Ding.

It was a Monday in May when I showed up for my first day at work. I remember that because spring was in full swing at the time and it was driving my hay fever insane, so I walked into the café with a blotchy nose and running eyes while praying that this small act of unprofessionalism wouldn’t get me instantly fired.

The Midnight Coffee. My new workplace, just on the corner of Harriet Street and Glenorchy Boulevard. It wasn’t a glamorous building by any means, but the suspiciously high hourly wage more than made up for that particular deficit. I’d almost certainly been convinced that the job offer was an elaborate scam until they’d emailed me with a verifiably legal contract, but even then, the details of the job were certainly peculiar…

We’d like to apologise in advance, the email read. We’re afraid that you’ll be the only staff member on the premises for day shifts, since we’re having a shortage of employees at the moment. We’re a family business, and unfortunately our owner is currently ill and unable to supervise operations. However, we are more than confident that you will be able to manage with the previous barista experience which you detailed in your resumé. The only mandatory condition of your employment is that you never go down into the basement, as we keep our most sensitive ingredients in the cellar. We greatly appreciate your patience and cooperation in these difficult times, and we look forward to welcoming you. There had been a list of instructions on how to operate the various machines in the café as well as a rundown of café protocols at the end.

Peculiar was perhaps an understatement. Still, money made the world go round, and the obscene amount that I’d be earning would go a long way towards paying off my mother’s medical debts.

The first thing I noticed was that it was eerily quiet in the café. The only sound I had heard was the little ding of the bell when I had opened the door, and it shut itself with a loud clang that almost made me flinch as I stepped inside.

I made my way behind the counter, and was surprised to find a note. It had been messily scribbled out using a sparkly marker, and the handwriting itself was spindly and child-like. It read:

WE HOPE YOU STAY FOR A LIFETIME :)

I looked around. There were no signs of other people, so I assumed that the owners had left it earlier for me to find. I was about to toss the paper in the trash, but then I noticed that there were ink stains seeping to the front from the backside. I flipped it over, and my blood ran cold for a second.

help me

I stared at the paper, then looked out over the tables and chairs in the room once more. No signs of anybody. “Hello?”

I half-expected somebody to answer, but all I got was nothing. I waited, just to be sure, but everything remained just as quiet as it had been when I’d first walked in.

It was probably a prank. Still, I kept the paper clutched close to my side that morning as I bustled through my routine, keeping one eye out for anything that looked even remotely out of place.

By the afternoon, though, the edges of my paranoia had worn off and I was thoroughly bored. I was quickly realising that the Midnight Coffee was not a successful business by any means. People walked past the windows like the place didn’t even exist, which I found strange—there’d normally have been a rush at around lunch hour no matter what the food place was, even if it was the worst cheap chain brand on the planet. Not a single person had walked into the café since I’d started. Was it because of my magnetic personality?

I signed my hours out on the timesheet, then wondered if anybody would notice if I added a couple extra. My eyes wandered over the café, which was just as empty as it had been all day, and I thought, Fuck it.

I put in a couple extra, shrugged on my coat, then left.

—

The bus was late that evening, but I didn't mind. The weather was at that sweet breaking point between early summer and late spring, and there was still a lot of daylight despite the late hour, lending a pleasant atmosphere to the everyday humdrum of life and cars and people downtown. I rode off bathed in the rouge haze of a warm sunset, surprised at how content I felt. Maybe, I caught myself thinking, it will all end up working out this time.

“Name?” The receptionist at the hospital desk looked just about ready to head home and collapse. I didn’t blame her.

“Isaac. Isaac Dolores. I’m here to visit Etiam Dolores? I have an appointment.”

“Go right up ahead.”

I fumbled with the bouquet of lilies in my right hand as I affixed the little visitor’s badge to the front of my shirt, then headed deeper into the hospital.

The coma wing was on the twelfth floor, which meant an awkward elevator ride trying not to make eye contact with the other occupants—several staff and some fellow visitors, by the looks of them. A couple got off for the Burn Wing, and another few left for the Mental Ward, which left only me sailing to the top.

