A hunger through time-23
701 Words
I hovered near the ceiling of my old bedroom, my spirit a thin, restless ribbon of mist. Below, Perceval—my Cornelius, my fragmented soul—lay on the bed where he had once ended me. His chest rose and fell with the ragged rhythm of a man haunted.
"Alice?" he whispered into the gloom, his voice a raw plea. "If you are there... tell me who we were. Tell me why my heart feels like a broken thing."
I reached out, my fingers trembling as I tried to brush the dark, unruly hair from his forehead. But I was only air and memory; my touch was no more than a chill in the room. I watched, agonized, as he stood and trudged toward the library. I followed him, watching him tear through the shelves with the same desperate, frantic energy he had possessed in life. He was searching for the truth, but the house held its secrets close, and I—lost in the fog of my own death—could not guide him. Even the hidden panels he had found earlier were mysteries to me now.
The next morning, the house was bright with a sterile, intrusive light. Lucy had commanded him to repair the parlor floor, and I watched from the shadows as he hammered away, his brow furrowed in concentration.
I knew. A sudden, piercing memory shattered through my haze: the sister’s room. Lucy’s room. There was a hollow beneath the floorboards there, a place where she had stashed her venomous heart.
I drifted to the parlor, my essence pulsing. I needed to move him. I touched him, but nothing. I touched the necklace that was the same as mine and he gasped, clutching his chest, that got his attention. I flicked the lights in the hallway, a rhythmic, frantic blinking that cut through the gloom. Perceval looked up, his brow furrowed, then followed the flickering trail as I led him, step by light-drenched step, toward the door of my sister’s former quarters.
He hesitated at the threshold, his intuition warring with his fear. I gathered all my strength, every ounce of my residual soul, and willed the heavy brass vase on the mantelpiece to tip.
It crashed to the floor with a deafening roar, shattering against the wood. As it broke, the impact loosened a warped floorboard nearby. Perceval knelt, his breath hitching, and pried the wood upward.
He pulled out a small, leather-bound book. Lucy’s diary.
I drifted closer, watching as he flipped through the pages. The entries were a sickening map of a soul in decay. There was Lucy’s jagged handwriting, charting her descent. She had hated me—hated my passion, my romance, the way our father’s eyes followed me with pride. She had hated the world, and eventually, she had turned that hatred toward Cornelius , watching him from the shadows until it curdled into a fevered, stalking obsession.
As Percy read, the timeline of his own journals aligned with hers, but then the entries diverged into a nightmare.
“He speaks of her with a light in his eyes I cannot bear,” one entry read, the ink blotted and thick. “He thinks of her as his salvation, but he is mine. I will carve her out of his life. I will bleed the light from her until he has nowhere left to turn but the dark I have built for him.”
Percy gasped, his hand flying to his mouth as he realized the truth: the obsession that had led to my death had not been born of Cornelius’s madness, but of my sister’s hand. He was reading the blueprints of my murder, the occult rituals she had meticulously documented to bind his will and break his mind.
I watched him weep, his tears falling onto the pages of my past, and for the first time in decades, I felt a spark of fire in my cold chest. He knew. He finally knew that the man he was had been a victim as much as I, and that the monster who had torn us apart was still, in the form of Lucy, walking through the halls of our home
- Writer
