Transcend (8 page)

“What you ask, I can’t…it’s too much.”   

The door swung open, yielding to a portly woman dressed in a servant’s uniform. Mrs. Tibbett. The air of control about her made it clear who was in charge of the Montgomery household. “That is quite enough, Jenna.”

“Please,” Ien pleaded, his gaze boring into the back of Jenna’s head.

She nodded, hiding the letter inside her apron.

“Mrs. Tibbett?” Ien focused his attention on the woman, his eyes dark. “You can’t let Mother do this. I’m not dead. Please.”

Mrs. Tibbett ignored him, looking past him to Jenna. “Are his things packed?”

“Yes. Mrs. Montgomery wanted him to see—”

“I am well aware of what our mistress wants.” Mrs. Tibbett turned towards Ien, a needle in her hand.

Ien squirmed away from her, his bindings biting deeply into his flesh. He hated being sedated, hated the feeling of fire the medicine produced in his veins. The more he pulled away from Mrs. Tibbett, the more the straps bore into his skin.

“No. Don’t,” he sputtered. “I don’t need that. Please.” Ien’s words fell on deaf ears. Mrs. Tibbett wrapped her heavy fingers around his forearm, plunging the needle into his flesh. Fire spread throughout his body, followed by the familiar crushing darkness.

~

Ien woke with a start, dressed in black woolen trousers, a black wool sweater and a heavy coat. His body had grown gaunt and thin. His arms, barely more than bones and flesh, were bound together at the wrists. He sat in a wheelchair, his legs as frail and feeble as his arms.

Cold air swirled around him, shocking his lungs. He looked about, attempting to gain his bearings. Snow dotted the grounds. There were traces of an early thaw, but the dark clouds storming on the horizon indicated that winter wasn’t quite finished yet. Ien suspected that a fresh layer of snow would cover everything by nightfall, so different from the morning’s hopeful beginnings.

Is it really the same day?                                                          

The landscape was eerily familiar—the family cemetery. Ien looked past the tombs and graves, toward the gardens and the sprawling estate seated at the top of the hill. Narrowing his eyes, he could almost make out his room.

Are you there Jenna? Watching?

He refocused on the macabre scene. The mausoleum door stood ajar, a dark casket on the ground, with poles affixed to either side. Mist swirled around the graves and headstones, moving and parting like a breath. It was happening. Now. Mother was holding
his
funeral.

People he barely knew crowded the space around the casket, wrapped in a blanket of mist. Ien opened his mouth to scream. No voice came, his body overwhelmed by the heavy sedation. He waited, tightening his jaw. His bandages grew hot. The taste of vengeance coated his tongue. He would never forgive his parents for this.

Never.

Guests settled into the spaces around the grave as the priest began the service. Ien watched, sickened. His mother and father looked grief-stricken, even sincere. Ien knew it was all for show, one more act for the benefit of maintaining appearances.

A noise drew his attention away from the crowd. Two figures emerged through the mist. James and Kiera.

Kiera.

Ien’s heart rammed against his chest when he saw her—black layers of silk, a veil shielding her face.

Was she crying for him?

The cameo hung around her neck, still intertwined with her chain.

Does my ring remain close to your heart?

She grabbed James’ hand as she approached the casket, the torment visible on her face.

 “You came,” Ien whispered.

Kiera turned and looked in his direction. Ien held his breath. She wouldn’t recognize him, of course. Not from such a distance and not under the shroud of bandages and his cloak.

He released the breath, imagining himself running toward her, his face and body healed. He envisioned her response at seeing him alive, the comfort her touch would bring, the way her lips would taste as she healed the darkest places within his heart through her kiss.

His heart froze. Pictures of Mother’s expression when she looked at his face filled his mind. They combined with the looks of horror the servants held every time they changed his bandages.

Revulsion chilled his blood as he became acutely aware of the cloth rubbing against his still-raw face.

Deformed.

Cursed.

Broken.

Those were the words his mother had used to describe him, the truth Jenna tried to shield him from.

