Chapter Text
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—
—running, she’s running for the door. Behind her Rachel makes a horrified sound in the pit of her throat but it’s too late, Sarah is past her, Sarah is past Helena – who gives her a wide-eyed expression like Sarah just split the world in two – and she’s out the door. She is stumbling down a set of porch steps too difficult to see in the dark, she is – out. She’s out. She’s outside of the house.
“Oh shit,” she breathes, “oh shit,” and she keeps running. There’s a stitch in her side, but that’s fine. She’s run through worse. She can almost catch onto the edges of a memory, something where she was holding a white bag full of snow – but it’s gone. That’s fine, she’ll ask someone about it later. When she gets home.
Outside of the mansion, the world is dark. Sarah is running through the beam of golden light left from the open door; on the other side of it, she can hear horrible screaming. The wet sharp sound of flesh ripping. Oh, shit, they’re fighting. Right now. Sarah laughs, realizes she doesn’t have the air for it, smiles, looks up—
Fuck! Forest. Too late to stop running, she’s in it. Branches crack under her feet and Sarah starts zig-zagging on some instinct she doesn’t know. Something something tracking.
While she’s thinking about that, she slows. Her body shakes and stumbles and tries to fall over, but Sarah doesn’t let it; all she does is let it lean against a tree, so the two of them can shake together.
Okay. Okay. Okay. Woods. Shit. Shit, there are woods out here, Sarah is in the woods, this isn’t Toronto – this isn’t anywhere near Toronto – right, Manning, woods. You’re in the woods. You pissed off two hungry monsters and eventually they’ll remember that it was you who made them angry, not each other. Helena knows these woods – she must, ‘cause she keeps leaving and coming back. So where does that put you.
Nowhere good, is the answer to that. Sarah’s stomach takes the moment to let out a long, hurting growl – if she’s outside the house, does that mean she has to eat? Can she eat? Shit, she doesn’t know the rules. She stands up on her feet again, pushes off the tree, keeps walking. Branches keep cracking, which is probably not good.
In the distance, something screams. Something else screams and it’s not in the distance at all. Fuck. Animals, Sarah thinks, aren’t supposed to scream like that. She shivers. She wishes she had a jacket; she wishes she had Helena’s furs. Her stomach keeps growling and her legs are shaking and she wishes she was at home, with Kira, drinking tea. She must be so close to that. If she keeps walking.
“Girl,” whispers a voice, and the i in girl goes on too long. “Girl, girl, are you lost? Do you want to go home?”
Sarah swallows, doesn’t say anything, keeps walking.
“Girl,” says the voice again. Sarah’s eyes have adjusted well enough that she can see the shadow of something that is far too big for a voice that thin and sweet. She’s full on shaking now. Her stomach growls back at the thing in the dark and it laughs in a sound like bells.
It keeps pace next to her as she walks. “Girl,” it says again, “girl girl girl what’s your name?”
Sarah runs. Bolts, really, tearing through the trees like a madwoman. She can hear the sound of bells chiming and the thing in the woods keeps up. “I ate my father,” it tells her, “I ate my mother. I ate my sister, I ate my brother. I’ll tell you a story, you know that it’s funny, you know how it ends: with a little girl running.”
“Piss off,” Sarah gasps, “don’t have time for this shit,” and she stumbles, and she’s on her knees in the woods. A heavy footstep hits the ground behind her. Sarah’s eyes snap open, stare at the leaf litter, watch a variety of horrible insects bury their way into it. It’s big. This thing, it’s big. It’s really big.
Sarah bunches her weight onto her feet, shifts, and leaps for a tree. Grabs a branch, pulls herself up, the next one, the next one, she’s climbing higher, she’s shaking. Below her something screams, hurls itself into the trunk. “Girl,” it keens. Sarah keeps grabbing and pulling, up, higher and higher. “Girl” screams the thing below her, so loud birds come flying out of the treetops. Sarah shakes and grabs and pulls and her mind goes away, it’s just her body taking her higher and higher until she runs out of branches. She folds herself up small in the top of the tree and shakes for a bit. Then she looks down.
The forest below her is an endless dark sea. She keeps thinking that eventually it will stop, and it does not stop. When she twists her neck right she can see the mansion, all lit up. She stares at it. She can’t see Helena or Rachel – of course she can’t, of course she wouldn’t be able to, but it rattles her spine. She looks back out. The forest doesn’t end. She wants it to end, but it won’t. It goes on to the horizon line. Sarah, seasick, grabs onto a branch and tries to make her brain tell her what to do. It doesn’t.
