#like the mildew growing on her kitchen rags

[lovesodeepandwideandwell]

Today my roommate (m) got home from work (landscaping) before his wife and usually she makes him shower right away but today he did NOT and he instead hung out in the main area and I'm still getting whiffs of it three hours later

[ksj-com]

There Is No Game Over-

Welcome to the Family

- Pairing: Namjoon x Reader

- Genre: Resident Evil 7!AU, horror, angst, action, violence, slight fluff

- Warnings/Tags: torture cutting scene, characters tied up against will, reader torture gagged, mentally insane characters, cussing, gore, killing scenes, monsters, may need prior Resident Evil 7 knowledge to understand some scenes, life or death scenes, deputy Jungkook, death, weapons mention, argument scene, light jokes, little kissing, feeling of helplessness, sudden ending, Namjoon having to choose between you or other people to save

- Word Count: 6,613 words

- Summary: Being kidnapped by the Bakers always put you on edge when playing Resident Evil 7. Tagging along with Namjoon and helping him escape to find his girlfriend, you grow a deeper connection with him then you did while playing on a VR. 

|| Masterlist ||

A/N: Credit to @pjm-com​ for writing some of these scenes

The sound of a man screaming rings through your ears drums. You thought it was going to be Jungkook, but the next time you opened your eyes there was a man sitting next to you. Another man, who you realized was Jack from Resident Evil 7, was cutting the man’s cheek. You remembered this scene so vividly: Namjoon, the main character, didn’t want to eat the Baker family’s dinner because it was a bunch of organs and bugs. In result, Jack’s temper led to the moment that was unfolding in front of your eyes. Namjoon couldn’t fight back since he was restrained by ropes that tied his arms and legs to the chair. You wanted to get up and run, you knew this game map like the back of your hand, but you were in the same situation. Your arms and legs were tied tightly against the chair you were sitting on. A rag wrapped around your head, touching the back of your throat to cause you to gag if a sound threatened to come out. You decided to not risk budging, and continued to watch.

“He’s not eatin’ it, Jack! He’s not eatin’ it!” Marguerite shouts at the top of her lungs, her voice making you cringe.

“Shut the hell up, Marguerite,” Jack groans. Marguerite storms off as a response, leaving you both with Jack, Lucas, and Grandma Eveline. Jack was about to cut another slice in Namjoon’s other cheek, but the doorbell rings throughout the house.

“I bet it’s that damn cop again,” Lucas mentions before they both exit the kitchen. Eveline stayed in her wheelchair, perfectly silent and still. Because you’ve already played this game before, you knew she was nothing to worry about for now.

You watch Namjoon take this chance to try to escape the confines of the chair, tipping and knocking the chair over on its side. The weak wood chair breaks under Namjoon’s crashing weight. You both cringe from the loud noise that echoes from the crash. The second he shakes the rope off his wrists and ankles he rushes over to you, untying the cloth around your mouth and all the areas you were being tied down. Once he reaches your ankles, he notices that you have the same heartbeat watch that he has on his wrist.

“Looks like whatever they did to my wrist, they did the same to your ankle” he says. You look at his wrist for the first time. Previously in the game, Namjoon went through a chainsaw fight and the result ended in him losing one of his hands. Now, his hand looked as if it was stapled back on and fully functional. On top of that, he had a watch that tracked his health when playing the game. Comparing his wrist to your ankle, it looked exactly the same except your foot was the one that was stapled on instead.

You thought about what was going through Namjoon’s head during this whole game. Through the horrors and dangers of the infected household; did he ever think Mia wasn’t worth it? After all, his girlfriend is the reason why he was here in the first place.

“Namjoon, is Mia really worth all of this?” Your voice croaks. You were parched from having a rag pushed all the way to the back of your throat for so long.

He looks up at you flabbergasted. “Of course, why wouldn’t she be? There’s obviously something wrong with her and this place in general.”

You nod agreeing with him. You didn’t want to be here. You finished this game once and you definitely didn’t want to do it again…like this.

“Plus, she was your best friend. Don’t you think she’s worth it too?” He asks you. So that’s why you’re here. Memories flood into your head like a barrier just broke within your mind. You remember the beginning of the story now from your perspective.

•••

You were in the middle of watching TV when you saw the phone call from Namjoon. 

“Hello?” You brought the phone to your ear. You haven’t talked to Namjoon ever sense Mia went missing three years ago. He went off the walls when she was declared dead by the police. He knew something couldn’t be right.

“Hey, (Y/N). It’s Namjoon. Before you hang up I need to ask you something,” He waits to see if you would stay on the call before he dared to continue.

You sigh. “Is this about Mia?”

“Yes, but she’s alive. Trust me. She sent me video footage of her and I think she’s in danger. She’s in Louisiana and I was thinking that—“

“I could come with you?” You interrupt. The phone line goes silent. He was scared of your response. He obviously didn’t want to go alone. “Send me the video she sent you,” You say and hang up the call. There was no way you were actually considering going to Louisiana with Namjoon to find her…but she was your best friend after all.

A minute later you receive the video from Namjoon:

“What the fuck?” You mutter to yourself. You immediately go back to the text conversation between you and Namjoon. ‘I’m in,‘ you text him.

•••

And just like that, you were sucked into this mess. You snap back to present day, now untied from the chair. You knew exactly what to do: help Namjoon find Mia and get the hell out of this game…if you survive. You didn’t know how to tell Namjoon that you knew exactly what to do. Every jump scare, every fighting scene, every plot twist was ingrained into your mind. “Namjoon can I ask you one thing?” You rub the raw skin on your wrists.

“Anything.”

“Just…do what I say and follow me when I tell you to. You aren’t exactly logical when it comes to Mia sometimes,” you feel as though that’s the best possible way to tell him that you are in charge here. His brows furrow, but he nods in agreement. “Okay good, let’s looks around here.” You knew everything that needed to be found, opening drawers that contained ammo for the gun you will be getting later.

“I found a hatch!” Namjoon whispers loudly to get your attention. You had hoped he would find that hatch since that’s what you needed to get through to get to the next part of the game. He pulls at the wood door on the ground, but it doesn’t budge. “God dammit, it’s locked” he huffs.

“Stick with me. Let’s find the key.” This was the challenging part: the key was at the end of the hallway. In the game, when you approach the key area, Jack reappears. And worst of the all, he sees you and ends up chasing you around until you pick up the key and step into the hatch.

You and Namjoon were now sitting at the end of the hallway. As you stood in front of him, you slowly walk forward. “Why are you being so sl-“ Namjoon’s whisper stops abruptly when Jack comes walking to the end of the hallway. His posture hangs over a table, where the key was sitting, until he notices you both.

“Thought you’d just slip out before dinner was done?” Jack approaches with an axe in his hand.

You turn around, slipping past Namjoon for you to be in front again. You had to do this right because who knows if you would get a second chance. You grip Namjoon’s hand so you didn’t leave him behind anywhere. Making your way around the dining room and into the living room as Jack was on your heels. You circled around the living room table and back out to the hallway that contained no threat. This was your time as you both ran towards the key, but Namjoon smacks into your nonmoving back when Jack breaks through the wall in front of you.

“You’re wasting your time” Jack grunts.

You were so out of breath but the fear of death has you turning back around. Luckily, the new hole in the wall was in the room that contained the hatch. You looped around once again, going through the hole in the wall and snatching the key up on the table. Jack was no longer behind you both, but that didn’t stop you from rushing to the hatch door and unlocking it as quick as possible. You and Namjoon hopped in and closed the door behind you. The space was so cramped that you both had to be on your hands and knees to fit. It looked as if you were under the house. Ripped up foundation was the ceiling, while the floor was matted down dirt and trash. Broken windows, lawn equipment, and trash bags all crammed against the walls. You had wondered how they even stored this stuff down here to begin with.

“It reeks down here,” Namjoon scrunches his nose. The smell of mildew and garbage made you want to puke while you both crawl your way over to the other side of the hatch. The other side led you to a hole opening to another room in the house. He waits for you to pull yourself out of the opening before saying, “Where the hell are we now?”

The safe room, you thought to yourself. “Looks like the laundry room, I think we’re safe otherwise he would’ve been waiting here for us,” you patted yourself on the back for the improv.

“You’re right, but how do we get out of here without him seeing us?” He pulls his fingers through his tangled hair. You knew that once you stepped out of the room Jack wouldn’t be there, but one of the many boss battles that occur in the game is coming up sooner than you would like.

You eventually convinced Namjoon that you couldn’t stay in that room forever, and he finally grew enough courage to follow you through the open door. Once he realized that Jack was no where to be found, he continued to scavenge the area for any remaining things that could be useful.

A knocking on one of the windows stopped Namjoon in his tracks. You approach it, but Namjoon grabs your wrist. “What the hell are you doing? Would if it’s one of them?” He hisses.

Annoyed, you yank your wrist from his grasp. You knew who it was and you knew you were going to be safe. It was out of his knowledge to know these things, but you still couldn’t help but feel a bit offended that he would think that you would be stupid enough to approach something you weren’t sure about. You kept walking, ignoring his questions. He follows close behind, curious to see if something bad occurs. Not to your surprise, a cop stands at the window. Barb wire and broken wood planks spread across the window frame, but there was still enough space between the ripped up boards to see him in his uniform. The usual person that you would see as the cop in the game was replaced by someone that sent chills down your spine. It was Jungkook.

“Jungkook?” You gasp to yourself He looks at you confused, he didn’t recognize his own name. Is this a glitch?

“It’s deputy,” he scoffs.

“Okay, deputy, I know this is asking for a lot but could we use your pocket knife? We’re being held hostage in this house with no protection and we need your help. There are crazy people in this house,” You wanted to hide the fact that your eyes were bulging out of your skull because of the person you were talking to right now.

“Whoa whoa…not so fast. You don’t exactly seem like you’re playing with a full deck of cards yourself,” he reads your expression, brows furrowed and eyes narrowed into yours.

“Are you serious?” You say. He says that same line to Namjoon in the original game, but he’s talking to you this time. You figured he would go off script at least for that one.

“Listen, there have been several missing person cases around here, how do I know you’re not involved?” His flashlight is shining brightly at your face.

“You let me borrow your pocket knife and I’ll tell you whatever you want in the garage. The garage door is opened by a button which is inside a box that’s covered in tape. I need to get in there somehow,” You pray that this works since you weren’t going by the original dialogue of the video game cutscene anymore.

‘Jungkook’ thinks for a second before nodding slightly. He hands you a small knife through the gap in the window, “Garage. Now.”

You give him a nod before turning back around to meet the eyes of a confused Namjoon. “What?” You question. What does he have to say now?

“What was that?” he crosses his arms, quizzing you.

You roll your eyes. “What was what, Namjoon?” Your attitude raises, you just wanted to get out of here.

“The pocket knife, it wasn’t even in his hand or in sight when you asked him for it…how did you know he had one?” Namjoon’s voice was the only thing that made sound in the house.

You felt your body run cold, letting out a laugh to hide the fact that you had no logical explanation to give him. “Just a lucky guess. It’s a cop, so I just assumed he had something other than one gun,” you play it off with a shrug. Walking past him, you make your way down to the garage to cut open the taped barrier. A red button was now clearly visible when opening the metal cabinet-like door, so you don’t hesitate to smash the button and watch the door to the garage scale up. The garage was now completely laid out in front of you and Namjoon now. A police car and it’s lights rotated around the walls. The cop noticed you both immediately and approached you aggressively.

“Now, tell me what you guys are doing out here tonight?” He yells.

Namjoon couldn’t stand letting you talk all the time, so he steps in front of you to answer. “I’m trying to find my wife that went missing and things went bat-shit crazy—“

The police’s head whips around to see that the garage door that separates the outside world from this hellhole was now closing. “Put that door back up! Put that door back up!” He points his finger at you frantically, but by then it was too late. Namjoon stumbles back from fear, gasping for breath. A shovel was pushed through the deputy’s head from behind, the top of his head slides off of the shovel and onto the ground to reveal who was behind this act. It was Jack.

You’re half surprised that Jack is standing behind the beheaded cop, considering Jungkook, or who you thought was Jungkook, was in the game. You have a slight worry that the game won’t follow it’s normal track, but for now you act on instinct.

“Lets go!” You yell, yanking Namjoon by the arm considering he’s frozen to the floor. Making a jump for it, you scramble to get the keys that are lying innocently on the workbench before dashing to the other side of the garage. Namjoon is tripping over his own feet, rambling about how you even knew the keys were there. The sound of Jack’s shovel is slamming into the large metal shelf placed in the middle of the floor, sending cans of paint and debris everywhere. You use that little setback to shove Namjoon into the passenger seat, hopping in the drivers side and shoving the keys into the ignition. You’re almost convinced that the starter won’t flip, but after a few clicks the engine rumbles to life.

