The Waters of Lethe
Disclaimer: I don't own FMA, I just like to play around in its world and torture Ed for a while.
Author's note: post series. Some movie events may happen, but differently
Warning: violence, language and death. Major Lovecraft type vibe in this chapter.
Beta: Took-baggins
67. The Long Nightmare, part A
Drops of sweat plopped down on the paper, smearing the barely dried ink and making it bleed into the paper's fibers like spiderwebs. At first Edward thought it was just the deep southern heat that made him sweat. The train clattered fast through the flat Mississippi delta, but it couldn't outrun the temperature shockwave. At nine in the morning, the mercury in thermometers all over the state of Mississippi were edging past eighty degrees.
Edward kept wiping his face off, but the sweat wouldn't stop coming. When the tremors began to shiver through his body and the car walls seemed to move back and forth, he finally realized why.
He was sick again.
Malaria.
Just one mosquito bite. A simple blemish on his cheek that sentenced him to a lifetime of agony. The bacillus hid in his bloodsteam like a venemous spider, and then every eight to fourteen months it emerged to ravage him with chills,fever,headache and a nausea so profound he wanted to die.
He sighed and capped his pen before he reached into the leather valise next to him. A moment of digging about yielded a small dark brown glass bottle with a cork stopper. Edward pulled it out with his teeth, then tipped the bottle on to his right hand.
One small white pill rolled out and he cupped his palm to keep it in place.
Quinine. His lifeline. The medicine didn't stop the attacks of malaria,but it made them bearable. Edward reached with his left hand for the coffee cup, lifted and tilted it to his lips. He filled his mouth with some of the lukewarm brew,then paused when the train began shaking.
He waited for the train to finish crossing over the "points" before he stuck the pill between his lips, and then threw his head back to swallow the medicine. A shudder ran through him just then,as if the malaria was reminding him who was really in charge.
"Are you all right,mister?" Edward had been so focused,he'd never noticed the child who'd crawled on to the train seat opposite him. A girl dressed like a boy in dark pants,white shirt,blue suspenders and a matching cloth cap.
Klose.
Edward knew he was dreaming right then.
After their difficult first meeting, he'd taunted Klose by jerring at her "you look like a paperboy!" But she'd asked for it because she'd called him a "shrimp", and crudely referred to Al as "a tin can". But despite their adversarial relaltionship, he'd still saved her life when the insane Majahal attempted to put her soul into one of his life-size dolls.
Majahal also attempted human transmutation and he saw the Gate.
But all he'd lost was his sanity.
It was so unfair.
"Mister?" The dream-Klose was persistent. "What is that?"
"My medicine, It's called quinine. It helps me with an illness called malaria." Edward was patient if apprehensive. Benign dream things too often turned into terrifying nightmare monsters.
"Quinine," she giggled,not a good sign. "That's a funny word, mister. What's your name?"
"Edward. Edward Thomson. Will you tell me yours?"
"Maribelle. Maribelle Lyonnase."
"That is a pretty name, Maribelle." Edward shivered again, this attack was progressing quickly. He would need to find a bed very soon. Even with the quinine, he still had to let the malaria run its course.
"Mister!" Maribelle's voice pitched higher in alarm. "You don't look so good!"
The walls of the train car were spinning around him and Edward supposed he fainted right then.
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He woke up to an insistent movement of his head. Increasing awareness told him a small hand was gently slapping his cheek. He reaced out and seized with his right and was rewarded with a cessation of the movement,plus a short sharp shriek.
"OW!" Edward let go and opened his eyes.
Maribelle looked reproachfully at him while rubbing her left wrist. Tears trembled in her dark eyes and her lower lip stuck out.
"Sorry," he mumbled, feeling the heat of embarrassment, or just fever reddening his face. "I didn't mean that."
"O.K? I forgive you!" Maribelle's tears vanished in an instant and she got off him. Edward found himself laying on the floor of the train car. He stood up and instantly sat down again on an empty seat when his legs trembled and threatened to give out.
He wondered where her parents were until he remembered he was dreaming. Logic wasn't applicable in the dreamworld. "Excuse me, Maribelle, but I need your help."
"Sure, Mr. Thomson, anything! What is it?"
"The quinine doesn't stop the illness I have, it just keeps the attacks under control. Because I am going to be very ill for the next few days, I need to find a doctor at the train's next stop. Do you know of any?"
"Yeah,sure! The doctors Faust!"
"Doctors Faust?"
"Yeah, they're twins and they'll take good care of you until you get better. I'll take you to them, c'mon!"
Maribelle took Edward's left hand in an unnaturally strong grip and pulled him towards the door. He hesitated because the train was still moving very fast. "Wait!"
