Hannah's Labyrinth

She was found with her nose peeking from the earth, like the imprint of some bizarre fossil. Her nostrils flared wildly to draw in air, and the shallow ground heaved and fell with the rhythm of her chest. The gardener, Burt, quickly swept the mud from her face. Last night’s rain had made the clumps of dirt moist enough so that they clung to everything. Even as the larger globs rolled from her cheeks, tinier fragments hung from the ends of her long lashes, below the veils of which her eyes themselves were squeezed firmly shut, refusing to recognise the world.

“Come now,” Burt said, a tremor of panic in his voice, though it seemed soothing enough at surface level. The gravelly lilt of his thick Lancashire accent gave only the impression of honesty. Despite his low pay, brisk treatment by her uncle, and aching bones, he cared for the girl. It was often Burt who would run to the aid of the young woman when she tumbled into a slew of outbursts, or was scalded by the maids. He saw her like a porcelain doll, the paintwork and blush of her pale countenance chipped and fading, but still to be cradled with care.

“Why’ve you done this, Han? I told you not to listen!” Burt implored now, his unkempt brows furrowed over the bridge of his nose in concerned frustration.

Hannah remained cadaver-like in her complete stillness, except for the now more measured flaring of her nostrils with each breath of the dewy morning. The muslin nightgown clinging to her was damp and bleached with the inky spatters of earth.

Burt reluctantly turned back to the house and pelted in the direction of her uncle’s study. He knew the interruption would not be welcomed, but Hannah’s current state could not be ignored. It had surely escalated; seemingly overnight.

She remained in her self-induced darkness, wishing to sink lower and lower into the sediment of the cool earth.

A wavering voice, distinctly sexless, and yet with a pronunciation of words that resembled the precise, articulate pattern of her uncle, filled her mind as her fingers flexed beside her in the dirt coffin she had made for herself.

“This is simply not good enough, child. It is as though you wish to be found,”

Hannah’s mud-encrusted lips trembled as the rich layers of vocal tones laced into one another and licked the tunnels of her ears. A shudder, unrelated to the damp soil filling every part of her, crept up her spine. It became more apparent that the voice was composed of many; some scratchy, some booming, but all conducting their perverse orchestra in the cavern of her skull.

“We await you. You belong with us. A part of this Legion,”

Hannah nodded slowly, lips pursed together so tightly that they began to purple beneath their coat of dirt. As she moved, she began to disturb the halo of earth set around her.

“Earth is no longer for you,” The voice swelled and died with its many instruments, wheezing and wailing in each corner of her brain.

Hannah had tried to take her place beside them - oh, how desperately she had. When the voice, more insidious than the booming chorus it had now mutated into, first appeared insidiously while she wept, alone in her room, she had denied the foul things it had spewed at her. But gradually, she had known that the “imps” as she called them, had been right. Her place was below ground, where no other living soul could suffer her presence.

Hannah had been set to marry a young man her uncle had paired her with. He had been an apprentice accountant with her uncle since the age of fifteen, and Hannah had received a glimmer of inclination then that she and the aspiring suit would be thrust together.

No sooner had the union been announced than Edmund had revealed the true nature of his ways. He was short with her when she tried to dote on him in the simple ways one could when courting. She offered him a cake she made at a picnic and he had sneered at her, snatching it from her delicately gloved fingers and tossing it into the grass beside them. She had stared dumbly at the tiny pastel fancy, tears of frustration welling in her warm brown eyes. The small, stolen fire that had danced in them at the prospect of spending time alone with the man she was betrothed to had quickly sputtered and died. The tears dampened its flame.

She felt stupid when she was with him, as he made every effort to show her that she was so. One night, as her uncle excused himself from his armchair beside the fire to fix himself a brandy, she had whispered, in a desperate effort to please, that she was excited for the coming April, and for their wedding.

Edmund, his black hair a mess of inky curls writhing and flowing in the vibrant glow of the fire beside him, had cast her a pitiful glare. “You can’t actually love me, can you?” He murmured, a lick of arsenic colouring his tone, making Hannah’s face flood with the warm tingle of embarrassment.

“For God’s sake, Hannah, the marriage is purely transactional,” His harsh whisper was obscured barely by the soft clink of her uncle reaching out for cubes of ice with his ornate silver tongs and dropping them methodically into the pit of his glass. “A man wouldn’t want to marry a poor wretch like you for love,” He grinned and shook his head. “There’s nothing to you. Too simple, no… devilry, no excitement,” he looked her up and down, his eyes resting mockingly on the lace collar hanging over the top of her bodice, obscuring what little cleavage she had.

Hannah’s heart hammered in her chest. She had wanted to flee through the front door to save herself from hearing the rest of this assault.

“You’re a Christian, you shouldn’t be saying such -“ She began.

“You know what I mean,” Edmund snorted, throwing his head back with a soft thud against the back of his chair. “There’s no - depth to you, no light or shade… just a terrible, unending wash of beige. I dread to think what intimacy would be like,”

Hannah’s lace-covered hands were writhing anxiously in her lap. They clutched and released the skirts of her dress with the rhythm of her scurrying heart. She was not as close to the fireplace as Edmund, but her cheeks were exploding with bursts of heat that prickled on the outskirts of her tightly-clenched jaw.

She had never imagined the neatly-dressed boy, who in his teenage years had bustled through her home carrying her uncle’s papers and briefcase, as now being well-versed in carnal matters. It both frightened and fascinated her - that the man she presumed had been an astute learner of Christ had likely frequented the taverns that one turned into at the end of their lane, and within them had sought what His word tries so deeply to suppress.

Suddenly she found herself unable to meet his cold gaze. She stared at the fire, and it’s brilliance hurt her eyes. But she cared not, and instead focused on each flame that the warm womb of coals birthed.

“Hannah, you cannot expect to get what you think you deserve in this world,” Edmund said, crossing one precisely-pressed trouser leg over the other. Their engagement ring sat on his fidgeting hand and seemed dim even in the firelight. Its falseness now made it appear dull even in the finest shades.

“It is simply not realistic,” he said, with a finality that made Hannah wince. “We all deserve nothing. We must strive on this earth to take that which we can lay our hands on. Love is worthless. Everything, simply everything, is business. Your uncle understands that,” Edmund glanced in the older man’s direction and saw that the gentleman’s slim fingers were rolling the glass of liquor in the air. The ice cubes sloshed and bobbed in the small sea of golden brown.

Edmund turned back to Hannah, his thin mouth curled in a rueful smile, his tongue flirting over the thinly parted lips like a serpents’, lapping up every last drop of dried scotch that pooled there. “He understood that enough to marry us,” he said softly. It reminded Hannah of the smooth, rhythmic lashing of a snake’s hiss.

“May God forgive you,” Hannah breathed tearfully, her pink lips, applied carefully with a pastel balm she had hoped would enhance her features for him, quivered with every sound that tumbled from them.

