Chapter 13

Sleepless Nights

It had been many months since Ryan last had a nightmare. His dreams were practically non-existent, just one of the things that made sleep so very mundane to him, it had come as a pleasant surprise to have such sweet and vivid dreams the night before. However, this night was plagued with realistic night terrors.

He found himself a child once more, hiding under a table in a small and dirty house he remembered but seldom thought about. Strange sounds emitted from behind a thin door, sounds he did not understand as a child, but the adult mind in sleep clearly identified them as the unmistakeable sounds of lust. He did not wish to open the door, he knew what lay within, a memory he had attempted to purge from himself but never quite fully forgotten. Despite his knowing and insistence not to open it, he found his dream state crawling from its hiding place and stepping towards the door. He screamed at his child self, begged them not to, pleaded with them to stay hidden and avert their eyes and ears from what was happening, but the child was concerned at the sounds, it sounded like someone in pain. He pushed lightly against the door and it creaked open easily exposing a well-lit room and two people, but it was not his mother and one of her clients as he remembered the sight being in his youth.

He watched in wide eyed horror as he saw his adult self upon the bed, covered in blood and underneath his heaving body a mass of flesh and blood that could once have been human, the sick pleasure in his adult face as he thrust himself into the mass of viscera that sloshed around him was deviant. Strands of long dark hair tangled in gore cascaded over the edge of the bed. His adult self looked up from its perverse activity, looked at the child in the doorway and smiled a twisted smile as his body convulsed and fell into what he could now see was a writhing mess of a person still living. A person who despite the carnage, he recognised.

The child screamed, ran out the door, back to the safety of the underside of the table and cried bitterly through clenched eyelids. He was so scared, he did not know what to do or where to go, he sat there as the sounds in the adjoining room died away.

His small sobs were broken by a soft voice coming from the room.

"Ryan…" it whispered.

His breath caught in his throat, he dare not look up.

"Ryan…" came the soft tones he recalled oh so well even after so long.

Reluctantly, he opened his eyes and gazed towards the doorway of terrors. Now a warm glow emitted from it, surrounding and silhouetting a female figure in a dress and long, dark hair that swayed as if caught on a gentle breeze, her features obscured from him by the shadows, but it was her, he knew it was her.

With small legs and a child's panic, he ran to her, into her outstretched arms where he wrapped his own around her waist and clung to her as tightly as his small arms would allow. He balled his eyes out into her abdomen and she encircled him with her arms, she stroked his black hair with her soft fingers.

"Don't leave me again…" he implored with his little voice, "Don't let me go,"

The female figure smiled down at him and stroked his cheek to rid him of painful tears, "Why do you cry my love?" she asked sweetly.

He could barely speak against her as his sobbing became more frantic and his breaths stuttered making his whole body shake. He just wished to hold her close and never let her go, fearing if he did she would be taken from him again.

"I'm… scared…" he managed between held breaths.

"Ryan," she said as she held him close to her, "My sweet, sweet, Ryan… You shouldn't be afraid, I'm with you,"

He shook his head vehemently against her in protest, "No, you're not!" he yelled, his voice becoming deeper, "You were stolen from me… and I couldn't save you,"

"You're wrong, my love… we've always been together. Nothing could keep us apart," she soothed him, albeit with a voice that altered from what he remembered, "Every time you remember me, I'm there, every time you forget yourself, I'm there…"

He hugged her tighter.

"Every woman you fuck… I'm there…"

Now it was not her voice at all and a sheer weight of dread fell upon the young boy.

He frightfully lifted his head to look at her and instantly recoiled his arms away at the sight. He fell to the hard ground beneath him at the sight but now back in his own adult body spontaneously.

It was her, but it was a sight he feared and hoped he would never see. He never saw her in her final moments of life, he could not bring himself to look upon what her family had done to her, but his mind had filled in the gaps for him.

She was pasty, deathly white. Dark rings around her empty, glazed eyes from blood loss and shock. Her lips a dark blue and stitched shut with thick cord. Her nightdress stained below the waist in a red shiny fluid and large clumps of some crimson organic matter stuck to it.

"No!" he squirmed away from her, pushing himself back with his legs as she advanced towards him, "Fuck no!"

He deplored the image before him but could not take his eyes from the macabre thing as it stepped forward with eager arms. He closed his eyes, wishing the damned vision to return to how it once looked, but when he opened them again, it was not her, it was a different woman, another he recognised.

She too, covered in gore but this time it trailed from her throat and spilled from her lips as she smiled. She was so small, so young looking, "Do you remember this one?" she asked in a thick cockney accent.

He could retreat no further when his back hit the wall.

"She was your first after me, wasn't she?" the voice became two, the cockney street child and his beloved, both their voices intertwined and produced from the same blood drenched lips, "I was there, my love,"

Just like his child self, he threw himself under the table again, unsure as an adult why that was so engrained in him. His eyes diverted for an instant and when they returned to the shambling woman, she had once again changed.

