Dangerous Ties

by Devyn Quinn

  Raising the staff high, the old woman continued. She turned toward the open burial shelf and delivered what seemed to be a blessing upon it. When this was done, she opened a leather pouch hanging by rawhide about her neck. A handful of what appeared to be ground peppercorn she fished out and pitched into the shelf. When at last her litany fell silent, one of the pallbearers raised a guttural hail, and at once all six youths moved away from the casket.

  It was the first clear look I had had of Carina’s body. She had been divested of all clothing, her long hair brushed out so that it lay shining and even over her white shoulders, and sprinkled with sprigs of wild violets and Sweet Williams from her crown to the ends of this beautiful hair. Like a napping fairy she looked! So still and bereft of bloom were her lovely cheeks; yet, her features bore the illusion of mortal vibrancy. I was compelled to advance closer to the casket, and as I looked down at her, this vibrancy played upon my mind. I half expected, half wished she would simply leap off the bier. I imagined her laughing and dancing again as she had done in the verdant valley grass. I touched her silken hair and admired sadly the magnificent white rose that had been placed over her navel. Her hands had been folded over the long stem. They, too, looked vibrant, as if with my next breath her lovely fingers would quicken and prick one of the thorns.

  I could hardly believe this girl was dead. But my disbelief receded in that moment under an unexpected deluge of loss and injustice. Carina was to never enjoy the pleasures that had so elegantly imbued her spirit. This touched me as even more regrettable than her untimely passing. I did not know that I was weeping until a pregnant woman offered me a handkerchief. Thanking her with a nod, I unfolded the cloth and wiped my eyes.

  As I looked down on Carina again, I noticed something ugly just beneath a lock of her hair at the side of her neck. Dismayed, I lifted the auburn lock aside and saw two dark, puckered puncture marks upon her throat.

  The sound of shock that rose to my lips was lost under a wail that rang through the grove. Carina’s father rushed forward on the other side of the table to stand beside the old woman. His face was ravaged by grief, and he held in his left hand a worn battle-axe with a highly polished bronze handle. The crone inhaled deeply and nodded to him, then raised her arms over Carina’s body. As she began to chant in their Germanic tongue, Carina’s father raised the weapon to his lips. He turned then and gripped the handle firmly in both hands, and raised it high over his head. With the howl of a wounded bear, he slipped to one knee and brought the blade sweeping down. It bore deeply into the earth and the quivering handle sang lightly.

  I was too lost in my own self-reproach to ponder the reason for the weapon or his action…until the old woman looked over at him and gestured him up. He rose and came to stand beside her, and with the back of his right hand caressed the cheek of his dead daughter. The old woman drew from her pouch a posy of dried valerian and laid this beside Carina’s head. She mumbled something and unfolded the dead girl’s lips. The grieving father held them apart with the first two fingers of his free hand and gently separated her jaws. I watched, mystified, as the woman lifted the posy and started to crumble the dried valerian into Carina’s mouth. When she was satisfied, the crone nodded to the father, who ever so gently re-closed Carina’s stiffened lips.

  His head fell forward and he sobbed now without reservation. The crone’s eyes raised to the mourners. There were family members all about me, yet it was directly at me the woman’s eyes descended. Hardened with an emotion beyond my understanding, her gaze punctured my grief. It found my conscience, my cultured propriety. It needled straight through the prim repose that had been cultivated so long now that it sheathed me as securely as secondary flesh. Time bogged down in those moments she examined my soul, so that she and I seemed removed from the grove and the mourners. An intelligence that transcended even the wisdom of her years burned in her absorbing gaze.

  Nocturne Liaison.

  I heard the term, of this I had no doubt. A graveled whisper, audible only between our mutual consciousnesses.

  I could not draw my vision from the crone, not even blink as she disrobed my educated reason and falsehoods with her unseen picks and claws. Her eyes widened into two great mirrors: In one I saw the reflection of my cowardice; whereas in the other, my sophisticated arrogance smirked back at me. Shallow was any excuse I could deign to speak against the stark, revealing images. By becoming a servant to propriety, I had compromised my claim to manliness and rebuffed my humanity.

