I've started writing a new story and I would like any feedback about my first two chapters. They're sort of long so if you don't feel like reading everything could you just critique as much as you can. Remember: I can't learn unless you tell me exactly what I do wrong so in other words... tear me apart!
Thank you so much!
“There’s nothing to be afraid of, Lily.” My mother told me one night as she gently pushed me back up the stairs. I buried my face into her silk robe, tears soaking through to her stomach.
“Mama, please! Please!” I cried, pushing against the carpeted steps with my bare feet as she tried to push me forward. “Please let me sleep with you and daddy tonight!”
“Now, now, if we let you sleep with us one night what’s to keep you from sleeping with us the next night? And the next night? And the next night?” My father had scooped me up into his thick arms and was carrying me upstairs. I tried desperately to wiggle out of his grasp but he held onto me with a grip tighter than death.
“Really Peter,” I heard my mother call from the bottom of the stairwell. “She’s just a little girl. I don’t see the harm in letting her sleep with us just this once.”
My father continued walking upstairs, reaching the spacious landing of dark mahogany floors. I recall looking over his shoulder, eyes blurry with unshed tears, and looking out of the ceiling-to-floor windows that made up the walls of the landing. The great Magnolias trembled in the cold night air, every so often revealing the thin white sliver of a moon. I trembled more violently than the Magnolias, not from the cold but from fear.
“Exactly Marian, you don’t see the harm in letting her sleep in our bedroom, but I do.” The psycho-analyst in my father was shining through by his tone. “She has to face her fears. If we allow her to act out her fears in this manner then she will grow to believe that there is a reason to be afraid. Unless we force her to face what is bothering her she will continue to believe in “vampires”.” Disgust dripped from his tone when he spoke “vampires”.
I was wailing now. We were nearing the end of the landing where one of the windows was replaced by a large mahogany door.
“Please, daddy! Please!” I shrieked until my face became hot from the force of my voice. “I don’t believe in vampires, daddy! Please don’t make me go in there! Daddy, please!” I was scrambling to get away from him. The door was looming closer. It appeared to him as a normal bedroom door. To me, it was the door to meet my death. “Please!” I screamed. My mother was standing at the opposite side of the landing, closest to the stairs. She clutched the neck of her silk robe. I stretched my arms out over my father’s shoulders to her in one final attempt for mercy. She looked away as I was placed in my bed.
My bedroom was lavish by anyone’s standards, made more so by the fact that I was only five years old. Monet’s lined the walls of expensive Italian wallpaper, a down-comforter of burgundy satin sat atop my Queen-sized four-poster bed, and matching sheer burgundy curtains over the only window in the room. Unlike the landing just outside of my door, there were no windows save for that one large awning-type opening with a bench at its base. The window swung open on its hinged side causing me to jump back into my father’s arms. His body was like the trunk of a tree, hard and unyielding.
“Lily.” His voice softened. “Lily, look at me when I’m speaking to you.”
I looked up, my arms still wrapped around his trunk. Tears were falling to their own accord but I made no sound. With his thick index finger, he brushed a tear from my cheek. I looked away, ashamed of the tears that coursed down my cheeks.
“Look at me.” I focused harder on the white marble floors, made gray by the lack of light. “Lilith Vindexa, look at me when I’m speaking to you.”
I looked up into his face. He paused, then after he was sure I was listening he continued speaking. “It’s just the wind. The wind pushed your window open and look at you now,” His tone was suddenly lined with sharp barbs that tore at my skin, “You’re trembling like a leaf because of the wind. You are a Vindexa. Fear is no friend of a Vindexa.” He dropped to his knees so that we were face-to-face. Placing the palms of his hands on either side of my face, he used his thumbs to smudge the tears away. “But above all, a Vindexa does not cry. You are a Vindexa, are you not?”
I nodded my head. “Of course you are,” His face softened as he looked upon mine, “You have our eyes.” He paused for a moment, his snowy-blue eyes clouding over in thought. A smile cracked upon his lips. “Into bed with you.”
I obeyed but drug my feet across the marble as I did. The bed was so high that I had to hold onto one of the four posts to get up. My father pulled the satin comforter down and I jumped underneath, shivering from the icy satin licking at my skin. My father leaned down and kissed my forehead.
My mother appeared behind him, a great smile upon her full lips. “Goodnight sweet-cheeks.” She tucked the comforter around my body then kissed me. My father was waiting for her inside of the doorway when she leaned beside me and slipped something cold in my hand.
“God is infallible.” She whispered into my ear, “Stand with him and he will always protect you.” With those words of comfort I tightened my hand around the cold object and watched her close my bedroom door. I was immediately swathed in total dark.
