A/N: Alright, this is the 'backstory' or character bio for my new -and first- character for a Mage: Awakening larp I just joined. I'm new to Mage and kind of had to improvise and feel my way around when working through her actual awakening. If I got anything terribly wrong, please let me know. For those who might be interested, her shadow name ends up being Ryan (I know, not a flashy demon name like most Mastigos I know have taken, but as you will see it has some sentimental value) and she is a Mastigos (as I just stated...) so thus the realm she wandered through was Pandemonium. Since I don't know what Pandemonium is, and my friends only told me that it was considered 'Hell' and reflected the person's personal hell, their personal nightmares, I kind of formed it around Ryan.
Anyway! I would love some feedback either way! Even if it's just a 'Yay demons!' or a 'Wtf...' haha, i'm not that picky
So Sing Me a Fucking Anthem
Fuck. After everything that has happened, you'd think that I would feel worse. I mean, I still feel pretty shitty, kind of all torn up inside, but I guess I assumed I would feel worse by the time that I got to this point. Of course, I'd had no idea that I would end up at this point. Not once, not even when things started to get bad. Sure, there had been times where I was almost certain that I was about two smart words away from ending up in a ditch somewhere (not that that stopped me), but never this.
No, never this.
Clarissa and Charles Bryant were your standard happy, healthy couple. They were young when they settled down and started their family, though for the life of me I can't understand why they would even want to. I'm more than certain by now that it was a bad idea. For them, at least, it had proved fatal.
My brother Joshua was born first. Bright-eyed and rambunctious, they had their hands full with him, enough that they'd set aside having another for a few years even though their initial plan had been to have ten kids, one right after another. Even as a child my eyes had widened at the very concept. It was hectic enough with me and my Joshua, and later with Tyler, and I couldn't imagine what it would be like with nine other siblings. I was smart enough to be grateful that my parents had decided to keep their pants on instead of going for some kind of record.
Anyway, March 21st of 1989 my brother Joshua was born and all was still right with the world. My parents were ecstatic, fumbling along with the burden of parenthood and doing a pretty damn good job compared to a lot of other people. It was a complete freak occurrence that three years later on the exact same day, I was born. A brother and sister that shared the same birthday, born three years apart? It sounds pretty cool at first, doesn't it? When we were really young it was, because we were both too young to realize anything other than that we were getting presents and what kid doesn't enjoy presents? Then, of course, we got older and it was a battle for attention, the usual greedy kid stuff. Everyone always seemed to think we were twins or something (which fluffed my ego and wounded his, since I was younger).
But really, other than that Josh and I got along really well. There was the usual brother-sister squabbling, and sometimes months at a time where we didn't speak a word to each other, but when it came right down to it he was my big brother and I his little sister.
Josh and I were close, but my best friend was a boy that lived down the street from me. His name was Ryan. Sound familiar? Yeah, call me sentimental. Whatever.
Ryan was a year older than me and lived down the street. A nice kid, considering that we became friends because I pretty much kicked his ass. He was eight, I was seven, and he accidentally took my sled thinking it was his when our families were at the hill near our house one winter. Having an older brother, I understood that the only way to get something back from a boy was to tackle him and beat him to get it back from him. Since I was used to tussling with Josh, who was three years older than me, I went all out on poor Ryan, who had a two-year-old sister and was taught that it was wrong to hit girls. Whether that was because it was wrong or because they had a highly contagious disease called cooties I forget. After all, it was a long time ago.
Ryan and I remained best friends until the day he died, but that comes in a bit later in our little story.
For now, let us return to those happy days for just a bit longer. If you could believe it, during those days I was one of those girly-girls. Well, not entirely. I wasn't an annoying little twit of a girl, not a princess –my mother wouldn't have held for any of that kind of nonsense. I mean, I did keep my hair long and I liked wearing pretty things. Dresses, skirts, bright colors like pink and yellow. So, yes, I may not have been a princess, but I was a girly-girl. I was a daddy's girl, though.
Daddy's little girl.
Heh. I wonder what he would say if he could see me now…
My father was a brilliant, wonderful man. He was an astronomy professor if you could believe that. A real nut about the stars. From high school all the way up to the year before my brother was born, he was also a camp counselor at a boy scout camp. He was really into living off the land, and because of that so were we. At least, we were all taught to do so. I know how to make a makeshift shelter, live off the land. I know a whole bunch of nifty stuff that he taught me about staying alive when you have nothing with you but a knife, the land, and the clothes on your back. It was valuable information that at the time I had never guessed would someday save the lives of me and my brothers.