“Is this my own fucking car?” Namjoon yells, and you ignore him while pushing the pedal to the floor and attempting to run over Jack. Namjoon is scrambling to get his seatbelt on as if you guys were even leaving the garage. “Y/N, what the fuck are you doing?”

Sometimes, you wanted to just duck tape his mouth. “Namjoon, shut the hell up.”

He says nothing further as you throw the gear into reverse and step on the gas, backing up into the concrete wall before flooring it forwards again. It takes a few tries, but after the third or fourth crash, Jack is gone. You know better that he isn’t on the ground, and within seconds is peeling the roof back. Even if you know what’s coming, you and Namjoon share the same screaming as Jack pushes you aside and starts to drive the car. You remember the line perfectly, but the sound of Jack talking is drowned out by the tires squealing and various things breaking in the garage. You duck in your seat, bracing for the impact.

“Lower your head!”

“Why?” Namjoon says back, like it was the calmest thing in the word. His eyes bulge as he looks in front of him, and he’s sinking into his seat in seconds before Jack is driving the car into the metal beam.

Silence fills the garage and it’s almost deafening. You take a quick look towards Jack, not breathing in the middle of the seat, before scrambling out of the car and grabbing the gun. Namjoon unbuckles his belt and does the same, eyes glued to the figure in the car as you back into the opposite wall. Your faces light with red tones as the car goes up in flames, Jack coming out unscathed with his hand out. You’re quick to aim the gun at his head, shooting three times before he drops to the ground, the final explosion of the car leaving you and Namjoon on your feet. Once deemed safe, you’re locking your arms together and moving towards the ladder that drops to the floor.

“That was fucking crazy,” Namjoon shouts, and you can’t do anything else besides agree with him. He starts searching the garage for first aid med’s and any coins, or lock picks he could find. At least he still had that common sense. “Can I have the gun?” All shakiness aside, you hand the gun to him, heart slamming at the base of your sternum while Namjoon motions to climb the ladder. You’re one foot up before Jack spawns right next to you, leaving you caged between him and Namjoon.

“Do I have your attention? I’m about to show you something wonderful.”

You practically mouthed those words as he said them, eyes shut before you feel the hot blood splatter all over your face. The gunshot silences the room, even Namjoon’s breathing had come to a halt as the sound of Jack’s body hits the floor. You’re almost unfazed as you start climbing the ladder, leaving Namjoon down there wondering what the fuck just happened. He moves slow, sluggish like he’s about to pass out. You don’t care that you’re leaving him in the dust. You needed to get the metal ox head to open the door for later, and that’s the only thing on your mind.

Jack was out of the way. For now.

It’s been hours.

You and Namjoon haven’t made a dent in getting out it seems. You can feel the weight of the two brass dog heads in your pocket and the way they clink together is almost teasing. You need the third one to unlock the door to the outside, your mind is going crazy just thinking about it. The game is still on track, the monsters popping out at certain times, and you know that soon you’re going to have to face Jack again.

“Y/N. You think we have enough ammo?” Namjoon asks softly, like he’s tired. You can see it in his face too. His eyes look sunken in, back hunched even though he is steadily alert. You nod silently at his question, knowing that he was itching to get out of here too. You both halt before the double doors, knowing what lies behind them and in the back of his mind, Namjoon does too. He’s terrified. That he’s fighting for nothing, that he might lose you in the next fight. That he won’t be useful to you or Mia.

He’s not even sure why the hell he keeps going, any man in their right mind would’ve left the moment they entered the house but something tells Namjoon to stay. As you both enter the downstairs shower room, you can hear the low growl of the monsters pulling out of the wall, the black tar connecting them to the house as if it was one being.

You wince at the sight, shotgun ready as Namjoon loads up the Albert-01, and you both stand back to back to look at the masses slugging towards you. The huge black monster was most likely someone that had died in the Baker house. Maybe Clancy. The black claws on the end of the deformed hands were lunging at you both left and right, the head with huge canines for teeth wide open with the tongue hanging out. You leave minimal time to examine them further since you’re sick of seeing them, and move the shotgun barrel closer before pulling the tigger.

“Works every time,” you say to yourself, watching the head explode into black chunks that dissolve into the tile grout underneath your feet. You watch Namjoon take out the other monster one shot at a time, bullets flying through the skin before finally dropping to the ground. You’re unfazed as you reach the morgue, stomach dropping at the sight of the body bags dangling from the ceiling, the bronze dog head glinting in the light. You feel a wave of relief wash over you. You wanted to get out of this fucking mess.

“Joon! Look,” you breathe, scrambling up the stairs with Namjoon in tow. You both sit like idiots, watching it suspend from the metal beams over your head.

“Fucking finally. Let’s grab it and get out of here.”

You grab his hand, and prepare to jump as soon as you hear the floor boards creak behind you. You could never get away from him.

Pushing off of the ledge, you and Namjoon hurdle into the bottom half of the morgue, considering the area was a loft type of room. You both tuck before you hit the ground, rolling a little bit and soon in seconds you’re back on your feet. Jack jumps down like he’s supposed to, a huge version of hedge trimmers lay in his hand, snapping at any skin he could. Pushing the body bag to stun him like in the game, you soon get bored from the Mary-go-round game you play. It seems Jack does too considering he’s ripping open the chainlink fence.

“Another chainsaw!” Namjoon shouts, lunging across the concrete floor to grab at it before distancing himself. You, having already finished the game, pull out the circular saw. You didn’t wanna use it until now when it would be super handy. This wouldn’t have worked in the game, but once you both get Jack down, you and Namjoon stick the blades of each weapon into his gorging tumor. It shreds through the various amounts of adipose tissue, ripping through the dermal layer of skin before exploding the entire upper torso.

Great, you think. Another fluid to wash off my body. Back to the wall, you watch Jack’s nerve endings come alive in the bottom half of his body. It takes a couple steps towards you before falling.

Namjoon winces. “Just fucking stay dead, okay!?”

You felt a little more sluggish as you made your way back upstairs, glad no other monsters were spawning. You were beyond irritated. What if you actually died in this game? Would you wake up and it would’ve all been a fever dream? Or would your mom come in and find you gone? Would you re-spawn over and over again? It hurt your head to think about, so you leave it alone. Namjoon can feel your tense emotion as he trudges in front of you, flashlight pointing at the dark tunnels of the basement.

“You think we got a good chance of finding Mia?” He sounds cautious as he turns back to you, eyes pleading for you to say something. You’ve been silent for a little. You chew on your lip, debating if you even wanted to start something right now. You wanted to get out of there, too. Not at the expense of your life. So you decide to not bite your tongue.

“You still want to?”

Namjoon’s eyes widen a little. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because!” You snap, stopping in the middle of the tar-soaked hallway crossing your arms over your chest. “She almost beat you within an inch of your life the first twenty minutes we were inside the house! This family has been trying to kill us over and over again, and I have no doubt that they will come back. Why do you still want to stay?” Namjoon is deep in thought, voice cracking as he tries to speak.

“Other than the fact that I love her… It’s the right thing to do. I don’t know what else to do, so can’t you just work with me here?!” He’s yelling now, tears welling in his eyes while the ridges of his knuckles turning white as he clenches his fist around the Albert-01. You’re ready to rip out your hair, turning on him.

“I’ve been working with you, Namjoon! This whole fucking time!” You scream, voice straining. “Risking my life for someone who’s already infected! Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to go home!?” Your chest is heaving, hands pushing your hair back as you drop the subject, continuing down the hall and up the stairs. It stays painfully silent, the tension thick between you and Namjoon. Once you enter the safe room, you feel little relieved as you push the cassette tape into the recorder.

The room was dimly lit by a single lamp placed in a wooden desk. The floor was slightly messy, papers were pressed into the floor boards and the shelves had miscellaneous items lazily thrown about. Random paintings were placed on the wall, one of a woman in a victorian-like dress and the others of simple nature. The huge green chest was sitting off to the side which held all of the things we didn’t need or didn’t have room to carry around.

“I’m sorry” Namjoon’s voice comes in from behind you

“Just forget it,” you scoff, back still facing towards him.

“No,” he shakes his head, eyes still focused on the back of your head.

“Namjoon-“

“You have no idea how important you are to me, (Y/N)!” He cuts you off before you could counter anything he had to say. You turn around to meet eyes with him. “I can’t lose you too…” he shakes his head. The feeling of your arms around him, makes his inner dam break. Tears flow down his cheeks and his sobs are hard as he gasps for breath after each cry. You just stood there, not letting go of his shaking body. This is what he needed right now.

“We’ll find her, and if we don’t, then we’ll die doing it” those words coming out of your mouth scared the shit out of you, but you couldn’t let Namjoon see that right now.

“Would if she’s not worth dying for?” He says quietly. You finally decide to let him go, both of you still close to one another.

“Then we won’t die,” you look up at him. Although he was more than half a foot taller than you, you didn’t feel small in front of him. Mentally, he looked up to you. He always thought you were the strongest person he ever met, and you were still living up to those standards. “Maybe we should try to wipe some of this blood and nasty black shit off or something?” You say, breaking away from his gaze.

“Sounds like a good idea” he laughs.

You take one of the pieces of fabric off of one of the drawers. “Damn, no mirrors in here,” you look around.

“Give it to me, I can do it.” You hand him the cloth and he searches your face. Why did this seem like such an intimate act to him? The cloth barely makes contact with your face. His motions were so gentle and slow. His wristband showed a red line across his wrist that you couldn’t help but glance at. You watched his face focus on the areas he was trying to wipe. When you met eyes, a smile broke onto both of your faces.

“Almost done?” Your voice hums.

“Yup, my turn,” he smiles and drops the cloth into your palms. He sits on the desk, making you more eye level to him. You swallow harshly before stepping in front of his open legged position. You peel his dark brown hair off of his sticky forehead.

“You got some sweaty ass forehead,” you joke.

“Shut up” he chuckles. The cloth drags down his face and around his mouth. Running along his lips, he pushes your hand down and away from his face. To your surprise, he brings his lips to yours. His hands lightly rested at the bottom of your back as his lips moved slowly around yours. Your eyes flutter shut and you felt yourself get lost in the moment. The kiss remained slow and meaningful until you pulled away.

“Namjoon this is—“

“Wrong? It doesn’t feel like it,” he kisses you again, except after a few seconds he’s the one that pulls away. “Unless it does for you, we can stop.”

“Shut up you dummy,” you take his head in your hands and pull him into another kiss. His arms wrap completely around you and pull you as close as you could be. He takes your bottom lip between his teeth, pulling and letting it snap back. Once the kiss was finished, both of your lips were red and swollen. The smiles on your lips slowly faded when you realized the reality that you two were in again.

“I suppose we should heal up ourselves with some med kits before going back out there,” you sigh. He nodded, watching you dig through the big green chest and scrounge up two medkits. Returning to Namjoon, you were about to shoot the medkit into his vein until you caught a look at his wristwatch. It was already green.

Wait, what? You thought to yourself. You swore that he was in the red a couple minutes ago.

“You healed me,” he answers the confusion that you were thinking to yourself.

You look up to him still confused. “How?”

“Hell if I know, but look at yours. You’re no different” he says. You look down at your ankle, what was once a blinking orange line, was now green as well.

“Well I guess we don’t need medkits anymore,” you look up at him bright-eyed. You had this game in the bag now! After placing the medkits back into the chest, it was time to go. Namjoon cocked his gun for it to be ready to fire at anytime.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

You were determined, now more than ever, to finally get the fuck out of the property.

Killing the mom was the scariest for you. It seemed like everywhere you went, the bugs were following you. In your ear, in your mouth.. But finally, Namjoon had killed the mom, grabbing the lantern and bolting out of there. Grabbing the two key cards was easy enough, but if you were honest, Lucas was scary in a psycho sadistic way. You had a feeling he knew how to fuck with somebody’s mind, which made traveling through his house all the more scarier.

Namjoon was quick to outsmart him, putting the bomb in the wall and giving you guys an exit. He had an iron grip on your hand, basically dragging you through the docks as you made it to the boat house. It was the last final fucking stretch and you feel like you could burst into tears.

“Namjoon!!” You scream, watching a four legged molded come from the water and block the way. The brunette was quick on his feet, shotgun aimed at the head of the body, firing within seconds as you both stepped over the corpse. Reaching the final chest. You both rummage through the container, grabbing everything you could and then some.

Armed with Albert-01 and the grenade launcher, you push as many bullets as you can into the bag, while packing the flame rounds into the gun. Namjoon is stocking on the med kits just in case, both of the shotguns strapped to his frame. A deep feeling settles in the pit of your stomach as you reach the top of the boat house to meet Mia and Zoe. You aren’t gonna see Namjoon again, and you’ll finally wake up in your own house. Unfortunately you have to table the thoughts as Zoe hands him the serum, Namjoon pocketing them as you brace for the worst impact of the game.