“No need for him to,” Edmund smirked. “I am quite content with the reality of our world. You should learn to be too, Hannah. After all, the wedding is merely weeks away,”

Hannah’s jaw hung open on its hinge. Never had she heard a statement so brazen - the arrogance of rejecting God! It made her stomach lurch. “You don’t mean that!” She said desperately, her voice a hushed shriek.

“We are all born unto Lucifer, really. In time, you will come to see that even you belong in the Pit with him, by the order of nature,”

Hannah felt he was saying these words not because he believed them, but because he knew the mere utterance of them unnerved her. It worked; Hannah shot up in her seat, mumbled an excuse for herself and quickly fled up the stairs, tripping over the hem of her skirt in her haste to leave the field of Edmund’s humiliating gaze.

She had not shown up at the church for the ceremony. Rather, the housemaids had discovered her hiding beneath her bed in her wedding gown, her cheek pressed so hard against the floorboards that the oak left the impressions of its rings in her soft skin. She had not been able to face the possibility of marrying into a lie, and to give herself to someone who’s view of the world was sat at such a distant pole to her own.

Her uncle had lampooned her viciously, his voice hoarse by the end of his tireless monologue. His well-preened moustache had become wiry and ruffled by its conclusion, and his sallow cheeks had taken on a ruddiness that appeared under the pale skin like blotches of scarlet ink on parchment. The sight of him in such a wild rage had frightened Hannah, though she did not outwardly react. Instead she sat motionless in her uncle’s chair, her back ruler-straight, eyes glassy and hands pressed firmly atop her knees.

Of course, he had been strict before, and had always reserved for her a kind of coldness that portrayed his distaste for having to shelter her following the death of her parents. But his thinly-veiled distaste for her presence was, for the first time, morphing into something other than cold indifference. Instead, a great rage broke from within him. The cold glimmer of his carob eyes suddenly crackled with a simmering blue flame; a scintilla of impatience soon roared into an insatiable flame. The kerosene of her disobedience had conjured a monstrosity from the dull flame. All his resentment for her burdensome presence over the years had been the boxes of gunpowder sitting dormant below the spark. Now they had ignited, and the once aloof stone walls were falling in.

Hannah sat and stared at the buttons on his waistcoat as he screamed at her. She watched as, with each animated spewing of pejoratives, the clusters of thin veins littering his sallow cheeks became more present against the waxy skin. But the tirade became dull and muffled as each barrage struck her. The words had become too hurtful, so she had drowned them out. Her uncle sounded far away then, as though he were speaking to her over crashing waves. She was at one end of the cove, and he at the other.

The waves lapped the shore until he spat at her to remove herself from his study. She complied, rising as if her body belonged to the heavenly hivemind, and the responsibility for her own flesh had given way to some other force. She ventured mechanically upstairs, her feet gliding briskly over the lip of each step. The hurried footfall caused her uncle to peer until the living room lintel after her, his mouth slack with bemusement at her sudden vanishing. She could imagine the very corners of his slick black moustache curling with curiosity at her odd turn. She concluded, as she let the oak door click behind her, that she did not care. Decidedly, she allowed the gentle sway of her body on her heels to tip her like a swing over the cusp of balance, and her spine thudded against one of the harsh wooden panels of the door.

At some point, she had slid tearfully to the floor, her fair locks framing her shoulders like the rays of a Sistine halo. She was not sure how much time had passed. Vaguely, she hoped her uncle, or even Edmund, despite her simmering contempt for his revolting notions, would traipse up the staircase to come and comfort her. No footfall was heard, no attempt was made. She waited, in a self-made shroud of hope. Quite soon, the moribund mist thickened around her. She crawled into bed, fully clothed, and lay there. Some time later, she started from her stupor, her head jerking against the frilled pillow, her flaxen ringlets damp with a mixture of tears and sweat.

She did not remember clambering into the bed.

Hannah contemplated for hours, as she lay on her bed in full petticoat, over-skirt and laced-up leather boots, of how gravely disappointing she was. While Hannah had not lost her spiritual integrity by leaving Edmund a jilted fiancé, she had disappointed everyone else. Even though her reasoning was Godly, it was also distinctly selfish. Her uncle had wanted her to marry Edmund because it meant she would not have to dwindle in his abode for much longer, and he could continue being the miserly bachelor he had been deprived of lauding about as for the past ten years. For Edmund, she had now jeopardised his stake in the family inheritance he had worked so diligently to receive, simply because his idea of marriage had not coincided with hers.

She tossed and turned, her scuffed boots smearing streaks of dried dirt onto the floral sheets. She thought about Edmund’s smug philosophy that everyone was Satan’s child from birth, and in the palm of her despair, the taloned fingers of his ideals curled around her hunched shoulders.

In the night, the imps came for her, and sat on her chest. They crowded her, their translucent grey skin coarse against her cheek. A flurry of black nails scratched at her soft flesh, snagging on her nightgown, hitching the gentle fabric into countless ladders.

With the largest of the impish Legion perched on her breastbone, it’s long feet bridging across her sternum. It’s claws sank into the soft flesh of her breasts like a knife breeching the skin of a peach. In her petrified wake, she did not wince. Instead, she simply stared, mouth slightly agape, at the shadows slithering over the ceiling. The rest of the fiends gathered around her in her rigid tableaux of sleep as if they were her peering within her sinking casket.

Their hands, their feet, like the paws of large rats, pressed upon her, as if they were forcing her down. Sure was the eerily still girl that she really was in a coffin, and the earth would come tumbling down on her soon.

And yet the prospect eventually came to please her.

The ceiling grew further away, the shadows faded, and she felt her stiff lips twitch into a momentary smile. It was a relieved smile, her glossy eyes swelling with the warmth of gleeful anticipation. The silk sheets seemed to ebb around her like the enveloping sheets of lagoon waters. No dread seized her at the concept of the earth claiming her. Instead she felt a deep want, a peace that ebbed through her veins like a river, lush and fertile after a fresh rain.

It was during this gentle lull that Hannah heard the voice for the first time.

It appeared deep in the cavern of her ear, hoarse and croaking, like the deep crackling of a midnight bonfire.

The voice, seedy and coloured with the smile of a mischievous knowing, told her it knew of her worthlessness, and how it had been waiting for her to realise it. It told of how it had been lurking in the recesses of her mind, concealed within the cobwebbed gloom, biding its time before it had pried at her weak spot long enough to strike. And, though the voice spoke as one, it was oddly choral, as if comprised of a shoal of varying pitches and tenors. It also addressed itself in plural terms, whispering “we” and “us” when it nestled against her eardrum.

The Legion, goblin-like and giggling in their assault on the girl, told her that the earth she had felt herself tumbling into, was her true home, and that she needed to dig even deeper, in order to reach their internal dwellings.

