Beneath the Surface [ON HOLD]

Chapter Fourteen - The Creeping Madness

Chapter Fourteen – The Creeping Madness

Nicholas’ POV

Day after day my mind was becoming more and more blurred.

This thought had never caused me any concern – in fact, I relished in my incoherent memories; glad that I was never able to clearly remember my life before I came here.

But now… Now everything was different. At first the lapses in my sanity were infrequent and brief, but ever since my twentieth birthday these gaps have become a rather daily and expected occurrence.

At the beginning they were short – almost as if I had fallen asleep for a few minutes, but as time passed I began to notice the way I would black out for hours; wake up in the strangest of places, my hands bloodied and raw. I could never remember what happened – and a part of me did not want to.

As the months passed by in a blur of wakefulness and blackness I began to realise that time was running out – the sands of my hourglass were trickling away; steadily but surely.

I needed to find her – I needed her to break this accursed spell; to rid me of this half-life I have grown accustomed to living.

 My father wanted me to die a slow and painful death.

I realise that now.

He wanted me to drown in my own madness.

I was so close to asking her to help me – so close to asking Red to free me from this hell I’m living.

But what would she have said? What could she have said?

She hated me for taking her away from her little village – from her quaint life as the inventor’s daughter. We hardly knew each other, but I trusted her with my life, even if she didn’t know it yet.

She was my only hope – she was the only person in all my years here to have gotten close to me without being killed. She was different – she had to be different, otherwise I was as good as dead. Or something akin to it.

However, as I watched her stomp away from me, her hands waving madly in the air and snippets of her rant floating back to me on the breeze, I couldn’t help but feel a growing sense of hopelessness.

God – and I have steadily begun to question his existence – had a twisted sense of humour.

A wave of dizziness overcame me and I fisted my hands in my hair, pulling at the strands roughly. Not now.

Gritting my teeth against the growing blackness veiling my eyesight, I try to hold onto my slipping consciousness; grasping at fleeting memories that I willed to anchor me to the world.

A single scene unravelled itself before my eyes, the images becoming clearer and clearer until I was sure I was standing there in person.

I stood staring at a five year old version of myself, his white hair flopping into his deep blue eyes that were filled with tears.

I watched with a detached feeling of confusion as the young version of me knelt beside a huge four poster bed, the heavy blankets and fur covers strewn over the floor and bed haphazardly, as if its occupant had been tossing and turning violently.

The occupant in question was a beautiful woman of about thirty and five; with long red hair and deep grey eyes that were shadowed with pain. Her complexion was sickly and pale, the veins twining up her neck standing out against the pallor of her skin. A thin sheen of sweat covered her face, matting her hair to her forehead.