The Corridor

Lady Songbird has a contest going- http://weblog.xanga.com/Lady_Songbird/655819277/the-entries.html the brief was to write something using a picture as inspiration.  I chose number three, The Corridor.  Here is what I have thus far... because as you all know me... I tend to write long winded stories.  I hope you enjoy. Part 2 will continue soon.

The white bearded man that reminded Brianna of Santa Claus, but without the twinkle in his eye or the belly that shook like a bowl full of jelly, was droning on and on about stones.  It wasn’t that the subject matter was boring; it was that it was unbearably boring for a girl of 14 who longed to be elsewhere.  The monotone murmur of his voice with an affected British accent tinged by the drawl of his native tongue was enough to drive an insomniac to slumber.    Brianna distracted herself briefly with the math.  If he gave this tour twice a day, every day for the seasonal capacity of this region, well he’d be as bored as he was making Brianna.  She did her level best to register apathy by turning up the volume of her IPOD. 

Even the thumping bass of her favorite band didn’t keep bits of useless information from seeping in.  She still ascertained that the stones that made up this very corridor had to be mined and hauled from miles away over rough forest terrain, often by the sheer strength of the peasant slaves forced into labor by the vicious King. Many died by simply working to death.  Some of the stones that made up the castle weighed in excess of a ton, lifted by simple leveraging devices made from the tallest trees.  Even the most scintillating particulars of a King who’s vanity and arrogance lead him not only to kill the architect of the castle but to claim divine inspiration of the design, was muttered without any dramatic nuance.  The monotony continued as he described the King’s decent into madness ending with the killing of his beloved Queen by hanging; the charge lay against her being witchcraft. Scholars theorized that the Queen suspecting her impending death escaped first with their only son, eventually being caught by peasants petrified of aiding in her flight.  When she was returned to the castle she claimed the King’s only heir was killed in their escape.  This is what fueled the King’s rage; leading to her hanging with no last moment’s pardon.  Brianna gazed out the turret window of the lengthy corridor wishing to be anywhere but here. An escape for her would not come so easily either. She made no effort to hide her disdain for musty castles and damp monuments her mother typically dragged her through every summer, by turning up the volume on her IPOD even more. 

She expected to get a look from her mother, instead she got indifference.  Brianna’s mother Lillian listened to the tour guide with rapt attention.  Yet another aspect of her personality that Brianna found embarrassing.   Lillian had an obsessive fascination with history.  Every summer she would drag Brianna away from her friends to spend weeks trekking through castles, museums, sacred monuments, and burial ground in the far corners of the world.  One year was a 5 week camping trip to the Badlands of South Dakota to visit Native American burial sites.  Another year was a visit to a Tibetan monastery to seek the wisdom of the monks who reincarnated from a past life.  The worst by far for Brianna was the Mid-Summer night’s festival at Stonehenge, where Lillian had danced naked under the full moon.  Lillian’s behavior seemed always an attempt at how greatly she could humiliate Brianna by doing or saying the oddest, least socially acceptable thing in her presence.  Brianna had begun to think of her mother as less of a maternal figure and more as an albatross of questionable sanity. Brianna’s greatest wish was for the day she would be old enough to be left behind to enjoy the summer with her friends.  Sitting by the pool, sunbathing, gossiping with the other girls her age was Brianna’s greatest desire- still unfulfilled.   

Worse even still was most of Brianna’s friends liked and even respected Lillian.  They thought of her eccentricities as a cute quirk of character.  ‘At least she’s not your mother,’ Brianna often complained to friends too smitten with Lillian’s novelty to consider Brianna’s feelings.  Many of her girlfriends even seemed to treat Lillian as a peer, confiding in her their deepest thoughts and longings.  It was hard to rebel against a mother figure that was already rebellious.  Lillian was a born-again child of nature.  Not being raised in that environment Lillian had adopted her earthy, free-spirited, anti-establishment lifestyle in response to overprotective zealot parents.  She often remarked that she would never oppress Brianna in the same way she had been oppressed as a child.  This in practice had left Brianna without much understanding of boundaries and limits. Brianna’s father had always been the disciplinarian in the family, a loving but strict parental figure.  This fundamental difference in life philosophy had lead to her parents’ eventual divorce, causing Brianna to spend most of the school year between households and long summer quests with her mother around the world.  When people asked what had caused her parents’ divorce Brianna lied by omission.  What Brianna had never spoken of was the fact that her mother was a witch.

A spell casting, Goddess worshiping, psychic medium, who envisions ghosts as clearly as another living person standing before her; this was the unspoken truth of Brianna’s mother.  A family secret she dare not share with anyone.  When she and her father Tom talked about Lillian, who seemed often to be the subject, they would commiserate over her eccentricities.  Yet somehow it always seemed as if Brianna’s father missed her mother, despite the hardship her peculiarity endured, he seemed to regret the divorce.  Brianna on the other hand almost wished it was possible to divorce a parent.  “Someday you’ll see what I see,” Lillian would tell her.

