Chapter 15 #2
We cut and stabbed, cut and stabbed, cut and stabbed. Flesh tore. Skin split. Fragments of him fell to the floor.
The world around us drowned in red, and the bones upstairs wept.
We didn’t stop until Gunnar’s body convulsed once, twice, and then collapsed inward, emptied of structure. Ophelia stepped back, as if waking from a trance, awareness returning all at once. The knife slipped from her hold.
I paused, numb, not because I didn't understand what we had done, but because I didn’t know what she would do next.
They had been together for nearly a hundred years.
Was that enough time for love to fester into contempt, or did something remain, buried under habit and shared survival?
Was she mourning him, regretting the moment she chose to take me in?
Or perhaps killing him was like cutting out a malignancy only to discover it had spread everywhere; to get rid of him fully, she would have to cut out every part of herself.
I moved toward her, intending to guide her back to her lair, to let her recover in the soil of her homeland. But she shook her head in a pained “no.”
Through clenched teeth, she said, “We need to bury him.”
She had taken his dirt-filled medallion. Nothing left for him to anchor himself to, nothing that could sustain him. I looked at the hemorrhage she had become. If she didn’t get into her soil soon, she’d be beyond saving.
Ophelia noticed my hesitation. “We need to make sure, Agatha.”
The pendant at her throat held only a fragment of soil. It wouldn’t sustain her for long. And yet, she refused to leave me.
Burying him was not enough for her. She made me fetch the hatchet Sylvie and I had used to split wood from the living room.
I placed the blade at Gunnar’s shoulder and swung.
The steel bit, skin splitting, the muscle resisting with a strange elasticity. He emitted a congested, gurgling sound, more a vibration than a voice, like a corpse stirring in its own skin. I stumbled back, sweat slick on my forehead.
I hacked at the legs. Bone grated, metal bit. I slid the hatchet along his femur, following the curve, the blade meeting resistance before snapping through.
The entire time, Ophelia sat in the corner. She was still naked, still covered in blood, still gripping the knife, staring into space, probably trying to visualize what her life would be now, without him. Remembering who she was before.
I had only been with them for a few months, but I couldn’t remember myself either. My life before them felt like a series of pictures in someone else’s album, all out of order. Thinking beyond this moment, beyond the blade splintering the bone, was more effort than I was willing to give.
I took his head last. His remaining eye still watched me. It only took a few chops to decapitate him fully. I heaved, then dragged the sheet from the bed and started placing the body parts on top.
I would have to make two or three trips. Gunnar, now just a heap of pieces and gore stacked upon a sheet, was bigger than anyone I’d ever seen. It was hard to believe he was truly gone. His presence, once so enormous, was seeping out of the house like an exorcism.
The grave I dug was wide and shallow, but it took most of the night to finish. Like I had felt trying to enter the forest, the garden seemed to refuse Gunnar, rejecting him as a creature of another time and place.
I dug. I dug. I dug. Just as I had that first night. Just as I had when I buried Sylvie.
In the hour before sunrise, Ophelia’s figure emerged from the house, wavering like smoke. She’d wrapped herself in one of Sylvie’s old trench coats.
“Wait,” she said, pulling a salt shaker from one of the pockets. “He did it once. To the one before me.”
Even though the soil was no longer his and couldn’t sustain him, Ophelia did not take the chance.
When I was a child, it was a local legend: an envious neighbor contaminating a more successful farmer’s field with salt to make the soil infertile.
There was so little left in the shaker that I could hear the granules rattling from where I stood. She knelt at the edge of the grave and scattered the grains. They winked like tiny diamonds.
A pale strand of light spread across the horizon, sharpening the mist and turning the air brittle.
I wondered if Ophelia had always hated him but never allowed herself to admit it.
And what did that make of me? Was I only a vessel, something to steady herself against?
Perhaps she, like him, had feared the length of eternity, and together they had wound around each other like toxic vines—beautiful and suffocating, draining whatever they touched.
Sylvie had been scared to leave me, too, and chose to find a replacement, someone to distract her so there was no void when she finally departed. She had been waiting for Rochelle to return so she could take the final step and sever the dead limb—me.
Or was it a much simpler equation? Ophelia feared Gunnar would replace her with me, so she struck before she could become another quiet relic in his keeping.
I lowered Gunnar’s pieces into the grave, and Ophelia poured soil over them. Then I dragged the young man forward and placed him beside Gunnar.
Something about it felt wrong. Gunnar had lived too long, had gathered too much knowledge from the world to be reduced to this. Yet he had never existed alone, moving from one companion to another, binding them to him. Now he would remain beside a man whose name we never learned.
The first faint blush of morning spread across the sky as I pressed the earth flat. My heart beat too fast. My teeth would not stop chattering.
“We did it, Agatha. It's done.”
Agatha.
In some deep, innocent ignorance, like Ophelia, I had hoped to reclaim the lost part of myself.
Yet, there I was, still the same, with no past and no present.
Ophelia and I stumbled back toward the house.
I supported her as best I could, her strength fading, yet she refused the respite that would have healed her. She stayed beside me. Loyal, as she once was to Gunnar.
I guided her to the basement and helped her into her box. Before I could put the lid on, she looked at me. For a moment, I thought she understood everything. Then she gave a faint smile and closed her eyes. I looked at her ethereal face, marked with drying blood, and lowered the lid.