My rear met the heavy wooden table and my retreat stopped abruptly. I looked up into his face, wide-eyed. He pressed up against me, his arousal painfully evident, and all but bore me over as he kissed my open lips. I’d have lost my balance if he hadn’t had me pinned against the wood, and gripped me by the hair.
“Milja,” he said, and it really was a growl this time. My hands were on his wet bare body and I could feel the flame burning beneath his skin, threatening to set me on fire. He bit my lower lip, pulling it between his teeth, making me whimper. My whole body seemed to be dissolving, everything wet and slippery as if I were the one who’d been soaped up, all the strength ebbing out of me even as his strength grew. His fire, my water. Oh God but I could feel that strength, and feel myself at its mercy. His need was overwhelming—and it made him clumsy and abrupt. He pushed my blouse up to my armpits and—clearly having no clue what to do with my bra—shoved that out of the way in similar fashion so that he could bury his face in my bare breasts. His kisses were ravenous; I could feel him shaking under my hands. My nipples, wet from his mouth, hardened like gemstones. He crouched to mouth all the way down my stomach as if he were devouring me alive, filling his tongue and nose with my scent and my warmth, gasping between kisses. Then he bunched my skirt up at my waist and caressed my legs, his hands strong and forceful, yanking the wisp of lace between my thighs aside so that he could sink his face into my sex. I fell back upon the tabletop, my elbows knocking the wood. His stubble rasped on my skin. As his tongue settled over me I spasmed and arched, twisting away from him and thrusting into him all at the same time, overwhelmed by his mouth. He pinned me, and I yielded joyfully. His fingers spread me as he kissed and sucked and licked. My whimpers of pleasure became frantic, and his attentions grew even more desperate; I was being eaten by a starving man.
Soaring on the storm of my arousal, I wrapped my fingers in his ragged hair. “Please…oh God, please!” I had no other name to cry out.
Oh. This was what I had been dreaming of. Five years of dreams.
Braced on his arms, wrapped in my legs, he ate me like a wild beast devouring his prey. Release took me and I wailed without words, and I heard his throaty grunts under my cries as he pinned my bucking hips and wrung out every last drop of ecstasy from my flesh.
I wanted to collapse into his embrace. I wanted to stroke his face and kiss his lips.
But that wasn’t what he had in mind at all. Abruptly, he stood and stepped back enough to flip me, folding me facedown over the table. After all his sweet attentions, that wasn’t what I’d expected and I think I resisted a little, without thinking—but he put a hand on my back and pushed me down hard, pinning me. The breath went out of my lungs.
His intent was primal, all animalistic lust, and he didn’t even pretend to be apologetic about that.
I shut my eyes, feeling him gather my long skirt again and throw it over my hips, baring my ass. His hands took possession of that like Joshua marching into the Promised Land: he caught hold of my lacy little panties and this time he just tore them to bits between his hands.
Oh God, I mouthed. I’d never had to deal with anything like this; it frightened me, and it turned me on. I was wet and puffy already, from the ministrations of his mouth and from my own shameless arousal. I was very glad of that readiness when he pressed up against me, hard as rock, bulling his way into my sex. My eyes flashed open.
I was staring straight across the kitchen at the family photos on the wall.
“No, please!” I gasped. “Not here!”
All the breath was sucked out of my lungs. For a moment I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t think—it was like I was falling through hard vacuum.
Then there was daylight. And grass under my feet. And I was standing—sort of, because I was bent over a great oak table that wasn’t there anymore and only the man’s hard hands on my hips were stopping me pitching forward onto my face—and I was looking down a mountainside at a village in a valley far below.
I screamed, when I got my breath back. That took long enough that some part of my brain did recognize that it was my village, that I was somehow standing on the familiar mountain shoulder an hour’s hike above our church, that the sun was starting to set, and the roofs were on fire with the evening light, and we were outdoors…how had that happened—?
