Archive of Our Own

Helena is whistling again. This time she only managed to be silent for three rooms – a wood-paneled space with a pool table and a table set for chess, a small room full of cabinets packed with fine china, a cavernous room with what looked like a throne at one end – before she started up again. It’s driving Sarah insane, but what can she do? Every time she asks Helena to stop, Helena says what is it worth and grins because she knows Sarah won’t pay the price. Whatever it is. Not worth it – not another deal, not another string that ties her to this thing that smells like fresh-turned earth and wet fur.

At least Sarah doesn’t recognize the song. If Helena was whistling something recognizable – well. Sarah doesn’t know. She wouldn’t like it.

The next door is locked; it’s white, made of abalone or something that reflects the light in pale discs. Sarah tries the handle and then turns to Helena.

“No,” Helena says. “That—” (she points to the door, as if Sarah could have possibly meant something else) “—is Rachel’s. And if we open it. She will be angry.” Helena says this with smug resignation; the rest of her sentence is already clear. And if she’s angry she’ll come after me, and we’ll fight, and you don’t like it when we fight. So we can’t try and open it.

Sarah rattles the knob anyways. “What the hell has she got to hide,” she mutters. “’sides everything.”

“Everything,” Helena says agreeably. She brightens. “Do you want to see my room.”

This is the fourth time she’s offered. Sarah has the vague feeling that if she goes into Helena’s room she will never come out of Helena’s room, and that has kept the two of them wandering no matter how many times Helena asks. It’s fine. Helena forgets that she’s asked after a few minutes – every time she has presented the question, she has done it with the same level of excitement.

“Not yet,” Sarah says. “I want to keep going.”

Helena sighs out through her lips. “The house will never stop,” she says grumpily, but keeps moving down the hallway anyways. “What do you want to see. I can find it for you.”

“I don’t know,” Sarah says. She trails her fingers along the wall; in front of her Helena does the same on the other side. It’s true: Sarah really doesn’t know what they’re looking for. She only knows that she she’ll know it when they find it; she knows she wanted to go further into the house, and she didn’t want to do it alone.

“Is there – a map, or somethin’?”

“No map,” Helena says. “It happens forever.” She thumps her palm against the wall a few times; the house obligingly continues to do nothing.

Sarah opens the next door. The walls are cream and honey-colored, and in the center of the room is an enormous chocolate fountain. Somewhere, music plays – something with the rattling of jingle bells, plucks of a harp. “Oh!” says Helena, and goes in.

“Oh,” says Sarah, with much less pleasure. She follows. Sometimes she is hit with the fact that she could just have this – this could be her life, falling over next to Helena by that chocolate fountain and stuffing her face with it before falling asleep on the floor. If she wanted it, she could have it.

But she can’t. She doesn’t know why she can’t, but she knows that she can’t. The thought of that calls up some well-deep ache inside of her, and she doesn’t know if it’s because she can’t eat that chocolate or if it’s because she doesn’t know why she can’t.

She leans up against the wall and watches Helena – well, honestly, massacre the chocolate fountain. Sarah looks around the room. Her mouth fills with saliva and she swallows it down. She drums her heels against the floor and tries to put this sudden ache back in its box.

“You should try it,” Helena says, syllables stuck together with melted chocolate, bubbling out of her mouth. “Chocolate! It is good. Sweet. Do you know it?”

“Yeah, Helena,” Sarah says. “I know chocolate.”

“Oh,” Helena says. She is sitting with her legs folded towards her, just running her hands through the fountain and then slurping chocolate out of them. Sarah closes her eyes and feels her heart let out its series of jagged thumps.

Helena keeps slurping. That sound. Ugh. Sarah opens her eyes again. “You didn’t have it,” she says, “before.”

“No,” Helena says. “All I had before was me.” She twists her head around on her neck to look at Sarah. Chocolate is smeared everywhere. Some of it is in her hair. Some of it is crusting, brown and smooth, on her furs. “But. There was much me. So.” She shrugs a shoulder and goes back to eating. The music plays. The door has closed behind them, and Sarah is certain that if she opened it again it would lead back into a different hallway. She sits down on the floor.

“All the other yous,” she says.

“Mhm.”

The chocolate never stops flowing, no matter how long Helena eats.

