Tell Me I'm Worthless(54)

You made him do something, didn’t you?

Yes.

Did he deserve it?

Yes.

What did you make him do?

The House doesn’t answer me.

Ila pushes open part of the fencing, which isn’t even properly secured.

“The construction stalled,” she said, “because the site manager apparently went nuts. He attacked some of the other men working there, threw tools at them.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

“Called them the n word. The official line was that he had a psychotic episode.”

“Hmm.”

Ila pushes through the gap she’s made and holds it open for me to follow. It feels so much the same as it did three years ago, pushing through the artificial border. But it is also completely different. This time we have context. We know what we’re in for, and we press onwards anyway, over the gulf. The grounds are thick with nettles and long grass. My hand is stung. I can feel the raised hive between my finger and thumb, and it stays there for five minutes before numbing. There is no longer a front door. The entrance is just an open maw now, a gaping hole which seems to swallow everything. The House might be allowing us to see it, but we can’t see inside there. Maybe, just maybe, I should have let Ila bring a torch. But the thought of her holding it would have made me panic.

“Should we go in?” I ask.

“We know the way, right? I’ve replayed that night a hundred times in my head. We know the way.”

I’m not so sure we do. Those corridors didn’t make sense. We only navigated them because the House wanted us to. But, I suppose, if the House wants us to get to the red room then we will get there. Ila grabs my hand and pulls me one last time into the dark.





We can see nothing at all at first. I can’t even see Ila, although she’s right in front of me, and I can even feel her hand firm on mine. The difference between having my eyes shut and open is nothing at all. I know where we are: standing in the entrance hall. I know that the dining room is off to one side, and the stairs are ahead. But whether any of these things are still intact is impossible to tell. The House could, for all I know, be entirely empty, with no floors left, just a great big cavernous void. A nothingness which surrounds us. Ila leads me forwards anyway. She is guiding me, but I get the horrible impression that something is guiding her in turn.

“The stairs are in front of us.”

Her voice cuts through the emptiness and breaks it. When she speaks, suddenly, I can see, only dimly at first but then with more clarity. I can see the stairs, and I can see that almost all of them are collapsed in on themselves. The bannister that gave Hannah a splinter is gone completely. Above us I can see the sickening sky through the roof, which isn’t there at all now. There are broken edges of it, and then nothing. All around us are parts of it, which, over time, have tumbled down and crashed, spreading broken tiles and brick and wood across the floor. Amongst all of this, I can see the corpses of birds and animals that must have wandered in through the unobstructed door and… been crushed by falling debris? I’m not sure. Some of them have been here for a while. Some of them seem so fresh that they could have died an hour ago. The smell of rot makes me want to gag. But through all of this there is a clear path, winding across the entrance hall and towards the stairs. And then, I can see, even as the stairs have collapsed, there are wooden planks laying up the length of them that someone could, if they were very careful, walk up. It would be hard to not fall. I guess they were put there during the attempt at construction work. Maybe. Or maybe you laid it out for us, House? A trail of breadcrumbs leading right to your oven.

I should leave. I should let go of Ila’s hand and run back out into the real world. But I wouldn’t be safe from it then, really. It has already been pushing into my life, through my walls, through my posters. Through my friends. Jon cutting his name into Sasha’s body repeatedly. Jon and every man like him cutting every woman he knows up like collage with an old Playboy magazine until they are regurgitated, rearranged and neat. When he looked at me in that room at that party with those eyes. They were your eyes, weren’t they, House? That was all you. You didn’t make him do it, but he let you in. I know. I know you have always had me, and, if I run out of here, you’ll always have me still. Ila and I… we never left this House. That’s the truth of it. Sure, we stumbled out into the light of day, but enough of us stayed within, and enough of it stayed within us, that there was no real escape at all. So I let Ila pull me along, deeper and deeper into you. She steps, gingerly, onto the planks.

“You go up first,” I say.

“Yeah, thanks. Very chivalrous.”

There are enough of the steps on each side that it’s possible to place one foot on there and the other on the hardwood plank. Ila’s arms stretch out either side of her, swaying a little, like a tightrope walker. I go up after her, doing the same. It doesn’t feel like you will let us fall. I do nearly trip at the last moment, but Ila holds me and stops me from tumbling back down the stairs. We’re standing on the landing. I can see it all, now, in detail, despite how dark it must be. It’s like we are in the middle of the daytime, although it must be close to midnight. And there they are, the doors. Doors, all along the length of the landing. I was worried this, too, might have rotted away, but it feels firm beneath me. All across it, obscuring the entrances to the doors, are more dead things. Badgers. Rats. Pigeons. Sprawled and still, limbs splayed out around them.