I do not own "Twilight" or "Possession"... but if you haven't seen the latter, then you've really missed out. Chapter one
Tap-tap-tap...
The wind blowing outside was chilly, yet she felt completely hot. Her breathing was fast and erratic; her body was twisting in all sorts of directions just to get comfortable. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to sleep so badly, yet the rain wouldn't let her. She'd always hated Forks because of the rain.
Tap-tap-tap…
She threw off the covers and hugged her pillow, trying to get some rest. But then she was too cold, so she went to retrieve them. Her curly locks tickled her neck, so she grabbed a rubber band and tied it in a loose knot. It was messy and greasy, she noted, and decided that she needed to take a bath in the morning. If there was any hot water in the house, that is.
The young woman got out of bed, straightened the wrinkled sheets and lay back down. Ok, now she would sleep. She was confident she would sleep. She closed her eyes and started counting sheep, but unfortunately, her earlier remark about her hair made her start thinking about it instead. Greasy hair. I need a bath. Hair. Bath. Bath. Bath. Bath….
"Fuck!" she screeched into her pillow, before standing up decidedly. If a bath was what she wanted, a bath she was going to get. Who cared if it was nearly two in the morning? It was her own damn house and she could take a bath whenever she damn desired.
The anger was gone as soon as her naked feet came in contact with the floorboards. It was as if she was pierced by a needle, or drenched in cold water. She wrapped her arms around herself and reached for the comforter, wrapping it around herself before checking out the heater. Although it was the middle of July, the nights at Forks, Washington, were chilly.
After cranking up the heat, she headed downstairs, resolved to make herself a cup of tea as she waited for her room to warm up, and turned on all the lights. A couple of years ago, she would not have permitted herself such a luxury, thinking that it was a waste of electricity, but now she didn't care. In the darkness, the empty rooms and the white sheets spread out over the furniture looked ghastly, haunted. As if the freezing house wasn't enough, it was as if nature itself was trying to spook her. And while Isabella Swan was not the type of girl to scare easily, she certainly was not about to risk a heart attack because she didn't want to give a few dollars for electricity.
Her old home in Forks was a tiny, narrow two-storage house. She remembered it as steadfast, if not terribly modern, but now, without anyone to take care of the repairs, it was falling apart. The floorboards creaked, the wind moaned in the empty hallways, and the air was stale and full of dust. It was the epitome of abandon, and she couldn't help but feel slightly guilty of it.
Isabella hadn't even taken into account the horrible state of the house when she had arrived earlier that day. She had had just about enough energy to start the gas and water before making a beeline for her old bedroom, hoping to get some sleep after the exhausting ride from Seattle… But she couldn't.
Had this been the first time she could not sleep, Isabella would have blamed it on the day – the one-year anniversary after her father's death. However, her insomnia had started not too long after the funeral, and she already knew that battling with it was futile. So, as she took in the sad state of the house, she decided to forgo tea and clean up instead.
To be honest, she did not want to come back, not really. She was not in want of work – last year, she had successfully finished her dissertation and been assigned as an Assistant professor at the University of Washington, which was by all means no small feat. However, after her father's passing away, she had been… for a lack of a better term, off. Isabella was good at hiding her condition, and for the strangers she looked no different than most women in their late twenties. She went to the university, taught the classes, wrote, interacted… she lived, but passionlessly, as if she was going through the motions automatically.
Her friends, the ones that saw through her masks, compared her to a robot or a zombie… but she had not yet started wandering around with her hands outspread in search of brains, so they cut her some slack. And if Alice and Rose had to be honest, Isabella was doing much better now than she had. At the beginning, she had been so listless and tired they had had to feed her like a baby and drag her forcefully to the shower. Words like 'depression' and 'emotional duress' were thrown left and right, and for a while they had been seriously worried about her.
Eventually, she had resurfaced, but she had been changed irrevocably.