“I think I’m missing something,” Sarah says. “But I don’t know what it is. I just – I know it’s not there. Whatever it is.” She kneads the heel of her hand over her breastbone, and she doesn’t feel better. Helena doesn’t look at her, doesn’t look away from the fountain and her hands inside of it.

“You’re just hungry,” she says. “If you eat enough, the feeling stops.”

The feeling doesn’t stop.

It just gets worse.

They wander around the house for a long time – long enough that they keep having to make bedrooms, curl up in an exhausted animal pile in any number of beds that are exactly as comfortable as Sarah needs them to be. She still doesn’t know, after all this time, if Helena is asleep or just pretending. She fakes it well. She snores a little bit. The ache in Sarah’s heart gets bigger, like toothache. Like toothache. She heard a story like that, once, she thinks, about toothache.

They are lying curled up in the dark. After a while, if you stay close enough to Helena, she stops smelling like anything; they are lying curled up in the dark, and nothing smells like anything.

“What happened to my teeth,” she says.

“I ate them,” Helena says drowsily. “Did you forget.”

“Yeah,” Sarah says. “Yeah, I think I forgot.”

“Oh,” Helena says. After a moment she rolls away from Sarah and Sarah hears vague wet sounds, some clicking. Then Helena says “Hold out your hand.”

Sarah does. Something wet and small falls into it. She touches her fingers to the edge of it, finds that it’s a tooth.

“That was yours,” Helena says. “It was inside of you.”

“I don’t remember it,” Sarah says. She thinks she should be panicked, but the panic is swallowed by whatever sick feeling is growing and growing inside of her. “I don’t remember it,” she says again.

“Good,” Helena says, with the desperate puzzled air of a puppy trying to please. “It hurt, they hurt you, you said. So. Good. To forget. It’s good.”

“What am I missing?” Sarah says.

“I don’t know,” Helena says. After a silence she drops three more teeth into Sarah’s hand. “Was it this?”

“No,” Sarah says. She thinks she’s going to cry, so she fumbles for Helena’s hand and drops the teeth back into her warm sweating palm. “You take ‘em,” she says. “If you had ‘em before.”

“Okay,” Helena says, and swallows them again. She reaches out her fingertips and touches Sarah’s face in the dark. “If you remember. Tell me.”

“I don’t remember,” Sarah says.

“I know,” Helena says. “I know.”

The latest room is a great hall, glass-paned, lined with taxidermy animals. Sarah thinks that at this point the house is just showing off. She doesn’t recognize any of the species – they all have names she doesn’t understand, words that she doesn’t even think are in Latin. Rachel would probably know, but Sarah isn’t with Rachel. Helena doesn’t even read the labels; she just tugs at the edges of the animals, experimental, curious to see which pieces of them she can use.

When she finally bounces around to join Sarah again she is carrying an entire antler. The length of it is sharp and bone. Sarah is suddenly glad Rachel isn’t here, because she’s not sure one of them could resist the temptation to use it. She almost wants to use it for something; it’s just that sharp.

“Careful,” she says. “You’re gonna gut me with that thing.”

“I would never,” Helena says, “on accident.” She slides the antler into her furs. “I am keeping it. In my room.” She brightens. “Do you want to see my room.”

“Where did you pull that off of, eh?”

“It’s in the basement,” Helena says. “But I can take you to it. It’s nice. Warm. Soft.”

Sarah ignores her, weaves through the alleys of the dead to try and find the deer with a missing antler. A diorama of some sort of wolves attacking an enormous bird, several fish mounted on metal rods and swimming through the air, a tree with a monkey in it, Sarah is on the ground. She’s just there. Helena is talking about her room with frantic sharpness, but she stops when she sees Sarah on the ground.

“Are you hurting,” she says, and crouches down next to her.

“I’m missing something,” Sarah says. “There’s something – it’s not here, I can’t remember, I—”

Helena turns Sarah’s face back and forth with her hands and Sarah is too distracted to tell her to stop. She looks back up at the animals. Wolves attacking a bird. Fish. Monkey. Wolves attacking a bird. Fish. Monkey. Oh, she doesn’t have it. She really doesn’t.

“Are you upset,” Helena says slowly, “because I took the antler.”

“No,” Sarah says. Helena drops Sarah’s face, and she closes her eyes again. In the dark nothing makes any more sense. She opens her eyes. Light filters in through the window-walls. Someone did a great job on the taxidermy; the fear in the animals’ eyes looks so real. But it’s not real. They’re dead, and their fear isn’t real anymore.

