Headful of Ghosts, pt 9

[wesleysgirl]

The hallway is long and empty and the building echoes around him. Angel can hear it breathing. He can hear everything. People on the other side of the world, speaking languages he can barely recognize, let alone understand, and he can hear them. They're trying to tell him something and he doesn't know what it is. It's important, though -- he knows that much. So he listens, and tries to understand.

He's surrounded by people. In this hallway, in his head, and all of them whispering secrets in his ears. He can't think, can't separate one voice from another. And they're all touching him, clawing at him with their fingers.

Angel makes a sound like a whimper and leans against the wall, sliding down it until he's sitting on the floor. He puts his hands over his face. Rocks back and forth, chanting under his breath to block out the sounds of the voices as they whisper inside his head. The world tilts and spins. It's wrong that he can feel it rotating. He shouldn't be able to.

A little girl pulls at Angel's arm, and he gasps and jerks away from her insubstantial fingers that are like ice, burning him with their cold.

"I can't help you," Angel says softly. "Please. I'm sorry." He repeats the same things over and over again, even though he doesn't think it will do any good. He dares a glance at the girl -- she's a tiny thing with white hair and pale skin and eyes as black as spilled ink. She leaves bloody fingerprints where she touches him.

"Please. I'm so sorry." Angel turns and crawls away from her, and when he looks back, she's gone, dissolved into the air like so much smoke.

He can hear something new now. It's a steady pulsing, a soft thudding sound that creeps inside him like the ghosts and makes him feel something that's not there, something he's missing.

It seems to take hours to walk, one hand braced against the wall, to the source of the sound, but Angel makes it. He pushes open a door. The room on the other side stretches out like a rubber band, an impossible distance that leaves him shaken. The base of his skull aches.

Slowly, Angel crosses the room to the bed, where a man lies sleeping in a crumpled heap. His hand is white, wrapped, a bird with a broken wing, his breathing shallow. Angel watches as his own fingers brush over warm skin. He hears a gentle murmur that suddenly silences everything else in his head; the silence is so unexpected that it feels like going deaf, and the relief leaves Angel weak-kneed and dizzy. He sits on the bed, frowning and watching the sleeping man, trying to figure out why the man looks so familiar. Is this a dream? Has he dreamt it before?

The smell of blood is faint, but Angel can't ignore it. He leans in and inhales, and the scent of it makes his mouth water. "Who are you?" he whispers, but the man on the bed doesn't answer.

Angel doesn't know if this is real.

Comments

[mpoetess.livejournal.com]

Cre. Pee. You give good haunted.