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The Old Brand-New: Lena lives in a lonely mansion, but one snowy night, a vengeful clone of herself comes to make her pay for the life she never got to live.

 

Chapter 7

“Some people are like antifreeze. They taste good. Then, they tear up your insides.”

Dan listened to the water drip into the bottle. It was no faucet, but it was steady. Calming. The whole night, sleep had escaped him. And so, he puzzled. With water secured, the next problem was food.

“We’re agreed on five days, then?” he asked Andrew, who sat huddled by the door. “I guess we’ll have to split the food in half. So, per day, that’s a tenth of what we’ve got.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Andrew replied. “But after that, we’re out. Unless we eat less.”

The two men stared at each other.

“That’s not going to be fun,” Andrew continued. “Can we wait a day before eating, just to stretch it out?”

Dan shrugged. “Might work. What about afterwards?”

“After we get out?”

“Yeah,” Dan said. “Or maybe—best if we stay here, right?”

“Well, that won’t work,” Andrew said, standing up and stretching. “Unless you’ve hid a pile of steaks somewhere.”

“I thought I heard a rat the other day,” Dan said. “I don’t know. I don’t even know how many rats there are, but if we find some, we’re set for at least a week. And if we go outside—it’s just—people out there won’t exactly be nice.”

Andrew’s brow lowered, his eyes shrinking to slits. “I’m not daft, you know.” Dan shrunk back.

“Sorry,” Andrew said. “I’m just—this is stressful, okay? Look, the rats might work for a few days, assuming we can catch them. But we can’t stay here forever.”

“But we’ve got water. Clean water! Where else can we find that?”

Andrew raised his arms. “Then what do we eat?”

“I dunno,” Dan said, rubbing his forehead. “More rats?”

“Oh, yes,” Andrew said. “We’ll lure them out with a pan flute and have a feast.”

Dan dropped his eyes. “We can figure something out.”

“We’ve got a moldy sandwich, Dan,” Andrew said. “And a half-empty bag of beef jerky. But out there? There’s always Valton.”

“Valton’s probably a cinder,” Dan said.

Andrew shrugged. “It’s only a few kilometers downhill. We can pop down and back in half a day.”

Dan wrinkled his nose. He’d never stopped at Valton, and neither had anyone else in the course of human history. The whole town was twenty buildings full of half as many people. He only knew its name from their desperate radio ads. Every town with a history tried the tourist angle. Trouble was, every town in the Mits was historical. The bloody endelwood made it impossible to move around. So, best as anyone could tell, about eight thousand years ago, people had squeezed out of the forests and built every city in the world right then and there. As far as Dan knew, nobody’d founded a new town for centuries. It all made Valton seem—pointless.

Dan shuffled his legs. That infernal scratching was echoing down the hall again.

“Shh! There it is,” he said, jumping to his feet. “Listen!”

The men waited, but after a while, Andrew furrowed his brow. “I’m not hearing anything.”

Steady and silent, Dan snuck down the tunnel. After a moment, Andrew followed. They scanned the walls, waiting for something to move. Every now and then, the scratching would stop, but it always came back. Eventually, Dan reached the trash-pile at the end, where the scratching seemed the most intense.

Andrew rubbed his chin. “And you’re still hearing it?”

Dan nodded.

“You’ve got better ears than I do,” Andrew said.

“I mean, it’s not very loud,” Dan said. Curling over a piece of wood that jutted out from the wall, Dan stuck his ear toward the wall. “It’s in the pile.”

Andrew’s face rumpled in abject disgust. “Oh, this is sickening.”

Though Dan had to agree, he started to paw at the trash. He let the loose bits tumble off to the side as he carved his way through. Wires curled around his arms; nails threatened to pierce his skin. Scooping away black sludge, he made his way deeper and deeper. It took the better part of ten minutes, and Andrew refused to help for the whole time, but Dan cleared a small hole to the back.

That was when he saw the doorknob.

It stuck out from a door, as doorknobs tended to. But the sight of this particular doorknob on this particular door, having been sealed behind a disgraceful pile of rubbish in an abandoned tunnel, made Dan raise his eyebrows.

“It’s blocked,” he said.

Andrew squinted and inched closer. “Well, if that doesn’t ring the alarm bells, the bells are broken.”

“Wanna see what’s back there?” Dan said.

“So much.”

The men started to clear a better path to the door—Andrew even took a few handfuls of the black sludge. In a few minutes, Dan cracked the door open. Behind it was an empty tool closet. Not two meters wide, not two meters deep.

At the sight, Andrew closed his eyes. “All that—all that. For a broom closet. And no rats.”

Puzzled, Dan stepped into the closet. As Andrew shuffled back to the other side of the tunnel, shaking his hands clear of the sludge, Dan tapped on the wall. The scratching had gone away. But he had heard scratching. If not rats, perhaps something mechanical? He glanced at the ceiling and found an air-vent just outside the closet. That would be it, then.

But when Dan sighed and turned away, the scratching began anew. Mocking him. When he walked under the air-vent, he didn’t feel anything. Not so much as a breeze.

Frustrated, he knelt and scanned the walls. Surely the rats had a hole somewhere. And surely the pathmen had a reason for sealing the door. But he didn’t find a hole. Instead, his hands landed on two small pebbles tucked away in the left corner. He picked them up. They were smooth river-stones, no larger than his thumbnail, and when he turned them over, he pursed his lips. Someone had carved a rune into them:

 Dan stared at them with low eyes. It must have been a joke. If genuine, these might’ve sold for quite a bit. Nothing spectacular, but a thousand marks at least. These kinds of runes didn’t pop up just anywhere—you had to dig deep underground. Nobody knew where they came from, but Dan always liked them. Not even from just a religious perspective—Mother, the King, and every rector this side of the continent saw those runes as proof of God the Conqueror’s first army of men, and Dan supposed he had to believe that, too—but beyond that, Dan just liked the thought of the unknown soul who had, long ago, sat with a chisel and carved them so perfectly. Dan smiled. He tucked the stones into his pocket and walked back to Andrew.

At that moment, the scratching stopped.