Within the mortuary’s cold walls stood a very tall man in a white rabbit mask. The black hollows reflected nothing; they swallowed the light. The mask seemed rubber one moment, porcelain the next, perhaps even leather — its material and shape kept shifting, but some details never changed: vein-like fissures beneath the hollows, horns, vicious, needle-sharp teeth, black lines on the chin, and an inverted pentagram on the brow. If not for the long ears, you’d say its snout looked more like an angry dog crossed with a devil than any rabbit.
He stared into the void. There was something in his stillness older than a human life.
He wore a perfectly cut black dinner suit and cloth gloves; the collar of his white shirt caught the light. An oval, gold-mounted pendant on a gold chain hung at his throat — a bulbous turquoise piece with a yellow crescent and a red, flower-like symbol.
Before him, on the post-mortem table, lay Anna. The cold bit into her skin like a thousand tiny needles. Her brain still slept somewhere in a murky, black layer of non-being. The air smelt of sharp chemicals and something sweet and heavy. From very far away, out of the depths of the dark, a warm voice was singing:
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star…”
At first they weren’t even words. Just ripples, a whisper, tender and a little sad. Anna drifted in that voice as if in warm water. There, in the dark, there was no body, no pain, no memories. Only a voice she knew far too well.
Mum’s.
“How I wonder what you are…”
A woman stood in the dark. Beautiful, slender, with very long hair that spilled onto the floor like a waterfall. Her dress was white and almost luminous. There was no face. In place of it, a blurred, soft oval. Anna reached for her, and every time it seemed that one more step would bring her fingers to that hand, the image shivered. The white dress gave way to a black dinner suit. The long hair drowned in shadow. The woman’s outline stretched, grew more angular. Where the blank face had been, a rabbit mask surfaced. The voice’s gentle tone dropped, roughened; a metallic edge crept in. In the background, scraps of the lullaby still flickered, but over them another sound forced its way through, alien:
“When the blazing sun is gone.”
A pause. A second.
“Anna.”
Closer. Harsher.
“ANNA!”
The name split the darkness like a flash. It yanked her upwards, to the surface, where there was air and a body again. Anna sucked in a breath. Her chest clenched painfully at the cold air. She flung her eyes open and jerked upright, braced on her elbows.
She was perched on the edge of a table covered with a coarse turquoise blanket that had slipped from her shoulders. She looked around. The room seemed small. Metal tables, cupboards, fridge drawers, grey tiles on the floor. Anna pulled the blanket to her chest without thinking, only then realising there was nothing on her but bare skin. Something tugged at her toe. Irritated, she yanked the blanket back to free her feet. A tag hung from the big toe of her right foot. Just an ordinary paper tag on a string. Lifting her foot closer to her eyes, she read:
“Name: Anna Lord.
Date of birth: 05/11/1990
Date of death: 06/10/2007
Sex: female,
Age: 16.
Place found: ‘Starlight Motel’.
Description: found with no signs of violence.”
Her mind stumbled over the word ‘death’ like an invisible step. She stared at the numbers, but they wouldn’t come any closer, wouldn’t put down roots into any memory. Just a string of dates and a blunt statement: you are no longer here. Anna tore off the tag, flung it away and dug her fingers into her hair.
She tried to focus. “Right, easy, remember. Remember — remember…”
She tried to pull anything at all from the dark: yesterday, the day before, a week ago. Darkness. Not even a hole, but a dense, impossible blank. She couldn’t even remember what she looked like, and the only thing left in her head was a name — Anna.
A thought came, vilely calm, not her own: “Maybe I really am dead?” Her face twisted.
“Yeah, of course,” she muttered, and pinched her leg harder, to the point of pain. The pain was utterly real. Sharp, wounding. Anna sniffed. “No. I can feel it. So I’m alive. Then how the hell did I end up here?”
The mortuary wasn’t about to answer. The lamp light burned her eyes, indifferent. She sat straighter, shuffled nearer the edge of the table, ready to climb down. There was the sense that somewhere there’d been pain, and… water? A deafening roar of water and someone’s lullaby. She ran a nervous hand over her face — and felt dampness under her nose. A drop of blood slid to her lip. She winced and wiped it away with the back of her hand. Red smeared on her skin.
Anna slid off the table, gripping its edge. She threw the turquoise blanket over her shoulders like a miserable cloak so she wouldn’t feel completely naked. Through a small window in the wall she could see a laboratory. The light was on inside. A draught stirred the papers on the desk. No one was there.
Anna stepped closer and pressed her forehead to the cold glass. In the lab, an MRI scan of someone’s brain was pinned to the wall. Black-and-white bands, slices, meaningless to an ordinary person. She stared at them, chasing a strange feeling, as if somewhere deep in that picture something about her was hidden. Beyond the door, out in the corridor, someone was humming, very softly. At first she decided it was just the familiar noise inside her skull. But the sound returned: a long, childlike hum, no words, “mm-mm-mm-mm,” the way a child fills in a tune for themselves. Gooseflesh darted across Anna’s skin. The voice was oddly familiar. She froze, listening. The humming grew clearer. Outside the door came a faint scuff of steps; someone small went past.
“Miss, which ward is my little brother in?” came a girl’s voice, quite distinctly, almost beside her.
