Chapter 7 - The Unforgiven Debt
"Elena, listen to me, Sarah was a roommate from college, nothing more, it was a lifetime ago," Mark stammered, reaching out to touch her arm, but she flinched away.
"A roommate? Is that why our daughter is holding her childhood toy? Is that why we're trapped in some supernatural purgatory tied to your past?" Elena shot back bitterly.
The younger Mark at the desk stood up abruptly, knocking his chair over onto the linoleum with a clatter, his eyes wide with terror as he stared directly at Clara.
"Get out of my apartment! Who let you in here?" the young man yelled, charging toward the corner, but he passed right through Clara’s small form as if she were smoke.
As he passed through her, the apartment around them began to distort, the walls bleeding a thick, black oil that soaked into the carpet and stripped the color away.
"You traded her life for your degree, Mark. You walked away when the fire started," the radio rasped, the voice shifting into a distorted mimicry of Sarah's final screams.
"I tried to save her! The smoke was too thick, the ceiling collapsed!" Mark screamed back at the empty air, falling to his knees as the crushing weight of old guilt broke him.
Clara walked over to her weeping father, placing the pristine pink bunny on his lap before pointing a small finger at the closet door at the end of the hallway.
The closet door was scorched and blackened around the edges, glowing with a dull, internal heat that suggested a raging inferno was trapped just inches behind the wooden panels.
"We have to open it, Mark," Elena said quietly, her anger completely replaced by a hollow, crushing despair as she looked at the burning closet and then down at her husband.
"If we open that door, we invite the fire back in. We invite the past to consume whatever we have left of the present," Mark warned, his voice a choked whisper of terror.
"We never really left it, Mark. We've been living inside the smoke for twenty years," Elena replied, walking over to the scorching handle and laying her bare hand upon the iron.
"Mommy, look! The hallway is changing again!" Clara called out cheerfully, pointing toward the window where the college apartment was dissolving into a completely new scene.
Through the glass, instead of the university campus, they could see the backyard of their current suburban home, but the grass was dead, twisted, and covered in ash.
A figure was standing by the swing set in the ash-covered yard, wearing a dark blue button-down shirt identical to the one Mark was wearing at that very moment.
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The figure turned its head slowly toward the window, revealing Mark's own face staring back at them with a wide, manic grin that held no humanity whatsoever.
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