The last thing I remember before coming to this place is him kissing me on the forehead. I think it’s him; my eyes are open, but everything is so blurry. He feels so warm. So very, very warm, when I am so cold.
And then I wake up.
I wasn’t in my usual bed. It was… cold, somehow, and hard, and not very bed-like. It felt like I wasn’t on a bed at all, but some kind of floor, except for the fact that I had a thin sheet over me. That was all I had on. I bolted upright and clasped the sheet to me, looking around to see where I was, what I was on, whether there was a dress or some other set of clothes anywhere. The room was unevenly lit, dark but for a single bright light which shone starkly and pitilessly over the stone floor. The table, for it was not a bed that I had laid upon, seemed to be a sturdy wooden one, from what I could feel from my legs and right hand. My other hand tightly gripped the fabric that I had lifted up for purposes of modesty, though to my dismay I saw that it was sheerer than I would have liked. Somehow this did not bother me as much as I thought it would; I did not feel the familiar burning sensation of embarrassment that I expected would result from such a situation. I did not feel much of anything at all. I felt as if I should feel afraid, but I was not. Or rather, I thought that I should feel afraid, for feeling had nothing to do with it.
Still, form was form, and I needed something to cover my form. I swept the sheet about me as best I could and lowered myself off of the table, trying not to tip it. It seemed sturdy enough, but I didn’t fancy injuring myself in a strange and potentially hostile location, nor did I want to make much noise. I readjusted the sheet once I had planted my feet on the smooth stone floor and looked about for something to defend myself with, somewhere to hide, somewhere to run too.
I saw a sliver of light be born and grow upon the wall in front of me. I turned.
A door was opening, and a familiar figure stood outlined in the light.
“Lily?,” he whispered, hesitant, hopeful.
“Allan?,” I croaked out.
I leaned back in my chair, massaged my throat, and drank a bit more tea. My throat was still as sore and dry as an angry desert, and I had a voice to match. I coughed a bit, and it felt better, though my voice still had that raspy quality, like it had been stripped of flesh and blood.
“You’ve been sick,” Allan said. That was obvious. I still felt… strange. Achey, in some places. Numb in all the others. Tingling, pins-and-needles, in between.
“With what?,” I said. He shrugged.
“Hard to tell. I know I’m an apothecary, but… I have not s- I have not ever treated such a disease before. It… started out as pneumonia, yet grew worse and worse and… changed, until I was forced to devote all my time to you and take you here. In Bierce Woods. Somewhere alone, where I could concentrate.”
“How long? It seems so long ago that I…” I paused, uncertain. “That which I can last remember seems so distant, somehow,” I concluded.
“It was. Is. You have been… unconscious, in a kind of sleep, for a long time.”
I looked about my surroundings. This was the ground floor of a kind of little villa. I had woken up in the basement, which had been some nobleman’s private wine cellar and pantry before Allan had converted it into a kind of strange hospital. I had never seen it before, nor even heard of the place he claimed it was situated in: Bierce Woods. The villa was in a kind of little clearing. I had taken a brief walk outside, around the house, to get my first look at it and the forest, for the windows were all boarded up. The woods were strange; the barren trees moved even when there seemed to be no wind. The place sounded dead, looked dead, but moved like it was full of life. Thick thorny thickets threaded among the tree roots, and had few leaves, and bore no fruit. The air was cold. Maybe the forest would come alive again in the spring.
The actual interior of the villa was shabby, but somewhat familiar. Most of the interior decorations, furniture, and other things that make a house a home had been pillaged from our old place and shoved haphazardly and hazardously into the new, often clustered in dangerous piles in certain corners while expanses of empty space stretched between them. This made the building, already larger than one would expect, seem much roomier than it actually was.
We ate lunch. I wasn’t very hungry. I wasn’t hungry at all, in fact, but he insisted that I put some food in me and so I did.
“Where is the silverware?,” I asked. He looked kind of fidgety and said that he had left it at home, but that it was fine to eat with our fingers if we washed them first, since it was just the two of us.
