The ghost-echoes re-emerged in the mezzanines, drifting at the far edges of the foyer. No, not again. A hand fell on my shoulder. I gasped and spun around.
"We must leave," Sutton said, eyes darting from me to them. "Now." He turned and walked away, hastily, not looking back. "If you wish to live, you will follow me."
"I'm not going anywhere without my sister," I yelled, and the things in the darkness drew closer. They'd seemed frightened of the skeletal nightmare that had just taken my sister. Maybe even frightened of Sutton, but their hunger was greater than their fear. I could feel it.
"Then you are already dead," Sutton said, striding into the sitting room and disappearing from my view to the left of the massive fireplace. His shadow danced out behind him, elongated and deformed, then was gone.
"Sadie," a voice like broken glass whispered behind me, and I bolted to the fireplace, but there was no sign of Sutton. I spun in place, panic pumping into my veins as the wraiths crowded and swelled and drifted toward me.
"Ahem," Sutton said. I whirled around to see him peering at me from behind a lush tapestry that hung to the floor. "This way." He vanished, and the tapestry rippled.
I looked back once more at the ghost-echoes and remembered their cold touch on my bones, then I practically leapt behind the hidden exit.
#
I followed Sutton deep into a narrow corridor that seemed to be dappled in moonlight, though there were no windows. There were no lights of any kind other than Sutton's torch, which he carried as if he were the first man to invent fire. Where are we? It seemed like a hallway to nowhere, like we were behind the walls of the house. A secret passage. How much does Sutton know about this house? The only place I was interested in going was up.
"Sutton . . . ?" He walked on unfazed, a good ten feet ahead of me.
"Sutton," I called a little louder, running to catch up. "What happened to my sister? Where did that monster take her?"
"There's no time, we have to—"
I yanked his wrist, spun him around, and shoved him against the wall.
"There's no time? So that means you know? You know where the—the Bone Princess took Tabitha? You have to tell me!"
He grabbed my shoulder and squeezed me a little harder than he needed to, pushing me against the other side of the hallway. With the torch hanging over our heads, he leaned in close, gritting his teeth, trying to be firm. It didn't work.
"There's. No. Time." He punctuated each word with a fierce little nudge. "And be. Quiet. There was no anger in his eyes, and none in his voice or in his grip. Merely urgency. "I know it can be difficult for a woman to remain calm when she is out of her known environment, but I'm afraid I must insist."
"You insist I be quiet?" My words escalated to a yell. "I INSIST you tell me WHERE MY SISTER IS!"
"Stop it Sadie . . . you don't understand. You have to be silent!" He tried to grab my mouth, but I ducked underneath his arm, grabbing a long, broken piece of wood from the floor. An old piece of molding that had come loose. I smacked it against the wall, the noise echoing down the hall.
"You're going to get us killed!"
I slapped the plaster wall again with the wood. "I'll be quiet when you tell me where my sister is!"
"Da attic. De-da. De-da." A shiver ripped up my spine. The raspy voice which'd answered sounded more Oliver Twist than Sutton's Downton Abbey.
"Ou's dere?" It demanded. I whipped my head back towards the foyer in time to see a disheveled old man in a ratty overcoat and crooked beret stumble into the corridor. Bloody bandages circled his head, covering his eyes. He sniffed the air and smiled, exposing his black teeth.
"Blasted!" Sutton yelled at me, and he took off down the hall. I was barely able to keep up because I kept looking back.
Black forms erupted from the darkness behind the old man, racing between and around his feet. "Get'em," he roared, and they leapt toward us, all gleaming little eyes and sharp little teeth. Like a pack of hunting dogs, but not dogs at all. They had too many limbs. They had too many eyes. They smiled exactly like the old man's smile.
I didn't mean to slow down, but I did, screaming. Sutton grabbed my wrist, tugging me along. We ran. And we ran. Down the hall, Sutton never hesitating with each twist and turn, the shrieks from the hounds, growing more shrill in the narrow corridor, bouncing all around us. We rounded a corner and Sutton, still griping my hand, pushed me past a heavy drapery of some sort, deep into a cramped, dark crevice, pressing his right index finger to my lips.
"Don't move," he said, gravely serious. Winded and afraid. "Be quiet. Stay right here. No matter what you hear."
I quickly nodded, and he pulled back through the drape and into the corridor.
"Come and get me," I heard Sutton yell.
