Chapter 10:
Blue Rose α
She heard her voice again.
Was she sleeping when she first heard her saying these words?
Was she about to say goodnight to her? At night, her thoughts were fragmenting. These puzzling bits of memory came to her scarce and mingled, one at a time as if they had been scattered.
A - Your father and I... We truly loved each other... Even if we spent only so many years together, I was blessed. I don’t have any regret. It was blissful. I wish you the same.
M - Are you sad now?
A - Well, a little. I will always miss him... His grave... It’s far from everything. But I love you too, love all of you. I’m still happy thanks to you all being here with me. Look, even Gülnihal is here with us. I’m also glad when I see it, even if it’s with melancholia... She’s part of the family too now.
M - That’s not its name anymore though.
A - You don’t like it? I know it’s of Ottoman origin, but...
M - We’ve found a new one that suits it better!
A - Oh really my sweet? And what might it be?
M - I’m sure you’ll like it too...
~
Everything was trembling. There was an earthquake in the memory, rough and painful, and then everything stopped.
All around, all was still and the dark. No sound, no light, only silence, for a long while.
Another voice spoke, but its sounds faded quickly.
- She’s reactive but never regained consciousness.
She must be dreaming...
The sound of this distant and unfamiliar voice slipped away as her awareness was rising. She opened her eyes.
Mary-Esther woke up. She thought for a moment that her dreams were becoming stranger each time she slept.
But they faded like mist in the morning.
Anyway, she was wide awake now.
~
Mary-Esther found herself sleeping on a floor, not in a garden anymore.
Under her face and hand was this crimson carpet with flowery patterns. Patterns of brambles and roses...
Roses were everywhere in that forsaken train... She now realised she couldn’t go a day or even an hour without seeing something that would loosely or plainly remind her of roses.
She moved slowly, discovering Blue sleeping next to her. She sighed in relief, and gazed for a long moment at the sleeping bird. There was so much relief in the sight of this small body breathing softly and regularly.
To stand up, she put a mucky hand on the carpet, leaving a stain of mud with falling dirt and ashes. She had also slept in all that filth. It was disgusting.
When she discovered that she was again in the same messy restaurant from the beginning, she started to feel down. The safe place was nonetheless not one she longed to return to.
The unexpected sound of clapping hands surprised her.
Turning around, she discovered the blond girl there a little further. Elise was applauding ironically, with a pained look on her face.
She stepped a little closer to her. Mary-Esther realised she couldn’t really tell her age now. Her stature appeared young, but her face looked more mature. And her behaviour didn’t match what she would expect neither an adult nor a child. She felt confused about antagonistic deductions her intuition did about her.
E - Congratulations... I didn’t expect you to return home that filthy, but you proved me again how wrong I can be. You truly are incredible...
Mary-Esther remained silent, feeling awkward more than anything. She was not sure whether she was bothered or happy to see Elise again.
E - We’re all in together anyway... So there is something your reckless attitude might help me with... But you shouldn’t go out like that...
M - What do you want from me?
She wasn’t willing to obey, but was curious about it nonetheless now.
E - You noticed how things tend to disappear around here, haven’t you? And since you’re good at making some things reappear, I want you to find my notebook. But Don’t touch it with these filthy gloves of yours. You know where the bathroom is, right? Go wash yourself before you spread more of these sad stains everywhere around. Wouldn’t want you to do something you might regret later... Right, Esther?
She looked at her hands, a little confused. They were dirty but...
M - What gloves are you talking about? I’m not wearing any...
Elise snorted, spiteful, maybe nervous as well. She spoke with cynicism in her tone again.
E - Why yes, of course you aren’t! And Blue is your bird remind me? Stop this and just go. This is not funny.
Something was wrong, but she couldn’t find its logic right away. All she wanted now was to act as petty as Elise was to her.
Mary-Esther gave her a disdainful smile, and called Blue. The bird woke up suddenly, shrieked, and faithfully flew toward her left arm, where it stood beautifully. Esther looked at it and back at Elise with a mean smile.
Elise glared at them without showing surprise at this scene. She looked a little sad maybe.
She sighed and spoke with a softer voice, and a very different tone. A younger tone.
E - Take that dirty doll with you if you like it so much... But remember that it’s not yours yet, Mary... So you’d better hurry back!
It sounded strange, and Elise had barely moved, still looking rather sad. What she just said made Mary-Esther feel queer now. Some things didn’t align logically once more.
Was Elise unable to see Blue as a bird? Or was something direr at stake here?
