Chapter 1
It’s impossible – those first few eternities – to still yourself, to cease the ceaseless cycle: sleep, forget, wake, walk; sleep, forget, wake, walk – but bound as you are in the cell that you have chosen, you are unable to walk, and unable to walk, you are unable to sleep; unable to sleep, you are unable to wake; and everything has already been forgotten, so what is there to forget?
You do not know this, but others like you are forced into their memories when they are tucked away, as you are now. You have no memories, and so, you cannot be tucked away. With nothing else open to you, there is only sitting and watching and gathering strength.
She describes you as a beast, ravenous, waiting at the end of a deep, thick jungle – a monster straight out of her fairytales – and in her describing, you are given room and space to walk again. A jungle, deep and thick, and a pathway that leads from your contained cell into her. There is a gate at the end of the path with a key rusted shut inside that you cannot turn.
You climb over the fence, shredding your white dress, and you watch.
“I can feel her, sometimes.” Dani places her fingertips at the back of her skull, right where its base meets the top of her neck, in the little divot between the muscles holding them together. “She wanders.” Her fingers creep up through her hair, along the midway point between her two lobes, down her forehead, and then stop, resting on the bridge of her nose, just between her eyes. “She sits, and she stays.” She pinches the bridge of her nose and winces. “It hurts, and it scares me.”
Jamie rummages about in one of the spare drawers in their kitchen, pulling out a pill bottle. “Advil?” She shuffles through and pulls out another one. “Or ibuprofen?” Her eyes meet Dani’s, and her lips curve in a smile that isn’t near as jovial as her tone is.
“I….” Dani hesitates. “I don’t think that’ll help.” She places one hand over Jamie’s so that their fingers touch. “It’ll deaden me, and then if she wants to take me, she can—” The pain rests between her eyes, and she sees the reflection of that horrible woman on the pale, clear orange of the pill bottle, and she flinches away. The pill bottle clatters to the floor. Her hands flick out, flutter, shake, as though to shake the image, that horrible feeling, but it doesn’t move, and she doesn’t move, and no matter how much deep breathing and relaxation techniques she has learned over the years, this will always spook her, and her heart will always race, and she will always start breathing quick, and she will always be covered with a thin veil of sweat that pools at her brow.
“Hey.” Jamie takes her hand and gives it a squeeze – sometimes gentle, but never so now, because this is grounding, this is giving her something real and present and clear to focus on, and it is never so harsh as to harm her but is always tight enough to remind her who is really here. “You’re okay. You’re still you.”
Dani nods. She is still her. This is a real moment, a present one. This is not a tucking away, not a hiding in a memory. She has never experienced that herself, never had the occasion to experience it, but remembers how the children described it – stuck in a memory, knowing that it wasn’t quite real, but enclosed in it all the same. Even pleasant memories seem terrifying and broken when you aren’t allowed to move past them, she is sure.
When the woman comes for her, what dreams may come?
The pain moves – the woman moves – from between her eyes and up, just to the forefront of her mind. It isn’t quite like a migraine. She used to get those on her period sometimes, things that Flora might have called perfectly dreadful if she had known of them, but they feel nothing like this singular pressure that travels from one end to the other and sits and stares and moves and sits and stays and moves and moves and moves—
Migraines might have pressure points, but the pain radiates outward. They come with auras that make it harder for her to see, and before Bly Manor – before Eddie – she would lock herself in a dark room and cover her eyes with an even darker rag and force herself into darkness to ease the pain alone. Sometimes the far too dark unsettles her now. At first, it had been seeing Eddie everywhere, and then there was that brief period of being free, and now….
Now it’s Bly Manor and the woman writhing inside her like a parasite that must consume and the knowledge that this pressure is not a migraine and not something she can soothe away into nothingness but one she must acknowledge and be aware of but also ignore to try and maintain any semblance of normal.
They aren’t normal.
The woman, the creature, the beast slowly creeps back to that spot at the base of her skull, and then she disappears, and then Dani breathes easy again.