I stood there, shaking, my hands balled into tight fists. The drape moved as the strange hunting pack raced past my hovel, followed by the heavy footsteps of the old man, who yelled something about picking the flesh from our bones. And then they were gone, chasing Sutton deeper and deeper into this nightmare. Darkness engulfed me.
Sutton was gone.
Shit. SHIT! What did I do? I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, breathing and breathing, trying to calm myself, but I couldn't calm down, wondering what might have happened to Sutton. And Tabby. What will happen to Tabby if I just got us both killed? My heart tore itself apart behind my ribs. I pressed my hand to my chest, feeling its heavy beat against my palm and in my fingertips and again wondered why anyone would need a heartbeat in hell.
Utter silence settled upon the complete darkness except for the screams in my head. I wanted to leave. I wanted to find him. Find Tabitha. Get the hell out of here. He said to stay here, Sadie. Stay here and be quiet. Trembling, I felt around. The hovel was larger than I'd first realized. I eased myself away from the corridor and slid to the floor, crying a little, and then I just sat there, the darkness so complete I began to wonder if I'd gone blind. Or if this was it—the end of my death dream, and I was really lying on the floor of the basement with my skull blown open and a chunk of my brain stuck in a bloody nest of green hair, and this had all been some final, awful cerebral misfire. Now I was about to blink out. No heaven. No hell. No ghosts. No darkness, because darkness was something. Death was nothing.
I waited for nothing, but it didn't come.
I'm not dead. I'm not dead.
The mantra was not reassuring, because this was somehow worse.
Black panic crept up from the depths of my stomach and curled its knobby fingers around my heart. Squeezing. I knew I was about to lose it. Something shifted in the darkness, and then I did lose it as a hand pressed to my mouth, stifling my screams.
"It's me." His mouth pressed close to my ear, his breath warm on my neck. "It's Sutton." I thrashed for another second because it's hard to stop freaking out when you're in the middle of a major freak out, and then when Sutton was sure I was done, he peeled his hand away from my mouth.
"How did you—"
"I know these passages well. We're safe. For now. Come along . . ."
His fingers brushed my forearm and slid down to my hand. He gently guided me through the black until the air changed around us, and I knew we were in a larger open room. As the claustrophobia eased, I threw my arms him. "I'm sorry," I mumbled into the crook of his neck. His back stiffened. I didn't care about my brash behavior. Feeling his heartbeat—even though it was a stranger's heartbeat—against my chest was suddenly the most amazing sensation I'd ever felt. "I'm sorry," I whispered, fighting the tears. Unsure if they were the sad or joyous kind, but I knew I never wanted this stranger's heartbeat to stop. Especially on my account.
"It's okay," he said, awkwardly patting my back. I could tell he was unsure what to do. I apologized again as I detached myself from his chest. "It's okay," he repeated, "I shouldn't have . . ." He patted his pockets, pulled out a box of matches and immediately went to work relighting his torch. We were in a ballroom. As to be expected, it was grand, with rows of mirrors three times my size, hanging on walls of silver damask wallpaper. Scenes of the night were painted on the ceilings and in the center, a moon waned over an enormous chandelier of a thousand crystals that surely once sparkled like stars, but was now crusted in millions of insect shells and wings caught by the cobwebs over the centuries. "I shouldn't have pushed you so hard. I forget how delicate women can be. I don't have much, eh, experience in that department. But Prof—"
"Ya know. You could really stand to lose the whole bring-the-delicate-flower-her-smelling-salts thing, it's kinda nineteenth century, dontcha think?"
"I'll have you know that among certain circles in Cumberland, I am considered quite the feminist."
A laugh spurted from my lips. "Yeah, if it's 1950."
"Ha! Well, Miss Sharpton, I am sure that even by American standards you are as progressive as they come, but if you expect a man to live seventy-six years ahead of the current thought and decorum of the time, you will always be disappointed. Especially in England."
"What—? What do you mean seventy-six years ahead? Did you hit your head back there? What year do you think it is?"
"The Year of Our Lord, Eighteen hundred and seventy-four, of course. At least it was before I came to be trapped here."
"Wh-a-a-t? 1874? You think it's 1874?"
"Well, yes," he said, drawing back his chin. His eyes got a little wild. "What year do you think it is?"
"Two Thousand Fifteen."
His mouth opened softly, and I watched thoughts tear through his head. How is this possible? He touched my cheek and I understood how he felt; I wanted to touch his face, too. To make sure he was real. My heart pounded as his fingers dragged across my face to the studs in my earlobe.
