Lapvona(34)

A tremble of the ground woke Marek in the corner of the room. For a moment, he forgot that he had ever left his father’s home. How many times had he slept there? How many times had a noise or vibration roused him while it was still and dark in the room? His father always got up early. Marek turned and felt the cool black linen against his body. These weren’t his clothes. The stiff collar pressed against his throat. Still, he was not sure what was real. He opened his eyes and let them adjust from dream to darkness.

‘Papa?’ he said. He must have awoken this way a hundred times since Jude had left him at Villiam’s, a soft moment of the mind. Lispeth always answered, ‘No.’ But now nobody answered, and the hard bed beneath his body reminded him of where he was again. He was home. ‘Papa?’ he said again.

Marek pushed himself up, thirsty and confused. He could have sworn he’d felt Jude in the room. The door was slightly ajar and the flies were crowding in. He could feel the bed calling back to him to lie down, to stay still in the heat. Marek forced himself to get up anyway. Nothing moved but the flies. Marek stumbled toward the swarm, adjusting his eyes to the moonlight through the open door. He saw Klim’s torso, a headless, armless, legless thing made of collapsed ribs and a spine whose bones were exposed at the bottom, like a little tail sticking out from the flesh. Taking this flesh for his father’s, Marek fell upon it. How had he not seen it before? Had he been so blind in the dark when he’d come? What monster had cut his father down to this? He remembered his promise to Jude. ‘I’ll feel guilty when you die,’ and so he did. His guilt was a lonely horror, desperate but dumb. He got up and backed away from the severed torso and went out. In the pasture, everything was still, the moonlight thin and low. Had he not looked up at the sky to beg God for guidance, he would have seen Jude scurrying into the woods on the far side of the pasture, running from guilt of his own.



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*

When Jude was deep between the trees, he stopped to listen for anything above the distant buzzing of the flies, but heard nothing. No wind, no birds. He half expected that a hand would descend from the sky to grip his shoulder and yank him down into a booby-trap grave. He turned to look behind him, above. It was only when he caught his breath that he realized he still held Klim’s head in his hands. The man’s jaw hung open, his tongue thin and gray between sparse brown teeth. His nose was smashed and broken. Jude had not been careful in his butchery, grappling with the body, letting the head hit and drag on the hard ground. Under the moonlight through the empty branches, Jude saw Klim’s eyelashes flutter under his own breath. He startled and screamed, silently—like in a dream—and threw the head into the undergrowth and ran further away, deeper into the woods.

Was this a dream? If so, when had it begun? Had he actually left his cottage that morning, or was he still there, trapped in the maze of blood? Or had he fallen asleep by the lake? Or had he died and woken up in hell? White orbs began to appear in his vision as he ran, like fireflies, but cold, white. Sprites or ghosts, he didn’t know. They moved steadily toward him, widening as they got closer. ‘They will absorb me,’ Jude thought. ‘This is what death looks like. White lights coming for you through the trees.’ He closed his eyes as he ran away from them, but the lights were still there. They were inside his eyes. He ran faster and repented in each breath—‘God, forgive me.’ And he felt something push him from behind, like an icy hand at the small of his back. The coolness was delicious, a seduction. Perhaps it was just the wet of his shirt smacking his skin, but it was enough to cause him to run even faster. He ran until he could no longer breathe. The lights followed him.

Finally, he stumbled and fell and found himself facedown in a bed of wildflowers. He lifted his face into the moonlight and the miraculous scent of wild basil and crocus. Had he arrived? Was he through to heaven? Was this where the lights had been chasing him? How else to explain such flowers growing in the dust? He rolled over and looked up at the sky, a closed circle of black night surrounded by bare trees. The white lights retreated upward into the stars.

Then, as in a dream, he began to feel that he was not alone. Narcissi glowed in the moonlight like lit candles illuminating a female figure draped in black, her long skirt trailing over the flowers up ahead. Jude felt no fear or surprise. It was as though fate had brought him into this miracle. ‘Agata?’ he called. The girl’s head turned.

Even after all his ire, his spite, his disgust, his struggle, the movement of her head toward him filled his heart with longing. Here was his girl: thirteen years older and dressed like a maiden of death, all in black, like the priest; her face was thinner than he’d remembered, but it was her. Her green eyes were sunken and hollow under her black hood but they were the same. They gleamed at him in the moonlight like a wolf’s as they had so many years ago when he’d found her wandering the woods, a child. He had to have her. He rose and ran. She dropped the small satchel she carried, picked up her skirt, and ran through the flowers away from him. But Jude caught up to her easily. ‘Agata!’ he called again. From the pulse of her steps, Jude knew she had recognized his voice. He was dreaming, he was sure. And perhaps this assurance removed any hesitation he might have had to run at the girl and push her down so that she fell straight back and hit the ground. She struggled under her robes to get back up, but Jude pounced on her, his face meeting hers immediately, his spit shaking on her as he spoke, his head vibrating as though it, too, would separate from his body. ‘Did you bring this on? This unholy terror?’ he asked her. She said nothing as usual, simply turned her head away and closed her eyes. If it was Jude’s dream, he could have his way, however he’d like. He felt the sweat of nausea creep up from his loins to his throat, and as he straddled the dark girl, he held her down by the throat with one hand and lifted her skirt with his other. She wore many garments, all dark and heavy. Her innermost garment was black and thick with sweat. Jude didn’t wonder what it all meant. Already his penis was hard and throbbing. He held her shoulders down now and used his own knees to force hers to spread. She submitted easily, her head ever turned away, but her eyes open. Jude clumsily poked at the red froth of hair on her pubis, then stabbed at the lips to her sheath, which was clenched tight like a fist. He let himself lie on her body—she was larger, softer than she’d been as a child—and he sank himself inside her, into the small darkness. He’d last known her sheath tortured and bleeding, straining to birth a distorted skull. He pulled out, studying her face in the moonlight for any indication of suffering or pleasure. He went back in, shuddered at the pressure of her tight hole, a touch he had longed for, for so long. Would he die now? She gave a little puff of air through her nose, like something was getting snuffed out. He pressed his chest against hers and kept his hands on her shoulders so she couldn’t move. He would have her in his dream that last time, mad in the fever of his cannibalism, near death, he thought, finally. And thank God she had appeared in his moment of madness. He fucked her until he collapsed, ejecting what felt like cold poison into her womb. He felt it go, and he pulled out and rolled off, spent.