Wilhelmina A Novella (15 page)

Something thin and razor sharp pierced the skin between my neck and shoulder, slicing into my soft flesh like a knife, and soon I was the one who was screaming. The agonizing pain jolted through my body like lightning.

Those sharp and fiery teeth were yanked out of my shoulder as the monsters around me began fighting over what was left of the survivors.

A strong hand grabbed my wrist and pulled me to my feet as two furiously growling titans of rock and ash collided behind me. I stumbled along the blood soaked grass, slipping and sliding as this mysterious stranger and I made a feeble attempt to escape this hellish night. It would do no good, I knew this much.

The slave led me out of the garden and into the cover of the lush green trees. I heard both of us panting and heaving, gasping and swallowing loudly with bits of our voices staggering out of our throats like whimpering dogs. I knew that we had to be completely silent if we wanted to stay alive; the problem was stopping myself, silencing these small yelps as we ran, because it felt like my body wasn’t mine, and these gasps belonged to someone else. I just happened to be along for the terrifying ride.

The slave fell to the ground and began screaming, loudly - so
loudly
. My frightened mind and wandering body were reunited when I realized the danger his outburst posed.

‘Shh! They’ll hear us!’ I hissed, but it was no use. He gripped his chest and screamed as loud as his lungs could bellow.

‘It’s burning,’ he shouted, ‘burning like fire!’

I saw the round crescent shapes on his leg in the shadows, three demon bite marks. He kept screaming, no matter how many times I told him he was going to get us caught. He was gone, lost. So I ran as far away from him as I could. I ran past tree after tree, jumping over any fallen trunk or obstacle in my way.

My lungs burned and my heart was straining itself to pump blood through my veins. Very little seeped out of the wound in my shoulder, which stung like an acidic balm had been rubbed into the wound, but I ignored that for the sake of survival. My legs heated up with the burn of adrenaline, and my lungs were ever warmer.

Actually, my lungs felt like they were on fire; they were literally
hot
. It was incredibly difficult to breath, but the focus on my lungs was torn away as the heat in my legs became so scorching that it was hard to believe that it was just the exercise.

Suddenly I was in a world of pain as well, just like my previous partner in escape, whose screams had gone abruptly silent just moments ago. I stopped running and grabbed onto a nearby tree to keep from toppling over. My feet, my thighs, my arms, my chest, my head, my
heart
, they all burned. It wasn’t fire, like the man said, it was
hellfire
.

Scorching hot sand scratched and scraped its way through my veins, and ten thousand blisteringly hot needles slowly pressed themselves into my skin, harder and harder until the pressure of them all broke the skin and set my nerves ablaze.

My mind surged with a powerhouse of shock. I felt like I should have been on fire, my body as bright as the sun in the night, but I was still in the dark forest beneath the shade of canopy.

I clenched my teeth tightly; I wasn’t going to scream and give away my position to the deadly stalkers in the woods. I fell back onto the ground, gripping and clawing at the cool soil, but my palms were still holding invisible fireballs and molten iron smothered my body. I wished that the liquefied metal would sweep me away and dissolve my flesh as instantly as I knew it should, but the iron wasn’t really there.

I pounded the dirt, covered my mouth with my hands and bit into the grit, breaking the skin and drawing blood - anything to stay quiet as this horrid perdition engulfed me like a tar pit.

The blood I drew only burned my throat as it seeped into my mouth. Like my very blood boiled and each drop sizzled. It was. I couldn’t stand it anymore, this was too bewildering to withstand.

I picked up a rock with sharp edges, anything sturdy would do, and grasped at the images of my dearest to me, pushing him through the flames and pain and into my mind. Behind my eyes, I saw Charles. Not as he was in the pile, dead and still, but as we were that morning, together. When his body was smooth and just as exposed as mine, and his skin was like a white night sky, faceted with burning stars of sweat on a milky way trail down his navel and to the deepest part of him. It wasn’t like his skin was burning with hellfire, but rather his very soul was trying to break through as we were one.

