Before I knew it, I was on the sidewalk outside the brick building, and I was climbing the cracked and crumbling stairs, and I was at the door trying to decide if I should ring the bell or just let myself in.
Oh wait, I was in already. I was coughing and coughing and batting at the smoke to get it away from my face.
When the air settled—when my eyes and lungs got used to it, or when I realized I was lucid enough to communicate to myself that I was dreaming and this wasn’t actual smoke—a sense of calm came over me. I let myself see where I was.
The house had shifted its arrangement of rooms, with some doorways I didn’t remember, and some rooms in places there hadn’t previously been rooms. Up above, the ceiling creaked with the weight
of
movement.
A
rotting
chandelier, covered in moss and spiderwebs, misted with smoke, shook as if a person were stomping heavily right over it.
“Is someone up there?” I called.
“Abby?”
That’s when I caught the drapes moving at the far end of the giant room.
Someone was hiding near the windows, like last time. The same figure, the same girl.
I could see her more clearly now.
The long curtains were in tatters, so it wasn’t entirely possible for her to fully conceal herself behind them. Holes in the mealy fabric showed pieces of her body—she was still wearing the too-tight jeans she’d been wearing on the night I last saw her; the jeans that said FU on the thigh (upside down, because she’d scrawled it without thinking of how other people would read it, or because she meant it for herself more than anyone else)—and the gutted hem of the drapes showed me the bottoms of her legs in those jeans and two bare, dirt-blackened feet.
All this time I’d been looking for Abby, and here I’d found someone else.
In the dream, I found myself doing things I’m not sure I could have done in real life. My dream-self picked her way through the room to get closer to those drapes. My dream-self had no fear. She ignored the growing sense that there were others behind her, others she hadn’t been introduced to yet. She found the edge of the drapes and moved slowly along the length, searching for a cord.
When she found it, hidden in the tatters and held together by a few tangled threads, she took it in both hands and she pulled. The drapes slid open, and the girl, Fiona Burke, was revealed.
There she was—not an animated and gruesome corpse, dead the way she surely should have been if the stories were to be believed. And not years older, either, the way she would be now if she’d survived.
Fiona Burke hadn’t aged a day.
Her hair was red with the black roots, gone pinkish in some spots. Her eyes were liquid-lined. Her bare stomach was visible, but it wasn’t that she’d grown out of her shirt in the years since I’d known her; that’s how she liked to wear her shirts, one size too small and no shame for what was showing.
With the drapes open, Fiona Burke stepped out into the room because there was nowhere to hide. There was glass all over the floor from a window that must have been shattered—and as she walked closer to me she stepped right on the shards. Pain didn’t reach her face, if she felt any at all. I realized, now that I’d grown up and she’d stopped growing, we were about the same height.
She spoke then. She recognized me.
Happy now? You little brat.
I could have asked her how she knew it was me, after all these years, because I dyed my hair black now, blue-black from a bottle, and didn’t I look any different from when I was a kid?
Before I could utter a word, she grabbed my hand and shoved something into it that was hotter even than her skin, sizzling like a coal burning from a fire, and hard, like a knob of bone. My sole reaction was to get it away from me as quickly as possible. My hand opened and let go.
What dropped to the ground was a pendant made from a smoke-gray stone.
That’s when I remembered I’d seen something very much like it before.