OH GOD, WHAT IS HE?
He let me pitch forward onto my hands and knees in the sheep-bitten grass. But that was the extent of his mercy. He reached out and took a grip of the hair at the back of my scalp, pulling my head up and drawing my throat taut. Wet heat ran through me. His thighs were hard and rough against the bare skin of my exposed bottom.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” I sobbed as he entered me again, all the way. He felt more solid than the mountain beneath my knees; the only real thing in a world that seemed capable of vanishing in a trice. I was grateful for the implacable grip and the inexorable impalement. I was grateful for the hot brief pain—and more so when he slipped a hand around to the front of my sex to caress that pain away. Ass in the air, fingers clawing at the turf, I felt him start to move inside me, fierce and urgent. I let go then of any sense of self, any right to a rational understanding, and yielded to him entirely, my mind an empty hollow thing, my body nothing but an open vessel vibrating to his punishing rhythm.
I wasn’t expecting pleasure, but then I had given up expecting anything. My spasm, when it came, took me by surprise—and my cries made him roar. He was so deep in me when he came that I felt like I was being split in two.
I came back to consciousness when he laughed in my ear.
“I remember.”
My face mashed into the grass, I couldn’t even breathe properly, much less answer him. Only when he withdrew from me did I tip over and roll onto my back, my heart thundering. He stood over me, silhouetted against a red western sky and the bare rock of the high mountain peak.
“I remember now,” he repeated, stretching up his arms and staring at his spread fingers as if he’d never seen them before, “who I am.”
The sunset had found its way into his eyes, somehow: they gleamed like live coals.
“Who?” I asked. The sky and the mountain were wrinkling up around him, like a plastic backdrop exposed to a heat gun. Reality shrank and warped, the stress lines radiating in threads from behind his shoulders.
It almost looked like he wore great blurred wings.
“Azazel,” he said, his bared teeth white against the black scruff of his stubbled jaw. “Right arm of the Serpent: commander of the Egrigoroi: of highest standing amongst the Watchers: scapegoat for the world: fallen and most loathly son of Almighty God.”
The misshapen fabric of the universe snapped and gushed light, blinding me. The mountainside vibrated like the skin of a drum, making rocks dance and slide and tumble. I flung an arm over my face and screwed my eyes shut.
When I opened them again, he was gone.
chapter four
FORGOTTEN GODS
For a long time I sat there on the mountainside, hugging myself and shaking with shock. My damp clothes didn’t keep out the breeze. The light turned to pure sunset red, and then the sun dipped behind the peak to the west, and shadow slipped over the rocks and the grass and wrapped me in its clammy hand. I started to shiver from the cold then.
I waited, but he didn’t come back. Eventually I admitted I was losing the light, and that if I didn’t get down off the mountainside, I’d be trapped up there all night. Stiff and stooped, my thighs cramping, I set off.
The descent was nightmarish. Not so much at first—I had enough light to see where I was putting my feet, and where the cliff edges were on the narrow shepherds’ path—but as the day turned to dusk and then darkness, with no moon yet risen, I found myself stumbling and slipping and creeping along with one hand on the rock face. I barked my shins and wrenched my muscles. I started to cry, too scared and angry to hold it in any longer. My tears scalded my cheeks. By the end, in my despair, I was even cursin
g him out loud.
Him: Azazel; angel then and demon now; a Prince of Darkness. I must have been crazy to call him the names I did.
But it didn’t make any difference. He didn’t return, either to rescue me or to rain hellfire upon me. I’d been abandoned.
I made the last and steepest part of the descent on hands and ass, sliding my bruised rear over the rocks one bump at a time, desperately trying to work out where the cliff face to my right ended and the drop began.
I don’t know how long it took. It felt like forever. By the time I stumbled to my front door I felt utterly exhausted. I crawled into my narrow bed with my clothes still on, not bothering to make up any sheets on the bare mattress. Pulling the faded quilt over my head, I was still sobbing as I lost consciousness.
