CH 6
Hot, painful barbs made sharp forays up her body. The child gasped and jerked awake onto her back, violently twisting and convulsing to some grotesque seizure like a flailing, hooked fish. Her mouth frothed with white spittle as streams of translucent bubbles dribbled down the corners of her mouth and puddled near her ears. Slowly extending a shaking hand above her face, the child gazed at it feverishly as intense foreign sensations racked every inch of her body, wondering what was happening. It felt as if there were an iron ore inside her stomach, slowly and uncomfortably expanding from the inside until it inevitably bursts through her flesh, shattering her pulsing wet entrails and the launching the fatty pieces into the air. The child let her arm fall and twisted onto her side, hugging her knees and quaking in excruciating pain as two consciences clashed to inhabit one physical vessel.
"I am…almost…you…"
The little girl gasped and released a wounded screech. Rumia's voice vibrated deeply from inside of her.
"Everything…that is mine…will be yours…"
Suddenly, faint, discolored images flickered inside the child's head. She shook her head confusedly as bright, clashing colors blossomed in her blurry field of vision and overshadowed the images of reality before her eyes.
"Through… my eyes," murmured Rumia, "Do you want to see?"
The agony melted mercifully away.
Hot puffs of air burst softly against the child's face as the sweet, homely smell of cinnamon and earthy nuts curled up her nose. The crackle of flickering flames came gradually into hearing, accompanied by a cadence of hushed, rhythmic voices. The psychedelic splatter that danced across little girl's vision deepened into cozy shades of coffee and red, slowly beginning to take shape.
She found herself clutching the arm of a tall, clean-shaven man tugging a leather suitcase behind him.
"Really, sweetie, I'll be back soon. Father won't be gone long! Listen to your mother while I'm gone, alright?" As he knelt down to brush a strand of hair out of her face, the child jolted in surprise when she realized she was gazing up at the wolf man. She tried to tear away, but it was not her own body that she was inhabited and she did not have jurisdiction over its movements.
"No! No please! Don't leave me alone with Mother!" the child felt herself tug desperately at the wolf man's cuffed sleeve as he rose and started towards the doorway. "She was doing these—I don't know—strange things…witchcraft. I saw her."
Worry creased the wolf man's face, but he patted her reassuringly on the head, gazing at her with a painfully genuine tenderness that pierced the little girl's heart as she struggled to accept the discrepancy between the wolf man she knew and this benign paternal figure.
With a last word of farewell, the wolf man stepped out the door and shut it behind him. Rumia's body leaned against the door pitifully, tears rolling slowly off her cheek and smearing the polished wood.
"What a disrespectful daughter!"
The voice sent shivers down her back. The slender figure of a stylish, confident woman appeared in the entrance hall. She had Rumia's blonde hair and icy eyes, fiercely contrasting with a set of full, ruby lips pursed in a disapproving frown. With a pallid complexion, harmoniously proportioned facial features, and sharp, chiseled jaw, she looked like a marble masterpiece from Hellenistic Greece.
"Clever, sneaky girl," scoffed the woman. "And I hadn't the faintest clue!" The sharp stilettos clacked dissonantly against the granite floor as she cornered Rumia and seized her wrist. "You little vixen. You know, don't you? Damn…"
The accusing tones of Rumia's mother slurred and melted into silence. Whimsically, the surroundings dissolved into blurry swatches of color, recombining into a new setting before the child's eyes. Skin crawling in anticipation, she watched helplessly as event after unexpected event unfolded.
The next memory surfaced in pitch-black.
A shrill, guttural shriek reverberated harshly off the walls of the stuffy chamber.
Sharp terror seized the child and she thrashed drunkenly in response—before realizing that the emotion was not her own and she still had no authority over the body that her conscious inhabited. A damp, saline smell of sweat lingered about as jarring screams pierced ominously through the gloom, heralding a pivotal memory of agony and finality.
In one hand, the child found Rumia gripping a familiar silver dagger. With a jolt of dismay, she saw that her other hand was rigidly outstretched, slick with sweat and blood. A flurry of cuts ran across the fleshy cushion of the palm and gathered where a jagged artery was unnaturally exposed, pumping slight, scarlet rivulets that dribbled down the shaking wrist. The child watched in helpless horror as Rumia's dagger arm lifted shakily and plunged the keen metallic tip into a nail bed, goring a thin, meandering path underneath and levering off a bloody keratin chunk. The tender, vein-webbed flesh underneath shivered with globular beads of crimson that inched down the finger like discolored tears. Watching incredulously as raw screeches of agony rolled from Rumia' throat with ease, the child could not fathom the situation.
Stop! Stop doing this to yourself! I know how much you suffered in this house, but—I don't know—I just—I don't want to be your eyes anymore! Please stop! Rumia—!
She wanted to tear her hands away, but the blade came down once more and twisted itself into the flushed red skin. Cursed to be a bystander, the little girl could not rewrite history. She screamed silently in unison with her physical human vessel as a dark reservoir pooled on the floor.
"Tell me!" A voice pierced through her muddled thoughts. It belonged to Rumia's mother. Rumia lifted her head weakly, locking eyes with the cross-legged witch that levitated indifferently in the far end of the room.
Tousled blonde hair covered the woman's eyes, but two glowing red pupils shone through the straw tendrils, sparkling with malice. At that moment, the child knew who was really mad—the woman. She cast heinous curses without a second thought. She lied pathologically. She inflicted pain liberally. She dwelled in the dim, destructive corners of witchcraft.
