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When Sarah opens the door, she is hit immediately with three things: the smell of blood, the sound of horrible inhuman screaming, and the sight of a thrashing mass of limbs in the center of the room.
A nice room, that’s what she notices second – in the slowed-down moment where her hand is still hanging loose around the doorknob and her brain is desperately running towards anything that isn’t the clawing biting thing on the floor. Mosaic tiles. A fountain. Some sort of ivy climbing the blue, blue walls. It would probably smell nice if it didn’t smell like blood.
A second passes, then another one. An electric pulse goes through the fighting bodies and they go completely shock-still. A head lifts.
“Sarah?” Helena says through the clawed-open skin of her mouth. Sarah can see the white glint of bone through the ragged remains of her cheek. She can hear herself making a choked-up noise, and then she slams the door shut.
They’re going to come after me, she thinks – nightmare logic – and she starts running down the hallway, looking for a door that could lead to her bedroom. Any of them could, realistically, but some of them are more likely to than others. Red doors lead to Sarah’s room, sometimes. Brown ones. Ones with square-shaped handles. She opens one of them and it’s the butcher-room next to the kitchen and she slams it shut again and she opens another door and it’s the greenhouse and all the plants are dying and dead and she slams it shut again and she’s still running down the hallway and if she has to hear Helena saying her name and sending the tattered fragments of her faceskin fluttering she will go unbelievably mad.
The third door is her bedroom. Sarah slams it shut, fumbles her way into her bed and lies shaking under the blankets like a terrified child. Nightmare logic: you can’t hurt me if I don’t get out from under the covers. She shakes. She clings to the fear with both hands, because once it leaves her there’s only going to be guilt. The fear she can stand. The guilt – no, she’s never been good at that. She used to run to escape it, but there’s nowhere to run to anymore.
Removed from the situation, she gains clarity. The thing in the center of the room: two bodies. Helena on top of Rachel. Too much blood to see clearly. Sudden white jabs of bone. The wet slick of organs. They’re going to kill each other, probably, if they haven’t already. Sarah should have stopped it. Should she? She should have. Would they stop for her? Maybe. Probably. They love her, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
My fault, she thinks, and the guilt slams into her like a train hitting. Her fault. They’re tearing themselves open for her, they have been for—
—a long time, she knows that. She’s always known that.
(On the bad days, she’s flattered.)
If Sarah would pick one of them, they wouldn’t be doing this. She knows it in her bones. It makes her sick; she curls up smaller. She floats in the sea of her own guilt, and relief – if one of them dies, she’ll be spared the decision. If both of them die, she’ll probably be free.
And that makes her guiltier. She cuts herself loose from her body and floats farther. The room is silent – it’s always silent – and it smells faintly like some dark green perfume. Sarah didn’t realize that it smelled like home until now, when she takes in breaths and is comforted by it.
After a while, her door creaks open. “You said you’d leave me alone when I’m sleeping,” Sarah says. “We had a deal.”
“You’re not sleeping,” Helena says, sounding exhausted. Sarah hears the sound of footsteps, some great weight dragging against the floor like a bagful of wet pennies. Helena’s weight thumps into her bed and Sarah chokes on it, the smell. “Oof,” Helena says, and the word is so normal-sounding – slightly baffled – that Sarah can’t help swallowing down a laugh. She knows how the story goes, though, so she doesn’t turn around and look. She doesn’t think she’s allowed.
“Are you – alright,” she says.
“It will heal,” Helena says, still sounding tired. “Are you alright.”
“I’m not the one bleeding, am I.”
“No,” Helena says, “not that alright.” Sarah hears the hollow thump of palm hitting flesh. “Here.”
Sarah doesn’t say anything. Her tongue wrestles down another useless apology.
“Mm,” Helena says. Sarah hears the wet slick sound of Helena’s furs sliding against the bed. If you touch me I’ll scream, she thinks, and somehow Helena hears it – she doesn’t come close enough to touch.
“It’s not your fault,” Helena says. “Sometimes, just – too much. Two of us. In one house. We were not supposed to be this. It hurts. Sometimes.”
“Not your fault,” Helena says again to the silence. “We fought like this before you came.”
“I hate this house,” Sarah says, picking at a loose piece of skin by her fingernail. “I hate this bloody house with all these bloody rooms and all these bloody doors, I hate this house.”
