38. Leandra
“Where are you taking me?” My voice comes out small, swallowed by the close press of stone walls.
The air down here is cold and rancid, like the breath of something long dead.
Konstantine’s grip on my arm is the only thing keeping me from tumbling headfirst into the void.
I stumble, my bare feet slipping on stone slick with moisture, and he yanks me upright without breaking stride, without even looking at me.
The torch in his other hand throws dancing shadows everywhere, making the carved faces on the walls seem to move, to leer, to twist their mouths in silent screams.
“Konstantine, please, I’ll be better. I’ll try harder. I’ll be her, I promise, I’ll be Ines.”
The name makes him pause.
His whole body goes rigid, and for one breathless moment I think I’ve said the right thing, that I’ve found the key that will unlock whatever mercy still lives in his fractured fucked up mind. But then he turns, and the torchlight catches his face, and I see that I have made a terrible mistake.
His eyes are wild. There is no other word for it.
The pupils are blown so wide they’ve nearly swallowed the iris, leaving only the thinnest ring of colour, and that colour seems to pulse, to vibrate with some feverish internal energy.
The colours around him are a maelstrom of violent purple, sick yellow and a red so dark it’s almost black, all of it shot through with jagged lightning bolts of white that make my head ache.
“Ines,” he breathes, and the way he says it is not a response to my words but something else entirely, something I don’t understand. “Yes. Ines. My Ines. She’s been waiting. I know that now. She’s been so patient, waiting in the dark, waiting for me to bring her back.”
My blood turns to ice water. “What do you mean? I’m right here. I’m Ines. See? I’m Ines.”
I’m babbling now, the words spilling out of me but my feet are moving again because he’s dragging me forward. The stairs are ending, and we’re stepping into a space that opens up around us like a wound in the earth.
It’s a crypt.
Oh god, of course it’s a fucking crypt.
The ceiling vaults upward into darkness that the torch can’t reach, supported by pillars carved with more of those screaming faces.
Sconces line the walls, and Konstantine moves from one to the next, touching his torch to oil-soaked rags until the whole chamber flickers with a sickly orange light.
The illumination reveals stone floors worn to a polish, walls covered in frescoes that depict scenes I don’t want to understand, bodies intertwined, mouths open in ecstasy or agony or both.
Blades, chalices and things that look like wings, and at the centre of it all, is an altar.
And on the altar, is a shape draped in white linen.
I stop breathing as my mind registers what it is.
I can see the contours of feet, the gentle rise of hips, the slope of shoulders, the suggestion of a face beneath the cloth. My mind is screaming, clawing at the inside of my skull, telling me to run but Konstantine’s hand is an iron shackle around my wrist and there is nowhere to run to.
“Do you know what death is?”
Konstantine’s voice has changed. It’s calmer now, almost scholarly, which is somehow even more terrifying than his mania.
He leads me toward the altar, and my legs move because they must, because resistance would be worse, because I have learned through long and bitter experience that fighting only makes the pain last longer.
“Death is not an end. God told us this. Death is a transition, a doorway, a veil. And a veil can be parted.”
What on earth is he talking about? What madness is this?
He releases my wrist and steps toward the altar. I stand frozen, my legs trembling, my stomach churning with the sour taste of fear. The air down here smells of old stone and older death, of myrrh and something else, something sweet and rotten.
Konstantine takes the edge of the linen in both hands. He looks back at me over his shoulder, and his smile is beatific, is radiant, is the smile of a saint about to perform a miracle.
“I’ve been waiting so long to introduce you to yourself,” he says. “Welcome home, my love.”
He pulls back the cloth, and I scream.
I can’t help it. The sound tears out of my throat before my mind can catch up; raw, primal, and completely involuntary. Because the thing on the altar is Ines. It is the woman whose identity has been forced onto me like a second skin.
But this Ines is dead.
This Ines has been dead for a very long time.
The body has clearly been embalmed. I can see the incisions where the morticians did their work, neat lines sewn shut with precise stitches.
I can see how that awful gaping wound at her neck was carefully put back together again.
The skin has been preserved, but it’s wrong; leathery, sunken, and pulled tight over bones that are too sharp, too prominent.