My mother was a teacher too, and like her darling husband saw fit that her children would benefit from what she could teach them. Mom's teachings ran more into the academics, though. She taught fifth grade, and I was lucky enough to actually have her for my teacher. And by lucky I mean mortified. I managed to survive, though, and perhaps I was better for it. One thing was for certain, and that was that I was always an excellent student because of it. I like to think I'm naturally pretty smart, and thanks to mommy dearest I never missed an assignment. I've got to admit that it was always a thing of pride when my A+ tests got put on the refrigerator, though.
So life was good. There were the little tragedies here and there, but we lived an altogether peaceful, happy, mundane life.
All that changed when my little brother Tyler was born.
It was January 3rd, 2006. I remember it as a very cold day. Freezing, actually. I also remembering it being a Tuesday, though for the life of me I don't know why that fact registered itself as relevant. Perhaps it was because of everything that happened that day that I retained every detail so perfectly. The human psyche works funny that way, doesn't it? Something tragic happens and our little minds take extremist measures. Sometimes they block everything out, so that we cannot remember anything at all, and other times the horror of it all is stained into our mind so deep, so clear, that we are forced to retain it for the rest of our lives. A mar to stain us, so that we will never forget the truth of what the world really is.
Which is a cold place. A cruel place.
It is a world of pain and suffering. A world of darkness.
That cold, cruel Tuesday in January began like every day had for the past couple months at this point, with my screams. I'd been having horrible nightmares since I was little, and the only reason I haven't brought that up in our little story until now is because up until this point in the story they were just one of those little bumps in the fabric of an otherwise relatively good and peaceful life. Besides, up until a couple months before that dreadful Tuesday I could never remember what it was I was screaming about after I woke up. Sometimes I would scream things in my sleep, but they were always seemingly random, occasionally in what sounded like a different language entirely. But leading up to that fateful day, I was able to clearly recall each nightmare I had.
They were often the same, and I was often one of the star players.
The nightmare that woke me at three in the morning on January 3rd, 2006 was one that had been weighing on me for almost two straight weeks. I'd hardly been sleeping because of it, and had been lying to my family about remembering it so that I wouldn't trouble them. I chalked it up to anxiety about my mom. Silly worries. Everything would be fine. Sure, the pregnancy had been a hard one as pregnancies go, and you hear about bad things happening in situations like that, but you never think any of those things could happen to you.
But my dream was so vivid. There she was, lying on the hospital bed and staring up at me with those vacant eyes. The eyes of the dead. Her face was drawn up, frozen in terror and pain, and she was reaching for me. I knew she was dead, but her lips were moving and she was reaching for me. Sometimes in the nightmare there were words, but most of the time her lips just moved like she was speaking. Even so, I knew what she was saying.
"Keep him safe. Don't let them get him. Keep him safe."
Then, "Run, Regina! Run!"
In the way that dreams work, I would find myself running down this filthy alleyway clutching something to my chest, not really questioning how I got there or why. All I knew was that I had to keep running. I had to keep moving, no matter what. I tripped over myself on the same corner every single time, crashing to the ground still clutching the something to my chest. The shadows seemed to grab me, clawing at me, and I screamed, scrambling away from them to grab my treasure and keep going.
Because I knew that no matter what, I couldn't stop. No matter what, I had to keep running. Even when my lungs burned, feeling like they were going to collapse, I knew that I had to keep going. When my legs were lead and my feet bleeding because my shoes had worn down, I needed to keep running. But when I reached out to grab that precious treasure I had been trying to keep from the living shadows, those unseen demons, it was always just out of my reached.
Here was where the nightmare would vary.
Most of the time, when I reached my fingers would touch the edge of the fabric that wrapped the bundle and then the shadows would flow over it, dragging it away and into the darkness. Then, the shadows would overtake me, too. I could feel them, seeping over me, sinking into me. Consuming me, chewing on my soul like some kind of rare and tasty taffy.
Ha. Yum.
From this version of the nightmare, I would wake screaming, often crying, and in more pain than I could comprehend. Was it even possible for the human body to feel so much pain and remain unmarred? My brother, who was seventeen at the time, had taken to sleeping with his door open by this time and would be there when I woke up. He always looked so afraid, so worried when he helped me sit up and hugged me close. I don't think he got much more sleep than I did during those few months… and after he probably got even less.
