Cover Him with Darkness

by Janine Ashbless

  After four days Father agreed he was able to go for medical treatment—but Vera swept out of the room triumphantly to organize transport before he revealed his one condition. “Someone,” he whispered to me, plucking at the sheet over his chest, “someone… Come closer, Milja.” He looked around the room, as if he was worried a spy had crept in among the shadows.

  “It’s all right, Papa. We’re alone. You can talk.” My heart was beating uncomfortably fast.

  “Someone from the family must stay and guard him. It is our holy duty.”

  So, I thought, it wasn’t all just something I’d imagined. It was real. “He’s…still there?” I said hoarsely.

  Father’s watery eyes sharpened for a moment, his brows drawing together in consternation. “Of course. Nothing has changed. Except that…Milja, you are not a child anymore. You know you must do what is right.”

  “What is right, Papa? What do I do?”

  “You must stay until I come back. If you have to leave…if I am kept in hospital… I have wired the cave with explosive. The switch is in the passage. You must bring the walls down upon him.”

  chapter three

  OUT OF THE DEPTHS

  It was not until my father was driven away safely in a hired car with Vera that I made the climb up to our old house.

  “I don’t like it,” my cousin told me, holding on to the passenger-side door as we stood in the square, preparing to part. She spoke in English, not just because she was more used to the tongue after years abroad, but because we were being watched, quite openly, by knots of villagers. It was highly unlikely anyone could follow our exchange, but still we kept it down to a low and urgent undertone. “I’ve spoken to your Uncle Josif; he is flying out tonight from Boston.”

  “What? How did he get away from his business?” I didn’t ever remember Uncle Josif—he was accorded the title by dint of his comparative age and status, though he was my cousin’s husband—taking a day off from the construction company he owned, except for the highest holy days of Christmas and Easter.

  “Never you mind. He will be here in a couple of days, so you will not be on your own with these…peasants.”

  I cringed. Those peasants had flatly refused any financial remuneration for lodging, feeding and caring for us or for my father. “Nana Vera! Don’t call them that!”

  “Why not? They are peasants—they know nothing. You mustn’t let them into the church, Milja. They will rob the place; a church without a priest is nothing to them. And if they found him…”

  Like some ghost, her meaning hovered between us. I swallowed. “You’ve seen him, then?”

  You believe? I might have added.

  She nodded curtly. “Once. You remember when we came to visit, when you were ten? Then. Horrible.”

  Did she mean that he was horrible, or that his situation was? Her expression of disgust could have meant either. Was I alone in hating what we’d done to our prisoner?

  “Don’t go near him on your own,” she commanded, her eyes narrowing to slits as if she could read my mind. “Wait until your Uncle Josif gets here.”

  “Uncle Josif isn’t family,” I reminded her. He’d met Vera when she was working in a tourist hotel on the Gulf of Kotor, and his own family originally came from Cetinje. “He shouldn’t be involved. Tell no one else: that’s the rule, remember?”

  “Don’t you tell me what we have to do, Milja. We are running out of menfolk. If you’d married…”

  “Don’t start!”

  “You want your father to die before seeing you a bride? Because that’s the way you’re going.”

  “He is not going to die!” I snapped, and for a moment we stood scowling at each other. Vera had the grace to look abashed.

  “Of course he’s not, honey,” she muttered.

  “Milja.” My father’s croaky voice came from the backseat of the car. I leaned in to see him, and he touched my head gently as if giving me a blessing. “You must bring the money from the house. It is under the slab in front of the window, you know the one.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Hospitals are expensive: I can’t have your cousin paying for me to lie in bed. Bring some of the old statues too, from the passage, when you come to see me. We can sell those.”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “Don’t forget what I told you, little chick. The switch…”

  “No, Papa. Don’t worry. I will do what you said.”

  Then they left me.

