And I am not frightened of dying, any time will do, I don’t mind.
A thin light cut through the crack. The room was cold and dark, with thick stone bricks lining the wet walls. Someone was in the room but her face was hidden. Her reason for being in the room was unknown, but it seemed obvious that she had never seen anything other than the room and the crying skinless creature in the corner. The creature whined; its eyelids heavy and grey like the skin of a dying man. The girl touched her hands, then her face and then the place where her heart should have been, although there seemed to be an empty space. Faces, she could remember faces. She reached out to touch them but they were only in her head. The creature whined louder, his eyelids glued together. The girl looked up and wondered if the creature was really there. Was she naturally aided with this curiosity? Why was she even asking where she was or why we she was there? Maybe someone had made her that way, but the creature was the only other thing she knew, and he didn’t look all that up for creating anything but noise.
She crawled up to a wall and pressed on it, the same way she did every day. It left a dark stain on her hand and when she pushed harder she noticed that her hand was leaking something red which made her want to stop. The girl’s eyes were covered too, but she seemed to know the room well enough to keep her face hidden. She liked to curl up like a snail shell in a corner because it made her feel safe, although she was not afraid. The creature whined once more and she whined back. Its mouth was lopsided, twisted in to a grimace. It was crouched over and very still. Not the kind of still you got from a statue, the kind of still you got from a predator waiting for something that wasn’t yet aware of its presence. The girl whined loudly and the creature shrunk into a warped ball.
She crawled towards him curiously, unafraid until its face was pressed up against hers. His breath was warmer than the room, but not as warm as her own. She shied away from the smell; maybe she would return again after she had walked back to the wall and repeated her actions again? But the girl felt strange, and so she lifted her head up and opened her eyes wide. The creature could not see, but felt them on him. His eyelids fluttered like metal butterflies, and then then suddenly the room blurred into sight. It saw her, and it did not understand. Her eyes were red with the anger and lust from her past life, wide with the shame of a bad man. It whined and then looked up and into the red, and the girl looked back.
His eyes were huge and black. A black darker than the room and more powerful than the movement she’d learnt. They dug into her and she felt pain for the first time, tricked into loneliness and desperation. It no longer seemed like a catalyst of noise, but a thing capable of things she could only imagine, perhaps even the creation of her and maybe just maybe, the creation of the room itself. Her eyes widened further, fear torturing her last breaths like a twisted metaphor. The darkness, it was inside her and it wouldn’t go away.
The creature ventured further into her eyes and saw the fear and then the pain, the curiosity and the heartbreak and he backed away, until finally all that could be seen was its own reflection. The creature let out a cry, unlike the ones it had let slip earlier that day. It could be nothing other than mad and nothing other than there. Was it she who had bought it here? It saw itself and the crying proceeded into screams while the girl sat and stared, eyes red and wild. Frantic, in two different ways within one room; it was not in her mind, nor was it in the creatures. The darkness was strangling, and her fear had pained it, this was all there was – and all there could be.