38. Leandra #2
I am drowning in dead flesh, trapped in the face of a murdered woman, and I’m screaming but the sound is muffled, absorbed by the leathery mask pressed against my lips.
Konstantine is chanting again. His voice is ecstatic, trembling with religious fervour.
I feel his hands smoothing the edges of the face against my own skin, pressing it into place, trying to make it stick.
His fingers trace the lines of my jaw, the arch of my eyebrows, the curve of my lips through the layer of dead tissue and he’s weeping openly now, his tears falling onto the mask that covers my face.
“One flesh,” he moans. “One soul. One eternal love.”
I manage to turn my head, to gasp in a breath of air that isn’t filtered through a corpse’s skin, and I shriek with all the force my lungs can muster.
“You’re mad! You’re insane! Get it off me, get it off, GET IT FUCKING OFF!”
The blow comes out of nowhere. His fist connects with my temple, and the world goes white, then red, then black. I’m falling, I’m spinning, I’m gone.
But when I come back, everything is wrong.
I’m the one on the altar now. The stone is cold against my back, cold through the thin fabric of my gown. The white linen that covered Ines’s body has been thrown aside, and I can feel the corpse beside me, feel the cold radiating from it, smell the sickly-sweet scent of decay.
Ines’s face is still pressed against my own.
I can feel it, moist and unnatural. My arms are heavy, unresponsive, and when I try to move them I realize that Konstantine has bound my wrists with something.
I’m naked, spread-eagled on the altar, my arms stretched above my head, my legs apart.
The position is horrifyingly familiar, and my mind is screaming.
NO. NO. NO. NOT AGAIN!
But my mouth won’t form the words.
Konstantine is moving around the altar. I can hear his footsteps, the heavy rasp of his breathing, the occasional snatch of his chanting.
“I know what I did wrong before,” he says, “I tried to pour her into you all at once, but the vessel wasn’t prepared. The vessel must be opened, the vessel must be hollowed out. The vessel must be made ready to receive the sacred.”
He comes back into my field of vision, and I see that he has a stone bowl in his hands. It’s ancient, carved with symbols that make my eyes ache just to look at them. It’s filled with something that looks like oil but moves too slowly, too thickly, catching the light in ways that oil shouldn’t.
But that’s not what makes me scream again.
What makes me scream is what he does next.
He sets the bowl down beside my hip and turns to Ines’s corpse.
The body is so fragile now, the flesh so desiccated and brittle that when he grabs her arm and pulls, it separates from the shoulder with a sound like dry branches snapping.
The joint gives way with a small pop, and Konstantine holds the arm up like a trophy.
I am screaming, I am screaming so hard that my throat is raw and bleeding, and I can taste copper on my tongue.
“Bone of her bone,” Konstantine intones, and he takes the arm in both hands and breaks it over his knee. The snap is loud in the crypt, loud as a gunshot and the bone splinters. He picks through the fragments with the care of a surgeon, selecting pieces that please him. “Flesh of her flesh.”
He places the fragments in the stone bowl, grinding them together with a pestle I didn’t see him produce.
The sound is horrible, a gritty crunching that sets my teeth on edge and makes my whole body convulse with revulsion.
He grinds until the bones are powder, and then he dips his fingers into the bowl and scoops out a paste, and he turns to me.
“Open your mouth.”
Abso-fucking-lutely not. I clench my jaw so tight my teeth ache. I shake my head, pressing my lips together, sealing them shut against whatever nightmare he’s trying to force into me.
I will not open my mouth.
I will not,
I will not.
Konstantine sighs. It’s a disappointed sound, like the sound of a teacher whose favourite student has let him down. He sets the bowl aside, and for a moment I think I’ve won, he’s going to give up, he’s going to realize this is madness, he’s going to…
His hand clamps down on my jaw, fingers pressing into the hinges until pain blooms white-hot and my mouth is forced open by the sheer brutal pressure.
I choke, I gag, I try to bite him but his grip is implacable. Then his other hand is there, fingers coated in bone paste, and he’s pushing the gritty mixture into my mouth, onto my tongue, against the back of my throat.
The taste is indescribable.
It’s like licking a tombstone, like swallowing centuries of death.
The powder is gritty and dry, and it sucks all the moisture from my mouth. I’m choking, I’m gagging but he’s holding my jaw shut now, clamping my lips together, forcing me to swallow.
I convulse, my body trying to reject what he’s forced into me, but somehow the paste slides down my throat. It’s inside me now, it’s part of me, and I am sobbing. I am weeping beneath the mask of Ines’s dead face.
He releases my jaw and steps back, surveying his work with the critical eye of an artist. The bowl is still there, still half-full of ground bone, and I know with a sick certainty that he’s going to make me swallow more, that this ritual is only beginning.
He picks up the femur, holding it in both hands like a sacred object, like a relic. Like something precious, holy, and terrible beyond words.
“The final part is the most important,” he says, and his voice has gone soft, gentle, has become the voice of a lover. “The union of flesh, the joining of bodies. The sacred marriage that will bind your soul to hers forever. This is how it was meant to be, my love. This is how I bring you back.”
I understand what he’s going to do a split second before he does it.
“No,” I whisper. “No, no, no, please. God, no, Konstantine, please. I’ll be her, I promise. I’ll be anyone you want, just please don’t, please…”
I can feel the cold stone against my bare skin, the cold terror flooding through my veins and the tears streaming down my cheeks, pooling beneath the mask of dead flesh that covers my face.
I thrash against the bindings. I twist, buck and scream but the straps hold tight, and the drugs are still in my system, turning my muscles to water, turning my resistance to nothing.
His hand presses down on my stomach, holding me in place, and I feel the jagged end of the bone press against my inner thigh.
“This will fix you,” he murmurs. “This will make you whole. This will bring her back to me.”
He forces the thing into me, forces it in with such brutality I feel myself rip.
I scream as it enters me. I can feel every ridge, every splinter, every irregular surface of the broken bone as he pushes it deeper and deeper.