51. Lazarus
It’s late afternoon by the time I make it back to the villa and I know exactly where he is, can almost picture him in this very moment.
I move towards the chapel door. The door is ajar, a sliver of sickly yellow light bleeding up the stairs. The smell intensifies; formaldehyde, damp earth, and something else, something rancid and organic that no chemical can fully mask. It’s the smell of a love that has festered into gangrene.
My stomach clenches, but I force myself forward, down the stone steps, one by one. Each step of my descent feels like a step into a deeper circle of a personal hell, one my brother has meticulously curated.
The room opens up into a cavern of horrors. Flickering candles cast a jaundiced glow on the scene. I can see the altar, can see the cavernous walls looming above me.
And there, right in the middle, is my brother.
He is on his knees, rocking back and forth in a mindless rhythm. In his arms, cradled against his chest like a sleeping child, is the mangled remains of Ines’s preserved body.
Her skin is a patchwork of parchment and glistening, dark rot.
One arm hangs at a grotesque angle, the fingers curled into a claw and the other is missing entirely.
That beautiful cursed face is no more. It is gone, as if it’s been ripped clean off from her bones.
Her hair, once a cascade of braids is now a brittle, straw-like nest, matted and completely ruined.
And he is whispering to it. A litany of devotion and apology that fills the cold air like a chant.
“I love you, I love you, I love you… I’m sorry, my darling, I’m so sorry… I didn’t mean to hurt you, you know I didn’t… I love you, I love you…”
The words are a soft, spoken directly into the hollow of her ear, or what remains of it.
He rocks her, his cheek pressed against the ruin of her hair. He is a man holding the wreckage of his entire world, and the sight of it ignites a fury in me so pure, so incandescent, it whites out my vision for a moment.
Even dead, even a crumbling effigy of flesh and bone, Ines is still destroying him. Still destroying us.
I take a step forward, my jaw clenched so tight my teeth ache. My boot comes down on something unseen in the half-light. A brittle, sharp crack echoes through the chapel like a gunshot.
The rocking instantly stops.
The whispering ceases.
The silence that follows is heavy and suffocating.
Konstantine freezes. His whole body goes rigid.
Then, with a slow, almost creaking motion he turns his head.
His eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, find mine.
They are the eyes of a man who has been staring into an abyss for so long that the abyss has not just started to stare back but has erupted, has consumed.
There is no surprise in them, only a flicker of something that might be hope. A terrifying, childlike hope.
“La-Lazarus?” His voice is a dry rasp, the voice of a tomb. “Did you bring her back? Did you bring my wife back to me?”
The question hangs in the air, so monstrous in its delusion that for a second, I can’t speak. My rage finds its voice, cold and sharp as a scalpel. “That girl is not Ines. She was never Ines. She is not yours.”
Something shifts in his face. The hope curdles into confusion, then into a dawning, terrible understanding. He looks down at the thing in his arms, then back at me and the scream he lets out is not a human sound.
It’s a raw, primal shriek of betrayal and loss that tears from his throat.
He doesn’t put Ines down.
He clutches her tighter, as if I might try to snatch her away and in the same, fluid motion, he launches himself at me.
He is a blur of matted hair and wild eyes, and the weight of him combined with the dead weight of the corpse catches me off guard. We both go down hard onto the stone floor. The impact drives the air from my lungs.
The world becomes a chaos of flailing limbs, dust, and the dry, sweet stench of decay.
We are rolling, a grotesque tangle of the living and the dead. The remains of Ines are crushed between us, a brittle, crumbling third combatant in the fight. I feel a rib snap under my back, not mine but hers, a dry, splintering sensation that sends a jolt of revulsion through me.
Her desiccated flesh powders against my skin, and her straw-like hair scratches my face. I am being smeared with her. I am being baptized in the very filth of her.
Konstantine is on top of me, his face a mask of feral grief. He’s not a fighter, never was but madness has given him a desperate, wiry strength. He lands a punch to my jaw that makes my teeth clack together and fills my mouth with the copper taste of blood.
“You can’t have her!” he sobs, spittle flying from his lips. “She’s mine! You never understood! You never understood our love!”
