by A. M. Shine
‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ the woman said, reaching out her hand. ‘Quickly now, come with me. The light is already on.’
3
Mina was pulled to her feet by the coldest hand; its fingers were as bone, their grip like a vice around her wrist. The woman’s thumbnail cut the skin where the veins run blue. Faint specks of dust flittered around the bulb, its restless light awakening shadows in every corner. Their footsteps and the cage’s rattle echoed off the walls, scattering in all directions. Despite the cavernous air, the passage was tight, and the birdcage scratched against it as Mina lumbered forward, so exhausted now that she struggled to throw one foot in front of the other.
‘Come on!’ the woman screamed; her voice riled and shrill. Even the bird baulked back into the corner of its cage, too flustered to pare a sound from its beak. There was light at the corridor’s end – vivid and unnatural – and they were hurtling towards it.
‘Get inside, now!’ she screeched; throwing Mina through the doorway and slamming it shut behind them.
A skinny hand reached out from the woman’s shawl, securing the locks quickly and skilfully as though she had practised each one a thousand times. Mina, meanwhile, slid down the wall, still holding the cage in both arms, with the bird’s wings flailing against her fingers. She stretched her aching legs out across the floor. What is this place? The light reflected from every angle. It burned like the summer sun, scoring colours into her mind. She shielded her eyes as best she could, but still it crept in. Her hands felt cold against her face; all fingers numb.
‘That was too close,’ she heard the woman say. ‘That was stupid.’
‘Where did she…?’ a man’s voice tried to ask before she cut him off. He spoke so low that Mina had hardly heard him over the parrot’s screeching.
‘I should have left her outside. We’re supposed to be in here before the light even comes on. That’s the rule. That’s the way it has to be.’
The shrieks Mina heard had been so loud, so close, as though they had chased her to the door, snapping at her heels. Would the woman really have left her out there?
Mina’s fingers fanned apart over her eyes. Her cheeks were flushed and warm. Her lips were chapped. They felt prosthetic, and probably looked even worse. Every part of her felt rusty, as if the cogs that kept her moving were starting to grind each other down.
The room was coming into focus. Details were beginning to differentiate and darken in the white. Mina could feel the blood pumping in and around her skull. Flat as the floor might have been, she had to press her back against the wall just to keep steady.
‘Come on, Meens,’ she whispered, ‘you got this,’ and through squinted eyes she could finally see.
The wall facing Mina was one immense mirror, duplicating all within the room and obscuring all that lay beyond it, in the darkest night, where the memory of those voices still haunted the woodland. She saw herself, fingers pressed to lips that had no feeling. Her fringe was smeared to her forehead. Her eyeliner had bled out. Filth swirled through the floor like marble, softened and shaped by too many tired attempts to clean it. The toes of her boots wore a sock of wet mud, slowly caking to solid. Her jeans were stippled in more of the same.
A low table – cut from the fat, dissevered bole of a tree – occupied the centre of the floor, out of place in a room of stone and glass. Mina drew her feet away. There were berries on the table – fat black ones and red pellets – arranged like a feral child’s tea party. She was on the far side of starvation now. She couldn’t have eaten, even if she tried. In the corner a few blankets and a discoloured quilt of no clear design were piled. It was, however, the only hint of colour in a room as dispiriting as the forest outside. A fluorescent light buzzed somewhere overhead. It reminded Mina of the noise her fridge made in the days before its motor burned out. Could they not dim it a little? Did it have to be so painfully bright, and so loud? It was like a hive of bees picking through the honeycomb of her brain. She couldn’t think straight.
The woman came to kneel in front of Mina, both hands tugging the shawl tight around her body. The other voice she had heard wasn’t that of a man, but a boy, possibly still in his late teens. He stood awkwardly by the mirror, arms crossed, hugging his body, staring at the parrot.
His raven-black hair was scruffy and long, starched from grease, and in need of a good wash with soap and water. The only stubble on his face clung like gunpowder above his lip. The eyes were the palest blue, and bloodshot; painfully so. Their threaded capillaries trickled through the white, and they hadn’t blinked. The face was narrow, and his mouth was always slightly ajar, revealing a few crooked teeth.
