Running
It was dark, but not yet late, and so her father allowed Christine to run off to play in those windswept summer grasses of the fields with her promise that she would not dirty her new dress.
The laughter of the other children long filled the moonlight, but in her pursuit of grasshoppers, Christine must have strayed from the group, for the sound faded, and she soon found herself quite alone and quite near to the woods. There were fireflies here. She stopped running and stood still to marvel as they poured from amongst the trees and speckled the silver night with their tiny golden lights.
"Fairies," she whispered. Where there were fireflies, there were bound to be fairies! If she did not move, they would not know she was there, and they would appear to dance before her.
The tickling grasses brushed at her bare legs. The wind was coming from the forest. It bit her cheeks and made her long for the bonfire, but she remained still. If she waited, they would come. A grasshopper leapt across her feet. She looked down. She was barefoot and the grasshopper was gone.
The longer she waited, the more fireflies emerged from the woods to encompass her in the night. They were thickening. One flew so close to her face that she saw its little body clearly, illuminated by its own flashing light. She gasped and took a step back, but the swarm had become just as dense behind her now. So many lights—zipping and spinning and surrounding her so completely beyond and above that she could no longer find the moon. How would she ever be able to see the fairies?
She stepped forward, reaching out to part the curtains of light, but there was no end to it. Faster and faster she moved, but the throng was limitless. And that was when she heard it:
"Songbird." The hollow voice of the wind blew through the lights, stirring them softly.
She froze. The flashes were so many now that they became a single mass of fire, burning and pillaring to the sky, and she was in the middle of it—at the center of the bonfire.
"Songbird," the wind came again, and the flames parted slightly at their breath.
She reached out to the open space. The wind was cold and the fire did not like it. She could escape this way.
"I hear you," she whispered to it. "I hear you calling me."
"Songbird," the voice rose once more, and the cold arms of the wind enfolded her like an angel's and drew her through the blazing light.
"I'm coming!" she gasped. "I can feel you!"
And then it was dark again. The fire was gone and the white moon rippled in the black sky as if it were only a reflection of itself.
It was summer, but she was shivering. His embrace chilled her to the bone. She turned to look up at him and he was just as she remembered he would be: Absolutely immobile save for the billowing of his blackness in that wind and the glinting of the silver of his blade.
"I know who you are," she whispered.
He moved! He looked down to her with those glowing eyes that were held by no sockets, with that face that was made of nothing but the darkness.
"Who am I?" His voice surrounded her and filled her. It was more than the wind now; it was the night.
She felt very small. She was smaller than she should have been. Shouldn't she have been taller? Shouldn't she have been able to reach his face?
"You are an angel," she breathed. "Papa said there would be angels in France."
He appeared to be frozen again then, but she knew he was not, for she could see his fingers tighten about the staff of his blade.
"Do you know who I am?" she asked him timidly.
The black of his robes swelled and sank with silent breaths. "You are my little songbird."
"Aren't you an angel?" she asked, more frightened now.
He turned from her then. "I suppose I am, in a way."
She took a step after him. "Have you come for me?"
"You wanted me."
"You saved me from the fire." The distance between them was growing. "Don't go," she pleaded, and she reached out to him.
He turned to her and extended his free hand. Every bone in it was pure white. "I have something to show you," he whispered, and his voice was beautiful enough to be an angel's.
"I am frightened," she said as she took his hand.
He clasped it gently and began to lead her through the trees. "There is no fear here."
"The forest? It's so far away…" But they were already deeply within it.
"There is a stream here," he continued. "It begins in the earth, it flows down the slope, and it becomes a lake."
"Papa told me I was safe…"
"A vast, dark lake where daylight never reaches."
"I don't want to see the lake." She whimpered softly and tried to pull her hand from his, but it was held fast.
"My little songbird." He stopped and turned to her. "Don't you see we have already reached the stream?"
And so they had. It was beautiful and surrounded by lush moss and delicate blossoms. Ivy hung from the trees at its banks and rogue snatches of moonlight skipped across its running, rolling rivulets between stones. The water was not very deep, but she was so small that it did not need to be.
