by Alyssa Wees
“Are you okay?” Rose says through the door, and it’s nearly the thousandth time she’s asked me that since I woke up this morning. I don’t answer, swirling water in my mouth instead.
When I open the door a second later, she comes in and immediately presses the back of her always-icy hand to my always-hot forehead. I’m tall but she’s taller, and she stoops her wiry frame down a little to level her eyes with mine. Her long golden hair is still pinned in a high bun from her ballet class, her bare shoulders spotted with pale freckles, her blue eyes blinking too fast, too frequently. It’s strange, how we can look nothing alike and still be related, sisters only a year and a half apart. In almost every way, even below the surface, she is morning and I am midnight.
Her skin grows warmer as she lends me her chill. “I don’t think you should go to the attic,” she says quietly, peering into my face. “I think you should stay with me.”
“I’m sure Ren would be happy to sleep in my bed to keep you company,” I say. “Or Raisa, if you ask very, very sweetly.”
“It’s not the same, though.” She sighs, sucking in one cheek and chewing on it. “How long will you be up there?”
I breathe, in and in and in, stalling. There are a thousand true answers to that question, but none of them will make her feel better.
I do not say, I don’t know.
I do not say, Indefinitely.
I do not say, Forever.
“You could come with me,” I say instead, even though I know it’s an empty offer. I mean, this is Rose I’m talking to. Rose, who would follow me anywhere in the world I wanted to wander—except at night. Rose, who keeps fresh batteries near her bed for when her night-light burns out. Rose, who often sleeps with her eyes half-open and the curtains fully drawn because even the insides of her own eyelids are too dark.
She removes her hand from my head, and already I feel too hot without it there.
“You know how colors aren’t really there in the dark?” she says, reaching up to unwind her bun, pulling pin after pin out of her hair to make a haphazard pile next to the sink. “I think it’s that way with beauty too. That’s why monsters dwell in darkness—because ugliness doesn’t need light to exist.”
My heart squeezes hard as I parse her words like a riddle.
Just yesterday, my sisters and I decided to spend the entire day together at the beach. When we ran out the front door on our way to the shore, I spotted something in the street: a butterfly, a huge one, tipped on its side, its black and blue and violet wings fluttering uselessly, its little legs scrabbling to right itself. In our sleepy town, there wasn’t much traffic in the late morning, and I crossed the road to where the butterfly wriggled on the edge of the hot pavement. I crouched down to assess it, to ascertain whether its struggle was real and not conjured by my volatile imagination. Renata ran right past, smiling at the sky, unaware of anything below the soft shelf of clouds high above our heads and the warm wind skimming her cheeks, the siren song of the waves smacking the sand like the ocean licking its lips with a watery tongue.
“Don’t touch that thing with your bare hands!” Raisa called as she sprinted by me. She flipped around to skip backward as she spoke. “Germs, disease, death!” Then she laughed and turned back around, to run after Renata.
The butterfly was real, then, and I made a scoop with my hands, unsure how to proceed, worrying that picking it up would only cause more damage. I couldn’t quite tell what was wrong with it, other than that its wings, flapping madly, didn’t seem to catch the air, to lift it off the ground. I vacillated, its antennae twitching. Should I shovel it up, or—
A shoe slammed down onto the bug, a flip-flop squish. I teetered backward, catching myself with my hands in a crab-crawl position. Looking up, I blinked at Rose, who dragged the bottom of her shoe along the pavement, wiping off the varicolored viscera of the smashed butterfly.
I stared and stared at her, unmoving, even as the smooth pavement scorched my palms, even as the sunlight knifed into my eyes, the world becoming blurred and metallic around the edges.
“I ended its suffering,” she said in an exuberant hush, her yellow hair shining, her bathing suit as red as the flush in her cheeks. She tilted her head to the side, as if she couldn’t comprehend why I might be upset, why I didn’t understand.
