BatB, Last Day of my Old Life

You shall have to forgive the pause between my last entry and this one.  
As it stands, the free time my husband and I have is…limited at best.  The last time I was writing we were both called away quite abruptly.  It was very ‘drop everything and run” if you will.
I will speak no more of this, you and I reader were in the middle of something.


My sister’s hand was clenched within the fist of a cloaked and masked madman far larger than both her and I put together.  A madman with some god-awful capacity for making things happen I couldn’t understand.  I stood in the midst of all this calamity trying to find some way to stop it, but how was I supposed to do that when I was a small, slow moving girl with nothing on my side.  No weapons, no strength.  No shoes even.

But sometimes, even in the deepest of darkness a spark can be lit. Mine happened to be a silly, irrational little spark, but that’s that.  It was a stupid plan, lacking even a kind of basic reason.  But when you’re desperate, you’re desperate, and you’ll grasp at anything that presents itself.  

I had glanced around my father’s dusty, cramped office, my eyes zipping about the tight space, but finding no ally.  Finally I glanced over my shoulder and found a small glass figurine, one of those cheap little things that is meant to look expensive by virtue of borrowing heavily from Roccoco design.  It depicted a small, naïve and innocent looking shepherdess with two wooly little lambs at her feet.  Normally, I would have been attracted to such a frothy little thing, but I had no time to debate whether or not an item could be sacrificed based on how aesthetically pleasing it was.   It would do nothing as a weapon, but it might serve me well as a distraction…

I snatched at it and flung it down hard upon my father’s heavy desk, just some short space away from the book that lay like a mouth waiting to eat my sister’s hand.  It shattered all about us with an angry, crystalline chime, fragments blasting all about the cramped space, striking everyone and everything.  A few bitter shards bit into my fore arm as I shielded my eyes from the blast.  I’m sure Chloe was hit too, but I really wasn’t thinking about that.   I was thinking about the man, and hoping, hoping that the glass went into his eyes, flew into his mouth, made him bleed so profusely that he wouldn’t be able to do whatever it was he was doing.  
There were a few moments of chaos following the sharp snap of the figurine against the table.   I heard the man snarl, a fierce angry sound that no human should be able to make, as he stumbled backwards into a bookshelf against the farthest wall.  Scraping beneath his hood at eyes I couldn’t see with his massive, gloved hands.  As he hit the wall, several glossy covered books fell from their place and scattered about his feet.
As soon as he had lost the grip he had on my sisters hand, Chloe had scampered to the door and now fumbled with the lock as best she could.  She appeared to be fine aside from a few red lines, I can only suppose she saw me fling down the figure before it hit and had been quick enough to shield her face with her free hand.  Her small hands slipped against the lock and couldn’t manage a good grip upon it.  It hadn’t opened for me, and it wasn’t going to open for her, I assumed, until the man who had forced it shut left or decided to open it.  
And then there was me, the instigator of all this disarray.  I scrambled over broken shards pressing some into my feet in the process, but my adrenaline ran fierce and wild in my veins and I didn’t feel the pain as acutely as I normally would have.  I took up my sisters’ place, snatched up the pen and looked down into the age-stained and crumbling pages of the book.  Words sprang up like the voices of ghosts.
Franklin William Tesla
Johann Alexandre van Fiersen
Emile Alain Bernot
Sarah Boyden
Francine Jennifer McDermott
Allen Michael Andrews
There were other names listed besides, some I could read, others I could not, in a varied cornucopia of rushed scripts. There were letters written that I had never seen before and have never seen again.  On occasion there was a hasty X or ink covered thumbprint.  The inks were all different, even if only in slight ways, but all were old.  This was a record of the people whose lives had been altered by this book, the strangers from foreign lands and different times who shared the single, unfortunate commonality of having to place their name inside of it.  What it all meant, I could only assume back then, but it read like a list of prisoners.  This must have been what the man was trying to force my sister to do, sign her name away.  There was script at the top of the page, written boldly and elegantly long before any of the names and embellished like an illuminated text from a dream.  It must have stated the purpose of the signing, but I couldn’t understand its arabesque letters.  I imagined that it had to translate to something like, “sign here and be taken away”, or “all thee condemned must sign below.”  
“Sneaky little viper!” I heard the man spit, the fingers of his gloves were smeared and speckled with blood, but if he was cognizant enough to see what it was I had done he must have gotten rid of the most troublesome bits of glass by then.
“Put down that pen you idiot!  You have no clue what your doing!”
He lunged for me, but I snatched a handful of broken glass from the table top and flung it at him.  He turned his head this time, but it gave me the few moments I needed to do what it was I needed to do.  

