The street lamp in the garden held his old body like it had always been there.
Steven looked at it from the balcony — at the lamp post, at the way the grey-dark night sat around it, at the cricket sounds that moved through the garden below in waves, indifferent to everything. Crickets. The most normal sound in the world. Happening right now, in a garden where his own former female body was hanging upside down from a lamp post, cut, naked and still.
He stood there for a moment longer than he should have.
Then he went back inside.
---
The room received him with its familiar silence. He sat on the edge of the mattress. He put his hands on his knees and looked at the floor and let himself be in stress for exactly as long as it took to understand that the stress was not going to resolve itself by being felt.
*Think,* he told himself. *What do you know? What do you do with what you know?*
The answers were not immediately available.
He got up.
He opened the corridor door before he had finished deciding to, stepping over the threshold with the specific energy of someone who has determined that staying still is worse than moving and has committed to motion before the destination is clear. The words on the door — *WELCOME SHIVANI IN NIGHTMARE* — passed above his head as he stepped under them.
He did not look at them.
The corridor was empty and dim. He walked.
After perhaps thirty steps, he heard it.
A woman's voice. Coming from somewhere he couldn't immediately locate — not close, not far, the specific quality of a sound that was moving or that the corridor was bending around.
*"My daughter — please — where is my daughter, give her back to me—"*
Steven stopped walking.
The voice had a texture he recognized without being able to name. Not the recognition of a face or a name — something older than that, something that lived in the body rather than the mind. He knew this sound. He knew the specific frequency of this particular grief.
He stood in the corridor and listened and felt the knowing move through him and could not locate where it came from.
He turned.
And ran in the opposite direction.
---
He ran until the sound was gone — until the crying woman's voice had become something he could no longer hear even when he strained for it, until the corridor had absorbed it entirely. Then he stopped. Put one hand on the wall. Breathed.
*Calm,* he thought. *Read the situation.*
He looked back the way he had come.
Twelve doors. He counted them — one by one, the doors he had passed in his run, each one sitting in the corridor wall with the specific weight of a door that was trying to look like every other door and was not entirely succeeding.
Twelve doors. In a dormitory where all of them should have been student rooms.
He looked at them and felt the recognition arrive in pieces. Each door was familiar. Not from this building — from somewhere else, from some other context, from a collection of memories he couldn't quite assemble into a clear image. He knew these doors. He did not know from where.
Four turns. Two staircases. Both staircases normal — the geometry of them correct, the physics of them obeying the rules that staircases were supposed to obey, which was more than he could say for most of what the nightmare had offered him tonight.
He looked at the walls.
White. They had been white when he started running. They were still white — but at the line where the wall met the ceiling, something was moving. Dark and slow, spreading downward the way water spreads across a surface, following the line of least resistance. He watched it reach the halfway point of the wall and kept watching and it did not stop.
*Blood,* he thought, with the flat certainty of someone who had seen enough tonight to know what dark and slow moving down a white wall looked like.
He filed it. Turned his attention to the inventory. Found the knife. Let his fingers rest on the handle — not drawing it, not yet, but present.
And then the sound returned.
Not from ahead of him. Not from the distance he had left it at.
From directly behind him.
*"My daughter — please — where is she—"*
Close. The space between one person and another, the distance of a conversation.
Steven's hand closed around the knife.
He turned.
The figure behind him resolved from the dim light of the corridor the way figures resolve in nightmares — all at once, complete, as though it had always been there and the darkness had simply been keeping it on his behalf.
He looked at her face.
And whatever expression Steven's face had been maintaining — the controlled neutrality he had worn through the rotating room, through the skeleton hands, through the cotton-fabric creature, through his own former body hanging in the garden — came apart.
Something moved across his features that he could not stop.
Stress. Fear. The specific, unwilling expression of someone encountering a thing they were not prepared for, encountering it in their face before their mind had given permission.
He looked at her.
And that woman was —
---
*End of Chapter Nineteen*