Now, in the other version of this particular nightmare, the less frequent version, I would reach for the bundle and grab it, dragging it to me as I pushed myself to my feet just before the shadows got us. Then I would run again with it clutched to my chest, and I would continue to run. I would spend what felt like years running with my heels a breath away from the edge of those living, writhing shadows. Eventually my legs would wear down, my lungs burning so much that I could no longer breath. Here was when I fell. I fell but kept that bundle clutched close to my chest, and it was only then that I noticed the smell.
Ugh. That smell. Sometimes that smell would haunt me for hours after I woke up.
It was the smell of rot, the smell of death and decay. More than that, the stench somehow seemed tainted more than its natural putrid odor. It was sickening, and it was coming from my precious treasure. I never want to look, and I always do. Every single time I ignore my instinct to drop it and get far, far away from it and instead give in to that stupid thing we humans cannot avoid called curiosity. I'm pretty sure mine will get me killed one day, which isn't funny at all because that's a legitimate option nowadays.
Inside that little bundle was a rotting corpse. Small, decaying hands gripping its tattered face that is drawn up in a tattered scream. It feels soft in my hands, yielding and oozing. The dead baby screams at me in its silent stillness. I want to scream back, I open my mouth to do so even, and am gently lifted out of sleep with only that sense of horror deeper than anything I have ever known to follow me out.
I preferred the version that had me waking screaming. At least in that one I knew what the ending was.
But it was this version that woke me that Tuesday morning, with one exception. This time I got to scream, and when I woke to Josh hovering over me, shaking me to drag me out of my nightmares, I was filled with the overwhelming certainty that today was wrong. It was just wrong.
But of course, I didn't mention this. I never spoke up about it. I was fourteen, what the hell did I know about anything? No one was going to listen to me if I said that something bad was going to happen, and even if they did what was I going to say? That I was going to be nommed on by the shadows while on the run with a dead, rotting baby in my arms?
Right.
So I swallowed a mug of tea, took a hot shower, and got ready for school several hours early, but I never said a word about the nightmare I insisted I didn't remember. No, I would much rather curl up on the couch with a book and forget about reality for a few hours until it was time to catch the bus. Usually by third period I was able to shake of whatever nightmare I had recently been plagued with, but this day was different. No, today it haunted me, and ten minutes into my second-to-last class of the day, it began to culminate.
Josh showed up at the door to my classroom. He spoke a few words to my teacher, then looked at me and I could tell by the look in his eyes that something had gone terribly, horribly wrong. Fuck. I knew it. I knew it from the moment I woke up that this day was just wrong, and when Josh looked at me like that…
The teacher called my name and nodded for me to go with Josh. Neither of them said anything. I didn't expect Mrs. Palenscar to know what the fuck was going on, probably just that it was a family emergency, but Josh should have told me something. He should have prepared me for what was about to happen. Fuck, I should have pushed him to tell me, but I didn't. I was afraid. I didn't really want to know, because then it would become real.
So in silence we left school and went to the hospital. Neither of us spoke on that long drive. I don't think either of us could even if we'd wanted to.
Too soon we were filing into that tiny hospital room. Dad was already there, and he looked so pale and about ten years older than he actually was. Mom was there. She looked so tiny, so frail… I rushed to her side as if I'd suddenly snapped back into reality. She was conscious, if only barely, and smiled at me. Told me that I was a big sister now and I had to protect my baby brother like Josh had always protected me. Stick up for him like a good big sister, because that was what I was now. I was a big sister. Looking back, I think she was also telling me that I would also be the woman of the house now. It was my job to keep the men sane.
Heh. That was what she always said. "As the official Woman of the House, it is my job to keep you crazy males sane." Then she'd cluck her tongue against her teeth, laugh, and go back to whatever it was she'd been doing.
She knew she was going to die then, but I don't think she knew how. Or maybe she did. I wouldn't know. I wasn't the one that was torn apart in front of her daughter minutes later, so how would I know if the knowledge of one's fate had any effect on the sound of the screams when that fate actually came pouring from the shadows.
Mom had just started to cough, started to shudder and shake and the doctors were ushering us out so that they could tend to her without an anxious family hanging over their shoulders. I didn't blame them, but the moment they turned away I dashed back into the room. To hell if I knew what I was going to do, all I knew was that I needed to be in that room if she was going to die. I needed to be there. I didn't think that I could stop it, but I had some crazy notion that my being there would do something.
Maybe it did.
