Sunday: This Is Hell Who: Neta and Sorcha Where: An abandoned Victorian house in the woods When: 5:45AM
Hell was subjective. What was hell for one person, could be nothing of import to another. One person's heaven could be hell for someone else. Everyone's hell was different, and sometimes more than one thing could be hell.
This was hell. Hell was curled in a tight ball, listening to the voices of everyone you'd failed. Reliving your failure. Wallowing in your hate and anger and despair. Eaten by grief and guilt. Hearing the whispers to try again, to take that gun and shoot again and again and again, to ignore the pain and make them pay. Make them all pay. Even though she was helpless and useless, they still urged her onwards, making her helplessness part of hell. And hell lasted forever, because how would you ever know when it ended or began?
I deserve this.
This was hell, too. Hell was lying, still curled into a tight ball, on the hard wooden floors of a cold, dusty, cobweb-filled building that creaked and shuddered with the sound of rain on the sagging roof and broken windows. Shivering and naked. Alone and with a howling wind in your ears. It was just a different hell, that was all.
Neta opened her eyes, shifted on the floor, winced, and pushed herself up to sit. Wherever this new hell was, she was sure she deserved this, too.
There was something Sorcha was meant to see, and she wasn't sure what it was. Something had drawn her here to this place, this rotting ramshackle house that hadn't been more than a ten-minute walk from hers. She'd dreamed of rain and dragons, of gory red light spilling from the windows, of a sound like a heartbeat, the slick and gushy sound of an aberration being born. None of it had made any sense, but she'd awakened in a cold sweat with two words on her lips: Something's coming. The terror of it had been enough to propel her out of bed and into jeans, a sweater and rain boots, and she'd left her house very quietly, although her brothers wouldn't have heard her over the sound of the raging storm outside.
She was drenched by the time she got to where she was going, standing outside the front room of the deserted house and looking through the completely broken-out picture window. She'd put her hair into a braid to sleep, and it was plastered to her head and hanging over one shoulder as she shivered in the cold rain. She wasn't there for long at all-- just long enough to question her own sanity-- when the curled-up figure appeared. Appeared, from out of nowhere. One of Sorcha's hands rose to cover her mouth, to prevent the escape of any sound, and she backed up a step when the woman sat up, unsure whether or not she'd be noticed.
The house was empty, as far as Neta could tell. The creaking wasn't the sound of feet, but the sound of wind and falling apart timbers. Why was she here? She breathed again-- her heart was beating-- her skin was whole and not the ashed He had made of it.
Had she not died? ... no, she knew she had died. She had been dead. This was just some new way to torment her. This was just another hell.
Neta stood up slowly. She couldn't revel in the feeling of being alive again, wearing the same strong, honed body she'd worn before. She'd told herself she wouldn't ever revel in anything again; she was too busy waiting for the next axe to fall.
Her eyes narrowed on the figure outside the house, illuminated in the murky pre-dawn morning by a sudden flash of lightning. "What do you want!" she demanded loudly. Her voice hadn't changed from what she remembered, still low and strong and even booming when she raised it. It didn't even sound creaky from lack of use.
Sorcha's hand dropped from her mouth, and she pushed it beneath the sleeve of her sweater to pinch her skin viciously. She was trying to figure out if she had indeed awakened and walked out here for God only knew what reason, or if she was still in the precognitive dream. The pinch hurt, and rain continued to patter down on her head, so she figured this was actually happening. The figure was a woman, completely nude, with long, dark curly hair and the strong features of a person unaccustomed to being trifled with, and when she asked Sorcha what she wanted, she shook her head mutely. She hadn't even brought a gun with her. What in the world was the matter with her today? Normally Sorcha did not venture out without a firearm in her possession.
"I don't want anything," she said finally, still shaking her head. Except to know why I had to come here, and who you are, and if you are as dangerous as I feel you are. She had no basis for the unease she felt, but it was there nonetheless.
That made no sense, and Neta scowled at the figure. A woman, from her figure. She stalked to the window in question, and something restless and angry seemed to well up in her as she moved, something that said there was something to be done, but not what, where, or now. When she spoke again, it was in a growl. "Then what the hell are you doing here, woman? It's a goddamn storm, it's the goddamn ass-crack of morning--" Though how she knew that, she wasn't entirely sure. "--and you're standing there staring at me like a goddamn rubber-necker!"
Though then she belatedly realized she wasn't wearing anything-- which might explain the rubber-necking-- and crossed a hand over her breasts, scowling. Even more belatedly, she realized she didn't know where here was. Aside from hell.