The first floor was clean and she moved to the second, pausing only for a second in front of the mirror suspended near the staircase. Like most mousy little girls, Isabella had grown up thinking that the mind was what mattered, that the body was not important, and therefore did not spend a disproportional amount of time standing in front of looking glasses and indulging her own vanity. What she saw in the clear surface wasn't much different than what she saw every day – pale, heart-shaped face with bloodless lips, too large brown eyes and limp, lifeless hair. Her looks matched the house – dull and haunted.
What has become of me? She asked herself as she made her way up the stairs.
Alice would have said she was still grieving and needed time to recuperate.
Rose would have said she was being a conformist and that she always chose the easy way out.
Isabella didn't need a degree in psychology or biochemistry to know what had happened. During the past decade, all of her efforts were concentrated on finishing school and getting academic recognition. Now that this goal was accomplished, her next step seemed obvious – to work her way up the academic ladder and become a professor. It appeared simple enough, but not as challenging as before. The loss of her father, one of the few people she looked up to, had made things look mundane and boring.
In short, she had lost her drive.
It wasn't a problem, per see. Isabella could re-discover the wonderful world if she only set her mind to the task. It was late May; June was just around the corner. Two more months, and then there was August, all for herself. She hadn't even taken a sick day the whole year, so she could enjoy an extended vacation, should she wish for it.
But what could she do on this whole month of freedom? Her salary wasn't all that spectacular, so she couldn't afford anything extravagant. Rose and Alice would love to buy her a fancy holiday, should she ever express a desire for it, but all three of them knew that it would be a cold day in Hell before Bella Swan asked for something. She didn't even celebrate her birthday.
She listed the different vacation possibilities within her price range and came up with nothing. Hell, even that trip to Chicago for the conference on Semiotic language she had to take at the end of July would cost her a pretty penny, even with the University paying for her plane tickets.
As she worked her way through the second floor, she started doing a mental list of all the things she needed to do once the shops opened. A little after she had lost her sleep, the twenty-four hour period was divided not on day and night, but rather by the times the shops opened and closed. She would have to take a shower, and then buy some groceries for the people she expected. She would buy flowers to take to the graveyard as well. And, of course, she would also have to take a moment to prepare for the nerve-wrecking conversations she would have to have with Billy Black and Sue Clearwater.
Her lips tightened into a hard line. To say that she was nervous would've been an understatement. In fact, she dreaded that encounter more than having to actually go to the graveyard. She had studied for almost a decade in order to get her Ph.D. and had seen more than one variation on the life after death topic. She could always find comfort in the thought that the body was just an empty shell now, and that the spirit lived on in the memories of others - all she needed to do was walk around her old home to find Charlie again.
That was part of the reasons why she wouldn't give up the house. Her mother had, on several occasions, suggested fixing it up and selling it, so that she wouldn't have to deal with the pain whenever she went to Forks. But Bella hadn't been ready to give up the memories (she still wasn't), and being the child of two divorced parents, there was always a part of her that questioned Renee's judgment. What was more, the house had been in the family for four generations – what right did Bella have to just sell it, without thinking about the consequences? What if, years from now, she drove through town, felt a pang of nostalgia and pulled over at the curb. She would get out, walk down the lane, and have some strangers open the door to her. The idea of being treated like a guest in your own home made her feel sick.
She left the cleaning of Charlie's room for last, going through the rest of the second floor before dragging her feet up to his door. Of course, she had been there after… after the funeral. She didn't expect to find bloodied sheets or vomit on the floors. It had been straightened out, cleaned up... but somehow, she felt a sense of dread as she paused in front of the threshold. Then she took a fortifying breath and pushing the door open.
The room was small and furnished spartanly. After the divorce, Charlie had moved out of his parents' old bedroom and back into the old nursery, leaving the third room on the floor for her use. It had seemed weird to her at the time, but when she thought about it, it was clear that it had been a sign of Charlie's resolution to never get married again. The single bed, the single room, the overall bachelor lifestyle – while he was not afraid to face a lunatic with a gun, her father had done everything to make sure his heart was safe.