Jacks last, but not least, form in the game is a grotesque monster with eyes all over the skin. It was a boss battle you wanted to finish once, and never again, but you didn’t have that luck. You feel a hand wrap around your body, squishing flat against Namjoon’s as you’re thrown onto the wood of the deck, rolling before you come to a ragged stop. You’re on your feet in a few seconds, Namjoon struggling to regain his balance while you have the first few shots off at the eyes. They go out in three shots total, making Albert-01 your best friend as you run away from the hand that slaps down on the wooden planks.

You’re dodging the swipes, left and right, but Jack’s swings finally get the best of you. His arm launches you off the first floor. The shallow water from the second floor splashes in your mouth as you cough from the impact of falling on your back. The wind gets knocked right from your lungs, leaving you lying there breathless for a few seconds before shaking out of your daze.

Jack was focused on Namjoon when you got yourself back on your feet. This gave you a clear shot of the eyes that laid around Jack’s back and tail. You took the opportunity of a lifetime and began shooting like a mad man. Thankfully, your good aim managed to take them all out before Jack turned to face you again. You jumped up the ladder two bars at a time to be able to make it back to Namjoon.

“He’s just got one more eye on his stomach!” Your voice barely carries across the room as Jack shouted his offensive statements. “Someone has to distract him!”

As someone distracted Jack on the top level, the other person sneaks down to the lower level right under Jack. Thus, giving them the clear shot of the last eye placed on his stomach.

“You distract him, I got this.” Namjoon nods at you.

You fucking better, you thought to yourself. You took a deep breath to shake the anxiety dwelling deep within your body. Aimless gunshots exploded out of your gun as you drew Jack away from the only way down. Jack dragged his enormous body towards you. Thankfully his AI wasn’t made for two people so he was easily distracted from Namjoon.

There was little good news for you on the other hand, while you were cornered now with no ammo left in your gun. The only thing left was your grenade launcher. You quickly switched and started shooting at Jack helplessly. The kickback of the massive weapon left your shoulder aching, but the adrenaline running through your body left that a problem for later. Eventually, the grenade launcher used its last grenade and you were left with nothing.

You stood there defeated, watching Jack wind up his deadly arm. Not even a block would protect you from the blow. Is this it? You’re going to die in a video game?

Before your thoughts could roam even more into the unknown, Jack’s body fell through the floorboards. He did it.

You flew down the ladder to reunite with Namjoon once more. “We did it! We did it!” You jump into his arms. His arms wrapped around you tightly, you both spinning around the flooded room. You wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there, so you took his hand in yours and ran for the exit where Zoe and Mia were waiting. Now was the time that could determine everything. There’s only one cure left and Namjoon had three different people that needed it. Will he choose Mia, his wife, and my best friend, that we both came here for? Or will he choose Zoe, the one that mentored us along the way? Or, is there even a slim chance that he’ll choose you?

You all three stood in front of him, watching the gears turning inside his head. Your heart was beating through your chest. You wanted him to pick you, but you understood the circumstances. He came here for Mia and he will choose Mia in the end.

“Mia…” Namjoon looks down at his feet while Mia walks toward his figure with a smile on her face. He finally makes eye contact with her, catching a glimpse of you in the background.

“I’m sorry. I came here for you, but I can’t use this on you,” He walks past her and inches towards you. “(Y/N), you’ve saved my ass too many times for me to leave you here to die.” He pushes the syringe into your wrist, making sure every last drop of the cure goes into your blood system.

You were left speechless, along with everyone else. Namjoon didn’t have the heart to look at Mia’s and Zoe’s face before guiding you both onto the boat out of there. You happened to see Mia and Zoe watching you both row off with the look of true fear on their face. You would be in that same position if Namjoon didn’t choose you. What would you have done then? You turned to face Namjoon again.

“Thank you…I should’ve said it sooner, but I was so shocked. I really thought you were going to pick Mia,” His eyes meet yours. There was no doubt that he was sad about leaving Mia behind, but after everything you both had been through he thought you were more important. It seemed harsh but it was true.

“I know I made the right choice. No looking back,” Namjoon gives you a warm smile. That was the last time you saw Namjoon when the boat flipped over and pure darkness devoured your vision.

[unsettlingshortstories]

Onion

Caitlin R. Kiernan (2005)

Frank was seven years old when he found the fields of red grass growing behind the basement wall. The building on St. Mark’s where his parents lived after his father took a job in Manhattan and moved them from the New Jersey suburbs across the wide, gray Hudson. And of course he’d been told to stay out of the basement, no place for a child to play because there were rats down there, his mother said, and rats could give you tetanus and rabies. Rats might even be carrying plague, she said, but the sooty blackness at the foot of the stairs was too much temptation for any seven-year old, the long, long hallway past the door to the super’s apartment and sometimes a single naked bulb burned way down at the end of that hall. Dirty, white-yellow stain that only seemed to emphasize the gloom, drawing attention to just how very dark dark could be, and after school Frank would stand at the bottom of the stairs for an hour at a time, peering into the hall that led down to the basement.

     “Does your mama know you’re always hanging around down here?” Mr. Sweeney would ask whenever he came out and found Frank lurking in the shadows. Frank would squint at the flood of light from Mr. Sweeney’s open door, would shrug or mumble the most noncommittal response he could come up with.     “I bet you she don’t,” Mr. Sweeney would say. “I bet she don’t know.”     “Are there really rats down there?” Frank might ask and Mr. Sweeney would nod his head, point towards the long hall and say “You better believe there’s rats. Boy, there’s rats under this dump big as German shepherd puppies. They got eyes like acetylene blow torches and teeth like carving knives. Can chew straight through concrete, these rats we got.”     “They why don’t you get a cat?” Frank asked once and Mr. Sweeney laughed, phlegmy old man laugh, and “Oh, we had some cats, boy,” he said. “We had whole goddamn cat armies, but when these rats get done, ain’t never anything left but some gnawed-up bones and whiskers.”     “I don’t believe that,” Frank said. “Rats don’t get that big. Rats don’t eat cats.”     “You better get your skinny rump back upstairs, or they’re gonna eat you too,” and then Mr. Sweeney laughed again and slammed his door, left Frank alone in the dark, his heart thumping loud and his head filled with visions of the voracious, giant rats that tunneled through masonry and dined on any cat unlucky enough to get in their way.     And that’s the way it went, week after week, month after month, until one snowblind February afternoon, too cold and wet to go outside and his mother didn’t notice when he slipped quietly downstairs with the flashlight she kept in a kitchen drawer. Mr. Sweeney was busy with a busted radiator on the third floor, so nobody around this time to tell him scary stories and chase him home again, and Frank walked right on past the super’s door, stood shivering in the chilly, mildew-stinking air of the hallway. The unsteady beam of his flashlight to show narrow walls that might have been blue or green a long time ago, little black-and-white, six-sided ceramic tiles on the floor, but half of them missing and he could see the rotting boards underneath. There were doors along the length of the hall, some of them boarded up, nailed shut, one door frame without any door at all and he stepped very fast past that one.     Indiana Jones wouldn’t be afraid, he thought, counting his footsteps in case that might be important later on, listening to the winter wind yowling raw along the street as it swept past the building on its way to Tompkins Square Park and the East River. Twenty steps, twenty-five, thirty-three and then he was standing below the dangling bulb and for the first time Frank stopped and looked back the way he’d come. And maybe he’d counted wrong, because it seemed a lot farther than only thirty-three steps back to the dim and postage-stamp-sized splotch of day at the other end of the hall.     Only ten steps more down to the basement door, heavy, gray steel door with a rusted hasp and a Yale padlock, but standing wide open like it was waiting for him and maybe Mr. Sweeney only forgot to lock it the last time he came down to check the furnace or wrap the pipes. And later, Frank wouldn’t remember much about crossing the threshold into the deeper night of the basement, the soup-thick stench and taste of dust and rot and mushrooms, picking his way through the maze of sagging shelves and wooden crates, decaying heaps of rags and newspapers, past the ancient furnace crouched in one corner like a cast-iron octopus. Angry, orange-red glow from the furnace grate like the eyes of the super’s cat-eating rats—he would remember that—and then Frank heard the dry, rustling sound coming from one corner of the basement.     Years later, through high school and college and the slow purgatory of this twenties, this is where the bad dreams would always begin, the moment that he lifted the flashlight and saw the wide and jagged crack in the concrete wall. A faint draft from that corner that smelled of cinnamon and ammonia, and he knew better than to look, knew he should turn and run all the way back because it wasn’t ever really rats that he was supposed to be afraid of. The rats just a silly grown-up lie to keep him safe, smaller, kinder nightmare for his own good, and Run, boy, Mr. Sweeney whispered inside his head. Run fast while you still can, while you still don’t know.     But Frank didn’t run away, and when he pressed his face to the crack in the wall, he could see that the fields stretched away for miles and miles, crimson meadows beneath a sky the yellow-green of an old bruise. The white trees that writhed and rustled in the choking, spicy breeze, and far, far way, the black thing striding slowly through the grass on bandy, stilt-long legs.

Frank and Willa share the tiny apartment on Mott Street, roachy Chinatown hovel one floor above an apothecary so the place always stinks of ginseng and jasmine and the powdered husks of dried sea creatures. Four walls, a gas range, an ancient Frigidaire that only works when it feels like it, but together they can afford the rent, most of the time, and the month or two they’ve come up short Mrs. Wu has let them slide. His job at a copy shop and hers waiting tables and sometimes they talk about moving out of the city, packing up their raggedy-ass belongings and riding a Greyhound all the way to Florida, all the way to the Keys, and then it’ll be summer all year long. But not this sticky, sweltering new York summer, no, it would be clean ocean air and rum drinks, sun-warm sand and the lullaby roll and crash of waves at night.     Frank is still in bed when Willa comes out of the closet that passes as their bathroom, naked and dripping from the shower, her hair wrapped up in a towel that used to be white and he stops staring at the tattered Cézanne print thumbtacked over the television and stares at her instead. Willa is tall and her skin so pale he thought she might be sick the first time they met, so skinny that he can see intimations of her skeleton beneath that skin like milk and pearls. Can trace the blue-green network of veins and capillaries in her throat, between her small breasts, winding like hesitant, watercolor brush strokes down her arms. He’s pretty sure that one day Willa will finally figure out she can do a hell of a lot better than him and move on, but he tries not to let that ruin whatever it is they have now.     “It’s all yours,” she says, his turn even though the water won’t be hot again for at least half an hour, and Willa sits down in a chair near the foot of the bed. She leans forward and rubs vigorously at her hair trapped inside the dingy towel.     “We could both play hooky,” Frank says hopefully, watching her, imagining how much better sex would be than the chugging, headache drone of Xerox machines, the endless dissatisfaction of clients. “You could come back to bed and we could lie here all day. We could just lie here and sweat and watch television.”     “Jesus, Frank, how am I supposed to resist an offer like that?”     “Okay, so we could screw and sweat and watch television.”   She stops drying her hair and glares at him, shakes her head and frowns, but the sort of frown that says I wish I could more than it says anything else.     “That new girl isn’t working out,” she says.     “The fat chick from Kazakhstan?” Frank asks and he rolls over onto his back, easier to forget the fantasies of a lazy day alone with Willa if he isn’t looking at her sitting there naked.     “Fucking Kazakhstan. I mean, what the hell were Ted and Daniel thinking? She can’t even speak enough English to tell someone where the toilet is, much less take an order.”     “Maybe they felt sorry for her,” Frank says unhelpfully and now he’s staring up at his favorite crack on the water-stained ceiling, the one that always makes him think of a Viking orbiter photo of the Valles Marineris from one of his old astronomy books. “I’ve heard that people do that sometimes, feel sorry for people.”     “Well, they’d probably lose less money if they just sent the bitch to college, the way she’s been pissing off customers.”     ”Maybe you should suggest that today,” and a moment later Willa’s wet towel smacks him in the face, steamy-damp terry cloth that smells like her black hair dye and the cheap baby shampoo she uses. It covers his eyes, obscuring his view of the Martian rift valley overhead, but Frank doesn’t move the towel immediately, better to lie there a moment longer, breathing her in.     “Is it supposed to rain today?” Willa asks and he mumbles through the wet towel that he doesn’t know.     “They keep promising it’s going to rain and it keeps not raining.”    Frank sits up and the towel slides off his face and into his lap, lies there as the dampness begins to soak through his boxers.     ”I don’t know,” he says again; Willa has her back turned to him and she doesn’t reply or make any sign to show that she’s heard. She’s pulling a bright yellow T-shirt on over her head, the Curious George shirt he gave her for Christmas, has put on a pair of yellow panties, too.     “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s the heat. The heat’s driving me crazy.”     Frank glances toward the window, the sash up but the chintzy curtains hanging limp and lifeless in the stagnant July air; he’d have to get out of bed, walk all the way across the room, lean over the sill and peer up past the walls and rooftops to see if there are any clouds. “It might rain today,” he says, instead.     “I don’t think it’s ever going to rain again as long as I live,” Willa says and steps into her jeans. “I think we’ve broken this goddamn planet and it’s never going to rain anywhere ever again.”     Frank rubs his fingers through his stiff, dirty hair and looks back at the Cézanne still life above the television—a tabletop, the absinthe bottle and a carafe of water, an empty glass, the fruit that might be peaches.     “You’ll be at the meeting tonight?” he asks and Frank keeps his eyes on the print because he doesn’t like the sullen, secretive expression Willa gets whenever they have to talk about the meetings.     “Yeah,” she says, sighs, and then there’s the cloth-metal sound of her zipper. “Of course I’ll be at the meeting. Where the hell else would I be?”     And then she goes back into the bedroom and shuts the door behind her, leaves Frank alone with the Cézanne and the exotic reek of the apothecary downstairs, Valles Marineris and the bright day spilling uninvited through the window above Mott Street.

