Immortal Memory (Iris' Atlantis 1)

23: Locked away

Timothy

When I reached some levels of consciousness after a deep dreamless sleep, I first became aware of a familiar presence by my resting surface.

I opened my eyes blurrily with a clear intention to tell Stump to return later, preferably closer to midnight. But as I got my eyes open, there was no one with me in a dark room, just spirits, flowing from shape to shape like smoke streaming from dozens of incense sticks.

I was inside the vault where Blizzard usually slept. I was alone. I wasn't a vampire. And he had closed the vault.

As alarming as it was to find oneself locked inside an old bank vault, my first thought went to the clear presence by my bedside. I lay very still, paralyzed by the knowledge that I had killed the man who now haunted my resting place.

The only real light came inside from a small hole in the vault door. It was close to the ceiling and cast the room in deep shadows. Last night Blizzard had drilled the air hole just for me.

I swallowed.

"Stump?" I asked the silence.

No response.

I had heard my share of spook-stories of ghosts coming back to haunt the living. But the only ghost I had ever encountered had been Clover's father, and while the encounter had made my hackle rise, it wasn't because the living would have come back to life with anything tangible. Valerian Shatter Hat's ghost hadn't felt alive by any measures. It had been transparent for this sixth sense that let me perceive auras and the fluctuation of life force in humans, magical creatures and places.

And Stump I did feel. Clearly, as if he had been standing by my bedstead in flesh.

As I rose from the bed and cast my gaze around the room, the presence retreated to the back of the room. It slipped to the other side of the huge metal barricade that separated me from the rest of the world.

With no clear intention in my apprehension, I took my robe from yesterday and followed it to the door. I placed my hand onto the painted metal. I heard and felt the immense metal bars retreating inside. A slight crack emerged between the door and the frame.

I pushed open the heavy vault door and stepped into the reception area bathed in dim daylight from a cloudy sky. No lights were lit.

There was no one in this room either, just the ghost I felt by me in silence. Around us I heard now the normal everyday sounds of a small apartment building in the south west Breasinghae.

I saw the slow spiritual flow around me with an ease I didn't remember from my time as an immortal shadow of the night.

Now the question was, was I an immortal of some kind? Or just turning mad? Had I survived an explosion and woken up from a cocoon in a Forest? Was Stump here?

I turned to face the place where I could have sworn he was standing.

Sweat broke.

There was no one there, just the vault.

I drew in a slow breath. Blew it out even slower.

Once Hellebore had told me to stop breathing, when I had been a vampire. I wondered now if I could have stopped breathing then. Would I have turned back into a glass skeleton?

Suddenly, I remembered a piece of a conversation, something Stump had told me:

"Oh. Just go and drop, won't you? You're impossible to talk to otherwise. And I don't have most of the answers."