Hard to tell, because the next moment she was screaming and there was blood everywhere. So much blood… I didn't know that a person could hold so much blood. It coated the walls, her bed, what was left of her body, and me. I wore that red like a crimson dress. With my dark hair and creamy pale skin tone, red had always been a good color on me. I'm not sure how blood can both be dark and still so bright, but Mom's was. Maybe because it came from everywhere at once. At first, I was so lost. I had no idea what was going on.
Then I saw it. Just a flash of something, and I could have sworn it was ginning at me before it was gone. It was the wrongness. Wrongness, that was what my mind called it. Maybe if I hadn't just been coated in my mother's blood I would have called it a demon, associated it with some kind of evil, but at the time all that registered was that this thing was the 'wrongness' that I had been dreading for the past few months.
Doctors rushed in. The thing was gone. My mother was dead. And I was coated in her blood.
No one could explain what had happened to her, and I was the only one who had really seen what had happened. It was obvious that something or someone had ripped my mother open, but no one could explain who, what, or how. For a while, the police were looking at me. They thought I had killed my own mother for some deranged reason. Thought I snapped because she'd had another kid that was going to steal more attention away from me. After all, because I shared a birthday with an older brother I was naturally starved for attention and some genetic tweak gave it the last little boost it needed to make me go matricidal. They even had one of those criminal psychologists take a look at me, try to get inside of my head and figure out if I was one of the nutters.
The man they got to do this concluded that I was definitely off and had the potential for extreme violence, but that it was unlikely for me to ever harm family. What a relief, I wasn't a sociopath.
Ryan became my rock. I had Joshua and my dad, of course, but Ryan was there when I needed to freak out. I just couldn't bring myself to collapse in front of Josh and Dad, not when I knew that they were hurting just like I was. Sure, they hadn't been drenched in her blood, but they had come rushing in with the doctors. They saw the same scene. But Ryan was clean, he had his own dramas, but he was clean of my own so I could freak out around him. He was my best friend, and was always able to pull me out of my own head. He was there when I threw that desk at Martin Griffin, stopped me from tackling him to the ground and beating his head into the smooth tile for saying something unbecoming about my family. He was there when I nearly did beat some chick's head into a cement wall for pissing me off.
It was like a switch had been flipped in me. All of a sudden I was this feral, vicious creature that could be set off almost at random. Especially for that first year, the only one who was safe from my wrath was baby Tyler. That sweet, beautiful baby boy. He alone was spared, and no one questioned it. At first I knew that my dad was hesitant to leave me alone with him with how I'd been acting out recently. I resented that for a while, then eventually got over it by the time he realized that little Tyler was in no danger around me. In fact, he was probably safer with me than anyone else, as I was likely to rip someone to shreds for making even one wrong move in his direction. I think the point he realized this was when I gave myself a running start to shoulder someone into the pool that first summer when it looked like he was going throw something in the direction where my father and Tyler were sitting. It wasn't that I thought he was aiming to hit the baby with the volleyball or anything, I wasn't that paranoid. It was more that I didn't trust his aim and his destination was a bit too close to where the baby was for comfort. So I took care of the problem the quickest way I knew how.
So I tackled him into the pool, and we got into it. He didn't care that I was a girl and neither did I, so the only thing that kept me from probably drowning was Josh and Ryan tearing us away from each other. Ryan had grabbed me around the waist and hauled me off in one direction and Josh took care of the guy I'd unceremoniously tackled.
From then on, it seemed like both Josh and Ryan were constantly ready to stop me from getting myself into a fight. Most of the time they succeeded, too. After all, I was volatile, not stupid.
For a while, life continued on like this. Dad seemed to be fading away from us, growing more and more distant with each passing day. He tried, I know he did, to keep things happy, but losing the love of your life does something to a man. He had us, but we knew that it wasn't enough. It got to the point where we hardly saw him anymore. He was always in the basement, which he had converted into his personal study. I don't think he ever did any work down there, not after Mom died. He just went down there and laid on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, which he and Mom had painted like the night sky. My mother had been quite a good artist, and had put up an array of constellations. Some were real, others were made up. There was a lion up there for me, my given name being Regina, and a ship for my brother Joshua, who had been named for the first man to ever sail single-handedly around the world –Joshua Slocum.
I'm not sure what she would have put for Tyler.