Ding. I stepped out, and the elevator doors shut themselves behind me. Clang.

My mother was old. She’d been old when I’d been young, and now she was practically ancient. Just before my father had divorced her when I was eight, he’d said to me, “Your mum wanted you so badly that she refused to adopt, you know. She went to all these clinics and doctors. She was absolutely convinced that she could have you, and, well…” He mussed my hair with his big palm, and I giggled. “Look how you turned out! Ah, she’s always been stubborn. Stubborn and wonderful.”

“If you think Mom’s wonderful, why are you leaving us?”

I still remember exactly the way he’d smiled, because I remember thinking how strange it was that a smile could be so sad. “Well, she loves you so much that there’s not much room for anything else, see. Not much room here for your old Poppa George.”

(That was the last time I saw my father. Last I heard, he found another wife and made a new family over in Adonis. He still sends postcards occasionally.)

Now, my mother might have been old, but she was still as energetic as a firecracker. She was like some unstoppable force of nature that wouldn’t go away until you were fed, watered, mothered, and smothered, in any of the above order. She had a tongue on her like a nine-tailed whip, and she never hesitated to give people a piece of her mind when she felt they deserved it. She was a pillar of the community and the bedrock that made me who I was.

I had thought that she’d be in my life forever.

In retrospect, I guess what happened to her was inevitable. I’d gone out to fetch some groceries when I came home and found her slumped at the bottom of the stairs, and it didn’t take some genius to figure out that she’d taken quite the tumble. I called emergency services, but by then it was too late.

“Your mother’s brain-dead,” said the man in white standing before me, who sounded professionally sympathetic. “She’s in a coma. I’m sorry.”

“Isn’t there—isn’t there anything you can do for her? Will she wake up?”

“No. Probably never, or not for a very long time.” The man in white didn’t sugarcoat things, because it wasn’t his job to sugarcoat things.

It was mine. “Well, people wake up from comas after ten years, right? She could wake up. It’s possible.”

He saw the hope on my face, and I guess he just didn’t have the heart to argue with me any longer after that. “She could.”

That was how my mother had ended up in the Coma Wing, where she’d been living peacefully for two years with the help of machines which kept her breathing and fed.

I put the lilies on her nightstand and looked at her. Sometimes, it was possible for me to imagine that she was just dreaming—but then I’d see how frail her wrists had become and the tubing encircling her face, and the illusion would quickly disperse.

Some visitors to the Coma Wing talked to their loved ones in the beds. I never did, because I didn’t want to hope that someday my mother would sit up and respond. It felt like wishing for it would make the exact opposite happen.

So instead, I kissed her forehead, tucked her snugly in, then left.

—

I lived in a dingy attic in the East End of North Canley. Mrs. Czapek had rented it out to me on the conditions that I didn't get up to any funny business and I didn't make any excessive noise, both of which I had faithfully complied with for the better part of a year now. It wasn't the best of places and it could get draughty during the winter, but it was mine and that was enough.

Theo was already cawing in his cage and hopping impatiently from one foot to the other when I took off my coat and hung it on the door. He was a crow that I'd found a few years ago with a broken wing, and I'd slowly nursed him back to health over the course of six months. Now he was as chipper as a dog and just as mischievous. "Hey, Theo," I said, and I unlocked his door to let him out. "How are you doing?"

He shook out all his feathers, looking up at me with a quizzical expression, and I laughed. God, it was so nice to be home after a long day. I turned on my laptop and looked at the day’s news.

There was a report on the recent uptick in local crime rates, which I found to be unsurprising. The rise in rent prices and extraordinary food inflation rates had forced a lot of people out onto the streets, which reminded me once again that I was in a supremely lucky position—thank goodness for Mrs. Czapek. Besides that, there was the usual depressing spate of delights: political announcements, a shooting in the upper district, a young girl who was missing, and so on.

I fed Theo, cleaned myself up a bit, had leftovers for dinner, and went to bed.

