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Annals of Fear II	By : DeathNoteFangirl Category: Death Note > Yaoi-Male/Male > Mello/Matt Views: 5803 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note and I do not make any money from these writings

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There was a gap in the barricade.   Matt rushed to the hearth, where a mattress lay before it.   He dragged it upwards and struggled with it to the doorway.   It was piled high with furniture there, as was the other door, leading to the older part of the house.    The pile creaked ominously, as he threw the mattress against it.   It settled and held.    They would be coming soon, with their guns and their threats and their dogs.   Matt paced the room.   His eyes fell upon the hole in the wall, which led to a cavity.    He could escape down there.   His ears rang with the banging of metal on metal.    He grabbed another dining room chair and threw it onto the stack.

Something bad had happened.   Something so terrible that his mind shied from even revealing it to him.   His stomach turned and a deep dread washed through him.    He didn't linger upon it.   Matt turned and found himself face to face with the red-haired man, face filthy with blood and tear-stains.    Dark-rimmed green eyes stared back with such sorrow.   Matt raised his Beretta and emptied three shots into the apparition.   It was no longer there. Instead, it sat on the settee, staring into space.   Matt stalked around, listening to the sounds of men and women on the television.   'Celia' was showing.   Doña Benita was telling the little girl a story about fairies and demons.   Matt paused to listen to it.   His father did not look up.

"1639." The Trans-Atlantic drawl, from near to the wall, startled Matt into nearly firing another shot.    There was a flash of memory.   Mello's shocked expression as he fell.   But Mello wasn't dead.   Mello was standing right here; his unscarred face nestled within a plumage of black feathers and his blond hair in a perfect bob.   He smirked.   His piercing blue eyes pinned Matt to the spot; Mello was staring.    "The code to your collar."   The words hit Matt like daggers.   Mello affected mock surprise.   "Awww, baby, did you think you could get away with shooting me?"

Matt stumbled backwards, nearly losing his footing on the trash carpeting the floor.   Rats scurried through the discarded papers and cans.   His left boot landed in the mouldy remains of half-eaten cordero al chilindrón.   Pieces of rotting lamb and yellowish-grey sauce splattered as he kicked the carton away.   He leapt backwards and looked up. Cisco Heras had gone.   Mello had gone.   Matt was on his own.   There were voices, on the other side of the barricade. He could barely make out what was being said, but his mind supplied the dialogue.   "Pequeño, nadie va a hacerte daño." Of course people were going to hurt him.   The soldiers were coming!   His father was going to kill him!

Matt fired over the barricade, then rushed to hide behind the settee.   Mello had arranged himself upon it, licking his chocolate, grinning in some delight.   "Take it off, Matty, it doesn't belong to you anymore."   Mello's gloved hand came out, his gaze lowering, significantly, towards Matt's collar.   "Oh, poor baby," Mello purred, "no wonder Henriette Chaho killed herself having you.   I'd hate to stick around and watch the train crash as well."   His fingers flexed to hurry Matt with handing over his collar.   Matt didn't move to touch it.   His hands were still on the grip of his Beretta.   "Revenge finally for all of the grief I put you through. You shot me dead, Matty.   Dead.   Oh dear."

"Mail!"   A female voice called over the barricade. "Mail, Mello needs you.   Please!"   But over the top there were male voices, calling for Henriette and asking about the child.

Matt blinked and the Mello on the settee faded from view.   Henriette was such a sad word.    He knew who he was now. He was Cisco Heras. They were here to kill him.   "¡Soy un héroe y no voy a morir como un perro!" Matt yelled and came out shooting.   His position was all wrong.   He was supposed to have one foot behind and one in front, keeping himself balanced, but the force of the shots jerked his arms upwards and sent him sprawling back against the settee.   His eyes met those of a small boy, on hands and knees behind it.   The emaciated child initially froze, then scrambled backwards, out of sight.   Rats scurried through the layer of rubbish that littered the floor.   They swarmed past Matt into the direction of the boy.   Matt kicked out at them, leaping up onto the settee.   The child climbed up, on the other side, and they surveyed each other warily.   Then Matt lifted his aching right arm and fingered a lock of his own hair.   "Rojo."   He smiled and the boy's face lit up.   "Rojo."

"Rojo." The child replied, mirroring Matt's actions with his own hair. Lice cascaded down from the boy's scalp, too many to countenance.

Matt stared at them, watching their desperate flight.    He was in a bathroom now, gazing into a sink; an inch of water lay pooled at its base.   The lice were in it. Some struggled, kicking their tiny legs, trying to make it to the edge and to life.   Some of them made it.   El señor Wammy reached in and flicked them back into the killing well.   Matt examined their lifeless bodies, becoming still as they drowned.   He had the measure of El señor Wammy now.   He was a man who killed those clever enough to come out on top.   Then Matt would just have to bide his time.   El señor Wammy hadn't even seen the other lice. Those who hadn't crept out from the fallen hair.   They made it into the rubbish bin and Matt wished them well.   They could climb out from there.