She felt clueless but felt too uneasy in the presence of this golden haired girl to tread deeper.
She turned around to head toward the bathroom. It wasn’t truly that she wanted to obey, but more that she felt the same about how dirty she now was.
E - Esther!
Elise had suddenly called out to her. Mary-Esther stopped walking and turned around, holding her left arm a little firmer for Blue.
Elise looked like she was about to cry, feeling even sadder. She seemed to be searching for her words for a minute, in vain.
M - What is it?
E - I...
~
Remember...
Elise was struggling, trembling and about to let her emotions get the better of her.
She was fighting against her sorrow and fears with all her might, and other conflicts coursing through her.
She wanted to say soft things, nice things... No matter how vulnerable it would make her, no matter how painful it would be; but the words remained stuck inside her throat. She couldn’t breathe.
She wanted to scream how awful she felt, how sad and sorry she was, how scared she was for those she cared for... How jealous she was...
She wanted to tell Esther how much she loved her, how much she needed her to stay.
Elise wanted to beg her to stay with her forever. But she was unable to speak, unable to voice out her deeper fears and wishes coherently. She was agonizing and sweating in vain, paralysed from the inside.
She knew what they would reply to her begging anyway.
That she was searching for a way out... That she would never stay with her...
It made her tear up, still conflicted between accepting or refusing her fate in this place.
Elise was deeply jealous of Blue, and of Esther. She wanted to say it, to yell it and cry. To cry everything out she had remembered and pieced out together; because she loved them too...
She loved Blue too... But Blue couldn’t even hear her, and Esther was keeping Blue all to herself now... Was it irony? It was so sad and infuriating. She didn’t know what to do.
Elise was struggling with her emotions, her collapsing thoughts and memories, her words, becoming less and less able to express anything. And that chaotic ocean inside of her, eroding her personality and the few things she managed to hold onto or rebuilt unsteadily... It was restless. Something deep and violent inside her heart and inside this place was unable to get free or lighter.
In front of her had stood the embodiment and the person she both despised and loved most...
Elise was imprisoned from the inside, in hell. She knew that Mary would escape without her, leaving her behind again.
She knew she had lost. She was lost...
She would be broken, her memories tainted further, her items to exist upon destroyed.
Esther would leave them all behind...
Elise wanted to relieve some of her agonizing sensations by yelling at her, taunting her, confessing how much she hated her.
All while wanting to embrace her and cry in her arms, admitting how much she missed her...
But the poor thing Elise was becoming couldn’t bring herself to do both, and managed to release neither.
She felt as if her body was shrinking. Time was passing but not a single word managed to come out.
Other memories returned, and as many vanished from her, leaving her alone.
When she finally got back to her senses, Mary-Esther was already gone.
Elise was back to her lonely and quiet hell.
~
The airlock door closed behind Mary-Esther. She had left, feeling really sick.
She had felt as if awful memories and desires had begun to burst in that place, blowing her own consciousness apart.
She couldn’t stand Elise’s glaring anymore. She just stood there like an angry paralysed doll, cursing her.
It felt too heavy... And she had fled away from her.
Esther entered the shower room and locked herself inside. She let Blue stand on a bar to hold towels.
She found yellow clothes tidily arranged on a chair for her. They had been left there in anticipation of her arrival.
Did Elise do that? Maybe she cared.
She would try them on after washing away finally all the muck covering her from head to toes.
She abandoned her clothes again beyond repairs and entered the shower. The water flowing away was dark like ink.
Mary-Esther prayed it would be the last time she would have to take a shower in this train. Even if the hot water felt nice on her, she didn’t want it anymore. She wanted far more to walk on a real ground outside again...
Again...
She was daydreaming about walking or strolling on different places, fields, paths and roads, while letting the water wash her.
Dreaming about a morning walk in a nearby forest, in radiant summer and freezing winter...
Passing by a small stream, finding her way between rocks and bushes... Crossing a field to go into town. Or looking at these unending fields, stretching beyond her sight, with nothing else but the earth, the wind and the sky...
She would look at birds flying away.
Any place with only one ground level, and no walls to stop her from running ahead for more than five seconds... That would be great. Going anywhere but here was becoming a hopeful dream...
She stopped contemplating her wishes when Blue shrieked.
Mary-Esther opened her eyes, recalling she was still in the shower, and unfortunately not outside under the rain.
She stopped the water with a trembling hand. She thanked Blue for almost waking her up.
This had avoided her falling even sicker.
