Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2)

by Laura Giebfried

  “Stop –”

  I grabbed her arm as she tried to steady me again and pulled her forward. Surprised, she barely had time to throw her arm out to prevent her head from slamming into the tile wall, instead bounding off of it and falling into the water after me. Choking, she pushed herself back up despite her soaked clothes dragging her down and clambered over the side to fall upon the bathroom floor, spitting out a mouthful of water as she went.

  “Chto za huy –? Let go!”

  She kicked at my arm as I tried to latch onto her again, but I wrapped my hand around her ankle and used it to pull her back again. I could only drag myself half out of the tub to get to her: the rest of my strength had to go to fighting her off. She was going to kill me – she had been sent to do so because I hadn't paid for all that I had done wrong. As I pulled harder on her arm, she fell back over me and I seized her around the throat, holding her off of me as I constricted her airway with all of my might. She flailed her arms in terror, smacking my arms and head as she tried to get away, but my grip was too tight and the water was blinding her from seeing where to aim.

  “I – I did not mean –”

  I pressed my thumbs into her neck with more force as she tried to speak. My arms were weak and shaking, but my fingers were clenched in an unyielding grip. I could feel the strangely smooth skin on her neck where the burn flowed down it like a river, and as the image of the place that my mother had dove into flashed before my eyes, I squeezed harder.

  “Eh – nim –”

  Her voice cracked and disappeared into her throat, and her black eyes began to turn upwards towards the ceiling, finally becoming light. As the hands that had been trying to fight me off sank and slid down my arms, no longer strong enough to continue their attempts, a separate voice filled the room, though she could not hear it.

  “Enim.”

  I looked up in surprise and my grip faltered. Ilona's form dropped from beneath it and sank to the floor, and her breath came back in a stream of choking sounds as she fought for air again. My eyes rose above where she lay and over to the corner of the room where the voice had come from. The man there stared at me with a firmness that I hadn't seen in someone's eyes for so long, finally looking past me and through me to what I really was, his brown eyes still flecked with gold even in the harsh white lights. I fell back against the wall, half in and half out of the tub, and the water rose up around me and began to pool onto the floor.

  Ilona got a hold of herself and scrambled up, slipping on the wet tiles, and made her way to the door. Grasping the frame to keep herself upright, she turned back to me with a disbelieving expression that widened her normally narrowed eyes. Her upper-half was completely drenched and the hair sticking to her head and fabric wrapped about her arms made her look like some tormented, nightmarish merperson, and as she raised her hands and combed back the bangs plastered to her face, the fluorescent lights flashed in her darkened, colorless eyes.

  “I – I –” Her voice still struggled to come, but it wasn't from the throbbing ring of red that circled her neck. She shook her head in bewilderment, too dazed to process what had gone wrong. From where she stood in the doorway, so pale and uncomprehending and dragged down with water-logged clothes, she had never looked more human, and something in the sight made me as uncertain as I had been certain the moment before, and my thoughts muddled and broke to reform into new ideas.

  The wallet and cell phone were lying on the floor between us, having fallen from my pocket when she had dragged me into the room. As her eyes found them, she scrambled forward and snatched them up along with her bag, clutching them to her as she continued to bore her eyes into mine.

  “This was mistake.”

  She shook her head and stumbled backwards over the threshold. The sound of the door to the hall slamming was barely audible over the rushing in my ears, and my head kept dipping in and out of the tub to allow water to surge down into my throat. It took me a long moment before I realized that she was gone. Her presence left the room with the burst of air-conditioned air that came from the hallway, and it sank over my skin to chill me as the fever finally reduced to nothingness.

  I smacked my hand against the rim of the tub, trying to grasp it with floundering, useless fingers, and pulled myself over it to fall upon the floor. The pain in my leg was indistinguishable from the throbbing that had come over my entire form, and the man's eyes followed me as I struggled and collapsed upon the floor.

  “Enim,” he said again, his voice still the soft one that I so longed not to remember, “what have you done?”

  And as I lay upon the tiles, too weak to live but too weak to die, it occurred to me that if I broke every bone, and weighted myself down with stones to sink into the water, letting them crush me into pieces as they sank atop me on the ocean floor, and every breath that was so hard to take already finally became impossible, and the salt stung my eyes to make them tear when they otherwise could not – maybe then I would feel something other than the nothingness that guilt filled me up with, and I would be able to do more than long for distant remedies that would never make me better, regardless of how hard I wished for them to do so. Maybe then I would stop hurting, or stop hurting other people, and the world wouldn't be broken in my vision anymore and I wouldn't have to grapple with pieces that I couldn't put back together. Maybe things would be different, because that was all that I had been searching for when I decided on the train ride to France: some change in scenery, some last long adventure to hold me back from outgrowing the innocence of youth, and someplace where someone would understand who I was rather than who I should be.

