The Girl Who Came Back

The door shut with a sound too soft for wood.

Lin stood before it, one hand still raised. The brass plate had gone blank. The names were gone, the scratches, the dark seam where the Hall had opened its mouth. Only the door remained, ordinary and terrible, set into the end of the corridor beneath the seventh floor.

The girl who had crossed through it was breathing hard.

She looked seventeen, perhaps. Her hair hung in wet ropes around her face, and one cheek was purple with bruising. Rainwater darkened the sleeves of a red jacket Lin remembered buying at a market near the university. But the jacket was torn at the shoulder, and beneath it the girl wore a white shirt spotted with old brown blood.

“Don’t,” the girl said.

Lin had not moved toward her. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t look at me like I’m a door you managed to open.”

Her voice was Mei’s voice, but not the voice Lin remembered. It had lost the childish quickness and the bright impatience. This voice had been worn thin by waiting.

Lin lowered her hand. “What should I look at you like?”

The girl laughed once. There was no amusement in it. “You always wanted instructions after you’d already decided.”

At the far end of the corridor, the Clerk watched them. His hands rested flat on the lapels of his suit. For once, he did not look bored. Behind him, the darkness of the stairwell seemed to pulse with a distant storm.

“Mei,” Lin said.

The girl flinched as if struck.

Lin stopped herself. The name had come too easily, pulled from the place she had sacrificed. She could still say it, but it no longer carried an image. Mei was not a face in a yellow raincoat, not a child asleep over a sketchbook, not the seventeen-year-old before her. It was only a sound, and the Hall had learned how to make sounds.

“What do you remember?” Lin asked.

The girl looked at her for a long moment. “The storm. The stairs flooding. You standing in the kitchen with your arms crossed.”

“And what did I say?”

“You said, ‘If you walk out during this storm, don’t bother coming back.’”

The corridor seemed to contract around them. Somewhere behind the walls, a girl began to hum the tune Mei had used when she could not sleep.

The adolescent version of Mei wiped rain from her mouth. “You said it like you meant it.”

“I did.”

That answer seemed to surprise her. “Why?”

“Because I was frightened. Because you kept saying you would leave. Because I thought if I made the door frightening enough, you would stay.”

Mei glanced at the blank door. “You were good at that.”

A bell rang below them.

The Clerk turned toward the stairs. “Checkout,” he said.

Lin’s stomach tightened. “For whom?”

He smiled politely. “The guest who has been waiting longest.”

A figure appeared on the landing: Yvonne, barefoot and wrapped in a gray dressing gown. She held one of the Hall’s dust-scented rule cards between two fingers. Her face looked older than it had an hour before.

“Don’t listen to him,” Yvonne whispered. “The Hall calls everything checkout when it means collection.”

“Can we leave?” Lin asked.

Yvonne’s eyes moved to Mei. “One of you can.”

Mei’s expression hardened. “That’s what it always says.”

Lin turned to her. “You’ve heard this before?”

“I’ve heard every promise it knows how to make.” Mei looked past Lin, toward the corridor behind them. Doors had appeared there while they spoke. Dozens of them, perhaps hundreds, each with a narrow pane of rippling glass. Behind one pane, a child pressed both palms against the glass. Behind another, an older woman paced in circles. Behind a third, Lin saw herself standing in the kitchen, arms crossed, saying the sentence again.

Mei took Lin’s wrist. Her fingers were cold but solid.

“Don’t look at them,” she said. “They get better when you remember.”

Lin looked down at the hand holding her. A crescent of ink stained Mei’s thumb. It was the same black mark Mei had once gotten from drawing on the underside of a desk, a private signature hidden where no one would think to search.

It proved nothing.

The knowledge hurt more than certainty would have.

“What do you want?” Lin asked.

Mei released her. “I want to know whether I’m the one who came in.”

Before Lin could answer, a door opened behind them.

Not the named door. One of the new doors. From inside came the sound of footsteps: two sets, perfectly matched. Lin and Mei’s steps had been echoing together since the corridor shifted, but these footsteps copied them exactly—heel, toe, pause; heel, toe, pause.

Then a voice called from the darkness.

“Lin?”

It was Mei’s voice at seventeen.

The girl beside Lin went white. “That isn’t me.”

The voice called again, closer this time.

“Lin, if you walk out during this storm—”

Mei seized Lin’s hand.

“Run,” she said. “Before it finishes the sentence.”