DIVINATIONS 
MAGAZINE

The motel was a victim of decay. A flickering sign illuminated the building, its bricks bruised by neglect. Debris lurked in the shadows outside of the reception area. At the witching hour, Maura was the only soul disturbing the silence. She urged the door open, her hand ghosting over cracks where paint peeled. It groaned, reluctant and disturbed, as she entered.

The reception desk dominated the room, harbouring a recently deceased cigarette and an abandoned coffee cup. It stained the air with the odour of spoiled milk and smoke. Maura smothered a cough as the taxi driver’s words slipped back into her skull:

“Sure you want to go that way?”

“Why?”

The silhouette in the front seat had hesitated. “Not much out there, is all.”

The hospital had warned her about infection risk post-surgery. Doubt was a different kind of disease, but exhaustion was an effective cure. Maura had sunk into the backseat and closed her eyes, tempting sleep. “It’s all booked,” she said. “No refunds.”

The sentiment held true as she approached the desk and faced the evidence of her non-refundable booking. There was no bell to ring, nobody to summon. Just a typewritten note buried beneath a key:

enjoy your stay at the Gateway. we hope you Sleep Well.

Easy enough. Maura could live without a warm welcome if it spared her from small talk. Reaching for the key, her fingers skimmed over metal. A cry shot past her lips as she yanked her hand back. It was red-hot. Violent heat devoured her fingertips with a bubbling burn. Her skin liquified, melting down to the revelation of bone. Fire cascaded through her hand, pain whitening her vision—

—her eyes squeezed shut. When she blinked them open, her fingers were fine. There was no burn, no pain. All that marked her hand was an erupting bruise from where the cannula had fed into her vein earlier that day.

“An absence of evidence is the proof of imagination,” Maura murmured. It was the explanation her mother used to smooth over the cracks in reality. A daydream is just an excuse for the mind to gaslight itself, Maura had been told since before she knew what gaslight meant. The human mind is an expert at trickery. She nursed those old words like wounds as she touched the key again.

The key was smooth and cold, speckled with cigarette ash. She swiped it from the note, checked the room number and deserted the reception area.

Room 3 was painted a sickly shade of green. Maura stepped inside and closed the door. It locked with a loud click. An unnerving silence swelled in the space. The curtains had been preemptively drawn, as if some poltergeist had anticipated her midnight arrival (There was her imagination again. She could almost hear her mother tutting).

Dropping onto the bed, Maura rescued her phone from her bag. Call me if you feel like you’re slipping, her mother had said. She dialled her number and listened as it rang.

Another loud click sounded. White noise bled from the phone, crackling in her ear.

“Mau—” A voice, warped and discordant, cut through the high-pitched static, broken off like a limb at the end, “—you’re—”

The butchered sentence faltered.

“Mom?” Maura could hear notes of her mother; the familiar low drag of vowels, like they were being exhaled in a stream of smoke. She thought of the dead cigarette in reception, all burned out.

“Maura,” The voice itself was crackling now, the failed connection dragging it down to unreachable depths. “Mau—ra.” It flatlined. Maura heard a third click: an extended tone, high as a siren’s call. Two words crackled beneath it: “Sleep well.” They repeated in splintered sounds: Sleep. Well. We. Sleep. Elle. Weeps. Well. Sleep. Well. Sleep. Sleep.

Maura flung her phone away. It smashed into the boxy television, punching a hole through the right-hand corner. Glass shards erupted, sailing through the air and scattering across the carpet. She stared at the wreckage, her rapid breaths stabbing the air.

Something trickled out of the hole. A dark line travelled downwards, pooling in front of the television set. Maura stood up and crept towards the cabinet. Her hand hovered in the air before her. She was overcome by the sensation that the limb had disconnected itself from her body. She watched as it travelled downwards, marked by the purpling cannula bruise, and trailed through the weeping liquid.

She watched still as her hand—this limb severed from her mind—raised the sticky substance to her mouth, pushing past her lips and stroking the inside of her cheeks.

Iron coated her tongue, metallic and bloody.

The line was red, the liquid hot. It wept, as if from a fresh wound.

A hand shot out from the hole and seized her wrist. Sharp nails dug into her skin, excavating flesh from bone. Maura choked on her bloody fingers as she screamed into the silence, her eyes slamming shut—

—and flying open.

She was sitting on the bed, holding her phone. The television was whole. There was no fracture in the scene before her; only the same shabby motel room, no refunds accepted.

“Your imagination...” The sentence crumbled in her mouth, tasting like ash, “Just an excuse.”

Her phone refused to wake up. It was dead, she realised, swallowed by the black hole of low battery. She couldn’t have made any call. There was no cell service here. Didn’t the taxi driver warn her? It was just a daydream. A dream-dream, maybe. When was the last time she had slept without the aid of anaesthesia? It was easy to slip in and out—there was a reason why she couldn’t drive home post-surgery.

Nightmare removal was still a relatively new procedure. They had said it would take a while before she would know if it had been successful. Her psyche had to exorcise itself first. The natural trajectory of recovery: it would get worse before it got better.