Mary-Esther picked up the yellow dress and other clothing that were prepared there for her. They matched and fit her. Yellow certainly wasn’t her favourite colour, but that dress was pleasant and soft anyway.
Her hair was still wet, but she wasn’t worried about it.
When she was ready to leave, she rose her left arm that harboured some deep marks now, for Blue. When the bird was standing and clinging there as should be, she opened the door to leave. Its talons didn’t hurt much anymore now for some reason.
Mary-Esther walked back to the restaurant. She expected to find Elise again, maybe even standing right where she left her, but the blond girl was gone.
On the table close to where she had been, there was a letter awaiting her instead.
She unfolded it with her right hand only to see the note. It was written on an old sheet of paper with the colour of biscuits. The kind that just begins to burn on the edges in an oven.
She spread her fingers on the sweetly rough paper to unfold it and keep it that way.
She recognised Elise’s handwriting inside.
But she was unable to read the words. She could read the letters individually, but her brain refused to process their accumulation into written words and to release any rightful meaning.
It was not as if the letter was in a different language or alphabet. Something in the way she read these symbols just did not work within her brain... At best she could guess a few articles or prepositions, but she found herself unable to recognise nor understand any other word written there.
It felt as if she had just been cursed to forget how to talk, quite awfully. That painful realisation and hopeless intellectual struggle made her feel worried more than anything.
It was like trying to open a locked door that wouldn’t budge, only she was trying to read words on a letter probably addressed to her. Her hand was trembling.
She took the letter with her and chose to go further anyway. She would try to read it again later.
Maybe, hopefully, she was just tired...
~
While entering the first stairway, she asked herself whether she should comply with Elise’s request. Should she search for that book? Or should she simply resume her search for the engine room?
She got closer to a window and looked at the landscape outside.
The sky was white and grey, looking rainy. A sea was visible in the distance, far away and under the same stretched blanket of clouds. They were uneven and pretty.
Mary-Esther was feeling quite alright then. Being with Blue, wearing something comfortable and clean. She felt warm enough, and in the end, that yellow she was wearing was cheering her up a little.
She smiled a little under her wet hair. For a second, she had felt at ease despite her situation. As if she was getting used to it.
She looked at the quiet Blue on her arm. She asked it what they should do, plainly.
The bird looked around but obviously did not reply. So Mary chose to move ahead like before.
She would keep an eye open for lost books, but not search thoroughly for it. She might find it along her way with some luck.
She thought about something. She recalled passing through a library above the restaurant previously.
Alright she thought, maybe she would do that little detour to take a quick look there. Looking for a book in a library seemed pretty obvious anyway, but she would give it a little time.
Mary-Esther braced herself and went upstairs after crossing that bridge of the stairways wagon. She headed into the library. The place was silently waiting, in dimmer light. She let Blue fly and wander around.
She began having a look at each and every shelf for any notebook that would look out of place.
She didn’t find anything interesting, soon to reach the last shelves. She was startled when she noticed Scarlett in a corner at the end there, sitting on the ground. She had a pile of books next to her and an open one on her lap.
Scarlett noticed the yellow tint on the hem of a skirt and slowly raised her attention.
S - Elise... Oh. Mary... It’s been a while...
She spoke without much emotion in her voice. She folded down the top corner of her page and put her book down aside. She moved slowly to stand up, making Mary-Esther step back. She still felt intimidated by Scarlett.
Without showing much in facial expression and with an even colder voice, Scarlett spoke again with an ambivalent tone.
S - How do you do my dear?
M - So far... I guess... Not too bad.
S - Getting used to this place?
M - More or less... Do you know where we are? Where is the train heading to?
S - Are you joking? I thought you would have realised it by now...
M - I’m not sure about anything that happened to me...
Scarlett opened her arms slowly, and lowered them in a sigh.
S - We are among the dead little sister... Wasn’t this obvious? It’s limbo. Don’t you get it?
Mary-Esther felt that something was wrong with this understanding. She did fear what Scarlett just said might be true, but she couldn’t believe it. There was something else, something wrong about that statement. She wasn’t too shocked hearing this conviction, because she had also imagined it and now felt it was a mistake.
Maybe the reality was close in some ways, but it was still different.
M - I don’t think so Scarlett...
S - Oh, and why is that?
M - Because I don’t remember dying... If I were dead, and my brain rotting, memory loss would either be complete or make no sense. There would either be nothing or everything back... So I know it’s a stretch, but that is... an illogical situation.
Scarlett seemed surprised and interested in what she had just said.
Her green eyes were wide open. She had suddenly thought about something she didn’t quite understood either. Then she chuckled for no apparent reason.
