I’m sitting cross-legged in the middle of my bed, back straight, eyes closed, hands resting on my knees. I know it’s stupid, but I thought I’d try it and hopefully be able to clear my mind. Besides, if I can, maybe it’ll do a little good.
I’ve been sitting in this position motionlessly for about thirty minutes now. My back is aching and I’m tired, but I’ve actually succeeded in pushing away almost all of my thoughts. Meditation…sort of. The difference is, most people do it to try to get in touch with their senses or to purify their souls, or maybe to try to become ‘enlightened.’ I believe that’s Buddhism. Not sure. Don’t care. But with me, I just want to stop my torture and try to get rid of some of my conscious thoughts for a little while—except for one major problem, I’ll get my mind cleared for a moment, concentrating on my breathing pattern and the silence around me, and then suddenly I’ll feel the pulse again, dark, scary, seductive. Evil to some degree, yet even desirable. Then I’ll pull from it, but I’ll start thinking again.
Right now I’ve hit one of the pulses. This time, instead of pulling away from it, it holds me and seeps into me even as I open my eyes and try to fight back, unable to move, my eyes now bloodshot suddenly. In a way, it’s like I’m drowning, but it’s not really happening. My hands grip my knees so hard I think my fingers could break from the strain, though they somehow don’t. I’m trying to reach the surface to breathe and this dark energy, tingling, seeps into my ears and my nose and mouth—yet I’m breathing normally. It floods over my eyes, yet nothing is there.
Slowly, my room fades from my vision, my having stared ahead so longs without blinking that my eyes water and sting.
Me. Crying. Darkness around me. “Why has he deceived me?”
A strange woman in a ancient Egyptian-style attire and dark skin and solid black, shining eyes, kneels next to me, fangs protruding, yet kindness in her heart. “My poor child,” she says, blood falling from her eyes in the place of tears. “Your Love never lied to you. His love is strong for you, unbreakable.” She lifts my chin so that I am looking up into her beautiful, hideous eyes. “But his Majesty deceives you only. You are beginning to see. You have more to come.”
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The room before me slams into my line of sight, shoving what I just saw out of my mind, away from me. But I only get a moment of my lighted room before another stranger vision comes, sliding over reality like a mask of ghostly essence.
Again, it’s the black veil and arc way. This time, she is there, standing before it, facing me with all the black behind her. “He searches, little one,” she holds up her hands, “for these.” She backs into the shadows of the arc, and suddenly I am sitting in my room, on my bed again. But yet again, the third time, I see the arc. I am standing before it, so close to the terrifying gateway. The black silk giant veil is blown from a breeze from behind it, and it sways toward me, even touching me lightly. I move it aside and the vampire hisses and reaches and grabs me, pulling me back into the arc with her so quickly I only catch a glimpse of her wild face and savage eyes and teeth.
My room again, but I am pulled away once more, this time trying with all my might to cling to reality, failing again as before. “You must take your King, the True King of the Liviere, and you must win the war and send your enemy to Hell, to the Underworld, the birthplace of all evils…He has told you he searches for my descended Blood of Eden. He will find her…The war, see it soon…”
My room once more. This time the darkness leaves me and evaporates. I am quite weak now. I realize my nose is bleeding again.
“Why can’t I just pick my nose to get a bloody nose? Or why can’t I just get punched in the face to bleed?” I snap weakly. “Rather that than only visions.” Ok. Moral? I’m never going to meditate again. I quickly leave my room with the bloody nose, an aching back, stiff legs, and sore temper, and I rush to the bathroom to keep from getting blood everywhere. I honestly think I’m gonna barf—Yep.
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I snatch the lid up form the toilet and out it comes.
“Crap!” I say just before I heave again. I shiver disgustedly. Barely anything came out. It’s mostly dry heaves, and it sort of hurts. I am so glad I haven’t eaten yet!
Over the course of the next few weeks, I get a few more, “Octavius in chains in a dark room, being tortured as he cries only for me,” visions, and even more, “Leviath comes to visit me and takes me to the dark forest, or to the Crypts, his home,” dreams. Some of the dreams, he starts to be a little nicer to me and less cruel. He seems to get the faint hint of a heart and conscience, and the scary part? I actually start to kind of like him, sort of. He doesn’t play tricks anymore. He doesn’t try to scare me. He, in one of my dreams where I meet other vampires and they want to kill me because I’m human and an outsider, he displays an overprotective quality, as if he cares truthfully, no lies told. He hurt them or threatened them. He didn’t tolerate anyone even talking in a disapproving manner of me. He even killed one who threatened me, and the woman hadn’t even threatened me to my face!
