“Jiahui!”
Jiahui’s mother’s voice echoed from the floor below. It was muffled by layers of drywall and distorted by distance, but it always pierced through to the furthest corners of the house.
Meanwhile, Jiahui was in the kitchen, chopping carrots with the big cleaver that her mother always told her to be careful with. Despite its intimidating size, Jiahui had never used it for anything other than vegetables. Only when her mother used it to tenderize meat did she ever see it pulverize flesh— muscle fiber pounded into a shapeless mass, tiny pink flecks blown over the countertop.
Jiahui wished she didn’t think about her mother so much.
It was Wednesday, which meant that Jiahui’s mother was doing laundry, and Jiahui was being called to go to the boiler room. She didn’t like it there. The boiler room was the farthest place in the house to reach. It was connected to the rest by a peculiarly long hallway— precluded by a tiny set of stairs, which always made Jiahui stumble when she went down them, and proceeded by a nightmarish walk down the slanted corridor. The lightbulb at the end of the hall had been burned out since before Jiahui was born. The only illumination came from the preceding corridor and the boiler room itself.
When she was young, the hallway used to give Jiahui nightmares. However, in middle school, she began to take a sort of strange comfort in it. She would run to the end of the hall and sit in the suffocating, blanketing darkness, far away from where anyone would be able to find her, and far away from where she could hear anyone yelling her name.
“Jiahui! Are you daydreaming up there?” Her mother’s voice cut through the silence. “Come down here and help.”
Grimacing, Jiahui set the cleaver down onto the cutting board. The door leading downstairs was already open. Jiahui wished she didn’t live here.
Reluctantly, Jiahui stepped into the dark. The dingy lightbulb overhead flickered. It was barely a comfort nowadays. The world was a lot smaller.
⸸
The few occasions she’d ever had other kids over, her classmates (not friends) told her the hallway was creepy.
“It’s haunted,” they’d said, milling about nervously at the entrance, “there’s a monster waiting there at the end.”
Well, it’s not haunted, Jiahui thought as she walked. But maybe it’d be better if it was.
What waited at the end of the hallway was worse than a ghost. The boiler room, with its dimly lit, bloated metal guts, the laundry machine next to it. This thing was maybe the worst apparatus in the house. At least, it was the one Jiahui most disliked; supposedly energy efficient, it ate its way through twice the regular amount of power on its normal settings, clanking and groaning all the while like an old man on his deathbed. There was an arduous set of inputs to ensure it would finish drying at a reasonable time that could not be reset if a mistake was made in the middle.
Eventually she had screwed up the sequence so many times her mother had decided she simply wasn’t responsible enough to do the laundry unwatched. Of Jiahui’s many unpleasant memories in the house, some of the worst were trying to press the right buttons under the exacting gaze of her mother, and feeling the judgement in her eyes increase with every misstep.
The sooner she got this over with, the better, Jiahui reasoned. The hairline cracks along the walls under her fingertips seemed to go on forever.
It was taking longer than Jiahui remembered. Yes, the walk was more than most were used to, but she’d been down here countless times. Had she successfully avoided this long enough that she’d forgotten what the passage was like? Or maybe the opposite was true, that she’d wandered so many times on autopilot that her perception was skewed. She shrugged it off. It didn’t really matter. The door was in sight anyway.
Finally she arrived at the laundry room. The door was shut. She tried the handle, only to find it locked.
“Mom?” she frowned, jiggling the handle again.
A low, creaking sound answered her. Nothing else.
Jiahui had no idea what to make of this. Briefly she wondered if her mother, the most humorless woman she’d ever known, was making some sort of strange joke. Whatever was happening, she wanted nothing to do with it. There would be a smaller chance of getting blamed if she fled the scene.
Jiahui turned on her heel and began making her way back to the stairs. The hallway seemed even longer this time. She tried not to shiver.
When she made her way towards the tiny, teetering steps, she flung the door open, only to find a smooth concrete wall instead of stairs.
Jiahui felt panic begin to prickle under her skin.
“Mom?!” she called out. It had been her mother’s voice she’d heard down here, hadn’t it? Of course it was— the house had no one else.
Jiahui’s call was swallowed by the dark. The air was still.