"Professor Knowby believed—and it was merely a theory, he had no evidence to support it—that here, we are currently existing outside of time."
"I think Professor Knowby was on to something," I said through trapped breaths. "Although he was missing one key factor."
"What was that?"
"Place. This hellhole sits outside of time and place."
He nodded slow nods, and his wide blue eyes stared down at me; his fingers caught a lock of my hair. He watched in awe as the minty green lock slid away and fell back into place. I couldn't tell if there was affection in his touch, or if I was a mere academic curiosity. "The future," he said. "You are the evidence he sought."
"Sutton?"
"Hmm?"
"Do you know where the attic is?" He nodded in affirmation. "Tell me," I pleaded, near tears. "Tell me the way . . . I have to save my sister."
His head bobbed back and forth. "No. I won't tell you where it is. But I'll take you there if that is what you truly desire. Only to the door, though. Crossing the threshold is a suicide mission, Sadie. No one escapes becoming the next Bone Princess. And no Bone Princess escapes the maternal clutches of Mother Dust."
Something in him had shifted; I could see it in the way he looked at me. Not affection. Maybe fascination? Maybe academic curiosity?
"Okay. It's a deal." I vibrated with thanks. "Just to the attic door, and I'm on my own." Then I realized it wasn't just me vibrating, a grinding creak reverberated through the room.
"It's no longer safe here," he said, quickly looking around, assessing the exits, weapons, something. "We must make haste."
"Are the hounds back?"
"Far worse, I am afraid. There's always something worse," he said, as the floor rocked beneath our feet. Dust wafted down from the ceiling. "There's always something worse the deeper you go into the house. The higher up. Then of course there are the catacombs below that you should never, never enter under any circumstances. Do you understand?" The question wasn't rhetorical.
"Yes!" I yelled over an insectile warble that thrummed in the air, blurring the edges of the room and burrowing into my head. It stopped, and the room snapped back into place—only it hadn't stopped. It was in my head. Behind my eyes.
"Think," Sutton said, pressing his hands to his face
"Of"
working the tips of his fingers
"Something"
into the flesh of his eyelids
"You"
deeper and deeper, blood flowing between his fingers
"LOVE."
Then his right eye bulged from its socket, staring wildly, and slid like a slug down the back of his hand, trailing a glistening line of blood.
"Sutton!" I screamed, backing away from him. There was something else in the room with us, and its angles were all wrong. It moved in every direction at once. I stared into it and through it, and though it had nothing that could sanely be called a face, it was smiling. Sutton backed away, too, and I saw him through the shifting vaporous thing, like seeing him through rippling, shattering glass. He was taking his head apart with his bare hands.
"DO IT," he yelled, working his blood-sheathed fingers into his empty eye-sockets and grabbing hold, prying his skull apart while his lips pulled into a wanton, hungry grin. There was a sound like a melon bursting, and Sutton's brain sloshed down his face in a chunky rush of yellow and black and grey. I screamed, and the sound came out like a choked and dying gurgle, as maggots boiled in the hot soup pouring from the gaping fissure in his head.
"DO IT!"
But I couldn't stop screaming. My hands quivered before my face, the flesh of my fingertips opening as if invisible razors were chasing across them. Around my palms, around my wrists, unzipping me. "It's you Sadie," the thing at the center of the room whispered in the tongue of a thousand dying stars, "Bone Princess."
Hands on my shoulders.
"THINK OF SOMETHING YOU LOVE—"
My mother. Not dying in my arms, hugging me, tucking me in. Comforting me when I skinned my knee. Letting me help her paint one of her set-pieces while Tabby bounced in her bouncy chair, her fat little lips wrapped around her paci. Tabby.
Tabby. Tabby. I couldn't save my mother but I had to save Taby—and then the thing in the room recoiled.
It made a sound like something wounded, and its impossible angles folded upon themselves until there was nothing. A final, convulsive burst shook the room, and the thing was gone, leaving behind only a quivering mass that hung in the air for a moment, tendrils like reaching vines grabbing at nothing, before hitting the ground in a viscous burst.
"—NOW," Sutton was saying. He was lying against the wall, disheveled and exhausted, but his face entirely intact. I held up my hands. The illusion had passed.
Sutton crawled to a navy blue, velvet settee. I thought he was going to pull himself onto it for a rest, but instead, he pushed it aside, revealing what looked like a cartoon mouse-hole big enough to accommodate a full-grown adult. He crawled into the hole, motioning for me to follow.