“You are demons?” Hannah responded, her cheeks prickling with needles of fear. Every ingrained belief of Christian dogma she had been forced to subscribe to since childhood was screaming at her, telling her not to entertain this hellish scourge. But still, she listened - she couldn’t help herself.

“Perhaps - to some we may be seen as such,” The astral voice snickered. Its colourless laugh reminded her of the sound Burt’s toolbox made whenever he bustled about the garden; the callous tinkling of rusted bolts. “To others, we are bringers of truth, artisans of honesty, surgeons to one's misguided soul,”

The revelation made her breath hitch in her throat. A part of her supposed they were lying, manipulating her in order to snatch them into their infernal grasp, but a part of her could not help but drink in their dulcet tones. What they said to her seemed to be some perverted gospel she was desperate to read from.

She remembered, briefly, one specific moment, quite pleasant and benign, and unplaceable in time, when she had been sat against the trunk of the large oak tree at the base of the grounds. A book sat on her lap, its pages fluttering lazily in the breeze. She had invited Edmund, but he had quickly waved her away as he sat, hunched over the large logbook on his desk. He had muttered something impatiently about having to finish the numbers for her uncle. Disappointed, but not allowing the small rejection to dampen her mood, she swivelled on her heel and floated merrily outside.

She had settled into a small nook of roots beneath the shade of the tree and opened a book. The cracked spine made it so that the pages flipped over her knee. Her finger followed the tiny text as the gentle breeze made the page corners rustle and flutter. She had lost herself beneath the oak tree, only disturbed from her reverie when she had caught the familiar tinkling of Burt’s toolbox in the distance.

He was ambling down the garden path, his broad shoulders constricted by an ill-fitting linen shirt and braces. By contrast, his trousers were too baggy, no one having cared to sew the cuffs for him to account for his stocky height. Hannah had supposed they had belonged to an uncle, or even his father, and no one had ever offered to adjust them for him. The stiff brown fabric was sturdy but beginning to look battered in their age, and the cuffs were dark and sodden by the morning’s dew.

As he whistled his way up the path, Burt turned to her. His face was distinctly square, the muscles of his strong jaw giving his neck an angular quality that made him appear like a partially-finished Roman bust. The edges had not quite been smoothed or rounded. Stubble littered the prominent jaw, edging upwards into a crop of chestnut curls. Beneath the craggy brow, were kind eyes that completely softened the harsh edges of his face. While the skin was worn and toughened by years of outdoor work, the eyes deep-set into the leather canvas twinkled invitingly. They shone at her even from the distance of the garden path.

“Alright, Han?” Burt called over.

Hannah smiled at the familiar nickname. Burt had been only a few years her senior when she had first arrived at her uncle’s house, and so the two teenagers had treated one another on an unusually equal basis from the moment they met. Youth had stripped away the formal acknowledgement of status their adult peers had come to adopt, and so Burt and Hannah had addressed one another with a casual respect. Something they still did, much to her uncle’s chagrin.

She had returned his smile, offering him a friendly wave. She had often been complacent with Burt, taking his presence for granted, but she felt a subtle warmth whenever he passed. Even such a small gesture of a wave and a casual greeting made Hannah’s day. And this most recent incident stuck in her mind.

“Enjoying your book, love?”

“Yes, thank you, Burt,” She called back, her gloved hand shielding her squinting brow from the wash of sunlight creeping over her.

“What’s this one about, then? Did you finish that one about that dirty Monk?”

Hannah giggled at the charming bluntness of his synopsis, “Yes, finish the gardening and come sit with me, I’ll tell you the ending,”

“Deal,” Burt said. His haphazardly-toothed grin was endearing, and made the sun’s beam seem stronger.

She watched him trundle off, and turned back to her book. The smile had lingered on her face as she reached the end of her chapter.

Burt had been the only one to ever be kind. To even greet her with a flash of fondness, despite being worlds apart in most respects. And yet, as she remembered how she had sat happily on the earth, she felt a strong wave of discomfort. A distinct sense of guilt, as though to lounge about beneath the blue sky, rose like bile in her throat at the memory. She felt like a fraud. As she lay there, contemplating her position in her uncle’s house, in the world, on her patch of ground where her feet met the thinly-covered crust, she felt a deep sense of shame. She had not deserved such liberation, such kindness, especially from a soul as sweet at Burt. Even the dismissal from Edmund prior to skipping outside seemed like a politeness now.

She recoiled into a ball upon the silk sheets. She was not worthy of such things. The Legion crooned sweetly at this realisation, praising her for arriving at such a deprecating notion.

She belonged deep within the earth, in the astral plane that spat lava and filth, within which the demons bathed. She knew that now. These impish creatures had presented themselves to her and told her what she had needed to hear. Whether it be a twisted truth or fiction, it was hers to live.

It was after that night, where Hannah had stirred and wrestled with this realisation like the lover Edmund could have been in her bed, that the maids of the household began reporting strange behaviour to her uncle.

The Imps, as she had decided to call them, in a rather fond way, had given her instructions. These snippets of advice trickled through to her as she went about her daily errands. The first came as she was making herself a cup of tea.

The maids had chittered anxiously as they watched her drift over to the stove. There was something wrong with her. The usually cheery girl had adopted a distinctly vacant look. Her blossom-pink lips had slackened from their usually merry smile into a dull slant. Her eyes were utterly blank, and every move, from filling the kettle with water to stirring the tiny china cup, seemed eerily robotic.

Hannah moved towards the kitchen table after having heaped a sickening amount of sugar into the light brown liquid. She continued to stir it mechanically with the tiny silver spoon, but not once did the maids catch her taking a sip. She sat at the table, motionless, apart from her hand continuously stirring the tea, for what seemed like hours, until she made a sudden bolt that caused the younger of the two maids to start and let out a small shriek.

In an instant, Hannah had darted from her seat and sprung into a crouching position on the floor. She craned her neck towards the small crack between the joining of the adjacent strips of skirting board, as if peering into the small abyss. Eventually, her hands clapped around something, causing her eyes to glower triumphantly.

She moved with a speed that the maids had never seen before. Her movements, jerky and without contemplation, were unnatural. The older maid craned her neck to peer over Hannah’s shoulder, whilst retaining a cautious distance. She tried to see what the girl was holding in her hands and poring over. Eventually the maid, the toes of her leather shoes cracking as she ascended onto her tip-toes, saw the splayed legs of a house spider. Unlike the spindly round-bodied money spiders that dangled with a dozy stillness in the corners of the kitchen ceilings, this spider was large enough to discern specific parts of its anatomy, even down to the odd knuckle-joints the crumpled legs widened into at the centre of the limb. The maids could see where the fat body tapered into a head, like a bizarre figure eight. Long, thick legs, stark against the white porcelain of Hannah’s palms, sprouted from the engorged torso. The stunned creature seemed to quiver in Hannah’s palm, electric with the eagerness to spring from its captor’s grasp at any moment. The elder maid thought it would surely make a sprint for it. But before it could, the arachnid’s legs were bundled into the centre of Hannah’s palm and it was thrust into her mouth.

