Tell Me I'm Worthless(44)

Her heart stopped when she saw what was chiseled into the wood next to that one. She stood up and stepped away from the words as if they were toxic to her. It had to be nothing, surely… some sick coincidence. Lots of people had the same name as her. It could be referring to anyone.

And yet. It said, Hannah you are home.

Even when she looked away from it, the words were there, in her head. Hannah you are home, Hannah you are home. She didn’t feel that she was home at all. She wanted to leave. There was something very, very wrong about this house, and she felt that if she didn’t leave now, she would never leave at all.

“Alice,” she said, “Ila, I want to go.”

Their murmuring had ceased, and the argument had, she guessed, been resolved. But there was no answer to her. She looked to her left, and then to her right, and there was no light at all, no sign of the torch beam.

“Hey!” she shouted, as loud as she could. It was a deep sin, she was sure, to shout here, but she had to – they had probably just wandered off, forgetting about her, always leaving her behind, always forgetting about her because she was small and, she secretly thought, they didn’t actually care, did they, they just liked having her there, they didn’t want her to leave, that’s why Alice hated her boyfriend, that’s why they had left her now alone in the dark and why they weren’t responding to her screaming for help at all.

“Help!” she shouted again.

The House gulped down her voice. It didn’t echo. Wherever they had gone, they couldn’t hear her. And like that, Hannah was lost. She turned to the direction she thought they had come from, the route that would lead her straight back to the first-floor landing. That would still be dark, but it would be somewhere she knew and maybe, just maybe, Hannah would be able to make her way down the stairs and out into the outside, which suddenly seemed like the safest place possible. She had to put her hand out to feel the wall, and it was good to know that it was there, something real. Her other hand gripped the right shoulder strap of her rucksack again. As she moved down the corridor, she felt the things carved into the wall running beneath her fingers. Her footsteps thumped beneath her. Every now and then, there would be a door. She couldn’t see it, but she could feel it with her hand. She already knew none of them would open. There was no point in even trying. The best way to go was straight on.

At the end of this corridor, Hannah was sure there would be the landing. The walls and the ceiling of the corridor felt violent compared to the open space of the landing, which was about to come, any moment, the landing would be there, she would stumble out into it and the air would be less dry in her throat. But there was only darkness. The corridor stretched on and on, longer than it had been before. Longer than it could logically be. The patterns beneath her hand started to feel familiar. It came to her then, although she wasn’t sure why or how it had landed in her head: this was the same stretch of corridor, over and over, looping like a Moebius strip. There was no end. There never would be.

She screamed, again, pointlessly. “Help!” She stood still and listened as the word was eaten up by the darkness. There was no presence around her, nothing behind or in front. Something wet was on her cheeks. She rubbed her eyes.

Stupid little girl, crying because she’s lost, stupid little girl.

Those words… it wasn’t clear if they were her own. They came to her like her own thoughts, but they had a voice which was not hers.

Every child gets lost, in the woods, in the supermarket. Hannah remembered this. She was six, and had been walking behind her mum, the bright lights and colours of capitalism reflecting in her eyes. And then, quite suddenly, her mum was gone. Little Hannah ran to a woman who she was sure looked like her, but the woman turned and it wasn’t her mum at all, it was some other woman with straw coloured hair. Her face, to Hannah, looked like an old leather sofa. “Are you lost?” she asked.

Again, Hannah put her hand out to the wall, and was shocked to find that it was now warm. Warm and alive. Hannah lent in and pressed her ear to it. There was a movement, from deep within the House. Shifting in and out. Deep breaths.

Hannah started to run, but her feet were unsteady. She ran without certainty of which direction she was headed in, and knowing, of course, that it didn’t matter one bit. It was dark as night behind her, but, suddenly, the way ahead seemed to be illuminated, if only very slightly. The walls, and the locked doors embedded in them, were visible to her. The wallpaper, peeling off in strips, the ceiling, cracked, the words and images on the floor and the wall. She could see them, slightly at first, but as she ran, nearly falling over her own feet, her heartbeat deafening in her head, they became clearer and clearer.

Hannah you are home.

She propelled herself as fast as she could, passing a violent, detailed carving of a woman with her eyes crossed out and her vagina being stretched open by some kind of medical instrument. Passing more words, bigger words, those same words, Hannah you are home, Hannah you are home. There were no more doors now, just walls, stretching out in front of her. There was only ahead, which was light, which was progress, and behind, which was dark, hallowed, cold. And that light which pulled her in was all red.

Then came the door. Up ahead. She stopped running, and nearly tumbled onto the floorboard with shock at its sudden existence. A door, in the distance, but definitely real, and not off to the side like the others had been. This one was a dead end to the corridor. It was open. Ajar. There was more of that same light, blazing through the crack, bright and red and glorious and living. It made her feel special. She let her bag slip from her shoulder onto the ground and left it there. As she walked now, with the words looping in spirals around the walls and floor and ceiling, the words repeating their welcome, their affirmation, Hannah you are home, Hannah you are home, Hannah you are home, Hannah you are home, Hannah you are home, twisting around her like comforting arms. The door opened fully, and she walked into the threshold of the room. The walls were bright with the red. They were entirely unblemished. Looking at them hurt, but she looked at them anyway. She felt safe, like she had crawled back inside the womb. The House had no electricity, but the lightbulb burned from the ceiling anyway. The room throbbed. The walls weren’t solid. The red settled on her, bathing her. The words were not written around the walls here, but they rattled in her head anyway, and they rang true. Yes, she was, Hannah was home.