Half past two and Frank sits on a plastic milk crate in the stockroom of Gotham Kwick Kopy, trying to decide whether or not to eat the peanut butter and honey sandwich he brought for lunch. The air conditioning’s on the blink again and he thinks it might actually be hotter inside the shop than out on the street; a few merciful degrees cooler in the stockroom, though, shadowy refuge stacked high with cardboard boxes of copy paper in a dozen shades of white and all the colors of the rainbow. He peels back the top of his sandwich, the doughy Millbrook bread that Willa likes, and frowns at the mess underneath. So hot out front that the peanut butter has melted, oily mess to leak straight through wax paper and the brown bag and he’s trying to remember if peanut butter and honey can spoil.     Both the stockroom doors swing open and Frank looks up, blinks and squints at the sun-framed silhouette, Joe Manske letting in the heat and “Hey, don’t do that,” Frank says as Joe switches on the lights. The fluorescents buzz and flicker uncertainly, chasing away the shadows, drenching the stockroom in their bland, indifferent glare.     “Dude, why are you sitting back here in the dark?” Joe asks and for a moment Frank considers throwing the sandwich at him.     “Why aren’t you working on that Mac?” Frank asks right back and “It’s fixed, good as new,” Joe says, grins his big, stupid grin, and sits down on a box of laser print paper near the door.     “That fucker won’t ever be good as new again.”     “Well, at least it’s stopped making that sound. That’s good enough for me,” and Joe takes out a pack of Camels, offers one to Frank and Frank shakes his head no. A month now since his last cigarette, quitting because Willa’s step-mother is dying of lung cancer, quitting because cigarettes cost too goddamn much, anyhow, and “Thanks, though,” he says.     “Whatever,” Joe Manske mumbles around the filter of his Camel, thumb on the strike wheel of his silver lighter and in a moment the air is filled with the pungent aroma of burning tobacco. Frank gives up on the dubious sandwich, drops it back into the brown bag and crumples the bag into a greasy ball.     “I fuckin’ hate this fuckin’ job,” Joe says, disgusted, smoky cloud of words about his head, and he points at the stockroom door with his cigarette. “You just missed a real peace of work, man.”     “Yeah?” and Frank tosses the sandwich ball towards the big plastic garbage can sitting a few feet away, misses and it rolls behind the busted Canon 2400 color copier that’s been sitting in the same spot since he started this job a year ago.     “Yeah,” Joe says. “I was trying to finish that pet store job and this dude comes in, little bitty old man looks like he just got off the boat from Poland or Armenia or some shit—“     “My grandmother was Polish,“ Frank says and Joe sighs loudly, long impatient sigh and he flicks ash onto the cement floor. “You know what I mean.”     “So what’d he want anyway?” Frank asks, not because he cares but the shortest way through any conversation with Joe Manske is usually right down the middle, just be quiet and listen and sooner or later he’ll probably come to the end and shut up.     “He had this old book with him. The damned thing must have been even older than him and was falling apart. I don’t think you could so much as look at it without the pages crumbling. Had it tied together with some string and he kept askin’ me all these questions, real technical shit about the machines, you know.”     “Yeah? Like what?”     “Dude, I don’t know. I can’t remember half of it, techie shit, like I was friggin’ Mr. Wizard or somethin’. I finally just told him we couldn’t be responsible if the copiers messed up his old book, but he still kept on askin’ these questions. Lucky for me, one of the self-service machines jammed and I told him I had to go fix it. By the time I was finished, he was gone.”     “You live to serve,” Frank says, wondering if Willa would be able to tell if he had just one cigarette. “The customer is always right.”     “Fuck that shit,” Joe Manske says. “I don’t get paid enough to have to listen to some senile old fart jabberin’ at me all day.”     “Yes sir, helpful is your middle name.”     “Fuck you.”     Frank laughs and gets up, pushes the milk crate towards the wall with the toe of one shoe so no one’s going to come along later and trip over it, break their neck and have him to blame. “I better get back to work,” he says and “You do that,” Joe grumbles and puffs his Camel.     Through the stockroom doors and back out into the stifling, noisy clutter of the shop, and it must be at least ten degrees warmer out here, he thinks. There’s a line at the register and the phone’s ringing, no one out front but Maggie and she glowers at him across the chaos. “I’m on it,” Frank says; she shakes her head doubtfully and turns to help a woman wearing a dark purple dress and matching beret. Frank’s reaching across the counter for the telephone receiver when he notices the business card lying near a display of Liquid Paper. Black sans serif print on an expensive, white cotton card stock and what appears to be an infinity symbol in the lower left-hand corner. FOUND: LOST WORLDS centered at the top, TERRAE NOVUM ET TERRA INDETERMINATA on the next line down in smaller letters. Then a name and an address—Dr. Solomon Monalisa, Ph.D., 43 W. 61st St., Manhattan—but no number or email, and Frank picks up the card, holds it so Maggie can see.     “Where’d this come from?” he asks but she only shrugs, annoyed but still smiling her strained and weary smile for the woman in the purple beret. “Beats me. Ask Joe, if he ever comes back. Now will you please answer the phone?”     He apologizes, lifts the receiver, “Gotham Kwick Kopy, Frank speaking. How may I help you?” and slips the white card into his back pocket.

The group meets in the basement of a synagogue on Eldridge Street. Once a month, eight o’clock until everyone who wants to talk has taken his or her turn, coffee and stale doughnuts before and afterwards. Metal folding chairs and a lectern down front, a microphone and crackly PA system even though the room isn’t really large enough to need one. Never more than fourteen or fifteen people, occasionally as few as six or seven, and Frank and Willa always sit at the very back, near the door. Sometimes Willa doesn’t make it all the way through a meeting and she says she hates the way they all watch her if she gets up to leave early, like she’s done something wrong, she says, like this is all her fault, somehow. So they sit by the door, which is fine with Frank; he’d rather not have everyone staring at the back of his head, anyway.     He’s sipping at a styrofoam cup of the bitter, black coffee, three sugars and it’s still bitter, watching the others, all their familiar, telltale quirks and peculiarities, their equivocal glances, when Willa comes in. First the sound of her clunky motorcycle boots on the concrete steps and then she stands in the doorway a moment, that expression like it’s always the first time for her and it can never be any other way.     “Hey,” Frank says quietly. “I made it,” she replies and sits down beside him. There’s a stain on the front of her Curious George T-shirt that looks like chocolate sauce.     “How was your day?” he asks her, talking so she doesn’t lock up before things even get started.       “Same as ever. It sucked. They didn’t fire Miss Kazakhstan.”     “That’s good, dear. Would you like a martini?” and he jabs a thumb toward the free-coffee-and-stale-doughnut table. “I think I’ll pass,” Willa says humorlessly, rubs her hands together and stares at the floor between her feet. “I think my stomach hurts enough already.”     “Would you rather just go home? We can miss one night. I sure as hell don’t care—“     “No,” she says, answering too fast, too emphatic, so he knows she means yes. “That would be silly. I’ll be fine when things get started.”     And then Mr. Zaroba stands, stocky man with skin like tea-stained muslin, salt-and-pepper hair and beard and his bushy, gray eyebrows. Kindly blue grandfather eyes and he raises one hand to get everyone’s attention, as if they aren’t all looking at him already, as if they haven’t all been waiting for him to open his mouth and break the tense, uncertain silence.     “Good evening, everyone,” he says, and Willa sits up a little straighter in her chair, expectant arch of her back as though she’s getting ready to run.     “Before we begin,” Mr. Zaroba continues, “there’s something I wanted to share. I came across this last week,” and he takes a piece of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolds it, and begins to read. An item from the New York Tribune, February 17th, 1901; reports by an Indian tribe in Alaska of a city in the sky that was seen sometimes, and a prospector named Willoughby who claimed to have witnessed the thing himself in 1897, claimed to have tried to photograph it on several occasions and succeeded, finally.     “And now this,” Zaroba says and he pulls a second folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, presto, bottomless bag of tricks, that pocket, and this time he reads from a book, Alaska by Miner Bruce, page 107, he says. Someone else who saw the city suspended in the arctic sky, a Mr. C.W. Thornton of Seattle, and “’It required no effort of the imagination to liken it to a city,’” Mr. Zaroba reads, “’but was so distinct that it required, instead, faith to believe that it was not in reality a city.’”     People shift nervously in their seats, scuff their feet, and someone whispers too loudly.     “I have the prospector’s photograph,” Zaroba says. “It’s only a Xerox from the book, of course. It isn’t very clear, but I thought some of you might like to see it.” And he hands one of the sheets of paper to the person sitting nearest him.     “Damn, I need a cigarette,” Willa whispers and “You and me both, Frank whispers back. It takes almost five minutes for the sheet of paper to make its way to the rear of the room, passed along from hand to hand while Zaroba stands patiently at the front, his head bowed solemn as if leading a prayer. Some hold onto it as long as they dare and others hardly seem to want to touch it. A man three rows in front of them gets up and brings it back to Willa.       ”I don’t see nothing but clouds,” he says, sounding disappointed.     And neither does Frank, fuzzy photograph of a mirage, deceit of sunlight in the collision of warm and freezing air high above a glacier, but Willa must see more. She holds the paper tight and chews at her lower lip, traces the distorted peaks and cumulonimbus towers with the tip of an index finger.     “My god,” she whispers.     In a moment Zaroba comes up the aisle and takes the picture away, leaves Willa staring at her empty hands, her eyes wet like she might start crying. Frank puts an arm around her bony shoulders, but she immediately wiggles free and scoots her chair a few inches farther away.     “So, who wants to get us started tonight?” Mr. Zaroba asks when he gets back to the lectern. At first no one moves or speaks or raises a hand, each looking at the others or trying hard to look nowhere at all. And then a young woman stands up, younger than Willa, filthy clothes and bruise-dark circles under her eyes, hair that hasn’t been combed or washed in ages. Her name is Janice and Frank thinks that she’s a junky, probably a heroin addict because she always wears long sleeves.     “Janice? Very good, then,” and Mr. Zaroba returns to his seat in the first row. Everyone watches Janice as she walks slowly to the front of the room, or they pretend not to watch her. There’s a small hole in the seat of her dirty, threadbare jeans and Frank can see that she isn’t wearing underwear. She stands behind the lectern, coughs once, twice, and brushes her shaggy bangs out of her face. She looks anxiously at Mr. Zaroba and “It’s all right, Janice,” he says. “Take all the time you need. No one’s going to rush you.”     “Bullshit,” Willa mutters, loud enough that the man sitting three rows in front of them turns and scowls. “What the hell are you staring at,” she growls and he turns back towards the lectern.     “It’s okay, baby,” Frank says and takes her hand, squeezes hard enough that she can’t shake him loose this time. “We can leave anytime you want.”     Janice coughs again and there’s a faint feedback whine from the mike. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand and “I was only fourteen years old,” she begins. “I still lived with my foster parents in Trenton and there was this old cemetery near our house, Riverview Cemetery. Me and my sister, my foster sister, we used to go there to smoke and talk, you know, just to get away from the house.”     Janice looks at the basement ceiling while she speaks, or down at the lectern, but never at the others. She pauses and wipes her nose again.     “We went there all the time. Wasn’t anything out there to be afraid of, not like at home. Just dead people, and me and Nadine weren’t afraid of dead people. Dead people don’t hurt anyone, right? We could sit there under the trees in the summer and it was almost like things weren’t so bad. Nadine was a year older than me.”     Willa tries to pull her hand free, digs her nails into Frank’s palm but he doesn’t let go. They both know where this is going, have both heard Janice’s story so many times that they could recite it backwards, same tired old horror story, and “It’s okay,” he says out loud, to Willa or to himself.     “Mostly it was just regular headstones, but there were a few bigger crypts set way back near the water. I didn’t like being around them. I told her that, over and over, but Nadine said they were like little castles, like something out of fairy tales.     “One day one of them was open, like maybe someone had busted into it, and Nadine had to see if there were still bones inside. I begged her not to, said whoever broke it open might still be hanging around somewhere and we ought to go home and come back later. But she wouldn’t listen to me.     “I didn’t want to look inside. I swear to God, I didn’t.”     “Liar.” Willa whispers, so low now that the man three rows in front of them doesn’t hear, but Frank does. Her nails are digging deeper into his palm, and his eyes are beginning to water from the pain. “You wanted to see,” she says. “Just like the rest of us, you wanted to see.”     “I said, ‘What if someone’s still in there?’ but she wouldn’t listen. She wasn’t ever afraid of anything. She used to lay down on train tracks just to piss me off.”     “What did you see in the crypt, Janice, when you and Nadine looked inside?” Mr. Zaroba asks, but no hint of impatience in his voice, not hurrying her or prompting, only helping her find a path across the words as though they were slippery rocks in a cold stream. “Can you tell us?”     Janice takes a very deep breath, swallows, and “Stairs,” she says. “Stairs going down into the ground. There was a light way down at the bottom, a blue light, like a cop car light. Only it wasn’t flashing. And we could hear something moving around down there, and something else that sounded like a dog panting. I tried to get Nadine to come back to the house with me then, but she wouldn’t. She said ‘Those stairs might go anywhere, Jan. Don’t you want to see? Don’t you want to know?”      Another pause and “I couldn’t stop her,” Janice says.     Willa mutters something Frank doesn’t understand, then, something vicious, and he lets go of her hand, rubs at the four crescent-shaped wounds her nails leave behind. Blood drawn, crimson tattoos to mark the wild and irreparable tear in her soul by marking him, and he presses his palm to his black work pants, no matter if it stains, no one will ever notice.     “I waited at the top of the stairs until dark,” Janice says. “I kept on calling her. I called her until my throat hurt.” When the sun started going down, the blue light at the bottom got brighter and brighter and once or twice I thought I could see someone moving around down there, someone standing between me and the light. Finally, yelled I was going to get the goddamn cops if she didn’t come back…” and Janice trails off, hugs herself like she’s cold and gazes straight ahead, but Frank knows she doesn’t see any of them sitting there, watching her, waiting for the next word, waiting for their turns at the lectern.     “You don’t have to say any more tonight,” Zaroba says. “You know we’ll all understand if you can’t.”     “No,” Janice says. “I can…I really need to,” and she squeezes her eyes shut tight. Mr. Zaroba stands, takes one reassuring step towards the lectern.     “We’re all right here,” he says, and “We’re listening,” Willa mumbles mockingly. “We’re listening,” Zaroba says a second later.     “I didn’t go to the police. I didn’t tell anyone anything until the next day. My foster parents, they just thought she’d run away again. No one would believe me when I told them about the crypt, when I told them where Nadine had really gone. Finally, they made me show them, though, the cops did, so I took them out to Riverview.”     “Why do we always have to fucking start with her?” Willa whispers. “I can’t remember a single time she didn’t go first.”     Someone sneezes and “It was sealed up again,” Janice says, her small and brittle voice made big and brittle by the PA speakers. “But they opened it.” The cemetery people didn’t want them to, but they did anyway. I swore I’d kill myself if they didn’t open it and get Nadine out of there.”     “Can you remember a time she didn’t go first?” Willa asks and Frank looks at her, but he doesn’t answer.     “All they found inside was a coffin. The cops even pulled up part of the marble floor, but there wasn’t anything under it, just dirt.”     A few more minutes, a few more details, and Janice is done. Mr. Zaroba hugs her and she goes back to her seat. “Who wants to be next?” he asks them and it’s the man who calls himself Charlie Jones, though they all know that’s not his real name. Every month he apologizes because he can’t use his real name at the meetings, too afraid someone at work might find out, and then he tells them about the time he opened a bedroom door in his house in Hartford and there was nothing on the other side but stars. When he’s done, Zaroba shakes his hand, pats him on the back, and now it’s time for the woman who got lost once on the subway, two hours to get from South Ferry to the Houston Street Station, alone in an empty train that rushed along through a darkness filled with the sound of children crying. Then a timid Colombian woman named Juanita Lazarte, the night she watched two moons cross the sky above Peekskill, the morning the sun rose in the south.     And all the others, each in his or her turn, as the big wall clock behind the lectern ticks and the night fills up with the weight and absurdity of their stories, glimpses of impossible geographies, entire worlds hidden in plain view if you’re unlucky enough to see them. “If you’re damned,” Juanita Lazarte once said and quickly crossed herself. Mr. Zaroba who was once an atmospheric scientist and pilot for the Navy. He’s seen something too, of course, the summer of 1969, flying supplies in a Hercules C-130 from Christchurch, New Zealand to McMurdo Station. A freak storm, whiteout conditions and instrument malfunction, and when they finally found a break in the clouds somewhere over the Transantarctic Mountains the entire crew saw the ruins of a vast city, glittering obsidian towers and shattered, crystal spires, crumbling walls carved from the mountains themselves. At least that’s what Zaroba says. He also says the Navy pressured the other men into signing papers agreeing never to talk about the flight and when he refused, he was pronounced mentally unsound by a military psychiatrist and discharged.     When Willa’s turn comes, she glances at Frank, not a word but all the terrible things right there in her eyes for him to see, unspoken resignation, surrender, and then she goes down the aisle and stands behind the lectern.

