He runs up the crumbling stairs, not daring to look back and nearly tripping over the Persian cat who has been patiently waiting for him at the top.
Nightmare number 113:
I am sitting in a very big chair and I cannot get out of it. My arms are tied to the chair arms but my hands are gone. There are people without faces standing around me feeding me pieces of paper that have all the things I am supposed to be written on them but they never ask me what I am.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS is halfway to the elevator, halfway to returning to Vermont and his university and his thesis and his normal, halfway to forgetting any of this ever happened, and hey, maybe he’ll take the cat with him and someday he’ll convince himself that the whole underground library wonderland was an elaborate fantasy backstory about where the cat came from that he told himself so many times he started to believe it when the cat was only ever a squish-faced stray who followed him home, wherever home is.
Then he remembers the door he entered through last time in the basement of the Collector’s Club was burned and likely rendered useless.
So halfway to the elevator with the cat still following, Zachary turns and heads back to his room instead.
In the center of his door is a Post-it Note. The paper is a muted blue rather than the traditional yellow.
In small, neat letters it reads: All you need to know has been given to you.
Zachary takes the note from the door. He reads it four times and turns it over, finding nothing on the reverse. He reads it again not believing its statement as he enters the room, the fireplace crackling and waiting for him.
The cat follows him inside. Zachary locks the door behind the cat.
He sticks the Post-it Note to the frame of the bunny pirate painting.
He looks down at his wrists.
He did not wish to be here any longer.
He tries to remember the last time he talked to someone who wasn’t a cat. Was drunken-Dorian story time a few hours ago? Did that even happen? He doesn’t know anymore.
Maybe he is tired. What’s the difference between tired and sleepy? He puts on pajamas and sits in front of the fireplace. The Persian cat curls up at the foot of the bed, quietly making him feel a little better. All this comfort shouldn’t feel so uncomfortable.
Zachary stares at the flames, remembering the shadowed figure in the hallway, staring at him in a space filled with nothing but corpses.
Maybe your mind is playing tricks on you, the voice in his head suggests.
“I thought you were my mind,” Zachary says aloud and on the bed the cat stirs and stretches and settles again.
The voice in his head does not respond.
Zachary suddenly desperately wants someone to talk to but also doesn’t want to leave the room. He thinks of texting Kat because Kat is usually up at all hours though he doesn’t know what he would write. Hey K, stuck in an underground library dungeon, how’s the snow?
He finds his phone and it has a partial charge, not as high as it should be given the length of time its been plugged in but enough to turn it on.
The picture from the party at the Algonquin he had saved is still there and now it is obvious that the masked woman in the photograph is Mirabel, and even more clear to him that the man speaking with her is Dorian. He wonders what they were whispering about a year ago and can’t decide whether or not he wants to know.
There are no missed calls and three text messages. A photo of his finished scarf from Kat, a reminder from his mother that Mercury is going into retrograde soon, and a four-word message from an unknown number:
Tread carefully, Mr. Rawlins.
Zachary turns his phone off. There isn’t any service down here anyway.
He goes to the desk and picks up a pen and inscribes two words on a card.
Hello, Kitchen.
He places it in the dumbwaiter and sends it on its way and he has almost convinced himself that the Kitchen and the story-covered corpses and the place itself and Mirabel and Dorian and the room he’s standing in and his pajamas are all figments of his imagination when the bell dings.
Hello, Mr. Rawlins, how may we help you?
Zachary thinks for a long time before he inscribes a reply.