By Gwendaline Higgins

It burnt her—his blood on her fingers, the taste of his sweat on her lips. She ran on. She crawled and scrambled, rather, through the creaking darkness of the upstairs corridor. The knowledge was a new terror, a new shadow lurking for her along those walls.

She veered left onto the landing, swatted away the lick of the rosebush that grew through the stained-glass window. Brushed off her skin the curtains that always tried to wrap around her neck. 

The steps of the grand staircase grunted and growled at her bare feet as if they knew. Of course, they knew: the house always knew, just like him. At the bottom of the stairs, she braced herself.

But the hit she’d expected didn’t come. She pressed on, side-stepped the silk Persian rug and its ominous hisses. Prised off the bronze fire stoker that launched itself at her ankle. And then she was free.

She would be free. 

The grand door was just in front of her. A long looming of stern oakwood, and a wrought brass handle that promised a future. Open fields and thickly safe forests, the gaze of the sun, a passing of seasons… 

Her fingertips were reaching for her chest when the hit finally came—

And then, there she was, kneeling up on the chipped sandstone of the foyer. Her head felt woozy. The skin of her palms and knees rubbed raw. Pain coursed through her as loud as the thumping at her cheekbone. Was it his armchair or the coat rack? 

Both of them stood in the middle of the grand foyer, very still. The coat rack slightly askance, its naked branches immobile as trophy antlers. Next to it the armchair looked its usual saggy self, its old contented leather scratched and cracked, placid. Above, the chandelier smirked. It wouldn’t tell.

To hell with them all, she had the key. 

She took out the burnished key wedged heavily between her breasts. She’d cut it off his belt, the keyring screaming like bones being sawn alive. Now the key’s metal was warm as a body, not night-cold anymore. She steadied her knuckles around it, steadied the heaving in her breath. She slid the key into the disused lock. Through the stiffness of the key she felt it, the lock, pushing back. It pushed back in a lazy, sluggish sort of way, holding its ground. So she forced it in, wrenched it round—

The key clicked in.

She’d unlocked it! She pressed down on the handle, her heart wild as leaves in the wind. But the door stayed closed. Its long oakwood panel was not even looking any sterner, it was merely standing there, impassible. She pleaded with it—when, behind her—

A tick-tap of steps on tiles.

She let go of the brass handle, only a moment. The coat rack and his armchair were standing a bit closer. Not quite in the middle of the foyer anymore, though still pretending to be things. 

She beat at the door, frantic, wrenched at the handle, turned and spun the key, pleaded, begged it to please let her, to let her go, just this one time, to please, please, let her go… 

Behind and above her, the grand house started clinking and clattering awake. The things in every room sharpening together like knives.

The terror-shadow, again: they all knew. 

The will to beg drained away from her throat.

There was only her breath, and the sounds of the things.

The hope to live, still there, bunched up in her belly. And the oakwood stillness of the door; the cool heft of its brass handle in her hand.

*

It stayed with her, all these years.

Through all the years she had spent in hiding, through the thicknesses of all the forests that she had crossed. Through all the days of not-trusting anything made of wood or metal, of still-looking over her shoulder, through the days of dreading the nights and the nights of shuddering at shadows and murmurs, it stayed. 

How there had been no words left in her throat that night. How the brass handle had felt in her hand—smooth, cool, unyielding. The feel of death pooling underneath. The knowledge of it being ready for her. How the door had opened—relented? Slipped up? How she’d lurched through, her shoulders scraping the oakwood, her feet tottering and stumbling and her face in the sudden sun. The burning in her lungs. How she had run, and run. 

Yes, it was still there after all those years.

The hope to live bunched up like a fist in her belly.

The will to live well—like a rage, tearing through.

She would be free. 

She was free.

*  *  *

Gwendaline Higgins is French-Australian and lives and writes in two languages. Her work was shortlisted for the Not Quite Write Flash Fiction Prize and appeared in the Literary Revelations poetry journal; she was a finalist of the francophone Young Writer’s Prize (‘Prix du Jeune Écrivain’).