Chapter 20 Call of The Revenant
Niklaus
Sapphire’s absence yanks me out of my nightmare with a vicious whiplash.
The basement is empty. How did I miss this? Where has he taken her?
She’s gone.
Sapphire is gone!
I search the darkness. But there is no breath stammering from her weak lungs. There is no heartbeat. It’s just me here.
Did I black out?!
One minute Abbott was fucking assaulting her and the next no one is here at all. This momentary lapse makes me feel like I am not a goddamned man at all. How could I not protect a helpless woman from this evil?
Agatha’s injection is making me lose time!
I was stuck in a loop of those hollow days in that abandoned cottage. The flashbacks of lying in a grave while I tried to stop crying. The dirt underneath my fingernails. The smell of wet earth burning into my memory.
I cried for my father, for Niles, to come save me.
I was so young.
How long has it been since I relived those days? Yet Agatha summoned my demons with swift ease and pleasure.
But the absence of Sapphire’s steady breathing became terrifyingly loud.
I am alone in this cellar now. The stained mattress is bare. I scour the room in a haze with drooping eyes. It’s all empty.
I feel so fucked up in the head from Agatha’s injection that I begin to worry that Sapphire Valdawell was a figment of my drugged-induced imagination.
What if she was never real? What if my reality was fabricated?
That’s what Mind Phantoms do, isn’t it? What if I never time traveled, and I’m really from this time?
There’s a black hole forming in my chest. It’s not heavy like a weight. It’s a howling wind. The thought of being alone here in this era of old ways and sadism. Even the slightest bit of doubt that the Mind Phantoms invented this idea of her…
Sapphire Valdawell.
Did I make her up?
Doubt flourishes in the sea of my mind.
Each short breath I take sends echoes through the mausoleum built for someone no one else remembers.
But what about that vivid memory of her climbing to the top of the Red Oak trees when we were children?
Or the time I teased her for the light dusting of freckles over the bridge of her nose? Those strange different colored eyes…
I’ve hated her most of my life. But what if she isn’t real? I’ll never leave this place. I’m stuck here—
That scream finds its way under the crack of the basement door in fragments.
It jolts me upright, blasting a hum of panic and relief through my bones.
It wakes up that foggy part of my brain that’s been asleep, trapped in a loop of questioning my reality.
I know her voice but have not heard that fear in it before.
That scream is one Sapphire wouldn’t make unless…
I twist my right wrist in my shackle again, using my thumbnail to carve into the leather.
“Come on, you son of a bitch,” I growl at the restraints.
Sapphire screams again.
“Fuck!” I hiss.
I twist so hard the skin on my wrists begin to peel off.
“Niles!” I shout after hearing another deadly shriek whip through the air. I swear to God if she travels and I’m not with her, I’ll fucking kill myself.
Maybe there’s one redeeming quality in my father during his complete loss of morals and sanity during this time of his life. Maybe I can talk to him. Reach that part of him who raised me. The man who was kind to strangers and made it his mission to make his wife laugh. Is he still in there?
“Niklaus!” she screams my name from somewhere in the house, and it sounds like she’s being choked, or her mouth is being muffled.
“Niles! I swear to fucking God!” I roar as blood trickles down my elbow. Skin curling around the restraints like pencil shavings. I almost have it…
“He isn’t coming.”
Agatha stands at the top of the stairs, holding a gas lamp, and shuts the door behind her.