I struck. And I struck again. And again, until I could escape this pain. I heard a crack as the right side of my skull caved in, and my brain had been shocked into blackness from the final blow. At that point I remember becoming disoriented, but I can’t remember much of those moments other than random thoughts and images.

But even that desperate attempt at suicide wasn’t enough. By the next morning I had complete control of my thoughts again. I felt every inch of my hot, burning body to make sure that the flames weren’t real. I felt my head; it was as though the rock had never touched my temple, healed anew new.

Demons, those rogue and devilish fiends of the night that drank and bathed in the blood of my friends and fellow human beings, were all that flashed in my mind as I rolled around the bed of leaves and twigs, screaming, chewing at the dirt and clawing at my skin. I wasn’t sure when I’d started screaming, but there I was in beautiful morning glory, my world completely pain, shouting and begging for death.

The rogue urchins, remnants of a fallen king, the bloodshed of everyone in the manor, these unexplainable flames, they were all part of the tragedy, the
truth
, that haunted me; I had gone insane.

I must have been crazy, out of my head, to have seen, to have endured what I was going through. These fires, incapable of being doused, must have been my punishment from god for begging a demonchild of the devil to thrust deep into me, loving every minute of it. I was soiled, dirty, and this was my eternal punishment; the freedom to leave the governess’ mansion of horrors only to be licked by the unearthly tongues of little imps as they seared and scarred my skin.

If so, then was I dead? How did it happen?

Did that bite to the shoulder kill me? Or did Charles lose control when his instincts took over, and I was to succumb to his lust for flesh and blood at the same time? Or, maybe, just maybe, I was still lying in the mud of the garden shed, thirteen years old and a victim of my own stubbornness, starved and dehydrated, breathing my last breaths while undergoing the desperate delusions of a child who yearned to live a life of fantasy, a life where she grew up to be beautiful, where she did see Charles and he confessed that he was madly in love with her. Delusions of her guilt and sorrows manifesting themselves as bloodthirsty monsters while Mr. Abberdean became an angel.

After nightfall, I lied still on the forest bed and stared at the sky in a helpless heap. I hadn't drawn a breath of air in hours, let alone screamed. There was no point in screaming, that was a response to pain one felt in the real world. But I had transcended to an entirely new plane of pain and suffering.

What good was a cry for help when I was already dead?

This pain was above and beyond screams, it was unlike anything I’d felt, and I understood why. It wasn’t burning my body away, oh no; it was burning away at my soul. It was eating up my spirit, everything that was
me
, like a fuel, like a star, exhausting on this most precious resource until there was nothing left.

But what then?

What happened when my soul was dried up and inexistent? What happened when I was left hollow inside, alone in the darkness of the woods? Would that mean that my hell, this purgatory, would be done and finished with me? Would I go to heaven, or hell for being a consort to darkness, for loving Charles?

Would I simply cease to exist altogether?

The thought of being nothing, not even a memory, was as unbearable as this indescribable agony. And yet, as my heart raced and pumped this thick, fiery punishment throughout my body, it sounded like a dream come true.

Time held no essence here. There was a strangely beautiful purple haze flowing along the night sky, like a wispy river, one long and never ending cloud. The moon simply crawled along the sky while the sun followed suit, like two lovers chasing one another, even though neither of them could ever reach the other save once in a while, eclipsed and whole, until they were lost to each other again. Meanwhile, I was shackled to the earth in defeat as snakes of razorblades and glass shredded my skin and twisted inside of my belly in gyrating torrents.

I was certain, after all of the clawing, burning, and slicing, that I must have looked like a creature from the darkest depths of a child's nightmares. A monster. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right.

It was injustice.

For all their killing and slaughtering, for all their selfish, vicious, gory, cruel, bloodthirsty ways, those who’d done this to me remained beautiful. But I would be a monster until my punishment was served, disfigured and hideous for crimes that were not my own. Like I was the virgin priestess Medusa, raped in Athena’s temple, and the goddess took her wrath out on me, accusing
me
of the defiling her sacred grounds.