Hide. He had to hide.   The hole in the wall would take him out of here.   Matt was back in that house in Navarre.    He could see his father pacing behind the barricade.   He could hear the howling battle cries, "¡No nos llevaréis! ¡Bietan Jarrai! ¡Henriette!" There would be shots.   There would be gurgling sounds and shots.   Matt sprinted towards the hole in the wall.   He felt the wind on his face coming from it.   He saw the long drop, though there was utter blackness in there, and that made no sense.    He could hear the shooting.   He could hear the gurgling.   He turned to see and heard a booming, unnatural voice shout, "In!"

Matt darted away from the hole in the stairwell wall and raced up the stairs.   He knew, without looking, that the shadow man was right behind him.   He scrambled onto the top stairs and into the corridor.   Maja Gustafsson was waiting for him.   Dripping water and staring, turning away, into the unfurnished room.   But she couldn't be there.   The witch bottle was still under the tree and she only appeared when it was out.   Matt dashed instead into the room that he and Mello had originally ear-marked as their own.   They had never slept a night in here, but the bed was still there.   Minus its mattress, but still with its frame.   Matt dived under it and watched the open door for whoever might come after him.   He had his semi-automatic pointed.   Nothing came in.

His heart was pounding.   That was the most apparent aspect of all of this right now.   He could feel it, as a pulse, on the dusty floor beneath his back.   What was he doing under the bed?    That was a ridiculous place to hide.   He wasn't thinking straight, because he was in a manor house filled with a high level of EMF and a massive influx of infrasound. He had an eidetic memory. It was projecting his thoughts out into his environment.    There were no soldiers.   That was in 1993.   There was no ghost of his father.    Mello was a force of his imagination.   None of this was real.

There was movement on the threshold.   The door swung gently backwards against the wall.   Brown trousers and polished, brown Derby shoes were all he could see of the person who walked into the room.   Matt knew anyway who it was.   He had seen them before.   This was just his memory again, throwing out random shit, trying to make him believe that it was happening.   He watched the man stroll towards the bed, then stop and turn before it.   The frame sank slightly, as the springs depressed upon the hardwood base.    Matt could have reached out and touched the back of those calves.   He stared with wide eyes.   The springs above him creaked in protest and there was the edge of a Trilby hat.   Matt gasped, as El señor Wammy peered beneath the bed.   "Ah, Mail Jeevas."

Pain pinged in Matt's heart.   He squirmed backwards, emerging from the other side of the bed.   He straightened, expecting to find the man gone.   But El señor Wammy sat there still, his back towards Matt.    Matt could hear his own breathing, in sharp, ragged panting.   "PICNIC." Matt said, his voice clearly enunciated, though wavering with shock.   It was an acronym. It meant, 'problem in chair, not in computer.'

"Does the code work?"   El señor Wammy asked. He did not turn around.

"What?"

"Mello gave you the code for your collar.   Does it open it?"

Matt risked a glance out of the window.   Deontic's BMW was being driven down the track, away from the house.   That would be more eidetic recall.   Deontic hadn't even been here this time.   She was staffing the hub.     It had to be a memory flash, because it also looked as though she was standing in the courtyard, just north of the yew tree.   Matt stared at the back of the old man's head.   If he was a ghost, then he was a mind reader, for how else would he know about the collar's code? Mello, downstairs, had not been real.   He had no scar.    "Is it hallucination or have I gone insane, like Mello did in Southampton?   He saw things too."

There was a smile in El señor Wammy's tone, "You always asked the right questions."

"It's a bit of both.   You don't have to be eidetic to hallucinate in here."    Matt backed right up to the wall, then took a hand off his gun long enough to find his cigarettes.   He lit one, luxuriating in the draft of calming that the first drag caused.   "Mello was going to blow up the outhouses.    He can't do that while I'm in here.   He wouldn't endanger me." Matt blinked, unable to shift from his mind the image of Mello's expression, as he flew back and fell.   "I didn't shoot Mello.   I wouldn't have..." He frowned and looked to the bed for answers.   El señor Wammy had gone.   With shaking hands, Matt stashed the Beretta back into its holster and kept his cigarette between his lips.   He held his collar between fingers and thumbs, then jogged to the mirror on the dresser there.    In the moonlight and the glowing embers of his cigarette, he could just discern the minute numbers on the dials.   He turned them, with pronounced clicking sounds, until the digits lined up.   1639.   Matt took another long drag and pulled each side of the steel band.   The collar stayed resolutely shut.    Relief flooded his senses, but then he saw the shadow man reflected in the glass behind him.   "No!   I'm not yours!"   Matt was already running, alongside the dresser, heading for the door. "The collar didn't come off!"   He screamed behind him.   "It wasn't the right code!"

