by Sadie King
“I have to admit brother, that is a beautiful animal. You really outdid me this time.”
“Of course I did. You know all the big deer are down near the Hollow. Doesn’t hurt that I’m a better shot than you either.”
Jack couldn’t take any credit for the kill, but he could at least editorialize. Rhapsodize. Partake in the gloating.
“Right through the spine. Perfect shot. Best I’ve ever seen.”
“Pure luck is more like it. Here’s an idea—next time we hunt the Hollow, and you head up to that rocky wasteland.”
Victor clearly had no intention of describing, in excruciating intimate detail, how he and Zora had spent their time up in that rocky wasteland. If Zora had her way, they’d spend their entire time up there on the next trip—do no hunting whatsoever. To hell with the Hollow.
“It’s a deal. You wait and see. Next time I’ll hunt the other side of the canyon and kill something big.”
He looked dead into Zora’s eyes. A thin sneer on his lips meant only for her.
“Even if it’s a doe.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
On the drive home, sick with anger and disgust and fear, Zora managed to wear a false face of cheer. No use in darkening Victor’s joy. All macho posturing aside, his envy over his brother’s kill couldn’t possibly hide his excitement—the epic size of the kill, the magnificent spilling of blood by one of his own blood. Suffusing his buoyant mood was his tryst with Zora in the shadows of the sacred spring.
Back home, hardly in a celebratory mood, Zora headed straight to the library. Mountains of work to climb, or better yet, tunnel through with the help of outlines. She got about a tenth of the way through the first mountain, Constitution Peak, before falling fast asleep in the catacombs of Welch Library.
Father and son were up to their usual antics the next day in class. The father the scribe of a message; the son the messenger of a scribe. Zora opened the note. The catechism of truth and love and sex that Victor had devised for the two lovers.
Psyche, you have my arrow; leave me your question.
V.
She replied a couple hours later, after having lunch with Jack in the Cave, daring the son to tell, and getting more truth than she could have asked for, about growing up in the shadow of the father.
What is your darkest secret?
Jack had been a secret, but not really a dark one. She wanted more, she wanted the dusk as much as the dawn. Jack was just an amuse-bouche in the feast of secrets, an appetizer of a revelation. She wanted le dessert du diable—the dessert of the devil. Why not skip right to the dessert from the appetizer—wasn’t that the most satisfying part of the meal? The most sinful?
On Wednesday, another note.
My darkest secret? A labyrinth of time and space. First I must find us a path, a way through the winding of the night. Do not come to me; I will come to you.
V.
The week came and went. The weekend came and went. Nothing from Victor. She skipped the meeting of the Juris Club. A Matterhorn of work was the excuse she gave herself. Vane was the real reason. She knew he would be even more insufferable as a Patrician than he’d been as a Magister. Even more fascistic. Even more magisterial. How ironic.
Then a new terror entered her life.
On Monday, late, on the cusp of 2 AM, she sat in the east wing of the library, in the basement, a nook all to herself. The tedium in front of her was positively dreadful: Civil Procedure. Even a scattering of cups of coffee from the upstairs Starbucks could barely keep her eyes open. Civil Procedure made paint peeling seem like a phantasmagoria of the senses.
She was in the middle of trying to digest some nonsense about collateral estoppel when she heard it. A whisper from a world of demon dreams.
Slave.
She tried to arrest her thoughts, to stop sliding into a nightmare about the Gatekeeper. Too late.
Slave.
The whisper grew louder. More urgent.
Slave.
Her eyes flew open. This was no dream. A terrible hallucination? Of hearing but not of sight?
Slave.
The whisper was all around her, right upon her, suffocating her with its hate.
Her head whipped around, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound. Of the viciousness. It seemed to come from the right, from the left, above her, below her, reverberating. Was it Vane or Jack playing a cruel joke on her? Or even Victor?
But it sounded uncannily like the Gatekeeper. An unmistakable sound, a sound of tragedy without redemption, of hell without humanity.
