A/N: For Chrissake, please review. It's a help for me - look, I started layouting - and I kinda like getting my ego stroked. So please drop a review - it's not that hard.
Chapter 2-3: Leave the Past Behind
This place was getting worse and worse. Even Jenna had stopped talking. She'd been inordinately enthusiastic just before, but now, the building seemed to have affected her just as much as me. The ringing in my ears, which had been faint before, had become a painful howling, and the smell of acetone seemed to burn all the way through my body. My vision was blotchy and occasionally overlaid with wierd glimpses of images that I couldn't quite focus on. Still, I felt I needed to go on. I didn't know why. It felt like there would be a reward, like I'd find out why I came here.
Somehow, I found myself on my hands and knees, but I didn't care. The feeling that there was something to struggle for had grown stronger, completely overpowering me. The images became sharper as my vision became blotchier, and soon the faded sequences of images were to prefer to the reality that was becoming blacker every second. I faintly felt my numb body slump up against the wall, my limbs heavy amidst the thick haze surrounding me.
A bird. Either a crow or a raven. A large, white building, dignified and Victorian in construction. A young girl, no more than thirteen or fourteen, staggering jerkily around a large field, being watched from afar by a middle-aged woman and two young men. The girl approached the bird, which had perched on a low branch. Here, the images flickered and blurred, bringing with them an intense headache. The next thing I could see was the girl holding the crow - it was clearly a crow - by its legs and managing to snap its neck with one hand. As the supervisors came running to stop her, she tore into the bird with her dirty nails, staining her loose, white clothes.
Just before the supervisors grabbed her under her arms and pulled her away, she managed to rip out a mouthful of feathers and bloody meat from the dead bird, not out of hunger or greed, but something else, something fueled by the longing in her eyes. As the middle-aged supervisor screamed at her, I couldn't understand a word through the haze of memories, but the girl's answer rang crystal clear. "But Miss, he grants me good luck for it! If I'd known, I'd still have her!"
I got a quick glimpse of a white room with thick layers of cloth on the walls, with the girl, just washed and in clean clothes, lying on the middle of the floor. She bit her lip, hard enough to make herself bleed, whereafter she dragged her index finger across the bloodied area and drew a symbol on the floor.
I only managed to make out a vague image of the symbol - a downward-pointing triangle with a double cross inside it, the lines breaking out of the sides of the triangle and taking a fresh smear of blood with them - before the images disappeared, leaving behind only a featureless grey spreading across my vision, broken quickly by a wild scream that seemed to rip into my brain.
As if through the memories of another, I felt something about the symbol. Its meaning was foreign to me, as it was to the person whose memories these were - they were memories, I was sure of that - but the feeling of it, its very shape, exuded a feeling of foreboding and fear, like the feeling of standing on a mile-high cliff and knowing that there's no choice but to jump.
The greyish-red nothingness was replaced, like a shift in consciousness, by a sight so gruesome I had no choice but to ineffectually scratch at my eyes, my hands being the only thing I could feel. These were not memories, I was sure of that. These were the worst scenarios that could be thought up by a broken mind. A field, stretching on and on forever, beyond the horizon, over the oceans, of twisted, torn-apart bodies.
The sky was a plagued brown, broken here and there by flashes of a green like that of rotting, infected flesh. Spears and swords, each one made only of metal, a dull greyish-black alloy, protruded from every single body, and thousands more reached up from below, from the miles-deep ocean of bodies.
A slab of steel, untainted by even a drop of the blood that was drowning the world around it, lay in the middle of the carnage, with nothing upon it but a single figure, white-haired and pale-skinned. Suspended in the air above him were about a dozen bodies, each riddled with nails, chains and hooks. Their faces were twisted in pain, the faces of -
I was woken by a hard kick to the side. My mouth tasted of rust and chlorine. I vaguely sensed two figures towering over me, talking to each other. As soon as I heard one speak, I could recognize Jenna's voice, but warped, as if I was hearing it through static.
"So ya say that was you?" Another voice, familiar but distorted, like she'd been screaming for days, spoke. I couldn't remember the person, and black clothes were the only things I could see of her.
"Yes. I'm sorry for it all. I really hate when stuff like this happens."
Pause.
"I thought you wouldn't come here, that I wouldn't attract you with what I did, but I guess I was wrong."
I could hear Jenna speaking again, her voice breaking through the veil of static. "Oh wow. Holy fuck. I thought I was bein' a bit eager to go here, but well, I'd never guessed there was someone as screwed up as you behind it. Well, didja know Melissa here?" The other person spoke again.
"Hm? Did she tell you that was her name? Sorry to break it to you, but she was lying. Her name is Bella.
Ah, by the way -" I could slowly make out a familiar, black-haired silhouette through the blur "- I shouldn't be lying to you either, eh? I gave you my surname before. My first name is Mary, but hell, nobody calls me that anymore." Mary? Like in Brandon? "Well, I guess I've used enough false names in my time. I'm Alice, basically."