Episode 1

Episode 1

Within the mortuary’s cold walls stood a very tall man in a white rabbit mask. The black hollows reflected nothing; they swallowed the light. The mask seemed rubber one moment, porcelain the next, perhaps even leather — its material and shape kept shifting, but some details never changed: vein-like fissures beneath the hollows, horns, vicious, needle-sharp teeth, black lines on the chin, and an inverted pentagram on the brow. If not for the long ears, you’d say its snout looked more like an angry dog crossed with a devil than any rabbit.

He stared into the void. There was something in his stillness older than a human life.

He wore a perfectly cut black dinner suit and cloth gloves; the collar of his white shirt caught the light. An oval, gold-mounted pendant on a gold chain hung at his throat — a bulbous turquoise piece with a yellow crescent and a red, flower-like symbol.

Before him, on the post-mortem table, lay Anna. The cold bit into her skin like a thousand tiny needles. Her brain still slept somewhere in a murky, black layer of non-being. The air smelt of sharp chemicals and something sweet and heavy. From very far away, out of the depths of the dark, a warm voice was singing:

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star…”

At first they weren’t even words. Just ripples, a whisper, tender and a little sad. Anna drifted in that voice as if in warm water. There, in the dark, there was no body, no pain, no memories. Only a voice she knew far too well.

Mum’s.

“How I wonder what you are…”

A woman stood in the dark. Beautiful, slender, with very long hair that spilled onto the floor like a waterfall. Her dress was white and almost luminous. There was no face. In place of it, a blurred, soft oval. Anna reached for her, and every time it seemed that one more step would bring her fingers to that hand, the image shivered. The white dress gave way to a black dinner suit. The long hair drowned in shadow. The woman’s outline stretched, grew more angular. Where the blank face had been, a rabbit mask surfaced. The voice’s gentle tone dropped, roughened; a metallic edge crept in. In the background, scraps of the lullaby still flickered, but over them another sound forced its way through, alien:

“When the sun suddenly sets…”

A pause. A second.

“Anna.”

Closer. Harsher.

“ANNA!”

The name split the darkness like a flash. It yanked her upwards, to the surface, where there was air and a body again. Anna sucked in a breath. Her chest clenched painfully at the cold air. She flung her eyes open and jerked upright, braced on her elbows.

She was perched on the edge of a table covered with a coarse turquoise blanket that had slipped from her shoulders. She looked around. The room seemed small. Metal tables, cupboards, fridge drawers, grey tiles on the floor. Anna pulled the blanket to her chest without thinking, only then realising there was nothing on her but bare skin. Something tugged at her toe. Irritated, she yanked the blanket back to free her feet. A tag hung from the big toe of her right foot. Just an ordinary paper tag on a string. Lifting her foot closer to her eyes, she read:

“Name: Anna Lord.

Date of birth: 05/11/1990

Date of death: 06/10/2007

Sex: female,

Age: 16.

Place found: ‘Starlight Motel’.

Description: found with no signs of violence.”

Her mind stumbled over the word ‘death’ like an invisible step. She stared at the numbers, but they wouldn’t come any closer, wouldn’t put down roots into any memory. Just a string of dates and a blunt statement: you are no longer here. Anna tore off the tag, flung it away and dug her fingers into her hair.

She tried to focus. “Right, easy, remember. Remember — remember…”

She tried to pull anything at all from the dark: yesterday, the day before, a week ago. Darkness. Not even a hole, but a dense, impossible blank. She couldn’t even remember what she looked like, and the only thing left in her head was a name — Anna.

A thought came, vilely calm, not her own: “Maybe I really am dead?” Her face twisted.

“Yeah, of course,” she muttered, and pinched her leg harder, to the point of pain. The pain was utterly real. Sharp, wounding. Anna sniffed. “No. I can feel it. So I’m alive. Then how the hell did I end up here?”

The mortuary wasn’t about to answer. The lamp light burned her eyes, indifferent. She sat straighter, shuffled nearer the edge of the table, ready to climb down. There was the sense that somewhere there’d been pain, and… water? A deafening roar of water and someone’s lullaby. She ran a nervous hand over her face — and felt dampness under her nose. A drop of blood slid to her lip. She winced and wiped it away with the back of her hand. Red smeared on her skin.

Anna slid off the table, gripping its edge. She threw the turquoise blanket over her shoulders like a miserable cloak so she wouldn’t feel completely naked. Through a small window in the wall she could see a laboratory. The light was on inside. A draught stirred the papers on the desk. No one was there.

Anna stepped closer and pressed her forehead to the cold glass. In the lab, an MRI scan of someone’s brain was pinned to the wall. Black-and-white bands, slices, meaningless to an ordinary person. She stared at them, chasing a strange feeling, as if somewhere deep in that picture something about her was hidden. Beyond the door, out in the corridor, someone was humming, very softly. At first she decided it was just the familiar noise inside her skull. But the sound returned: a long, childlike hum, no words, “mm-mm-mm-mm,” the way a child fills in a tune for themselves. Gooseflesh darted across Anna’s skin. The voice was oddly familiar. She froze, listening. The humming grew clearer. Outside the door came a faint scuff of steps; someone small went past.

