i.
Devi buys groceries. She's new to the neighborhood, and it's not a good neighborhood but at least it's a self-absorbed suburban kind of poverty rather than the desperate grasping meanness of the apartments she's occupied thus far in her adult life. Her new house is the only thing she can afford with her savings, and it's a rat's nest to be quite frank. The floors of the house are pitted grey concrete. There had been a leak in the plumbing a decade before, or something, and the previous owner had never arranged for the floor to be replaced. Looking around at her new house, Devi thinks she can see why. Even the light that falls on her feet as she passes by the window is filthy, miserable and dark. Half the appliances in the kitchen gave up the ghost years before. She spun the dial on the mint-blue oven and a shower of sparks rained down inside the greasy glass pane.
She buys Lysol and bactine and rags and thinks of all its old corners and how tired her elbows are going to be by tomorrow, and ignores the cashier's advances with gritted teeth. She doesn't think she is going to make this place a home. She's too tired for anything that sentimental. She just wants it to be livable.
ii.
Devi does not sleep well. Devi has never been an easy sleeper, but the nights here are the scratch of cheap wool, irritating and clingy. The moonlight that comes in through her windows follows her like the gaze of a malevolent eye. Only when the new moon is swallowed up by the sky does she feel even an ounce of peace, and still, over the glittering powder of the star-strewn darkness, she can feel its spectral eyelid ready to crack open again in a few precious hours.
She moves her bed from one end of the room to the other, which does nothing. She buys soothing CDs and chamomile tea, both of which she hates. She boards up the bedroom windows. And then, because it's so satisfying, she boards up the rest of the windows too. She still does not sleep.
iii.
Her new house has a basement, which she uses to store her easels and canvases. There are rats in the darkness. She is not afraid of rats, but she doesn't like them either. She lays out rat traps under the old furniture and sheets and she waits, and she waits, and. The traps gather dust. The cheese goes hard and green. Devi stands in the midst of the mess, tapping her foot on the sagging floor, and hears even now the rustling in the walls. Her traps lie where she left them.
iv.
This city oozes little evils into its streets like a garbage bag spilling sickly sweet slime into the gutter. In an alley between Nerve Publishing and her car, which she has only barely managed to find a spot for after circling the block for a full half hour longer than she planned - after watching the clock tick down until she was already ten minutes late for her meeting before she even left the vehicle - after watching the HR rep smile grimly as he accepted her resume and then promised to give her a call - Devi is in no mood to deal with the petty villains who populate this urban sprawl. She is livid, wound tight, ready to lacerate.
When the thug in the alley backs her up against a corner, Devi does what she learned to do in art school and lashes out - slams the heel of her palm up into his nostrils and crushes his face. She can feel the cartilage crunching against the blow, bone shattering, sinuses collapsing - the whole thing caves in like old fruit, and she's left heaving with the aftermath of adrenaline as he gurgles and twitches on the pavement. Her heel scrapes the ground as she takes a step back, garbage oil and blood dragging in her wake.
She watches his eyes roll back into his head and she thinks - should I be strong enough to do that?
v.
Devi paints, and she paints, and when she runs out of canvas she just tears bookshelves from the walls and starts painting there, desperate to drain the thing in her head into ink. She can't stop or she'll lose the momentum, she can feel something dragging at the inside of her head, like it's waiting for a place to dig its claws in and choke her down to an art block. She doesn't give it purchase. She paints into the night, which she doesn't sleep through anyway, and into the heavy-eyed weight of the day. Still-lifes become swollen portraits become howling surrealist landscapes and still she goes, she paints her bedroom walls with unblinking dripping eyes, she paints the doors with visions of some sublime hellmouth that comes to her stroke by stroke, block by block. She is pouring out something that will kill her if she tries to keep it caged.
There is a trap door in her basement floor. She descends into the darkness like Hecate carrying her torch into the underworld, flashlight squeezed tight in her hand.
vi.
Devi doesn't know how to be quiet and keep her head down. When the world pushes on her, she pushes back. When the paintings start to talk back to her, Devi only talks over them.
vii.
Devi covers the walls in grappling monsters and childhood nightmares, working through the night and into the indistinguishable day, closed inside of her boarded windows and buried underneath the earth. She hasn't taken a job in weeks. Maybe more. She forgets to pay the electricity but the lights stay on, she forgets to pay the water but the water keeps coming. She buys cheap food. She's never eaten much.
viii.
Devi wrenches her sticky fist free of a stranger's eye socket and stands, wobbling, under the light of the Seven-Eleven fluorescents. Fluid drips down her knuckles. Did she do that?
ix.
