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And, as always, thank you TouchingTrusting for being great.
Watch out, ye landlubbers, there be storms ahead! This is a 'T' rated fic, as I don't believe anything I write is too excessive, but be warned that there is attempted murder and possibly disturbing images below. Have fun!
Chapter Sixteen: The Darkest Hour
Was it horrible? Was it necessary?
'Can I really destroy a life?'
Something inside of her twisted and broke.
'Shut up!' Christine screamed inside her head. 'It's his fault, he's making me do this. I'm a prisoner damnit! I need to do this! I need to! I need to!'
She repeated it in her head until she believed it, and left the room on silent feet, heavy silver in her hand. The sitting room was swallowed in darkness that was so thick even her adjusted eyes could barely see; silence smothered her ears like heavy pressure, faltering her sense of balance and making her own thoughts too loud to stand. She crossed into the music room; the lifeless instruments stared at her hollowly, weary sentinels that met her presence with hostility. The silver was suddenly hot in her hand, her palms slick with sweat, and it seemed so clumsy, so heavy, pulling her down to the floor.
And then she was in front of that door, that always closed door, and Christine felt her hand reach out and push it open. It swung wide easily, a fact which surprised her and also did not. He slept so little, it was his house, and she showed so much fear. Why would he lock his door, when he slept only when she slept, when she wouldn't dare cross the empty space to actually come looking for him if she awoke? He offered no comfort for any problem.
And he could not have anticipated this.
His room seemed even darker than the others, and she had to stand in the open doorway for a moment for her eyes to adjust to the further blackness. Her heart thudded in her ears so loudly she was afraid that he would hear it and awaken. But when her eyes finally adjusted well enough for her to survey the room they fell upon the large, six sided object in the center of the raised dais and her loudly beating heart nearly stopped.
There was a corpse in a coffin!
Christine stepped back instinctively, horrified at the sight of a dead body. Her eyes, almost by providence, caught sight of one pallid hand, fingers clasped around the nearly invisible black mask only made visible by the contrast of white skin. She had one last fleeting moment of ignorance before understanding hit her so hard that she staggered and nearly threw up.
'Oh God, oh God, it's not dead, it's him; it's his face!'
Christine lurched forward, her hands on her knees, trying to control her ragged breathing and her gag reflex. She had to stay silent, but oh God, how could anyone look that that and not be decomposing! Christine clasped a hand to her mouth, feeling bile rise into her throat. 'He's alive!' She thought frantically, as if trying to convince herself. 'This doesn't change anything! He's alive…but he looks dead.'
A strange thought rose to the surface, surprising and rather horrifying in its bitterness. 'He looks dead and soon he is going to be dead.'
Christine raised her eyes and bit her lip until she tasted blood. 'I can't do this,' she thought desperately. 'What am I supposed to do?'
She stood for a long time in the crushingly silent room and tried to control her crazed emotions. Sweat poured off her like she had run for miles; she shook and her skin was hot like a high fever. Christine licked dry lips and slowly forced herself to stand straight. Jerkily, her body moving as if it were not her own, she felt her feet cross the dark space to in horrified wonder near that death's face.
It was the worst thing she had ever seen, though it seemed wrong to call it a deformity; Christine had always connected that word with images of Elephant man-like lumps, misplaced features, scars and puckered flesh. But this face was nothing that she had ever seen; it did not look so much disfigured as putrefied. Bile rose in her throat as she studied him. The thick black hair she had seen was obviously a wig; now all she could see were dark clumped pieces scattered across translucent gray skin pulled taut against the skull, with a network of vaguely pulsing blue veins running underneath the surface. The flesh sunk into the eye cavities so deep that they seemed empty holes in the darkness, the lips were pale and shriveled, and the nose non-existent, just one dark gap in the center of the dead face. It looked as a man does when he has died and been left exposed to the elements for weeks; how he looks after the blowflies and maggots have come and gone, after nature has sucked away everything resembling life except for bone and that final withered shred of skin. It was a face out of nightmares, out of horror movies, and in Christine's brain revulsion and pity rose and clashed and fought for dominance.
