Reflected sorrows

Chapter 4

She turned her head apprehensively, feeling her aching bones creak like the cries of a small child, clattering against each other so small and insignificant, and yet scraping in the back of her ears and making an unbearable scaping sound; one that scraped away her sanity until it snapped. The face she saw before her was uncanny, and everything about it, though familiar, was strange and eerie; perhaps it was the dull light, or perhaps exhaustion taking its cruel grasp over her sight, but the face was that girl. It intermittently became that mortifying face: the image of anguish. She stepped back, then felt her terror subside. It was in fact just a friend, come to see where she had gone to at such an hour- "Hello! Why are you here?" She asked, a whispering slicing through the calm and yet wary tones in her voice. She could ignore the hallucinations of an insomniac; it was simply a friend, come to see where she was, or perhaps to say that they could do this with her.

"Yeah, you picked a good spot for ghost watching, Celeste, pretty cold up in here."

She shivered at the voice. It was cold, indeed, but she could barely feel the winter chill among the bleak beginnings of paranoia. "Yeah..." She replied half-heartedly, the paranoia inside her growing steadily like an Autumnal tree, its seething flames furiously dancing through her mind and making her shudder. Then, as she turned around, she saw that the door was askew, not tightly shut as it had been before, inducing intermittent light and only letting her see frames of the scene briefly before her world was plunged into unrelenting darkness once more. The figure seemed ominous in the light, their face just barely lit by the bleak, intermittent moonlight that lay, pale, on the side of their face. When she realised that they were still waiting for more of a response, she leapt out of her pool of darkness, lighting her candle and watching as the tentacle of amber light illuminated the scene. "You wanna check out those-"

But the figure had already began saying goodbyes, and they wandered away without a trace into the all-engulfing fog of shadow. Even as they left, she felt a chill bubble and seethe within her as the face flickered inbetween the girl from the mirror and the oddly familiar face of a friend. She shuddered; how was she seeing that grotesque image even in the fog of dreary shadows? 

It was a dull wander back into the chambers of darkness, and it took all her will and sanity not to scream and beg like a small child for escape from her eternal torment- she knew this place had something wrong about it; it was the teeth of awareness sinking in and crushing your dreams while you slept, blissfully unaware of the anguish being planted inside of your unconscious mind. She took a sip of water from her flask, but it was tasteless and empty of relief, instead giving her a shudder of dread as she looked upon the stairs she would need to climb once more, with aching bones, back to those eyes, and back to the darkness that enveloped this entire place in sorrow beyond that of the melancholia of the storm she had arrived through. But she continued through the anguish and held her lantern close, wary of the flitting, dark figures surrounding her and holding her intermittent light as a shield from their insidious glares. She didn't know that face that had greeted her, in fact it was ominous to see its kind and welcoming gaze and see nothing but the moonlight glinting of the side of its face. She knew that she should recognise it, but it was uncannily unfamiliar, despite the fact she knew its name and its face, every jagged edge of its figure, all the imperfections deep carved in ravines across its forehead. She felt no compassion, however, only fear. For that face followed her everywhere; those hollow eyes with nothing in them but inky black sorrow that bled out into a night that called it only closer; and she could always hear the whistling of her skirts through the night, brushing against the ground and stirring up dust from its slumber as the girl stumbled onward with wild eyes that carried a flame of hopelessness. She knew the terror better than anything else, however. That fear that she was there. That fear that she would be in every dull, glinting reflection and face Celeste every step she took, haunting every cursive glance with her potent despair.

 As she walked past the eerily glaring paintings, she hobbled under their glares and tried to hide among the shadows, lighting only the slightest path toward a better place with dull, flickering candlelight. But they were always there, deathly silent and revealing no secrets to her ravenous mind, that was always searching for something to find or something to know, something to break the impenetrable melancholia of this world in which she inhabited and seize her from her relentless torment. She had never known such a dull melancholy as potent as this place; these paintings had a glare potent as the bleak, acrid air of winter, and now that she was unprotected by precarious walls made of cold bricks, she felt their glares like ice down her spine and embraced the warmth of her candle like a child cradling a small toy, clinging onto hope through every shed tear. It was supposed to be so calm. It was supposed to be so kind as their gazes dragged her unwilling through a tangle of overgrown trees that spoke in strange, incomprehensible languages, as if it were just wind howling and making the trees writhe in its grasp as the hostile, disdainful gazes plucked her from her spot and dragged her into the face of uncanny dangers that every child is warned against- it was a treachery to ignore the howling winds. She writhed in their cruel touch, but she couldn't escape the glares that followed her, haunting every brushstroke with a deathly sense of eyes watching her every move through this uncharted yet familiar land of sorrows.

And, as she arrived at a door, she glanced behind her; it seemed unfamiliar, despite the fact that she had followed the same route and felt the same cold breezes chill her bones- despite the familiarity of the glares the paintings gave her at every turn with milky eyes, she still felt unease creeping into her vision at the sight of the cascading staircases with jagged angles. There was no marking upon the door, and no scratch that came from years of childhoods, with the laughs and cackles of childish games lurking in the deep-engraved marks. There was instead an unnerving silence about the perfection of this place as she felt the door creep open, and sensed the cold handle moving in her grasp, writhing and shivering as if it were a living, breathing mound of golden tendrils. The tendrils seemed to scuttle away like bugs as a predator came close, and to her they revealed something strangely too extravagant, with angles too jagged and yet unwavering- they showed her a room full of golden-framed paintings- but these were of rugged green; they were depictions of thriving nature, throbbing under the howling winds that whistled past, leaving the bushes dishevelled and shaken to soaked mounds, quivering under the trembling, hollow gaze of the moon. All these depictions had no eyes, and yet they felt alive, with memories and hate all the same, and they had a dreary backdrop like the raging storm she had entered to, with the trees trembling relentlessly and grasping her, tossing her around. She saw their tendrils. Perhaps they were arms. Perhaps these creatures walked on their own and ate food just as she did. Perhaps the same conflicts held their tongues tied as betrayal seethed in the air. These plants depicted in deft, skilled brushstrokes were somewhat alive. She knew it. 

She turned toward the other wall and took a few steps back- she quailed at the sight of what lay there, mocking her in a cruel dance of light. A mirror reflected the world she saw; every move was repeated and repeated and repeated under the sharp, acrimonious reflections of the shredded carpets. But it felt somewhat delayed, and the rim of the mirror was too intricate, and yet imperfect compared to the absolute painstaking detail of every single painting that lay in this cavernous space of rotting walls and decayed memories and childhoods. Her face was hollow and sleepless in the reflection, simply an echo of what she saw as she looked in the light of her lantern; every second she expected to see that face grinning back at her, but it didn't come. She was just paranoid, she told herself, but just because she may be paranoid didn't mean it wasn't there, mocking her terror. Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean danger doesn't lurk at every turn, every reflection. She gazed into the shadowed, portal-like mirror with dissonant reflections. It was like seeing into another world- one of dreary weather and dim lights, where not even the dull light of a torch lay to guide you. She stood up, her feet aching, and scampered out of the room like a lost child, searching for the sense of safety she yearned for, and had yearned ever since she set foot outside her house. But that safety seemed to run from her, seeing the peril she was in and crawling under her skin in the form of trembling fear that brought her to a rambling madman. She saw the door close behind her with a deafening crash and took a sigh of relief; but it was fake- a mask easily tossed away to reveal a terrible structure consisting of nothing but bones and ash. A false sigh. And then she paused, before making her way further down those dreary steps and treasured the silence between every step like horses' hooves trampling the concrete in a storm-like malady.