The Castle of Forgotten Souls

'Till Death Do Us Part

The dark surrounded her. It slowly crushed her. She could hear whispers. Small, ethereal whispers that had shivers running up her spine. Leah stared without seeing anything. 

A pipe had burst somewhere above her. The drip of the water echoed through the tunnel. It had been echoing for ages. There was no end. It drove her crazy.

Her left eye twitched in annoyance. She closed her eyes with a defeated sigh and slid to the floor. Her hands were a welcome support for her tired head. Leah felt as if she had been awake for years, millennia. 

She tried to tune everything out, something she had seen Anna do whenever everything got too much for her. Chloe did it without knowing when she got wrapped up in something. Leah had never been much good at it. She felt things.

So she felt. She felt the biting cold of the stone wall pressed against her wall, soaked in the feeling of the slimy floor and walls sticking to her clothes. Leah felt the dampness of the passageway and considered the bleakness of her situation. 

She took in the absence of her friends. She felt the despair and worry bubbling up inside her. Leah was sick of feeling, so she thought instead. Thought to ignore her senses.

Leah doesn't know what happened or how she got here. The last thing she remembered was running.

Anna, that moronic girl, she thought fondly, was taking on the cat to give them time to escape. Leah remembered thinking Anna was losing to the cat, so she ran.

'If I run', she remembered thinking, 'if I'm out of danger, Anna will run too.'

She wouldn't get hurt anymore. Then, Anna had screamed, and it was so full of raw pain and misery that Leah fell over in her haste to see if she was dead. Leah did not even want to entertain the notion. 

She did not know what a world without Anna O'Connell was like, and she was not planning on finding out anytime soon.

The next thing she knew, she was falling into oblivion. She did not know how long she fell, how long Leah screamed until she was hoarse for help, how long it took to get to this dark, slime-ridden, damp place. Realistically, Leah knew it only had to have been a few minutes, but it had felt like an eternity. And not a fun one.

This darkness was nothing like the comforting darkness that enveloped her when she was sleeping in her bed. The farthest away from the safe, secure darkness. The one full of whispered secrets and hushed giggles on sleepover nights. 

This darkness soaked into her bones, tainted them so irrevocably that Leah had started to believe she would never be warm again. This darkness housed all her darkest demons.

Anna's scream of pain rang through her ears. She stared into the dark some more. The sight of Anna's hand, charred and blistered after being plunged into a fire. All to save them.

 Leah had always known that that particular instinct of hers would end up with Anna hurt. Anna never listened to her when Leah reprimanded her for getting into fights.

'You can't fight every demon in the world,' she would say. 'Someday, Anna, you will face a demon that will hurt you beyond repair.'

A picture of Chloe leaning over Anna as she took her last breaths, her last thoughts being that Leah never cared, that she abandoned them the first chance she got, flashed into her mind. 

Would they realise Leah was actually trapped? Would they leave the house, thinking they would see her in the morning? Would she never get to leave?

She shook her head.