Come on, Manning. The woods can’t go on forever, that doesn’t make sense. (The house goes on forever. The house makes doors open where there shouldn’t be doors. What is “sense” now anyway?) If you keep walking long enough you’ll find the edge of them. (If you keep walking long enough you’ll fall over and die.) (Or something will eat you.) (Or Rachel and Helena will find you, and maybe they’ll eat you. Would that be better? ) You just have to climb down from the tree. (For what? Maybe you should wait here and they’ll come get you and bring you home.) You just have to keep moving. (You can’t. You won’t be able to. This is an impossible thing.)
Just keep moving.
(You can’t.)
Just keep moving.
(Sarah. This isn’t going to work.)
Sarah climbs down, slowly, branch by branch. There is nothing at the foot of the tree. The sky isn’t shading any color to tell her whether or not dawn is coming. She keeps remembering, sick and dizzy, that the forest went on forever. The distance Sarah ran from the mansion is the size of an eyelash, and the forest is the world. She wants – she wants.
She walks forward, slow, step after trudging step. Things eat each other alive in the dark, and Sarah can hear every single sound. Her bones ache. Her stomach whines to itself, giving up, getting quiet. When Sarah turns her head too fast the world sparkles. Fuck. Maybe she’ll eat bark or something; someone told her once that she could eat it. She doesn’t remember who. God, it better not have been Helena.
Sarah keeps stumbling over brush, elephant-sounds, keeps almost smacking into trees. It’s dark. The world is just trees and brush and leaves, someone is watching her from by a tree, there’s no break in the woods and there’s no light anywhere. It’s just this forest for—
Wait.
Sarah jolts, but the person watching her is – a person. Barely, but. A person. A little lumpy around the edges. A man, snaggletoothed, skin bulging like tumors. Bald. Lurched over. His hands are on the tree, picking at the bark; his eyes are on her.
“Hey,” Sarah says. “Hey. You know the way out of here?”
He whines at her. A string of drool drips down his chin. Sarah risks a step closer. “I need to get out,” she says. “I need to get to Toronto. You know where that is? Canada? Can you understand me?”
The head moves up, so he’s looking slightly above her head. The head moves down, so he’s looking slightly below her head. It’s the world’s worst nod, but she’ll take it. “Great,” Sarah says. “God. Okay. Great. Do you know how to get out of here?”
No response.
“Can you – can you get me out of the woods? I’ll pay.”
His mouth opens. Ungh, he says, and mm.
“What do I have to pay,” Sarah says, taking another step closer. “Please. Please—” her voice breaks “—I want to go home.”
He reaches out a hand, fast, when she gets close enough; the hand flicks the tears off her face and then he licks them. He pats the bald top of his head a few times, nnn, nnnnm.
Sarah pats her own head. He nods at her, enthusiastically.
“Shite,” Sarah breathes, and then – struggling to keep her voice steady – “my hair? You want my hair?”
More nodding. Sarah bites the inside of her lip, hard, almost hard enough to bleed. “Great,” she says. “Yeah, deal, get me out, you can take it. Eat it. I don’t give a shit.”
He puts his hand in the small of her back, gently, like he’s escorting her to a dance. And then they are walking through the woods.
“You got a name or somethin’,” Sarah says, after a few terrible moments where she can hear something eating, greedily, somewhere in the distance.
He just laughs. It sounds like gargling with no water.
“Come on,” Sarah says. “I’m guessin’ we’ve got a bit of a hike, yeah? There’s gotta be something I can call you.”
Somewhere, something thrashes through the trees. He makes a low distressed sound, pushes Sarah forward with his hand. The hand is beginning to sweat. Sarah’s heart is a wardrum in her throat, but that’s fine if she gets out of here.
Aaa, he says, and unnn, and sssss.
“Ans?” Sarah says faintly, starting to jog a little bit from the fear coming off of him in waves.
Ih, he says. Ihaaaaanns.
“Yannis?”
Mmn.
“Great,” Sarah says. “I’m – uh. S.” She swallows. “Thank you. For uh. This.”