Every few months either I or Josh would try to talk to Dad, try to pull him out of his misery, but nothing ever worked. So we did what we could, and we got by the best we could. Little Tyler was proving to be his own kind of handful, but for the most time he was a good baby. Cute, sweet, smart, and as well behaved as one could expect a baby to be. Even when he became a toddler he was good, which was a relief to all of us.
The strange things started happening again when Tyler turned three. Dead things, always dead things, would appear around the house. A dead cat on the doorstep, a dead crow in the attic. We might have thought that they were just unfortunate coincidences. All things die, and they just all happened to like to come to die at our place, right? Ha. Yeah, except for the fact that the cat and the crow were definitely dead for a while before they showed up at our house. Days at least, but probably closer to weeks. Newly dead things weren't already beginning to decay like that, didn't smell like that…
My nightmares got worse again that summer. I was able to remember snippets of them, just enough to dread the upcoming months. A few years wasn't nearly enough to erase the memory of my mother's violent death and the months leading up to it. This time, though, I was only remembering bits and pieces. Maybe it was that whole suppression thing that was fucking me over, my mind trying to protect me or something. Screw it, for the first time I actually wanted to know what the rest of the nightmares were, because if it was anything like what had happened with Mom, maybe there was something I could do this time. To hell if I knew what, but knowing was better than not knowing, wasn't it?
Time dragged on, but the memories remained vague and I was growing desperate. So I turned to the people I cared most about. I told Ryan to be careful, told Josh to watch his back and keep a close eye on Tyler whenever he had him, told my dad to stay safe, and I was never more than two feet away from Tyler whenever I was with him. There was no fucking was that some shadow thing was going to take any more of my family from me.
Well. I was right with that part, anyway.
September 14th, 2009. My dad left for work and did not come back. We were told that when he was driving into the city his car ended up in the Chicago River. Ever been to Chicago and driven over one of the bridges?
Yeah. Tell me how the fuck a little-ass beater like my dad's car ended up in the river.
The next few months were a blur of dead things and courtrooms. It was ultimately decided that we would continue living together in our house, and our aunt that lived in the next town over would come and check in on us. We weren't going to stand being separated, and Josh was prepared to go so far as quit school and get custody of us if that was what it would take.
Well, he did that anyway.
After about a month living in that house we packed up our shit and moved into an apartment in the city. We just couldn't stay there. Josh quit school and began working full time, but he made me finish high school. It was really rough that year, but after a while we settled into a routine and were once again slowly grounding ourselves. Like when my mom died, Ryan was my rock. I really don't know what I would have done without him. He was the one that not only kept me from getting expelled but kept me from sinking into that little Gina-size pit of despair that would have consumed me after all that had happened. With the nightmares that came at me a few times a week at this point and then the nightmares of the waking world, I'm pretty sure that if hadn't shot up the school or work or something, I probably would have offed myself.
But Ryan was there. He was always there.
There all the way up until the moment that he wasn't, and that was the moment that my world really ended.
I'm going to skip all of the intermediate drama that happened during the tail end of 2009 and throughout 2010 and just hit on the main points. As I said, we shakily got to our feet again and were finding our way along as well as we could. After my senior year I started to work full time, taking a couple classes over at the community college, but otherwise mostly using my days to work and help support our dysfunctional little family. I'd also turned to small-time crime to keep myself occupied and still managed to get all my schoolwork in on time (go me). Ryan came along with me on all of my… excursions more to make sure I didn't get into too much trouble more than to actually participate. I didn't hook up with any kind of gang if that's what you're thinking, didn't fall in with the 'wrong crowd'. I did it all on my own, and it was little shit anyway like breaking in to houses and rearranging their kitchens in the middle of the night.
I'm a prankster at heart, not a convict.
Maybe I should have been. Maybe I should have gotten in league with some kind of gang if I was going to be messing with shit like that. Maybe if I had, things would have turned out differently. Hah. Maybe they would be worse. Guess I'll never know, so it's not like it matters, but it's one of those things that you really can't help but think about after you've lost everything.
Anyway, I was into small-time crime, harmless stuff really, and my big brother Joshua was onto me about it. He knew I left at night and often didn't come back until sometime around sunrise if not shortly before. Probably the only thing that kept him from really riding me about it was that he knew that I was with Ryan and he trusted Ryan to stop me from doing anything too stupid, and trusted me to listen to him.
He shouldn't have.