"Come ON, Mister!" An angry, impatient note crept into Maribelle's voice and she pulled with both hands. The door of the passenger car stood open and the landscape whizzed by in a blur. Edward's feet skidded on the floor.
"Maribelle! The train! It's still moving!"
Then they were falling through the air.
He knew the landing was going to hurt. And it did.
Edward jarred himself on the hard ground and he just lay there, breathless for a moment.
"Come ON, Mister!"
Maribelle was standing right next to him and she didn't look friendly anymore. Still, Edward got slowly to his feet, picked up his valise and let her take his hand. The nightmare monster was determined to lead him through hell. All he could do was go along and hope it wouldn't be too bad.
They walked together through the dusty red streets of a small town. No one was about, but Edward had the sense of eyes looking at him from behind curtained windows. The air was still, with a reddish cast. No birds sang, no dogs barked, no cars rattled down the road; but Edward gradually became aware of music in the distance.
It came closer and closer, and he eventually saw the source was a large marching band. The band members looked trim in red coats with white trim, white pants with red stripes down the sides, and shiny black shoes. Tall red hats with white visors and black chin straps completed their ensemble.
None of them had faces, just blank space,smooth and white as eggshells between hat brims and chin straps.
The tune the band played was eerily familiar and Edwardcaught himself humming along before realizing why. It was the Amestrian national anthem, he'd heard it often enough during army reviews on the parade ground at Central military HQ.
But...
There was something wrong with the song. It sounded strangely discordant and Edward listened harder before the mystery was explained. The marching band was playing two different songs- the second was also a national anthem.
The German national anthem.
The two songs overlapped briefly, and then rang out seperately before overlapping again. The cacophony reminded Edward of an out-of-tune piano and it made his head pound. But just as he was about to scream in pain, the music stopped abrupttly and silence rushed in with such force it hurt.
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Time and space moved in a herky-jerky motion, like a badly threaded film. Suddenly, Edward and Maribelle were out in the country, and walking past endless cotton fields. She still held his right hand in a tight grip and he had to walk fast to keep up with her.
The air was still and hot. Great drops of sweat rolled down Edward's face and slid off his chin. They fell slowly, shining like jewels before they hit the red dirt with explosive force. His knees trembled when each drop fell.
"Maribelle, how far?"
"Not far, Mister." She was still frowning when she looked up at him.
Edward knew he would wake up screaming because of her.
The sound of sobbing caught his attention and he looked to his left. There in a bare field stood a large crowd of white people-clothes,hair,faces-all were bleached as if by sun exposure. They began to scream after Edward and Maribelle drew even with them and the sound was a like a drill straight into his brain.
"Why are they screaming!" Edward fell to his knees and clapped his hands over his ears.
"Because you killed them,mister." Maribelle grabbed his wrists and pulled them away, her expression was pitiless.
"I - I killed them?"
"You called the Gate, the Gate came and it took them all away." Some of the screaming turned to hysterical laughter and this new sound was even worse. "They had lives, they had families, but you took those away from them."
The screaming and the laughter stopped abruptly. As before, the silence boomed in painfully.
"But it's OK" Maribelle suddenly beamed a brilliant smile at him. "You didn't know what you were doing."
Such was the illogic of dreams when she suddenly announced a moment later, "We're here!"
They must have walked on further without Edward realizing it. Suddenly, the flat cotton fields were gone, replaced by a high black wrought-iron fence. Behind an imposing black gate stood a massive Victorian-style house of many windows, balconies and turrets. A white wooden sign attached to the fence announced in tall black letters:
PHILLIP AND THOMAS FAUST, M.D.
GENERAL PRACTICE & OBSTETRICS
PRIVATE HOSPITAL
WHITES ONLY
Edward didn't want to go in. But Maribelle was already pushing a large white buzzer located below the sign. There was a loud click and the gates swung open silently.
He didn't want to go in. But she was already leading him forward down a wide driveway paved with white gravel. The gates slammed shut behind him with a terrible finality, like the slamming of a coffin lid.
There was no going back.
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The air was infernally hot, or maybe it was just Edward's fever. The sun bounced off the white gravel and shone painfully into his eyes. He stumbled and recovered, then stumbled again. He fell to his hands and knees this time and the gravel cut into his palms like shards of glass.
Maribelle was shouting at him but he couldn't understand the words through the roaring in his ears. He was sweating so profusely the water poured off his face. He was on the verge of complete collapse and he couldn't stop trembling.
"Cease your struggles,Shambalan."
Edward whipped his head up,but he was alone. But of course, Mariebelle would vanish after completing her task of delivering him to Hell.
