Sister Quatro (Scenes 3-8)
3
Several turns later through the hallways, Madison knew she had lost her way back to her sisters. Every hallway she passed seemed the same, just row after row of mirrors and doors in perfect maddening symmetry, just to thwart the intentions of one bratty sister.
She cursed (“Damn it!”), then let out a sigh and said, "I'll have to talk with Kathy about this place." Yet after continuing down yet another hallway without any sign of where she was and now wishing she had brought a compass with her, she cursed again at the futility of using it, saying, “Damn it, why does it have to be like this?”
This place was a part of the Phantom Realms, after all, and real-world compasses and maps need not apply in this place. For all she knew, north could be south, and up could be down, and left could be right, and right could be left, and everything she saw in this mansion may as well be up the constipated woozle hole of Kathy's imagination.
Even so, she kept turning right at every corner till she reached a side hallway that she hoped would lead to the inclined passageway towards the grand staircase, so she looked for any gradation (no matter how slight) in the wear of the carpet. Then the myth of the Minotaur flashed through her mind, and she cursed yet again for forgetting to bring a marker to write directions on the wall; at this point, she was willing to endure one of Katherine's tirades if vandalizing one of her walls meant getting out of this place. Then her smartphone entered her mind, and she dug her hands into the pockets of her jeans but found them empty except for her wallet, and she cursed again (“Damn it all!”), because she had probably put her phone in the pocket of her jacket, then cursed yet (“Damn it, give me break!”), because Katherine made her remove her jacket before entering the door. Then her father's big ring of keys flashed through her mind, and hope fluttered through her heart when she could use one of the keys to get out of here, but she cursed over Katherine taking them with her (“Damn it, this sucks ass!”). Coincidences kept dogging her through the awful chain of mishaps passing through her mind, and all of it had started with that damn phone call from Katherine over what Celia did.
It was always 'Celia did this,' or 'Celia did that,' and Madison had to share the burden with Katherine over crap outside of her control. Thus, she had canceled another date with another guy she had promised to go out with in the park earlier this afternoon, and now it was this monstrosity of a pickle, yet another turn of a vicious cycle. For all she knew, Celia would be going out with her date, and Katherine would be hounding her over getting lost in her dream realm again, and Madison had nothing to say but to curse over and over like a broken record.
She then let out yet another sigh and looked up at the ceiling and said to air, "What else do you have up your sleeve, huh? I swear, I was born in the wrong fucking family!"
And so she trudged onwards through the hallways with no end in sight, simmering in today's miseries till they became cliches, when another thought flashed through her mind. A heinous act fluttered on the edge of action, on the edge of a thoughtful possibility, and she stood before one of the myriad mirrors and looked at her reflection. A mischievous smile curled up her face in the mirror, and she placed her hand on the mirror's surface, kicking herself for not seeing it sooner.
She could just break one mirror, and Katherine would know where to get her, and Madison could tell her about the bloodstained carpet in the hallway.
Then she cursed again.
“God, damn it, really? Really?” she said.
If Madison had just kept her cool and stayed where she was and broken the damn mirror where the blood stain was, she would've already warned her sisters long ago, and they would already be out of here, and Madison would be in her room plotting revenge on Celia right now.
But she thought about it, first. Breaking mirrors caused seven years of bad luck, but given the state of her misery now, she guessed that she had already endured seven years of it in the seven wretched hours of today from writing up yet another last-minute paper for class to waiting in the park for two hours for a truant date to the blasted phone call from Katherine and Celia's subsequent trolling.
With this in mind, she checked her watch and was disappointed. It had only been six hours since her professor assigned her that paper topic before her class ended at 11:15 a.m., and now it was barely 5:10 p.m. "One more hour of this hell," she said to herself, "and I'll have every damn reason to break these mirrors, Kathy be damned!"
But then she spotted one ahead of her and gasped.
She darted towards it in disbelief. The mirror was broken into a spider’s web of cracks, and on closer inspection, she found blood seeping through the center of it.
She raised her hand to it and felt the same traces of that man in the white suit and black gloves with the sardonic smile reverberating through her head. But this time, another person's presence now accompanied him, a girl’s presence.
"What's going on here?" she said.
