Chapter Six
Kolfina
“Kolfina Everleigh de Klein.”
The voice calls to me through the walls, and I open my eyes to nothing but darkness. A great empty void surrounding me that chews and swallows any form of light until there is nothing left.
Something thick and painful wraps around me, binding my arms and legs to my chest as if I am but a babe in the womb of my mother once more.
The pressure squeezes too tight, poking and jabbing and leaving trails of bloodied scratches across my sensitive skin.
Blood drips from the wounds, staining the nothingness, filling it until I am choking on the sour taste, until it is flooding my lungs and I am choking on sanguine waters.
I try to open my mouth, to strain my muscles, my senses, my awareness, desperate to find anything to tell me where I am or what is happening, but I cannot move. Cannot breathe. Cannot see.
“Did you sing—play maybe? Sometimes we can hear—” The voice fades in and out as I struggle to keep focus.
A light appears in the distance, small as a candle flame at the end of a hall, and I desperately want to reach for it.
To catch it and hold its heat in the curve of my hands.
“—down in the village, and the children say it’s the ghost of this house—”
My hands twitch, and I manage to pry them away from my chest, though it aches to do so.
I claw at the darkness in front of me, pulling long tendrils of nothingness away until the light gets bigger and bigger.
It casts a dull glow on the darkness, and the more I pull away, the more I can see of the strange bindings that hold me down.
Vines.
Hundreds of them. Wrapped and twisted atop each other, thorns glinting like tiny needle points hungry for my blood. They squeeze harder as I try to pull away, tearing flesh and muscle away from bone.
I do not care. I grasp at them and ignore the pain, pulling myself forward as if digging myself from my own grave.
“I’ve never really been sure which to believe…”
That voice. I recognize it, though the memory is distant. Foggy. Like a memory from my childhood that I can recall the shape of but not the colours.
I want to cry out for it, want to ask it what is going on, ask it to find me and save me, even if I don’t know what it would be saving me from.
But opening my mouth only floods my throat with more nothingness.
Only weighs me down, sinking me deeper into the vines and roots that seem intent on devouring me whole.
Theodore.
His name sings somewhere in the back of my mind, a quiet, stuttering sound that reminds me of messy dark curls and wide, curious eyes. I can almost see him there, wandering around my birdcage, searching for something that may not be there to find.
The vines begin to close again as my attention wavers, great grasping things that latch around my ankles like manacles.
I kick against them, opening my mouth to cry out—for help?
In pain? I’m not sure. Instead of sound, petals fall from my lips, growing from the nothingness in my chest. Blue as the summer sky, stained red with the blood that once gave me life.
I choke on them, spitting out what has already surfaced and swallowing the rest down.
Please, I want to cry. Please, don’t let it take me. I do not wish to disappear.
“I think I would be sad,” the boy is saying, voice drifting through the thickening vines like water, “to be left alone here in this house with no one to remember me. Is that what it’s like for you? Are you here too, walking the halls alone, left behind like this portrait?”
Was I left behind? Have I been abandoned? Forgotten? Is that why it hurts so much to pull myself from the darkness? Is it the lack of memory that grasps at me now? The inevitability of inexistence?
“Well, regardless, I think I’ll clean this place up for you.
I don’t know if you have anyone out there thinking about you or missing you, but just in case you don’t…
” The voice pauses, trailing off, and I claw harder at the foliage in an attempt to hear what he has to say.
“I’m not very important, and I'm not sure you even know who I am, but I’ll remember you.
If that’s okay. That way, if you’re able to hear me, you might not feel so alone. ”
I’ll remember you.
Fire flares to life around me, chasing away the vines and the flowers and the nothing. Between one sob and the next, I am standing in my music room, my throat clear and my lungs gasping for air that I no longer need.
It takes a moment to reorient myself. I have no way of knowing how much time has passed between Theodore's last visit and his current one, but it can’t be the same day judging by his clothes. How long has it been? A day? A week? He did not look old enough for it to have been years.
There are times when I find myself lost in the gardens on the walls, and it frightens me. I drift through the hallways of my home, listless and confused, but sometimes the wallpaper reaches out and grasps hold of me, and I am simply gone.
