The Bone Princess

Chapter 5: Mother Dust

I stood there staring down the hallway, the scene had finally changed. At the end, instead of two lush chairs, I was staring directly into a bathroom.

No. No. No. Wasn't the library supposed to be next? Sutton had said something about a library.

I still had to pee, and that brought me a little bit of hope. I was still human.

I crept down the hallway, trying to mimic Sutton's cautious, investigatory ways: tiled floor, claw-foot tub, and a window, looking out at the same impenetrable black.

I sighed, unzipping, and sitting on the toilet, and as soon as I felt a moment of relief as my bladder drained, the door slammed shut in one quick whip.

Of course it did.

My heart pounded, but I didn't care. I took my time, finishing, zipping up my shorts and then, with a running start, I threw myself at the door. To my surprise, it swung outward, spilling me onto—the bathroom floor.

The same bathroom, in reverse.

I laid my cheek on the cool tile. I wanted it all to be over. The old pipes rattled continuously, and then a bubbling belch croaked from the tub. The kind that meant surely something bad would follow. I slowly inched closer on the floor until I could see inside: black ichor flowed up from the drain, oozing, filling the ivory porcelain tub. The blackness outside had gotten in, bringing panic with it. I imagined the entire room filling up with the black ooze. I imagined it reaching my ankles and reaching my knees, and filling my ears and my nose and my mouth as I drowned in a Victorian bathroom in hell.

I looked back through the door—there was nothing but the mirrored bathroom, so I hustled to the window, fumbling a tiny metal clasp. It opened. A miracle. I pressed the palms of both hands to the horizontal wooden crossbar, but then found myself screaming, pulling my bleeding hands back. The wood was alive, bristling with thorns and vines. Rosebuds unfolded to full bloom, dripping blood, their fragrant petals making the bathroom smell like a funeral parlor. The black stuff had nearly filled the tub, smooth and perfect like oily obsidian. It stopped just as the liquid reached the top.

Not a single drop spilled over the edge. But then something broke the surface—a rudimentary head, quivering, not yet developed enough to support its own weight. It collapsed forward into the muck, splashing the liquid all over me. I yelped. The droplets burned, sizzling on my arms. The head moved again, and I grabbed for the nearest heavy object.

I removed the porcelain lid from the toilet tank as the head once more broke the surface, and the searing black poison spilled over. Eyes gleamed from raw, pink sockets, she hissed, revealing decaying teeth like little rotten daggers. I hurled the lid, shattering the window as the dead thing rose to its feet; its legs quivering like a newborn deer. I shielded my face and threw myself through the window, the thorns tearing into my palms and the roses bleeding into my hair, soaking down the back of my shirt. Biting cold night air rushed around me as I tumbled onto a jutting ledge in the howling night air. The darkness was no longer complete. The moon hung in the sky, bloated and white hot, as ragged black clouds drifting past like.

Snowflakes pelted my face like grains of sand and melted on my eyelids as the vines twisted out of the bathroom, thick and thorny, trapping the dead thing from the tub. It clawed and clawed, breaking the vines as they continued to grow upward into the churning night, thicker and higher. And higher and higher. I looked around, holding myself in the freezing cold—there was nowhere else to go but up.

Up.

I wanted to go up.

I climbed and climbed, stepping on overgrown thorns that barely held my weight, and then my feet swung and kicked out over black nothing when I got to the next level. One last heave and I pulled myself over a stony ledge and crashed onto a great balcony, my shoulder slamming into the icy floor, breath driven from my lungs, and head spinning.