There is No Escape

“There is No Escape”
An account of tragedy…
[Author's Note: Though I am very proud of this story, I do feel that, after looking at it since the contest (last year?), that it needs a lot of work. This feels like the framework of the story, not the finished body. Still, I hope you enjoy!]

She never thought the gentle voice in her mind was anything more than a blessing. At sixteen, Shana had already spent countless hours of her life bent over her desk, writing stories and shredding failures until her wrist was sore and her mind was numb, fuzzy and thoughtless. A few of her friends who also dabbled in that delicate skill called writing believed her when she said one of her characters was now giving her advice.

She walked the halls of her school, textbooks in hand, and certainly appeared crazy to some as ideas appeared in her mind. She mumbled to herself, hurrying to her next class to write down the scene that her gift had bestowed upon her, never questioning where those images, those stories, those characters came from. She had accepted that she had little control over it and welcomed it as her greatest gift.

Shana never considered herself to be pretty, though she was with her shoulder length burgundy-dyed hair, gray eyes, and slender frame. She saw only her writing as an asset. And one day, she found someone who agreed with her, someone only in her mind.

In her black, white-lined pajamas she stared hopelessly at her computer screen, frustrated nearly to the point of tears. It had been a long day at school, with several tests that took her nearly an hour each to finish, and she had fought with her best friend, accidentally taking her stress out on the one she cared for. After a miserable, noisy bus ride home she had hoped to write something to ease her mind. Instead, a blank page returned her gaze with about as much enthusiasm as she had.

Suddenly, as thunder shook the windows in their frames, an idea came to her. Frantically, she typed a short phrase:

“A killer sees that his would-be victim is being beaten and cannot murder her, falling in love with her instead.”

Beaming with pride at the possibilities, she leaned back in the chair.

“It could be very interesting,” she said to herself. Yet in her mind, she saw someone else speak those words. It was one of her newest characters, one from the fantasy role-playing game she spent a lot of time thinking about. It was Ladarius, Archangel of the Apocalypse, whose wings were made entirely of metal, bound together by red thread. This image of him wore loose-fitting white robes lined with red, black, and gold and had white hair down to his shoulderblades pulled back in a ponytail. He was sitting on a simple wooden chair in an empty void, smoking and considering her quietly.

His presence did not startle Shana as it probably should have; she had been having small conversations with herself on her writing for some time now, and having something to represent the other voice was comforting. “I like the sound of it,” she said. She rolled some possible titles for this story around for a moment. At each, Ladarius shook his head, almost seeming disappointed.

“Get some sleep,” he told her, though the words, of course, came out of her mouth. “You’ve done well today. You can work more tomorrow.”

“I am tired…”

Shana climbed beneath her forest green blankets, setting her alarm for school in the morning. As she drifted off, she imagined her odd-winged angel, whose form was trim and toned, holding her and bidding her goodnight.

She dreamt of endlessly falling rain.
----

As she wrote this new story, a tragic tale from the very beginning, Shana slowly put more and more reliance on Ladarius. As she thought, it always seemed as though he was leaning over her shoulder and watching her every stroke of the pen. As a week passed, she found him easy to talk to. She began to forget that he did not really exist, and instead of whispering to him, she spoke in full voice.

She asked him for help one night, having a hard time with how the story would end. Ladarius, pausing to look over what she had written so far (she flipped through her notebook and re-read it all), gave her two possible endings.

“Which do you like?” he asked, straddling the chair and holding a rose in his gloved hand.

She was silent for a moment. “I like them both. Both are so sad, Ladarius…”

“Happy endings,” he told her in his emotionless voice, “are not always the right ones. Choose one and reach it. You cannot waste time like you always do.”

“I don’t waste time,” she said. “This is hard, and sometimes I have to think about things.”

“You do waste time,” Ladarius snapped. “I give you everything you need. You should have accomplished much more by now. Now get to work.”

She wrote until he was satisfied with her accomplishment. It was two in the morning. Tired and frustrated, she snapped a pencil between her fingers.

“I’ve got to get some sleep,” she whimpered.

“You’re doing so wonderfully,” she told herself through Ladarius. Like most writers, she had an overactive imagination, and in that moment she could feel Ladarius’s arms over her shoulders in an enveloping embrace. “Go to sleep, Shana.”

She climbed into bed smiling, clinging to the angel of annihilation who was not really there.
----

The story was finished in two weeks. Shana was pleased with it, and all of her friends told her it was ‘good,’ and ‘so sad,’ exactly what she wanted to hear. Most importantly, she agreed with them.

“I’m going to try to get it published,” she told her muse, holding the pages of college-ruled paper covered in pen in her hands.

“You can’t do that,” he said. “It’s cliché and boring. No one will publish it.”

“But I like it! You said you liked it all this time, too.” Her voice wavered as his faith in her vanished.

“I don’t like it. It was a waste of my time and yours. Get rid of it, Shana, you will be much better off.”

“I don’t want to,” she said, beginning to panic, her voice rising. Fortunately, no one else was home to hear her argue with herself. “It’s good.”

“It is not.” Ladarius took the story from her (she held it in front of her) and tore it in half (she shredded the only copy she had). As she cried over it, he simply stood over her in her imagination and disapproved. Finally, she stood and looked him in the eyes.

“I don’t need you for this anymore! I could write without you before, and I don’t need you now!”

Ladarius struck her. (Her arm would be bruised the next morning, marks clearly made by her own hand.) “You ungrateful… You’ll see, you need me.”

----
Shana ignored his overshadowing voice for three weeks. She refused to write anything that she thought came from him. Occasionally, his near violent, furious howls would reach her. (People gave her strange looks as she yelled at herself.)

As that time went by, she became depressed.

“Writing is all you have,” Ladarius would say to her whenever he could. “You know you can’t just give it up. Without it you have nothing to live for.”

She lost sleep, interest in her schoolwork, and eventually she could not even speak to her friends without snapping at them or ignoring them altogether. Her mind was too filled with the ranting of the demon in her mind. She begged him to leave her alone, but he refused to relent and no one seemed to notice the suffering look on her face or the sudden change in her persona.

Finally the angel could take no more. As she looked out her window into the starlit night, Ladarius wrapped his arms around her (she crossed her arms near her waist).

“Admit that you need me, Shana.”

“I don’t need you!”

“You’re depressed now, because you refuse to write. I’ve seen you crying. You need me, but you won’t accept me.”

“I won’t depend on you!”

The Archangel of The End drew the sword at his hip. “You cannot ignore me. You cannot live without my voice.” (She held a knife to her throat where he placed his blade.)

“I can’t live… without your voice,” she sobbed. “But I can’t listen to it anymore. You aren’t really helping me at all! You took that story from me. I’m not taking your advice ever again, understand?”

“How dare you ignore me, Shana, after all I’ve given you!”

Her own angel jerked the blade across her throat.