The woman hands stretched her crooked hands and bent them at inhuman angles. The dagger followed her movements, and it was the woman who had true jurisdiction over the blade, not her daughter. Rumia's body was petrified and her hand gripped the hilt involuntarily. She did not want this.
In one short moment, the child watched the solid assumptions that she carried since she first arrived in the wolf man's mansion fall apart in tatters—the wolf man's villainous pursuits, his relationship with his daughter, and Rumia's alleged suicide.
"Are you going to tell me now?"
The witch was answered by incoherent, blubbering pleas. Breath rattling impatiently, she twisted her hands, and the dagger drew another sickening, red line on her daughter's palm.
"I know he told you! He tells you everything! That fool of a man—I've married him only so I can take back what was MINE! What was my FAMILY'S!" In a sudden spasm of angry exasperation, the ruthless witch balled her hand into a fist. "DAMN YOU. GO TO HELL—WHERE YOU BELONG!"
"No, Father! HELP ME." Rumia's eyes rolled upwards until there was nothing but white. "FATHER!" she screeched.
The dagger was not pointing at the hands, but the heart. Panicking, Rumia wrapped her fingers around the black hilt, trying in vain to yank it away. At the slightest movement of her mother's hand, the keen tip rotated smoothly and twisted itself into Rumia's chest.
No more. No more—please! Let me out!
As the second memory dissolved into oblivion, the child squirmed helplessly within the bounds of the foreign body and begged for mercy, far beyond overwhelmed.
Blinking open her eyes, the child found Rumia's body slumped against the wall, unable to move. The witch woman was kneeled before her, chanting inaudibly as her hands undulated sensually around the heavy dagger studded in her daughter's chest.
A smile lingered on the corner of the witch woman's lips as she uncurled a hand and connected the tip of her index finger with the hilt. The little girl suddenly found herself disconnected from solidity and spit unceremoniously into the surrounding air. The weighty substance accompanying the human body could no longer be felt, replaced by nothing but a wavery cold tinge.
The child gasped in surprise as Rumia's spirit was ripped away from her remains. She felt the spirit attempt to return, but some invisible force field prevented it. The poor spirit thrashed in panic, its unstable white particles scattering and reforming simultaneously, unable to return to its body.
"Isolated from your body," chuckled the witch, "Isolated from the spirits and the entire spirit world!" The woman's shoulders shook as she stifled a childish giggle. "This," she gestured towards the dagger that grew out of Rumia's chest, "will never allow you to recombine with your body." Rumia's spirit threw itself madly against its mother, screeching silently. The witch continued, "The netherworld—do you feel it?" she cackled. "No! Of course not. I've barred you from it permanently, do you hear me? Every other spirit in this household will be trapped inside its body, as long as you remain trapped outside your body. Even if you manage to pull this dagger out, it will be reversed, and you will be trapped in your own corpse forever while every other soul is free. They can hear you, maybe, but they can't help you!" Ecstatic laughter bounced off the walls. "Neither can your poor, poor father! Have a grand time haunting him, dear. I fear he may go mad."
The most recent in a long line of victims, the child had been the first to pull the dagger out of Rumia's chest and reverse the curse. When she did, the chattering apparitions were freed of the bodies that lay rotting in the stone prison, and they had come to the child's assistance.
Before that, however, Rumia was trapped outside her body, forced to float around the gloomy estate of her father and watch him delve in psychotic fantasies and hallucinations, descending into madness. His previous victims, the whispering voices the child had heard when she was locked inside the stone prison, were trapped inside their bodies and unable to come out and help. Rumia had watched helplessly as her father murdered innocent look-alikes he had sourced from all over the world, salvaging various methods to send each victim a message and hope for salvation. For years she wandered and watched, flitting about weakly through the empty rooms as her spirit deteriorated and she became as mad as her father.
At long last, her efforts have not been in vain.
The child's fingers twitched from where she lay on the floor. An earthquake split her skull as another conscience wiggled its way inside, and two was almost one.
"Kill my Father. Please."
The little girl's eyes snapped open. She flexed her knuckles and inhaled deeply, inflating her lungs with frosty air. Supernatural blood coursed hotly through her veins as all the weaknesses and inadequacies she had as a human disappeared. A leisurely hiss escaped through a pair of gleaming yellow canines as the child rose, quaking in pleasure with unnatural strength and energy.
I will.
She turned to the wolf man.
He was absolutely perplexed. A moment ago, the child had been sprawled lifelessly at his feet. Suddenly, she began writhing as her body distorted strangely in a symphony of ear-splitting crackles, and she fell still again. When she opened her eyes, they were a raging, bloodshot red.
The wolf man babbled in shock and backpedaled, pressing himself against the wall in terror. The child giggled ruthlessly, for the tables have turned dramatically.
She could hear the thumping cadence of the madman's heart and the rhythmic throbbing of the vital artery pulsing in his neck. The monster child wanted to burst the vessel open and spray the savory fluid across her tongue.
Yes—kill him!
Hands outstretched, she strode lithely towards the wolf man until the two were nose to nose. He reeled backwards, spluttering indistinct apologies.
"I-I'm sorry—I—sorry—"
The little girl found him quite hilarious and cut him off with a bloodcurdling cackle. She planted a hand on his chest and thrust her nose into his face, revealing a row of pointed fangs nestled cozily in her mouth.
"Is that so?"
She plunged her hands through the wolf man's chest.
The earth rumbled in acknowledgement of the completion of a demonic pact as the dead and the alive were merged ultimately into one.