The oubliette, I was not a mouse, I was a vampire, I was a blind vampire who would heal, of course, eventually, and see again.
And then the fall.
Well. I was strong. I had survived. I always survived.
The panic took some time to subdue; it lasted longer each time, it seemed; from a purely scientific perspective, I supposed I ought to have been taking notes.
The evil tide of panic rolled over me again, and when it finally passed and my screaming brain stilled, I was crouched low in the water, huddling to the chilly walls and shaking in a near fit. My throat felt odd. Ah. I’d been screaming, again. I swallowed a trickle of my own precious and scarce blood and wondered when Claire would seek me out. She would; she
I was not used to feeling this horror, which combined all the fears of my mortal life in a toxic elixir; the closeness of the walls, the darkness, the filthy water, the knowledge that I might never leave this place, that I’d starve here to rags and bones until thirst robbed me of all shreds of the mind I’d struggled so hard to preserve, gnawing my own flesh until it was drained dry.
My father had gone mad when I was only a very young boy, and they’d confined him…not in a well like this, but in a hut, a lightless and chained hovel, with no hope or memory of daylight. When I had nightmares—daily—that was my hell, that I woke dressed in my father’s filthy rags, chained and alone, abandoned to the screaming in my head.
In the dark.
It did not feel right. Oliver was not randomly cruel; he enjoyed power, but mostly for what power could do. He’d had many opportunities to remake Morganville in his own image, but he’d refrained, over and over; I’d thought there was genuine respect, even an odd and grudging love, growing between him and Amelie. Yet he’d changed, and through him, so had Amelie. For the worse.
Amelie wasn’t herself. Oliver should not have done this to me; he should not have been able to, without her consent. There was something missing, something I did not yet understand.
It was a puzzle, and I liked puzzles; I clung to them, here in the dark, a shield against all the pieces falling apart, crashing together in my head, crashing and cutting….
Another panic attack swept over me, hot as boiling lead and cold as the snows that piled waist high in my youth, and what little mind I had dissolved in an acidic frenzy, thoughts rushing as fast as modern trains crashing through stone, veering wildly from the tracks, turning and burning into chaos c
It was harder this time, coming back. I ached. I trembled. I think I might have wept, but water dripped cold on me, and I wasn’t sure. No shame in tears. No shame at all, since there was no one to see me, no one ever ever ever again.
Hours crawled slowly, and I began to feel something odd…a pressure, a strange sensation that made me want to claw at my injured eyes…but I held off, hands fisted into shaking lumps, and pounded the hard, smooth walls until I felt bones shifting beneath the skin. It healed faster than I would have liked; the distraction didn’t last, and the pressure in my eyes built and built and suddenly, there was a breathtakingly lovely burst of
The glare burned so badly I cried out, but it didn’t matter. I could see, and suddenly, the panic wasn’t quite so desperate or overwhelming. I could manage this. I
Because that was, in fact, my secret. In an insane world, sanity made very little sense. No one expected me to live, and therefore, I did. Always.
I looked up, and saw a depressingly narrow tunnel closing into a tiny, dim hole far, far above…and the gleam of a silver grate above, a circle enclosing a cross. Pennyfeather hadn’t just thrown me blinded into a pit; he’d thrown me into one of the levels of hell, and locked me in with silver, on the terribly unlikely chance I might scale the heights to crawl out. And who knew what lay beyond; nothing good, I was sure. If it had been Oliver giving the order, he’d left little to chance when he was determined in his course.
“Don’t worry,” I told it. “Someone will pay for your suffering. Heavily. With screaming.”
I felt I should repeat it for the other slipper, in case there should be any bad feelings between the two. One should never create tension between one’s footwear.
That duty done, I looked up again. Water dripped cold from the heights and hit my face in sharp, icy stabs. It was cruel, since it could only irritate me, not sustain me. Still, there must be rats. Every dungeon had rats; they came standard issue. Rat blood was not my favorite, but as the old saying goes, any port in a storm. And I was most definitely in a storm, a true tempest of trouble.
I pulled myself sharply away from the memory. No. No, we do not think of those things.