I do not know where I go. I do not know how much time passes. I know only that I am somewhere I do not wish to be. Somewhere I wouldn't be able to leave if I allowed the darkness to consume me completely.
"Why don't we hang you back up?"
Theodore reaches out for a painting that sits before him and hoists it back onto the wall with mild difficulty.
He is not small in height, not like I am, but he is weak in muscle and gaunt in face.
Still, he manages, and when he pulls away and dusts his hands on his trousers, I see the woman from the mirrors staring back at him. At me.
It's a strange, sort of distant, recognition.
Like staring at someone who looks like me, but something is just slightly off—the eyes a bit too close together, the smile just a bit too big.
I feel her gaze follow me as I step closer.
I try to search for the pain that gnaws at my insides even now, try to find the sadness that Theodore mentioned.
My hand shakes as I reach out and touch the painting, wishing I could feel the texture of the strokes beneath my fingertips.
"Oh."
Theodore’s gasp comes quick and sudden in the otherwise quiet room, and I turn to face him, to see what it is that’s surprised him so.
For a moment, I don’t understand what’s happened. There is a slack look on his face, befuddlement and awe waltzing in his wide eyes as he stares. I glance back at the painting, but nothing seems to have changed, nothing to warrant such a reaction from him.
When I look at him again, it clicks. A latch locking into place.
He is looking at me.
Hope bubbles in my chest like acid, scorching the walls of my throat. I dare not open my mouth for fear of what might spill out. I dare not ask if he can see me in case my imagination has run away again and none of this is real.
He blinks, his lips parting slightly. I do not need to breathe, but I find myself holding my breath anyway.
"Hello," he whispers.
Hello. Hello. Hello.
I want to say it back. I want to scream it, sob it. I want to say it over and over and over again until he tells me to stop, and then I want to say it again.
But the words never come, stuck somewhere in the darkness where my memories hide. I cannot remember the last time I spoke, cannot remember what my last words were.
My throat feels clogged with seaweed, and thorned vines stab into the skin of my wrists. Can he see them? Can he see the monsters in the wallpaper that try to eat me whole?
"Are you—are you Kolfina?"
Are you Kolfina?
Kolfina?
Is that my name? Is that what it sounds like? Soft and whispered, like a secret? Like a lullaby in the hush of night? Would it sound so melodic in anyone else's voice?
I work my tongue behind my teeth, trying to shape the letters, to remember how my throat might contract around the sounds. All I've known is my songs, the mournful drone I cast into the night when the urge builds within my chest and can no longer be contained.
Theodore steps forward, his thin fingers reaching out for me.
Fear splices through the place my heart once beat and I tear away from him, falling back into the wall where my portrait rests. I let the darkness surround me once more, but this time I do not let it consume me.
Kolfina.
I have a name now. I have a face. What more could the boy with the pretty eyes give to me if I let him?
Kolfina. My name is Kolfina.
Theodore visits me nearly every day now.
I know he has been instructed by Mr. Allard to take inventory of the household, but it appears he has tasked himself with fixing up my music room as well, though I could not say why.
He is diligent in his work, hanging a thick cloth over the crack in the window to keep out the weather, rescuing the sheet music and books that can be rescued and being rid of those which cannot.
He sweeps away the dust and scrapes at the mold in the corners, sews up the rips in my reading chair and washes the throw now draped across it.
He even replaces my old, tattered rug with a new one—fresh and blue and so bright I swear he has laid out a piece of the sky just for me.
Sometimes he speaks as if he knows I am there.
Asking if it’s okay that he move the harp to the other corner.
Asking if I ever sat in the window and wrote music to the sound of the sea.
He tells me about the work he does in the rest of the house.
Tells me about his luncheons with Azizi and the way he finds their quiet somehow comforting.
On rare occasions he will speak of the village at the base of my cliff, though these moments are brief and always accompanied by a sad sort of smile.
He has not seen me again, but I follow him around my home when he’s here. And when he is not, I follow Azizi. I imagine them as tethers, anchors mooring me to the ocean floor so I cannot drift too far.
“Do you know anything about the woman who used to live here, Mr. Allard?”