Disclaimer: The world of Harry Potter and its characters are not mine.
A/N: Happy Hallowe'en, everyone. The title of this piece is inspired by Emily Dickinson's poem, "One need not be a chamber to be haunted". A close is a British term for an alleyway.
In the Closes of Her Mind
There was a scar between her breasts, a long thin scar made by a knife. Late at night, while her boyfriend was snoring beside her, she lay awake and stared at the shadows playing tricks on the ceiling. She could feel the cold tip of the blade on her chest, breaking her skin open with agonising slowness, a straight line to count the score: one. She did not cry out; she could not cry out. It was her demon and hers alone.
In the morning she woke up early to cook breakfast for her boyfriend and herself. Grey morning light trickled into the kitchen and languished in a haze. Sausages and eggs sizzled in the frying pan. The kettle wheezed, shrill as a fire alarm. Quickly she moved the kettle out of the way and turned off the heat.
Yawning, her boyfriend shuffled into the kitchen, kissed her good morning on the cheek, and grabbed a tin of tea from the cupboard. While he made tea for two, he chattered on about trivial matters: his brother's joke shop, the latest antics of his nieces and nephews, their best friend's social life (or lack thereof), the dismal lunch he had the other day...
She interjected every so often, though she was barely aware of what she was saying. The talk was a welcoming distraction, a way to fill her emptiness with sound. When her boyfriend made a joke, she smiled in indulgence before making a wry remark. She loved him for being everything she was not. In a kitchen filled with mundane things and mundane talk, she could almost believe everything would be all right.
She lay alone on her bed that night; it was her boyfriend's turn to look after his mother. A hand touched the prickling mark between her breasts, but it was not her hand. She was trembling, not from fear but from the coldness of the hand. Icy and hard, the demon's hand could have been made of steel, and it was wet with her blood. Fingernails scraped her abdomen as if wanting to rip her belly open and pull out her uterus, but there was no pain. Instead, there was a ticklish feeling, an itch she wanted to scratch.
She opened her mouth and exhaled, a soundless cry into the rustling night. The demon never breathed a word to her, not into her ears nor inside her head. There was no need for words when the demon had already ensnared its prey.
In the dark she lay still on the bed, convincing herself that the demon was gone for good. A lock of hair tickled her neck, and she could not be sure if it was hers—brown and brittle as hay—or someone else's—black and curly as a snake.
Finis.
A/N: This piece came about as a result of reading too much Neil Gaiman. I wrote it in a hurry and didn't think much about it afterwards. In the end, it doesn't read like Neil Gaiman. Thank you for reading.