The Room Without a Window

The door swung open with a dull creak, the hinges too worn and tired to make a proper noise. She looked up anyway from her place on the bed, and the smile that curved her lips didn't reach her eyes.

"I see you found the place okay," said the woman, her voice low and wry as she waved one scarlet hand at him. Blood pooled around her, glistening on the sheets and filling the air with the too-sweet metallic scent of iron and life. "Close the door behind you, would you?"

Obediently he did so, crossing over the carpet that once might have been a color, but now was a mess of ancient, faded stains. Looking around the squalid room he was glad for the smell of blood; it covered anything else that might have filled the air. "You gave very clear directions," he demurred, and his smile was much more honest than hers.

Round shoulders shrugged, and she shoved her glasses up further on her nose, smearing blood over one lens and not noticing. It hurt to crane her neck up to look at him; he towered over her even standing. "Have a seat," she offered, nodding at the bed, running a hand up her bare leg, where a deep cut oozed sluggishly over her pale skin, the muscle and fat clearly visible in the edges. Poking and prodding at it, she was having a hard time paying attention to him. She should have been dead or faint from blood loss, but common concerns like that had no form here.

He took all of this in with a distant sense of detachment that let him know this couldn't be real. No one could sit there and play with their own bleeding wounds like that, with the Mona Lisa smile on, in a cheap motel room. If this were real he would have refused to sit, would have stood rather than sink down onto the bed. But it wasn't, so he sat, and the blood squished under him, warm and wet and he just KNEW his jeans would never be the same. How to explain that to his mother, when he took laundry there next week?

He might have continued on thinking such mundane thoughts, but she reached over with one seemingly-gloved hand (short fingers, stubby, with rings that glittered and caught the light, but seemed dull and uninteresting when he looked at them intently) to poke him sharply in the shoulder. "Of course I gave clear directions. I wanted you here, didn't I? Did you bring it?" This she asked with eagerness, dark eyes lighting up as she leaned closer, crooked teeth bared as she smiled hopefully.

"What would you do if I said no?" he wondered idly, but already he was pulling it from his pocket, a long, thin box of wood, with strange symbols carved onto it. Inwardly he realized he'd never seen it before, and had no clue what it was or what was inside. It flickered with a dull light, and he let her take it without a moment's hesitation.

"Perfect," she breathed, snatching it from his hands. Far from the flat smile she had offered when he came in, now the grin that crossed her round face was wild, a feral thing that spoke of feverish madness and breathless delerium. "Oh, it's -perfect-. You'll use it with me, won't you?"

Opening the box with quick, sure movements of her little hands, leaving dark smears all over the pale wood, she withdrew a long, narrow glass tube that gave off a fitful glow, like the sputtering of a candle in a drafty room, and she laughed. It was not a sound he ever, ever wanted to hear again, though for the life of him he couldn't tear his gaze away from her hands and that strange piece of glass.

"Do I have a choice?" came the ironic reply, but she wasn't listening to him. Instead she snapped it neatly in half, the fragile glass splintering and dropping crumbs into her lap. Two pieces remained in her hands, jagged edged, and the sullen red glow grew brighter. She took his hand and turned it palm-up, slapping half of it into his hand.

"Now remember, it's down the block, not across the street," she admonished with a motherly smile, and took the other piece of the tube in her right hand. Humming under her breath, with the tip of her pink tongue poking out the corner of her mouth, she meticulously laid the broken edge of the tube into the center of her palm. Waiting for him to do the same, she paid no attention to the frown that crossed his face.

What were they doing? And why? Things usually didn't make sense in dreams. At least, he thought it was a dream. So did it even matter? She was looking at him expectantly, blinking at him owlishly through her thick lenses, looking both childishly hopeful and ritualistically somber. With a half-shrug, he pressed the sharp end of the tube to his hand, and looked back at her with a patient smile, one blonde eyebrow lifted. "What exactly are we doing, again?"

"Can't be again, never told you in the first place, but if you MUST know, we're ending the world," she informed him with all seriousness. "Now, on the count of three, shove as hard as you can. Don't mind if it gets lodged in bone, or anything silly like that. It shouldn't hurt. Whatever you do, don't stop once we've started." The hollow glass throbbed, its glow brighter now, like a red firefly against a dark, dark sky. "On the count of three?" she proposed, and he nodded. Anything to get out of this bizarre dream.

"One." The word left her mouth with an almost religious zeal, and she licked her lips in anticipation and stroked a thumb along the tube of the strange instrument. The forgotten crumbs in her lap were crawling, working their way up over her blood-soaked skirts to dance down her leg and climb into the deep cut already there, starting up a fresh flow of blood. By now he didn't even notice the smell anymore.

"Two." Suddenly he was aware of the heat of the glass in his hand, which had warmed as its glow grew brighter. It was now hard to look at it; the light had gone from a fitful mulberry flicker to a fierce scarlet blaze, and it edged closer toward pink with each passing moment. He spared a glance up at her face; she was watching him just as intently, eyes too-bright as she grinned at him. "And to think, I didn't want to die a virgin," she chirped cheerfully, and readjusted her grip.

"Three!"

Almost as though he had no choice, he thrust the glass into his palm. Pain exploded and he cursed, almost jerking the tube away, but it was white-hot now, blinding and searing, and through the agony he remembered her saying not to stop once he'd started. She was laughing, jamming her piece of it right through her palm, twisting to get it through a particularly stubborn tendon. Showing no pain, she almost sang with glee, blood pouring down to add to the puddle already there. Gritting his teeth he pushed harder, and he felt the glass move through his hand, felt little pieces splinter off inside of him, felt it as it ground past his bone, like nails on a chalkboard, a scrape that he felt in the back of his jaw and hated.

Just when he thought the pain was too much, when he thought that her laughter would drive him insane as it grew louder and louder, he screamed, the tube shoving through flesh on the other side of his hand.

Everything went dark.

Sitting up in bed with a strangled shout, the man panted for breath. His hand hurt terribly, his left, and the fleeting memory of a bizarre dream made him jerk his arm up from the covers to make sure he was whole.

He wasn't.

There, embedded in his hand, was a hollow glass tube, a circle of his own flesh inside. It gave off no light, but blood spurted in frenzied gouts from the edges when he grabbed it and yanked it out.

Screaming filled his ears, and he watched in horror as the sky outside his window turned orange. Scrambling out of bed, the tube falling to shatter on the floor in negligence, he looked outside.

A mushroom cloud billowed up slowly from the city, and he swallowed hard, knowing that at any moment the aftershocks would hit.

Her voice rang through his mind (who WAS she, with the eyes black as pits and the no-nonsense manner?) again, as though to mock him. "We're ending the world."

He didn't even have time to swear before his house and everything in it was turned to ash.

(The end.)

(No, it's not supposed to make a lick of sense.)