  ***

  Everything was familiar, and yet everything was strange. I was seeing now with the eyes of a foreigner: the cramped little buildings wedged under the brow of the cliff, with the domestic rooms crammed against the church in peculiar proximity. Even the steps themselves—two hundred rock-cut rises at the end of a dusty track. When I was young I had run up and down them every day without a thought, but now I was ashamed to find that my thighs ached and my breath came short.

  I couldn’t face the church and what lay beneath it straightaway, so I went into the house first, using the key Father had left me. Nothing had changed, and yet…everything had. I knew the pattern on the rug before the fireplace and the contents of the dresser drawer on the left and every one of the books in Father’s study; I knew the shabby winter coat hanging behind the door and the chipped ewer in the center of the table (I’d dropped it when I was thirteen and we’d never found that piece of the lip). But my old room was empty and smelled of plaster dust, and the quilted coverlet on the bed, which I remembered as a vibrant patchwork of flower shapes, looked faded and cheap. I couldn’t have grown much taller since eighteen, but the roof felt lower.

  I hadn’t realized we were so poor. My friends in America would hardly believe anyone could live like this, without Internet or a washing machine or cable. Forget dishwashers; our house didn’t even have piped hot water—we collected rain in a cistern up in the cliff face. Down in the village at least they had electricity and solar panels and television. Up on our crag here we were still lighting kerosene lamps and cooking in a log-fired oven.

  I wandered around the house, touching things at random. I wound the clock and set it to the time specified by my otherwise-useless phone. I put the single plate on the table away in the cupboard. There was a covered pot on the stove-top, but when I lifted the lid the smell of rotted beans turned my stomach. So I sat down at the table and gripped my hands together. This was my home, but I did not feel at home here. The dissonance made my head ache: inside, I was a happy child and an aching teenager and a grown woman of twenty-three, all at the same time. I was part of this place, and I was a foreigner. I had returned to the home I loved, and yet I was an intruder.

  My gaze shifted to the spines of the books in the case. Even from here I was sure I could recognize and name each one, just from their colors and shapes. As a game, I began to work my way across a shelf: Modern Engineering Principles and Practices…The Homilies of St. Macarius… The Mountains of Serbia…First Steps in English (from which Father had taught me: British English, not American English, taps not faucets)… The Child’s Encyclopedia volumes Two, Three and Four (but not One, which I’d dropped being chased home from school one day and never recovered)…a Bible…the Book of Enoch…

  Cover him with darkness, that he may remain there forever.

  Forever. Down there in the mountain behind me, bound hand and foot. Had he noticed that the priest had stopped visiting? Did he realize that he’d been abandoned by the man now, just as the girl had abandoned him years ago? Had he called out, unheard, with only the echoes standing in witness to his pleas? Had he missed the food and the drink that I no longer brought him, the touch of my hands, those tiny mercies in an eternity of suffering? Had I made it worse by offering him ease, then depriving him again just as he learned to hope?

  The sun-patch thrown on the flagstones by the small kitchen window had disappeared, as the shadow of the cliff above shifted. I shook myself from my trance and rose from the chair.

  Fear was no longer an excus
e.

  If the house had felt strange, the soot-blackened interior of the tiny church, with its icons so darkened by age that only their gilt halos could be made out clearly, was like something from another era; something medieval and now distinctly unwelcoming. St. Michael, patron saint of our family, stood over the recumbent Devil still, and watched me with mournful disapproval as I retrieved from under the floor tile the key to the narrow padlocked door behind the altar. My hands were unsteady as I probed the lock, but I remembered the old trick of jiggling the key against the teeth to persuade it to turn. I stepped into the passage beyond for the first time in years.

  An arm’s length behind the wooden door was something new: a metal door I’d never seen before. Nonplussed, I looked it over. It had deep lintels and jambs, also steel, and no lock but two heavy bracing bars. It was, I worked out, a homemade blast door, welded from many sections. Father must have fitted it himself, when he decided to prepare the world’s last line of defense against the prisoner below.

  It took the weight of my shoulder to move the steel door on its hinges.

