The Key (Sanguinem Emere)

by Taxer, Carmen

  A Master.

  I open the laptop and stare blankly at the screen. I need to write something, anything, a stream of consciousness, a well of words, just to get this force off of my chest, just to express my need, my want, my fears for me, and my two girls. And Dimitri.

  Dimitri.

  I type the name.

  Dimitri. What to say? How to express the magnitude of what I’m feeling?

  WEDNESDAY 20 November 2008… 23:30

  I’m dreaming again, I’m sure of it. The colours aren’t right… Swirling dizzyingly in an oil pattern, swipes and swerves of brush strokes over my eyes. A cobweb fancy. But I can’t escape, despite my fear in the dark. The night around me is too thick, like plastic paint. A dream.

  A dream.

  But there she is. Cecily. My baby sister, huddled. A frozen foetus beneath the ripples, her toddler fingers around her shoulders, clutching at the naked skin. All pale moonlight reflections at the bottom of the night-time lake waters.

  She looks cold. Like a little human ice-cube, her face scrunched up in… pain?

  My feet react and I walk towards the edge, stepping into the water, ignoring the cold and the way it grabs at my thighs, holding me back, keeping me from her. Her little toes are turning blue.

  Fingers clasp at her face, trying to pull her from me, black fingers, frozen to death, but I snatch at her arm, pulling her up through the ink. Her little body unfolds, exposing her to the liquid cold and her head turns languidly towards me, bobbing gently in her affirmation of my loyalty.

  Her jaw drops open as her eyes remain shut, squeezed tight, locking me out. But her mouth opens, a void, growing larger and emptier. It expands, filling my vision. At first a reaction of her unconscious body, now a horror distension. Nothing within but the darkness.

  And she screams.

  I pull myself up, out of the cold and dark as I blink my eyes rapidly, fluttering my eyelids, forcing myself awake. Don’t let the sleep take me, not back to that dream. I rub my face, bullying myself into wakefulness. I hate these dreams and all their ilk. Intended to make you beg for consciousness.

  The ice still pulls at me, but I must have fallen asleep over Dimitri’s article. The laptop has shut down to a steady flashing silence beside me, its screen immovably blank, uncompromising. Sleep mode, just like me. The air-con in here is like a dream of Antarctica. I can feel the chill in the marrow of my bones. That explains the nightmare.

  But my heart is still thundering from the scream I hear. I’m know I hadn’t been dreaming that. It’s too real, still vibrating in my head.

  At the thought of the gnawing sound, echoing through my nightmare, my skin shudders not just from the falsified coolness infiltrating the room. I glance beside me to the lamp and quickly, trying not to leave any part of me exposed to the shadows for too long, snap on the switch. Blessed light hounds the darkness away from me, leaving little to fear besides my own body’s shadow which creeps away from me, stretching up over the wall, reaching for heights my short frame will never achieve.

  Well, I can’t sleep now.

  I had been hoping to dream of Dimitri.

  Unbidden a smile steals my lips for a moment until I shake myself to focus.

  I vaguely recall him coming to me this evening. It must have been just before I passed out. Seeking out his little key. I’d had great plans to jostle information from him about the room behind the door. The door I still haven’t gotten to see thanks to my scattered mind. But the sight of him had naturally expelled thoughts of query and discord from my head.

  He wasn’t in my dream, for all my hoping and deliberately picturing his face as my eyes closed. A pity. If he had been I may have at least seen some action.

  I blush shamefully at the thought. This is not the way to be thinking about him.

  He will come to me in his own time.

  I suspect.

  I hope.

  And now I am awake. In the tense glow from the light beside my bed, the memory of a scream still dancing through my mind, I try to decipher the plot flicking briefly in my brain.

  My feet swing off the side of the bed as I disentangle myself from the duvet, coiling around my legs, trying to hinder my progress as I decide to get up. There’s no one awake now to prevent me from discovery and exploration, of that I’m certain as I glance at my phone.

