Love Is Red

by Sophie Jaff

  “Katherine,” you say, “Katherine, my heart.”

  But she does not respond, just looks at you, her body quivering, her lips drawing back, her teeth bared in a rictus grin, and a low growl starts up from her chest and you see that she is not Katherine at all but someone else, someone completely different, an alien thing gripping your own blade, naked and feral, her skin pale and cold, her eyes red and swimming with something that isn’t Katherine, and now you feel more than alarm; your breath quickens and your heart beats and now for the first time you feel fear.

  She growls low in her throat, and springs.

  And then she is in your arms. But not warm and pliant, now fierce and intent and she is strong, she is hellishly strong, and she is going for your throat, clawing at your eyes, biting and scratching and growling like a rabid dog.

  Still, you could finish this.

  And then something deep within you rises up.

  And then something deep within you rises up.

  And then something deep within you rises up.

  You know and are aware, and see what happened to the time you thought you’d lost.

  The night she had stayed with you and called out in her nightmares and you had come.

  “Please,” she had said. “Please.”

  He had heard her deep in the deepest darkness, had risen up from deep within the prison of his own flesh, beneath and behind the wall, the small and secret shining sliver left true, the real him had risen up and up and it was he who had taken her into his arms and it was he who was with her, together merely man and woman, and taken her not in lust or hatred or lechery but in love and in sweetness and in all that is good and right and true, because he had loved her with his human and real and true and tender heart, and in reaching out for that one moment deep in the night he had been himself. He had found himself before the nightmare began again, amid the frenzy and sickness and the terror and despair, the misery and the torture of the innocent, the defilement and debasement and destruction and the ruination of lives, spreading out in a congealed mass, a poisonous web of death that he would know and live with intimately forever and forever. The screams, the pleas, the split flesh and despair.

  And now Katherine was in his arms, his arms, they were his again, and he knew the endless pain and remorse and suffering and fury and hatred and anguish that would follow if he did not, and so he spoke to the Katherine, to the Katherine he loved deep, deep down. He knew that the woman who hissed and growled and spat and went for his eyes was not her but he believed, he believed that somewhere Katherine was holding on too, and he knew that there was no other course, and so in faith and in love he held out his own body, which was finally his own body again, he opened his arms to her, and with a full and honest heart he gave her back her word.

  “Please,” David Balan said.

  The woman screamed in unholy triumph and sank the knife in deep up to the brim. And the scream pulled the man on the wooden deck back up into the terrible world, and he saw and screamed too and then Katherine was there and she saw how David Balan’s eyes rolled up in his head and how he fell back through the wooden rails to the earth below, his eyes still fixed on some point in the sky that he would never see.

  Suffer it to be so now, for thus it becomes us to fulfill all righteousness.

  In the Beginning

  He did not see them at first. He had come outside to breathe in the night air and to clear his head. He had stood in the overcrowded warmth, watching as the people came, one after another, to pay tribute or to kneel at her feet. He did not know how the word had spread, only that it had. He was forgotten in the shadows, his heart swollen with misery and loneliness till he could not stay but had come to gaze at the stars that shone down without mercy or pity or judgment.

  He stared upward and remembered when he had first laid eyes upon her.

  She was small and dark and not without a little prettiness. She had seemed modest. Her parents had needed to coax her forward to greet him. He had gazed down upon her lowered head and upon her dark hair. The marriage was arranged.

  Then she had come to him two days after that meeting, alone to his workplace. She stood in the dusty shafts of light, amid the splintered chips and curls of wood. Her eyes were bright and her voice was hard. “Hosanna,” she had said and had spoken of visions and angels and the will of the One Most High. She had stood with her eyes shining and her voice rising, and he saw suddenly that she was beautiful, and that her beauty was not for him.

  He hit her.

  He hit her with the flat of his hand. His hand came sailing out of its own accord and hit her cheek and she stopped talking and the silence was terrible.

  He could see the white print of his palm against her cheek and a thin line of red ran from one nostril where the meaty part of his hand had struck her face. She neither shrank nor wept nor begged his forgiveness but instead looked at him with pity and with a terrible tenderness.

  He had ordered her to leave him, and then it was he who wept. For he knew that she was beautiful and that he loved her and that she would never be his.

  That night he lay tossing in the dark. He would never find the man or men who had taken her innocence from her. Whether she was sly, or whether the loss of her innocence had driven her mad, he did not know, but she would not be swayed from her belief that her visions were true.

  When he confided to his family, they urged him to leave her, whether he chose publicly or privately. He told them he would not. His mother wept and his father called him a fool to raise another’s child, for he would be known as a cuckold and would bring shame upon their name. He thought only of her face and of the thin red trickle and he knew that he could not.

  The next morning he had told her that he too had been visited by the Angel and that the Angel had given his blessing. Weeping, she had embraced him, and her tears fell wet and warm against his chest. It was the first time she had touched him of her own accord. He saw then how he might win some small part of her for himself and was resolved.

