Reflected sorrows

Chapter 11

Then she saw, once again, the glaring, insidious eyes of those paintings. Something in them was sickly; sicklier than before; and it was so cold before – and yet they recognised her weary, feeble form now, eyes carving ravines with bittersweet tears and trembling with every step. She saw the collapsed queen, betrayal dancing like a furious, intermittent flame. You turned away and felt, still, the blood seeping out of dagger-inflicted wounds in her heart; you could sense it crawling down your back like and army of the undead. Unkept promises and broken love was caged in that sorrowful gaze, crawling over your skin and engulfing you with a strange, uncanny sense of dread – a painting, no matter how skilful, no matter how perfect in every brushstroke, should make you feel wounds being inflicted before your eyes. But wait... That painting should be upstairs. It shouldn't even be here, among the untamed wilderness spilling out from the river of intricate paintwork. She squinted at it; there had to be something that she wasn't seeing. But it was there. And the paintings felt odd to her all of a sudden – as if they knew her. She would never see. She would never notice it but for a cursive and fearful glance. But there lay within that gaze a girl she had known very well. Perhaps should have known well.

She panted, stopping for a moment next to the stairs; this place didn't want her to leave. She could feel its grasp down her arms wishing she'd stay here and look once more upon the paintings, admire their dreary elegance. But it didn't feel right. Like she was squirming out of one creature's jaws right into another. The stairs were jagged teeth crumbling and cascading into crevices and feeble, frail ghosts of jaws. She simply saw the apparition as it mocked her with insidious malice; silent; she gazed at the banisters and back at the perishing queen once more, but now it called to her. Sleepily, as if in a daze, she staggered forward graciously. The frames whispered dark secrets in her ear, as silently sinister as stormy winds clasping her face in cruel claws. They spoke in unfamiliar tongues, but among the overlapping voices she heard one. She knew this voice. It spoke with seething rage, as if betrayed. What it said was clear as a starless, cloudless night-

"You never cared, did you?" She glanced around nervously. Something lay among the towers of precarious, perpetually falling brickwork; there lay a canary among doves. A swan among geese. An apparition among living, taunted souls. Tears streaked a yellow face - it was cream and sickly as old, decaying paper with dreams dissolving into misty gloom and fog. Blots of dark, spreading ink the colour of deep crimson festered within the eyes of the ghost, and she stumbled away with her eyes glued. She could see it. She could hear its rasping voice and the swishing of its breath as the dress, frayed as it was, writhed in unfelt winds revealing underneath nothing but air. But the spirit made no move. It graciously stared, placid in its disdain. She slowed, stuttering as she spoke:

"You - I - I know you. I know it. Who-"

The apparition was gone before the sickly complexion could writhe away from its deathly chains and speak in the dreadful tongue.

And before it spoke again, its clear flesh tormented with tears, she turned her head and stepped away, down the stairs. Through the halls. Through the chambers of dread that whispered secrets in her ear at every turn. Before she even knew it she was at the wooden door, watching it decay even as she crept closer, as if avoiding someone who watched her every turn as she stepped forth; The mansion opened its gaping jaws with a creak, and she looked in the shadows, searched them for any sign of someone who could've moved the door forward even a little- but the grace and delicacy at which it crept was unnerving, and the wood seemed to have tendrils seeping into the ground so certain that she thought they were stuck fast to the floor, no amount of strength able to open them; how had the wind been more than a fleeting apparition? That was all it was here, even in the darkest nights and the most furious, lashing storms that punished you for crimes you never committed, simply an apparition of a story whispered in your ear. It couldn't have opened the house's gaping jaws and wrenched open the jagged teeth of rot; no wind and no story whispered over a campfire could prise open those fatal gates and reveal the deep dark chasm of carpets too well-preserved or endure the disdainful glares of the light reflecting off the windows. She took a step forward, and it mocked her gentle hesitation. The doors revealed a world to her that she shouldn't be able to see. A world that seemed almost alien – perhaps she preferred the insides of this magnificent, malice-drooling beast, with blood dripping down like fools' gold melted down in vain to soft pattering of tears onto a ground that had given up, and a tree, singular and solitary, her leaves phlegmatic among the relentless storm of thunder rolling in, an insatiable beast. The sky seemed alien. The trees alive with sorrow. The clouds mocking and cruel. Was this really the world she had left? Had malady consumed her thus that she could not distinguish thought from sight?

