The hallway learned new distances as she walked, the walls swelling and tightening like lungs that had never known air and were testing it for the first time, floor tiles glittering faintly with embedded flakes of mica that caught her breath and returned it to her in tiny cold flashes, the ceiling rising until it drowned in a dusk that could not belong to a house. Footsteps softened to a hush that felt borrowed. Her pulse counted in her ears with the insistence of a small animal trapped beneath a bowl. She told herself not to hurry. She did not listen.

At the far end, where the light thinned to a delicate bruise, the figure waited. Rabbit by suggestion only, pale coat too clean to be alive, long ears lifted as if listening to a song she could not hear. One gloved paw held a watch whose chain pooled on the floor like a thin spill of mercury, links slipping over each other with the quiet of coins handled by a careful thief. The watch face caught the dim and refused to keep it, glass curving into a tiny moon that trembled each time the hand twitched. The creature tilted its head and the outline shivered, edges dipping in and out of comprehension like a candle flame in a draft, one blink and there were whiskers, the next a sleek muzzle not made for hay, another blink and a smooth feline jaw with teeth like polished pins, and then the rabbit again, as if her sight were being corrected by an impatient optician who had lost interest in accuracy and cared for speed.

A voice reached her without choosing a mouth. The sound rode the plaster and the hidden beams, slithered down the paint in a low murmur that curled under her ribs and tugged like a hook set with exquisite care. Come along, it breathed, light as lint, then again, sharper, as if the corridor itself had decided to speak. Come.

The watch ticked. It did not tick like a clock. Each small sound scraped, a grit of crystal dragged across glass, a blade tested with a thumbnail. The seconds were not equal. They arrived greedy, then late, then in pairs that fought each other for her attention. She felt the irregularity in her chest until her heart attempted to match it and then failed and then tried again, eager to please a rhythm that did not deserve obedience. The rabbit lifted the watch to its ear, listening with a patience that suggested this inspection had been repeated many times and would be repeated again, perhaps forever, and then it looked at her with eyes that ought to have been red but were silver, mirror-bright, a liquid metal trapped by skin, so reflective she saw herself inside them with greater clarity than any human eye could offer, a clarity that felt like the first breath after breaking the surface of a lake in winter.

Something delighted at her fear. She could feel that pleasure the way one feels a draft slide under a door. It did not belong to her. It helped her move anyway.

When she drew another step nearer the figure stuttered into its other shape as if the rabbit had been a costume ripped off by impatient fingers. The small black cat stood where the rabbit had stood, fur so dark it swallowed the weak light until its outline looked cut from an absence. Silver eyes regarded her without blinking. The tail made a slow question mark and then straightened with a flourish, punctuation on a sentence that had not yet been spoken. A purr rose without breath, a tremor that traveled the floorboards, traveled the bones of her feet, traveled the narrow stairs of her spine, and landed somewhere behind her eyes with a faint, pleasant ache. The cat smiled the way cats do, which is to say the mouth stayed almost still while the gaze did the work for it, the promise of teeth so gentle it could almost be mistaken for kindness. Then, with a twitch that made her stomach dip as if a bridge had swayed, the cat slipped and the rabbit returned, ears tall, whiskers precise, watch steady in the tender cradle of its paw.

She tried to speak. The word arrived dry and unuseful. She closed her mouth and swallowed the failure like a pill taken without water. The rabbit turned and moved. It did not hop. It did not run. It slid forward through the thinning light as though pulled by a thread knotted through its ribs. The chain followed with a soft cascading hiss. She followed because not following would require explanation and the part of her that still enjoyed explanations had gone quiet.

