Chapter 7-Constance

~*Chapter 7-Constance*~

I remembered the pain as if it had only ransacked my body moments ago; it was like nothing I had ever seen before. Not once in my life had I felt any sort of pain until that moment, and not once have I felt any sort of pain since.

It had been almost like being trapped inside of a furnace; it had almost been like being trapped inside of an iron maiden. It had been almost like my entire body was being cleaved in two, while bits and pieces of myself splintered off like wood. It had been almost like being completely submerged in frigid water, and then getting sucked under the ice to where I could not get back up. It had been almost like death. Death in a million and one ways, hitting me all at once, tearing me apart, strangling me slowly and painfully until I succumbed. Mother told me that I did not move so much as a centimeter until after my birthday. I had just lain there in the middle of the floor, eyes clenched shut against the agony. But no matter how much effort I put into keeping the torture at bay, it still found its way inside, flowing freely, bringing anguish to each part of my body before finally settling at my heart.

Once having exhausted its ability to inflict suffering on the rest of my body, it instead turned to hacking away at my heart; I could not even fathom what this bit felt like. It was both scalding hot and icy cold; it was both too heavy to shake off and too light to focus in on. I felt as though it simultaneously came from both the outside of my body and the inside. It made me want to take in a gasp of breath, but it also made me never want to breathe again. It was a curious sensation, pain. Especially pain as intense and brutal as it was. I would never forget it.

There were reminders of the agony that I endured all around me; my skin was colder than the frost on the outside of a window in the morning, my heart refused to beat, and, for over a century, I have been sixteen years old.

I have never aged a day since my sixteenth birthday. I was perpetually stuck inside of this teenaged shell of a body, forced to put myself through the monotony of daily life, wondering when it would end and, when it did, if I would be able to give up my existence peacefully. I lived each day as if I was a resurrected corpse that had been trained to put up with the drudgery of immortal life, constantly waiting for an out. I could not taste food, I could not sleep, and I could not ever grow any older than sixteen. I could not feel the changes in the weather that constitute the four seasons; I could not shed a single tear; I could not feel pain. I was caught between the two stages of existence:  life and death. I could not die, therefore I could not live. I was a Victus Mortuus – one of the living dead.

I had no idea if I was the only Victus Mortuus out there, but I assumed that I must be, for I could not come up with a viable reason for this problem of mine. I do not mean for it to seem as though I did not try; I spent the better part of ninety years attempting to coax answers from the condition itself, which was rather difficult, seeing as I had no other known cases of Victus Mortuus to take into consideration when forming a hypothesis. I certainly could not look for any sort of trend, since I was the only Victus Mortuus on earth for all I knew. This made my experiments quite open-ended, theory after theory being continually rebuffed due to my lack of initial data. After all, only so much information could be gleaned from myself alone.

I had come to one conclusion, however:  Victus Mortuus is not something that can be acquired. One must be born with it; the qualities that accompany the condition – immortality, superhuman abilities and senses, beyond impressive intellect – are innate. It was all genetic, spelled out in one’s own personal set of chromosomes. There was something in the human genome that allowed this disorder to exist, and I was determined to know exactly what that something was. The only problem was that I was no closer to discovering this secret locked away within the impenetrable vaults of my own DNA than I was to reaching the end of my existence.

This is why I went running sometimes; I would simply leave the house barefoot and tear off through the forest behind my house, legs moving so fast that they were blurs, feet silently pounding the ground for only a fraction of a second at a time. I ran because I needed to clear my mind. I ran because I had nothing else to think about when speeding through the dense undergrowth at breakneck speed, and it gave me the opportunity to concentrate on my condition. More importantly, it gave me an opportunity to concentrate on finding a reason for my condition.

As soon as I had taken that sheet of paper from my pocket and looked once more at the red scribbles that adorned it proudly, I had known that it was a good time for a run. I needed to get all thoughts of anything save for my condition from my mind, and I needed to instead focus my time and energy on finding a cure.

But before I could set about solving it, I needed to know what caused the problem.

So I ran.

~*~

I had no clue as to how long I was gone, but by the time I arrived back at home, Celeste’s ride was pulling out of the driveway. Celeste was out on the front porch waving one last goodbye to her friend in the blue Camry – Janelle, I think, was her name – with her arms wrapped tightly around her petite body to keep in as much warmth as she could. As I walked around to the front of the house to where she could see me, her pretty face smiled at me. She then gave her head one small jerk toward the front door, indicating that she was cold and was going inside, and that I should follow as well, because she wished to have a word with me.