The younger maid dropped the silver tray she was holding. It ricocheted off the stone floor with a resounding crash, but it did not seem to register for Hannah. The older maid watched in horror as Hannah barely blinked at the sudden ruckus, instead focusing on consuming the spider with rhythmic chews. The long legs, despite being snapped and bent to the best of their ability, lingered on the edge of her mouth. They protruded grotesquely between her lips, as if the spider was trying to prise open Hannah’s jaw and make its escape. After some time, and not before she had stuffed each severed limb onto her tongue with her finger like a child wiping away globs of jam, Hannah swallowed gleefully.

Silence reigned in the cold kitchen. The older maid heard the gritty crunch of Hannah’s teeth on the spider’s body whenever a harsh quiet fell from then on. The noise of the abdomen popping beneath the pressure of Hannah’s incisors itched in the canals of her ears like the hum of a distant wasp.

“Miss Hannah! What on earth-“ The younger maid started after she had spent several minutes processing what she had just witnessed.

Her older counterpart clenched the girl’s wrist in an arresting but comforting gesture. “Hush, clean up the tray, I will fetch her uncle,”

The mature housemaid’s grey eyes lingered on Hannah with a curious revulsion for a moment before she turned swiftly on her heel and fled into the hall.

Hannah was watched closely by the two maids after that, under her uncle’s instruction. Every time she exhibited even a flash of odd behaviour they would whisper behind their hands and shortly thereafter, file into her the study to report their observations. Unbeknownst to Hannah, who was preoccupied by the Imps’ missions, her uncle was sending regular letters to the family doctor. These letters were answered up until a point, until her uncle’s complaints of lunacy in the household were forwarded to an extraneous source. They gained the attention of Dr. Wilson, an expert in dealing with lunatics at the local Blackthorn asylum. He housed them, examined them and, when prudent, returned them, often subdued and cowed, to their families. Hannah’s uncle began to correspond with him on a weekly basis, rounding up his letters on Friday evenings with a detailed account of the young woman’s behaviour. Anything new was emphasised. Her diet of insects had been consistent from the very beginning.

The Imps had told Hannah that her journey to join them in the nether-realm was the equivalent of a maze, and to navigate it she must do as they did. In other words, she was to adopt the lower ways of life, and shed herself of any enlightened humanist notions. The depletion of moral tenets would not be complete until she had become beast-like and confirmed herself to a life below the earth. Only then would she drop down to each level of the labyrinth, past where the Minotaur expelled its hot breath. She would then reach the infernal nirvana where she truly belonged.

The first floor of the labyrinth required the consumption of creatures below ground, so as to adopt the ways of a hell-dweller. The Imps had coaxed her into it, whispering furiously at her as she chewed the dry, prickly legs of spiders and beetles, trying her utmost to ignore their gritty texture, and blink away the tears of resistance welling in her eyes. But soon, the meaty crunch of the fat abdomen splitting between her teeth became a thing of rich, gratifying beauty. The Imps had begun to revel cheerily as she came to exist only on a diet of soil settlers.

In the weeks that followed, Hannah would flit from room to room as if propelled by an unseen force, pouncing on unsuspecting insects who crawled from beneath floorboards and out of the walls.

Tiring of waiting for her prey, Hannah even took to pawing at patches in the garden, scooping up worms and beetles from the damp earth and shovelling them into her gullet. She often licked the spattering of wet earth from around her mouth and seemed to relish its gritty, muddy taste with an unnerving smile.

Burt had watched, mouth-agape with revulsive shock, as Hannah had salivated hungrily over a large black beetle she had discovered beneath an upturned log. She had proceeded, much to his horror, to stuff the tiny creature into her mouth before letting out a satisfied belch. She had then crawled off, her pale pink dress filthy and her hands black to the elbows with smeared mud, like a beast.

She was so far removed from the girl Burt had befriended long ago when he was first assigned to tend to the estate gardens. The change had happened so suddenly, that Burt, from his mostly extraneous vantage point of the household, had been unaware. He had not even caught the hushed whisperings of the maids claiming she had been taken by some evil spirit, or rendered a lunatic by her and Edmund’s failed engagement. After all, he only went into the house to eat. Most of his time was spent on the grounds.

He had known nothing of countless incidents where Hannah had snuck into the garden and stuffed her throat with bugs and filth, ignoring the tears streaming down her face as she crammed her mouth with bark and stones. She had not felt the pain, or rather, it was a distant fact in an outer-corner of her mind, one which the Imps guarded closely, so that she could continue her degradation unhindered.

He knew neither of the times shortly after where she had regurgitated the muddy debris onto the carpet in the living room, and smeared it into the dense fibres with her feet. The orange bile was often streaked with filaments of scarlet where the bark had cut her throat on its way up. He had been oblivious to the occasions where she had giggled and belched hoarsely upon being discovered sitting proudly beside her filth, by the pair of exasperated maids.

All he knew was that, until she had emerged into the garden to claw at the earth periodically, he had seen increasingly less of the sweet girl he quietly called his friend.

One day, when Hannah was foraging for more lowly creatures to gorge on, Burt approached her warily. His eyes roved her bent and twisted body, her bare feet sunken into the damp ground.

"Han?" He offered tentatively.

He couldn't understand why she tarried for hours in the mud, her long hair damp with the morning mist. He supposed she must be freezing, what with her thin nightgown and unclad feet. A wave of deep concern washed over him. He set his toolbox down beside him with a gentle thud; the sound made Hannah's eyes snap upwards. Their emptiness made Burt want to recoil, even as he lowered himself onto the grass to meet her.

"Han? Are you okay, love?" Burt said softly. "Won't you come inside? Your feet... and hands... You'll catch your bleedin' death,"

Hannah cocked her head to one side, like a mongrel enquiring to its owner for silent instruction. Then, as though she had heard a distant noise, her eyes widened in wild excitement.

"Burt!" She breathed, her voice hoarse from where the bark and rocks she had been surviving on had scraped at her throat on their way up and out. "Burt! I want you to do something for me," She said, as if they were two kids daring one another to do something illicit on the school grounds.

"I want you to bury me,"

The words seemed to hover in the air between them. Hannah searched Burt's face with an eagerness that unnerved him.

After some time, Burt collected himself from his stunned reverie. "But...why would you want me to do that?"

The overly-large grin on her face flickered for a moment, like the leaves of a branch battered by a strong breeze.

"They told me to," Hannah murmured incredulously, as though such an answer was blindingly obvious.

Sweat sprang to Burt's brow, even in the cool morning air. "Who's 'they', Han?" He pressed.

Hannah's eyes swam with a mischievous wonder, as though she held secrets to things he could scarcely fathom. "The Imps!" She admitted finally.

Burt leant back, as though he were reeling from such an odd confession.

