Pathos - A Duskwood Fanfiction

Chapter 36

A light tapping sound jolted her awake.

She sat bolt upright from a dead sleep and stared sightlessly into the darkness of room number six at the Duskwood motel, her heart racing as her mind fought to shake off the fog of sleep and process the sound that had roused it.

The sound came again.

It sounded like the tapping of fingernails on wood, and she blindly looked over in the direction of the door, frozen.

Jake?

It had been eight excruciating days since she had watched him get into Alan's car and drive away, and seven even worse nights of those days than that since she'd had any signs of him still existing at all. She had spent every single one of those day's nights lying alone in his bed, watching the door in silent vigil - only stopping in the small hours of the morning when exhaustion finally forced her eyes to close against their will.

It had been a nightmare that she had known intimately from her nights spent waiting for him to appear out of the ashes of Richy's insanity, and she'd had to sit with it again, alone in Jake's bed this time, as it had wrapped the familiar and wretched fingers of fear and doubt slowly around her heart.

She could feel those icy fingers return with venom now, as she sat upright alone in the dark, listening to the sound of someone tapping at his door.

Please let it be Jake.

She slid to the edge of the bed and stood, a hand unconsciously raising to touch the pendant that hung from the chain around her neck.

It won't be Jake. He has a key.

As she walked over to the door, the tapping sounded again, and taking a deep breath as she prepared herself for immeasurable disappointment, she looked through the peephole.

Fuck.

It was Lilly.

Standing in the darkness outside, Jake's sister was leaning with her forehead against the door, fingernails poised lightly on the wooden surface. Swallowing a sigh of irritation and bubbling anxiety at the lack of tall, dark, and insanely handsome, she quietly opened the door.

Lilly stepped back as the door unlocked and swung open, and when their eyes met, the other woman gazed at her searchingly before looking over her shoulder into the gloom of the room behind her.

She stood in silence as Lilly did this, watching as the other woman's light blue eyes scanned the room that had now been dimly illuminated by the cool white light emanating from the motel parking lot streetlamps. It did not escape her observations that Lilly looked as exhausted as she currently felt; the skin under her eyes was dark and gaunt looking, and her pale blonde hair was thrown back into a haphazard, messy bun.

"He's not here."

Lilly's voice was a tired whisper, and she just shook her head mutely in response as the fatigue in the other woman's words made the almost unbearable weight of her own seem to double down with alacrity.

She stepped aside to let Lilly in, and once they were both inside, she closed and locked the door. Turning on the small lamp sitting on the desk on, she turned to find Lilly standing beside the bed, staring at it silently.

She walked over to her then, and put a gentle hand on the other woman's shoulder. Lilly lifted her eyes to find hers, and that was when she saw the deep red of her eyes and the tears dripping down her cheeks.

"Lilly?" she asked faintly, feeling the room start to spin and the floor under her feet turn into the consistency of mist.

Lilly stared at her for a moment, and she heard an audibly dry swallow as the other woman seemed to fight for her ability to speak.

"I got a call," she whispered finally, her voice cracking slightly. "From Jake. Four days ago."

She dropped her hand away from Lilly's shoulder.

"He said that he had run into some trouble," Lilly continued in a low, faltering tone, her sentences flat and oddly truncated as though the act of utilizing proper grammar to relay what she was saying was too painful somehow, as if speaking clearly would somehow make what she was saying become too real.

"Didn't say what. But said that he would be home the next day by the latest. Told me not to tell you. Didn't want you to worry."

She stared sightlessly at the other woman as the words slowly dripped into her consciousness, dropping one by one into the formless chasm that had become her heart.

"Four days ago," she echoed in a whisper, and, after a moment, Lilly nodded and then the room fell into a deep and awful silence.

She slowly lowered herself onto the bed and sat on its edge. She closed her eyes then, feeling the chasm that was her heart begin to twist and contort itself into something that was hard, unyielding, and poisonous. The hands that she had been using to support herself on the bed began to tighten and clench around the blanket that was below them, and before she could stop herself, the pure hell of the past eight days exploded inside of her and she snapped in cold fury at the woman who was standing in front of her.

"Four days ago? You knew that he was in trouble four days ago and you're only telling me now?"

Lilly visibly paled as her voice flung itself with rage into the space between them, and the other woman took a step back as she rose to her feet.

"He told me not to tell you," Lilly whispered, her eyes glittering wetly. "It's Jake. I couldn't."

She skewered Lilly with a dark stare then, and began walking over to the closet.

"But you can tell me now?" she asked sharply, reaching the closet and flinging the door open roughly. "Why?"

Lilly watched as she pulled a black tshirt out of the closet that was easily three times her size, and then the other woman cast her eyes downward as she began to undress herself from her night clothes. When Lilly's voice finally came in reply, it was quiet and broken and exhausted.

"Because I just couldn't do it anymore. He said he was coming home. He didn't say to the motel, he didn't say to Duskwood, he said home."

She finished pulling the shirt on over her bra and let the hem fall to her hips as she stared at Lilly in angry consternation.

"Where's home, then? I have no idea where he actually lives. Maybe he went there, wherever the fuck that is."

Lilly shook her head.

"I don't think so," she said slowly. "He said that he was coming home to you."

She turned away dismissively from Lilly then, and reached back into the closet for her pants. Stepping into them, she pulled them up and then walked to the door where her coat was hanging on one of the hooks on the back of it. She put it on, stepped into her shoes, and then turned back to face Lilly, who was staring at her.

"Where are you going to go?" the other woman asked, as she reached for the lock on the door.

"To the only person that I can. Alan."

And with that, she opened the door and stepped out. After a moment, Lilly followed her, and then a key clicked in the lock of the door of room #6, leaving it to sit empty and silent in the dark.