She gasped in awe and clasped her hands together. He must have let hers go.
"But… But there is no sound." She could not tear her eyes from the sight, but she heard him rustle at her side. "The water is moving but it makes no sound."
"I can change that for you." He extended his staff over the the bank. "Would you like that? My little songbird?"
She nodded and the sound began—A trickle at first, a mere drip-drop, but it soon became a lapping which passed into a gurgling that turned to running which grew into a rushing that culminated at a roaring.
"It's too loud!" she gasped, barely hearing her own voice over the water's. "It's running too slowly, too softly to be so loud!"
"Oh, but it is not moving at all."
And as she looked, she saw that he was right. The water had become frozen—not as ice, but as a painting of a river—motionless in time.
She was frightened again. "Why… How… How can something so still make so much noise?" The bank's edge felt slippery and cold under her bare feet.
"Why…" The voice of the wind blew through her again with iced needles that pricked her inside and out, but even it was barely audible over the running of the water. "Why don't you ask it!" And then she felt the hand of bone press against her back.
She screamed!
But it was no child's scream. It was her own scream, and once again Christine found herself shocked awake in her own bed in the Louis-Philippe room and trembling through the cold grip of too-real remnants of her nightmare.
The running of the water continued to echo in her ears and as she panted to catch her breath, she pushed herself from the pillows with utter terror at what sight might greet her.
The room was empty. Normal… Safe, and lit comfortably by the familiar glow of the low night lamps. Bombarded with lightheadedness by the sheer relief of it, she collapsed back against the pillows and put a cold hand to her clammy forehead. The pendant of the necklace around her wrist brushed her cheek. It was warm. She pulled her hand away and looked at the little engraved silver heart as it twirled back and forth gently in the air. Songbird… Elainie… Songbird… Elainie… Songbird…
The sound of running water would not leave her ears. She pushed herself up again and shook her head, trying to clear it, trying to set her mind free. It would not cease. She pressed her hands over her ears and only then did it finally fade. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then opened them again before slowly lowering her hands. The moment she did, the sound returned. She realized then that it was not within her mind; it was without it.
"Running… Running," she murmured, and her eyes found the open door to the bath across the room. The sound was coming from the darkness beyond that doorway.
She pushed back the covers and rose. Had she forgotten to turn off the faucet? If the tap had been running all while she slept, that would explain her strange dream, wouldn't it? She turned up the lamp on the nightstand, then began to cross the room. But how could she have left the water running without remembering it? She stopped halfway to the door.
"Erik?" she called softly.
All was silent save for that gentle running of the water. He wouldn't have been in there in the dark anyway.
She took a few more steps and wracked her brain in attempt to recall if she might have left the faucet open. Or if she remembered distinctly closing it. But she recalled neither; her preparation for bed was a dazed blur to her now just as it had been at the time. Could she have been so distracted in her state that she left the water running?
She gasped and stopped short just outside of the doorway as her bare foot sloshed into a thickly soaked area of the carpet. The bathroom must have flooded! The water was icy cold. It took her several moments to catch her breath before she was able to let her other foot join the first, but even as she gingerly stepped into the wet plush, she gasped again. Pinpricks of shock ran up her legs and her shivering became uncontrollable. She moved quickly the last couple steps to the doorframe and reached in to turn on the electric lights.
They flickered to life, revealing the elegant bathroom to her in all its normalcy save for the pool of clear water centimeters deep that sloshed into every corner of the room and lapped out the door to soak into the lush carpet about her toes.
Although she stepped in carefully, she found the hard floor beneath the water very slippery and so she kept a hand at the wall. The noise in the windowless room echoed about the marble into the illusion of a roaring that was far too loud for the small faucets of the bathtub… That large, opulent bathtub, which stood before her now overflowing like a fountain gone mad.
