Chapter 5 #2
At first, I can barely make out anything in the distance. I’m not wearing my glasses, and the only source of light is in the spot I’m standing in. The hallway stretches on until its swallowed by the darkness, no doors or windows in sight.
My eyes finally adjust.
My blood freezes over with terror.
About twenty feet from me, peeking just out of the pitch black; its form resembles a person, but it’s on all fours, its limbs dramatically elongated with what seem to be extra joints, all pointing in different directions.
Its back is a perfect arch, brushing against the eight-foot tall ceiling, covered in a mess of wild, dark hair.
Its dark grey skin gleams unnaturally, like it’s been polished.
Those humanoid eyes are entirely black, sucking in all the light like a black hole. They look strangely familiar.
Its mouth opens, revealing a row of sharp teeth, and lets out a hair-raising sound, like a combination of a screeching cat, a growling dog, and a woman screaming with pain and fear.
Genevieve’s voice, filled with a sick sort of excitement, sounds directly in my right ear.
“Run.”
I turn and run. The dim light in my patch of the hallway follows me. My legs pump hard and my lungs strain, but I never make it into the darkness swallowing the rest of the corridor. It makes me feel like a hamster on a wheel, stuck on the same spot no matter how fast I run.
I don’t look back, but I can feel the monster closing in—I can tell it’s faster than me.
“Run!” Genevieve whisper-shouts with that same hideous glee, her voice reverberating in my skull.
The hallway tilts upward. My legs and lungs strain harder as I scramble to adjust to the new angle.
The ground morphs from marble to forest floor, still tilting until I’m literally climbing, fisting at handfuls of grass and dirt and rock to yank myself up faster, my knees and my feet digging into the mushy earth.
I try to use the eshé to make myself fly, disappear—something, then to try and wake myself up when none of them work. It doesn’t respond.
I hear that same awful noise closing in behind me, and my skin bursts with gooseflesh. My cheeks are wet with tears. The exertion is making my throat hurt.
Thin, cold, unnaturally long hands wrap tight around both my ankles.
My scream cuts off in my throat as I’m yanked down until I’m underneath the creature. It grabs my throat and lifts me off the ground, leaving me dangling uselessly in the air. I scrabble at its grasp on my neck, hacking and coughing, legs kicking wildly as I struggle to breathe.
Then, somehow, between one second and the next, the beast is gone, and I’m lying face-first on the forest floor, completely naked with an equally naked body pressed on top of mine.
I’ve never touched her like this—never been hugged by her like this, but I recognise her scent and the feel of her skin immediately. My adrenaline spikes, my body growing alternatively hot and cold as Genevieve murmurs sweet nothings, her hands running possessively over my bare skin.
She cups and squeezes my breasts, strokes hungrily over the curve of my belly then greedily palms my hips, like she’s obsessed with the juxtaposition of rough beads against smooth skin. Both hands dip between my thighs, cupping my pussy.
“Fuck, oh God,” I whimper, arching helplessly, pressing into her.
When teeth sink into the side of my throat, they aren’t hers, but the monster’s, sharp and jagged, tearing mercilessly into my flesh while my best friend moans like she’s in ecstasy.
I gasp awake, covered in sweat, tangled in unfamiliar sheets. I don’t think after I reorient myself, rolling onto my stomach and clenching my eyes shut as I slip my hand down between my legs, where I’m soaked, my pussy wet and swollen.
I bite my lower lip hard, refusing to make a sound as I stroke myself to a quick, toe-curling orgasm, my entire body shaking with it. I’m still fired up, after, so I keep going, whining into the pillows and grinding into my hand until I come again, tears in my eyes.
I melt onto the bed, breathing heavily. There used to be times when dreams like this—even simple, innocent dreams about holding her hand in public, or going on swoony dates—would fill me with shame, but it’s been a long time since I’ve felt ashamed of anything when it comes to Genevieve.
It’s not the first bizarre, erotically charged dream I’ve had of my former best friend, and it probably won’t be the last.
Still, something about this particular one has me shaken.
Ten years ago, when nightmares of a different time and a different hostel left me drenched in sweat and shaking with remembered trauma, I’d leave my room and my hall, desperate and unmoored, and walk the ten minutes it took to get to hers—use my exhaustion as an excuse to selfishly harness the eshé, soothing any complaints or suspicions her roommate might’ve had as Genevieve sleepily and wordlessly lifted her sheet for me in silent invitation to crawl into her bed.
