Tell Me I'm Worthless(43)

“We should have all brought torches,” Hannah said, speaking to herself.

“Nah.” Alice was putting on a confident, cavalier attitude. “This way we can’t just go wandering off. We have to stick together.”

“I think you just like being the one in control,” murmured Ila.

It felt weird to speak loudly in the House. It felt as if they would have been breaking a taboo. Alice wanted to explore the kitchens, but the hallway that led there was impassable. The floorboards had rotted away, and parts of the ceiling had fallen in. Alice was disappointed, and worried this meant that anything on the first floor would be impossible to explore as well. She strode back out of the dining room, leaving the other two to hurry after her, both of them fearful of what it would mean to be stuck there without any light to guide them. They really, really should have brought more torches, or a lamp, or something. They got back to the entrance hall, and Alice was already halfway up the stairs.

“Shit!” called Ila, behind her.

Alice stopped. “What?”

“The stairs. Are they safe?”

Alice thought, and then jumped up, twice, on the stair she stood on. It creaked, and Hannah was sure it was going to collapse in, swallowing Alice whole. But it stayed.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, and kept walking up, leaving Ila and Hannah no choice but to go after her.

The stairs felt dangerously unsteady beneath her feet. They are going to break, they are going to break, the thought rattled inside her with every heartbeat. They are going to break and that’ll be it. She put her hand out to grab the handrail of the stairs, and then felt a splinter of wood push its way into her palm.

“Shit. Shitshitshit.” She stumbled up the last of the stairs.

Alice settled the light on her. “What’s wrong?”

“Fucking,” she held out her hand, “fucking splinter.”

She pulled it out, feeling the pain spike and then dull once the wood was gone. It wasn’t a big wound, and it stopped bleeding quickly, but she was uncomfortably aware, now, of her own hand, and the feeling of the blood pumping through her. And the spot of bright, wet red glimmered in the torchlight. The House watched the three girls, and a thin line of water dripped from the ceiling. If it had been raining that night, it could have just been rain. But it wasn’t. It was dry outside. The House was salivating.

There were doorways, growing out from the landing they stood on, as organised and logical as the ivy that covered the walls. Alice let the torch beam settle on each and every doorway, before moving to the next. Each one was open, with no door and no sign that there had ever been one, although there must have been. The light reached a short way down, illuminating floorboards, walls, ceilings. They were identical. Each and every corridor. Alice chose, apparently randomly. If she had some way of truly deciding, she had not consulted the others. So they went down the corridor to the left of them. It was just as good as any of the others. The only sounds were their breaths, and their feet on the floor, and the creaking of the wood as they stepped on it.

The light played over the wallpaper on each side of them, and Hannah realised that there were signs that people had been in here, which surprised her. And then she chastised herself for even being surprised. Of course, a great big abandoned building would have had people break inside, just like they had. And whoever had come here had left evidence of their presence. The wallpaper was rotting away, but on the pieces which remained, and on the brickwork beneath it, people had carved things in crude, jagged hands. Dicks, of course. Dicks in a variety of situations. Hannah passed dicks spewing cum out from their tips, dicks poking into assholes and cunts, dicks going into mouths, dicks going into the bodies of girls, girls with Xs over their eyes. There were double lightning bolts, some of them so large they reached from the floor to the ceiling. And there were swastikas, some of which had been aborted halfway through, some fully formed. It wasn’t just like this on the walls. The wooden floors beneath them, which might, once, have been covered in carpet, were covered in words, some of them old, some of them new. She tried to read them as the three girls stopped to inspect the corridors, which had split into two. While Ila and Alice argued under their breath about which direction they should head in, Hannah dropped down to the floor to see what had been written on it.

“You chose the direction we went in,” Ila murmured.

“Yes, because I have the light,” snapped Alice, loudly, too loudly. The peace was disturbed.

“Just because you have the fucking torch doesn’t mean… look, both these branches are identical, it doesn’t even matter, right?”

They were pressed close to each other. Hannah felt, strangely, that her exclusion from the argument was intentional; neither asked for her opinion on where they should go next. There were doors all the way down this corridor, and Alice had tried to open each and every one as they passed them, but none of them opened. The argument kept going, slightly out of clear earshot, and Hannah looked down at the floorboards. The words on them were different from the graffiti on the walls. These seemed more articulate. Sick so sick, went one, older piece, carved deeply. Sick so sick so sick. Next to it, in much smaller, neater words, they have forgotten have they not they forget what keeps them here safe from the outsiders. I will rise up again. That one was written a lot, in lots of different hands, ones seeming newer and ones seeming far older. I will rise up again in the new dawn, one of them continued. It will be a glad day.