Dead Echo

  *

  Sometime later she came to her senses on the floor of the attic. The overhead light was still on but everything was quiet now. She heard the songs of birds outside, very incongruent in the banality of the attic. She rolled over and groaned, aware suddenly of a pain in her throat. She began to massage it, sat up. The table. There, right where she knew it’d be, clean now except for the dust. Each chair pushed back to its place. She smacked her lips and grimaced. Never could she remember having a taste this bad. And what the hell was she doing up here in the first place? Nothing came to mind. It was a great, vast blank. She felt a horrible combination of hangover and flu. She was afraid she’d throw up.

  She looked behind and saw the opening to the attic. The ladder was down. She pulled herself over to it and descended to the floor, fighting through acid curtains of dizziness as she stumbled (hands on either wall) to the bathroom. The door was open but the light was off and she went inside, fumbling for the light switch with one hand and opening the drawer that held her toothbrush with the other. But she completely forgot about it the second she looked at herself. The mirror above the sink was directly before her. Her face was smeared with blood, specks of gray matter dotting her nightshirt. The images of the girls came back now like a violent thunderclap and she began screaming at the mirror, lost now in the terror she’d finally found real.