Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here [Sean]
Jun 18, 2011 20:58:16 GMT -5
Post by L.C. Milliner on Jun 18, 2011 20:58:16 GMT -5
Staying awake was hard business.
It was around two in the morning when L.C.’s fourth CD ran out, and she took her headphones off, her eyes staying shut as she placed them on the stand, listening to them slip onto the floor. She groaned and thought about retrieving them, but instead rolled over into her pillow and found herself muttering a bedtime prayer. “Now I lay me down to sleep...” She muttered, half of it coming out as mumbled, garbled nonsense. She moved on to the Lord’s Prayer, muttered titles to random books, and found herself muttering the same words over and over in an attempt to keep herself awake.
“See how lovingly the blessed virgin opens her arms to thee? On her bosom thy hardened heart will be melted; there, thou wilt confess...”
She wasn’t entirely sure when she stopped saying them and started thinking she was saying them, but in the end she finally lost the battle and drifted off to sleep.
The nightmare came in a screaming cacophony of a rusty calliope melody being started up, and she found herself in the part of the dream she had told Sean about, the hoop from her childhood. It played out exactly like she had thought it- she was in the hoop, then on the ground, then in the office of the carnival veterinarian, setting her arm as she screamed. It was all downhill from there, a lot of falling down rabbit holes and running, most of it just nonsense- scary nonsense, but nonsense.
There was a part where, after all her running about, she found herself running through a cornfield only to burst out of it and into a house of mirrors. She always hated the mirror houses, even when she set them up, knew every twist and turn, and could walk through with her eyes shut. Being surrounded by mirrors on all sides was terrifying, because everywhere you looked, you could see yourself. When you saw yourself getting scared, you tended to get worse. Finally she made it to a room with a bunch of doors and she paused, resting her hands on her knees. She had been doing a lot of running.
On the outside of her dream, L.C. barely moved. In fact, she looked almost peaceful for a while. The only thing one could notice was her grip slowly tightening on the pillow she had wrapped herself around. After a twitch around two thirty, she abruptly turned over in her sleep, quickly and quietly. It didn’t look like much, but it was the beginning of the end.
While she was bent, she noticed the dead leaves scattered on the floor were being blown by some sort of wind. She paused and watched them with a growing sense of foreboding, looking up and realizing the door across from her was opening slowly, revealing it to be the size of a closet. She knitted her eyebrows together, because even though she had this dream a thousand times, her subconscious self still didn’t understand what it meant.
Her feet came out from underneath her as a gust of wind swept her up, and she rolled into the closet room, where the door slammed behind her. She screeched and pounded at the door, jiggling the knob, but she was knocked off her feet again as the room inexplicably began to bounce up and down, making her crash into the walls, ceiling, floor, and the doorknob. It shook like a blender, and when it spit her out she already saw bruises forming in the dim light. She fell to the floor and coughed, looking up and realizing that now every door was opening. The room began to tilt her toward another door. She flat out screamed.
A whimper broke out of the dream and all but echoed around her room.
Each time she fell out of a room, the door would disappear. That was the only good thing. The rooms grew more violent with their shaking after each go, and the final room felt like she was being kicked and she could really feel the pain, even though dreams were not supposed to have them. She was finally thrown out, and she realized there was now a door in the floor. She opened it slowly, looking down to discover there was nothing there. All she saw was a panel of black. She looked behind her for a door and saw none. She looked back into the black hole, took a breath, and jumped in, allowing the nothingness to embrace her as she shut the door behind her.
The fall didn’t last too long at all before she found herself crashing into a familiar place- Hammel. But it wasn’t the Hammel she knew. Not in the least. Every student had on prison clothes. Not the orange jumpsuit kind, but the striped, black and white kind. They were scattered all over, lying down in hallways, shuffling in and out of classrooms. A lot of the walls were burned out and charred on the ground level. It was cold outside, but barely anyone wore shoes. She saw trash fires made of old workbooks and desk tops. She was in the same garb as everyone else, and for some reason she rolled up her sleeve, exposing a black tattoo of a meaningless number, stark against her pale white arm.
She was skin and bone. Everyone was. She couldn’t see faces clearly, and they seemed blurred to her, but it was obvious to her that all the people there were students and teachers. All of them were prisoners. All of them had numbers. All of them were metas.
And, looking to the ground, she realized she wasn’t standing in snow, but in ashes. They fluttered down from the sky. The burning smell hurt her nose. She knew that smell. That was the smell of burning hair.
She realized with a start: no. That was the smell of burning bodies.
L.C. jerked violently in her sleep and curled into a ball. Her breathing hitched for a moment like she had been punched. Her heart rate was staccato. But she wasn’t waking up.
She hit the fence running and gritted her teeth, ignoring the pangs of pain in her feet and hands as the barbed wire and glass tore at her skin. She heard the bullets ricochet around her, hitting the fence, the ground, the trees on the other side. She felt one graze her shoulder and she cried out loudly, finally scaling the fence. She dropped to the other side with a painful crunch, glass shards embedding in her back. But she didn’t have time to lie down. She took off running, flinching at the sound of every gunshot. She looked behind her and saw her bloody footprints in the dirt, and she veered off to the right, only to trip and fall headlong down into a ravine, or at least that’s what she thought. After about a minute of rolling she realized she wasn’t stopping.
She had been turning over and muttering in her sleep about numbers and the Holocaust and carnivals. She was getting caught in her sheets as she thrashed, kicking wildly in an attempt to get them off. From outside the room you could hear her moving.
Her fall ended as she tumbled out of the woods onto the streets of a suburb, and as she stood she realized two things- she wasn’t bleeding anymore, and she was much older. (Well, not much, but she was in her late twenties.) Her hair was still a mousy, box dyed brown. He clothes looked more professional- black dress pants, heels. She wore heels? That was a surprise.
