6. Three Threads
Chapter six
Three Threads
Iwoke up cold.
Not room-cold. Louisiana in May was never room-cold. This was an unnatural cold. One that came up through the mattress and settled into my back. One that had been with me since the first night here. A cold no blanket could fix.
I was starting to think it wasn’t in the room. I was starting to think it was in the bed.
I didn’t sit up. The shadows in the corners had gone quiet, and I wanted them to stay that way until I knew where he was, before he realized I was awake.
I cracked my eyes open. The room was where I’d left it. Dark wainscoting floor to ceiling, the way it had been every time I’d opened my eyes in it. No windows. Old wood. Old money. The single iron sconce by the door held a fresh candle, burning steady. He’d been in.
A scatter of white petals lay across the coverlet. One on my shoulder. One in my hair.
That ain’t no flower. That’s a tag.
The woman’s voice came back to me as clear as if I were in her kitchen. Pain lanced through my skull. Every place one of them petals touched, he can see. Every petal still on you, he can find.
I’d been wearing him for fuck knows how long.
The shadows in the corners hummed once, low, like an animal turning over in its sleep. I pressed my bound hands to the place in my chest where they answered, and they went quiet.
Stay there, I told them. Not yet.
I had rules now. I’d been making them up as I went.
Rule one: don’t let him see me afraid.
Rule two: don’t let him know something was changing in me, in my chest, my core, the very heart of me.
Rule three: when he came, take everything I could before he took from me.
Rule four, added tonight: the petals come off.
***
I made myself wait. He always came soon after I woke, and I didn’t know how long I’d been out. The hum was the only clock I had now, and the hum did not change.
I sat up. My legs held me. The drug he kept dosing me with, whatever it was, ran out of me faster than the time before. Either he was running short, or my body was acclimating to the dose, or something in me was answering it. I’d find out which.
The first petal came off my shoulder between my thumb and forefinger. I held it up to the candle. It looked like a petal. White, faintly damp at the edge, the curl of it perfect; a beautiful lie. Each one a fucking supernatural version of Siri.
I put it on the dresser, where I could see it. I did not crush it. I did not throw it.
The petals in my hair took longer. My wrists were still bound in the silver-threaded rope, and I had to lean my whole head down to my hands and comb them out with my fingers.
I knelt on the floor.
The floor was warm in most places but grew cooler near the bed, and under my knees the dark wood was solid, old, well-fitted. Whatever was making me cold was not the floor.
I bent down and looked under the bed.
I didn’t see it at first; I felt it.
There were marks on the underside of the bed.
Not scratches. Not the dings a piece of old furniture took over the decades it sat in a house.
These were deliberate. Some carved, some burned in, some painted in something dark, or both.
They ran along the inner edge of the lower rails, three of them on the side I could see, in a script I had not learned but somehow recognized.
The way you recognize a face from the wrong angle.
I lay flat on my back on the floor and slid under the bed.
The hum changed.
It was the first thing I noticed. When my head came under the frame, the hum that had been a low constant beneath the mattress for weeks pressed against my skull like a hand. Not louder. Closer. The way the inside of a bell sounds different than the outside.
I lay very still and looked up.
There were more marks than I’d been able to see from the side. Three on each lower rail, that I could count. Two on the underside of the headboard. One on the headboard side of the bottom slats, big as my hand, more elaborate than the others. The big one was humming the hardest.
I stared at them. The shadows from the corners moved toward me along the floor, slow and curious, and stopped at the edge of the bed frame like dogs at the edge of a porch. They did not come under with me. They wanted to. They were not sure they could.
It’s all right, I told them. Watch.
I picked the smallest sigil first; it had mostly been painted on. The one on the lower rail closest to my left hand. Simple. Three lines meeting at a point, a curl coming off the bottom, a slash through the curl.
I wet my thumb on my tongue.
I pressed it to the slash and dragged.
The mark resisted. For a second I thought I was wrong about what I could do here, that it was burned into the wood and not painted, that I was a woman lying under a bed scratching at a stain like a child.