It was the reality he now saw in the faces of everyone who dared to look at him.

The fantasies of Kiera’s reunion rained around him as he pictured the truth her eyes would hold and the sound of the scream that would leave her lips. His heart sunk and for a moment he believed that this sham of a death, his funeral, was the kindest gift he could give Kiera. There would be no future for them now. He wouldn’t ruin her in that way, wouldn’t condemn her to a lifetime of anguish whenever she risked a glance at him.

He had to release her, if he could.  

Kiera slowly made her way to Ien’s casket, still holding James’ hand. She squeezed it, leaning on him. Ien gasped as time stopped and the world spun to a halt. James and Kiera clung to each other, frozen where they stood.

A moment passed.

And another.

Ien’s lungs screamed for air. An inferno tightened in his stomach.
He’s just comforting her, like he said he would. He’s being a friend.

Another moment gone.

The inferno spread to Ien’s heart as he watched an imperceptible spark pass between his friends. Doubt overcame reason. His thoughts swirled into a tempest of other possibilities—a secret affair, the future he could never have, and him, forgotten and discarded over the haze of time.

The scene clicked forward in slow motion, his heart filled with molten vengeance: Kiera placing a rose on the casket, James kissing her tears away.

Ien’s mouth filled with the acrid taste of copper as he bit back the jealously consuming him. His wheelchair swayed under him as he rocked side to side. His vision tunneled, the world falling away, all but Kiera.

One word swirled up from the depths of his soul, escaping his mouth. “Kiera,” he screamed just as a needle plunged into his arm and a new fire consumed his senses, ending the sound.

And maybe, his life.         

10.

“Love is strong as death;

jealousy is cruel as the grave:

the coals thereof are coals of fire,

which hath a most vehement flame.”

~The Bible (Song of Solomon 8:6-7)

~~

Darkness consumes me, bringing me back to a distant world inside my mind. I crave the escape, anxious to forget the misery I’ve just witnessed—James and Kiera clinging to each other, his lips brushing her skin. My body clenches with the image of them still present in my mind

James and Kiera.

There can be no James and Kiera, not in that way. Not in any way. I refuse to believe in that possibility, refuse to think that Kiera would so easily replace me.

My thoughts alter the world around me, bending it at odd angles. I force memories of her, my memories, into the empty spaces, willing them to take shape around me. Kiera appears first, framed in moonlight. Tendrils of fog rise up around her, tethering her to the meadow that surrounds us.  

“You’re late,” she says, her smile reaching from her lips to her eyes.

“You’re early,” I tease as I walk towards her, allowing the same mist to wind its way around me until we’re both part of the same web.

“Did you bring it?”

“Of course,” I reply. I pull reams of parchment from the inside pocket of my coat. “I have been waiting for you to see this.”

She takes the paper from me and scans the pages, flipping rapidly through the pile. “A duet?”

“Yes, violin and piano.”

“Ah. And I suppose you think
you’re
playing the piano?”

“Well, I’m certainly not playing the violin.”

An impish glint forms in her eyes. “Oh, Ien. What would your mother think?”

“She’s not here.” It’s a command to the world around me. I don’t want Mother in this fantasy. I don’t want her in any part of my life ever again.  “Mother has no standing in my life anymore.”

“So we play alone? Only for us?” Kiera leans in closer, her breath caressing my neck.

My knees wobble with her presence. “Yes,” I say. “Only for us.” My lips tremble as the words hang in the air.

She steps back, creating a space between us I can’t tolerate. Before I can bridge the distance, the scene morphs. A piano now separates us. Kiera brings a violin up to her chin and begins to play the song.

Our song.

The notes start off in slow, intoxicating rhythms. First the violin, then the piano. Each cadence is echoed and answered, a dialogue created in music. We work every sound, letting them weave around us, binding us together. The air crackles as every measure, every motif, creates our own escape. Our hearts beat in time with the cadences of the music pouring through our fingers and I pray this is more than a fantasy.

