Nothing But Blackened Teeth(13)

Three seconds.

“Let go.”

I couldn’t hear the others anymore, but the floorboards throbbed like they had a heart carved into their grain.

Lin held on. “God damn it, Cat. I’m not the enemy.”

Four, five.

I loaded a breath into my lungs like it was a silver bullet, the air burning between my teeth. Six. Seven. Eight. Between every second, I eased another millimeter forward, let myself slide between the sine waves of pain, Lin’s grasp slackening in increments. At that point, it was just about ego, mine and his, daring each other to break.

“Cat—”

The fusuma opposite us rolled open, rocketing so hard along the walls it slammed into the wall.

We jumped, Lin nearly torquing my hand the wrong way. It was Talia, a shoulder leaned against the frame, the mass of her hair squirming around her face, her eyes black. The light from our phones were three xenon squares, mirrored in each pupil. She grinned at us. “You wouldn’t believe what I found.”

My breath shallowed to sips.

Something was wrong.

It wasn’t just the fact that Talia had bolted so unexpectedly out of that door, although that was at least some of it. It was the way she did it. No matter how many times I turned the thought over, looking for a new angle, the same image kept coming up: a fishing line rolled down her throat, tracing the ripples of her intestinal tract, the hook at its end crooking up and out through her navel, bent like a finger calling her onward.

“What’d you find?” The corridor behind her peeled away into a hell of opened doors, closing into a deep indigo murk. Something was wrong. Somewhere, choking in alcohol and stress hormones, there was a piece of me that knew why.

“You wouldn’t believe it. Seriously. Like, oh my god—”

“Was it the ghost girl?” Lin interrupted.

“No. Shit. I wish. But it’s almost as good. I can’t believe—” Talia strained her hair through her fingers and rubbed the ends together. Her expression was exultant. “You have to see it.”

Phillip loped out of the gloom, his smartphone bleaching his blond hair to cartilage colors, his skin to polished bone china. A second later, Faiz came up from behind, his breath thready, whistling between his teeth as he shambled to where Talia stood, the look on her face halfway between worship and a woman’s love for her dog.

Faiz walked up to her and they sank together into an embrace. I glanced away, an itching in the skin below my right eye. The muscle fluttered. My head swam, full of static again, like someone’d tuned the inside of my head to a broadcast decades dead.

“Why the hell did you run off like that? What were you thinking?”

“Sorry. I know. I just—I was excited.”

Faiz, shouting: “You could have been hurt!”

“I know, I know.” Talia waved away his concern, her eagerness a knife working under all of our jabber, all of our fears, cutting away the parts that didn’t fit what she needed. Feverish. “I’m sorry. But seriously, it’s fine. Nothing happened. It’s all good. And it doesn’t matter. I need you to follow me. You have to see this.”

Lin’s fingers met with mine, familiar. I ran my eyes over the lacquered rail along which the fusuma had moved, crossed it to where it met with the adjoining wall before I flicked my gaze to the opposite end. There weren’t any hinges.

No grooves, no indentations, no clever mechanism to accommodate the moving panels. The rail looked ornamental, was ornamental.

It didn’t make sense.

“No offense to the happy couple here.” Lin coughed into his free hand. “But assuming that there’s something actually here, how the fuck do we know that Talia isn’t possessed by some crazy—”

“There wasn’t a door,” I said.

It had been a wall. It was still a wall. But no one seemed to conjecture the problem save for me, and no one was listening.

“How did you get in there? There wasn’t a door.”

“What are you talking about?” Talia laced an arm around Faiz’s, full of absolvement for my outburst, chin tipped to a modest angle. She rocked the fusuma back and forth. “It’s right here.”

“But it wasn’t there a second ago. We went through every room on this floor and the one below. That door didn’t exist. The hallways. All of it. It didn’t exist when we first came in.”

“You’re drunk,” said Talia.

“Please don’t go with her,” I said, starting forward.

Lin folded his arm around my shoulders. “I got her. You do what you want.”

“You can’t go in there.”

Phillip started towards Lin and me, palm turned up. “We shouldn’t leave these—”

“We’re fine.” Lin bared a snarl. “You guys go do protagonist shit.”

“Come on.” Talia wrapped both Faiz and Phillip in smiles, a hand in each of hers, and walked them into the mouth of the house.

“There w-n’t a door. They neesh to come back. They arsh goin’ to get themselves killed. Fuck.” It wouldn’t come out right: the words muffled, my tongue suddenly too big, a nerveless flap of muscle, stringing sick onto the floor.

“It’s fine. It’s just a stupid old house.” Lin rubbed absent circles into the muscles bracketing my spine, right where the brain stem eases into the neck. “They’re going to come back spooked and that’s it. Chill.”