Thunk.

  Ka-thunk.

  Calliope wound her head back a third time, poised to press her forehead ft against the door's leathery skin once more, but paused mid-tic in midair. Maybe there was something that she'd missed? Some sort of weakness, like a silver bullet to a lycanthrope–though she cked a gun to shoot it with, she'd spit the cartridge at Marie herself if need demanded… but no. Nothing to save her, only unnecessary purple words and an apology for her impending doom: for divulging such knowledge I am sorry. Useless. Fucking useless.

  Ka-thunk.

  She would've screamed in sheer frustration, if she weren't currently stalked by a centipedal devil-woman seeking to suck her soul away, whose sight and sound were both the same in that they were empathic–the only empathy the Egl?che possessed. As her heartbeat continued its betrayal, the lights of the twisted student center's hallway flickered to herald her approach; Callie thought she caught the faintest whisper of her name along the wind. She shivered. There shouldn't be a wind, indoors–but then almost everything in her present nightmare shouldn't be: ominous double-doors guarding the Necronomicon not excepted.

  "What's even the fucking point of you, if you can't tell me how to beat her," she whispered to the overrge, overwrought panes. Their decorated lines led her to no answers.

  That the door was so ornate demanded scrutiny, though. Doors were dividers, portals meant to compartmentalize rooms apart from rooms, things apart from other things–thought apart from thought, dream distinct from nightmare. Most spaces they contained were roughly the same size, give or take, disordered magnitudes: a pristine ballroom here, a cluttered kitchenette there. Not so with the door in front of her, and not so with the byrinth of them she'd unlocked months ago when she first invited Esther inside her mind; Its hex-skulled skeleton key wrenched open far too many doors with worse things than skeletons behind them.

  She wished the doors It opened were only ever ordinary–instead, the weirder ones opened not onto rooms but onto voids, oceans of ideas so vast they defied description. To fit the Necronomicon inside her little brain, Ettie had to extract a year's worth of experience from her, and a wound like that weighed heavy on her psyche. That the portal was so scarred made sense as a means of mirroring the stitches in her brain, and its cyclopean quality belied the sheer scope of what it contained. Untold horrors lurked within.

  An untold horror lurked without, too. Calliope tried to still her breathing, to listen for the hideous scuttling of the Egl?che's legs when It approached. It would find her, soon, and then it wouldn't matter how many doors within her head were left unopened. Fear would eat around them, oozing through the brickmold, until all that was left of her mind would be a signed, sealed copy of the Necronomicon, with nobody to ever read it.

  "So why'd you fucking put it in me!" She cried, beating her fists against the door. Her thoughts wandered back to the reason for it all, the catalyst without which she'd be in a far less deadly dream. Her memories of Esther were still vivid and pristine. Those mesmerizing eyes… the way she resembled an inkblot on reality itself… those damnable dimepiece curves… she missed It all. But it was only memory. The memory of a god, however great, couldn't defeat a living one. There were limits to her imagination: recollected power couldn't overthrow the present.

  Callie blinked in realization. Her hands pushed off the door, and she stepped back to take in its full scope: its full unbounded scope that described things far beyond her own imagination. That gave her an idea.

  "Oh, Callie-bear…" a ghastly voice echoed, faraway. The end of the hall fshed a sickening orange. She'd have to be quick about it.

  The doors had grooves, but no true knob or handle. No true keyhole, either, only a circur recess in its center too rge for a key… but rge enough for a hand. In desperation, she plunged hers into it. It was–predictably–awful: a million points like little hairs pressed against her arm as she pushed further, further, until she at st touched something she could turn. Chittering ughter separate from Marie's filled her head, its source unknown Her lip quivered, her breathing hastened; she spun the knob as far to the right as it would go and jerked her hand out of the opening. From the elbow down it dropped a brackish-smelling bckened ichor. How disgusting.

  Beneath the ooze, the skin of her arm was reddened in a thousand pces, the product of a thousand follicur bites. The injury would give anyone concern, but it barely registered on the list of reasons Calliope had to be afraid. There was a deep, mechanical rumbling as the portal's peridermis cracked and split right down the middle, then began to open outwards… she darted to one side as the double panels swung wide until they were perpendicur to the wall. Her back pressed ft against the nearest of them. What now, she thought, scratching at her arm as hives raised on it like goosebumps. She didn't yet dare to take a gander at the chthonic void she'd just unearthed.

  The silence after the creaking was so deep she could’ve heard a metaphysical pindrop in her head from a thousand dreaming leagues. No sound whatsoever came forth from the door itself. But then she heard it, from somewhere else: behind her, at the far end of the hall where it veered left into the maze: the pitter-patter of far-too-many legs ushering Marie right towards her.

  Ba-bump.

  If this were a dream, why did her heart have to be so damn loud? What use was astral blood coursing through her astral body? No reason, but fear; It was going to hear her.

  Ba-bump. Ba-bump.

  A hiss, inverted and inhaled. “Found you!” Marie sang. The centifootsteps on the tiles grew faster, more insistent. From the sound of it, she'd just rounded the corner and would be visible if Calliope weren't hidden. From the lilting in her voice, she was excited, even ecstatic, about their premature reunion.

  As it drew closer, a horrible scraping noise impinged upon Callie's hearing, like nails on a chalkboard–if the chalkboard were hewn out of amalgamated bones whose former inhabitants added each a scream into its hateful chord. The screech overtook the higher registers of hearing, hollowing out space at the bottom for Marie, whose voice was low and dark and dangerous. “Oh, Cal,” she tutted, “don't take it personally. You aren't special. You never were. It’s all the same to me.” The scraping grew louder. It advanced.

  Calliope took a deep breath. She wasn't going to go out without facing It head-on. Her entire body shook with terror from the extremities on up, but she managed it: she stepped out from behind the door without succumbing to paralysis.