At first it was every few nights that I dreamed of him. But after the first two weeks, it started becoming more and more often. Sometimes a whole row of nights, sometimes skipping one or two or three. Now he’s come every night for a week, and for some reason, even though he’s distant in a major way, he easily and wantingly displays his attraction to me through expressions upon his face and obvious stares. He has come to notice that I don’t loathe his presence as much as I first did, but he still senses my fear is great and I still hate him basically. However, he asks me every night, before returning me, if I want to stay with him, even if just one night. As could be expected and imagined, I, of course, tell him no, that I want to go home, that I want him to leave me alone, that I don’t want to see him again in any of my dreams.
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I just woke from one particular dream in which I was taken to an old crypt that led deep into the ground, into a chamber, a very large circular room. He had taken me through a hallway from that torch-lit throne room, and the hallway was so dark that all I saw was empty blackness around me, and he led me to a door, which he opened. It bled light into the stone hall and he pulled me inside and shut the door. We were alone there, except an old human subservient with a scar on his left eye that turned his eye pale. Leviath had taken me to some sort of private study. He dismissed the old man with the blind left eye, and Leviath sat in a comfortable-looking cherry-wood chair with elegant carvings and red cushions. He gestured for me to take a matching one that faced him, which I wasn’t most keenly set on doing.
He proceeded to speak. “I have seen you many times now, and every time I see you again, it’s as if I’ve never seen you before, as if I’ve never known such a beauty, but I have, and you never tire me to look at you…I have stupidly come to ask you every night, that you stay with me, that maybe you’ll even join me in my bed—“
“You disgust me,” I hissed.
He smiled, “I know. Yet I also feel deep in you, that you do find me desirable.” I had no reply, so he continued. “I’ve come almost to the point of forcing you and making you my wife. But I cannot because I have not found whom I seek. I simply will tell you this, you should expect me to come for you and steal you. It is only a matter of time.”
“You will find her,” I replied, remembering what the strange, beautiful vampire lady had told me.
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Leviath frowned at my words. “How do you know this?”
I told him the truth, “A woman told me. She was one of yours, but I have never seen her here.”
He leaned forward, suddenly interested and wanting answers, “Who was this woman? What was her name?”
“I don’t know. I only know that I saw her. She showed me an arc way and said you were searching for them.” Something told me not to tell him the rest, so I lied. “She just vanished after that, behind it, and it disappeared.”
“What did this arc way look like?”
“Two columns with a big black cloth curtain thing suspended over the dark entrance.”
“I see.” He sat back, unsatisfied, but knowing he’d get nothing else out of me, and he positioned himself comfortably in the chair. I sat erect, my back rigid, my poise tall all the while, and my hands were clasped in my lap upon the white gown covering my les and reaching down to my ankles. He simply watched me in silence, contemplating something in his mind.
“Where are you? Marie…please answer me…” a voice cried out from far away in my mind, screaming helplessly, hoping I could hear him. It was Octavius’s cries. I could’ve even swore that I’d heard a faint cry matching it from some far away, distant chamber or wherever, yet it was close enough to sound just like a cry to me. It was so faint I couldn’t tell whether I’d heard it or not. I felt the chains on my wrist, his wrists; cold iron chains, and rough backs that have caused sores and raw skin and bleeding from the coarse friction.
I must have looked down suddenly, frowning, straining to hear if it was wind or really a voice. After a moment, I realized I’d imagined really hearing it. The wind was blowing, and it sounded like some wailing voice; it wasn’t.
Leviath asked darkly, “What is it?” He hadn’t heard a thing. But when I looked up, I saw suppressed anger and hatred. He seemed to have an impatience about something.
I knew better than to cross him, so I simply stuttered, “I—I don’t know…I think…I thought I heard someone yelling but it was just the wind.”
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He stood slowly and paced even slower in an absent-minded state, and he said slowly. “What would you choose to do if I allowed you complete control over your own mind and body instead of me leading you around all the time? Would you stay? Or would you try to escape?”
“You know the answer to that,” I replied.
“Yes….I suppose I do…” By then, he’d somehow ended up in front of me, and he’d knelt before me and was looking into my eyes as he took my right hand in both of his cold hands. “Do you…do you think you could ever love me? Or if not that, accept me?”
“You know my answer should only be no,” I replied again. This time I added, “I do not love anyone, especially not you. It’s your fault anyways, for that fact.”
