Candle in the Attic Window(60)
Where was he? Where was he?
Rocks crunched together. She froze. Her eyes cut to the door. A shadow, rippling in the wind. In her mind flashed again that long-ago nightmare of mismatched eyes. A voice like the thunder rattled in her head.
Her hand flew to her locket and she screamed. She flung herself at the closest window and broke through, heedless of the scratches and splinters in her skin. What she could not ignore was the splash of pain that rippled up her leg as her ankle twisted and refused to bear her weight. She tumbled forward.
“No, no, no, NONONONONONO,” she whined, her voice long unused now slipping forth like metal scraping metal. The shadow stalked her, gliding across the ground like a hunting dog ahead of its caster.
She met his eyes across the distance. Grey like the rocks and harder still. They widened as they took her in and she felt the memory of scalpels and cold ointments. He opened his mouth to speak, but then she was moving despite the pain, moving up and towards him, shrieking like a hawk. She lashed out and he fell back, no longer a monster but a man, the same as any in the anatomy texts. Berserk, she threw herself on him.
As she bore him down, images pinwheeled through her brain like scraps of paper caught in a wind. Images of the man before her examining her with grey eyes and a surgeon’s smile, and of another whose mismatched eyes blazed hungrily, hatefully in her head and whose voice cut across her soul like razors stropping stone.
Her fist rose and the man squirmed away from her, babbling inanities. She reached for him, feeling the strength coil through her. She could rip him in two like a rat and crush those hateful eyes. As she dragged him back, fear filled the grey eyes. Fear and something else.
Her face looked back at her, contorted in rage.
“Elizabeth,” he said. But he wasn’t looking at her. His flailing hands snagged the locket and, as she jerked back in surprise, he tore it loose. She stood and stepped back, her hand flying to her throat.
Then, hands dangling, she looked down at him as he grovelled in the dirt, sobbing and clutching her locket. No, not hers – his. His locket. His Elizabeth.
She wasn’t his. She had not been waiting for him. A darkness crept upon her and she saw those mismatched eyes again, alight this time with a devil’s flame. Her hands clenched then, abruptly, relaxed.
“No,” she said. “No.”
On his knees, he reached for her, babbling. She stepped back. “No,” she said again, more strongly. She brushed fingers across her throat. The weight was gone. The weight of Elizabeth. Of memories not hers. Of designs and desires that she had no part in.
She was not Elizabeth. She had never been Elizabeth. And she had not been born in the sea. But to the sea she would return.
Leaving the man with the grey eyes behind, she walked away from the house with its secrets and down towards the water, her golden limbs moving much more smoothly than they ever had before. Before she knew it, she was running.
As she entered the water, she wondered, just for a moment, whether her intended bridegroom would be upset by her absence. She imagined his mismatched eyes wide with rage and his hands, so like hers, shaking in fury. Then, pushing that thought aside, she wondered what her new name would be.
In the end, there was only one way to find out. With strong, smooth strokes, she began to swim.
Josh Reynolds is a freelance writer of moderate skill and exceptional confidence. He has written a bit and some of it was even published. For money. By real people. His work has appeared in anthologies such as Cthulhu Unbound 2 from Permuted Press and Specters in Coal Dust from Woodland Press, as well as in magazines such as Innsmouth Free Press and Bards and Sages Quarterly.
Feel free to stop by his blog, http://joshuamreynolds.blogspot.com/, and cast aspersions on his character or to give him money.
Dark Epistle
By Jim Blackstone
I pressed the skull to my stomach. I only looked down once to investigate it again, while I fled for my life, and only because my fingers had slipped into what I can only imagine to be ocular orifices that should not have been there. The skull was demonic to the core, triangular, and as black as the darkness beyond the stars.
Forgive me. In my haste to start this letter again, I have begun in the wrong place. Each day, I run, hide. Like a rabbit in winter, desperate for sustenance, I sense the proximity of those who hunt me. I know that my time is scarce.
Yet, I will try for the port of Tyre, or for the crossroads at Constantinople, or for escape to undetermined lands far safer than home.
First, however, I will do my duty. I have to report.
It was never my intention to wander so deeply into darkness. I could say the same about so many things: I never intended to live in a blighted wilderness on the edge of the Holy Land; I never intended to join a suspicious religious order of knights; and I never intended to fall in love with a woman – “Abide even as I,” said the Apostle Paul to the unwed, and such was my sacred aim. Then the Pope involved himself.
I write these words that, through blasphemy, truths might be revealed. The Western World needs to know those secrets rising covertly from the Orient and invading, through stealth, the lands of my nativity. All must know of the conspiracies, political manipulations, usurpations, demoniacal plots, and the hidden fight for survival, the silent war that we are on the verge of losing. Indeed, the first draft of this letter, I had addressed to the Holy See in Rome, the Church Father himself. Yet, I fear that if I do not change my account – offer truth in the lingua franca of my people – that these things unspoken and unspeakable, which may have been known by the Ante-Nicene Fathers and to some who came later, might continue to slumber in dark Vatican vaults, whilst a greater shadow seethes westward across Europe.