“Sarah,” Helena says.

“I want to keep going,” Sarah says. She pushes herself up to her feet again and looks down the aisle wolves fish monkey nothing, nothing. “Come on.”

“Hm,” Helena says, but she follows.

She keeps moving forward, and the house obligingly makes more doors at the end of every room. An empty echoing white marble tomb with a pool of blue water in the center. A chamber full of dollhouse furniture arranged in painstaking dioramas that Helena steps on without seeming to notice or care. A library.

“Oh,” Sarah says, stopping.

“Books,” Helena says, and keeps pushing forwards towards the next door.

“I wanted them,” Sarah says, “I think.”

Helena stops. “For what.”

“To read them,” Sarah says. She steps closer, studies spines. Pulls the first book she can find off the shelf – the spine is unmarked – and flips it open.

All the pages are empty. Blank. Oh.

She closes the book again.

“What did it say,” Helena says, flipping through another book before she gets bored of it and rips out a page. She starts folding it in her hands. Sarah looks at the broken spine of the book on the ground.

“Didn’t say anything,” she says.

“Mm,” Helena says, and holds up the folded page. It’s a butterfly, probably, Sarah’s head hurts. Helena opens her mouth and swallows the paper before Sarah can start thinking, before Sarah can start thinking about why.

“Is this where Rachel gets all her books,” she says, to cover the awful sound of Helena crunching. Helena shrugs both her shoulders, an avian motion, and swallows.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Do you want to keep going. Do you think there will be more food.”

“Where does she get all the books,” Sarah says, “if all of these are blank.” She pulls another book off the shelf and it’s blank and she drops it to the ground and she pulls another book off the shelf and it’s blank and she drops it to the ground and Helena is doing it too, now, maybe because she knows, maybe because she’s just excited to do what Sarah is doing, every single book is blank – they’re all blank – if Sarah knew what she was looking for she could find it here but all the pages are blank and all the books are off the shelves, on the floor, and Helena is looking at her like: now what. Well, Sarah? Now what?

“Okay,” Sarah says, “next room.” She pushes out the door and into another hallway – this one plastered with cream wallpaper that has patterns on it Sarah can’t see. Helena trails behind her, an anxious ghost. She’s eating one of the other books. Cover and all.

“Do you forget things,” Sarah says as they walk down the hallway.

“Yes,” Helena says. “Better this way. You can hold the thing that happened in your hands, and then it dies, and then it is a body. And when it is a body you can take the bones of it and you can take the meat of it and rip these things apart. And you can choose which one you eat.” She scratches her fingers along the wall and the wallpaper comes off in long, desperate strips.

“Sometimes I remember the thing that happened,” she says, “and sometimes I remember the feeling. You see? You have to choose. Because one of them is bad, many times. Sometimes both things are good, and that is good.”

“I didn’t choose this,” Sarah says. “It just happened.”

Helena nods. “Easier.” She opens a door and they’re through it and it’s a wreckage. At one point it was some sort of parlor, drawing room maybe, but the window is shattered and the woods are pressing in against the place where the window should be. Glass all over the ground. Clawmarks. A pile of curtains in the corner that reeks.

Helena has stopped and stared at it. “I thought we fixed it,” she says, voice small. “I thought – I thought we fixed it. I thought we made it better.”

“Helena,” Sarah says. “What happened. I don’t – what happened.”

“You weren’t there,” Helena says, still in that strange small voice. “This was before you came.”

“What happened,” Sarah says. Helena keeps standing there with her back to Sarah and then a shock comes over her, and she’s alright again.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know! I don’t remember.” She turns around. The skin around her eyes is pink, and the eyes themselves are feral-wild. But they always are, so it isn’t a concrete enough sign of whether Sarah should be worried. If she can be worried. She can, probably, be worried. “Do you want to go deeper into the house,” Helena says.

Does she? “Yeah,” she says, because she doesn’t know what else to want.

Helena stares at her, eyes twitching between Sarah’s eyes. “Stay here,” she says. “Stay very here. Do you understand. If you hear voices outside the window do not answer.”

“What?” Sarah says. “Where are you going, I thought you were helping – y’know – with this, I thought.” The words sputter out. Helping. What was Helena helping her with.

“I know,” Helena says, “but I. I have to. The room, I have to fix it. The house is hurting. The outsides are not supposed to be inside. The forest. Do you remember.”