Checking to make sure that the meta-Nazis were nowhere to be found behind her, L.C. made her way down the street. It was late at night, and there wasn’t a star in the sky. The streetlights emitted a faint glow, and from that she could see where she was going. She traveled down the sidewalk, every step taking her closer to the end of the cul-de-sac. She had no idea where she was going.
As she got to the circular part of the road, she noticed something- a mailbox, bright white. On it was a stamping of letters that spelled out the names of people who lived there. She looked at them with obvious curiosity. ‘Keystone.’ ‘Richmond.’ ‘Rockwood.’
‘Milliner.’
Her struggling stopped and the girl fell into an eerie, stock still motion.
The door was easily opened- it wasn’t even locked. It creaked as it did and she shut it quickly, listening for any stirring. Nothing. She paused and moved forward quietly down a main hallway, toward what looked like the entrance to a kitchen. The living room was to her right. On her left was a set of stairs, leading upstairs. She heard the sounds of snoring, so she left it alone, opting to take the straightaway instead.
The walls were plastered with pictures of two children- a boy and a girl, by the looks of it. Smiling, blonde children took up the span of the left wall. On the right were the adults. She looked at them, expecting the pictures to be of her or something- a bright ending to her nightmare- but instead, she found a picture of her mother, smiling happily next to a man she didn’t know. She froze.
Every inch of the wall was covered with pictures of her and that man. And the family portrait, showing the four of them and her brother, her real brother, made her finally snap. She reached up a hand and, with one movement, ripped the picture, the wallpaper, and the plaster holding it all up off the wall. Everything fell with a glorious cacophony of shattering glass and thumping. The noises of sleep upstairs ceased, and the sounds of waking up began. A grim smile came to L.C.’s lips as she turned, pacing back to the bottom of the stairs. She wanted to see them, all of them. And she wanted to commit their faces to memory before she ripped them off.
“Oh Mother, I’m home...”
The thrashing started up again in twofold, as did the whimpering. L.C. wanted out of the dream, every part of it, because she knew what happened next.
There had been pictures on the walls, but they were shattered on the floor now. The wallpaper was scored with long gashes, and they were red and starting to turn brown. The house was dark. In the kitchen there was a man face down on the floor in a pool of blood that enveloped his entire body. Well, most of it. His head had been separated from his neck and was nowhere to be found. The body was still warm. Boot prints led from the kitchen to the living room, then into the garage.
She was waiting in there.
Standing over a frightened old woman, a brown haired and raging Lyra Milliner was holding a severed head in one hand. Her other hand was covered in spikes. The rest of her was covered in blood and brain matter and other gory details. Her hair was flecked with it. Her jeans were stained with it. She threw the head down, the force of her throw shattering the skull across the concrete. The woman whimpered.
“Well, Mother? Is this what you wanted?” Lyra spread her arms and looked down at the old woman. Her Mother. “Is this the life you wanted, after throwing me out of your house? You hoped I would die, didn’t you?” The old woman shook her head, mute. Lyra screamed in rage and stomped her foot. “DON’T LIE TO ME, YOU BITCH!” There was a sickening crack as Lyra raised her foot and spikes jutted from the bottom. She kicked her Mother square in the face.
The ex-carnival performer was lying on the cold concrete of the garage floor. Her new husband was dead. Her new life was shattered. The children? She’d get to them later. She wasn’t sure where she had hid them, but she’d find them. She’d rip the house apart board by board if she had to-
Sirens.
“No, no, nononono...”
Lyra looked up at the windows of the garage and saw the flashing blue and red lights. They illuminated the space, even the dust motes twirling in the air. Lyra seemed to shift back down to her teenage self again, her hair becoming blonde, her height shrinking a few inches. She looked to her Mother on the floor. She was faceless. The front of her skull was shattered and caved. “Did you… No. You didn’t have the time. No. No…”
The police were coming. The Nazis, the carnival people, all of them were coming, to put her in shaking rooms and concentration camps and she would fall forever and ever. She couldn’t let it happen. Not now. She couldn’t go through that, not again, wasn’t once a night enough? She stepped back, away from the garage windows, placing herself in the doorway between the garage and the kitchen. She was crying but she didn’t knew why, not until she looked at her hand and realized it was shaped like a finger gun, the kind children played with. She gulped and pressed her two fingers to her forehead, then, thinking harder, to her chin. No, that wasn’t right either.
‘Sean, I lied, wake me up, wake me up, WAKE ME UP!!!’
The temple would have to do.
She tried to stop the tears from falling as she drilled her fingers into the side of her head, whispering to herself. Her body was wracked with sobs, so she could barely say the words.
“Our father... who art... in heaven, hallowed be... thy-”
Her thumb pushed downward in a shooting motion.
Bang.
“NO!” L.C. exploded awake with a scream loud enough to wake the quick and the dead. She tried to move, but the blankets constricted her- immediately spikes ran along her body as she flailed, ripping the sheets and the better part of the mattress up as she rolled off the bed onto the floor. The bathroom- eleven steps away- she bolted for it, slamming a shoulder into the door before vomiting into the sink, the closest thing she could get hold of. Her forehead hit the faucet, but she could barely register the pain as she took deep breaths.
She kept assuring herself that she wasn’t dead, but her panic was still there, making her heave again as she started to cry over the sink. She was bloody from her spikes accidentally jabbing her as she tore her way through the sheets and was covered in a cold sweat, another remnant from her night terrors.
“God.” She whispered, as if the pain would go away just by her saying it. “God...” And she was sobbing again, this time in real life, as she sunk down to her knees in front of the sink, still gasping for air.
How many times had she been through this since she stopped taking those pills? She couldn’t remember anymore.