  03:38 am.

  Feeling truly rebellious, I tug a silken, geisha robe over my shoulders, cloaking the flimsy nightgown I found in the closets.

  Wearing clothes that don’t belong to me. Sleeping in a strange bed. Keeping away from my own apartment for more than one night. These things would have bothered me before, would have disturbed me, set me off-kilter as a creature of comfort.

  But it feels appropriate. This feels like home.

  I leave my feet bare as I stalk from the room, sliding my hand over the wall to keep my balance in the dark. Everyone may be asleep, but I would rather not make an effort to raise them from their beds. I’m not entirely certain that what I’m doing is breaking the rules, but it would probably be the safest choice to keep it quiet in any case. I don’t want to provoke another tense visit from my Master in the middle of the night.

  Or do I?

  It’s all so befuddled.

  My jaw still aches at the thought of that word as I clench my teeth in frustration. I have never succumbed to the will of anyone. Why the fuck am I doing this to myself now?

  Regardless, it does no good to let myself be distracted from the task at hand. Even if I am within my rights to be pottering about his home in the dark, I know that what I am about to do is wrong. Just as I know he neglected to strictly instruct me on what he expected me to do – and not to do – with this key in a precise command. He knows I figured out his test within moments of him handing over the item. And he knows I see the bait in his task, menial as it may seem. I could see it in the way his eyes shifted from vague to intently amused.

  I’m a reporter, for the love of god. No one honestly expects me to pass up the opportunity to uncover a hidden thing, do they? A secret. The reason I chose this profession. To lay everything bare before my eyes.

  So this is what he meant when he invited me to Delilah’s party? That I would not leave unsatisfied.

  He has dirt to sweep away, even if he seems the pristine mirage of normality on the surface. He has secrets to keep.

  And now I have secrets to uncover. Is this also a part of the test? To determine if I can uncover his skeletons? If so, does he intend me to, despite his instructions?

  Is he looking to uncover the depth of my loyalty? Or does he expect me to rise above the mesmerising effect he has had on my psyche?

  Too many questions. And that only heightens the thrill. An entire theme park of riddles to unravel from their coiling loops. My trepidation is but a slight blemish on the horizon of my ecstasy.

  And so I circle in my head, in the night, around my own fears, trepidations, insecurities, and thrills. Thrills above all, heightened to a near climax. After weeks of battling my own affection for him, I am finally liberated from the weight of his eyes with the means to shine a light on his darkness. I am free to investigate his hidden treasures and curses. But it is an agonising exultation.

  I may want him more than I want to know.

  My feet don’t catch on the rugs, overlapping one another like a pile of dogs, as I creep through the night-glazed hallway. I lift them barely, gliding them across the floor, feeling the tug of fibres beneath my skin, my hand still magnetised to the wall to prevent a fall.

  A faint glow seeps through the air around me. A light is on somewhere in this house.

  For a moment, just a breath, my feet hesitate and I think to ignore this sudden rebellion in my heart. But Dimitri’s eyes rise unbidden to the surface of my mind. Goading almost in their sincerity - as the words he needed to speak did not fall from his lips. He never told me not to find the room. He did not instruct me to stay away.

  I know I’m bending the rules, he knows he
gave me the access to bend the rules. And both of us know that, even though the wording was not precise, I’m not supposed to go down there.

  The light is on below the stairs.

  A glowing haze insinuates itself through the house from an emanation creeping away from the ground floor corridor. As I descend the stairs in the half-light, I can feel the corridor like the streaming song of a siren, lulling me into the sanctity of discovery.

  I sneak downstairs, stealthy as a cat, hoping the sound of my own impatient breathing is not drowning out the quiet night noises for everyone else in the house, as it is for me.

  The hallway is indeed lit with a series of fluorescent lights glowing across its narrow roof. At least it is now. A wonder I didn’t fixate on it before, it’s only a few short paces from the study/library that we saw Dimitri in a few nights ago. It seems like weeks, but I know it’s only a couple of days.