The passage opened into a long gallery where portraits had once hung. Pale rectangles remained where frames had shielded the paint from fading, each rectangle a door that had forgotten its hinge. The rabbit coasted past them in a line that knifed toward another dark. As she drew alongside the last pale mark she saw a reflection without a source, a girl’s face at the age of ten looking back from a bare patch of wall, mouth smudged as if with jam, eyes wide with a trust she no longer wore. The vision vanished before she could flinch. The next rectangle held another version of her, older by a breath, eyes a shade colder. Then nothing. Then a third, distant, regal, intolerable, so composed that for a heartbeat her chest cramped with anger, and then that too cleared as if wiped by a careful cloth. The gallery did not want her memories. It wanted her attention.

She gave it freely. The rabbit paused and looked over its shoulder with a jerk too sharp to belong to a living neck. The silver returned, that impossible silver that made a mirror of an eye, and for an instant she understood that being seen was not the same as being looked at. Seen was catalogued. Seen was measured and noted and filed. Seen meant a ledger somewhere had gained a line with her name and a series of neat marks that would only grow.

Shadows at the baseboards thickened as if filled with ink. The smell changed, leaving dust for something damp and green, the breath of moss peeled back from stone, the faint sweetness of sap nipped from a twig and tasted by teeth that would later admit the crime. A breeze arrived from nowhere and went nowhere, lifting her hair at the temples and laying it down again with the intimate assurance of hands that had known her for years. She stepped from wood to tile and the tile offered a temperature she could not remember learning, colder than kitchen flagstones, warmer than ice, a womb-temperature that carried the memory of dark and patience.

The rabbit moved faster. Its outline juddered with the haste, sometimes breaking into a handful of jagged pieces that regrouped with a soft tug each time the watch swung. She matched it without thought, breath shortening, shoulders easing into a runner’s ambition she did not recognize as hers. The chain sang quietly. The scrape-tick of the watch marked a discipline that punished hesitation. One of the pale rectangles to her right buckled, became a window, showed a field she did not know under a sky the wrong shade of blue, and the wind through that false pane smelled of hot grass and ash. She resisted a childish wish to reach out and touch it. She focused on the creature’s back, that theatrical whiteness that wanted to be believed and did not deserve belief.

A whisper crawled up from the tiles with a grit that reminded her of salt ground with a spoon. Come see, little heat. The phrase made no sense but fit inside her head with the comfort of a proverb. Come see how easily you are moved.

She lengthened her stride. The gallery narrowed to a throat. The throat swallowed. Beyond it a new space flared and died and flared again, light behaving like an animal trained to beg for scraps. She smelled stone caught in rain after a long drought. She tasted copper and fruit skin and the sticky throat of a theater after a crowd has left, all perfume and dust and the echo of applause trapped under seats.

The rabbit stopped so abruptly that she stumbled, catching herself on a wall that ceded an inch too much and then hardened as if chastened for hospitality. It faced her squarely now, body still, watch steady. The ears sharpened with a soldier’s attention. The silver burned. It lifted the watch to her face with a slowness that made politeness feel like a threat. The hand inside skittered backward, then forward, then backward again, and each motion nicked the air as if carving marks where she would not see them until later. The chain coiled at her feet like a docile snake.

The voice came a second time, clearer, as if it had grown bored with suggestion. Follow. The word lodged behind her breastbone and scratched at the soft while it settled. The eyes widened a hair. She had the sharp ridiculous sense that it was taking notes. She squared her shoulders because if she could not be brave she could pretend and perhaps the pretending would learn how to become true. The watch clicked once, a single tap that vibrated her teeth.

Then the mask slipped again and the cat stood in its place, small and perfect, fur drinking light, silver eyes without kindness and without malice, an appraisal that made her think of jewellers and surgeons. The tail swayed as if drawing a line through possibilities and then choosing a single path. A purr rolled out that did not need a throat to exist. It climbed her bones like ivy. It found the top of her skull and pressed there until her scalp tingled pleasantly and she blinked slow. She stopped herself from stepping forward only because some feral preservation rose and hissed inside her like steam in a pipe.