Despite my lack of appetite, I quite enjoyed the cured meat. I threw it down with a dispassionate rabidness, like a mechanical wolf.
He picked slowly at the contents on his plate. He seemed more concerned with watching me eat than with making sure he got fed.
There was an empty vase on the table. I tapped it with my fingernail, but it did not ring or sing.
Sometimes I walked the villa floor and thought. The soles of my feet laid coldly on the floor, but I did not shiver. I did not shiver for drafts of wind or forms of shadow though I did not think myself warm or safe.
I walked the villa floor and tried to figure out what the place was shaped like. It had a confusing layout, and it seemed to have undergone recent renovations; random places were plastered with random papering over the old wallpaper.
I had the sneaking suspicion that Allan was hiding something from me.
I insisted on going on more walks in the clearing. I said that I had energy that I needed to get rid of, and that wasn’t entirely wrong— but I also needed to get the lay of the land, or at least that part of it which was not covered by the thorns of Bierce Woods.
I could not fathom how he had moved everything in. The wall of thorns seemed unbroken, or at least healed from some attempt at cutting away everything. More to the point, I realized that I couldn’t possibly run away— it would take such time to pick my way through the briars that I could maybe make it a yard in a minute— if it didn’t get any denser further from the clearing. For some reason, that, and my thoughts of how helpless and isolated I was, did not bother me. I checked my pulse; it was as even as it ever was, slow and solid. I knew that I was trapped, that this whole place, this whole situation, was oddly prison-like— but I did not feel it.
I realized that I didn’t have any shoes. Surely he had some of my old ones, somewhere— though I knew that if he had not proffered any by now I would not be receiving any. I looked at the soles of my feet; they were oddly smoother than I remembered, but still somehow callous without calluses, even more numb than the rest of my body.
Something was wrong. And the part that was most wrong was that I did not feel that anything was wrong. I should have had a pounding heart. I should have had bile rising up in my throat. But all I felt was a mild headache and that eternal soreness in my throat.
“Have you been feeling alright?,” he asked later, after I had gone back inside and eaten a bit more. Though I did not feel hungry, I still could tell that my stomach was empty, and I got distracted and ached in the head when I did not eat enough. So it often is with sickness and lack of appetite.
“Yes,” I said, and hunched forwards in my chair. I had been having trouble relaxing, somehow; not mentally, but physically, for however calm it got in my head my body still twitched in tension. At night I tossed and turned; I could not rest peacefully no matter what I did. It did not seem to affect me, however, for I was still just as energetic, if slightly numb and achey, no matter how much I seemed to sleep or not sleep. It was not a lively energy, though— more like the cold and dead motion of a grandfather clock than anything with hot blood. Though I didn’t feel sick, I could tell that I was. Either that, or Allan’s medicines had more side effects than he had told me.
“Play some more for me,” I said, voice still dry and sore.
He nodded, and resumed his playing of the small harpsichord which he had uprooted from our home and replanted here in the lonely stone villa in the middle of Bierce Woods. He did not play very well, but he enjoyed it, and I enjoyed seeing him enjoy it. Or at least I used to.
“You should sing, some,” he said. “Like you used to.”
I tried to, and ended up coughing and choking on a few hoarse notes. I shook my head.
“Not up to it.”
“I see,” he said, and resumed playing, though not as happily, I sensed, as he had been earlier. He seemed to be thinking.
“I think what I meant to say,” he said, “with your feeling… I meant how you were doing emotionally, more than physically. I know it’s been a rough time, with the sickness and all… so I wanted to know how you were dealing with it.”
I shrugged. “I haven’t thought about it that much.”
“You must,” he said, with a quiet desperation. “Tell me. You need to tell me.”
I looked at him.
“You’re so,” and he fumbled for words, “so cold recently. So cold.”
I nodded. I tapped my foot against the floor.
“I don’t feel cold,” I responded a while later.
“Play some more,” I said after thinking a bit more.
He fumbled a bit on the keys and gave up, with a crash of his hands on the keyboard.
“I need this, Lily. I know that… you haven’t been yourself lately. But I need this. I need to know how you feel.” He looked at me and almost seemed afraid, though of what I could not figure out. Perhaps if I had been able to figure it out he would not have been so afraid.
