silently panic, not wanting to make Gwen worse.
“Gwen, you need to take me to where Sebastian disappeared. I have a feeling that he’s alive, his body will be fine, but it will be empty. We need to save him before he’s too far gone and they don’t let him back.” I quickly spun and locked my eyes with her, careful not to look at anything in between the candlestick and her scared face. She whimpered, and I thought for a second she might try to run again, but she nodded bravely and took my hand. As she led me forward, they followed us. Their quiet, angry murmuring bubbled around. I felt like I was trapped in a dream as I was taken up the creaking wooden stairs into the unlit and dank upstairs corridor. On either side were unused, Victorian style light holders and wallpaper darkened with dust and muck. The carpets, scruffy and visibly damp from the leaking roof, led the way forward. Gwen silently pulled me forward, hand clammy with fear, and stopped suddenly outside of a solid, thick door, red paint peeling from every inch. Very faint screams could be heard as if from miles away seeping through the doorframe.
I shuddered knowing Seb, my only family left, could be one of the lost souls within contributing to that noise. The pain he was in was probably unimaginable and I suddenly felt incapable of dealing with the task of ridding this house and myself of all the evilness that had decided to stick with me. I didn’t know how I was going to save my brother and Esther, but I knew I had to even if it killed me. Taking a deep breath to steady my dizzy mind, I slowly reached forward and grasped the door handle. Slowly, with every ounce of courage I possibly muster, I turned the rusty handle clockwise until it clicked harshly into place, echoing around the ‘empty’ corridor. I could see them all standing there though, watching and waiting for me to slip up and try to look at them, or close my eyes which were currently stinging madly from lack of sleep or blinking.
Sebastian
I gave a slight push and the door swung inwards with a screeching creak to reveal a completely black room whose atmosphere seemed impenetrable and dangerous. I took a careful step forward, not knowing what to expect, and ducked as a fist came pummelling from the side of the doorway aimed for my head. Heaving myself away from the hand, I lost my balance with the shock and fell to the floor with a yell. Gwen’s concentration broke and she bent to help me up. Her head snapped to the end of the room, her eyes growing scarily wide and making me think her eyeballs might pop straight out.
“Gwen?” I stood up shakily and brushed myself down. She didn’t move an inch.
“Dad?” Gwen whispered hopefully. She glanced blankly just past my right shoulder, into the depths of the opaque blackness. “Dad!” shuffling towards the pitch black corner of the old bedroom I knew something had happened when I had fallen, and I grabbed her wrist. “Gwen! Snap out of it!” she tried to tug herself away from me. The longer I took to bring her back to normality the closer they were getting with their expressionless, greying faces and outstretched hands. She pulled herself away from me. She almost began to run away, to the version of her dad they wanted her to see in the corner, away from me and towards them. She tried to surge forwards. Gwen was quite weak but managed to slip from my grasp. She stormed forwards determinedly.
I shouted her name again. She ignored me. I spun her around and slapped her hard. Straight across her face. I turned away from her afterwards with regret.
“Rick?” she blinked a few times like a child awaking from a deep sleep. “Oh my... What happened?”
“I don’t know.” I said carefully, glad to have her back. She still seemed dazed but time was running out and the room, apart from having the constant noise of distant screams and a lot of violence, didn’t appear to have anything that could help us save Seb. If he could be saved at all. A light bulb, decades out of use, flickered on weakly.
“There’s no electricity in this building, it’s been derelict for years.” Gwen said, as if stating that fact would stop the bulb being any less real. She strode over to the light bulb, unscrewed it carelessly and threw it to the floor, face contorted in mutinous resentment.
Rick...
“I just heard him, Gwen. I heard Seb’s voice.” I whispered.
Can...
“Can what? Can I do something?” I shouted at the unpopulated room, circling it impatiently. As I did my second route, the in-built cupboard caught my eye. Walking over, I pulled out my Xenite pendulum for protection. I still wasn’t sure how it came into my possession; I only knew it had always been mine. It hadn’t been a proven item for protection anyway, but like a child carries a comfort blanket, I carried my milky white Xenite rock on its fine, silver chain. I had a feeling they didn’t like it, it had immense powers that overwhelmed them; my lucky charm. A small glow emanated from the fingernail sized stone, and I opened the cupboard doors full of determination to find Seb and end this nightmare. His limp body lay against a chest of drawers, face drawn and beset with terror.
My eyes saw his body with life clearly gone forever, but my mind wouldn’t believe. Breath came in short, shallow bursts. I perched next to him and touched his cheek. “Seb, come on. Wake up.” His cheek was already turning pale and cold. “You can’t be... dead. Remember when we were little and you said you’d have my back, always? You double pinky hard-boiled promised. We spat and shook on it. We pricked our fingertips and shared blood so we could be more like twins!” he lay, eyes open and staring at the stained ceiling above. I imagined he could see the bright stars beyond, one shining emblem in the sky for every loved one we’d ever known to pass on to the next life. I hoped he had joined them.
“He’s not dead because... because you just need to bring him back. You told me that before we even came up here.” Gwen reminded me gently, as if reading my thoughts.
