Excerpt: Cantabile

It was hours later, and he could feel with a sickening clarity the way each passing second bit into his heart. And when he glanced up into the darkness of his room—

—This isn’t my room—

—it was like Isaac was seeing everything through a filter; the darkness was just another heavy curtain, and the rain tapping against the window was another, and the whole damn world was just made up of layers for him to drown in. He felt suffocated by the idea, and he couldn’t think.

Isaac could not see past his veil of inconsolability. It was a feeling that ran profoundly deeper than any emotion could ever dream of encompassing. It was utterly indefinable. His insides were soaked and stuffed with it—he could feel it shifting in his lungs, clotting his veins, blinding his sight.

He was sure that he’d screamed or yelled at first. Or cried. His father and that priest weren’t in the room—Isaac was sure that he’d ordered them, half-frenzied and wild with what was threatening to undo him completely, out of the room. The door was bolted shut, but he couldn’t recall when exactly this had all happened. It was only the seconds and the increasing feeling of sick that marked the passage of time for him; he found that he had difficulty placing specific moments into this time frame.

I killed my mother.

The thought flashed, unbidden and feverish, across the dark expanse of Isaac’s mind. He clasped a hand to his mouth and bent double, moaning.

I killed my sister.

His other hand clawed at the wooden floor. His nails snapped off, but Isaac didn’t notice. The pain that flared through his bleeding fingers was nothing to him.

What had the priest said? What did his father say? Possessed by a demon. Something about a rock—Isaac remembered picking up that rock, because Olivia had pointed it out and yet, the only demon Isaac acknowledged was himself.

He couldn’t remember the rest of that evening. Everything blended into a slow-moving darkness, and then the next moment he’d woken up to that priest in his room.
And then everything had fallen apart.
Isaac Atwood could not recall any memory of killing his mother. He couldn’t remember killing his sister.

Ah, but what he could remember…

Everything was rushing through him—the scent of his mother’s hair; her eyes when she laughed; the cadence of his sister’s voice; the tilt of her warm smiles.

These moments were painfully clear to him. Too clear. The world sharpened into the tip of a blinding hot sword that drove straight through the foundations of his very soul, and Isaac was sure he’d never screamed so loud in his life. His already sore throat screamed right along with him in painful protest, but he couldn’t have cared less; as he continued to be enveloped by his screams and his incomprehensible agony, he couldn’t tell if what was clouding his vision were the hot tears streaming from his eyes, or the world falling in on him.

He desperately hoped it was the latter.

Isaac felt himself going rigid with shock; his screams began to give way to incomprehensible sobs and his vision flickered dangerously. It occurred to him—although this thought was weak and almost unacknowledged—that he did not want to lose consciousness.

Not again.

The terror that flared through his veins was enough to finally break him. Before he lost consciousness completely, he thought he heard something crack and break. The door to the room? And then, for a second, there was loud, urgent voices—but they were far away, shut off from him through the layers of the world that now held him prisoner.

An unfamiliar hand on his back, and then darkness.