Nightmarish Sacrifice (Cardew) (22 page)

             
“Oh dear –” was all that I managed to utter; despite all rational reasons, the unrestricted dark might his eyes were emitting was hypnotizing me so powerfully, so irresistibly... “Why are you so damn persuasive when you aren’t even speaking?!”

             
“It’s very simple, beauty –” Cardew smiled and his breath sent a warm scented whiff towards my lips as we were so close to each other we were almost touching. “Because you’re in love with me –”

                                          It was too early for me to be completely awake, the sun was still wondering whether to rise at all or to have some more wholesome sleep first, and the monotonous dull motions of the train were lulling me even more, slowly, gently. If only I could relax in the almost empty vehicle...

             
‘You are absolutely out of mind!’ my logic had warned me, but I had suppressed it and left anyway.

             
In quest for a place I had seen only in a nightmare...

             
As soon as I had got home and sunk into sleep the night before, the terror-filled dreams had obsessed my consciousness again, and had once more carried me to the imaginary graveyard where Odda’s fallen tomb was resting undisturbed and waiting for me in its frustratingly constant stillness.

             
Nevertheless, this time the vision had shown me more – as though merely so as to give me the direction in which I was to go, it had raised my point of view above the deserted cemetery to let me catch a glimpse of the surroundings, and I had clearly seen a small river washing away the heavy leaden grief in the farther end of the burial-ground. As a consequence, immediately after waking up, I had found a map of the region and got on the first train that was heading for the closest town on the bank of a river.

             
Maybe this really was irrational an action, but in the current moment, my instincts were so much stronger than my ability to reason that I couldn’t help obeying them.

             
I had followed the direction of my nightmares...

             
Because I really couldn’t take the ignorance anymore: my soul was painfully inflamed on the inside, and I was desperately craving to know – to be sure, or at least to believe from all my heart – that Cardew was not a murderer.

             
And if he was...

             
I had to be certain of that so as to forgive him or try to save myself in time.

             
As I was already aware that I was in love with this boy – angelic or sinful, pure or hurtful, it didn’t matter to me what he was – and I did need to trust him, although before I would have never believed that exactly this would be so vitally necessary for me.

             
I needed to feel protected in his presence, to relax completely up to the point of oblivion and to know that I would be absolutely safe, to be able to even entrust my life into his hands...

             
But I couldn’t do it if I didn’t know his soul as well as I knew mine.

             
And maybe it was offensive and forbidden, maybe it was not fair, but I would open up the hidden wounds of his past so as to find out who he really was.

             
What he really was...

             
The train shook unexpectedly and I almost hit my head against the glass of the window; an emptily gray railway station was floating closer through the fog of a miserable day but that sight cheered me up and I hurried to jump out of the vehicle and have a look around.

             
Everything surrounding me felt so spookily transparent that it made me smile – the atmosphere was finally exactly like in my sinister nightmares; this awoke my hopes for finding the truth, and generously gave them enough oxygen to burn more briskly...

             
What a town, I whispered in my mind when I left the station and found myself in one of the main streets, where even the buildings – as if having absorbed from the constant heavy fog – were granite gray, beautiful and hostile.

             
Was everyone there strange or was it just that I hadn’t woken up yet? In fact, there were people around hurrying in all directions like in every other city, but it was as though nobody was noticing the others at all, like they existed in parallel dimensions.

             
I felt as if I was walking around corpses – I could even sense the bleak dark coldness the ice building them was radiating...

             
It must have been from the weather, I summed up and blinked to chase the moist away from my lashes; maybe I was in one of my weird moods again, but clouds were making the best celestial vault possible to rise above my head and shield me from the sunlight I wasn’t too fond of.

             
This gray emptiness was so overwhelmingly obsessive...

             
“To the graveyard,” I said to the taxi driver as soon as I got into the car and closed the door; an ominous premonition had prevented me from asking any of the citizens for the direction – maybe because I could intuitively sense how ill-boding they would find it that a stranger wanted to know the way to the cemetery.

             
The driver nodded and cast me a glance before starting the engine.

             
“You’re not from here, are you?” he asked with a polite intonation without looking at me anymore.

             
“No,” I admitted; the warmth in the car was making me more communicative. “But I have a friend who is buried here.”