  Absolute terror greeted her; the monstress had decayed since she'd st seen her. There was no more need for pleasant pretense: what was Marie’s skin still clung to the bituminous skeleton beneath in tatters, but the flesh around the jaw had fully rotted off, revealing a bony, rictus grin. That pair of the darkest eyes she'd ever seen gleamed out at her from sunken eye sockets above high cheekbones. Her fangs clicked, a dreadful sound… but the source of the (far worse) scraping was her nails, now so long they reached the floor, tapering like overlong syringes. It had come to administer her a lethal injection; the executioner's head tilted when It saw her.

  “There you are. Tired of running? You always freeze up when you're afraid. Makes it easier for me.”

  “I–I’m not scared," she stuttered.

  Shh. Of course you are.

  Callie whimpered. It advanced, but even before It reached her Its work was underway: she could feel it weighing down her mind and legs with lead, split by real and irreal isotopes. Keeping her from running. Compelling her to watch the final moments before It began tearing her apart. It was almost complete, but something still radioactive demanded Calliope's attention: to her right, in the gaping window onto nothing that the open door had made, there was a spot of light. Many spots of light, in fact.

  Tchlik. “What's this?” Marie mused. “Some memory you're desperately holding onto?" Tch. "Cute! But if you fight it, I'll only make it worse for you~ I'll make it hurt, C—-”

  Again that distortion in her ears. “I–I don't know,” she admitted, staring at the lights. They looked to be getting closer. As one winked out, then in, she realized: they came in pairs or polycules, like stars. Though… they gleamed too coldly to be stars. No, they were not lights, but eyes. “Shit,” she cursed.

  Marie echoed her sentiment “No!” It hissed. They moved in unison: the monster towards the doorway, and her away from it, until she'd hidden herself again behind the farthest sb of charred leather. She was spared of seeing It scramble forward on those legs until It reached the threshold. She heard it, still… but It wasn't fast enough. Eyelight was much faster than sound.

  The owners of all those eyes emerged in a stampede: shuffling ungoleths on stiltlike limbs, lesser agl?ec-wifs estranged from their Mother, atraphors with compound-nostrils that all chuffed at the scent of something warm-brained after so very, very long, and scores of others. Every creature she'd read about that should remain unknown and unnamed issued from the doorway. The little student center hallway couldn’t hope to bear the strain: like hot blown gss the walls thinned, then stretched, then burst open in a molten sputter. The wind howled out into the void at every tear. Some rge, ugly, ghoulish thing managed to poke a multi-pronged head around the door at her… before it was whisked off into the hole that opened up opposing it. That one would remain nameless–thankfully.

  It wasn't the only thing to be consumed. All around her, spots were appearing in her vision, like burns spreading over paper. She began to hyperventite… and hyper-hyper-ventited when one of Marie’s cws curled around her ankle.

  “You can't escape me, Callie~” It snarled, with no lilt in her voice anymore. She couldn't help but peer around the door to look. It was a gory and chaotic sight: the anterior of Marie's body thrashed about like a charmed snake, besieged by the army of monsters Callie'd unleashed. Here and there, It stabbed at one or two and tossed a corpse aside, but four more would take their pce. Little of Its body remained visible under all the grimy things that now crawled over It. They did so for security: any wild creatures loosed from inside the Necronomicon fell through the holes to nowhere in the opposite wall. Only Marie–and those hitched to her–remained anchored in the floor… even as the very floor began to rot away.

  The chaos served Calliope on that occasion. The tile she was standing on vanished to thin air, and she took the chance to hoist her leg out of Marie’s grip and hop, dufflepudded, to safety. Her heart was racing at such speed she worried it would break some sort of sound barrier. She was afraid, but still alive. Marie still meant to unmake her… but all that It could manage under the conceptual overload was grasp at the air where her leg had been, to no effect.

  It hissed. From within the mountain of seething, monstrous flesh, a lone eye of darkest tar pitched her way. “You're not special, Callie. You reek of fear. It's pathetic."

  Calliope drew herself up to her full height, all five-foot-nine-inches of gangly loser. “Y-yeah, I'm scared. Just not of you. Or–” she dodged a crab-helmet-looking thing as it flew past, “More scared of all this shit, I guess, right now.”

  The world had grown so patchy that to make out the shapes of objects became difficult. In the confusion, seeing only bits of demons instead of their full forms, Callie could rex a bit. A bit. She knew that her victory was one-time and temporary by the way Marie remained in pce some feet away instead of lunging at her in vain. It could afford patience; she could not. The next time she fell asleep, It’d be there waiting–and this time It would seal all portals to avoid any surprises. Regardless, she couldn't help but feel a little smug. She allowed herself to smile, just a little, just as the st scrap of dream-reality burned up: that dark eye smoking at her like a hot coal pressed out of malice.

  She bolted upright into a lesser darkness. The thundercp of her returning consciousness rattled through her skull as she regained her bearings: her bedroom, not the student center. No living or unliving things to skulk about besides herself. No sound to break the silence besides the real beating of her heart and her bored, shallow breathing. She was awake, and still alive.

  Calliope's hands touched along her shoulders, forearms, waist, thighs. All still there and with no new scars or injuries. She'd fallen asleep in her work clothes, with the sleeves rolled up–the wrinkles on the cream-white colred shirt marked her mistake. Passing out had cost her. But she'd done it; she'd escaped! In spite of the trauma, she began to ugh. It was the only medicine she could afford at present.

  "Ha-ha! That's right, fuck you, FUCK you, bitch!" She called out to her open closet doorframe, whose shadowy depths were imitative of the abyss she'd just crawled out of. She flipped the darkness off for good measure… but of course there wasn't a reply. Marie would wait until her back was turned to strike again, like more than half the preying things she'd caught an eyeful of when opening the book. It didn't care much for the waking world when her visit there came with a time limit. Eventually she'd have to rest.