I had strange dreams that night. In them, a little girl in a white dress was calling out to me, her mouth forming the vaguest shapes of words, but the wind kept snatching her voice away no matter how hard I strained to hear her. I tried trudging towards her through the snow, but my feet kept sinking deeper and deeper until I was buried in a world of cold white, and the snow burrowed into my nose and mouth until I couldn’t breathe, like two icy hands were wrapped around my throat...

My mother was staring at me as if I wasn’t there. Isaac, dear, she said, and she was so old that the flesh was flaking off of her cracked and rotting skull, Let me go.

I woke up in a cold sweat with my sheets wound around my legs and arms, sinuous snakes which ensnared me and tied me down to the bed. I wrenched them away from me like my life depended on it and fled down to the kitchen for a glass of water. As my shaking hand held the rapidly filling cup, my eyes wandered over to the window. For an instant, I thought I saw snowflakes, but when I rubbed my eyes, the momentary mirage was gone.

I didn’t get much sleep after that.

—

I regretted that fact a great deal later in the morning when I trekked over to the Midnight Coffee for my day shift. I didn’t feel very much like a functional person, or even very much like a person when it came down to it. What I wanted most of all in the world was to put my head down and get another thirty hours of sleep.

The door chimed as I pushed it open (ding!) and I paused. The lights were off. Everything was off, actually: the humming of the machines, the digital display of the cash register, the perpetually warming kettle of coffee.

This was a 24-hour café, which meant that theoretically nothing was ever supposed to be off. Perhaps whoever was doing the night shift had simply forgotten that rule? I stepped inside (clang!) and walked over to the counter. The only moving thing in the whole place besides me was the ever-ticking hand of the clock on the wall.

There was another note on the counter. I hesitantly picked it up. It was written in the same sparkly marker as before, and it read:

HOPE YOU NEVER LEAVE US! :)

I flipped it over.

they know what you did

“This isn’t funny,” I said to the empty café, which was even quieter than usual with the absence of the powered devices running in the background. I blinked, then shook my head at myself. Of course nobody was going to respond.

‘They know what you did’? What did that mean? I turned it over and over in my mind, then finally had a realisation. Maybe it was referencing the extra hours I’d marked on the sheet yesterday. But that wasn’t a crime, was it?

No, no, now I was thinking about this the wrong way. I was treating the little card like it was a real threat, but it was just a prank. It was nothing to be worried about.

A small part of me was starting to feel slightly unnerved. Isn’t this how horror movies usually begin? it whispered. When the protagonist believes that they’re losing their sanity, but supernatural spooky shit is actually happening to them and they’re just in denial and then they end up getting killed by it?

No. I was just being paranoid. I tossed the little card into the trash and busied myself turning everything back on again.

You are not going to lose this job.

One thing which I hadn’t admitted, even to myself, was that I was glad of the lack of customers in this place. For one thing, I wouldn’t have any tricky social interactions to work through, and for another, I wouldn’t have to make any coffee.

Despite my previous barista experience, I’d always been terrible at making coffee. Customers consistently left anti-rave reviews on my profile which ran something along the lines of ‘never knew that mud pie was on the menu’ and ‘try your dog’s diarrhea instead’. I had become something of an infamous legend within local café circles, and consequently I never lasted very long at any of the jobs I took with them. Who needed a barista who couldn’t brew coffee?

So, yes, fine: I’d lied on my application and omitted those particular details from my resumé. But it had been a necessary lie, which made it acceptable.

The morning came and went as uneventfully as it had during the previous day.

At noon, I decided to make lunch for myself. The job offer had said nothing about freeloading being illegal, so I assumed that making and eating sandwiches using café resources was free real estate. I rummaged around in the back kitchens and came up with some half-decent lettuce and cheese and bread and ham, which I started putting together on the counter.

That was when I heard the music.

It wasn’t pop music, or rock music, or any other music that you commonly heard in public places. It was the drip-drip-drip of a tinny music box slowly winding down to a crawl.

I’d always thought of music boxes as being somewhat innocent—to me, they sounded a little bit like children’s toys, or maybe a very tiny glockenspiel. This music box did not sound innocent.

