Hi everyone, i've been told that last chapter was pretty sad and i guess it is. And so you know now, this one's sadder still. It's the death of hermother and flight ofher father combined with the very end of Mary's chance for a semi-normal life. Ijust couldn't find a way to put a positive spin on it. So i didn't. It's tragic. And i think iuse the word 'blood' more times on those last few paragraphs than Edgar Allen Poe uses the word 'despair' in his collected works. Perhaps not.Point remains, there's lots of blood.
Fearing Keep Me In The Shadows' judgement (review) it's a nice long chapter posted quite early and also the penultimate one. After this there's only one chapter before theend. Lucia, i'll be right here if you cry (come to think ofit that applies to all)and i have gingerbread men. Thanks also to Oscarinaff. Thank you all, enjoy the ride. Skaye.
When she arrived home, jubilant, she told her mother who did her best to share her excitement despite the fact that she honestly couldn't see the appeal in a glorified moped. Her father had locked the door to his library and didn't respond when she knocked and yelled the news through to him. She was worried but too excited to make a big deal of it. She went out to practise with her guns; she was making real progress with her control of the semi-autos. She hit the center of the target she was aiming for 93 percent of the time. She made a mental note to experiment with moving targets some time.
The bike arrived two days later, assembled, unpacked and ready to ride. If only she knew how. It would have been a simple matter to hire a teacher from town for a week or so but that seemed to her like an admission of defeat. She was determined to learn this thing on her own. She sat in the dark leather seat and experimented with each control, discovering the ignition a very uncomfortable two minutes before she found the brake. The controls were rudimentary, accelerator, brake, gears and indicators just like a car. Steering was something totally different, leaning in the direction she wanted to go. It took a lot of guts and a lot of practice but she stuck at it, driving the bike all day for three weeks along the empty concrete roads and dirt trails around the house. She crashed quite badly once and had to rest for a couple of days and she had plenty of small falls that made her limbs bruise and ache. It was difficult and dangerous without protective gear but she adored the danger of it almost as much as the sheer thrill of speed and momentum.
Within a month she was driving it like a professional and went once again into town to take her test and get a license. She drove the bike all the way home without a single fall and still helmet-less. There were few if any police on those mountain roads so she was never once stopped. She arrived home under the weight of odd indigo storm clouds which were beginning to build up around the mountain. The air was oppressive and seemed to crackle around the house. She displayed her license proudly to her mother who was overjoyed and presented her with a helmet. They laughed together and then sat down to dinner. They knew without even asking that her father was "too busy" to join them although her mother was plainly worried over it. She muttered over and over again that he just "wasn't himself". They hadn't seen him in over a week and he never left the library now.
The heavy air with its dense clouds stayed over the house all through the next day and the next. They were still there a week later on Mary's 19th birthday which her father forgot about. Her mother compensated to the best of her ability cooking Mary a cake herself and giving her lovely presents, a new pair of bright red boots, a cell phone, a pretty little pair of diamond earrings, a stack of new LP's, a long leather coat, even a pair of small handguns of a fine European make. She couldn't help but be delighted with her presents although she would have liked to see her father, he had been her guide and guardian her entire life and now as she was preparing to leave he wouldn't even see her.
The rain started that night, great heavy drops of it that lashed vengefully against the large windows of the house. The wind picked up and swept along the roof lifting tiles that had sat there for centuries and hurling them to the ground. Under the heavy velvet counterpane of her bed, Mary clutched her new handguns for security and turned her music up to drown out the din. She didn't hear the commotion from the library, books flying and thudding against the walls carried by invisible currents of power that swirled around her father.
She fell asleep just past midnight and therefore didn't notice that her music stopped abruptly as the power in the house cut out. The noises in the library suddenly went dead and for an entire three minutes, there was perfect silence in the house. The storm seemed to be holding its breath. Waiting. Lightning flared above the house in great vivid green forks and there was such a boom of thunder Mary was thrown off her bed deafened for a few minutes. She screamed silently and, grabbing her guns, she ran out of her room and down towards the library. The door was ajar and the inside was a bomb-site.
Hardly a single book remained on its shelf and very few were still intact. It hit her like a punch in the stomach. She leaned against the wall for a second, staring with her mouth wide at the barely-recognisable chaos. Then as her hearing returned with an unpleasant ringing in her ears, she walked on through the house which had gone still again. Her mother was not in her room and her father was nowhere to be seen. She realised with a sudden cold shock that her father might have been in the library when that happened to it. She ran back there immediately and called out hysterically for him. She waded into the mess of pages and splinters and felt around for him. She called and called digging through the mangled remains of the books she'd known so well. She established after fifteen minutes searching that he wasn't in there and the relief brought with it a sudden exhaustion. She picked her way out of the stricken library and continued her search of the house. The power was still down so she lit an old gas lantern and walked on carefully, gun raised to shoulder level, afraid of what she might see.
