The Invictus

Ricochet

Delilah woke up in a room brocaded with blackness as though of her very own crypt. Her only memory as of now was when they had left Yorkshire earlier this morning to stop at the sun-down at a small country inn. And then?

She had fallen asleep most likely.

Except, this was not the chamber she had closed her eyes in. That was not the ceiling she had closed her eyes to and the sheets were unlike anything.
She opened her eyes to a bleak, bleary dull grey ridges although she was certain a crystal chandelier hanging from a mauve gable had been what she had closed her eyes to. The chamber around her was stifling and small and the bed she lay in was warm, but so tapered that even so much of it had mobbed the chamber out of capacity. And although the sheets she lay tangled in were satiny, like dewdrops and supplest she had ever held, something about their deep oxblood shade undid her.

Light of the day was not in sight.

The hair at the back of her neck stood to the ends as though sensing the horror that seemed to be unravelling around her and Delilah sat up, shivering all over at once and not at all out of cold. She detached herself from the bed, as though it was blight and instead found her feet rooted on the coldest of flagstones ever.

There were no windows around and it was a wonder that she could breathe the air she was gasping upon. Delilah stood softly, staring at the dark, sturdy door that stood firm not a feet away from her.

A shadow stood in the farthest corner of the small chamber. Black as the very conscience of sin. With bleeding red eyes.

Delilah dared not glance at it. because she believed in its ominousity. She believed in ghost and all the other, yet impossible things.

For all evident reasons, in fact, this chamber had a distinct feel of prison cell and Delilah feared that the worst had happened and somehow...she had died and ended up in a emptiness somewhere between earth and the nether-world.

"Richard." She called gently, unknowingly. Because that name seemed to be the only expectation hereafter. "Richard?"

For someone caught in such place, Delilah was utterly quiet. And incurious.

All things scary seemed to be beyond that dark, damned door, except that shadow present within. And the urge to open it was as strong as the urge to turn her eyes inward and slip back into the passive oblivion of slumber. The blessing of not knowing wherever the hell she was.

Delilah decided on knowing. It was always better to know.

It would be better to know what was beyond that door than to be entrapped in the crypt of the room for eternity.

She then opened the door into a fiery darkness but suddenly fell downwards....to land into a very eerie, unknown, terrifyingly familiar chamber to Wolfbridge asylum...with the portrait of a watching stag on the wall, that seemed to have aware eyes.

Like faint echo of faraway song....Delilah remembered being here with Richard, in the initial days of their relationship, when they were still to taste each other's passion. In this room. So scared, when Richard had told her that they were being watched.

The shadow seemed to have followed her here.it stood right behind her. Black. With red, blazing eyes. Closer now.

She was alone today. Richard was not here. He was not in hell.

Of course. He did not belong here.

"Richard!" Delilah shouted. "Richard!" she screamed.

That seemed to be the only word she had ever spoken all her life.

Then the door at the other side of the wall came to her notice and Delilah reached for it. Dark, resolute .... Yet it gave way the moment she touched it.

She fell again.

Landing on cold flagstone this time. Bruising her knees and the palm of both her hands from the impact.

She knew this place too.

It was the basement of Stormcastle. Where a thousand of autopsies and experiments on the dead had been performed under the duke's command. Logic had ceased to act, at his behest. Impossibilities manifested. Yet in a sad, odd way....what a heart-rending, forlorn place this was to be lost in.

She was not alone here either.

The dark, haunting shape of the entity stood right in front of her and although Delilah pretended to not have seen it, she could feel cold fingers of fear creep up her spine. It had come so much closer now....not an arm-length away anymore.

The autopsy table in the middle of the room had a corpse laid out on it. Rotting. Decaying. Bones visible through the flesh that fell off in pieces.

The entity in front of her pointed its blighted finger towards the corpse as though asking of Delilah to look at it.

To look into his face. Delilah trundled closer.....the skylight above was pitch black. The sable light from the burning torches around the basement cast horrible hues at the mouldering, nameless cadaver.

Except that it was not a cadaver. And not nameless.

The decomposing body on a closer look turned out to be Richard's. And it was breathing. Slowly. Softly.

Inhumanely.

Delilah whimpered. "Oh, Richard. Please, please. What have I done!"

And fell again into the consecrated darkness of amnesia as the haunting shadow wrapped its fingers around her eyes.

This time, she found herself at the ruin of the medieval abbey in Yorkshire, in broad daylight...no entity to hound her this time. It was raining savagely outside.

She heard footsteps. Not one pair but two.

Then outside of her own being, Delilah saw herself. With Richard, alive and walking. She remembered that day clearly from the bygones of her life.

In a manner, Delilah was plaguing her own pasted, and had once upon a time been haunted by her own self.

At once, Richard lifted his head and his eyes met hers. It was hard to tell what he saw. Or whether he saw her. But he had soon carried her past self out of there.

This, later, would be the place where he died. This, later, would a lot evil a ground than any hell could ever have been.

All of it...of course, was but a dream. Nightmare. It meant nothing. It meant something. Fortold something.

The ghosts of her past had been her own person. And the shadow...the entity, none other than Alexis, the devil himself.