***
DAVID HASN'T DONE much, but inspect every article of furniture in Hadley's room with a thoroughness most people would find in doctors or surgeons. Hadley would've been more worried about it, if he wasn't so sure that this wasn't his room.
Magic is real. Monsters are real. But this isn't his room, even if it looks like it.
"Where are we?" he asks, not expecting an answer. He rubs the heel of his shoe on the carpeted floor. "Is any of this real?"
David slams a drawer. It doesn't make a sound. "What do you think?"
"I think this place is wrong," says Hadley. He gets up from the bed, noiselessly. But he knows that his bed creaks at the slightest hint of movement. This bed doesn't.
"What's so wrong about it?" David asks, running his hand over the walls of Hadley's not-room.
This place, whatever it is, is too sharp. Noiseless. Too clear, too stark in its contrasts between light and shadow, lighting too dramatic to be real. Real life is blurred edges, soft shadows and dim fluorescent lights. Real life isn't a Caravaggio painting.
"I don't know," says Hadley. He kicks the bed. There's no sound of impact. "This isn't real, is it?"
"In a way, it is," says David. "You ever heard of limbo?"
Hadley lets out a snort. "How low can you go? That sort of thing?"
"No, but that would've been more fun," says David, smiling. He puts a hand to one of the walls. "Limbo as in: a state of uncertainty. The space between dreams and reality. That sort of thing. You never read fantasy books?"
Hadley has a brief vision of himself, being twelve and standing in front of his mother, being forced to watch his Harry Potter books burn in the fireplace in the foyer. He can't remember what he'd been punished for, but he remembers the crackling of the pages as they went up in flames, the way the covers darkened and darkened until he couldn't tell which book was which, and his mother, right in front of him, as impassive and cold as ever.
"No," Hadley says. "I don't recall ever reading books with magic in them, no."
"Sad life you must've had," says David.
"Right," says Hadley. He frowns at David. "What are you trying to do?"
David rubs a circular spot on the wall with his right hand. His eyes are screwed shut. "I'm trying to find the source."
"The source of what, exactly?"
"Oh, now you're asking questions. Let me concentrate, please."
Hadley lets him concentrate. When he looks away from David, he hears something—like the splitting of wood. A clear crack.
"What the hell?" he says, turning to look at David, whose eyes are still screwed shut.
The paint on the wall that David touches has started to flake off. David doesn't move his hand away. Rather, he presses harder into the wall. The wall makes another sound—a crack—before Hadley sees something.
Fissures that grow in the wall under the heel of David's palm, and they stretch out, slowly, like vines. Something seeps out of them, something viscous and black and Hadley watches it slide out with morbid curiosity. It oozes out of the cracks in the wall and drips out onto the floor, onto David's right hand. It moves like it's breathing.
