My neighbour lay there, gripping the axe blade away from her face, blood trickling down from her palms, eyes full of delight and hunger, her smile wide and full of teeth.
Full of victory.
“Got you,” she said.
My colleagues, the director, the secretary’s spaniel, had all disappeared. The office, empty now, shuddered with joy. The lights flickered off one by one.
My neighbour pushed the axe—and me attached to it. I stumbled back as the darkness swallowed up the room and I fell through a doorway. I rolled over concrete, righted myself and came to a stop where I was spat out on the floor.
The floor of her basement.
Then I watched as the door between our houses slammed shut.
CHAPTER 54
Oh fuck.
I dropped the axe and ran to the door.
Oh fuck oh fuck.
I scrabbled for a handle, an edge, anything to pry it open again.
Oh no, please, oh fuck, oh no, please, no, please.
The door wouldn’t give. I went back and grabbed the axe. I’d broken through before. Perhaps I could do it again. Panicked, I swung at the wood. The metal cut through the boards then clanged against brick. Fragments of door fell away, revealing nothing but old stone wall. The door wasn’t just gone. It was as if it had never been there at all.
I wasn’t getting out. It was over.
I’d failed.
I sank to my knees and pressed my forehead to the wall. My home, the house I’d fought so hard for, was just on the other side. The flowers in spring. The coloured leaves in autumn. I’d come so close. I thought I’d had to understand and forgive the director, but I’d gotten it wrong. It wasn’t about my anger at other people at all. I hadn’t learned a thing.
And I’d fallen at the very last hurdle.
A chuckle echoed quietly from a corner behind me. I turned resignedly to the sound. My neighbour prowled out of the darkness.
“You really gave me the runaround there. First the axe. Now this.”
She wore my face, wide-eyed and grinning so hard it looked painful. The crescent moon scar shone along the curve of her forehead.
“It didn’t have to be this difficult,” she said. “You know that’s what makes the end so horrifying for some. Their inability to accept that it’s here.”
She circled me in the shrinking light. The beams overhead creaked under the strain of the earth outside.
“They always spend the precious little time they have remaining fighting the inevitable.” She paced leisurely around me. “They wrap themselves in knots of denial and bargaining with a universe that really doesn’t care. And then their very last moment is one of rage, despair and terror. Can you imagine that?” She shook her head in mocking disbelief. “A whole life reduced to that last moment. Well, you won’t have to imagine it for long.”
Soil tumbled down the stairs into the basement.
“You could have spent time with loved ones.” She shrugged. “Or if you don’t have any loved ones, gone somewhere you like to be. The beach. A nice garden. I don’t know, something nice to think about in the last moments.” She flashed me a look and flicked her tongue over her teeth. “Though between you and me, we know it won’t work.”
Rivulets of earth trickled in through the gaps between the stones in the wall. I shuffled away from the encroaching soil, tucking closer to where the door used to be, as if I could shuffle away from the awful, soul-sucking, sinking feeling that weighed heavy in my heart-pounding, panicking chest. I was so far underground. No one would ever be able to find me.
My neighbour pouted.
“Oh, come on, Tammy. Don’t you understand yet?” She knelt down in front of me as soil rained down around her. “I’m not the one you came here to get rid of.”
I stared at her.
