When we burst into the open air, I heard wind skidding over frozen water, and I knew we were back at the castle. The ice sheets creaked and groaned, singing the same stern song that had lulled me to sleep since I was a child. But the rhythm was different now; the lullaby had been inverted. The night itself had been reversed – even the constellations of stars were upside down.
“Keep moving,” the murderer urged. She was shivering in her scanty clothes.
“Why are we back at the castle?”
“I want you to take me to your father’s study.”
“Then why did you ask me to meet you at the club?”
The murderer smiled. “I had to bring you here through my secret passage,” she said, “or you’d never understand who I am.
She pulled me close and kissed me until my legs turned to water. Her tongue slithered between my lips and tickled the roof of my mouth. My red dress slipped from my shoulders. Her cold fingers crawled across my breasts – squeezing, kneading, as if my flesh held secrets. Our scents rose and mingled, smoke flowers freezing in mid-air.
“Now,” she said, “ask me who I am.”
When you kissed me that night, I made the mistake of opening my eyes. I wanted to peer into the tunnels of your pupils, into the coils of your brain matter. I wanted to watch the clockworks of your mind, but your face was a glass orb filled with darkness. All I could see was an obsidian opacity. I don’t know what scared me more – the fact that your beautiful skull had turned hollow, or that its surface didn’t reflect me at all. Even a charlatan’s seeing stone would have reflected a white smudge.
Then you slid your tongue into my mouth. Instantly your face was flesh again, your cheeks hot to the touch. You clutched my breasts, pinched my nipples as if to milk blood from the nubs. The treacherous stone in your tongue wasn’t a diamond, but a shard of ice, which melted into sweet water. With one moan, I drowned out the nightmare that I’d seen in your eyes.
She whispered her story into my ear.
Three words. That was her history. Three words, and I knew all I could stand to know. If she had told me any more, I would have fallen off the narrow ledge of myself into the void below.
She slid her finger into my mouth, dug something from the hollow under my tongue, and pressed the object into my palm. It was a key made of bone. She didn’t have to tell me which door the key would open.
“Let’s go see your father,” she said.
We ran up the hill to the castle and flew through the massive doors. We climbed the twisting staircase that led to my father’s study, ascending so high that the air became too thin for us to breathe, and we had to stop to gulp air from each others’ lips. Our hearts banged like lust-drunk birds against the cages of our ribs. We stood in front of the door to his chamber and clung to each other like teenage lovers, our tongues weaving and slapping as we kissed.
Then my father cried out my name.
The murderer’s body stiffened against mine. Our excitement hardened into a crystalline rage. We broke our embrace. I pushed the bone key into the lock. As soon as the door opened, the cry stopped. A staggering silence filled the room.
The study was empty. Cobwebs and their listless shadows stood in lieu of objects. I saw phantom bookshelves that held no books, a pair of hovering chairs, and a floating globe that replicated no world I had ever seen. My father’s private sanctuary was as bereft as a desecrated shrine. At the heart of this sepulchre stood a pedestal draped in threadbare velvet. On top of the pedestal sat a chalice.
I went to the pedestal, lifted the tarnished cup, and looked inside. A layer of dust shifted on the surface of the fluid. A fissure opened in the dust, revealing a crimson crescent, like a mouth. The thin lips parted. The mouth sighed my name.
“That’s his blood,” said the murderer.
I screamed.
The murderer snatched the chalice and tipped it onto the floor. Gore rained in clotted gouts. She pulled something out of the cup. It was a carved bone fragment, identical to the transmitter that my father had given me. I took the shard and held it for a long time, watching it float in my shaking hand.
“Go ahead,” the murderer said. “See if it works.”
I placed it in my ear. Not so much as a whisper seeped through the circuits.
“Do you remember the day he died?” she asked.
“No.”
The murderer squatted on the floor, tracing letters in the red liquid: FUCK US ALL.
Her porcelain cheeks were streaked with blood. I sank to the floor beside her. Using her forefinger as a brush, she painted my mouth.
“Beautiful,” she said. “Now paint mine.”
I did as she said. She caught my finger between her teeth and suckled at the tip. The suction sent a spear of longing through my belly.
“Remember when you came up to this room, the night you told him you were leaving?” she asked. “He said he’d never let you go.”
“I don’t remember.”
“He said you could never leave the castle,” she went on. “You were his lily. His hothouse flower.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“You did, my dear.”
“My father can’t be dead. How did he interview all those criminals?”
But I already knew. I had ushered the murderers into the castle and led them into the library, where I sat them down in front of the confessional screen. I had set up the tape recorder to record their stories. The criminals believed they were pouring out their hearts to a man, a corporeal being like themselves. But the voice that spoke to them came from a distant part of the castle. The voice came from my father’s blood.
When the interviews were over, I transcribed the tapes. I wrote my father’s books; I published them under his name. And all the while his blood instructed me, guided me, from the chalice upstairs. Blood speaks to blood.
“You’re remembering, aren’t you?” the murderer said. “Think back. Do you remember why you wanted to escape?”
She kissed me. Our lips and tongues merged in a slippery knot. Her hands slid under my dress and glided up my thighs, up to the crevice that had never been opened. Her fingers sank into flesh so wet that it gave way to her caress like ectoplasm.
“Please,” I whispered. “Please.”
She took hold of my shoulders and pushed me onto my back, parting my knees. Her face, as she gazed down at me with lust-dark eyes, was a mirror image of my own longing. I spread my thighs and raised my hips, so that her lily-white hand could dive into my deepest secrets.
Outside the castle, the lake screamed. The ice was tearing itself apart. When the sheets melted to let the lake’s secrets rise, my father’s remains would bob to the surface. First the small bones would emerge, then the heavier ones, and finally the massive cranium with the star-shaped hole that I made when I bludgeoned him to death.
“Do you remember now?” she asked.
I moaned, tossing my head from side to side.
“You wanted to leave the castle because you wanted to get fucked.” She drove her fist deeper. My mind flashed to the lovers in the club, to the scene that my father had always been afraid of.
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, I wanted to get fucked.”
“Did you think it was a coincidence, when you found that dress tonight? You used to pay your father’s guards to smuggle those slutty clothes into the castle. You used to lie awake at night, wishing some stranger would break in and deflower you. Like this.”
The murderer drove her vicious little fist in and out of my cunt. She had almost reached the hard atom at my centre. My hips pumped up and down in their own frenzied dance – faster and faster, until my inner walls burned. Then her knuckles struck the core of my memory, and I fell into a blood-red seizure.