Not releasing the wall until absolutely necessary, she made her way across the floor with perhaps not enough caution, and she wrenched the knobs of the faucets closed. The silence was immediate, and the only remaining sound-the soft lapping of the pool against the marble-she found almost lulling. She clenched her chattering teeth and, very slowly releasing the knob to find her balance, she looked down into the bathtub. She froze so suddenly that even her shivering stopped.
There was something in there. Something floating just below the surface of the water that still trickled over the tub's edge. Something white. Something pink and white.
A billowing sheet of fabric slowly became still as the rippling of the water died. As the movement ceased, Christine could begin to see that it was wrapped about something.
She stepped forward and put her hands on the edge of the tub. She leaned toward the water, peering down at the twisted white sheet. White… white… white… pink!
"No!" she choked, and she plunged her hands into the water, grasping at sheet and the hard shape beneath it.
"Elainie! No! Not again!"
Christine pulled the body above the surface and tore the sheet from the little girl's dead face.
"No," she sobbed. "Not again. No... no… no…"
She knelt at the side of the tub and wrapped her arms around Elainie, cradling her drowned form the best she could with the side of the bath between them.
She pressed her cheek against the top of the little girl's head, strands of the soaked hair tickling her nose as she wept for the child.
"I'm sorry… I'm sorry," Christine gasped. "I should have turned off the water. I'm sorry…"
She pulled back to wipe the tears from her own face with one hand and Elainie's head fell against her other arm, leaving the girl's small pink mouth to drop open. Christine stared down at her for a shaking silent moment, then very slowly lifted her fingers to the girl's jaw to press it closed again. It would not move. Christine pressed a little harder, but the girl's body was so stiff… So stiff and dead. Christine withdrew her hand and it trembled with new intensity.
When she looked back down at the white sheet, she saw then it was no longer white. It had become spotted with red. Christine's eyes widened and her arm that held the body aloft began to shake so much it caused the water in the tub to splash over the edge and onto her lap. The red spots spread and grew.
"No," she whispered, too shocked to pull away as the blood seeped through the white sheet and spiraled across the turbulent surface of the bathwater.
Christine knew this white sheet. This was Erik's sheet. This was the sheet she had seen over Elainie's body in the laboratory. Christine knew what was under that sheet!
She gasped and choked again. Water splashed into her eyes. "No," she moaned as the horror convulsed through her that this body she held was the very body that should be lying on Erik's table. Christine could not even close her eyes to shut out the sight and they found the child's face again. Elainie's eyes were open too. Elainie's blue eyes were open just as wide as her twisted, gaping mouth.
Christine screamed and threw both of her arms over her head. The girl's small shape fell back into the bathwater with a freezing splash that coated Christine in numbing spasms.
She pushed herself from the side of the bathtub, stumbling on the slippery floor, frigid water splashing about her ankles and seizing at her calves. She wanted to scream again, she wanted to call for Erik, but she was shivering too violently and her throat seized in the grip of terror. Slipping again, she grabbed hold of the commode to keep from falling into the water, and her fingers clenched its hard edges as she gasped and gasped to catch her breath.
The white sheet that had been billowing about in the tub as if it meant to escape gradually became still, and any sign of the girl beneath it was invisible to Christine now. She had left her there… Let her drown again…
"I'm sorry," she finally managed to whimper. "I'm sorry."
The white sheet looked so small… Christine couldn't imagine how it could possibly conceal even such a little girl so completely now.
"Forgive me." Slowly, she released her desperate grip on the commode and took a fraught step toward the bathtub's edge.
"Forgive me," she pleaded, but as she leaned over the water, she did not kneel again. There was no red on the sheet anymore. There was no blood in the water.
Her teardrops left the tiniest rings of ripples that disappeared against the sides of the bathtub. "I'm sorry…"
Her fingertips dipped below the surface to brush against the white fabric. It was soft. Strands of fringe tangled about each other with the movement of the water. This wasn't a sheet at all. She clasped it, and gently, so gently drew it out of the water. The drips dropped from it with soft, wet plunks. There was nothing beneath it. Nothing else in the bathtub at all.