Another slick sound, and Helena’s body weight is pressed into Sarah from behind. Sarah thinks something that isn’t even a word, just a gut-punch sound – she hates that Helena heard what was beneath that. She hates it. Helena’s arm wraps around her tight but not tight enough to be a vice and Sarah hates – she does – she hates.
She holds her breath for a moment, waiting for Helena to call her on the lie, but Helena doesn’t. She just breathes, her breath puffing against the back of Sarah’s neck. By now Sarah is used to the smell. So much blood. Helena says she’ll be fine, so she’ll probably be fine, but – god. All that blood.
“You don’t have to go,” Sarah says, voice rough. “When I fall asleep. You don’t have to go.”
Helena doesn’t say anything. Her breath hiccups against the back of Sarah’s neck, silent and warm.
Sarah dreams about Kira. She is painting Sarah at an easel Sarah can only remember when she’s asleep. Kira’s back is to Sarah, but Sarah recognizes her anyways. Sarah’s mouth bleeds red all the way down the page.
“When’s my mum coming home?” she asks.
“I’m right here,” Sarah says. “ , I’m right here.”
“You’re not my mom,” Kira says, without looking away. On the easel the picture of Sarah wrenches itself off the page, opens its mouth and pours red paint onto the floor. Kira dips her paintbrush into it and goes back to the easel, painting the same picture of Sarah. The same mouth. The same dark hair. The same eyes.
“ ,” Sarah says. She crawls towards herself on the ground. “Kira.” She is herself watching herself crawl towards herself on the ground. She can’t recognize herself either way, Kira. Kira.
“Go home,” Kira says. “You’re not supposed to be
Sarah wakes up, sudden, heart racing. In a room with no windows, you can never tell what time of day it is. Helena hasn’t moved – when Sarah jolts, Helena shifts slightly. “You taste like nightmares,” she says.
“Bloody hell,” Sarah says, “are you stuck to me.”
She is. The blood has dried, and Helena is stick. She unsticks herself with a grunt of effort and rolls over to the other side of the bed, tacky sounds in the dark. Sarah listens to the gulping of Helena’s breath; she sits up, pinches the chunks of her hair that are glued together.
“Gross,” she says emphatically. Helena doesn’t say anything. “Hey. You really alright?”
“Sarah,” Helena says, and then stops. “Sarah,” she says again, “I need. Food. Can you.”
Sarah turns her head and looks at Helena, a lump of hair and fur in the dark. Her heart remembers fear and hums itself faster. “Yeah,” she says slowly, “o—okay, yeah.” She stands up. She backs up, slow, towards the door. Helena’s breathing rasps and rasps and Sarah turns the handle and she’s outside.
In the light, her whole body is red. She doesn’t even want to look at her back and see the splatterpaint there. “Shit,” she breathes, and makes her way to the parlor room where they eat breakfast. It, at least, is still there; the table groans under the weight of all the meat and sugar. Sarah finds a plate. She dumps a handful of honey-glazed songbirds on it, some glistening lump of red jelly, a pile of pastries that look like flowers. An orange. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She had really thought, for a second, that Helena would be hungry enough to eat her.
At the thought, Sarah puts the plate down and leans her weight on the table. She breathes in through her teeth. “Shit,” she says again, and a third time: “shite.” The house echoes with the sound of absolutely nothing.
Sarah grabs the plate in both hands, winds her way to a brown door with a square handle, mutters “you’d better” and opens it. Inside is the constant hushdark of her bedroom. Helena rolls over and Sarah can see the whites of her eyes.
A low, rumbling sound. Sarah drops the plate, spins around, and slams the door shut behind her. She can hear a slam as something hits the door, then some scratching, then the distant sound of something chewing. Her heart says: you almost killed us again. Sarah says: yeah, but I didn’t, did I?
Flakes of dried blood shed from her sleeve like scales. The sudden desire for a bath hits her so hard she almost falls over. God. Imagine being clean of this.
There’s no rhyme or rhythm to which rooms in the house lead to bathrooms. If she had to piss she’s sure there would be one right there; since she doesn’t have to, she wanders. She walks to the first door and tries it: locked. Second door: locked. By the third door Sarah starts rattling the knob; it’s glass, and she thinks she could probably shatter it. “Come on, you piece of shit,” she says, leaning forward and pushing and twisting the knob, “can you for once just—”
The door opens, she stumbles through, it isn’t a bathroom. It’s a small room – two walls made entirely of glass, one wall with the door and a dizzying expanse of crowded bookshelves, another wall with more bookshelves and a bed and Rachel in the bed.