  It was imperative though that she avoid sleep at all costs, at least until Ettie was back to shield her brain. Oh, Ettie… she did owe It some thanks for her salvation, however indirect. She'd have to tell her that once they'd been reunited–soon, with all fortune and necessity. Calliope pulled her jacket off the headboard and turned out the inside pocket.

  Something was wrong. Something new was missing. There was no square of little pills to be found within the pocket. Maybe she'd mispced it? No, no… every other pocket she turned out was the same. It hadn't fallen on the floor or underneath her bed, either… she was in the midst of frantically checking the tter when a knock came on the bedroom door.

  "Callie? You awake?" Erika's voice was muffled only slightly by the thin, fky wood. It triggered her memory of what Marie had spoken in that voice. Was there any chance those words were truly said? No, no, it was all lies… she was being paranoid.

  "Yeah?" Callie pulled her head up from underneath in an arch, to sit up on the bed.

  "You decent?" Erika continued.

  "Uh, yeah?" She was annoyed. It wasn't really an indecent question–Erika knew she didn't like to be seen in her pajamas much–but more indecent timing. This was taking up precious time she needed to find where her damn acid had went. If she just–

  The door opened. Erika's appearance provided her with a nice, healthy shock of fear. Her hair was tied up into a sleek bck bun, and in bck panda-bear pajamas it was giving too many gothy vibes for Callie's liking. Maybe she'd developed a fear of dark-haired dark-cd women? Who could bme her?

  "I think somebody broke in!" Erika whispered, harshly. Her eyebrows were stuck up in a raised position; she looked fearful. Oh. So it was serious.

  "Wait–what?"

  "Yeah! I heard a noise, and I got up to check, and I swear I saw the front door close!"

  Calliope's face paled–with all its color changes, she was becoming something of a chameleon. She'd escaped the bck out of damnation, temporarily… what fresh hell had she awoken into?

  "The fuck? Are you sure you weren't like, dreaming?"

  Erika shook her head. "I thought I was, but then I saw that my Advil's gone! I keep it on the bedside table and it's gone. I'm sure. Someone was definitely here… er, unless you took it?"

  "No," she answered, "it wasn't me. Maybe it was the ghost?" She offered. One misfortune after another; the least she could do was lighten the mood.

  Or not. Erika's eyebrows lowered to scowl at her. "Callie. Not funny. I seriously think there was somebody in here."

  "Okay! Damn, sorry… is anything else missing?"

  Erika's lips pursed; her eyes rolled up to think. "Hm. Don't think so? The TV and stuff's still here. Is anything of yours gone?"

  Her goddamned drugs. "No, I don't think so."

  "Hm… weird. Scary. Doesn't make any sense, I mean I know the neighborhood kinda sucks but this is too much. I just hope nobody's stalking me." They made eye contact. Erika looked truly worried.

  Callie briefly acknowledged the possibility. But it seemed unlikely. The only expnation that made sense to her was that the intruder–whoever they were, if they even existed–had visited for her, and her alone. She was becoming too much of a magnet for all things unfortunate.

  "Maybe we should file a police report. The front door has a bolt. It's shitty, and sticks, but it'll work. Let's use that tonight." She said. Up on the third floor, the decrepit front door was the only realistic way into their apartment from outside. Callie shuddered to think of any unrealistic ways… too many of the creatures in her nightmare seemed capable of climbing walls and opening windows… or ignoring Euclidean boundaries entirely.

  "Ooh, yeah! Good idea! And I will, just–" Erika yawned, "–I need to get back to sleep. You should too."

  Absolutely fucking not. "Mm, sure. I'm still hoping it was a dream and it just rolled under your bed or something. Did you–"

  "Yes, I checked, Callie. No."

  "Okay. Sorry."

  They shared an awkward silence. Callie had to bance her concerns: investigating Erika's cim of a break-in versus her own desire to avoid eternal nocturnal torment. She wished she'd leave. But how to ask? If–

  "Callie." Erika spoke.

  "Yeah?"

  "Can you help me check the apartment? I'm kinda freaked out."

  "Oh. Sure." Well… with no pills, there was no immediate rush.

  They combed through every room together: the living room with its facsimile of a firepce, the little linen closet off the hall containing bedthings they never used, the single bathroom they both shared, Erika's bedroom, and the kitchen, where a backdoor led to aged narrow steps that spiraled to the basement. Neither of them wished to go down that way into the dark, but luckily there was no need: that door had a bolt, too, and Erika triple-checked that it was tched. All the doors and windows within were locked, but everywhere they found nothing, and no one, except for the two missing sets of pills.

  "At least they didn't leave the milk out, right?" Callie cracked another joke, not learning from her mistake.

  "Oh come on. That was you… right?"

  "Yeah, sure." She lied. To expin that it wasn't her in spirit, but a… friend, possessing her, seemed too disturbing a topic. Erika had only just started to calm down after their search turned up empty.

  "Thanks–really, thanks," she said when they were done, "Good night, Callie. Make sure you lock your door!"

  She did, or tried to: the loose doorknob prevented it from catching. She sighed instead, turning to the bedroom window whose blinds she hadn't yet turned closed. Streetlight striped in from outside, and when she got up close, she saw it: proof that Erika's theory wasn't a mere dream.

  Directly across the street and bathed in the sepia of streetlights, there was a bck, windowless van parked at the sidewalk. Something glinted out of the front window–a lens?–before the engine revved and it sped off into the night, like a mouse startled by her footsteps.

  "The fuck?" She said aloud. Things like that didn't just happen–the confluence of weirdness had to be correted. Someone, or something, was on to her, somehow.

  Had they been in her apartment? If they found her drugs, which were illegal, why wasn't she detained? Would that come ter? Or if it were just an amateur, a thief, why would they be driving the most suspicious van in the world on the road? Why would they have stolen nothing else? She couldn't make heads or tails of it–which made a twisted sort of sense, with how her streak of luck to date could easily compel a coin to nd on its edge instead of either face. If probability was quantized, impossible events could tunnel through occasionally, and Calliope was ridden with worm-holes by now, the diced cheese cubed out of gactically rare milk.