Yannis doesn’t say anything. The thrashing in the treetops starts up again, like some very large bird is having trouble. It’s almost funny, really, it would be funny if Sarah couldn’t also hear howling and shrieking and wet gurgling sounds underneath it. God, what sort of shit is in these woods.
They keep moving, a sort of half-jog. “How long’ve we got?” Sarah says, hating herself for talking but hating the howling silence more. Yannis keeps not talking. His breath comes in frantic puffs. Large animals move on either side of them, passing by them in the brush and then vanishing before Sarah can make out their shapes. In the distance, a bird calls and it goes on and on and on until everything else is silent. Then it stops, and the noise starts up again. I hurt I hurt I hurt in a million different tongues.
“Can you really not talk,” she says.
Sss, Yannis says. Nn. Drrrrlla. P. Pppp. rrrrnss.
“Indoors?” Sarah tries. “Practice?” but Yannis shakes his head and doesn’t say anything else. Another bird trills. Maybe it’s getting close to dawn. Maybe Sarah just can’t see it yet.
God, does she really want to see what it’s like when all the birds in this place wake up?
“Does the sun shine here,” she tries, and Yannis shakes his head again. His worry itches all through her but this is as fast as she can go – her stomach growls – and she isn’t going to run at whatever pace he clearly needs her to go. In fact: they stop, because Sarah’s knees buckle and she has to lean against another tree.
“I’m sorry,” she says, when Yannis stares at her goggle-eyed and drooling. “I can’t, I—” she bows forward, holds her head in her hands. She is so hungry. If Yannis held still long enough Sarah would eat him, which is a terrible thing to think. Something flaps its way into the tree above her, thrashing madly, and Sarah looks up at Yannis.
“Yannis,” she says, “if the sun doesn’t rise here, why are all the birds calling?”
Yannis is looking into the tree and his face is a flat mask of horror. He gets down on the ground, on his knees. He whines and whines.
Something wet hits Sarah’s shoulder. It’s very red. Horror rises in Sarah like dark water and she looks up, and up, and up.
Rachel is sitting on one of the branches, feet dangling casually towards the ground. One of her legs is ripped partway off her body, but that’s not where the blood came from.
Both of her eyes are gone.
The sockets are wet bloody holes, dotted with clumps of wet white that must be her – oh fuck, Sarah thinks, and dry heaves on the ground but she’s got nothing to throw up anymore. She can’t even feel anything through all her horror and horror and fear. Rachel sitting in the tree. Rachel bleeding. Rachel here, and sitting in the tree, and where can Sarah run to, Rachel is here, Rachel found her and found her completely blind.
A bird calls, only it isn’t a bird. Sarah looks back and Rachel’s wet bloody mouth is open and she’s singing. She isn’t looking at Sarah – well, she isn’t looking at anything, but she’s doing that not in Sarah’s direction. At Yannis. She trills, chirps, her voice like water flowing backwards up the rocks.
Yannis grunts and whines. He makes his way to his feet again and then makes some whining yips, a growl, more animal sounds. He bares his teeth, thank fuck. In the tree Rachel’s voice goes cold and crystalline and she just keeps singing and Sarah doesn’t know what she’s saying except for how she knows it’s about her. Slowly – carefully – she starts inching around the tree trunk. Bit by bit, until Rachel and Yannis are at her back. She starts moving forward – slow. She breathes shallow. Rachel sings and then stops and says: “Sarah.”
Sarah stops moving.
“Don’t run. I’ll chase you. I’ll catch you. It will hurt.”
So many feelings rise up in Sarah at once that the only thing she can think is it’s not fair. This isn’t fair, it’s not fair, she did everything right – she timed it perfectly, she got out, she got someone to take her home, she played every part right and here is Rachel anyways to end it. To bring her back to the mansion, to keep dancing her around in circles forever and ever. Not even until Sarah dies, because she doesn’t even think they’ll let her die.
It’s not fair. It’s not fair. She starts crying, near-silent hiccuping sounds. After a few seconds Rachel starts trilling again.
Only it’s not Rachel, because while that bird calls Rachel’s voice is saying: “Sarah.”
“What,” Sarah says.
“Come here.”
“No.”
“Sarah,” says Rachel’s voice, from somewhere else entirely. “Don’t run. I’ll chase you.”
“Sarah,” says the same voice from a different place. “Run. I’ll chase you.”
“Sarah!”
“Sarah.”
“Sarah, what’s the rest of your name?”
