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willowwind78 · 3 months

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1 Annabel- Chapter 4

Chapter 4 - Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

My spirits were elevated by the enchanting appearance of nature;

The past was blotted from my memory, the present was tranquil,

And the future gilded by bright rays of hope and anticipations of joy.

The rain had stopped by the time Christina opened her eyes again. Her body lay against the base of a tree. She vaguely recalled passing out. She marveled at the brilliance of the stars in the cloudless sky, lost in their wonder and awesomeness. She felt amazing. For the first time in months, there was no pain. She had slept and there were no dreams. The world around her was new and full of possibility. A strange feeling crept up within her, dark and alluring.

She was overwhelmed by the vividness of color and light surrounding her so much so that she failed to hear the heart beating not ten feet above her, despite how it echoed cleanly in her ears. Christina was engrossed in studying the craters penetrating the moon’s gray surface when a pair of wing-tipped shoes landed with a silent thump next to her. Silently. She quickly realized they had landed with such delicacy normal ears should not have heard a sound but she did. Her heart tightened, the muscle straining against the inside of her chest at his nearness. Her limbs moved without her, twisting and manipulating her body, prostrating herself before him, head down, arms outstretched.

“You may relax my child, it is not your body that I need right now, but your tongue.”

Her voice sounded from her body without her. “Anything your ears wish to hear, my Lord.” Panic gripped her in her reverie. What was happening to her? She felt her body right itself and lean back against the tree seemingly without her. It sat cross-legged and looked up to the suited man eagerly. Christina peered through her own eyes to look down at her hands, something was off. Her skin had taken on a greyish-green tone and was hardening slowly but definitely as if it were growing scales in places. She was in her body but it was no longer hers.

“Christina, my dear, would you please tell me what you were dreaming about?” His voice was just as inspiring as it was hours, days, or… weeks ago. It soothed a small part of her panicking.

“I dreamt nothing, my Lord, for the first time in months.” She felt shame in not pleasing him. His disappointment was clear in the roll of his eyes that she had answered him incorrectly. Her head bowed. Through a tear in her tights, she could see where her scabbed over shin had turned to scale.

Her Lord appeared to be growing impatient. His head tilted awkwardly to the side. “What was the last dream you had, Christina?”

The Christina inside had a bad feeling about this but could not prevent herself from thinking back to the horrible nightmares, nor could she stop the Christina outside from recounting everything as she remembered it like a possessed narrator. As soon as the white steeple flashed through her memory and her body began to speak Christina was filled with dread. “There’s a small church; white-washed wooden siding with a tall steeple containing an old iron bell.” As her body betrayed her desire for silence, she felt less and less in control of anything.

“Where is the church, Christina?”

“It looks familiar. There are rolling hills and it is fall. The leaves are all different colors and there is a cliff off in the distance. The church is in the valley with a small cemetery next to it...” Her body’s voice sounded like an automaton, unnaturally punctuating every word and speaking in a monotonic drone. The Christina inside tried to stop thinking about the dream but failed. The harder she tried the more she felt the need to obey. “There are many people dressed in black. They are sad.”

“Do you know these people, Christina?”

Christina would have cried if she had still been attached to her body. This dream had been haunting her for months. It had cost her everything. “Yes, I know them.” He had promised her no more pain but this was torture. She was reliving the dream over and over and over again in her own head. “They are my family.” It was then that she realized where she was. “We are at my mother’s church in Walkersville, West Virginia.”

The dream Christina suddenly appeared and everything went dark. Christina became lost in her own dream listening to the distant sound of her own voice echoing outside of her. “I am in the casket carried by my two brothers, two uncles, my father, and my husband.” The details were lost in the monotonic recitation. It included nothing of her screaming and kicking at the inside of the coffin lid. The body of Christina said nothing of her nails scratching away at the satin lining. It spoke not a word of the real Christina’s desperate attempt to escape her wooden prison. “They place the coffin in the ground.” It speaks not of the panic and fear causing the walls of the casket to shrink ever smaller or of the sinking feeling of the casket as it creeps its way lower and lower into the ground with her inside. It does not even try to describe the horrifying sound of dirt hitting the outside of the wooden box slowly drowning out the sound of her sobbing family.

“Thank you for helping me. We are done now, Christina.”

