navwin » Main Forums » Passions in Prose » Brushing death
Passions in Prose
Post A Reply Post New Topic Brushing death Go to Previous / Newer Topic Back to Topic List Go to Next / Older Topic
Skyfyre
Senior Member
since 1999-08-15
Posts 1906
Sitting in Michael's Lap

0 posted 2001-03-06 08:02 PM


There was something in the house.

She had felt no sense of presence as she usually did; there was no prickling at the back of her neck or flutter in her stomach to warn of danger.  In fact, had the intruder not been so carelessly loud, she might not have noticed them at all; but being a light sleeper was part of her curse, and the faint rustlings and muffled footsteps drifting from below was enough to roust her from some swiftly-fading dream.

Malee climbed carefully from her bed, wincing at each squeak of the springs.  She stifled a gasp as her toes touched the chill of the bare wooden floor, placing her steps cautiously to avoid the more noisome boards as she made her way to the half-open door.  Gathering her courage, she slipped through the doorway, flitting her gaze this way and that for anything suspicious.  Pale gold irises slowly gave way to black as her eyes adjusted to the deeper darkness of the hall.

She listened.  The sounds had ceased, at least momentarily, with her appearance at the top of the stairs.  Whatever it was, it had noticed her, and frozen.  Malee waited, motionless, trying vainly to sort the familiar shadows below from any that did not belong.  Effectively blind, she cursed herself for her paranoid habit of drawing all the shades at dusk.  For several moments, nothing stirred.  Realizing the stalemate, she dared a cautious step onto the topmost stair, uttering a half-whispered "Hello...?" into the gravid silence in hopes of stirring her quarry to action.

There was a sudden disturbance at the bottom of the stairway; a single, shuffling footfall and a motion that barely caught the edge of moonlight streaming in from the bedroom door.  A dark shape hovered on the lower landing, as if daring her to descend.  Malee swallowed hard, listening for any hint of sound; the rustle of cloth, breathing, anything.  She heard nothing, save the rushing of her own blood in her ears.

Her mind raced, trying to decide the best course of action.  She had to assume that this thing was dangerous ... but what could she do?  Her only viable escape route – the stairs – was cut off; her bedroom seemed miles away, and she could imagine no safety in a room without so much as a lock on the door.  Her vision began to swim; in her terror, she had been holding her breath, and lack of oxygen now threatened the whirling panic of her consciousness.   Judging consciousness more important than silence, she inhaled noisily, lungs aching at the sudden inrush of air.

The shape on the stairs stirred; she attempted a desperate backstep but was sprawled by the uneven shift of her weight as the shadow raced toward her.  She landed on her rump, powerless to escape her assailant.  Instinctively, she raised her arms in front of her, flailing them wildly at the shadow as it hurled itself unerringly toward her face.  Horror blinded her to everything but her mysterious attacker; she watched it approach almost in slow-motion, noting every minute detail with sick fascination.  As it closed in, she caught a glance of a misshapen grin.

At the last second, Malee squeezed her eyes shut, determined at least not to stare into the eyes of Death.  Turning her face to the side, she recoiled as her left hand struck something smooth and hard.  The impact was not painful, though she felt a familiar tingling along her skin as her other hand clawed at the air below where its mate had connected.  Stunned, she felt the object give way before her feeble blow.  The stairway rung with a  hollow shriek of pain and the clatter of something hard and heavy crashing to the ground.

Morbidly curious, Malee opened her eyes, daring a glance at the scene before her.  Two steps down from the landing, a dark object still spun where it had been hastily dropped; she quickly recognized it as one of the wooden masks which normally hung on her living room wall.  She stared at it in disbelief until it glided to a halt, her mind trying to account for its having taken on  a life of its own.  Absently, her gaze settled on the hand which had experienced the odd tingle ...

In a rush, the facts clicked into place and Malee nearly laughed at herself.  No wonder I didn't ‘feel' him -- he's too familiar.  "Samuel!"  Her annoyance rang clearly through the darkness.  "Good Lord, what were you trying to do, KILL me??"

Slowly, a milky apparition took shape before her.  Chagrin warred with amusement on the youthful face, tempered with pain.  Samuel clutched one arm just above the wrist; through the semi-transparency of his fingers Malee noticed that the ‘flesh' beneath was uneven and faded. That must have been where I touched him, she mused, feeling a tendril of guilt snaking through her indignation.

"That hurt."  Samuel declared, sulking.  He bared the wound, showing where his right hand appeared almost suspended in midair a few inches above the thick of his lower arm.  A few ragged-looking streaks of blue-white hung in the gaps between where her fingers had seared through the child's limb.

