In the labyrinth of the old motel where the corridors narrowed like the tight throat of some forgotten stellar vortex, the air hung like a heavy pall, damp and steeped in days gone by. It felt as if time had simply stopped here.
On one scuffed, sorry-looking door, a brass number “24” trembled. From inside, a mobile kept ringing, again and again with stubborn insistence.
Behind that door, it was cramped, airless, filthy. The burgundy carpet had worn down to bald scars, exposing the slow, merciless rot beneath. Wallpaper in a tiny, pointless pattern had peeled away in places to show mould and decay. An old, bulging CRT set stood by the door; beside it, a cheap electric kettle and a black ashtray spilling over with cigarette butts. On the bedside unit, next to the landline, the handset lay off the cradle while a mobile shivered — a small thing with a grey-blue display, the kind that keeps going after its tenth fall. A dim ceiling lamp flickered on and off. Even the light here seemed ready to surrender.
On the bed, under a threadbare coverlet, sat a white rabbit called Cyrus. A pretentious name for a rabbit, admittedly, but it suited him oddly well. Clean, sturdy, with fur so dazzlingly white it looked like a projection from a parallel dimension, a cruel contrast to the squalor of this refuge. His eyes were large and round, catching the lamplight in a way that gave them an amber glint — warmer than anything else in the room. On his left haunch, where the fur thinned, was a birthmark shaped like a crescent moon.
Opposite the bed, a young woman named Anna sat in an old armchair that remembered other lives and far drearier lodgers. One leg was hooked over the arm, back half-slouched, a pose so loose it verged on defiant.
Her long dark hair, tied back, fell almost to her knees. She wore a black fabric corset cinched tight at the waist, blue jeans, black stilettos, and light-brown suede fingerless gloves. She sat the way blokes do before a match: legs apart, sure of herself, and frankly not giving a toss how it looked. Her black eyes stared somewhere past it all, blurred and unfocused. She was just a shell that remembered only how to breathe.
The mobile fell silent. Silence hit, sudden and hard. The girl gave the smallest flinch, as if slapped, blinked, and for the first time in ages, she moved. The rabbit on the bed turned his head towards his owner. She leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees. Looked at him. Between them there was an understanding of the sort that forms between two people. To her, Cyrus wasn’t just a pet, but the truest, most faithful friend she’d had in all her life.
The mobile came alive again, ringing with nagging insistence. The ringtone pressed into her temples like a blunt knife. Anna let out a heavy breath, rose from the chair and went to the bedside table. Tiny shards of glass crunched underfoot in the carpet —an overturned table lamp lay by the wall, and nearby a smashed bottle of wine. On the bedside table sat a crumpled pack of cigarettes with a black-and-red logo and a name a moody teenager might have thought up: “D.Evil”. Beside it — the newspaper “The Sleeping City”, a round brown stain on the front page.
The girl drew out a cigarette, flicked a heavy metal lighter with a practised snap, and brought the flame to her lips. The flame briefly lit her face: soft, rounded lines, a snub nose, freckles, a mole under her right eye, plump lips with the corners faintly upturned — a smile that hadn’t truly lit in a long time.
She closed her eyes, savouring that first drag, the smoke trying to fill the emptiness inside. She leaned over the small black-and-yellow cassette player at the edge of the bedside table. Pressed the button. The tape clicked, the cogs began to whirr, and Joy Division seeped through the cramped room like a warming poison. A muffled bass came in, simple drums, and a man’s voice.
Music washed over the room in a wave. The girl lifted her head, half-closed her eyes, and breathed out smoke in a slow stream, allowing herself a brief, elegant gesture. Her body found the rhythm on its own. Her shoulders gave a slight sway. The fingers holding the cigarette traced a crooked arc in the air. With her free hand she began, by feel, to undo the hooks of her corset. She did it carelessly, slowly. The corset gave. Black fabric fell open, revealing a lace bra.
On the mobile’s screen a contact name flashed for a second: “Noah”, then flipped back to some number. Anna went to the bedside table and took the mobile in her hand, squeezing until her knuckles turned white. She turned to the window.
Cold evening air surged into the stuffy room, at once thinning the smell of tobacco and cheap alcohol. Outside, evening was sliding into night; the sky still held the last of its blue, but the first stars were already pricking through the dark grey. Her long hair had slipped loose from its tie, a little mussed. The wind stirred it; a light strand stuck to her lips, damp with cigarette smoke. She paused for a second, giving the moment a chance. Then, almost lazily, she tossed the mobile out of the window.
The phone plunged, its screen glowing all the way down until it hit the ground.
She turned. Walked past her pet without so much as a glance and slipped into the bathroom.
The bathroom was white, cold, and very bright. The tiled walls shone with a sterile light, throwing back the pallor of her skin. Anna was already standing by the sink in just her underwear and stockings. The light fell from above, emphasising her wavy dark-blonde hair and the frailty of her collarbones. And pointed ears peeped from the curling strands — like those of a fairy-tale creature torn out of folklore into reality, where myth mingles with horror — and such details whispered of hidden mutations, of genetic secrets that might, perhaps, destroy the world with a single whisper.