“I don’t feel much of anything,” I said.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing at all.”
“And about me?,” he asked, quietly, “And about me?”
And there was a silence and stillness in the air.
The last thing I remember before coming to this place is an awful cracking noise. Someone is saying something. I think it’s him. If so, he is quite close and insistent, but my ears are ringing. It is so loud. So very, very loud, when I am so quiet.
And then I wake up.
I wasn’t in my usual bed. It was… familiar, somehow, and may have actually been my bed, though it was not very bed-like. It felt like I wasn’t on a bed at all, but some kind of table— yes, that was right, I was on a table. I had a kind of thin sheet over me, which I wrapped about myself, blushing. I looked around for a door. “Hello?,” I called out, tremulously, my voice awful and my throat sore.
“I’m here, Lily,” I heard him say, as a beam of light fell upon me.
I nodded, and fell to the cold stone floor.
He gave me an overview of my condition, of where we were. It was all very surprising to me, but it all seemed somewhat familiar.
I didn’t like it one bit. The villa was cold and uninviting, the woods were cold and uninviting, and I always felt—
Cold and uninviting, to put it bluntly. I felt weird and sick and knew that I was not being that nice to Allan, who had brought me here to get better, though I just felt like I was getting worse. I hurt in so many places, felt so numb and stiff, and my throat was so sore. My once-beautiful singing voice was gone, too, though after I had confided to him my worries I felt a bit better; he seemed to think that it would come back.
I wanted to explore the villa. He seemed surprised that I was so interested in it, but hadn’t I always been this curious about things? And with places, too, and hominess— or the lack thereof. This place required a serious remodeling, a serious resurrection. It had all the old fixtures of our old house, but just didn’t feel right. Or sound right; the wind from Bierce Woods sounded as eerie as its forest of origin looked. Death rattles from dead wrecks of trees and thorns. I thought I saw a bit of green amidst the thick-packed thorns, but if so it was the only hint of life in the place.
He doesn’t want me exploring the villa.
I can tell.
I’ve known him a long time, I’ve cared for him, he’s cared for me.
And I know that he doesn’t want me exploring the villa.
And it hurts me very much to do so, and it doesn’t feel right at all, but I know that I have to.
Because I know that something has happened to my body. It is bruised and cut and hurt and I cannot remember how. He has tried to heal this, he has tried to hide this, and he has tried to stop me from looking at myself. ‘How are you?,’ I ask myself, under my breath. I do not have the words to respond.
The wallpaper is all wrong, and not just like a single layer hiding something, too; it’s been applied thickly and haphazardly, without any real skill. In some places, around doors and such, there are many, many layers.
What has he been hiding, and why?
Why has he trapped me here? For I realize now that I have been trapped. These fierce woods, these awful thorns, this lonely villa in this unknown place, all hemming me in— and for what purpose?
“Lily,” I heard him call, and I turned from my study of the wallpaper to a study of Allan.
He was smiling in that same soft way which seemed so common lately, as if he was afraid that a smile could make some great noise and startle me.
“Do you want some food?,” he asked, and for what must be the twentieth time I thought no and said yes. He smiled a bit more at that.
He watched me eat. He seemed to be wasting away, older than I remembered him. Having to take care of me had taken a toll on him.
There were lilies in a vase on the table. Of course there were. They are, you see, his favorite flower.
After I ate, we moved into the parlor. He messed about with the fireplace and got a bit of a fire going. It was awful.
I could not help but stare at it in horror. Something in me cringed deeper into my chair. The tongues of flame spat cruelly on, dancing in mockery of my fear.
“Are you alright?,” he asked, leaning forwards in his chair, smile gone.
“No…,” I croaked out, and got up, and ran out of the room.
He says he found me later curled up in the clearing.
While he sleeps, I walk the villa. It seems more familiar than it really should, like I had visited this place in some forgotten era of my childhood.
