Something More Than Night by Ian Tregillis

She’d seen the undamaged floor a thousand times, damn it. A dark haze fell across the bedroom. Her vision retreated into a tunnel.
    The burn contracted, pulsed, snapped back. Unmoved. Unchanged.
    Molly collapsed on the rumpled bed, too weary even to remove her boots, and fell into a dark dreamless nothing.
    *   *   *
    The moon hung a little lower in the sky, but it was still dark outside when she awoke to a clanging sound from downstairs. A metallic banging, as though somebody were rummaging the pots and pans and being none too gentle about it. There was a smash, as of broken glass, followed by what sounded, impossibly, like the roll of surf along a beach.
    What the hell, Bayliss?
    Molly groaned. A hot, spiky headache had taken root inside her skull. She’d strained herself, and now she had the hangover sensation that a layer of grit coated the backs of her eyeballs. She rolled over and once again retrieved the bat from its hiding spot under the bed. A dull ache throbbed in her toes and ankles when she wobbled to her feet; she should have removed her boots. (Hadn’t she been barefoot before? She remembered footprints in the snow.) She crossed the bedroom, boot heels clacking across the floorboards. She opened the door that led to the stairs, and immediately knew something was very, very wrong.
    First: it wasn’t night any longer. The space on the other side of the door shone brighter than a July afternoon.
    Second: the apartment’s staircase had disappeared. The senseless jumble in its place was a scrap heap, a pile of examples—impressions—of the concept of stairs:
    Part of an escalator. A concrete step from behind her childhood home, its riser covered in scrawls of blue and yellow chalk, an ice-cream cone melting, a little boy crying. Step 232 of the Washington Monument, the one where she’d lost count during a school field trip in ninth grade. A half-twist of the spiral staircase from an old 747. The space under the stairs to the choir loft of her mother’s church, the home of Molly’s first kiss.
    She descended the kaleidoscopic gauntlet where the stairs had been; dodged the flickering news footage of firefighters dousing the flames that would gut this building in the future; tripped over the time she’d cheated on Ria; squeezed past the tortured squeaking of a mouse caught on a glue trap in the pantry; and landed just outside a kitchen that smelled of spilled red wine and freshly extinguished birthday candles. She tightened her hold on the bat, took a deep breath, and prepared to scream bloody murder.
    But when she leaped from her hiding spot, the words shriveled in her throat. It wasn’t Bayliss.
    The thing in the kitchen wasn’t remotely shaped like a man at all. Nor, she realized, was it alone. Another loomed behind her. When the being in the kitchen turned, a pair of vast gossamer wings scraped dust from the moon. Its face was a blinding sheet of flame.
    WHERE? its query thundered with demand. The bat in Molly’s hands exploded into a cloud of mismatched butterfly wings. They fluttered to the floor while the furious angels grabbed Molly by the soul, turned her inside out, and shook until all her memories fell away.
    … the sting of salt in the eye, the crumbs of a broken oyster cracker …
    … a needle in Martin’s arm, his bleary eyes not seeing her …
    … downloading a Wynton Marsalis album, playing it on infinite loop while studying for final exams …
    WHERE?
    … the pop of bubble wrap …
    … a dog licking Molly’s fingers, its tongue warm and slobbery …
    … the smell of melted plastic …
    … standing in line at the DMV, getting hit on by a redneck in a gimmee cap …
    … dirt caked under her fingernails …
    … a cracked lid on the container Leslie Johnson used to bring a cow brain to school in fifth grade, the blood smeared on her desk looking like canned ravioli sauce …
    … an earache …
    … Martin pushing her down in the mud so that she’d stop following