  And so they had gone out into the world. Not driven out by the whispers or the looks, the small slights that he alone seemed to feel, but because she said that they would not be safe if they stayed. When he pressed her for further explanation she gave none, but only said that they must go. He looked in her eyes and saw the fear and knew that it was true. Though there had been no ceremony, in his heart he was wedded to her and he could not let her go alone.

  On the first night of their journey as they had lain under the rough-spun blankets he had reached out in the dark, hoping to find comfort. She did not flinch or protest, but had stayed passive and removed. Her eyes fixed somewhere far above, her body inert as rock. His hand fell away and he did not touch her again, neither in hatred nor in tenderness.

  And so they traveled, plodding up and down the stony hills. The sun beat down in the day and the nights were cold and filled with stinging wind. They did not see many others and for long stretches they did not talk. The only sound was the tinny clang of the donkey’s bell as it swayed under her growing weight.

  He had a shameful, secret hope that in journeying she might lose the babe but she showed no signs of weakness. Her youth and strength and single-mindedness terrified him. He was weary unto the bone but he could never leave her. They were cleaved together with bitter clay.

  Finally they could go no farther for her time had come, and so they took the shelter where they could find it.

  It had been a hard birth and a long birth, but she had only screamed once, as the infant’s head crowned through a cap of blood. The man had thought that this moment would bring them closer, but it was not to be. She had gripped his hand as the sweat broke upon her skin, she had borne down, but even then she was as regal as a queen, and as proud, and showed no sign of needing him. Then the child gave a wail and she screamed out in triumph and in power and in joy.

  Long afterward he stood outside in the night, away from her and the silent flock of people who had come to see her and her chi
ld, and it was only then that he noticed them.

  Three figures stood in the darkness. There were very tall, far taller than any men he had ever seen, with broad shoulders and powerfully built. The rich material of their robes hung in heavy folds, dark against the starlit sky. Their heads were swathed in reams of cloth and he could not see their faces for their backs were turned. He approached them silently, and they did not see him. They stood like statues and did not speak but looked toward the mean little dwelling.

  Then out of the silence he heard, “So it has happened.”

  The voice was low and dark, as if the speaker’s throat was filled with earth.

  A second speaker answered him light and high, like a wind through the reeds. “We studied the skies, the signs were clear—”

  “A Vessel will be born when the spheres align under fiery skies, and she will bear a child who will change the Song.” The low voice was impatient. “But how can any child born of a mortal bear such power? He’ll be the fire that consumes us all.”

  Now there was a new voice, scarce above a whisper. It was a voice of endless deserts and white twisted roots, the oldest that the man had ever heard.

  “Though the Song will be forever altered, we are but witnesses. The sky may catch alight and burn, or the sun blacken and be snuffed out, but we cannot amend or change the Music. Do not forget that we watch, we bear witness and that is all.”

  Then there was silence and the man thought the exchange was over. But at last the low voice said, almost hesitantly, “Yet see already what this child’s birth has wrought.”

  “You speak of the one who bears the Scythe?”

  “The One who Harvests, who brings untold suffering unto the daughters of Eve,” replied the low voice.

  “An Ender of Life so that more shall live.” The ancient whisper was inexorable. “He comes to preserve the Harmony.”

  There was silence and then the low voice muttered, “Let us pay our respects and leave this place. The night shall soon fade and the journey back is long.”

  The three figures began to move toward the stable and those it sheltered. At that moment the stars seemed to flare with an awesome and terrible brightness and he could see them clearly. Their robes were dark plum, burnished copper, and deep blue embroidered with glints of gold and silver thread. He saw that each of them carried an object. The first held a small wooden chest with a delicate golden lattice, the second carried a casket woven of pale cream reeds, and the third cupped a jar burnished with a purplish glaze. Their faces remained shadowed by the folds of fabric, but he saw by their hands that their skin was the color of sand and their fingers, curled around their offerings, seemed unusually long and slender. As the man stood watching them, the last figure turned and looked at him, just for a moment, before turning back to follow his companions.

  Then the man stood for a long while, alone in the dark.

  Years would pass, enough years for a good life, though the man himself would not last another thirty seasons. What days were his he used profitably; his nights were for the most part calm and tranquil. But sometimes, and without warning, the memory would come to him. He would be taken there again. Standing and watching the three figures moving slowly toward the humble shelter where the woman and the child slept, where the people came to pay homage.

  He would remember how the last figure turned and stared. Then the man would grow cold. His teeth would clench and his eyes would shut tight, but still he would see it clear, what no man was meant to see.

  The silver eyes, the alien gaze.

  SICKLE MAN FOUND DEAD

  “It was like the Devil was on his side”

  THE NOTORIOUS SERIAL KILLER RESPONSIBLE for the deaths of twelve women has now been identified as David Balan, a 35-year-old lawyer at Jacob and Rivera.

  According to authorities, police discovered Balan’s body early Sunday morning in Waterville, Vt., after they received a letter written by Balan. The document stated where his body was to be found.