Suddenly everything made sense: why he was so isolated, why even with all of his power he still hid away, why his unearthly and beautiful voice was unknown to the world, why he felt that the only way to love someone was to take them.
'Because any other way they would run,' Christine thought with immeasurable pity and sadness even while she closed her eyes so she would not have to look at him and clapped her hand to her throat so that she would not vomit. 'Because in his mind, there was no other way.'
Did this change anything?
A war raged in her mind. Some part of Christine acknowledged that it did, that in her mind pity had somehow made him more human. Part of her, the childlike part that hid deep within her, had the strong, primitive reaction that he was a monster and now more frightening than ever, something that she wanted to dive under the covers to escape. Sympathy told her that he was just a man, just a sad man, and how much of a bastard was she to be horrified of him just because of how he looked, and to be thinking of taking his life when he had obviously already suffered so much?
Christine raised her eyes and looked at that withered face again, and decided that no, it didn't change anything. She was still a prisoner, she still had to get free, and she still had no other choice.
Maybe…maybe she'd be putting him out of his misery. Maybe this was the best course of action.
'No other choice.'
She raised the candlestick over her head and held it there for a long moment. 'I'm so sorry!' she screamed inside her head, tears pouring down her face. 'I'm so sorry, God forgive me, God forgive me…'
Christine closed her eyes and brought it down hard, the silver blurring in the air, an almost tangible sound in the silence. It hit something hard and stopped, but she knew it was wrong, all wrong, and her eyes flew open to see his eyes, more feral and frightening than ever, staring out of that dead face.
His hand hovered above his head, long fingers wrapped around the candlestick. He stared at her, and Christine thought she was going to die.
'He's going to kill me…and I deserve it.'
But she couldn't stand there and look death in the face any longer.
Christine dropped the candlestick and bolted out the door, though she knew that it would never be fast enough. Her plan had failed, and suddenly her situation had gotten a hundred times worse.
Her feet took her out of his presence and wildly past couches and tables that couldn't be seen in the heavy darkness; she tripped and went sprawling but quickly righted herself and kept moving, pausing at the door of her room. Instead of opening it she pressed her forehead to the heavy oak and cried, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, her mouth contorted in agony so that only small whimpers escaped. There was no use hiding in that room, there would be no sanctuary there. She saw her life suddenly as if it was at the end of a long path, and this is where that path had led her: to that very moment, awaiting death at the hands of the madman she had tried to kill. Christine cried into the door, pressing her face and hands into the wood as if she wanted to sink into it and disappear. How had she gotten to this point? Why had life led her here? Why, why, what was the purpose?
"I am going to die without purpose," she sobbed, curling her fists into the oak paneling as if trying to find a handhold at the edge of a cliff. "Dad, dad, help me, I don't want to die like this!"
The lights flickered on and Christine's breath hitched, her eyes widening in glazed terror. Slowly and without changing her cowering position at the door, she turned her head and craned her head to see the other side of the room, suddenly so harshly bright.
He staggered into her line of sight a moment later, his craven figure hunched and bent as he moved like a disjointed puppet: jerkily, stumblingly. The candlestick was in his hand, and his bent head stared at it with disbelieving horror.
Finally those bizarre yellow eyes moved slowly upward to lock on hers, and they looked stranger and madder than ever. She flinched, waiting to see that face, but the black mask was once again firmly in place, as if it had never left the skin, as if she had never seen that rotting corpse's head. But she had, and the image wouldn't leave her head; it was burning into her retinas, superimposed over the black leather, staring at her desperately.
"You tried to kill me," he said slowly, his voice suddenly thin and unbeautiful. He sounded so shocked, and Christine choked back a sob at the disbelief in his voice.
