Page 57 of The House of Quiet

Chapter Forty-Nine

The Heart of the House

It all hurts so much.

She has no sense of self, no sense of her own body or mind anymore.

She’s only sensation. The noise isn’t just in her ears; it’s in her brain, in her bones, in her blood, pulsing, terrorizing, demanding noise.

She can’t escape it. There’s only quiet if shemakes it, and she has to make it.

She has to make the quiet. She has to take the noise and push it into somethingelse.

There’s always a noisy body and a quiet body, one to take the noise from and one to push it into.

All she feels is the buildup of pressure so terrible she thinks she’ll explode, and then the release as she siphons it away and dribbles it into a different container.

The old one that absorbs the noise, instead of amplifying it.

She doesn’t know anything other than the noise, always somewhere from a low hum to a horrendous crescendo. Her whole world is a cycle of pain and relief. And right now it’s cycled into pain worse than any she’s ever known.

She has to quiet that noise. Now . She reaches deep inside, finds the connection to her own hand.

She’d forgotten she had hands, but she does.

She stretches, grasping in the air, hoping and waiting for a hand to take hers so she can release herself from this agony once more, if only for a little while.