Rachel is swathed in bandages, so white they make her a ghost. She has a bandage wrapped tightly around her eyes. “Sarah,” she says, after a moment. Her voice is colorless with polite surprise.
“What the hell happened,” Sarah says, hand still clutching the knob so tight she thinks it’ll shatter.
Rachel gives the impression of studying her, even through the bandages. “You’ve already spoken with Helena,” she says. “What more do you need to know?”
Into Sarah’s baffled silence, Rachel says: “You stink like her blood.” Her mouth forms a slight, amused smile. “Either come in or shut the door.”
Sarah comes in and also shuts the door. She stands awkwardly in the middle of the room before Rachel gestures to the foot of the bed with a hand whose pinky finger is one small lump of bandage.
“She ate your finger?” Sarah says weakly.
“She did many things,” Rachel says. “As did I.” She sighs as Sarah sits at the edge of the bed and begins combing dried blood out of her hair. “You understand it’s not your fault.”
Sarah makes a noncommittal sound, thinks tell me again with an urgent guilty need. Her ends are split, clogged with blood. She focuses on that and nothing else.
“It isn’t,” Rachel says again, more softly. “We understand that choosing is difficult for you. But your lack of choice is difficult for us. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Et cetera.”
“You were fighting about me,” Sarah says, slow and stupid.
“Of course,” Rachel says. “What else is there to fight over?”
Sarah swallows down her own disappointment, her surprise, her disappointment at her surprise. “Helena said you fought before I got here,” she tells her fingers.
“Well,” Rachel says. “We were always going to. We weren’t meant to cohabitate. Helena grows frantic the longer she is out of the woods, and I…” she trails off. Sarah risks looking at her – realizes it isn’t a risk, because Rachel can’t see her looking – looks. Without Rachel’s eyes, all Sarah has to steer by is her mouth. Right now it’s a small sad fold, something tucked into the corners Sarah can’t see. Red. She’s wearing a grey top that looks like pajamas, which is hideously disorienting. Sarah looks away again. She’s getting blood all over the carpet. If Helena was here, she would eat it.
“You,” she says, after Rachel goes silent. “Are you gonna tell me anything?”
She stops, considers the game, realizes with a guilty thrill that she’s going to play it even though it’s stupid and cruel.
“Helena,” she says, “won’t say shit. Or she – lies. Don’t think she means to, but.”
The air in the room goes sharp. “Well,” Rachel says. “I suppose I will, if she won’t.” A rustle of fabric. “Do you understand taxonomy?”
Sarah snorts. “No.”
Rachel lets out a breath through her nose that could mean anything. “On the shelf to the right of the door,” she says. “Second – no, third shelf down. There should be a book on animal taxonomy. Fetch it, would you.”
Sarah stares blankly at her. “Sarah,” Rachel says.
Sarah lurches to her feet, stares blankly at the shelf to the right of the door. Poetry, mythology, The Art of War. Books on chess. Books on art. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She spots a faded blue book with the word taxonomy on the spine, grabs it. She thinks of saying I got enough of this in elementary school, but she thinks even without eyes Rachel would be able to get too much out of that.
“Good,” Rachel says, when Sarah sits back down. “I would find the right diagram, but I’m afraid I’m indisposed.” Her voice is thin and trembling with humor. Sarah flips through it until she finds a diagram. Birds flapping wildly around an upside-down pyramid, and Sarah is sure someone would be disappointed in her for not knowing what kind of birds they are. She doesn’t know who would be disappointed in her, though.
“Originally there was only one of us,” Rachel says, “or so the story goes. Older than any of you. You and I fall under the same kingdom, technically, although my kind has always been different from yours. But. We’re all animals.”
Kingdom labeled with birds. The part of the pyramid decorated with bones, worms, a snarling possum, fish swimming optimistically through something’s ribs.
“As I said,” Rachel says. “One of us. Initially. One single phylum. Something happened, they – split – I’m unfamiliar with the details, he never told me. And then there were two. Sky and ground, wind and branches, however you’d like to distinguish the classes.” She’s growing more animated as she talks, hands actually moving through the air in a way Sarah has never seen. It’s strange. She looks young. “The two halves couldn’t stand to be together, so one of them fled to the water and one of them fled deeper into the land – and, from them, two different classes entirely emerged. Separate. Not close to the same animal at all.”
