Page 42 of Lair

I startle and cry out, quailing back against the door. “Don’t fucking touch me!”

“Aurora. I... I won’t hurt you.” His voice, suddenly, is far away. The pain in it unmistakable. “It’s not what you think...”

“How could you do that?” I sob, pulsing with rage, and choke on the words. My eyes fill with tears. “I was falling for you. I was falling for you...”

There is a long silence. I cannot tell where he is in that void, but when he speaks again his voice trembles. “Please. Just let me explain.”

“Who are you? What are you?” I spit. “Were you...” My stomach heaves at the words. “Were you eating her...”

“No. No, I was not.”

“Don’t lie to me!”

“I would not lie to you, Aurora. I would never do that.” There is a long silence, and then, “You want to know what I am?”

I wait, not trusting myself to speak.

“You want to know why I’m so pale?”

No. No.

“Why I shun daylight?”

Please stop.

“Why I drink...?”

I turn cold all over. That can’t be. That’s ridiculous. “You can’t... There are no...” I swallow. “You’re just a madman who thinks he is a...”

“I can prove it to you, if you wish,” he says quietly.

I can’t speak for the lump in my throat, and he takes that as my answer.

“There is a porthole. There, on the wall to your left.” He pauses. “Open it.”

I hesitate, listening. I can’t hear any movement at all in that room. Any breathing at all, besides my own terrified pants.

I stand and keep to the wall, away from where I last heard that voice. My hands find a new wall and there, above my head, the cool collar of a baseplate. It’s circular, and I can feel a hinge, and two dogs—the fasteners for a storm cover. A deadlight, in maritime parlance.

Every cell in my body is screaming for me to not turn my back on that room, but I do. I unscrew the dogs until those threading devices can be tugged out of their grooves and hinged away.

I hesitate, looking over my shoulder into the blackness.

“Go on,” urges Adrian’s voice gently.

So I creak the storm cover wide in a protest of rusty hinges.

Glowy daylight flares into a small, unadorned space that’s not much bigger than its narrow bed, with a toilet beside it, a bulkhead with rows of dark communication consoles locked behind a thumbprint sensor. Some sort of panic room.

Yeah, sounds about right.

I swallow, palms slick with sweat, and open the storm cover all the way. It judders, its eerie creaking rising, rising, filling the whole room, and my heart is thumping in my throat by the time the round portlight widens like a reverse eclipse and falls on the pale, familiar face of Adrian Voper standing in the middle of the room.

It is only a moment—one infinite, vibrating moment—that our eyes are locked, before his skin begins to smoke.

It hisses and sizzles and black burns bloom like a mold across his face, but he endures it—waiting for my belief to set in, for the hiccups of grief to catch in my throat, and a fume of gray smoke starts up from his head by the time I let out a wracking sob and slam the storm cover shut and yank the dogs back in place.

Nothing to hear in that room, for the longest time, but his anguished breathing. If breathing it is.

---