“Come back into the room of doors,” the voice said, and Diel left the steps to Purgatory and walked back into the large hallway. He felt a pull to a door at his right. “Go to the door that is calling you.” Diel moved toward the door that had a light shining underneath it, beckoning him through. He had to go through there. He knew he did. But as he placed his hand on the doorknob, something pulled in his stomach, and his heart thudded and pain burned in his temples. Diel hissed, gripping at his head—
“You feel no pain,” the voice said again, sterner. He felt tapping on his hand, a steady, rhythmic beat that his heart clung to and began to imitate. “There is nothing to fear behind that door. If it is calling for you, go through it.” Diel turned back to the door, the pain in his head once again numbed.
He reached out, took hold of the doorknob and stepped inside. He blinked as he looked around the small room. He was in a shack of some sort. Dilapidated walls dripped with damp; the panels of wood were chipped and covered in rotting paint and mold. It smelled of smoke and dankness and fear.
The furniture was old and ripped, cigarette-burned and marked. The two couches were small and barely fit for purpose. Diel felt his mouth moving, speaking aloud exactly what he was seeing.
“And what else can you see?” the voice replied.
Diel walked through the living room into a kitchen. The cabinets were no longer white, but speckled with flecks of fat from the frying pan and yellow with tobacco stains. He stopped at the door. His head tilted to the side as he saw a man and woman sitting at a table, empty liquor bottles and half-smoked cigarettes scattered around them. There were needles on the table too, and bands tied around the woman’s arms. A needle stuck out from her flesh; her eyes were glazed and her lips were parted, head tipped backward, awake but not present.
He turned when he heard a floorboard creak behind him. Diel’s eyes narrowed on the young boy who walked through. He was a walking skeleton. He had a thick crop of dark hair and large, sunken blue eyes that seemed to see everything.
“Does he live there?” the voice asked. Diel nodded. The little boy lived there. The woman was his mother, but she was a bad one. She didn’t love him; he didn’t love her. He had raised himself. The man wasn’t his father. Just another abusive jerk in his mother’s life. The boy hated the man. He beat him. He—
Diel heard soft singing coming from the back from the house. It immediately filled him with light. He turned and followed the sound, walking through the dark hallway into a tiny room with two stained and filthy sheetless mattresses on the floor.
Diel paused in the doorway. A little girl sat on one mattress. She was playing with a doll. The doll was old and missing an arm and a leg. One of its eyes was painted an ice-blue color, and red pen covered one side of its face. The little girl had long dark hair and was wearing a dress riddled with holes and sullied with dirt.
She looked up and stared right at him. Diel couldn’t move, the air in his lungs escaping. “You’re back,” the little girl said, and he felt his heart beat fast once again. The girl smiled widely at him, and he felt something inside him crack. Because she was like the doll. Half of her face was covered with a deep red birthmark, the eye on that side an ice-blue color compared to the dark blue of the other.
Blind, Diel realized. She was blind in one eye.
“You’re back!” she said again in relief, and something made him want to hold her in his arms. But then the half-starved boy from the living room rushed through and sat beside her on the mattress. He took her in his arms, and Diel couldn’t look away from them. “Finn,” she whispered, utter relief in her tone. “I’m so happy you’re back.”
“Cara,” the boy, Finn, said in response. “Did he touch you? Did he hurt you?” The boy’s voice was familiar to Diel, but he didn’t know why. Then the boy’s head ticked to the side, and his eyes blinked in rapid succession.
Diel felt a crack splinter down his chest as he watched him, as he watched them both. As he saw the boy sit beside her in her bed, a protective arm around her shoulders. Diel knew that the mattress next to her was the boy’s. The two children hid away in this tiny, filthy box of a room while their mother got high. They didn’t attend school. They’d taught themselves to read and write. No one knew or even cared that they lived there, miles from anyone else.