Tell Me I'm Worthless(45)

Alice and/or Ila


Hannah had been there one moment, and then, when they turned back, after deciding on a direction to go, she was gone.

Ila swore.

Alice pointed the torch down the other branch of the corridor, but there was no sign of her. She turned and pointed it back the way they came, but still, no Hannah. If she had walked off somewhere, it was beyond the reach of the torchlight. Ila was still standing behind her, the constant stream of “fuck, fuck, fuck,” weirdly reassuring. Ila, at least, was there, and as long as Alice could hear her, she knew that.

“Hannah!” shouted Alice. There was no answer.

“We have to turn back,” said Ila. “She could be back on the landing.”

“She could just as easily have gone down the other branch. And if we go back to the landing, we’ll be leaving her there, getting further away from her.”

“Well, shit,” said Ila. She pushed Alice as hard as she could. “Fuck you! This is your fault!”

“How? She wandered off!”

“No!” Ila’s eyes were wild, brimming with tears. “No, no, this was your stupid, virtue signalling idea, that coming here could mean something, that this would represent something, because you couldn’t admit that you just thought it would be funny to do some breaking and entering. And now Hannah isn’t here.”

“No, she isn’t,” agreed Alice, doing her best to keep her voice calm. “And every second we stand still she stays lost.”

“So where do we go?”

Alice thought. “If she went back to the landing, then she’s out of this maze of corridors, right? But if she went deeper in, then… we should go deeper.”

Neither of them wanted to talk about the obvious thing, which was that Hannah wasn’t calling for them, or responding to their calls. But they turned. They had been standing in the way of one of the two branches, so there was only one she could have gone down, if she hadn’t headed back. And they started to walk. Ila put her hand out and grasped Alice’s fingers tightly, despite how angry she was at her. They followed the corridor, looking at the circle of light. Every now and then they called for Hannah. Sometimes, Alice would stop, silently, and try one of the doors they passed, but they were, of course, all locked, or rusted shut. They kept going, kept calling, following the corridor as long as they could, passing countless slurs cut into the walls on either side of them.

“Hannah!” shouted Ila.

No answer.

At first, they thought the light had found a dead end, and their stomachs dropped. But then Ila realised it was actually a corner. It got closer. On the wall ahead, somebody, somewhen, had written fucking bitches with a blade.

They turned the corner and there it was. The corridor stretched ahead, and ended, abruptly, with the door. Alice’s torch showed it clearly. It was ajar, and inside was darkness. They walked faster, hands still joined, their footsteps the only things in the world, the door rushing towards them. They didn’t stop to see what was written on the walls around them, if anything was written on them at all. Alice pushed the door open, terrified about what she would find in there.

It was dark, and she moved the torchlight across the room. She saw the desk, pushed against the wall. The door, the second door, shut tightly on the other side of the room. Hannah was standing opposite with her back to them, pressing her face into the wallpaper. Her arms outstretched, palms turned inwards.

“Hannah,” breathed Ila.

Hannah turned towards them. She was pale in the beam of the torchlight. As pale as a ghost.

“Hello Ila,” she said, in a quiet voice. “Are you okay?”

“What happened?”

Ila wanted to go to her and embrace the girl, but she didn’t. There was something wrong. Hannah crackled like static. She looked up at the ceiling. Her face was blank, yet Alice couldn’t help but project emotion onto it, reading hurt into Hannah’s motionless mouth and her wide eyes. Those eyes searched for something on the expanse of the ceiling before settling on the single anachronistic bulb which hung from its wire lifelessly. She stared at it, blinked, and the lightbulb was illuminated. Alice dropped the torch onto the floor. Her eyes had grown used to the gloom and the torchlight, so now, with the room properly lit, it felt like she was staring into the heart of an explosion. She had to screw her eyes shut from the pain before she could slowly open them again, and it was still too much, really, it still hurt her eyes. Ila had to put her hands up over her face until she was used to the jarring brightness. The torch rolled a little as it hit the floor, and then stayed still, its beam still on but utterly useless now. Hannah hadn’t even blinked.

The room seemed to come alive around them. The red of the walls intruded in on the space, dribbling and pooling beneath their feet, washing everything clean. The walls themselves may have been pressing in to crush them, or they may have been far off, barely visible in the distance, or they may have been both at once. And the ceiling, was that pressing down from above, or was it as tall and wide as the open sky?

By all rights Hannah had been staring straight at the unshaded lightbulb long enough to have caused herself some serious damage, but she didn’t seem to mind. She just looked up. Her mouth twisted upwards in a half smile. Then her retinas flicked down and she beheld the two of them. There were tears beginning to well up and wet her cheeks. She looked at them, and Alice could have sworn her eyes, which had once been blue, were being diluted with the room’s colour. Going red, gradually, and growing brighter too.