Another punch, this one to my cheekbone, and my vision explodes in a supernova of pain.
I see stars, and behind the stars, I see her face.
Not this crumbling husk, but Ines as she was in life.
The way she would look at me over the dinner table, a slow, predatory smile playing on her lips as her hand found Konstantine’s thigh under the table, her eyes never leaving mine.
“…You tried to steal her before. You tried to steal her love, but she always wanted me more. She always desired me more.” His words come out jumbled.
A tirade of delusion that reveals the true madness consuming him.
“She might have enjoyed fucking you, but it was me she truly loved. Me she truly wanted…”
The rage that floods me now is not hot. It is a glacial, clarifying fury that burns away the pain and the shock. Even now, he cannot admit what she did, what he did, what they did. After all these years, he still refuses to see his abuses for what they were.
I hate her for what she did to him, I hate her for what she made me do. I hate her for this final, grotesque embrace. For the way her crumbling bones are digging into my flesh, for the way her dust is filling my nostrils, for the way she is still, still, the centre of his entire fucking universe.
With a roar that comes from the deepest pit of my soul, I buck my hips and throw Konstantine off balance.
He topples sideways, his grip on the corpse loosening.
The body rolls away with a dry, rustling sound, coming to rest a few feet from us, its empty eye sockets staring at the ceiling.
For a split second, Konstantine’s attention follows it, a look of pure, unadulterated panic on his face.
It’s the opening I need. I scramble on top of him, my knees pinning his arms to the floor. He thrashes beneath me, screaming her name, his body arching with a strength I have to use all my weight to contain.
He is crying now, great, heaving sobs that wrack his frame. “Please, Lazarus! Please! Don’t take her from me! She’s all I have!”
My hands find his throat. The skin is clammy and slick with sweat and the greasy residue of decay.
I squeeze.
I don’t look at his face,
I can’t. If I look at his face, at the brother I loved, I might falter.
I fix my eyes on her.
And I squeeze and I squeeze.
Ines’s skull lies just beyond his shoulder, dislodged from the rest of the body during our struggle. The flickering fluorescent light plays over its contours, making the empty sockets seem to shift and watch.
Even now, even as a detached, fleshless thing, it mocks me.
My hands tighten. Konstantine’s struggles become more frantic, his legs kicking uselessly against the stone floor.
A gurgling sound escapes his throat. The dust of her is in my lungs, the grit of her bones is ground into my clothes, into the cuts on my knuckles.
We are all becoming one thing down here, a single, composite creature of violence and rot.
“She… is… nothing,” I hiss through gritted teeth, the words a mantra against the grinning bone. “She was a parasite. A leech, and she deserved everything she got.”
His eyes, bloodshot and bulging, are still fixed on the skull, not on me. Even as I choke the life from him, his last conscious thought is for her.
Finally, his body goes slack. His eyelids flutter and close. The gurgling stops, replaced by a shallow, rasping breath. I hold on for a few seconds longer, feeling the frantic pulse in his carotid artery slow to a dull, thudding rhythm under my thumbs. Then, I release him.
I let his head fall. It hits the stone floor with a dull, wet thud, his face turned towards the dirt, towards the scattered, powdery remains of his damned beloved. He lies there, face down in the filth, a broken man at the feet of his broken god.
I look down at the skull. It sits there, pristine and whole amidst the scattered debris of her body, the last intact monument to her existence. The grin is still there. Of course it is. It’s carved into the bone.
But it seems different now. Fading. Powerless.
I take a step towards it. My boot hovering over it.
I think of all the nights I spent in this place, bound, drugged, used and abused by this bitch.
“You are not his,” I whisper down to the skull, my voice a raw, torn thing. “You are not anyone’s. You are just dead.”
I bring my boot down.
The sound is not a crack, but a crunch. It doesn’t break into a few clean pieces. It implodes, folding in on itself, the fragments grinding together into a gritty paste of bone shards and dried matter.
And that perfect, mocking grin is gone, replaced by a concave ruin.
I grind my heel down, twisting, feeling the last solid pieces give way until there is nothing left but a flattened, unrecognizable smear of dirt.