  The crone’s consciousness bade me to contemplate the thing I had destroyed. And as my eyes lowered to the casket, the impact of my failures accelerated time again. Carina was dead, and never again would I have chance to speak the words that self-deceit had restrained. My shame and regret transformed into anger, an anger so torrid I felt the skin of provinciality burn away. I saw another man help Carina’s father to his feet, and my sympathy for the grieving father released me from the hold of timelessness. The emotion on his face was unreadable as I smoothed my fingertips across the auburn strands over her shoulder.

  Ruefully, I admired her fair shoulders, which I had foolishly refrained from touching while she had lived. Her lips were sculpted rosebuds, beseeching me even yet to throw off the shackles of respectability and kiss them with unabashed desire.

  The crone touched my hand with her bony fingers. As heated as Carina’s skin was cold was her soft, living flesh. I looked up at her again and perceived a flash of the girl she had once been: a bashful, playful kitten just like her granddaughter. Her lips glazed with radiance as she smiled.

  “Nocturne Liaison.”

  The words were only a whisper, yet they sliced through the air as clean as the blade of the battle-axe. I felt a momentary jarring in my chest, and a sharp pain seized both my temples. When these sensations passed I felt much as if I had sobered from the most indignant intoxication. I looked at the crone, and her eyes had taken the mist of the aged again; her narrow, leathery lips puckered so that she looked only tried by my presence.

  “Return home, schoolmaster.”

  My fingers curled mournfully about Carina’s hair. But I turned as the crone bade and left them all to their pagan rite. I made my way out of the grove, and as I stepped into the unveiled sunshine, I heard the crone’s wail. Never such a flesh-shattering sound had I heard than that scream of unforgiving, savage wrath. It was not directed at me, that much instinct confirmed, and the shocked, soft response it brought from the mourners prompted me to stride quickly for home. Only the lingering sense of intoxication kept all questions mercifully at bay.

  Alone in the house and needing something to help forget the funeral, I uncorked a bottle of wine brought along from Berne. I had rarely allowed myself to indulge to the point of inebriation, but this time I quickly guzzled a quarter of the bottle while re-reading the last newspaper I had bought before taking my new position. At last, too blind with drunkenness to read, I stumbled to the bed and fell across it.

  As my eyes closed, the funeral shifted back into my mind. I drifted to sleep mumbling curses upon myself. And in my dreams I stood beside the casket. As I touched Carina’s face, a vine fell from the branch above my head. It landed on my hand and twisted around my fingers tightly enough to draw blood. The harder I attempted to remove it, the tighter it squeezed, until at last the fibers broke through my flesh and my blood spurted everywhere.

  A scream drew my attention away. Looking down, I saw Carina’s body had disappeared. I turned and scanned the grove but saw no one bearing the body away. There was no one at all, except a shadowy serpent slithering toward a great cross in the darkest recesses of the grove.

  I awoke with the fingers of my right hand throbbing. It was only the spectral pain of a dream, but as I rubbed them I saw a wisp of something bound about the first two fingers. I got up and went to the hearth where a dwindling fire remained. And as I examined my hand, I found several auburn hairs caught between the fingers. I pulled them off carefully and laid them on the nightstand be
fore finishing off the rest of the bottle.

  3

  The next day, I awakened with a chill and the gloomy determination to see no one. It was Sunday, and throughout the village some festivity was being prepared. From my windows, I watched as women garlanded the doors, shutters, and lintels of the shops and other buildings with flowers. Young men carried in kindling from the woods and built a great cone for a bonfire in the village square. Elders and children were setting up tables and singing. The cheery lilt of their voices and the occasional whoops of the young men rankled me in an indeterminate way. On arriving with the morning meal, my servant brought two plates of smoked meat, a large wheel of cheese, and an entire loaf of bread. Weistreim explained he would not be back that day as he was attending the celebration planned for that evening.