When I woke up the next morning, the tears were all gone. In their place was a scarred hollow, cold with guilt.
I knew what I’d done. I stood face-to-face with it as I looked into the mirror at my wide eyes shadowed with black rings, and my hair hanging loose about my pinched face. I spread my hands across my pale belly, touching the bruises Azazel’s fingers had left upon my hips. He’d kissed those breasts, that stomach, that dark fleece. He’d bitten that swollen mouth, and rooted like an animal between those narrow thighs. Even now my body remembered his, with a mutinous glow I tried to ignore.
I had betrayed everyone. I had given my love, over years—and my body in a few wild moments—to something whose evil I couldn’t even start to imagine.
My whole life was a lie.
How could I confess this enormity to anyone? How would it be possible to even ask for forgiveness? Did God forgive this sort of crime?
I took my flashlight and went down into the cavern. I’d done a module on demolition at college, and the course had included three years of geology. Father had laid the explosive well, I thought: if it detonated as planned then it should bring the whole hollow in on itself. I took a duffle bag and filled it with the icons and idols from the rock-cut passage until I could only just hoist it onto my back. I wanted to pack Father’s favorite books too, but I couldn’t carry them, so I took the two framed photographs off the kitchen wall.
I pulled down my father’s copy of the Book of Enoch though, and leafed through it as it lay open on the table. The words were like an accusation aimed straight at me: And Azâzêl taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all coloring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways.
I put the book back on the shelf. Then I returned to close and bar the blast door in the passage. I set the timer, thumbed the ignition and walked out of the church.
I was halfway down the two hundred steps when I heard the crack and thud of the explosive. It was more muffled than I’d expected, but after the first detonations the great gruff sound of falling rocks seemed to go on for an age. Tiny pebbles danced as the ground vibrated around my feet.
I didn’t look back.
In the village, the dogs that used to follow me about now barked at me and howled in distress. The earthquake the night before had cracked several walls and collapsed the dome on the tower of the church, but at least no one had been hurt. I paid American dollars, the bulk of my own cash, for a beat-up Zaštava that must have rolled off the auto-line back when Marshal Tito was in power, along with a tankful of gas.
That automobile got me all the way to Podgorica, though it shed its exhaust muffler en route.
I didn’t dare look back. Not once.
Father had been put in a private room in the hospital, on the same corridor as the chapel so that he might go and pray there when he felt strong enough. The room was bare and ugly, like the rest of the hospital, but it was quiet and I was grateful: the public wards with their mumbling old men and their smell of urine and despair—never quite masked by the chemical reek of bleach—made my heart ache. How was my strong, wise father with his love of machinery and his pure baritone reduced to this pitiful state? What had gone wrong in the world that this was the end for us all?
“His heart is under a lot of strain,” the doctor told me as Father slept. “We are running tests but it looks like his whole system…his kidneys aren’t working properly. We’d be looking at a transplant…if we could find a donor.”
“I’ll donate one of mine,” I said. “I only need one, don’t I?”
The doctor tilted his head. He looked tired, I thought, even though it wasn’t yet midnight. “Don’t be too hasty. We will certainly run tests. Tissue compatibility, you understand?”
“I’m his daughter, aren’t I?” The hope of being able to do something to fix this terrible situation made me loud.
“But even if you are a suitable donor, it’s not at all clear that he’s strong enough for surgery of that magnitude at the moment. I’d need to be happier with his overall condition before agreeing to that.”
“But he might get worse while we wait!”
He sighed. “For the moment we need to be patient.”
Left alone, I circled to the bed. Vera and Uncle Josif had gone to the hotel room she’d found across the street, once I’d promised I’d stay the night. I sat myself in the lumpy leatherette chair by the head of the bed and took my father’s hand.
“Little chick.” His voice was no louder than a murmur but his smile was sweet. I saw the glint of his eyes under half-raised lids.
