The silver letter opener.

“You kept it,” Mina whispers, and with a delicate hand, she scoops it up, passing it to me.

“Of course I did,” I say, holding it tight.

It’s all I can bring through with me. The very thing that killed me.

The air shifts in the room, and there’s suddenly someone else with us. She’s no more than a shadow at first, her spectral figure soft and unformed. Then she emerges, bit by bit. Her dark hair, her nervous hands, that face I know so well.

Bee. She curls into herself, her whole body shaking. This is unfamiliar to her, only the second time she’s died. She’s not an old pro at it like me.

A long sigh, and she opens her eyes. “Hello, Lucy,” she says, and her gaze shifts. “Hello, Mina.”

At this, Mina brightens. “Hello, Bee.”

They’ve never met, but they know each other anyhow. They know the stories, all our secrets laid bare in this place.

An echo beyond this room, and the men are getting closer, the flames devouring them. We can feel them coming, and so can the others, the walls rattling, hard and fast.

“What are we going to do?” Mina asks, and Bee and I each take her hand as we wait for this.

The men materialize among us, obscure at first, before becoming stronger, more solid. More dangerous. They gather themselves to their feet, their shadows so much darker, so much longer than before. The arms are reaching out for them, but both Rochester and Dracula sidestep every one, grinning to themselves, remembering how they put them here. This purgatory of souls they handpicked. Souls they condemned to this.

Dracula turns toward us. “Sweet Mina,” he says. “So lovely to meet you again after all these years.”

Mina whimpers as we slide back across the floor, but there’s nowhere to go, nowhere that isn’t reaching out for us, reaching out for them. This is it. What Bee and I have been running from for decades.

Bee looks at me, the darkness edging closer. “Now,” she whispers, and I clutch the letter opener tighter.

Dracula sees it in my hand. “That won’t do you any good here,” he says. “I’m already dead.”

“It isn’t for you.” Smiling, I turn toward the wall. “It’s for them.”

I wait until an arm pulls back, far enough out of my way. Then I plunge the letter opener into the wall and cut straight through the plaster, gone soft and liquid. It opens up like flesh, like an infected wound, and a hundred fingers emerge, slithering like Medusa’s crown. But one gash isn’t enough. I slash again and again, dozens of times, trying to make room for all of them to crawl right through.