  Down I went, into the dark, the first person in weeks to tread this path. I carried only a two-liter bottle of water and a flashlight. The church’s lingering scent of frankincense gave way to a cellar smell of damp stone. From the niches to either side, the nameless statues of forgotten gods watched me pass.

  Down, down, my feet scuffing the stone on which no dust settled. My fingers spread, brushing the rock.

  The passage opened out into the cavern. Daylight filtered in from the broken roof far above. Great slabs of limestone lay spilled across the path of my flashlight.

  There. There he was. Just as I remembered. My nightmares were all real. I felt my heart pound against my ribs like it would smash them.

  Dear God.

  I was seeing him with adult eyes too. He didn’t look like a titan, or a demon, or a god. He looked like a man: perhaps in his early thirties, swarthy, with an athletic build and really dark lashes and hair going prematurely gray. Tall, but not inhumanly so. Dirty; naked; abused. His exposed armpits and crotch were exclamation marks of vulnerability. I picked my way over to the slab and knelt over him. His face was just the same as it had been five and more years ago: stubbled, haggard with pain but handsome despite that. Breathtakingly so, like the agonized beauty of certain icons.

  I touched his face. He opened his eyes. “Milja.”

  I began to cry.

  His voice was hoarse. “You…came…back.”

  I was shocked: he’d never addressed me before. The words “I’m sorry!” spilled from my lips along with my sobs; “Oh God, oh God—I’m sorry! Papa sent me away! I didn’t want to go, I didn’t—”

  My tears were dripping on his face. I wiped clumsily at them, smearing the dirt. “What’s your name?” I begged.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Who are you?”

  He tried to moisten his lips. “I…don’t remember.”

  Bending forward, I pressed my wet cheek to his. Did I believe him? I don’t know. He could be Loki or Prometheus or Azazel; I know I didn’t care anymore. When I sat up I reached to the nape of my neck and undid my necklace. The sheath of bright blue plastic peeled off to reveal a supple length of steel-toothed metal: a wire saw.

  This was it. The moment of choice.

  The moment I betray my family, I thought. My father, who has trusted me even after last time. The whole line of my blood. All those people over all the centuries, who have stayed here, slaves to this prisoner, because it was their duty. Because they were keeping the world safe. Because they were obeying the will of God.

  I cut through his bonds, one by one. It took a long time. The leather resisted even the titanium-tipped saw-teeth, and I wondered what the hell it was. I thought about Loki’s son, slaughtered by the Æsir so that his body parts might be used as rope—for only a god might bind a god. The thought was foul and I tried to push it aside.

  As I cut, his breathing grew louder and louder, sucking great lungfuls of the flat cavern air as if he were building up to a fearful effort.

  When I freed his second ankle, he rolled onto one hip. For a moment he lay without moving, groaning a little under his breath.

  I touched the back of his hand. “Take your time,” I whispered, wondering if I would have to pull him to his feet. That wouldn’t go well; he was far too heavy for me.

  But then, with a heave and a grunt, he sat up, pulled the severed ends of his tethers loose and rubbed at his leg. The skin beneath his bonds was sticky-raw: I saw how he had to pull the leather off to free his wrists and feet. His breath came harsh and shallow, and I think the change in posture was as agonizing as the removal of the binding. When he opened his screwed-up eyes I passed him the water bottle.

  He didn’t know how to open it. He had no idea about screw-top caps.

  “Here.” Quickly I remedied the situation. The water escaped down his throat and chest as he glugged it back, cutting runnels in the dirt there.

  I was wearing a long skirt that day to mollify the old women; I wet the hem while he was getting his breath back and tried to gently clean his face with the cloth.

  That was rash. He caught my wrist in one hand; I felt the fingers of his other on my bare calf. Our eyes locked, and I felt time hang, breathless—before he moved to cover my mouth with his, and I tasted blood and stone and darkness in his kiss.

