“Who’s Aurélie?”
He doesn’t answer. Drops onto one knee and wraps his long arms around himself, head hanging. He’s so thin. His spine stands out like a little mountain range down his neck, strangely reptilian. “Aidez moi,” he whispers. “S’il vous pla?t, ayez pitié. J’ai tellement peur.”
“Help me,” Will translates softly. “Please, have pity. I am so afraid.”
“He’s afraid?” Jules practically shrieks. “What about us? Dorf said there was something down here. That thing could very well be it. What if he’s infected or something?”
The pale man tips sideways and clatters to the floor. His breathing is getting shallower, quick, weak gasps. His skin is turning a disgusting gray-purple color.
“He’s going to bleed to death,” I say. It comes out cold, flat. I don’t know what the proper reaction is to meeting a terrifying person on the verge of death in the palace of your kidnappers, My brain is telling me to run back to the Sistine Room, pick a different door, and forget we ever saw him, but––
“Maybe he can help us.” I step toward him cautiously. His breaths are so quiet now. A line of blood is creeping away from him across the floor, like a finger, reaching for us. “Maybe he can tell us what we need to know to get out of here.”
“Are you crazy?” Jules whimpers. “No, no, no, we are on the run, okay? We are going to be killed.”
“Jules, look at him. He’s hurt. He’s in the same boat as us and he’s probably been down here longer—”
“It might be a trick,” Will says. “If he’s faking it—”
I shrug. “Then I die gruesomely and you guys know better for next time. Win-win.” I’m not waiting for a decision by committee. I pull my letter opener out of my pocket and walk up to the pale man. Crouch. He raises his head, looking at me from under his lids. His skin is almost translucent now from loss of blood. Patches of red are blooming around his eyes and on his neck. His fingernails are thick and yellow.
“Aidez-moi,” he wheezes again, barely audible. “Aurélie, aidez-moi. . . .”
I hold his gaze. “Can you get us out of here?”
He begins nodding, but his eyes are glazing over. “Oui, mademoiselle, oui—!”
“Okay. Un accord. You help us and we’ll help you, got that?”
He’s sobbing, grasping for my hand, tears dripping, mixing with the blood on the floor.
I jerk away and force down the bile rising in my throat. “If he tries anything . . .” I turn to the others. “Just get away; don’t let him touch you. Until then we’re going to help him.”
He smells disgusting. A mixture of sweaty and grimy, New York City streets in summertime and something bloody and metallic that I can’t quite place. I’m trying not to breathe—trying not to accidentally touch his skin and throw up everywhere– as I wrap swath after swath of pine-green velvet from some drapes around his arm. It’s like I’m in Gone with the Wind, being all nurse-like and mid-19th-century. Give me some hoopskirts and I’ll kick Melanie right out of town.
“More,” I say, and throw my head back, staring up at the ceiling. “I need more cloth.”
We’re one door over from the Sistine Room now. A little hexagonal sitting room with a concert harp standing in the center. The drapes were hanging in front of some fake mirror windows that I assume are supposed to trick you into feeling less enclosed, except they do the exact opposite. You see drapes and a window-shaped object, and you expect to be able to look through it and gaze out into the sky or wide-open fields, but you don’t. You see yourself. It’s disturbing.
Will tears another strip off the drapes and passes it to me. I gulp air and dive back down, tying bandages as fast as I can.
The blood is coming from a deep gash running from the base of his elbow to his wrist. It’s on the top of his arm, just a flesh wound, but it’s bizarre. It’s not a cut. Not a bite. It’s wide and smooth at the edges, a trough, almost like something burned him. Slowly.
“He said he can get us out of here?” Jules mutters over to me. He’s hunched next to Will, trying to find the seams in the curtains. “And yet, we can’t believe anything he says. So explain to me, why are we helping him again? We can’t trust him!”