25 Red Twilight Demon of the Flowers chapter 25

Chapter 25 Fractured Memories part 4

Rumbling quakes the bed, hands crawl up my chest. I struggle, I try to shake from side to side, but no part of my body will reply to my commands, it is almost as if I am outside myself looking up. Some sort of prerecorded memory playing out in real time, as if I can't fight becomes I didn't fight. I yell at myself in my thoughts I cry, is swear, I want to do something, anything.

The hands' inch ever closer, they move up my chest and around my caller, they move to my cheeks then. Eyes come into sight, blocking my vision. Shadowy blue eyes, I feel a squeezing sensation. I experience a flash of light; my vision fades to black.

Suddenly it is mid-morning, birds are chirping, I can hear men working outside. My skin feels sticky, my eyes are swollen from the clay in the air, and I have an aching hard-on. After rubbing my eyes and growing, waiting for the sleep to leave my body and my unexpected arousal to reseed I climb out of bed and take inventory of my room. Surely whatever was in my room left something behind to prove it was indeed there.

I find what looks like claw marks under the bed, water resin on the floor, but no monsters. I see the crumbled up note that I had discarded earlier. Holding it up to the light it has the watermark that the leather paper from the dungeon had "Have you seen the mark?" I whisper to myself, yes, I have. In my heightened sense of awareness, I can see hair floating throw the air. As well as a beam of light trailing across my room that is filtered an off-color, this light is moving against the rest of the light, it's not coming in from the window it is coming out of the mirror in the corner of my room…

Surely, I must look mad if anyone were to look at me at this very moment as I run at the mirror chasing the light. I find it! A chip in the mirror! Evenly at eye level a chip only slightly larger than the head of a tip of a ballpoint pen. I press my face to the glass struggling to look past the mirror. There is a room on the other side of the wall, gray and straightforward, a t.v., a radio, boxes stacked floor to ceiling in one cornor, and no doors or windows visible.

I pull the mirror off the wall to reveal a hole drilled into the drywall around the size of a small coin; otherwise the wall is smooth. Paranoia grips at my soul, what is this room? Is it related to what I saw last night? I run out of my room and search the hallway for a way into the room adjacent to my own.

I find the next nearest door on the right side of the hallway and haphazardly push it open, it is a bedroom, Vidal's bedroom. Vidal screams when the door opens, she is standing mostly in the nude before a mirror on her side, she tucks a hand between her thighs hiding her feminine bits and folds a hand over her breast. She shouts at me in the common tongue of the land and waves at me in a threatening way.

I close the door and walk back a hand full of steps, I slide down the wall sitting down as I think. Or maybe I just sulk. I force myself into a state of calm and walk out into the grape fields. It would not be too much of a hyperbole to say I was born on the far end of the lake from here, "across the pond" is the phrase kids used in school to describe foreigners. I cumbersome weight strikes my mind as I think about how big that pond really is.

At home I am someone, people know me, know my work. Given the condition, many take for granted the niceties extended to them. You know your own customs, the way people talk and act in public, but when you are a stranger in a strange land, it becomes crushing when you notice you no longer understand the tone of peoples voices or the words they use.

In about of loneliness I approach an elderly woman and try to grate her, she sees me and understands that I am trying to talk to her and she speaks back, but it is clear that she doesn't understand the words I am saying, and I can't understand her. I spend some time in the 'village' hoping to shack some hands and learn about the area before I start to draw the conclusion that Griswold and Samur are the only people around that understand the western tongue.

This actualization is enough to convince almost anyone to turn their eyes to the sky and contemplate "how big is the world?" or "how small am I?" a day's walk from home but it feels like a different world, I don't know if the words exist to adequately described the depths of space, and if the words to described such a thing can be found I have trouble fathoming the idea that our minds would be able to embrace the vastness around us. Thinking about the way we measure things and the variable scale that one could conceive of, it seems to me that from a plot in space in which you could adequately perceive the cosmos, looking back to my tiny earth you would not see distinctive valuable live so much as meaningless scant growths of semi-intelligent symbionts blindly fumbling to grasp at the value of the world on which they sit. What horror? What vast emptiness awaits anyone foolhardy enough to reach their hands to the stars and wish to be a part of them?

I am thankfully distracted from my existential moment when I hear the bird Grimm squawking, and I see Samur riding nearby. I wave, Samur notices, she turns Grimm to face me and runs into the fields where I watch the sky. The peppy hyena jumps from her mount landing atop my chest throwing me at the ground. Her arms reach around my neck, and her nose touches mine as her eyes lock with me.

"Silly kitten, what are we doing now?"

"cloud watching" I try to play off my anxieties

Samur rings the bell around my neck with one finger "I think I grow hungry. Let us return home, Griswold will take good care of us." Her teeth rub my shoulder as she whispers "lest I take a bite out of you?"

I can't possibly turn this invitation down, for the last almost two days I have felt a longing that I knew Samur could heal. Samur picks me up and dusts me off. As we mount Grimm heading back to the estate I whisper with Samur "Have you seen the mark?"

With a bubbly smile, she calls back "what for do you mean?"

"I'll show you" the two of us return to the castle. I take Samur to the hallway in which I had seen the antique mirror. I point out the sun symbol in the center of the molding. The image vexes me, the wavy lines, the ring within the ring. I fear the emblem even without understanding it.

I look to my friend "what is it?"

"old, I can tell you that much." Samur stars into the mirror watching herself, she turns from side to side and pulls on the sides of her dress holding into her body examining her features. "I think I have seen 'it' in the book depository. Something to do with some river goddess as I recall."

"I have seen it more than once in the last few days." I express

"Maybe. This mirror, my grand-mama took it from the skeleton of a burned church. Perhaps the church wants it back." The tone of Samur's voice is far to calm, so happy and playful for talk of such grisly things. "I have not walked down this hallway in some time. Tell me what else have you seen?"

"A room full of boxes and a television is hidden in the wall of my room."

Samur laughs "show me!"

I can't understand the way she is acting, I am quivering, and she is giggling. Yet still we rush back to my room, and I show her the hole in the wall that leads to the storage room. I explain to her that I couldn't find a way in, she tells me how she thinks that the way in is through the floor. So she leads me back down to ground level and starts counting her footsteps looking for where my room would be.

With some pocking around we find a closet with a trap door leading up. The door is nailed shut, and the nails bent off to one side forming hooks. Samur pulls up her dress and withdraws a skinning knife from her garter belt. Utilizing the hook at the end of the blade she pulls the nails from the ceiling, and a ladder falls leading the way up.

We climb into the tiny room together and start exploring. The t.v. Still seems to work as does the v.h.s. Player hooked up to it. The boxes seem to be packed tightly with cosset tapes. As I start pulling open boxes, I take notices of the dates on them. Most of these seem to be only a few years old. The two of us dig about looking for the last tape. We pull it out then load it into the tape deck. I hit play.