The Twin They Erased novel · Chapter 14 of 24
Chapter 14: The Ledge
I did not shout and I did not hammer on the door.
Three years in a tower had taught me what a locked door was for.
It was for making me wait, and I was finished waiting.
The yellow room had a window onto the porch roof.
The sash was stuck with old paint, and I broke it loose with the heel of my hand.
Cold air came in off the lake.
I went out onto the slates in my school shoes, with the whole dark lawn below me and the lit windows of the dining room throwing yellow squares across the grass.
The bell tower rope had been forty feet.
This was a drainpipe and twenty.
It ran up the corner of the house beside the top window, bolted to the brick every few feet, and it held my weight with a groan.
I climbed it hand over hand, the way I had climbed every night for a month, and my arms remembered how.
At the top I got one foot on the sill and a fist around the frame.
The curtains were drawn.
Through the gap I saw a lamp turned low and a narrow bed.
I tapped the glass twice with one knuckle.
Nothing moved.
I tapped again, and the curtain shook.
A hand came up and pulled it back.
It was my own face, framed in the window.
Her hair was long and tangled and her cheeks were hollow, and she wore a nightgown a size too big.
She looked at me with grey eyes that took a long time to focus.
Then she turned the latch with both hands and pushed the window up, and I fell in over the sill onto a rug.
"You're real," Tilda said.
Her voice was a rasp.
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