He struggled to his feet, picked up his valise and resumed walking towards the house. The lane seemed endlessly long, it was narrow and wide,straight and curvy. The magnolia trees that lined it were heavy with blossoms which were too big to be normal. They crinkled like paper when the wind blew,and their scent was so sweet it was almost nauseating.
The lane was shorter than Edward realized, or maybe his perception of distance was just shot to hell in the dream world. At the end of the lane was a circular driveway directly in front of the house, in the green space inside of the circle stood a gallows.
Envy hung by his neck from a noose tied to the top bar of the gallows . The rope creaked as the Sin twisted slowly in the wind. He'd been there for some time because his feet were skeletonized and his black outfit was faded and torn.
Edward walked closer until he was directly below the gallows and he looked up at his bitterest enemy,his inhuman half-brother. He jumped back with a startled cry when Envy suddenly turned his head and uttered a loud burst of laughter. Edward lost his balance and he fell heavily on his backside before he stared up in shock at the dead Homunculus.
Envy's long green hair jerked convulsively like it was alive, but his eyes,his violet eyes were gone. The sockets were just black pits where fat white maggots which writhed as if dancing the tarantella. The Sin continued to laugh harshly for another few seconds before he spoke with an ugly sneer on his dessicated face.
"You're a killer,just like me,little brother!"
The wind rose to a howling gale and the magnolia blossoms burst free, the petals whirling like tornadoes. They obscured the gallows and Envy,who screamed in terror. Then the flower storm was over and the gallows was gone,replaced by a green marble fountain of dolphins squirting water from their mouths.
Edward climbed unsteadily to his feet and he skirted the fountain warily. The dolphin's eyes followed him with malignant glares and Edward found himself searching his memory to remember if he'd ever done anything bad to a dolphin. At least they were made of marble and they couldn't follow him up the wide white wooden steps of the house. He hoped.
He stumbled on almost every step and the dolphins laughed with unpleasant chur-chur noises until he finally made the wide veranda. This was a much cooler area which stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction. White wicker chairs sat invitingly next to the door, and Edward made for one because he needed to sit down and rest.
But the front door opened before he could do so and Edward had another unpleasant shock when he saw Gluttony standing there. The fat Sin wore a butler's uniform, the black material straining to cover his bulk, but his eyes were different,dark and sparkling with intelligence. He spoke in a surprisingly cultured tones, "May I help you,sir?"
"Um, I, um." Edward stuttered because he was surprised to hear Gluttony speak so clearly. The formerly dim-witted Sin sounded like an Ivy League university graduate. "I need a doctor."
"Won't you come in?" Gluttony opened the door wider and motioned for Edward to enter a large foyer. He did so feeling like he was making a terrible mistake. "Walk this way, please."
Gluttony led Edward into a small room off the foyer and motioned to an overstuffed sofa. "Wait here in the parlor, please. The doctor will see you as soon as he can."
Edward sat down gingerly on the edge of the sofa as the door closed, and then he heard the sound of a key in the lock. He looked nervously about the room, it was full of more overstuffed furniture, and small round tables, the surfaces of the latter were crowded with porcelain figures painted in garish colors, and glass cases of stuffed animals and birds. The walls were papered in a dusky rose color, that was flocked with strange designs in high relief. Edward assumed the flocking was made of velvet, although it looked like more like black mold.
He turned to look at the wall behind him. It was also papered, but most of the paper was covered over by framed photographs suspended from long wires in the Victorian manner. He supposed they were photographs of the Faust twins's ancestors, but they were mighty strange looking ones. The closest portriat to him, on top of a small round table next to the sofa was the standard wedding photo: the man in a dark colored suit with a white flower in his buttonhole. His hair was plastered down with some kind of oil and he looked acutely uncomfortable.
Maybe the flower smelled bad, Edward surmised. Because the blossom wasn't the usual white carnation, instead it was an an obscene creation which looked somewhat like a lily. The petals were long and drooping,the stamens were dark and fat, and the shade was whiter than white, more like the bloated fish belly white of a drowned corpse. Edward shook his head in a van attempt to rid his mind of that unpleasant picture. He instantly regretted it when a wave of nausea fluttered across his stomach. Only with a strong effort did Edward force back the urge to vomit.
The more he looked at the portrait, the more he disliked it. The background, once the benign standard set of a professional stuio photographer of the nineteenth century had morphed into something like a Heironymous Bosch painting. The nightmarish shapes writhing on the panels reminded Edward of the other dimensional horrors faced by Carnacki, the fictional "ghost finder". But the bride...
