The Key (Sanguinem Emere) (26 page)

“When I used to look at the world, I saw the faces of the ones I love, the ones I would love, and the ones I’d never get the opportunity to love. But yours is all I see now. Your face haunts me. Your love is my breath, my pulse, my life. Forever.”

Alex smiles behind him with genuine affection as he listens to the vows so close to a whispered plea. Dimitri’s vows. His vows to me. His solemn promise to love me for all eternity. Or for as long as we both shall live.

I smile at the irony. And speak:

“Dimitri Kron, when you walk towards me, I feel the sun. You radiate. You feed me. I want to bathe in your light forever. I want to lie with you always.”

The priest speaks, and this time I listen. With reverence.

“Do you, Dimitri Kron, take Eva Wright to be your wife – to live together after God’s ordinance – in the holy estate of matrimony? Will you love her, comfort her, honour and keep her, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse, in sadness and in joy, to cherish and continually bestow upon her your heart’s deepest devotion, forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto her as long as you both shall live?”

“I will.”

“Do you Eva Wright take Dimitri Kron to be your husband – to live together after God’s ordinance – in the holy estate of matrimony? Will you love him, comfort him, honour and keep him, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse, in sadness and in joy, to cherish and continually bestow upon him your heart’s deepest devotion, forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto him as long as you both shall live?”

“I will.” As if there was ever a question.

“May these rings be blessed as the symbol of this affectionate unity. These two lives are now joined in one unbroken circle. Wherever they go – may they always return to one another. May these two find in each other the love for which all men and women yearn. May they grow in understanding and in compassion. May the home which they establish together be such a place that many will find there a friend. May these rings on her/their fingers symbolize the touch of the spirit of love in their hearts.

“You are now consecrated to one another as husband and wife from this day forward. Dimitri, if you would?”

Dimitri’s hand clasps mine, his eyes trained on me, “I give you this ring as the pledge of my love and as the symbol of our unity and with this ring, I thee wed.”

The priest continues solemnly with a hint of a smile, “What – therefore – God has joined together – let no man put asunder.

“And so, by the power vested in me I now pronounce you man and wife – and may your days be good and long upon the earth.

“You may now kiss the bride.”

SATURDAY 19 December 2009… 10:22

Mercy House

A communications breakdown. That’s what it was. He’ll come and release me from here soon enough. He’s put me on a drip. Something. Something opaque. I’m not usually this drowsy. Must be the stuff in the bag, crawling down its long, thin tube, down, down into my parched veins.

Can’t put my finger on it. He got mad. Then sad. His face crumbled into weariness. The glasses came off. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. Like Alex.

My brother takes my hand. I know it’s him because he smells like smoke.

“I’m here.”

“I know,” I mumble through thick lips. Did I call out to him?

“Shane,” I turn my face to look at Alex who furrows his brow in perplexity at me, “Doctor Shane put me in here, didn’t he?”

“You had an accident, Eva.”

“Nah, he’s mad, cuz I wouldn’t say what he wanted to hear.”

Alex strokes my hair, “Honey, you lost a lot of blood.”

I glance around the ceiling, my eyes slightly blurry, my head too heavy to lift. I shouldn’t go to sleep, but I really, really want to.

“Why, Sweetheart?” Something wet drips onto my hand, the one Alex is holding tightly.

I loll my head to the side. He’s crying. I try to raise my hand to his face, but he holds it stiffly from him, turning it so my palm faces up. A bandage around my wrist. A big, thick one. And a stain of blood, brown around the edges of the splotch and turning a deeper red the further in it goes.

“You know you’re sick. Why did you do this?”

“I didn’t do it.” Why won’t they just listen to me? I’ve seen these marks before. Artery marks. I’ve felt them before. Only this time I didn’t remember her visit. Probably because Shane had me drugged all to hell.

“Eva, the marks are all over your body! You’ve gone too far, you nearly died this time!”

“Did you call Dimitri?”

“Goddammit, Eva.”

“He’ll want to know.”

“I called Delilah,” Alex pauses and looks away from my eyes, always a sucker for trying to hide me from bad news, “He won’t come.”

He won’t come? Leave me here and let her take me again, this time she might just kill me.

Tuesday 10 November 2009… 03:21

“Dear God, help me, please! I am a sinner, true, but I do not want to die!”

Her whispered pleas carry through the still night blanket of the great hall. The evening’s feast lies scattered over and between up-turned platters and tipped goblets. A claret sea creature, with beaded black eyes and spider-leg whiskers, its name utterly lost to her now, squats malignantly at the master’s end of the table. The candelabra’s glow gives it life, watching her, a sentinel for her raging husband. The hem of her rose-dyed skirts soaks up the wine dripping from the edge of the table she huddles behind.

“Wife!”

She slaps her bloodied hand over her mouth to stop the imminent squeal. His voice rattles through the hall, booming in her ears and she pulls her legs closer to her chest, determined not to let her fear betray her.

Quietly as she can, she scrapes the carving knife up from its forlorn outpost at her feet. It had been intended for the pheasant, not for him.

But now she clutches it to her breast as the thunderous thud of his footfalls grows louder. Her final threat for him to stop in his fury.