Frank wakes up from a dream of rain and thunder and Willa’s sitting cross-legged at the foot of their bed, nothing on but her pajama bottoms, watching television with the sound off and smoking a cigarette. “Where the hell’d you get that?” he asks, blinks sleepily and points at the cigarette.     “I bought a pack on my break today,” she replies, not taking her eyes off the screen. She takes a long drag and the smoke leaks slowly from her nostrils.     “I thought we had an agreement.”     ”I’m sorry,” but she doesn’t sound sorry at all, and Frank sits up and blinks at the TV screen, rubs his eyes, and now he can see it’s Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story.     ”You can turn the sound up, if you want to,” he says. “It won’t bother me.”     ”No, that’s okay. I know it by heart anyway.”     And then neither of them says anything else for a few minutes, sit watching the televisions, and when Willa has smoked the cigarette down to the filter she stubs it out in a saucer.     ”I don’t think I want to go to the meetings anymore,” she says. “I think they’re only making it worse for me.”     Frank waits a moment before he replies, waiting to be sure that she’s finished, and then, “That’s your decision, Willa. If that’s what you want.”     ”Of course it’s my decision.”     ”You know what I meant.”     ”I can’t keep reciting it over and over like the rest of you. There’s no fucking point. I could talk about it from now till doomsday and it still wouldn’t make sense and I’d still be afraid. Nothing Zaroba and that bunch of freaks has to say is going to change that, Frank.”     Willa picks up the pack of Camels off the bed, lights another cigarette with a disposable lighter that looks pink by the flickering, grainy light from the TV screen.     ”I’m sorry,” Frank says.     ”Does it help you?” she asks and now there’s an angry-sharp edge in her voice, Willa’s switchblade mood swings, sullen to pissed in the space between heartbeats. “Has it ever helped you at all?”     Frank doesn’t want to fight with her tonight, wants to close his eyes and slip back down to sleep, back to his raincool dreams. Too hot for an argument, and “I don’t know,” he says, and that’s almost not a lie.     ”Yeah, well, whatever,” Willa mumbles and takes another drag off her cigarette.     ”We’ll talk about it in the morning if you want,” Frank says and he lies back down, turns to face the open window and the noise of Mott Street at two A.M., the blinking orange neon from a noodle shop across the street.     ”I’m not going to change my mind, if that’s what you mean,” Willa says.     ”You can turn the sound up,” Frank tells her again and concentrates on the soothing rhythm of the noodle shop sign, orange pulse like campfire light, much, much better than counting imaginary sheep. In a moment he’s almost asleep again, scant inches from sleep and “Did you ever see Return to Oz?” Willa asks him.     ”What?”     ”Return to Oz, the one where Fairuza Balk plays Dorothy and Laurie Piper plays Auntie Em.”     ”No,” Frank replies. “I never did,” and he rolls over onto his back and stares at the ceiling instead of the neon sign. In the dark and the gray light from the television, his favorite crack looks even more like the Valles Marineris.     ”It wasn’t anything like The Wizard of Oz. I was just a little kid, but I remember it. It scared the hell out of me.”     ”Your mother let you see scary movies when you were a little kid?”     Willa ignores the question, her eyes still fixed on The Philadelphia Story if they’re fixed anywhere, and she exhales a cloud of smoke that swirls and drifts about above the bed.     ”When the film begins, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry think Dorothy’s sick,” she says. “They think she’s crazy, because she talks about Oz all the time, because she won’t believe it was only a nightmare. They finally send her off to a sanitarium for electric shock treatment—“     ”Jesus,” Frank says, not entirely sure that Willa isn’t making all this up. “That’s horrible.”     ”Yeah, but it’s true, isn’t it? It’s what really happens to little girls who see places that aren’t supposed to be there. People aren’t ever so glad you didn’t die in a twister that they want to listen to crazy shit about talking scarecrows and emerald cities.”     And Frank doesn’t answer because he knows he isn’t supposed to, knows that she would rather he didn’t even try, so he sweats and stares at his surrogate, plaster Mars instead, at the shadow play from the television screen; she doesn’t say anything else, and in a little while more, he’s asleep.

In this dream there is still thunder, no rain from the other sky but the crack and rumble of thunder so loud that the air shimmers and could splinter like ice. The tall red grass almost as high as his waist, rippling gently in the wind, and Frank wishes that Willa wouldn’t get so close to the fleshy, white trees. She thinks they might have fruit, peaches and she’s never eaten a white peach before, she said. Giants fighting in the sky and Willa picking up windfall fruit from the rocky ground beneath the trees; Frank looks over his shoulder, back towards the fissure in the basement wall, back the way they came, but it’s vanished.     I should be sacred, he thinks. No, I should be scared.     And now Willa is coming back towards him through the crimson waves of grass, her skirt for a linen basket to hold all the pale fruit she’s gathered. She’s smiling and he tries to remember the last time he saw her smile, really smile, not just a smirk or sneer. She smiles and steps through the murmuring grass that seems to part to let her pass, her bare arms and legs safe from the blades grown sharp as straight razors.     ”They are peaches,” she beams.     But the fruit is the color of school-room chalk, it’s skin smooth and slick and glistening with tiny, pinhead beads of nectar seeping out through minute pores. “Take one,” she says, but his stomach lurches and rolls at the thought, loath to even touch one of the things and then she sighs and dumps them all into the grass at his feet.     ”I used to know a story about peaches,” Willa says. “It was a Japanese story, I think. Or maybe it was Chinese.”     ”I’m pretty sure those aren’t peaches,” Frank says, and he takes a step backwards, away from the pile of sweating, albino fruit.     ”I heard the pits are poisonous,” she says. “Arsenic, or maybe it’s cyanide.”     A brilliant flash of chartreuse lightning then and the sky sizzles and smells like charred meat. Willa bends and retrieves a piece of the fruit, takes a bite before he can stop her; the sound of her teeth sinking through its skin, tearing through the colorless pulp inside, is louder than the thunder, and milky juice rolls down her chin and stains her Curious George T-shirt. Something wriggles from between her lips, falls to the grass, and when Willa opens her jaws wide to take another bite Frank can see that her mouth is filled with wriggling things.     ”They have to be careful you don’t swallow your tongue,” she says, mumbling around the white peach. “If you swallow your tongue you’ll choke to death.”     Frank snatches the fruit away from her, grabs it quick before she puts any more of it in her belly, and she frowns and wipes the juice staining her hands off onto her skirt. The half-eaten thing feels warm and he tosses it away.     ”Jesus, that was fucking silly, Frank. The harm’s already done, you know that. The harm was done the day you looked through that hole in the wall.”     And then the sky booms its symphony of gangrene and sepsis and lightning stabs down with electric claws, thunder then lightning but that’s only the wrong way round if he pretends Willa isn’t right, if he pretends that he’s seven again and this time he doesn’t take the flashlight from the kitchen drawer. This time he does what his mother says and doesn’t go sneaking off the minute she turns her back.     Frank stands alone beneath the restless trees, his aching, dizzy head too full of all the time that can’t be redeemed, now or then or ever, and he watches as Willa walks alone across the red fields towards the endless deserts of scrap iron and bone, towards the bloated, scarlet-purple sun. The black things have noticed her, and creep along close behind, stalking silent on ebony, mantis legs.     This time he wakes up before they catch her.

