Page 27 of Wretched Thorns

***

I checked the dresser.

It was solid wood, dark, the drawers tight in their tracks the way drawers are when a piece of furniture had been built somewhere with a winter. I pulled the top drawer all the way out and tipped it. Nothing on the underside. Nothing on the inside back. I pulled the second drawer. Nothing.

I tried the armoire next.

The armoire had a key in the lock and the door swung open silently on hinges someone had cared for. Inside, dust and the ghost of old sachets, the way it had been every other time I’d looked. I ran my hand along the inside of the door, fingers light.

I found it on the second pass. Small. Less than the size of my thumbprint. Burned into the back of the armoire door, hidden from my line of sight. The same hum, when I leaned close. A smaller hum, this one. A keeper, not a generator. The big one under the bed was the engine, and these smaller ones were the wires.

The room was wired. But wired for what?

I closed the armoire and stood. My knees ached. My wrists ached.

I’d been afraid for months. The fear was still there, under everything, but tonight, kneeling on the floor of the room he’d put me in, watching a wet smear of something that smelled like him come up under my thumbnail, the fear had shifted. Not lifted. Shifted. Hope.

I was learning, and knowledge is power. I had some power here.

***

I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my bound hands to my chest, and the threads were there.

Three of them. There had been three clear distinct notes at once in color: golden and silver and onyx. I had realized there were three making up a single unit; but I just had never heard or felt them, individually.

I could now.

The dark one was the steadiest of the three. When I reached for it with my attention, what came back was a kind of weight. Solid. Settled. Like leaning your back against something that had been standing in the same place for a long time.

The gold one was quicker. Brighter. When I reached for it, what came back ran past me like a wire pulled tight. There was heat in it. Something restless underneath the brightness, something that wanted to move.

The silver one was the most precise. When I reached for it, it noticed me. That was the only word for it. The onyx thread had given me weight, the gold had given me motion, but this one looked back, focused, the way a person looks up from what they were doing when somebody walks into the room.

Three different threads. Three different textures. Woven together, sort of.

I didn’t know what was on the other end. I knew the threads led somewhere. I knew they were real in the same way I knew the shadows were real, but I didn’t know what to make of them. Not yet. Tonight I just wanted to know they were there.

It was enough.

***

I looked at the corner where the shadow pooled deepest, where the wainscoting met the floor and the candle gave up.

Come here, I asked. Not out loud. Just in the place in me that the threads ran through.

The shadow lifted off the floor. It moved across the dark wood toward me, the way a stray cat moves toward a hand it hasn’t decided about yet. It stopped at my feet.

I stared at it.

I opened my hand on my lap as well as I could with my wrists still crossed and bound.

A small pool of dark gathered in my palm. About the size of my thumbprint. It breathed, the way a small animal breathes. When I moved my fingers, it shifted. When I opened my hand wider, it spread. When I closed my fist, it didn’t crush. It just stopped being a pool and became a presence inside my hand. Weight without mass. Cool but not cold.

Hi, I thought at it, and then laughed at myself, but the sound broke halfway through, turning into something dangerously close to a sob.

It didn’t answer in words. It pushed back against my palm, the way a cat pushes back against a hand.

I almost laughed again, a spark of joy flared inside me; but I was so enthralled.