  Ch. 15

  A soft sound started in my ears, just low enough that it wasn't audible, but vaguely reminiscent all the same. Someone must have turned the audio player on; the soprano was singing her song to the moon, again. My hands found the rim of the sink and I heaved myself up to a standing position. My leg was bent and useless beneath me, and the other shook to hold me in place. As my eyes moved up, blinking persistently in an attempt to see clearly again, they found my reflection in the mirror. Beneath the artificial lights, my wasted form stared back at me like some deadened creature grasping onto life.

  I leaned in closer to try and distinguish my face from beneath the hair plastered to my head. Though my irises were still blue, the scleras had reddened and my skin had paled to such an extent that the eyes themselves seemed to have been beaten with some blunt, coarse object.

  I turned and staggered away from where the blood had spattered onto the tile to make my way back into the main room. It took the last bit of energy that I had to reach the bed, and I was too drained to lift myself atop it, instead curling myself up in the corner that the mattress and bedside table created. I wrapped my arms about my legs and clung onto myself in an attempt to counter the shaking that had come over my form. Though the room had darkened, there was a light piercing the mind inside my skull that entered between my eyes and drove itself straight through the organ and bone, breaking my vision so that the world looked like glass scattered out before me on every surface and molecule of air.

  I let out a breath. The room had become far colder than any amount of air-conditioning could allow, and the sunlight seemed to have sunk away behind the curtains. As I stared at them, it occurred to me that even if I had had the strength to stand and pull them open again the sky would have been as dark and empty as the space around me; the world had grown old and retreated away.

  Something shifted to my side, just visible out of the corner of my vision. I forced my eyes as far into the corners of the sockets as they would allow in an attempt to see what was there without making a move, but only the hint of a dark shape was discernible. My teeth chattered and I clenched my jaw shut to keep them from making any noise, hoping that if I stayed still enough and kept my mind quiet enough the thoughts wouldn't escape into the room to find me.

  But they would find me, they always did. I could search and search for everything and nothing and come up sho
rt every time no matter how long or hard I tried, but the thoughts could could succeed every time. And if I had just found Jack like I had thought that I would – like I was supposed to have – then none of this would have happened. The room would melt around me and reform to something new – something better – and life would die and come back again the way that it should have, reborn into the one that I was supposed to be living outside of whatever horror had taken it over.

  I reached into my pocket and grappled for what remained there. Ilona had taken my wallet and phone, just as I should have known that she would have when I had seen her on the streets of Amsterdam, and now the only thing left was the paper that I had scribbled my father's address onto. The surface of it had adopted a film from being drenched that tore the fibers apart and scratched at my fingers, but the phone number on the other side was mostly intact. I held it close to my face to read what it said.

  With my good hand I reached up and patted the surface of the bedside table in search of the phone, knocking into the lamp and bible as I went. When I found it and tugged it down into my lap, the base toppled over the floor. Righting it, I stared at the buttons for a long moment before I was able to punch in the number. When the secretary's high-pitched voice came over the line, I spoke in a slow, shaking voice to ask her to put me through to him, needing to repeat the request several times before she could do so.

  He answered on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  His voice was slightly unfamiliar, though whether from the competing noises in my ears or a shift in his tone I couldn't tell. I pressed the receiver closer to my head and adjusted the handset in my fingers, needing to take several long breaths before I was able to answer.

  “Dad?”

  “Enim?” There was a noise in the background as something fell off of the desk and onto the office floor, but he hardly seemed to notice. “Enim – what are you doing? Where are you?”

  I shook my head, the movement slow and uncertain, before I realized that he couldn't see me do so. I swallowed again; my throat was so tight that the words were getting caught at the base of it.

  “I … don't know.”

  “You don't know where you are?” he asked, his voice sharpening. “What is this, Enim? Why are you calling?”

  “I ...” I shifted again as the image off to my left made its way back into my vision, shutting my eyes and trying to bring back the one of Jack. “I just ...”

  “Just what? Just thought that you'd call and tell me that you're fine, regardless of the fact that you showed up here with no explanation and ran out on me, half-scaring my family to death?” he asked. “Ava told me that you tricked her into getting the key to my office – are you out of your mind? She's seven years old, Enim!”

  “No, it … it wasn't like that.”

  “What were you looking for? Why did you come here?”

  “I ...” I shook my head again. “I don't know anymore.”

  “So there was no reason? You just planned the whole thing with no purpose?” He paused, suddenly uncertain. “When did you stop taking your medicine?”

  “I didn't; I mean, not before I came to see you.”

  “So it's not working? Jesus, and no one in the facility knew any better?”

  “Why did you leave me there?”

  He paused, both trying to make out the words that had become garbled and thick beneath my tongue and attempting to decipher what I meant.

  “You told me to,” he said. “You were adamant; you wouldn't calm down until I did.”

  “No, not at the facility. After …. after Mom jumped.”

  He was a silent for a long moment.

  “Enim, you know why. You know that I couldn't stay.”

  “But why did you leave me there? Why didn't you – why couldn't you've taken me with you?”