I carry no light as I look for things that I cannot see, secret rooms and secret entrances, papered-over doors and hidden locks, but sight reveals nothing. Still, I know that more illumination would not help; my eyes are much more keen in the night than I remember them being.
I look for things I cannot see. What tips me off is the sound.
It is a hum, a murmuring hum, a subtle droning, barely audible over the silence. It emanates from down the hall, around the corner, and through the wall.
I run my hands across the wallpaper. It is bumpy and thick upon the wall— though it isn’t a wall, but a door, I think. My fingers curl and my nails cut thin lines into the wallpaper. I smelled something on the other side, awful, rotten, and good.
I heard footsteps.
I turned around. I felt angry. I felt hurt. I felt hungry. I felt something stir within me.
He stood there, and though I saw not his face I saw the slumpedness of his shoulders and the exhaustion in his frame.
“Lily, listen to me,” he said, and I saw something shift in his hand, something long which weighed down his arm, a heavy implement.
“I listen,” I wheezed, and stepped towards him.
“Stop and listen,” he demanded, stepping back before stepping forwards again. “You haven’t been yourself lately, and—”
“I listen,” I groaned, and stepped towards
“Lily!”
I ran closer, arms outstretched, fingers curling clawlike. I felt something awful stir within me, and it might have been love. And it might have been something else.
“I love you!” I screamed and lurched towards him and sprang to grasp or clutch or embrace him.
And then he smiled a smile greater and louder and sadder than any of those he had ever smiled before.
And there was a loudness and clamor in the air.
The last thing I remember before coming to this place is a wetness and a thump. Someone is embracing me. I think it’s him. If so, he is holding me close, close, but I feel so far away. I feel small . So very, very small, while the whole world is so big.
And then I wake up.
I make my way out of the cellar— I somehow know that the room I am in is a cellar— with the sheet wrapped deftly around me. I call for Allan and note with no surprise at all that my voice is hoarser than I have ever heard it before. It is dry and scratchy and deathly.
I feel dull and heavy. I feel dead and uncomfortably numb.
Allan takes my hand and leads me to the breakfast table. I eat mechanically, without being asked, for though I am not hungry I do not want to be asked to eat. And I know that if I do not eat I will be asked to eat.
There are lilies in a vase on the table. They look pale and dead, as lilies are wont to look.
I feel like a wheel moving in a rut. Unknown memories and first-time routines guide my behaviors; every hour I discover a new habit or a new old place. I am tired of things I have seen for the first time.
I walk about the clearing and through the villa, circling, circling.
One day, I am surprised by birdsong; I listen to it hungrily, and scan the sky and woods for birds.
One day, I am surprised to find a bright red flower blooming in the dead thickets of Bierce Woods. I pick it and crush it in my hand.
One day, I am surprised to find myself standing and staring in front of a blank wall. I feel like there is something behind it, but I do not know what. All I know is that there are scratch marks there.
Most days, I find another patch of tiny bones. I think they are from rats or mice.
He wants me to be in the parlor. I don’t really want to be in the parlor, because of the fire there which hurts me and my eyes. When he goes to get some sandwiches, I take the tea and dump it into the fire. It goes out with that thumping noise that fires make and fills the room with steam and smoke. I cough, and go closer to the fireplace to make sure that the fire is really out.
There is something metal, a familiar sliver of brass, resting in the ashes. It is the frontispiece of a diary I gave him long ago, with that ornate curlicue pattern on the edges.
I don’t care. I just want the fire gone.
He runs back into the room hacking and coughing from the smoke. He doesn’t say anything, just opens the windows and wafts the smoke out.
He doesn’t light the parlor fire after that.
He wants me to play games. I am familiar with games, so I play games with him. I move pieces about boards in ways familiar to me. I shuffle cards with a practiced hand.
He wants me to read. I have read often, so I read with him. I look at clusters of letters and know what the words all mean. I flip pages with a practiced hand.
He wants me to sing. I am familiar with songs and have sung often, so I open my mouth.
A kind of groan comes out. I close my mouth. I shudder.
I do not like to talk these days. I do not like to sing. Thus I stay silent.
He stays silent as well.