"No less than you deserved," Malee quipped, though with more resolve than she felt.  "You nearly scared me to death."  

Unexpectedly, Samuel grinned.  "Really?" he asked with childish glee.  "I really scared you?"

Tearing her eyes away from the wound, Malee regarded him with a raised eyebrow.  "I could have hurt myself when I fell, you know."

Samuel's excitement crumbled, replaced by a desperate concern.  "You're alright, aren't you?" he asked in a tearful voice.  "I mean, I was only playing, I didn't mean to hurt you ..."  His voice trailed off as his bottom lip began to tremble.  Malee ached to comfort the boy, but wisely refrained from touching him – exposing him to her aura again would only cause further injury.  Still, she attempted with words what she could not do with hugs.

"Of course I'm all right, imp," she grinned.  "Half-asleep, and mad as a hornet, but unhurt other than my dignity."  Samuel's expression became more hopeful at the joke.  "Now, child, let's see what we can do for that arm."

Waving the specter before her, Malee heaved herself to her feet and shuffled down the stairs, stopping to pick up the discarded mask along the way.  She hung it in its proper place on the living room wall on her way to the kitchen, where Samuel waited expectantly.  He grinned sheepishly across the room as she straightened the macabre artifact to her satisfaction, then shook her finger at him in a wordless admonition not to touch her treasures in the future.  He nodded silent assent, clutching his wounded arm closer to his wraithlike body.

Being a medium – a living being who could see and speak with the dead – had not been an easy life for Malee.  It was like always having voices in her head; the spirits were everywhere, and could go anywhere -- it was impossible to escape them if they chose to pursue.  In fact, it was not uncommon for Malee to answer a question aloud in a crowded room, realizing only after receiving a dozen puzzled stares that the query had not been voiced by anyone with breath to speak it.

She had not asked for this ability; it had been inflicted upon her as a child when after she had a close brush with death.  More precisely, she had been dead; sheer luck had allowed the doctors to restart her heart nearly 3 minutes after she should have been beyond saving.  She remembered the hushed voices pronouncing her brain dead when they thought she couldn't hear.  She remembered her mother weeping at her bedside, mourning a child whose body was alive but whose spirit had fled.  She remembered her own panic as she felt the nurse turning off the machines that were keeping her body alive – no, not yet! – then the dark and perilous struggle that had allowed her to cling to life.

The very fiber of her being called out for her surrender; the anguish was simply too great, too close, too real.  There was a greater darkness in this void – always, it called her, seduced her with the knowledge that giving up the fight would be so much easier.  She struggled with her own spirit.  but whenever she started to drift toward the chasm, the Others were there.

"Too soon, too soon," they would whisper, their cold but gentle hands herding her away from the brink.  "Where there is life and breath, you cannot abandon it.  You must turn back, child.  Go back, and we will be with you."  The voices were unfamiliar but reassuring, and she trusted them as only a child could.  Balling her fists against the pain, she climbed from the numbing refuge of the void into the deathly ruin of her own body.

She had awakened that evening, much to the startlement of her attending nurse who had grown accustomed to her fragile and unresponsive charge.  Malee  half-opened her eyes, which now seemed too large in her gaunt face, and croaked out a breathy plea for water.  The burly nurse had nearly fainted from the shock.  Upon recovering, she nodded, wide eyed, and fled from the room as though she had seen a ghost.  Exhausted, Malee tumbled back into unconsciousness before having the chance to see if the woman returned.

While she slept, the Others had always been there, as promised ... their aspects were a bit more distant, though, and she missed the familiar touch of their hands.  She pleaded for them to come closer, but they would not – could not, they claimed, but they vowed never to be far.  Often, she wept, wracked with pain, paralyzed by weakness and feeling very alone.  Sometimes her mother came, stroking her hair gently as she murmured words of comfort; the Others were always silent then, though she could feel them hovering close by.  A few times she called to them, but her words were unintelligible; her mother always answered, though, assuming hunger or thirst as was appropriate, or placing a cool hand on Malee's fevered forehead for reassurance.  Once or twice Malee wondered why her mother seemed unaware of the Others, though they stood only an arm's length away from the bed ...

A small noise from Samuel jerked Malee from her reverie.  With an apologetic glance at the diminutive spirit, she settled herself in a chair in front of him, closing her eyes and clearing her mind of everything but the chant which would make her a channel to the very void she had once escaped.  As her words gained speed and power, she braced herself for bone-numbing chill which was the price any mortal must pay who was foolish enough to touch the Darkness.  Even still, she gasped with shock as it came.