He hurtled through the open doorway and crossed the landing in two strides, before slipping at the top of the stairs and crashing halfway down them.   Pain jarred up his spine from his already bruised backside and he curled in a heap, protecting his head, just gasping for a moment to feel and think.   He wasn't thinking straight.   He knew that.   So much fantasy wrapped around reality that he couldn't even precisely pinpoint where the danger might lie.   He kept his eyes shut, not wishing to see any more distractions, though all instinct told him that something was leaning in close to his face.   He thought back to the last thing that he knew for certain.   That was the sight of the shadow man, out on the cobbles and the sensation of pure, unadulterated evil.   The shock of the seeing.     The realisation that neither Mello nor Mario nor his own reserves of intellect could save him now.   Then the sinking inside and the jerking relocation to somewhere else. Spain or the living room of the manor house.

Mello had left him.   Of all the disparate facts jostling for his attention, that one was indisputable.   Mello was not here, ergo Mello had abandoned him.   Or had he shot Mello?   That image kept bubbling up, along with a feeling of such dread and terror that he pushed it straight back down again.   It couldn't have happened.   Matt's heart thundered again. He felt sick.   He stood up, opening his eyes, in one fluid movement.    His cigarette was singeing a hole into the carpet, three stairs below.   Nothing was leaning over him.    Matt snatched up the cigarette and stepped down, onto the mid-landing.   This house should have been blown up.   That's what they were going to do.    That's what he would do. All the rest was fantasy and it wasn't game over yet. It was not game over yet.

Matt stopped, just above the gaping hole, created by Mello's sledgehammer, in the stairwell.   Now it felt threatening, like something could reach out and grab his legs as he passed.   He blinked, knocking that image from his mind.   He was paranoid and confused enough, without adding more from his own imagination.   It was so dark in here.   How had he seen before?   The answer came immediately.   He hadn't seen a thing.    He had been blundering about in the pitch blackness.   It was all fake.   He was doing this to himself.   But where the fuck was Mello?    Matt leapt forward and out, practically free-falling over six stairs, but it kept him clear of the hole.    He landed with a sickening thud on his feet, at the foot of the stairs; the shock shot pains up his legs and he danced with the resultant pins and needles in his feet.

His whole body hurt!   But Mello had beaten him up, so of course he hurt.   Mello had beaten him up and then abandoned him; here in a house that drew hallucinations like the worst acid trip known to humanity.   Why would Mello do that to him?   Because it would be easy to make his death seem like an accident here.   Suicide.    Matt had the gun.   It was right here in his holster.   All he had to do was climb into that hole, down into the shaft.   It wouldn't be too great a fall from here.   He could access the altar then, down in the secret cavern, where the monks lay.   It felt as though the whole house held its breath; a great calm descended.

The barricade was there.   Matt could make out the furniture piled up, in silhouette, in the murky moonlight.    He could only barely remember building it and that memory reeked of fantasy.   His father had been beside him at the time and the view outside had not been Wales.   His consciousness was catching up fast with what his silenced thoughts had been screaming at him.   Mello had been shot.   Matt saw it all now.   The shadow man had entered him and his finger had squeezed the trigger that had killed Mello.   Behind that barricade, Mello lay dead.   Matt's breath shuddered to a gasping cry, "¡Mihael!" and it felt echoed, though in reality or imagination, Matt couldn't tell, by another heart-rending keening, '¡Henriette!'   "¡Mihael!"   The gun was in Matt's hand and he couldn't recall taking it from its holster. He stared at it.   All instinct said to do it.   To end it here too. To willingly sacrifice himself to the greater good.   To build the power of the house.   To boost the fortunes of the family.   Matt stared at the Beretta.   "No."

He started running, throwing himself against the barricade, testing its strength to see if he could climb it.   But before he could get a foot onto the table at its base, an almighty crashing of splintering glass sounded in the room behind him. Matt instinctively ducked, covering his head with his arms, as shards of it flew through the air.   None of them hit him.   None came close.    Deontic's voice screamed at him, "Matt!   Through the window!   Lauren is about to detonate the bombs!"

Matt turned.   The huge picture window, with its glorious view of the Ysywyth Valley, stood smashed with jagged glass and gaping cold.    He rushed towards it, not seeing Deontic anywhere close.   He tucked his chin down into his gilet collar and shielded his head and face again with his arms, as he leapt at the pane and rolled, curled into a ball, onto the grass outside.    It wasn't just Deontic there.   It was Lauren too.   There was a few seconds' delay, before they both emerged from their hiding places, behind the garden wall and the side of the house.     Matt staggered to his feet and surveyed them both coldly, before sprinting, slipping on the wet grass, towards the eastern side of the house and its access to the courtyard.