“Sarah aren’t you hungry, I could feed you, come a little closer—”
“Sarah do you love me—”
“I love you, Sarah, Sarah, Sarah—”
Something tears open with a meaty ripping sound, somewhere Sarah can’t see, and the voices are getting closer and they aren’t even pretending to sound like Rachel anymore. Sarah Sarah Sarah and every time one of them says Sarah’s name it feels like a tiny fishhook curling into her skin and pulling. Every single time.
A hand grabs her arm and Sarah screams, louder than any sound she’s ever made in her life. It’s wet. The hand. It’s wet and covered in something soft and slick that slides off of Sarah’s hand and hits the ground with a wet splat. Also, it’s Rachel’s hand. Rachel pulls Sarah to standing and pulls Sarah forwards through the woods, fast, limping awfully. The only color Sarah can see clearly is the occasional flash of Rachel’s leg bone, where it’s supposed to connect to her hip.
Sarah drops to the ground, trying to make herself deadweight, but it doesn’t work – Rachel keeps dragging her forward anyways, and now Sarah is skidding along the ground. “Rachel,” she says. “Rachel. I’m not going back, I’d rather kill myself.”
“No,” Rachel says, without looking – “looking” – down. “If you try. I’ll make you sleep. Walk.”
“No.”
“I can hurt you,” Rachel says.
“You won’t, though,” Sarah says, and Rachel picks her up with one hand and slams her against the nearest tree trunk. It rains needles down onto Sarah’s shoulder. Rachel’s hand is around her throat, pinning her to the trunk. Her face is too close; Sarah can see her brain glinting in the depths of her eye sockets.
Rachel doesn’t say anything, and after a moment she drops her. Sarah thuds to the ground and her legs buckle and she wants to go home and she misses Kira and she misses stupid shit, like the sound of car alarms going off at two in the morning. She misses stale pretzels. She misses sidewalks. Rachel’s hand fists in the back of her sweater and drags her along the ground and Sarah cries because she doesn’t – she just doesn’t know what else to do.
“I can walk,” she says, after a long long time has passed. “Rachel. I said I can walk.”
The hand lets go. Sarah stumbles to her feet, and they’re walking. The woods are weirdly quiet now. Sarah sniffs in a breath, wipes tears from her face with the back of her hand. She sways a little bit closer to Rachel, close enough to see trickles of liquid coming from her eye sockets. Shit, Sarah thinks, with helpless dismay, and then she elbows Rachel in the eye socket and sprints.
If she can make it back to Yannis – he isn’t stronger than Rachel, she doesn’t think, but (god help her) he can buy her time and if she knows where she’s going she can run, she can run, her body is empty and flying, her body isn’t anything but a collection of crumpled paper and sparks, it’s fine, she can—
She hits the ground hard, skids, feels her body snap and give up. Rachel’s weight is on top of her, crouched on Sarah’s spine. She’s making this endless rusty trill of a sound, like if a violin was clockwork, like if a violin was clockwork and past all hope of repair. Fuck. Something is dripping onto the back of Sarah’s neck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Sarah,” Rachel says, and those two syllables are packed tight with the sum total of wanting. Every single piece of wanting in the world, crammed into Sarah’s name.
Sarah breathes in wet dirt, coughs it out. “Let me go,” she says.
“No,” Rachel says. “Not ever.” She pulls Sarah to standing and makes a distressed noise in her throat. Sarah looks down. Rachel’s leg isn’t really attached anymore; it’s clinging by a few wet scraps of flesh, and Rachel is panting with her mouth open. Something dribbles from her eye into her panting open mouth.
Then Rachel’s hand fists in Sarah’s hair and pushes, and everything snaps to black.
Sarah wakes up when her head jars into the stairs outside the mansion. Rachel is fumbling with the doorknob and the second Sarah shifts her head a little bit she says: “Don’t.”
Sarah makes a noise in her throat and lets her head slump back down. Rachel grabs the back of Sarah’s sweater again and drags her inside, across the rough plush of the carpet. Then she lets go. The door closes. Here on the ground Sarah can see the hulking carcass of the wolf, and also Helena’s leg behind it. She can’t see if the leg is attached to anything. It’s just lying on the ground.
