Jania's Self Improvement (Horror Story)

I have some exciting content coming out this week, but thought it best to start with some horror for Halloween! I love horror but have a hard time writing it. I hope you enjoy!

Based on the dialogue prompt: "I wouldn't open that door if I were you."

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Jania thinks she may have miscalculated.

The cabin lists to one side, away from the treeline that is a good deal closer than she remembers it being in her childhood, and towards the rolling hill that leads to the switchback road they’d just come up. The roof ripples like ocean waves, water damage evident in the edge of every shingle. The front door is barely on its hinges and she has an unpleasant feeling that, if she opens it, she’ll find that the only thing keeping it upright is the rusty padlock secured next to the rusted doorknob.

“Yeah,” Edmund says from behind her. “I wouldn’t open that door if I were you.”

Like the house, Edmund is different than she remembers. When she was a little girl, he’d seemed so handsome and strong, like the lead actor of a soap opera or one of those farmers on the almond commercials. Now, he’s slouched, balding, and a good deal less friendly.

“Then how,” she asks, “do you suppose I get in?”

Edmund squints up at the boarded attic window. He chews his cheek and the wrinkle between his bushy eyebrows deepens. “You a good climber?”

Jania bites back the first thing she wants to say. Of course she’s a good climber—one of the best in the world in fact. She’s got six medals hanging on the wall of her apartment at home that say how good of a climber she is. It’s because she’s a good climber that she knows better than to even try to find a good handhold in the water-damaged wood.

“I’ll think of something,” she says. She digs in her peacoat’s pocket until she comes up with the crinkled envelope her mother had given her. “Here. Thanks for driving me.”

Edmund takes it from her, his old, calloused fingertips grazing the back of her hand unpleasantly. “Want me to stick around until you see if the phone’s working?”

She frowns down at where his skin touched hers. “No, thanks. I have a cellphone.”

“Cellphone’s aren’t reliable up here,” he says.

“It’s a very good cellphone.”

Edmund shrugs, flannel shirt flexing with the move.  “Suit yourself.”

She watches him climb back into his truck. The truck, at least, is in good condition with big tires and a mounted set of floodlights on the cab. They might not have made it up the treacherous, winding road without it. He peels out of the sloping, bare driveway, big wheels spitting gravel. She can hear his truck swinging around the turns, faster than when she’d been in the passenger seat, but only catches glimpses of it through the trees before the forest and the sheer angle of the mountain hides it from sight. Soon, even the sound of the engine is swallowed up completely.

Jania kicks at the sparse gravel that makes up the driveway. Another problem with this idea: she’s not sure that her little Honda Accord, even after she repaves the driveway, can handle the mountains.

One problem at a time.

She picks up the duffle at her feet and tries to decide if it’s even worth the effort of going around the back. The plant life clearly hasn’t been cut back in at least a year and the small, cobbled path that once led to the kitchen door is hidden completely under weeds and wildflowers. If she tries it, she’s going to have to change into the only pair of jeans she brought. Some of those brambles look like they’d tear through her athletic pants like tissue paper. Not for the first time, she wonders what she’s doing here.

“Do you really want to go back?” she mutters. There’s no small amount of bitterness in the words. She already knows the answer to that.

She drops her luggage off on the sagging front porch. The windows to either side are boarded up tight. She scans the weathered bench under the one to her right, almost hopping to see a crowbar or even a heavy piece of firewood. No such luck.

Her climbing gloves are in the outer pocket of her bag and it’s a comfort to slip them on. She flexes her hands a few times, warming up the leather. She can hang from her fingertips; a few, rotting boards shouldn’t be a problem.

She gets lucky with the boards covering the left window. They’re loose and a lot less secure than the ones covering the right. Maybe two or three nails to each side rather than seventeen hundred keeping the other window locked up tight.