Three small children who looked as if they'd drowned long ago crowded into the room, bumping shoulders. They were draped in glistening seaweed, water pooling around their feet. I smelled the ocean.
"Is that you, mommy?" One of them said, its voice thick and gurgling.
I was past the point of screaming. My mind wanted to blow away like autumn leaves in the wind. Like a dandelion. Puff.
I hurried after Sutton into the tunnel, crawling and crawling, and the waterlogged kids didn't follow us, though I could hear their choked, phlegmy voices, crying for their mother.
#
We emerged into a large bedroom where the furniture and fabrics were some shade of green other than the gossamer cloth that hung like cobwebs from the massive four-post bed. The ceilings seemed extra high, and in the corner, near a writing desk, a winding circular staircase led to an opening in the ceiling. I followed Sutton up. One level closer to the attic, I thought, one level closer to Tabitha. We slipped into another corridor behind the house walls—all crumbly plaster and slats like ribs. One level closer to Mother Dust.
"Sutton . . . ?" I whispered this time.
"Hmm?"
"Earlier, what did you mean by reaping? What does Mother Dust want my with my sister?"
He seemed reluctant to answer, but then said, matter-of-factly, "Tabitha was chosen to be the next Bone Princess."
"What?" My whisper became shrill. "Why? She's just a little girl! What's wrong with the current Bone Princess?"
"That is the peculiar part. I've never seen her reap a girl so young. As for the Bone Princess—she's dying of course—almost sucked completely dry. Bone dry. And Mother Dust needs a replacement, for she lives on Bone Princesses. Before each one dies completely, she always choose the next soul-martyr for their Queen."
"Tabby is going to become like that creature? All sunken cheeks and milky eyes and spiders and cobwebs?"
He paused and turned to look at me. "She probably already has." I pinched my lips hard as they started to quiver. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry." And with that he turned ahead, and we kept walking.
It's not true, Sadie. You'll get to her in time. Tabby is NOT the Bone Princess. I imagined her with that ivory headdress atop her blonde bob. I tried not to imagine her toothy grin, because knowing Tabby, she'd probably like that stupid crown. Knowing Tabby, she'd love being the Bone Princess.
"And all those sad, broken souls—the menagerie of freaks in Allerdale Hall—quiver at the very mention of her name, Mother Dust."
"'And the Red Death held sway over all,'" I said, trying to change the subject. I didn't want to think about Tabby ruling this hellhole.
"What is that," Sutton stopped and turned back to my with a frown, "Is that Browning?"
"Poe," I said. He waved a dismissive hand. "What? My mom loved Poe."
"Vulgar American tripe."
"Pfft. People still read him. In 2015."
He smiled. "What do I know of the future?"
Every corridor felt darker and the air of every room felt thinner the deeper we walked into the house, the further we got from the foyer, the front door, the outside. The further we got from the living, just me and this pale, Victorian, James Bond, boy. I wondered how long Sutton had been here doing this. How long had he been wondering about his own life? Sometimes quiet tears dripped quietly down my face. I knew Sutton knew I was crying and I appreciated that he never acknowledged it. That he never told me everything was going to be okay.
"Fear, he said. "Fear is what keeps you alive in Allerdale Hall." If fear was what kept you alive in Allerdale Hall, then I'm golden.
It felt like an eternity walking between those walls, fighting, running, but most of all hiding from monsters. Sutton knew every hidden crook and secret crevice. Wardrobes which led to secret passageways and trunks that opened into staircases. Most of the time I had no idea if we were still going up or down or sideways, but whenever one of the cretins in the House of Horrors took us off course, Sutton found our way back. He talked for hours about all the evidence he'd recorded and his hypotheses about Crimson Peak. The papers he plans to write when he is freed. Essays. Books even. He always talked about the future. Never the past. And I never asked because whenever we crept near that territory he became as awkward as Sherlock. But more sad. And I couldn't stand for Sutton to be sad. I was carrying around enough sadness and anger for the both of us.
#
"I need to take a break," I said, bent over, hands on my knees. My entire body ached with all the fights and all the falls. My feet were blistered in my boots and my eyes stung with bleariness. I was hungry and thirsty and dirty but most of all, tired. So. So tired.
"No," Sutton said. "We can take a break when we get to the library."
"Aren't you tired?"
"Of course, I'm utterly exhausted. I haven't slept a wink since you've arrived." He pulled out his pocket watch and held it under the moonlight dabbles in the windowless corridor. "I haven't slept in three days."