"These 'Imps' - can you see them?" Burt whispered, his eyes darting around the space between them, half expecting strange little creatures to spring from the ether.

Hannah shook her head enthusiastically. Burt struggled to comprehend, watching her, that the sophisticated, if a little girlish, young woman, had been reduced to little more than the babbling toddler sat before him. She was at the mercy of her primal instincts.

"Hear them," She clarified.

"I... I can't bury you, Han," Burt reiterated.

"Why not?!" Hannah cried, her eyes shining with tears of protest.

"Because-" Burt began, hesitating so as to expel his frustrated breath through his nose. "Because, I don't know why you feel, all of a sudden, that you should be buried, but whatever these voices are telling you, they're wrong,"

He knew he had made a misstep as soon as the words fell from his lips. Hannah's mouth formed into a taut pout. Her unruly eyebrows, flecked with specks of dirt from her endless foraging furrowed over the bridge of her nose in a scowl. After that, despite his best efforts, he could draw nothing else from her. She drew inwards and huddled away from him, her eyes growing cloudy with disdain. It hurt him, to see her so mistrustful of him. But, figuring his attempts were futile, he got to his feet and returned, with a distracted mind, to his work.

Days following Hannah’s bizarre request, Burt had stumbled upon her small, red nose protruding from the damp earth and fled into the house to alert anyone who would listen.

Hannah was quickly wrestled from the ground by Burt and her uncle, kicking feverishly as she felt the dirt tumble from her legs and torso. A steaming, snarling breath whistled from between her clenched teeth, as she protested wildly at being torn from her makeshift coffin. The maids had soon materialised at the men’s sides and produced a length of rope from their pinafore pockets. Both set to work frantically, as Burt and her uncle bent her trembling limbs into position. Her wrists and ankles were tightly bound. All the while, Hannah bucked and flailed. Her eyes travelled accusingly to rest on Burt’s face. He wore an apologetic look, his eyes moist and glistening with an unmissable guilt. His stubble-laden cheeks were punched red with cold, and above them his craggy brow was furrowed with a fear in which Hannah had never seen registered before. The usually nonchalant handyman had adopted a look of deep concern - one that, even in her violent fervour, frightened Hannah. Its unusual appearance caused her to resist even more furiously. The heels of her feet clipped one maid on the chin, and sent her reeling. Her uncle had screamed at her to finish the job, emphasising that Hannah must not break free. Having no time to nurse the red welt already blossoming on her jaw, the maid tied the remaining knots so forcefully that Hannah’s chafing ankles exploded with the prickling pain of protest.

She grunted and convulsed as all four of them carried her mud-caked form into the back of the small carriage lying at the foot of the pebbled drive. Clearly, her uncle had wasted no time in setting up transport to take Hannah from the house. Her burdensome behaviour had become too much for him to tolerate. Word in the town had circled of the “invalid” niece he kept within his walls, like a dirty secret. Hushed words and furtive glances greeted him when he visited the office. He supposed one of the maids had let the details of Hannah’s condition slip and the gossip had worked its way into town. Like some bizarre plague, it had hopped from lowlife to lowlife, until even his offices had caught wind and were crawling with it.

He had told no one of the incident that had befallen him on his walk home one evening, having stayed late at the office to file some reports.

As he had left the building, the lock sliding into place behind him, the peace of the misty eve seemed to make every inkling of stress ebb from his weary muscles. A smile even curled at the corners of his thin mouth as he donned his hat and stepped into the street. He had reached only as far as the corner shop when a figure skipped up behind him. The flurry of footsteps caused him to cast an eye over his shoulder. He soon realised that it was the local pastor, still donning his rubric and collar. A thick silver cross swung proudly at his navel.

“Isaiah!” The man shouted, his voice melodic even in such a bold cry.

Hannah’s uncle slowed reluctantly and turned round to offer a strained smile at the familiar face. “Father, how are you this evening?”

“Fine, and yourself?” The short reply and the impatient look in the priest’s icy blue eyes made Hannah’s uncle feel as though their small talk was clouding a persistence to address something more important.

“None too bad, Father,” He replied in a clipped tone. He had simply wanted to return home unbothered after a long day. A muscle jerked in his jaw behind the taut smile. “May I help you in any way this evening? Are the Church’s accounts in need of a looking over?”

The priest chose to ignore the hint of sarcasm lacing his words. Father Vogel was a notoriously serious individual. His humour, if he possessed any at all, was obvious and only emerged on the rarest of occasions. Hannah’s uncle had never known a man to be so persistently solemn. “I’ve come to advise you regarding your niece, Isaiah,” Vogel said, his hands clasped at his navel.

Isaiah’ jaw clenched, so as to disguise his annoyance at the proposed subject. “What about her?” He said, feigning polite ignorance.

“Well, people have been talking, and it seems she has fallen prey to… demonic influence, let us say,”

Isaiah smiled thinly, attempting to restrain himself from a short outburst. “Ironic isn’t it, Father, that gossip travels fastest in the Church, where one would think silence in the face of God would be upheld. It is unkind to disseminate foul rumours about others, is it not?”

Vogel’s cheeks flushed an indignant shade of pink. “You do not believe she is-?” He spluttered, but was quickly siphoned off by Isaiah’s brisk tone.

“No, I do not think she is at the mercy of the Devil,” He said plainly. “I believe she is merely beset with a serious case of nerves,”

“Nerves?! But Isaiah the stories we’ve heard-“ Vogel protested.

“Are mere stories,” Isaiah shut him down once more. “And I would thank you not to spread them further amongst your flock,”

Vogel’s face had a contorted look about it, that suggested he was about to burst with a mix of anger and the desire for suggestion. Unable to contain himself, he at last blurted out his proposition to Isaiah.

“I should like to perform a cleansing - an exorcism, if you will,”

Isaiah scrunched his nose up at the word ‘exorcism’. What a stirring, ugly word it was - reserved for horror stories and folk tales. His face smoothed out after his initial display of indignation and he resumed his bored expression. “Exorcism…” He rolled the word over his tongue. So many harsh syllables. “Is that not a Catholic rite, Father?”

Vogel, astutely German and Protestant in dogmatic origin, looked as though he had been slapped. “Sir! Why, exorcism is a Christian rite, and has been used since the Witch Trials of old, on those who succumbed to the curses of those in league with Satan! The Demoniacs - who spoke in unknown tongues, ate foul things and acted bizarrely,” His eyes moved shiftily under hooded lids to marvel at Isaiah, as if he were drawing the most unabashed of parallels between the historically possessed and Hannah.