The cat tilted its head and the movement dragged reality with it for a heartbeat, walls bulging, tiles slipping, perspective lurching, then smoothing as if nothing had occurred. The mouth opened a fraction. The tongue touched a tooth. The eyes said everything words would ruin. Then, with a neat shiver, the black dissolved and the rabbit returned, ears taut, whiskers curving into punctuation only it could read.

It spun on one heel and flowed away, watch swinging, chain trailing, a glimmering line she could not bear to lose. She went after, faster now, heartbeat stitching itself to the scrape-tick until the two were one, breath shorter, limbs warm, a lightness in her chest that felt like laughter starved of a reason and so inventing one. The gallery became a series of doors that would not be doors and windows that did not care what they looked out upon, the air thinning and thickening like soup testing recipes, the temperature fluctuating with a cruel intelligence that kept her from adapting. She loved it. The shock of that truth made her stumble again and this time she did not fully recover, her palm grazing the wall, fingers sinking a little into a surface that had learned the trick of flesh.

The rabbit’s pace eased. It wanted her near. It let her catch up by a hand’s width, no more. The watch swung within reaching distance, the glass catching her face and returning it strange, skin a shade paler, eyes wider than she had thought, mouth uncertain in a way she had not allowed it to be since childhood. She reached without deciding to. The chain lifted like a living thing surprised by a touch it expected and had chosen to behave for. The rabbit pulled it away by an inch. The correction was gentle. The lesson was not.

It stepped into a space that did not exist an instant before it entered, a clearing that grew like mold in shadow, low and wide, floor glassy as if the world had been dropped and glued back together with a clear adhesive. Hairline fractures crossed underfoot in patterns that tempted naming. She named none. The rabbit stood at the exact center and trembled as if caught in a thin wind that had chosen only one body to disturb. The watch stilled. A hush fell, thick and sweet, making the air near her mouth taste of sugar scorched at the bottom of a pot. She wanted water and did not want water. Thirst made the heart bold.

The last of her caution cracked. She walked to the center, each step drawing a soft note from the glass beneath, a music that built on itself until it sounded like insects singing in a dry field, relentless and patient. She stopped within reach. The rabbit lifted the watch one last time to her face, then tilted it so that the glass caught the strange ceiling and finally her eyes aligned with the silver hands.

They spun. Backward. Forward. Then not at all. In the stillness there was a sound like silk cut with a perfectly sharpened scissor.

The cat looked at her through the rabbit’s eyes. For one impossible instant the two overlapped, a double exposure that landed in her gut with the weight of a vow. Something inside her made room and something else moved in and sat down with the self-assurance of a guest who knows they were invited long before the host understood it. She felt as if she had opened a window in a room that had always been sealed and the first gust had discovered her furniture and begun to rearrange it.

A lull of breath passed between them that tasted of rainwater kept too long in a bucket. The purr returned, a vibration that now seemed to come from the glass underfoot, from the walls, from her own ribs, a choir with one note. The tail of the cat she could not see flicked in her mind, precise and pleased. The rabbit inclined its head, a small courtly bow that would have been absurd anywhere else and here felt appropriate. The watch clicked a single gentle click that sounded like approval.

She reached again. The chain rose away. The lesson repeated itself without cruelty. Not yet, it suggested. Learn to want it properly.

Her breath shook. She steadied it with a stubbornness that felt like a habit she might come to love. The clearing dimmed, brightened, dimmed again. Something below the glass stretched, the way a sleeper stretches without waking, long and slow and content with its own strength. She did not know that movement. She wanted to.

The rabbit turned for the last time and ran without running, gliding toward a mouth in the far wall that had not been an opening until that moment. The edges of the mouth rippled like the surface of a pond when a fish rises under it. The watch swung in a perfect crescent. The chain sang once, bright and thin. She followed, legs carrying her with a grace they rarely had, mind clear and empty as a bowl set for a purpose it has not yet been told. Excitement rose in her throat until it felt like a second heartbeat. The corridor beyond the mouth smelled of sap and stone and coins cooled in water. The walls leaned in to listen. The floor promised a change she could not yet name.

She did not look back.