Chapter Text
Part 1: Elizabeth
I’m not sure where the pain is, but it is here somewhere, quietly residing within me, and has been for some time now. Once warm and full of life, my body is now a chasm, hollowed out, and that benign ache drifts and ricochets around these barren walls like a ghoul. It pulses, not unlike a kind of hunger, then diffuses and gets lost again. Since this is the only sensation accessible to me now, I focus on its strange meandering, while I remain blissfully unaware of what is really happening to me.
In this liminal dimension in which I find myself, everything is calm now. Blood no longer viciously pumps through my veins, my lungs do not shudder around sharp breaths, my ligaments have been freed from the quivering convulsions at long last, and all has gone still. Very still. A great weight rests over me now, and I wonder if this is death pulling me now from this mortal vessel. Through the veil. Into the other side, if such a place should exist. I hope it does.
But then a slight tugging emerges at my side. It is even and rhythmic. In and out. Deliberate in its course as it roves over the expanse of what I can just about make out to be my midriff. A chilling stroke of air rattles through me, and the tugging stops, if just for a moment before it returns only this time with more callous fervour. Quick, rough movements assault me as it goes back again across the expanse of my body. What is this feeling? I cannot grasp it, not when I feel the last few tendrils of my consciousness ceding from this world as I become more and more wrapped up in the darkness that is so very comfortable to slip away into. Far away, those frantic inflictions continue to work at my body, but as I drift further and further out, my cares soon dissipate, and at long last, there is simple, true peace.
Everything is over.
At least for a few seconds that is. But in this moment, I am able to glimpse something that only the poets have ever come close enough to in capturing its serenity, and not even they, nor indeed do I, have any true understanding of its sincere nature.
The veil drops, with me on the other side. An eternity passes in those precious few seconds. I am dead.
I think it to myself again. I am dead. The thought echoes.
In the fragment of time that I had in this dark and lonely realm, I was unexpectedly imbued with an ominous and numbing revelation. One that sunk into all corners of my soul, settling in like the tide. It was not something I thought out loud, but something I felt deeply. There was only darkness, within and beyond my soul. I wouldn’t utter that epiphany out loud for months after that moment, not to anything. And yet it stayed with me, even when I suddenly felt the painful clasp of life’s grip, forcing me back again, and I was ripped harshly back through that veil.
*
I awake to a cacophony of frenzied wails, and the unnatural screeches of electrical impulses as every nerve in my body is, all at once, set alight. I seize and shake, eyes bulging, my throat tearing with my screams, as I am subjected to the most agonising terror I could have ever thought possible. Pain returns with a vengeance as what feels like a million needles strike at my body. I writhe under its immense power, limbs struggling aimlessly as I realise that something restrains me at my wrists. The image flickers in my mind of a moth trapped in a picture frame, crucified by cruel pins through its body. The thought escapes me. The pain all too consuming. I cannot even comprehend how my mind is not yet fried by these currents. I cannot comprehend anything.
The pain stops.
Out of nowhere, the buzz of electricity cuts out. The fire scourging every fibre of my being is extinguished, and my hoarse cries simmer into little sobs. I shiver.
“Elizabeth?”
Where is that phantom voice? My eyes are cloudy and bristled with tears.
Something cold nudges at my left hand, then snakes between my fingers. Its movements trembling with trepidation.
A cracked gasp escapes my throat. My fingers twitch around the delicate thing, and it feels like a hand also, but cold – very cold.
“Is… she…?”
“Shh.”
A shadow swoops over my eyes. At first, in the sea of strange fuzzy lights, it appears only as a dark, edgeless mass circling my vision. But after I blink a couple of times, it takes the form of five long protrusions, then, as everything continues to clear up, a hand. It retreats from my sight.
“Elizabeth?” The voice comes from my right this time. Stony. There is an odd prodding at my chest, and the glimmer of something metal. “If you can hear me then blink twice.”
I do my best to comply, remembering that I am in my body again. I close and open my eyes twice.
There is an astonished sigh to my left, and to my right that hand looms over me again, though this time there is also a tool nearing my eye in the warped shape of a circle. My eyelid is pulled open wider.
“Pupils dilated. And… a slight jaundice…”
The cold hand clasps mine tighter now. “Elizabeth?”
This time my name is spoken in a hoarse voice, thick with anguish.
Suddenly I realise, with unnatural lucidity, how there is a complete absence of pain anywhere in my body. There is air delving in and out of my lungs once more, and the steady pump of blood in my chest has quickly resumed, yet there is not a hint of pain at all. There is something eerie about it.
And as my eyes begin to distinguish shapes again in the lurid palette above me, and I see the outlines of two heads on either side peering down at me, an uneasy feeling starts to swell within me. On my right, there is the sweaty, exasperated visage of a man that I cannot help but despise, and I feel that tumultuous mix of emotion rush through me again staring at his shadowy face now. But to my left, there is an even greater tide of emotion when I catch sight of those shining, auburn eyes, like dark oceans brimming with all of life’s wonders. My monster.
There is something deeply wrong here. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be alive. But it’s hard to worry about everything that’s wrong when I’m staring down a deep well of melancholic beauty. A tear even spills over the edge. My pour soul.
“It… really worked,” Victor heaved in amazement, wiping his brow with the back of his wrist. Red stains his fingertips. “She’s…” He couldn’t seem to finish the thought, as a dark cloud passed over his gaze. He looked to me like he was trapped between bewilderment and a haunting sense of dread. He looked sickly.
“She’s alive!” exclaimed the choked voice to my left, with palpable relief in his tone. His grip intensified. But Victor’s uneasiness had infected me, the room felt colder now.
“Is there any pain, Elizabeth?” Victor asked, assessing me with his clinical glare. I shake my head. There is no pain. There is no anything. He averts his eyes, nervous. “That’s… that’s good...”
A dark suspicion creeps up on me.
No. This can’t be good. What has he done?
A nimble thumb starts to stroke at the back of my wrist, an attempt at comfort. My once delicate frame now feels unbearably stiff and heavy, like an effigy. Like a tomb. I cannot even lift a finger, let alone an arm. I feel mummified. I feel dead.
“Everything is fixed now,” the monster speaks, earnest and heartfelt. He couldn’t be bearing a more different countenance than that of his maker, who is chillingly looming over me still. The monster looks me straight in the eye when he utters the last words I hear before unconsciousness takes me again.
“Everything will be good from now on.”
It does nothing to calm my growing sense of dread.