“Miss, which ward is my little brother in?” came a girl’s voice, quite distinctly, almost beside her.

Anna flinched. The words opened a tiny crack in her memory, and through it rushed a feeling: the white walls of a hospital, the sharp reek of antiseptic, a tight blanket up to her chin. Herself, small, but somehow seeing like a grown-up. And beside the bed a nurse, with a kind face and eyes where horror was hiding.

“Joseph will be scared without me.”

The name hit her like a hammer.

Joseph.

Anna moved for the door without thinking. She grasped the cold handle; a foreboding rose from her gut to her throat. She wanted to turn back, climb onto the table again, lie down and pretend none of it had happened. But curiosity, and fear for the voice that sounded so familiar, shoved her forward. The door opened softly. The corridor was empty. No girl, no nurse, no ward. And how could there be? This was a mortuary. And yet she knew: the voice had been here. She took a few steps, her bare feet slipping. A door stood ajar to the left. Another room beyond. Her body knew before her mind did. She touched the door with her fingers and pushed. What she saw was so wrong that her brain refused to admit it was real. On a body trolley, covered with a turquoise sheet, lay a girl. At first Anna saw only a profile: the line of the chin, the curve of the mouth, long lashes. The ribcage slightly raised beneath the sheet.

This girl had a seam. Long, crooked, dark, running down from the neck. The skin around it was dull, greyish. Anna took a step closer, barely breathing. A beautiful mask with gentle features. Before her lay her exact double, only mirrored. The words slipped out of her mouth of their own accord:

“Beautiful…”

At that moment “beautiful” opened her eyes. The lids lifted, and it became clear that the only thing worse than closed eyes are open ones — on a corpse. There were no pupils. The whole span from lid to lid was a deep, lightless black. But not just darkness — within that blackness, tiny, icy sparks were flickering. As if someone had set into her sockets fragments of the night sky, packed with stars and far-off galaxies. She smiled. Unhurried, human, almost shy.

“Oh, thank you,” she said in the very same voice that sounded from Anna’s own throat, only a touch softer. “You too.”

Anna flinched back, but her legs wouldn’t obey. The girl on the trolley sat up slowly; the sheet slid gently from her shoulders. The coarse seam on her body looked like a foreign element on something that was moving, alive. Anna went down hard. Her knees slammed the floor, but she barely noticed. With effort she straightened an arm and pointed at the double, words refusing to come.

“Did I really frighten you? It’s me,” the double smiled.

“Am I supposed to know you?!”

“Preferably.”

Anna let out a hoarse, nervous sound that was almost not a laugh at all. She looked away, at the seam, and felt something inside her begin to tear.

“Look at yourself! The only thing I know is that you’re meant to be dead!”

The double tilted her head slightly.

“Really?” she asked softly. In her eyes the stars seemed to flare brighter.

She leaned forward, slowly, bracing her palms on the trolley. Anna tried to edge back, but her body pinned her to the floor.

On the double’s right wrist Anna noticed an incised symbol — the same one she bore.

She leaned closer, so close Anna could feel the imagined scent of her. Those galaxy-filled eyes were a centimetre from her face. The smile warped. The face cracked — not the skin, but the picture itself. Under the crack showed sharp, uneven teeth, too long for a human mouth. The skin at the edges of the lips was subtly coming apart.

Anna screwed her eyes shut as hard as she could.

“It’s just in my head. Just in my head.”

Blindly, she tried to shove the thing away, whatever it was. Her fingers met something cold and solid; she stumbled and fell onto her back.

She opened her eyes. The trolley was empty. The sheet was pulled smooth; the glittering black eyes were gone. Only in the corner of the room, in the shadow, a silhouette of a tall man in a mask showed itself for an instant. The double had glanced his way and vanished, like a timid creature diving into a burrow. Anna sat up; her head was spinning. She took hold of her forehead, pressing her palm to her skin, wanting to keep her brain in place. “I’m going mad,” a nervous smile cut across her face.

Anna noticed a crumpled sheet of paper on the trolley. It definitely hadn’t been there before. Or she hadn’t seen it. Or it had appeared along with something that doesn’t exist. She reached out and picked it up. The paper was covered in tiny handwriting. Lines were crossed out in several places, so fiercely the ink had run. Dried drops of blood along the edge. In the centre: a sweeping mark.

She smoothed the sheet.

—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

8 November 2003.

I’m so frightened…

When he saw me, his eyes flared with madness, and the next day he drove me and Joseph out to an abandoned cellar somewhere deep in the woods. By his account, this little hideaway was set up by William Alford as a place for his perverse amusements. We crossed the threshold, and a scene opened before me that made my blood run cold. Gary, John and Oliver were standing on chairs, and a noose was cinched around Gary’s neck. In their eyes I read pure terror. They were pleading for rescue, they wanted to live. That monster walked slowly up to Joseph and, with a cold smile, he s—”

—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The sentence broke off, trailing into smeared ink.