In a half-trance, Malee held her hands out to Samuel.  Stepping forward, the ghost-child laid his injured arm across her palms without hesitating; this was not the first time Malee had called the Void to heal his ills.  As the chill of Samuel's damaged limb touched the magicked chill of her hands, Malee winced, sharing the fiery agony that coursed through the wound.  Life was never meant to touch Death.  The warning of the Others materialized in her mind, dredged from some half-formed childhood memory.  Indeed, she mused, gritting her teeth against the death-cold that ripped through her body.  Sheer force of will, tempered by her fear of tempting Death too long, allowed Malee to seize the dark power conjured by her spell and shape it into healing energy around Samuel's arm.  After a few agonizing moments, the child's arm was whole again and the exhausted medium dropped her arms to her sides, banishing the chill back to whence it came.  Struggling to hold herself upright with the arms of her chair, Malee scrutinized her work.  "How do you feel?" she managed.

Samuel wiggled his fingers experimentally.  "I'm good – it's perfect." he smiled, more confidently.  "Thank you."

What is death to me is life to him – and vice versa.  Malee had discovered quite by accident that the touch of the living was "death" to a spirit –  that the ‘positive' energies exuded by any living thing weakened the ‘negative' energies that were the essence of ghosts.  With prolonged exposure, the aura of the living could destroy a spirit entirely.  On the other hand, the chill energies that she had to call forth in order to heal Samuel exacted a similar price from her – and she had no doubt that to tarry too long would be equally fatal.

Grunting an acknowledgment, Malee struggled to her feet and leveled her gaze on the childish specter.  She wished she could put her hands on her hips to show her displeasure, but she simply hadn't the strength.

"Don't. Do.  That. Again."  Samuel shrunk lower with her every word.  "You have no idea what it costs me every time I have to do that.  One of these days," she shuddered involuntarily, "I may not be able to pull out of it, and that will leave YOU without a nursemaid for your every bump and scratch."

Luckily for him, Samuel had the grace to look appropriately cowed.






[This message has been edited by Skyfyre (edited 03-07-2001).]

© Copyright 2001 Linda Anderson - All Rights Reserved
Christopher
Moderator
Member Rara Avis
since 1999-08-02
Posts 8296
Purgatorial Incarceration
1 posted 2001-03-07 06:39 PM


Holding my place - will get back to this, with a recipe for mincemeat.
Skyfyre
Senior Member
since 1999-08-15
Posts 1906
Sitting in Michael's Lap
2 posted 2001-03-07 08:37 PM


Oh boy ... can't wait.

Might I suggest that you read it over before you start chopping ... I made some changes while you weren't looking!


Wesley the Blue
Member
since 1999-09-02
Posts 426
Forest Lake, MN, USA
3 posted 2001-03-18 01:04 AM


An enthraling piece. It drew me in and I just had to finish it. The descriptions were good, however I think there could be more description of things in general. An interesting story, thank you for sharing.
Keith

every day is a new day with which we can change the world

LoveBug
Deputy Moderator 5 Tours
Moderator
Member Elite
since 2000-01-08
Posts 4697

4 posted 2001-03-22 08:20 PM


A very impressive story. Very well-written. I especally love the line "Life was never meant to touch death". Great story. Thanks for posting.

"Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, for everyone can see and few can feel."-Machiavelli

Christopher
Moderator
Member Rara Avis
since 1999-08-02
Posts 8296
Purgatorial Incarceration
5 posted 2001-03-26 12:22 PM


Since it took me so long, I'll use a new reply so I can bump this up!

Have I mentioned how much I hate you sometimes? You make this seem so easy dammit! LOL – Very good and interesting tale here. Obviously demands more – seems almost like an introduction to the lady’s life, though it can stand as an event of its own. You, of course, did extremely well rendering the story as is your trademark. A little jumpy in a few spots, but I think that’s more grammar than anything else. Love this idea, and a very neat and tidy explanation to it to boot. You kept on track and kept me interested. *sigh* will you give me an autograph?

C

Post A Reply Post New Topic ⇧ top of page ⇧ Go to Previous / Newer Topic Back to Topic List Go to Next / Older Topic
All times are ET (US). All dates are in Year-Month-Day format.
navwin » Main Forums » Passions in Prose » Brushing death

Passions in Poetry | pipTalk Home Page | Main Poetry Forums | 100 Best Poems

How to Join | Member's Area / Help | Private Library | Search | Contact Us | Login
Discussion | Tech Talk | Archives | Sanctuary