Klytemnestra,Claret, turns her gaze at me, then at our joined hands. Her nostrils flare. ‘The suffering I must endure to get my due … But it will have to do. Quick then, pick a door, before they disappear again.’ She strides towards one side of the corridor, dragging me along, nails sinking deep into my palm as if I’m holding hands with a hissing, ferocious feline.
I fume at this, but between my returning sight and my renewed hope, it’s best to tuck my ego in a corner, warn it not to make a fuss. Let her think she leads this duo, for now, while she holds that sharp knife. I’ve never met a cat that couldn’t be de-clawed in time.
Claret stops before a lacquered mahogany door with a gilded doorknob. ‘Does this look like mine?’ she asks. ‘Like how my door looked to you before, when you so rudely opened it?’
Her grip on my hand is tight, trembling. I pretend to observe the door, weighing my options. It’s obvious she’s as eager to escape this as I am. But short of opening a random door and pushing her inside, hoping the door will hold and keep her in, lying will not serve me much. ‘No,’ I admit. ‘This looks nothing like your door.’ I turn my head around, trying to assess all the doors. It’s disorienting, after wading through so much ofnothing. No door within my sight resembles Claret’s. Hers was ghostly white, with a bloodied doorknob. But what if that was how it appeared to me in the moment, to intrigue me? ‘Perhaps we try it anyway?’ I say. Any way out would be better than our current circumstances.
Claret goes for the doorknob, grabbing it awkwardlywith her knife-holding hand. She pushes. Nothing happens. Pushes again, before she growls and plunges her knife at the door.
A spark – of something, a wound torn into a world we’re not supposed to see. It disappears faster than I can think of it. Then her knife slides down the door like she has stabbed warm butter. She barely manages to catch it.
‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake, let me try.’ I don’t pretend to understand the rules of this infuriating limbo, yet one thing is clear: stabbing at things will take us nowhere. I reach out and touch the doorknob gently, coaxing it to twist. It’s cold, unrelenting. I barely manage a rotation when I hear a click, as if someone locked this door just now, from the inside. I peer under the doorknob; a keyhole shimmers momentarily, then turns black. Interesting. Could there be keys –
‘Your way does not yield more results than mine,’ Claret scoffs.
‘I don’t think this is your door. Or mine,’ I admit grudgingly. ‘Let’s try another.’
We head to the next door along, a heavy, stony thing that feels like it should open to a murky cellar. I try its simple wooden handle. It groans but does not open – not even when Claret tries to push it with her elbow, putting her whole weight on it.
I shake my head, defeated. ‘This would be so much quicker if we had the keys.’
‘This would be so much quicker if we weren’t holding hands like children,’ she retorts.
Would it, though? I want to point out that we wouldn’t see a single door, were our hands not so awkwardly laced together. I want to, but I say nothing, because I can hearthe thunder brewing in her voice. I’ve been at the receiving end of it enough for one day.
We try a few more doors, with the same devastating lack of progress. I make a point to search some of the sconces, lift up the carpet, in case I can identify a hiding place where keys are stashed. But nothing works. The carpet is soft to the touch, yet it feels connected to the floors like a nail on a finger – I have this weird thought that if I separate it from the stone, the floors will start bleeding, so I give up that pursuit. Claret was right, holding hands slows us down; it’s inelegant, inconvenient, and frankly humbling. I’m tethered to a ball of copper lightning that can barely reach my shoulders, yet she has surely bruised my fingers with her iron grip. I don’t like what this display of brutish strength means for our eventual, inevitable clash. This world does not afford a stash of poisons for me to choose the sweetest, the one she won’t see coming. I’ll have to improvise. Oh, how I loathe improvising.
I’m about to swallow my pride once again and ask her to relax her hold on me, when something flickers. A shadow, at the corner of my eye.
I turn towards the far end of the corridor, and wish I hadn’t.
We are no longer alone here. Yet I preferred it when we were. Because this moaning mist of darkness that approaches us at breakneck speed appears much less likely to be amenable to reason. Or to poison. Or to allowing us to survive. A cloying smell of rotting roses permeates the air.
‘What is that thing?’ Claret’s voice is quiet, and that tells me all I need to know.
‘We need to run. Now,’ I whisper.
I’m not sure if it can hear us. I can’t discern a face; only a long, black, hooded cloak seemingly floating of its own accord. The air around it is charged with malice. The creature howls like a thousand voices crying; the sound is not unlike a stack of twigs being burned, if both the fire and the twigs were sentient – and furious. It’s a blood-curdling, chilling sound.
I turn around, this time doing all the dragging, as I coax Claret to run. Reluctantly, she follows. Our stomping steps are clumsy on the carpet, the flames fastened on the walls diminishing behind us, as if that screeching wraith is sucking all the light in the room. I spot thorns at the edge of my vision, rose bushes climbing on the walls, devouring grey stone with hungry, leafy mouths. The howling breaks apart enough to make out words, equally if not more frightening in their sibilance. ‘Parting is sssuch … sweet … sssorrow,’ the creature coos, its voice both teasing and morose, promising it will hold us close until we die. Its flowery stench is overpowering, making my eyes water.
I don’t see a way to escape this. My heart is lodged inside my throat, beating furiously.
I glance madly left and right, looking for another way out. We’re not fast enough.
‘There,’ Claret says, pointing to a pair of blood-red doors looming ahead. ‘Could these work?’ She sounds as out of breath as I am, and just as much in need of saving.
We’re cornered, and this thing will catch us quick. ‘Let’s try,’ I say, and it’s a prayer.
We reach the doors, the unabated darkness at our heels, repeating the same words from before in a broken echo. ‘Sssorrow …’ We push, we prod, we kick.
‘Sssuch … sweet … sssorrow …’ It sounds much closer now.
The doors don’t budge an inch.
‘I’m not going to die like this,’ Claret says. ‘Try again, damn you.’ She grabs my other hand in hers, somehow still not letting go of her knife in the process. She uses both our hands to batter at the door, screaming a battle cry just loud enough to rival our impending death’s laments.
With a sound akin to thunder, the doors suddenly give – but my relief is short-lived.
