Brigits_Flame Feb.Week Three
Title: Penumbra
Prompt: "I Love You"
Genre: Fiction, paranormal
Rating: R
Word Count: Approx 1600
Warning: Sexuality, fairly explicit, quasi-non-consensual
The second time Rebecca felt the presence of someone in the room with her was again at dusk. There was no one physically in the great library with her, no one in the massive old house save Josie the cook, though she may have already retired to her room. Yet the sense of someone, something, there in the room with her expanded from a quiet uneasiness to a palpable awareness of the Other.
The shadows had lengthened with the coming twilight and Rebecca sat motionless in the overstuffed velvet armchair amid the dust and musty smells of the old room, her book quiet in her hands, listening, waiting.
On the mantle of the cold stone fireplace the mahogany clock ticked with a ponderous depth, its lonely, low rhythm the only sound. Too slow, it seemed to slow still more with the creeping time as Rebecca sat, ears straining to hear what some other undefined sensibility told her was present.
Outside the high, mullioned French windows the fading light of the setting sun yellowed the sky to a dull, muddy gold in the west. The afternoon rain had lifted just in time for night to fall, and the last of the feeble light slipped under the layer of iron gray clouds in one final valiant effort before darkness claimed the sky.
A sigh, a whisper of a sound moved through the room, somewhere, everywhere, as though the walls themselves had released the breath they were holding, as the last light of day slipped away.
Rebecca lifted and tilted her head, staring into the gloom, uncertain that she had heard anything at all.
Shadows crept in from behind the massive oak desk by the windows, edging in close from along the back and sides of the deep mahogany bookshelves on either side of the room, sliding down the walls from the heavy gilt-edged picture frames and the unlit candle sconces. Rebecca looked down at her book and knew she would have to light a lamp if she wanted to keep reading, but she made no move to do so.
Instead she held her breath, willing complete silence. Her heart sped up even as the clock in the mantle sounded the seconds in achingly slow, half-time beats. She didn’t feel true fear, but there was an apprehension that overlaid her inexplicable anticipation.
It occurred to her that perhaps she had been living in the old house for too long with only the company of a handful of servants. She wondered if too much solitude could produce madness, or if simply the repression of her grief might do the same. It had been nearly a year since her father had died, following her mother two years before. Rebecca never felt she had recovered from the first loss before the second one struck.
She was left in the care of an uncle who owned the old estate and staunchly refused to live there himself. For reasons of his health he maintained a cottage in Brighton where the sea air was fresher. Being something of a recluse and not particularly interested in playing surrogate parent, he had arranged for Rebecca to be moved to the old estate house to the north.
Rebecca was unwilling to dwell upon it, but the cold reality was that no one seemed to want her. She took walks in the gardens, played the long-neglected pianoforte to fill the silence, and took advantage of the vast library in the old house’s west wing.
Still, the quiet days and nights had stretched endlessly and emptily on, until she had begun to feel that the very walls were watching her.
Without knowing exactly when it had begun, she was knew she was waiting for something.
And something was there, moving invisibly through the shadows on the walls, and she knew it wanted her.
***
Late at night in her bed Rebecca faded in and out of half-waking sleep as the waning moon outside her bedroom window slipped in and out from behind the ragged clouds.
She could not be certain exactly when she first felt it, but as it grew in pressure she became aware of a presence moving onto her bed with her. It began at her feet, a gentle, slow sense of the feather mattress sinking under the weight of something unseen. There was a soft sensation between her calves, the cooling sense of the bedclothes being lifted, and then her sleeping gown being slowly drawn open, one tiny pearl button at a time.
She couldn’t move.
The pressure she had felt against her legs moved up her body, settling against her heated skin like a chill breeze. The impression of large hands moved over her, up her sides, squeezed her breasts, softly, and then harder, and then glided back down her body, sending shudders rippling through her. The unseen hands inexorably drew her legs apart. Something far, far down in the waking center of her consciousness told her to resist, but no part of her body could be willed to obey.
The hands cupped her backside, raising her hips to meet the body of another. Her breath caught. A soft sensation, warm and damp, pressed against her throat, the feeling of silky hair brushed against her cheek. She wanted to reach out, to touch, but she couldn’t do that anymore than she could escape.
A whisper of breath touched her ear; cool fingers lifted a tendril of hair from her face.
Love you…
The hardness of a man pressed against her most personal part, and she gasped. Again she found it impossible to affect her release from whatever it was that held her. With slow, remorseless thrusts, he pushed into her body. The pain was matched only by her unaccountable desire to give herself over to the one that wanted her, to feel filled by him, to surrender utterly.
Her arms, suddenly freed from the spell, came up and found themselves around his neck. Her fingers laced through his cool silky hair. She was making sounds, or so it seemed, but everything was lost in the rocking rhythm of his body driving into hers and her maddening need for something that lay just beyond her grasp.
And then it was there, a great heaving upward, exploding sweetness, jewel tones flashing through her body from its core, colors bursting behind her eyes and she was crying, gasping, mindless animal cries in the night.
In the panting, liquid afterwards he lay still upon her, his face buried deep in the warmth of her neck, his hands still grasping her body against his.
Rebecca drifted; the throb of the dull ache between her legs more satisfying than painful. She felt him withdraw, the fluid heat leave her body. A softening coolness descended over her skin, as though the window had been opened and allowed a chill breeze into her room.
She was vaguely aware that she lay across her bed akimbo, one arm thrown over her eyes, the bedclothes torn aside, and her sleep gown tangled amid them. It wasn’t proper; she was peripherally embarrassed at her state but again had not the strength, nor the will, to change things. After some little time a sense of peace, in shades of darkest midnight blue, stole over her and she fell into the deepest of sleep.
***
A day of strangely dreamy detachment followed. She ate her meals, played tinny notes on the pianoforte for a short time, and sat in the garden briefly before the cold drizzle of rain began again. After dinner she took up her book and retired to the library to read. Or wait.
Night fell, and the shadows swallowed the room. When she could no longer make out the print on the pages, Rebecca closed her book. The ticking of the clock on the mantle began once again to give the strange impression of slowing down, of the time lengthening and stretching out, like a winding ribbon between low, deep tocks.
Rebecca stood, her book sliding to the floor. Across the great room with its expanse of faded Persian rugs laid over ancient, stained wood, in the darkest corner where the unlit fireplace loomed, she sensed a beckoning. The slowing rhythm of the mantle clock seemed to call to her, to reach with unseen arms across the deepening penumbra.
Rebecca glided across the room, unaware of the movement of her legs or the sensation of the floor beneath her booted feet. She stood before the massive gray stone hearth, and reached out with one tremulous, pale hand.
A shadow moved in the wall, as though emerging from behind the stone, forming first a rough, lumpy outline and then taking the shape of a featureless man. From the flat surface the darkness bulged outward, becoming a smoky shape apart from the wall, reaching in full relief for Rebecca’s outstretched hand.
She felt the fingers close around hers, cool at first, and then warming as the hand gained solidity in hers. She felt it pull her forward, a gentle tug. Rebecca’s heart pounded.
I love you…
She took a step forward, warmed at the words that bloomed in her breast.
Love you…
Rebecca moved forward, reaching with her other hand. A second smoky shape emerged from the wall and formed another hand to take hers. They pulled her forward, gently, relentlessly, to the moving shape within the wall.
Love…
Rebecca offered no resistance; she let herself be pulled, guided, into the sheltering gloom, into the depth of obscurity and eternal unknowingness on the other side, within the wall.