  Still, there were far more urgent matters to attend to. She pced an earbud in each ear and tuned her phone to online videos concerning Boston's public transit system. She mustn't fall asleep. She'd have to find another plug.

  The next morning, her tired brain produced a sobering thought: In retrospect, it'd all been inevitable. She'd begun to believe that her and Esther's meetcute was a fixed point in time around which reality revolved. The dominoes that led to that nuclear chaos had too many dots coming up her number to be mere coincidence.

  The arderangement of fate might've begun with her ill-fated dormitory. For decades MISC was famous for not only prestige and ingenuity, but also infamous for its chronic shortage of undergraduate housing, such that incoming freshmen had to enter into a lottery to determine which of the various domiciles they'd get to call home. Many rushed sororities, fraternities, or other independent living groups–a tendency on which the Institute depended–but regardless, by the end of the first year the freshman sediment had settled into a dozen or so silt-streams of varying dispositions. Every dormitory was unique: in its construction, in its upkeep, in its culture, even. There was a sense of house pride that gradually infused itself into the residents–not unlike the asbestos that was definitely used in the construction of at least some of the older buildings. MISC was 'quirky' like that; it had been ever since its baptism one-and-a-half centuries before on the antediluvian banks of the Miskatonic.

  When Callie passed through the lottery, she'd been given her third choice: Bexley Hall. It wasn't shiny, new, and spongy like Simmons, nor a trendsetter of wider MISC culture like venerable Walcott House. It's most obvious cim was most convenient, as it was but a stone's throw from the Institute's front door. But Bexley’s reputation went well in advance: it was aces in accessibility not only to campus but to substance, too.

  In the 1970's, overeager chemistry majors ran one of the rgest sources of LSD in the Northeast out of their Bexley dorm rooms. That fact became well-known, so much so that the FBI–or those dressed like them–came to investigate. Legend has it that on arrival they found only a pte of cookies and a gss of milk–a mockery, perhaps a product of post-war chagrin with government powers and MISC's defense contracts with them whose terms stretched back decades. Sure, the Bexley operation was no Manhattan Project, like the one wrought by the physicists who reappeared from time to time to haunt cssrooms as guest lecturers. But it was cndestine, efficient, and successful. While the physicists' brainchild threatened theoretical explosions over metropolitan centers, the undergraduate chemists' actually exploded minds all throughout New Engnd for a decade or more. Even forty years on, intrepid residents could still find stashes of a certain kind of acid hidden in the building.

  The Institute would of course prefer that such history remain unknown. There were rumors that the administration wanted to shutter Bexley, citing water damage in the walls. But everyone knew there wasn't water there, as well as the real reason: it was the twenty-first century, not the 1970's, and neverending stories of students high out of their skulls at parties was unacceptable to MISC's reputation. The only barrier that held back the dorm from demolition was, again, the housing shortage. The building's days were tallied in the girders and rebar that went up each morning as the Institute pressed on with erecting modern, less groovy domiciles.

  Calliope knew none of that when she first settled down into her freshman home. She'd never let even a drop of alcohol pass her lips before university; drug abuse resistance education in… well, she couldn't recall ever receiving such instruction, except maybe through osmosis? Regardless of when, D.A.R.E guaranteed it, for a time. As aloof as she tried to be, no creature could retreat entirely from its environment: spring semester freshman year she tripped for the first time. Afterwards it just became a thing she did, sometimes, especially to get out of the whole "being-a-person" thing for a little while. When in Rome–and amidst the columns of MISC's Lobby Seven, one could easily pretend–do as the Romans do: get really, really, high.

  So as the girl with would-be calleidoscope eyes stood outside Bexley Hall again in the snow, she repeated to herself: it'd all been inevitable. Determinism was comfort, in a way: if it was inevitable, then she didn't need to worry, because it would all work out. It'd all work out!

  Her new mantra proved effective. Tailgating behind a resident to gain access to the building took less than ten minutes. As an older dorm on Institutional hospice, Bexley's security had developed cataracts, so she had no issue making her way up to room 6E and knocking– after making sure the lime-green mbda shape was still stickered near the doorknob.

  A face she didn't recognize peeked out at her: a man, short–shorter than her, with less-short, curly cocoa hair and the beginnings of a unibrow. It wasn't Dev, as she expected–but then Dev would've graduated st June anyway, and moved on to bigger and better things than selling LSD out of a dorm room.

  "Uh… hi?" He asked, furrowing.

  "Hey! I'm picking something up for, uh, Jack Florey." she spoke the stupid fucking passphrase. That put the wanted recognition into his eyes. Good; this would take no time at all.

  "Oh, shit! Like the–"

  "–Knights of the stupid Lambda Calculus, yeah. Ugh." She rolled her eyes. The man's own darted around her to ensure she was alone.

  "It'll be seventy, if you've got it." He said, hushed.

  "Yeah." She reached for her wallet.

  "You knew Dev, right?" He pocketed the wad of bills without a gnce.

  "Yeah. Gd to see his dumb riddles still work! Thanks." And like that, the tab of pills passed from his hand to hers into her pocket. It was precious cargo; she stowed it deep, accordingly. The desire to make further conversation had departed Calliope completely; she made it almost a full door down the hall before the mystery man spoke again and stopped her.

  "Yo, Dev was a pretty fun guy. Have a safe trip!" He called out, through the crack in the door. Only one dark eye was visible.

  Have a safe trip… she remembered mauveine orbs uncountable staring at her from all angles.

  Have a safe trip… she recalled the clicking sound of Marie's legs over the floor and that constant drip, drip, drip of foul-smelling not-oil.

  "Ha-ha, I'll try!" she called back.