I turned onto my side, away from the door and towards my window where a ray of faint moonlight shone onto the marble. I focused on that light as I tried to steady my rampant breathing. It was as if I someone had closed my throat, so heavy was my breathing. I looked away from the light and into my hand. Through the dark I made out the faint outline of my mother’s rosary. My breathing returned to normal.
God is infallible. Stand with him and he will always protect you. I repeated my mother’s words in my head to keep my calm. I looked back at the moonlight glistening on the marble. Suddenly, the moonlight changed shape. It was as if someone had been blocking it but had moved back into the darkness. My breath ceased completely. From the far corner of my room I heard someone begin to mimic the heavy breaths that had been wrenched from my own lungs moments earlier. My pulse quickened. I looked to the corner from where I thought the breathing had originated from. As my eyes began to adjust to the lack of light I was able to make out the figure of a person hunched over in the corner. As soon as I had spotted them, their breathing stopped and they fell to the floor. Because of the extreme height of my bed I wasn’t able to see the being as it crawled on all fours, across the floor. Although I couldn’t see it, I could hear the horrible scratching as it used its nails to creep closer towards my bed. Closer, closer, still it came.
All was silent. I had been frozen but abruptly my heart began to pulse, just in time for me to throw the comforter over my head. The heavy breathing began again, only this time it was closer and accompanied by an odor similar to dirt. The odor became so strong that I nearly choked. I squeezed my eyelids shut, clenching the rosary tight in my palm.
The breathing ceased. The odor was still as strong as ever but at least that horrible breathing had stopped. Slowly, I pulled the comforter down. I pulled it down just past my bottom lash as I tried to look around for the figure. It was nowhere in sight. I let out a sigh of blessed relief.
“God is infallible. Stand with him and he-”
“-Will fuck you over.” A man’s voice in my ear cut me off. Laughter rang from what seemed like a group of men and women in my room. My neck snapped to the side. To my absolute horror, a man’s face was inches beside mine lying on my pillow, in my bed. He smiled, revealing two abnormally long canines. I screamed and jumped out of the bed. I ran to the door but from the darkness hands grabbed my petite frame and kept me from reaching it.
“Daddy! Daddy!” I screamed as I fought like a wild animal to get away from the hands.
“Daddy, daddy!” Another man’s voice mimicked mine, his voice cracking from the effort of being so high-pitched. “Daddy is a little, oh, how do you say it? Tied up at the moment?”
Those from the dark laughed. As if on key I heard my father yelling downstairs. Something heavy had fallen, followed by my mother’s terrified screams.
“Mama!” I struggled even more violently at hearing her screams. The group of people in my room found my struggle uproariously funny. Some of the hands dropped away so that only one pair held onto me. I could barely see their outline but nevertheless I pressed the rosary against them. He screeched and dropped his hands, falling away from me.
“A cross! That little wretch has a cross!” I heard him yell as I ran to my door. I had it open when the man I had seen in my bed grabbed me and threw me under his arm.
He turned back and barked at the figure writhing like a worm on my bedroom floor. “Get up, you imbecile. Crosses can’t hurt you!” The figure continued to writhe around. The man walked over and kicked him soundly in the gut. “I said get up!”
“Yes, Christian.” The writhing figure spoke sheepishly, then stood and stepped back against the wall with a group of others. “What are you going to do with the little girl? Can I have her? I rather fancy the taste of little children.”
“Damien wants her. None of us are to touch her.” Christian spoke, his chest vibrating with his powerful voice. He turned from my room and began to walk downstairs, all the while toting me under his arm as though I were a piece of carry-on luggage.
“Please,” I pleaded with Christian, straining to look into his dark, brooding face, “P-p-please,” I couldn’t finish my sentence before the tears came. Christian kept his gaze forward as he bounced with confidence down the stairwell.
“Close your eyes, child.” Christian spoke with that confident, booming voice of his.
I wish I had listened to that perfect stranger. Perhaps if I had I wouldn’t be here now, scarred with images that no Hollywood horror flick could ever aptly recreate. I was defiant and to this day, fourteen years later, I wake in the middle of the night with beads of sweat on my forehead, screams at the tip of my tongue, tears in my eyes.
On the lush base level of my house, my mother and father. Tortured. Beaten. Blood coming from their mouths and ears like spickets. My father, that goliath of a man who always stood with his shoulders straight, chin squared with such pride was lying on the floor in an inhuman position, eyes flung open and unblinking. I could see my mother in the corner, chanting like a madman, rocking back and forth on her knees. Men and women, of the likes I had never seen, turned my home into shambles. They ran to and fro, room-to-room, frantically searching. The television had been overturned, as had the couches. Light fixtures hung limp from the ceiling, casting eerie shadows as they swung. Rugs lay on the ground completely askew. The glass dining room table had been shattered, the pieces of which Christian crunched beneath his black boots as he walked.