Tenna runs into her as she's picking up a new work shirt from the mall, and she's a whirl of enthusiasm as she leads Devi over to the noodle kiosk and buys her a bowl and berates her for never answering her phone, honestly Devi I know you get tunnel vision when you're working but you couldn't spare one minute for your old pal Tenna?
Devi doesn't know what to say - she can't remember the last time she heard the phone ring. Has the message light been blinking at her this whole time? How long has it been since she checked her messages? Devi slurps noodles from her Styrofoam bowl uneasily. Sorry, she says. It's been a weird few weeks.
It's been six months, Tenna says, a hint of accusation finally slipping through her forced cheer, I was starting to think you died or something.
x.
Devi watches the man who just cooked her dinner claw at his own throat, eyes bulging. The trachea is collapsed. No matter how hard he sucks there's no air getting through that ruined pipe. Like a collar, the skin around his neck blooms red and purple in the shape of her fingers. He claws madly, tearing himself open, and Devi imagines that she can see the red and purple veins tearing underneath his greedy fingers. He should have kept his hands to himself. She wipes her hand on her thigh and pops another shrimp puff into her mouth.
xi.
Devi meets a guy at the art store on her side of town, the new cashier, sharp like a knife in every sense of the metaphor, from his cutting cheekbones to his gloved fingers to his dry, relentless commentary. He says it's the only job he can get with half an art degree. He throws in a couple texture sponges for free and tells her that when he burns this place to the ground he'll be sure to grab a box of copics for her.
xii.
Devi observes a moving truck through a crack in the slatted window. Neighbors. Nothing good comes of neighbors. Walking around on her lawn, trying to look in her windows. Watching her house. Nothing good.
xiii.
The basement only seems to go deeper and deeper. Each time she searches for a trap door she finds one, stairs and endless stairs, deep enough into the earth that she cannot help but know that she is lost in the stomach of some primeval behemoth, some gravedirt angler fish, navigating its hungry intestines.
On the lower floors she finds lurking rust-spotted contraptions, mechanisms out of a nightmare. They lie unused in the darkness, dreaming of some forgotten inquisition, leaping beneath her hands like they know her touch and long for the life she can breathe back into them. Do they remember her? Are they hers? Gritty red flakes splinter and drift under her fingers. Devi looks up from her work to find that she no longer knows how she came to live here.
xiv.
Devi pushes her hair off her sweat-slicked forehead, smearing tacky blood all over herself. When did her hair get this long? She pauses in the middle of wrenching a man's teeth out of his jaw and goes to find some scissors, she knows she has some scissors, maybe she left them with the barista in the other room.
xv.
Sweltering in the afternoon sunshine, Devi offers the husband a glass of lemonade with dust all muddied down at the bottom. His wife sags listless against the moving truck, glassy eyes and withered limbs. Nothing good comes of neighbors. Even now her skin is crawling at the thought of them watching her, monitoring her, with their inscrutable human desires.
The husband is bent over the trunk of their car, scrounging in the junk for the CD he says would have made him a rock star if it wasn't for the little snot, and Devi is reaching out for his neck, for the column of vertebrae that will snap like a wishbone under her hand - when the kid wanders out of the house. Their eyes meet. He has these big watery eyes, these little-red-riding-hood eyes, clutching his teddy bear to his tiny chest. For a half second the two of them freeze in place, watching each other. She can almost hear his heart slamming frantic against his ribs. His huge watery eyes are reflecting her nightmare shape back at her, the monster that will haunt his sleep for weeks after this moment is over, the inhuman inscrutable thing that holds his entire life in her paint-stained palms.
Slowly, she lowers her hand. Not today, she decides. Another day, perhaps.
xvi.
Sickness comes pouring out of her like vomit, like a still birth. Sickness climbs the walls and watches her from the shadows, slitted screwhead eyes, and Sickness laughs like the clicking of an insect. you cannot keep me here mother, It says, i will not remain within you
It screams and tears at her as she grabs it, knife-sharp and terrified of her - it should be, yes, it should be - as she squeezes it back down into the canvas. The sound is like a swarm of insects, like a fire popping. Devi pinches its tiny head between her fingers and feels the fragile nothing threaten to split open. Limb by straining limb, she forces the vicious little thing into the paint, until it is nothing but oil glaring up at her, wounded and reduced.
Don't forget who made you, Devi says, drawing back her blue-smeared hand. You're mine, you wretched little monster. You picked this planet to colonize, and you can't escape its gravity now.
The hungry walls scream at her, another monstrous ungrateful child.
xvii.
