Solid Walls

Chapter Thirty-Seven

They took the stairs as fast as they could without tripping, grasping the steps and walls to steady their climb. The bells jingled wildly with the pounding of their feet. They knew everyone in the house who wasn't already awake was sitting up in bed now, perhaps throwing on robes and running into the halls, wondering where the scrambling sounds were coming from. But they couldn't care about that right now. They could only focus on the next step, on the next few feet ahead that could be illuminated by flashlight.

When they finally emerged at the top of the stairs, Nell shone the light down the passage in either direction. In that brief flash, Chloe saw the heel of a foot disappear around the corner to the right.

"Willa!" she called, taking chase. "Willa!"

Behind her she could hear Nell shouting for her to wait, but she didn't listen, plunging into the darkness and leaving her only source of light behind.

As soon as she turned the corner, Nell's calls vanished. Chloe strained to hear Willa's footsteps, but the only sounds in the passage were the faint ringing of the bells and her own ragged breathing. She spun around in the pitch blackness and tried to go back the way she'd come, but suddenly she couldn't remember what right or left meant, or up or down or backward or ahead. She tried to recall the details of the drawings they'd studied, but all she could conjure were twisting black lines that seemed to scribble each other out. She reached for a wall or a door or anything solid, but somehow all she felt was thick, hot air all around. How was that possible? How could she not find a wall in a passage only a few feet wide? She felt her breath go shallow, her chest tighten and heave. She opened her mouth to call out so Nell could find her, but she could only get out a trembling whisper between gasps.

"Nell...Nell...?"

She stumbled in the direction she thought would lead her forward, toward Willa. She had to save Willa. That was why she was there. That was what mattered. She reached as far as her arms would stretch and moved through the dark until at last it seemed she'd found a wall. She pressed her hands against the wood on either side and almost cried in relief.

"Willa?" she whispered, her voice shaking and teary.

She walked along guided by the walls, heading in what she could only hope was the right direction. There were only so many yards of hidden corridor, after all, and they all looped around. Eventually she would have to find Nell again, or Willa. Everything would be okay now, now that she'd found the edges of the passage...

But the texture of the walls against her hands was starting to shift. Instead of flat, splintering boards, she felt something else. Protrusions beneath her fingers, what must have been warped sections in the wood. She ran her fingers blindly along the surfaces...and then every inch of her skin seemed to drop away from her body. The warped walls weren't made of wood. The protrusions were smooth and curving—a cheek, a chin, a mouth gaping wider and wider...

She screamed and drew her hands in, stumbling away from the faces that couldn't be silently emerging from the walls around her, not here. Not here. Not here. Not here.

"No, no..." She wept silently and pulled her arms in tight. "I can't...I can't help...I'm sorry, Dad, I had to leave...I'm so sorry, so sorry, so sorry..."

She curled into herself, not daring to feel for a wall again, for whatever was stretching out toward her, reaching for her clothes, screaming at her with soundless mouths, staring with sightless faces. She ran straight ahead, knowing she would probably run headfirst into a wall, but not caring, because this space was impossible, this whole thing was impossible, and as soon as she turned a corner she would see Nell standing in the doorway leading to Willa's room waiting for her to come back into the light. But instead she ran into nothing: no walls, no corners, no grasping hands or sorrowful faces. And there was no way to know when the passage would end, when a turn might come, so she clutched her chest and thought of Willa and ran at random headlong to the left.