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The door looks like an exit.
The door lies.
Sasha James is somewhat too aware of both of these things for comfort.
The Archivist would probably complain if he knew that she still thinks of herself as Sasha James. She wishes that he was close enough to complain, just so that she could see the look on his face when she told him that she is the only thing living and loved and remembered with any claim to that name, and therefore it is more hers than anyone else’s.
She likes being Sasha James. She always likes being them, until she does not, and then she becomes someone else.
There is no one else here to become.
She might as well be Sasha James.
The door is a lie, but sometimes she is tempted to reach out and grasp the black metal handle with her fingers, soft and stubby with hilarious chunks of keratin at the tips or long and vicious sharp depending on her mood. Just take the handle and pull, and let whatever is behind the door sing her inside.
She does not think it’s entirely the Distortion’s fault that she’s tempted. She’s often a stranger even to herself, but she has had a self long enough to have accumulated history, and she has spent an uncomfortably long portion of that history trapped.
She does not like being trapped. She does not like the four walls, or the weight of her enemy’s home hanging above her like some great stooping bird, golden eyes wide and watchful and always on her.
So sometimes she thinks about reaching for the door. She doesn’t. She hadn’t enjoyed trading one trap for another enough to want to repeat the experience.
Sasha does not know how much time has passed when she finds herself no longer alone between the four walls (five, six, seven, eight walls; the geometry down here is uncertain and becomes even more so any time the door is present) where the Archivist had entombed her.
It looks like a woman. That is also a lie. Its hair is very carefully coiffed. Her eyes ache if she looks too long at the way the curls loop and twist. She is reminded of the web on her table-trap, the way that even before she was Sasha she could stand and stare at it for hours, feel it sinking hooks behind the thin eggshell of what is sometimes her skull. This, too, is a trap. A lie-trap.
It says nothing, rare for a creature of the Twisting Deceit. It simply watches her. Eventually it leaves. Time passes. It returns. It still says nothing, makes no attempt to draw Sasha in with pretty, knotting, misleading words. It looks. Perhaps it has been too long with the Watcher. It has learned bad habits.
She almost feels sorry for it.
When it is gone again, she almost wishes for its return.
She is not one of the One Alone. But she thinks she might be a little bit lonely.
Sasha starts to dream of it when it isn’t there. This, too, is a lie, some trick of the Distortion. She can’t be dreaming of it because she doesn’t dream. She doesn’t dream. She doesn’t ever dream, because she doesn’t sleep.
By the time that Sasha finally breaks and speaks, she is not surprised that she is the one to do so first. This creature of the Distortion is more cunning than most of its kind, clearly. It does not need words. It has allowed her to be worn down by the weight of the Archives above and the walls too close around her, the silence free of any other voice, the deep and oppressive dark broken only by the twisting, shifting light that spills out from behind the door when her lone visitor cracks it open; it has used fears that by right belong to other masters to make her soft, tender, something easily swallowed. Such a clever, clever monster.
“What do you want?” Sasha asks.
The creature pretends surprise. It is very good at pretending, but Sasha wouldn’t expect anything else. The creature had been considering her feet. She's wearing sensible court shoes with a low, square heel, but the toes had started to twist and curl the longer she looked at them. Now she is looking at Sasha. Idly, Sasha wonders if she will curl and twist, too.
“To understand.”
Sasha shakes her head. “That’s not your role.” The lie-creature really has been too long under the Watcher’s roof. “You’re not meant to want to understand. And I’m not meant to be understood.”
The creature almost smiles, like she is pleased by the way that Sasha’s words tangle around themselves and turn. Sasha begins to worry that she is also learning bad habits.
“You knew Helen Richardson,” the creature says. “You met her. Not the other Sasha. You.”
For the first time, Sasha realizes. “You look like her.”
“That’s not—.” The frown line that pinches between the Helen-Lie’s brows is too long, curving up toward her hairline like a question mark. “That’s not the part that matters.”