“Did I wake you? Go back to sleep, Papa; it’s okay.”
“I could always hear your voice, even with a whole school of children shouting.”
I thought I’d been mousy-quiet at school. I squeezed his hand reprovingly. “You’d better not have been listening in just now.”
“Of course not. I didn’t hear a word.”
“Good!” I kissed his temple, hard.
“Milja…why are you here?”
I took a deep breath. “Some men from the village…they came up and wanted to come into the church. I didn’t trust them. I was afraid.” It was hard to lie to my father, but much easier than confessing my true guilt. “I did what you said, Papa. The switch in the passage. I brought down the roof of the cave.”
“He’s buried then?”
“Gone. Forever.” My heart was beating so loud that I was sure he must be able to hear it.
My father sighed. Perhaps if he’d felt stronger he would have been more agitated, but he just looked at me sadly, his eyes wet. “Well then. It is done. Our family is free of its obligation.”
I nodded, biting my lip. For a long time there was silence. My father’s eyes closed and I started to think he was asleep again.
“Milja.”
My head jerked up, my whole body startling as only someone with a guilty conscience does. “Papa?”
“This room…the hospital bills. You need to take an icon or two to Branko.”
“How do I find him?”
“You brought the money from under the window stone?”
“Yes.”
“And the book that was there too?”
He meant the tiny black address book bound about with elastic bands. I nodded. “Yes.”
“Branko is here in Podgorica. His phone number is on the first page, but you must add two to each digit written. He will buy off you.”
I’d stashed the duffle bag in a lockup at the public station, paying for a month’s rent. “No problem.”
“Milja…”
“What?”
“Be careful.”
Podgorica is not a pretty tourist-trade city. Its old buildings were bombed almost flat in the War Against Fascism, and its modern architecture cannot dream of matching the high-rise glass-and-steel majesty of Boston, though there’s a lot of building work going on right now. I insisted on meeting Branko in a public space, o
ne of my own choosing, and I chose a park that was shaded by scruffy trees and surrounded by ugly pastel-painted apartment blocks. I was grateful the sky was partly overcast and lazily threatening a summer downpour. Summer in the capital wasn’t humid, not like the Boston I’d left behind, but I’d heard it could be insanely hot. Even now I stuck to the shade.
As I walked across the worn earth in the dusty shadow of the plane trees I remembered the story Father had told me of King Xerxes, who on his way to invade Greece had fallen hopelessly in love with a plane tree and bedecked it like a royal bride in gold ornaments. Strange to think of a man conceiving a passion for a tree, I thought—but then at least both were creatures of the Earth, bound by their material nature. Wasn’t it more unnatural for a denizen of the highest Heaven, a being of pure spirit, to take on flesh and indulge the basest human appetites?
The comparison—and the memories it roused—made heat rise to my cheeks. I stuffed the thoughts back down in my mind, out of sight.
I was nervous. The unlicensed selling of antiquities was strictly illegal of course, not to mention the small factor that the objects from the cave did not, strictly speaking, belong to my family. They were property of the Church itself, I supposed, if only the Church knew. It was too late now to feel the prick of conscience—my emigration and college fees had been paid by these black-market transactions—but it did make me walk cautiously, looking around for policemen. I hadn’t been able to shake off the feeling, since blowing up the cave, that I was being watched.
So I’d been cautious in my dealings with Branko. I’d bought a local SIM off a street vendor for my phone, taken pictures of my chosen artifact (an icon of St. Stefan) and sent them for inspection. Branko had sounded wary at first about dealing with me instead of Father. But he’d made an offer that seemed to me to be reasonable—not that I really had any idea how much such things were worth, but it was a gratifying number of euros—and we’d agreed to meet. I’d bought a plastic bag of oranges and the palm-sized picture, wrapped in newspaper, now nested among them.
Cover Him with Darkness Page 6