Chapter 15: Confession
Cybil's police car roared off down the dirt road towards its destination. Adrian yelled the directions as he uneasily glanced back and forth between Cybil and the road ahead of them. Lots of trees as far as the eye could see, all of them beginning to lose a couple of their leaves with the change of the seasons. But it was something Adrian was used to seeing, considering he pretty much lived out in the sticks. But something was different about the place in autumn. It didn't look as cheerful and beautiful as it used to maybe three months before.
Leaves and dirt were kicked up as Cybil brought her car's speed up a notch, to a good seventyfive mph. Growing completely unnerved by the only sounds around him being the leaves, he reached forward and turned on the radio, and 'Perfect Self' by Stereomud was what played. A song Adrian knew all too well.
Settle down you all
Can't you hear the footsteps down the hall?
You're waiting for the scream of your conscience call
And everyone's just dying
Adrian quickly reached back over to the radio and turned the tuner off as quick as he did on. But still, the song refused to leave his head. It was now stuck there, like one of those annoying but catchy commercial tunes that you just can't shut out no matter how hard you try. And the harder you try, the louder it seems to get.
'Get out of my head...' he tried hard not to break down in the car, 'please get out of my head and leave me the hell alone...'
What the fuck is wrong?
I said that I would always find my way back home
Now everyone I love has been left alone
And everyone's just dying
Adrian rushed out of the car the moment it stopped out of Maria Constantine's home, but from the very second he did he knew something was terribly, terribly wrong. And that pain in his stomach was slowly beginning to return. The song in his head refused to leave, and it got much louder inside of Adrian's head when he rushed through the front door that had been ripped off of its hinges.
"Maria..." he mumbled at no higher volume than a whisper- he had a feeling he wouldn't get a reply either way. Cybil followed into the home behind him and quietly tried to get in front of him, as if to protect him in case anything was upstairs. This plan was quickly thwarted however when Adrian forced her out of his way and bolted up the flight of stairs and pushed open the door to Maria's bedroom- and was reduced to pure indifference.
It's you and I
Begging for life
It's you and I
Seems like in death
We all become our perfect self
Last chance to pray
And rid ourself of the pain
He stared with a blank look on his face at the room around him. He almost slipped and fell from the slickness of the wood floor, rather the blood that had spilled all over it. Once he kept his balance, though, he could do nothing but stare. It was almost as if it absolutely could not be real. The room was drenched in blood. Walls, floor, ceiling, every object in the room given a red makeover. It was too sick and twisted to be true.
Adrian reached up slightly and rubbed his scalp as he felt something tiny drop on his head. He brought his hand down, and saw that his fingertips were now bloodied as well. He turned to his left ever so cautiously- the bed was on his left, and he did not like the idea of turning to look at it. But he came to find Maria, and no matter how minute the chance was that she was alive, he had to make sure. Even if that putrid stench of death was hung in the air. That sickening smell of decay that reminded him more of Silent Hill with each inhalation he made.
Seems like in death
We all become our perfect self
Last chance to pray
And rid ourself of the pain
She was far from being helped. Adrian quickly looked down, and decided to trail his eyes on her from the bottom up- somehow that made it a little bit easier for him to take. Her right foot was over her left, both bare, and a single large nail impaled them both to the bed underneath. Numerous rips were in her skin tight blue jeans and blood seeped out of each rip- all of them presumably from lashings, at least that's what it looked like. A large spear impaled her through the stomach, and the point had left out of the bottom of the bed and stuck in the wooden floor. Her neck was sliced open from one large gash that went from ear to ear. Her arms were outstretched and unmovable as her hands were also impaled to the bed by nails, one for each. But to top it all off, and the most sickening of all to Adrian- her sad and innocent green eyes were missing from their sockets.
Help comes when I don't even want it
Do you really believe that I need it?
Seems like in death, I'm alive
Help comes when I don't even want it
Do you really believe that I need it?
Seems like in death, I'm alive
The song continued to play in his head, like some twisted music box that refused to let its song end so easily. Adrian was in too much of a shock however to be effected by that any longer. He was too busy blankly registering the fact that the last person he truly, in his heart, had ever loved, was actually gone. His family, his brother... and now Maria. How else could things get worse? If he were to die next, he would have welcomed it at this point. No.. not before his revenge. That was now before anything and everything. But wait... something caught his eye.
Seems like in death, I'm alive...
He further inspected the spear stuck through his ex's gut, and found something else had been ripped up from it. A small picture. The middle of it was poked out but still hung to the picture by a thread. He reached up slowly to grab it, and did so with a gentle touch that way he didn't rip the picture in two. He then slowly brought it up off the spear it was attached to, before he turned to leave the room- only to bump into Cybil. Who just caught that smell of death herself.
Cybil stayed quiet as she stared at the body, almost in the same stone like manner that Adrian did before her. No words would have been able to describe the utter disguist she was feeling anyway. Her deep blue eyes illustrated enough torture.
While she gazed in disbelief at the barbaric sight before her, Adrian silently pulled up a rolling chair and sat down in it to inspect the picture. It was a picture of her and Cain as he thought it was-
No, it was a picture of her and Adrian. One of the very first ones they took together for that matter. He couldn't bring himself to smile at it, though. All he could do was blink, and even that felt like it took every muscle in his body to do. He then flipped the photo over to look at the back, and his eyes then showed a hint of feeling. Confusion, as he glanced a the letters.
