Life After Death - An Erica Black Continuation (4)

Twenty Nine

Once her uncle, Regulus had left her small apartment, Erica Black sat alone for a short moment reliving the events of that evening and collecting her self. Finally, she peeled herself from her bed and as she limped to the door, couldn't help but glance back at it over her shoulder and shivering at the sight of it. She staggered to the bathroom, turned the shower on high and pacing the length of the small, tiled room whilst she waited for it to heat up. Only when the boiling water created large, thick clouds of steam against the cool tile did she step under it.

She spent the next hour scrubbing every inch of her body under the scalding water until her pale complexion was fiery and irritated. She scoured fragments of her skin frantically, until she ran out at which point, she hiccupped a faltered sob and collapsed into a pile on the shower's floor letting out a tormented scream to the humid air of the small bathroom. Her own howls of anguish echoed back at her, taunting her relentlessly. She felt dirty, and she knew that no matter how much she scrubbed, she might never feel clean again.

Erica felt small, like a child who'd lost their parent in Diagon Alley, lost and alone. She could feel herself shrinking into the corner of the shower, the walls growing higher around her, looming above her. The shower itself, the small tiled room distorted before her eyes, stretching wide and far in a way that only intensified the sensation she felt of shrivelling. Suddenly, her breath got caught in her throat and it was as if she'd forgotten how to breathe the confined space of the walls around her grew even further and yet, some how, simultaneously began to close in on her, constricting around her windpipe like a snake.

Gasping for air, she began to panic. Her heart was beating at a million miles an hour in a way that couldn't be healthy, unable to breathe anything more than the occasional strained gulp of thick steam, it felt as though her lungs had been paved with concrete as her chest heaved desperately. Erica Black, for a moment, thought she might be dying. Her ears rang violently, she couldn't hear a single sound around her; like she was trapped in a box of glass, an invisible barrier between her and the rest of the world.

Everything around her swirled disorientingly, her head was reeling in a way that made her stomach flip and twist nauseatingly. Her vision blurred until her surrounding were indistinguishable and lost in the moment of pure, inescapable panic, she reached out, grabbing for something, for anything. Blindly and franticly grabbing at air, she tried to pull herself to her feet but fell back against the tiles, smacking her head. She laid sobbing under the water as it rained down on her shaking body. A stream of steaming water and scarlet blood swirling down the drain as her mind began to slow, her surroundings started to recontextualise themselves and as the pieces of the world slowly fell back into place, the uncomfortable ringing noise in her ears quietened until it was almost completely inaudible, her body slowly stilled and her breathing, eventually, evened out to steady and deliberate inhales and exhales.

Exhausted, she lay bloody and bruised against the white floor, drifting in and out of consciousness. Powerless against the unwelcome memories of not only that evening but others she had worked hard to forget from the earlier years of her life.