“Damien.” Christian was addressing a man of similar athletic build as my father, standing in the middle of my living room beside my mother. He wore lavish clothes, as if he were some wealthy Raja from the middle-East. I would have mistaken him for some evil Raja had I not seen his face when he turned. He looked almost exactly like Christian but whereas Christian had curly auburn locks, Damien’s hair was quite long and looked like a white spider’s silk. “What is the meaning of this, Damien?”
“Whatever do you mean, brother?” Damien asked, his marble-like complexion contorting to that of perplexity.
“We found the remaining two Vindexa’s, just as Gabriel asked of us.” Christian came to stand in front of Damien. My eyes were locked not on Damien but my mother who focused on my father’s misshapen form. “Must we really defile them any further than what is absolutely necessary?”
“You show weakness, Christian,” Damien squatted down so that he obscured my view. “Ah, this must be the Vindexa pride and joy. Lilith, no?”
“Yes.” Christian tightened the grip under his arm, “Lilith Marian Vindexa.”
“Little Lilith. How aptly named, don’t you think Christian? Much like your name.” Damien grinned, revealing the same abnormally long canines that had belonged to the others. “Lilith. Did you ever wonder about the true meaning of your name? Your parents called you Lily for your lily-white skin, no doubt.” With his index finger he gently traced my cheekbone down towards my mouth. “Lilith. How ironic.” As his finger lingered over my lips, I opened my mouth and bit down on it. He pulled his finger away where little drops of drop began to appear from the minute wound.
“Look at that! She has a taste for blood!” Damien’s blue eyes glittered with delight. He took another step towards me but Christian stepped back.
Damien laughed, backing away. He grabbed my mother from the floor and began to dance around the room with her limp body as she yelped in fear. “Marian Vindexa, I do say, you are quite the beauty. I had heard stories but… ah, if only I weren’t 600 years your senior.” With a chuckle, he leaned his face into the base of her neck, causing her eyes to widen to the size of saucers and a pitiful gargling sound to escape her ruby-red lips.
“Damien! That isn’t necessary.” Christian sat me down beside the overturned sofa. He stalked forward, his footsteps heavy against the marble floors. With one fluid-like motion he grabbed Damien’s long white hair, yanking it back so far that his face was forced upwards. As he did this, my mother was released and would have fallen to the floor had he not grabbed her waist. She stood as a rag doll would in the arms of a child. Blood dripped from Damien’s lips, bubbling forth as he laughed.
“And yet,” Damien spoke, his voice straining from the abnormal angle of his neck, as Christian still held tight onto his hair, “After all of these years, you still long for her-”
Christian’s eyes narrowed to slits. Anger oozed from his pores. Taking the palm of his hand, he hit Damien aside the head with enough force to cause him to stumble forward. He fell against a wall. Slowly he turned to face us, cackling maniacally as he still leaned against the wall.
“Oh, brother, you truly are pitiful.” Damien cackled, brushing himself off. Christian ignored his jab. He turned from Damien and scooped my mother up, cradling her in his arms.
Treating her as if she had been just born, Christian laid her down on the floor beside my father. “We have what we came for. Let us leave.”
“Not yet we haven’t.” Damien sprung forward, grabbing me by the back of the neck and lifting me off of the ground. My blood froze. Christian turned just in time to see his brother leaning down, his lips against my neck. I don’t recall what happened next. My vision blurred until the room went dark and my body went limp. In my mind, this was death. I was dead.
CHAPTER 2
When I woke it was still dark. I turned onto my side. I was in bed, the cold satin comforter rustling like dry leaves as I turned. It had been a dream. Another nightmare. My father’s words filled my head, “Nightmares are only figments of your overactive imagination. Think of them as fictional stories made up by your brain, like dreams but not quite as pleasant.” I was about to fall back to sleep when I heard the wind whistling through my open window. Jumping from bed, I stepped into the moonlight. There he was, sitting on the bench at the base of my window, behind the sheer burgundy curtain. Just as I saw him, he turned away from the window to face me. Christian.
“No…” I whispered, stumbling backwards.
He jumped from the bench and was at my side, helping me to my feet again. He held tight onto my arm.
“They will not hurt you.” He said. I looked at him, taken suddenly aback by the blood that fell from his eyes like tears. His clothes were ripped and torn to pieces, gaping wounds on his chest. He noticed my terrified gaze and released me, taking a step back towards the window. “They will not hurt you. Eventually they will come looking for you, but for now… you’re safe.”
My hands flew to my neck, feeling for puncture wounds. There were none to be found. My hands dropped from my neck with relief. Just as the relief had come it fled once more. I ran out of my bedroom and took giant leaps down the stairwell. From behind I could hear Christian running. I took the last step and stopped. I held onto the railing and fell back onto the stairs. It hadn’t been a nightmare.
Christian was behind me. Silent.
The Art of Regret: chapter 1-2