I hope there aren’t any spiders. She threads her fingers through a gap in the wood and yanks. With a loud crack! the first board comes loose. She stumbles back and, after regaining her footing, throws the board onto the porch next to her. Dust drifts out from the dark room beyond. She waits for it to settle and then quickly pulls the last three boards down with surprising ease.

She heaves her bag through the newly opened window without a care for the contents. Just a couple changes of clothes, spare batteries, some water and snacks. Her mother had had Edmund switch on the utilities last week, but Jania’s not willing to chance plumbing that hasn’t been used in nearly half a decade. The last time she’d believed someone about there being enough water, she’d ended up on her own personal version of Survivor for a month straight. The only reason she’d stuck it out that long was because Matt—

Well. She wasn’t the only one on that trip and, therefore, not the sole decision maker.

The inside of the cabin is, at least, in better repair than the outside had led her to believe. The floorboards only flex under her weight here and there. The kitchen stove turns on when she tries it and, to her surprise, so does the water. She frowns at the way the spout sputters and leans down to smell. Her nose wrinkles. Okay, maybe she shouldn’t be drinking the water just yet.

The house creaks as she heads from the kitchen to the stairs that lie between the dining table and the living room where she entered. Here’s where things might get a little dangerous. Some of the stairs look alright but there’s one in the middle that’s sagging. She looks up and finds the culprit; there’s a leak in the ceiling of the second story.

Jania gingerly puts her full weight on the second step. It holds. Then the third. The fourth. The fifth steps sags and she stops, knuckles white on the bannister. She studies the wood under her fingers critically. If the step breaks and she’s forced to rely on the bannister, she’s not sure it will hold.

“Right,” she murmurs. She’s not going to test fate. There’s an inspector coming out to the house on Thursday, just two days away. She can stand to live on the first floor until someone who actually knows what they’re doing arrives.

She snags her bag from the living room and chucks it onto the kitchen table. Might as well set up for the night. She fishes her toiletries out and puts them by the kitchen sink. The food she decides to leave in the zipped bag until she knows there aren’t any pests in the house.

The sun is barely setting and she’s already run out of things she can do. Jania rolls out her thin sleeping bag in the living room to sit on while she eats a granola bar.

It’s eerily quiet out here. She touches her phone through her pants’ pocket. There isn’t a strong enough signal out here to watch anything, but she’s got some videos saved on her phone.

Most of those videos are of Matt.

Pain spikes through her and she closes her eyes, riding it out. She can’t bear to look at a video of him right now. Her wounds are still too fresh. Too raw. She understands why he called off their engagement, she does, but—

She can’t forgive him quite yet.

She eats dinner in silence, listening to the faint wind outside. This is what she’s here for. Peace. Solitude. Quiet. Time to recenter herself and get out of the competitive head space climbing’s kept her in for the last ten years.

Matt’d been ready to settle down. Get 9-5 jobs. Maybe have some kids. Maybe if she takes her time out here, lives a little more slowly, she’ll finally understand why traveling the world was no longer enough for him.

“Then you’ll make up and live happily ever after,” she says. She laughs without humor. Yeah, right. Last she heard, he was already dating someone new. Whatever answers Jania finds out here won’t be enough to get him back. They’ll only be enough for her and her alone.

Still, she can’t help but hope.

Sleeping in the cabin is just about as miserable as she expected. Her sleeping bag is rated for 30-degree weather but feels too light. Every pockmark in the wooden floors seems to imprint itself into her skin. She feels like she’s sleeping naked, almost, and has to zip it up all the way over her head so she can at least feel a little bit sheltered.

The woods are loud at night, filled with rustling foliage and strange chirps from insects. She thinks she even hears a mountain lion, screaming in the distance, but can’t be sure. For all she knows, that’s the sound squirrels around here make. She doesn’t know enough about this type of forest to tell what’s what. She just knows it’s eerie enough to raise all the hair on her arms.