He wore a bomber jacket, zipped up to the neck. Every inch of him was filthy, most noticeably where he had rubbed his hands on his jeans whenever they touched anything he didn’t like the feel of. He paced back and forth, throwing cagey glances towards his own reflection, until eventually he slinked over towards the hill of blankets, and there he sat, watching Mina.
‘Is she okay?’ he asked.
‘Daniel, please,’ the woman replied sharply. ‘She’s still in shock.’
She was even older up close. Mina zoned out, staring at the bruised bags under the woman’s eyes and the deep creases that ran through her skin like cracks through clay. Was this shock? Mina’s fingers were clenched around the bars of the birdcage again. They wouldn’t release their grip. Maybe that’s where the shock begins – at the tips of the fingers.
‘What’s your name?’ the woman asked.
Mina didn’t respond. The question sounded so far away. Her throat was dry; parched as sun-dried paper. She tried swallowing. She could feel and hear her neck tightening but couldn’t draw a bead of moisture from her mouth.
‘My name is Madeline,’ the woman said.
‘Danny,’ the boy added, waving one of his hands timidly from the corner.
‘Daniel, please,’ she snapped. ‘What’s your name?’ she repeated, placing her hands on Mina’s shoulders. The left one ached from her touch.
‘Mina,’ she whispered, meeting her in the eye, seeing only the woman now. ‘My name is Mina.’
‘How did you get here?’ Madeline asked.
Mina didn’t know where here was. She thought of Peter’s map and that vague, nameless area where he had marked her destination – where somebody still peered out from their window, waiting for their golden conure. How could she have gotten so lost?
‘My car broke down, just outside the forest, and so I walked it.’
It was Daniel who reacted. He slapped both hands on his head in frustration and began circling the room like a shark. Madeline ignored him but made no attempt to mask her dislike of the boy; the furrows of her brow folding into a magnificent frown.
‘I knew it,’ he said. ‘Everything breaks down there. My bike did the same. Phones, too, don’t work here. Nothing works except the fucking lights.’
‘You’re not helping, Daniel,’ Madeline said without turning her head. ‘Well, Mina,’ she said grudgingly, as though she didn’t like the sound of it, ‘you’re probably wondering what’s going on here.’
Mina nodded her head. The woman released her shoulders, satisfied that she now held her full attention.
‘It must all seem very strange to you,’ Madeline said, like a headmistress addressing a new pupil. ‘Well, that’s because it is all very strange – the light, this building, the things outside.’
‘What things outside?’ Mina repeated, peering over Madeline’s shoulder, seeing only the reflection of her own face and the bulk of the woman’s blanket.
‘I don’t know what they are. They only come above ground when it’s dark. And when they do the only place we’re safe from harm is in here.’
‘They don’t like the light,’ Daniel put in.
‘They don’t like daylight,’ Madeline said angrily. Everything the boy said seemed to creep under her skin. ‘The artificial light has no effect on them. That’s not what keeps them from breaking in.
You should know this, Daniel. I’ve already told you. As long as they can see us, then they leave us alone. It’s that simple.’
Mina looked to the boy in disbelief. Could she really accept what they were telling her? Should any sane person stand such words next to the truth and judge their likeness? There was no doubting Madeline’s earnestness, or the agitation that kept the boy from standing still. The reality they presented was unbelievable; imaginings torn from the pages of a penny dreadful. And yet Mina knew that they both honestly believed it. For how long, she wondered, had they lived it?
‘We stay in here when it’s dark,’ the boy said, sadly gazing towards the mirror. ‘And we don’t leave again until the sun comes up.’
‘That’s correct, Daniel,’ Madeline said, nodding her head approvingly.
Mina was adrift in someone else’s nightmare, too exhausted to shake herself awake.
‘What do they look like?’ she asked.
