:Wow, I have succeeded in breaking the block of writers, sorry about that, it couldn't be helped, but here you go now.
: Hope you enjoy, I've put my heart and soul into this story so it mans a lot to me if anyone still reads this, thanks for all of your wonderful reviews too.
Echo: 9 Sleepy Pasts.
Howard grumbled from his sleep as his back begun to protest against the awkward position it was in. It was only after this that he also noticed a slight prodding on his shoulder.
Opening his eyes to the world he squinted through the semi darkness as he stretched his back out.
"Howard! I've been poking you for ages!" Howard's head shot around to the sound of Vince's weak and antsy voice. The wide blue eyes stared at him anxiously through the darkness.
"Vince?" Howard asked, rubbing his eyes to attempt to focus on the prone figure. "What's going on?" In his sleepy state Howard didn't notice Vince's increased agitation.
"Howard will you wake up!" Vince insisted, voice in a rushed desperate whisper.
"Get Naboo, or Bollo, I need my beauty sleep." Howard muttered as he tried to lean against the couch again whilst Vince's knee tried to force him off.
"I can't they wont wake up!" Vince insisted in an increasingly desperate fashion.
In the back of his mind Howard was aware that he should be paying attention to Vince, but he was just too tired to move, let alone listen.
"Vince just go to sleep." Was his last mumbled phrase before he slumped on the sofa, fully intent on sleeping the night, and next few days, away.
"Howard! Agh!" Vince cursed under his breath as he glanced around the room, the darkness was getting thicker. He looked at Naboo and Bollo who were both out for the count and drooling in the deepest sleep they'd ever had. He couldn't let Howard fall into it too, somehow he just knew he'd never wake up.
Howard himself thought he was finally being left in peace until he was suddenly thrown off the sofa, he landed hard on the floor with a heavy thud above him.
"Vince! What-" Howard looked over to see Vince half sprawled on top of him eyes wide and staring at him desperately. Howard didn't have the time to look further at him however as Vince suddenly grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him into a sitting position.
Howard looked at Vince in annoyance as Vince pulled them both backwards slowly, but Vince wasn't looking at him anymore. No, Vince's eyes were transfixed on the top of the door near the ceiling, showing more fear then Howard had ever seen in a person.
Slowly he turned to the door himself, and saw the reason those blue eyes were so haunted.
At the top of the door, through the nearly non-existent crack, shadows like wisps of smoke were creeping through and floating sinisterly around the room.
"What the-" Howard said in a near whisper, now that he noticed it more he could feel Vince's heart beating rapidly through his back.
They watched in paralyzed fear as the shadows swirled around the room and then begun to collect over their heads to form something more tangible then smoke.
Howard could do nothing but stare at the slowly forming darkness, body feeling heavier then he'd ever known. Vince however seemed to manage to reconnect his brain.
"Come on Howard move!" he urged out, jumping up and dragging Howard best as he could with him as he pelted for the door. Howard saw even as he was pulled along, the creature turn its face to them as Vince managed to wrench open the door and turn to flee down the corridor.
As soon as they had left the room Howard's body seemed to gradually become less heavy, and he was more aware for Vince's vice-like grip on his arm that forced him to keep running. How Vince kept running was beyond Howard, but he wasn't about to stop to think.
They pounded down the corridor away from where Vince's room used to be and fled tripping down the stairs to another long hallway.
Before Howard could quite grasp their new location Vince hurled them around and into nothing less then a cupboard, slamming the doors shut behind them. Howard sat scrunched up and panting as Vince finally stopped and sunk down next to him, holding his stomach and gulping air. However, as his raven-haired companion stared in a fearful certainty at the door in the dark, Howard couldn't bring himself to comment on a safety hazard that he normally would have, for example never close the doors if you're in a cupboard.
Instead he joined Vince in staring at the doors in the darkness.
The jazz maverick was beginning to think that danger had passed, whatever it was, and turned to Vince to state as much, but as soon as he turned his head that strange heavy feeling washed over him again.
Thinking what a good idea it would be to catch up on some sleep whilst he was here, he shifted slightly to lean against the cupboard, yawning.
"Howard no!" Vince hissed desperately, trying to shake the sleep out of Howard who remained stubbornly lump-like. The fear in Vince's voice could almost be felt, and the slightly chocked sound of it nearly made Howard sit up, but the fuzziness in his head increased until his eyes were only half open.
"G'night Vince." He mumbled, much to Vince's hushed protests.
"Howard don't leave me!" Vince sobbed, the sound nearly breaking Howard's heart, and he begun to worry over why he couldn't move or stay awake, but there was nothing he could do, he was too tired.
Vince switched his petrified gaze from Howard to the darkening doorway rapidly. His stomach burned horribly from any movement, his head ached dully making thinking more complicated then usual and his hands seared with pain from suddenly being used and gripping Howard's arm so tightly. To that effect all of him ached from the effort and he shook from adrenalin, tiredness and fear.
But all of that paled in the thought that something bad was coming for them and Howard had fallen into a sleep Vince couldn't hope to wake him from, and there was no way he could drag him anymore.