All told, she wakes up in a bad mood with hardly any sleep under her belt. She drags herself to the kitchen and brushes her teeth with bottled water. She blinks out the window over the sink with bleary eyes. Trees press up right against the glass, branches gently knocking against it. How did the trees grow so close? She doesn’t remember them ever being this close when she was a little girl.

She goes to grab new clothes from her duffle. She stops short of the table, toothbrush still clutched in one hand. A cold chill spreads out from her locked spine and through her stomach.

Her bag isn’t on the table where she left it.

She takes an instinctive step back before she catches herself. The sleepless night is getting to her. There’s a distant memory in her head of waking up last night and needing water. She came into the kitchen to grab it from her bag. She’s a heavy sleeper and it’s not uncommon for her to move things while half-awake. She must have brought the whole bag to the living room where she’d set up camp and not realized it.

She drops her toothbrush back into her bathroom kit and wipes her sweaty palms on her sleep shorts. The house smells wetter and heavier than it did yesterday. She’s being too paranoid—there’s nothing to be afraid of here. Her bag’s by her sleeping bag. She knows it is.

Still, even though she knows it, it’s relief to see it in the living room, open and with her clothes spilling out of it. Jania figures she must not have seen the water bottle on top and dug through it like an animal to get to the extras packed on the bottom.

She changes quickly into a pair of jogging pants and a loose, long-sleeved t-shirt. Her mom said that the woods have had a tick problem this year and she’s been afraid of them since she was a child. A morning run will wake her up and rid of her of the scare she gave herself.

When she was a kid, she used to love running through these woods. Her mom had had a path cut for her, afraid that she’d run off one of the numerous cliffs on the mountain. It eases something in her to step through the window, onto the porch, and into the fresh air on the way to where she remembers the start.

The old path is not as overgrown as she feared. Maybe Edmund had cleared it when he heard she was coming. The markers her mom put up are still visible, florescent flashes of orange metal pinned to the trees every ten feet or so. She starts out at a slow pace, but soon grows more comfortable with the uneven and distantly familiar terrain.

It’s different running through a forest than through a city. Her calves burn with the effort to adjust to the uncertain footing here. Her eyes start to water as her speed makes it harder and harder to track the trees sliding past. Once, she misjudges a branch and winces as it catches her across the cheek. She slows to a walk after that one, breathing hard. The woods hiss around her, leaves rustling in a slight breeze.

Matt would have loved it here. He’d always preferred their national park climbs over their indoor tournaments.

“What am I doing?” She’s hardly aware she’s spoken the words out loud until they shatter the peace of the forest. Her chest burns at the thought of him. She’s not supposed to think about him—this trip is about her. She stares unseeing into the forest. She needs to reprioritize her life. She’s getting older and there aren’t that many forty-year-old climbers in the business--

Movement drags her back to reality with terrifying swiftness. Her eyes lock onto a tree, twenty feet ahead. Her heart is pounding in her chest before she realizes what drew her attention. There’s a butterfly, about the size of her palm, sitting on the bark. What had attracted her eye was its wings, opening and closing.

Jania stares, hand pressed over her heart. Just a bug. A monarch butterfly, by the looks of it. She frowns at it. Didn’t they usually stay further south? As much as she loves being outdoors, she’s never been particularly interested in learning about nature. That had been more Matt’s thing.

“It’s my thing now,” she mutters and turns on her heel to start her trek back to the cabin. Jania’s cleared her schedule through the year for this. Even if things like butterflies scare her now, they won’t soon. She’s going to adapt to life out here and prove to (Matt) herself that she’s more than competitions and her family’s name.

The cabin is further than she thought it’d be and it takes her nearly twice as long to get back. By the time it looms into view, she’s sweating and her skin is crawling with imagined ticks.

What she needs is a shower.

----------.

The shower thing is proving more difficult than she expected. The tiles of the floor are slimy to the touch and there’s algae growing from random patches of grout. The water that comes out of the showerhead is rust-colored for a solid two minutes before it reluctantly begins to run clear.