“Yes, who lived when the country was at war with itself over religion,” Isaiah mused, “And Catholics were bold enough to try and blow up the throne. The Church still likes to appropriate what suits itself, even when it violates the version of God’s word they have chosen for themselves,”

Vogel looked as though he was about to keel over on the spot. His mouth opened and closed in silent protest, but no words could be formed. The corners of Isaiah’s thin lips curled in a vaguely triumphant smile. “We don’t require your services, Father, but we do require your silence,” Isaiah’s voice grew unmistakably cold. He knew, though he chose not to dwell on it much, that Hannah’s sudden turn was as a result of deprecative grief. The loss of her parents had caught up with her. He was also sure, deep down, that Edmund had not loved her and frankly voiced as much, without saving face. Something fragile within Hannah had snapped, leading her to become an almost feral shadow of her former self.

“If any of your lambs come from my household with further talk, do not entertain them,” He said gravely. He left Vogel to sputter strained sounds in the road as he turned on his heel and headed for home.

Hannah’s uncle bore a somewhat sour look on his downturned mouth as he faced the carriage. Such talk had caused him public embarrassment. The thought danced unerringly through his mind like a wind-bent flame. He had not yet discussed his fury with the staff for blabbing about her condition, but he certainly would when he returned from seeing Hannah to her new abode.

Burt had tried to follow Hannah into the cart, but was quickly blocked by her uncle’s firm hand on his chest. He stumbled back, and watched the pitiful sight of Hannah strewn across the backseat, wriggling frantically. It quickly receded from his view, as the tall figure of her uncle folded elegantly into the narrow doorway and took the seat opposite her. His long fingers, curled into a delicate fist, rapped the side of the ochre carriage. At once, the driver - a quiet, unassuming man named Ackles - flicked his wrists and sent the two horses thundering down the lane. The cart, housing the disgruntled, serpentine figure of Hannah writhing in displeasure, and her exasperated uncle, trundled in their wake.

As they drove, Hannah watched with blackened, glaring eyes as her uncle retrieved something from the depths of his breast pocket. A crackle and a flourish told her it was a role of paper.

“Know what this is, dearest niece?” The tone of her uncle’s speech was not the disinterested, patronising one he usually used for her. Instead it was laced with revulsion. He had come to value Edmund, his little protégé, far above the dozy girl who had been dumped into his care against his will years prior.

Her jaw was clenched firmly shut. He noticed that the diet of filth and bugs had been unkind to her. Her cheeks had dwindled to a yellowish hue, and her cheekbones pressed against the thinning skin where before they had been absent.

“It’s a letter from a man named Dr. Wilson. I have been consulting with him for quite some time,” Her uncle went on. “He is recommending you are to be committed to Blackthorn on the basis of his diagnosis of acute lunacy,”

There was a triumph to his voice, as though he had just achieved something he had been striving towards for an age. “I have his signature here - all the arrangements have been made,”

“But… he’s never even seen me. How could he decide what’s wrong with me?” Hannah murmured. She sounded, for a moment, to be near enough herself again.

“I’ve kept him abreast of your behaviour since you first began to… deteriorate,” Her uncle replied, staring down his long nose at her.

She spat at him, a phlegm-filled glob of green and brown. It landed on his knee. He scowled at her, before reaching into his trouser pocket and removing a silken handkerchief. He flicked away the filth and wiped the stain emerging on the crisply-pressed leg of his trousers.

“They won’t let you do this! I had breached level six! And I will complete it!” Her voice was a guttural mutation of the timid chirrup he had only ever known her to greet him with.

Her uncle scoffed at her, his brow furrowed in a sour, mocking imitation of pity. He viewed her as a wounded animal voiding itself in the face of death, and excreting, and expelling fluids as it twitched helplessly: a sad, humiliating sight. Hannah, in her devolvement into the Impish form she had viewed herself worthy of becoming, had grown to be little more than that.

“You don’t know what you are saying, child. You haven’t for some time,” His tone was almost bored as he addressed her. He placed the document in his pocket and stared absently at a stray thread emerging from the cuff of his jacket.

All the time the Imps were whispering in her brain. “Don’t let him take us! He wants to keep you in the above! You’ll be led out of the labyrinth if you go with him, Hannah! So much work… all undone…” They had wailed.

The journey had seemed to last for an eon, and throughout this morbid epoch the Imps raged and blasphemed in the outer reaches of her mind, their screeching as clear as a church bell, ricocheting off the cold stone walls of her skull. Her thoughts were no longer hers. In the weeks they had assimilated with those of the Imps. She had become utterly susceptible to their influence.

Hannah had glanced at the ugly grey-stone building of Blackthorn Asylum as they drew to a halt under its grave shadow. The eyesore had been erected in a poor imitation of renaissance gothic during its recent resurgence. They had hoped a structure with a skeleton borrowed from the period of enlightenment would bestow an aura of sense upon its inhabitants. But already, the dark stone had been battered and worn by various weathers. Mildew and wilting plants clung to the outcrops of brick like gangrene in a wound. The parasites of cold and ivy had sunken deep into the brickwork, making it appear far older than it was.

Once dragged from the car and thrust through the large oak doors, Hannah was huddled in a cold, pale green room. Her mud-spattered dress had been torn roughly from her body. She stood, nude yet defiant, the Imps bolstering her in response to this bizarre assault. They ensure that the hum of voices all around her, discussing her state of mind, remained strangely distant. Her concentration weaved in and out of the forefront of her consciousness, so that details drowned just as quickly as they seared themselves into her retina.

She lost entire moments. Life, as she was passed from hand to strange hand in the mouth of the large, gaudy house, jumped and skipped like a silent film reel. Noises popped and fizzled but were neither fixed, nor complete. Faces were smooth and rounded, like the aged bottoms of china pots. When she tried to focus on their features - the curve of a nose, the colour of their eyes - her vision splintered and was directed elsewhere. People dropped in and out of her periphery.

Her uncle, whose voice had been mingled with the others, was soon decidedly absent from the chaos. He had promptly turned and left her once assured she was in the hands of the staff. She imagined him hurrying to his carriage, and barking at Ackles to flee back to the house, before she could be handed back to him, and the shirking of his duties as her guardian was reversed.

The thought ignited a rage within her that, despite the Imps’ presence in her brain, was deeply human. Even by her own family she felt undervalued. She knew, according to the Impish logic she too had come to adopt, that she did not deserve any recognition. But the lonely child within her broke free momentarily, steering the deranged creature she had become into an episode of anger-induced madness.

Her hands had been briefly freed as they prepared her for her cell. Her thin wrist slipped from the clammy palm and hovered stiffly in mid-air for a moment, before she broke into action.

She stuffed the man’s hand into her mouth. His flailing fingers touched the back of her throat. In an instant, the man drew his hand away in revulsion, his fingers coated with a thick layer of her spit. But despite his quick reaction, the damage had been done. The walls of her gullet flexed instantly, and her stomach heaved. She spewed bark and rocks onto the floor.

The assistant exclaimed in disgust. He ordered a colleague to clear up the mess. Reluctantly, a weedy man in the familiar white garb slouched off to fetch a mop and bucket.