The notion that the Gatekeeper could be there, in the basement of Welch Library, was absurd on its face. How could she have known that Zora was there in the first place? And how could she have gotten past the night security guard, the stony-faced man who scanned the identification card of everyone who entered?
Slave.
As Zora craned her neck to the left to look down a row of books, the Gatekeeper stepped from behind the stacks. She stood there, blankly, like a statue, right past the procession of books. She looked at Zora, looked past her and through her, her eyes focused everywhere and nowhere. On her face, for no apparent reason, she bore several large bruises. She wore rags, tattered clothing.
Zora tried to rise from her chair but couldn’t. She muffled a scream. She was transfixed with terror—the other extreme from her reaction on the hunting trip, up in those perilous rocky hills, when every joint and every muscle had come unwound from terror.
Show me your hands, slave.
Zora could not move. The Gatekeeper, seeing no reaction from the cowering woman at the table, began to slowly walk forward. She would see those hands one way or the other. Take the hands with her if necessary. The hands that bore the mark. And hands that bore the mark meant eyes that needed to see. Needed to be blinded to see.
The steps of the Gatekeeper toward her unlocked her paralysis just enough. Like a marionette, she mechanically lifted her arms, palms facing the Gatekeeper, fingers splayed out. The Gatekeeper stopped and smiled.
You still have the mark. I have it now too. Do you see?
The Gatekeeper lifted up her palms. In the middle of each one, she bore a raw ugly wound, flesh peeled away by some sort of sharp object. A jagged knife. Or a rusty nail. Freshly-made craters in skin, oozing blood, exposing muscle, rimmed with pus. Self-inflicted stigmata. The most revolting thing Zora had ever seen. But her eyes were as paralyzed as the rest of her body, and she could not look away.
She tried to pray to God to spare her life, spare her from the Gatekeeper. She wanted to remind God of her faithfulness, her humility. Her own suffering, her own Christian passion. No prayer would come, nor any thought of heaven or hell. She prayed then that the Gatekeeper would be merciful. That death would come on fleeting wings.
I will watch over you slave. You have been chosen. As I have been chosen.
The Gatekeeper lowered her palms, walked back to the end of the row of books, turned the corner, and was gone from view. It took several minutes for Zora to start to shake, and she shook for several more.
She needed to tell someone—alert someone that the Gatekeeper was stalking her, was already falling back into her old fondness for delusional gore. Even if it was self-inflicted. Zora knew that the Gatekeeper would kill again, if she hadn’t killed again already. The Gatekeeper followed an inexorable law of violent death that she was incapable of breaking.
In the wake of her moment of greatest peril, Zora called Victor. The man she doubted most was the man she trusted most. Her lover. Her protector. Her confidante. Her friend. Cupid leaning over her benumbed body to kiss her back to life.
“Zora, what’s going on? I can’t really talk right now.”
“I just saw the Gatekeeper, Victor. Dorothy. I just saw her. Here in the library. I’m scared. What should I do?”
“You just saw Dorothy?! How is that possible?”
The second question was rhetorical. And it was cruel, because without Victor as the catalyst, the Gatekeeper would st
ill have been under lock and key in the Drome. The Drome was a fortress of solitude and insanity. Nobody could get out. Unless they had Victor on their side.
“I don’t know, she must have followed me. I couldn’t stop shaking. She called me slave. I thought she was going to kill me.”
There was a long pause on the line, a breath that rattled.
“Don’t call the police. Let me take care of it. I know the FBI agent who deals with Dorothy, Agent Blair, I’ll discuss this with her.”
“I just want to be with you right now.”
“Right now is not a good time. I’m down at the county morgue. There’s a body here. They think it might be Dorothy’s work. They called me in because of my familiarity with her case. An FBI team is coming in from Phoenix.”
“Let me come.”
Before she knew what she was saying, before she contemplated the consequences of her words, she had blurted them out. Above all she wanted to stand beside Victor, lie beside him, no matter where he was, what he was doing. He was her ground and her firmament. Her heaven and yes, from time to time, her hell.
