a/n: Oh boy, another disturbing chapter! This one mentions miscarriage and is a little graphic. So be warned
I'll fly away, oh glory
I'll fly away
When I die, hallelujah by and by
I'll fly away...
The song echoed off the tile walls, the crisp thin voices of a choir of young girls. Nona knew the song and the familiar beige tile of the middle school's bathroom, but she didn't remember the hallway being so long.
Finally she reached the stalls and mirrors, though now they too didn't quite match her memory. There were more of them, at once self-contained and stretching seemingly forever. Nona found a corner and touched up her lipstick, smoothing her hair with shaky hands.
She knew that Cordelia wouldn't be worried yet. In addition to being less susceptible to the clutches of hell, she could also stay descended far longer without the threat of disintegration. The Supreme knew this. With the way things were going, though, Nona wondered if she might beat her own record this time.
The bathroom's overhead lighting made her look pale and tired. She rummaged through the small purse over her shoulder, suddenly desperate to cover the circles she saw beneath her eyes. But when she looked up again the mirror burst into flames.
Nona startled, turning around in sudden fear that someone had seen. This caused the trash can in the near corner to spontaneously ignite, too.
"Look what she did!" The girl in the plaid-and-navy uniform was shorter than her now, so much younger, but Nona gasped anyway. "She's evil!"
"No..." Nona urged, "No, I didn't, I didn't mean to..."
"Evil, she's evil!" A small chorus of others had appeared now, too, behind the first classmate. Through the walls, the familiar hymn still echoed, sung in a maddening jump-rope-rhyme loop.
"Why do you even go here?" the first girl demanded. "Your family's not even Christian. I heard your parents have sex parties and sleep with other people!"
"I heard she's the antichrist! Who else could start fires with their mind?"
Several girls screamed, cowering cinematically.
"She's a witch! Burn her, burn her!"
"You're not really here," said Nona firmly, trying hard to get her bearings. She didn't know why she was suddenly having such a hard time with this hell. Somewhere beyond the pain and fear, this frustrated her.
"I'm right here," snarled the underworld-thing, revealing its true form so suddenly that Nona, terrified, lunged for it on instinct. In the demon's wake stood the girl, young and blonde, her arm bent at an inhuman angle.
"Look what you did!" she cried, weeping.
"No," Nona gasped. "I didn't, I'm sorry... oh God..."
She ran for the stalls, pushing and pulling on each door but finding most of them locked. In the few that came open were things she had feared as a child. In one she found Pascow from Pet Sematary, in another the little black dog from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark; in a third, the clown with the tear-away face from The Nightmare Before Christmas. When she got to the very last door, it opened not to a toilet, but a scene from her parents' bedroom.
Her mother looked up at her from the teal satin sheets, tangled naked with a therapy patient half her age. "It's okay honey," she said calmly, looking up at Nona. "Dad knows."
Nona slammed the door shut. Exiting, she finally found her way out of the bathroom and into a long, winding hallway. Walking heavy with purpose, she felt as if the floors were cracking under her, the walls shaking with her rage. They weren't, of course. Everything still looked the same-the way the trash got swept up, the way the halls were decorated with sports posters.
But she, Nona, was different, overtaken now by a rage that seemed to burn beyond fire and become ice again. She felt as if she had claws now. She imagined swiping at the wall with them, leaving long five-point marks across football and color-guard and junior-varsity golf. Demon-cum-classmates appeared in her path, like goomba effigies in eight-bit video games, and because she knew that they couldn't truly die and weren't really children, she killed them. Because she could. They didn't make triumphant analog noises or dissolve into coins, though. They bled.
A small dark-haired boy, aged for preschool instead of middle school, appeared. Or perhaps, she thought, he had been there all along. He said nothing but surveyed Nona's rampage with wide, frightened eyes before scampering away.
Seeing her features in his was like getting the wind knocked out of her. All at once then, she was too sad and tired to be angry.
"Wait!" she called breathlessly after him as he ran into the ether. "This isn't me, don't be afraid of me! Please..."
He never called her mother. As the rage in her dissolved, pain swelled instead, nauseous physical cramping in her abdomen. It was so bad that she couldn't stand straight. She remembered.
"Mom..." she whispered, bending. "Mom, it just hurts so much..." She watched the small river of blood gush and pool around her white shoes. (It made no sense, of course, her tights weren't torn.) A chunk of tissue, unrecognizable as anything human, fell to the linoleum between her feet.
Relief rushed her, and with it, fatigue and then emptiness. She stumbled forward, seeing a doorway at one end of somewhere, awash in light.
As she dragged towards it, Nona thought that maybe Langdon was right. She had felt unseen by her parents as a child, and bullied by her peers in adolescence. As an adult, she'd had a miscarriage. These things hurt, but they were ordinary traumas that affected millions-billions, even-of other people. They weren't worthy of being turned into monsters in hell.
No, Nona realized, all her monsters came from the inside. They had just always been there. They were her, and that was so much worse.
Exhausted, she stumbled out the small doorway and found herself in a busy outdoor market. In the dividing street, a jazz funeral procession was going by, similar to the ones she sometimes saw at home in New Orleans. The one difference here was that the marchers, with their instruments, had flesh as matte-gray as the top hats they wore, and their eyes were small red or yellow slits in their ashen faces. They stomped, clanging symbols and blowing long mournful sounds on trombones and trumpets and horns; and then, with the rattle of the hearse, were gone.
As the long black car rattled out of sight, Nona stepped off the curb. Slowly, achingly she lay down, supine in the street. She lay one arm across her forehead, sheilding her eyes from the hell-sun's odd gray glare. The same hymn was here, too. Instead of a girls-school choir, it now took the form of a singular female jazz singer from inside a nearby bar.
When the shadows of this life have gone
I'll fly away
Like a bird from these prison walls I'll fly
I'll fly away...
The woman's voice was so unspeakably sad that Nona finally allowed herself to cry a little. She watched shoes and hooves clomp by, unconcerned with her, as several tears clouded her vision and rolled sideways down her cheeks.
One pair stopped. Through the blur of tears in her eyes Nona thought she recognized Papa Legba's gray dreadlocks. The younger of the pair came close and stood over her. He had Langdon's dark-blond hair, but Nona's vision was too foggy to make his face out. It wasn't as if she would have recognized it, anyway.
He stared down at her for a few seconds, then held out his hand. She sensed so little malice in the gesture that she might have taken it. But before she could decide, the dreadlocked man was grabbing the blond one by the arm and hurrying him away.
It was then that the chapel appeared-or perhaps Nona just noticed it-there at the dead-end of the crooked street. It was an unassuming little building, gray and compact, with an old-fashioned steeple. But Nona recognized a certain familiar grief radiating off of it, grief that she hadn't sensed so strongly since the first time she stood at the Montgomery Mansion's door. She hadn't understood it then. The magnetic darkness inside her that pulled her in, the way that she could feel tragic places but not be hurt by them. The giddy thrill of painful things, and all that said about her.
The little chapel was just as horrid, but familiar, and its pull was such that Nona picked herself up from the ground, walked up to it, and let herself in.