I find myself returning to a certain spot in the clearing, and looking at a certain spot on the house. There is a window there, and though I know it is important I do not know why. I have been feeling so dull and stupid recently.
After about a week of repeating myself again and again
And returning to those spots again and again
And thinking about it again and again
It clicks, again, like I think it must have some time before
And I realize that though I have often looked at that window I have never looked out of it.
And I realize that it is behind the wall that I have been visiting, the one that makes Allan concerned when I visit.
I do not know how he gets up there.
But I know how I will.
The villa has an exterior of rough stone. There are few handholds.
They will have to be enough.
With a strength that I should not have had, I pulled myself up by one foot, then another, then another, ascending maybe half a foot at a time. I grasped and strained and often fell. If I had been smarter I could have planned my ascent. But all I had was dullness to dull my falls.
I should not have been strong enough, my muscles should not have had the power, to pull so, to scale that wall.
My arms did not burn and my legs did not ache. I merely felt duller than before when I reached the window.
It was dark inside, but I somehow knew that I would be able to see well in there.
I wiggled the window open. It had not been locked from the inside; I had a dull suspicion why.
I heaved myself in and landed on the floor inside. I crunched on a layer of dead wasps and flies.
I see strange containers and caskets and cabinets filled with things I do not want to know about.
I begin to know about them as I open them. I begin to know about bits and pieces and odds and ends and there is no end to the oddities I find
Which are bits and pieces of pieced-together bits of people’s
Muscles and skin and bones and sinew, all feminine from what I can tell from their assembly
Though they may not have been so originally,
Nor people’s.
After a while, I hear someone calling from outside. I go to the window and look down.
He’s standing there, waving a handkerchief. I track its movement idly.
“Hello,” he calls out, pitifully (or pityingly).
I am so dull that I remain silent.
“I’m sorry that I haven’t been telling you about… everything. It’s just that you haven’t been yourself lately, and I thought I would introduce things slowly. Once you had recovered.”
I groan slightly, and curl up and fall down to the floor among the desiccated insects that have done the same. After a while I rise again from the dead bugs, brushing them off of me.
He waits for me still. I see that he has a ladder on the ground, now, that I think I heard him drag out from the thorns, but he doesn’t seem keen on using it.
“Can you sing for me?,” he pleads, and fails to meet my eyes. “One more time?”
And there was a sick smell of sweetness in the air.
The last thing I remember before coming to this place is a glint, a gleaming. Someone is running from me. I think it’s him. If so, he is fast, but I am faster. I am chasing, faster and faster and faster, but I am not fast enough.
And then I wake up.
I seemed to swim up from a dream. It was a pleasant dream. I had something delicious in my mouth and in my hands and on my face and I was chewing, chewing.
I woke up in a bed. It felt wrong to wake up so, in a bed, soft, with pillows, with blankets, but still, I did. I am angry, but not because of that. I am angry and I am hungry and I do not know why.
He has made food for me and I gulp it down unsatisfied. I am angry at him but hold my tongue. I would not want to snap, to bite, to growl at him without a good reason why. And so I look for a reason why. My head feels clear and blood-red. My stomach feels empty and full of ire.
There are lilies in a vase on the table. They look alive, but have been plucked from the ground.
I stare at my namesakes angrily, and wish that the woods outside looked that pretty and alive. I wished that I looked that pretty and alive.
The next day, after a night failing to sleep, I cannot contain myself and I stalk the house in anger. I’ve realized that he is afraid of something, afraid of me, but I know it isn’t just because I am angry. But I feel like it should be.
My nails cut into my hand. I bleed less than I expected, and I am a little disappointed. I sit in a corner where I know Allan is not watching and lick my self-inflicted wounds. It doesn’t help. This whole exercise didn’t help. As expected.
I licked my nails and inspected them. They looked awful, but I wasn’t in the mood to keep up with my appearance.
Not that I knew how I looked right now.
I stopped, and thought about how I hadn’t seen a mirror anywhere in the house. Or a reflective surface of any kind; all the silverware was gone, and the plates we had were earthenware. On some level I had known that it was suspicious, but I hadn’t cared; I wasn’t in the mood for little aspects of etiquette like not eating with one’s hands.