There was more: a secret part of her had a morbid fascination with death. She was drawn, as if by a tactile desire, to the flowing folds of the black cloak of Thanatos. In the library, as a girl, she had found a book called Voices of Death. In one sitting she had read it from cover to cover.
Her soul had matured twenty years in one day because of that book. It was full of the writings, the reflections, of people on the cusp of life and death—suicides, cancer victims, prisoners facing the executioner. Before meeting Victor, she had never truly known Eros, but she had known Thanatos since she was a girl, in the intimate unseen corners of her mind. And now the god of death was beckoning her to come.
“Join me? Here? Why on earth would you want to?”
“To feel safe.”
The paradox of feeling safe next to a mutilated corpse hung in the space between them, but she plowed forward anyway. Added practicality to passion, logic to emotion.
“And I am taking your class right, I might as well see what criminal law is all about. Up close. On a slab.”
No mention of her secret fascination. No need.
“Well, I suppose it’s OK. You can come here in the capacity of one of my students. I’ll get the ME to sign off on it. Just try not to throw up all over the body.”
Which proved to be a challenge of mind over digestive matter. The corpse had the Gatekeeper’s MO written all over its mangled flesh—or, to be more precise, written all over its lack of flesh. A truly gruesome pile of flesh and bone.
Zora stood beside Victor, where she’d yearned to be, across the table from the ME. A short, gaunt, serious man by the name of Benito Gonzalez. The three of them wore blue hospital scrubs, overlain by a heavy-duty green rubber apron. The same apron that a butcher would wear, or a slaughterhouse worker. Or, for that matter, an ax murderer with a neat streak.
Dr. Gonzalez took no chances of contamination from blood splattering, from bones grenading and organs erupting. In addition to the scrubs and apron, they all wore face shields made of a virtually unbreakable polycarbonate material. Huddled around the mortuary slab, they were butchers of the mysteries of death, blacksmiths of the plots of murder.
The hands and feet of the nude woman on the slab were missing. The victim had already been positively ID’ed. After a fashion. Sarah was all they had so far—a known vagrant who rolled her shopping cart all over Madison Springs, full of the junk that other people had shed. She was treated little better that the contents of her cart, in life as in death. Everybody knew her, or at least had seen her. One of the most famous people in town. Nobody talked to her. What might happen to them, what terrible mind-rending things, if they did?
Dr. Gonzalez needed to establish her exact COD. A bigger challenge than Zora quelling her reflex to gag. Sarah had suffered so much trauma that pinpointing the COD was like putting together a puzzle whose pieces had gone through a shredder.
It wasn’t the missing eyes that had killed her—eyes not simply crushed inward but completely gone, plucked clean from their sockets. Nor was it the missing extremities. If her hands and feet had been amputated while Sarah were still alive, there would have been less lividity in her arms and legs. The massive hemorrhaging of pre-mortem amputation would have significantly scaled back the victim’s post-mortem lividity. Whoever had harvested her hands and feet had waited until she was dead.
When Dr. Gonzalez peeled open her chest cavity, peering beneath the cluster of stab wounds through and around her breasts, he quickly found that both ventricles had been punctured by the knife. Heart failure would have been almost instantaneous from either one of those wounds. Death had been fleeting for Sarah. A fast end to a life cursed with vagrancy, marked with the stigma of a wandering pariah.
Dr. Gonzalez gave his guests a little anatomy lesson, a demonstration of the finer points of cadaverous criminology, using the butchering of Sarah as his forum. He showed them with a scalpel, recreating the crime, how one of the knife thrusts had nicked the poor woman’s superior vena cava. He nicked her in the heart once again, but this time she hardly bled, a gentle oozing of thick black blood.
Zora could stand no more, her sense of disgust coagulating into a thicker, stronger sense of injustice. She turned to Victor, away from the desecrated murdered body, her eyes brimming with tears and recrimination.
“The Gatekeeper did this, I know she did. And you let it happen. You let her out.”
