His tears blind him to the changing world around him.
The maze-scene kaleidoscopes around his hunched body, shifts from a wash of red-soaked greenery to black. Lost in his grief, the weeping boy doesn’t notice at first. The sound changes, though, and this he does notice, even with his weaker human hearing. He lifts his head, hearing nothing. The silence stretches long and thin across a room that is much the same. It is such a complete blackness that he can’t tell, however. Eldrian rises to his feet, his green eyes wide and effectively blind. He wouldn’t mind if this is the end. He wouldn’t protest if Hell has finally claimed his soul, acquired him for all of eternity to pay for his sins. And though the darkness unnerves him, at first he makes no move to find an escape from it. I deserve it, he tells himself over and over until he vehemently believes it. He anchors himself to his spot, determined to make it his final resting site, trying to embrace the darkness that forces itself around him regardless of his comfort.
It doesn’t work.
His stomach is uncomfortably full (full of Nellie’s life-force, full of death and regret and horror) but the rest of him is achingly empty. He’s weary to his very bones, but still, the instinct to survive soon starts his feet. Something else does, too. Some slow-creep sound from one corner of the room starts up. With all of his other senses dulled by the blackened room, his hearing becomes heightened. He should be able to tell which direction the movement is coming from, but it seems to change every time he pinpoints it. Panic rises within him until he’s practically spinning in place, his ears straining to catch the movement. To die here of his own remorse is one thing, but to be consumed by an unknown entity is an entirely different matter.
At the hissing, slithering creature’s loudest announcement, the once-horse picks a direction and runs. He is sure-footed, despite his many environmental handicaps and the exhaustion weighing in his soul, but it seems to take forever to reach any sort of edge to the place. When he finally does, Eldrian smashes head-first into a wall. Instantly, a lightning shot of pain shoots through his nose. Blood wells up inside of it and falls down and across his mouth. Broken, he thinks, tasting his own coppery life-force. But the creature makes a triumphant sound just behind him, and the boy dives to the side just in time to avoid it crashing down on him. When he moves, his hand brushes across a warm doorknob, and he grabs for it like a drowning man desperate for a life-preserver. He tries to yank the door open, but it is heavier than he’d realized. It opens painfully slow, and with each inch, the doorknob grows warmer. The creature stirs and prepares for another attack behind him. Eldrian isn’t sure he’ll escape, because the knob becomes hot – almost too hot to handle. By the time he thinks he can squeeze through the opening, his hand burns with the effort, but he makes it through.
The boy emerges into a hallway, nursing his burnt hand and blinking against the sudden light. His nose pulses with pain. He tries to gingerly touch it with his good hand, but it only increases the flow of blood down his face. Giving up the venture entirely, he drops his hands to his sides and studies the new place he has found himself in. A building? It’s utterly foreign to his horse-self, but his human-self is almost comforted by the surroundings. To human eyes, it’s a lavish, ornate dwelling that speaks of some amount of wealth. Plush, patterned carpet lines the floor, stone statues (one of a gargoyle and one of an angel) occupy the corners of the hall. A part of him (the young, curious part that had been an innocent child back in Beqanna) wants to study it all. But the same hands he’d use to run over the objects in study had held down a girl, had murdered her in cold blood. The same head he’d tilt in unbridled curiosity had grown fangs, just before, and had sunk them into Nellie’s pliant flesh.
He doesn’t want to continue on, not really, but he knows he must. He knows that if he stands here long enough, some other horror will come for him – he has no choice in the matter. But as Eldrian starts down the length of the hall, as he thinks about his life pre-London (the soft meadows, the bowing willows – his mothers, his father) he realizes he wants to get back there more than anything. It’s all just a misunderstanding, this part of his life. Just a nightmare he’ll wake from if he tries hard enough to escape it. A warmth far different than the handle of the door floods him, floods the entire building, it seems. Movement to his left catches his eye – had the stone angel been stretching its arms out before? But he pays it no mind after that, because the golden warmth beckons him onward. It fills him with happiness, with nostalgia, and finally he understands why.
“Mom?” They appear at the end of hall, his two mothers. Emmerly, his adopted mother with her splotched brown and white hair and pale blue eyes, leans against the wall. Talulah stands just before the descending stairs, her skin cold and metallic but her eyes like lit kindling. They simmer with unknown love as they regard him, drawing him in. The young man moves towards both of them, a smile cracking the blood that has dried on his face. They’ll know what to do. They’ll hold him and forgive him and tell him everything is all right.
“You killed her.” Emmerly’s face becomes soft and sad, she leans over as if he’s broken her. And in some other part of the mansion, he can hear a cry. It sounds just like Nellie as he inflicted the first bite of many. It’s high and piercing, tinged with the same surprise he’d heard in the maze. This time, though, it gives him pause. This time, he’s not a monster but a young boy filled with the realization of what he’s done. It hits him like a physical blow, that scream, and he knows he’ll remember it for the rest of his days.