  In prospect, it'd all be inevitable. Bexley was just across the road that divided campus into halves foreign and domestic; the little rhythmic "cuckoo" of the crosswalk all that separated her from the way back home that led through muraled tunnels and–terminally–the subway. She was halfway up the steps into the entrance lobby when the color orange caught her eye, in the form of a fluffy mass of hair. Orange in New Engnd's winter was almost as unnatural as pink: Sawyer James's locks had not the wherewithal to fall off like browning leaves and leave only balding bark beneath. If they had, perhaps things would've been different. But, as things were: his tawny curls drew her eye, like the st deciduous tree that refused to yield to frost, and they made eye contact. Then, he became a conifer of sorts: his face lit up like a Christmas tree.

  "Callie! Hey! Didn't expect to see you here!" He puffed, in excited breaths that were visible in the cold air. Both of them lingered on the stairs.

  "Oh… hey Sawyer." She mumbled, looking down.

  "I was just heading back to Tang, but it's actually really good I caught you! If–"

  Her tinnitus smothered all sound. Calliope watched Sawyer's mouth fp about with disinterest. What were the magic words that she could say to shoo him off? Ettie would've known. Him–and Erika–and any human–were just obstacles for her now, she who was up to her eyeballs in creepy-crawlies they couldn't see or understand. What use was Sawyer? What use were human friends in her position? She was alone… but then she had a spark of pragmatism. Maybe he could help her after all.

  She needed to get high. She shouldn't do so alone. Erika was likely to be out working, or fast asleep if otherwise. Who could be more eager to favor her than Sawyer?

  "–Hey. Do you wanna come over?" She blurted out.

  Sawyer's mouth stood open.

  "Oh. I mean. Ha-ha. Sure! That works actually, I had something I wanted to give you–for the holidays." He reached behind his head to pat his backpack.

  And he carries it around with him?!... whatever. She shivered. "Oh, wow, okay! Yeah, I guess we can, uh–" she gestured up the steps, into campus.

  "Sure." He smiled at her with closed eyes. "After you!"

  The Infinite Corridor was only moderately crowded today. At its end, Callie traipsed down the steps that led into the basement without thinking, with Sawyer close behind. At MISC, almost all of the buildings were connected underground, like the roots of a great tree–a tree she always swore sprouted up between the man and woman on the Institute's formal seal, but was only a Mande effect It would be a great metaphor if it were real: a tree of knowledge, tended by MISC's motto: mens Et manus, mind-and-hand. But no. There was only a mp between them on the seal, containing a djinn, or something fouler. Funny. Her own mp was her brain, or maybe her skull; rubbing it, ingesting microdots; her genie an impossible woman with bright eyes. She only had to continue on her journey underground, into the cavern, waiting for the proper moment, and they'd be reunited.

  One could go all the way from the subway stop where campus ended in the east, to the steps of the main entrance on Massachusetts Avenue, without ever seeing sunlight. On the way, Sawyer made smalltalk with her that dropped out of her awareness as quickly as it entered. They stopped only once, to take in one of the murals in the part of the tunnels that ran underneath Ames Street.

  "Ha. That's funny." Sawyer said. On the white concrete opposite them, someone had painted an analog clock with arms and legs, strapped to an altar. A hand descending from a cloud pulled counterclockwise on the hour hand. Letters in an arch above read: "Daylight Savings; We Can Always Use More Time"

  "Ha. Yeah." She agreed. The sand in her hourgss was starting to run out.

  The rest of the way was uneventful. She plodded onwards, forwards, upwards, onto the train and off and up the hill and finally the steps that led into her apartment. She learned Sawyer's csses were going well, though he was excited to see family again over the holidays. He even made her an offer on that front: "Y'know, if you're not doing anything, I could always ask and see if a plus-one's okay…" He started as Callie checked her coat inside the door.

  "Oh, that's–" Unnecessary. Sweet. Impossible. "–okay. I'll just be here."

  "Hm." Sawyer pced his own coat on a hook beside hers. "Do you have to work? Over Christmas?"

  "A little bit. Probably." She waffled. The tablet of pills was burning a hole in her coat pocket again; it practically glowed out at her from the wall rack. When would she get to use it? If Sawyer stayed a while, she could slip into the bathroom and pop one… he'd definitely notice, but she could maybe control herself well enough to seem well enough. And there was still the matter of his "gift" for her to consider, even if he agreed to be her trip-sitter…

  She scanned him, up and down. A navy winter coat over a grey-and-maroon MISC hoodie, featuring mascot Errol the Eroteme across the chest. The cloth was baggy on his torso; Sawyer was tall and slim like her. Unlike her, he didn't hunch as much, because he'd earned the right to stand up straight: mechanical engineering was no joke, especially at the graduate level, and he was taking it in stride. It was only around Calliope that he was sheepish: blue eyes beneath orange hair would look at her, then look away. Hell, if he blushed the same auburn on his cheeks, she wouldn't be surprised. He looked nervous.

  "Hey!" She moved to assuage that. "Do you wanna… I mean, we could py a game or something. I could get you cereal? I think Erika's at clinical, so it's just us…"

  The st time she’d been almost alone in a house with Sawyer, she hadn't trusted him. That was then; this was now. Sawyer could be trusted to flirt with her, a little, but from the moment he obeyed her wishes not to go to the emergency room, Callie knew; he wouldn't ever go too far. Sawyer was a loyal dog.

  He smiled like one, too. "Sure! A game sounds great. I'm just gonna, uh–hey, where's your bathroom?"

  She pointed to the nearest door on the same side as the entrance. That was the bathroom she hadn't used in quite a while, so it was probably the cleaner of the two. At the foot of it in the hall, a piece of paper y askew. She'd have to clean that up. Later; it could wait.

