Far Away

[Deamon]

She was visiting her abuela. The old house she resided in was as Aracelis remembered it. It stood as an imposing structure of wood and stone and obscured the sky as she approached. Upon reaching the back door she pushed on it and the old hinges effortlessly swung open without making a sound. A small draft and musty smell was all that greeted her. Following her memory of the floor plan, Aracelis stepped through the entrance corridor and turned into the kitchen, with its circular dining table and faded red and white chequered tablecloth. She didn’t look around closely and instead continued her march by turning left and quickly passing through one corner of the living room, ignoring the kitsch that typically suffocated the space. The main hallway was darker than she remembered it being. As she stood there she looked around at the stairs, both the ones leading up to the second floor and the ones that went down, the ones she had no memory of.

“Abuela?” Aracelis called up to the second floor, but she didn’t receive any response.

“Maybe she’s gone out?” Leslie offered from over her shoulder.

Aracelis scoffed. “Doubt it.”

They continued on, following the stairs down, one rotation, two rotations, deeper and deeper into the earth with each landing they reached. It never got darker, if anything it got brighter and Aracelis began to feel unwell.

“Should we go back?” She asked Leslie, but didn’t receive a reply. “Leslie?” She opened her mouth to call out for him again but instead found herself choking on a hair. Her hand came up and began to pull it out of her mouth but while it started out as a single strand the more she pulled the more tangled it became, she yanked and tugged on it trying frantically to pull the ball of hair out of her throat before she choked, her mouth forced open in a wordless scream.

When Aracelis woke she was in an unfamiliar room that smelled of bleach and iron. Half of her vision was blacked out and a halo of pain encircled her head, pressing hard against her temples. When she tried to move there was resistance and pain as her arm caught on the sling it was propped up in. Aracelis didn’t remember much of their rescue. The exhaustion she had been pushing herself throughout her time on the island had caught up with her as soon as she was safely on the boat. She had fallen asleep on Leslie’s shoulder as soon as they’d sat down.

It would end up being much later that she would learn that the terrorists had tried to prevent their escape.

Her face still hurt, she could still feel the ghost of Bethany’s pick axe pressing again her cheek. The afterimage of Molly’s sword flashed across her elbow and bicep. She could remember the feeling of the skin splitting and the blood rushing out.

Her hands felt empty without her baseball bat, her weapon and protector. The thing she had used to keep everyone who intended harm upon her away. The thing she had used to impose her will.

Constance, Bethany, Molly.

The replay of Constance’s final fate came unbidden into her mind. The bat colliding with her skull, the bone cracking and caving in on itself like an undercooked egg.

Aracelis went to swallow and found something sticking in her throat. Reaching up with her free arm she stuck her fingers into her mouth and pulled out a long, curly, deep brown hair. One of her own. Aracelis stared at it, gagged, then threw up over the side of the bed.