  There were no words. There had never been adequate words for his pain and need, or for my hunger. All these years my guilt and my loneliness had pulled me back to this place, and to this moment: this kiss. I grasped his shoulder and felt the play of his muscles as we moved together; beneath my fingertips there was grit stuck to his skin that might have been there for centuries. I yielded to his cold lips and his arms and the press of his torso, repudiating my yesterdays and throwing away all my tomorrows in the rush of this moment, this ache. He had already taken my heart: now he stole my breath and my senses.

  The only thing that kept me from rapture was his grip on my wrist, tight and growing tighter. I could feel the bones of my wrist grinding together; in the discomfort I felt a dim echo of his agony—and because of that I welcomed it. But the hurt grew and at last I broke the kiss with a gasp.

  I heard him growl.

  “Please—not so tight!” I begged.

  He looked down at his hand as if he’d never seen it before, and abruptly he released me. I cradled my wrist, rubbing it, and stared up at him through my lashes. I was half-afraid, half-enchanted, and dizzy with uncertainty and arousal.

  For a moment he took my face lightly in his hands, thumbs limning the bones of my cheeks. In the half-light I saw the slow shake of his head. “My star of the morning,” he breathed, “come to lead me to the day.”

  I didn’t understand.

  “Is there a sun shining still?” he whispered. “And snow upon the high peaks?”

  I nodded inside the cage of his fingers.

  “Is there grass?” he pressed me, brushing my lips with his. His skin was warm now. “Do trees still lift their arms to the sky?”

  “Of course.”

  With all the muscular uncoiling of a snake he rose up on his knees over me. I saw his skin gleaming with perspiration. Maybe he was no titan, but he was far taller than I was; he loomed like a wave about to fall. For a moment then, I admit, I thought that he was about to seize me and press his naked body down upon me—but instead he put his head back and stretched, flexing each joint, and just by watching I understood the inexpressible pleasure of being able to move and twist and ease every muscle: the visceral joy of freedom.

  He laughed disbelievingly, low in his throat. “Show me.”

  “Show you?”

  “Which way is out?” he asked, reaching to pull me to my feet as he rose up himself. My legs were weak and I tipped against him, dizzy.

  Oh God. His naked body, here, now, against mine. I can feel his…

  “Okay. I’ll take you.” I was blushing with shame fo
r what had not happened.

  And that was how I came to release the prisoner of eons. The act itself had been so abrupt—so sudden—that now it felt utterly unreal. Even the throb of my flesh and the quiver in my legs made it seem all a part of my fantasy.

  I led him to the tunnel mouth, but he wasn’t content to follow and he pushed ahead, drawing me by the hand. He didn’t spare the icons and the votive offerings a single glance: his attention was fixed upon escape. As the first breath of warmer air came to us he released me and hurried forward, fending off the walls as he stumbled because his legs were still a little uncertain beneath him.

  I felt then the clutch of fear. He didn’t look back to see if I was following. He didn’t seem to remember me. All his focus was on what lay before him and, as I hurried to keep up, every straining inch of the distance between us tore at me.

  Was he going to abandon me, now that I’d freed him?

  The door to the church was standing open. He surged out into the room, searching for an exit. I wondered for a moment whether he would be able to cross holy ground, but he didn’t even seem to notice his surroundings: he had eyes for nothing but the outer door, its ancient planks outlined by the sun. He wrenched it open and the blazing glow of the afternoon poured in upon him, lapping his naked flesh, haloing him in light. A human would have flinched and shielded his eyes: even where I stood, at the back of the chamber, I was half blinded. Tears swelled my eyes and my throat. He only lifted his chin, staring.

  Beneath my feet, the ground trembled. It lasted perhaps a second or two—almost as if the Earth itself shivered.

  The breath stopped in my breast as I waited for what would happen next—for him to burn to ash perhaps, or for an eagle to swoop down upon him from the heavens. Or for him to unfurl demon wings and vanish with a clap of sulfurous thunder. I didn’t even have his name to call out in my terror.