  No plants down here, it seems.

  How could I have ignored this on that first trip to the library? But I think I can imagine, it must look like nothing more than an ill-designed architectural defect in the dark with no lights to guide the trespasser. Because that is what I am doing… Trespassing on my master’s privacy.

  He is not my master.

  I have no master.

  I am my own master.

  How long can I hold out with this mantra? How long can I deny the effect that Dimitri is having on me? The same glazed, stubborn gaze of loyalty must be crossing my features in a more frequent rush of late as the one I saw on Delilah’s face a day or so ago. The look that almost made me forget she is my friend for a split second. Made me want to slap her and shake her. Remind her that she is Delilah de La Faye – The girl who, at one time, had five men vying for her hand in marriage. Five rich and astoundingly gorgeous men. And she refused each and every one, claiming her heart to belong to another.

  It makes sense to me now. But how could she hide it from me?

  Because I would never understand. Just as Alex failed to understand when I explained it to him.

  No one can ever grasp it until they have experienced Dimitri as we have; as I have.

  A strange scent permeates the area. Sweet, despite the absence of flowers. Slightly unpleasant with a hint of must and copper.

  There is a door at the end of the hallway. One door. Quite an anti-climax for the hype surrounding this place (well, at least in my mind, anyway), and the length of the hallway leading up to it. Based on the reverence with which Dimitri spoke about the door, I would almost expect there to have been a luxurious, burgundy carpet awaiting me.

  But there isn’t.

  The stone creations of wall surrounding me are the same as what has been used to build the rest of the mansion, and they hold no portraits, landscapes, or sconces for medieval torches. Rather they are entirely bare as is the floor beneath my feet. The oddity here is the fluorescence which practically blinds me and robs me of my night vision.

  But I could swear the door stands slightly ajar. Just enough to eliminate any knowledge of what may be inside. Usually an open door marks the start of

  another clue as to the solution to a mystery. But here, the inside of whatever chamber lies beyond is utterly blanketed in darkness. With the glare of false light out here, I know I will never be able to spy the changes in density of darkness within.

  It wouldn’t hurt just to look, though.

  My feet lead me on, just as my brain starts to bring itself to the party.

  Dimitri took the key from me earlier this night when he came to see me. The only key to this room, as he tells me. Now the door is standing slightly open and he has not yet returned the key to me, its keeper. Surely then he is still within the room, doing…

  My feet do not stop, despite my misgivings. It has always been this way. If there is a secret to be revealed, it must be I that bares it to the light, shows it for the unintimidating thing that it really is. I love the chase of someone’s secrets.

  But this could lose me my master. And still my feet continue their stealth-laden path.

  Another scream rends the silence in half. And I shriek.

  I run.

  Again my body controls me, overrides my mind like a fail-safe, drags me to security, and I find myself turning without knowing why. Without being able to dissect the fear in me. That scream. The same as I heard in my dream, the same rolling off of my younger sister’s lips, though that was a nightmare. And this is unutterably real.

  Can it have been her?

  No, that’s absurd, isn’t it?

  It could be her or me or Alex or anyone screaming. A throat-wrecking noise so raw that the throat which produced it is unidentifiable. Quite possibly a mass of bleeding vocal chords.

  I turn to flee and hands grasp at me, stopping my escape with steady fingers, kneading into my arms. The rattling scream cuts off abruptly, but I can still feel it in my skull, flying back and forth, thudding through my head.

  A woman’s scream. A girl’s to be more precise.

  I know what I will see as I look up, and the sight of Levi’s eyes gazing sadly down at my face, which must appear a mask of terror, does not surprise me. I had known I would be caught, be it by him or Dimitri, it makes no difference. I will be made to pay for disobeying my master’s unspoken rule. I just hope it’s something painful, and not the humiliation of being cast from Dimitri’s household.

  God. Who am I?