My eyes wandered over to the little card I had so thoughtlessly discarded in the trash, which was lying ‘HOPE YOU NEVER LEAVE US! :)’-side up. There was a slight queasiness in the back of my throat that was threatening to burgeon into fully-fledged sickness.

I turned to look for the source of the music. It was coming from the basement door.

(Of course it was.)

I walked over and opened it.

The first thing that hit me was the smell. It smelled like cream and toast and baguettes and coffee and fat and butter and sugar and lard, like some great confectionary of sweetness and delight had been left down there to rot for too long and the sickened result ended up seeping into the walls. I gagged slightly at the sheer, overwhelming patisserie-ness of it all and squinted into the darkness. “Hello?”

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“Hello?” something echoed back, quieter in origin and higher-pitched than my own voice. It could have been a little girl’s voice, or it could have just been some echo returning from a cavernous underground space, but I had no way of knowing which it was while it was dark. I swallowed, fighting down the urge to run, and flicked on the basement lights.

At first glance, there was nothing unusual, but then my gaze fell upon something at the bottom of the stairs. My heart almost skipped a beat. Was that… no, it couldn’t be. It shouldn’t be, because it wasn’t possible…

…but it looked an awful lot like my mother’s crumpled body was at the bottom of the stairs.

My feet were already moving down the steps before I could stop myself, and I knelt, pulling on her arm. “Mom?”

It tore off at the shoulder joint and came away in my grip.

I was too shocked to scream. I just stared at it numbly with incomprehension for a very long moment, then finally realised that it was just a piece of ragged old sackcloth. My overactive imagination had filled in the rest of the blanks to make me believe that the so-called ‘body’ on the floor was my mother’s. It wasn’t my mother. It wasn’t my mother.

So why was it moving?

I leapt back just as the seams of the sack burst apart and a writhing, wriggling mass of hairy black rodent bodies wormed outwards in waves of pink feet and tails. I yelled out with surprise and scrambled backwards up the steps, watching the swarming rats dispersing back into their hidden cubby holes and assorted tunnels in the walls. Within moments, they were all gone.

My heart was pounding so forcefully against my chest that I thought my ribcage would explode. “Fuck,” I whispered to the empty silence as I struggled to remember how to breathe. “Fuck.”

The sounds of the music box, if there had ever really been one, were gone.

—

I left.

I didn’t care if abandoning my shift meant getting fired any longer, because all that mattered was getting as far away as possible from the Midnight Coffee. I could find another job elsewhere, though unfortunately probably not one that paid as much, and I would be free of whatever supernatural creepy shit had been happening to me there.

Theo was especially agitated when I got home that afternoon. He was pecking furiously at the bars of his cage, and when I let him out he immediately started turning circles in the air with his big, black wings, threatening to bring down the lights.

“Theo!” I chased him around for a bit before I finally managed to bring him down. I soothed him by stroking the downy feathers on his belly. “Hey, buddy, what’s wrong?”

He burrowed his beak into my jacket, and I held him close for a long while. “Shh, shh.” I sank backwards into my bed and stared at the ceiling with Theo on my chest, listening to my own breathing in the strange quiet.

I wished I could talk to my mother.

The phone rang. I gently shoved Theo away and padded across the room in bare feet, grabbing my cell phone. The caller I.D. read ‘STOREROOM C’, which was rather unusual, and I picked up the call with a slight frown. “Hello?”

hello? The voice on the other end was small, confused. Lost. It sounded like it belonged to a little girl. can you hear me?

“I can hear you.”

they want me to tell you something. The girl paused, like she was receiving instructions from somebody else in a different room. they know you were lying about the groceries.

My breathing started to become uneven. I said nothing.

they say you have to come back to the café. A longer pause this time, and when her voice came back, it was trembling. please hurry. i'm in Storeroom C.

There was a soft 'click' as the call disconnected.

I stared at the phone in my hand for a very, very long time. I didn't know what to think or what to do.

Call the police? a small part of me suggested, and the rest of me shot the thought down immediately. I couldn't. They knew, whoever 'they' was. That meant that calling the police was now the last possible option...

I sat down, hard, on the carpet, and drew my knees up into my chest. My head was dizzy with nerves and exhaustion. Everything was spinning out of my control. I didn't want to do this.