This February marked another bout of nightmares hitting one night after another, nightmares I woke from with the clear memory of everything that happened. The odd thing that it was the exact same nightmares I had been having before my mom died, with the shadows and the running. There were subtle changes, but it was the same dreams. My mother screaming for me to run, to protect 'him', who I understood was Tyler. Me, running frantically through dark and dirty streets and alleys. The shadows, chasing me. I still tripped in that same spot and still there was the split in the dreams. Sometimes I would hold on to Tyler, get up, and keep running. Most of the time the shadows got us. They would swarm over the baby, who this time was screaming and wriggling around in the bundle he was wrapped in, and swallow him into the darkness. I was still able to hear his screams when the shadows sunk into me.
February dragged on, and the nightmares began to change now, little by little. By the last week of February, it was like the nightmares had caught up to real time. Instead of running with a baby bundle in my arms, I was clutching a five-year-old boy who was crying and clinging to me like a lifeline. And when I tripped, sending us sprawling, he would try to reach me. Sometimes he made it and we would get up again and keep running. I no longer ended up with a dead, rotting baby, but what happened now was a lot worse. When I finally couldn't go any further and collapsed under the strain, Tyler would pull back from my neck where he had buried his head crying and he would smile at me. His eyes would be red and his face would look wrong, like it was trying to take on a different shape beyond what the eye could actually see.
He smiled at me, and then he ripped my throat out. I went from corpse-baby to demon-child.
It was either that, or the shadows got us. The ones that got Tyler were different from the ones that got me, though. The ones that got Tyler dragged him away from me and I could hear him screaming in the distance while the other shadows sunk into me. It was still this soul-wrenching pain, but it was different somehow. It was like being torn open against my will, forced to take in something that I didn't want. It was like and not like dying, with the exception that as I woke, usually screaming into my pillow, I was left with the feeling that I wasn't really dead, not really. More like I was leaving myself behind.
Sometimes before I woke I would glimpse what I could only describe as hell, but that only happened a handful of times.
Friday, March 4th 2011 was the end of my world. Or maybe it was technically Saturday the 5th, as it happened so late at night it bridged into morning. I came home early from my nightly fun and found the door to the apartment open. In fact, all of the doors and windows were open. Everything was wide open but the place was otherwise pristine. Nothing was out of place. We were pretty tidy people, even with a five-year-old around, and nothing pointed to their being a break-in other than that all the doors and windows were open. Thinking maybe someone had figured out somehow that I was the one who'd broken into their house and decided to pay back the favor, I checked the kitchen cabinets but everything was still in the same place.
It was then that I decided to check the bedrooms. I ran to Tyler's first and found it empty, the door wide open. I called out for him and Josh as I checked Josh's room and found a similar situation there. Everything was in place, but the door was open and no one was there. I was frantic, and pulled out my phone, still yelling for either of them to come out, that this wasn't funny.
That was when I heard the crying coming from Josh's closet. I wrenched it open and found Tyler there, huddled in the corner and sobbing while apparently trying to stay quiet. When he saw that it was me he launched at me and started babbling about something happening, about Josh suddenly telling him to hide in his closet while he went to speak to some people that had shown up and were in the living room. He'd heard shouting, and then nothing, and Josh hadn't come back. That feeling of dread began to fill me up as I hurriedly pulled out my phone and called Josh. His cell started to ring from on top of the dresser, so I hung up and dialed Ryan's number instead. I didn't know what was going on, but I knew I would feel better if someone else was there to help me figure it out, and it was probably better if we didn't stay here. If Josh came back and didn't find us, then he would call my cell.
Ryan came and picked us up, but the night wasn't going to see fit for us to reach his house. I don't think the night intended for any of us to survive it, actually. What followed could be seen as a series of unfortunate events, or perhaps a twist of fate, maybe the conspiracy of time and space to make sure that we did not reach the safety of Ryan's house and the warmth and potential peace it offered. Ryan's car ran out of gas in a bad part of town, both of our cell phones died, and when we started walking I tripped badly and hurt my ankle. It wasn't broken or anything, but it hurt like a bitch and by that point I was most definitely not in the mood.
Perhaps if I hadn't been a solo troublemaker at the time and had the backing and protection of a gang, then what happened next wouldn't have happened. I'm serious, because in all likelihood if I had been a part of a gang it probably would have been the one that we were about to encounter. They were hanging around a battered apartment complex, and we would have to pass right by them. Ryan was a formidable guy, tall and possessing of that lean musculature that came with a mix of good genetics and about ten years of gymnastics, but alone against eight guys? Sure, I was there with Tyler, but what could we do? We posed no threat to them. Some girl in jeans and a fitted sweatshirt with a five-year-old wrapped in her coat balanced on her hip? Ha. Yeah, right. My long hair was even pulled back into two low pigtails over my shoulders.