A painful whirlwind of increasingly morbid thoughts stabbed at Vince's head as his panic grew, the certainty of pain or capture or, anything swirled around and the walls started closing in.
Soon Vince was back down in that wretched hole, blood pooled around him and clinging to him wet and sticky and metallic. He couldn't move, couldn't think, couldn't breathe.
Raven hair was clenched tightly with painful hands as Vince scrunched in on himself, images flickering in front of his open eyes.
He was caught in the headlights of his memories, and even as the doors wafted open sinisterly all he could do was flinch from the darkness on the other side of them and cower into Howard's sleeping body.
The slight comfort of Howard's familiar smell and warmth made Vince cling to him for his life. 'Howard's here, it's alright, Howard's here, I'm not alone' came the broken mantra from his head even as he felt smoke soft hands grab him.
"Take them both, we don't want that one alerting that shaman." Vince could barely interpret the words, but the sinking cold inside him told him that he'd somehow failed Howard now, he couldn't protect him.
The movement through the mansion passed by in a whirl of flickering darkness and blurred memories of pain. It was as if his mind was being blinkered against intelligent thought.
Only vaguely was Vince's traumored mind aware of being placed on a cool floor, a strange heaviness overcoming his wrists and ankles.
Occasional glimpses through the darkness revealed a high far away arched ceiling, a dark figure in the background and a finely tiled floor.
Eventually the darkness passed, and he stared dimly at the ceiling, too exhausted and shell-shocked to move. The whirlwind of memories he couldn't focus on decreased to a dull ache in the back of his head.
Vince felt heavy and defeated, staring blankly at a roof too far away to distinguish from the low light levels. His body would have melted into the floor if it could, but if anything the thought enhanced the feeling of his bones against the solid ground. Hs stomach burned on and off for Vince didn't know how long, he could have been staring at the ceiling for hours.
His fear of the lobster pot had vanished and any tension present in his limbs had long since faded away. Gradually he felt the darkness accumulate at the back of his mind until when he blinked he no longer wanted to open his eyes.
The strange pre-sleep thoughts crept into his mind, that the meerkats would only eat bananas nowadays and he was meant to ask them why, Naboo was having a half price sale at the kiosk later that month which would be fun as he was making lemonade for it, images of green penguins and red mirrors and deep black darkness.
Vince drifted to sleep never once having heard Howard's cries for him to speak.
XxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx
Howard stared helplessly at Vince as his eyes finally closed and his breathing evened out. Although at any other time he was thrilled that Vince was sleeping peacefully, not like this, not at the moment.
Howard himself had his wrists cuffed directly to the wall and had no hope of movement, the redness of his wrists from trying was proof enough. He had woken up cuffed to the wall seeing the large shadow creature drag Vince to some chains embedded in the floor.
This had been the moment he had started to struggle only to find himself very movement inhibited. Jacques stood like a statue staring down at Vince with no emotion as the sleep-inducing shadow cuffed Vince's wrists and ankles.
Howard begun to get seriously worried when Vince reacted to none of this, staring blankly through the shadows at the ceiling.
Even when the shadow moved away Vince did not react, staring blankly ahead. Through what had seemed hours to Vince, but was in actual fact a couple of minutes, Howard had yelled at the prone figure to move, speak, scream or anything, all the while under the scathing looks of Jacques who switched staring alternatively from one prisoner to the other, delighting in Vince's lack of reaction.
"What did you do to him?" Howard yelled demandingly at the smiling man, who slowly turned his attention from the sleeping Vince to the furious Howard.
"Nothing, or I wouldn't have to if you had just stopped interfering. That little shaman friend of yours really messed everything up for us." Jacques muttered darkly.
"You mean messed up killing your own son, you're sick!" Howard retorted.
"Sick is a matter of opinion, besides, darling Marian was always right Vince himself proved that, and I was just carrying out her dying wish. Something her own son never appreciated." He sniffed haughtily, Howard stared at the deranged man in disgust.
"Yes, because her last wish was practically to kill him dead and make you a murderer in the process!" The jazz maverick fumed in outrage.
"She nearly managed it too." Jacques murmured staring down at Vince with an unreadable expression on his face.
"What." Howard was suddenly frighteningly glad Vince wasn't awake to hear this conversation.
"Well, you see she started it!" Jacques begun, suddenly flustered as he pulled at his hair in a disturbingly Vince-like way. "I thought that you know, it might have just been momentary, but somehow she knew that he was wrong even before she said it." Howard gulped nervously as the mad man kept looking at Vince as if seeing ghosts.
"The nurse told me that she had just given Vince to Marian to hold for the first time because she hadn't wanted to when he was born. And I had never known why he seemed fine to me, maybe a bit lethargic." The man babbled insanely as Howard grew cold listening to the whole messed up story of the screwed up family.
"B-but when we got to the room," Jacques choked on his own words slightly, "Marian was, you see, I didn't know she would do it! She was always fond of children! We all thought she'd be the perfect mother! She was always so excited about Vince!" The man was practically tearing his hair out and looking nervously at Howard as if to assure him this was the truth.
Even though part of him didn't want to hear the fractured story, his vast experience with mad people, ahem Fossil, told him that this could be the only way to get Vince out of there alive.
