by E. C. Hibbs
Bianka Farkas, who might just have opened the gates to hell, I mused. How far do you think you can run from a nightmare, Miss Busy Bee?
I froze as I thought I heard a threatening chuckle. I spun around and drew back the curtain above the headboard, but there was nothing except the drifting snowflakes. The faraway muffle of traffic coasted on the wind, and the door blew shut with a loud snap. I jumped, staring at it, and then reminded myself that there were no drafts in the house. I had closed all the windows.
My heart immediately pounded, and I leapt to my feet. I heard Lucy scream.
“Nem!” I yelled, desperately twisting the handle. The door swung open, and I bolted outside, leaping down the stairs so fast that I lost my footing and sprawled onto the living room carpet. My teeth opened up the cut in my lip again, and a fresh dribble of blood spilled onto my chin.
I took in the scene in an instant. The flames in the grate had burned out; some of the twigs around the sofa dislodged by accident. It was dark outside. It was enough. I imagined the mist curling down the chimney. And now here he was, standing in front of me, in the middle of the room, Lucy in his arms. I saw the fear in her eyes. The moment froze over the three of us.
“Get away!” I snarled, staggering upright. Blood flew from my mouth with every word. I reached into my pocket and grabbed my knife, pulling the blade free. I rushed over, and brought it down hard, aiming for his eye. He barely moved except to calmly hold up his hand. The blade tore straight through it.
No kind of pain passed across his face. He glared at me, and clamped his fingers around my fist. Lucy cried out as she saw the knife through the back of his hand. His long nails dug into my skin and I fought the urge to whimper. His blood was running around the blade, but it was such a dark red that it seemed black.
His eyes flamed. “Clever little fool,” he hissed, and I immediately felt his will creep over me, rooting me to the spot. “Burn birch and incense... how very well remembered. But you should have paid better attention to your folktales. And taken greater care, to attempt to mask the scent of spilled blood! I will always find you! Both of you!”
And in that moment, I knew I had been correct. I knew exactly what he was. I screamed it out, trying to somehow force power of my own into the word.
“Lidérc!”
He laughed spitefully. “Do not waste your breath. Only a true name holds power. Not some label as to what they are.” Then he forced me to my knees. He ripped the knife from my grasp, and the floor seemed a thousand times harder as I landed at his feet. “Did you honestly believe you could outrun me?”
“Bee!” Lucy cried, thrashing frantically above me.
“Let her go!” I shouted. “She’s done nothing wrong, why won’t you leave her alone?”
He sneered at me, then looked back at Lucy and raised his finger to her cheek. She flinched away and I tried to throw myself at him, but I couldn’t move at all. If anything, the pressure hardened, and I stumbled forward onto my hands.
“Because I chose her,” he replied simply. “Just as I chose all of the others.”
Lucy gritted her teeth. “Well, if it’s me you want,” she stammered, “then let Bianka go.”
“Lucy!” I shouted.
“I don’t want you to get hurt!” She strained to look at me. “Please let her go. She came into this by accident; she has no part in anything. At least let her go!”
He was silent for a moment; then he brought his lips to her ear. Lucy screwed her eyes shut and I shook with anger. “You are wrong,” he whispered, darting me a sly glance.
And then, incredibly, I heard sirens. The sirens of an ambulance.
He stilled, listening intently, and for a second, I saw panic flash through the depths of his dark eyes. Then, before I knew it, he’d wrenched me up and sent me flying across the room. I managed to twist my face at the last minute, so my nose and teeth didn’t take the brunt of the impact as I slammed into the wall. He pinned me there, for the split second in which I tried to react, but it was a short-lived attempt.
Pain seared through my back. I howled in agony, feeling its spasm shoot down through my right leg. I plummeted onto my front, gasping like a fish, and managed to throw my head around over my shoulder to see what had happened. I couldn’t stop a gasp of fright escaping. The full three inch blade of my penknife was embedded in the small of my back, with only the hilt visible.