‘Like us, I suppose,’ Madeline replied calmly. ‘But they’re not like us. They’re leaner and they’re longer, and I won’t describe their faces to you. I couldn’t, to be honest, even if I tried.’
Mina frowned at the woman like a child who suspected the adults were lying to her.
‘Why don’t you see for yourself?’ Madeline said, unblinkingly, pointing towards the glass. ‘Go on, have a look. I see no reason why you should take my word. I did only just save your life.’
Daniel’s sore eyes widened. Somehow, he seemed to turn even paler. He looked to Mina and shook his head. Don’t do it, he was telling her. But with Madeline standing between them he couldn’t say a word.
‘I can tell that you don’t believe me,’ Madeline said. ‘So, what are you afraid of?’
‘Madeline,’ Daniel said, ‘I don’t…’
‘Quiet, Daniel,’ she snapped. ‘We don’t want her to think we’re liars now, do we?’
Mina rose to her feet with legs so weary that her knees rattled together. Without the wall to support her she would never have gotten off the ground. The bird watched her intently, as though she was performing some wonderful feat for his entertainment alone. Simply standing up was miraculous enough. She walked tenderly towards her own reflection, fixing her hair and wiping something from her cheek, trying to make the other Mina more presentable. She came within an arm’s reach of the glass, and still couldn’t see beyond her mirror image. She would have to step closer. Mina hesitated.
‘Go on,’ Madeline said, ‘what are you waiting for?’
Mina cupped her hands against the glass to block out the light and brought her eyes in closer. The forest should have been illuminated. The light on the wall was so intense that it should have flooded outside, revealing the trees and anything that may have skulked between them, but there was nothing, just the dark reflection of her own eyes.
‘I can’t see anything,’ she said.
‘It’s the glass,’ Daniel explained. ‘Whatever it’s made of, the light doesn’t pass through it.’
Mina tried to draw some sense out of the dark, but nothing inhabited that black void save for mystery and anticipation. Did Madeline really expect her to see something, or was she the butt of some cruel joke?
‘You should step away from the window,’ Daniel said quietly, almost a whisper.
‘Why?’ Mina asked, ‘I can’t see any…’
An ear-splitting scream sent Mina tumbling. Her legs relinquished their burden, and both palms slapped down on the floor. It had been right there, in her face, so close that she fancied she had felt it through the glass. She scurried backwards against the wall; the heels of her boots scraping across the concrete. Mina watched her own terrified reflection retreat. But what horrors had the mirrored pane kept secret? What had stood on the other side of the glass?
‘Did you see it?’ Madeline asked, her voice mischievous, but the face as motionless as a mask.
No, I didn’t fucking see it, Mina thought; her nerves wrought into wiry knots. She sat, knees tucked, with her head in her hands, fighting back the brimming tears awaiting the signal to flood their banks. The shock alone had blacked out her senses. This was a hard reset. The last five minutes had undermined a lifetime of rational thinking. Monsters don’t exist. All of this isn’t happening.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Daniel said to the woman. ‘You knew that would happen!’
Madeline didn’t respond. Instead, she looked over to the room’s corner where the mishmash of throws and blankets was stirring.
‘Oh, Ciara,’ she shouted over, ‘did we wake you?’
‘Leave her alone,’ Daniel whispered, the words slipping out so quietly that Madeline didn’t seem to hear them.
A tousled head of red hair poked out from the mound, like one disturbed from hibernation. She had been crying. Her face was drained of everything but tears. Their streams still traced her cheeks and swirled the emerald water through her eyes. For a wonderfully benighted moment she seemed to have no idea where she was. As if a dreamy fog still clouded her consciousness. She licked her lips and yawned like a cat that had slept all its nine lives and just woken up for supper.
Mina felt that familiar urge to grab the sketchbook from her bag. She needed this – some distraction from whatever monstrous complications now gathered outside the window. Focus on the face, she thought. Lose yourself for a second – anything to stop the shaking.
