...
...I believe I am in a coma, in a hospital somewhere. I have been in a car crash, or knocked off a bicycle. I have sustained severe injuries to my body and brain.
Friends and family come to see me every day. They speak to me as if I can hear everything. They never cry, they want to be strong for me. They wonder if I'm dreaming. They hope so. They hope my dreams are of butterflies and meadows.
They don't know I'm stuck in this world, where impossible, terrifying things happen to a girl called Alice.
And in this world there is a heartless, silver-eyed angel, and he is Life.
And there is a cruel, black-haired sorceress, and she is Death.
The angel and the sorceress have shut Alice in a stone prison, and there is nothing she can do, because she is me. And I'm in a coma, in a hospital somewhere, and the stone prison is my mind.
I'm trapped.
...This is what I have to believe. I don't know what else to.
...
I sat propped against the stone wall, dazed, dizzy, fighting wave after wave of cramping nausea that wracked my body.
Pain was everywhere. It seeped into the marrow of my bones, knotted the threads of my muscles, poisoned my veins, throbbed with my pulse. My arm was burning, my skull pounding, my back ached and my ribs seemed to be stabbing my insides with each shallow breath.
Even the lacerations in my hands and feet were stinging badly, although I'd hardly noticed them since I had been on the run. Hope had acted as an anesthetizing emollient in my body, and now that hope had packed up and moved out, there was no more buffer between me and pain.
And I just felt so tired.
I felt like I couldn't remember what it was like to not feel tired, or afraid, or in pain. I was beginning to think that frightened, pain-filled exhaustion was my 'normal'. The default setting for me.
My spine and tail bone ached, but I dully consigned the discomfort to the general conglomerate of 'The Pain That Is Me' and stayed where I was, knees drawn up, letting the cold hard stone siphon out every last drop of warmth from my body. The encroaching numbness wasn't unwelcome.
I stared hopelessly around the chamber. More like a dungeon than a chamber, I thought. I was unnerved by the distorting patterns created by the flickering wall-lamps and even more so by the places that their light did not reach, where the shadows seemed like black holes leading into an infinity of darkness.
I wondered how long I would be here.
Who would be the next person I would see? The Woman, or Lucius? Or both of them? Perhaps neither of them. Perhaps I would slowly starve to death and one day, a hundred years from now, excavators would discover a small, curled-up pile of dry bones, my bones, and ponder on the sorry fate of the person they once belonged to.
The notion of seeing Lucius again added yet more confusion to the sorry mess of my thoughts. It was...frightening, but I was more frightened of not seeing him. He was the only person in my relentlessly restricted world I could...what?—trust?...Did you really just think that, Alice?
But, in a way, it was true. I could trust him—not to be kind, or even to not hurt me—but at least to afford me some basic decency. To treat me as a human being. I had no such guarantee with Her. She was just so entwined in darkness; she seemed to reek with it, it leaked from her very pores. She had...powers. I had seen them. I had experienced them. It was no use trying to deny it, however much I wished to. She was...not of this earth. I didn't know from where she came and I didn't want to know. The mere thought of her black-filled eyes turned my heart to a cold lump of stone.
Beside Her, Lucius seemed like a champion of truth and light. Of course, he was neither.
He would be angry with me, I had no doubt. Would I be punished? Would he at last mete out the 'indelible consequences' that he had threatened me with from the very beginning? One thing I knew for certain: I would rather endure his retribution, however painful it might be, than face the untold horrors in store for me at the hands of the Woman.
I could only pray that she really did intend to return 'Lucius's toy' back to him. In one piece.
I thought about the strange conversation we had shared, just before she had disappeared. What had she meant, asking those things about how I...felt about him? Implying that I—I was— And how could I defend myself against her insinuations when I didn't even know, understand, what it was that I did feel? Two days ago, I had made the decision to flee the man. At the time it had seemed absolutely imperative to do so...I had felt on the brink of suffocation, smothered by his control, strangled by his secrets...
But now...now he seemed my last, my only, hope...
...
"Wake up, mudblood."
Those three words, whispered into my ear, pulled me out of a deep, exhausted slumber I hadn't realised I'd fallen into.
I had the sickening sensation of waking up, not from a nightmare, but into one. My body immediately began shaking, from fear, from the freezing cold.
She was stooping closely over me and groggily I registered that she was winding something around my wrists...a thin cord, biting into my flesh.
"You know," she said quietly, "when a female expects the company of a gentleman, she ought to properly prepare herself."
My heart leaped wildly, jolting me fully awake.
Lucius?...
I tried to peer over her shoulder, wondering if he was already standing there, somewhere in the shadows. The Woman smiled. "So eager..." she murmured. "So impatient to run back to your captor."