  "Thanks," Sawyer replied, turning the knob. "I'll just be a minute–"

  There was no sound; the sight alone was deafening, unbearable. As Sawyer pushed the door open the bathroom's interior slowly became more and more revealed. In the first few seconds it was out of focus, unclear–but still horrible, in a way she couldn't yet express, like the dread of a dream ere it went bad. But then the picture coalesced, and Calliope saw every awful detail in the dark:

  Paper was spread over near-every surface in the bathroom. The sink, the mirror, the toilet cover, the walls, the floor: all of them were pstered with sticky notes or printer sheets, like some sort of intra-office prank. But it was no joke or todo-list. In bck ink; in marker; even in what appeared to be blood in some pces, strange symbols were scribbled every which way. They hurt to look at. They hurt to hear. Mental resolution of their meaning broke like a wave: first cresting over Sawyer, then herself, then reflecting back. He took the brunt of it from where he was, in the threshold where every inward angle ended on a sigil. From such a rogue wave there could be no recovery.

  It happened swiftly: in the time it took to blink, or less; in the time it took for one final arm to spark synapses across the length and breadth of Sawyer's brain. In one final epileptic confgration every neuron he possessed lit up, when it happened… and then the thing that’d been Sawyer Carter James just a moment before slumped forward. But one faculty remained to him then, after his mind was scooped out of its socket like pink-gray wrinkled sherbet: the ability to scream.

  So he began to scream, and scream, and scream.

  The sound whistled from his diaphragm as if it were a diabolic tea kettle–too high, much too high to be human–and went to echo madly off the bathroom walls, where the ink scrawled on every inch of paper drank away the din a byte or two. The scream's coaguting properties were impressive: Calliope's blood curdled away from her ears when she heard it, making her chill down to the core. Sawyer's body was struck frozen too, colpsing down to its knees, but with no will to guide it any longer those could not support it, so its face fell ft against the cold tile floor. The head nded in one of the only spaces not covered in some way by pages, and papers fanned out about it every which way, forming a divot on an altar, or maybe an inverted halo. But even there, its scream continued. There was no light behind the eyes to stop it anymore.

  The worst part about the scream was the way it refused to remain outside of her head, where sounds should be. Sounds should not intrude; but as Calliope looked on and down to the fallen body, she could feel it in her very bones: a rising, then falling whine, like a Shepard tone. Hideous, all-consuming; every symbol on every page on every surface resonated with it. "S-Sawyer!" She cried out–but that almighty Scream whittled it into a whisper. Half of her stumbled forward on one leg aiming to help while the other half refused to step any further into that chamber of evil. Given the chance again to fight, flee, f-etcetera, her body chose once more: to freeze.

  Intervention thawed her. On her right side she heard Erika's door open, followed by hurried footsteps on the hallway floor. It was miraculous that her overburdened mind put it together in time: if Erika saw so much as one inkstroke of that bathroom, she'd be bound up in Sawyer's fate, too.

  Calliope turned. "No, don't!" She yelled. Erika's brow wrinkled in confusion. But her momentum was too great, the hardwood floor too slick against the soles of her pajamas. She'd be carried past the threshold. Callie acted without thinking: she tackled her.

  They tumbled to the ground in a heap. Her hands csped around Erika's wrists to cushion the fall… which immediately embarrassed her, so she released them just as fast. "Sorry! Erika, I just–" she began–then noticed that the brown eyes below her had become bright, wide, and iridescently mauve.

  Esther's face smiled up at her. Calliope's head swam in multiple strokes: the world around grew fuzzy, even as Ettie herself grew sharper, and the screaming in her ears grew distant–irrelevant. Everything was irrelevant except for her and It.

  It's wonderful to see you. I wondered how long it would take for that sign to fall.

  That sly, acidic voice was welcomed back into her brain. Calliope's heart leapt for joy, burning through the ice that filled her throat, where it settled like a hot coal. "Ettie!? You're back!" She sniffled, beginning to tear up.

  I never intended to leave you.

  Without thinking Calie embraced her. Her nose came to rest beside Ettie's neck, just grazing the dark forest of hair whose foliage felt softer than silk against her skin. She forgot herself, and forgot to realize too that a hug of any kind was her closest approach to Ettie thus far. She hoped that initial perigee would be the first of many: Esther smelled beyond heavenly, like clove and marshmallow, with tones of something dark and syrupy beneath–mosses, maybe. To breathe her in made her feel ever more lightheaded; It hatched a kaleidoscope of butterflies within her stomach.

  "I missed you," she sighed into Ettie's neck. Silence, nothing, no reply; then a familiar prickle; a vibration sweeping through her skull; a thousand little hands upturning every fold of her grey matter, with a gentleness meant more for tissue paper; It was reading her.

  It read her–and the pair of them birthed twin realizations at almost the same time.

  She broke their embrace and arched upwards so that she was leaning over on her knees, with palms ft on either side of Esther's–Erika's?–head. "Sorry," she said, "I didn't mean to–you know. Ha-ha. Anyway, uh… how're you back?"

  Esther blinked. In that sliver of time something rger than thought rushed over her: rage. Rage so potent it would skip the boiling and fsh her blood to vapor if she endured it more than an instant. Pink-hot, it ignited every nerve… then was chilled by the cold desire for revenge… then tempered by fear, or relief, so that the full gamut was ft, quenched iron in the end. Even so, It was enough emotion to make Callie's head pop several times over… until it passed, and those starry eyes opened on her anew.

  To find a single human mind among all thoughts is like finding a buoy in the ocean. I tried to wake you up, until the octopus expired on me. I kept trying; I looked for you; I never stopped. But I didn't think I would find you in your lifetime.

  It raised a pale hand to her cheek. Two fingers stroked the bone down to her chin. She shivered.

  "We're very, very lucky my experiment–my preparation–was successful." Ettie smiled with eyes as watery as her own.