The long weekend, then, hotter and drier, the sky more white than blue and the air on Mott Street and everywhere else that Frank has any reason to go has grown so ripe, so redolent, that sometimes he pulls the collars of his T-shirts up over his mouth and nose, breathes through the cotton like a surgeon or a wild west bandit, but the smell always gets through anyway. On the news there are people dying of heat stroke and dehydration, people dying in the streets and ERs, but fresh-faced weathermen still promise that it will rain very soon. He’s stopped believing them and maybe that means Willa’s right and it never will rain again.     Frank hasn’t shown the white card—FOUND: LOST WORLDS—to Willa, keeps it hidden in his wallet, only taking it out when he’s alone and no one will see, no one to ask where or what or who. He’s read it over and over again, has each line committed to memory, and Monday morning he almost calls Mr. Zaroba about it. The half hour between Willa leaving for the café and the time that he has to leave for the copy shop if he isn’t going to be late, and he holds the telephone receiver and stares at Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s card lying there on the table in front of him. The sound of his heart, the dial-tone drone, and the traffic down on Mott Street, the spice-and-dried-fish odor of the apothecary leaking up through the floorboards, and a fat drop of sweat slides down his forehead and spreads itself painfully across his left eyeball. By the time he’s finished rubbing at his eye, calling Zaroba no longer seems like such a good idea after all, and Frank puts the white card back into his wallet, slips it in safe between his driver’s license and a dog-eared, expired MetroCard.     Instead he calls in sick, gets Maggie and she doesn’t believe for one moment that there’s anything wrong with him.     ”I fucking swear, I can’t even get up off the toilet long enough to make a phone call. I’m calling you from the head,” only half an effort at sounding sincere because they both know this is only going through the motions.     ”As we speak—“ he starts, but Maggie cuts him off.     ”That’s enough, Frank. But I’m telling you, man if you wanna keep this job, you better get your slacker ass down here tomorrow morning.”     ”Right,” Frank says. “I hear you,” and she hangs up first     And then Frank stares at the open window, the sun beating down like the Voice of God out there, and it takes him almost five minutes to remember where to find the next number he has to call.

Sidney McAvoy stopped coming to the meetings at the synagogue on Eldridge Street almost a year ago, not long after Frank’s first time. Small, hawk-nosed man with nervous, ferrety eyes, and he’s always reminded Frank a little of Dustin Hoffman in Papillon. Some sort of tension or wound between Sidney and Mr. Zaroba that Frank never fully understood, but he saw it from the start, the way their eyes never met and Sidney never took his turn at the lectern, sat silent, brooding, chewing at the stem of a cheap, unlit pipe. And then an argument after one of the meetings, the same night that Zaroba told Janice that she shouldn’t ever go back to the cemetery in Trenton, that she should never try to find the staircase and the blue light again. Both men speaking in urgent, angry whispers, Zaroba looking up occasionally to smile a sheepish, embarrassed, apologetic smile. Everyone pretending not to see or hear, talking among themselves, occupied with their stale doughnuts and tiny packets of non-dairy creamer, and then Sidney McAvoy left and never came back.     Frank would’ve forgotten all about him, almost had forgotten, and then one night he and Willa were coming home late from a bar where they drink sometimes, whenever they’re feeling irresponsible enough to spend money on booze. Cheap vodka or cheaper beer, a few hours wasted just trying to feel like everyone else, the way they imagined other, normal people might feel, and they ran into Sidney McAvoy a few blocks from their apartment. He was wearing a ratty green raincoat, even though it wasn’t raining, and chewing on one of his pipes, carrying a large box wrapped in white butcher’s paper, tied up tight and neat with twine.     ”Shit,” Willa whispered. “Make like you don’t see him,” but Sidney had already noticed them and he was busy clumsily trying to hide the big package behind his back.     ”I know you two,” he declared, talking loudly, a suspicious, accusatory glint to his quavering voice. “You’re both with Zaroba, aren’t you? You still go to his meetings.” That last word a sneer and he pointed a short, grubby finger at the center of Frank’s chest.     ”That’s really none of your goddamn business, is it?” Willa growled and Frank stepped quickly between them; she mumbled and spit curses behind his back and Sindey McAvoy glared up at Frank with his beady-dark eyes. A whole lifetime’s worth of bitterness and distrust trapped inside those eyes, eyes that have seen far too much or far too little, and “How have you been, Mr. McAvoy,” Frank said, straining to sound friendly, and he managed the sickly ghost of a smile.     Sidney grunted and almost dropped his carefully-wrapped package.     ”If you care about that girl there,” he said, speaking around the stem of the pipe clenched between his yellowed teeth, “you’ll keep her away from Zaroba. And you’ll both stop telling him things, if you know what’s good for you. There are more useful answers in a road atlas than you’re ever going to get out of that old phony.”     ”What makes you say that?” Frank asked. “What were you guys fighting about?” but Sidney was already scuttling away down Canal Street, his white package hugged close to his chest. He turned a corner without looking back and was gone.     ”Fucking nut job,” Willa mumbled. “What the hell’s his problem anyway?”       ”Maybe the less we know about him the better,” Frank said and he put an arm around Willa’s small waist, holding her close to him, trying hard not to think about what could have been in the box but unable to think of anything else.     And two weeks later, dim and snowy last day before Thanksgiving, Frank found Sidney McAvoy’s number in the phone book and called him.

A wet comb through his hair, cleaner shirt and socks, and Frank goes out into the sizzling day; across Columbus Park to the Canal Street Station and he takes the M to Grand Street, rides the B line all the way to the subway stop beneath the Museum of Natural History. Rumbling long through the honeycombed earth, the diesel and dust and garbage scented darkness and him swaddled inside steel and unsteady fluorescent light. Time to think that he’d rather not have, unwelcome luxury of second thoughts, and when the train finally reaches the museum he’s almost ready to turn right around and head back downtown. Almost, but Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s card is in his wallet to keep him moving, get him off the train and up the concrete steps to the museum entrance. Ten dollars he can’t spare to get inside, but Sidney McAvoy will never agree to meet him anywhere outside, too paranoid for a walk in Central Park or a quiet booth in a deli or a coffee shop somewhere.     ”People are always listening,” he says, whenever Frank has suggested or asked that they meet somewhere without an entrance fee. “You never know what they might overhear.”     So sometimes it’s the long marble bench in front of the Apatosaurus, or the abyssal, blue-black gloom of the Hall of Fishes, seats beneath a planetarium constellation sky, whichever spot happens to strike Sidney’s fancy that particular day. His fancy or his cabalistic fantasies, if there’s any difference, and today Frank finds him in the Hall of Asiatic Mammals, short and rumpled man in a threadbare tweed jacket and red tennis shoes standing alone before the Indian leopard diorama, gazing intently in at the pocket of counterfeit jungle and the taxidermied cats. Frank waits behind him for a minute or two, waiting to be noticed, and when Sidney looks up and speaks, he speaks to Frank’s reflection.     ”I’m very busy today,” he says, brusque, impatient. “I hope this isn’t going to take long.”     And no, Frank says, it won’t take long at all, I promise, but Sidney’s doubtful expression to show just how much he believes that. He sighs and looks back to the stuffed leopards, papier-mâché trees and wax leaves, a painted flock of peafowl rising to hang forever beneath a painted forest canopy. Snapshot moment of another world and the walls of the dimly-lit hall lined with a dozen or more such scenes.     ”You want to know about Monalisa,” Sidney says. “That’s why you came here, because you think I can tell you who he is.”     ”Yeah,” and Frank reaches into this pocket for his wallet. “He came into the place where I work last week and left this.” He takes out the card and Sidney turns around only long enough to get it from him.     ”So, you talked to him?”     ”No, I didn’t. I was eating my lunch in the stockroom. I didn’t actually see him for myself.”     Sidney stares at the card, seems to read it carefully three or four times and then he hands it back to Frank, goes back to staring at the leopards.     ”Why didn’t you show this to Zaroba?” he asks sarcastically, taunting, but Frank answers him anyway, not in the mood today for Sidney’s grudges and intrigues.     ”Because I didn’t think he’d tell me anything. You know he’s more interested in the mysteries than ever finding answers.” And Frank pauses, silent for a moment and Sidney’s silent, too, both men watching the big cats now—glass eyes, freeze-frame talons, and taut, spectacled haunches—as though the leopards might suddenly spring towards them, all this stillness just a clever ruse for the tourists and the kiddies; maybe dead leopards know the nervous, wary faces of men who have seen things that they never should have seen.     ”He knows the truth would swallow him whole,” Sidney says. The leopards don’t pounce and he adds, “He knows he’s a coward.”     ”So who is Dr. Monalisa?”     ”A bit of something the truth already swallowed and spat back up,” and Sidney chuckles sourly to himself and produces one of his pipes from a jacket pocket. “He’s a navigator, a pilot, a cartographer…”     Frank notices that one of the two leopards has captured a stuffed peacock, holds it fast between velvet, razored paws, and he can’t remember if it was that way only a moment before.     ”He draws maps,” Sidney says. “He catalogs doors and windows and culverts.”     ”That’s bullshit,” Frank whispers, his voice low now so the old woman staring in at the giant panda exhibit won’t hear him. “You’re trying to tell me he can find places?”     ”He isn’t a sane man, Frank,” Sidney says and now he holds up his left hand and presses his palm firmly against the glass, as if he’s testing the invisible barrier, gauging its integrity. “He has answers, but he has prices, too. You think this is Hell, you see how it feels to be in debt to Dr. Solomon Monalisa.”     ”It isn’t me. It’s Willa. I think she’s starting to lose it.”     ”We all lost ‘it’ a long time ago, Frank.”     ”I’m afraid she’s going to do something. I’m afraid she’ll hurt herself.”     And Sidney turns his back on the leopards then, takes the pipe from his mouth, and glares up at Frank.     But some of the anger, some of the bitterness, has gone from his eyes, and “He might keep her alive,” he says, “but you wouldn’t want her back when he was done. If she’d even come back. No, Frank. You two stay away from Monalisa. Look for your own answers. You don’t think you found that card by accident, do you? You don’t really think there are such things as coincidences? That’s not even his real address—“     ”She can’t sleep anymore,” Frank says, but now Sidney McAvoy isn’t listening, glances back over his shoulder at the Indian rain forest, incandescent daylight, illusory distances, and “I have to go now,” he says. “I’m very busy today.”     ”I think she’s fucking dying, man,” Frank says as Sidney straightens his tie and puts the pipe back into his pocket; the old woman looks up from the panda in its unreal bamboo thicket and frowns at them both.     ”I’m very busy today, Frank. Call me next week. I think I can meet you at the Guggenheim next week.”     And he walks quickly away towards the Roosevelt Rotunda, past the Siberian tiger and the Sumatran rhinoceros, leaving Frank alone with the frowning woman. When Sidney has vanished into the shadows behind a small herd of Indian elephants, Frank turns back to the leopards and the smudgy hand print Sidney McAvoy has left on their glass.