"Perhaps this one was more to your liking?" the woman now appeared as a curvaceous wavy haired brunette with perfect makeup flawed by mascara tear stains, her naked body decorated in crimson waterfalls from her shoulder across her breasts and from her groin down her legs, her flesh littered in a collage of deep bite marks, knife slices and vicious bruising, "I was there too…"

Ryan closed his eyes and covered his ears to the onslaught of her voice deviating from its gentle tones he adored to those of harpies he despised.

"No!" he screamed, "This isn't real. You weren't there! You weren't any of them!"

"But you wanted them to be me, didn't you…"

The tears returned to his eyes in his turmoil, "But they weren't you, sweetheart… none of them were you…"

She knelt on the ground before him and softly placed her hands on his knees which were brought up protectively to his chest, "I can be anyone, my love… I'm here with you now…"

Even though he could not see the metamorphosis, he could still feel the change in her hands as they morphed into someone else's. He felt compelled to look, some strange desire in himself to see what shape she now held with her true voice.

Through blurry vision he allowed her to come into view, her hair a falling river of red fire, her skin so perfect, unblemished and pure, her sapphire eyes with begging urgency and fear within them.

He wanted to speak her name, a name he kept to himself and not revealed to any other person since her demise but simply could not bring himself to utter it even as a whisper on his softest breath.

Her lips opened and she spoke to him with his beloved's voice, "I'm with you now, my love…" blood began to spill from her eyes in tears and her face morphed between that of Abigail's and the woman he loved over and over again just as he awoke with a startled cry.

Abigail jumped at hearing the sound of a key in the lock of her cell door, she had not slept in apprehension of his arrival, but she lay on the bed and kept as still as she could. She thought that perhaps if he believed her to be asleep he would leave her be. Her eyes darted in the darkness, staring at the blank wall, never once turning to face him. She recited scripture to herself silently.

Our Father, who art in Heaven…

Ryan quietly entered her cell without a word, took one look at her still body upon the bed and could instantly tell she was not asleep, her posture was wrong, too stiff and rigid, her breathing forced. Having watched her sleep in the past, he could not be fooled by her act.

Her muscles tensed at hearing him approach, but she forced herself to remain still, even as she felt him climb into bed alongside her and place his arm tenderly across her body to bring her closer, his face nuzzled in the nape of her neck, inhaling the scent of her mane deeply.

"I know you're awake," he spoke.

Abigail held her breath in fright, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, On earth as it is in Heaven… she implored God to hear her silence.

"Shhh…" he stroked her hair at feeling her sudden tightening limbs, "I'm not here to hurt you, so please don't struggle… Just let me hold you…" he sighed deeply, "Will you speak to me?"

Forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us… Even as she thought the words, she wondered if it were possible to forgive Satan for what he had done to her.

He would not press her for her voice, it was hers to keep if she chose not to share it with him. Instead, he would talk and he would appreciate her silence, he did not wish her to scream tonight, did not wish her to moan or whimper at his touch. Her silence brought him comfort.

"I had a wife once…" he said suddenly in a very sad whisper.

Lead us not into temptati… wait, what did you say? Her breath escaped her.

"She was…" he pondered the words before using them, finding it so difficult to relay just what this one person in his life had meant to him in simple, barbaric words, no matter how eloquent, "She was my angel. I loved her so much…"

You're lying… she thought coldly, The devil surely cannot love.

He realised that he needed to finally speak of it all, something he had never done and what better person was there to tell the tale to than someone who could pass it no further.

"She knew me. She understood me," Ryan paused, a tight feeling enveloping his chest. With his next words, his voice broke and with it a great scar covering a deep, painful wound within his chest, one that torn and bled profusely in the empty place where his heart lay, a place that he swore no longer beat, but it did now and his eyes wept at her memory, "I did… she let me do unspeakable things to her," he sniffed back his tears, but continued sobbing, "She was stolen from me… Her family took her… And then, God himself, reached out His hand and took her from me… He took my unborn child with her that night…"

Abigail's heart froze in her chest, his words, although few reverberated deep within her soul, his voice spoke truths she could hardly fathom. The mention of a child tore through her. She tried desperately to focus on the pain between her thighs as a reminder of his vile deeds. She wondered if the 'unspeakable things' this woman let him do were as unspeakable as her own experience, she wondered how someone could ever love him after that.

"I swore on that night that I would never allow that to happen again. God would never take anyone else from me. God… God, can't take you away from me, sweetheart," he held her tighter, "Not again,"

Oh God, her eyes widened at his words, realising that somehow in the madness, Ryan no longer saw her as Abigail, no longer as herself.

"I alone decide when God can have you. We can be together, my little antibody," his weeping ceased, and he nuzzled himself closer, he whispered in her ear, "Just don't struggle so much, or else… I may need to let you go to God sooner than I would like,"

A genuinely happy smile graced his lips, her warmth, her size, her beautiful long hair; she was perfect and he would be damned if he were to let her go. Not again. Not ever again. He knew he could hold onto this one. He would hold her and keep her for as long as he could. He would never let her go and God would never take her from him.

"Goodnight sweetheart, I promise I'll make tomorrow a better day for you… I have such delights to show you…"

For a second night, Abigail did not sleep.