  “And what celebration would this be,” I asked politely, but I heard the sourness in my tone. Since awakening, my habited priorities had returned to haunt my demeanor. It reproached the memory of seeing myself through the crone’s eyes, arguing with erudite persuasiveness that the ordeal had been nothing more than having allowed my misplaced guilt to be swayed by the pagan funeral.

  His answer was bright, but guarded, “In memoriam of certain ancestors. You would not be familiar with them, monsieur.”

  At the moment, I was not interested to inquire either, and when he left, I pulled the shutters closed and laid the tray he had brought inside the pantry. Although the weather was temperate, I could not shake the feeling of being cold. I threw some kindling onto the low flame in the fireplace, and when there was a good, steady fire, I browsed through my collection of books and manuscripts. At length I found a treatise by Grigori Rastrelli, “The Mathematical Properties and Mystical Symmetry of Musical Notes.” I sat down in the overstuffed chair before the fireplace. My grasp of the Russian was sufficient and the text absorbing. Soon the sounds of growing merriment from outside were inaudible to me.

  Most the day I sat reading, rising only when necessity called or I wanted to nibble on something from the pantry. The celebration outside was in high order by mid-afternoon; drums began to beat from the square, and their pagan toll grew steadily deeper and more fervent. Eventually, it became so loud I could no longer concentrate. I laid the book down and went over the assignments I had planned for the next day’s class. But as I pored over my notated journal, a chorus of shrill voices suddenly pierced the monotonous drumming. Laying the journal aside, I went to the window and peeked out again. The bonfire was burning high above the silhouettes dancing and sitting cross-legged around it, and the smoke that wafted from the flames lazily licked the orange threads of twilight on the horizon.

  As I watched the arcane festivity, I saw women amongst the shifting throngs of dancers. They were naked, and the light of the bonfire made their bare flesh gleam like smooth cream. It seemed so indecent to me suddenly; and though propriety tried to convince me it was morality that was offended, my heart knew better.

  Carina had been in the grave less than a day.

  Later, as I cut some of the bread and cheese for dinner, I was startled by an abrupt silence. The drums had quieted, the voices of merriment hushed completely. I sat, embraced and expectant while I ate, but the festive sounds did not rise again. I returned to the treatise for some time, and when I was too tired to read anymore, I looked out the window one last time. The crowd had emptied from the square, and the bonfire remained burning. A single man paced back and forth before it. I squinted and made out the familiar features of Carina’s father. His arms were crossed, and his eyes were buried beneath an iron-hard furrow of brows. With a twinge of sympathy that softened my earlier judgmental indignity, I left him to his privacy and readied for bed.

  I did not reach bed, however. The troubling image of Carina’s father pacing the ground stirred my remorse again. Before it could compel the illusions I’d surely suffered in the grove, I returned to the chair. Draping a quilt over my legs, I read long into the night until at last I fell asleep.

  So deep was my slumber I cannot swear what next my conscious mind knew. Whether it was real or something from a dream, I was startled by a scratching sound, like sand rubbed against glass, somewhat away from my chair. I believe my eyes opened, long enough for me to see or imagine the text in my lap. The next moment, my mind lulled into black numbness.

  I dreamed of a viper that slithered over the shingles of the house. It maneuvered over the underlaps of the shingles slowly, so that the splinters snagged its old skin and loosened it from the creature’s body. It was a slow process, but I heard the echo of each old scale as it peeled from the body. I flinched with every snap of parched skin, knowing that soon the viper would find its relief, and make its way down the boards and search for some tiny cranny or hidden hole. It would enter the house then and find me, asleep and vulnerable in the chair.

  The image dimmed and I started to return to a deep sleep. Then, abruptly, I perceived a low grating sound like the tearing of tin. A distant image of opening fangs glinted at me in the beckoning blackness. My heart rate accelerated as I fought to open my eyes. Ice grazed my cheekbone. The minute hairs froze beneath the chilled touch, and the tissue and bone under my seared skin throbbed with intruding coldness. This coldness at once spread throughout my face, as intense as if I’d dived into artic waters, and my nostrils and throat felt frosted completely.