Thick nausea swept over me and I fell back onto the floor, struggling not to vomit. I distantly heard Lucy scream my name as the blood drummed in my ears, too fast for me to count my heartbeats. I wrenched my eyes open and looked out into a distorted world. Tears began to stream down my face; the pain exploded into my head and made the room spin, but I still managed to see the two of them opposite me. I vaguely processed that he’d moved closer – I supposed, to torment me. I saw his lips apart, pointed fangs bared.
“She will not be taken from me,” he snarled, and he brought those dagger-like teeth down on the front of Lucy’s throat, crushing her windpipe. Her head rolled back; eyes still open; mouth hanging slightly agape, as though in faint surprise.
The earth collapsed underneath my body. My leaded eyelids closed. I felt a burst of flame pass around me, and even as I slipped away, I knew that he was gone. And that my best friend was dead. Her face burned into every thought as I began slipping into the floor, as I groped blindly at the hilt, and warm wetness spilled over my hands.
I had never imagined her to ever spend her last days in a nursing home. She would always still be there, laughing and smiling, even when she was old and frail, and awaiting death like an old friend. I knew in my gut that she’d keep going and going: one of those people who you could imagine would never leave. She was the friend that everyone sought, and hardly any ever managed to find. I couldn’t imagine her to be dead. Not Lucy.
In the semi-conscious dream where I hid as a refuge from the pain, guilt burned in my mind. I realised that my desperation to keep the two of us safe made me let my guard down. It helped me to falsely believe that I knew more than I did. Just because I was aware of the legend of Lidérc didn’t mean I had the upper hand in any way. After all, I was only a human.
Lidérc. Beneath the terror when I tried to defend Lucy, I felt hazy shock that I was right. Everything I’d seen had fit – mainly how he had disappeared at the first crow of a cockerel at dawn. That was something Apa had told me. They were creatures of the night, who gave us the word for nightmare – lidércynomas. His fingernails were black and pointed – just like bird talons – and the fire in his eyes shone out the legends that surrounded the shadowy demons. Of a burning being, capable of flight; sprinkling flames in the air and haunting graveyards. A monster that marked its exit with a burst of fire after entering homes through keyholes or down unguarded chimneys, to bring illness and death to all who dwelled within.
“The most important thing to remember, Bianka, when dealing with a Lidérc, Apa had said, is to never underestimate it. You can think you know everything, but it will always have something else up its sleeve. Forget that, and it will bring you down. It’s impossible to outrun, and not just literally. Once it’s targeted you, it will never stop, and it will always find you.”
The pain vanished as I tore back up my macabre rabbit hole, to have a hospital bed catch me just in time.
CHAPTER VI
I was sure that I was hallucinating. When clarity returned, and began to hold me tight, chasing away the darkness of that spinning nightmare, I slowly regained control of my own body. Progress was slow at first: practising moving my hands and feet, and then extended to lowering my arms to my sides. Eventually, I loosened up and began communicating; first with nurses and doctors, then with police officers and counsellors. With patience, my words reached the surface – even though they were forced to fit the situation.
I believed what had been said, about scratching my neck by accident. At first, I was too jumpy; I went straight to the mirror in the ward bathroom when I was taken for a wash, and ch
ecked my neck. My thoughts were frantic, yelling that it wasn’t a scratch; it was a bite. But when I stared at my reflection, what met my eyes was indeed just a deep graze. It was on the right hand side, and already healing over. I touched it gently. The flesh was tender and warm, flaring a healthy red: the complete opposite of Lucy’s. Sitting in my wheelchair, I looked at my arms. The strange blackness had vanished, without any kind of trace.
Did I imagine it all? Had he not come back?
I wanted to believe that. I tried so hard to turn the hoped fantasy into reality, but it didn’t last long. The very notion that Lucy was dead brought that home from the onset. In hospital, I tried to push her out of my mind, but it proved impossible. What made it even harder was that I couldn’t tell anybody what had happened. In the eyes of the rest of the world, she was still missing. And I could never reveal that I had found her, let alone that I knew she was dead. The knowledge was heartbreaking. I thought of her parents and Emily. Of all the people involved, they deserved to know most of all, and they never could.