The woman had the greenest eyes that Mina had ever seen, and they were set in the kindest of faces, like jewels in a brooch. The mouth was small, but shaped with sumptuous lips, and the little teeth behind them were still white. She had the appearance of one so young, and yet her sadness was the most striking part of her; that was what Mina was drawn to. She knew what it felt like. You never pick up all the pieces when you shatter like that.
Another person was obviously the last sight that Ciara had expected to see. Her jaw hung open like a little girl who just woke up to catch Santa Claus filling her stocking. She looked to Daniel for answers. This didn’t surprise Mina in the slightest. Madeline stood askance, like a bitter stepmother, angry with her for sleeping in so late.
‘This is Mina,’ Daniel said to her, his tone soft and comforting. ‘Her car broke down and she walked into the forest. She just made it before the light came on.’
‘Mina,’ the woman repeated with a tired smile, ‘that’s a lovely name.’
Ciara’s hair was wonderfully chaotic, like flames licking the cold air around her head. She ran both hands through it, and scratched the back of her neck, screwing up her eyes with satisfaction. Her face lit up when she saw the parrot. The smile was perfect. It was open and genuine, and Mina made a mental note to remember it.
‘No way!’ she said, standing up frantically amidst all the layers. ‘You brought a parrot? It is a parrot, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in real life.’
Ciara was wearing an oversized green jumper and a pair of jeans. Much like Daniel’s clothes, they would have all profited from a wash and some fresh air. She had her sleeves stretched down over her hands, with her thumbs poking out of two well-worn holes. Mina had many like it.
‘It’s called a golden conure,’ Mina replied, thinking of Peter. What she wouldn’t have given to be sat beside him, drink in hand and briquettes on the fire, not a worry in the known world, and no things outside the window. A chill slipped down her spine. Could it all be true? Was she now trapped here like the rest of them?
‘He’s golden, all right,’ Ciara said, kneeling to examine it more closely. ‘Or wait, sorry, is it a boy or a girl?’
‘It’s a boy, I think,’ Mina replied, distantly. Is all this really happening?
‘He’ll be dinner soon unless Daniel can catch us some food,’ Madeline put in, her tall body now looming over them.
Ciara looked horrified by the prospect and turned her gaze to the floor. Daniel, also, just looked away. Mina wondered how long this bully had picked them apart, wearing them down to this sad, silent acceptance.
‘When
I leave this place my bird is coming with me,’ Mina said. ‘You’ll just have to find a different dinner, Madeline.’
The woman considered her quietly, as if disappointed. In a room full of children, as she thought them to be, perhaps she had hoped that Mina, being older, would become a party to her interests.
‘If you think you’re leaving this place, then you’re a bigger fool than the rest of them,’ Madeline replied. No anger, no frown. This was spoken as a matter of fact.
Ciara was seen to fidget with her fingers. Daniel stood with his arms crossed again, his gloom focused on the parrot, still trying to figure out why anyone in their right mind would carry a caged bird into the woods with them.
‘There’s some food on the table,’ Madeline said. ‘It’s all we have for now, but you should eat. There’s some water…’ Here she paused before drawing a hand to her mouth. ‘I left it in the corridor by the front door. I left the water outside.’
‘We can get it in the morning, Madeline,’ Ciara said, feigning a smile. ‘I’m sure we can survive a night without it.’
‘It’ll be gone by the morning, you stupid girl,’ she replied. ‘We needed that bottle. We need to drink. We can live off currants and nuts all we like, but we need water. I can’t believe I forgot it.’
Mina rummaged through the bag still roped around her shoulder. Madeline’s hawk-like eyes turned in an instant, eyeballing its contents. She edged slowly closer and closer, like a heron stalking its breakfast. It was no surprise that Mina’s body was bent out of shape. Her bag was fit to burst at its seams.
‘There you are,’ she said, reaching the bottle towards Madeline. She wanted nothing more than to drink it herself, such was her thirst, but it seemed the right thing to do; a thank you, if nothing else, for taking her in.
‘There isn’t much left,’ Mina said, ‘but I’m sure it’s enough to get us by until the morning.’