The air in this room still tastes the same, even after all these years.
Konstantine’s head lolls against my shoulder, a string of saliva connecting his slack lips to the cotton of my shirt. He’s heavier than he looks, a sack of useless, pampered flesh.
I carry him not with strain but with the deliberate, ceremonial pace of a man bearing a sacred offering.
My offering. To my own altar. To myself.
The bed is still here. The iron frame, the thin mattress where I spent years drowning in a chemical fog, while that bitch abused my body and my own brother stood and watched and did nothing.
I lay him down. The mattress sighs under his weight, a sound so familiar it makes my teeth ache.
My hands, moving with a surgeon’s precision, begin their work. I grab that very same rope they used on me, and I bind him with it. Bind him with my dried-up blood, with my pain, with my haunted memories.
First his wrists, crossed and lashed to the iron headboard, then his ankles, spread just enough to make him feel vulnerable, tied to the foot of the bed.
He is a starfish splayed out for dissection, and I am the one holding the knife.
He stirs for a second, making a pathetic mewling sound in his throat. His eyelids flutter, trying to open, but the sedative I slipped into his veins is a heavy, black tide pulling him back under.
“Brother,” I whisper, but he doesn’t respond. The drug will keep him in a twilight state, a hazy purgatory where he can feel, he can hear, but he cannot move, cannot scream.
He will be a prisoner in the cathedral of his own skull.
Just as I was.
As I step back, I look at him, truly look at him, at what he has become, at what he is now.
And there it is. All my hatred. All my rage. It all comes flooding back like a tsunami bursting through the floodgates.
His mouth is open, a wet, dark hole, and a soft snore rattles in his throat. He looks like a landed fish, gasping for a world it cannot comprehend.
“It should have been you.”
Our father’s words, a deathbed rasp, meant for me.
It should have been me. From the very beginning. I should have been the one anointed with the chrism of power. Because Konstantine was always too weak, too pathetic, too human to ever stand a chance of ruling anything more than a dinner party.
And I realise then that is not just hate I feel, but pity. A derision so profound it almost feels like mercy. You poor, stupid creature. You were born a lamb in a world of wolves, and you were foolish enough to think a title alone would give you fangs.
My gaze traces the line of his jaw, the vulnerable arch of his throat where the needle’s mark is a tiny, perfect ruby.
The helplessness suits him. It strips away the pretence of authority, the borrowed robes of an office he never earned, and reveals the truth of him; a soft, pampered object.
A plaything. He was always drawn to the fire, even as he tried to smother it.
Now I am the fire, and he is nothing but kindling, bound and waiting for the match.
God is showing me the way now.
Every step I have taken, every humiliation I have endured has been a rung on a ladder leading to this room, this moment.
I realise suddenly that God didn’t abandon me here; He forged me here.
He let them lock me in this box so I could learn the exquisite architecture of suffering. And now, He is granting me everything. He is handing me the keys to the kingdom, and my brother is the lock I must break to open the door.
And break it I will. Gladly.
I just have to keep him here, keep him contained. A ghost in the family attic. I will tend to him. I will feed him the same poison they fed me, drop by drop, and I will watch the light in his eyes dim to a guttering candle flame.
I will be his only visitor, his only God.
And when the time is right, when Antonio comes knocking with that predictable, righteous fury blazing in his eyes, the final act will begin.
A smile touches my lips. It’s a slow, creeping thing, a crack spreading across a frozen lake. I can feel it pulling at the muscles of my face, a sensation so unfamiliar it’s almost painful.
Everything is slipping into place.
I stand and move to the side of the bed.
This is my divine retribution.
Not a quick, merciful death, but this.
I am not just taking his power; I am taking his soul, one drugged, terrified heartbeat at a time.
“Sleep well, brother,” I murmur, my voice a velvet purr in the sepulchral silence. “When you wake, we will all begin our life together. Just as it should have been.”
The lamp flickers, the shadows dance, and I stand there, a dark sentinel, watching over my greatest work. The hatred is a pure, white-hot sun in my chest, and for the first time in my life, I feel its warmth.