The Seams Have Splintered, Too.

Episode 4.

Normal has a way of reconvening despite the odds – after that night, my life went on.

Though my skin still pricked at the thought of what I’d found, I had plenty of projects to keep me busy, grounded.

For solace, I drew myself parallels:

You’ve lived through this before... It’s just like that college dorm.

It wasn’t an impossible leap. After all, same as the dorm, a vigil of creaks and knocks seemed to jump out every hour, waking me almost as soon as I’d started to sleep. But at least I had Kombucha with me now – a steady, comforting comrade against the shadows, my love for her reinvigorated each time she pressed a weary lick into my palm.

Even so, there loomed an unspeakable sense of wrong.

As if the house were holding its breath with me inside it. As if it were waiting. Both of us were. For what, I could not know. But whatever it was, it was coming to me slow, biding its time observing, withdrawing, just before I might have seen…

But I didn’t want to see.

I wasn’t looking for clarity. No… I favored evasion – covering every mirror that I could manage, ignoring each noise, each wayward chill… as if in willfully forgetting something had happened after the party, I could somehow live in a world in which nothing did.

That world was difficult to secure.

My routine, I found, was filled with reflections. They stilled my heart each time… how they always came so unexpected…

I nearly rear-ended a man pulling out from the café one afternoon, too transfixed by the shock of those haunting, bloodshot eyes in the rearview mirror to notice anyone else inside it. I avoided driving anywhere after that, barring myself, in effect, from the very means of an escape from the disturbance of my home. But if I couldn’t prevent the distortion of my face in every mirror, I could at least prevent myself from seeing them. For everybody’s safety, not just my own. Unfortunately, I had a far more fruitful shot of achieving this if I never went beyond where I controlled.

Once the last of my Halloween commissions were delivered and closed, I barely left my home.

I lost all touch with Anna at some point because of this. Though she invited me out several more times after the ship tour, I never had the will to answer her calls, much less, return them. It didn’t help that I had by now acquired a fear of my vacant phone, horrified anew each time I saw her unexpectedly in the screen – that bleeding, broken mouth, those deathly ashen cheeks…

Though my business suffered likewise the more I neglected blackened screens, I found a way to manage, falling stiffly into the “normalcy” of an increasingly solitary routine. I convinced myself there was comfort in it – joy in the warmth of the overrun lightbulb, satisfaction in the click of the old lamp’s switch when I finally gave it rest in the morning. Sunlight meant survival to me then, meant that I had managed through the worst of all the hours and come out clean again – no waking bloody-faced before a mirror, no sleep-opening more secret, empty chambers…

I’d locked the attic hatch up either way. In a wild fit of fear, I’d thrown the key. It lay somewhere in the wild backyard weeds now. I wouldn’t allow myself a search to find out where. If I didn’t know in waking, I thought, I couldn’t know in sleeping either. So, the old key stayed out there, buried, in time, by an early November snow, lost as far as anyone would know.

Any comfort in the snow’s security was fleeting, though. The drag of the earth toward winter brought, too, less and lesser daylight hours. I suppose I should have known from this the lightbulbs would lose power someday soon, but while I missed all signs of flickering, the bed-lamp drained unnoticeably.

I woke to a shock of night.

The dark was far too thick to see a thing.

I thought, perhaps, I’d turned the lamp off in my sleep, but when I summoned the courage to twist the switch, there was, of course, no energy left to revive. I knew that there were lightbulbs stored downstairs, but at the time, I had no light to get me there. The house lacked overhead illumination. The hallway had some fixtures on the walls, but as I sat there in the deepest dark I’d seen I was far too well aware that the fixtures were out there and I was here.

Even my phone was stowed up “safe” in a drawer somewhere downstairs.

It wouldn’t have been so bad, I supposed, to feel my way through the room into the hall, but as soon as I shifted my feet to the edge of the bed I heard something.

Every muscle in me froze.

I listened, scarcely breathing.

Somewhere in the shadows by the door, a weight was shifted.

Kombucha gave a low and threatening growl. This, perhaps, unsettled me even more.

As I cowered inward, the weight shifted again. The movement made a sound akin to fabric sweeping swiftly over the floor.

Time stretched as I stared, cemented, uselessly straining my eyes, trying to pinpoint where the movement was headed and what exactly I should do in the meantime.

Before I could think much further, Kombucha flew to her feet, claws scrambling against the hardwood as she lunged toward the foot of the bed, howling viciously.

I suddenly remembered to breathe, a jagged inhale forcing the air in loudly.

Kombucha quieted at once and leapt onto the mattress by my feet, her paws plodding steadily over the comforter to make her way toward me.

I felt her little tongue press warm against my arm.

And then I heard her growl. Not from beside me, no. But across the room.

She was facing me from the opposite wall…

As the weight of the realization shattered over me, a cold, hard hand slid its way around my waist, and squeezed.

“So say something,” a man’s voice breathed.

A deafening, high-pitched shriek rang out by the window.

The bedside lamp turned on.

I squinted blindly.

The curtains had been drawn in all the noise. The window reflected like a mirror, Lavinia’s face for my own.

When I leapt up to check behind me, the intruding man was gone.