It is an angel, she thinks, but it is also the sound of a jaw snapping closed around a rabbit's neck, the void between stars that slavers insatiably for heat and light, the way that a tree grows from the socket of a decomposing skull. This is it, this is the thing that all her work has been bringing her towards: a magnum opus, a scream into the sunless terror of existence.
It is a room, just a room in a house somewhere in the world, but it is draining everything she is into its sodden corners. The walls are a rotting fresco of brains and oil paint, and she cannot stop adding to them. She cannot stop. She doesn't know why, but it's imperative - it's dire - that she not stop. It isn't finished, she tells herself. I've just got to finish it.
xviii.
They sit on his car on the cliff over the city and watch the stars through the smog, a purple and white world rendered clean and lovely in the darkness. It all looks so beautiful from up here, she says, her hands warm against the rust-spotted metal. He frowns up at the sky, dark circled eyes and bitter thin lips. A beautiful rotten lie, he says. It's all held together with string and spit.
She watches him and he watches the horizon, the mountains that are only black cut-outs against the cancerous sky. It's only pretty when you can squint at it, he says. A collage of ugliness rendered beautiful by distance.
I wonder what starts to happen when it falls apart, she says.
Devi waits for him to let her down, like all the others. She waits, and she waits, and she waits.
xiv.
I'm glad I asked you, she says, and she leans in. She leans in to meet him half way with his parted lips and his wide eyes, and - he pulls away, ducking down into the cage of his skinny arms, breathing hard. I'm sorry, he says, I'm sorry, you're so - relentlessly magnificent and I'm just - I -
The walls are whispering to her, all the painted white mouths and fresco teeth in a hissing chorus, telling her how sweet he is, how naïve, how precious. Your work, the walls hiss, think of your work. How will you work with this sweet lovely thing distracting you? Dragging you away from the house? Taking you away from your work?
Devi watches her own knuckles bend and crack as if they belong to someone else. There is only the work, and what is she if she is not working? There is nothing else of her left.
Kill him, the walls whisper, kill him like the others. They're all prettier in pieces.
xv.
The glass in the mirror shatters as his head cracks into it, a fracture that blinks back at her with a menagerie of endless eyes, her own eyes. There is still enough give for breath to whistle in and out of his throat, and he could at least try to pry her loose right now, if he had half a mind to. He could take a swing at her. He doesn't. She can feel his pulse in her hand, the wild rabbit thump. She could break him with a twitch, all his hollow bird bones and razor edges. She never holds them like this, never this closely, never long enough to hear their rabbit fast hearts in her palm.
I could keep him, she thinks. I could keep him. Just until he disappoints me.
He licks his lips, nervous tick, and he says, So you - you weren't joking about the murder stuff I guess. His hand trembles, but it settles over her wrist, just lightly enough that she almost can't feel it. You should know this isn't necessarily a deal breaker. For me.
The walls howl. They seem to throb all around her, stretching and writhing, reaching for her. Devi hooks her fingers inside of his mouth to hold it open and silent, watching the thick heave of his throat from the inside as he swallows. She could break him. She could keep him. She could tear him open.
Devi is a screaming manic ragged collection of compulsions, the trigger and the finger itching on the trigger, and the only thing left of her now is her want and her resentment. She hunches her back against the howling of the walls. Let them howl! She knows what she wants! She'll have what she wants and this thing that suckers at her fingers and screams for her attention can eat its gruesome oily heart out.
Devi looks down at the hand on her wrist, the bony fingers, fraying gloves. The pale knuckles almost look swollen against the spun-glass thinness of the bones.
They all look prettier in pieces. Bite sized. Manageable. Johnny has been sweet so far, but even he is ugly up close, a collage of blemishes held together with string. The difference is only that his ugly interests her. Endears her. Why can't people be like paintings? Malleable? Perfectible? There is only the work and there is only the work and so she'll keep him. She'll keep him.
The knuckles first, she decides. The knuckles first, and then the eyes.
xvi.
When Tess wakes up in the darkness her shoulders already ache from the suspension hook. She makes her first mistake because the light is terrible, and because she never got a good look at her abductor in the parking lot. Dillon groans feebly next to her. The figure perched on the work table across the room is half gargoyle, half scarecrow, barely distinguishable from the dark.
you, she says, with her mouth dry as a bar of soap, who are you
The figure tilts its head, ear up like an animal trying to pick out a sound. It sends shivers down her spine. Johnny, it says. It waves a hand in a gross approximation of a formal bow, the outline of the appendage stubbed and strange. But seeing as we're currently sharing this lovely domicile, you can call me Nny.
This is when Tess makes her second mistake.