“I was going to move it out of the way, Rose,” I said finally, pushing myself to my feet. My knees cracked as I straightened them. I wrapped my fingers around her wrist. I wanted to make her feel the hurt, just a little, and my hands were still smarting from the heat of the road. “I was going to save it.”
“I ended its suffering,” she said again, not shaking off my hand as I thought she might. Her breath came very fast, and her fingers flexed and curled, flexed and curled. Her eyes never left mine. “It wasn’t beautiful anymore.”
“It was always going to be beautiful,” I replied coolly, “no matter what.”
Rose shook her head.
It wasn’t beautiful anymore. Her words echo inside me, joining with the present.
Ugliness doesn’t need light to exist.
That is why Rose despairs of the dark: she would rather look her monsters full in the face, would rather know their exact size and shape, than to acquiesce to the wildness of her imagination, caught in that shadow-swathed place where her mind can conjure the very worst things, where her fear can fester and distort.
“Well, I think it’s the opposite, actually,” I say, folding my arms and leaning on the bathroom sink. “I think there’s beauty in the things we can’t see but that we still know are there. Like wind, or music.”
She says nothing, dislodging the last of the thousand yellow bobby pins that were holding her bun in place, and letting her hair fall around her shoulders. Her fingers curl around the edge of the counter as she stares at her reflection in the mirror, barely blinking. Then, after a long moment, she turns to me and smiles. Like a winter sun, bright and cold at once.
“Go,” she says gently. “You look like you haven’t slept for a week.”
“Wow, thanks,” I say with a little laugh, pushing off the ceramic and stepping into the hallway. “Sweet dreams. I love you infinitely.”
She smiles brighter. “Infinitely.”
As I’m walking toward the attic, Mom and Dad come upstairs and give me hugs like I’m suddenly moving far, far away.
“I love you,” Dad says to me, before turning to blow a kiss to each of my sisters, Rose in the bathroom and Renata and Raisa in the room they share. “And you and you and you.”
“I love you too,” I say, before quickly slipping into my room. With a glance at Gabrielle, who pointedly looks away like she knows I want privacy, I change into a pair of sleep shorts and a soft old T-shirt, listening as Renata says her usual prayers in her room next to mine—loudly, in her high-tide voice, churning and exultant, because she believes this is the only way her prayers will be heard.
“Dear water, wind, and stars! Dear fire, frost, and stone!” she says now as I tug my shirt down and grab my pillow. “Send us your crash and your splash and your whoosh and your bang! Send us your flash and your snap and your shake! Please watch over us and keep us safe! It’s the darkest night yet, and I never want to sleep again. Amen, amen, amen.”
“If you don’t go to sleep, I’ll prick your finger until you do,” Raisa grumbles, her words reaching me through their half-open door.
“That won’t work on me,” Renata says, her voice back to low tide. “I am not the princess in this story.”
“Well, obviously. But the spindle doesn’t have to be magical, my dear,” Raisa says, mock-sweetly. “Blood loss will work just as well.”
Renata laughs, a quick, cracking sound, and there’s a soft smack as Raisa launches a pillow at her. I step quietly from my room, wishing that falling asleep were that easy, like a spell: a prick and a sigh and then nothin
g but dreams.
My sisters finally settle into silence as I hold my pillow to my chest and head to the narrow staircase at the end of the hall, past the bathroom and my parents’ bedroom. Gabrielle is at my side, as always, and not for the first time, I wish I could tell her how grateful I am for her constant company and how her growls echo in my chest, the way the pain in my palms matches the prickle in her paws when she steps on something thorny. Our odd connection makes me feel less alone.
It’s been eight years since Gabrielle trotted out from the woods behind our house and came right up to the back door as if she belonged inside with the rest of us. Her very sudden and very confident arrival was strange, to be sure, and was made even stranger by the fact that there are no woods behind our house except for the ones I see in my vision. I thought Gabrielle would disappear when the woods did—but somehow, miraculously, she didn’t, and I’m glad she’s here with me tonight.