The morning sun rose again, and I knew wouldn’t feel it above the fires of penance, just like every other day before. But there
was
something different this time, something I felt only slightly, but the difference was enough to notice above the ceaseless inferno that had consumed me for what must have been months, maybe even years.

What I felt was warmth in my open palm. I painfully twisted my head to look at the pale palm, with fingers so white they had to be made of snow or ice, and saw the sun’s brilliance bouncing off of the china smooth curves of my hand, sending beautifully vivid colors all around the forest and trees. As the hot pain edged away from my palm, and cool, soothing milk poured through my veins, my forearm imitated my hand and wrist - shifting from soft flesh to hard, smooth porcelain.

Soon my other arm followed suit, and my feet, too. Over my elbows and knees, ebbing away and retreating into the core of my body.

My heart raced faster and ached with tension as the flames inside burned hotter and hotter, like a star burning up the last of its essences. I was livid, frozen stiff with such a higher plateau of agony and torture that it seemed to mesh with ecstasy. The friction of my struggling heart, beating away at the white hot heat inside of me, was a pain so intense that my fingers curled and my legs became restless at the sensation of the curse consuming what was left of my soul.

Climax: my heart literally burst inside of me with an awe-inflicting explosion of heat and ice cold tingles colliding throughout my entire body, from head to toe, all the way to the ends of each strand of hair. I was the cold hard soil and the fluidic sun at the same time, and I could feel everything, as though every lash, every lock of my wild red hair, was a limb, a beating organism, a part of me.

I remained on the ground, wondering just where the agony, where the torture, had gone.

Just where had the hell that I was so prepared to suffer through gone?

Now there was only the warm touch of the sun’s kiss, and I smirked; maybe that’s why the moon is always running while the sun is chasing? He isn’t exactly faithful if he’ll kiss any woodland tart on her back. Then I laughed as I realized I’d just called myself a floozy for enjoying the warmth of a cosmic man that was far too great for my reach.

I really had gone insane.

I was on my feet before I had even
thought
of moving, like my body reacted to whatever I wanted without question, like there was no resistance from the air, or even gravity. That’s because there wasn’t.

The woods were so lovely, dark but warm and lit; a sensual gift just for me. Dust motes and bark fibers drifted through the air in large spiraling clouds, all around me and above my head. Spider webs drifted on the soft breeze, their ghostly white streams streaked by beams of illustrious gold beauty that painted the dark jade walls in the shade of the leaves.

My perception shifted, and suddenly the world moved faster, what I would consider ‘normal’ before I died and went to heaven - or whatever this place was. Then I shifted the world again at will until everything stood completely still, frozen and unable to move unless I deemed it fit to do so. In this world, this reality, this new life, I was able to shift the world to my own perception, and I loved every moment.

Then I was hit over the head by the thoughts that had remained dormant. Thoughts of the governess’ mansion, thoughts of the dismembered slaves as their debauched killers drained them dry of blood and soul altogether. Thoughts of the pile of statuesque pieces where Charles’ body would be.

If I had a heart it would have wept for him at that moment.

I heard the snap of a twig and I turned around so quickly that there was no transition at all. I was looking ahead of me, north, and then I was facing south, staring down a doe as she froze under the ferocity of my hiss.

No, not a hiss – a
growl
. I’d been so shocked by my own predatory reaction that I couldn’t move out of my crouch. I could feel her heart beating, as the faint thud of her neck moved the air around it so that I could feel the pressure thumping against my own skin, yards away. I could smell her, sense her fear, and smell her blood; it was repulsive. I stood up once her unsavory odor dissolved the mood to hunt. The moment I moved, she jolted, galloping away at such a slow rate I could have walked right up to her and snapped her neck.

Snapped
her
neck?

I couldn’t believe the thought had actually occurred to me so carelessly, as though I was thinking of whether or not I should butter my toast.

I ran through the forest, my flaming hair whipping behind me like real fire. In fact, I felt like fire personified – free and dangerous if anyone got too close. But I had complete control over that factor - or so I thought. My hubris would soon become a misfortune.