She remembers her mother telling her that there’re cleaning products underneath the kitchen sink. She passes the stairs on her way and frowns when a cold breeze brushes past her. She stops and frowns up them to the second floor. Was there a window open? That could be why there’s so much moisture in the house. When the inspector arrives, she’d have him go and board it up.

There’s bleach and a few sponges where her mother said they’d be and she sets them on the kitchen counter gratefully. Even better, there’s a bucket to dilute the bleach in since there aren’t any gloves to protect her hands. She puts the bucket under the faucet and waits for it to fill. As she watches the water rise, she realizes that there’s something bothering her. Something’s out of place.

Her toothbrush isn’t propped up on her bathroom kit.

She justifies it at first. She got startled when her bag wasn’t where she remembered it being. She probably set it down on the table or maybe even on her sleeping bag. But as she searches each places, the water spluttering into the bucket ringing in her ears, the panic grows. Her toothbrush didn’t just walk off.

It’s only when the bucket overflows, water dripping from the lip, over the edge of the sink, and onto the floor, that she stops her frantic search. She shuts it off, leaving her hand on the knob for a long time. Her toothbrush wasn’t on the floor, amongst her things, or even in the dusty cabinets.

Slowly, she carries her cleaning supplies to the bathroom, at a loss for what to do. She’s been in the cabin for nearly half an hour—surely if anyone was here with the intention to harm her, they would have attacked by now? Or she would have seen them while searching for her toothbrush? The only place she hadn’t looked was upstairs and she knew that was impossible, considering the condition of the stairs. Well, maybe not impossible, but improbable.

She leaves the bathroom to grab her phone and calls Edmund.

“Hello?”

“It’s Jania,” she says and then, without waiting for acknowledgement, “did you come up here?”

There’s a long silence. “Wow, you got signal,” Edmund says, sounding taken aback. “That’s a really good phone.”

“Did you?”

“No, I’m in town.” There’s the sound of cars passing and a door swinging closed. “Why, you need something?”

Jania bites her lip. “Are there any neighbors? Or maybe campers or something out here?”

“No,” he says slowly. “Why?”

“It’s probably nothing,” she says. “I just—lost track of my toothbrush is all. An animal might have come and grabbed it for all I know.”

Again, it takes Edmund a minute to respond. “The woods can make anyone see things. If you want, I can come get you. Book you a room at the motel.”

She’s already shaking her head. Now, talking to another human being, she feels silly. “No, it’s alright. It’s been too long since I’ve been out in nature. It’s probably right in front of me somewhere.”

“I could be there in an hour,” Edmund says. There’s jingling that sounds a lot like keys. “We could be back in town before dark.”

He must think her a scared little girl to be talking about the dark. It was a mistake to call. “I said it’s fine. I’ll see you on Thursday with the inspector.”

“Just call me if you change your mind,” Edmund says. There’s something in his voice that she can’t quite place. Almost like…worry. “You haven’t been out into the forest, have you?”

Jania’s eyes fall on the trees outside the kitchen window. For a split second, she swears that she sees movement behind the closest tree. A deer? “Why?”

“I haven’t maintained the paths,” Edmund says. Is it just her, or does that sound a lot like an excuse? He clears his throat. “Could be dangerous. Meant to tell you before I left.”

“I’ll be careful.”

She hangs up the phone feeling both better and worse. Better because of course it’s just her mind playing tricks on her. She’s become too comfortable in hotel rooms and city centers is all.

Worse because now Edmund must think she’s still a little girl at heart and that, for some reason, really bothers her.

You care too much what people think, Matt told her.

Or maybe I care just enough, she’d replied.

She frowns and goes to scrub the shower.

------.