Rachel pulls Sarah upright, grabs her arm, starts pulling her towards the stairs. “Rachel,” Sarah says. Rachel doesn’t answer. They reach the stairs and Sarah can see the leg and it is attached to a body, it’s attached to Helena’s body, Helena’s body lying facedown on the ground next to a puddle of organs and also a knife. The apple Rachel was cutting has rolled across the ground, and is lying next to the wolf’s mouth. But the knife. The knife is next to Helena. Next to Helena’s body. The knife. That’s where the knife is. Wet and slick with blood and guts, where it is, next to Helena’s body.
“Rachel,” Sarah says again, her voice a wreck. Rachel pushes her up the stairs. Sarah grabs onto the banister, looks down at the bodies. “Is she dead.”
“I don’t care,” Rachel growls, and keeps pushing.
Sarah can’t think through the dizzy panicked whirl of her brain – her whole body is filled up with anxious blood, and she can feel every bit of it. She grabs Rachel’s hand and puts it at her throat. She nestles Rachel’s thumb up against the frantic beating of her pulse. “Could she still be alive,” Sarah says, trying desperately to keep her voice steady.
Rachel’s mouth opens just a little wider. God, her teeth are sharp. Too sharp. Just a little bit, but a little bit is still too sharp. “Worth,” she says, and: “worth,” and “oh” and “What. What is it worth.”
Sarah presses Rachel’s hand a little tighter on her windpipe. Rachel lets out a gusting, shaky breath through her nose and then spins around, breathes in through her nose and mouth.
“Yes,” she says. “She’s alive.”
“Save her.”
“No.”
“I don’t have anything else to give you,” Sarah says, voice helpless and scared. “Rachel, please.”
“Again,” Rachel says, leaning against the banister, swaying.
“Rachel,” Sarah says, swallowing, “please. You’re the only one who can help me. It’s just you. I need you.”
“Good,” Rachel says. For a moment the air is utterly and completely silent, besides the sounds of them breathing. Then: “I’ll do it.” Then: “You owe me.”
“I know,” Sarah says.
“Good,” Rachel says again, and grabs Sarah’s arm and pulls her up the stairs. Partway through something rips, rolls and thumps its way down stair by stair. Sarah doesn’t turn around to look at it, doesn’t pay attention to the way Rachel is hopping. If she doesn’t look, none of this is real. If she doesn’t look, this is a dream she can wake up from.
Rachel opens a door, shoves Sarah through it, closes the door without saying anything. Fuck everything, it’s a dining room. The table is groaning under the weight of a feast, fruit in gem-plastic colors, meat and fish so beautifully colored the cuts don’t even look real. Sarah sits down on the ground – no she doesn’t, sitting implies that she meant it. She’s just on the ground now. Now she’s lying on her side. She said she’d let Rachel choke her. She would let Rachel choke her, if it meant Sarah didn’t have to stay in this house alone with whatever thing Rachel actually is. Sarah would cut out her own eye and give it to Rachel if it meant she didn’t have to be alone with her.
She lies on the ground. A record player clicks and pops and starts playing until Sarah wheezes “please don’t” and it stops. Eventually she sits up. Then she stands. Then she tries the door, and isn’t even surprised that it’s locked. She rests her face against it, tries to breathe in the smell of the wood but can only smell the cinnamon and tomato sauce and butter and meat from the table behind her. She gives up. Eventually, she just gives up. She sits on the ground.
Time passes.
They haven’t let Sarah sleep since she got to the house, not properly. Every time she tries one of the two of them wakes her up. Now she lists onto her side and tries to sleep and finds that she can’t anymore; she’s forgotten all the steps, she doesn’t remember how it goes.
Bobbing halfway in the water of sleep, she dreams about Kira. Kira is sitting at the dining table and she’s starving – she’s so hungry, but she won’t eat. Sarah doesn’t understand why she won’t eat. It’s Sarah’s job to look after her, and how can she keep Kira safe if Kira won’t eat anything?
“Kira, love,” she says, “come on, just a bite.”
“No,” Kira says. “No, it’s not safe.”
Sarah looks at the food and it’s just food. “It’s fine, monkey,” she says. “I promise.”
“I want to go home,” Kira says.
“This is home now,” Sarah says.
Kira starts crying. “Come on, monkey,” Sarah says, “we’ve been over it, I know it’s hard but—”
Kira shoves her plate away, keeps crying. “Kira,” Sarah says, trying not to get angry and failing. “There’s all this food, why won’t you eat some of it. You’re just gonna get hungry.”
