When the last of the shadow clinging like disease to the pale of her freckled skin finally bleeds away, her gaze lifts. But when it does, the maze is gone. The green hedge, the stone walls, the basin and the grass beneath her. They’re all gone. Still crumpled on the floor, she scuttles backwards, gasping when her back collides with something hard. As if she had been struck, she turns, scrambling to her feet with her hands raised in trembling fists out in front of her. But it is only a wall, white and sterile but dingy with age. Her hands drop like stones to her sides and she turns in a circle to take in the tiny room. Four walls, oh how she hated walls, a door and a plain ceiling. No windows, and she hated that too. Against one wall was a dusted oval mirror, a white ceramic sink with a scratchy hand-towel tossed over one side. For a long moment she did nothing but stare at that mirror, relieved that she seemed to be standing in a place in the tiny bathroom that made it impossible for her to see her own reflection. But then curiosity got the best of her, as it so often does, and her sneakered feet were scuffling across the white tile floor.
Her hands gripped the edges of the sink leaving smudges of red and brown along the smooth ceramic as she lifted her green eyes reluctantly to the oval piece of glass. The face that stared back was at once so achingly familiar, like a face she’d seen before in a dream or a nightmare, and yet so violently unfamiliar, so wholly wrong she thought she might throw-up again. “That isn’t me.” She said quietly, a mangled whisper, watching the mouth of the reflection move to shape the same words. “Not me.” They said again together.
Her bright indigo hair was tied back in a ponytail, messy and unkempt but at least it stayed out of her face. As if possessed, her fingers flew to the ponytail, to the band holding it together, and pulled it free. When her hair fell around her face it hid the blood around her mouth, the blood on her chin and down the front of her shirt. It even hid the gash across her throat, the wound not-Erebor had left with the edge on an entirely real knife. Abandoning her hair, she grabbed the towel. With her other hand she turned on the hot water, soaked the cloth, and then brought it to her face. For the next several minutes, those green eyes locked on the reflection, she scrubbed the blood from herself until her skin was pink and raw and new. The frantic scrubbing had opened up the cut on her throat, but she left it alone, ignored the tear drops of red as they puckered and gathered near the edges of the cut open flesh. “Not me.” She said again, turning off the water and dropping the muddy red towel into the sink basin.
But then her reflection smiled back at her, a malicious smile with blood glimmering in the cracks of her ghostly white teeth. “Of course I’m you.” The reflection said arrogantly, flipping a hand impatiently at the nothingness in the mirror. “All of this is you. The blood is definitely you.” She smiled wide again, those glittering green eyes flashing dangerously as the overhead light flickered uncertainly. Malis swore the shadows grew in her peripheral. She didn’t, couldn’t, look away from her reflection, though. “No, I didn’t ask for any of this. I don’t want any of this.” Malis argued quickly, dismay flashing like fear across her face. But her reflection seemed unperturbed, unconvinced, as she cocked an eyebrow pointedly at Malis. “Okay, yeah, so we both know that’s a lie. I was there when you hesitated at drinking the water, I felt how badly you wanted to resist your humanity. You can’t lie to me, I am you.” The reflection leaned forward abruptly, stopped only by the glass separating them, her eyes flat and black and her smile stony. “We love the darkness, we live for the blood on our hands.”
Malis turned then, so abruptly she tripped over her own feet, and slammed open the narrow wooden door. Even as she slipped through and closed it behind her, she could hear the laughter of the reflection rattling the pane of glass. Worse was the weight of her truths as they settled like stones on Malis’ shoulders.
She had loved the darkness.
It had suited her like nothing else could.
The laughter faded completely as soon as the door had closed, and only then did Malis stop to look at the space around her. She stood in a hall, it was long and narrow and poorly lit, and there were a few doors on either side. The one she had come through was a plain wood door, and when she touched the handle she found it had already locked. Behind her, peeking through the darkness, were a red door and a black door, and she turned from both instead heading further down the hall. Each door she passed she reached out a cautious hand to the handle, checking to see if it was locked or accessible. Nearly every door was locked. But at the end of the hall there was only a wall with one single door. She felt reluctant to check it because if this, too, was locked then she would have to go back to the red and black doors, and the idea of going back through, of starting all over, it tied knots in her stomach. But as her hand reached for the door, those fingers wrapping around cool metal, she felt it give with a click as the door swung open to greet her like a gaping, hungry mouth.
She went inside.
But as soon as her foot crossed the threshold, she was falling, falling, landing with a splash in what appeared to be a room filled with blood. It was impossible to tell how deep it really was, but her feet couldn’t find a bottom and it was far too thick to swim through. Like quicksand it pulled her under, holding her ankles and her waist, pulling her deeper even as a flicker of overhead light revealed a platform just a yard away. She struggled for it, but the hot blood splashed against her face, it filled her eyes and her mouth and she could hardly breathe for the way she gagged around it. But then a hand was reaching for her, an arm, a body, an entire person with Lena’s uncertain face. “Malis, grab my hand!” Lena said, and the blood still poured from a wound in her neck. “Hurry!” Malis lunged forward and her fingers tangled with Lena’s, the grip solidifying as she pulled herself closer. “Lena I shouldn’t have done that, I-” but her voice trailed off and the apology that had been forming there turned to dust on her tongue. She wasn’t sorry. She felt regret, revulsion, but not remorse. Lena pulled her closer and finally Malis could almost touch the platform. She reached for it, curling her fingers around the wood to pull herself out. But before she had a chance to do so, Lena let go. Malis felt her eyes jump to the girls pale face, and as her gaze lifted she saw the glint of the blade as Lena plunged the knife into Malis’ forehead. Her fingers lost their grip just as darkness appeared at the edge of her vision, pooling and filling until there was nothing else. Like a stone, she sank unconscious to the bottom of the blood-pool.
When she awoke with a gasp it was impossible to know how much time had passed. But as her eyes opened and her gaze lifted to the white tile floor and dingy white walls, she knew exactly where she was. The sink and mirror were in the same place, the scratchy hand-towel untouched at the edge of the sink. There was no blood, no filth, no sign that Malis had been here before. But she knew. Her reflection appeared suddenly in the mirror even though Malis hadn’t moved from where she woke crumpled in the corner. “You couldn’t even tell her you were sorry.” Her reflection said in a triumphant sing-song voice. “That’s why we’re here Malis, because we deserve this.” The reflection inched closer, pressed her hands against the other side of the mirror, her smile widening even as blood seeped over her lips. “Welcome to Hell, you’ve earned it.”
Like a knife had been plunged into her head again, she sank uselessly to the floor, her face pressed flush against the cool tile. She rolled away from the mirror, offering only her back, and let her eyes fixate on the veins between the tiles on the floor. Her knees tucked to her chest, her arms around them, and then she closed her eyes as she gave into the nothingness, the darkness that had waited for her earlier in her peripheral. “You win.” She said, she whispered, the sound like wind through brittle leaves. “I belong here.”
MALIS
makai x oksana