Cont’d

Suddenly, being alone terrified me more than the voices. I ran my hands along the walls, looking for the way out. There were no buttons, no release knobs… nothing. I was trapped.

Do you know what it is to be trapped, alone, with dangers all around you? Do you know what it is to be left without hope? I did. Soon, the voices began whispering my name. I heard them whispering, like dead leaves on a dirt road. I heard their laughter.

I could stay silent no longer.

Just as I began to scream, he was there, covering my mouth with his hand. Gary, he said his name was. He’d come from yet another place, somewhere on the other side of what was the bathroom wall, where his door had been. Gary was… older. He surprised me somewhat, since everyone else—all two of them—had been my age. Had been like me.

Gary was not like me. Not like me at all.

He told me stories of the different houses he’d been to. He said if you are careful, and leave the main house at just the right time, you can visit sometimes nine houses in one night. He said he’d met a lot of people wandering the galleys between the houses. That’s what he called the dusty spaces between the walls. Galleys.

We had to spend a lot of time together, we two. For whatever reason, neither of us could find our way out, and back to the main house. Back to it.

The voices laughed from beyond the walls. Sometimes I thought I heard Mother’s laughter mixed in with the bellowing guffaws of a man. Still other times, I heard the soft tittering of an old woman… and it was hers that scared me the worst. Perhaps she was the “nanny lady” come to enact vengeance for the hopscotch grid carved so carefully into the floor. When I whimpered and cried out, Gary held me.

Every time we grew tired, Gary would hold me and tell me of his house, through the bathroom wall and beyond the main house. We’d talk long into the night; the nights were longer and the days shorter, there. If I grew frightened, he held me. If I missed my family, he held me. Gary never seemed to tire or need my help. Gary held me. And years passed.

I know years passed. My hair grew, my breasts grew. Gary… well, he didn’t change. Just me. I can’t remember needing to eat, or drink, or even urinate. I only remember the shortened days and endless nights, and the nightmares that raged forever. And Gary’s arms around me, comforting me, sending me back to sleep.

One night, I slept, dreamless. When I woke, Gary was still holding me, but he was cold. When I moved, his arms fell from around me and thumped to the floor.

I scrambled away from him, staring at his slumped body, swallowing my screams.

Splinters were stuck in his eyes, and a wire dangled from his throat where it had slid through the skin, severing the arteries and veins. But there was no blood.

Gary was dead.

I heard a giggle from the far side of the room, and though I recognized it, knew it was her, I could not turn and welcome Maya back into my life. Not now, not when she’d killed Gary.

She didn’t wait for me. They both came around in front of me, Joseph appeared from the shadows and took my hair in both his hands. Maya came toward me, looking just as she had the last time I’d laid eyes on her. She hadn’t grown. When she was close enough, I brought both legs up and kicked her—hard—in the stomach. Hard enough to knock both her, and Joseph behind me, off balance. Before Maya fell, she hit me, right between my eyes. Pain radiated from each socket as I stood and ran for the bathroom. Why is it so dark?

As I slammed the door behind me, I heard a click. I turned the tiny lock to keep Maya and Joseph from getting to me too quickly, and I felt it.

The door had opened. It was there, right beside the main door, and I’d leaned against it.

Everything slowed to a crawl; it was so dark! Seconds, minutes, hours, days seemed to pass while I tried to move through air as thick as cane syrup to get to that little door. It was beginning to close when I reached it. My fingers pinched in the hinges as I felt my way around it, my hand grasping the edges and holding it open while I squeezed through.

At that point I didn’t care what lay beyond, as long as it wasn’t Maya and Joseph.

I sat, curled and still, in the galley between the walls. I heard nothing from beyond, not even the ever present voices. Just silence. Finally, my nerve began to wane so I forced myself forward, crawling on hands and knees… hand out, down, wait. Knee forward, down, wait. The blackness of the galley terrified me, the silence terrified me… but what scared me most of all was emptiness beneath me. No shiny, glaring eyes or knitted brows with frozen screams lay there… in the blackness I could see nothing.

Finally, my right elbow ceased to rub against the lathe and studs, and I felt the walls carefully. Another door, but beyond it was… what? Nothing? So far as I could see there was nothing, not a blessed bit of light reached this corner of the hell I found myself in.

I went ahead anyway.

I am here now. I don’t miss Maya or Joseph. I sometimes miss Gary and the conversations we had, mostly his voice resonating against my ear as I leaned against his chest. I don’t know how long it’s been since I visited the house… since I visited there… When Mother found me lying in a pool of my own blood, outside my bedroom door, five years after I’d disappeared, she had me locked away. She brought me here. She told me Nanny had paid for me to stay here, at this wonderful institution.

Nanny? I didn’t remember a nanny in my life; no grandmother, no servant raising me. Just Mother. Cold chills raised the hair on my arms. Caught! Punished!

The doctor says I’m here for my own safety. The doctor says that whatever happened to me, I made sure I would never have to see those horrors again. If only he’d believe me. I didn’t take my eyes… Maya got them. I know Maya got them.

Days, hours, minutes, seconds. They all pass the same here, in the darkness.

Sometimes I can hear Maya whispering from behind the wall. She wants me to forgive her. She wants me to come back and play with her again. She says “nanny lady” has taken Joseph, and she’s all alone.

God save me, I want to go. I want to bring Maya back with me, back to play with the doctors and perhaps even… a little game with Mother.

I felt the wall last night. I found the bubble in the paint. It’s not a bubble after all, it’s a button. It’s calling me…

This short story is one of many in my collection, Into a Long Ago Future.

It is also continued in the Galleys Between series of novellas, available exclusively in digital formats.