Next level down. Birds and fish circling each other, caught somewhere between sea and sky.
“He raised an island from the sea,” Rachel says. “I never saw it brought to life, I wasn’t—” and she isn’t speaking English anymore. She sounds like a bird trilling and trilling in the branches, and Sarah can’t understand her. She’s right; they aren’t the same animal anymore.
She looks at the book, feels like an idiot. Hates feeling like an idiot. So that’s Rachel at the bottom, that single painted bird, her own strange species. Genus, family, order. Phylum, right, that’s the split. Helena called the things in the woods family, so they’re the same – class– no, she doesn’t understand it, she doesn’t get shit. Rachel’s still singing. Her hands dart around her in the air and she can’t see Sarah not getting it, she’s blind.
“Rachel,” Sarah says, frustration sharpening the edges of her consonants. “You’re not speaking English.”
Rachel stops. Her fingertips touch her throat and then fold in front of her on the bed, hand over hand. “I,” she says. “For how long.”
“There was an island,” Sarah says, “that’s all I got.”
Rachel’s hands twitch up against each other. “That’s essentially the story,” she says. “One of us fled into the woods – I don’t know the particulars, ask Helena for her own mythology. One of us left for the sea. The island. There were so many of us. You can’t imagine it. The light, the music.” She looks – “looks” – away from Sarah, towards the window. Sarah realizes with a dizzy shock that this room is on the third floor. She has never been on the third floor; she’s never seen a staircase. The door she opened was on the second floor. She looks away from the window, back to the shelves packed to bursting with empty stories.
“There’s no middleground anymore,” Rachel says quietly. “Between the two of us.”
“So what am I,” Sarah says.
Rachel tilts her head: good point.
“What happened to it?” Sarah says. “Your island. Where’d it go?”
Rachel keeps her head pointed towards the window; the muscles in her neck tremble, like any second she will leap for the glass.
“How’d you get to this house?”
Nothing.
“Why me?”
“Do you know what it feels like, when your eyes grow back?” Rachel says musingly. “It itches. You’d think it would hurt, wouldn’t you? But no. It itches. You’d like to pick at your sockets, and yet you can’t reach them through the bandages you’ve wrapped around yourself. And so the fury grows in you, slowly, at the same pace as your vitreous gel. There’s nothing you can do with it except feed it.” Her head turns, sharp, towards Sarah. “Unless of course you have nothing to feed it with.”
Sarah’s stomach growls. She’s so used to the sound of it that it takes her a moment to realize that it wasn’t her stomach.
“Rachel,” she says, “you want me—”
“Yes,” Rachel says. “Yes, I do.”
“—to get,” Sarah says, and then stops. Her heart says: oh, come on, not this again. Sarah says: well I didn’t know this was going to happen, did I. Her heart says: yes you did, that’s why I’m going so fast.
“You smell like her,” Rachel says, quiet. “She’s the lucky one, between the two of us. You always let her bite down.”
“I don’t let—” Sarah starts, frustrated, and then realizes that sentence means: I don’t let her do anything, she just does it, which means: well if you want to do it just do it, and then Rachel would – just do it – and that wouldn’t end well for Sarah, would it. She cuts the sentence off but it’s too late to save it. Rachel’s hands knead at the blanket, feline. They’re all so hungry in this house. You’d think one house couldn’t hold all this starving.
“Sarah,” Rachel says, and then stops. “Sarah,” she says again, “I think you should go.”
Instead Sarah decides to be an idiot, and says: “Why don’t you just do it.”
“If I started,” Rachel says, voice barely audible, “I would never stop. On the island—” and she stops, clings to the words like rope in her hands. “On the island—” but then she stops again. Make a stupid decision, Sarah M, Sarah thinks to herself, go on then, and she reaches out and puts her hand on top of Rachel’s kneading fingers. Rachel goes still. Her head jerks back towards Sarah, sightless and desperate.
“Don’t touch me,” she says roughly. Under Sarah’s hand Rachel’s fingers tremble, and she swears she can feel the bandaged shape of Rachel’s pinky finger growing towards the sun of her as she touches it.
“On the island,” Sarah says.
“On the island we took your people for sport and hunted them through the cities of glass and gold,” Rachel says, voice a strained hiss. “When I tell you not to touch me, Sarah, I mean it.”
