I grasp the end of the board and gently pull.
At first, it seems as solid as the rest of the seat, but then there’s a slight give, and suddenly there’s a thin piece of wood in my hand.
Gingerly, I slide my hand inside the gap between the wall and the bench, visions of something lurching out of the dark to bite my fingers, my heart pounding in my ears, but there’s no sharp sting, no pain.
There’s just the rustle of paper.
Mouth dry, I pull out a folded stack of yellow paper and when I open it, I see each line filled in a neat, economical scrawl.
And at the top, the words that make me lift a trembling hand to my mouth.
Mari—London, 1974.
MARI, 1974—ORVIETO
The scream doesn’t just wake her.
It sends Mari hurtling into consciousness, her brain rattling in her skull. She’d always thought it was a cliché, that moment of someone sitting straight up in bed, heart pounding, but that’s where she is now, hand pressed to her chest as she searches the room for the source of that sound.
She’s sees almost immediately that it’s Pierce. They’d fallen asleep peacefully enough earlier, wrapped up in each other, sweat still drying on their skin, but now he’s out of bed, crouched naked in one corner of the room, his hands over his ears, his eyes wild.
And he’s still screaming, screaming and screaming, the sound so loud that Mari is forced to get out of bed and go to him, grabbing his wrists as she tries to wake him.
“Pierce!” she says, her voice sharp. “Pierce!”
She can hear footsteps in the hall, and then Lara’s voice at the door. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing!” Mari calls back, even though Pierce is still whimpering at her feet, blinking like he’s trying to clear his head.
“Go back to bed!” Mari adds, and she kneels down in front of Pierce. He’s covered in sweat, almost glowing in the moonlight spilling through the window, and Mari brushes his hair back from his face.
The rain has returned and with it, the oppressiveness of the house, a feeling that seems to affect Pierce more than any of them, and Mari sometimes has the crazy thought that maybe they were the ones causing it, that all their tension and weird energy was spinning out and up into the sky.
“It’s all right, love,” Mari says, and she’s assailed by the memory of holding Billy as he burned like an ember against her chest, shushing him and speaking the same words into his damp hair.
It’s all right, love.
They’re not words anyone has ever said to her.
“I … I was dreaming,” Pierce gulps out, his hand shaking as he reaches up to grab Mari’s wrist. “But it was real, Mare, it was so … so fucking real.…”
She doesn’t bother reminding him that this is why they’d agreed that while booze is fine, he should lay off the drugs. They always mess with his mind like this, make him see things or hear things or have these horrible nightmares he can never shake. He’ll be ruined for days now, she knows. No music, no writing.
“What was in the dream?” she asks, trying to make her voice soothing and steady. He looks at her, his face somehow going even whiter in the moonlight.
“You,” he says, and then she shakes his head again, pulling his hand back from hers. “You were covered in blood. Reaching out. And it was … it was like you were so tall, and I was so small, I was crouching at your feet.”
Pierce breaks off then, putting his face in his hands. “It was so fucking wild. I was looking up at you and all that blood and thinking, she’s inevitable, she’s inevitable, like this fucking drumbeat.…”
Mari lifts his face again, looking into his eyes. “It was just a dream, Pierce. See? Look. No blood.” She holds up both her hands. “Just me.”
He gives another shuddering sigh, leaning forward to rest his head against her breasts, and she keeps stroking his hair, feeling his sweat and tears soaking through her nightgown.
When he seems calmer, she can’t stop herself from saying, “And, you know, Pierce, that line you said? ‘She’s inevitable’？”
Pulling back, Pierce blinks at her, and she goes on, her heartbeat speeding up. “That’s really good. It’s so cool and could be foreboding, but could also be romantic.…”
His brow furrows. “What are you getting at?”
“I just think it’s a line you should use. Like in a song.”
Pierce pushes her away, his hands on her arms, his movements shaky as he stands. “No way,” he says on a breathless kind of laugh. “I just want to forget that shit and go to bed.”
But Mari doesn’t want to forget it.
She’s still thinking about it long after Pierce goes back to sleep, breathing softly beside her, and when she can’t lie there anymore, she gets up, goes to her notebook and the little desk under the window.
Victoria’s story has been frozen in amber for weeks now, but suddenly Mari feels it coming back to life.
She’s inevitable.
Pierce’s vision of Mari covered in blood comes back to her as she starts to write.
She’s inevitable.
Victoria, covered in blood. Whose blood? It doesn’t matter, not yet. She’ll figure that out.
The well, the cave into hell. There’s something there, maybe. Something, too, in the shopkeeper’s story about a suicide in this house. Years and years ago, but everyone in the town still remembers.
Houses remember.
Now the line makes more sense to her, now she knows how to use it.
Not a love story at all.
Or yes, a love story, but there’s horror inside of it. There’s death and loss, blood and sweat. Just as there is in every love story, after all.
Mari’s pen moves faster and faster as the story starts taking shape.
By the time the sun rises, she knows the book she’s writing and she understands why she couldn’t write it before.
It needed Pierce’s dream to show her the path.
Pierce wakes up, eventually, presses a kiss to the top of her head, but thankfully doesn’t bother her, drifting out of the room with his guitar in hand.
After a moment, she hears him begin to play in another room, and that seems to make her write even faster. She likes it, this sense of them both creating at the same time, near each other, but not together. Her writing inspiring his playing, his playing inspiring her writing.
It’s the life she’s wanted for them since the moment she climbed out that window in North London three years ago.
Finally, her hand cramping and her shoulders aching, she pauses, stretches.
Pierce is still playing, but it’s not a song she’s heard from him before. It’s sweet and sour at the same time, the notes dancing, and it makes her get up from her desk and go in search of him.
But when she steps out into the hallway, she realizes the music is coming from behind Lara’s cracked bedroom door.
Pierce is with her.
Pierce is playing for her.
Mari makes herself cross the narrow hallway, pushing the door open.
Lara’s room is nearly identical to the one Mari shares with Pierce, just smaller and done in shades of green instead of blue. There’s the same window, the same small desk under it, and the bed is pushed against the same far wall.