Hours and hours later, past sunset to the other side of the wasted day, the night that seems even hotter than the scorching afternoon, and Frank is dreaming that the crack in the basement wall on St. Mark’s place is much too narrow for him to squeeze through. Maybe the way it really happened after all, and then he hears a small, anguished sound from somewhere close behind him, something hurting or lost, and when he turns to see, Frank opens his eyes and there’s only the tangerine glow of the noodle shop sign outside the apartment window. He blinks once, twice, but this stubborn world doesn’t go away, doesn’t break apart into random kaleidoscopic shards to become some other place entirely. So he sits up, head full of the familiar disappointment, this incontestable solidity, and it takes him a moment to realize that Willa isn’t in bed. Faint outline of her body left in the wrinkled sheets and the bathroom light is burning, the door open, so she’s probably just taking a piss.     ”You okay in there?” he asks, but no reply. The soft drip, drip, drip of the kitchenette faucet, tick of the wind-up alarm clock on the table next to Willa’s side of the bed, street noise, but no answer. “Did you fall in or something?” he shouts. “Did you drown?”     And still no response, but his senses waking up, picking out more than the ordinary, every-night sounds, a trilling whine pitched so high he feels it more than hears it, and now he notices the way that the air in the apartment smells.     Go back to sleep, he thinks, but both legs already over the edge of the bed, both feet already on the dusty floor. When you wake up again it’ll be over.     The trill worming its way beneath his skin, soaking in, pricking gently at the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck, and all the silver fillings in his teeth have begun to hum along sympathetically. Where he’s standing, Frank can see into the bathroom, just barely, a narrow slice of linoleum, slice of porcelain toilet tank, a mildew and polyurethane fold of shower curtain. And he thinks that the air has started to shimmer, an almost imperceptible warping of the light escaping from the open door, but that might only be his imagination. He takes one small step towards the foot of the bed and there’s Willa, standing naked before the tiny mirror above the bathroom sink. The jut of her shoulder blades and hip bones, the anorexic swell of her rib cage, all the minute details of her painful thinness seem even more pronounced in the harsh and curving light.     ”Hey. Is something wrong? Are you sick?” and she turns her head slowly to look at him, or maybe only looking towards him because there’s nothing much like recognition on her face. Her wide, unblinking eyes, blind woman’s stare, and “Can’t you hear me, Willa?” he asks as she turns slowly back to the mirror. Her lips move, shaping rough, inaudible words.     The trilling grows infinitesimally louder, climbs another half-octave, and there’s a warm, wet trickle across Frank’s lips and he realizes that his nose is bleeding.     Behind Willa the bathroom wall, the shower, the low ceiling—everything—ripples and dissolves and there’s a sudden, staccato pop as the bulb above the sink blows. And after an instant of perfect darkness, perfect nothing, dull and yellow-green shafts of light from somewhere far, far above, flickering light from an alien sun shining down through the waters of an alien sea; dim, translucent shapes dart and flash through those depths, bodies more insubstantial than jellyfish, more sinuous than eels, and Willa rises to meet them, arms outstretched, her hair drifting about her face like a halo of seaweed and algae. In the ocean-filtered light, Willa’s pale skin seems sleek and smooth as dolphin-flesh. Air rushes from her lips, her nostrils, and flows eagerly away in a glassy swirl of bubbles.     The trilling has filled Frank’s head so full, and his aching skull, his brain, seem only an instant from merciful explosion, fragile, eggshell bone collapsed by the terrible, lonely sound and the weight of all that water stacked above him. He staggers, takes a step backwards, and now Willa’s face is turned up to meet the sunlight streaming down, and she’s more beautiful than anyone or anything he’s ever seen or dreamt.     Down on Mott Street, the screech of tires, the angry blat of a car horn and someone begins shouting very loudly in Chinese.     And now the bathroom is only a bathroom again, and Willa lies in a limp, strangling heap on the floor, her wet hair and skin glistening in the light from the bulb above the sink. The water rolls off her back, her thighs, spreads across the floor in a widening puddle, and Frank realizes that the trilling has finally stopped, only the memory of it left in his ringing ears and bleeding nose. When the dizziness has passed, he goes to her, sits down on the wet floor and holds her while she coughs and pukes up gouts of salt water and snotty strands of something the color of verdigris. Her skin so cold it hurts to touch, cold coming off her like a fever, and something small and chitinous slips from her hair and scuttles behind the toilet on long, jointed legs.     ”Did you see?” she asks him, desperate, rheumy words gurgling out with all the water that she’s swallowed. “Did you, Frank? Did you see it?”     ”Yes,” he tells her, just like every time before. “Yes, baby. I did. I saw it all,” and Willa smiles, closes her eyes, and in a little while she’s asleep. He carries her, dripping, back to their bed and holds her until the sun rises and she’s warm again.

The next day neither of them goes to work, and some small, niggling part of Frank manages to worry about what will happen to them if he loses the shit job at Gotham Kwick Kopy, if Willa gets fired from the café, obstinate shred of himself still capable of caring about such things. How the rent will be paid, how they’ll eat, everything that hasn’t really seemed to matter in more years than he wants to count. Half the morning in bed and his nosebleed keeps coming back, a roll of toilet paper and then one of their towels stained all the shades of dried and drying blood; Willa wearing her winter coat despite the heat, and she keeps trying to get him to go to a doctor, but no, he says. That might lead to questions, and besides, it’ll stop sooner or later. It’s always stopped before.     By twelve o’clock, Willa’s traded the coat for her pink cardigan, feels good enough that she makes them peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches, black coffee and stale potato chips, and after he eats Frank begins to feel better, too. But going to the park is Willa’s idea, because the apartment still smells faintly of silt and dead fish, muddy, low-tide stink that’ll take hours more to disappear completely. He knows the odor makes her nervous, so he agrees, even though he’d rather spend the afternoon sleeping off his headache. Maybe a cold shower, another cup of Willa’s bitter-strong coffee, and if he’s lucky he could doze for hours without dreaming     They take the subway up to Fifth, follow the eastern edge of the park north, past the zoo and East Green all the way to Pilgrim Hill and the Conservatory Pond. It’s not so very hot that there aren’t a few model sailing ships on the pond, just enough breeze to keep their miniature Bermuda sails standing tall and taut as shark fins. Frank and Willa sit in the shade near the Alice in Wonderland statue, her favorite spot in all of Central Park, rocky place near the tea party, granite and rustling leaves, the clean laughter of children climbing about on the huge, bronze mushrooms. A little girl with frizzy black hair and red and white peppermint-striped tights is petting the kitten in Alice’s lap, stroking its metal fur and meowling loudly, and “I can’t ever remember her name,” Willa says.     ”What?” Frank asks. “Whose name?” not sure if she means the little girl or the kitten or something else entirely.     ”Alice’s kitten. I know it had a name, but I never can remember it.”     Frank watches the little girl for a moment, and “Dinah,” he says. “I think the kitten’s name was Dinah.”     ”Oh, yeah, Dinah. That’s it,” and he knows that she’s just thinking out loud, whatever comes to mind so that she won’t have to talk about last night, so the conversation won’t accidentally find its own way back to those few drowning moments of chartreuse light and eel shadows. Trying so hard to pretend and he almost decides they’re both better off if he plays along and doesn’t show her Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s white calling card.     ”That’s a good name for a cat,” she says. “If we ever get a kitten, I think I’ll name it Dinah.”     ”Mrs. Wu doesn’t like cats.”     ”Well, we’re not going to spend the rest of our lives in that dump. Next time, we’ll get an apartment that allows cats.”     Frank takes the card out and lays his wallet on the grass, but Willa hasn’t even noticed, too busy watching the children clambering about on Alice, too busy dreaming about kittens. The card is creased and smudged from a week riding around in his back pocket and all the handling it’s suffered, the edges beginning to fray, and he gives it to her without any explanation.     ”What’s this?” she asks and he tells her to read it first, just read it, so she does. Reads it two or three times and then Willa returns the card, goes back to watching the children. But her expression has changed, the labored, make-believe smile gone now and she just looks like herself again, plain old Willa, the distance in her eyes, the hard angles at the corners of her mouth that aren’t quite a frown.     ”Sidney says he’s for real,” half the truth, at best, and Frank glances down at the card, reading it again for the hundredth or two-hundredth time     ”Sidney McAvoy’s a fucking lunatic.”     ”He says this guy has maps—“     ”Christ, Frank. What do you want me to say? You want me to give you permission to go talk to some crackpot? You don’t need my permission.”     ”I was hoping you’d come with me,” he says so softly that he’s almost whispering, and he puts the card back into his wallet where neither of them will have to look at it, stuffs the wallet back into his jeans pocket.     ”Well, I won’t. I go to your goddamn meetings. I already have to listen to that asshole Zaroba. That’s enough for me, thank you very much. That’s more than enough.”     The little girl petting Dinah slips, loses her footing and almost slides backwards off the edge of the sculpture, but her mother catches her and sets her safely on the ground.     ””I see what it’s doing to you,” Frank says. “I have to watch. How much longer do you think you can go on like this?”     She doesn’t answer him, opens her purse and takes out a pack of cigarettes, only one left and she crumbles the empty package and tosses it over her shoulder into the bushes.     ”What if this guy really can help you? What if he can make it stop?”     Willa is digging noisily around in her purse, trying to find her lighter or a book of matches, and she turns and stares at Frank, the cigarette hanging unlit from her lips. Her eyes shining bright as broken gemstones, shattered crystal eyes, furious, resentful, and he knows that she could hate him, that she could leave him here and never look back. She takes the cigarette from her mouth, licks her upper lip, and for a long moment Willa holds the tip of her tongue trapped tight between her teeth.     ”What the hell makes you think I want it to stop?”     And silence as what she’s said sinks in and he begins to understand that he’s never understood her at all. “It’s killing you,” he says, finally, the only thing he can think to say, and Willa’s eyes seem to flash and grow brighter, more broken, more eager to slice.     ”No, Frank, it’s the only thing keeping me alive. Knowing that it’s out there, that I’ll see it again, and someday maybe it won’t make me come back here.”     And then she gets up and walks quickly away towards the pond, brisk, determined steps to put more distance between them. She stops long enough to bum a light from an old black man with a dachshund, then ducks around one corner of the boathouse and he can’t see her anymore. Frank doesn’t follow, sits watching the tiny sailboats and yachts gliding gracefully across the moss-dark surface of the water, their silent choreography of wakes and ripples. He decides maybe it’s better not to worry about Willa for now, plenty of time for that later and he wonders what he’ll say to Monalisa when he finds him.

We shall be less apt to admire what this World calls great, shall nobly despise those Trifles the generality of Men set their Affections on, when we know that there are a multitude of such Earths inhabited and adorn’d as well as our own.                                                                       CHRISTIAAN HUYGENS (c. 1690)

[angrybisexualravenclaw]

Copper Blood

Short unfinished scary fic, includes death and graphic descriptions of rotting corpses, as well as a general uneasy feel. 

The smell of sugar cookies and lavender still pervaded the air, despite three rinses of bleach. And copper. The tangy smell of it was everywhere. She had collected them everywhere, obsessed with them. When she had gotten married, they thought she’d stop. Three hundred pennies in an old muslin sack that was starting to tear. Instead, she started building.

It had been a small cottage when they had moved in, a little front room, a tinier back room, a loft for sleeping, and an outhouse. She’d built on it until it was unrecognizable. The front room, a little foyer with seashells and stones among the tiled penny floor. A curtain of strings of tiny beads, glowing gold and bronze in the fading light, led to a main room, with chairs to sit on, a table to eat off of. Here, rugs made of plastic bags and long reeds lay, a break from the sun glare bouncing off pennies. Its walls sagged, held up by cabinets and other bits of furniture, put up hastily to try to form supports.

To one side, a doorway leading to the only room without a penny floor, the kitchen, which was a mosaic of smashed pottery, all the could-have-beens and might-have-happened and yesterdays of memories long faded away. White china, the type that one receives at a wedding, pink ceramic with garish flowers, the rainbow messes of pottery that children make so often. The walls had been painted a long time ago, but they were fading and crumbling, the bricks and stone and mortar turning to dust, the paint chipped and scratched. The plates along the walls had cracks, with gold paint along every line as if to emphasize what was broken, missing, or aging.

The back room, what had once been a small thing, big enough for a rug, a chair, and a box bed tucked into the wall, with two drawers for babies, was gone. The floor was pennies, half-coins, and more, melted in the heat of candles, potatoes, bedstoves, and bodies, anything to push away the freezing cold of silence. Melted together, the floor seemed a piece of art more disturbing than any impressionist’s piece, more depressing than any dreary poem. The bed was gone, boarded up and painted over, until only the cleverest eye would note where the pennies ended and the black paint began. Where the pennies’ brightness, even at midday, could not shine into. A newer bed sat in the corner, a small pallet on stacks of coins, sagging under its years of weight. The mattress was flat and torn, snagged by months of nettles and thistles, repentance for something that could never be forgiven. A foul smell wove through the air, smelling of lavender, rot, and paint thinner.

On the outside, the house seemed normal, but those who had entered knew of its secrets, its history, and its pain. We knew of the women who had lived here.

~

After her death, the house was put up for sale. My mother bought it, as nobody else would. The house may have been inanimate, but its inhabitants were still very much alive, spiritually speaking, and to tear down the house would have been an act worse than death, she said. Once a year she would visit it, but other than that, she left it alone. I thought it a terrible waste of a beautiful house, and my sister, Pandora, agreed. A house that unique must have a tragic and romantic history, perfect for two budding princess-detectives in training to live. Perhaps if she had known, she would have stopped us, but we were often left alone to our wishes for hours, later days, on end.

Mother worked shifts at the local hospital, though local was rather a relative term, since the hospital was an hour away, two if the car broke down as it did so on a regular basis. The hospital was understaffed, so the nurses often had to take double or even triple shifts. When we were younger, she would take us with her and leave us with a cousin in the area, but now that we were older, it was easier to leave us home. She often left in the morning, got some rest at our cousins, and come back long past our bedtime. We were left home with dinner keeping warm in the oven and a list of chores for us to do while she was working. It was one of these days that we chose to go exploring.

I’d meant to wake early, to see Mother out the door and make sure she didn’t dawdle, but life never seemed to work out that way, and I woke to Pandora shaking me because I wouldn’t get up.

Sneaking over was easy, as nobody paid attention to us, being small and not very pretty. The house was a bit away, but we’d turned an old wagon into a pedal cart with room for our stuffed subjects. As long as we leaned over toward the right a lot, it would stick to tipping over once or twice and mostly behave otherwise.

The door was locked when we got there. When I rattled the door, I could hear the sound of a latch, and a bit of wall crumbling. “The brambles have grown over the door, my lady,” I announced.

“We must slice them with our sword, Eve.” Pandora pulled out the old silver fork. She had brought it to use as a scepter or to slice bread. Maybe it would work for this too. She pushed the fork through the crack and shoved against the latch. After a bit of crumbling sounds and some clunks, I heard the latch fall on the ground. “Done!” We shoved the door open triumphantly.

