Everly went to the next room. Gray walls gray floor gray furniture gray scrubs white hair sightless eyes.
Slam.
By now, Everly’s breaths were coming in ragged gasps as her mind struggled to process what was happening. One more room, she told herself. One more.
So, she went to the next door. She opened it. She looked inside.
It was the same the same the same the same.
Except.
Except this woman’s hair was not as white—it was streaked with nearly white-blond hair that was nonetheless more golden, more vivid than that of the other three women Everly had seen on that floor. And the wrinkles around her eyes were less prominent and she could—
She could see.
She could see Everly, and Everly saw as the woman saw her, and she saw as the woman began to stand—to move, perhaps, in Everly’s direction—but before she had the chance, Everly had closed the door sharply and moved on down the hall.
Here, she paused. There were more doors—countless doors, it felt to Everly—but what was she accomplishing, moving so erratically from room to room like this? So, instead, she found her feet moving, almost as though by their own volition, down, down, to the very end of the hall, to the final door before the endless gray hallway came to an all-too-abrupt end.
Everly opened the door.
Gray walls gray floor gray furniture gray scrubs on—
Gray scrubs on a different woman.
A younger woman, Everly realized with a start. She looked to be in her midtwenties, thirty at the very most, which felt so out of place in the building where Everly had never encountered anyone who seemed younger than sixty.
Except for that man. Luca.
But this was not Luca, it was a very confused-looking young woman whose head swiveled abruptly upon Everly’s entrance, and she stared at her so intensely that for a moment Everly was almost afraid.
Until the moment stretched on. And on. And on, far beyond when any normal person should have been able to stare without blinking, or shifting, or speaking into the empty air that sat between Everly and this strange young woman.
Tentatively, Everly took a small step into the room, keeping hold of the other woman’s gaze all the while. “Hello,” Everly said, and her words sounded to her like they cracked apart the atmosphere in the room, breaking it dangerously into shards. “My name is Everly.”
The woman did not respond, only continued to stare, and so Everly took another step toward her, speaking in a cautious, almost soothing tone. “Can you tell me your name?” she asked.
Nothing. There was no response, and the closer Everly got to the other woman, the better she could make out her features, the more she could see that maybe there wasn’t anything there for her to respond with. Her eyes were empty, lifeless.
And blue. Ringed with the slightest tinge of green.
Everly’s breath hitched, and faster than she had entered she retreated from the hall’s final room, closing the door sharply and resolutely behind her.
There were two things that Everly thought she knew, and both terrified her in equal amounts.
One: that woman, the one in the final room, was the same as all the others. She was younger, to be sure, less withered. But she held herself the same way, and her features carved the same expressions into the lines of her face. And her eyes . . .
Two: she knew why that woman, and all the others before her, had unnerved her so badly, and why seeing them had created an unscratchable itch in the pit of Everly’s memory. It was because she knew them. Her. That woman—all of them, really, but especially the last one, the youngest one—looked like her mother.
Was her mother.
Couldn’t be her mother.
No, Everly scolded herself. They really couldn’t be her mother, first because there were too many of them, and second because none were the right age, and third because her mother was dead.
And dead was dead was dead.
And yet.
Everly suddenly thought back to the photo album she’d discovered. To the picture of her mother, with a floppy hat on her head and a bottle of champagne in her hand.
Blond hair, blue eyes.
It couldn’t be.
Everly forced herself to walk down the gray hall, away from the final door, and all the other doors and all the hidden women they contained. Forced her mind to shut off, to stop thinking for once, and to stop spiraling so deeply out of control.
Before she reached the end of the hall, Everly heard a thud—the very distinct and obvious thud of footsteps—nearby. She still wasn’t thinking—couldn’t stop to think—and so instead she ran, pushing herself until she reached the elevator that felt so much farther away than it had moments before. Once inside the elevator, she slammed her thumb on the button for the first floor, and then waited, waited, waited as the steps became louder, closer, coming from a room not too far away from where she cowered in the elevator.
And then the doors were closing, and she was safe—had she ever not been?—and it was okay. The final second before the doors met in the middle, Everly caught a glimpse of someone walking into the hall—the owner of the heavy footsteps, presumably. It looked like a man, cloaked in a deep-red uniform, but she didn’t catch his face.
Right then, she didn’t care. She was too relieved at having gotten away. And also, she still was not thinking.
No thinking.
No more thinking.
No more no more no more no more—