Kiera closes her eyes and sways to the music, unleashing pieces of her heart into every note. I reply, our rhythm in perfect unison. Nothing but the music we create exists here. Not Mother or the deformity slowly killing me. Not the madness that lurks beneath this world.

Nothing.

Only this moment in time in a world created by our music.

I’m filled by Kiera and the song that unites us. It reaches into the deepest parts of my soul, trapping me in an ecstasy I am helpless against. The notes rush to a climax, my emotions tethered to the sound. It ends too soon as shadows of the melody hold us in place until the tension is too much for me to bear. I push back from the piano and pull Kiera into a tight embrace, every nerve tingling in anticipation.

She pulls away and my heart breaks a little. Starring into my eyes, she reaches for my soul. Nothing but silence passes between us, the air burning with tension. Until, mercifully, she leans in, her lips finding mine.

The kiss lasts but a moment before the world around us shatters and Kiera disappears. “No,” I scream to the swirling landscape. “Kiera!”

Emptiness fills me—a longing impossible to quench. I survey the scene, desperate to settle my mind in this world.

Chaos and confusion continue to mingle until, in the distance, a picture starts to form. Kiera plays her violin. The same song. Every cadence, every movement, the same.

A piano appears, but it is not me that plays this time. It’s James. They sway to the music, a dance in perfect precision. Jealousy, violent and hot, radiates through me. I run towards them as the world spirals, pulling me in different directions. Harder and harder I push, desperate to end the vision. Every note of my song propels me forward, increasing the rage that scorches through me.

The music whispers its own taunts and nothing I do brings an end to the madness. My heart pounds against my ribs, as my ears fill with the sound of my torment. The song builds and tears blur my vision. An explosion of sound surrounds me as too many things happen at once.

James pulls Kiera into a tight embrace.

Their lips meet.

My soul shatters.

Mother’s voice echoes through the rage-filled spaces of my mind. “You’re dead, Ien. You’re dead. Let go now. End your misery.”

Erik joins the mayhem ravaging through me with a chorus of laughter. “She was never yours, dear brother. How could she love someone like you?”

The laughter continues, fusing together my rage, my madness, my deformity. I watch, incapable of turning away, as James and Kiera lose themselves in a kiss that burns through

my

soul…

11.

“All we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream”

~Edgar Allen Poe (A Dream With a Dream)

~

Ien opened his eyes in a rush, gasping as the last remnants of the images of James and Kiera stayed with him. He felt battered, broken, as if his insides had been turned out. He couldn’t shake the feeling that everything he had witnessed was real. Couldn’t shake the sound of his mother’s words or Erik’s laughter. He blinked once, twice, and the truth spilled out before him—he was still bound, sitting in the wheelchair in a long hallway. Two men dressed in white coats eased an older woman into a smaller wheelchair. She mumbled unintelligible words to them before she turned toward Ien. Her gaze penetrated through him, her eyes ruined from age or disease. She smiled, laughed.

The scene unraveled around Ien and an invisible force pushed him forward. More fire poured through his veins and his mind closed in on itself again.

A moment passed. Or maybe a day.

He woke, still seated in the chair. And this time he was next to a cot in a cupboard-sized room. The air smelled of antiseptic and incense. There were no adornments on the walls, none of the luxurious trappings of the life he knew. Basic necessities, nothing more.   

Mother and another woman spoke in hushed tones, unaware that he had woken. Ien stared at the woman. She was as tall as Mother, dressed in a black habit, wearing a large crucifix on her chest.

A nun.

“We are not a prison, Mrs. Montgomery. Nor are we equipped to do what you expect.” The woman’s voice was nearly as hard and as unyielding as Mother’s. In a different time, Ien would have found their exchange entertaining.

“Understood, Sister Agnes. But I believe this is the best place for him. Mr. Montgomery has already spoken with—”

“I am aware of the order. Your son will have his own room and his progress monitored. But I wouldn’t expect much. From what you’ve told me, his future is grim.”

 “Please, just heal my son.” Mother paused, her face hard. Ien looked for some sign of regret or pain, anything to indicate that she cared for him, that she had ever cared.