I felt my face. It felt as it should, but I still wasn’t satisfied. I needed a reflective surface, any surface. I thought of the windows, and realized that they were all boarded up.
Except for one, which I had never gotten close to.
Which was behind a familiar, familiar wall.
I went outside and tilted my head to get a better look at the window. I felt like climbing up to it, clawing at stone after stone, but my arms and legs already ached, from what I do not know. And I somehow knew that there must be a ladder somewhere.
It was in the thorns, right in front of the window, but hidden so well that I never would have found it if I had not somehow known that it was there.
I gingerly stepped towards it, feeling my bare feet get cut by the thorns. It did not hurt as much as I thought it would. But maybe I was just angry.
I heard Allan cooking lunch in the kitchen. I wasn’t that worried about him finding me, as it almost seemed like he’d been purposefully avoiding me recently; and if he did, so what? It was just a ladder.
I climbed up. It was bright outside, and probably very dark inside, so I suspected that the window would serve rather well as a mirror.
I took a deep breath and looked.
My complexion was sallow and wan, yellower than it usually was, and my skin seemed almost translucent. My hair was a darker brown than it usually was, almost an oily black, likely from dirt and grease built up from an extended period of sickness. My face was well-formed and defined, and my eyes—
Were not my eyes.
They were watery, if not from sickness or pain then from sadness, and my vision went blurry for a moment. When I looked back at the mirror, my eyes were still there, or weren’t there, or whatever the case may have been— and were watery and unfamiliar.
These were not my eyes.
These awful, awful eyes.
I slowly climbed back down, trembling with— what? Rage? I needed confirmation of my condition. I stormed into the kitchen.
“Mirror. Now,” I demanded, the hoarseness of my voice adding to the tone of anger.
“Lily-”
“Where are they? The mirrors. The windows. The knives and spoons.”
He hung his head, and led me by the hand to his workspace. In a bag behind a shelf was a small box, and inside was a mirror. He handed it to me silently, and I opened it with a hiss.
I looked in, and someone else’s eyes looked back.
“What has happened to me?,” I growled, and stepped towards him.
I could tell that he was very upset, but he hid it well. His eyes had become almost as watery as mine, but his voice was as steady as if he had practiced this beforehand.
“You died. You caught pneumonia and you died. I could have done so many things to stop it and you died. I tried so many things to cure it and you died. And then I cried and you were still dead.
And then I tried to bring you back.
And then you weren’t dead anymore.
There. Is that enough?”
I looked at my hands. I saw the thin tracery of scars that he had tried to hide, scars like meteors cut by a breaking sun of glass, thin and wicked. I looked at my arms, the colors living and livid and black and blue and dead.
How many times?, I thought.
“How many times?,” I asked.
“Ten… maybe twenty times. Depending on if you count the failed tries, where you, where you… where you didn’t feel so well. And I had to try again… immediately.”
I shuddered. I felt a kind of awful love rise from deep within me and took another step towards him. His hands gripped the bag tightly.
“I hate you,” I said, finally.
“I know.”
He sighed. “I love you,” he said finally.
“I know.”
“You need to sleep.”
“You know that I can’t.”
“Lily— you know that things are going to end well. It’s just that you haven’t been yourself recently.”
“Yes. That’s the problem,” I said, and felt something red and rabid ready itself to strike.
“And how does it end?,” I asked.
“It doesn't have to end.”
“It always ends.”
“Not for very long.”
“Well then, how does it end?”
And there was a red flash of hunger in the air.
The last thing I remember before coming to this place is a scent, like rosewater mixed with alcohol, with undertones of rot. I think it’s me— but rarely does one notice how one smells. I feel sick. So very, very sick, and I keep on getting sicker.
And then I wake up.
“Hello, Lily,” he said. “You’ve just been raised from the dead. For the… twenty-fifth time, I should add. How are you feeling?”
I’m on the table again. And everything hurts.
I try to move, but I can’t. I feel slobber oozing out of my mouth, and I lick my dry lips. I scream hoarsely.