“Yes,” Sarah says immediately, because she does. It’s dark and it’s sharp and it hurts and it’s hers.

Helena steps forward and rocks so her forehead presses against Sarah’s. Sarah puts her hands on Helena’s shoulders. I think I love you crosses her mind and is gone again before she can touch it. “Don’t move,” Helena says again.

“I want to keep going,” Sarah says. “I need to find it.”

“Don’t move,” Helena says again, and takes a step backwards, and goes back out the door.

Sarah is heading for the next door when Helena comes back. Rachel is following her, silent but radiating the precise feeling that Helena has interrupted something very important and none of this is worth her time. When she sees Sarah, something in the corner of her mouth goes soft. Then she sees the rest of the room.

“Well,” she says.

“I thought we fixed it,” Helena says.

“There wasn’t time,” Rachel says. “You were hardly in a position to—”

“Can you fix it,” Helena says.

“You can fix it,” Rachel says. “If this is such a problem for you.”

“Why does it matter,” Sarah says, and they both turn to look at her again, and it never stops feeling good. It always feels so good when they are both looking at her. “Come on,” she says. “The house’ll fix it if it’s a problem, yeah? I want to keep going.”

Rachel looks at Helena. Helena says something rough and fast and soft. Rachel looks back at Sarah.

“You should have asked,” she says. “I can help.”

“No,” Helena says, “no, I can help.”

Rachel just keeps looking at Sarah. “Has she?” she says. “Helped.”

“No.”

Helena makes a hurt noise in her throat.

“I want to remember,” Sarah says, building up momentum as she says it, making it into the thing that she wants. “If you both won’t help I’ll do it on my own.”

“I offered,” Rachel says, and steps forward. The dark light pours through the window and touches the black velvet of her dress where it clings to her wrists and hips and neck.

“No,” Helena says, but Rachel doesn’t even turn around. She settles her hand in the small of Sarah’s back and starts pushing her forward. Behind them, something growls. Rachel tilts her head back and looks over her shoulder.

“I could tell her the story,” she says, “of how that window broke.”

“No.”

“Once upon a time,” Rachel says, “there was a forest, and that forest was full of animals. One day one of those animals tumbled into—”

Something growls again and it’s Helena. It’s Helena, growling, stepping forward, teeth sharp. Sarah goes stiff. The only real warm thing in the world is Rachel’s hand, gentle in the small of her back.

“Animal,” Rachel says softly. “Look at you. Unlovable.”

The growling goes on and on and Rachel doesn’t even move or seem bothered by it. Sarah is frozen. Sarah is up a tree in the woods, and everything in the woods is desperate to know Sarah’s name.

“You can’t even touch me,” Rachel says, still in that soft quiet voice. “Or you’ll scare her. And if you scare her you lose her, don’t you. Are you willing to lose her? Would you like to come and fight me again, right now?”

Helena stops, stuck in place, swaying. Her eyes are wet. She opens her mouth but all that comes out are more wordless sounds. Animal animal animal animal, thrumming in Sarah’s throat and chest and bones. She wants to move forward. She is so close to finding the thing that she can swallow, the thing that will fill her belly up and make her whole again. But she can’t stop watching it. This. Them. They’re telling her something, she just can’t get it.

“Take,” Helena says, finally. “Go.” And she turns back around and – in one violent shudder – claws open a sofa. Rachel pushes Sarah, propels her towards the next door. Behind them Helena is screaming and the sound is horrible and sad. This moment is an animal and Sarah can hold it in her hands. She breaks it into two pieces. In one hand she has the memory, and in the other she has the feeling – love, flattery, fear.

She swallows the second one. She lets the bones go. They move into the next room.

“More windows,” Sarah says, “when you’re here.”

Rachel makes a polite sound of interest but otherwise doesn’t acknowledge it – what Sarah said, that truth. She sort of hates it. Outside of some windows it’s night, and outside of some windows it’s day, and sometimes the sun is on her right side and sometimes it’s on her left and once she looks out and something is keeping pace outside the windows, in the dark. Rachel’s hand is still up against Sarah’s back, pushing her forwards towards – something.

“Where are we going,” Sarah says.

“I thought you knew,” Rachel says. Her voice is warm with amusement, some joke at Sarah’s expense.

“You’re lying,” Sarah says. “Thought you didn’t do that.”