"Three days! We haven't known each other for three days."
"Of course, you have, sixty-four hours to be exact. We've just been in the inner-most part of the house where no sun ray nor moon beam can penetrate."
"A surge of adrenaline pumped through my veins. We need to hustle. We need to get to the attic. Suddenly my steps set a new pace, and we arrived at a place where the wall had either crumbled or been smashed. We quickly stepped through it, into a short hallway lined with paintings in gilded frames. A single gas lantern, its wan flame fluttering, hung from the ceiling before a great wooden door, swaying gently in a breeze that was not there. I tried not to look at the paintings—they were clearly looking back.
"Here," Sutton said, winded, stepping up to the door. He turned the knob. There was a loud click.
Another long stretch of hallway ending in a sitting area. Wall sconces with old candles, wax drips frozen in time, framed two lush, high-backed chairs before a vaulted window that looked out onto darkness. There were three doors on the left side of the hall. Two on the right.
Click.
The door we'd come through eased shut behind us. I gasped, and then breathed a sigh of relief that we had both ended up on the same side. Somehow the fear of being alone here without him had crept it's way into being my biggest fear of all.
Sutton walked ahead of me, checking the doors. They were locked. We reached the chairs and the window, and the hallway cut to the right. Another stretch, ending in another ornately carved wooden door. Another wavering gas lantern. The left wall was lined in more framed paintings. The right wall had more doors.
Sutton walked toward the door, and I stepped between the chairs to the window. Placed my hand on the cold glass. The house may as well have been at the bottom of an ocean of pure black. If the glass cracked, that blackness might come spilling in, and we'd drown. I knew we were closer to the attic. Somehow I could feel it. We were closer to Mother Dust. Closer to me being alone.
"No!" he yelled, shaking the door handle. "We were too slow," he said, aggressively shaking another handle. He began to move from door to door. "The house has us. We've been caught."
"What do you mean?" I asked, running over. "We can't be caught. We have to get to the attic. We have to save Tabby!"
"See for yourself," he said, moving toward the ornate wooden door. "Open it."
I did, stepping through and into another hallway.
"What the hell . . . ," I muttered.
Another long stretch of hallway led to a sitting area—two, lush, high-backed chairs before a vaulted window that looked out onto darkness. Three doors. Two doors. At the window, the hallway cut to the right. Gas lantern—wavering flame. The same damned hallway.
"No," I said. Sutton followed as I stepped deeper into the hallway, past the doors and toward the vast window looking out onto black nothing, the two chairs. Turning right, walking faster, past the paintings, toward the ornate wooden door. The knob was cold. I turned it.
Click.
The same damned hallway. The same damned window. Again and again. Again and fucking again. I walked faster and Sutton walked faster until we were both running. I don't know how many times we made that loop, and with each circuit, Sutton seemed to grow smaller. He seemed to cave in a little upon himself, defeat settling into his frame. Breaking him.
Then when we passed the chairs again, he just stopped.
Instead of sitting in the chair, he backed against the wall and sunk down to the ground, knees bent. He rubbed his eyes between his thumb and forefinger.
I sank next to him, as close as I could, bodies touching. Sutton didn't look up.
The darkness outside pressed in, and the ceiling suddenly felt lower. The air thinner. The silence more deafening.
And after a very long break, I turned to him and gently asked, "How long have you been here?"
"Three months," he said, not missing a beat. I paused, waiting to see if he'd continue. It was my fault we were trapped. I'm the one who'd made us come here. His voice was soft and crackly: "I've counted nearly one hundred sunrises in the windows of Allerdale Hall, but a day and a night here is no mere cycle of twenty-four hours. As you know."
Something in his voice had changed. The hopelessness stung me like a swarm of bees. Buzzing, stinging, killer bees.
His eyes dampened.
So did mine. It took me several more minutes to get the next question out I turned to him:
"We're not going to make it to the attic, are we?" He was very good at holding back his tears. I tried to do the same despite the silence crushing me, for him. He didn't answer, he just finally looked up. At me. And his head gently bobbed back and forth. "We're going to die here, aren't we?"
He continued to nod. Every bob, bringing his head closer to mine. "I have never known anyone to come to the second level and make it down. They've all . . . become something else. A permanent addition to Crimson Peak."
"Then why—why would you come here with me?"
"I-I don't know. Because dying with you—while saving a little girl—is better then being alone for one more day in this God forsaken place."
