For two days after that he left me alone, did not remind me. But I was tired of the fear. It all happened by itself. My curse pierced him in the night, and he did not wake up. I ran away from my sin, I locked myself in the bathroom, I prayed and cried. I went looking for the way up into the attic. I didn’t find it, neither the attic nor the way to get there. Then I went down to the yard and climbed up the fire escape. I stood at the edge of the roof when the sun came up, bathing the world in gold and turquoise, and the swifts jetted overhead with joyous noise, and still I stood there, unable to make myself jump. It turned out to be harder, much harder than I thought. I was all swollen with tears, I swayed and pleaded with the wind to help me, but it was too feeble for that. Then I heard a horrified scream—I imagined it was Sphinx—and my legs pushed me on their own accord. I took a step, slipped, scrambled for purchase on the rounded edge of the steel plate, fell, and grabbed it with my hands. And immediately realized that I was not going to let go. No matter what. Not if I had to hang like that for a long time, not if I got tired, not even by accident. I hung there and cried. Then I pulled myself up and lay flat on the roof, legs still dangling. The palms of my hands were on fire, there was blood on them, and also something was trickling down my leg and pooling in my shoe. I knew that I was forever a coward, and I hated myself. The sun was beating down on me. The edge of the roof dug under my ribs. One of the girls saw me out of the window of their wing, I heard her shouting and pulled farther up, so I was fully on the roof. But I could not get up and climb down. This was how the two long-limbed Spiders found me. They grabbed me and took me with them.
Later I tried doing it again, in a different way, but it didn’t work the second time either . . . Blind came to visit me in the Sepulcher. He had on this one-size-fits-all white gown; it would have fit two more of him easily. He climbed on the bed, sat there cross-legged, and listened to my silence.
“Why?” he asked.
“There is a great sin on me,” I said. “I cannot be redeemed.”
After Wolf I knew better than to trust them. I waited. What would this one say? The one hiding inside himself. Not nice at all, the way Wolf had seemed. Quite the opposite. It could have been anything. He could turn into Sphinx. I remembered the oath I gave him and then broke: “If you want to stay with us . . .” If he did that, I’d have to go away. Or he could turn into Wolf and make a razor blade out of me. I never told him who it was that I was supposed to forever tether to a post beyond the House gates. He could have decided he owed me something, and I didn’t want that.
“Come back,” he said. “No one is going to find out.”
“Why?” I said. “And how do I pay for it?”
“Stupid,” Blind said. And left.
So I went back. Life goes on, and my sin is still on me. While I live, it will be thus. I have no way to atone. Ghosts constantly stream through these walls, but only one of them bares his fangs at me. He is everywhere. On the windowsill when I pull away the curtain, waiting for me in the shower, even at the bottom of the bath when I am about to climb in, looking at me with burning eyes from underwater. I am almost used to it now, and don’t go to pieces anymore every time we meet. I go to bed later than before and rise earlier, to make sure my nights are dreamless—because in the dreams he can do whatever he wants with me. I’m tired of him, and he of me, but we cannot get rid of each other. The pills help, but only for a while.
Every morning I go down to the yard to feed the stray dogs running around in the predawn hours on the other side of the fence, in the Outsides. They know I’m going to show up and wait for me there. All it takes is the secreted half of my dinner, and they are ready to talk to me about their vagabond life, and listen to me talk about mine. They live in a pack, and so do I. We have a lot to discuss. I never ask them if they know what sin is. But I suspect they do. Sometimes, very rarely, I work miracles for them: healing gashes on their paws, growing fur over burns, or conjuring a phantom of the Great White Bitch that resembles a polar bear a bit. They like to chase it along the fence. Then we go our separate ways. They leave to tend to their quarrelsome business, and I return to the House. Occasionally I meet Blind in the hallway, as he’s returning from his nightly wanderings. More often on my way down to the yard, but sometimes also on the way back. I often think that if I were to come out at night he would be everywhere, in myriad different disguises, just like my ghost. But I never go out at night. I’m afraid of the dark.