She looked at the cracks in the center caked over with blood, then ran the fingers of her other hand on the larger shards near the edges of the mirror. And in the reflection of one of those shards, she saw a girl with bobbed dark hair at the end of the hallway looking at her.
Madison turned and saw nobody at the end of the hallway, and even when she ran down to the end of it and looked both ways along the adjoining hallway crossing it, she saw no sign of the girl anywhere.
4
Nico's first conscious thoughts were a continuation of what she had shared with her sister many times in their nighttime kissing games in their bedroom, till it changed into something she wanted to forget but couldn’t. In that dream, she was hugging and kissing Mara and fondling her breasts, making love to her sister the way she had always done, till Mara’s face morphed into the face of the 'bambina' girl, yet something about her eyes seemed different. Unlike the ‘bambina’ girl with the blank expression and eyes, this 'bambina' girl had roving predatory eyes like those of a she-wolf. And what’s more, this ‘bambina’ girl was much rougher than she had ever been on Mara on their night of sweet punishment, grabbing her hands and holding her down and planting suffocating kisses on her mouth and going down her body with kisses and pinches, till she reached her pubic hairs and pleasured her the way Mara had done, first with her fingers and then with her . . .
Through it all, even as her mind blanked out at that moment, Nico's worst impression (beyond doing it with another girl) was that she was enjoying it.
5
The ‘bambina’ bore witness to yet another atrocity that Rancaster was now committing over this hollowed-out vessel of a girl, this pitiful specimen of humanity, this girl she knew nothing about save for what had been said about her. Rancaster was on top of her again, stiff-arming her onto the ground with a five-pointed star tracing itself over her stomach and another seal of black roses inscribing Mara’s body on the grounds of the square. He then bent over Mara’s face and repeated the spell, consummating it once again through a lip-locked enchantment of a wayward Prince over a Sleeping Beauty.
The ‘bambina’ squirmed at the sight and looked away, or attempted to look away, yet something inside her kept her gaze on the atrocity. Something had been eating away at her since she had watched Nico’s death on Rancaster’s stage, something inside her that was yearning to get out, something that was keeping her entranced at the atrocity before her.
Whatever was budding inside her was now in the process of keeping her entranced upon the violation of another girl, though her rational faculties were screaming at her to look away. She wanted to, by God, she wanted to avert her eyes, but she couldn’t. For the life of her, she couldn’t!
So she did the next best thing: she closed her eyes.
And for a few moments, the action worked, and her nerves calmed down a bit, and her breathing smoothed out into even exhalations of relief, till a mirror appeared before her in the darkness of her mind.
She peered at that reflection of herself, till the reflection smiled and said, “Hello, girl-character.”
“Who are you?” the ‘bambina’ said.
“I’m you,” she said, “but only when you’re not looking.”
The ‘bambina’ opened her eyes and found herself aiming her gun at Rancaster’s back after he had finished his spell over Mara, gripping her gun in a two-handed grip. Yet just as she put her finger on the trigger, a psychic hold clamped over her hand and kept her from shooting.
“Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, bambina,” Rancaster said, looking back over his shoulder at her. “And you can’t shoot me with an empty gun now, can you?”
The ‘bambina’ cried.
6
When Nico woke up, she woke up screaming at the sight of the same Rancaster hovering over her head after he had completed his blood seal over Mara's body and taken his hand off of her stomach. Her lips were now clammy and cold with his saliva evaporating in the nighttime chill. Her mouth felt violated after the consummation of the God-awful spell, and her throat felt sore, and her breathing was labored, and her voice came out coughing and hoarse. She wanted to throw up but felt as though the contents of her stomach had been squeezed dry, now only aching and growling for something to sate itself. How long since she had last eaten, she could only guess, and with the way her stomach rumbled and lurched and heaved, she may as well have been starving for a week.
She was still breathing, but she wanted to cry herself to sleep after the horror of witnessing Mara suffer and her parents die, after getting shot at and bleeding out onto the floor, and after witnessing and experiencing that bastard's elongating tongue snaking down Mara's gullet not just once but twice. At all these collective traumas, Nico broke down and cried where she lay in the center of the square, turning onto her side and pulling up her knees to her stomach and folding her arms over it and squinting her eyes in a grimace of tears.