Christine took a careful step back and looked at the fabric she held. It was far too small to be the white sheet from the laboratory. But what was it? She pressed the water from it, then carefully unfolded its twists. She straightened each of its wrinkles—and then she knew exactly what it was she held. It was her shawl. Her hands twitched and she dropped it onto the floor, just barely managing to take another step back without slipping. Her eyes were uncontrollably locked on that white lump of wet cloth, but her hand found the wall behind her and she followed it slowly, very slowly to the open door and out of the bathroom. Only when she felt the carpet beneath her feet again did she tear her eyes from the shawl and turn around.
Her bedroom was dark. All the lights were out and the features of the room were only dimly illuminated by what light spilled through the bathroom door.
"No," she whimpered again, and she desperately tried to keep her eyes open as her face contorted in hysteria. Her fingers ran back through her hair and she clenched at it, nearly tearing it from her own scalp as she shook her head back and forth between dry heaves of terror.
The electric lights behind her flickered.
"No!" she screamed, and she whirled about to face the bathroom again.
They buzzed and popped softly, then flickered again, noticeably dimmer.
"Stop it!" Her throat tore with the intensity of her shriek. "Stop!"
The sizzling was growing and her bare feet were numb in the icy water.
"No!" She turned and ran into the darkness.
In the spastic flashes of remaining light, her violently shaking hands found the matches in her drawer and she threw herself to the gas lamp at the wall. She lifted the match, about to strike—then she froze. The smell… The smell of the gas… It wasn't just at the lamp. It was all around her. It filled the entire room that flashed about her like a lightning storm.
Darkness… A moment of light… Darkness… A few more moments of light…
She dropped the matches.
The gas was still on, but the lights were out. She took a step back from the lamp. The gas, the gas… Darkness, a flash a light, darkness, two more flashes, darkness… She waited. She shook. At the next moment of light, she would turn off the gas and she would leave the room. She waited… A flash! But it was too brief! She waited… Light again! The gas was off and she was out the door before she had the chance to find herself in darkness again.
In the cold, dim drawing room, she sank onto the couch and sobbed for some time into a pillow.
"What do you want from me?" she finally whimpered. "I'm sorry…"
She thought she heard a door close down the hall, and she sat up quickly.
"Erik?" she whispered.
Silence… Soft and gentle silence, but silence all the same.
She dropped her face into her hands. "I am going mad."
She told herself she did not believe in ghosts. She told herself she was not afraid. She told herself they weren't real. What was real? Elainie was dead. Erik was going to find out how she had died… Erik was going to—Christine stood up. She needed to see what was real. Before she began to rave. She needed to tighten her grasp for the sake of her own sanity. She needed to see Elainie, harmless and pitiable, dry and eyes closed, under her white sheet. She needed to see it right now.
The metal handle of the laboratory door was, as always, chilling to her touch. And when she oh-so-silently entered the room, she made no move to go around the concealing shelves, but instead made her way straight to her corner on the floor and found her convenient crack between the books that gave her the full view of the entire room. Erik was not there. Not where she could see… But she heard… She heard something. A grating noise—metal against metal… Or perhaps metal against stone. And she knew it was coming from that partially-open door that led to the back room she had never known. He was back there, and Elainie was on the table all alone… And her sheet was gone.
Christine grasped at the cold metal edge of the shelf above her head and pulled herself to stand once more. At eye level, there were a great deal more spaces between books and papers and cases for her to see. If Erik had been there, surely he would have seen her through those gaps, but he was not there.
Elainie was alone, and her sheet was gone. Her tiny torso was spread, opened wide, and from this angle, Christine could clearly see all she could not see the other night. All she had never, in her most graphic nightmares, feared she might see. Red organs and grey entrails contrasted themselves mutely with the white of bones to which clung flakes of blood that had time to dry beneath that sheet since two nights ago. Blue and black veins coursed the open cavity all the way up to the white of the throat where the skin remained unmarred just beneath that once-sweet, little face that had sunken so into gauntness that the little girl now more resembled an old woman.