She sat in a large gilded chair by which her new husband stood obediantly, and she was quite the fattest woman Edward had ever seen. She could have been a living personification of "the goddess of Willendorf" because she had only short, flabby stumps for arms, her wedding ring was a tiny glint among fingers so obese they looked like gigantic maggots. The rest of her was a round glob of blubber covered by a tent-sized dress of a dark shade of velvet. She had no discernible neck and her tiny black eyes floated like raisins in a bowl of lard.
Her hair was piled indordinately high and fell about her chubby face in elaborate ringlets. Nestled in the hair was a diamond tiara, and from that floated down an enormous white veil which stretched around the back and sides of the chair to the floor. Edward tore his eyes away from the portrait and he looked over at the door, but silence reigned without. He hoped the Gluttony-butler didn't forget to tell the Faust twins a new patient was waiting. He looked back at the portrait.
Here he received another surprise. Before, the bride and groom seemed to be just staring out into space, but now they looked directly at him. Neither looked friendly, in fact the stares were decidedly hostile in intent. Edward knew he was being silly, yet he gulped nervously. Coming here had been a mistake. He wanted to stand up, but his legs didn't seem to get the message. He risked a sidelong glance at the wedding portrait and realized with an unpleasant shock the couple were openly glaring at him now.
A new prickle of fear ran through Edward when the whispering started. It seemed to come from everywhere: the corners of the room, the porcelain figures on the tables - and the photographs on the wall.
He moaned aloud when the word they whispered became audible.
Murderer...
He jumped in inch off the sofa when the word was spoken loudly by both bride and groom.
"Murderer!"
Edward put his hands over his ears and screwed his eyes shut. "Stop it!"
"MURDERER!"
"It wasn't my fault, they drugged me!" a sob crawled up his throat and burst between his lips. "I had no will of my own, stop it! Please!"
"You killed all those innocent people, just so you could go home!" the obese bride accused.
"NO! I didn't! I wouldn't do it willingly, so I was drugged!"
Edward finally screamed, a loud wail of despair and pain. It seemed to break the spell because he could finally stand up. But he fell heavily to his knees after just one step. The entire room seemed to be shouting at him and it made him frantic with terror. Since he couldn't walk, he crawled to the door as fast as he could. He was panting like an overworked steam engine pulling a large train up a steep hill. The air had become hot and thick and breathing was difficult. Edward reached up and grasped the door knob, then tried to turn it, but it wouldn't budge. He pulled himself up and tried again, but the door was well and truly locked.
Edward tugged widly at it. "Please! Let me out, please!"
He let go of the knob with one hand so he could pound on the door. That proved to be a mistake as his knees buckled and he fell back to the floor. Then, a new horror made itself known.
A grand piano was on the other side of the room, its closed lid covered with a colorful fringed shawl decorated with embroidered roses. Over the shawl, the top of the piano was crowded with framed photographs, stuffed birds and animals in glass cases, and a heavy glass vase of red roses. The keys were covered, but now the cover slid slowly back and the piano began to play, the keys depressing as if touched by invisible fingers. Edward recongnized the tune instantly.
Chopin.
The Death March.
Pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you.
The playing was soft at first, then louder and louder, and then the piano began to move in his direction. The vase of flowers fell off first, the glass shattering with a tremendous crash.
The photographs toppled over next, and finally the glass cases of stuffed creatures. They screeched with a terrible sound as the wheels of the piano crushed them. The Death March repeated the same motif faster and faster, the sound punctuated by smashing glass and breaking wood as the piano plowed into the delicate tables that made the parlor an obstacle course.
"No." Edward breathed in disbelief, unable to believe his eyes. "No! This can't be happening!"
The words barely left his lips before the sofa also began to move. First one end swung around until the entire piece of furniture faced him, then it pushed ponderously forward, rucking up the faded woolen carpet.
"No! NO! NO! Edward closed his eyes again and screamed. "Please, stop it! STOP!"
It was a toss-up as to wether the piano or the sofa would get to him first. The figures in the photographs were still shouting at the top of their voices, "MURDERER!!"
Edward was openly crying, fat tears leaked under his hands and rolled down his cheeks along with the sweat and dripped like a waterfall off his chin. "STOP IT, PLEASE! I didn't want to kill them! I - don't want to hurt anyone!"
"I - I'm...sorry!"
The cacophony stopped.
A key rattled in the lock and the door opened, letting in a welcome gust of cool air. A soft voice asked, "What's all this noise about? I came as quickly as I could."
Edward opened his eyes. The parlor was as it had been when he first entered. All the furniture was in place, nothing was broken and the bridal couple stared blandly out of the portrait frame.
This was all too much for Edward, and he passed out.
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