Chapter 8 #2
I am going to die, she thinks.
All nuns are taught not to fear death but to embrace it. Upon their death, all their sin and all suffering too shall die, and they will live in eternal bliss with their Husband Jesus Christ in Heaven.
Yet for all that she is supposed to welcome death with good cheer, Sister Ursula finds herself balking at it now, for what will become of the saint’s skull if she does?
Perhaps Elsebeth will manage to reunite the skull with the body by herself, but then who will intercede for Sister Hildegard’s soul?
She cannot expect Elsebeth to use her wish on behalf of a dead nun she has never met, not now that she knows what has become of Elsebeth’s sister.
Poor Elsebeth, who has suffered so much in this sordid war already. It’s not to be wondered at that her faith has faltered.
If I die, she shall be all alone in this world.
This thought more than anything electrifies Sister Ursula. She begins to struggle. The revenant grunts as she rakes her nails across its wrist; the skin has dried and toughened like jerky. But it doesn’t loosen its grip on her, and it doesn’t slow down.
Next, she makes herself drop to the ground like a stone, but the walking corpse simply keeps dragging her along as if she’s nothing more than a sack of spuds.
She opens her mouth and screams, spits, and rages. No meek sacrificial lamb, she; she has turned into one of hell’s own demons, kicking, scratching, and punching.
The revenant stops dragging her. It looms over her, hisses. She bares her teeth at it.
It opens its mouth, and then the true horror begins.
It unhinges its jaw until it touches its throat, the skin bunching like a gray scarf. The smell that wafts from its mouth is the stench of the grave. Threads of saliva stretch between its teeth like spiderwebs.
Through all the horror and the fear, Sister Ursula thinks, All the saints and angels above, please save me now.
Her prayer is answered. The night splits apart in sudden heat and light.
The revenant screams, this infernal screeching that is all its own, for no human being has ever sounded like that.
It lets go of Sister Ursula and staggers back, its arms raised to shield its eyes from the light.
Its lower jaw dangles like a piece of meat from a hook.
Elsebeth is there then, standing over Sister Ursula with a torch in hand, her mouth twisted into a snarl, looking exactly like what Sister Ursula imagines the early saints and nuns looked like, those who defended the faith with a Bible in one hand, a sword in the other.
“Touch her again, and I shall set you on fire, you fiend!” Elsebeth snarls.
“You found me,” Sister Ursula says. She laughs, then sobs, then laughs again.
Elsebeth says, “Of course I did. Now get up and lean on me. I don’t know how long this torch will burn for, and Nachzehrer fear neither God nor man, only fire.”
Sister Ursula gets to her feet with difficulty. Her right leg is utterly useless; resting even the slightest bit of weight on it makes her knee feel as if shards of glass are being driven into the flesh.
Yet fear makes her fast. She hops on her good leg, her teeth gritted against the dull pain that soon blooms in her hip. Elsebeth has a hold of her, and that helps.
The revenant follows them all the way back to the house, gibbering and wailing. It lunges at them when they are near the well, and Sister Ursula fears her mind will buckle and break from sheer terror, but Elsebeth jabs at it with the torch, driving it back.
Once back inside of the house, Elsebeth slides the bolt home, then extinguishes the torch by dunking it in the bucket of well water she fetched before they went to bed.
The smoke that rises stings Sister Ursula’s eyes and throat.
She coughs softly to get rid of the feeling, then opens her mouth to ask Elsebeth whether they should bar the windows, only the girl doesn’t give her the chance.
She grabs Sister Ursula by the throat and presses her hard against the wall, her thumb digging into the soft place just below Sister Ursula’s jaw joint.
“How could you?” she chokes, as if it is she who is being half strangled.
“How could you be so stupid? To open the door to a Nachzehrer!”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was a Nachzehrer.” As she speaks, her throat moves painfully against the web of skin between Elsebeth’s thumb and index finger. “I thought it was someone sick and confused who needed help.”
“And you went to give it without thought!”
“I meant only to help. It pleases the Lord when we clothe the naked, feed the hungry, heal the sick, water—”
“You meant to be selfless,” Elsebeth spits, as if the word is somehow dirty.
“Yes. I must be, don’t you see? After what I did to Sister Hildegard—”
“You put yourself in danger, heedless of the cost! What might have become of your dead sister if you and I had died here tonight? Or of your fellow sisters in that nunnery you call home, or the saint’s skull for that matter? When others depend on you, endless selflessness is not a virtue!”
Tears veil Sister Ursula’s eyes. “I didn’t…” she tries, but Elsebeth talks right over her.
“And did you even think of me, and what I might think and feel when I woke to find you gone?” She swallows thickly, then suddenly wails, “How could you leave me?!” She buries her face against Sister Ursula’s abused throat and sobs.
For her to rail at me thus, I must have wounded her horribly, Sister Ursula thinks; a girl as stubborn and proud and fiery as Elsebeth does not easily admit to vulnerability.
The guilt, the shame, and the pain of it draw the tears from her eyes.
They roll down her cheeks, big and fat as drops of summer rain.
She winds her arms around Elsebeth and holds her close, and oh, what a pleasure it is to finally hold her!
She wants to tell her how the thought of her was enough to make her fight the Nachzehrer, but all that comes out are the words that she has been taught as a girl.
“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Forgive me my trespasses against you,” she murmurs, wincing at how stern yet hollow it all sounds.
She tries to soften the words with kisses she drops on Elsebeth’s pale hair.