Hannah laughed jovially - her cackle was low and brooding, and sounded as though it did not belong to her. Its feminine tones were marred by a deep, thick essence that seemed almost decidedly masculine. It was as though the Imps and their unearthly chorus were using her as a conduit, their excitable chittering leaking through her battered and broken vessel.

As a result of the mess she had inconvenienced them with, Hannah was thrown roughly into the cell they had chosen for her - a dim room with a tiny square window, its cube of light fractured by thick iron bars. Its walls were covered in a thick, cladding. Firmer than a pillow but softer than brick. The dense white fabric was streaked with damp and She watched people come and go, fixing the chains to her feet and ensuring they were secured to the hooks set deep into the wall behind her. She observed the staff, never the same face, bringing in slop to eat and a bucket for her waste. They punctured the passing hours with an odd erraticism, so that time passed in an odd way. Nothing was predictable.

All that was constant was the Imps, urging her, advising her - never leaving her at the mercy of the surface-dwellers for more than a second.

Her head felt stuffed with a cloud-like wool. Both clogged and empty all at the same time. Out of the vacant sea of white, the will of the Imps swirled and swelled like the grotesque, strained feathers of fattened geese. She was both empty and crammed, swaying between the two feelings like a pendulum set on an alien pentameter.

She struggled idly beneath the constraints of the jacket they had dragged over her head only hours before. The locks, leading up to thick leather straps curling around her ankles like odd boa constrictors, jingled every now and then, in their odd solemn song of solitude.

She longed for her teeth to close around spider flesh.

Hannah was there for fifteen weeks. The attending psychiatrists occasionally came to talk to her, as precariously and pityingly as though she were a caged animal prepared to spring at them for the slightest infraction on her mental fragility.

But the talks spun in the heart of a roulette wheel, and always ended at the same point they began at. They made nothing of her condition aside from branding her with the label of a melancholia-induced lunatic. The words meant nothing to her. The Imps ignored them entirely. When Dr. Wilson had announced the diagnosis, she thought she had even heard a chorus of laughter in the back of her brain. They, of course, knew the truth. Wilson’s vapid attempts to tether her to the upside of the world would snag and fail, like the tying of a thin, worn cord around her middle. With the Imps’ help she would complete the labyrinth. There was no question of it. She knew this was what she deserved.

If there was one thing about Hannah, it was that she had always been unwavering in her ideals. Her uncle saw it as a dumb stubbornness. However others, particularly Burt, viewed it as a marker of admirable determination. Even when Edmund had shown her little affection during their engagement, she had stood resolutely by him, and assigned herself rather happily to the task of being his wife for the remainder of her days.

Though her mission was not without its hardships. Her body, existing on the meagre protein the spiders and other insects had brought her over the last few months, was in a weary state. A minute part of her even considered simply resigning herself to the walls of her cell. But Hannah did not. The Imps had told her to simply bide her time. That she did. Calmly observing and calculating her surroundings with a precision concealed by the feral glow in her tempestuous eyes. Tiny storms danced in them. And yet, behind the swirling veil of clouds, the lightning flickered eagerly.

She tucked herself up against the rotten wadding of the white walls and waited.

A letter was received and tossed to her under the small gap beneath the heavy metal door. She opened it with her teeth. It took her half an hour. She prised the folded paper open with her toes. In an odd position, she craned herself closer so as to observe the neat writing she instantly recognised as her uncle’s.

In his cold, unfeeling hand, he had announced to her that Edmund was to be married to someone else - the sister of a senior accountant at the office.

Hannah had sat immobile, digesting the letter’s content for a little while. She then urinated onto the neat paper, smiling wanly as she did so. After admiring her work, she dropped to the floor and began scratching fruitlessly at the cold floor. She had screamed bitterly and scraped at the unforgiving stone until her nails splintered and the faded green paint was streaked with blood.

Weeks passed, as she sat, curled and poised in her cell like an adder in a grass thicket. At the whim of the Imps, whose voices were somewhat dull as they too, lay in wait, Hannah screamed, flailed and munched on insects that scurried under the gap under the door. She lectured the air about the labyrinth she was intended to descend no matter what the cost, and the sense of enlightenment the Imps’ presence had brought to her.

Finally, Hannah’s window of opportunity slid into view with the arrival of the assistants who came to bathe her. She had been stewing in her own filth for so long, left to wallow and reek, that she had almost forgotten what her skin felt like without a constant layer of grime sitting atop the epidermis. She scowled as the burlier of the two men ambled in the narrow doorway. She saw his nose wrinkle unashamedly as he caught her stench.

Breath firmly held, he began to untie her chains. They fell from her legs and she rolled her ankles in relief. They cracked and popped like the turning of rusted cogs. She was obediently still, while her eyes swivelled in their sockets like a crab’s, drinking in everything around her. The assistant grasped her shoulders and spun her round on the cold floor so that he could undo the buckles of her strait jacket. His big, clumsy hands fumbled over them, until finally she felt the fabric loosen. Her arms fell to her sides.

Briskly, the assistant pulled her into a standing position. She wobbled on her heels for a moment before steadying herself. She turned under the guide of his large arm, so as to face the large metal door, now standing invitingly ajar. It took the assistant longer than Hannah to turn and face the exit. His large frame meant that he had to shuffle somewhat rather than pivot.

Hannah took this tiny second to enact her plan.

The long arms of her jacket flailing as she broke into a sprint, Hannah ducked below the breaking swipe of the man’s meaty arm and zipped through the door. She had adopted the same sudden speed she had used to strike and capture the countless spiders and insects at her uncle’s house. The man’s thick fingers closed around mid-air. She had clipped herself ever so slightly on the doorframe as she weaved through the gap, but the jolt of pain that went through her shoulder felt nothing short of sweet as she pelted down the corridor. The man’s gruff voice boomed after her, but she kept running, even as her thigh muscles exploded with the bitter sting of lactic acid.

Her eyes roved wildly in her skull, searching the long corridors for a mark of descent.

Stairs, she needed stairs.

The Imps, who had receded somewhat into the depths of her mind over the last few weeks with little to consume, were suddenly at the forefront of her skull again. Their feeble whispers had returned to sharp, resounding barks. She could almost feel them pressing against her brow, clamouring for domination. They spat their advice into her ears. She obeyed it, dashing down the lengthy corridor until she came to an atrium. She avoided looking at the staff and doctors gathered in pockets near the various offshoots of rooms, ignoring their accusatory glances. Before they could even react, she shot down a dingy opening to her left, and was pleased to see that it contained a staircase. She looked eagerly over the black iron railing and found that the rickety frame acted as some sort of passage allowing access to all floors of the asylum. It was the spine in Blackthorn’s gargantuan nervous system.

The Imps croaked with joyous laughter she she thundered down the winding iron staircase. She could hear voices above her, but she did not care. She descended further and further, until the stairs stopped abruptly and she found herself in front of a grotty wooden door, softened and pockmarked by rot.