Once we were inside the house, I set about making a fire in the fireplace, seeing as Celeste was still rather chilled. She had not removed her wool coat since I had seen her on the porch. The remnants of winter were just as harsh as winter itself, and she, being so small and fair, had little physical tolerance for them. So, I took firewood down from our small stack and settled it within the grate, laying newspaper on top and crumpled beneath. I then pulled a book of matches from the box on the bookshelf in which we kept them, struck it, and lit the newspaper. The newspaper would ignite the log in its own time, but for now, the paper itself curled up, falling into black ashes as the flame ate it.

I checked the time on my silver pocket watch. Seven fifty-three and sixteen seconds.

“Thanks, Cons,” Celeste said, pulling a footstool up before the fire and warming her hands in its balmy heat. I nodded my “You’re welcome,” and took a seat on the sofa behind her.

After a few minutes, she turned around on the hassock to face me (and I guessed to warm her back as well).

“So,” she began, as she usually began conversations, “What were you doing around the back on the house in weather like this?”

Without missing a beat, I said, “Bringing in more firewood.”

“But you didn’t have any when I first saw you,” she said.

“I know. I was taking it in the back door, and I went back for a second armful, and the sight of you made me forget to actually get the wood.”

Luckily, Celeste was not the observant type to notice that the stack of wood by our grate had not grown at all since this morning, or that I had not been wearing shoes when she had first seen me. At this point in my relationship with her, I knew quite well what I could and could not get away with in terms of explaining some of the stranger things that I do on occasion.

She considered this for a second, and then said, “Okay. How was your day at school?”

Dull, I thought. Dull as per usual. “Fine,” I said aloud.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I answered.

This was routine for us. Every day when I came home from school, Celeste would ask me, always in the same tone of voice (polite, but also mildly curious) how my day at school was. And I would always answer in the same tone (polite, but also mildly bored) that it had been fine. Then, she would ask what had happened, to which I always replied, “Nothing,” whether something of interest had actually occurred or not.

“How was the mall?” I asked, more out of courtesy than actual interest. I did not care what went on in her life, so long as she managed to keep hers separate from mine. When she started prying into my personal affairs, then something would have to be done for me to regain my privacy. But, Celeste too had learned some things about me in the year and a half that we have lived together; one of those things was that I did not like to be bothered. So, as much as she might have been longing to ask more about my school days and other such matters, she refrained out of respect from me and my own personal wishes, and, for which, I was extremely grateful.

I honestly did not care one way or another; if she wanted to stick her little pixy nose in where it did not belong, then her pixy nose would get snubbed and snubbed until it went back to its original, proper place:  far from mine. I had no problem with giving her what was coming to her if she chose to pry, but I generally liked Celeste, and I did not want to have to keep her in line if I did not have to. I had been prepared to step on toes if it meant that she would back up into her appropriate place; she simply made it so that I did not have to.

I only half-listened as she told me all about her shopping, waiting for her to finish so that I could leave. She eventually drew her lengthy story to a close, at which point, I faked a yawn and headed off toward the stairs to my room.

The woods outside my window were quiet, barely making so much as a whisper as the wind softly swept over the branches and little animals scampered through the undergrowth. The sky was a beautiful, inky black, peppered here and there with stars that looked smaller than flecks of dust on a dark piece of swarthy satin. It was picturesque.

I sat down at my vanity and picked up my hairbrush, fingering my hair critically. As I ran the brush through my hair, I tried my hardest to empty my mind of all things except the feeling of the bristles on my scalp. It was no small feat, seeing as my mind was vast enough to comprehend anything of value.

After a while, I had lulled myself into a half-daze (a condition in which I was fully conscious and aware of everything going on around me, but I simply did not respond to it). The repetitive and rhythmic pull of the brush through my hair was incredibly mollifying. My body seemed to shut itself to the outside world, causing it all to sound and seem as it if was under water. I would not allow myself to hear anything, see anything, feel anything, or smell anything acutely; everything was dulled down to the point of it all seeming distant and smoky, like none of it was happening at all, but I was merely conjouring it up as I went.

So I sat there, in my own little vacuum at my vanity, waiting for something to get my attention.

Suddenly, I felt eyes watching me from outside my window.

These eyes were not frightening in the least; in fact, they felt kind, like I knew them from somewhere. They did not watch me with any intent at all save for the simple one of only laying a gaze on me once more. The eyes looked at me as though I was a ghost from the past, someone they had known and trusted, come back now purely for those eyes to see again a face that they thought to be lost forever. I could sense the expression of pleasant disbelief in them as I sat brushing my hair, not even turning to look out of my window. I could sense their colour, even. They were green. A bright emerald green that glittered only more when he laughed than they did in the sun.

Before I could even think of the name that was paired with these entirely unique eyes, before I could even reason as to how he could possibly have gotten here, before I could even get a handle on my sudden rush of nostalgic emotion, I did something that I hadn’t sincerely done in a very long time.

I smiled.