Chapter 55
She was right. Ever since I’d hit her with the axe, she’d become everything I’d ever wanted to be. It was as if we’d switched somehow. Only I was still just me. That’s why I’d failed. I never stood a chance from the start.
The earth, black as night, swallowed up the walls of the basement.
And then there was nothing.
No house. No basement. Just me and her in the darkness at the heart of the hill.
“You have to remember, the place where you’re going, it’s just emptiness.”
My neighbour stood over me, dimly lit in the half-light of this strange place. Around us an unending void. Her eyes glittered.
“Wouldn’t it be better if you just, y’know”—she leaned closer to me—“didn’t exist?”
“There’s nothing there that you didn’t already know in the first place.”
It was me. I was the monster.
“Just unzip the costume and fade away,” she continued. “No more pretending. No more struggling. It’s not like you were doing a good job of it anyway.”
The void found the edges of my feet.
“Whether it’s fear or pain or sadness, it’s just what you brought into it.”
All of this pain, this loneliness. I’d brought it here.
I saw as the outline of my toes started to fade, felt the edging loss of sensation.
“It would be a relief, right?” Her eyes were wide, wide as her hungry mouth. “A relief for everyone. Even you.”
Wide in that way when you’ve lost all reason to pretend you’re whole and happy.
I knew those eyes. They were mine.
“Don’t you want this over already?” she said. “Isn’t this absolute hell?”
“Own it.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
“Yes,” I said. “This is hell.”
She grinned in victory.
“We’re in hell,” I said.
And her grin melted at the corners a little.
“Shut your whore mouth.”
“We’re in hell,” I said again.
“No.” She shook her head and wagged her finger. “No no no—”
“We are in hell.”
“Fuck you.”
“You and me.”
“Fuck you!”
“We’re in hell.”
“I will devour you!”
“And you’ll still be here. Only now you’ll be alone…”
“I will wear your fucking skin!”
“Alone in my hell.”
She stared at me in fury, eyes that horrible bloodshot red, throat wrung blue. Her shoulders heaving under a weight I knew only too well.
She was me, alright. Me and all of the hell that lay inside me.
If I was my own shadow, then all this darkness belonged to me. As did the truth that came with it.
“You’re right,” I said. “I hate this. I spend every day trying to be someone else. Each morning, I wake up hoping I’ll be different. I hate being like this. Almost as much you do.”
“You’re so fucking miserable,” she spat. “I wish you’d just die!”
I laughed. “Join the fucking club!”
My laughter enraged her. Her face wrung itself red and the skin around her—my—lips split as she became all teeth and nails and horns. Her skin paled and cracked. Her shoulders rounded and her limbs lengthened and her eyes glowed with that awful light.
She lunged at me.
I lunged back.
I caught her hands, mirroring her in mid-air, palm to palm, claws to broken nails.
She reached her right arm back to swipe at me and I did the same.
We struck the same spot in the space between us.
Where she moved, I followed, a perfect reflection as she was to me.
I felt my rage coming out of her, my all-consuming anger crashing back over me, all the ugliness of it.
And then the waves of disgust, the shame, the fear, the loneliness, the soul-crushing sadness and the emptiness.
All of it I felt as she felt it as I had felt it, reflected back and forth and on and on and on.
I thought of the dilapidated house above us, the years and years of it lying empty. I thought of the nights I’d fallen asleep holding myself.
She caved in around herself, taloned arms helplessly wrapped around her scaly shoulders, her face stretched into a monstrous but silent scream.
A scream I knew all too well.
I finally saw it. Now, I understood.
And the hate and the rage and the fear and the disgust and the shame vanished.
And all I felt was love.
I gathered her into my arms like a child.
She scrabbled and fought, but I held on.
Just like the stories. Just like in Tam Lin.
And I didn’t care what she turned herself into whether it was snakes or spiders or fire.
I understood it now. What it meant to love, and to be loved, that hard.
She curled up in my lap and sobbed into my chest as I hushed her and stroked her hair. She was so small. Small and alone.
“Why?” she said. “Why why why?”
“A long time ago,” I said, “when you were still new, someone told you a story, maybe not in their words, but in their actions, in their choices. And in that story, you were a monster. And so, you behaved like a monster.”
She curled in tighter to me as I took the needle from my pocket, still threaded with the red string.
“You grew tough scaly skin that no one could pierce,” I said, “or see you through.”
I pushed the needle into the sole of my foot, gritting my teeth against the pain.
“You lashed out so no one could come close enough to hurt you,” I said, “or heal you.”
I pulled the thread through the hard skin.
“You hid yourself away in the dark where you wouldn’t be found by your enemies,” I said, “or your friends.”
I pulled her close to me, holding her tightly, then pressed the needle to the hard skin on the sole of her foot.
“Then when you found people, good people, you didn’t know what to do with them. So, you devoured them.”
With one quick move I pushed the needle through her skin.
She yowled, but I held tight. She looked at me accusingly.
“Because you were so hungry for love. Because you never trusted anyone to stay out of choice.”
I made a loop, guided the needle through it then pulled the thread tight between us.
The fourth knot.
Her eyes darted down to where I’d stitched us together, the other three knots sticky with our intermingled blood.
“We’ve done monstrous things,” I said. “But I don’t think that’s who we are. I think it’s time we admitted we’re not monsters.”
“But then,” she said quietly, “who are we really?”
I kissed the top of her head.
“Come home, my little shadow, and let’s find out.”
She nodded. I threaded the needle once more and pushed it through our skins. The pain flared white hot in my mind. The soles of our feet pressed together. Like a book, or two slices of sandwich bread, or two palms. Like a prayer. Like the house.
I pushed on.
“It’s okay,” I said, as my fingers became slick with blood, as her face raised to my face, as her sweating chest pulled close to my sweating chest.
“It’s going to be okay,” I whispered to her. “It’s going to be okay.”
And with each okay I worked the needle and thread, passing it back and forth between us, sewing us together, palm to palm, sole to sole, cheek to cheek, bone to bone, until I couldn’t feel her skin against mine anymore because now it was my skin, until the boundaries between us melted away.
“It’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay.”
And then I was sitting in the dark of her basement—the real one, not the one deep down inside the hill—alone but not alone, wet through with sweat and tears, arms wrapped around my own shoulders, needle stuck to my fingers with blood, the light of the rising sun just starting to filter down the stairs.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said to myself. “It’s going to be okay.”
Then the door between the two houses blew open and I was engulfed in a cloud of brown dust.