She throws herself into cleaning after washing off any potential ticks. The main problem is that the house is dusty from years of standing abandoned. She sweeps and sweeps and sweeps but the only areas she seems to make any progress on are the bathroom and the living room just before where the stairs start. Could the wind she still feels blowing down from the second floor have kept it cleaner than other areas of the house?

She tries fixing the hinges on the front door and only manages to break off the top one. It stains her hands with rust and she makes a note to call Edmund tomorrow with instructions to buy new hinges. She couldn’t keep coming through the front window forever.

By the time the sun starts to set, she’s got more done than she thought possible. The floors are clean and she’s made good progress on cleaning out the dirt from the cabinets. The toilet works every flush now instead of every other and the shower no longer smells of mold and mildew.

She heats a meal pack on the stove with a pan she found in the back of a cabinet. Her mother hadn’t cleared out everything from the cabin when they’d quit coming all those years ago. The smell of powdered potatoes and preserved gravy makes the house feel a little more alive and lived in.

She drafts a to-do list on her phone as she eats. Replace the hinges. Fix the stairs. Find the leaks. Clear path to the kitchen.

Thunk.

Her hand freezes, travel spoon halfway to her lips. Her eyes drift up to the ceiling above her. Was she imagining it or did that sound like—

Thunk.

Jania scrambles to her feet, heart pounding in her chest. The remains of her meal fall onto her sleeping bag, but she can hardly focus on that. That sound came from above her. That sound came from the second floor.

Thunk.

The third thunk calms her slightly. If it was an animal or a person, it wouldn’t be rhythmic. Now that she’s listening for it, the wind is howling outside. Maybe there’s a shutter loose, or even a door.

Thunk.

Still she needs to check it out.

She hadn’t found any replacement bulbs, so the only light she has is her lantern or the light from her phone. She holds the lantern out in front of her like a shield and peers up the stairs into the darkness of the second floor.

Nothing.

She climbs the first four steps, knowing they’ll hold her weight at least. The illumination only reaches the very edge of the top step and no further. Tentatively, she tries the fifth stair again, putting more of her weight on it than last time. Maybe she’s being too careful—

Crack!

Jania trips down the stairs, landing hard on her butt. The fifth stair is now cracked in two, jagged chunks of wood sticking this way and that.

“Bad idea, Jania,” she tells herself. She gets up carefully, testing the extent of her injury. Nothing serious.

The door or window is still banging upstairs.

Reluctantly, Jania puts her shoes on. She’s not going to sleep with that sound. She might as well see if it’s an external window that she can close. Otherwise she’ll be up all night, just in time for Edmund to come and make assumptions about whether or not she’s still afraid of the dark.

The forest outside of the house is blue-lit from the light of the full moon. She scans the exterior of the house with her flashlight carefully. The attic window is boarded shut and so are the second floor, front-facing windows. If she’s got it right, the stairs face east.

The path on the east side of the house is better than the one that leads to the kitchen. Was Edmund lying when he claimed to not have maintained them? No, more than likely animals come through here. Deer, maybe.

Thunk.

She startles at the sound and looks up. Luck is on her side it seems. The shutters on the window above her are loose, slamming against the house each time the wind sweeps through the treetops. The only way up to the window is to climb the trees behind her and hope her reach is long enough.

Jania squints against the darkness, flicking her flashlight off to see if there’s enough light from the moon to see by. No such luck.  She’s climbed with lights before, of course, but only when absolutely necessary. Her light can’t even hook onto her pants, meaning she’d have to carry it in her hand. It’s an unnecessary risk.

She converts her flashlight to lantern mode and sets it at the base of the tree closest to the window. It’s range of light is just enough that she can make out the window she needs to get to. She toes off her shoes, does a few light stretches and jumps for the lowest branch.

Bark bites into her fingertips and she winces. Should have thought to wear her gloves. Too late now. She swings herself up onto the branch, clamping it between her thighs as she looks for her next target.

