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Intervention

Lore wasn’t ready.

Like, okay, she knew Hamish wasn’t doing great. His mental state had begun to dissolve: a sandcastle under assault by the steady drumbeat of the sea. Except in this case, the sea was a nightmare tide, corrosive and foul. Whatever this place was, it was clear that it was marked indelibly by tragedy, and though it looked like a house, it was as tractless and wide as any wilderness.

But we’re alive, she told herself. They had running water in some rooms. Food in others. Beds. Though there seemed to be something—what, ghosts? Illusions? Glitches in the Matrix?—afoot, they hadn’t been harmed by them. Though some seemed inclined to chase after them, others were content to remain in one place, screaming or bleeding or sobbing. (In one bedroom, they found a man simply beating his head into the wall. Again and again. Over and over. Whumpth. Whumpth. Whumpth. By the time they arrived, his face was already swollen and burst like a ripe fruit. Strings of flesh and blood hung between his cratered visage and the jungle wallpaper, like a cheese pull from pizza, sticky with marinara. And he kept doing it. Mumbling muffled words from somewhere through the meat of his ruined mouth. Lore found it horrifying but also…coldly, weirdly fascinating. She could’ve stared at him longer if Hamish hadn’t hurried her out of the room.)

Hamish always wanted to keep moving. Like something was chasing him—something other than the entities in these rooms.

In every room she’d see him twitch and flick his gaze around. Staring sometimes for long moments into mirrors or into a glass-top coffee table or into the dead screen of an old TV. He looked haunted by more than just ghosts. And her response to that was, Yeah, well, who isn’t? It wasn’t like Lore wasn’t seeing things either. She heard Matty whispering underneath doors. She heard, nonsensically, video game sounds—from her own personal bank of audio files, the ones she’d been collecting to use in her new game, the game she hadn’t even started yet. And sometimes just passing through a room, she blinked and behind her eyes, she saw a snapshot of something horrible that had happened in that place. Not something that might’ve happened. Something that had happened. She could feel it. She knew it. Intimately. Intrinsically.

Suicides and murders and abuse. But other, smaller, stranger things, too: Like in one absolute mess of a room, Lore saw in her mind’s eye a hoarder trapped underneath a landslide of their own hoard, growing weaker and weaker, unable to even reach her pets to feed them—the dogs and cats wailed and howled and yowled. Until they didn’t anymore. And the woman died there, like that, underneath the crush. Heart attack. In another room, a child in his pajamas found both of his parents dead—not from anything sinister, not from a murder-suicide, not from some serial killer, but just because one morning, the mother touched the faucet, a faucet which had been accidentally electrified due to some bad plumbing wiring mojo, and as she was being electrocuted, the father tried to pull her away, but was caught by the same current. Both died. A sad, stupid thing. A child, orphaned from a freak accident. Left alone, forever. ( Like me, she thought, idly. You’re alone and you should be alone and you need to be alone. )

And Lore had no idea if Hamish was seeing any of this or not. She told herself it didn’t matter. Because she didn’t need him. And if that was true, then the reverse was true as well. He didn’t need her. Let him go through his own shit, she decided. Let him process it how he needed to process it. He had his God, he had his beautiful family and his sobriety and his smug fucking attitude. Good luck, dude .

But all that time, she realized, she had left him alone.

And he was flailing.

And a little part of her knew: You’re flailing, too, girl.

—

It happened so fast.

His elbow in her nose. Pop. Him with the mirror glass. Plunging toward his own throat.

Lore rushed him. Caught his wrist. He was stronger than her, easily. She had slowed his attempt, but not stopped it. Three inches to an open windpipe. Two inches. One.

She did the only thing she knew to do.

Lore pumped her knee into his balls.

—

It did the trick. The air went out of him. The fight, too. He whimpered and staggered backward, and the mirror glass fell from his hand. After a while, Hamish calmed down. He sat down on the floor, his back against the base of the couch.

Lore sat next to him.

(She made sure the mirror shards were nowhere near them.)

(Just in case.)

Her nose had stopped bleeding. It throbbed, though, like it had its own heartbeat. Bub-bub, bub-bub, bub-bub .

“You hit me,” she said.

“I know.”

“The fuck, dude.”

“I know .”

She let loose an angry, guttural, exasperated sigh. Yuuuuggghhh . Words tumbled out of her. “I think this place is fucking with you.” No, asshole . She corrected herself: “With us . It’s making me think that I can do this all alone, that I don’t need you. But then—then!” She wagged her finger in the air as if she were manically lecturing an audience. “Then I realize, no, that’s just me. That’s just my fucking brain, wanting to shoulder all the burden and do all the things—reap the reward, but eat the pain. The house isn’t putting that thought in my head. It just turned up the volume. And I bet it’s doing that with you, too. Finding all those bad thoughts inside you and making them louder, and louder, and louder again. Am I right?”

Hamish, pale and sweaty, his hair a muss, gave her a weird look. “Maybe.”

“Y’know, I’ve not…” Here she cleared her throat, because sometimes the truth wanted to get stuck there instead of working its way free. A bird trapped in a net. “I’ve not been particularly good at caring about other people. I mean—I care about them when I think about them. I guess I’m not good at the thinking about them part. I just hyperfocus on myself. Eyes on my own paper. I trust, falsely, foolishly, that everyone else has their shit together and just as I don’t need their help, they don’t need my help. And…they do sometimes need my help. And—” More truth that didn’t want to come free, like she was holding in vomit and knew she’d feel better once she puked it up but still tried really hard not to puke it up. “ And sometimes, I need their help, too. So I’m sorry I haven’t been really here for you.”