Her gaze fell on a small plastic bottle at the edge of the sink. On the label: “Risperidone”. Her fingers, delicate and tremulous, quivered slightly as she picked it up. She turned it over, listening to the dull rattle of tablets against cheap plastic, and screwed her eyes shut. Something between nausea and fatigue was rising inside, but it had dragged on so long there wasn’t even the strength left for despair.
She tipped the tablets into her palm. A small handful of tiny white discs, meant to mend a mind, now turned into a ticket to the other side. She rested her shoulder blades against the cold wall, stared at the tablets in her palm, thinking of something. Then she tipped back her head, tossed the tablets into her mouth and, wincing at the acrid bitterness, swallowed them, feeling them scrape her throat.
Anna turned the mixer tap on the bath; the pressure roared, the noise grew heavy and oppressive. The hot stream battered the enamel, a thin veil of steam rising. The empty bottle fell to the floor and rolled, knocking against the wall. She didn’t dare take off her underwear. Because she was ashamed for the people who would later haul her swollen, bluish body out of this puddle, waterlogged to a sickening swell, with skin mottled in purple patches of decay, foam dried at her mouth in a yellowish crust, eyes bulged from their sockets and glassy like a fish on a tip, hair matted into clumps with slime and filth, giving off a heavy, cloying stench of rot that would soak into their clothes and haunt their nightmares as they tried to scrub away the vile slime stuck to their fingers.
She lurched into the bath and flopped into the water, letting it close around her like a filthy bog. Scalding hot, but somehow calming.
Anna lay listening to the water still roaring, filling the voids, drowning out any other sound. When she opened her eyes again, she noticed the skin on her wrist prickling, itching. An unfamiliar sensation—not like a cut, not like a burn. As if along the inside of her left arm someone had drawn a fine, ice-cold point. She raised her wrist from the water; it ran down her fingers. Where the skin had been smooth moments before, thin red weals were swelling up.
They were appearing on their own. Some invisible hand, very careful, almost gentle, was carving a pattern. The lines crossed and writhed, forming an ugly motif — something like a stylised, mangled flower. The girl watched as her own skin was etched by that invisible knife, and felt only a mute horror buried under a thick layer of apathy.
Anyone else in her place would have scrambled out of the bath, run for help, shouted, screamed, anything. She just kept sitting there. Her hand trembled, but she didn’t pull it back, letting the pattern finish itself.
The music playing in the cassette player suddenly stuttered. A rustle bled through the speakers. The track rasped, dissolved into a hiss. Over the white noise another sound slowly crystallised: a quiet woman’s voice singing a children’s lullaby.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky.
When the blazing sun is gone,
When he nothing shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
The words about the little star came through the interference as if from underwater. Something in the room had shifted. The rabbit on the bed lifted itself, ears bolt upright. He stared at the closed bathroom door, his muzzle tense. The soft, unnatural hissing, laced with the lullaby, spread through the room like the smell of burning. The walls began to crack. Quietly, almost imperceptibly—the way the first fractures look in the shell of an egg just before something nightmarish hatches. After a while, the cracks thickened, lengthened, branching out.
Paint bubbled and flaked off in scales; the plaster swelled, broke and crumbled. Furniture blurred into misshapen shadows. The carpet turned sodden, its edges pulling like candle wax; the bed’s legs went down with a wet squelch into the softening floor. The bedside table skewed, the wood bulging under an unseen heat. But there was no flame—only invisible entropy, reducing everything to atoms. In the fissures in the walls, tiny pale points appeared. You might have thought they were just bits of plaster fallen away to reveal the white undercoat. Then it became clear: those points were stars. Very distant, beyond the cracked shell of the motel wall.
In the reflection of the melting television screen, a silhouette flickered at the window for a moment: a figure with an elongated, unnaturally long nose and horns jutting from its head.
Cyrus hopped off the bed and dashed to the bathroom door. He pressed his fluffy chest to it and began to scrabble, furious. Tiny claws bit into the wood. He felt death coming with every fibre of his animal self. From out here, in the room, you could hear only the rush of water and a woman’s voice humming a lullaby.
The bathwater turned pink. A thin thread of blood seeped from the fresh pattern on her wrist and bloomed into soft clouds. Anna watched it and thought how beautiful it was. A careless watercolour wash at her own end.
Her eyelids suddenly grew heavy. Her head went light, like a balloon ready to pull free of her body. She let her lids fall. From her left nostril a fine thread of blood began to run, slipped to her upper lip, and was smeared away by the hot water.
The girl’s body slid under the water, her hair fanning around her head like black seaweed. The water brimmed and spilled over the edges, gushed onto the floor, ran for the threshold. It reached Cyrus’s paws, scorched his pads like acid; he jerked, but didn’t leave the door, only scrabbled harder with his claws, trying to get inside, raking the wood down to bloody splinters. His fur was soaked and clumped into matted lumps, steeped in that vile liquid that carried the reek of death. Objects around them slowly lifted off the floor and floated upwards, as if gravity had gone on temporary strike. From the open window, fog crawled into the molten room. It filled the space, mingling with the steam and the smell of damp fabric.
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