“I hope not,” Brianna would mutter to herself.  The last thing Brianna wanted was to end up as crazy as her loon of a mother.

“Brie,” her mother pulled one of the ear pieces from her ear.  It hadn’t hurt, but she was unwilling to deprive her mother of any chance at feeling guilty for dragging Brianna along on her latest quest.  “Do you see that?”

“Ouch!”  Brianna feigned injury.  Her mother wasn’t buying into it with any sympathy. This made her even more petulant.  “See what?”

“This handprint,” Lillian was engrossed in tracing of what could only be described as concrete impression of a handprint.  “This looks exactly like your hand.”

“It can’t be,” Brianna examined it carefully. At the midpoint of the long darkened corridor about shoulder height was a stone in the wall that had a precise imprint of a hand.  Logic would dictate that a handprint couldn’t be left behind like poured concrete into a solid stone. It reminded Brianna of those kindergarten handprints every child makes to give their mother on Mother’s Day.  The teacher pressing your hand into clay, allowing it to dry and then letting you paint it for posterity.  Given the time frame it would have to have been carved or chiseled, yet the detail of it was so precise she couldn’t imagine any sculptor making such a rendering.   Brianna absently examined her own hand against the one in the stone.  The handprint was the same size as Brianna’s.  The essential lines of her hand, the life line, the love line and the knowledge line she knew from palmistry her mother had often practiced on her were exact matches.  Even this coincidence she could dismiss if it weren’t for one absolute element that couldn’t be dismissed.  Brianna always wore on the ring finger of her right hand her great grandmother’s engagement ring.  The band of the ring had some very distinctive Celtic knots that were also on the impression of the handprint carved into the stone.  “It can’t be my hand-“

“That is your great grandmother’s ring,” Lillian observed also.  “Unless a long lost descendent of ours made this impression- I’d say that is your hand!”

Brianna lifted her hand toward the impression intending to disprove it as coincidence when it wouldn’t fit perfectly.  Instead she felt it before skin even touched rock an electric charge of energy that she heard, felt and saw.  First the loud popping noise came like an airplane breaking the sound barrier.  Her mother’s voice was a distant utterance asking if she was alright, followed by the monotone accent of the tour guide asking if she needed a doctor.  Then silence.  Whatever happened next was painful.  Only to be described as being vacuumed out of your own skin.  She tried to scream, but nothing came out. Then darkness overtook her sight, she didn’t feel as though she had lost consciousness, only that she was blind for the moment.  When her sight returned what she saw next confused and alarmed her even more- the corridor moments ago filled with tourists, the tour guide and her mother was completely empty.  Where had everyone gone she wondered?

She listened to hear voices unable to imagine her mother leaving her side in this condition for any reason.  She felt dizzy but slowly stood bracing herself with one hand against the cool smooth stone.  In her confusion she laid her hand on the same stone where the handprint had been imbedded.  The handprint was gone! She tried not to panic, but could feel it rising in her like a tidal wave.  She listened again. She listened for her mother’s voice.  What she heard instead was hammering, sawing and men’s voices in a language she didn’t understand.  When she looked outside the turret window there were men building wooden scaffolding with a long arm that someone was tying a noose at the end of, a hangmen’s noose.  The men were dressed in what looked like period costume.  “This has to be some kind of joke,” she told herself, but realized she wasn’t laughing.

She stood there for what seemed like an eternity looking for the handprint up and down the wall.  Then a young woman appeared at the end of the hallway walking toward her.  Finally, she thought, I’ll get some answers.

“Hi,” Brianna began as the girl drew closer.  She was dressed in a simple wool chemise looking garment, her hair completely covered with a scarf.  She was carrying what looked like fur robes in her outstretched arms, her eyes red from crying.  As she approached Brianna stood to block her way.  “I seem to have lost my tour.  Did you see a group of people walk that way?”

Oddly she kept walking even as Brianna spoke.  “Hey! I asked you a question.”

Brianna lifted a hand to stop the oblivious girl in her tracks.  She kept coming as though Brianna wasn’t even there. Brianna shouted to get her attention, still nothing.  Brianna put her hand up intending to stop the girl only to find her hand wasn’t corporal. Like a scene from a movie Brianna watched helplessly as her hand went through the girl. The girl stopped for a brief moment looking around her as if she expected to see something that wasn’t there, shuddering from an unseen chill.  Then she walked on.  Disconcerting as it was the girl walked through Brianna to a doorway at the end of the corridor.  Brianna followed mindlessly not knowing what else to do... one of us she decided was a ghost and Brianna intended to find out whom. 

At the end of the corridor a guard stood watch.  He was dressed in the very same tabard and carried the exact replica of sword Brianna had seen earlier on the tour- only his version didn’t appear as worn or ancient as the ones behind glass in the display.  Brianna tried to reassure herself that this was all a strange dream she would be waking from very soon.  The guard opened the door to the cell allowing the servant girl with the swollen eyes into it, and that’s when Brianna got a glimpse of her.  The woman inside the cell at the end of the corridor could only be one person, the martyred Queen.