Me and Ryan exchanged a glance as we began to pass them, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing. Maybe they didn't see us? Maybe they didn't care?
Then one of them called out, and they approached us. They 'asked' for our money, and I gave them a bit more bite than I probably should have. Do I really need to go into detail in what happened next? I put down Tyler, had him stand behind me as they laughed and made lewd comments. Ryan… he stuck up for me, stood in front of me, got in their faces and told them to back off. They pushed him, and he pushed back harder than they gave him credit for. He sent one of them to the ground and the rest pounced.
The shadows on the street seemed to get darker in the flurry of fists and feet that leveled Ryan to the ground and kept him there. It suddenly felt so cold, and March was already cold this year. I was trying to push past the guys blocking my way to Ryan when I heard Tyler scream, and I immediately turned toward my little brother only to find him gone. He was just gone. The shadows under that tree were opaque, completely impenetrable, and I could have sworn that I'd seen them move. I screamed for Tyler, moved toward the low-branched pine tree and found myself stopped by one of the guys.
I fought viciously against the fucker. I needed to get to that tree, needed to get Tyler, but I wasn't strong enough. I was thrown toward Ryan, who was huddled in a little ball on the ground, just as one of the guys descended on him with a metal bat.
I was pretty sure I knew what was going to happen next. Except that it didn't. Headlights appeared around the corner and they scattered. At that point I hardly cared about the car and whoever was coming toward us, I was more concerned with Ryan. He wasn't moving, and before they scattered the guy wielding the bat had gotten in one last blow to his head.
I rolled him over, I pleaded with him. I think I was crying. I should have been, anyway. I was a real cryer when shit happened. He looked bad. If I didn't know it was him, I probably wouldn't have been able to recognize him because his face was so broken and bloody. It looked like it had been beaten in to some semblance of a flat surface. His nose was crushed, his face slightly caved in. There was so much blood I couldn't really tell what was coming from where, it all just looked like it was oozing out of his pores. His eyes were closed, and one looked wrong in the light of the approaching headlights, like if I reached forward to touch it the texture beneath that eyelid would not be the solidness of an eye.
The car stopped, someone came out and ran to us, and all I could do was scream over Ryan. Over his body, because I knew how to check a pulse and by the time the man from the car had reached us I had done so. I had checked for it five times and had gotten nothing.
Nothing.
The man touched my shoulder and I pulled back. I looked at him, then down at Ryan, and it was like everything became hazy and disgustingly clear in the same moment. This was when everything shifted out of focus. A part of me was vaguely aware that something was happening, there was a brief sense of déjà vu, and suddenly the street was gone.
The whole world was gone. Instead I was standing in the near darkness of the underground with a dead wolf at my feet. The colors were all dark and yet somehow extraordinarily vibrant. There was no visible light source, it was as if the walls of the cavern was casting its own sickly red glow. Everything seemed stained that color. Red, but not just any red. It was the red-brown of dried blood, and it covered everything.
I looked at my hands, at the wolf, and it was all coated with that color.
A misshapen being inched toward me out of the shadows, reaching for me with a gnarled hand as it clucked out something hardly intelligible through a mouth that stretched across the entire bottom half of its face. The general notion of what it was saying was that if I wasn't going to eat the wolf, it would. I wasn't going to eat the wolf, nor was anyone else as far as I was concerned, so I pushed it away. I took my stance over my wolf and I faced off against the demon, because that was what it was. It hissed at me, then lifted its face and let out a horrid cry that seemed to last for ages before I could hear more wailing cries echo it in the distance as it's group, or its pack or whatever they were came to its aid.
They pried the wolf away from me. He disappeared beneath their hands, in the tangled mass of their bodies, their salivating mouths. They consumed him, and I fought them the entire way. They were all lesser demons, the peons of the lowest pawns, but even so I was useless against them. Helpless. And when they were done consuming the wolf, my wolf, they turned to me with their mouths gaping and their eyes bright with hunger. At first I thought that they wanted to consume me, too, and I backed away, right into another figure. It proved to be another demon, but this one was different. Tall, so black that he seemed featureless, and grinning a perverse smile.
