“Wake up! Wake up, Aiden!”
Somebody’s banging on my door.
“You have to wake up, Aiden. Aiden!”
Swallowing my tiredness, I blink at my surroundings. I’m in a chair, clammy with sweat, my clothes twisted tight around me. It’s nighttime, a candle guttering on a nearby table. There’s a tartan blanket over my lap, old man’s hands laid across a dog-eared book. Veins bulge in wrinkled flesh, crisscrossing dry ink stains and liver spots. I flex my fingers, stiff with age.
“Aiden, please!” says the voice in the corridor.
Rising from my chair, I move to the door, old aches stirring throughout my body like swarms of disturbed hornets. The hinges are loose, the bottom corner of the door scraping against the floor, revealing the lanky figure of Gregory Gold on the other side, slumped against the doorframe. He looks much as he will when he attacks the butler, though his dinner jacket’s torn and caked with mud, his breathing ragged.
He’s clutching the chess piece Anna gave me, and that, together with his use of my real name, is enough to convince me that he’s another of my hosts. Normally, I’d welcome such a meeting, but he’s in a frightful state, agitated and disheveled, a man dragged to hell and back.
Upon seeing me, he grips my shoulders. His dark eyes are bloodshot, flicking this way and that.
“Don’t get out of the carriage,” he says, spittle hanging off his lips. “Whatever you do, don’t get out of the carriage.”
His fear is a disease, the infection spreading through me.
“What happened to you?” I ask, a tremor in my voice.
“He…he never stops…”
“Never stops what?” I ask.
Gold’s shaking his head, pounding his temples. Tears stream down his cheeks, but I don’t know how to begin comforting him.
“Never stops what, Gold?” I ask again.
“Cutting,” he says, drawing up his sleeve to reveal the slices beneath. They look exactly like the knife wounds Bell woke up with that first morning.
“You won’t want to, you won’t, but you’ll give her up, you’ll tell, you’ll tell them everything, you won’t want to, but you’ll tell,” he babbles. “There’s two of them. Two. They look the same, but there’s two.”
His mind’s broken; I can see that now. There isn’t an ounce of sanity left to the man. I reach out a hand, hoping to draw him into the room, but he takes fright, backing away until he bumps into the far wall, only his voice remaining.
“Don’t get out of the carriage,” he hisses at me, wheeling away down the corridor.
I take a step out after him, but it’s too dark to see anything, and by the time I return with a candle, the corridor’s empty.