'IVOU'
It was then that he realized he had been transfixed on the photo with the middle jutted out of sight. He frowned at his own stupidity before he pushed the center back into place, and was surprised at what the letters spelled out then.
'I Love You'
And at that moment, Adrian exhaled deeply. He felt his chest slump forward as his jaw dropped. It had to be a nightmare. None of this could have been true. It was just too harshly real to be. No way. If Adrian wished for a single time to wake up from such madness and find that it was a dream, this would have been that time.
But unfortunately for him, this time it was no dream. Not something that could simply be taken back. Nothing could be done now but cry, and that was too hard to be possible at the moment. Adrian taught himself to be tough. To be prepared. Ironically enough for him, though, nothing could have prepared him for the sight of his mutilated ex girlfriend. He was so blindsided that it furthered his silent insistence that it was only a dream. It had to be. No logical explanation in tow. This just could not be real.
'No one in the world we live in is so cruel. It's just not possible in a real world...'
Adrian kept telling himself that in his mind as he leaned forward and buried his shaking head in his hands- as if shaking his head enough would take everything away and make it all a dream. But a jarring thud would remind him that this was, indeed, reality.
The thud came from Cybil- her eyes widened as her legs simply buckled underneath her and forced her onto the seat of her pants. Right on the blood soaked floor. The fact that she just got blood all over her didn't matter- it was the fact that it was blood from a woman she could have warned before, but she chose not to. As far as Cybil was concerned, it was her own blood she had slipped and fell in. Only she was bled through someone else.
Cybil turned to Adrian almost as if to quickly apologize, but as her mouth opened to speak she fell quiet. Adrian wasn't in any better shape than she was. And she wouldn't have wanted to hear anyone apologize to her at such a time. So instead of doing that, she stood up, ignoring the blood on her pants and hands, and ambled over to the dead body on the bead. She then firmly gripped the large spear that Maria was stuck to, and with one determined tug, the spear cleanly left her body with a gutwrenching shloop-like noise.
Adrian momentarily looked up to see where the noise came from, and saw Cybil take the spear and place it flat next to Maria's corpse. He wanted to yell at Cybil not to do anything, but he was far too drained of his emotions to do such a thing. He just went back to shaking his head, still holding onto the belief that he would wake up from this dream any minute. Just as Cybil left the room for a moment.
When she came back, she had a blanket with her, presumably from one of the other bedrooms. She headed over and carefully, neatly placed the blanket over the dead body, shielding Adrian's eyes from the horrid sight. Cybil turned to Adrian, and then she was barely able to even whisper the words, "I'll just be downstairs," before she left the room and closed the door behind her. Adrian didn't even notice the inaudible click of the door closing, he simply stood up to head over to Maria's bed and sat down over the edge of it.
He gripped the lump in the bed sheets where Maria's hand was- as cold as it was through the blanket. But it was when with his other hand he put the ripped picture over her chest that he broke down.
"I just... I just wanted to say..." he cried. It took at least a minute for him to get those five simple words out of his mouth in between sobs, before he finally continued his sentence, "I was never able to say... how much I hated you."
It pained him to say that sentence to a dead person- a dead person he once dated no less, but he obviously needed it out of his system. But that wasn't all he had to say. He took a deep breath and tried to keep from shaking before he continued to speak, voice cracking every chance it got to. "I hated you for leaving... you just didn't want to care about my dreams, and were so... so conceited. So many times I, I had the thought that you only dated me because I was going to be famous..."
The next sentence was so brutal for him to admit, he said it in extremely short fragments- too torn up inside to say it in a single coherent line, "but it was... was just now that I.. had realized... looking at.. this picture... you did love me... and I just couldn't remember." He leaned forward and cried unabashedly, forehead pressed against Maria's- the only part of her left uncovered by the blanket between her and Adrian.
"And I remembered you left cause you were just afraid... you were so afraid.. that I believed you didn't deserve me.. and you left to save yourself the heartbreak... of me cheating on you... you were too unsure of yourself to realize.. I never would have done that to you... I hated you because of myself. My head was twisted up, I fucked it up... I fucked it all up, it was my fault."
"I hated you... but now I know.. I should have loved you more than I did. I let you down, Maria... I just wish you were awake to hear me... I love you, oh God I love you so much..." He rubbed his forehead before he leaned up and gently pressed his lips to Maria's forehead and stood up. It would be the last time he'd ever see her. Just like the last time he saw Cain was three months ago. He could remember the pain he felt from it. What it did to him on the inside. And he could remember then, he promised he'd have revenge. This time... he couldn't promise that. He couldn't promise he'd be willing to be by Cybil's side, either. Because if there really was a God out there.. if there really was someone watching over him... he would see that Adrian got that revenge. All by himself.
Maria's death took the pain Adrian felt over Cain, and amplified it a good ten times over. There would be no remorse, no turning back. And as he lifted the sheet from Maria's head to reveal her eyeless face, he noticed something he again, mentally yelled at himself for not noticing sooner. Slowly, he reached down by Maria's neck, and lifted up the rosary from around it. He clutched it in one hand and stared at it mesmerizingly, before he put it around his own neck, and firmly said four last words before he went downstairs.
Now three months before, Adrian never believed in a God. It just wasn't him. But after his brother's death and the death of his ex, he couldn't see them in eternal sleep. They were in a better place. They were being watched. And this feeling gave those four words Adrian spoke something extra to hold on to.
"God... please give me strength."
