Page 35 of Wicked Vile King
He left me in here. Saint Laurier left me in here and locked the door. I'd do anything right now if he'd just let me out.
I shudder and shake, cold from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. My breath is loud, my heartbeat loud, my thoughts loud, but the loudest of all is a single hopeless prayer.
Don't think of it, Willow!
Don't remember.
Pray you forget.
The dark place he locked me in smells like mildew and stale water that drips slowly from somewhere far off. I lift my shaking hands in the pitch black and search the door again, slower this time, forcing myself to calm and take my time. Finally, I find the knob. I turn it back-and-forth, back-and-forth, twisting and pulling with all my might, but the door doesn't budge. It just shakes a little when I grab it with both hands and rear back, trying to pry it off its hinges.
Drip, drip, dripsounds from inside the catacomb.
My heart answers with the skip of a beat and my brain with flashes of that night. The bathtub, the blood, the death, and then the darkness.
Oh God.
Not again.
"Please," I manage, flattening my forehead to the door and nearly kissing it.
"Please," I croak a second later.
But it's too late. The drip of water and the stench of mildew fades away beneath the rapid-fire inhale of my own breath and the fetor of spilled blood.
Don't think about it, Willow.
Stop thinking about it!!
I can't stop it though. The flashes detonate no matter what I do. I am back at the only place I've ever called home in the heart of South Carolina. Normally, everything is tidy and clean in our house and smells of cinnamon, vanilla, and those candles Mama likes from the store, but today is different. There's blood on the porcelain tile beneath my feet, not unyielding darkness and centuries-old stone. Behind my eyes, there's a glimmer of light through the large window above the bathtub, where dusk enters and announces the coming of nightfall. Gone is the black nothingness of the tunnel and the solid plank of a shut door. My body remains, but my mind goes all the way back to last year and that unnatural scent that made every one of my hairs stand on end. I don't smell stale water and mildew anymore, only blood and death.
Stop fucking thinking about it!!!
I open my mouth to scream, but just like back then, the sound is extinguished, lost to the rising tide of my panic. I grip the doorknob like if I hold it hard enough, I can make it magically unlock beneath my hands and leave this place.
"H . . . help," I manage, slicing back to reality, but the word sounds like the whisper of a ghost.
"Help," I say again, or try to, as the darkness suffocates me, squeezing the air from my middle and trying to suck me back to the past and the place I don't belong.
This is the worst kind of dark, where there's no light from the moon, no hope from a nightlight, and no switch to flip on to keep the monsters away. There's just the nothingness of the pitch black, and it comes for me, gulping me down.
Nothing holds the thoughts at bay anymore. Tears fall, and my breath comes and goes faster and faster, until I am hyperventilating and wheezing and I fall to my knees, the stone hard and unyielding. An openness at my back and the feeling of vulnerability make me want to scream, but I can't let go of the door. I can't stop touching it because if I do, I might disappear for good this time.
Time passes differently in the dark.
It is both fast and slow.
It is forward and rewind.
And I am here and not, seeing things that don't exist but once did. My nightmares come to life.
The soft warmth of blood-stained bathwater seeps over the floor, up my toes, and across my hands, just like it did all those months ago when I crawled to her side on my hands and knees.
In front of me, there's not a door, but a bathtub, and the water still pours out of the faucet and into a large porcelain basin, her discarded body left to decay in the water.
There are my panicked screams for help and the vile stench of spilled vomit.
And the broken door handle that presses against my skin, cold metal sheared off in my panic to escape.