“I don’t care,” Kira says. “I don’t care, I don’t want to eat it.”
Sarah picks up an apple.
“No,” Kira says, and Sarah is prying her mouth open, “no,” Kira says, “no, no, no—”
Sarah wakes up and she’s holding an apple and her mouth is puddling with drool. She drops the apple. She is standing over the dinner table – all the seats are empty – she is so hungry she thinks she might not even be a person anymore. She might just be hungry. She sits down at the head of the table, rests her elbows on the surface, rests her head in her hands. Shakes a little bit, because what the hell else is she going to do.
Time passes.
Rachel opens the door. She’s wearing a sleek black jacket, a knotted scarf, black trousers. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ve made a mistake, haven’t I.” She sighs out through her nose. “We were wrong to keep you here, you can Rachel opens the door. She’s wearing a sleek black, fuck Sarah can’t keep it straight in her brain. The dream starts and stops and starts again, and she’s awake, and her head is on the table. An entire fish is resting on a plate and it stares at Sarah dolefully. “I know,” Sarah says. “Me too.”
Time passes.
Helena opens the door. She is wearing Sarah’s London Calling shirt, the one Sarah thought she’d lost. It’s layered over a black shirt, but that’s not enough to hide the blood. “Hello,” she says.
“Don’t waste your time,” Sarah mutters into the table. “I’m dreaming.”
“No,” Helena says, perfectly serene. She puts her hand on Sarah’s arm. “It’s time to go now. You saved my life. There are rules.”
“I still owe Rachel.”
Helena laughs, low and guttural in her throat. “Not anymore.”
Sarah sits up. “Really?” she says.
“Yes,” Rachel says. “We were wrong to keep you shit, Sarah is dreaming. She wakes up again and just barely manages to keep herself from falling out of the chair. I should be trying to get out of here, she thinks muzzily. The table has no knives on it, just spoons. Shit, she’s dreaming.
Sarah wakes up again and she’s still lying on the floor. She didn’t even stand up in the first place. She is still lying on the floor. She and the wolf are both lying on the floor, on the carpet, she doesn’t know when Helena brought the wolf in here but she did and it’s on the floor. Someone wedged an apple in its mouth. Sarah is lying on the floor and the wolf isn’t there, because that was a dream. Her stomach growls. Now that she’s back in the house it doesn’t seem pressing, it just seems funny. It’s funny that she’s this hungry all the time. It’s funny that this is all she can dream about.
Time passes.
Rachel opens the door. She is in a wheelchair and there is a blanket thrown over the place where her legs should be; there is a bandage wrapped tightly around her eyes. “Hello, Sarah,” she says. “I’ve come to collect.”
“Don’t waste your time,” Sarah mutters into the carpet. “I’m dreaming.”
Rachel wheels herself over to Sarah, gets herself out of the wheelchair and kneels next to her on the ground. Her hand is in Sarah’s hair. “This could all be a dream, if you’d like,” she says. “When you’re dreaming, there are never consequences. Would you like this to be a dream, Sarah? That way you can have whatever it is that you want. It wouldn’t matter. You could say it out loud.”
“Yeah,” Sarah says. “Yeah. Could this be a dream?”
“Of course, sweetheart,” Rachel says. “You’re dreaming.”
“Thanks,” Sarah says, and Rachel puts her hands around Sarah’s throat, and also she opens the door. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” she says, taking Sarah’s hand and leading her outside. They are standing in the middle of a glass city, and the city is filled with people, and all of them are dangerous and beautiful.
“Yeah,” Sarah says.
“What do you want, Sarah?” Rachel says.
Time passes.
“I want,” Sarah says.
Time passes.
Rachel puts her hands around Sarah’s throat, and Helena laughs low and guttural in Sarah’s throat. “Stop,” Sarah says, “stop laughing.”
Time passes.
Rachel opens the door. She is in a wheelchair and she’s wearing Sarah’s London Calling shirt and she says “I’m not angry with you, it’s just that the sound of Sarah breathing in the dark, wheezing, Rachel sighs and says “It’s time to go now.” It’s time to go now. Helena picks up the fish from the table and pops its eyes out and feeds them to Rachel only Sarah is Rachel and she’s spitting them out on the ground, all of her teeth, Helena pulling Sarah’s teeth out of her mouth and feeding them to Stop,” Sarah says, “stop laughing, stop laughing, stop, Sarah just wants to wake up, Sarah just wants to wake up, Sarah doesn’t want this to be a dream anymore, she wants to wake up. She keeps waking up and she’s in different places around this room, and then she realizes she hasn’t moved, and then she wakes up – the nightmare of it never stops, and she wants to be awake, and she wants and she wants and she wants.
