“Collector, who is this? Another one that should have been mine?” said no other than Beelzebub, or ‘Mr. Bee.’ as he liked to be called, and reached for a lock of Serena’s hair.
“Kitty?” asked the tall man, whose face was covered in rags, genuinely confused. His voice was husk, deep and ancient.
“Don’t be silly, Charon. All the millennia you have been moving the souls of the dead across the river Styx and you still have trouble telling the difference between human and animal souls?”
“If she no ours, how I know?” Charon offered as an explanation.
“She is mine.” The Collector said and put one hand around Serena drawing her close and out of the reach of the demons.
Serena buried her face into the Collector’s side.
“Oh girl, don’t be so quick to find comfort in the Collector” Mr. Bee said, “He will soon throw you into the Labyrinth where the suffering is never ending. You’ll spend a thousand lives redoing and undoing things that have already been done. Centuries will pass and as your soul stretches thin, you will wish for death, but death won’t come. The Labyrinth is cruel child, even crueler than hell.”
Serena stepped back from the Collector. “Is this true?” she asked him.
“Purgatory is a second chance,” the Collector explained.
Mr. Bee scoffed, “At least hell is a destination, not a state of in-between… If you had only been a little more deceiving, a little more destructive, perhaps you would have gone with me.”
“The labyrinth is the road to salvation” the Collector interrupted.
Mr. Bee ignored him.
“You know… you could still choose to leave him and come with me. Not to hell, your name is not written in the book of the dead, but you could still come with me to the underworld.”
Serena looked at Mr. Bee suspiciously as the latter extended his hand and bowed.
“Ms., it would be my honor if you would become my companion at the gates of hell. I am kind of bored by the company of this big, stupid bag of bones,” he said gesturing to Charon, who did not protest.
“If you come with me now, we will make an excellent team. We will receive the damned souls together, we can make fun of them, if you like. We could also host hell tours together. It will be so exciting!”
Serena looked at the Collector. Now that she had his luminous eyes, his face looked more human.
“Did the Collector mention that there are rooms that could trap you in the Labyrinth forever?”
He reached out and grabbed her by the hand. Serena felt heavy, grounded, as if her human body had returned to her. For some reason she couldn’t stand it, her body felt like a ton of bricks. Did it always feel like that when she was alive?
“You could go with him,” the Collector said, “but you will never have the chance to undo the unkind things you did. You will not be able to help those you hurt, especially Alice, heal. “
“Alice?” Serena let go of the demon’s hand. Her sister felt like a distant thing. A memory she couldn’t quite grasp. Away from Mr. Bee, her body became light, and her mind clear. She remembered…
12 year-old Alice and 8-year old Serena are listening to their dad speaking angrily on the phone. “Where’s mom?” Serena asks her older sister.“She left. I don’t think she’s coming back.” Serena begins to cry. “Don’t worry. I’ll look after you,” Alice says and hugs her.But Serena was mad and pushes her away. “No! you are not mom! I want my real mommy!”
14 year-old Alice and 10 year-old Serena are fighting over clothes. Serena swears at Alice and the latter slaps her hard on the face. Alice tells her not to be like mom who used to swear at them and at their dad. Later, their father brings them together, Alice asks for forgiveness from Serena, who hugs her.
Alice tells 16 year-old Serena their dad has cancer and he is dying. Serena has her first heavy alcoholic drink from her father’s cabinet. She contemplates if she is indeed turning like her mother.
Right after their father’s funeral, Serena grabs a bottle of vodka she was hiding and intends to drink it in her room. Her sister sees her and snatches it away. They fight. “I need you to fucking grow up!” Alice tells her. “Tell me how I am just like mom,” Serena shouts back. “You are not,” Alice says, “but you are trying so hard to be.”
Serena is 18 when she meets Alice’s new boyfriend. She does not see how they could make it as a couple, if Alice is busy with a part time job and some college courses. Serena notices the way her sister’s boyfriend looks at her and wonders if he would be faithful to her sister to her sister.
