Tell Me I'm Worthless(55)

“What doorway is it?”

Ila walks towards one with a dead fox curled in front of it.

“This one.”

“How do you know?” I ask, but I don’t expect an answer, and one doesn’t come.

We step over the fox. Its eyes are open, but they aren’t there. Something has pecked at them and pulled them out. The corridor stretches down. I can see it. But apart from that, and the dead animals which scatter the length of it, it is the same as it always was. The same graffiti in the walls and on the floor. The same doors, positioned occasionally, always locked. Beneath our feet I spot the cadaver of a cat that has had its back cut open, and its spine pulled out. Some of the dead things are so old that they are just bones, or have become dried, mummified and unidentifiable shapes. And the smell. It grows stronger with every step. Ila’s hold on my hand tightens.

I can hear something moving at the end of the corridor. We keep walking and turn at the junction to see a bird flapping. It’s standing on the floor, and then it takes off into the air, but there is no room to move around. It just thumps into the wall and drops to the floor again. It’s a crow. It looks at us and caws, loudly. I could swear that it sounds scared. It’s just as anxious as we are. We walk towards it, and then when it’s close it jumps up again. Ila nearly falls into me. She lets out a little scream that someday in the distant past, I would have teased her for. The crow flies up, and then loops further down the corridor, slamming into the ceiling, the wall, and the floor repeatedly. It’s flying blind, I realise. We can see in the dark but the crow can’t, the House has decided not to let it.

“We should follow it,” Ila says, quietly, in my ear.

“Why?”

“Because it is being pulled to the same place as we are.”

We turn the corner at the end of this hallway and see the crow sitting in the middle of the floor. It hops towards us, and peers at us curiously. Can it see now? Can it hear us?

There is a door at the end of the corridor, and it’s open, just slightly. Red light is seeping out through the crack, infecting the rest of the hallway. The bird turns from us and hops towards the door. It looks back again, as if to say, come on, I know why you’re here, and then it flaps its wings into the room. Ila and I look at each other.

“I think we’re supposed to follow,” I say.

“That’s the room.” Ila looks scared now, far more so than I expected her to be.

“It’s why we’re here, right?”

“I know. But. Alice, I can feel it. I can hear it. Can you hear it, too?”

“Yes.”

“What does it say?”

“It told me it hurt, when they tried to convert it. What does it say to you?”

Ila starts to walk backwards, away from me and away from the open doorway.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, under her breath. “I’m so sorry, Alice.”

“What does it say, Ila?” I don’t let her run. I grab her and hold her in case she tries.

“It asked me to bring you here. And I did what it said. It wanted you, and it said it would let me go if I brought you here. Let go of me!”

She hits me in the face, and I spin away, into the nearest wall. There are words written deep into the fabric matter of the wall. Welcome home Alice, Welcome home Ila, Welcome home.

“It won’t let you go!” I shout after her, and she stops. “Even if you try to leave. You know this corridor will just loop around back to the room, right? It wants us here.”

“But it said…”

“And you believed it? After watching what it did to Hannah? You still did what it asked?”

Ila turns around to me.

“So what do we do?”

“We follow the crow. We go in, together. And we don’t let it turn us against each other.”

She laughs a cold laugh without humour. “And then what?”

“I don’t know. But we’re here. And the room is there, waiting for us. And you took us here, so you owe it to me now to come with me.”

Ila sighs, deeper than she has ever sighed. She could still run. Run so far that the House vanishes into the distance. Move cities. She wanted to move city, after the first time she escaped. So did I. But we didn’t. And if you asked either of us why we stayed here, we’d have no answer at all. I think that if we left, it would just have pulled us back again, though. She swallows and shuts her eyes tight, and when she opens them again she starts to walk forward. The light from the room is getting brighter. I know, in there I will find England’s green and pleasant land, pasture, sick pasture, the festering cunt of this country, the flower of evil at its heart, when the Nazis won the war Winston Churchill hanged himself from the rafters of Downing Street rather than admit defeat, when he hanged himself his cock became erect (that happens when a body is hanged), and all the little children came in poked at his cock with sticks and laughed that the old fool was dead and gone. Fuck, I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m broken, but I’m not alone, because she’s here, and you’re here, and Hannah lays ahead of me in the near distance, calling out voicelessly. We open the door, and the red light fills up our eyes, the brightest thing you’ve ever seen, sun in a village on an August day, flowers sprouting in the flowerbeds around the village green, the village they tore down the social housing for, the social housing over the road, torn down, to build this little idyllic blue heaven, God love us, God love us. They didn’t tear down a village to build those flats. I need to think straight. I can’t become irrational. I have to think straight and move forward, even as the door shuts behind us, and again, there’s nothing on the other side but the end of the world. And in here, the red is vivid, and the lightbulb hangs like a star, and Hannah is nowhere to be seen. The bird that led us into the room has gone, it flew off into the English countryside I think.