Time passes.
Helena opens the door. She’s wearing a sweater Sarah wore a few—
—a few—
—a sweater that Sarah wore recently, and leggings, and she looks tired. She sits down next to Sarah on the ground. “Hello,” she says. “You are on the ground.”
“Am I still asleep,” Sarah mutters.
“I don’t know,” Helena says. “Do you want to be asleep? Then you can be dreaming. Dreaming is easier. You can do anything, and it doesn’t even matter.”
“I want things to matter.”
“Then you are awake,” Helena says. She stands up – makes a muffled sound – moves to the dining table and starts doing something Sarah can’t see. “You saved my life, I think.”
“Would she have let you die?”
“I don’t know,” Helena says. She stops moving, for a second, and then she starts up again. She shoves something in her mouth and cracks it efficiently with her teeth before swallowing and continuing to talk. “She would have been sorry later, I think, if she didn’t. But not sorry then.”
She fills up a plate with food and sits back down next to Sarah with another high noise of pain. She passes the plate to Sarah so casually that it takes Sarah a beat to remember that she isn’t supposed to eat the food that’s on it. Fuck. Fuck this. Fuck Helena. She rolls over onto her side, back turned. Her hair falls over her neck like a barrier between the two of them.
“You have to eat, Sarah,” Helena says. “You are hurting. Food helps.”
“Don’t want it,” Sarah says. Her stomach growls.
“Hm.”
Helena keeps eating. Bones crack. She slurps up something, and Sarah is nauseous-sick. “Did you like the woods,” Helena says through a mouthful of food.
Sarah just laughs, soft and hysterical.
“You didn’t like them?”
“I want to go home,” Sarah says.
“Maybe that is somebody’s home. You don’t know. You went out there, and that could be a home. Maybe.”
“Everything that lived out there wanted to eat me,” Sarah says. “Not my home.”
“Hm,” Helena says, but the sound is softer this time. Sarah closes her eyes and listens to the sound of Helena’s hunger in the dark. Crack, lick, slurp. “Do you want to see,” Helena says.
“No,” Sarah says, without even opening her eyes, without even knowing what question she is answering.
“I want to show you,” Helena says. “Look. Look, Sarah.”
“No.”
Helena jabs her in the arm with a fork. “You are bad,” she says. “Give me your hand then and you can feel it.”
“No, absolutely bloody not, that’s worse!”
Helena’s hand curls shyly around Sarah’s wrist, but when Sarah tries to jerk her hand away the grip is iron. Helena pulls Sarah’s arm at a weird angle, and then her hand is touching fabric, and then it’s touching skin—
—skin that’s gaping open and inside of the skin is—
—she rips her hand away. “Oh god,” she says. “What the hell, I thought – thought you healed, what—”
“Slow,” Helena says through a mouthful. “Food helps. You should see. Very pretty. All my insides outside.” She laughs to herself and Sarah hears the damp sound of crumbs spraying.
“You know I think you’re worse than her,” she says, and the chewing stops for a second before it starts up again. “At least she knows she’s a monster. You – I don’t even know what to do with you, do I.”
“Sorry,” Helena says, voice like a stepped-on flower.
“You always are,” Sarah says. “And then you just keep doing it anyways.”
“I love you,” Helena says.
“Then let me out.”
“Then you’ll go away,” Helena says. “And the two of us will be alone again, because we don’t have any other place to go. And I can eat Rachel’s eyeballs forever but they only tasted good the first time. So then what do I do.” She chews some more. “I want you to stay and I want you to be happy and I want to eat you, but only when all the light inside of you is gone.”
Sarah’s stomach growls; it’s not as loud as the sound of her not saying anything. A piece of cheese wiggles in front of her face and she slaps it away, manages – somehow – to stand. “Stay the hell away from me,” she says, and Helena’s eyes go so wide Sarah can see the whites all the way around. She drops the cheese. Good, Sarah thinks, good.
“She hurt you,” Helena says.