Then I thought of the fear in the girl's voice, and I realised that there was no other way this could end. I had to do this.

I slowly shuffled over to the door and pulled my coat on. Theo looked over at me, bright-eyed with curiosity.

"I have to go out again," I said to Theo, my voice breaking a little. "I'll be back, okay?"

Caw-caw? said Theo.

I closed the door firmly behind me before I could have any second thoughts.

A weapon. I wanted a weapon. Unfortunately, Mrs. Czapek was not the sort of person who stocked up on machine guns within her lovely house, and the kitchen was disappointingly bare of sharp knives. After a bit of rummaging, the best thing I was able to come up with was a rusted hammer that looked like it had last been used during the Anthropocene. I tested the weight and heft of it in my hand, miming swinging it at an imaginary assailant. I almost took out the window.

“Are you fixing something?”

I spun around, hiding the hammer behind my back. Mrs. Czapek was standing in the kitchen doorway, a robe hanging off her stick-thin frame and thick rectangular glasses planted over her nose. There was a mug of coffee in her right hand and overlarge slippers were adorning her wrinkled feet.

“No,” I said, trying to play it off as something incredibly trivial. “It’s… for work.”

“Oh. Well, put it back when you’re done, please. That was my husband’s.” She squinted at me. “Have you been getting enough sleep? You look like a raccoon.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m just tired.” I forced a laugh which was practically dripping with midi-chlorians. “I’ll put it back, I promise.”

“Do you want coffee? I just put on a fresh kettle of water.”

That was the last thing I wanted. “No, no thanks.”

“Okay.” She turned around, ready to leave, but paused on the threshold. “Be careful, dear.”

“I will.”

It was a necessary lie.

—

The Midnight Coffee was a different place at night. During the daytime, it looked unassuming—even boring, to a point, like a lion sunbathing on a hill. But at night, the lights threw a sinister yellowed shade over the sidewalks outside, and the emptiness of the place shone through, casting its pallor on the whole wide world. The lion woke up.

Open 24 hours. The girl’s whisper was playing over and over again in my mind. please hurry. please hurry. please hurry.

I stood on the steps with my entirely inadequate hammer and wondered just what the hell I was doing.

My hand pushed open the door. It did not chime, and it slid shut behind me without a sound like the hinges had been oiled. Storeroom C. Where was Storeroom C? I walked over to the counter, and my eye fell on the little white card resting upon it.

CONFESS

The back of the card was blank.

“What do you want me to confess to?” I asked the empty café. I sure felt like somebody was listening, though, which lent a little tremolo to my words. “Why are you doing this?”

The back of the card was no longer blank.

they said it’s about your mother

“You said you knew about the groceries. Why do you need me to tell you if you already know?”

More ink was bleeding through from the other side. I flipped the card over.

WE WANT TO KNOW THE WHOLE STORY :)

“And you’ll let the girl go? If I tell you, will you let her go?” I flipped the card over again.

they say yes

I dropped the card back on the counter. I could feel the café humming with pseudo-silence, waiting for me to speak. I was an unwilling performer on an infinite stage with an invisible audience. The sweat under my arms was suddenly making me feel cold. I wished I could lie.

“I killed my mother,” I said.

—

My mother.

My mother was old. She’d been old when I’d been young, and now she was practically ancient.

My mother might have been old, but she was still as energetic as a firecracker. She was like some unstoppable force of nature that wouldn’t go away until you were fed, watered, mothered, and smothered, in any of the above order. She had a tongue on her like a nine-tailed whip, and she never hesitated to give people a piece of her mind when she felt they deserved it. She was a pillar of the community and the bedrock that made me who I was.

I had thought that she’d be in my life forever.

I know you might be thinking that I’m a monster, but I didn’t kill her for the reasons you think. Look—let me try again, okay?

My mother was beginning to forget things.

It started small. She would misplace the car keys, or struggle to come up with the right name for somebody, but she would always shrug it off. ‘I’m getting old,’ she’d always joke. ‘Forget my own head next.’