"What happened Mr. Noir?" He questioned hesitantly.
"Well, when we got there, Marian, she was right to do it of course! She just needed to show to the rest of us that he was wrong!" Howard waited nervously as the man panted.
"She, she was suffocating him," He murmured, attention now fully on Vince. "Had that little blue pillow over him as he lay there on her lap. The nurse and some others removed Vince but they said, said that he might already have suffered from oxygen shortage, that he may never recover, that this could change his life. If she'd just told me before then-! Then he could have just gone somewhere else, but no one wants a brain damaged baby." He took a breath to steady himself somewhat and stepped towards Vince hesitantly.
"They tried again, after Vince had recovered, giving her the baby whilst they were still in the room, and I tried I really did! 'Look at our little Vince, isn't he pretty, aren't his eyes just the perfect blue?' I couldn't accept it, but she knew better then me, mothers always know best, 'he's not right Jacques I don't want him, he's too stupid.'" He took a final breath and took a few steps away from the innocent Vince on the floor.
"The nurses said that the lack of reaction was more likely from the trauma and he would recover, not from innate stupidity. But the more I thought about it over the years the more I realized that Marian was right, he was always wrong, Marian wouldn't have acted like that unless it was true."
"Oh Vince." Howard muttered sadly in the pause that followed, staring at that beautiful and innocent person that had been unfairly thrown into this family's twisted world. The person that had given his life so much meaning. And maybe he was messed up slightly, and maybe he never would be up to Howard's intellectual standard, but there wasn't a wrong bone in his body. And Howard wouldn't change him for the world.
"Not to matter, this will all be finished tonight." Jacques stated, emotion deserting his face.
"What are you going to do? And how have you been managing to do all of this?" Howard demanded nervously, eager to both find out how and hoping to keep him talking until he thought of a decent escape plan.
"That's quite simple really." The loathed man clicked his fingers and the far wall opposite to Howard slid aside to reveal a black blue abyss that slowly begun to emit neon green smoke.
"No, that was the, that thing in Bainbridge's house!" Howard exclaimed, vividly remembering the abyss behind the heavy wood door that had swallowed up the giant rabbit that had tried to attack Vince, right back on the first night they met.
"Well there were always two of them, very useful things these portals, they'll comply with the owner's wishes you see, like some sort of mystic, freaky, psychic power or something." He finished, bemused but pleased.
"So that's how-" Howard trailed off, realizing he actually didn't understand at all.
"Yes, its an heirloom I hadn't used before Vince finally managed to escape around seven years ago, something to do with a leopard I don't know. But when I finally tracked him down around five, six years after, well he was a wreck to put it plainly. So I thought that he would cause me more trouble then anything and my good friend Bainbridge offered his services, he owed me anyway." Howard kept getting more confused and angry by the minute, did these two men seriously think they could mess with someone like this?
"Did Vince a favor really, took him over there unconscious, Bainbridge had one of these portal things too you see. He commanded it to erase Vince's memories, and to occasionally send random things through the portal to keep him docile and amused, or kill him, either way it would give him something else to focus on then the way he was being treated.
"Vince apparently woke up a few days later without any memories other then those in the forest, Bainbridge gave him something shiny to distract him from that fact and told him to stay up there, and that was it. Leave him to slowly starve or fall into the portal, and be done with him."
Howard stared in disgust at the man, how could anyone be that impassionate towards another human, treating him like some brainless rat in a cage.
"I think Bainbridge may have begun to become attached to him unfortunately, he once said how he occasionally left real food for him, well either way he would die eventually. That's why he begun to regain his memories slowly when he was taken away from there however, otherwise he would never have recognized this mansion and I could have done away with him much more easily.
"But no, you just had to interfere." He continued ranting, shooting Howard a dirty look. "So I took it upon myself to finish the job once I went round to Bainbridge's and found a note he'd left that Vince had escaped and he would recapture him. He never came back though, so I found out about you and where you worked and low and behold Vince had become a registered zookeeper.
"I easily lured that retard Fossil here and activated my own portal, things that would reenact Vince's memories at first as I was sure he'd begin to remember. But then when that failed I stepped up, he would be dead by now if not for your diminutive friend, and then again when I sent the next one to collapse his bedroom." Jacques sighed dramatically as he reached the end of his tale.
"So finally I sent one to put them asleep and bring Vince here, I didn't mean for you to come too but it matters not now." Howard was still struggling to take all of this in as Jacques moved next to Vince.
"Don't worry, it will all be over soon, then you wont be in anymore pain." Jacques crooned softly at Vince, much as one would soothe a child, before he straightened up.
"Yes, it will all be over soon." He muttered, before viciously throwing a kick at Vince's ribs, startling him awake with a cry of pain as an audible crack was heard.
"Vince!" Howard screamed, once again completely focused on the here and now and his best friend's imminent death.
"I'll end it all for you Marian, and for you too Vince."
:Some much needed answers, I really hope you enjoyed and please please review, the next ought to be the last chapter, and then I don't know what I'll do... cry myself to sleep.
:Thanks for reading, shadowtheo