Sasha stands. Her muscles don’t ache, even after months of sitting curled against the wall, because lactic acid is one of the stupider parts of being shaped like a person and she never bothers with it. She sweeps a hand over herself. The fingers are short and blunt right now and very human. “Isn’t it?”
She really doesn’t look much like the first Sasha James, but even she doesn’t really remember what the first Sasha James looked like, and so she looks exactly like Sasha James, down to the last minute detail.
The Helen-Lie looks at her for another long minute, and then she leaves.
Sasha wonders what kind of game it is that they are playing.
The Helen-Lie comes back. Sometimes they talk. Sasha tries very hard not to feel grateful.
“I don’t know that I enjoy being what I am,” the Helen-Lie says.
Sasha shrugs. “So be something else.”
“It doesn’t feel right,” the Helen-Lie tells her. Sasha doesn’t really understand. She doesn’t know why the Helen-Lie keeps telling her these things, what she hopes to gain from it. She doesn’t really mind, though. She has decided that she prefers when the Helen-Lie is here, even if she knows that if she can’t understand the game, she is going to lose, and the Helen-Lie is going to win.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, to lose to something that plays so well.
“Why not?”
“They’re—it doesn’t feel right. Their fear.”
Sasha misses the taste of fear on the back of her tongue, and she does not understand. “There’s nothing wrong with being a picky eater,” she offers. She’s always had rather discriminating taste, herself. “Perhaps you just need to find the one that does feel right.”
She hopes that was encouraging.
She doesn’t like to think of the Helen-Lie going hungry.
The Helen-Lie is back to watching her.
“I could let you out,” she says, almost cautiously, as though she is the one with cause to be cautious. “Not in the Archives, of course. I rather like them. I don’t want to see what you would do.”
Sasha thinks she might not do anything. The Unknowing failed; even down here she had felt it. She has already played her games out in the Archives. They know her now. It would be much less fun.
“When I said you should find someone to eat,” Sasha says, “I didn’t mean me.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it,” the Helen-Lie says. She tilts her head. Sasha has lived among people long and often enough to know that the angle is wrong, the bend of the Helen-Lie’s throat one that a human spine would never allow if it was intact. Sasha had made the same mistake once, when she was still young and new. The screaming had been satisfying but it had also marked her out too obviously as other and ruined her fun. She’s become better at pretending she doesn’t twist and bend that way, since. She’s very good at it now, better than any of the others. She can almost always pass as people.
She also knows what a human spine looks like when it is not intact. For comparison.
“What’s funny?”
“You’re so scared of me,” the Helen-Lie says, and Sasha would like to protest but that would be foolish; if she wasn’t afraid, she would have stepped through that door and thought it an escape months ago. “But you’re almost like me.” Her mouth curves too far when she smiles. It’s very—.
Strange. Uncanny. As familiar as her reflection in a mirror, had a mirror ever shown her anything familiar.
It’s very beautiful.
“Not really,” Sasha says.
“Are you sure?” The Helen-Lie leans in, her twisting mouth very close to Sasha’s ear. “It Is Not What It Is.” She leans away, her back returning to its original proportions. “Everything you are is a lie. You really should come in. You might find it very comfortable.”
“I’m not a lie,” Sasha says, and smiles back sharp. “I’m Sasha.”
“I don’t think you are,” Helen says, but she laughs a little, and the way it winds and echoes against the twelve stone walls of Sasha’s cage is beautiful too.
NotThem her first captor, Dekker, had called her, and Sasha had never much liked it, although she had liked that the name made him afraid when he spoke it. He had been very afraid of her, even after he had caged her. He had been things other than only afraid, too, in the brief shining moments before all that, when she had still been a Them to him without the Not.
“I’m more Sasha than you are Helen,” she says. “I worked hard at being Sasha. Helen is just something you swallowed that got caught in your throat.”
The Helen stops smiling. Sasha tries to convince herself that the hurting that replaces the smiling is beautiful too, as it had been on Dekker, or Lucy, or the Archivist. (She has been around the Twisting Deceit for too long. She is picking up bad habits. She has always been a stranger, especially to herself.)
It’s hard to keep track of time down here, particularly since Sasha has never much cared about time, even when she was not Down Here.