Sarah stops touching her. Rachel’s mouth is open and red. Her teeth are slightly too sharp, which Sarah usually doesn’t have the time to notice. Now, in the glassy throe of her adrenaline, she can’t stop noticing it.
“But we weren’t animals,” Rachel says, head tipped back down to not watch her hands. “The animals were on the mainland, we weren’t them. We cooked our meat. We served it with herbs and sauces and summerwine. The animals were on the mainland. We were on the island and the dances went on forever.”
“You must miss it,” Sarah says slowly, feeling – blindly, only not that, another word for blindly – for something in this speech that she can use.
But instead Rachel goes silent. “I’m on the mainland now,” she says in a small strange voice. “Get out.”
“Rachel—”
“Get out,” Rachel snarls, head whipping up to bare her teeth at Sarah. The words are terrifying, sharp – but completely human. Sounding. Human-sounding. Sarah jerks to her feet, looks at the smear of Helena’s blood she’s left on the bed. She imagines the moment she leaves, Rachel fumbling herself onto her four animal limbs, leaning forward—
She backs up towards the door. Rachel’s gaze follows her unerringly, mouth all the way open, sucking in deep breaths. Sarah lets her back thud against the door and she’s fumbling for the handle and Rachel says, soft and rough, “You smell like fear. I could do anything to you, Sarah. You’d let me. You already lie there and let me tell stories of everything that I might do to you. It would be just like another story. I could chase you down. I’m faster than you, you know that.” She tilts her head to the side and – horror – she looks like Rachel. She looks just like herself. “Do you think about it?” she says, voice soft and sweet and kind. “I think you do.”
The doorknob is cold round glass under Sarah’s hand and she pulls it open, somehow gets outside and gets the door closed and is on the ground shaking before she can even think about it. When she closes her eyes she can see herself running, in the woods or through some ornate glass labyrinth. Fuck. Fuck. Her legs are shaking and her hands are shaking and her heart is punching her repeatedly, how could you do that, why do you keep doing that to us, remember when you said you’d never be a junkie and Sarah says no, no, no I don’t remember, no I don’t remember anything.
Remember when you said you’d never be a junkie. City in the cold. Flakes of snow in his eyebrows. Sarah head tilted back towards the sky laughing. The sky. I’d never. Never ever. Never do that shit to myself. Chasing it, the high, snow on her tongue melting gone. What was his name? She doesn’t know. Probably it wasn’t important. He could have been anyone. She could have been anyone, and now she isn’t.
She could be the person who goes back in there. Or maybe she could cross the hallway and open the door on the other side, because she knows exactly where it would put her. They’re both waiting for her. Rachel in a room full of light she can’t see and Helena lying in the dark, picking meat from between her teeth and smelling Sarah’s pillows. They are both focused to the point of trembling on their doors – just in case Sarah might come back through, pull her hair back from her throat, and say all I can think about anymore is you.
She can taste their hope on her tongue and then it melts and it’s gone. Or maybe it’s her own hope. She’s having a hard time telling the difference, these days.
Sarah pulls herself to her feet, slow. By now all the blood has dried. “I have to piss,” she tells the walls, feeling ridiculous but not letting it stop her. It’s enough, anyways: she opens a door and Helena isn’t on the other side of it. The bathwater is steaming, and it has rose petals floating in it. More tea, a teacup resting hopefully on the rim of the tub.
“Piss off,” she tells it, “like hell am I eating anything now.” It doesn’t move, because it’s a teacup and of course it isn’t going to. Sarah imagines picking it up and hurling it across the room and she really, she really, she really doesn’t know if that’s her or Rachel. She doesn’t know if Rachel is herself or Helena. She doesn’t know if Helena, right now, is trying to make herself into Sarah instead.
Seasick, Sarah peels off her clothes and gets into the tub. The water turns red, diluted. Like cherry wine. She hates it. “Pull yourself together, M—” she starts, realizes she can’t remember the rest of the word, decides to stop. She trails her fingers through the water. Her brain doesn’t know what to be scared of, so it decides to be scared of everything – the sound of Helena scratching at the door, the books and books of stories Rachel has been telling Sarah, the light through the window, the idea of birds. Any and any and all of it.
“I’m not scared,” Sarah tells the blood in the water. “I’m not.” She reaches up her hand and touches the blood in her hair; then she closes her eyes, holds her breath, and lets herself sink under the water.