Rachel stops. The room they’re in is white, with glass spheres filled with plants hanging from the ceiling. Rachel in her black velvet dress is the only dark thing Sarah can see.

“You’re right,” she says, sounding surprised at it. “You’re owed.”

“Where are we going,” Sarah says again.

“Forward,” Rachel says. Sarah stops in place and stares at Rachel until Rachel purses her lips, sighs. Then Sarah keeps going.

“I’m curious,” Rachel says from next to her, “to see what will happen if I continue to push you.” She tilts her head to the side, considers. “And I hardly want to be around Helena, when she’s in one of her…moods.”

Sarah keeps pushing forward, sending glass orbs tinging against each other as she goes. She gnaws on the inside of her lip. It’s Rachel, isn’t it, to give Sarah two truths and make her choose between them – just like it’s Rachel to set Helena roaring, set Sarah running, and then make them both deal with the aftermath themselves.

“What do you think will happen,” she says finally, feeling guilty about it. “If you push.”

“I don’t know,” Rachel says, reaching up a hand to stop an orb from swaying. Inside of it some plant Sarah doesn’t know sighs, reaches out fronds towards Rachel’s hand. Rachel studies it with complete disinterest and keeps moving forward. “You’re unique, Sarah. I’ve never seen anything like you before.”

Sarah kicks down her own delight at that. “Do you think I’ll remember,” she says instead.

“Remember what?”

“What I’m trying to remember.”

“Well,” Rachel says, tucking a smile against the vowel, “I would say that if you can’t remember something, and all you remember is that you’re trying to remember, the process of that remembering does seem rather…cyclical.” The next door is elegant wrought iron, and Sarah can’t open it. Rachel turns the doorknob easily and moves through it, into a long dark red hallway lined with paintings on the walls. Somewhere a violin makes its familiar way through a series of trills. The paintings on the walls are all landscapes, captured in photographic detail. A series of tall, sharp glass buildings. A gazebo by the sea. A house perched at the edge of a cliff.

“I remember everything,” Rachel offers as they walk.

“Helena doesn’t.”

“If you continue to use us as a baseline for one another, you’ll be disappointed.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Are you happy?” Rachel says, suddenly. She hasn’t stopped moving, and she hasn’t turned to look at Sarah, but she’s said it.

“No,” Sarah says.

“And what’s stopping you from being happy?”

“I can’t remember,” Sarah says. “Not – that’s what’s stopping me. Whatever it is I can’t remember, I – I need it, I – I’m not – I can’t.”

“What would happen,” Rachel says, “if you let yourself forget it.” This hallway does go on forever. All the paintings. Full of glass. If Rachel wasn’t here, what would the paintings be? Would they be this sharp? A lake so full of swans that their feathered bodies touch each other, an enormous labyrinth, a ballroom packed with beautiful people. Sarah looks away again.

“No,” she says. “No, I need it.”

“Sarah,” Rachel says, voice soft and gentle. “I wasn’t saying that you should forget it. This is important to you – whatever it is. You’ve made that clear. I only want to know what will happen if you let go of it, because it does seem to be hurting you.”

“It’s not hurting me,” Sarah says immediately.

“You’re frantic,” Rachel says, words held quietly between her teeth and lips. She opens the next door and it’s a dance studio, rubber floor, ballet barre. Rachel’s feet make muffled sounds on the floor as they go. They are both reflected in all of the mirrors. It is so unbearably strange for Sarah to see herself that she stops looking. She doesn’t want to look.

“If I forgot,” she says.

“If you forgot.”

“Then nothing would be stopping me,” Sarah says.

“From?”

“Eating.”

“And what’s so terrible about eating?” They’re through the next door, in a living room that looks warm – a couch, a blue shelf packed with records, blurry photographs on all the walls. Someone has left a painting abandoned on an easel; it’s a woman with brown hair, painted in a child’s sloppy strokes. The mouth, red, drips. It’s the only sound. Like blood. Like drool. Drip, drip, drip. There’s a label above the woman’s head but it’s been crossed out in a stroke of black paint.

“Sarah,” Rachel says, from behind her.

“That’s all I have left,” Sarah says. “That’s it.”

“What is?”

Her vision blurs and she realizes that she’s crying – which is strange, because she isn’t sad. “I tried,” she says. “I promise I tried.”