Rational logic was all Maura needed, the executioner of imagination.

Pressure slid across her lower back. She jumped up, whirling around to face the bed. For a second—

—no. She blinked fast, skipping the scene. Whatever cracks her subconscious had fallen through, logic said there was not another person in the bed. That had not been a foot brushing her back. The yellowed sheets could not have rustled, because they were undisturbed now, crinkled only where she had sat.

She needed to sleep. She knew she would sleep well.

Maura exchanged her hospital gown for pyjamas, pulling on a pair with a teddy-bear print. They were like the ones she had worn as a child, matching with her twin sister. Elle had always wanted them to mirror each other.

Slipping into bed, Maura pulled the sheets over her limbs. They were softer than she had expected; heavier, too. The weight anchored her shoulders. The bed itself seemed almost like an ocean, uncharted territory that she sunk into.

And it did feel like sinking, a gentle kind of drowning. She was slowly drifting off, then quickly drifting down.

The mattress was folding inwards.

Maura barely managed a gasp before she heard a vicious rip. Her body was swallowed up, falling into a labyrinth of springs as the mattress sucked her inside its metal cage. The coiled springs hissed as they ensnared her ankles and wrists. She struggled as they stabbed through her skin, a raw scream scratching her throat before the mattress closed over and locked her into darkness. Her consciousness raced away—

—until life shocked back into her body. Maura flinched awake, shuddering as she scrambled off the bed and stumbled away from the mattress. She hit the wall, grasping the curtains before she turned around.

The sheets were a twisted mess, sweat stains stark against old discolouration. She expected a crimson massacre, but there was nothing. The mattress was unbroken. She looked down at herself and saw no evidence to suggest a thousand springs had perforated her body.

“That’s it,” Maura stumbled towards the bathroom, “Enough.”

Fluorescent light pierced her eyes, buzzing like flies above her head. She pretended her hands weren’t shaking and splashed water over her face.

Gripping the side of the sink, she conspired with her reflection. Do you think I’m imagining things?

I don’t know. Her reflection stared back. Do you think Elle was imagining things?

Maura recoiled. She strangled the tap, shutting off the water as she confronted her mirror-self, this false twin. Her hand reached up to graze her left ear, easing her hair aside.

There—a series of stitches, curved like a crescent moon that had risen above her helix, sewing the side of her head back together again.

Or, at least, that was what she should have seen.

All rational thought was erased by the check of reality. Instead of post-operative stitches, Maura’s fingertips brushed over a scar that was months into healing. She traced the puckered spots where stitches had been removed, evidence of a post-surgery existence.

“I fell asleep,” she said to the thin crack between herself and her reflection, “for a second.” An hour, at most. She couldn’t have been trapped in that nightmare any longer.

Screaming tore apart her thoughts, setting her alight with panic as she hurried from the bathroom. A grainy scene blared out of the television set. All the air fled her lungs when she saw the figure in the recording.

It was her mirror. Her twin.

Elle was screaming. The brutal echo shoved a shard of terror through Maura as she watched her sister, the reflection she had not seen for years, drown in a bed like the one behind her. The picture glitched, rewinding with a screech.

“No!” Maura scratched the screen, slamming her hand against it as her sister’s screams ricocheted again. “Let her go!”

It was the same motel room. If Maura could reach inside the television, she could pull Elle out. She punched the screen, splitting her skin as glass cracked. Elle was inside. Elle’s hand had reached for her—

The recording cut out. White noise blasted across the screen. The dots spilled onto her bloodied knuckles, static writhing up her wrist. Maura tried to slap it off, but the static raged up her arm like fire ants, stinging her skin.

Maura, Maura, the static screeched as it scorched her shoulders, racing towards her neck, tasting and taunting. Your mother warned you: an absence of evidence is the proof of imagination. But you know the truth of twins. A woman disappears in a motel room. A woman is eaten by a motel room, gobbled by the walls and swallowed by the bed. A woman slips through the cracks, devoured by a nightmare. The voice crackled, viciously intimate as it climbed into the crook of her ear and stroked the skin near where her scar, those undone stitches, disrupted her flesh. Is Elle dead? Or is Elle asleep? Are you dead? Or are you asleep? You tried to cut us out, but you only made us hungry. We liked the taste of her blood. Your blood. Her flesh. Your flesh. The end. Here is your end.

Tears stained her cheeks. Maura gasped as she came unfrozen. She lunged forward, running for the door. She threw it open and almost fell into the waiting void.

Oblivion stared back at her. Beyond the threshold of the motel room, there was nothing but aggressive absence, a gateway to complete darkness. No ground, no sky. All she heard was the steady pulse of a heart monitor, coming from somewhere above. She pressed her hand to her heart. The rhythms were a perfect match.

She had never woken up.

Sleep well, the severed sound whispered. Maura sank to the floor of the motel room as static burrowed into her ear canal. Lost in limbo, she stared out at the black expanse of her nightmare and succumbed to sleep.