Wildalone

by Krassi Zourkova

  YOU SHOULD NEVER OPEN A door through which you might not wish to enter.

  Yet Silen hadn’t predicted that soon, when all other doors of the world would slam shut, this same warning would bring me back to the Graduate College, looking for him.

  Or had he?

  The vine-leaf door was locked, and I waited—for the familiar voice, for its oddly wise words whose advice I needed now more than ever. But the corridor remained quiet, as I headed back past restroom signs and rows of light switches.

  Darkness doesn’t find us on its own, Theia. It wants to be invited.

  I pushed the switches down, every last one of them. And, finally invited, the darkness became complete.

  A STEP DOWN THE PITCH-BLACK corridor.

  Then another.

  I had walked into the abyss of night so many times, but never like this. Groping for walls. In a basement. Alone. Terrified.

  Suddenly a light began to take shape. A faint silver glow, intensifying as I walked, until I recognized what my fingers had felt only moments earlier: the door’s handle, shaped like a crescent moon.

  This time it opened, and I found myself in a tunnel dug straight into the earth, lit up by dozens of candles hidden inside the wall’s crevices. At the other end was a cave unlike any I had ever seen. Whimsical carvings spiraled up in erratic reds and browns, carrying their luminance through the air, all the way to a ceiling whose shoulders bent from the weight of world above. Far ahead, caught in a surreal play of symmetry, a lake doubled everything up. And in the middle, indulged in its own frightening beauty, the strangest of trees cast its reflection—green foliage on the right; bare branches on the left—over a satyr who sat in his usual solitude, waiting.

  I followed a stone path across the water, over to him. “What is all this, Silen?”

  “The beginning of the Underworld.”

  “But the Underworld doesn’t exist. It’s just legend.”

  “Humans call ‘legend’ whatever frightens them most. Still, it doesn’t cease to exist.”

  “So you’re telling me that this is where the dead . . . that the entrance to the Underworld lies in a Princeton basement?”

  “For every world, there is an underworld.” His hand swept the air, up toward what lay above us. “These buildings, they all have basements extending far, far deeper than you think. Even your mind”—his index finger touched my temple—“has its catacombs, secret passageways that you can only glimpse, in a single lifetime. And your heart, too; it has the most beautiful of underworlds. Have you noticed that for everything you want or love, something in you always begins to want or love the exact opposite?”

  “Yes. That’s how I lost them both.”

  “Lost?” He gave me one of his esoteric winks. “Tonight the fates have cast a choice for you.”

  “Between a man and a phantom?”

  “No, between memory and oblivion. A sip is all it takes.”

  “Sip from what?”

  “These—” He pointed at the water. The stone path divided it in two, with the tree exactly in the middle. “The Lake of Memory or the Lake of Forgetting. A choice given to each soul as it enters Hades.”

  “The land of the dead? But I’m not dead yet.”

  “You don’t need to be. The tunnel that led you here happens to be the Necromanteion, the death oracle of ancient Greece. It allows a communion with the deceased, a brief meeting with your loved ones. For that, many have braved the Underworld. Dionysus himself descended into its labyrinths, to bring back his mother, Semele.”

  “Dionysus is a god, though.”

  “Nongods have managed it too. Heracles, Odysseus . . . and, of course, Orpheus.” He took a golden sheath out of his pocket. About a square inch, perforated into lace by words that appeared to be in Greek. “This is the first of the Orphic tablets, the one that started them all. Dionysian mystics were buried with them, for the journey to the Underworld, and this one belonged to Orpheus himself. I gave it to him when he decided to venture into Hades.”

  The thin foil looked so delicate I was afraid to touch it. “What does the writing say?”

  “It comes from one of his songs. Instructions for the afterlife.”

  He recited the contents from memory, in English:

  You shall find on the left of the House of Hades a wellspring,

  And by its side standing a white cypress.

  To this wellspring approach not near.

  You shall find next to it the Lake of Memory,

  Cold water flowing forth, and a guardian before it.

  Say: “I am a child of Earth and Starry Heaven,

  I come parched with thirst. I perish.”

  And you shall be given a drink from the sacred water.

  “This means you are the guardian?”

  “Me?” He laughed, dropping the tablet back into his pocket. “No, the Lake of Memory is guarded by the fig tree. The sacred tree of Dionysus.”

  The fig again. Always the fig. No other tree could survive on the barren hills above the Black Sea. But figs did. And it was under a fig tree that my sister had danced, alone with the moon.

  “Why are there no leaves on the rest of it?”

  “Because the rest is the white cypress.”

  “Two trees grown into one?”

  “We have only one heart. Memory and oblivion both stem from it.” He pointed to the left, where bare branches, white like bones, reached down toward the water. “The cypress means letting go. Only a sip from its lake, and you can forget everything that has troubled you until now. Even love. Your mind will be wiped of dark memories just as the bark of this cypress grows immaculately clean.”

  I imagined forgetting. Quiet. Safe. Earth without a pulse, under the protective snow of winter. I would go back to my life unscathed. Graduate with honors. Conquer the music world. Even date—someone sweet and uncomplicated, like Ben.

