The Four Dimensions of Corey Emerson

Under Aquamarine Sun

            I had woken up in a pile of dirt, dust, grime, and vomit. My tight shoes were off my feet and my white, laced dress was torn. I would say I was cold, but there was a scratchy, wool blanket cast over my body. I was lying against cold bars of what I soon discovered to be a cell. I crawled to the front of the prison cell to look into almost pitch-black darkness. It wasn’t pitch black because I could see Bran’s claws chained to the ground and a muzzle over his beak. Knox was in the same cell he was, across from me. His hands were bound in black gloves that seemed to be melted or sewn onto his hands. I felt disgusted, but I couldn’t say or do anything. I had the same gloves on my hands. I struggled to get them off, but a voice growled from my right side.

            “If you’re going to take those off, Hun, it’s going hurt…” I swiftly turned to see a large furry figure barely being hit by a blue light coming from holes in the roof. The voice was coming from the cell next to me. The creature looked like a dog. It certainly smelled like one.  It had a thick British accent and I’d only heard one of those my entire journey through the Four Dimensions.

            “God,” I moaned. I laid back down, against the left of the cell but the wolf made a deep chuckle again. 

            “Ay, yeah, they got me to, didn’t they?” Elwyn Amadeus Tate laughed. “They got a good hundred of my clan, too. As soon as we hopped back in the Dimensions after trying to save your little arse.”

            I coughed. I supposed Elwyn could only be referring to Emerson and his… past. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that, by the way,” I whispered hoarsely.

            Elwyn mimicked my cough.  “Oh, it wasn’t your fault you ran away from us like a big pussy-cat… Emerson rubbed his cowardice onto you. It is rather unfortunate that you stuck with him, though… Couldn’t you tell he was weak?? I mean… look where he got you…”

            I didn’t know what to say, because Elwyn was right. “You said ‘do not be so loyal to them, and do not be so kind; you will not last three seconds if you trust either one.’”

            Elwyn chuckled again. “Yes, good memory,” he murmured sarcastically.

            “Who’s ‘them’?”

            Elwyn didn’t reply right away.

            “Elwyn-?”

            “-Oh, yes, we all wonder who ‘they’ is, don’t we? Isn’t that a question we should figure out on our own, and not just parade around as if it’s a simple question?”

            I sighed and curled into a ball facing away from Elwyn’s voice.

            “You do what you want, Sigurd, but there are some things you just need to figure out, yourself.”                                    

***

            When the aquamarine sun left the sky and came back through the cracks, a couple vampire guards took Elwyn in his human form and he didn’t fight back for a single second. It made me wonder how long he’d been in that cell.

            When they took him, I got as good a view of Elwyn’s human body as I could. He had worn and furry rags for clothes and cloth wraps around his feet. His face was a corpse’s face and his eyes were practically nothing. When the vampires dragged him out to who knew where, Elwyn smiled at me and chuckled like he had, during our talk.

            From the opposite cells, Bran and Knox crawled to the front bars and watched Elwyn go. Knox made the foolish decision to quarrel. He started to protest and tried so desperately to spew shoot flames from his bound and covered hands. One of the vampires broke away from the three carrying Elwyn and approached the cell with Knox and Bran.

            The vampire ran his long clawed fingers over the rusty cell bars. Suddenly, a large wall of what seemed to be black diamond crystalized in between the bars, so I could no longer see Knox and Bran. Shocked, I stumbled toward the bars of my cell and reached through them, protesting this. The vampire smirked at me, glided over and did the same thing.

            I pounded on the diamond until my hands were red and puffy and my knuckles were near bloody.

            “Don’t bother,” A voice rasped, to my left. I jumped. I didn’t know there was a cell next to me. No diamond was in between the bars, so I could sort of see the curled up ball of what seemed to be an old, torn man, in the dark. “They’ll start with your sight,” he continued. “Then they’ll numb you. Soon you’ll start hearing things and you won’t be able to move your hands, it’ll get so cold. Eventually, they’ll stop feeding you, but they’ve found a way to keep you alive.”

            There was a long silence until I scooted toward the bars to my side. “How do they keep you alive?”

            I saw the back of the corpse-like man raise and lower. “I haven’t been fed in twenty aquamarine suns and I feel like I’m going to die, but something inside me holds onto life… like it’s a disease… Life just won’t let me go... I can’t stand it…”

            I smiled at the horribleness of the man’s brittle condition. It made me feel that something right would eventually come from all of this. Some crazy sense of optimism told me I would get out of this Vampirian Parliament, continue to track Corey Emerson’s scent, and do the honors of removing his cowardly head from the rest of his body.