It was hard to identify just what that tone was her voice dripped with. Not disdain, but, in her exhaustion, a kind of disbelief. Of course Mina was worried. Of course she was.
She should want to go to see her friend, her sweet sister. She should want to be sure that she was safe. But while she had not retained a full memory of the things she'd seen, there had been that vision of a skull rotting away, licked by maggots, rotted and mildewed flesh above clean white fabric. She shuddered in her dark little cell.
She lifted her head slightly to see the shadow of Victor as he slid into the confessional. Through the grate, as her eyes had adjusted to the dark, she watched his face.
What had happened to send her from the house? She had a flash of horror, of the sense that the house was a prison, that the dead would bring it down on her, that the floorboards seeped with blood and entrails hung limp and gastric from the rafters like taffeta. "Death drove me," she murmured. She leaned her head against the wall that separated the two booths from each other. Her hair was matted around her face - little else was visible.
"Do you believe there is something more than death, Victor?" she asked. She was so tired the question was almost in a dream, almost a question asked by someone else to someone other than him.