22. When All Is Said and Done It Always Ends in Flames #2
Jude and I stood close enough for conversation, but nothing else.
I felt William’s presence then, the entrance of his silhouette in my periphery.
There was a sheen of sweat that swept across his forehead, a glint from the gun in his hand.
He pressed it into my cheek, nudging me forward.
Then he slid it below my jaw, into the softness of my throat.
Jude’s eyes dropped only slightly, momentarily, when I displaced the muzzle a hair’s breadth with the motion of a swallow. He shifted toward me with a step.
“Action,” said William de Witt.
Jude leaned forward and kissed me, his lips cool and dry. The air tasted smoky, almost thick with heat. My tongue sat heavy, grotesque, inside my mouth.
“More,” said William. He jammed the pistol harder into the soft underbelly of my chin. “You love him, don’t you?”
“She can’t act with that thing in the way,” Jude said. His voice was calm, almost bored. I noticed he had a bruise forming on the underside of his jaw, like he’d recently been hit with something hard.
“I’ll pull it away when I see it done right.
” William was looking at me, a spark of madness in his eyes, the ones I knew so well, in so many iterations.
I couldn’t look at him; bile coated the inside of my mouth.
“This is the moment of avowal, Emmanuelle. Let’s see that devotion. ” The word was an accusation; a snarl.
I looked at Jude and thought: In another life I might have loved you gently.
Then I made myself into something else, the kind of woman who’d lived so readily on her knees.
Such a boys’ club. For what, money? Some false idol of safety?
I leaned forward then, and kissed Jude with desperation, with overpowering compromise.
With the belief that a single kiss could redraw the cards, rearrange the stars, and save me.
Like a kiss could be so perfect, it might be worth the bargain for my life.
“More.” William drew the gun from my throat, sliding it down until it rested on the small of my back.
He was pushing me into Jude, guiding my hips closer, deeper.
He was also retching noisily into a handkerchief, a film of what seemed at first to be blackened mucus lining the pristine white.
“I know you like it,” he said in my ear, as the taste of my kiss with Jude turned sour.
“Don’t act like this isn’t what you want. ”
William hacked again into the cloth as Jude slid a hand around my jaw. I felt a deep, prodigious sickness, a rising malevolence of disgust.
“Kiss him like you’re fucking him,” William said. His voice was breathy, repulsive. “Come on, Emmanuelle. We both know you’re holding back.”
I wasn’t, not in any way that mattered. I was fully inhabiting my character now, her piteousness, her wormlike degradation.
I knew as much as I needed to of the story, its darker outlines, to feel sympathy for the woman with the gun to her throat; to be as disgusted by her terms of survival as I had been with my own.
I was having trouble breathing; I wanted to break away, to suck in a breath.
The pressure of Jude’s fingers was meant to calm me, to prevent me from making it worse, but what I wanted, then, was to be worse.
To be insufferable—to be disgusting, not just to myself but to everyone, and to William specifically.
I tasted a tiny, acidic surge of vomit and thought how good it would feel to have projectiles at my disposal.
To spill an organ just to stain his suit.
“More. More.” William’s voice was increasingly loud, his mouth so close to my ear I could feel the unshaved stubble of his chin on my cheek.
The spittle on his lips lingered wetly, a humid burst of rot.
The hand with the gun had climbed down the notches of my spine, resting on the clasp of my bra, digging in.
There was a rage in him reserved for something more than me, for which I was only the vessel. “Come on. More.”
I slid my mouth lower, to Jude’s neck. William’s pistol rose again to press to the base of my skull, its presence unignorable.
I thought about what I was willing to do, how much I could compromise, how much shame I was willing to swallow.
If I got on my knees, would that make a difference?
What could humanize me now; had I ever been human?
If I begged for pleasure or forgiveness, could the audience love me again, or was it already over?
Forget what I could survive. What did I deserve?
For a moment, the tension seemed to falter. The pressure of the muzzle digging into my back eased slightly as William coughed, then coughed again.
“Genesis—”
There was a hasty shuffle of footsteps behind me, transition of the gun from one hand to another as William’s cough became a gag. The gun reasserted itself at the base of my skull, followed by the sound of coughing so forced and vile it made my own stomach turn.
I snuck a look behind me then, or tried to.
I saw something I could only call a creature as it sprang forth from William’s throat, a bezoar of something part fur, part slime that sluiced between his parted lips to land like a stone in his palm.
From the blur of my periphery, I watched the creature begin to spread itself thin in an uncanny time-warp until it began to crawl, or maybe drip, like a growth of viscous spores over the width of William de Witt’s open hand.
It was so revolting, and so distractingly unnatural, that I forgot the imminence of danger.
I turned even farther, straining to gather what I could until Genesis whipped the side of my face with the gun, a loud crack resounding punitively from the bone of my cheek.
My head spun from the impact, the vision of the black mass in William’s hand blinking doubled, tripled behind my eyes.
He must have flung the mass onto the ground—there was a wet, squelching sound and I caught Jude’s eyes flicking down to my feet, following it with a glance so unmoved I could only assume he’d seen it happen several times already.
My eyes followed, though this time they didn’t have to travel far.
Whatever William had set loose from his own chest was growing, colonizing virally below our feet.
Already, the glob of particulates had spread across broken stone to the edge of the rotting fountain, dispersing into woven chains of toxic mold.
“This isn’t working.”
I blinked away the knowledge of what now spread unseen across the villa, reoriented by the sudden sound of William’s voice.
There was another spray of spittle as he snatched the gun from Genesis’s hand, and I flinched, skin crawling with the thought of what might emerge from him a second time.
The sting of my battered cheek was secondary to the wave of my revulsion.
This time, though, William aimed the gun at Jude, gesturing to the fountain. “Open it.”
Jude looked blankly at him. I looked at Jude’s swollen mouth, the tracks of sweat and grime across his face. I felt sorry for him, and sorry for me, for having chosen a violence that came with caveats. The monster who couldn’t harm his maker; the devil being punished by his god.
“Open it.” William shoved the gun into Jude’s forehead. “Now.”
Behind us, Genesis now stood frozen, awaiting instruction, like a robot docked in place.
I flicked a glance at her, wondering whether she thought she was safe from this.
What did she think would happen next? William de Witt had nothing left to live for, it seemed.
No twisted desire for Emmanuelle, no toxic rivalry with Fred, no one left to master. Nothing left to hide.
He was dying. I understood it then, finally.
The mold in Emmanuelle’s chest hadn’t been put there by her murderer—it had grown there, just as it now grew in his.
The toxicity William de Witt had spat onto the ground had clearly taken residency in his chest like some unnatural infection of the soul, and he really believed this ritual of his own twisted making was the answer.
The ritual is failing. So then it was this or oblivion. This or nothing.
There was nothing more dangerous than a man with his back to the wall.
Jude bent down to the fountain, the one I’d thought was broken. “I’ll need something for leverage.”
“No, you don’t.” He and William were talking in hissed, gritted voices. They’d always hated each other, I realized. This was an old enmity. “Open it.”
Jude’s shoulders were tensed, razorlike beneath his T-shirt. He bent down and gripped something with his fingers—the edge of the fountain’s base. A slab of what looked like concrete, and what could only be the lid of a tomb.
There was a weariness to him as he shoved it aside, or tried to.
I remembered his many deaths, the ends that cheated him so many times.
The undigested pills, the foot on the edge of the roof.
Unthinking, I dropped beside him to help him push.
Sweat dripped from Jude’s forehead onto the slab below until we managed to push it aside, just a little. Enough to reveal the horror beneath.