The Venantium Auallonia Trilogy: Midsummer Sky

Chapter 6: Moral Wounds

"Moral wounds have this peculiarity—they may be hidden but they are never closed, always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart. "

–Alexander Dumas, the Count of Monte Cristo

I was sharply woken up with a vibrational slap across my face that stung, an urgent and impatient voice spatting ugly words at me without remorse. There was a pounding like a jack hammer in my temples. I must have been drugged, considering my eyelids weighed a ton; heavy with intoxicated sleep. The voice shouted at me angrily again. There were undertones in the voice that indicated it came from a girl, but its octaves were all over the place to the point where words wouldn't form. It reminded me of the genre of music called dubstep where voices would go from soprano to alto in seconds, and would repeat over and over in the midst of computer sounds put together to sound like a song. Slowly, and quite painfully, I wrenched open my heavy eyelids. At first, everything was blurry, the girl before me and the subtle light and dark looming clouds that came from the gigantic bay windows. After a few moments my sight adjusted and so did my hearing once the girl cracked my across the face again. A metallic bitterness filled my taste buds enough for me to gag, trickling from my mouth in a stream. She was about to scream at me again when someone I couldn't see reprimanded her; insisting on tempering down the abuse in a voice that had a recognizable tone to it, but my mind immediately wrote it off as nothing. It was muffled at everything the guy? Yes, the guy's voice, said.

The drowsy feeling was slowly dissipating a little from my limbs, and I tried to attempted to sit further up from the hunched over position they left me in. They. The girl was discussing something with the guy I heard at the other end of the room in from of the stormy windows. A full New England downpour at its finest was crackling at the panes. A proverbial thunder rumbled above us; a flash of lightning jolted from the sky enough to illuminate the figure the girl was speaking to, and somewhere in the back of my mind all I could think of was a time when I was very little and Karla was in one of those indecently rare parental moments where she would actually care that I was her adopted daughter and I had been afraid of lightning.

"It's just thunder, Alexandria. It won't do anything to you." She would reproach. Even in my early years she refused to use my real name. She refused to acknowledge me as Dawn.

My lip would tremble, and I'd say, "But it looks like fire! Won't it burn us?"

"God's just in a grumpy mood. He won't burn you unless he finds it necessary. Think of it as his way of sports, like bowling. And every time thunder rolls he gets a strike, lighting is the spares."

Of all the things to recollect, I get Karla. Seriously, that's the best I get? There was movement again, and another shot of lightning that showed someone, the man I presumed; covered in entirely black. He was seated in an old Victorian styled chair; legs crossed and looking out at the storm before him. I recognized him just then, with an annoyed flash of astonishment. The shape of his arrogantly set shoulders and uncommon calmness of which he sat. There was a silence about him that made the hair on my arms stand on end. It was Gerard; my obsessed stalker. I tried desperately to sit up but it was no use. My hands and legs had been tied in perfection. I yanked at them as hard as I could even as the rope fibers chaffed my shivering skin; they wouldn't budge.

Beside me was a mangled nightstand littered with lit candles of every shape and size. No wonder I felt so warm at first when I woke up, I had been hunched over to close to the candles the heat practically could have waken me up. The rest of the room was somewhat small; loaded with tons of broken beds, chairs, and other odds and ends. I must be in an attic...somewhere. Thought I couldn't exactly figure out where. As soon as I thought that, the room was once more illuminated and I could see the patented plaque for St. Liza's Mental & Behavioral Hospital, given a broken plaque. How the hell did Gerard and this girl know where I was? The girl glided over to me passingly. She was wearing a mask, no, wait that's not a mask. Her face was painted like a sugar skull. Like the ones they use from Dia de Los Muertos; Day of the Dead. Her eyes were what struck me; black bottomless pits with bright blue eyes that looked like contacts and a nightmare Sally grin streaked across her painted stitched lips. Except that smiling paint consisted of an irritated scowl; one for some reason had it in for me.