  Balan had suffered a broken neck along with significant chest wounds, and it’s believed he fell backward from a two-story wooden balcony after being fatally stabbed by Katherine Emerson during a struggle.

  An anonymous tipster informed police that Balan had left for Vermont, intending to kill Katherine Emerson, the girlfriend of Sael de Villias. One of Balan’s closest friends, de Villias is CEO of RuBu Enterprises.

  Balan came to be known as the Sickle Man because he used a sickle blade to mutilate his victims’ bodies in a series of murders that baffled New York City police. He held the city under a siege of terror for over four months. His victims—women between the ages of 20 and 37—were found in their own locked apartments, undressed and bound on their beds.

  Though many of the victims had security cameras in their buildings, and at least seven of them had doormen, Balan was never caught on camera. The doormen and security guards never identified him. Nor could any eyewitnesses place him with the victims.

  “He was like a ghost,” said Nick Gusti, a chief detective for the New York City Police Department, during a press conference Sunday afternoon. “He seemed to come and go as he pleased.”

  Balan was meticulous and left little DNA evidence or fingerprints, despite undressing his victims and sometimes spending a significant amount of time in their apartments. Experts can’t account for this phenomenon, which is unprecedented.

  “It was uncanny,” said Sandra Haddon, a forensic analyst at the facility. “I’ve been working at this lab for 14 years and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  During a search of Balan’s apartment, police found a journal documenting some of the killings. Items belonging to the victims were also found.

  “He had these things hidden all over the apartment. It was a truly disturbing scene,” said William Heinreich, an NYPD spokesman.

  Eliza Clare, an FBI criminologist and psychiatrist, believes that Balan was obsessed with Emerson from early on, but that his true target was de Villias. “Killing Andrea Bowers and then planning to kill Katherine Emerson was his way of achieving intimacy,” Clare said. The ritualistic markings indicate that every kill was highly planned, building up to a final kill.

  Several of Balan’s friends and family members refuse to believe that he was the Sickle Man. His mother, Sierra Balan, believes that her son was framed.

  “David would never commit such atrocities. He’s innocent,” she said in an interview. “I’ll never accept it.”

  “I’m in total shock,” added Jeanette Castelli, a colleague and friend, who said she had known Balan since they were freshman at Haywood along with de Villias. “I never knew him to treat a woman disrespectfully, let alone be capable of such brutality.”

  De Villias and Emerson repeatedly declined to comment.

  Balan, described by those who knew him as personable, attractive, and a “nice guy,” has been likened to Ted Bundy, the infamous serial killer who confessed to 28 murders, and who may have caused the deaths of many more.

  “The comparison to Bundy makes sense,” said Clare. “Both men were attractive, white, upper middle class, and well educated. They used their charm, looks, and education to lure and prey upon single women.”

  Most of the victims’ family members expressed relief that Balan was found dead. “While his death won’t bring my sister back, at least we know it’s over,” said Susie Ranford, who founded the organization DWHA (Don’t Walk Home Alone) as a safe way to escort single women back to their apartments in honor of her sister, 29-year-old Emily “Emmy” Ranford, the fourth victim of the Sickle Man.

  But many remain outraged and grief-stricken.

  “I wish I could have killed him myself,” said Miguel Rodriguez, father of Balan’s second victim, 23-year-old Samantha Rodriguez.

  “We’ll never know why he did it. He’s ruined countless lives,” said Anthony Goldmark, fiancé of the fifth victim, 27-year-old Melissa Lin.

  Gusti also expressed frustration at Balan’s death. “We wanted to qu
estion him and discover his methods to prevent this from ever happening again,” he said. “There are many unanswered questions.”

  Balan’s body was claimed by his parents, Martin and Sierra Balan. A private funeral will be held in Evergreens, Conn., and his body will be buried in an undisclosed location.

  “Our prayers and thoughts are with the victims’ family and friends,” New York City mayor Donald McMeel said in a statement. “The city grieves with them over their tragic loss. They are gone but will never be forgotten.”

  30

  Every night it’s the same dream.

  In his dream everything is white. The canvas tent is white and the tablecloths are white. There are huge arrangements of summer flowers: lavender, lupines, rosemary, also summer roses. A breeze comes through the entrances to the tent. In this dream everyone is happy, everyone is laughing. Guests sit at small round tables. There are little candles on the tables, lit in preparation for the evening. He and Katherine are sitting at the main table facing the guests. In front of them is a cake. The cake is tall with multiple tiers and stiff white frosting. In his dream he knows that it’s a carrot cake, which is his favorite. In his dream he knows that he must give a speech, and that he and Katherine must cut the cake. He hears the light clinking of a fork upon a glass, another and another.

  “Speech, speech!” somebody calls and everyone starts chanting together. He rises and Katherine rises too.

  He says, “I just want to say that I love all of you. Each and every one of you. Thank you for being a part of my life, for your love, support, friendship, and wisdom.” In his dream he turns to Katherine and says, “Wherever you are, that place is home.”

  In his dream they kiss. A sweet soft kiss where everyone claps and laughs and says, “Awww.”