Page 47 of Wicked Vile King
WAKE UP!!
I jolt awake, my eyelids popping open, and I am lost at sea again, the world going underwater only to surface once more. The stench of too much blood—too much for the victim to live at least—and mildew slaps me head-on, and I am jostled awake. The table jitters on the floor again as my attention is jerked to the other side of the room.
To the corner.
Where the shadows eat the walls.
And the darkness lives and breathes.
There's a girl in the corner, standing there, looking at me. She wears a white medical gown, tied at the back, and nothing else. Everything not covered by the gown or her straight black hair is as bare as the day she was born. Her feet, her forearms, her legs below the knee, it's all pale, pristine flesh. Well, except for the splotches of blood freckling her legs and her arms and the white fabric of her gown.
She smells like the night she died.
Fucking ghost.
I should look away, but I don't. I'm staring at the girl in the corner, thedeadgirl in the corner. Black hair covers most of her face, but when she looks up from the floor at me, the strands part. I lock eyes with her, and if I could feel anything right now, I think I might remember what it was like to feel fear. Her eyes aren't dark chocolate and coffee, not like they used to be. No, they are milky white, clouded over and gone to hell with her.
"Go away," I hiss at her, but she doesn't listen, which is so unlike her.
Maybe in death, she grew a fucking spine.
The girl stays in the corner, standing there and still staring at me, unblinking. It makes my bones itch.
"Go away!" I tell her again, louder this time as her milky gaze assesses me, her head turning just enough so that I can see where her skull cracked like an egg. I can almost peek at her brain from this angle.
I blink, breathing in the stench of that night, blood and rotting earth. She doesn't blink back.
Of course, she wouldn't. She's fucking dead.
"You aren't real," I tell her after a long moment—it may be a minute or ten or even more, I don't know.
I don't care that she smells like she just crawled out of the past to appear at my side. The scent of isopropyl alcohol and homemade booze cuts through the stench, over the blood and the mildew, and fuck if she doesn't smellexactlylike she did that night, prison wine and death.
The ghost stays just to spite me.
"Fuck off," I tell her and turn my head away from her to look up at the ceiling. I let the heaviness settle over me again, and I almost give in to that heaviness—almost—when that itchy feeling spider-walks across the nape of my neck and burrows down to my spine. I turn to the left this time, my vision slanting with the movement, until my gaze meets the opposite corner.
Shadows.
Padded walls fileted open and leaking onto the scratched floor.
And another ghost.
Fucking great.
There's a boy, maybe six or seven years old in that corner, with dirty-blond hair that curls around his ears and a ripped blue polo shirt. He doesn't stand there all creepy like the girl. He doesn't stare at me either. He just sits cross-legged, tossing metal jacks on the floor in front of him.
Only the floor isn't the right color.
It should be cracked white tile to match my current jail cell, but it's not.
It's sun-bleached pavement, still wet from the rain, cracked with tall weeds snaking through it and stretching to the clouds.
I taste the bubblegum from that day on my tongue and smell the burnt popcorn lingering in the air from the crappy concession stand next to the field. The boy looks at me, and when he does, I see that his small hands are bloody, just like they were before, when we fought together, when he tried to save me, and . . .
Stop, goddammit!!!
I don't want to remember this shit.