Christina was horrified as her body collapsed at the base of the tree and her eyes closed throwing her into the darkness she felt in that last dream. She tried to scream but her body did not respond. She could feel nothing but heard the sound of his heartbeat diminish as he walked away. NO! The Christina inside screamed in horror as she realized what was happening. She had been dreaming of her death. She had been dreaming of this. She was trapped inside her own body, helpless. Her mind screamed, trying desperately to cry out while birds chirped cheerfully in the air around her. He was right. There was no pain, only fear.

#1 Annabel #Annabel Lee #Faith & Fangs #F&F

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willowwind78 · 3 months

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1 Annabel- Chapter 5

Chapter 5- Faust: First Part - Johann Wolfgang Van Goethe

Wild dreams torment me as I lie.

And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power woken at his word,

Though he can move my every inmost part – yet nothing in the outer world is stirred.

Thus by existence tortures and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest.

Annabel returned down the hall to her own room confused and unnerved. The floor was cold against her bare feet. She had not given it much thought earlier. Now, she wondered how she could have ignored her half-frozen toes and what time it was. She pushed the curtain aside and looked out the window.

The night sky glowed with millions of stars. The blackness went on forever, the moon shining like a light bulb in the sky. She could do nothing but smile as she slipped out of her pajamas and scurried to the wardrobe. A worn pair of jeans, white t-shirt, light sweater, and some socks, she tip-toed out of her room and down the hall. Carrying a pair of brown leather boots in her hand, she was careful to not make a sound as she crept down the steps and out the front door. On the last step she sat and pulled her boots onto her feet.

Struck by the beauty of the night, she reached down and felt the cool softness of the grass against her fingertips. A deep breath filled her lungs with the smell of rotting leaves that was fall. She half ran, half hopped to the converted stable beside the main house. The door creaked and moaned as she slid it open and disappeared into the darkness. Instinctively her hand reached out to grab a helmet where it hung, exactly as she had left it with a dark leather jacket. She threw them over the seat, pushed the small bike out of its holding and walked it nearly a quarter of a mile down the drive towards the dirt road.

Once past the mailbox, she swung her leg over the worn seat. Grinning from ear to ear, she clipped the turtle shell helmet under her chin, pushed the start plug and twisted her right hand. A familiar “Bwat-ta-tat-tat” filled the night air. The twinge of sulfur infected her nostrils. She wasn’t much for speed, but it sure beat walking. Off at a fantastic thirty-five miles per hour, the cool wind pulled tiny tendrils from her braided hair.

The Vespa twisted and turned with its rider past small forests of trees, along rocky hillsides and past field after field of sleeping sheep and cattle. At this time of the morning, there was not a soul to be seen. Every man woman and child was snug in their bed, preparing for the next day’s work.

From the first time she was allowed out on the scooter, she was enthralled by the feeling of freedom when straddling the old seat. The only thing that existed in the world was her, the dirt beneath the wheels and the wind flowing relentlessly across her shoulders. It was the closest to flying she had ever come. Complete exhilaration filled her every pore. While she contemplated at times, upgrading to a motorbike, the Vespa held a special place in her heart for midnight riding and it was easier to avoid deer.

She drove down the road in whatever direction the world took her. Father Samuel taught her long ago that there is purpose to all we do and following the path of God was as simple as letting go and allowing Them to lead you. While she often doubted Father Samuel’s wisdom, when she was on the bike, his words never rang truer. She paid no attention to where she was, just went where an invisible force tugged at her to go.

Within what seemed like no time at all, she arrived in an unfamiliar location. As the bliss of freedom wore off, reality began to settle in and she wondered to where she had traveled. The point she had left the graveled road was uncertain. Standing here in the woods without the faintest clue as to where she was, she started to ponder if perhaps she should have listened a little less to God and a little more to the Randall McNally folded beneath her seat.

With a flick of her foot, the kickstand came down and the Vespa sat neatly on the dirt path. Pine trees had left a thick bed of needles creating a crunchy trail beneath her feet. Unsure of where she was headed, she felt the need to travel on foot and after setting her helmet and jacket on the bike she started down the ever-thinning deer trail towards the unknown.

Tall oaks that had somehow managed to not get choked out by the pines, left pesky acorns threatening to wrench her ankles at nearly every step, but she picked her way along what felt for no particular reason, the way to go. Since the path seemed clear enough in the dark, she felt confident she could find her way back when she needed to.

Luckily, she was completely absorbed in watching her feet as she walked, so there was little chance of her falling off the steep cliff when the tree-line abruptly ended. The ground stopped. She looked up and out upon the horizon. It was breathtaking.