The flesh has taken on a yellowish-brown hue like old parchment, and in places it has pulled away from the underlying tissue, creating hollows and gaps beneath the surface.
The eyes are closed, the lids sunken into the sockets beneath.
The lips have drawn back slightly, exposing teeth in a permanent grimace that you could convince yourself might almost be a smile.
The braided hair has been arranged carefully, spread out around the head like a dark halo but it’s dull and brittle, lacking all the lustre of living hair.
But it’s definitely her.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Konstantine’s voice is reverent. He reaches down and touches the corpse’s cheek with a tenderness that makes my stomach heave.
I double over, I wretch as a wave of bile comes rushing up and I feel as it splashes off the stone, as bits of it land on my feet.
“…I’ve kept her safe.” He continues, as if he hasn’t noticed my reaction. “All this time, I’ve kept her safe. The Esau thought they could take her from me, but they didn’t understand. They didn’t understand what I am. What we are.”
He looks at me, and his eyes are wet with tears.
This is the moment, I think. This is the moment he tells me he knows I’m not her, this is the moment he sets me free and all this nightmare finally ends.
But he doesn’t.
Instead, he begins to chant.
The words are guttural, full of consonants that scrape against each other like stones grinding together in a riverbed.
He raises his hands above his head, and the torchlight catches the tears streaking down his cheeks.
The colours around him are pulsing, writhing, turning into something so dark and so twisted that I can barely stand to look at him.
I take a step back.
Then another.
My body is screaming at me to run, to flee, to climb those stairs and never look back.
But my legs are weak, my muscles trembling, because I’ve been drugged again.
I recognize the floating disconnection in my limbs, the way the world seems to be happening slightly to the left of where I’m standing, and I know I won’t make it three steps before he catches me.
Konstantine’s chant reaches a crescendo.
His voice cracks on the final syllable, and then he stops, his chest heaving, his whole body vibrating with some terrible energy.
He turns to the corpse, and before I can understand what he’s doing, before I can even form the thought, his fingers dig into the leathery flesh of Ines’s face and he pulls.
The sound is like old cloth tearing, like parchment being ripped. Like nothing I have ever heard before, and nothing I ever want to hear again.
I scream as the face comes away in his hands.
The whole face; the forehead, the cheeks, the nose, the lipless mouth, the sunken eyelids, all of it peels away from the skull beneath with a wet, fibrous tearing sound that echoes off the stone walls.
Beneath it, the skull gleams dully in the torchlight, scraps of desiccated tissue still clinging to the bone.
I can see the empty sockets where her eyes used to be, I can see the grin of her exposed teeth.
I am screaming and screaming, and I cannot stop.
Konstantine turns to me, and he’s holding Ines’s face in his hands like a sacred offering. The skin drapes over his fingers, still holding the shape of her features, and there are bits of something dark and crumbling stuck to the underside.
“Now you will be one,” he says. “Now I will bind your flesh to hers, your spirit to hers, your soul to her soul. You are the vessel. You are the resurrection and the life.”
He takes a step toward me.
I stumble backward, my feet tangling in the hem of the white gown he dressed me in, and I go down hard on the stone floor only just missing my pile of vomit.
The impact jars my spine, knocks the wind out of me and for a moment I can only gasp, can only claw at the floor, can only try to drag myself away from the nightmare advancing toward me.
He’s on me before I can get far. His weight presses me down, his knees pinning my arms to my sides. I buck, thrash, and scream but he’s so much stronger than me, so much bigger, and the drugs are making my movements slow, clumsy and useless.
“Shh,” he whispers, and his voice is gentle, loving, the voice of a man soothing a frightened child. “Shh, my love. This will only hurt for a moment, and then you will be whole. You will be complete. You will be truly her.”
The face is cold against my skin. Wet. How the fuck is it wet?
I can feel the inner surface, the texture of preserved tissue, the crumbling edges where the flesh has begun to decay despite the embalming.
He presses it over my own face, smoothing it down over my forehead, my nose, my cheeks, my lips, and I can smell her; the chemicals of preservation, the faint sweetness of putrefaction barely held at bay, the ghost of perfume that was applied to her corpse long, long ago.
I can’t breathe.
The skin is covering my nose and mouth, AND I CAN’T FUCKING brEATHE.