Alice slaps Serena hard on the face. It was the second time in her life she gets slapped on the face by her sister, but this time their father would not reconcile them.
It’s the Christmas eve after their father died, both sisters had recently receive news that their mother had also passed away. Alice begs Serena to stay for dinner with their aunt. “Where was she when mom left? when dad was sick?” asks Serena. “She came when she could, and she is here now. Please let’s have a family dinner. I made turkey.” But Serena thinks they’ll judge her and watch the amount of alcohol she consumes. And she had to have some alcohol, both her parents had died leaving her with a different ache in her heart. She decided to skip the dinner and go clubbing.
The summer she turned 21, Serena is at Alice’s wedding. She is the bridesmaid, but not the maid of honor. She becomes drunk at the wedding reception and ends up destroying the wedding cake, while singing “I came in like a wrecking ball.”
“Stop it!” Serena asks the Collector.
“It’s not me, it’s your consciousness.”
Then the Collector puts his hands on her head.
“Now, this is me.” What she saw then were not memories, but what had happened after the pool incident.
She sees Alice just as she realizes something was seriously wrong with Serena as they dragged her out of the pool. Alice runs to her body, trying to revive it. She shakes her, holds her and screams to her husband to call an ambulance.
She then sees Alice at the hospital. She sits there for the whole duration Serena was in a coma. During that stay Alice discovers she is pregnant and tells the sleeping Serena to wake up, because she has to be an aunt now.
Alice is at her funeral broken down, crying non-stop. Serena hears her say “I lost every single one. My family, they all left me.” After the funeral Alice sees blood on her underwear. She knows she miscarried.
She sees Alice at home a month after the funeral having a mental breakdown after she got into an argument with her husband over changing the TV channel. She is screaming and trying to kick him out of the house, but he subdues her gently. Even in his arms,Alice is not the same. Serena sees her sister’s flame become smaller, consumed by rage.
As soon as the last vision ended, Serena fell into the ground exhausted; she covered her face with her hands and began to cry for her sister. In all of her time on Earth, her pain clouded everyone else, even her sister’s pain.
“There’s nothing you can do about that. It’s better to put it behind and move on.”Mr. Bee said, “Your sister will have to move on too, that’s not on you. The risk of getting stuck in the labyrinth is far too great.”
But Serena turned to the Collector with a new determination, “I don’t want my sister’s flame to be put out. She is a good person. She took care of me. I will go with you, whatever the consequences are for me.”
A strange wind blew right then, Serena saw surprised through the locks of her wild hair dancing on her face, that she was the only one who was affected by it. It quickly became a powerful twister that tore her off the ground, away from the demons and the angel. Inside a whirlwind, she saw her father’s face smiling at her. “Well done, love. Be brave. I am waiting for you” he said before the twister carried her through a doorway and slammed her against the wall of a long, but familiar corridor.
An invisible force shut violently the door through which she just came out. The word inscribed on it, “Empathy,” slowly disappeared.
It was a room, Serena realized.
When Serena re-opened the door, everything was gone. It opened to nothing but a small, empty room.
Back in the corridors of the labyrinth, the many doors with the inscribed words awaited her. The words scared her still, but she was different now. She looked down on her chest, and witnessed her flame become a little bigger.
Many doors called for her; “Damaged” was the loudest. She knew it was the one that would make her face her addictions. If there was a room that could trap her forever, that would be the one.
She pumped herself up and went straight for it; get it over with…But right before she twisted the door-knob, she hesitated. She remembered she had previously left a room called “Anna” unresolved. Her mother, who the labyrinth had aged beyond recognition, was in there, patiently waiting for her daughters to forgive her.
The “Anna” door was not far; as Serena went for the room she passed a door which had “brave” inscribed on it. The word slowly disappeared.
-THE END-
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