Anna flinched. The words opened a tiny crack in her memory, and through it rushed a feeling: the white walls of a hospital, the sharp reek of antiseptic, a tight blanket up to her chin. Herself, small, but somehow seeing like a grown-up. And beside the bed a nurse, with a kind face and eyes where horror was hiding.
“Joseph will be scared without me.”
The name hit her like a hammer.
Joseph.
Anna moved for the door without thinking. She grasped the cold handle; a foreboding rose from her gut to her throat. She wanted to turn back, climb onto the table again, lie down and pretend none of it had happened. But curiosity, and fear for the voice that sounded so familiar, shoved her forward. The door opened softly. The corridor was empty. No girl, no nurse, no ward. And how could there be? This was a mortuary. And yet she knew: the voice had been here. She took a few steps, her bare feet slipping. A door stood ajar to the left. Another room beyond. Her body knew before her mind did. She touched the door with her fingers and pushed. What she saw was so wrong that her brain refused to admit it was real. On a body trolley, covered with a turquoise sheet, lay a girl. At first Anna saw only a profile: the line of the chin, the curve of the mouth, long lashes. The ribcage slightly raised beneath the sheet.
This girl had a seam. Long, crooked, dark, running down from the neck. The skin around it was dull, greyish. Anna took a step closer, barely breathing. A beautiful mask with gentle features. Before her lay her exact double, only mirrored. The words slipped out of her mouth of their own accord:
“She is beautiful…”
At that moment “beautiful” opened her eyes. The lids lifted, and it became clear that the only thing worse than closed eyes are open ones — on a corpse. There were no pupils. The whole span from lid to lid was a deep, lightless black. But not just darkness — within that blackness, tiny, icy sparks were flickering. As if someone had set into her sockets fragments of the night sky, packed with stars and far-off galaxies. She smiled. Unhurried, human, almost shy.
“Oh, thank you,” she said in the very same voice that sounded from Anna’s own throat, only a touch softer. “You too.”
Anna flinched back, but her legs wouldn’t obey. The girl on the trolley sat up slowly; the sheet slid gently from her shoulders. The coarse seam on her body looked like a foreign element on something that was moving, alive. Anna went down hard. Her knees slammed the floor, but she barely noticed. With effort she straightened an arm and pointed at the double, words refusing to come.
“Did I really frighten you? It’s me,” the double smiled.
“Am I supposed to know you?!”
“Preferably.”
Anna let out a hoarse, nervous sound that was almost not a laugh at all. She looked away, at the seam, and felt something inside her begin to tear.
“Look at yourself! The only thing I know is that you’re meant to be dead!”
The double tilted her head slightly.
“Really?” she asked softly. In her eyes the stars seemed to flare brighter.
She leaned forward, slowly, bracing her palms on the trolley. Anna tried to edge back, but her body pinned her to the floor.
On the double’s right wrist Anna noticed an incised symbol — the same one she bore.
She leaned closer, so close Anna could feel the imagined scent of her. Those galaxy-filled eyes were a centimetre from her face. The smile warped. The face cracked — not the skin, but the picture itself. Under the crack showed sharp, uneven teeth, too long for a human mouth. The skin at the edges of the lips was subtly coming apart.
Anna screwed her eyes shut as hard as she could.
“It’s just in my head. Just in my head.”
Blindly, she tried to shove the thing away, whatever it was. Her fingers met something cold and solid; she stumbled and fell onto her back.
She opened her eyes. The trolley was empty. The sheet was pulled smooth; the glittering black eyes were gone. Only in the corner of the room, in the shadow, a silhouette of a tall man in a mask showed itself for an instant. The double had glanced his way and vanished, like a timid creature diving into a burrow. Anna sat up; her head was spinning. She took hold of her forehead, pressing her palm to her skin, wanting to keep her brain in place. “I’m going mad,” a nervous smile cut across her face.
Anna noticed a crumpled sheet of paper on the trolley. It definitely hadn’t been there before. Or she hadn’t seen it. Or it had appeared along with something that doesn’t exist. She reached out and picked it up. The paper was covered in tiny handwriting. Lines were crossed out in several places, so fiercely the ink had run. Dried drops of blood along the edge. In the centre: a sweeping mark.
She smoothed the sheet.
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
8 November 2003.
I’m so frightened…
When he saw me, his eyes flared with madness, and the next day he drove me and Joseph out to an abandoned cellar somewhere deep in the woods. By his account, this little hideaway was set up by William Alford as a place for his perverse amusements. We crossed the threshold, and a scene opened before me that made my blood run cold. Gary, John and Oliver were standing on chairs, and a noose was cinched around Gary’s neck. In their eyes I read pure terror. They were pleading for rescue, they wanted to live. That monster walked slowly up to Joseph and, with a cold smile, he s—”
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The sentence broke off, trailing into smeared ink.
Below, the same thing repeated:
“I HATE YOU” — again and again to the end of the line, until the letters turned into black pulp.
Lower still, under a different date, in a different hand:
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“30 November 2003.
I am plunged into the abyss, into its deepest heart, where darkness wraps everything around. Even the devil himself, in his burning urge, could not descend here.”
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Her eyes skimmed the lines, but there was less and less sense. The words played like a recording of someone else’s madness.
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