  I shake myself from his hands in aggravation, more at myself than my sudden captor. I hate this shred of submission, this weakness gland that has suddenly sprung up beneath my skin.

  The door clicks near-soundlessly shut behind me. But I catch it and I do not flinch. It’ll only serve to further Levi’s amusement if he sees that my nerves are shattered by my own disobedience.

  “Levi, please, don’t tell him,” I mutter as I try to inch past him, if only to put something between myself and the unknown quantities within the chamber, which is now, thankfully, closed. “I only wanted to see, I swear.” I try not to sneer as I give myself up. I really do. But I feel like such a failure. And a traitor.

  “Oh, Eva?” He frowns sorrowfully. The blonde angel’s curls hanging limply around his face now, like his head has trailed through oil, shining oddly in this counterfeit light. An unusual copper colours the tips of his hair, but only on one side of his face. “You see,” He continues, “I think I have to tell him, you know that,” He chuckles in his strange, slithering way, making my skin creep.

  His smile is far too broad, too ostentatious, like he has what he requires to achieve his deepest desires, right under his thumb. Deftly, he reaches to me and places a hand on my abdomen, too far down for comfort. To my intense humiliation, elements of my flesh begin to stir as his eyes drink me in.

  I shuffle back from him in horrified vertigo. The scream, the knowledge that something… Something occurs down here, the realisation that I may have to choose between Dimitri and my sense of self.

  And now this.

  “You can’t touch me,” I whisper at him, “Dimitri protects me.”

  My tone isn’t near intimidating enough, I realise as his hand brushes the side of his face that, until quite recently, was still swollen from Dimitri’s displeasure. The smile that only briefly wavered from his countenance returns with a vengeance as his eyes shine and a strange pensive expressions casts itself over his face.

  “Hmm. But he may be disinclined to continue that ruling if he learns of this,” His fingers reach for me again as he places them roughly against my lips, pulling them apart, grazing over my teeth now clenched together. “Shall we discuss it with him and bet over the outcome?”

  I stay quiet. The vibrations of anger in me have turned to an amalgamation of fear and disgust.

  “Look, I’m only trying to help you, Eva,” His eyes tell me I can trust him, but I’m starting to suspect otherwise, “Let’s see if we can work something out?”

  “A show, then. tomorrow night before the Master arrives,” I look up at him as uncer
tainty coils in my gut. “Prove your love of him to me then. If you can convince me that you want to be here, I won’t say a word.”

  “What?”

  His voice lowers in a coaxing coil, wrapping around my chest, dragging the breath from me, “Display what is beneath these,” His fingers trifle at my gown, “And I will refrain from mentioning this little infringement to Dimitri, hmm?”

  I step back from him, once more torn between horror and disgust.

  “Oh please,” He fakes shock, “I won’t lay a finger on you. A simple show will suffice.”

  I would be well within my rights to refuse. I have not felt this victimised since the seventh grade when one of my neighbours’ boys tried to force me at water-gun-point to kiss him. Come to think of it, I have never felt this victimised. And, I suspect, the feel of his eyes roving over my naked skin, exposed like a slaughtered lamb, will somehow be worse than the sensation of his fingers. But the bastard has me cornered. Dimitri will be livid when he finds out what I have done. What can I do? Tell him? I can’t afford to lose him. I just can’t. I would rather…

  I nod.

  “Good girl,” He whispers, the sound rolling up to me like a gentle hiss, as he leans into my frame and places a tender kiss on my cheek.

  He reeks of stale tobacco and cologne, but my wrist is still so warm where he held it.

  THURSDAY 21 November 2008… 18:32

  Sleep evaded me last night like the soft, tantalizing strains of an ice cream van, billowing its song down a warm, sun-stripped street, refracting its location into a million shards. I would feel it creeping up on me, feel my body sliding tenderly into that place where everything is weightless, nothing holds import, and then his face would shatter through my subconscious, driving me back to wakefulness.