She stepped out into the shadowed, storm-ridden world and took a single look behind her, hearing the shudder as the door slammed behind as her glance shifted toward the path once more. So this was it. The trees glared upon her with a familiar eye of malice, uncanny but cruelly kind. And the path beckoned her like a young child, hopes and dreams shining in those eyes willing her into a dimly lit corridor of shadow, engulfed in a grief insatiable and unrelenting. The leaves were small hands, moments of joy carried through the shadows making tears prick the sides of your vision and sorrow and sympathy brew in your gaze as you take another step through your own web of despair, trees spider's silk mocking you. The blackened wood made her look down again, seeing that the tears were simply the rain blinding her to the joy she should feel at the breeze on her skin and she homely feeling washing over her complexion. She imagined those letters, so kind and warming but cruel at the edges, smiling upon her as she looked upon them with their corners digging into her skin, so delicate and easily shattered into tiny little pieces. Those letters... Perhaps she should listen to their pleas- their words may be wise and their complexion sympathetic, trying with every stroke of the pen to draw out the venomous grief in her tears. She'd listen. She'd look upon them with joy despite the woebegone voice inside her insisting that it wasn't good for her. Who was that voice? Perhaps she just simply needed to ignore it and cast it aside? She wished it were that simple. She snapped out of her thoughts, seeing the gate that lay ahead. Time to place her hand upon that cold metal and wish it were just a lover's hand guiding her through a rough path. She grasped it, but it felt lukewarm beneath her skin, soaked in the tears of grieving widows as their eyes scanned the telegraph.

It wasn't meant to be like this – she could feel the cold warmth of home on her skin making the hairs on her arm rise up and the rain falling over every part of this fog-tormented land, its influence a blanket over a child's sorrow, put to sleep only to wake with pacing, seething rage and anguish, and be put to slumber once again by soothing words; she saw the next gate up ahead, its glinting metal hinting peace. Hinting tranquillity. Hinting an end. Hinting joy. Hinting so much but only to lure her in with a twisted bait. It looked almost blackened, its charred paint peeling off to reveal crimson flesh of metal, bleeding the clear blood of salty tears and drinking in sorrow from the graves and the soaked, turmoil-haunted mud surrounding it. The posts either side had death and mortality lurking around the corner, revealed slowly and benevolently in form of the tiny parts of burnt flesh showing where the paint peeled away. It was as sharp as a knife edge inducing screams from the patient as they saw blood trickling down. This was the gate she would open, piercing it with her sorrows with it begging her to leave it to the dull apparitions of hope that had begun to engulf it in a dreary fog. To turn away and not give the gleaming smiles of light a single thought among the sea of writhing viridian.

She wished she could slow her footsteps. She wished the curled edges of the paper like rotting ferns would fall and shatter like glass, leaving her helpless and alone in the middle of a sea of tentacles and writhing, deep green entrails that grasped her, dragging her home again. She wished it was will of her own that sped her heartbeat to a grim, vile tempo that strained her voice and flattened her to a whisper begging for the rhythm to slow; she could not help the speed at which she bolted past the tree branches and cursed them as they went back to jutting out into the winding path – she bolted straight for those glinting smiles, their warmth vacant, replaced only by the temptation of peace. Of calm. Of a mind that would stop swirling and forgetting; It was her only thought, a single stech that no one else could smell and a drumming sound that unleashed upon her mind malady and despair strong enough to tear down the walls of sheet-white bone and tear through the world. It was there at every blink- every dark veil falling over her eyes protecting them for simply a moment from the sheer rain soaking the ground around her- it was an incessant melody of caustic and acrimonious notes, notes that she couldn't cast away. She could only grasp them with a tight-clenched fist. She could only sprint after the single, fleeting smile, the metal still taunting her with a creak that cast into her hands and spine a shudder. Glinting grins of familiarity that she needed to see only once before they ingrained in her memory, singing her and scolding her innocence. She saw that in the single gleam of moonlight. Then she turned, her footsteps slowing to a stop like the relentless sound of life support growing silent. The sound as it falls low. Brooding clouds were creeping like cruel fingers over the moon, the smiles and little warmth still there in the cold and stale light fading and fizzling to nothing – she walked on in complete darkness.