The irregular light of the lantern caught something shining wetly in the middle of the cavernous foyer at the entrance of the house. Mary doubled back and looked closer. The doors were open and the light rain still drifted in and there in the middle it the tiled floor surrounded by a terrible pool of blood lay her mother. Mary gasped and choked then ran down the stairs, stumbling on the thick carpet. She dashed to her mother's side and reached for her through the awful blood. Her voice wouldn't work and she shook violently. Her mother was limp and her skin in the lamplight was the colour of wax between the splashes of deep red. She opened her eyes faintly and they flickered to Mary holding her and to the front of her dress which was saturated in blood from the cut in her torso which seeped it still. She opened her mouth to speak and more blood ran out. Mary felt for her pulse; slowing, then slowing, then dead. A dead two minutes of stillness during which neither Mary's heart nor her mothers seemed to beat at all. Her thoughts were in chaos. Foolish to even attempt resuscitation. An ambulance would take hours to get here and it was too obscure for helicopters. The blood soaked through her thin nightdress and clung to her fingers making her head swim. She felt sick and strange, her head was filled with a high buzzing that drowned out all thoughts. The words dead, dead, dead played though her head like a broken record but she couldn't even think what that meant anymore. She longed for her father. Where was he? Where in hell was he? Her mother's voice roused her suddenly and she jumped. The lips were moving and the weak voice stuttered but the body was dead. The skin was already beginning to cool in the cold foyer. The voice found strength and the words became audible. Mary was unable to move.
"He is fled, Mary, the snake has slithered back to his master's side but the master must be vigilant lest he be devoured too. The princes will clash at the peak of the diabolical mountain and the battle will shake the Earth. The Fool shall make fools of them all and they will all help to raise the stairway to the sky from the tunnel to the Pit. Follow the ley lines to the centre of the web where the spider waits. Fly from your fear and your doubt and never let them consume you. Princess. Priestess. Take up your sword and show the fallen Hell."
The voice faded and the body lay still again. Mary sat still for what seemed hours, the words burned into her brain. Then her hands shook themselves and her whole body followed. She shook until her teeth chattered. Once it had subsided, she got to her feet and walked slowly and stiffly to her bathroom. She turned on the shower, cold water only at this time of night, and washed the blood from herself. Her long hair was hopelessly clotted with it and rather than tease the knots out of it, she simply took up a pair of scissors and cut it short. It fell away in dark dead strands that lay inert like feathers on the bathroom floor. She stared at themfor a minutewondering dumbly what they were.
She dressed in her new boots, skirt, shorts, fingerless biking gloves and a blue blouse then threw a few supplies, her laptop, cell phone and purse into a backpack before strapping on as many of her guns as she could comfortably carry, a great deal of ammunition and Kalina An. She sat down on her bed, packed and ready to go and without even noticing when it started, she was crying. Tears ran inevitably down her face and she sobbed painfully. She called out for her mother and father; she was alone in this place, her house. The body of her mother still lay going cold in the foyer; her father was gone, "back to his master" apparently. Without her even asking it to, her brain put two and two together. Father. Master. Those demon books, his odd behaviour, his sudden vanishing, her moth... He killed her. He killed her.
She thought further, the ley lines. Her mother had mentioned the ley lines. She knew about them, Gabriel had told her about these secret natural channels of energy that crisscrossed the whole surface of the Earth and he'd taught her how to see them. She scrambled about her parent's room for a roadmap of the whole country and from the ruins of the library; she found a large sheet of acetate. Transparent plastic paper her father used for making notes on ancient documents without actually touching them. She stuck it flat over the unfolded map then took up a purple marker. She breathed deeply and reached into the recesses of her mind trying to see the whole world as it was without cities or roads or bridges. She focused on her country alone and searched around for the very centre of the current web. She focused and saw and began to draw. She drew the shimmering lines on the acetate as she saw them. She lifted the marker, drew back her mind like a net and opened her eyes. The acetate over the map was covered in intricate purple lines exactly like a web. They all converged directly over a city almost a thousand miles to her South South East. That was her destination. She grabbed up the covered map and put it in her backpack.
She strode back downstairs through the foyer once more and looked down at her mother's still form in the vast glittering pool of blood. Mary left the lantern by her because it seemed like the thing to do and then walked out the front door. She took her motorcycle, revved the engine and set off without a backward glance. She refused to stop, refused to cry, any obstruction to her vision might cause her to crash. She couldn't afford to crash, no time to die. The dark flew past. She thought only two things; her mother was dead and her father, or whatever he was now, was responsible. Mother. Father. Someone had to bleed for this.