Sorcha's chin lifted. She was nothing if not stubborn, and she strongly disliked being spoken to that way. "What are you doing here?" she shot back. "In the storm, at the ass-crack of morning, with no clothes on?" She had to speak loudly to be heard over the downpour and the intermittent rumble of thunder. "Where did you come from?" It wasn't every day when one saw a person just appear, after all. Materialize. That was what it had been like. She couldn't say she really expected her questions to be answered, but she had to put forth the effort not to cringe and shrink away from this woman and her gruffness, her loud voice and the miasma of uneasiness her very presence provoked.
What was she doing here? Why was she naked? Neta scowled darkly at the questions she couldn't answer. The only question she could answer was the last, and she growled it out: "I came from hell. And I've come back to hell. Nothing else matters." She needed clothes... at the very least, she needed clothes. Then at least she could feel protected. Less vulnerable. Less uncertain. At least.
She swept away from the window and stalked further inside, feeling the floorboards creaking under her feet. The house felt like it would fall apart, but somehow it held.
Hell. Sorcha shrank back from the window, backing up one step and then another as the woman strode out of her sight. There was no way she'd follow her without a gun-- really stupid, Sorcha, leaving the gun at home-- and yet somehow she couldn't bring herself to leave. She didn't need a vision right then to tell her that something was seriously wrong with this scenario. Her back struck one of the trees that was growing unchecked near the front of the house, and she barely stifled a scream. Her heart pounded fiercely in her chest as she stood, her waterlogged sweater hanging down over her hands at the sleeves and nearly to mid-thigh at the hem.
Of course Neta had to switch hells to someplace that looked this terrible. She stalked around the room, which seemed now like some kind of living room full of sheet-covered furniture lining the walls. Neta paced from one end to the other, and finally kicked one of the shaped in frustration-- then swore when, of course, it hurt.
It did, however, knock the sheet off, revealing a trunk. So after Neta hopped around, holding her throbbing toes, for a moment, she got to opening it. There was fabric in there. "Yessss...."
Sorcha didn't know what she should do. If she had any sense, she'd turn herself around and walk back to her place, get out of this horrible weather. She'd been here less than a week and she'd already heard all about how crazy and unpredictable the climate was. That was proving to be true; it was even worse than the Florida panhandle could be during hurricane season. Torrential rains or not, though, she simply didn't feel right about walking off when she knew so little about what was going on here. She huddled beneath the tree, waiting to see if the woman in the ruined house was going to reappear.
Neta did finally reappear, after tossing clothing every which way in an attempt to find something halfway decent. There were frilly dresses and suits and it was utterly impossible to even imagine herself in buckets of lace. She finally came up with leather pants and a vest over a flanel shirt. It was the best she was going to get, and she hauled it in, cursing under her breath all the while.
Coming back to the window as she laced up the vest, and peered out. Rain-girl was still there. "Are you going to stand out there in the rain all fucking night, woman?" she hollered out at her.
There she was again, somehow looking even more fearsome fully dressed. Sorcha straightened her shoulders and called back, "It's morning, not night. It'll be daylight soon." However much daylight they could expect with it raining like this. She shoved some damp strands of hair off of her forehead and squinted, trying to see better. This was foolish, she knew. Ridiculous, even. But she felt so strongly that she'd been called here, summoned because this woman's presence was something about which she needed to be aware. She opened her mouth to speak again, but hesitated when she heard a sound from overhead. Something that wasn't the rain or the low grumble of thunder.
"How am I supposed to know what time it is?" Neta countered irritably. "It's dark. That's all that matters. Now are you coming in, or--"
The sound distracted her, as well-- a sound like a distant wail, or a chorus of screams-- and she broke off mid-sentence as her eyes were drawn inexorably upward, into the rainy sky. There was... something... coming. Something she could feel, more than see, since it was still a little ways off. "If you're getting in here, you'd better git, woman," she said, her voice a little less certain of itself and a little less strident.
Coming in? Every instinct Sorcha had told her that she definitely didn't want to go in there. Into that horrible, broken-down, cold and dirty abandoned house, with that woman who'd just appeared from nowhere? The woman radiated danger, and she was even more acutely aware that she didn't have her gun, nor her knife. Nothing. Her own eyes turned upward as she took a few seconds to contemplate the fearsome noises she heard. Uneasy, nervous and conflicted, she finally moved closer and stepped up into the house through the low, broken-out window, wincing when a shard of glass that was still in the frame cut her hand. Once inside, she huddled there in her wet clothes, poised to bolt back out the window the second she needed to.