When I found her wandering around near the highway, I knew that it was the beginning of our end.

I think what hurt the most was seeing her in denial. She was so good at lying that everyone believed it when she said she was fine, or that nothing was wrong. What made it worse was that I also wanted to believe her. She could still carry on conversations just fine, she could wax lyrical about blues or natter on about hockey, but sometimes she would get lost, forget what had just been said, and then I’d be reminded that she was not fine, that everything was wrong.

She didn’t want to go into an institution. ‘They’d lock me up and never let me go,’ she’d declared. ‘I want to keep on living as myself, thanks very much.’

So I took care of her. Got the groceries, made sure she didn’t wander off, provided conversation, put my pay towards monthly bills and fetched necessities and medicine when we needed it. It was actually quite a charmed period in my life—we would reminisce about my childhood and her relatives and bemoan the loss of familiar things like video stores and old pubs together, laughing like it had all taken place only yesterday. For a while, everything was good.

I think I always had a hope in the back of my mind that she’d get better as the months went by. That was stupid. I know it was stupid, because you don’t just get better from this kind of thing. But I still hoped. If you were me, you’d have hoped too, right?

She didn’t get better.

The angriest I’ve ever seen her was when she pissed herself. I heard her screaming, and when I rushed up the stairs to see what was the matter, I found her crying on the bathroom floor. And that scared me, because I’d never seen my mother behaving that way before. I’d never seen her losing her dignity.

Her moments of lucidity grew more and more fleeting, and she no longer commanded a room with her very presence. She was quickly changing into somebody I didn’t know before my very eyes, and I was helpless to do anything about it. It scared me.

On one Saturday morning, when I was cleaning the house, she came up to me, and her eyes were the clearest they’d been in weeks.

‘Son?’ she said. ‘I have something important to ask of you.’

‘Anything.’ What else could I have said?

‘I need you to promise that you’ll help me to move on before I get worse.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I need you to help me die.’

I wanted to believe that she wasn’t serious until I saw the earnestness in her eyes. ‘What?’ I was half-laughing when I said it, because it was ridiculous. The whole thing was ridiculous, and I didn’t want it to be happening to us. It wasn’t happening to us. ‘Mom, I can’t do that.’

‘Please.’ She clutched my hand in both of hers. ‘I can’t stand to see you taking care of me like this. You need your own life, and I’m not going to get any better.’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘Isaac, dear,’ she said. For what would turn out to be the very last time, she was using the unmistakable tone of command that I’d known from her all my life. ‘Let me go.’

I nodded.

I spent two months in agony after that. I tried to ask her if she still meant what she'd said a couple of weeks later, just in case she'd changed her mind, but she didn't remember, which left me on my own. I lost sleep wondering if there was an afterlife. I researched the most painless ways to die and looked into medically-assisted suicide, which seemed to be the only legal way to go about her request.

Okay. So.

The thing about medically-assisted suicide in North Canley is that the person who is going to die has to be mentally competent enough to consent. My mother was nowhere near that, because we’d lived in denial of her condition for so long that she was well past the point when she could make sound decisions.

Do you see where I’m going here?

I decided to kill my mother on a Tuesday. It had to look natural because I didn't want to go to jail, so that ruled out any weaponry or strangulation or brutal physical methods. I don't think I could have brought myself to kill her in those ways regardless. Gas leak, maybe? But then that ran the risk of triggering our monoxide alarms, and having them deliberately turned off would look suspicious to the police.

Reading through the news was what finally gave me my inspiration. There was an article on the leading causes of death amongst the elderly, and falling was the biggest one. I thought that I could probably make it look like she'd been trying to head down the stairs and then tripped. Nobody would suspect a thing.

I didn't sleep at all for the next couple of nights.

On the Thursday morning afterwards, I attempted to gently maneuver my mother to the top of the stairs. It was difficult, because she was choosing to be particularly obstinate that day, but after half an hour of coaxing I finally convinced her to move.

I had both my hands resting on her shoulders as we both looked out over the steps, like we were standing at the summit of some infinitely tall mountain. My palms were covered in sweat. I took a deep breath. ‘Mom? Mom, I love you.’