And for a time she cried, in which nothing else mattered but the present moment. Her mind was still processing what had been done to her, still assimilating it into the depths of her subconscious mind, where it surged and tossed and frothed like a storm in the middle of an ocean, till little by little, it began to settle into a dead stillness.
When Nico calmed herself down, still lying on her side, she opened her eyes but avoided looking at Rancaster's face and only looked up at the girl who had shot her.
And even this 'bambina' girl, looking down at her with that expressionless face, seemed to lighten up with something resembling pity or maybe even mercy with the hint of tears that had been wiped away. This girl turned away and walked towards the table that held both guns, one empty of bullets and the other one with its magazine still full.
The girl placed her hand over the unused gun and said to Rancaster, "May I, Father?”
The man looked down at the sniffling specimen of humanity and nodded his head. He had successfully imprinted his spell over Mara, his spell tingling over her astral form, but Nico still managed to block him from completely taking over Mara’s psyche. As long as Nico held out, however long that would be, there was nothing that he could do to make Nico’s beloved Mara his.
“Yes, you may,” the man said.
So the 'bambina' picked up the gun with one round already in the barrel and aimed it at Nico's head, perhaps as a show of mercy to a beaten and violated girl.
The ‘bambina’ looked down at Nico and said, “I’m sorry,” and she fired a round through her head.
Though the shot made no mark on Mara’s forehead, it severed Nico’s connection with Mara, sending Mara deeper into slow-wave sleep and pushing Nico into a free fall through Mara's subconscious mind.
7
The 'bambina' relinquished her gun in Rancaster's waiting hand, who put it back on the table.
Then he walked over to Mara's still form, kneeled on one knee, and again placed his hand over Mara's stomach for another attempt, crossing into Nico's psychic barrier, but the psychic pressure waves still resisted his entry. He kept pressing and digging with all his will, sinking deeper and deeper through the barrier shielding Mara's mind, but it proved too strong for him, even now with Nico’s psychic influence dispelled from Mara’s astral form.
Despite his efforts, another psychic blast blew Rancaster off, forcing him back a few feet amid a tsunami of energy flowing through the air and spilling over the grounds of the square. Then the ground beneath Mara's body glowed in a seal of red roses circumscribing her in its wake, and an enormous red rose opened and pillowed her body in its luxurious petals, then closed over her and sank through the ground and into the underground below the square.
“Damn that meddling brat!” Rancaster said.
The 'bambina' winced at his use of foul language and said, "Did I do anything wrong?"
"No," he said, walking over to her and ruffling her hair with his hand. “I know tonight’s been difficult for you, bambina, and I apologize for that, but for what it’s worth, you made me proud tonight. Remember that.”
The 'bambina' tried to manage a smile, yet failing that, she turned and walked away from him, leaving the square.
“Where are you going, darling?” he said.
“Leave me alone,” she said.
8
All the while, Nico (still clinging to Mara's astral form through sheer force of will) fell through the tunnel of forgotten dreams and landed in the garden area of the sukiya-zukuri mansion, wherein Colbie and Celia were playing with Kendra last night, and she rocked the grounds and their mansion, relinquishing her hold onto her sister on impact. She now hovered above Mara’s body in the crater, then looked over from a bird's-eye-view at the mansion and heard girls’ voices and then an echo of a slap disturbing the stillness of the air and another flurry of girls’ voices coming from the mansion.
Then she saw Kendra exiting the building and going into the garden where Nico had left Mara's form in the big crater, then calling out to her friends. And for the next several moments, Nico watched the proceedings as Colbie exited the mansion and helped Kendra carry Mara into the building, Nico following overhead and entering the mansion. There Nico saw three girls helping her sister to wake up, but when she saw Mara manifesting her psychokinesis and blasting Celia and Kendra against the walls and leaving Colbie struggling against her buffeting psychic waves, Nico had seen enough.
Their actions rekindled her hopes and strengthened her resolve, so when the whole house shook with Mara's rage, pulsing through the space with the anguish of her voice, with the fury in her eyes, with the hatred in her soul, with the beating of her heart that was slowly breaking . . .
And shattering . . .
And dying . . .
And dissipating into nothing—
In that solemn void, Nico's voice rang out across the Astral Plane . . .