Rachel’s hand finds itself against Sarah’s spine again. It moves up, it moves down. It moves up again, presses itself warmly against Sarah’s shoulderblade. Sarah stares at the mouth and waits for it to dry. The paint can’t stay wet forever; it’ll dry eventually. Sarah doesn’t remember her name. Not – not Sarah’s name, Sarah knows her own name, she knows Rachel’s name, she knows Helena’s name – it doesn’t matter, but. The paint is going to dry if she keeps watching it.

“What happens if I eat,” Sarah says, voice a whisper, all the feeling gone.

“You’ll stay here with us,” Rachel says. “That’s all.”

“I’m already here.”

Rachel is silent, for a moment. “You tried to run,” she says finally. “Nights and nights and nights ago. Do you remember that, Sarah?”

“I don’t,” Sarah says, and hates herself for it.

“Good,” Rachel says quietly. “It hurt.

“If you ate,” she says, “you couldn’t run again. You would have to come back.”

“I’m already here,” Sarah says, trying to understand. “Where – where else would I go? I’m already – I don’t get it. I just – I don’t get it, you keep saying all these things and I don’t understand them, I—”

Rachel sighs through her nose and then folds Sarah to her chest. She smells like wind and flowers and, below that, metal. Salt water. She smells like the breeze and she smells like the sea and Sarah buries her nose in Rachel’s shoulder and shudders with an urge she doesn’t understand anymore.

I think I love you runs across her mind in a bolt of prey-panic, vanishing into the dark.

“You’re so much smarter than you think,” Rachel says, petting Sarah’s head like Sarah is her animal. “Sweetheart. I wish you wouldn’t hurt yourself like this.”

“You know,” Sarah says, pained. “You know what I’m trying to remember. You know.”

“You told me,” Rachel says. “A long time ago. That was the price you paid for sleeping.”

“Why won’t you tell me.”

Rachel doesn’t say anything.

“Rachel.”

“I don’t want you to go,” Rachel says, in the smallest possible voice. “If you hold onto it, you’ll never stop trying to leave. You’ll hurl yourself at the walls until you shatter. I couldn’t bear to see you break yourself like that.”

“Tell me what it is,” Sarah whispers.

“I could tell you any story,” Rachel says. “Anything you could think of. They’d all be beautiful. I won’t tell you that one.”

“I could pay for it.”

“I won’t accept,” Rachel says, and lets Sarah go. Something in her eyes is deep and pained. “Eventually you’ll forget that I know. If that helps.”

Sarah scoffs a laugh in the pit of her throat and turns away, paces across the living room. The blank canvas on the easel across the room watches her mockingly as she paces. Her hand twitches with the urge to pick up a paintbrush, slash red across the canvas just to make something else hurt – but is that her, is that what she wants, what does she want, she doesn’t know.

“Once upon a time,” Rachel says, voice creeping after Sarah like an animal on velvet feet. “There was a girl. She was young.” Sarah keeps pacing through the living room, looking at the small details the house has made – the scuff on the edge of the cushions, the way the floorboards are worn down unevenly. “She had a home. This is a house, but it isn’t a home – she had a home. But it was taken from her.”

“How,” Sarah says, not looking at Rachel. If she doesn’t look at Rachel then this is just a story, and it isn’t true, and Rachel isn’t giving up Sarah’s truth as a sort of apology.

Rachel stops for a moment. “There was a fire,” she says after a time. “No. No, there wasn’t – there was a fire, but that wasn’t the reason she had to run. The fire came later.”

“There was a fire,” Sarah echoes. She tries to remember it. She scrubs her hands through her hair, dragging the heels of her hands along her temples – nothing, nothing.

“They told her to run,” Rachel says, voice trembling around the edges. “They promised they’d come back for her – she was their chosen daughter and they would find her, wherever she went. They told her to run. She ran and her home was destroyed.”

“Was it my fault.”

“I don’t know,” Rachel says. Sarah hears the small click of Rachel swallowing. “Empirical evidence suggests it wasn’t. But.” She makes the world’s smallest laugh. “Who trusts empirical evidence, in a story?”

“Is that why I feel so bad,” Sarah says, finally turning around. “Is that what I’m trying to remember.”

“Just listen to me,” Rachel says, exhausted. “For once.”

Sarah drops her weight down on the couch, shifts in the cushions to find the divot where someone like her has sat before. She can’t stop her feet from bouncing on the ground, can’t stop herself from picking up a couch cushion and worrying at the edges of it: she can’t remember. Any of this.