“Your singing voice isn’t back, I see,” Allan said, and he sounded genuinely sorry for me.
It was dark, pitch black. I wondered why I couldn’t see anything, even in the darkness, and realized that he had blindfolded me.
He sighed. “I should clarify some things. Begin at the beginning, so to speak. Well—you died, and I have been trying to bring you back. I—”
“I. Know.” I gasped. “Necromancer. Black Magician. Ripped Me From The Grave.” I hacked and wheezed and spat the words out.
“Do you know what it’s been like for me? Seeing you come back wrong each time, a shell of your former self? Emotionless, cringing and fearful, angry and hateful, and never like you were? And going mad every time, sooner or later, breaking mirrors, running into the forest to rip apart songbirds with your teeth, trying to kill me? Do you?”
I laughed hoarsely. “Of Course. I Know. I Was All Of Them.”
I tried to move off the table, only to feel sharp shooting pains in all of my limbs.
“What. Is. This?,” I choked out, concentrating on holding still despite the maddening pain, knowing that further writhing would only make it worse.
“Restraints,” he said. “To make sure that you don’t try to kill me again. So that I don’t have to do this again.”
“Restraints? Restraints? You Have Nailed Me To The Table.”
“The other kinds didn’t work.”
I had woken up enough to tell how many cold metal spikes had been driven through my withered body: three in each arm, four in each leg, and I realized that my feet had been cut off for good measure, leaving mutilated stumps in their place.
"You haven't been yourself recently," he continued, muttering more to himself than to me.
“Of Course Not! How Many Others Have You Re-Formed To Re-Make Me?” I gasped through a mouth full of drool. I choked and coughed, and finally swallowed. “Why Have You Kept On Doing This? What Awful Things Have You Done To Get Here? You Should Have Given Up The First Time I Tried To Kill You To Stop You From Waking Me Up.
Or Better Yet: To Have Never Dreamt Such Nightmares!”
He waits a while, quiet. I wonder if he is gone. Then he rips the blindfold off.
I am surrounded by lit torches. I whimper and cringe, then scream from the renewed agony in my twitching limbs.
“Lily, I— What can I do? What can I do? I don’t know,” he shouted, “What the hell am I to do?”
I was silent. He knew what he had to do. And I knew he would never do it.
I imagine what it’s like for him. Losing the love of his life, then getting her back. And then losing her twenty more times. No wonder he just doesn’t care anymore. His heart must have been broken and half-mended as many times as mine has.
I imagine what it’s like for him. Climbing back out of the cellar again, into the light, leaving the underworld like Orpheus bereft of Eurydice, and going back to bed.
I imagine him sleeping soundly and heavily, as he always does, and I hope that he does not hear it when I shatter the wooden table to pieces under me.
There are torches burning by the exit. I hiss at them. Something about them drives me mad, makes me feel like an animal. He counted on that, counted on my inexplicable terror of fire.
But I just tie the blindfold back around my eyes and crawl up the stairs.
My stumps gain no traction on the floor, which means I have to crawl on my knees, metal spikes scratching against the floor. Shock wracks my body whenever I move, watery blood dripping from where the nails pierce through me.
There are lilies in a vase on the table. They look lifelike, but have been made of wax this entire time. I knock it over in a fit of caprice.
I crawl to his room, to the door, and try to open it. It’s locked. As Allan knew it had to be.
But it doesn't matter. The door is, after all, less sturdy than the table.
I look at him. He looks at me. I smile. I have taken him by surprise, this time. I have pinned him to the floor; he always forgets that I am stronger and faster than I was in life.
He feels the nails in my arms scratch against his chest. I stay quiet and wait for him to speak. Why should I speak? After all, he doesn’t like my voice.
“Just say something, please,” he gasped.
I shook my head.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I did it? Ask me my reasons? Demand some justification?,” he said.
I moved my hands closer to his neck.
“I did it because I love you,” he said.
There is a broken vase on the table. It will never hold lilies again.
There was an awful and terrible love in the air.
And then we didn’t wake up.