I flung my hand down against the page and in a hasty, sloppy line signed down the letters that would change everything I knew.
C  o  s  e  t  t  e          M  a  r  i  a  h              D  a  w  e  s

“You fool!  You utter and total fool!  Do you realize what you’ve done?”  The man bellowed.
I had barely finished signing the last ‘s’ of my name when warm, slick fingers clawed my shoulders and spun me around.  Hot, angry puffs of breath beat against my face, I stared up into his hooded face but saw nothing.  Not even the vague outline of a head.  It was as though this man, this creature had a black pit to substitute for a face.  I couldn’t see his eyes, or if he even had any, but I could feel them drilling into mine, seething with a burning hate.  He didn’t say anything, and neither did I.  Words had fluttered out of my head like a flock of nervous birds the moment he touched me and I stood there stone still waiting for him to make a move, and fearing that at any moment his empty hood would fall back to reveal nothing else but an exaggerated mouth, split from ear to ear and ready to take off my head.
Soon, his breathing calmed, and he loosened his grip.  I still stood in the rigid stance I’d been in the past few minutes.
“You want to play at being the hero, all right then.  You have 15 minutes to pack, and then were leaving.  I shall be waiting here.  Don’t try any of your ‘antics’.  Know that if you run I can track you down in moments.  There is nothing I won’t do to see my task is carried out.”
“What will happen to me,” I said quietly.
“I don’t know,” he replied, “But I doubt it will be anything pleasant.”  His words were a stern, deep, staccato ringing in my head.  A cadence to which I thought my life would end.  I nodded dumbly and turned to the door, walking over glass that my pounding heart still wouldn’t allow me to feel.
I had purchased my sisters life with my own.  
Chloe stood dumbfounded and speechless at the still locked doors; she began stammering something, and wrapped her arms around my middle, crying into me.  But I didn’t hear her voice.  I don’t think she let go or even stopped weeping her apologies and pleas for me to run the rest of the time I had left.  
We came to the doors and they opened before us in a calm sweep.  I turned back to see the man slowly lowering his hand.  He hadn’t moved from the spot where we had both stood together moments before.
The next fifteen minutes are something of a blur in my mind, but I remember at least a few things.  I picked up the phone once to call the police, but there was only static on the line.  A trick from the demon that stood waiting in my father’s library I assume.  I tried the windows but, like the door in the library, they were locked and refused to open.  There was nowhere I could have run even if I did get out of the house, save for the massive forest outside of it.  The closest town was a ten minute drive away.  
I picked up my empty school backpack and put only a few things inside of it.  I remember expecting to die, especially in consideration of the last words the man had spoken to me.  Things I couldn’t really understand had just occurred, dangerous, frightening things.  A lunatic was waiting for me downstairs to take me God knows where, for God knows what.  Most of the things I brought were sentimental.  I only brought two pairs of clothes and a nightshirt.  If I was going to die, possibly alone and definitely in a strange place, I wanted the things that would comfort me.  
Chloe helped me quickly take the glass out of my feet, and cried even harder when she saw all of my blood.  I slid my feet into shoes, strapped on my back pack and headed back towards the library.  As we neared the heavy mahogany doors I had known and loved all my life my sister blurted out through her tears.  
“Cosette, I’m sorry, I love you.”
I turned and looked at her and found myself crying just a little as well.  I nodded my head before brushing my fingers through her short, wiry black hair and whispering back “Love you too, Chloe.”
I opened the door and entered alone.
My life as I knew it had just ended.