.
“You are the girl in the center of the story,” she says. “Bad story. Wrong story. We never wanted anybody except you.”
Rachel doesn’t look up. In the firelight Sarah can’t tell if she’s smiling. On ne dormoit point, et on passoit toute la nuit à se faire des malices les unx aux autres: enfin tout alla si bien, que la fille comença à trouver—
Sarah’s heart shivers in her chest. Nobody ever wanted me except you, she could say, but she is saving this information under her tongue for when she needs to spend it: a life in foster systems, a life of skinned knees and sticking-out ribs. They will both want to hear it. They will lick it off the backs of her eyes. How could anybody not want you, they’ll say, and they’ll mean it, and Sarah is sick with the possibility of that future.
She closes her eyes. I’m going to say yes, she wants to say – here, in this moment, Helena’s body, Rachel’s voice. I don’t know who I’m going to say yes to, but I’m going to say yes.
“She’s falling asleep,” Helena says, curiously, after Sarah doesn’t say anything. Sarah’s eyes are closed. In the dark their voices are the only sound.
“She’ll wake up again,” Rachel says. She keeps reading, on and on, telling Sarah a story that she has no hope of ever understanding.