“You can’t stay here,” said a voice behind her.
Berthe wanted to spin around, but the voice barely cut through the waves of pain. The most she could do was force her eyes slightly open.
The boy from the coffee shop swam in her vision, his pale face blurring into moonlight and then coalescing into features behind spectacles again. Sweat stung Berthe’s eyes. A stalker had her cornered in an alleyway at night, and she could hardly bring herself to mind.
“Oh, give it up,” she said, always bad at being tactful and now not even able to be polite. “Do you have some sort of fetish for girls getting sick on your feet?”
“I implore you not to give me the chance to develop one,” he said. “But you need help.”
His face kept disintegrating with each new wave of pain, nothing but glittering shards of moonlight in her vision. Berthe put her hands to her stomach, clutching at it, and realized her mistake when she almost toppled over sideways.
The boy had hold of her arm suddenly, grip cold and firm and inexorable, like being held up by a piece of machinery. Berthe was vaguely startled that he could hold her up at all, since they were the same height, and he was so skinny.
Berthe was starting to think she did need help. But that didn’t mean she had to accept it from him.
“So g-get my friends,” she said, her teeth chattering so hard that she was afraid they would smash like porcelain. “They’re in the—you know who I mean, you were staring like a—you’re creepy.”
He seemed entirely unaffected by this assessment. Possibly it was not news to him.
He said, as if she had not spoken at all and in relation to nothing, as if he was just plucking random words out of the air: “You don’t want to hurt anyone, do you?”
It was strange enough that Berthe opened her eyes all the way, even as another snake of pain uncoiled and struck in her belly. He looked at her, eyes unblinking behind his silly glasses, everything she saw about him at odds with his stone-fast grip.
She saw he was perfectly serious.
“Of c-course I don’t want to hurt anyone,” she gasped out.
“Come with me,” the creepy boy from the coffee shop said. “Or you’ll kill someone.”
Come with me if you want someone else to live, Berthe thought, her mind so muddled she could not even remember what movie she was mangling a quote from.
She wouldn’t have responded to a threat to herself; she would have screamed and hit out at him, not because she was brave but because that was something life prepared you for, creepy guys threatening you in darkened alleyways. She was not prepared for someone to say that she could be dangerous. She had never hurt anyone in her life and never wanted to. It was not a warning she could ignore.
Berthe staggered, a violent enough lurch so she was almost jarred out of even this boy’s grasp. “All right,” she got out, between stiff lips and chattering teeth.
The creep from the coffee shop wasn’t just strong, he was fast. Berthe stumbled in the boy’s speeding wake, and after a few streets, tilting into swathes of moonlight and then back to shadowy road, he stopped at a door. Berthe leaned her face against it, forehead pressed to peeling gray paint, and the boy fished out a key from the pocket of his skinny jeans and opened the door.
She went sprawling into a tiny coffin of a hall.
“Come on, come on,” the boy muttered, his keys falling to the floor with a clatter and a thud. He hauled her up again, arm an iron bar across her midsection, and pushed her up stairs covered in brown carpeting, worn white with the constant passage of feet. Even the white traces of age on the carpet shimmered in Berthe’s eyes like moonlight.
They got up the narrow little stairs and into another tiny hall, then through a door that looked out of place, heavy and dark in the midst of all this cheap flimsiness. The boy towed Berthe inside the door.
There were shutters on the windows, heavy and dark like the doors. There was a single bed in the corner, neatly made.
Sick and staggering, Berthe still felt a panicked fist clutch at the inside of her throat. She remembered what she had allowed herself to forget amid all the pain—that what she was doing was crazy.
“Oh no,” she said weakly, and backed right into the boy. She spun to face him, even though the sudden movement made her stagger and sway. “No—” she repeated, raining down blows on his narrow chest. They landed like kittens on lily pads.
He caught her wrists in that stone grip of his, pushing her firmly into the room and stepping backward over the threshold as he did so.
“Trust me,” he said. “You couldn’t pay me to stay in this room with you.”
He slammed the door shut. Berthe did not even feel afraid that she was now trapped in a stranger’s bedroom. She was just relieved to be alone with her miserable sickness, not to have to split her focus between current agony and present danger.
She sank down onto the carpet on her hands and knees and arched her back; she felt as if her spine were made of metal and somehow turning molten inside her skin, dissolving and burning at once. She gagged, wrenching pain all the way through her, as if her insides were being torn out. The bite on her arm where the creature from the campsite had sunk its teeth in throbbed as if it might start bleeding again.
Berthe sobbed. She was scared that she would choke up her internal organs, have them laid out ruby red on the carpet before her, her heart bitter in her mouth.
Her fingers clawed on the carpet, tearing it into ragged shreds. Berthe howled her agony and her vision whited out, all moonlight, moonlight, moonlight in the dark.
Berthe woke up aching in a nest of chaos. She lifted her head, her hair a snarled blond veil between her and the world. When she reached her hand to brush it back, her whole body shuddered in protest.
The room she had seen last night was destroyed. The bed was a metal skeleton, scraps of cloth that had been sheets and a mattress hanging on it like mournful ghosts. There was a wardrobe at the other end of the room that she had not even noticed: its door was torn off its hinges. The walls had been beige: now they were carved with deep, gray lines. The boards beneath the torn carpet were savagely scored as well, the floor a mess of splinters and nails.
Berthe was naked. She very urgently did not want to stay naked, curled up and whimpering like an animal.
She climbed gingerly to her feet and went over to the wardrobe with its door ripped off. There were clothes inside, boys’ clothes, and weird boys’ clothes at that, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and naked people couldn’t be fussy about fashion.
There were a lot of button-down shirts that did not fit across her boobs, but she got into a T-shirt that said ORGAN DONOR, INQUIRE WITHIN. The fit made it embarrassingly obvious she wasn’t wearing a bra.
She went down the stairs barefoot.
It was silent in the house, so silent she thought that perhaps she was alone here, that she could just open the door and go home now without having to face anything.
She pushed open the other door in the little hall, just the same.
Inside was a kitchen-cum-living room, all the blinds drawn. In the dimness she could see clean countertops, a battered sofa, and on a low table, a cup of tea with a cookie lying beside it.
In the darkest corner of the room stood the creep from the coffee shop.
He was still wearing his jacket and his dumb scarf, and he had his hands in his pockets. He looked up as she came in.
“I suppose you have a lot of questions,” he said. He sounded patient, like someone talking to a small child who could not possibly understand anything on her own.