She nodded, though the confusion was visible in her eyes. ‘I love you too.’

I tightened my grip on her shoulders.

'George?' Her confusion was turning into alarm. She turned her head towards me, her eyes wide with betrayal. 'George, you're hurting me—'

I pushed her.

I don't—I'm not going to go into the details of what her fall looked like. You probably already have an idea. All I will say is that I can still remember (and will forever remember) the sounds that her bracelets made as she went crashing down the steps: ding, ding, ding, and then one last clang as her body hit the ground and fell still in a crumpled heap.

The house was so quiet. I stood at the top of the stairs for a solid thirty seconds, frozen with horror.

My original plan had been to wait until I was sure she was dead, call the police, then explain to them that I'd found her dead and that I'd been helpless to do anything about it (I'd even bought the groceries beforehand), but that was before I'd actually killed my mother by pushing her down the stairs.

There was still hope. If I called for an ambulance, they could save her life and bring her back.

I ran down the steps and started doing CPR, dialling emergency services as I did so. Within minutes an ambulance was at the house and loading my mother's body away on a stretcher, while a no-nonsense paramedic scanned me for symptoms of shock or injury. 'Standard procedure,' she'd explained. I nodded numbly, because everything was happening too quickly for me to process anything. ‘Do you feel alright?’

‘Yes,’ I lied.

‘Were you home when this happened? Did you see your mother fall?’ That was a policeman, who was busy jotting down things on a notepad.

I did my best to sound traumatised and confused, which wasn’t hard because that was how I actually felt. ‘No, I was out getting groceries. I found her on the floor.’

…you know how the rest went.

You understand me now, right?

—

When I’d finished speaking, the café had gone completely silent. No more machines, no more buzz. I took a moment to compose myself and draw a few deep breaths—I felt uncomfortably exposed, like I’d just scraped off an outer layer to reveal something rawer and much too personal. I awaited judgement.

It came.

they say to come down to the basement

Keeping the hammer in my hand close, I opened the basement door.

It no longer smelled like a sick pastry shop. It no longer smelled like anything at all. I flicked the lights on and descended the wooden steps, wary of every creak and groan under my feet. There weren’t any rats or any creepy apparitions. Everything was well-lit and clean.

For some reason, that unnerved me even more.

“Hello?” My voice quivered in the quiet. “Where’s the girl?”

WE HAVE SOMETHING TO TELL YOU

I held the hammer in front of me like it was a holy symbol that could abjure evil. A few rusty flakes fell off the head. “Yeah?”

WE THINK YOU DESERVE A HAPPY ENDING

What did that mean? I swallowed, feeling the lump in my throat bobbing up and down. “Thank you?”

EVERYBODY DESERVES A HAPPY ENDING

OPEN THE DOOR

I looked up, and there was suddenly a door in the wall. It was marked with 'STOREROOM C' in large, curlicue letters. There was a scent wafting from it that spoke of long afternoons in a café diner with friends and warm chatter over mugs of steaming coffee. It smelled like being welcomed home. “What’s behind it?” I whispered. “Are you keeping the girl back there?”

YOUR MOTHER IS LYING IN BED 3C IN THE COMA WING AT 1307 SAINTS AVENUE

OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR

My heart was racing at a million miles per hour. My shaking fingers closed around the cold handle and pulled.

A young girl in a white dress, no more than eight or nine, stared up at me with wide, frightened eyes. Relief flooded my brain so suddenly that it made it hard to stand up. The girl was alright. We were going to make it out of here.

“Hey,” I said, trying to assume a soothing tone. “You called me. I’m here to get you out. What’s your name?”

I’m Lily. She sounded like she’d been crying for a very long time. Are you here to take me away?

“Yes. Come on, let’s get out of here.” I gave her a small smile. "I’m Isaac. Nice to meet you." I held out my hand to her.

Lily grinned back at me, showing white, white teeth. She grabbed my hand. HI, ISAAC.

—

They never found Isaac's body.

Clang.

they know you're here [https://i.postimg.cc/hGk9F74y/add-girl-in-white-dress.png]