I didn't deny it. "Where is he?" My voice was raspy. My lips felt dry and cracked, and I was terribly thirsty. It was so cold, I could see puffs of my breath when I spoke.
She shook her head and her black ringlets shone glossily in the flame-light. "I told you, mudblood: first, you must prepare."
"How?" I croaked.
"Well, little worm..." she spoke with a kind of tender malice, "when receiving company, the first thing a woman must do is to ensure she is presentable."
She reached down to the floor and began to drag her palm through the dust, back and forth. Slowly, deliberately, she raised her hand to my face and smeared the dirt down my cheek and across my mouth. Her hand was cold, but the contact seemed to sear, to sizzle, forcing a puff of pain from my lips. I tried to wrench myself away from her, but with my wrists bound together I succeeded only in tipping myself onto one side.
She giggled in that pretty, chiming way that I had come to fear and detest more than any other sound.
"She should also be properly attired," she said, making a small flicking gesture with her hands. There was a sensation of friction on my flesh, then the burning coldness of freezing stone against bare skin and an intense feeling of vulnerability and exposure. The realisation that I was completely naked hit me moments later, and I curled into a tight ball.
"Stop!" I gasped, but she merely grasped a fistful of my hair and twisted my face up towards her.
"And, of course, she should be perfectly coiffed." The gleam of a silver blade flashed near my eyes and I screwed my eyes shut, clenched my teeth and waited for Pain.
Go on, you crazy bitch, I thought. Just add it to the pile...
But there was no pain, only several hard tugs on my hair and a sound like something ripping, followed by another gleeful laugh. There was a tickling sensation on my face. When I opened my eyes The Woman was standing over me, a thick bunch of hair—my hair—clutched in her fist and she was sprinkling it over me in a shower of feathery strands. My bound hands went automatically to my head, patting frantically at the ragged patch where she had hacked off a large clump near the roots.
More than my dirt-smeared, blood-caked face, more than my nakedness, more than the pain I was in—it was this, this last degradation that sent me hurtling towards the precipice of despair.
It's just hair, I thought, trying desperately to hold myself together. But it wasn't 'just' my hair that she had sheared off and thrown contemptuously back at me. It was something far more precious—my dignity, my very sense of autonomy—that could not so readily be regrown. A strangled sound escaped my lips and my shoulders started convulsing with sharp little jerks.
"Snivelling again, mudblood? How adorably pathetic you are." She said it so sweetly, as if offering a compliment. "How you fall beneath even my far-from-elevated expectations."
She knelt and pulled me back upright. Still wielding the silver implement, she ran it lightly, caressingly, over my collar bone, zig-zagging it up my throat with just enough pressure to force me to tilt my head backwards. She rested the edge of the blade just beneath my jawline, catching the moisture slipping down my cheek. "You should thank me, worm, for preparing you so nicely to receive him."
"No. Please," I whispered through my sobs, as the significance of her words sunk in, "please...I don't want him to see me like th-this...please, give me back my clothes..."
"Why?" she taunted. Her lips were so near mine I could taste the unnatural iciness of her breath. "Are you afraid he may be violently overcome by all your exposed charms? Claim you here, on the floor, in the dirt?" She stared into my eyes with a mixture of amusement and revulsion. Then her lips curved up cruelly. "Well, perhaps he may. There's no accounting for some tastes."
My tears fell even more thickly at her humiliating taunts.
Suddenly she shoved me against the wall, knocking my head against the stone. "Stupid little thing," she snarled softly. "Don't you see? To a man like him, the only thing more appealing than vanquishing a woman, is saving her." Her gaze ran over every part of me, lingering on each mottled bloom of dark bruising, each jaggedly engraved laceration, as if admiring her handiwork. "Don't you want to be saved?"
My head was reeling with pain, confusion and distress. Saved? Yes, I wanted to be saved—I wanted him to save me—from here, from her...but to be forced to crawl back, naked, bloody, shorn, helpless, humiliated?
I hate you, I thought silently, fervently, I hate you for doing this to me.
Smiling, she leaned in closely to whisper in my ear, "I know."
She stood, turned, and made a fluid waving gesture at the far wall.
The whole chamber began to rumble and there was a heavy scraping sound of stone moving on stone. Transfixed, horrified, fascinated, I watched as a section of the wall began sinking into itself, the blocks swivelling and reforming, until I was staring into a door-shaped hole in the wall, an entrance-way, leading into immediate darkness.
The impossibility of what I had just witnessed was too much for me. I shrugged it numbly off me.
...I am in a coma, in a hospital somewhere...
