The Fall of Never by Ronald Malfi

Author:Ronald Malfi [Malfi, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2013-03-04T23:00:00+00:00

That night, she awoke to a noise. Covered in sweat and breathing heavy, she sat up stiffly in bed—and caught movement in the dark, at the opposite end of the room.

Someone stepped out of her bedroom, closing the door behind them.

“Who’s there?”

She pulled back the blankets and swung her legs to the floor. When she stood, her world seemed to cant to one side, as if in an attempt to shake her off balance. She thought she could hear footsteps creaking down the hallway outside her bedroom. She moved quickly to the door and pulled it open—

—and saw Becky’s bedroom door close at the other end of the hall.

The hallway was dark, but Becky’s bedroom door was awash in the white-blue moonlight issuing from the bank of windows that made up the opposite wall. Beyond that, the hallway was a confusing channel of closed doors and, at the end, a pit of black winding stairs.

There was a light on in Becky’s room. Kelly caught movement from inside through the crack at the bottom of her sister’s bedroom door.

Becky!

She dashed across the length of hallway and nearly drove herself into the framework of the door. She grasped the knob with an unsteady hand and turned it—

It didn’t turn.

It was locked.

As if swatted by an invisible hand, she took a step away from the door and simply stared at it. She fisted her right hand and knocked twice against the door.

She heard someone moving on the other side of the door.

“Becky? Honey, open the door. Becky, it’s Kelly. Open the door, sweetheart.”

It’s Kelly, her mind echoed in an imaginative impression of her sister’s voice. Who’s Kelly?

“Becky?”

The stairs at the end of the hall creaked.

Fear suddenly hit her, sharp and incensed.

That’s where the dead girls go, she thought, recalling her dream.

A glimmer of moonlight briefly illuminated what appeared to be tiny pale stones lined up on the banister—tiny white stones with eye sockets and teeth. But they were there and then gone, having never existed.

It’s all in my head, she thought. She felt her entire body begin to shake and knew that she was very near collapse, very near the end of the line. She’d suffered through three years at an institution, a loveless marriage and divorce, and had not tamed but at least managed to coexist in New York City…and now her batteries were finally about to die, to burn themselves out. All along, she’d been thinking that she was strong, that she could overcome, that things got better when you decided to make them get better. But no, she’d been wrong. Because nothing got better. Not really. Things kept locked away and forgotten just kept perpetuating themselves until there was no more room in the closet. And then there was nothing left but for those things to blow up.

I’m blowing up, she thought.

And insanely, she thought of Collin. More specifically, she recalled making love to Collin—and Collin making love to her—and the way they moved in bed together, the way he

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