Below, the same thing repeated:

“I HATE YOU” — again and again to the end of the line, until the letters turned into black pulp.

Lower still, under a different date, in a different hand:

—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“30 November 2003.

I am plunged into the abyss, into its deepest heart, where darkness wraps everything around. Even the devil himself, in his burning urge, could not descend here.”

—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Her eyes skimmed the lines, but there was less and less sense. The words played like a recording of someone else’s madness.

***

A hand clamped round a pen. A sheet of paper trembling with every breath. Letters dancing, outrunning the thoughts. The words ‘Gary’, ‘John’, ‘Oliver’, ‘Joseph’, ‘noose’, ‘cellar’ — biting into the paper like nails. Her nose awash with blood. Drops falling onto the page, mixing with the ink. Streaks of red laid over black. Her throat tight, ragged breathing. The room spinning. Anna is here, a thirteen-year-old girl, in her bedroom filling her diary.

There was a knock at the door.

“May I come in?” comes from the other side — a voice drawn out, soft, faintly mocking.

The sound passes through the door like a touch. It has the habit of asking permission only for the sake of appearances.

And that voice… once, for her, it was an entire sky with all the answers tucked behind it. He spoke, and the world fell into line like soldiers. He said her name as if the name didn’t belong to her at all, but to him. He could take it in his palm and turn it, like a key that fits any lock.

Back then, he was her demigod and her executioner in one. Warm as a blanket, and heavy as a concrete slab on her chest, pressing till her bones creaked, till all that was left of the body was a wet patch. He could smile in a way that made you want to believe: any moment now it’ll be all right, any moment now he’ll finally let go. But the smile always left a trace, like a fingernail on skin. Barely visible. Enough to remember. It was hard to say which was worse: when he spoke, or when he kept silent.

She hated that her body reacted faster than her head. That her heart gave a small, uneven leap. That inside her rose that filthy mix: fear, anger, disgust — and love… If she had to die for that voice, she would have. Like a loyal dog that its owner beats every day after work, and still it crawls to him, wagging its tail and licking the hand that only a moment ago smelt of the belt. To the point of retching. To humiliation. To the point where even crying feels shameful, because the tears seem to be for him, too.

“No! I want to be on my own! Go away!” Anna shouted at him.

A light chuckle came from behind the door.

“Of all people, you’re the last who should be afraid of me.” The words settled on her like a sticky film.

She closes her eyes. She has no strength left, but anger slices through the weakness.

“What did you slip me?!” Anna looked at the bottle of cola. “What did you do?!”

“Nothing much, don’t worry. Do you think I want to kill you?”

The room heaved. The table under her elbows turned into a ship about to go under. Anna dug her nails into the wood, but her fingers slid. The door opened without a knock.

She tries to rise, but her body won’t obey. Her legs are cotton-wool; her head rattles like an empty tin. Footsteps draw closer. She can’t see his face. Only a dark silhouette and a hand. Fingers touch her cheek. The forefinger taps lightly against her skin.

***

There was that unpleasant throb in her nose again. The diary page trembled in her hands. The room turned back into a mortuary. She looked at the door. A thought flickered in her head: I need to get out of here. The girl clutched the blanket to her, crushed the diary page in her fist and threw it away.

“I don’t trust idiots who can mistake the living for the dead.”

***

The night was viscous. In Hyde Park the lamplight melted in a light mist, turning into soft, murky blurs. The leaves rustled underfoot, damp after recent rain. Normal people at this hour were at home or in bars, not drifting along dark paths. These two girls didn’t fall into the ‘normal’ category. They walked, heels catching in the cracks of the pavement, laughing and chattering. Clothes: short, bright, provocative. Their make-up had run a little, but they didn’t care. One of the girls flopped onto the nearest bench, legs splayed.

The other stayed on her feet a couple of seconds more, looked around.

“I’ll call a taxi,” she began, reaching for her phone.

Her gaze snagged on something in the grass, a little further along the path. Where the circle of the lamp’s light ended, in the dim strip between the path and the bushes, something long lay stretched out.

“Look. Something’s lying there. Shall we check?”

“I’m out. I’ve got a bad feeling. What if it’s a dog? I hate running into dead animals, it upsets me.”

“Fine, sit tight. I’ll go look.”

She set her phone on the bench. She walked towards the dark shape, at first quickly, then more slowly. The grass squelched under her heel. She stopped a couple of metres away. Her eyes were adjusting to the dark, sketching the details. Hair. Pale skin. A body. Blood. Her mouth opened by itself.

The scream ripped out of her.

The one on the bench, scrabbling, dropped her phone, for a moment not knowing which way was up or down as she tried to dial emergency services.

In the cold grass, in the shimmer of the lamps, lay a woman’s body. She had died very recently. Her neck and straight white hair were slick with a sticky crimson shine.

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