She watches Rachel turn her back, and then suddenly one of the walls is a window. It wasn’t before; it feels like a terrible violation for the house to make a window in this room, but the fact is that there is one and Rachel is standing in front of it. Outside the window is the forest. Sarah doesn’t know what floor they’re on, but they’re up too high. Too high. The house doesn’t go up this high, and yet.

“She stumbled into a strange land,” Rachel says. She tilts her head; her hair falls by her face, and Sarah watches Rachel watch the woods. “Everything in it hated her. But she hated them more, so she was alright.” She touches her fingertips to the glass. “And then there was a house.”

She turns her head to look at Sarah over her shoulder. “It’s implausible, isn’t it,” she says. “This house.”

“I don’t—” Sarah starts, and then the door crashes open and Helena is standing in the doorway. Her hands are all torn-open, bloody, but she’s there. She looks at Sarah. She turns and looks at Rachel. She looks back at Sarah.

“I fixed it,” she says, and comes into the room. Rachel’s fingernails make a small screech as she drags them down the glass and curls her hands back together.

“Rachel told me,” Sarah says, accusing. “About the fire.”

Helena blinks at Rachel. “What fire.”

Rachel’s face is flat; she says nothing.

“Oh,” Helena says. “Oh. There was a fire?”

“I thought you were there,” Sarah says.

“Why would I have told you,” Rachel says to Helena. “You would have thought it was hysterical. It would have been your favorite joke. You already delight in hurting me—”

“Wait,” Sarah says, “wait—”

“You can’t have her,” Helena says, completely ignoring the way Sarah has stood up, the way she keeps saying hey and wait and why don’t you remember, why don’t I remember, why do we all keep forgetting—

“Yes,” Rachel says, “I can. I have lost everything. You – you have what I gave you. I put you up on two feet. I taught you to speak. The slightest provocation and you climb back out that window and run off into the woods, give it all up and still have—”

“Don’t want it,” Helena says, “want her, want this—”

“Will you stop yelling about me like I’m not here—” Sarah tries, but they’re closer now, foreheads almost pressed together, going back and forth so quickly that Sarah can’t get a word in edgewise – her head hurts – her head hurts. Across the room is a door. There wasn’t one there before, but now there is.

She takes a step back. She takes another step back. As always Helena and Rachel are more caught up in fighting over Sarah than actually remembering that she’s there, so: Sarah spins on heel and runs deeper into the house.

A room full to the top with bones.

A greenhouse where all the plants are dying.

A small whitewashed room with stick figures scrawled on every conceivable surface.

A cavernous hall with scratched-up marble tile, a grand piano whose carved legs have been gnawed on by something with enormous teeth.

She charges through the next door and finds herself back in the same room again, the two of them so close and shivering with some violent urge they’re both holding back from, I was so close, you ruined it, you always ruin this – she trusted me – she was going to forget about her dau— and Sarah is through the door.

A parlor with a small couch and a bowl of fruit on a table.

A cavernous bath, a pool of warm steaming water with a soft set of marble steps leading down to the bottom of the pool.

A dining room with a table full of beautiful food.

An endless hallway full of clocks, each clock ticking at a slightly different tempo.

The front hall. Sarah skids to a stop – she’s never seen a door in the front hall besides the front door but there is another door, because she just came through it. It’s tucked in the back behind the enormous staircase. She’s in the front hall. She drops her weight against a wall, heaves for breath. It’s silent. Sarah and the front door stare each other down, but: Sarah remembers the woods. She can’t go out into the woods again.

So there was a fire. Sarah clings to that. There was a fire. She feels seasick-certain that she was about to give it up, whatever it was, but there was a fire and that’s enough to hold onto. She stares down at the carpet – unburned – and casts her mind backwards into the soft dark of forgetting. There has to be, probably, something to remember there.

Absentmindedly Sarah crouches down and starts twisting together the fringe on the edge of the rug. She remembers the forest. She remembers Helena, and she remembers Rachel. She remembers this house. She remembers—

Where she has lifted up the carpet, she can see the ragged wood edge of a trapdoor. Sarah stops. She pushes the (heavy) carpet up to look at it: a clumsy patched-together series of wooden boards, laid carefully down. She lifts the edge of it and finds a set of stairs. Down, down. Rachel read a story like this to her, once. Down into the dark. Sarah doesn’t remember the words of it, but then again Sarah doesn’t remember anything.

