Initium (The Nocte Trilogy 2.50)

Is my pregnancy causing me to be sick?

Am I hallucinating?

I don’t know

I don’t know

I don’t know.

All I know is that every night, I see the blood. It fills my room like a great great ocean, and last night, a woman pulled herself from it. She was covered in it and wearing a silver ring.

“This is yours,” she uttered in a hoarse hoarse voice, and I’ve seen the ring before, but I can’t think of where.

I don’t take it, because I feel the energy coming from it. I feel it from here, from my bed. I close my eyes and Phillip is there, and the room is not bloody, and I am drenched in sweat.

“My heart,” he croons and he holds me, and Richard doesn’t even wake up. “My heart. It is almost time. Come to me.”

“Come to you where?” I cry. “Tell me, and I will.”

But he’s sad because he shouldn’t have to tell me. “You’ll know,” he says wisely and he’s gone, and monsters stay in his place.

Black black monsters with red eyes. Their teeth are white as they gnash in the night and glisten in the moon and I scream.

I scream and scream, and writhe and moan, and Richard never wakes up.

My mother comes, though, in the morning.

“I heard you screaming,” she tells me, and I don’t ask her how. Knowing her, she felt it in her bones.

She places her hand on my swollen tight belly and her mouth draws into a gnarled smile. “It’s almost time,” she nods. “This is almost over.”

I twist away from her touch because I can’t trust her now. I love her and she loves me, but I can’t trust her to do what is right by me. She is ruled by the stories, by her beliefs, by what she thinks is fate.

“There is no such thing as fate,” I tell her. “Your stories aren’t real, mother. The only thing that is real is us. Our babies, our lives. We determine what is real.”

She looks at me blackly and mutters under her breath. “You don’t even know what is real anymore, Olivia. That is the problem.”

I have to agree, but I don’t say it aloud. I don’t know what’s real anymore.

It’s this place.

It’s Whitley.

Or it’s my pregnancy.

Or it’s England.

Or it’s the air.

Or it’s my dreams.

I don’t know what it is. But I do know that my mind is deteriorating, and I’m floating, and the insanity is the sea, and I’m cast away in it, all alone and floating and sinking.

“I will not sink,” I tell myself as I wash my face, and as I do, my belly twinges and the pain is real. If nothing else is, the pain is.

The pain is.

The pain is.