  “And the other lake?”

  “The Lake of Memory will cause everything in your mind and heart to be imprinted there for good. So consider your choice carefully. Once made, it cannot be reversed.”

  I chose quickly—there was nothing in my mind or heart that I wouldn’t want imprinted there. But his voice stopped me: “Not yet. There is something else, something from the past that I must reveal to you.”

  He looked away, far into the cave, and I noticed her: a white figure sitting among the rocks, bent over a book, undisturbed by our presence. She lifted her face. Waved. Jumped up and began to tiptoe her way along the water.

  Ethereal. There was no better word. Even from a distance, her walk stunned with its dreamy lightness, carefree like the steps of a child skipping to the rhythm of a hum. As she came closer, I recognized Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads—the same book in which she had written a message to Rhys:

  Who else would love you like me

  if you changed my heart?

  Her eyes glided their unforgettable blue through me, detecting nothing but air, and moved on to the Lake of Memory. She reached into the water. Lifted a hand to her lips. Drank, and tossed the leftover drops, spilling a few over the still open book. Then she smiled at Silen—the same cryptic smile that refused to leave a room long after she was gone from it—and with a quick nod to him, she mouthed something before running off into the tunnel.

  “What did she say to you?”

  He hesitated, and that frightened me more than any lakes or underworlds.

  “Silen, what did she say?”

  “Until tonight.”

  It was a simple answer, and at first I saw no threat in it. Elza had known him while still at school. So what? She had come to the cave exactly as I had. Read a book of poems. Taken a sip of water, then walked back out into the unsuspecting world. I would have done it too, only moments earlier, if he hadn’t stopped me just in time.

  There is something else.

  I might have never pieced together the elaborate web of logic—the entire chain of events that had unleashed itself once my sister had set her mind to it—if
another line from the same poem hadn’t stuck in my own mind. Something about the moon. About how it miscounted its dogs and had to start over. Digit after digit, in a circle, like the hand of a clock thrown off each time until finally the dial would strike midnight, allowing a certain ritual to begin.

  “This book my sister was reading . . . it has a poem about Bacchus. About a moon keeping count by a fig tree. Lorca was describing the ritual, wasn’t he? That’s what Elza was up to that night?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she came here to you first, before she went to find Rhys?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did she know, though? I mean . . . why would she be reading about a death ritual and say she’d be seeing you later, if the accident hadn’t happened yet?”

  “Because it wasn’t an accident.”

  He had given me the answer weeks ago, when I didn’t have a clue what I was hearing: we had very little time . . . I helped her go through with it . . . I should have figured it out right then. Rhys dying on a full moon. And exactly before midnight.

  “Are you saying that my sister . . . that the two of you killed Rhys?!”

  “It was her only way to keep him. He had decided to move to Ireland with his little brother. And with the parents dead, there was nothing left to stop him.”

  “Nothing, except Elza. With your help!”

  He looked down, hunched like the cave’s ceiling—a sad resemblance of a man, who had infinite time to atone for what he had done but who probably knew, or at least suspected, that even an eternity wouldn’t suffice for him to do it.

  “How could you go along with this, Silen?”

  “One’s concept of right and wrong changes over time. Believe me, I have been trying to make my peace with it ever since.”

  “Peace with what, exactly? You let her kill him, and then made him a slave to her!”

  “Nothing is irreversible, Theia. I can help love find him.”

  “So that’s how I come in? Nice logic: the sister of the one who murdered him will now become his consolation prize. You unlock doors for me, send me to chapels, throw encoded bits of wisdom my way. But whom are you trying to console, really? Rhys or yourself?”

  “You are his true love, I have already seen it. Unless I am wrong again.”

  “When were you wrong before?”

  His eyes traced their memories along the shore, as if expecting to see the white figure once more.

  “She worried that he was slipping away, that her hypnotic beauty could no longer keep him. So she asked me about the future. Whether, if they were both given infinite time, he might one day love her the way she loved him. Or love her at all. It was a question that carried the doom of its own answer, because time, even an eternity of it, is powerless to let us keep what was never ours. But she needed to know. And to be absolutely certain.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Only what I saw. That his future held the most extraordinary thing: a long stretch of oblivion, of darkness, then suddenly within it—love. A love much stronger than her own. Hers wanted and demanded everything, craving with a madness that extinguished every obstacle in its way, even when that obstacle happened to be his heart. Whereas his love was different. It claimed with the abandon of an ocean wave—sweeping you over currents and depths but ready to collapse in on itself, to burst into foam and dissolve to nothing, just so it could deposit you safely on a shore somewhere.”

  Except I saw nothing safe about a shore that had just cost me Rhys. “Why did you think his love would be for me?”

  “I didn’t. When she asked me to look into his future, I saw a girl there who had the features of someone I already knew.”

  And so he had lied to Elza without knowing, promising her a future in which one day Rhys would love her.

  “She was going to need my help that final night. And I agreed. After all, why not facilitate what was bound to happen anyway? Besides, back then I would have done anything for her.”

  “You were in love with her?”