  Rattled to full consciousness, I gasped for air. My eyelids opened and shattered the crystals that seemed to bind the lashes.

  It was then I saw it. An obliqueness, too dense to be shadow, crouched between my chair and the hearth. I was struck with an instinctive terror; my limbs were paralyzed with fear. But as I beheld this unnatural blackness, my fear was surpassed by the dawning determination to know what this was. My determination ignored the rational voice that warned to get up and move away.

  A flicker from the hearth embers caught a glint of sculpted form. I gasped and jumped, and the sudden acceleration of blood in my system intensified the voice of ration. But as the form began to take substance and definition, my natural inquisitiveness silenced it. The lightless figure slowly rose so that I could make out the silhouette of a head, shoulders, the distinct and rounded outlines of a woman.

  It was then my consciousness screamed for me to flee. But her thoughts broached the space between us, and with an unspeaking command, she inflamed my curiosity—goaded it, willed it to a frenzied, single-purposed thing of which she alone held power. Rational fear lay dormant, so that I sat as in a stupor of fascination under her demanding will. It was a maneuver known and taught by unseemly spirits, ancient and potentially lethal to mortals.

  But at the moment I could not have cared less.

  Her hands rose and she lifted the length of her hair. For the first time I perceived more than a dark outline as she let go of the strands and they cascaded like glowing copper over two slender shoulders. My heart skipped a pace, and her skin began to take color and texture—all pale, satiny cream. As I stared at her rounded, desirable limbs, I felt my curiosity drained forcibly away. I heard common sense beckoning from a remote distance, and I attempted to respond. But as I started up from the chair, the ghostly figure pounced into my lap. I was weighted down by sheer, primitive horror.

  Her thighs straddled my legs. I discovered I had lost control of my body. My limbs were utterly immobile, though I could feel with acute clarity the cool hands that laced the back of my neck, the dewed sex that glided lightly over my crotch. Her face was still blackness to me, but her mouth braised my chin and her chilled tongue flicked over my gaping lips. She spoke something to me. The resonance of her voice lulled my fear as if it were hers to control entirely. Even now I do not know what it was exactly she commanded, only that I could not refuse. My jaw moved, and I began to recite some lengthy, mystically imbued alchemic procedure. In the original Arabic, I related this knowledge of which I was acquainted only by chance from a manuscript I had come across during my university days. My brain was raped, slowly and steadily, in the pilf
ering of this arcane formula.

  At the same time, my other senses were aroused by the closeness of this unearthly, nocturnal figure. And as the mechanical recitation echoed against the wall boards, the copper halo dimmed before my eyes and the disguise of darkness fell away.

  Carina was as lovely as always. As real as if she had never died. My stomach knotted with dread; my heart pounded with guilt. Tears burned at my eyes, and as they fell, she licked them from my cheeks. I wanted to speak her name and demand explanation, but my speech was entirely under her control.

  Her thighs slipped over the armrests of the chair. She began to undulate over my lap, so that her auburn hair whipped my shoulders and her nubile breasts bobbed before my eyes. My face burned with the smoldering urge to lift her up, throw her across my lap, and deal that chastisement I should have dealt her that day in the classroom.

  The thought of it honed my passion to an almost painful need. She must have suspected my thoughts, for her eyes lowered a moment. As they raised again, she smiled, that kittenish smile I so adored, and reached between her thighs and unbuttoned my trousers. Drawing my cock out, she rubbed it curiously. It swelled and hardened in her hands, which brought the most delighted purr to her lips.

  She tilted forward a little and rubbed her moist slit back and forth across me, tantalizing my anger and need sorely. I longed to suckle her nipples and devour her nubile breasts. Instead, I had to endure her husky coo as she tore the buttons of my shirt and flicked her fingernails across my nipples. She licked them both, sucked them until they panged, then pulled my trousers down over my hips. Her pelvis and pert bottom raised. Holding to my shoulders, she mounted me. Quite timidly, her nether mouth swallowed the length of my cock. Tight was her orifice, and she rode gingerly, pouting ever so softly, leaving me with no doubt that this was a virgin who ravished me.