She flung it open eagerly, grinning as the Imps encouraged her. The cramped lintel and frame bore entrance to a dingy corridor, beset by large iron pipes running along the ceiling. Hannah realised it was likely the tunnel network underneath the building, a route used by workers at candlelight to access one side of the building to the other speedily when necessary.

The slither of daylight coming from the door was all that lit the endless tunnel. Her shadow punctured the light source, leaving only trickles to spill over into the daunting mouth of the winding system.

But she was unafraid. She had been convinced by the Imps to find the darkness of the earth comforting, and so this great, damp serpents’ jaw was of no bother to her. The Imps were chittering in her ear like a flock of excitable chicks baying at the edge of the nest for food as she stepped a bare foot onto the cold floor. Instantly she became enveloped in the darkness. Her eyes glimmered in the small stream of light coming from the walls surrounding the iron staircase. A wide smile spread across her face as she closed the door behind her, drowning out the distant shouts of the asylum attendees still thundering after her. She let the darkness swallow her, and pressed on into the mouth of the beast. Another level of the great labyrinth to conquer.

Perhaps this one was the shortcut she had been longing to find.

September 8th, 1897

Dear Sir,

We regret to inform you that the body of your niece, Hannah Elizabeth Stanton, was found on the grounds of Blackthorn, deceased.

An inquest has been opened regarding the exact nature of Hannah’s escape from her room and resulting death, but according to the coroner’s report (see enclosed) the immediate conclusion is suicide.

Please find enclosed a check for the amount fully paid for the remainder of Hannah’s time within our care prior to her death.

Please accept our deepest sympathies.

Kind regards,

Edgar Wallbank (Director, Blackthorn Asylum)

Having read it, Isaiah handed the letter briskly to Burt, without comment. Burt saw the words “body” and “suicide” and fell queasily against the corner of his master’s desk.

Isaiah flicked through the attached pages, which were a coroner’s report detailing the state in which Hannah’s corpse had been found. He tried to push down the morbid curiosity within him but soon gave in. Lifting the pages until he came across a starkly impersonal rendition of a body crammed into the pipe-filled flooring. The measurements floating beside the perimeter of the crude figure made Isaiah’s jaw clench in disbelief. How could she have stuffed herself into a hole in the floor that was so small?

Rumours were already flying around Blackthorn. The attendant who supposedly discovered her on his nightly walk through the tunnels did so because of a foul odour, so he told. He recounted in hushed tones in the various books of the asylum corridors to hungry ears of how, upon opening the iron grate, he could have sworn he heard a rousing chorus of laughter emanating from the hole. He was sure he had been imagining it, but the symphony of triumphant howls was all too crisp a sound to truly mistake.

Still, as he hauled the metal slab to his right, what it revealed made the attendant all the more certain something inherently bizarre was afoot.

He yelped loudly, and his shock made the grate slip from his hands. He drew his foot out of the way in just enough time as it fell against the dank floor with a deafening clatter. The lamp he had set down beside him flickered, as if cowed by the raucous. But then, as it slowly began to burn bright once more, its orange glow spilled into the hole left by the slab.

It revealed something horrifying.

Wedged against the roughly-hewn piping was the contorted form of what had once been a bright, unassuming young woman. Death, which was sometimes peaceful, had robbed her entirely of this girlish effervescence.

Her mouth was wide and slack, but the essence of a placid smile rested there. Her eyes, half open, were coated with the glassy lacquer of stillness that made them appear like marbles set deep into the frame of a doll’s head. Her wrists were bent at a sharp angle and tucked beneath her chin. The bloated skin of her face and forearms was dyed with the magenta hues of dead blood stirring below its surface.

The attendant had never seen a corpse this far into death before. He had always assumed, naively, that the skin shallowed and sunk against the bones. Rather than being emaciated, Hannah appeared as a grotesque mutation of the girl she once was. A stain of deep red was smeared across her lips where her body had expelled blood. Her fingers, although fused from Riga mortis, were puffy in some places, as though they had swelled from a harsh cold.

She had curled up, knees to her chest, in the tiny man-hole. And her body, malnourished and waning, had given up on her in perhaps the most insidious example of self-flagellation imaginable.

The attendant vomited; The sight and smell was a sensory overload, and he struggled to rid the acrid stench of her distended corpse from his nostrils for several days after, as he relayed his experience to various colleagues. He pondered the incident in silence, often as he engaged in the mundane tasks of changing bedsheets and closing curtains, and wondered what thoughts had been running through Hannah’s mind as she lay in the confinements of the odd little hollow.

The attendant had not known that the Imps had controlled every dying thought to flicker across her mind.

Deeper, deeper, they had crooned, as Hannah wedged her body against the rumbling pipes. Every part of her ached, but a smile was fixed on her face the deeper she pressed herself into the ground. The final level! The final part echelon of your labyrinth. Soon you will be with us.

Her breathing was laboured and rasping as she dug her feet between the pipes. The coarse metal was unkind to her pale skin. She groaned and yelped as her bones screamed in protest. Everything was uncomfortable, and yet the throbbing of her limbs in their twisted tableaux was oddly sweet to her, just as it had been when she had envisioned herself falling into the earth the first night she heard the Imps. They told her to love the pain. They had taught her to revel in the disgusting, the unwanted, because this was the closest thing on earth to her true nature.

Hands reaching up gingerly above her head, she felt around for the lip of the grate. With what little strength she had left, she dragged it over the hatch. After fumbling at it like a child’s puzzle box, Hannah eventually got the corners to fit. They slid in with a loud clunk. She felt the metal grate press against her cheek and bathed in the total darkness. It cloaked her aching limbs in its silken mass, and made the pain even sweeter. Her breathing slowed and the smile on her face was unwavering, as she listened to the congratulatory cheers swarming her brain.

As her heart slowed and her breathing laboured, her body crushing itself in its bizarre foetal crouch, she saw a clear vision of the Imps, small, including-black and goblin-esque, with harsh, pointy little features, hopping and dancing around a roaring blue flame. They were celebrating her homecoming. She was soon to be united with her diabolical kin. She lay, curled up like the eye of a snail shell, and let the pain wash over her. Eventually, the agony of her bones, crammed against the perimeter of the hole, softened and was replaced instead by a throbbing euphoria. A long breath gushed from her dry, parted lips. As it lingered in the damp air before her, she heard the familiar genderless voice whisper with a perverted longing.

Han, come home now.

Their use of Burt’s affectionate nickname made a tear roll from her tired eyes. She momentarily cured how clever the Imps could be. Despite knowing deep within that it wasn’t Burt calling to her, she preferred to think, in those final weary moments, that it was. The only one who had ever shown her true kindness, guiding her to her eternity.

Hannah’s tired lungs did not draw any of the stagnant air back in. She had not reached hell, where Satan stirred in ice and chains. The centre of her labyrinth was this tiny cavity, set deep below ground.

For the Imps, it was enough. And for Hannah it was, too.