She knew all that, but upon seeing his room, with that narrow bed and ratty old chest of drawers did something to her. The street lamps gave everything an eerie, yellow sheen that somehow made Bella think of hospitals and sickness. Her knees bucked and she reached for the lights witch before she sank to the floor on her knees. Her hands came up to cradle her head and she took a series of deep breaths to keep herself calm.
It wasn't fair. Advanced degrees be damned, she couldn't be rational. Not when she was at his house, at his room, not when she could still recognize his presence after it had been thoroughly cleaned and stripped of any identity. She couldn't sit there and think that this was just the natural order of things, that everyone had to die and that he was always there in her thoughts. Because it wasn't the same. Because he had been her father. Because he had saved so many lives, helped so many people, and yet didn't live to see his own daughter married and happy.
Gathering herself, she straightened up and looked around. It looked fairly clean – perhaps she could get away with polishing the furniture and opening the windows to get some air in. As she set to the task of doing so, she noticed the small door on the end of the room.
There were still a few hours before the shops opened, she could check out the attic. Anything to put off cleaning Charlie's room.
The attic was a small, dry room that had been used as a storage space for old furniture. There were a couple of desks in need of repair and a couple of bookshelves that housed some of her great-grandmother Helen's books. Bella had tried reading some of them when she had been in high school, but most of the stuff hadn't made much sense to her at the time.
She sighed and walked around, touching the old spines gently. A fine layer of dust settled on her fingertips and she rubbed them thoughtfully. It was dirtier there than the rest of the house – apparently, nobody had been interested in great-grandmother Helen's book case. Well, it wasn't much of a surprise. The only things Charlie had to read were the records at the police station – he probably needed the newspaper to wind down. And Grandma Marie had been more interested in cooking and gardening.
Bella paused thoughtfully, before reaching out and seizing a small tome of Shakespeare's tragedies. She flipped through it, reading a few lines from "Macbeth", before closing it and returning it to its place. Too dark. She took the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats instead. Then a copy of "Pride and Prejudice", long worn and tattered. Then a book about plants. Her great-grandmother had had quite an eclectic collection.
An hour later, Bella was sorting through the books, arranging them from one shelf to the other, trying to decide which ones she wanted to take back to Seattle with her and which ones she should leave. There were some that were in a desperate need for repair. There were some that were practically falling apart. She was clearing the top shelf when she noticed something white in the far corner. Reaching out, she patted around in the dust before seizing a small paper boat. She stared at it, surprised, and then laughed that such a small trinket would be forever stored there. Just as she was about to put it away, however, she noticed there was writing on it.
Bella unfolded the little boat, thinking that it was just some grocery list or a small reference her grandmother had made in regards to some quote. It wouldn't be surprising. Instead, she found a letter in an unfamiliar handwriting, crumpled and wrinkled so badly that she had a hard time making out the words in the muted morning light.
My dear Madam,
I thank you for your congratulations on my upcoming nuptials, which I received with great pleasure. However, I am sorry that this happy event should become the cause for the discontinuance of our correspondence. I have always been thankful for our discussions, albeit the great distance between us, and I will be forever grateful that you accepted my meager offerings of friendship.
For your sake, I will not repeat my words from my last letter to you, for I realize they were unjust. I return your letters, as you requested, together with a copy of my small work, hoping that it would live up, if only by little, to your expectations.
I cannot express how much it pains me to cease contact with you… Had I been in my power to do so, I would have come in person to beg you to reconsider. Should you ever wish to resume contact with me, my address remains the same. My wishes and feelings have not altered, nor will they ever change.
I remain, dear Madam, your true friend,
Edward Masen, Esq.
She didn't know how long she stood there, just reading the letter and trying to make some sense of it. And then, as her mind finally caught up with her, her head reeled in shock and she was capable of one single, coherent thought:
"What on Earth does this mean?"
A/N - Comments are always appreciated.