When I woke up, I sat up to find a black silk material wrapped very loosely and gently around a bloody red rose at the foot of my bed by my feet. I pulled my feet back from it and crossed my legs. I’m now staring at it silently, deeply disturbed. This has to be some sort of a sick joke. I can understand having weird dreams and visions and crap, and even wounds showing up via a strong enough mental infliction…But this?
No way. No possible way.
In one sense, I want to smile. It’s…I guess romantic. But in every other aspect, I want to scream and tear it to shreds and bang my head against the wall to try to convince myself it’s not really there. It’s disturbing, scary, and a little beyond creepy. Maybe Octavius—Leviath, I mean—maybe he really did come while I was asleep and in bed last night. He must have, though I don’t know how he managed to get in the house and even in my room. If this is the case, it’s the first time he’s actually been around me in about a year, and I mean for real, the real him, not the dream episodes or visions in my head…I wonder if he’s giving me these dreams, too. They’re too related to be random dreams from my mind.
I reach out thoughtfully and touch the bloody rose petals and pull my hand back to look upon my fingers. Sure enough, it’s blood. I think I’m gonna be sick. I pick up the rose in the black silk material and leave my room immediately, searching out my family members. I’m quite upset. Perhaps they’ve done this, I’m sure it must be Jamie’s idea if that’s true, but perhaps not. If they did, this is a sick joke.
Just as I step out my door, a small sliver of bloody white paper falls from the folds of the black silk. I hadn’t seen it before, and I stop and stoop down to pick it up. Upon turning it over, I see a scribbled note signed with Leviath’s “Octavius’s last name.”
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It reads:
Soon, Marian.
Michael.
I grow dizzy. He had been giving me dreams. He know what I dreamed because he put it in my head—But it can’t be!
I rush down the hall and turn right, into the living room, looking for Jeana or John, or perhaps even both. Tears stream down from my eyes, and I see them and Diana upon the couch to my right. They don’t see me immediately, and they’re talking.
I stomp to them, behind Mom and Dad, and throw the rose and black cloth hard enough so that it lands on the floor for all three to see. All three are startled and look up to me, down to the blood-ridden rose, and back to me as I cry angrily, shoving the paper before Dad's face so he can see, and dropping it for him to catch and read, "How do you explain these?! Dreams?! They were on my bed by my feet! If you guys did this, that's the sickest joke I've heard in my whole effing life!" They're too busy staring at me with gaping mouths to read the note. I've crossed round the couch so that I'm before them, and I moved here while yelling and crying. "Read it, damn it!" I yell. I step on the rose accidentally, on the stem, and I reach down and brush my hands across the petals again, putting more blood on my hands. I hold out my hands for teh to see and cry a little quieter, "Do you see this? Do you know what it is?! It's blood!"
I suddenly become enraged and I reach down and pick up the rose and begin to try to rip it to pieces, tearing off the petals and breaking the stem and trying to wad it and smash it and tear it and mash it. I grab a handful of the mess and chunk it hard so that it litters the floor, away from me. I just want it away from me!
I hear Jeana's sickened gasp as John shows it to her, and I look up, uncovering my face with my bloody hands. My own blood tears have added to the amount of blood, this seeming to make it look like more blood than it really was. She looks more than ill. She's turned sickly gray. She looks up at me weakly, not seeming to breathe at all as I breathe rather hard. Dad looks equally sickened by this note, and he wants to no longer touch it. He holds it out, though, for Diana to take it, which she does carefully.
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I sit on my knees, looking down at my hands. "I told you," I whisper. "I told you, I told you, I told you. I think the dreams are what he puts in my head. I think he really came last night and put that there...I don't know anymore...I don't know...He won't go away. First he tortures me and now this, a new way to play with my mind. Why didn't Octavius just say his real name instead of his last name? Why didn't he just write Leviath? Why does he choose me?" I look up at my parents' and Diana's faces. "I want him to leave me alone...Diana, isn't there medication that can keep me from dreaming?"
She nods weakly. "We've already had you on it, though. It didn't work. You know that."
"There has to be something, though, something that could help me block him out."
"I don't know of anything that works--"
"I don't care what it is, anything that stops this, even if I die. I just want it to stop--"
"Marie, Marie, Marie. Foolish child. Talking to them will do no good--"
"Stop it!" I hiss, shutting my eyes. Cold room...chains...I clench my fists. It leaves and I relax, wiping my face with my white night gown, the one I was wearing in the dream.
