//CLARA//
The darkness wasn't just an absence of light anymore. It was a wide, rotting maw waiting for the exact second I closed my eyes to swallow me whole.
"More, Hattie," I rasped. My throat felt like it had been scrubbed with sea salt and gritty sand. "Light the ones on the mantle. All of them."
"Miss Eleanor, the room is already glowing like a cathedral," Hattie murmured.
"I don't care. Just do it. Light them all," I snapped, the words coming out sharper than I intended.
I saw her flinch, and a pang of guilt twisted in my chest, but the fear was louder and it was bludgeoning against my ribs like a sledgehammer.
Her eyes were rimmed with red, her apron wrinkled from hours of sitting by my side. But she didn't argue. She moved from one corner to the next, the rhythmic scritch-scritch of matches the only sound in the suffocating silence.
One gas lamp. Two. Five.