“What?”
Helena reaches up and spreads her hands around her throat, slowly. Sarah reaches up and touches her throat, feels small sudden shock of a bruise, puts her hand back down.
“Yeah,” Sarah says through her teeth. “I saved your life.” She spins on her heel and goes for the door, but – of course – it’s still locked. Of course it’s still locked. Sarah rattles it and rattles it and it just will not fucking open for her.
“She hurt you,” Helena says, anguished. “I will hurt her. I will make her pay for this.”
“What the hell is the bloody point of that!” Sarah says, ricocheting back around. “You gonna eat her nose next? She gonna slit your throat? Bloody hell, Helena, what the bloody hell is the bloody point of any of this bloody shit!”
“It feels good,” Helena says. Her posture is wilted, hands fiddling with each other. She rocks on her feet, heel-toe, heel-toe.
“It feels good,” Sarah says, lower. She shakes her head. “You piece of – it feels good.”
She rattles the doorknob with her hand. “Let me out,” she says, to Helena or the house or both of them, what’s the difference. “Get me out of this bloody room or I’ll stab myself in the throat with a bloody knife, see if I don’t.”
The doorknob clicks open, like an apology Sarah doesn’t want.
“Hey,” she says. “You owe me. Yeah?”
“Yes,” Helena whispers.
“Great,” Sarah says. “Stay away from me. Debt paid.” And she marches off into the house.
The dramatic gesture is ruined, somewhat, by the fact that she doesn’t know where she’s going. She opens a door and charges through it anyways just to make sure Helena doesn’t follow her. It’s a bedroom; it’s half the size of Sarah’s bedroom, maybe. A pair of child’s shoes are discarded by the bed. Sarah gets into the bed and pulls the covers over her head and nothing smells like Kira, it doesn’t smell like Kira at all.
The anger carried her this far and now it sputters out. Horribly she is homesick for the both of them, the people that they were before they weren’t people. She wants Rachel to slap Helena in the face and tell her to be better than this. She wants Helena to hold Rachel down until Rachel shrinks back into something civil. She wants both of them to look at Sarah and realize that Sarah is a person, and not just something that they both can eat. She wants to go home. Her stomach groans, torn open with all that wanting.
The room orbits her in lopsided circles. Sarah closes her eyes and remakes the house she grew up in, in her brain. Here is the door. Here is the hallway. Here is the list of markings in the closet, marking her growing up. Here is the other set of markings in the closet whose purpose she does not remember. Here is the kitchen. Here is the dining table. Here is the chair someone sat in. Here is another chair. Three chairs.
Fuck. She opens her eyes again. If she asked the mansion for it, would it give it to her? The house? The rooms? The smell of sunlight and dust? It would, probably, everything here loves her. The woods and the animals in the woods and the house and the animals in the house, they all love Sarah. She wishes that they didn’t.
Time pa—
Sarah stands up, staggers to the door and opens it: unlocked. She closes it again. Terrified, she opens it and stumbles outside – just because she can’t believe in it, the idea that the door could be open for her. Light drifts softly and sweetly down the hall. Its walls are dark wood; its carpet is red, plush. Sarah doesn’t turn around and look behind her, so she doesn’t have to see all the ways that room could or couldn’t be Kira’s.
There are so many doors. There are so many doors, red wood and green wood, ornate metalwork, glass knobs and heavy metal knockers shaped like lion’s heads and serpents. When Sarah turns around and looks behind her, the green door she’d walked through is closed. She sighs and keeps walking down the hallway. She can’t stop walking, now, because if she stops walking she’ll have to think about – well. She’ll have to think.
Brown wood. White wood. Stained glass with an arch. Dark brown wood. Open doorway.
Sarah stops, looks inside. It’s a room whose walls are made entirely of glass, all the light pouring in thick and viscous and shining. One of the walls is made of bookshelves, and in the middle of that wall is a bed, and in the middle of that bed is the tangle of Rachel and Helena. Helena’s head is in Rachel’s lap; Rachel is running her fingers through Helena’s hair, feeling her way blind.
But both their heads jerk up at the same time, even if only one of them is looking at Sarah. They are both looking at Sarah. They are always both looking at Sarah, even if they can’t see her.
There is a space on the bed where she could fit – if she wanted it. Sarah stands there in the doorway. Then she shifts back on her foot, and keeps walking down the hall.