“You’re fine. It’s fine. I’m just…dealing with things.”

Lore couldn’t help but laugh. “Ham, we’re both dealing with things. We’re trapped in a fucking maze of horrible rooms. But I’ve been treating it like a puzzle, like it’s something fascinating, and pretending that it’s not absolutely goddamn fucking awful. And it is awful. It’s so awful.” Saying that out loud made her feel it all the more keenly. This place is awful . She felt it under her skin. And on it, too, like a thin layer of emotional, spiritual grease. Filthy with it. She’d heard stories about those poor bastards social media companies hired—first in America, later in other countries, because of course, fuck those people, right—whose sole job was to go through all the horrendous, heinous, awful shit that saturated social media. Not just the trolling and the doxxing and the death threats. But like, the real dark shit. Videos of beheadings. Child porn. Animal abuse. Nightmares from the deepest, most fucked X-chan mines. It broke those people. Broke down their walls. Shattered the foundations of their minds. That’s what was happening to them in here. It’s what the house wanted. The house was torturing them with the torment of others. And sometimes, with our own torment, too .

“Dude, I—I think this is Hell. I think it’s my Hell. A real, actual Hell.”

“Of course, a mediocre white man would think it’s his Hell—maybe it’s my Hell, you ever think that? Maybe you’re in my Purgatory.” She saw him flinch. Lore’s words opened another wound. A little part of her knew that she wanted to hurt him—in part to get revenge for their conversation in the car, in part because she was always having to carry weak men, carry them and accommodate them and soothe their tender stupid hearts. ( Like Owen, she thought, cruelly.) But in part it was something altogether worse. If she pushed him hard enough, maybe he would finish the job she’d just interrupted. Maybe he would kill himself. Then she could be rid of the baggage that was Hamish. That was a dark and terrible thought that sickened her, particularly because it came from her. She cautioned herself: If you push too hard, you will break him. That’s not what you want.

A cold realization struck her: It’s what the house wants .

She sighed. “It’s not Hell, Hamish. I don’t know what it is. Not exactly. But it’s real. Not some afterworld. It’s a real place and we are stuck the fuck in it.”

“How do you know?” It was strange how much he sounded like a child asking that. Like he was lost and looking for reassurance.

“There’s not a holy book around that says Hell is up a mysterious staircase in the woods. And besides, we’re here together. Hell seems to be a lonely place.”

He regarded her carefully. “You might not be real.”

“I wish I weren’t real, Ham. Then I wouldn’t be here. But I’m real, and I’m really here, in this…this very real place.” She gave him a hard stare. “You know, though, since we’re doing reckonings right now…I am poly, pansexual, and despite the pronouns, I really do feel more at home in a body that isn’t supposed to be explicitly male or female. You were cool about stuff once. Easy-breezy, full of love, accepting of all things and all people, and now—now you’re this guy. The guy who thinks this is Hell. It’s not even the Creel thing, it’s just—I thought you were better than that. I need you to be better than that.”

His eyes shone with tears. “I know. I’m sorry. I just—things happen in life, you go through some shit and you start to get scared, you start looking for answers, and sometimes you find—” He wiped his eyes. “You find the wrong ones.”

Lore gave him some side-eye. “We all went through some shit, Ham.”

They were both quiet for a while.

“I died once,” he said, abruptly.

“Uh.” She gave him a look. “Say more, please.”

He told her a story then. How after high school, he went to Virginia Tech, nearly flunked out, was an absolute party boy. Got hooked on half the drugs available to him. Ate poorly. Looked like hammered shit. And then one day, he was at a party and took too much of something and…

And he woke up in the hospital.

After having been clinically dead.

“And I just started to think…I died, I never came back to life, and this is our home now.”

This is our home now .

That gave her the shivers.

But it also filled her with a special kind of rage. In her was an orchestral crescendo of anger, but also motivation . A swell of music like when you were about to kill the final boss. Matty’s message came to her, again, the one he had carved into the door: DON’T LET IT IN. And then, DON’T LET IT WIN.

They’d let it in.

But they didn’t have to let it win.

“We’re going to get out of here, Ham. We found the entrance to this place, and if there’s an entrance, there’s an exit. I’m sure of it.” She stood up with a grunt. Her knees cracked and popped. It only occurred to her now how sore her legs were. She shot out a hand. “Come on, let’s do this.”

Hamish nodded, and she helped him stand.

“Sorry again,” he said.

“I’m sorry, too.”

“Yeah, but—your nose.”

“It’s all right.”

“Broken, maybe.”

“Then it matches the rest of me.” She turned and looked at the scattering of mirror shards and the busted mirror hanging broken on the wall.

“I’ll try not to punch stuff,” he said with a dark, dire chuckle.

“Yeah…” But she paused. A spark of destruction lit in the darkness of her wandering mind. “Well. Now, hold on. Let’s not be hasty. Maybe it’s time to start punching stuff. And breaking things.”

“Huh?”

“Think about it. We’ve been meandering through this place, aimless. It’s not getting us anywhere. It’s like a ride we’re buckled into and it’s just…wearing us down.” Remember the warnings . “This place hates us. We’re supposed to remember that. It hates us, Hamish.”

For the first time in—what, days? She saw Hamish’s eyes brighten. That same spark in her was now in him. “We should break shit.”

“Yes. Yes! We’ve been playing by its rules. Circling the drain. But this is like Minecraft, man. We can destroy this place. Start smashing it to pieces. What happens if we break the walls? What’s behind them? Where does that take us? If this place hates us? Then maybe we need to hate it back .”