"You tried to kill me," he repeated again, with incredulity. Those eyes burned into hers. "You tried to kill me. How could you…do you hate me that much…Christine…"
"I…"
"Do you hate me more now?" He asked, his voice growing louder and losing its disbelieving tone, being shriller and more maniacal. "Do you hate me more because you failed, because now you know what is behind the mask?" He took a step toward her and she tried to melt into the door, frozen in horror. "What am I saying, of course you do. How could you not? You already thought I was a monster, and now…now you have proof! Did that soothe your conscience, little one?" He was coming closer as his voice rose in pitch. "Did you feel better about murder once you knew that you were not really killing a human being? Did it make you feel like the hero, slaying the beast, killing the dead? DID IT?"
"I…I…" Christine was sobbing so hard she was unable to form words.
"DID IT? DID IT?" He was nearly at her, his height imposing, his voice an explosion.
"No," she tried to gasp out, but she could barely breathe for crying. "No, no, that's not what I wanted…"
"I told you!" He roared. "I told you I would let you go! Why didn't you believe me? Why this? You've ruined everything, Christine, everything, when I would have given you anything! You tried to destroy me and in doing so you've hurt yourself in the worst possible way. You saw my face, you saw it, and now that image will never leave you be; it will haunt you forever! Oh, if only you had been successful in your attempt!"
He turned his head away from her and began to cry, huge gasping sobs that left his whole body shaking and his breathing harsh. She saw him claw suddenly at the mask and then remove it, still looking resolutely away from her, and his breathing eased.
They stood like that for a few moments but his cries did not cease; if anything they seemed to get more violent and unbearable.
Without even fully realizing that she was doing it Christine reached out one arm to touch his shoulder, desperate to stop this mad grief, this frenzy of despair, desperate to make amends. But he flinched at her contact and swung on her, snarling, that hideous face inches from her own. His golden eyes blazed with something close to insanity; tears still ran down those sunken cheeks and into the crater which should have been a nose. Veins pulsed in horrible rhythm across his forehead. His almost-lips were curled into a feral snarl, teeth broken and jagged within the dark hole of his mouth. Christine gasped and pressed against the door, trying to put as much space between as possible between her and death.
"What were you trying to do, little girl, comfort me?" He laughed mirthlessly. "Comfort the monster?" Suddenly he lunged and caught her hands, bringing them up to his face. She twisted them, desperate to wrench them away before they touched that gray membrane of flesh, but he held on like a vice and pulled her toward him. "You think I'm a monster!" He roared.
"Let me go!" Christine screamed, pulling at her arms with all of her strength. "Let me go, please let me go!"
"You think I'm a monster! You think I'm a monster!" He repeated, his voice frenzied. "A monster that deserves to die. How could I be so bad that it would cause someone as sweet and as innocent and as wonderful as you to try and kill me? Am I such a monster to be denied even love? I love you, Christine, I love you!" He forced her hands onto his face and her fingers felt the too smooth, almost slick feel of his skin that conjured thoughts of things dead and rotting, and bile rose in her throat, thick and bitter. "Look at me! I may be a monster but I am alive! I am alive!" He dropped her hands from his face and pressed them against his chest, where she could feel his heart weakly fluttering. "I'm alive," he whispered. "I live in this shell of a body. I've stayed alive for so many reasons but I've never lived…I live now…for you." He stared at her with those almost-lovely eyes in that dead face. "How could you?" he whispered. "I thought that you understood."
Christine looked at him with utter grief, her hands still pressed against his chest to feel its soft beating. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I just can't…I just wanted…I'm sorry. I thought…but I couldn't…oh God…forgive me…"
"I know what you thought, and I know your reasons." He seemed suddenly in complete composure, but she could still see tears in those eyes and the hear the quiet shaking of his words. Slowly he pulled away from her and turned his back. His hands reached upwards smoothly to his skull and Christine knew that the mask was back in place. "You felt that you needed to do this but you did not consider all of the consequences, all that you would lose. All that you would never be without me. I offered you the world. I offer it to you still, though I understand if you do not take it. But you cannot escape your fate…with me." He bent his head, and his long hands shook ever so slightly at his sides before he whispered cryptic words laced with a meaning that Christine did not fully understand. "Make up your mind, Christine. Make up your mind about who you want to be."