She thinks that a great deal of it passes before Helen returns.
“I don’t understand you,” Sasha says. It sounds like an apology. She thinks she might mean for it to be one.
Helen’s head has that tilt again, the side of her neck bulging like there really is something stuck in her throat. “I do not know you,” she says, carefully, and Sasha thinks there might be an apology in that, too.
“I might not even want to keep you,” Helen says. “I trapped the—the bone man. Jared. It was uncomfortable. I was very glad when the Archivist told me I should spit him back out again.”
Sasha had eaten a creature of Flesh once, mostly by accident. She had been Graham then, and the beef had arrived at his table rich with hate and still gently bleeding, even though he had ordered it well-done and, from the charred edges, the cook had tried very hard to oblige. Six of the restaurant’s other patrons had also got sick. Two of them had died. Graham had never been in any real danger, but it had been uncomfortable, and he had felt every mass and lesion that had formed in his stomach as he tried to digest the meal. “Disgusting,” she says, too pleased with Helen’s company to make any comment on her doing favors for the Archivist.
She thinks, briefly, of one of the archival assistants, the one called Tim. His mouth had always gone a little soft at the corners when they spoke, and she had been the only one to know that none of that softness was for her. She’d enjoyed mentioning her fictional boyfriend Tom around him, for the way he didn’t flinch, because he couldn’t quite bring himself to challenge his own version of self enough to admit, even behind his own eyes, that it bothered him. He’d kept flirting with her, even after Tom became a part of the conversation, because not to do so would be to acknowledge that something had changed.
She considers asking Helen if she knows how he had reacted when he’d found out that the first Sasha was dead. It’s been a long time since she’s had anything to sate her. Instead she finds herself speaking with the low edge of teasing in her voice learned from Tim Stoker in the months she had played at being something he knew. “Look at me. I’m much tastier than some flesh-thing. If you got a mouthful of me I don’t think you’d want to spit me back out. Better not to risk it.”
She does not know what she is doing.
She does not know why she is doing it.
She doesn’t know herself.
Helen smiles, though, so whatever she’s doing, she must be doing it right.
“If I let you out,” Helen says, “would you try to hurt them?” She says it like the answer matters. She says it like she’s not convinced that the answer matters.
She’s a creature of the Spiral. They’re always a little contradictory.
Mostly, Sasha likes it.
“I don’t know.” She doesn’t think so. She’s had her fun. If she hurt them, Helen might be upset, even if Sasha doesn't really understand why. She has decided that she cares if Helen is upset, even if she understands her own reasons no more than she does Helen's. She still can’t say with any certainty that any of those things would be enough to leash her. She is what she is, whatever that might be. “If I come inside, would you let me out again?”
Helen shrugs. Sasha recognizes her own way of moving, pleasingly alien when viewed in the slope of Helen’s shoulders. “I would—I think I would. I take the others places, sometimes. Sometimes I keep them a little too long, just to—the Archivist is afraid. He doesn’t trust me, he would be afraid even if I took them directly from their doorstep past mine. A few extra seconds, just enough for him to begin to doubt, and—.”
Sasha brushes her fingers against the slant of Helen’s mouth to silence her. Even with Sasha's fingers there to stem the words they keep flowing until Helen realizes that Sasha really doesn’t care about the Archivist's well-being and stops them up herself; she doesn’t need a throat or an open mouth to create sound. Sasha’s fingers are longer today, thin and sharp enough to cut. If she wanted them to.
She thinks hard for a moment, and then she replaces her fingers with her mouth. She’s never really known what to make of the kissing, but she has had some practice; she’s worn the faces of lovers before, turned lips against lips into something just strange and sharp enough for someone else’s spit to taste like dread. She’s not as practiced at making it into something nice, but they’re both of them shaped enough like people for it to work like it should, tongue and teeth, nerve endings and blood beneath the skin and all the parts of being something almost human and almost known that Sasha likes enough to crawl inside and call it her, self, me, mine.
Sasha James goes through the door.
Eventually she finds her way out again.