“They’ve stabbed him in the heart, Gwen.” I gestured weakly to the pool of blood I was squatting in that was growing slowly. “There’s no getting him back now, they’ve done the job properly, it seems.” My throat felt constricted and my eyes became awash with tears. “Seb, come back...” I murmured to him, shaking his shoulder tenderly. “They haven’t ripped him up to take with them; they’ve killed him outright and left him here to rot.” Anger reared its ugly head suddenly in the pit of my stomach; the force of it scared me. I didn’t want to be like them, filled with hate until that was all that drove me onwards surviving.
“That means nothing! Come on, you told me it would look like he was dead but that he wouldn’t be, that we just need to rescue him before he’s lost forever! We just need to... To go and get him?” her nervous excitement fizzled out with the realisation that we had nowhere to go from here, no plan B in place for when everything we hoped for plummeted to the ground and smashed into pieces. Gwen’s face slowly evolved from hopeless to cautiously excited. “Esther.” She murmured, clearly in the middle of a train of thought.
“Esther?” I asked with a hollow voice.
“We should find Esther, I have a feeling she’ll know what to do.” Her smile brightened the dark room, and I even felt a small, temporary tug of hope building in my stomach.
I shook my head. “Esther’s probably dead. Seb’s dead. I want to get you out of here first then I’ll look for them. You can’t help anymore than you have already, there’s no point risking both of our lives. I’ll take you to the car and you can wait there.”
“What are you talking about? You know fine well there’s no way of escaping. There’s only two ways of getting out of this place. Either we need to find out how to get rid of all these... things. Or...” A sad look passed by her face.
“At this minute in time, I really couldn’t care less about what happens to me.” I stated frankly, meaning every word. “What’s most important to me is that you get out of here alive even if I don’t.”
“No, Rick, you don’t understand. You don’t know everything, please remember that. This is more than just me and you, it’s not about who can be the bravest and most chivalrous. This is about survival, and saving humanity.”
“What?” Humanity didn’t come in to it,
just a troubled man who saw things.
“I can’t explain, I’m sorry. Just trust me, if you don’t get out of here, there’s no point in anyone leaving. I’ll explain everything later, when it’s all over.” She kissed me lightly.
After a pause I finally took a deep breath and told Gwen, “Okay, take me to Esther. I don’t know what’s going on but I’ll do whatever I need to save Seb. He was more than a brother and he risked his life for me, as did you and Esther. But, I won’t leave here tonight unless I know all of you are coming with me.” I vowed, tasting hot, salty tears in my dust filled mouth. She smiled, almost a fully genuine smile and then tensed, her entire body stiffening sharply.
“Why haven’t we been taken? I don’t know about you but I haven’t seen any of them, and I haven’t been careful with where I’ve been looking. We’ve been emotional and careless, and they haven’t come for us.” Gwen panicked.
“I honestly don’t know. Let’s just go and get Esther, and get the hell out of here as soon as we can. I’m sick of this goddamned house.” Sullenly, I glanced back at Seb one last time, and tried to remember the good times and when he’d been happy and alive. I remembered when we were younger before our parents died, at the natural little river we used to love in the garden of our holiday cottage. I’d been standing on the rocks, peering in at a fish that had gotten caught between a rock and a section of a log that had floated downstream. The doomed fish, head above water, had fascinated me for a good thirty seconds, blocking out the everyday noises and distractions of life. I was concentrated so hard on this shiny, green fish that I didn’t notice Sebastian approaching. As a joke he’d shouted “Rick the pri-” but before he could finish his usual taunt, I had been so surprised I lost my already clumsy footing and slipped head first into the river. My legs tangled and brain numb with shock I’d done nothing but lay there panicking insanely until Seb had sprinted over and yanked me out, feet first. I’d survived with just shallow scratches and bruising, and since then Seb had given me many reasons to owe him my life. This was my time to repay him for everything, and I wasn’t going to let him down no matter what.
I took her hand firmly, letting her know I’d be there until the end. Before I let her take me to the last place she’d seen Esther, I looked into her emerald green eyes, without saying a word, told her everything would be okay for us both in the end. She seemed to understand and squeezed my hand lovingly.
We crept through the corridor carefully, trying not to make a sound. I knew they would find us no matter how much noise we made, but it made us both feel better. I felt the room we were just in was sacred or protected somehow, but now we had left it, they were starting to come back. Reaching for us and groaning with anger and greed, I kept my eyes fixed on random pieces of furniture to not get caught within their grasp.
From my dreams I gathered that if they managed to get me, they would take me somewhere that agony would replace life and sanity, and I would slowly become one of them. I would forget everything I ever loved, and who I was before. My mind would be history, taken over by thoughts of causing pain and death. I would eternally reach for my next victim to torture. Outside of the house, Gwen had never been able to see them, experience the horror of constantly being watched and silently threatened. However inside this house filled with hell she could now see what I’d lived with for most of my life. Usually they kept their distance and I felt a kind of boundary between us, but that seemed blurred or non-existent now. Even in
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