"Matt!" Deontic yelled, rushing in his wake.   "Matt!   Mail!   Hold on!"

Lauren was faster, but he still had a head-start on both.    It was Lauren who shouted, "Matt, Mello's been shot!   Did you...?" He missed the end of the sentence, having turned a corner into the onslaught of the wind, but he'd heard enough for horror to wash over him in a wave of feeling.   He didn't stop.   He kept on running, though his lungs ached and his heart pounded.   He reached the outhouse, as Deontic and Lauren turned the corner behind him.    Mello was not lying there.   There was nothing that he could see.   "Matt."   Lauren gasped out.   "I have the detonator."   Matt ignored her, plunging into the blackness of the outhouse.   He fell to his knees, pulling off a glove to feel the concrete floor.   It was sticky with the stench of blood.   Matt froze.

Deontic was right behind him.   She slid two hands under his armpits and hauled him onto his feet.   Her expression was livid, in the moonlit shadows, and her voice was stern.    "Get away from the house!"   She swung him around, towards the door.   Matt stumbled forward, seeing his discarded bag and case.   He automatically, without thought nor sentiment, picked them up, then doubled back, skirting Deontic to collect Mello's stuff too.   He had to scrabble in the dark for them, but he found them.   They were sodden, caked with blood.

Lauren loitered in the doorway, concern etched on her features.   Deontic was trying to catch hold of Matt again, in order to shepherd him away.   The question burst out of Matt's mouth, "Is Mello dead?"

"No." Lauren gushed.

"Not quite."   Deontic snapped.

Matt hurried out, half jogging, half speed-walking towards the tree.   He knew that he ought to be saying something.   Warnings about the shadow man and woman, but his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth and his sensibilities were reeling.   Both women were right behind him, practically tripping in their closeness.   He dropped the bags and cases over the drystone wall, behind the tree, and glared back at the manor house.   Deontic climbed over there, slowly and without grace, getting slightly stuck at the top, before sliding down onto the sheep grass beyond.   Lauren touched Matt's shoulder.   "He will be alright.   It's Mello.   He won't..."

"Blow this fucking shitheap sky high."   Matt hitched his leg over the wall and pushed away to land on the other side.   Lauren was quick to join them.   "Something is going to try to stop us."   Matt turned swiftly around, surveying all that he could of the mountainside.   Deontic stared fearfully back over what she could see of the courtyard.   Lauren watched Matt, licking her lips and trying to find words.

Deontic barked out the order, "Lauren, do it!"

She hesitated a fraction too long, so Matt grabbed the detonator and pressed the button.   All three ducked down, as the explosion rocked the mountainside.   It was far louder than any had imagined.   Their ears rang, as the night turned momentarily bright as day.    There was a crackling roar, as masonry fell and the flames rose higher and higher. They could not see beyond the stables to inspect the full extent of the damage, but the fire was higher than that.   It seemed like the whole manor house was aflame.    Lauren's head lifted from the ground.   "Shit, Century's car was right next to the stables."

Deontic stared back at her, eyes wide and frightened.   "We should move."   She turned her head to look at Matt, who was lying stock still on the grass.   "If that goes..."   She let the sentiment hang.   Then, when nobody moved, she added, "We're a bit too close to that."

Lauren hurried to stand.   She grabbed the two bags and one of the cases, before standing over Matt. Deontic had shuffled across to him.    The Malaysian woman grimaced up at her.   Lauren sighed, "Matt, come on. We have to move."    He was rigid.   "Mail, please.    Vamos por favor."

Deontic sighed and sprang into a crouch.   "Matt, Mello is going to be really, really pissed off with you, if you don't move."   She tugged at the back of his gilet.     Matt slowly rose, his eyes glassy with tears.   He picked up the remaining case and allowed them to guide him alongside the wall, parallel to the trackway.   "He's alive, Matt, I promise you."

"Wow!"   Lauren had looked back.   The whole west side of the house was ablaze, while the outhouses no longer existed beyond a scorched and burning pile of rubble.    They could hear sirens in the distance, drawing near.    "Listen!"

"I hear them." Deontic replied, wearily.   "Fenian and Century sent us help."

Lauren shook her head, "No! Listen!"    Beneath the sirens was the faint shrieking of several house alarms, rising up from the valley below.    She turned to survey the mountainside, looking for clues.   She finally saw it, as a spot of light, on the far side of the slopes across the river valley.   "The electricity is back on."

Beside them, Matt's legs went from under him and he sat heavily on the mountainside, where he'd stood.   He stared frozen, into space, and his face was a mask of defeat.   His gaze held no hope at all.   He said nothing and reacted to nothing.   Just sat and stared, closed to them all.

Author's note: This story is being discussed here: http://mrsjeevas.joharrington.co.uk/forum/viewforum.php?f=11
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Annals of Fear II