There’s a rustle of bushes underneath her that stalls her swing to the next branch. She stills, eyes instinctively jerking to where she imagined she heard the noise. Her lantern’s light is enough to make out a few bushes and one or two tree trunks a short distance away. The shadows are deep and long the further they get from her light.

An odd shape peeking out from underneath the bush closest to her lantern catches her eye. She squints at. It looks like an exposed ball of roots, paler than the dry ground beneath it and spidering out towards her lantern. The part where they connect is thicker, growing from a mere inch or two in diameter to six inches at least. She leans over her branch and rubs at her eyes. If she didn’t know better, she’d think it was a—

Thunk.

She curses as her fingers bite into the bark as tension rockets up her back. Right. The window. When she looks back down at the bushes, she can’t pick out the roots she’d been staring at and has to laugh at herself. Look at her, finding things to jump at in the dark.

She scurries up the tree, toes digging into grooves to get her closer to her objective branch. It’s wider than the others, gnarled and crooked in the middle like it had once been pruned back, but then quickly grown back. The end of it almost perfectly taps against the window whose shutters she wants to tear off.

Once she’s on it, she scoots forward carefully, listening for any sign that the branch is going to break underneath her. Six feet from the window. Four. Now that she’s closer, she can see that the glass panes are cracked, the bottom left of the grid missing completely. She’d bet anything that the breeze she feels inside comes from this window.

She catches one shutter as the wind draws it open. The wood is smooth in her grip, years of weathering storms having worn it down. Unfortunately for her, the hinges are sturdier than the front door’s. She carefully leans forward and examines what she can see under the faint light. It’s hinges are sturdy, but the shutter is hanging at an angle. She wedges it back into the window frame tight enough that the wind doesn’t have a chance to dislodge it.

She’s trying to yank the other shutter—this one only pinned by one hinge—from the window when, in the pitch dark of the room, she swears that something moves.

Jania yelps and jerks back and several things happen all at once. The shutter pops loose and she fails to compensate. Her center of balance shifts as her hand flies wide, the shutter spinning off into the darkness. Her arms pinwheel, but it’s too late. The bark rips through her thin pants, tearing at her legs. She falls.

She hits the ground hard on her back. Her chest seizes as she tries to breathe. Her mind keeps replaying the moment over and over again. Something in the shadows had moved as if rising from the floor, there’s something on the second floor—

The light flickers as if something’s crossed in front of it, there and gone before her eyes have a chance to catch up.

Jania bolts back towards the house. The ground stabs at her feet but, by sheer dumb luck, nothing draws blood. She vaults through the window and doesn’t stop there. She scrambles into the bathroom and locks the door behind her, ears straining for what she knows is coming. Whatever was in that room knows that she saw it. Any moment now she’s going to hear it pounding down the stairs to tear at the bathroom door. Any minute now—

The air rings with the sound of her own beating heart. There’re no footsteps or thuds or howls like she imagined. The crickets outside are singing. Surely if they heard something, they’d be silent?

She spends the night in the shower stall shivering and waiting for morning.

-------.

By the time morning does come, Jania has a hundred reasons why she couldn’t have seen what she saw. It was late at night and she was tired. It was her mind playing tricks on her again. The shadow could have been her own, cast there by the lantern’s light, and moving as she fought with the shutters. Maybe there was a mirror in the room and what she’d been so scared by was her own reflection.

Whatever the case was, it wasn’t what she thought she saw. It didn’t have horns or eyes or anything of the sort. Obviously. She lets herself out of the bathroom and, as the morning light surrounds her, feels rather silly about the whole thing.

She changes into her running clothes. She’s being ridiculous. She’ll feel better after a run, she knows it. And if her eyes dart to every corner of the house as she gets ready, it’s only because she needs to find all the problems before the inspector comes later today.

That’s the only reason.

Her shoes are still outside, exactly where she’d left them. Seeing them there, clearly unmoved, unravel another bit of tension. See? If she’d really seen something out here, it would have moved her shoes. Hidden them or something so she couldn’t run away.