  “You wouldn't have wanted to. You wouldn't have come, even if I had asked.”

  It was hardly an answer. He knew so and yet gave it anyhow, and I couldn't waste the little remaining strength that I had to argue with him. The figure in the corner of my vision made another move, and I rotated further into the corner to turn away from it, one hand still clutching the phone in place and the other pressed between my legs as it began to bleed again.

  “You didn't want me, Enim,” he said more lowly. “You never wanted me; you wanted her. You wanted to stay.”

  “Then you should have stayed, too.”

  “I couldn't, Enim – why can't you see that? I couldn't stay – no one could have stayed. No one but you and Karl, and even he couldn't stand it by the end. Look what it did to him. Look what it did to you.”

  I shook my head again. He had no right to blame her, not when she had never blamed him, and yet I couldn't deny the way that what she had done had managed to take over every other want and desire that I had had even still, and had overrode every one of my own thoughts to replace with hers. And she hadn't meant it, but she hadn't realized what she had done, either. She hadn't lived through it like I had lived through it and hadn't seen herself the way I had seen her: she was too wrapped up in her mysteries and riddles to understand that the world was still functioning all around her – just a princess in her cold bedroom wishing that everyone else around her would find the answer that only mattered to her like Turandot had been.

  And she didn't realize that she had wrecked everything: she had torn the house down all around her, and ripped everyone's hearts from their chests to sew back in incorrectly, leaving them half-dead. She had ruined what we might have been altogether, and she had ruined what I was and what I would be. If she hadn't have been that way, then I wouldn't have been that way: and if she hadn't have hurt everyone around her, then I wouldn't have hurt everyone around me too. And I knew now that she had really gone to the bridge that night not because she thought that she had discovered the ending to Turandot, but because she had realized that she would never find it at all. It was clear that the mind couldn't contain everything that either of us had needed it to, and not knowing the answers took up so much more space than knowing ever did.

  And we were too alike: we had always been too alike. There was no balance to even out the extremes that she created like my father and Karl had been able to do, and without it she had dragged me down into the water with her to drown, but not that night on Christmas. She had sunken into someone hollow and dead long before her fall from the bridge, and nothing had changed even after my father had forced her to see the doctors and poured the assortment of colorful pills into her hand. No amount of medication would have saved her, just as Karl had said. She was unhappy, that was all. And that was all that I would be, as well, if I never found Jack.

  “No, you made me this way,” I said angrily. “You did this – you wanted this. You knew what trapping me in that house would do, and you did it anyway because you wanted both of us gone so that you could move on with some other family –”

  “Stop it, Enim – this is insane. I never wanted this – any of this – to happen!”

  “But you did. You went away and left me there, and then just sent Beringer to fix me even when you knew that he couldn't – when you knew what would happen –”

  “I didn't think that you would kill him!” my father shouted. “I didn't think that you would – that your thoughts would – I thought that he could help you! I thought he would stop you from killing yourself!”

  “He did,” I said devastatingly. “And look where it got us.”

  “Stop blaming me, Enim: I didn't cause this. I tried everything – I would have done anything to help you –”

  “Except stay.”

  He paused and took a breath, steadying his tone before continuing.

  “Enim, tell me where you are. Tell me where you are, and I can come and get you.”

  “I don't want you to.”

  “You need to. You need your medication, and you need to be supervised.”

  “No,” I said. “I don't need anything – I just need to find Jack.”


  “You what?” he said sharply. “Is this – is that what this is? Is that what you're doing? Looking for Jack?”

  His voice had taken on a needlelike tone and I had to pull the receiver back from my ear. The movement caused my arm to jerk and another bout of blood seeped from my clenched fingers to soak my pants.

  “He's here,” I said. “He's in France. He sent me a message –”

  “Enim – listen to yourself. You're not making sense. You're not thinking rationally.”

  “He sent me a brochure – he told me where he'd be – only it went to your house, and I got there too late –”

  “You're confused, Enim: you need your medicine. This is – this is insanity –”

  “You just don't understand,” I said. “You can't … you never understand. But he's here, and I was going to find him, but I got there too late –”

  “Jesus, Enim,” my father uttered. “Can't you hear yourself? Can't you see what you're doing? You're deluding yourself into believing things that aren't real – making up stories and creating connections where there are none to give points to meaningless things! It's the same thing that your mother did, just with a different story and different people!”

  “It's not,” I countered. “It's not like that. I'm not … I'm not looking for the ending, I'm looking for Jack, and he's out there.”

  “He's not! You're letting yourself think that because you're confused, just like you are with everything that happened last year with Beringer!”

  “I know what happened with Beringer,” I said.

  “You don't. You've pushed it out of your mind and filled in the blanks with your own conclusions, and none of them are remotely correct!”

  I shook my head. He didn't get it. He never got it. He was so set in the opinion that he had formed after everything that had happened that he had never bothered to look further, and if he had then he would have realized that I wasn't confused – not about this – and he wouldn't have been so set on making me believe him.