I was diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, from the loss of my friend and my own near brush with death. Tentative rumours even began to circulate that my attacker was the same person who took Lucy. But I never said a thing. I forced myself to concentrate on regaining my grip on reality, and I stayed in the hospital for fifteen weeks. Apa and Anya were at my bedside almost every day. Emily, William and Charlotte came too, and a few friends from school on a couple of occasions. I was soon moved to another ward and was put in one of the main bays, which made me feel much better.
But the reason I was kept in for that long, after I came out of my catatonia, was because he’d been right – if he’d been there at all, I told myself. The knife had damaged my nerves. Some of the muscles in my right leg were partially paralysed, and I had to essentially learn the basics of walking all over again. At first, I was in a wheelchair; then I progressed to crutches, and finally switched to a cane. When I was discharged in late June, Anya and Apa took me to get a support of my own. I chose a simple cane, with a brass handle shaped like a falcon’s head, the shaft itself made of birch. My limp was a hindrance, but I soon learned to live with it. I told myself that I was alive. That was what mattered.
Being so close to the summer, and not being anywhere near ready to sit my Matura exams, I didn’t go back to school when I was released. It was arranged that I would re-take the year when term time resumed. Anya stepped down from work to look after me, leaving Apa to bring in the money. The house was cordoned off by the police, so we moved into rented accommodation. I didn’t think I could have gone home anyhow. Everywhere I looked, I would have seen Lucy’s face, and all of the shadows would have been Lidérc-shaped.
There were a few glances when I returned to school in late August. Not jeering; by the time people hit eighteen onwards, most of them have outgrown that part of their personality if they ever possessed it. No, they were more the kind of glances that made you very aware that you were indeed hardly putting any weight on your right leg, walking with a cane when you were still a student. Even if they tried to hide it from their fleeting looks, every time one was thrown my way, it was so obvious that they might as well have blown an air-horn.
Imagine what fun your old bullies would have had with you now, I thought to myself. Stealing your cane; tripping you up; making an obstacle course of bags in the classroom. What an amusement you would have been, Bee.
I learned to ignore them after the first few months, once I’d gotten fully used to the cane myself. A lot of the non-intentional looks actually came from people in my classes who’d known me since childhood. They were people who’d seen me walking perfectly healthily, and then came back after summer to see me hobbling around, always being late for a class if it overran with another on the far side of the school. The majority were extremely supportive – again unintentionally – because their support came in paying absolutely no attention to me. I knew it was antisocial and bitter, but I was in no state of mind to converse in what I almost saw as small talk. There was still a heavy cloud hanging over me, and I had to deal with it before I could even comprehend allowing the sympathies. I was all too aware that people knew that during my stay in hospital, I’d also spent time in the psychiatric ward.
I slowly began to adjust back into normal life, still trying to convince myself that nothing had happened, that first night in the hospital. In one respect, it helped, because it cleared the way for me to only grieve for Lucy. I still had a few friends in some of my classes, and they had the patience of saints with me, but for the most part I became a loner. It was easier that way. I just let time pass, and days turned into weeks and weeks into months. The summer filtered away and autumn flamed into life. I completed my course of medication and mastered walking with my cane, so I could move as fast as I possibly could.
I worked hard at school, and gradually the nightmares began to fade away, until I soon returned to a regular sleep pattern. As the months went by, and forged more distance between me and the happenings, I found my sight deteriorating slightly, and I became sensitive to the lights in classrooms. After a visit to the eye clinic, I took to wearing tinted spectacles where needed.
Things got increasingly worse, and even though I perceived them, I didn’t think to connect them. First there were my eyes; I thought of it as an inconvenience, but nothing much more. A few months later, when winter approached, I began to become thirsty. My throat felt parched almost all the time, and no matter how much water I drank, nothing helped. That was so subtle, I didn’t notice it straightaway.
