The White Room: #1
B e a s t

There was a mug of coffee on the table, and a plate of brown, burnt toast. She stared at it, and turned. In the mirror, there was a mug of coffee on the table and a plate of toast. She picked up the mug and hurled it. It collided with itself, and eighteen ceramic shards tinkled to the ground; nine on each side of the mirror. She picked up the two sharpest fragments of the eighteen, which were oddly identical, and stared back at herself. Then she stepped to the side, and the self in front of her was whited out by the smooth expanse of wall. She moved her head slightly, and watched black droplets slide down the mirror, some getting absorbed or caught by the newly formed cracks, others cutting around the wound or avoiding the broken face altogether. They collected in a dark stain at the base of the otherwise spotless wall and seeped outward, spreading in ragged, stumbling waves like an army of half-dead soldiers. She turned her head away.

The wall was again in front of her, and for a moment she hesitated. She wondered, then, if, when she touched the wall, its inexorable whiteness would somehow consume and erase her, or perhaps swallow her like the coffee on the bleeding mirror. Gently she placed the tip of one index finger on the surface in front of her and drew it lightly downward. The plaster was hard and cool under her touch, and she felt that it was humming, or waiting, or breathing. It watched her blankly, and she gazed right back. Then suddenly, without warning, she plunged the ceramic shard she held deep into the blankness of the wall and drove it forward with every scrap of strength she had left in her thin frame, wrenching it downward, dragging on it with all of her weight as she dropped to the cold cement floor. Her breaths fell fast and shallow and echoed in the silence of the room, and she was still. She did not blink, she did not cry out. She made no movement at all, save for the pounding of her heart and the rapid rise and fall of her chest, in and out, in and out.

There was a black, jagged tear in the wall from center to base. Bits of plaster shifted and caved, or littered the floor around her. White dust clung dully to her dark brown hair and powdered her hands, as if she were a fallen snow queen in some ancient forest, or an old woman living in a distant, half forgotten memory.

Abruptly she cut off her breath, and the stillness was absolute. No sound disturbed the dead air. Below the mirror, the stain grew to the size of a rabbit and watched her, mute.

Time passed in spurts of vivid sensual awareness and intervals of ambiguity and unconsciousness. She seemed, then, to be in a kind of empty dream, the only comforts of which were absence and serenity. And then she would wake, and her vacant eyes would shift slightly. The pupils would contract, the fingers would twitch, the torn nails would click softly against the chilled, hard cement. She would lay for some minutes, in a pool of feeling and sensitivity, until slowly the pupils dilated and the fingers were still, and all that remained was the steady in and out, in and out, that never altered rhythm. The stain below the mirror swelled to the size of a hawk and hunched over her, peering at her.

Hours died away.

By the time she got stiffly and gradually to her feet, the plain brown toast was cold and dry. She carefully tore each of the bread slices into strips, and arranged the pieces by size. Absently, she touched each strip with a steady finger, pressing down just hard enough to leave a small crater in every one. She finished, paused, and surveyed her work like a small child might an anomaly on the sidewalk. Then, with the slightest movement of her hand, she hastily and roughly swept the pieces aside, jumbling the ordered rows into aimlessness. Picking them up one at a time, she shredded each strip into five pieces, until a lifeless tower of small, coarse brown squares rose in front of her. Each square she lifted to her mouth and swallowed without chewing. When she had finished, she turned the worn plate upside down, sending small crumbs skittering across the table, and set it down in the table’s center. She turned away and did not look at it again.

The tear in the wall yawned at her, and the stain, which was the size of a lion, prowled silently beside her. The dull strains of the two rectangular lights on the paneled ceiling began to stutter and flicker, tainting all of the whiteness with a hint of aged yellow. The streaks on the mirror looked like ancient tearstains, and the ceramic shards lay twisted on the floor, waiting, always waiting.

She stood in front of the cracked mirror and outlined her face with her right thumb. Placing her palm flat against the warped, fragmentary image, she stepped again to the side.

The angry black scar loomed before her, beckoning. She was shrinking away and reaching for it at the same time. Her small, pale hands found the torn edges of the hole and slid cautiously upwards, clutching the roughness of the plaster and recoiling from the sharp bite of the ceramic splinters lodged in it. White dust swirled and floated around her like a cloud, or a wizard’s spell. The walls watched her, the stain stalked her, the image in the mirror looked away, and the ceramic shards sat waiting. Timidly, fearfully, she stretched out one finger toward the darkness.

The lights flickered in dread and went out.

She screamed, and the silence roared. The darkness lunged out of the wall and attacked her, enveloping her, smothering her. The lion leapt at her and became a dragon, its leathery wings sweeping her back and forcing her into that terrible, gaping mouth in the wall. Her scream cut off abruptly, but the air reverberated with it, haunted by it, and it deafened her. The dragon landed on her chest, and she put up her arms in a vain attempt to hold it off. Its claws pierced her skin as it took hold of her, overwhelming her. It dragged her deeper and deeper into the blackness, where the wall swallowed her up and the echoes faded away, where the dust fled from her and the mirror couldn’t find her, and there was nothing but the dark, and the black.