Christine pressed her hands to her mouth to suppress the gagging moans that threatened to erupt from within her, even though she doubted they could have been heard over the wretched discordant noise that continued to fill the room. She could not tear her eyes from that cold, lonely, naked, and disemboweled child who lay, so small, on that cold, hard metal table surrounded by those cold metal trays, each containing a separate bloodied organ, mutilated with surgical precision and contrasting so darkly in their metallic glint with the soft gold of the curls of her hair. Her hair—which Christine just now noticed had been partially removed. Shaved away and left to reveal the white flesh of her little doll's scalp.
The constant grating noise suddenly stopped. Christine gasped and dropped to the floor, curing into a ball against the piercing cold in her corner, once more resuming the position of invisible observer. She saw Erik then emerge from that back door. Just as the time previous, he was without his mask and in his shirtsleeves, one of which was rolled above the elbow, the other remaining fastened at the cuff-link. He approached the table and set down the metal instrument he carried. It clanked against the table too loudly, and it was then that Christine noted just how much irritated anger filled Erik's deathly features.
"Well," he snapped at the child corpse. "If this is how you'll have it."
He reached to adjust the lamp above the table and Christine did all she could not to gasp as she saw his expression then so clearly. What she had taken for anger appeared to her now as hideous, terrifying, unabashed hatred! And yet, the moistness of tearstains on his sunken cheeks glinted in that lamplight.
Once satisfied with the angle of the lamp, he and all but tore the cuff-link from his sleeve, pushing it up carelessly. He then laughed softly and leaned over Elainie's placid face.
"There is an answer to everything," he hissed at her. "Now that I have mine, let's find yours."
He then retrieved the metal tool he had set down earlier, lifting it to the light. Its sharpened teeth shone like diamonds. Christine finally recognized it then as some kind of surgical bone saw.
Before she even had time to react to the realization, Erik placed one of his long, white, skeletal hands over the little girl's forehead just below where her miserable golden curls had been so rudely removed.
"As you intend to be difficult," he continued to speak directly to the eviscerated corpse, "I intend to be comprehensive." And then he pressed the saw into the child's scalp.
At the first sight of the dark, dead blood that became visible beneath the parting of the pale flesh, Christine lost control of her own body, and she began heaving so uncontrollably in breathless sobs, that even had her eyes remained on the sight, she would not have been able to see it for the flood of tears at once running across her vision. She pressed her hands over her mouth and nose and buried her face against her knees. She did not even let herself breathe, for she knew with the first gasp would come her screams. Despite all efforts to regain control, she was shaking too violently, and she feared at any moment, the shelves would begin to rattle. She pushed her head back and sucked in a silent breath as she wiped at her eyes. She would not look though the crack. She would not look again. She looked up. She—Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped. Erik was standing directly before her.
He sighed and shook his head as he wiped his hands on a towel that was already stained with browned blood.
She pressed herself as far back against the wall as she could.
"Christine." He sighed again and dropped one of his arms to rest atop a shelf where his fingertips drummed it impatiently. "If you wanted to watch… All you had to do was ask."
She could do nothing but stare at him in silent shock.
He stared back at her for a moment, then dropped the towel on an empty shelf above her head and stepped forward, extending a hand down to her.
Her stare shifted to his hand and her grasping gaze took in each vein running from his wrist up his bare arm.
When she did not move to take his hand, the tension in it visibly increased and the dark sockets of his eyes narrowed in his skull of a face.
"Do you want to watch or not?" he demanded, leaving her no room to avoid answer any longer.
"I…" her voice was a rasp of choked anguish. "I'm sorry."
"What's done is done."
He reached to her the slightest bit more, and this time she took his hand to stand. Once she was on her feet, he released her, retrieved his towel, and led her back around the shelves.
"What's not done is very little," he continued. "And about to be done with entirely."
She said nothing as she followed him, and once Elainie was in sight, Christine made certain her eyes remained fixed on the child's face below the dark incision of the saw and above the gaping hole below the neck.