The main thing that I did become aware of, was when I snapped awake in the middle of the night, choking. I was shocked when I realised it was because my mouth was full of blood, from a cut on my tongue. I guessed I’d bitten it in my sleep, and amazingly hadn’t woken up. But it happened more and more, and my tongue and the inside of my lips were soon crisscrossed with tiny scars. My teeth were somehow sharper than I remembered them ever being. Again, I shrugged it off.
Anya returned to work in November, and before long, she and Apa went away on another business trip, which fell on my birthday. I spent the day instead with the Denboroughs. William and Charlotte took me and Emily to Buda Castle, and – proof that she was Lucy’s sister – Emily gave me a badge proclaiming that I was nineteen. To make up for their absence, Anya and Apa took me south-west of Budapest to Lake Hévís, to have a late celebration.
But it just so happened that we came home on the anniversary of Lucy’s death, and since only I knew, my parents were worried when I suddenly became so upset after such a wonderful time at the thermal lake. I tried to keep the majority of my tears for when I was alone, but soon realised that Anya and Apa put it down to it being a year on from the time that I was taken to hospital.
The anniversary brought a delayed survivor’s guilt: in my attempt to clear my mind, I’d also halted my grieving process. When we arrived back in Budapest, I didn’t leave the house for a week, because every dark jacket I saw was a black pea coat; no breath of wind was clear of cries for help. I pressed my head into my pillows and closed my eyes against the onslaught. With Apa and Anya’s help, I fought back as best I could, determined to not give in to myself, and wake up in the hospital again, to find I’d suffered a mental relapse. But every time I was alone with silence, it was terrible to think that it should have been me instead.
Lucy had never hurt or harmed anyone. How could she of all people deserve to die?
My eyes and thirst gradually became more prominent, and it was a few weeks later, when I was getting ready for my Matura exams, that I began to think something was wrong. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I began to suspect it. That maybe something had happened to me a year ago in the hospital.
I sat the exams and the summer holidays rolled around again. By then, we’d put our house back on the market after repairing the broken window, but as far as I knew, there hadn’t been too many takers, because of the story of what had h
appened to me in there. I’d only gone back a few times with Apa and Anya to collect our belongings. We’d begun the search for a new home while still renting, and had made an offer for a slightly smaller house in northern Pest.
I went to the tiny bathroom to get ready for bed, resting my cane against the wall and glancing at my reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror. I did a double-take when I realised how pale I was. I’d been feeling under the weather for the last few weeks, but then I reminded myself that one of my friends at school had been sick recently; I’d probably just caught whatever he’d had.
It was struck by how much I looked like Lucy after I’d got her out of the crypt, and I wrenched open the cupboard door so I wouldn’t have to see myself. I tore the hairbrush through my hair, and made a mental note to get it trimmed sometime soon; it was almost three inches longer than I usually had it. Then I grabbed my toothbrush from the jug on the sink and cleaned my entire mouth, working entirely on autopilot.
The minty freshness washed over my tongue and I took a sip from the plastic tumbler to rinse, bending low over the sink. I splashed my face quickly with cold water; then reached over for the towel. I put the hairbrush back on its shelf in the cupboard. I closed the door, and a pair of blood-red eyes stared out from my reflection.
My heart shot into overdrive and I leapt away, the scream ringing in my ears. I stumbled as my legs tangled up in fear, and I hit the floor hard, narrowly missing smacking my head on the rim of the bathtub. I heard footsteps running up the stairs and then Anya’s frantic knocking on the door.
“Bianka! Are you alright?”
I didn’t move for a moment, catching my breath as I lay there. Then I grabbed hold of the side of the tub and hauled myself to my feet. I looked tentatively into the mirror, and was shocked to see that my reflection was back to normal. I frowned, softly touching the glass and then my own face, pulling my eye open wide, as though the redness had somehow retreated into another part of it. But there was nothing. Just my own, familiar blue.