But as soon as that comfortingly nihilistic thought entered my head, it was gone, abandoned—I was here—this was real—those echoing footsteps were real... I heard myself make a small gulping noise, my eyes riveted to the sunken opening in the wall...
...
He emerged from the darkness like an apparition of light and shadow.
In the flame-light his long hair gleamed like a halo, framing that too-sharp, too-beautiful, too-severe face. Had I really believed I could erase that face from my consciousness?
Our eyes connected, and the briefest flicker of shock passed over his features—and I knew then, that whatever the pretext the Woman had given him to come, it had not been to see me. She was watching his countenance with a complacent smirk and she clapped her hands with mock-girlishness. "But how nice of you to join us, Luci! We've been awaiting your arrival like two giggling schoolgirls."
Almost—almost imperceptibly, he shook his head, as if he were disappointed in me...no, for me. As if to say, 'You escaped me only to end up here, you foolish girl?'
A delicate, golden thread of warm hope tingled through my freezing body. Did he...could he...care?
He turned his silver eyes from me to her and made a slight, elegant bow. "Good evening," he said smoothly. My whole body thrummed to his voice, though he spoke with suave impassivity, as if he were visiting on the most mundane of errands. "I trust I find you well?"
The Woman glided over to him to give him her hand. "All the better for seeing you again," she replied as he brushed her fingers with his lips. "How very sweet of you to accept my invitation."
"You know I am a selfish man; I never deny myself any pleasure."
His elaborate gallantry set off her tinkling laughter. "How fortunate our pleasures coincide."
Stepping further into the chamber, Lucius surveyed the unprepossessing surroundings. "Charming what you've done with the place," he drawled with urbane irony. "Entertain here often?"
"Oh, when the fancy takes me. I decorated it myself, you know."
"Indeed? You ladies always have the knack for making an environment feel...welcoming."
I felt as if I were watching a carefully staged drawing-room play. Their witticisms were at once so formal, yet so prosaic, it appeared to me that they were each playing a character—though if it were for each other's benefit, or for mine, I could not tell.
I stared up at Lucius, longing for him to look at me again, to reassure myself that I hadn't been mistaken—that he really did feel something for me, closer to pity than hate...but now he seemed to be deliberately avoiding, not only my gaze, but my whole self. As if I were just another shadow on the floor.
The woman tugged on the sleeve of his long robe playfully. "Well, Lucius?" She smiled archly at him. "Aren't you going to thank me?"
"For what, pray?"
"Don't tease, you naughty boy! You know perfectly well what." She pointed at me. "That."
His eyes brushed over me briefly, but still would not reconnect with mine. "I hardly know whether to thank you or not," he murmured at length. "The trouble it has caused me...I begin to wonder if it's worth the effort."
She pouted coquettishly. "Oh don't be like that, Luci," she said. "Look, you've hurt its feelings."
I suppose my face was expressing something of confusion and rising panic. Though I felt he must—surely must be playing a part, I couldn't harden myself against an appalling new doubt...what if he didn't want me back? What if he refused? I thought of my wretched appearance, my pathetic, sorry state. ...Perhaps...perhaps I wasn't worth it...
"It looks somewhat the worse for wear," he murmured, with a supercilious tilt of his head. "Play with it for long, did you?"
"No, indeed! I promise you, it was already like that when I found it." She smirked coyly. "...Well, mostly."
He crossed his arms, his mouth pressed in a line, his gaze moving over my battered body, but never connecting with my eyes.
"Well, Lucius, since it's my gift to you, you'd better decide what you wish to do with it. ...I could kill it, if you like," she added conversationally, as if offering to step on a flea. "I know how fastidious you are about your things."
There was tension in the lines of his shoulders, I could see it even though half the room divided us. I had always been able to read his body better than his facial expressions, which had always been so rigidly fixed into impassivity or contempt. But our close proximity for so long had honed my instincts to tune into what his face concealed, and now it seemed to me he was calculating something, weighing which card to play, which to keep hidden...
"No," he said at last. "I haven't quite...finished with it yet."
I saw her suppress a smile. "Well, then," she said, "if you don't want to take it back, and you don't want me to kill it, I suppose it will have to stay here, with me." She made a sigh of mock-irritation. "I can think of many better ways to wile away the hours than bestowing my attention upon worthless mudbloods...but not very many."
I knew what was coming a split second before she moved and brought my bound arms up in a futile gesture of defense. But I couldn't stop it. The pain smashed into me like an avalanche, poured over me like a tsunami, howled through me like a tornado, and there was nothing to do but try to scream it out of me, scream and scream and—
—scream—for someone—what was his name?—
—grey eyes—features pointed, precise—smiling at me from a moving photo—
—who would save me—I knew, because he had saved me before—before, when I fell, when I was falling—before, when I was—I was a—
"Enough." Lucius's voice cut through the agony; quiet, but not quite calm. And as quickly as it had come, the pain was gone, leaving me twitching, faint and drenched in sweat.