We’d never risked holding each other—only our hands or knees or feet occasionally brushing—and hadn’t acknowledged or spoken of it come morning.
The desire to find her room right now is so strong my clenched jaw throbs from fighting it. The fact that we’re the only two here, that there’s no roommate to be wary of makes it harder.
If I slipped into her bed right now, I know how it’ll go—how we’d use the cover of darkness and the fogginess of sleep as an excuse to give in; we’d pretend we truly were locked forever from the rest of the world, far from the consequences of the morning, free to touch and kiss and bite and lick—
I’m so keyed up a future regret feels manageable if it means I’d get to have her even once, even like this, desperate and frantic and like a shameful secret.
Think of tomorrow, I remind myself furiously. Without her physical presence to deter me, I succeed, banishing away all the clouds threatening to impair my judgement.
I gently wrap my hand around the beads at the ends of my braids, letting their eshé roll over my fingers, sink into my skin. I think of Maraya Forest, refusing to get lost in the tide of that ever-present loneliness.
The lights come on when I sit up. A protective incantation flies to my lips, before I remember.
“Thank you?” I say tentatively, looking around. The house, of course, doesn’t respond.
I take out one of the many, small bottles of scented oil from my trunk, dipping two drops onto my fingers and stroking behind my ears. The calming scent of the grass from home filters into my nose, and I exhale shakily.
“Thank you …” I say again when the lights automatically go off the moment I’m back in bed.
I stare up at the ceiling, eyebrows furrowed.
Are sentient houses usually this responsive to outsiders?
According to my mother, they’re supposed to be strictly connected to their owners—usually families who have raised multiple generations of their blood within its walls, their eshé seeping into the property and bringing it to life over a long period of time.
I’m a virtual stranger, yet it seems to be responding to my needs with flawless anticipation. My mother hadn’t known much, though. Besides that, I still don’t believe a lot of sentient houses exist in spite of the laws against them. Before today, I’d thought they were a myth.
With the smell of home wafting around me, sleep soon comes easily, and I don’t have another nightmare.
When I wake up again with the faint surety that it’s morning, I do so with the knowledge that, at some point between my nightmare and right now, I’d died.
My eyes fly fully open. I swallow over and over again, but that damning taste of dirt doesn’t leave my throat.
How? When? Who—?
The house? It can’t be. Genevieve? I don’t believe it.
I should be hyperventilating, maybe. My eyes are hot but dry, and my breathing is steady despite my quiet devastation. I haven’t died in so long I’ve forgotten how much I hate it.
My hands fist the sheets in front of me as I take stock of my faculties. There’s nothing amiss—at least, nothing outward that I can easily pinpoint. I swallow again, convulsively. If it weren’t for the earthy taste in my mouth—
Had I died in my sleep? Ridiculous. Impossible. But it’s the only reasonable explanation. It has to be, because if it isn’t—
No. I refuse to believe it. I can’t. No.
Who’s whistling?
The moment I register the noise, it stops.
There’s someone in my room; a blurry figure in the corner of my eye. Years of training means I don’t further react. I stare into space with my lips pursed, like I’m still lost in thought.
Internally, I activate the protective charms in my beads. My glasses are resting on the bedside table. I don’t reach for them.
The blurry figure takes a step closer. I’m pretty sure it’s a woman. I’m also pretty sure it’s the same one I’d seen in the window the previous evening. But something about her eshé has me viewing her like a potential shannde—an evil spirit—instead of the harmless shannko I’d assumed she was.
She takes another step, faster this time.
I still pretend not to notice; most shanndes get their power from acknowledgement.
I’m lying on my left side, facing the wardrobe resting against the wall opposite me. She’s approaching from the corner of the room by the foot of the bed. I deliberately unfocus my eyes further, but don’t close them, don’t pretend to be asleep.
The smell hits me, and it takes everything in me not to retch. Its a mixture of mould and rot and death, warm and ripe and sticking to the back of my throat. With each step she takes, what sounds like pieces of flesh fall from her frame, landing with sickeningly wet thumps on the tiled floor.
She doesn’t stop until she’s standing directly in my line of sight.
I want to gag so badly its making my throat ache and my eyes water.