We climb together, up and up and up, up to the attic, to the room that will relieve me of my dream—and hopefully my visions too.
My foot finds the top step, and I clutch the pillow more closely, my elbows clasped tightly to my body, fitting into the curve of my waist. Even with the door here wide open, I don’t think I can extend my arms straight out to the sides without my fingertips jamming into the narrow walls. The light from the hallway below barely reaches us, but I know what is here. There’s a bed near the door, and across the small space is a dresser with three crooked drawers, a floor lamp, and a nightstand heaped with books whose spines are cracked, mostly biographies of royalty throughout history: the Romanovs, Nefertiti, Empress Dowager Cixi, the House of Medici. I’m coming here to sleep, not to read, but it makes me feel better to have them close. Comfort books, like comfort food.
But the best thing about the room is that there are no windows.
Gabrielle trots farther inside, and I shut the door. Its hinges give a rusted rasp, and the room collapses into total darkness, the space swollen with an unbroken shadow. For several seconds I blink, shivering, but not because it’s cold. I think, If beauty is banished from darkness, then I am the ugliest thing here.
I fall backward onto the bed, and the springs gasp, then sigh. I want to fall directly asleep, to skip the restless period of waiting for sleep to come. Gabrielle leaps onto the bed, and, like a thrown stone bouncing over a lake, I feel her relief rebounding across my ribs, relief that the sheets are soft and that there is nothing to frighten us here.
Or maybe that’s my own relief. We have held each other up for so long that sometimes I can’t discern the difference between us.
I lie on my side, and Gabrielle curls into the crook of my knees.
It is so, so dark.
And still I can’t sleep.
Gabrielle can’t either, so she stands and slinks up to my pillow. I reach out and pet the coarse fur on the back of her neck as she lies down beside my head, keeping my thoughts warm.
I try to swallow but my mouth is dry, and my fingers are scrunched in Gabrielle’s fur. Her unease collides with my own, two storm fronts crashing, and I’m alone even though she’s here, because she’s part of me and doesn’t count.
This room doesn’t feel safe the way I thought it would. I can’t see the walls, and if I can’t see them, how do I even know they’re there? I feel as though I’m spinning in space, unmoored. Dizzy. Lost.
I can’t sleep.
I can’t sleep.
I can’t sleep.
In the peculiar quiet of the absolute dark, I sit up in bed, cross-legged, wondering if it was a mistake to come here. Wondering if, maybe, even this darkness cannot help me escape myself.
I’m so deep in these thoughts that it takes me a few minutes to notice it: the darkness, breathing. The darkness itself is breathing.
Or.
Someone is breathing in the darkness.
I don’t know which frightens me more.
It’s exactly like in my dream, except now I’m awake. Holding my own breath, and silently urging Gabrielle to do the same, I hear it: long drag in, short whoosh out.
Again…
And again…
And again.
Gabrielle snarls once, then goes silent.
For an absurd second, I think the breath belongs to a small bird. Trapped in the top of our house, frantic for escape—the whisper of wings, the flutter of feathers, tiny eyes squinted, the click of a closing beak.
But no, this is not a bird. Maybe it’s the house, then, the walls and the roof and the floorboards settling, trying to get comfortable. Like me, maybe the house is restless, blue lips and sleeplessness, plagued with nightmares of wind and fire, of gutted rooms and windows cracking like bones.
But it is not that either.
I stare into the unwavering dim. I want to say something, to give the dark a name so that it won’t be so monstrous, so grim and devouring. But I can’t think what.
Maybe, though—maybe it’s just my sister, come to beg me to return to our room because she misses me. Because she can’t sleep without me near. And maybe, maybe I need her too.
“Rose?” I whisper at last. Even my heart is quiet, listening.
“No,” a voice says, cutting through the darkness. A voice not my own, and certainly not my sister’s. A voice like a syringe stabbing my skin, quick and clean and deep. The voice of a boy. “Not Rose,” he says.