The door creaked and squeaked as it dragged its sorry self open, yet more proof that it hadn’t been opened in some time, maybe even since before the old woman had died. I had a vague memory of her, though not much. I hadn’t liked her. I had memories of trembling hands that struggled to hold anything lighter than an envelope, yet grasped arms and shoulders with frightening strength. She always smelled of lavender. I sneezed every time she came close.

One look into the first room we entered proved the stories true and made our curiosity all the greater. Pennies coated the room. It looked like we’d broken into a vault. “The foyer, my lady,” Pandora announced, sweeping her hands around. Then she helped me haul the wagon in. The pennies that had tiled the floor had long-ago oxidized, creating a carpet of spiky green metal that tickled our feet. Next to us lay the latch, a bit of wall hanging to the ends and looking pathetic. The walls looked dull and lifeless. Two hard chairs sat in two corners with braided cushions on them. Other than that, the room was bare. This room didn’t hold any treasure or mystery worth looking into. Dragging our subjects behind us, we pushed through the curtain to the side room.

The next room was little, crammed so full of shelves and cabinets that there was barely room for the furniture in there. There were two winged armchairs stuffed with straw which made nice thrones for my sister and I. “The throne room, my lady.” Looking in the cabinets, I found two paper crowns and necklaces made of pennies. We put both on and proceeded to hold court.

After sentencing our teddy bears to three years of hard labor in the sheep farms for mutilating my rag doll and giving the family of clothespin dolls a loan out on yarn, we returned to exploring. A princess could only work so long before she needed an adventure. Dry weeds and plastic rags fell to pieces as we made our way to the next room, dusting our feet with river trips and market days.

Not expecting the next room to be several inches lower than its entrance, I tripped and went sprawling onto the floor. Said floor was cold and unforgiving. “Are you alright, Eve?” Pandora asked me.

“I’m fine, Pan. Help me up?” Getting up with her support, I scanned the room, expecting to see shelves and barrels, indicating the room to be a cellar. Instead, the windows caught my eye. They were small rectangular openings high up, covered with a waxy paper like the stuff Mom used to wrap sandwiches. The windows meant that the room wasn’t underground, like I’d originally thought. Still, it was far enough into the ground so that it was freezing cold. There was probably a square area covered with a board somewhere around here where food used to be stored to keep it cool. Maybe there was treasure in there. The walls had holes in them and didn’t look too sturdily built, layers of bricks of stone slapped together to create a barrier against the window. “The royal kitchen.” Now that I thought of it, it had been a while. “Let us feast!”

In the back of the room was a long dusty table, a strange-looking stove with lots of doors on the front and a side pocket filled with fungus-infested wood. An old meal in a stone pan was growing mold.  We dusted off the table and brought in the wooden chairs from the foyer, then laid our food out. A ceramic jug of earl grey tea with two wooden cups, a small loaf of bread, half a round of hard cheese, and several slices of ham. The tea had spilled onto my rag doll and soaked the bread. We had forgotten the pat of butter until after we ate the bread, and the ham was mostly fat. Still, we feasted like princesses.

Looking around, my sister discovered the boarded up hole I was expecting to find, under the table.

Swinging the board to the side, at first we found nothing but dust covering our finds. Pulling the items out one at a time, inside the bin we found several dusty, glass nursing bottles, the rubber teats and caps still intact. One had a few chunks of what used to be milk, like the child hadn’t quite drunk it all, and another half-full of diluted paregoric. The rest were clean of all but some cobwebs and mildew. A few potatoes came out next, sprouting huge eyes and starting to root around for a hold on the soil. Those were tossed aside in hopes of better treasure.

Next were pulled out two pouches of what looked like ginger and mint, a small vial of honeyed poppy. The pouches looked half full, but the vial was almost empty, and I saw several more that had been cleaned out,. Nothing else was of much value,  save three old photos. I pulled them out.

The first was of a young woman. She had a solemn face, but her eyes looked impatient, like she felt the picture was important, but that she would have liked it to be shorter so she could move on to other things. She also had a slightly unhinged look about her and something wasn’t quite right. Maybe it was the way her hair and clothes were perfectly done up, not a single mar. Or maybe the way her lips were pressed together like she couldn’t open her mouth even if she wanted to. On the back, in fading ink, read, July 16th, the first faire I attended. Back in my glory days, when luck came to me unbidden.

The next one was a picture of the same woman, slightly older, with a bump indicating a babe on the way, a child holding her hand and sucking their thumb, and a man next to her. The man and woman both looked serious. However, in this one, the woman’s eyes seemed a little more frantic, and her dress was wrinkled. The man looked jovial and at peace with the world. The back read, Donald Fisher was the handsomest man in town, and God chose me to be his devoted bride. He says he wishes to give me a life free of burden. It’s true then. I must work even harder to add to the ------. I couldn’t make out the last few words, as they’d been scratched off. It wasn’t very interesting, anyway.

I turned to the last one. This one was scratched up and looked poorly developed. It was another picture of the couple. The woman looked only slightly more put-together, and now she held a baby in her arms. The child from the last picture looked two or three years older, and held the hand of an even smaller child still in long gowns. I turned it around, hoping to see something interesting written, but there was nothing. Disappointed, I dropped them to the ground.

While I’d been reading, my sister had pulled out more things, but nothing that spoke of stories behind them: some more vegetables, green pennies stuck together, and a barrel it took the two of us to lift out containing a dirty, off-white paste. Three fat, wobbly candles lay at the bottom with flint and steel, but nothing else remained to pique our interest.

Bored of this room, cold and lifeless save a few moldy vegetables, I dragged my sister out. Ducking under a slowly sagging part of the ceiling, we returned to the first room. I was going for the other doorway when my sister tugged my sleeve and pointed up. I looked where she was pointing. Above our heads was a small square opening into what looked like a loft.

Lofts were, in my humble opinion, the best part of any house. They were always full of little nooks and crannies. My sister and I shared the loft back home, and we’d discovered all the secret places long ago. A loft here provided even more opportunity for discovering something really secret hidden away. The only problem I saw was the ladder. Our loft had a sturdy wooden ladder, more like a small staircase than anything else. This was just a rope ladder, and it was starting to go to pieces. The loft was high enough up so that I couldn’t boost my sister up, either. We’d have to find a new way of getting up.

After going through our cart to see if we’d brought anything useful (we hadn’t), we looked around the rooms we’d searched already. It was my sister’s idea to bring one of the chairs in and climb on it. It took the two of us to drag it out, and we managed to chip the sides of the doorway as well as the chair, but climbing on it and boosting each other up got us in.

Before I went up, I lit one of the candles from the kitchen area and stuck it on a wooden dish. I passed the plate up carefully, then climbed up myself. My sister had taken the candle and placed it to the side. Once that was done, she returned to help me up.

Once I was up inside the loft, we started looking around. There was one window which was little more than a wide crack where the beams of the roof met each other, covered up by more of the paper. A curtain divided the room, giving privacy to the left side. The right side had strings of vegetables: onions, peppers, beans, all strung up to dry. They were tough and nasty looking. Underneath were shriveled-up pumpkins and squash, and several chests and trunks. I went to the closest trunk. It had a lock, but the key hung on a chain next to it. Once my sister came over with the candle, I unlocked it and swung the lid open.

The top half was rather boring. I took out linens: nice ones. They looked like the ones that our mother had made when she had married our step-father. She’d said they had been a dowery. Next was a folded quilt, stiff and holding the memory of being folded even after we’d laid it out. The border was a pale green with delicate, brown embroidered leaves. The main body of the quilt was a dozen squares, each a different flower with spiral and leaf embroidery around. The back was a pale cotton with roses scattered across it. The bottom half was full of pennies. When I stuck my hands in and felt around, I found some baby things. Two pacifiers: one silver with a well-chewed wooden ring, the other one silver with a duck-shaped handle and little bells. Several cloth nappies and a few disposable ones were also located among the pennies. Nothing else remained.

The next several trunks were half-full of pressed clothes. Any clothes that had remained after the death of the house’s inhabitant had been washed and brought up. I found three children’s dresses, two baby blankets, and a few pairs of drawers. There was a wool coat, cap, and other small articles for a boy a little younger than we were. In the next trunk there were several men’s shirts, all of surprisingly good quality cotton. With them was four collars in boxes and two sets of cuffs. Two pairs of pants, leather lace-up shoes, and an overcoat made of broadcloth. A third and fourth held womens clothing. Two skirts in drab colors and shirtwaists lay on top. Below that was a stiff dress in a dark brown calico with jet buttons up the front and puffed sleeves. Three petticoats and a farthingale were tucked in the bottom, along with laced leather shoes and three collars with brooches. All the clothing we found was in good condition, having been made to last, but they smelled funny. Sprigs of lavender were tucked among them to disguise the smell, but there were stains on the inside that looked like pus and smelled like roadkill. A few of the nappies had an old reek of piss that made me gag.

Boring of the trunks, I decided to draw aside the curtain. I’d noticed a smell coming from there before, and now that I took the time to think about it, the smell coming from the curtained side was very similar to the clothing. Had they kept dead animals or something to experiment on?

This side had clearly been the bedroom of a young child. It still was, if the corpse in the bed was any indication. It let off a disgusting stench, attempting to be covered up by lavender all over the bed. The boy--it looked like a boy, though between the blanket covering it’s private parts and it already starting to rot away, it was hard to tell. He wore a simple night shirt, but the way it hung on him made it look like someone had been dressing him long after he died. His mouth was stained, both with blood that he had coughed up, and drips of food. A bowl of what had used to be bread and milk lay next to an out-stretched arm. Dried pus surrounded open sores, and it looked as if someone had been trying to care for him, in their own way. They’d tried to feed him and change his clothes. It hadn’t been done for a long while, though. The nightshirt was stuck to him through all the rotting flesh. Maggots had laid eggs in his body, which had hatched into more maggots, which had begun to feed at him. Whoever had cared for him had attempted to keep the bugs away by way of various oils and a net thrown over his body, had covered up the stench of his death with dried lavender, had even brought paint and painted him to appear as if he were still alive. It was enough to make my stomach turn.

It took a while before either of us were able to continue looking around. Aside from the obviously grotesque dead body, there wasn’t much on that side. There was a small chest with toys, a pocket knife and some carvings, and a small can of shoe polish. A curtain on one end hid a small shelf area for changing. Other than that, the loft was empty. We blew out the candle and left quickly, wanting to put the dead boy behind us.

I couldn’t shake the feeling of fear off. He had been our age when he died. Maybe a little older, but only a year or two. He’d clearly died of some kind of pox. Smallpox wasn’t everywhere, but it was still able to be caught. What if I died of it? Would my mother paint me and pretend I was still alive? The idea made me shudder. Exploring was no longer fun for me. I could tell my sister agreed. Still, we weren’t about to run away from this house, even if we were starting to regret coming. There was only one more room anyway. We could leave after that and pretend this never happened.

The last room was smaller than the others. It must have been a bedroom at one point, though if it weren’t for the pallet in the corner, I wouldn’t have guessed it. It took us a few minutes to realize it was actually bigger than it looked. The back wall was covered in black paint and poorly hammered-in boards. Two drawers were glued in place or something.

Other than the pallet, there was a small shelf. The top shelves had embroidery, and the bottom had two bibles, both well-thumbed. A few pages were dog-eared. When I opened it up, the pages all had something about forgiveness or sacrifice, deals made with God. I wondered what the point of it was. The pallet had been used. It had a thin, scratchy blanket, and no pillow. Two cilices lay folded at the end, and nettles and brambles had been laid on the bed. It didn’t look very comfortable. I wondered why anyone would subject themself willingly to that treatment.

While I had been looked at the pallet, my sister had decided to take measures into her own hands about opening up the drawers and wall. She came back in with a skillet and smashed it into the wall. The skillet rang and my sister fell on the ground, but the wall barely scratched. “Help me over here.” We took turns banging the skillet on the wall until it smashed through. We ripped the boards off. Immediately, the reek of rotting flesh hit me. I would have thrown up, but I had nothing left. I dry heaved a bit, anyway.

This body was much bigger. Definitely male, from what was left of his body. He wasn’t as rotted as the first body upstairs, but he was pretty bad. The drawers had popped open during the smashing, and babies lay in each, dead. They were pretty well preserved for the length of time they’d been dead. What was really disturbing was that all three bodies showed signs of having been disturbed in death. Changed and fed. The babies were wrapped in swaddling cloths, and the man had a night shirt on, though it was hiked up and covered in pus and blood. There was a gaping hole in the side of his head. It disturbed me greatly, but I couldn’t look away. It was so horrifying...what had he done for someone to bash him in so hard he died of it? Thew wound seeped fluids green, clear, pink, all kinds of nasty colors. Finally, my sister drew me away. She was scared, and I couldn’t blame her. We should never have come here. This was adult business, not ours.