“Wife!” He calls again, closer this time. A spider’s silken pull in the darkness of its web.

Strange then, that her feet betray her. Unwise to uncurl herself, leave the sanctity of shadow, stand and shatter her invisible shield. So that he can see her fear, her acceptance. Her love of him.

Her husband is leaning against the arch, his tall frame dominating the only escape from this room. His expression remains impassive and cold as she gazes fearfully at him, reminded with a cruel spike of his threat made at the table.

He had promised to end her life this night. Throw her body in with those others. His wives and lovers, mistresses and concubines. Sweet Jesus! That room, brimming with blood, the floor slick with unnameable fluids. And the smell – the stench! She barely had time to see the mass of femininity – hair tangled together, differing shades and all soaked in red, covering immodesties like a veil – in varying stages of decay, to hear the ominous growl in the dark, before she swung the door shut against the rot and horror of it. Denying the truth of his actions – the final end to those women he had claimed had passed in illness.

And it was but a moment thereafter that she had remembered the key, recalled it slipping from her grasp and landing, not with a clink, but with a muffled, wet sound. With eyes tightly closed and breath held, she had swooped back in, thoroughly ignoring the manner in which her skin moved in sudden ripples. Ominously teased at the sensation of being watched. The shivering growl sounded again, a rumble of angered breath, of a rabid hound perhaps, signalling the onset of her fearful weeping as she raked her fingers through the muck on the floor. Blindly searching. Fortuitously, the key had not skittered far.

Her husband’s voice had called to her, just then. Denied her opportunity to gather herself, her senses, to pull her delirium to heel, she had been forced to feign sickness over supper. Her face must have expressed her terror with parchment skin and shaking lip.

But this had not prevented him from asking for the key he had entrusted to her during his absence. The blood-stained key, displayed to him upon blood-smeared fingers.

The key now clutched in her fist, embedding its ridges into her flesh. Perhaps a small cut has already formed itself, mingling her own blood with that of some poor, fated girl’s still present on the key. Some unfortunate victim of her husband. This husband.

But he must see her devotion! It was the fear that made her run from him, not revulsion of the man himself.

He crosses the distance between them with his giant’s strides, coming to grasp her jaw in his hand. Halting the chattering of her teeth.

“You should not have run from me,” His voice is tender as he scuffs his thumb over the bruised flesh of her chin, “It pains me to inflict harm upon you.”

The knife is forgotten under the weight of his proximity and drops to the floor amidst the neglected cutlery. She falls against him, consumed by her love, blinded with tears at the pity in his voice. Her trembling lips come to rest on his bearded cheek.

“Then have mercy upon me, my Love! I succumbed out of loneliness, foolish curiosity,” His fingers entwine through her hair, cold and gentle still, “I will tell no one. I adore you!”

But her pleading is for naught as he suddenly grips her hair painfully taut and yanks her head back. The compassion in his face is replaced with a mask of violent disgust.

“You lie!” He bellows down upon her as he pulls her with him, taking long strides out of the hall. Her legs buckle beneath her at his sudden ferocity and she is dragged along with him, succumbing in agony to each stair he descends as it impacts her hip.

“No, please!” She shrieks, seeing the painted wall murals parade past her eyes, an endless display of forests bathed in moonlight. A sickening taunt thrown at her in the darkness of the stairwell where there is no light. She knows these cold, stone steps. She remembers where they lead.

“My lamb has disobeyed me,” His voice rings out in circular echoes, though his tone gains diplomacy, “She was warned.”

She screams and kicks wildly as the inevitable sound of the door scraping open flails at her ears. She can already smell it. The stench of aging death and new blood.

“Lord, please! Liberate me! Save me!”

With a heft he slides her body into the room, the floor’s blood seeps through her pretty pink gown, cold against the warmth of her back.

“I am the only God you will ever meet, my Dear,” His voice rumbles as he shuts the door slowly, the light dimming like the minds of the insane, “And your prayers fall upon deaf ears.”

“Please,” She screams once more as the dreaded growl vibrates close enough for her to smell the thing’s breath, “Dimitri, I love you!”

His indifferent figure shows no mercy as the door thuds closed, leaving her in darkness.

I snap out of the dream with a moan and grab wildly onto the nearest thing to stabilize me in the quiet dark, which turns out to be Dimitri’s arm. His head lifts from the pillow as he shushes me and looks down into my face w
ith concern crinkling his eyes.

“Bad dream?”

I nod and curl myself into him, fear motioning me to run, to leave, but I wait gingerly for the remnants of the dream to subside from my head, knowing it’ll pass soon. His arms are cold. I’ve come to expect that. Though he didn’t admit to it. And even though it still sounds crazy to my raging head. It all makes sense. The weakness, the tonic, his overt charisma.

But I’ve said it once and that’s enough. He didn’t deny my claim, in fact he all but verified it. I’m sure if I found the right place, there would be no pulse. That should sicken me. But it doesn’t. Everything about him is right and perfect and meant to be.

Even me.

I touch the ring around my finger. The most beautiful thing I have ever seen, besides the man who gave it to me.