  Calliope sat up on her knees. All the world was quiet; too quiet. She turned her head back to the open bathroom door, where even at that extreme angle it was visible, just barely: a symbol of byzantine complexity written on the tiles in bck ink. To comprehend the pattern injected still greater comprehension, like an amplifier autotuned to feedback:

  The symbols were a tuning fork for thinking things, a series of spectral semaphores to draw the lense of Its attention. If her unaltered thoughts were like a darkened buoy, then processing those signs made her a beacon, visible from orbit. Souls burned as little fires in the darkness, and the symbols kindled their thoughts with a specific signature. That was how Esther had sered in on her, like a satellite of mass surveilnce; to see them was for It to see her. But–like the Ve incident–there was a double fsh; the problem was she hadn't been the only one to see those signs.

  "Ettie…" she spoke uneasily. "Let me see what's going on. Please."

  When she looked back, Esther was already on her feet. The petite form looked over her, Its face shadowed but for those noctilucent eyes. For a second Callie fancied herself at the base of a dark tower, impossibly tall and crowned by violet lightning. Every portal in its walls seemed to look down at her. "That is a bad idea." It thundered.

  "Ettie. Now. Please?"

  That trademarked inscrutable stare; the windows of the tower burned more brightly.

  Just keep in mind. All that matters is that you're safe.

  The false vacuum colpsed. Her ears stopped ringing, and at first Calliope was grateful that in the time of their conversation, the screaming stopped. But it was short-lived, because it was repced with a sound almost as unpleasant: next to her, on the floor in her panda-bear pajamas, Erika was sobbing in a pile, rocking back and forth. Callie's hand was on her back in position to console her. A futile endeavor. What'd happened was altogether inconsoble.

  She withdrew her hand and crept towards the open bathroom door. Esther followed, assuming Its pce as her shadow. "Ettie…? What'd you do?..." Her heart was beating in her ears. She reached the threshold.

  Sawyer Carter James y there on the bathroom floor. He was breathing… but that wasn't really a relief. Breathing was a sign of life, not of sapience; from his vacant eyes she could tell–by intuition, with total certainty–that the tter had departed, possibly forever. The thing calling itself Sawyer was completely absent.

  She wheeled around, just to be met with that smile. That damned smile; at the best of times Its nigh-eternal smirk was unnerving. Now: it infuriated her.

  "Ettie! Put him back! Oh God, what the fuck…" What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck…

  That's not going to be possible.

  She rushed to Sawyer's side. Through the blurry screen of tears, she saw her hands shake him by the shoulders, at too long a distance, viewed as from outside. It couldn't possibly be real; any second now the vision would disintegrate, and Sawyer would be perfectly alive. But only his head shook, not the world: it flopped about like a marionette with severed strings. Drool sprinkled from his mouth and left spots on the pages.

  "Like hell it's not possible!" She yelled, to Esther–in the doorframe, again. Always It loved a good threshold to test and tease at. "You're a fucking god, right? It should be fucking easy for you!"

  "Can you unscramble an egg? Can you vomit up a piece of meat, unchewed?"

  "Shut up with the fucking riddles! You–" Her face paled. "Are you saying that you… no, no…" She looked back to Sawyer's face. It was bnk, but not peaceful; the jaw hung open in a silent scream, its tendons strained near to breaking. Then back to Esther, whose mouth was closed, but whose eyes were open, far too wide: again in their depths she could see a shadow of Its true self, far away. Had It spirited Sawyer off to some hellish existence between Its endless tendrils? Was It tasting him, the way It had the aquarium's yogurt? Was he still screaming in Its grip even now?

  "No. He's not. He's just not, anymore. I'm sorry, Callie–I really am." Ettie took a step inside the bathroom.

  "Don't. Just–don't. Fucking fix him, I don't fucking believe you can't do it."

  Esthe's eyes passed downwards to inspect the body. "You're right. I could. Just not in a human lifetime, or a handful… there are more than a handful of fragments. It's easier to take something apart than to put it back together. Even for me."

  Callie cursed her overactive imagination. She tried to stop it, but the vision came, unbidden: Sawyer, screaming, crying out in pain, doubling, tripling over as every ideome of him was pulled apart and whisked away on a trillion, trillion, trillion of Ettie's cilia. The st trace of him whimpered her name in bewilderment as it was swept into the dark. It was a gruesome sight, even to imagine.

  "Ettie… how did you not see him… I can't… I'm gonna throw up." she whispered. Her stomach retched.

  "No, you won't." The acid went back down. "And I did see him. I was excited that something tripped the signal. I thought it was you. In my excitement, he was only in my way. So I disassembled him…"

  The tears flowed freely from her eyes. She was grateful that–unlike with vomiting–Ettie allowed her space to cry. She barely paid attention to her words.

  "…finding every point of him again to bring him back may take longer than his body will survive. Even then, he'd return much older, and weaker. He'd be easily detached. Like you. Easy prey for little, grasping self-important things that would eat him up, like you almost were."

  Her grip on Sawyer's body's shoulder tightened. She looked at Ettie, failing to hide the fear in her face.

  Its hand stretched out to her, palm upturned. "You don't have to worry about that again. You're fraying at the edges now; your excuse for a mind is furcated many, many times. That'll tend to draw in things that live within the margins. Not so with me to protect you. I do mean to: I've been shepherding your dreams before to prevent something like that. Now, I'll hunt that sniveling insect to the edge of oblivion, too. I promise, Callie, you're safe." You're mine.

  She sniffed. Ettie's fingers moved to beckon her; she refused to accept the help, knowing it was half-false anyway. "You killed him. You fucking killed him, Ettie."

  "There's nothing you can do for him… if you wanted, I could recreate him. A perfect imitation of his being, idistinguishable to you and all others. But it wouldn't be the same. Do you want that?"

  She gred into those stupid, pink, exquisite eyes. "N–"

  "No, you don't. C'mon." Another wave. After an eternity, it crested; she took it. Esther pulled her to her feet.

  "Erika?..." She ventured, after venturing out of the bathroom. Bleary, brown eyes peeked out above her roommate's knees. In-between sobs she struggled to speak:

  "We should–hic–I'm gonna call 911."

