Karen came to with a start. She could feel Irwin’s arms tighten around her. Somewhere in her mind the thought came that the building would have screamed at the top of its lungs in only a building could scream. Irwin, who was lying next to her smoking a cigarette, jerked her even closer…and rumpled her hair as if she were a kid.
His voice was…soft. “You know, your hair’s the exact same color as that puppy I found out back when I was a kid. I had so much fun with that puppy…” He went on; Karen was not surprised to learn that that puppy didn’t live long. Then she started, slowly, to remember all the experiences with Irwin that she and that puppy had in common.
“Do not think of such things!” It was the Storage Space, her imaginary playmate, but who was she to question hearing voices at a time like this? “I would torture Le Grand Rat to death slowly, very slowly, if only a building could…” It went on. Briefly, Karen distracted herself from the horror of her situation by wondering how her subconscious came by such extensive knowledge of the 19th century. Then, while both her companions indulged in their respective sentimentality…the real one about all the animals he’d tortured, the imaginary one about tales of 19th-century theatre that it thought would distract her…she took inventory of her new wounds.
Irwin broke off to rumple her hair again. “Hungry? Thirsty?” He sounded like a kid with a guest sleeping over.
Karen suppressed a shudder. “Kind of hungry,” she managed in a little-kid voice.
“Gotcha covered! Back in a jiff!” Irwin scooted out of her storage unit like a boy scout out of a pup tent, clattered down the hall, and was gone.
Karen bolted for the hall in the opposite direction, half falling out of her storage unit before she realized, for the second time since she’d taken up residence in her storage unit, that she didn’t have the strength to go far. But this time even her imaginary playmate, the building, started replaying the horror of what Irwin had done to her, which succeeded in releasing enough adrenaline to get her halfway down the hall before she passed out again.
She immediately fell into a dark dream filled with a hatred for Irwin that was like no hatred she had ever felt before. Then, once again, despite Frank’s appearance in her dream to protest, she saw the light and moved toward it this time. That voice again, that had gone on so about a summer’s day… As she drew closer she could hear it clearly:
“Those lips that Love’s own hand did make
Breathed forth the sound that said ‘I hate,’
To me that languish’d for her sake:
But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom,
And taught it thus anew to greet:
‘I hate’ she alter’d with an end,
That follow’d it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who like a fiend
From heaven to hell is flown away;
‘I hate’ from hate away she threw,
And saved my life, saying ‘not you.'”