Then the resistance broke and a smear of something black came up under my thumb.
Not soot exactly. Not paint. Something that smelled, faintly, of his cologne.
The hum changed pitch.
I held still and listened. The hum was lower now in one register and higher in another, the chord broken. Not gone. Broken.
Holy shit, I mouthed at the underside of the bed.
I moved to the next sigil. This one was harder.
The lines were thinner, but deeper, more careful, and my fingernail caught on the wood when I scraped, kept skipping out of the groove.
I worked at it. The hum shifted again, the way a guitar string sounds when you bend it.
It was vibrating my ribs now as well as in my ears.
The threads in my chest were paying attention.
I picked the big one last.
The big one didn’t smudge. The big one was not painted.
The big one was burned into the wood, scored into it, deep enough that the lines were a sixteenth of an inch below the surface.
I could press my finger into the grooves and find no give.
Whatever was making me cold lived in the big one.
Whatever was holding the hum also lived in the big one.
I was not going to scratch the big one out tonight.
But I had learned something. I knew where it was.
I knew what it looked like. The smaller ones came down with spit and patience.
The big one did not. Whatever Marcus had done to this room had been done piece by piece, with knowledge, and I could undo at least some of it, piece by piece, with the same.
I slid back out from under the bed.
I sat on the floor and breathed.
***
I checked the dresser.
It was solid wood, dark, the drawers tight in their tracks the way drawers are when a piece of furniture had been built somewhere with a winter. I pulled the top drawer all the way out and tipped it. Nothing on the underside. Nothing on the inside back. I pulled the second drawer. Nothing.
I tried the armoire next.
The armoire had a key in the lock and the door swung open silently on hinges someone had cared for. Inside, dust and the ghost of old sachets, the way it had been every other time I’d looked. I ran my hand along the inside of the door, fingers light.
I found it on the second pass. Small. Less than the size of my thumbprint.
Burned into the back of the armoire door, hidden from my line of sight.
The same hum, when I leaned close. A smaller hum, this one.
A keeper, not a generator. The big one under the bed was the engine, and these smaller ones were the wires.
The room was wired. But wired for what?
I closed the armoire and stood. My knees ached. My wrists ached.
I’d been afraid for months. The fear was still there, under everything, but tonight, kneeling on the floor of the room he’d put me in, watching a wet smear of something that smelled like him come up under my thumbnail, the fear had shifted. Not lifted. Shifted. Hope.
I was learning, and knowledge is power. I had some power here.
***
I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my bound hands to my chest, and the threads were there.
Three of them. There had been three clear distinct notes at once in color: golden and silver and onyx. I had realized there were three making up a single unit; but I just had never heard or felt them, individually.
I could now.
The dark one was the steadiest of the three. When I reached for it with my attention, what came back was a kind of weight. Solid. Settled. Like leaning your back against something that had been standing in the same place for a long time.
The gold one was quicker. Brighter. When I reached for it, what came back ran past me like a wire pulled tight. There was heat in it. Something restless underneath the brightness, something that wanted to move.
The silver one was the most precise. When I reached for it, it noticed me. That was the only word for it. The onyx thread had given me weight, the gold had given me motion, but this one looked back, focused, the way a person looks up from what they were doing when somebody walks into the room.
Three different threads. Three different textures. Woven together, sort of.
I didn’t know what was on the other end. I knew the threads led somewhere. I knew they were real in the same way I knew the shadows were real, but I didn’t know what to make of them. Not yet. Tonight I just wanted to know they were there.
It was enough.
***
I looked at the corner where the shadow pooled deepest, where the wainscoting met the floor and the candle gave up.
Come here, I asked. Not out loud. Just in the place in me that the threads ran through.
The shadow lifted off the floor. It moved across the dark wood toward me, the way a stray cat moves toward a hand it hasn’t decided about yet. It stopped at my feet.
I stared at it.
I opened my hand on my lap as well as I could with my wrists still crossed and bound.