“You were a naughty, naughty boy.” Talulah grips the banister, her face aglow with its rising heat – now an untamed fire that rages across her features. “It’s no wonder I didn’t want you. No wonder I left you to die alone in the Gates.” The warmth suddenly becomes stifling. His throat is dry and he struggles to swallow, but still, he moves towards them. His family, his mothers - they’ll forgive him. The metal-woman sneers, her gaze darting between the blood on his shirt and his own eyes. “You are a stain on our family. I never loved you and never will.”
“Mom, please. I – I – “ Eldrian reaches out, so close that he can hear the heartbeats of the two women. But as he listens closer, he realizes they’re erratic, unnatural. It doesn’t occur to him that they’ve been conjured, his two dams, and his heart wins out over his brain. He pleads, knowing he’ll throw himself at their feet in penance if they ask it. “I didn’t – I wouldn’t –“ but he’s cut off when they begin to change. The two women lose their shape, becoming two-dimensional and flat. Emmerly sinks into the wall, crying out as her body becomes flush against it. Her skin disintegrates so that only her organs appear, shining and gruesome as the mansion’s latest mural. Talulah eyes him quickly, terror replacing the fire her gaze once held. “Please, don’t let it get meeeeee…” She falls like a streamer down the stairs, her body reduced to a line of pale grey skin.
The boy rushes down the stairs, taking them two at a time in his haste. His mother is sprawled down a dozen of the steps, stretched thin. He can see the veins and arteries that once supplied her body with blood, and he feels his stomach roil with regret at the thought. Talulah’s eyes linger at the last step for a moment, revulsion and fear in their depths when they see him, before they melt away. Only the grey accordion of her skin remains, painting the steps with the flat remains of the dead.
Eldrian tears away from the scene, hurt and confusion fueling his steps. What the hell is this place, anyway? And how do you get out? There’s a grand-looking door in the foyer at the bottom of the staircase. The front door, it has to be. He pulls at it for a long time, unable to find a deadbolt to free it from its locked position. After pounding on it for several long minutes with both his good and hurt hand (angry minutes which only add to the growing ache of failure in his chest) he turns away. Now, both of his hands throb painfully. He finds he doesn’t care a bit, finds that he rather likes the pain because it replaces the emptiness his mothers had scooped in his insides. He stands for a long time, flinching at all the aches and twinges of his injured body, unable to make a move. He feels stupid for ever yearning for adventure in the first place. All it has gotten him is a guilty conscious and a pair of dead mothers.
The young man clenches and unclenches his hands and his jaw. The taste of blood still lingers in the back of his throat, despite the water that had brought him back to human. There’s nothing about Nellie’s death that he secretly enjoyed, no part of himself that wants a repeat of the unfortunate encounter. He’ll always hate himself for killing her. And when that same cry of her's sounds into the near distance, Eldrian runs for it like his own life is at stake. Maybe it is.
Maybe this time he’ll save her instead.
She’s there at the top of another staircase, this one leading down into a darker, danker part of the house. The basement, his human brain once again supplies the information his horse-self didn’t have. Her eyes are the same, cerulean blue; her smile is vibrant and splitting her face nearly in two. It doesn’t make sense, because she’d just been screaming. The dark-haired boy walks towards her without hesitation, though, his bruised hands reaching for her. If only he could feel her, touch her, make sure she’s alive and her heart still bleeding (the blood at home in her veins where it belongs, not collecting and squelching in his stomach). But she’s coy. She winks at him mischievously, turning sharply on her heel and running down the stairs. “Come along,” she says, her voice sing-song. “Tha’s right. Follow your pretty English sparrow.” She giggles and disappears around the bend at the bottom. The words make him sick because they’d been his, but he follows anyway. He’d go anywhere she wanted him to from the guilt alone.
The stairs creak menacingly as he makes his way down them. At one point, the board cracks beneath his feet but doesn’t break. This part of the mansion is unfinished, cold and dark and damp. Eldrian shivers when he doesn’t see Nellie right away. “Nellie?” His voice is as strained as his vision as he peers into the darkness. “I’m here. Nellie?” It’s deathly silent for a moment. His heart races in his chest. She cries out for the third time, but this time, there’s no surprise in her voice. Eldrian stumbles blindly further into the basement. There’s a small room around the corner, hidden from his initial place by the stairs. A single bulb illuminates the room, casting harsh shadows on the scene. It doesn’t soften the sight of Nellie’s re-broken body, doesn’t hide the tears along the length of her skin. And though Eldrian doesn’t remember the extent of his work, the wounds that cover her are two parallel pricks – the bite of the vampire. She bleeds from all of them, her legs, her arms, her face. It pours out of her, spreading quickly around her prone body in a crimson lake. She doesn’t move at all except her eyes. “You did this.” And he collapses, the blood soaking into his trousers and feeling hot and sticky against his legs. “You killed me.” He doesn’t see the small hole in the corner of the wall, glowing bright just beyond. His tears blur the scene, blur Nellie’s face, but he can hear her all the same. “You killed me, Eldrian.”
Eldrian
gentleman son of Jason & Talulah