A small church nestled itself into the valley surrounded by a field of recently harvested corn. The white-washed walls were stark and out of place against the dark background. A faint glow had begun in the east where the sun was threatening to rise. A tiny graveyard lay next to the church, between the fields cut by a short dirt drive. As the sun peaked over the horizon, she followed the rays of light into the cemetery and was pulled in.

A young man, far too young to be mourning this kind of loss, knelt in front of a newly erected tombstone reading:

Tolle lege

Christina Evans

1995-2013

Beloved wife, daughter, sister and journalist

Tears filled his eyes. A glint of silver sat in his hand.

Annabel’s heart ached for him. His pain and thoughts echoed across the distance to her as if they were her own. He had come to take his own life on his wife’s grave. His blood would flow into the ground and in some way, he believed he would be with her again. The blade was poised, firmly grasped in his right hand, over his left wrist. His words carried across the wind to her ears.

“Heavenly Father, please forgive me. I do not understand. What did she do wrong? Was it me?” Tears openly flowed from his eyes, down his cheeks and dropped to the ground. “I loved her! Damn you I love her!” His body shook with a mixture of anger and pain, the muscles twitching and relaxing at sporadic intervals. Several times his arms tensed, readying the knife above his wrist, only to be relaxed and nearly dropped to the ground.

He looked up suddenly when he heard a voice behind him. A man, dressed in a charcoal gray three-piece pin-stripe suit and a dark red bowtie leaned against the fence, the watcher. “God considers the taking of one’s own life the biggest sin you can commit. Some might say… unforgivable.” He paused momentarily as the figure straightened and began to walk toward the young man. “Far greater than murder, gluttony, pride, envy, or even greed. Those that commit suicide are doomed to burn in hell for eternity. Is that what you want?”

“I… I don’t care anymore.” His head bowed as he stared at his left wrist. “Anything is better than the hell I am already in.”

“I can take away this pain away if you want. You will never have to feel again.” The suited man’s tongue spoke eloquently. It brought comfort and soothed even Annabel’s ears. She watched as the stranger glided through the cemetery, so smooth that he seemed to float across, his wing tip shoes leaving not a trace in the dewy grass. He placed his left hand on the shoulder of the mourning man in what should have been a comforting gesture but felt like something else entirely. “Imagine no pain, no worry, everlasting life. It is yours if you want it.”

“I never want to feel again. Not now. Not ever.” He looked up with tear-stained eyes, red and swollen with pain. “What kind of God would do this? Take away a life so young, so promising?”

The man in the gray suit’s mouth twitched only slightly. “My God will alleviate your pain if you choose to follow.”

“I choose.” The kneeling man said without hesitation. “I choose to forget.” The knife poised over his wrist, reverberating with intent.

“You would hand the devil your soul?”

“Lord, if you can hear me. I am done with you! You have taken everything from me!” the man’s voice echoed across the open ground. Hatred. Scorn. Loathing.

The stranger leaned toward the man, his lips nearly caressing his neck as he whispered into his ear. “You give me your soul? Openly?”

“Anything to take away this pain, yes.” With a quick slice, the blood began to flow, while simultaneously the suited man sank his teeth deep into the other man’s neck until his body collapsed in a lifeless heap. A shimmering cloud emerged from the man’s body like the smoke from a djinn’s lamp. Suddenly, the cloud shattered into a million pieces of shiny silver confetti that dissipated when they hit the ground.

Reality sucked back like a vacuum cleaner. The world shifted as Annabel returned to the hillside where her body stood motionless. Choking on a lump in her throat, she couldn’t scream. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. She stared in horror at the body laying on the ground, blood oozing from its wrist in ever slowing pulses. The sun rose above the horizon, casting light upon the world as if everything were still good and wholesome in it. Tears filled her own eyes. She slumped to the ground, hanging her legs over the side of the hill, dumbfounded, yet entranced by the surreal scene.

Questions filled her mind, bogging down her senses with confusion. Who was the man in the gray suit and where did he come from? What was he? Did she really just see him bite the other man? Was she even awake? She pinched her arm. Ouch. Yes, she was awake. How could she possibly see everything from so far away?

Eventually, something caught her eye. She tilted her head to the right unsure of what she was seeing. No, it couldn’t be. She caught herself attempting to leap forward to get a closer look, just before she would have fallen two hundred yards down the steep, rocky cliff. She squinted and peered, then closed her eyes and reopened them again.

No matter how many times she repeated this action, she could not change what she was seeing. Two men walked out of that cemetery into the trees and one of them was looking at her.

#Annabel Lee #1 Annabel #Faith & Fangs #F&F

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