A scream implodes in my throat, choking me as I swallow it back down. Sinuous terror spills through my veins, electric. I am up and off the bed, stumbling, clambering for the switch on the lamp, when a hand—a human hand—touches my wrist, gently. Hot fingertips graze my wild pulse.
“Wait,” says the voice, the boy, the darkness. “Please.”
I wrench my wrist away from his cautious grasp, my heart pounding as I stand still, so close I feel his breath trail across my skin. Gabrielle curls herself around my leg and growls, snapping her jaw in warning. I hear the click of her teeth and know that if the boy does not back away, Gabrielle will bite him until he does.
“I really must beg that you stay,” he says quietly, and his breath skims my cheek from above. I step back, away from what must be the lamp before me, even though I can’t see it. After a moment he sighs with relief, and I back up until my spine presses against the door to the stairs, my hand clenching the knob behind my back. Even if we were at opposite ends of the small room, though, we would still be close.
“Please, my sky,” he says more urgently now.
“What do you want?” I hiss. “Who are you?”
“Who am I?” The intruder speaks slowly, evenly. “Oh, I think you know, Rhea Ravenna.”
He casts my name like a spell, like a curse. I let go of my lungs, exhaling. “Do I know you?”
“Oh yes.” He pauses. “And no. Yes and no.”
“Well,” I say, and Gabrielle growls. “Which is it?”
He laughs: rabid, enraptured, a sound somewhere between an elegy and an alleluia. “We have met a thousand times before, you and I. But I don’t think you remember.”
“Of course I don’t remember,” I cry. “You’re not—”
Real. I was going to say real.
Because this is a dream—it has to be. He is the one who was breathing behind the door. But—
But his hot hand on my wrist. His needle-prick voice. His scent, faint but there, clinging quietly to the stiff, still air: a plump fresh apple plucked high from a tree.
“How did you get in here?” I grip the doorknob, ready to flee at any moment.
“Have you considered,” the boy says, “that I was already in the room when you entered?”
I shake my head, remembering too late that he can’t see me. “The room was empty.”
“Was it?”
“No one was here,” I say, although my breath catches on the last word. Another g
ruff rumble tumbles from the back of Gabrielle’s throat.
“Are you sure? Were you looking for anyone?”
I press one palm to my face, my flushed cheek. I could flee; I could run. Would he grab me, follow me?
“Well, of course I wasn’t looking for you,” I say after several seconds. “I don’t even know you.”
“You did, once,” he says. “But not now.”
“Where are you?” I blink, fast, but still it’s so, so dark, just the way I wanted it. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sitting atop the dresser, if you must know. Legs crossed, elbows resting on my knees. My chin lifted at about, oh, a fifteen-degree angle—”
“Stop. Just stop talking, please.”
He obliges. But the silence seems to smirk. I can feel the bite of it, like steel teeth scything into the skin of my heart.
The Darkness. That’s how I’m coming to think of him. A gutted shadow supported by a black glass skeleton with a taunting crystalline grin.
“Are you a ghost?” I ask the smiling Darkness.
“No,” he says. “I am not a ghost.”
“What, then?”
His smile glints and grows—I feel it rather than see it. “I think you know, Rhea Ravenna.”
“How did you come to know my name?” I demand. “And what is yours?”
“Your bones quivered and sighed my name last night, when you finally opened the attic door.” He speaks quietly now, so that I have to lean in to hear. “Listen to them. Tell your heart to hush. Silence your breath. Just for a few seconds. Just so you can hear. Your bones know even if your brain does not.”
“You know what?” I say, twisting the knob, “I’m just going to open this door and let in a little light to confirm that I’m not talking to a ghost.”
“No!” I hear his soles hit the ground as he jerks to his feet. Then, more softly: “If you do that, you’ll never see me again. I swear to you, you will never see me again.”
“Maybe I don’t want to see you again.” I smile, triumphant in gaining the upper hand. I square my shoulders, even if he can’t see me. Though I’m fairly certain he can sense my movements the way I sense him. “Maybe once will be enough.”