Desperately I clutched on to the image in my head, but, like the pain, it had flared and disappeared and all was black again. I began to sob, not for what I had endured, but for what I had so briefly seen, but could not tether—the glimpse of someone who must have meant something to me, in my old life...my lost life.
"There, there, mudblood," The Woman tutted. "You mustn't take rejection so much to heart. We'll have lots of fun together, you and I."
"Please," I whispered hoarsely, through lips bitten and bloody. "Please Lucius...don't...don't leave me here..."
But he still wouldn't look at me—he was turning away—moving back to the door—
"NO! DON'T LEAVE ME!" The scream tore itself from my lungs.
He stopped.
Horrified at myself, but powerless to stop, I scrabbled onto my knees and began to awkwardly crawl to him, sobbing, grovelling. "Please don't leave me here! Take me away—please, Lucius, take me with you..." I crawled until I was lying at his feet, clutching at the embroidered hem of his long robe.
A part of my mind seemed to detach and from somewhere outside of myself I watched the pathetic tableau of a terrified girl, stripped as much of her pride as her clothes, abasing herself at her captor's feet ...Pride, what use was pride, anyway? Could you eat it? Did it provide oxygen? Did pride protect you from fear—terror—pain? No. Pride was no prisoner's friend. It garnered punishments, and paid out from a poor purse, scant winnings of false hope and dangerous defiance. To the captive, pride was the lock at the end of the chain. To the condemned, it was the noose at the end of the rope.
Pride was a luxury only for people who had choices, who had power, who had names.
With a kind of righteous pity, I bore witness to...me, on my knees, cringing with supplication, doing that which I had sworn I never would. Begging.
My whole body was quaking and shuddering with desperation. I had no more cards to play. I had sacrificed my last vestige of self-respect to him and if he were to reject the offering, my game was up. There was only pain and death for me here, in the icy darkness.
A glint in Lucius's eyes reeled my mind back into my body. I stopped gibbering and clung to his silver-steel gaze, scarcely daring to breathe.
From somewhere behind me I heard The Woman's mocking voice. "It does fawn on you very prettily, Luci. Leave it with me a while longer and I'll have it licking the soles of your boots."
"I believe she would do so now, come to that," he said softly, but though his words derided, his eyes did not.
"Please," I whispered. "Help me."
Twice before I had pleaded his mercy. Once, to take away the agony of my broken fingers, and again, when I was delirious with pain-fuelled fever. Both times he had relented, had taken pity on me. I felt that, with that between us, that shared knowledge of his helping me, he couldn't turn his back on me now. He had, deliberately or not, created a dual role for himself, as both my subjugator and my saviour.
Suddenly he bent down and caught my shoulders, pulling me roughly up to stand. He shook me once then held me still—still and close—his eyes riveted to mine. "Why should I take you back, mudblood?" he murmured, his lips near to my own. "What need have I for you? Have I ever had of you?"
Though his fingers dug bruisingly into my arms, his touch was like an ataractic drug, and I felt my erratic heartbeat slowing and my blood calming. I remembered the first night we had met, when I had broken the brandy glass. Then, his scent had been hypnotic and foreign. Now it was so familiar. Reassuring. Vaguely, I wondered why I had ever thought it expedient to run away. It seemed now that the only place I belonged was with him. Hurting me, helping me.
"You d-don't." My voice, like my body, was shaking violently. "You don't need me...but I...I need you. ...Please."
The Woman drifted into the periphery of my vision, just behind Lucius's wide shoulders. I could feel her black eyes, glittering with triumph. "They're capricious creatures, are they not?" she said. "One moment biting the hand that feeds them, the next grovelling and snivelling like spaniels."
Neither of us acknowledged her; at that moment, she didn't even exist.
"I need you," I repeated.
There was something in his eyes I had never seen before. I was reminded of the silver orb of veiled sunlight I had marvelled at yesterday, of the streams of pale light that had broken through the murky stratus. I was reaching him. Finally. Finally I was breaking through.
Lucius removed his robe and drew it around my shoulders, binding me tightly into it, like a cocoon. The thick material was heavy, and warm with his body heat...so warm...I closed my eyes, trembling. ...Safe. I'm safe...
He pulled me tightly against him, and I buried my head into his solid, warm chest, shivering. "Please, Lucius," I whispered. "Take me home."
...
END OF PART ONE
...