Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
After leaving the prison, I head straight home, where my mother is waiting for me at the kitchen table. Sitting opposite her, I tell her everything, and her placid face never changes, her eyes almost looking through me. Pain spears my chest at her reticence, jealousy overwhelming me that Valdemar can hear my brother, yet all I’m surrounded by is quietude. The world of the dead is a silent one that leaves me with only my thoughts for company.
By evening, I’m drained, yet my brain refuses to shut down. Although I’ve been sleeping better, my dreams pulling me into a deep and immersive slumber, I wonder if sleep will come as easily tonight given that today’s visit yielded so many revelations, my head can barely hold on to them.
Yet the numbness remains, my body feeling nothing, my heart pumping purely out of necessity to keep me alive.
Ed spoke to me.
It doesn’t feel real. I want to hear his voice. I want to see his lips move, to hear the soft hiss of air through the small gap in his front teeth. I want his words the way he would have delivered them, with a smile or the curl of his top lip or the dimple in his right cheek. I don’t want Ed’s words coming out of Valdemar Montresor’s mouth; they aren’t his to utter.
Nonetheless, it’s Valdemar’s voice I hear every night.
In my waking state, I feel shame and embarrassment at my actions in the dreams. Why do I give myself to him so freely when in the cold light of day, I can’t stand to be around the man?
Yet I’m not sure how true that is anymore. When my last few visits have ended, I’ve been annoyed, wanting to stay, to talk to him further, but surely this is only because he’s telling me things I have a right to know, things I should have known a long time ago. I’ve never been able to talk about my brother with anyone, or about my ability to see the dead, and I’m ashamed to say it’s been a relief to share some of my troubles. But that’s all it is. It has nothing to do with Valdemar as a person and everything to do with the fact that he’s the only one with whom I can talk freely.
After placing the book I’ve been trying to read on my bedside table, I switch off the lamp, thrusting my bedroom into an unnatural darkness.
Willing myself to fight him, I drop my head onto the pillow.
I will not let him take me.
I will tell him no.
I will stop this.
It isn’t right, and although it’s just a dream, it feels so real, too real for it not to eat away at my conscience.
My eyes close and sleep calls, and I can almost feel him waiting for me.
Barefoot, I run through the maze, my hands full of my gossamer skirt, my silver hair loose around my shoulders. Glancing back, all I see is the neatly trimmed shrubbery surrounding me, looking no different from the foliage I was looking at not five minutes ago. The night air is still. An owl hoots in the distance, and the towering mansion watches with cold amusement as I try to find my way out of the labyrinth.
Like a jungle explorer, I push past the overgrown branches, wondering if I’ve taken a wrong turn or if the hedges are growing taller around me. My feet sink into the undergrowth, my arms exposed to the night air as the halter-neck dress swishes around my legs, the smell of dense earth connecting me with nature.
Tuning into the night, I hear the rhythmic flow of water. Following the sound, I run faster, push harder, and race against non-existent time.
A few seconds, minutes, hours, eternity. Time passes in its dreamlike way as I finally reach an opening, the leaves parting to reveal a square courtyard, an imposing fountain taking centre stage. The fountain is shaped like a chess piece within a large bowl of water with gargoyle heads dotted around its lower half. Water spurts from their gaping mouths, the sound menacing.
I shuffle towards the edge of the fountain, then bend down and place my cupped hands in the cool water to scoop some up before letting the liquid drain through my splayed fingers. The gargoyles appear to grimace, their mouths cavernous, eyes set in stone.
“Angel.”
His voice startles me even though I’ve been waiting for it, readying myself for his arrival. I don’t see him, only hear him.
“I’ve been looking for you.” His hand snakes around my waist, pulling me up to stand.
“I want to be cleansed. I want to forget,” I tell him.
He runs his hand up the side of my body, his fingers gliding along the underside of my arm as he pulls it outwards and then holds on to my hand.
“Step into the water,” he commands.
The hypnotic quality of his voice renders me docile as I dutifully do as he says, a shiver trickling through my insides. The bottom of my dress floats around my feet, the material hungrily soaking up the water as if it’s been starved.
There’s no sound of him entering the pool behind me, yet I know he’s there, his hand still holding mine. The water is cold, but all I feel is heat working its way up my legs as I wade into the middle.
“This pool is made up of tears, angel,” he tells me, the water circling my ankles. “It’s all the tears you’ve cried—every single one.”
The moonlight glistens off the tears, my movements sending slow ripples across the surface, the patter of the fountain getting louder as we move nearer.
Without a word, he beckons me to stop, and when I do, droplets spray against my shins. Releasing a clasp at the base of my neck, he pushes the dress from my shoulders, and it falls into the water, gathering like a billowing cloud before I step out of it and watch it float away.
He slides his fingers up my arms, and the heat from his hands joins the warmth swirling inside me. There’s a moment when I think I should be telling him to stop, but I don’t have the will to do it. Something is at work here, and I don’t know what trickery it is, what magic lies at the heart of these midnight escapades or within this wonderous mansion with its haunting songs, but I’m lost to it all, giving myself freely to whatever this man has in store—because I want it.
I want this.
I crave this.
So, when he tells me to sit, I obey, lowering my naked body slowly into my fallen tears.
His body acts like a chair as I lean my back against his chest, using his thighs like armrests. His hand curls around my throat, pulling my head back so all I can see is the blackness of the night sky with a thousand twinkling stars winking from above.
The rhythmic rushing of the fountain floods my ears as the water hits my inner thighs, the pressure of it massaging my muscles. He inches me closer, my legs spread and my eyes straining on the nightscape.
It’s when the water hits between my legs that I cry out. He tightens his hold around my throat, and his other hand holds me under the gushing fountain, the water assaulting my most intimate area.
“This is beautiful.” His words sink into me, pleasure building at the onslaught of the water. “Watching you spread out like this, holding you, tasting your tears.” His tongue licks at the droplets that have landed on my face.
It’s unrelenting, the power of the stream, the pummelling against my clit, the overwhelming pleasure it produces, and all because this man decides it will be so.
And I revel in it, pushing my hips into the torrent, letting it drum against my skin and stoke the heat that is raging within me.
“Let yourself go, angel,” he whispers, his fingers squeezing my throat until I’m not sure which stars I’m seeing, the ones above or the ones inside my head. “Come for me.”
And it hits, like a tornado that’s been building, a tsunami that’s been escalating. I break against the sheer pressure that’s intensified between my legs.
“Valdemar!”
Breathing hard, my eyes strain against the darkness of my room, my body shivering, the fire wild between my legs. Rubbing my hand against my throat, I swallow hard, trying to get my breath back.
A dream.
Just a dream. Like all the others.
But it had felt so real.
Like all the others.
My emotions are playing tricks on me. Ten years of snowballed grief has resulted in night-time hallucinations, reminding me of the trauma I’ve lived through. Growing up with no mother, knowing that mine and Ed’s birth was the cause of her death, is not something you live lightly with.
Spending your days talking to your dead mother is also not the norm. Then losing my brother the way I did—no wonder I’m having nightmares.
But they don’t feel like nightmares. Not while I’m having them. Not now that I’m awake.
They’re a guilty pleasure—pure, unadulterated indulgence. They feel like a sanctuary, a time and place that is just for me and Valdemar.
They feel like heaven.
What is wrong with me?