  "He's breathing. Do you need to give him CPR or something?"

  Erika's face jerked upwards. The speed of it was uncanny. "No. I can't go in there. I'll die." She said, matter-of-factly. There was a glint deep in her left eye, so small Callie almost missed it. Queer, and pink… it could only be Esther's penmanship.

  "...okay. Then I guess I'll just… I-I'll move him." She returned to the bathroom and bent down to where Sawyer's ankle extended almost to the door.

  Esther, give me strength.

  She scowled.

  G–Esther, give me strength!

  G–damnit.

  "Ugh, you have a godlike ego." She muttered. The warmth of Esther's smile was on her neck as she pulled with all her might to drag Sawyer out into the hallway.

  Beside her, Erika composed herself enough to make the call. "Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?" came a blown-out voice on speaker-phone.

  She looked at Esther. "You better clean up whatever you were doing," she whispered. The door to the bathroom across the hall still yawned; the mouth of hell was open, wide and empty.

  In a fluid motion Ettie bent at the waist, picked up the single page lying in the hallway, bent back, and stepped over Sawyer's broken form to the door. At her touch it was shut without a sound, and the sign was returned to its surface at eye level with a bit of tape. Calliope found it difficult to read: at the top in cursive, there were definitely the words "Keep Out", but below that it was… blurred. Censored from her understanding.

  "What was I doing?" Esther said, winking the one eye that wasn't vanished underneath her hair.

  "I–" she tried. Her head felt funnier than usual; her limbs held faint muscle memory of having just been possessed.

  "It's rhetorical. I needed somewhere to practice. To doodle, you know."

  "To doodle." She repeated. Ettie leaned against the jamb and crossed her arms and legs; the shoe she extended prodded Sawyer's shoulder before settling.

  "Yeah! At first I just kept you out of there. Then I figured out that book, and put a sign up to keep her out too," she thumbed towards Erika.

  "–Please hurry. Yes, he's breathing…" Erika's voice sounded underwater. Callie sighed through her nose and dried her tears.

  "Why."

  One thick eyebrow rose on Ettie's face. "Everything to do with you is so impermanent. It doesn't st! That tape only sticks for a few days at a time. You're lucky that Erika's never around… I do wonder if she'd taste the same."

  A fsh. There was a cold spot at the crown of her skull. She grimaced. "S-stop," she whimpered. Get out, get out, get out!

  They'd always had two bathrooms, but she usually used one of them, and Erika the other.

  G–t o–t!

  They'd always had one bathroom; the other was too messy/too old/didn't actually exist.

  G–

  They'd always had no bathrooms; their apartment was simply born that way. They urinated out the window.

  "STOP!" She grit her teeth and swung forward–blindly. A second passed, then two, but her fist connected only with thin air. Her eyes opened to find her arm outstretched and stuck fast, its hand bent back at the wrist and quivering with tension. With both hands Esther csped around it to a close and lowered the arm back to her side.

  They'd always had two bathrooms, but one of them will kill anyone but you if they go into it.

  "Please," Callie begged, in less than a whisper, "please. Stop. Don't make me forget."

  Esther frowned. She traced the length of Callie's thumb with her own. The smooth underside of Its rubbed against the wrinkles of her fingerprint.

  "I want this to be easy on you." Her look was of pity–fucking pity.

  Callie yanked her hand away. "Don't. Don't act like you care, either." Ettie only stared.

  "They're here." Erika cut in, before silence bnketed them again. The soft rustling of pajama fabric was the noise to break it, as she got to her feet. A knock came at the front door just before she stepped over Sawyer and between Calliope and It. Through it all, Ettie never broke eye contact. But Calliope hardly cared. With all the hurt rolling in her heart, looking at those eyes was an ache too familiar to cry over. The pain of losing Sawyer was acute; the pain of bearing Esther was and would be chronic.

  The cold spot migrated to her heart instead. Callie's mind and movements grew sluggish as the paramedics entered. What questions they asked her and what answers she gave, she couldn't recall–not because Ettie wiped them from her mind, but because she'd made more than enough memories that day. She'd made more than enough memories for a lifetime. The st of them–one that she knew she'd never naturally forget–would be the look on Sawyer's face when they carried him out: that terrible, impcable, eversting scream that bound up every fiber of his face and being. It seemed to perturb the first-responders a good fraction of how much it perturbed her, even if they were professionals.

  In the end she knew it'd be pointless. There was no hospital on Earth that could treat someone God had damned into a zillion pieces.

  Said God continued staring even after they'd gone, and it was just the three of them.

  "I think I need to lie down," Erika said. Calliope gave a noncommittal grunt, which nonetheless sufficed. Erika followed the hall until her bedroom without even a gnce at the bathroom from hell. And then there were two.

  There's only ever going to be two: me, above. And you–far, far below.

  Calliope broke. "I can't believe I said I missed you."

  It moved too rapidly for vision. Esther's hands each csped one of her own. "I can," It said. Those eyes were much too close… before she could avert her gaze It pulled her in. It pulled her so deep into those orbs that only the smallest tip of hairtail remained at the back of her skull, to buoy her from drowning.

  She fell: past pinkling crypts, the ciliary zone, radial furrows of indescribable colour, and on and into darkness. At first it seemed empty–a relief–but in that void things uncountable were joined. It saw her. She saw It, Itself, in shadow, an unduting silhouette–communicating without words. She wasn't certain of Its meaning. She wasn't certain she'd ever want to be.

  "Oh, Callie…" Esther reverberated. The shadow inched towards the light. Please, don't make me look, she prayed. Please don't make me see That again. Please–

  She surfaced. Both of Ettie's eyes gazed into her own. Both of Ettie's hands were warm, not cold; gentle, not stinging. She looked, and felt, absolutely real. Absolutely sincere.

  Not the former–not yet. The tter–yes.

  "You have no idea how much I care."

  gremnoire