Her lantern is completely out of battery. She’d left it on in her mad scramble back to the house. She leaves it on the porch and heads towards her running path. She’ll change the batteries when she comes back.

Unlike yesterday, Jania can’t seem to get into the rhythm of her run. Every snap of a twig startles her and she finds herself walking more often than not.

To distract herself, she counts the metal markers as she walks. Now that she’s an adult, she can appreciate the lengths her mother went to to keep her safe and on the trail. The bright orange is easy to follow and she finds herself relaxing with how predictably they’re spaced.

That is, of course, one of them blinks at her.

Jania bites back a curse and jumps a good two feet back before she realizes what she’s seeing. It’s the butterfly from yesterday’s run. It’s landed on one of the markers, the orange on its wings a near perfect match for the orange of the marker.

Jania drops her hands onto her knees, leaning over to catch her breath. She glares at the butterfly. “You scared me—”

A pale hand, knotted and gnarled like tree roots, appears around the edge of the tree and crushes the butterfly in its fist.

Electricity shoots through Jania and she’s running before her brain even realizes what’s happened. Someone was behind that tree, someone she hadn’t heard or seen on the path, someone who was hiding out of sight—

Her feet slip and slide across the pine needles as her ears strain for any hint that she’s being followed. She’s fast and fit. Whoever it is won’t catch her. She needs to get to the cabin. She hadn’t thought to bring her phone, like an idiot fighting her fear of the dark, so she needs to get to the cabin and to her phone.

Someone sighs in her ear and Jania lashes out on instinct. Her hand connects with air and her swing off balances her. She slips on the path, body twisting. She crashes into the ground shoulder twist and hears a familiar pop! as it dislocates. A second later, the burn hits and she cries out, writhing to get her weight off the injury.

A branch snaps and she looks up into the empty eye sockets of a monster.

It’s here, she thinks in the terrible moment her body freezes. It followed me after all.

Jania doesn’t know how she gets back to the cabin. She takes in the grinning skull, the strips of rotting flesh, the clearly human hands and bipedal form of the creature in snapshots. The nails reaching for her. The clawed feet digging into the ground.

And then the woods are rushing by her again, her lungs seizing and her dislocated shoulder almost numb from being jostled. The muscles in her legs are starved of oxygen and feel like logs, but she can’t stop. Behind her she can hear the creature barking and it sounds almost like a human laughing.

She hits the cabin door without remembering the lock and bounces off of it. She cries out as her bruises from last night are hit again, but she’s working off of pure adrenaline now. What was that? What was that in the forest?

She lunges through the open window without grace, her pants tearing on the jagged nails still sticking out of the walls. The pain of the nails sends her to her knees, but she can’t stop. She staggers to her feet and bolts for her bag.

It’s not in the living room.

Jania stares at the spot she last saw it with something like horrible disbelief. It’s not possible. It was on the floor by her sleeping bag—or was it in the kitchen? Now that she thinks about it, she never remembers taking it to the kitchen after that first day, and doesn’t remember ever taking it to the living room at all--

A floorboard from the second floor creaks.

No. Jania can’t think. Her mind feels frozen, like ice has been poured through her ears. Her eyes are watering. Or is she crying?

Another floorboard creaks, closer to the stairs.

Jania turns as if in a dream. Her nails dig into her hurt shoulder as she forces her legs to take a step. Then another. She walks to the bottom of the stairs and counts the steps.

First step. Nothing.

Second step. Firm.

Third step. Fine

Fourth step. Splinters.

The fifth step is broken like she remembers, but worse because there’s something dark and wet there and--

The sixth step is filled with that black liquid and, when she tracks the ooze up and up and up, there at the top of the stairs is her duffle bag.

A single monarch is sitting on the zipper, wings gently waving in the breeze.

Behind her, metal tears and the door cracks off its hinges as the chain is torn away.