Lips Like Ice

II

On the day her fever breaks, Lydia realizes that she smells absolutely disgusting. The dark lethargy has left her, but has been replaced with plain, normal old exhaustion. It is paired, however, with a strange sort of restlessness, the kind she gets on lazy week-ends when she loathes any chores but can't stop doing dishes, sweeping, scrubbing appliances and sorting through old clothes for donation. She feels a quick and painful pining for home, a ridiculous swell of concern for her pothos and her gold-fish. Imagine, being worried about the health of a fish when she is in a place that cannot be, watched over by a creature from fantastical nightmares, recovering from an illness unlike any she's ever read or heard about before.

And all of itl, that's the most terrifying part of it. This is no fever dream. It's too detailed; too, well, real. The world smells of salty broth, and her own rancid body. The air and the gravity

feel off, too pure and just heavy enough that gestures that should be easy require just that slight bit of extra effort. Raising her arm to push her hand through her matted hair is more like moving it through water than nothing—less resistance than water, but a sort of curl and eddy against the hairs along her skin all the same.

She wishes desperately that it was all a fever hallucination, but another glance around the horrifically fantastic room dashes that. She could never have come up with something like this, she knows. Not even in her wildest dreams. It's real. She's here.

She has recollection of having woken a few other times, of being goaded into drinking a bowl of soup or nibbling on something plain and dry-tasting. But she has no recollection of hygiene. She feels grimy and oily, and she needs the toilet something fierce.

She sits up. The creature is absent.

There are two doors that she never noticed before, when her vision was glazed and ringed with darkness, and her eyelids were drooping. Both doors are open. One, in the wall beyond the foot of the bed, leads out into what appears to be some sort of sitting room. Gilded furniture, gleaming tables, and soft rugs beckon from the amber-tinted shadows. The light in that room flickers and she thinks it looks like a fire. Now that she's seen it, she realizes that the air also smells faintly of wood smoke. She watches for a moment, concerned about a conflagration, and when the fire doesn't seem to grow or spread, she decides it must be in a hearth. Between the foot of the bed and the door is a pair of wing-back chairs, or whatever this over-sized world has that is analogous with wing-back chairs. They face the wall, and another hearth that is cold and black.

The second door is beside the table by the head of the bed. This one opens onto a room of gleaming marble and tile. There is a lamp on some sort of low stone shelf, and the scent of warm spice and steam curls out of the door. Lydia braves a foot out of the duvet and finds the floor both further away than she had anticipated and also covered with a plush rug. The air is still too cool, but now that she's not in the grips of a fever, it's not painful.

Her feet sink into the pile of the carpeting, nearly to the tops, and it is so soft it almost tickles. Her armpits come to just the top of mattress.

She looks around, but finds no discarded clothing, no carefully laid out bathrobe to wriggle into, so she investigates the door at the head of the bed in the nude. She keeps close to the wall, skirting the table. Her usual cup of broth is there, but it has gone stone cold, so she leaves it. She doesn't think she could drink one more drop with her bladder as full as it is. She pokes her head into the marble-room, glancing around quickly, but the creature isn't in here, either. What is here makes her think that it must be some sort of bathing chamber.

A wall of windows overlooks the strange, unnatural city and purple sky, and it is easily as wide as her entire apartment. There are low stone shelves around the perimeter of the other three walls, all of which seem to consist of the same pale marble. It is cut with veins of something bluish and silvery. In the golden glow of the lone lamp, the crystal glitter in the stone seems to dance. Perhaps, though, it is the weakness making her vision swim. Some of the shelf seems to serve as a valet-bench, boots lined up below and clothing hung on racks and pegs above. Beside that is a pile of folded fabric which Lydia assumes are towels. She takes one down, and it is easily the size of a curtain panel, but plush and thick. The weight of it makes it a bit unwieldy, but she manages to wrap it around herself in a sort of makeshift toga.