The Key (Sanguinem Emere) (27 page)

He has already fallen back to sleep, but the softness of his skin as his arm lies over my chest curls around my heart.

I do love him. I did miss him. I can’t believe what has happened just in the last few hours. It seems like the last year has been a nightmare and I’m waking up from it now to this bright new world, this perfect place of sudden liberty and joy.

Then what’s with the random doubts?

Slowly and as lightly as I can I lift his arm, giving his hand one last kiss and wait for him to curl it back into himself as his subconscious, dreaming mind takes hold. I lift myself from the bed, stopping periodically to ensure he isn’t watching me and pad from the room like a spy.

Which is what I am.

I know what I need to do to allay all my terrors. I fondle the key about my neck. Of course he had others. Why should I ever have believed this to be the only one? When people enquired about it, I side-tracked, I hedged, I ignored their questioning. Truthfully, I can’t say why I kept the damnded thing. Or even why I wore it all this time. After I left it quickly became a talisman, a symbol of everything that had been gnawing at me, devouring me and everything that had kept me sane. Mostly the thought that he would still be somewhere. Even if that somewhere wasn’t with me.

But if I know my husband – strange to think of him as such – then I also know that I still have the key for a reason. Though what that reason is, is so convoluted that I don’t think even he knows what it is anymore. But I do know that he is testing me still. Nobody changes their behaviour this quickly.

Regardless of how badly I want to believe he’s different.

The house is much the same as I remember it and the thrumming trepidation in my chest plays a tune I recall well from my last trip down to the littlest door at the end of the hall. The flowers and plants have grown more numerous. It also feels as though newer and thicker carpeting has replaced the old, but otherwise the texture in the air is the same. The taste of fear and curiosity comingled on my tongue is the same.

I lift the key from between my breasts and fondle it’s ridges, wondering why I am doing this, mentally kicking myself for ruining everything after last night. After he revealed himself and offered me something I didn’t even realise I wanted from him.

Why can’t I just leave well enough alone? He knows that answer better than I do, though I am beginning to see it.

I have to know.

I have to know.

I have to see.

My feet echo in the corridor, like they’re weighted down, like I’m wearing clogs. My bare-feet betray me to myself. I should stop.

I should go back.

I repeat the mantra to myself as I approach the steady little door, its handle and keyhole a symbol of a face. The screamer maybe.

I fit the key into the hole and click it open. A slight scratching sound, like from a barrel of rats erupts on the other side for a brief moment before it quietens down suddenly and the only silence follows in its wake.

The door swings open and immediately the scent sends me reeling back a step or two, but I stifle the vomit rising in my throat and try to enter the room.

Light from my cell phone bathes the room as I lift it above my head, not wanting to stay long enough for my eyes to adjust, not wanting to stay at all, but I have to know. Immediately the sight that greets me causes my fingers to clench closed around the phone but my right hand to flail wildly forgetting about the key.

It’s like a giant stony fist has my heart and is slowly applying pressure. My breathing is too shallow as spots dance in my eyes. One arm moves from the muck on the floor, a dainty arm, a girl’s. They all are. Her fingers reach out to me as she looks up, her face smeared black and crimson.

The key falls with a squelching clink to the floor at my feet and I scrabble madly for it as she – it - grabs onto my arm and I reel out of its grasp, pulling myself inward, trying to abate my panic. But I know it’s futile. I expected something, god knows what, but not this. I scream as the thing gropes for me again and I snatch up the key, and ram my foot into what feels hard enough to be a face.

A wet crunching sound greets my attack and I hiss in revulsion as my foot pulls back with some resistance, like pulling out of water.

I slide out of the room, hammering the door closed behind me, my fingers rattling the key back into the lock which shudders as something collides with the frame from the other side. Finally I hear the tell-tale click of the tumblers sliding into place and I fall to the ground, rocking slightly.

Never this. Never expected this.

God, Oh God.

It’s all true.

How could he? And was that really Cecily’s face I saw in there? Being slithered all over as she stared blankly up at me?

My clothes reek of the room and I shudder inwardly and outwardly, the shock shakes starting to wrack through me. But I need to move.

I need to get the fuck out of here. Maybe run. Now.

Now!

If this is the secret he was keeping from me, where to now?

Can’t run. That would be weak. And then he’d know for sure what I did.

And he’d follow me. I know that much.

But can I climb back into bed with him? Let him touch me with those blood stained hands? Let him smile at me as though he doesn’t have a room of decay and monstrosity hidden in his home?

His face taunts me and the answer is quite palpable.

Yes.

God, what does that make me?

Shaking and twitching I stand up and start moving. Not sure where or why really, just moving to retreat. The hallway to sanctity stretches before me and still I move as if in a dream, slow and weighted and very tired. Because I have to admit to myself, despite my unyielding devotion to him, the sanctity at the end of this path is not going to feel all that safe anymore. I opened the box. And now the horrors will plague my mind forever. But if I am going to accept him – my fingers caress the ring – then I must do so completely.

A lightness filters through me from somewhere in my chest as my limbs go cold and slightly numb.

I do.

I step out into the foyer, familiar to my eyes and thus comforting in its décor, its ambience and the presence of its owner, seated on the staircase, his eyes gazing coldly up at me.

The cold numbing my limbs turns to ice and spreads to my torso, crowding around my heart as I look back at him, shocked to see him there, knowing that the game is up.