With nowhere to go, Jiahui ran back towards the boiler room. Perhaps, impossibly, she’d find escape in the room she’d tried her best to avoid for 18 years. An undiscovered door. A false wall. A hatch to the ceiling which would wind a spiraling path to the backyard. Something.
She made to the laundry room in record time, only to find the door swung open to a pitch black interior.
Jiahui carefully sidled in, hands outstretched to feel along the pipes. The room had a single source of illumination when the washing machine wasn’t on— a lightbulb activated by an old-school pullstring. Jiahui moved her hands around, feeling more than a bit foolish despite her fear, until her fingers brushed the chain.
Click.
The room was barren of laundry. The air smelled like copper. The washing machine sat unused and dead, its mouth-like lid gaping open. Propped against the opposite wall was a mass of flesh vaguely resembling a body. The hands and feet were severed, and what might have once been a face was indistinct. It sat silently in a pool of dark fluid, of which Jiahui had one foot inside.
She stumbled backwards and slipped, landing hard on the concrete floor. To her horror, she realized that the hallway outside the boiler room was also smeared with fluid. It had been invisible in the dark. Now it soaked into her clothes, onto her hands.
Jiahui scrambled on all fours to get away. She slipped again and hit her chin on concrete. She cried for her mother. No reply came from the dark. She got on her feet and bolted for the exit.
It seemed the farther Jiahui ran, the longer the hallway stretched. It began to feel like the lower floor had dissolved into one long, twisting corridor. Jiahui turned sharp corners that weren’t there before. She caught her heel on sudden bumps in elevation. The incline of the hallway changed multiple times: up, then down, then down, then up, twisting in on itself like an intestine.
Jiahui could barely see through the hair in her face and the tears clotting up her glasses. She was feeling her way through the hallway more than walking. Not helped by the fact that the only light came from occasional bulbs next to eerie empty doorframes, the only break from the utter dark.
As she looked over her shoulder, haunted by flashes of limbless, faceless, flesh, Jiahui rammed into something heavy. She thought she heard a labored grunt from outside her own skull. She stumbled back, struggling to focus her vision on what now stood before her.
There was someone else in the hallway, illuminated by the open stairwell. Another her. Same hair, same clothes splattered with dark blood, same apron that she’d forgotten to take off upstairs. In her clenched hand, she held the cleaver, soaked black with gory residue.
The most striking difference, however, was her expression. It was a look of hatred Jiahui had never seen reflected in her own eyes before. Rage so potent her entire face seemed twisted by it. Her own face made alien.
They stood frozen in the corridor for a few seconds, the other Jiahui’s heavy breathing rattling down the hall.
Finally her double spoke: “What?” she snapped. “What?”
Jiahui couldn’t speak. Her mouth was stuck open.
Her double advanced on her with the cleaver. “You want to take this from me?” Her chest heaved with each ragged breath. “Do you know how long it took to gather the strength?”
She rounded on Jiahui. Jiahui thought she would turn the knife on her. Despite this, she found herself frozen. If her double had sank the blade in then and there, she would have been met with no resistance. Instead, she stepped back with a frustrated sneer.
“This choice is mine. If you want it, do it yourself.”
With that, the double stepped through the doorway and began shambling up the steps. Jiahui could only move when she disappeared from sight. When she rounded the corner, her copy was gone. There were only the stairs leading up, marred only a small spatter of red, and the cold glow of the lightbulb above.
It took Jiahui a great deal of effort to move her feet. Step by step, she dragged herself up. Her head was pounding. She wrestled with the doorknob, struggling to find purchase with her sweat-soaked palms, until it finally twisted. She pushed open the door, stepping into the bright light—
⸸
“Jiahui!”
Jiahui’s mother’s voice echoed from the floor below.
She was back in the kitchen, standing before a cutting board and a half-finished mound of chopped carrots. A stock-filled pot sat on the burner for boiling. Flies buzzed near the window above the sink.
Jiahui stared forward, her eyes wide. Her hands were clenched in two trembling fists. She could not remember how to breathe. She did not know if she was even alive.
“Jiahui! Are you daydreaming again?” Her mother’s voice cut through the silence. “Come down here and help.”
Jiahui looked down. The cleaver was clenched in her right hand. It had a dull gleam, a blade showing a distorted reflection of her sweaty, pale face.
“Jiahui!”