Neta didn't move from the window, squinting out into the darkness, though she did ease aside to let rain-girl pass to get inside. "Something's coming," she said, more to herself than to rain-girl, scanning the sky. "I can... I can feel it." She then glanced sidelong at her. "There something wrong, baby-girl? Do I look like I'm going to shank you? I don't have a fuckin' weapon, I don't know you from Adam and I got no reason to take you out--" Yet, anyhow. If she was an elemental, she'd be going down hard. "--so calm your shit, okay?"
"Never mind feeling it," Sorcha grumbled. "I can hear it." She was gazing warily at the dark-skinned woman, not sure if it'd be better to keep an eye on her or to watch the sky to see whatever horror was going to emerge from it. She just shook her head when Neta asked if there was something wrong, because there weren't sufficient words in the universe to describe this level of wrongness. She wanted to snap that her name wasn't baby-girl, but she didn't want to have to say what her name was. Instinctively, she felt that the less this woman knew about her, the better.
"If you're gonna be bitchy, honey, you didn't have to come in here." So much for the rare attempt at being polite and generous and offering a stranger her roof. Even if it wasn't much of a roof. Or really hers, that she knew of. Even so. Neta wasn't going to be trying that again any time soon. The feeling was coming closer, and the sound... what sound there was... seemed to grow in voices-- not volume, exactly, but in plurality.
She slowly stepped back from the window, as the feeling of something approaching seemed to tug at her. It was long habit of resisting compulsions, of rebelling against anything and everything, that kept her moving backwards one step at a time. "Maybe you ought to be gettin' back from that window," she said, her voice a little uncertain, and that irritated her. "Just a thought."
Getting back from the window meant getting further into her territory, and Sorcha didn't like that thought. However, her only other option was going back outside, where it was a ten minute walk home. So she moved back along the wall, one shoulder against it, getting out of the direct line of sight of... whatever danger was moving their way. Again she mentally lamented not having her gun; hopefully she wouldn't ever do something that stupid again, precognitive dream or not. She felt almost sick with fear, a feeling she hated, because she prided herself on being confident and together, all the time. Sorcha set her jaw and waited, her back to the wall, not saying anything else to the woman who was with her in the front part of the house.
Neta ignored Sorcha-- well, by "ignored", she simply didn't stare at her; she was well aware of where the woman was at all times, it was just deemed unimportant at the moment-- in favor of staring hard out into the storm. The sound was getting louder, and it seemed almost like she could hear individual voices in the clamor, but she couldn't make out what any of them were crying out.
And then the lightning illuminated a shape in the clouds that was coming closer. It was long and stretched-looking, and kind of fuzzy along the edges, and entirely pitch, inky black. "Holy shit," she muttered, torn between curiosity, a kind of primal terror for something that felt like it didn't even belong in this world, and that strange draw she'd felt before-- towards it.
Very rarely had Sorcha experienced the sensation of her skin crawling, but she felt that way now. Her breath felt trapped in her chest as she listened to the horrible sounds, as she wondered what in the world would be capable of making that sort of noise. She wasn't sure she wanted to know, but her foolhardy action of coming out here to see what she could see was going to have its consequences. She was standing further back from the window than Neta was, but still she could see the immense dark shape approaching. Her lips formed the word Jesus, but no sound actually came from her mouth. What could it be, and what was it going to do?
The shadow-thing glided down, from the clouds to skimming the trees all around, to lofting over the wet grass outside. It looked like a cloud of blackness; Neta couldn't make anything more than that out, even as it seeped in through the window. It didn't fly through the window, or walk, it seeped. That was the only word Neta could think of to describe it. Little tendrils of darkness spilled off of it, coiling and spinning like smoke, only the edges seemed, to her, to have faces in them.
The cloud solified into a shape, a horse-sized creature with a tail, a long neck, and vast wings. Bits of shadowstuff continued to eddy out of it now and then, but its long head dipped to Neta. There were no discernable eyes in that blankness. Her hand lifted of its own accord, and the thing bumped its nose into her fingers like a dog.
Dragon, Sorcha thought numbly. She knew dragons weren't real, of course, but that was what the dark thing looked like once it was inside the house and near them. Well... near the woman. It seemed too preoccupied with her to notice Sorcha, and she was glad of that. How could something that looked like a shadow, without much discernible detail, seem so ominous? She needed to be out of here; she felt that as surely as she'd felt the undeniable compulsion that had brought her here. But how to get past the shadow thing that was taking up part of the path by which she'd need to leave?
Something about this felt disturbingly right. Neta stroked the shadow-thing's nose, feeling the cool, slightly-giving smoothness underneath her fingertips. When she pulled her hand away briefly, sparkles of darkness clung to her skin. Bits of shadow were falling off the beast-shape now, drifting around the room and forming up into vaguely human-like shapes. Neta was too busy feasting her eyes on the beautiful thing that had come to greet her to wonder what they were or notice what Rain-girl was doing, her mind trying in vain to figure out just what it was, what it had to do with her, and just how it was going to be part of her never-ending torment.