  “It wasn’t love. Possibly lust, more than anything else. Your sister could be very . . . persuasive. I was her only path to the rituals, so she figured out early on that saying no to a beautiful woman is not in the nature of a satyr.”

  I had read about the nature of satyrs. And seen it, too, on the more explicit vases. Their obsession with nymphs: chasing them, having sex with them. Some of the images even showed satyrs with erections. No wonder Silen had been calling me a “nymph” all along.

  “Don’t be afraid, please, Theia. This weakness of mine . . . I assure you, it has been left behind, well into the past. For you I have felt only the most sincere admiration.”

  “I should hope so. To set Rhys up with a girl and secretly lust after her would have been an odd way of correcting past mistakes.”

  His eyes flared from my tone, reminding me who he was. But I was no longer afraid of him. Despite his legendary wisdom, he had been a fool: manipulated by a girl into becoming a murderer.

  “How exactly did Elza pull it off? Was she as good at killing men as she was at seducing them?”

  “The only thing your sister wasn’t good at was defeat. She used to pour her heart out to me—mostly darkness, the frantic darkness of a girl about to lose her first love. I warned her to keep him away from the rituals, but she hoped they would intrigue him and spark something in his already absent heart. For a while, it seemed to work. Then he drifted away even faster. So she begged me to arrange the marriage union, hieros gamos.”

  “That ring she slipped on his finger?”

  “No, the ring was her idea. Just a sentimental human touch. The ritual itself had commenced weeks earlier, over in the south woods bordering the golf course. I didn’t expect him to go along with it, yet she had managed to convince him somehow.”

  I remembered Rhys mentioning a mock wedding. “Convincing” him had simply meant getting him drunk and telling him that it was a game of no consequence.

  “The final rite was supposed to take place on the full moon in December. It was to be her great triumph, her silver-moon wedding night. But he could still change his mind at the last minute—as indeed he did—which demanded a backup plan. She hid his car keys so he would take the motorcycle and give her his helmet. Then a pedestrian had the misfortune of crossing College Road at the worst possible moment. To this day, Rhys thinks he killed a man. When a body was never found, he accused the butler of covering it all up. Spent weeks searching obituaries and missing person records, convinced he could help the dead man’s family. At some point, he even toyed with the idea of turning himself in.”

  “Did Ferry really cover everything up?”

  “No.”

  “Then what happened to the body?”

  “There was never a body. The pedestrian who got hit was not exactly . . . capable of dying.”

  “You?” Of course it had been him. “Why stage all this, if a sip of poison would have been enough?”

  “Because it had to be either an accident or a natural death. The rituals don’t work with murder.”

  “Why not? It’s a life for a life, isn’t it?”

  “In essence—yes. But you can’t take a life and then offer yours to the god in exchange. So she needed someone else to set the wheel in motion.”

  And what a wheel it had been! It would never stop spinning, bringing Rhys to her month after month, on every full moon.

  “Still, to plan an accident with the intent of killing someone . . .” I forced myself to look him in the eyes. “That sounds like the classic murder case to me.”

  “Not exactly. She had the criminal intent, mens rea. But the guilty act itself—the actus reus proper—was mine. A murder has always required both.”

  “You mean even the ancients got off on technicalities?”

  The red flushed his cheeks—another surge of anger he had to swallow, probably because he knew I had a point. “The thing is, Theia . . . an accident meant she could have died too. Then there woul
d have been no life left to offer in a ritual, no maenad and no daemon. Just a motorcycle flying off a curve. I don’t know many others who would have taken such a gamble.”

  “It wasn’t a gamble, if you had already revealed the future to her.”

  “The future is always a gamble. A chance remains, however small, that something might alter the course of events.”

  “Then why didn’t you simply wait for Rhys to ride back from Forbes?”

  “Because he would have been wearing a helmet. That way, the odds became unacceptably low.”

  The odds—of successfully killing him . . .

  I didn’t know what else to say. I had come for advice, but he was no longer someone I wanted advice from. “Have you considered that the best way to undo the harm, at least in part, might be to tell Rhys the truth?”

  “Many times.” He looked at the lakes, as if hoping to find there the key to that ever elusive absolution. “But would this really lessen the harm or merely add to it? Once he finds out, he would refuse to go near her.”

  “And what if he does? He speaks of taking his chances.”

  “There are no chances to take. She would kill him, you can be certain of it.”

  He was right. Elza had already killed Rhys once. Why would she hesitate to do it a second time?

  “The hour is approaching.” He pointed at the lakes. “You have a choice to make.”

  All along, I had assumed my choice was between Rhys and Jake, when in fact they were now on the same side of the scales. Loving them forever—or at least for the rest of my life—in a world of phantoms where everything was extreme, intense, magnified. Rhys and I would never leave the Princeton campus. I would share his body with Elza. He would share my heart with Jake. And one day, with two of us gone, the other two would continue their unending ritual.

  The alternative was to forget. To opt for a normal, human future. Yet, much as I tried, I couldn’t imagine myself in it.

  “You have chosen with the heart,” said the satyr, after watching me drink. “What surprises me most about this world is how little it changes.”