She had cut Dr. Gonzalez off mid-sentence, while he was explaining—and illustrating with the flair of a chef over a cutting board—the best way to dissect a heart. Struck into awkwardness, he quickly sank his gaze—and, grotesquely, his fingers—into the spaces between Sarah’s organs.
“You don’t know that. Remember what I told you, truth is blinding. Dorothy will get blamed for this, but that doesn’t mean it’s the truth. Dorothy is a victim too.”
The audacity of his words, spoken over the flayed-open body of an innocent woman, horrified Zora. The woman on the table was a real victim. Who had been mutilated, butchered, defiled.
In that cold bright room, over that pandemonium of bone and blood and muscle that had harbored a proud yet tragic soul, Zora felt no fascination with death. The passage of the soul, its liberation and its torment, had been her interest. The physicality of death only sickened her.
“You know what Victor, you are every bit as blind as Sarah. Only you have eyes, you just refuse to use them.”
She would have slapped him if that fucking face guard weren’t in the way, blocking her hand like it would have blocked a fragment of airborne bone.
For that he had no reply. He thought it better to let her words sink into stillness. Feelings untempered by words, she pressed on.
“I love you Victor, I really do, but I hate you for this.”
He broke the stillness with a pained apology. Scarcely louder than a whisper. And a clear reminder.
“I’m sorry my love. But you wanted to come.”
The tenderness of his tone, the echo of her heartbreak in his, tempered the searing heat of her feelings. She had new calm, and new resolve.
“I need to leave, clear my head, get some new air. Free of death and blood. You were right, I probably shouldn’t have come over here.”
Again, stillness.
Her slaughterhouse apron ended up in a heap on the floor, and she ended up in her room in a long sleepless night, cold on her bed like a cadaver.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Fear now ordered Zora’s daily path through life. Her eyes swept like falling water over the places she went, washing over the grounds of the law school as she walked over them. The library she avoided, and she only walked in daylight, when the sun was burning through the skies.
Always in the back of her mind, burning through to the front without warning, was a vision of the eyeless woman on the slab. Sarah the Slaughtered. Sarah the Forsaken. The brilliant darkness that had enveloped S
arah might envelop Zora. For days on end she felt this radiant fear, but something deeper lurked behind it, haunting her: a missing piece of herself.
Not eyes, not hands, not feet. Not yet. The missing piece was Victor. He hadn’t touched her, hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t loved her in the flesh, behind a shroud of words, during those terrible days. She began to feel forsaken.
Why hadn’t he reached out to her, why hadn’t he called, why hadn’t he come calling like the raven of the poem to her door?
He had promised he would. She needed the truth of his few simple words, the truth of a soft look. But in class he was merely the Judge, a façade of coldness and command. Where was Victor, where was her lover?
The end of another week had come. No end of fear, no new arrival of love. Of love consuming fear. At least sleep had finally come, and she was able to dream without horror.
It was not yet midnight. Reading cases for hours had hurled her early into dreams. The law of torts, open on a page, will do that to a person. A better cure for insomnia could not be found.
A harsh and urgent knocking on her door. A dream? A harbinger of the raven? Of death?
“Zora, wake up. We need to go. Everything’s ready.”
She knew it was him. She answered the door in her lacy lavender nightgown. Seeing that, he was tempted to come right in, shape his body to the curves and flows of the gown, liberate her body from its prison of sheen. But there was simply no time. And she hardly seemed in the mood.
“Victor . . . now? What’s the rush, I’m trying to sleep.”
“We’re leaving. Dimitrios and his wife are expecting us at 8 o’clock sharp. It’s a long flight to Greece. Hurry up or we’ll make the pilot wait.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Greece? I’ve always wanted to go to Greece, it’s always been my dream, but right now I just want to sleep. And dream. Come talk to me in the morning.”
She was still too groggy to be receptive to his charms, his entreaties. She started to close the door in his face. He held it there, his hand firm.
“Zora, I told you I’d come when I was ready to answer your question. The answer is in Greece. Our first stop is Koropi, 10 minutes from the Athens airport. Now get dressed, grab a few things, and we’ll go. You can sleep on the plane.”