He knows that I know.

And the expression on his face is unreadable once more.

“I thought you were different, Eva.” His voice is worn, that level of tired I’ve only ever heard in it once before. Far from exacerbating my fear it tweaks the most inappropriate of emotions in me. It’s like this time a year ago all over again. And that all-encompassing, soul-destroying sorrow seeps into me again, opening the chasm inside me and sucking the life into it.

As long as we had the secret, his to know and mine to keep we were okay. But it’s all going to be over soon.

“Dimitri, I’m sorry.”

He scoffs and thumps his fist hard into the banister, making me jump in fear of him. Just a little.

“But you wanted me to know, didn’t you?” My voice is unabashed, echoing my own desire to become as small as possible, “You gave me this thing!”

I hold up the key and his tired, worn eyes glance at it. His face is a terrible mask, unreadable, uncertain, everything obscured by the wildness of him, his hair, his beard, his inhuman eyes.

“I didn’t want it to come to this,” He starts to stand and I will myself not to run into his arms and make him hold me. His demeanour is too cold, too uncompromising, “I thought I could trust you with this one thing. The others, they all fell the same as you. Addison, Cecily, so many of them.”

I stand in shocked understanding.

“How could you?” If I didn’t know I’d just spoken, I’d think the world had faded to nothing. My voice is deathly quiet, like the grave. The only sounds apparent to my ears are the vague thumpings at the little door down the hall.

He smiles in a self-deprecating sort of way which washes away my horror for just a moment. Obliterating my knowledge that this man killed my sister. If she is even dead. “They were disobedient. They had to be punished.”

Dimitri pauses and then lifts his arms out to me, a symbol of his shame, his need to be forgiven.

How can I deny him that? He looks to sorrowful, so weary. My feet carry me to him in a rush and I curl into his arms, breathing him in and choking down sob after sob.

Only the smallest segment of my soul is screaming at me to run, call the cops, tell everyone that Dimitri Kron is a monster. But everything else in me wants to be here just like this. His secrets finally uncovered to me, the skeletons having fallen from his closet and his love in my hands.

This is all I have needed from him and even with the scratchings behind me, the knowledge of my sister’s death, the fear that I may have lost my best friend forever, knowing that I have possibly become more monstrous than the man I love – Nothing could be more sublime to me than this moment.

His hands lightly hover around my shoulders and then embrace me, his frame so very much larger than mine divides me from the horror I’ve witnessed. This is where I find him, here in his softness, in his goodness, his rumbling divinity.

His voice cracks as he speaks into my ear, “My Lamb, I really thought it would be different with you.”

My blood doesn’t even have a chance to begin to run cold before he lifts me bodily from the ground and pins my arms at my side. The scream erupts in my throat as I know where he is taking me and I kick at him, using my head as a weapon, beating into him, flailing madly, trying desperately to break from his vice of ownership.

My negation sounds out like a bell in the echoing corridor and I can’t think anymore. Fear chews on my nerves. I bite at him and am greeted with futility. He does not even wince. Or acknowledge my escape attempt or express concern at all, just his continued, mechanical footsteps, thudding ominously in my ears.

“Do not worry, Eva,” His voice is dead, without feeling and I fall limp and powerless, I am done, “It’ll be brief, and then we’ll be together forever.”

The door is clicked open though his hands do not move and I spy Levi, twirling a new key between his fingers. He smiles and waves mockingly as the fight in me breaks out anew.

Dimitri’s hands lay me down on the floor and I scrabble to break free, but the floor slides beneath me, slick and cold. As his fingers release me, newer, colder, pinching ones grasp at my arms and start pulling me back. His feet retreat and I glance up into his face one last time, regal, beautiful, and sorrowful.

“Dimitri! Please don’t leave me here!” My voice screams in pain as the sound erupts from me, louder than anticipated, terror, numbing my now ruined vocal chords.

But the door clicks shut and the darkness swallows me up as I feel lips on my neck. The teeth pierce me and I shriek.

It’s not like his, it burns like cold flame and I can’t stop the mess of screaming, even as the thing’s hand reaches around to cover my mouth, its filthy fingers going into me and touching my tongue. The taste of blood, old and now sweet with decay makes me gag as I wrack the room with screams. There are more growls now and something has my foot.

Then the door opens again.

An arm caws in. Something tangles into my hair and pulls me.

And I’m back in the corridor. Screaming. Can’t stop. Can’t.

My brother clamps his hand over my mouth as he shunts his back against the door, shutting it.

I gnaw at his hand, the screams an endless stream, an unstoppable horror driven by awful, gut-jutting terror.

He pulls me away. God knows how. Why? What the hell is happening? I can still feel them on me.

I’m bleeding.

The car door slams and I look up to the house, the scream still shaping my lips.

Dimitri’s eyes watch me impassively as Alex speeds away.

TUESDAY 10 November 2009… 19:26

“Why are we back here?” I hiss as I hide behind Alex. His Lexus is parked in Dimitri’s driveway, right in front of the two cop cruisers that followed us here.

I still can’t stop shaking.

It doesn’t feel right. Yesterday I got married. Now I’m terrified.

“He has to pay, Eva,” Alex takes my hand and practically pulls me to the house where Dimitri is waiting. He was warned we’d be coming, the cops had to pick up a warrant. How they got it I don’t know. I babbled so much, they must think I’m batshit.