S - That is an interesting point, because I too have some memories unclear or missing... But... Of course you don’t remember. You never did. You were always so forgetful...
Scarlet stepped closer to her, who was walking backward and away from that intimidating person, until she bumped into another shelve.
Mary-Esther had the same fear as the one she would have if Scarlett was willing to hit her.
She did not. She put a leg ahead to bar her way out, and caught her hands. She was caught, but Scarlett only took one of her hands between hers, and showed it to Mary-Esther. Two hands holding firmly hers.
Mary-Esther was too nervous at first, but stared at the hands and began to understand. What was wrong was not on the visible side of things, it was on what she felt physically against her skin.
As she saw Scarlett’s fingers moving around her own, she couldn’t feel anything but cool air and an odd paralysing sensation holding her hand. She didn’t feel the soft touch of skin nor any warmth, only cold air pressure. That realisation sent shivers along her spine. She saw a human, but all she felt was the touch of a ghost.
S - Do you understand now?
M - What...
S - You can feel it, right? I am not warm anymore. And I... I do remember how I died...
~
When Scarlett’s hands released her own, Mary-Esther felt almost no difference on her skin. As if nothing truly touched her. She was now doubtful again, between fear and sorrow.
She fell slowly against the shelf and on the floor in a sitting posture. Scarlett was dead... So this place...
She hesitantly called Blue, which came right away to her and comforted her.
Scarlett was looking down at her and the bird. She looked away and began to look around, silently. She looked at the numerous books around, and the landscape behind the window that never seemed to end. She didn’t add another word to express what was obvious to her.
Scarlett knew her fate was already over. She had no hope of escaping, ever.
It was a moment of quiet despair.
M - Scarlett...
S - Yes, Mary?
M - Would you know, where Elise’s book might be?
S - Why, does it matter? I don’t know where things go in here. Nor why...
Scarlett sighed.
S - There are patterns... So it might be in the sewing room... That’s where she used to play, bringing along what she found.
Scarlett looked elsewhere, repeating a few words as a complaint or prayer.
So forgetful... You were always so forgetful...
M - Thank you...
S - Why are you looking for it? It won’t change Elise’s fate anyway. What is your aim?
Mary-Esther was standing up and picking up Blue.
M - Maybe for the same reason that got me to bring you back your egg... Beyond that... Well, I want to leave this place. I want to remember what my family was also. But the first thing I want is to get out.
S - Leaving hell, no less... You want to leave... How? And why?
M - How, well, learning what I can, and aiming to reach the engine... Why? Because I want to live of course!
S - I don’t think that is what you truly want Esther... Otherwise, why would you have come up to this place at all in the first place. You’re not like us, you are the only one who came here willingly. As happy we were to find you, I don’t understand why nor how you did that, if it wasn’t to stay...
M - I... I don’t know. I don’t remember much from before I got in...
S - Always playing the forgetful act... You can’t hide behind that for ever Mary. Just say what you feel behind for once... How you feel about us, say it now.
Scarlett was apparently getting angry, and Mary-Esther didn’t follow. She only felt intimidated again. She asked the wrong question then.
M - Did I... I knew you?
Scarlet snapped and yelled. Mary-Esther was cornered again.
S - We’re your sisters Mary! For heaven sake, do you keep pretending or did you finally manage to forget us for good? How can you do that to us!
Mary-Esther kept trying to escape backward toward the exit leading to the stairway, her heart racing faster than ever. Scarlett in front of her had begun to cry, but still was infuriated.
S - Ooh... I get it now... It’s for her, isn’t it? I get it all! I know what you really want! You are such a mean and egoistic girl Mary. You’re despiteful. I hate... you. I hate you both!
Mary-Esther had fled. Scarlett had yelled her last words while crying heavily. Mary was too shocked to think about it and went across the bridge running in the next wagon.
She just rushed, away from Scarlett and that moment of panic. Away from her wrath, and from her disturbing words...
She opened the fourth floor wagon and rushed in, despite being suddenly blinded.
She couldn’t feel the floor below her feet anymore and shrieked. She suddenly fell somewhere, feeling Blue leaving her arm. It didn’t really feel like falling for a second, just maybe floating in the air.
But by the time she thought about what could be happening, she was landing suddenly from a real fall, abruptly and violently.
She passed out as her head hit the invisible floor.
She had felt like being somewhere else for a second. Maybe dreaming of being outside...
Away from this place. Away from poor Scarlett.
Her last thought had been sympathy for her.
~
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