In a deep, snarling bass he told me that if I wanted to make the death of my wolf mean something, I needed to navigate the caverns and get to the very center of the maze. Then with that same terrifying grin he offered to guide me. I took off running, darting down random tunnels, twining through passages that never seemed to end. I was lost, utterly and completely lost, and the further I got into the confusion, the harsher that red-brown light seeping from the walls seemed to be. At some point I started hearing laughter –or was it screaming? If I stopped to look, I would see faces in the walls, faces pushing out against them as if trying to mold their way into existence. If I looked hard enough, I could recognize those specters as the faces of my parents and my brothers, as Ryan's.
They laughed, and they screamed. They taunted me.
But among the voices I could hear one enraged shriek, and that was the one that I followed. It called to something primal inside of me. Something volatile and in pain. That sound resonated inside of me, echoed within the caverns of my own soul as it did within the caverns I now wandered. I slowed my run to walk, then my walk down to a halt as I came to a particular fork in the many winding passages. Down one, I could see a dim, gray light and if I looked closely my vision tunneled and I could make out a barren wasteland stretching out beyond it into eternity. Down the other was a tall, spiral staircase.
I knew I was making an irrevocable choice the moment I turned and headed toward the stairs, but I did not once look back.
However, when I came within feet of that spiral staircase I stopped again. Coming out of the shadows to block the stairs was a slender, lovely, angelic woman pushing a baby carriage filled with beautifully vibrant and fragrant flowers. Long brown hair draped around her in effortless waves like a cape as she flowed toward me but as I watched the hair became dry and brittle. It was suddenly harsh and it looked sharp to the touch. Her perfect, lovely face was strained and twisted. There was something wrong about her eyes, they looked too big, and when I looked closer I could see that it was because they had no lids. She smiled with her teeth, because there were no lips, and when she opened her mouth she had no tongue. The perfect lady, the bitter and voiceless demon. Her carriage was now a wheelbarrow filled with the decaying severed heads of the people I had lost.
She shrieked at me, cackled and waved a hand at me as if to shoo me away from her staircase. I backed away just a step, then stopped. I knew her. I knew that damaged demon, that crazed creature. At first I thought what I was seeing was my mother, but the true realization hit me less than a millisecond later.
It was me. This hissing, growling creature was me, collecting my losses and pushing them along with me. I horded them, kept them close to me so no one could take them. They were my sins, my horrors, no one else's. Besides, they'd all left me, anyway. They were always leaving me, fading away into those salivating shadows.
The demon that was me was babbling about her precious heads and snarled at me, then she moved away from the staircase and vanished into the shadows. I looked up the stairs. It wasn't until I began to ascend them and felt the sharp bite in my feet that I realized that they were imbedded with sharp teeth coated with some kind of poisonous acid. It burned… Fuck did it burn, but I kept climbing. I'm not sure even now whether it was because I had to keep going or I couldn't stop, maybe it was both. There is a fine line between the two, but it's there.
As I climbed the stairs I could hear that angry, agonizing screaming again, and this time it was coming from the top. I climbed no faster and no slower, I just maintained my steady, controlled pace until I reached the very top, letting that sound and the pain in my feet sink into me.
At the top of the stairs I found myself in a circular tower. Out the windows I could see that I had emerged from the underground and all around me was that vast, colorless wasteland and etched in the walls were what looked like hundreds upon thousands of scratches. They were names. They were all names, and as I ran my fingers over them I could feel that they resonated with the person who had etched them there. It seemed I was not the only one who had travelled through hell, and that was almost a comforting notion, one that a part of me had known and understood this entire time.
And there, in the middle of the tower chamber, was a pedestal with a great book open to the first blank page somewhere toward the middle. Beside the book was a bottle of red ink (was it really ink?) and a quill made out of the feather of a raven attached to the fingernail of a demon.
I picked it up, dipped in the ink, and signed my name in the book.
Regina Lyn Bryant
The book was gone, the tower was gone. I was standing on the roof of an apartment complex somewhere deep in the city I'd never been. In one hand I held a can of red spray pain and before me I had tagged my name on the wall of the staircase that lead into the building. There was other graffiti there as well, pictures and names, but I knew that none of those artfully done names were there for the same reason my own scribbled slash of a signature was.
I dropped the can, backed away, and looked at the different reds that stained my hands.
Regina Lyn Bryant, I had signed. At that moment I wasn't sure what had changed, but I could feel it burning inside of me, a new awareness that wasn't there before, and I knew that I had left my old world far behind me with no turning back. I had entered a new world now, a world of shadows and confusion, of demons and towers. I had entered a world of mystery.
A world of darkness.