"This is still hell," she reminded herself, a little breathlessly. "Even if the guardians seem sweet...."
Sorcha wasn't sure if she found the sight of the darkness clinging to the woman's already dark skin more frightening, or the fact that the shadow-thing seemed to be splitting off from itself, forming shapes that could have been human had they been solid. Would they try to stop her when she left? She didn't know, but it didn't matter. She was freezing, sopping wet and extremely uneasy, filled with a sense of impending doom. It didn't seem as if there was anything to be accomplished here, and she thought that maybe getting out of here before the situation worsened might be smart. She began moving along the wall toward the window again, keeping her steps as quiet as she could.
Several of the vaguely human-shaped shadows turned towards Sorcha as she started to move, and one of them drifted towards her. Neta didn't notice until the dragon's great head turned and its jaw gaped, releasing a multi-voiced scream. Then she jumped and spun, hand going to her hip, but there was no gun there. Her eyes found Sorcha-- Rain-girl-- and for a moment he just stared at her, frowning, her brows drawn tightly together. "Why are you here?" she asked finally.
Sorcha had been moving along the wall, touching it as she went with the hand she'd cut, leaving faint splotches of blood behind without realizing it. When the peculiar sound came from the shadow-dragon, she uttered a muffled cry, quickly biting her lip to stifle it. The word abomination had never held more meaning to her than it did now as she stared at something that simply shouldn't be possible. If she'd thought to bring her gun or knife, it wouldn't do her any good. How could you shoot something that was made of shadow? She twitched away from the piece of shadow that was heading in her direction, her gaze jumping warily from it to Neta as she inched closer to the window. "I had a feeling... something was going to happen," she said, not wanting to tell this woman that she had precognitive dreams. Potentially dangerous information to give to someone who seemed more than a little dangerous herself.
"You had a feeling." The dragon's long neck ducked under Neta's arm, and she hugged it to her hip absently. It felt too right, there, and she was too distracted to resist it. She frowned at Rain-girl, trying to think. Was she a psychic? Or was she summoned here by whatever had brought Neta here? If she had been summoned... why? She was not doing anything but standing there-- sneaking away-- and being frightened. Neta held up a hand to stop the shadow-being from advancing on her further. "What is your name?"
Just the sight of the woman embracing the shadow-thing made Sorcha's insides feel cold. It was a feeling akin to what she imagined watching someone lick a snake would be like, or cuddle one of those enormous hissing cockroaches. Disgusting and alien. She didn't want to tell the woman her name. It put her in mind of a story she vaguely remembered from her childhood, a story a neighbor lady'd used to tell about how the devil couldn't capture you if he didn't know your name. She didn't have any valid reason not to tell her, though, unless she was going to lose her nerve and simply bolt and run... and that wasn't Sorcha. "Sorcha," she replied, drawing her shoulders up and forcing herself not to jump when thunder grumbled loudly right overhead.
Neta mouthed the word. Rain-girl was Sorcha. There was another pause while she considered that, and then she said, back, "Neta Hillman. Would say it's a pleasure, but since you don't seem like you're enjoyin' yo'self much, Sorcha... guess it's not really." The shadow-beast's jaws snapped, making a sound like breaking glass in the process, and Neta actually grinned-- a wicked, even frightening sight, since there was no humor or good nature in it. "Run along now, honey. Before the boys decide they want to play."
It didn't really even sound like her, but it was what came out. She wasn't sure she liked that, but it was too late, and it was out now.
Neta Hillman. Sorcha filed the name away, wanting to be sure she didn't forget it. Her gaze skittered from Neta to the shadow-dragon to the ominous people-like shapes, also made of shadow, and she didn't need to be told twice. As much as she disliked essentially turning tail and running, she didn't see that she had much choice. She finished navigating the distance between where she was and the large, broken picture window frame through which she'd entered the house, and she hurled herself back out into the rain, onto the ground outside. It was still as dark as pitch, and rain was still pouring from the sky, and Sorcha took advantage of the weather to vanish from sight as quickly as she could manage. She had a ten-minute walk home, but the way she felt right then, she might make it in half the time.
The shadow-bits let out a disappointed-sounding wail, and all fled the building en masse the instant Sorcha did. It left Neta with the dragon, or whatever it was, hissing at her side, rain pouring in the broken window... with an uncomfortable, lost feeling like she had something to do that she wasn't doing it yet... and with absolutely no more idea of what she was doing here than she had before.