Elsebeth looks up, her puffy eyes furious. “I don’t want your papist prattle.”
Just a few days ago, Sister Ursula would have recoiled at such anger, or would have frozen as she always seems to do in times of fear and emotional turmoil.
But Elsebeth does not mean her any harm, and so she lays her hand against her sodden cheek, all pink and hot from fury. “Then what do you want from me?”
For a moment, neither woman says or does anything. There’s only the sound of their breathing, and of the Nachzehrer outside murmuring words it doesn’t understand as it keeps patting the door, looking for a way inside.
Then, Elsebeth grabs Sister Ursula’s collar with both hands, pulls her close, and crushes their mouths together.
Sister Ursula has kissed her sisters before.
When she was still a girl, she and two other postulants practiced kissing one afternoon so they might better imagine what the love of their Heavenly Husband would feel like, giggling all the while.
Besides, physical affection is not entirely forbidden if it is innocent, and kisses can be chaste.
There is nothing chaste about this kiss, though. It snatches the breath from her throat, makes the place between her legs, that furry, damp place she has no word for, clench.
Though nuns should be virgins, Sister Ursula knows the joys of orgasm.
It’s the only known cure for chlorosis, a condition common to young virgins and therefore common among nuns.
Whenever she feels listless and her heart beats much too fast, Sister Junius wets two fingers with a bit of oil and gently strokes her until everything in her contracts and warm waves of pleasure wash over her.
“There is no sin in this,” Sister Junius told her after that first time, wiping her fingers on a bit of cloth, “not when it is done for love, and what greater act of love than making you well again?” She had kissed her forehead, and Sister Ursula had felt safe and loved.
As Elsebeth kisses her now, Sister Ursula shakes as she does when she’s close to spending.
How can this girl’s touch inflame her so?
Everywhere Elsebeth touches her burns, throbs, and clamors for more, more, more.
She wants to crawl inside of her, devour her, inhale her, like she did with the saint’s skull, only more desperately.
She hitches up Elsebeth’s skirts, places her hands on the back of her thighs.
They are hot as a child’s fevered brow, and soft as sin.
She runs her fingers over them until she reaches her buttocks, firm from all her hard work on the farm.
She strokes the gentle curve, lightly at first, then presses harder, dimpling the flesh, feeling the taut muscles and hard pelvic bone underneath.
There’s not much to hold. She’s so thin, so sadly starved…
Elsebeth sobs, her fingers digging hard into Sister Ursula’s shoulders to keep from falling. She’s trembling all over. “Ursula,” she whispers.
Her name has been many things: a weapon wielded to obliterate the sinful bastard child she was before; a gift to mark the start of her new life, one of hard work but also of great purity and spiritual bliss; an aspiration, because the virgin saint whom she was named after was a courageous martyr.
In Elsebeth’s mouth, it is none of these things. It is both a curse and a benediction.
Yet when Sister Ursula moves her hand to stroke between Elsebeth’s legs, wondering if the slick hair there is as pale as the hair on her head, Elsebeth recoils.
Sister Ursula stands panting and confused. Bereft of the joy and the glory of Elsebeth’s touch, she feels both cold and sorrowful. Her lips still burn, as if Elsebeth has branded them. “Have I hurt you?” she asks softly.
“No.”
“Then why did you draw away?”
Wordlessly, Elsebeth shakes her head, her eyes downcast.
“There’s no sin in this,” Sister Ursula counters, “not when it is done out of love.”
Elsebeth rubs at her eyes, sniffs. “We should be abed,” she says, still not looking at Sister Ursula.
“You should be resting that leg of yours, and there’s nothing else we can do now.
Nachzehrer have no love for the light. Once the sun is up, we should leave.
It’s better if we keep moving, and the sooner we know whether there really is a wish waiting for us, the better. ”
“Elsebeth!”
“What?” she pants.
“I… We…” she stammers. She briefly closes her eyes, looking for the words to express all she is and all she feels, all the longing and the hurt and the sadness and the joy, but finding none.
“What?” She snarls the word this time. Her hands are balled into fists again, her body all taut and ready to fight, but there is a softness to her voice.
Sister Ursula opens her mouth, hesitates, then takes the coward’s way out by asking, “Shouldn’t we do something to make sure the Nachzehrer won’t come in?”
Elsebeth blinks in her slow, owlish way.
Then, the tension leaves her body, rounding her shoulders to a slump.
“No,” she says eventually. There is neither anger nor want in her voice now; the words are flat as pebbles.
“Nachzehrer don’t think. If the one outside knew how to open a window or work a door, it wouldn’t be outside still, and this door is thick and sturdy.
Its teeth will break and its fingers rot off before it’ll come through. ”
“Very well,” Sister Ursula says.
In bed, Elsebeth turns her back to Sister Ursula. Soon, her breathing becomes deep and regular.
Sister Ursula can’t sleep. Her throat aches with all her unshed tears.
She has done something wrong, yet knows not what and knows not how to make it right again.
She turns to look at the saint’s skull lying safely on its velvet pillow within its reliquary.
The flames from the fire in the hearth are reflected in its glass eyes so that they seem to have fire for pupils.
“Please, sweet saint,” she whispers, “won’t you intercede for me and set to rights whatever it is that I have done that has upset and displeased Elsebeth so?”
The saint remains silent.
She feels for her rosary, remembers that the Nachzehrer broke it.
It takes an eternity for the sun to rise.