"I believe you two know each other," Erik said with a wave of his hand toward the dead body as Christine shivered where she remained near the shelves.
He turned back to study her with tilt of his own corpse-like head. "Why, you're all wet. Really, Christine. Giving yourself pneumonia will solve absolutely none of your problems." He picked up a white sheet that was tossed over the counter and approached her with it.
She took a step back, her eyes widening all the more. "No!" she gasped.
Erik stopped. "If you don't want to watch, go back to your room."
She shook her head. "That is—That's her sheet."
He continued to approach her. "It is my sheet. And it will warm you all the same." He stopped before her and reached to wrap it about her shoulders. "This won't take long." His tone was softer now, more sympathetic. If only for a moment. "Otherwise I'd insist you go change first." He sighed. "But I'm so close to being done with this." He turned back to the table. "There really is nothing left to examine. No other place that might hold the answer. Other than her brain."
Christine clutched the sheet tightly as she felt the edge of the shelf press into her back. Was he really so close? The answer was so close.
Erik returned to the table and picked up his saw. He looked across to Christine. "Watch closely now. This is not something I'll be able to demonstrate twice."
She swallowed thickly and nodded.
Erik regarded her motionlessly for a moment. And he appeared to be frozen again, but she knew he was not, for she could see his fingers tighten about the handle of his blade. Then, without another word, he returned his gaze to the child's skull and pressed the the saw to the dark line in the scalp he had already made.
The thick tearing of the running of the saw's teeth across the dead flesh and the gross grating of dead bone was so wretchedly sickening that Christine almost dropped the sheet as she pressed trembling hands to her ears to drown it out. She squeezed her eyes shut and waited—waited in tortured, teeth-grinding agony until, though muffled, she heard metal touch metal again. Erik had put down the saw.
She opened her eyes just in time to see him systematically pull off the top of Elainie's skull, clumps of golden curls still attached to the scalp, and expose the soft and plump pink brain matter beneath.
She screamed! She dropped the sheet and screamed again. She turned, running for the door, but Erik caught her before she made it there. He spun her about to face him and pressed her back against the wall, pinning her by the arms.
"You think you can leave now?" he demanded.
She struggled against him, pulling to free her arms. Screaming and screaming and screaming in nauseated horror.
One of his hands pressed against her mouth and she saw a brief flash of light as the back of her head cracked into the wall.
"You wanted to see!" he shouted at her. "You came here!"
His unmasked face was so close, and she could see the tear streaks hiding in the cracks of his hollow cheeks again despite the blazing fire of his yellow eyes deep within their pits of black.
"Do you think I have appreciated being spied upon? Do you think I enjoy playing to this sick fascination you've developed? Do you think I give a damn about why she died? I am doing this for you, Christine! I am doing this for you!"
Even the pressure of his hand could not keep back her sobs then. Pushing against him with all her strength, she twisted from him and escaped to the door. She was running! Running back to her room, and he must have not pursued her, for she made it there and managed to close and lock the door behind her.
It was only after she locked herself in that, through her wracking sobs, she realized the lights in the room were on again. The doorknob moved. She stumbled away from it. He was trying to get in! She backed all the way to the bed and clung to its banister for support, burying her face in the curtains. Go away! If only he would go away! She sobbed until her breath was long since gone, but the doorknob did not rattle again.
She began to quiet soon after only because she simply did not have the strength to continue such grief, and it was in the resultant silence that Christine was certain she heard some small noise. She jumped, releasing the banister, and whirled about. But before she even had the chance to see if there was anything—or anyone—there, the lights in the room went out once more. The darkness was not abrupt, in fact it was rather natural, as if someone was turning off the lamps quite normally, but it did not matter. The hysterical running of Christine's pulse finally exploded, and through the blackness, she knew she saw, however fleeting, the twinkling of stars—the flashing of fireflies. But they were gone too quickly to grasp, and the loathsome demon of unconsciousness claimed her once again.