I found myself nodding and then there was no more room between us, and our lips touched, and it was the only moment I wanted. The only moment that mattered. He pulled me into his lap as he kissed me, and I felt it again—the stranger heartbeat—and the more I felt it, the more I wanted to feel it forever. "We're not going to die Sutton," I whispered, certainty in my voice. He nodded in affirmation, but the way he kissed me said otherwise. His kisses said carpe diem.
Seize the moment because it's likely the last.
And we did.
Until we both passed out from exhaustion, entangled in each other's arms under the wavering lamp in that impossibly dark, impossibly desperate, Allerdale hallway.
#
I awoke to pitch-black. The gas-lamp had finally flamed out. I'd no idea how long we'd slept, maybe an hour, maybe ten. Maybe ten days. Nothing felt real anymore. Except for the hunger pangs in my stomach and the pressure on my bladder. On the heels of that realization, a question popped into my mind: three months was a long time—what had Sutton been eating? My pulse skipped.
Was he even alive?
My hand found his chest. Yes. Heartbeat. Although, no longer quite a stranger's. My hand bumped Sutton's box of matches, and I pulled them from the inner pocket of his vest. I know there was a sconce on the wall. With a drippy white candle that looked a hundred years old. I felt along the wall until my fingers found it, then I struck a match, inhaling the smell of sulfur as I held the flame to the wick. But just as the wick caught the flame, something moved in the corner of my eye and I froze.
I turned slowly—at the end of the hallway was a towering man in billowing black robes. A length of red silk circled the lower half of his face and hung to the ground in a straight line. The top of his bald head nearly touched the ceiling. Bone white flesh. Huge, black eyes, like the eyes of a shark. The hilt of a dagger jutted from his forehead.
He drifted toward us, his robes hissing across the carpet runner. Spindly white fingers unfolded from within the black folds of his robe.
"S-Sutton!"
He bolted upright. "Blasted," he said in a small voice, leaping to his feet, stepping directly toward the massive man. He glanced back at me before he spoke.
"Warren," he said, raising his hands before him. "It's me." He tapped his chest. "It's Brother. You remember me. Surely you d—"
The man in the robe reached out with an arm that was too long. Its fingers closed around Sutton's throat and lifted him from the ground with no effort.
"NOOO!" I screamed, charging down the hallway, as Sutton's feet dangled and flailed. I jumped up, arms stretched, and seized the hilt of the dagger protruding from the thing's head.
It roared, dropping Sutton, who tumbled to the floor. I held on as its face flared up with a blue fire from within. He roared a second time, the pain in my ears alone nearly causing me to let go, then his giant hand swatted my chest, and I flung all the way down the hall crashing into the back wall. But I'd held on to the dagger as long as I could, causing the beast to tumble down and the dagger to clank to the floor, which rocked and trembled and rattled all the doors.
I yelped in pain, sucking in sharp breaths, grateful to have some distance from the monster.
"Warren, please," Sutton yelled, clambering away from the thing, which arced through the air, its robes trailing behind it, its hands reaching, seizing Sutton's ankles, slamming him up and back down onto the floor like his was just the weight of a squirrel. But then it didn't let go, it glided like an eel down the hall, holding on, dragging him like a hunted animal down the corridor.
Faster.
Screaming Sutton's name, I ran after them. And then I realized I was running through a smear of blood. Sutton's blood. Too much blood. My lungs collapsed in my chest. I couldn't see through the tears, but I kept running. The monster slammed open a door and slithered in, Sutton's crooked body, hanging out, caught on the corner. I was almost there, my hands reaching out for his face. His eyes stared open at me, and I swear his smile crooked. A smile that trickled blood. But then he was gone. The beast had pulled him in, and the door slammed, striking me in the face.
I hit the floor, blood filling my nose, flowing down my throat. I sprung back up, but I knew it. I knew the door would be locked. Screaming, I rattled it until my arms couldn't move anymore. And then I went back to our spot on the floor. Alone. Completely alone.
I sat there for a long time. I don't know how long. And then I got up and I walked. I walked past the window, again and again. Sutton is gone. Sutton is dead. And I walked and walked and walked down the same damned hallway, again and again. Five times, ten times. A hundred—who knew? Details changed—I noticed that much. Too bad I hadn't made the connection when I woke up to darkness in Sutton's arms. The flame in the lamp had flickered out—the first change. That was before the beast came. If I'd realized it then, we could have escaped and Sutton would still be alive.
And now more details changed. The paintings changed. The carpet changed. But the doors were always locked, until they weren't—
Click.