“Alright,” she says, “alright,” and she takes the staircase down.

The staircase is not very long, but it feels like it lasts forever. Each board creaks when Sarah puts a foot down. She wishes it was bright down here, she wishes she could carry the sun on a string like a balloon. A lamp, maybe, but she doesn’t know how she’d keep it lit.

At the bottom of the stairs she chokes: the smell is terrible, overwhelming, stale bodies in too small of a space, evergreen and dirt after rain. She can’t see anything in the dark; she stumbles over a pile of something that falls over with harsh clanging sounds. Sarah crouches down and feels the edges, finds plates and goblets and forks. She really, really wishes she could see.

She keeps moving forward. A small heart attack when she brushes against something soft – it’s just a fur. Piles of furs. This whole room is like some storage for things Sarah half-remembers. She weaves her way through piles she is beginning to be able to see and then – abruptly – remembers that she was trying to remember. There was something she forgot, and she forgot that she’d forgotten it.

She is touching the teeth in some animal skull when she realizes Rachel was right, that remembering hurts, that it would be easier and kinder if she forgot. Sarah opens her mouth to say a word, can’t remember the word, closes her mouth. Keeps moving into the dark. You were right, she thinks, come find me, but no one comes. No one comes for her.

She goes further back. A pile of furs with a dip in the middle where someone must have been sleeping. An enormous heap of old sweaters that Sarah vaguely recognizes – she might have worn some of them, or all of them. She accidentally kicks a small glass bottle and it goes spinning off into the dark. She is alone down here. It hurts, but the difference is that this is a hurt that she can fix. She can go back up there at any time.

Abruptly she sits down in some enormous ribcage – it’s big enough to cradle her – and folds her knees to her chest, and breaks her thoughts into pieces so she can lay them out in front of her.

“Alright,” she says, and “alright,” and “Sarah” because it seems like she should know her own name. “So you don’t remember. Anything. Now what.”

Her stomach growls.

The noise is so startling that Sarah jumps, down in the basement in the dark. Her stomach hasn’t growled in a long time; she doesn’t remember when it stopped, but she remembers that it stopped. After a while, it stopped growling. Now it’s back – thrumming to itself under the palm of her hand like an understandable heart.

“I just want to know what it is,” she tells the heavy velvet silence. “Then I’ll let go of it, promise. Blood and bone.”

Nothing answers her.

“Please.”

Silence.

“I’m so – I’m so hungry, I – please.”

More silence. Sarah shudders to herself, claws at her scalp like she can bleed the memory out. Nothing. Rachel was right, Rachel was right, Rachel is always right when she tries for it: this hurts. It’ll hurt less if she lets it go.

Sarah is holding an animal in her hands, and she splits it in two. The meat is gone and the bones make her too sad to look at; she leaves them there on the basement floor and climbs the stairs back up again.

At the top of the stairs, nothing has changed except the lack of ache in Sarah’s head. She closes the trapdoor. She puts the carpet back over it. She prods, curiously, at the seashell-echo of her own loss. It rings to itself, softer and softer; she thinks eventually it’s going to go. Oh, that feels good. Her heartbeat trips over itself, delighted to finally feel good – it feels so good to feel good. She can let herself have it. She goes back through the door behind the staircase

and she is in the room from before, where she’d left Helena and Rachel. The blank room with no furniture. The one with the window that Rachel had made. There are two bodies lying on the floor, facedown, in a puddle of meat and blood that’s gone all viscous and stale from waiting. Every now and then, Helena’s fingers twitch and Rachel’s hair flutters when she breathes. So they’re both alive. The sharp bone antler lies there, covered in blood and gore, a compass needle pointing to both of them.

Sarah’s stomach growls again, insistently. Her mouth waters. She looks around the room for – an apple, or something, a pomegranate. There’s nothing. There’s just all that meat.

She exhales through her mouth and staggers over to the two of them. Sits down on the ground. “This is what you wanted,” she tells them, pleading. “This is always what you wanted.”

No answer. Facedown, neither of them can watch her. No one can see her.

“I’ll put you back together,” she says. “You always healed before.”

Silence.

“I,” Sarah says, and she runs out of excuses. She grabs a piece of wet flesh from the floor, lifts it to her mouth, and eats.