             
“Oh,” he just said and took the next turn smoothly, the steering wheel sliding obediently in his hands. “A friend? I know almost everyone here, the town isn’t big, and if I can help you –”

             
My drama skills which were never leaving me livened up immediately, and I imagined how proud of me Mr Shelton would have been, had he seen my frankly grieved face.

             
“She died when she was sixteen, she’d be my age now –” I almost sobbed, my voice filled with realistic un-cried tears. “Her name was Odda –”

             
In the pause I left, the cab driver was apparently thinking strenuously, and the act of reading his expression – something I did effortlessly – reassured me that he could not help me.

             
“Odda?” he repeated quietly, as though not to disturb the spirit of the late. “No, I have never heard of such a girl. Are you sure she’s buried in this town?”

             
“That’s what I was told –” I uttered, this time with real confusion; my heart was overflowing with suddenly heated blood racing worriedly.

             
The man nodded without adding anything; the greyness was violently pressed to the windows from all directions as though it was desperately trying to get to me and suffocate me, and all the streets looked completely the same to my distracted stare as I was sunk inside my thoughts...

             
“Shall I wait for you here?” if it was not for those words of the driver, I wouldn’t have known that the car had stopped moving, so smooth and imperceptible the ride had been, as though we had been in a boat gliding through the mist.

             
“No, thank you –” I must have sounded startled as my voice shuddered with the impulse of fear that ran like electric shock through my veins; not to reveal more to the stranger, I paid quickly and gave him an inexpressive smile while leaving the car. “Have a pleasant day –”

             
For a moment he wondered whether it would be relevant if he wished the same to me, but then just nodded with a blankly kind smile and the car drove away.

             
I spent the next minute or so in waiting – in mere waiting to come to my senses; my back was turned towards the graveyard and I wasn’t sure whether I had the bravery needed to enter that land where alive beings were unwanted guests.

             
Only while they were still alive...

             
Gray.

             
The overcast skies had the colour of deadened stones, and seemed closer than usually, as though they were phlegmatically observing my every movement with their apathetic emptily blue-less eyes; each tiny drop of hazy rain drifting around resembled transparent molten steel, the pavement looked like it was about to burst into disconsolate tears, even the air itself was gray, so ultimate and ubiquitous that colour was everywhere around me.

             
Gray...

             
Cardew!

             
His name sobered me up a bit, like a touch of ice-cold blade imperceptibly kissing my neck, and I gathered the strength to walk right into the cemetery without turning back.

             
But I didn’t need more than several seconds to sense that the taxi driver had been right: no girl named Odda had ever been buried there – I could somehow intuitively perceive this – and although it was irrational, once I had become aware of that premonition, I couldn’t doubt in it anymore.

             
Because that graveyard was completely different from the one in my nightmare – it was not ominously chaotic and quaint in a medieval way, no sinister trees were scattered anywhere around, no creepy mist was prowling around the soil, which was not damp and swampy either – on the contrary, the low flawlessly but dully identical white tombs were arranged in neat even rows, no unwanted grass rising between them.

             
I didn’t even need to read all the names written there to know that Odda was not among the people resting in that burial ground; there was something vaguely appalling in the ultimate order there, and I was slightly shivering, feeling as if I was walking into some weird fantasy lacking the imagination needed to make itself really striking with horror.

             
Even I was surprised that I left the cemetery without checking all names on the gravestones, but the same instinct which had led me there was urging me to escape out of that place immediately – as though the ground would unexpectedly split under my feet and the fire erupted from the crack would suffocate me in its fluid heated embrace.

             
‘So, I was wrong,’ I thought when I ensconced myself back on the train, which was as deserted as it had been the same morning. ‘My intuition was wrong, I shouldn’t have come here –’

             
With the sorrowful sound of a saddened girl saying goodbye to her beloved boy who was to leave and fight in a bloodthirsty war, the train divided from the platform and slid away from it, both covered in the numerous tears of the foggy rain. I sighed noiselessly and relaxed my head on the back of the seat while trying to find a distraction serious enough to make me stop thinking of Odda and of Cardew’s supposed crime.

             
I realized I had at some point fallen asleep just when I woke up with a startle and found out that the vehicle had stopped moving; what had forced me to wake up hadn’t been a nightmare this time – it was an outburst of an unknown feeling.

             
It was strange, but at the same time, utterly powerful: a premonition – or simply one of the confusing impulses of my mind – screaming inside me, bidding me to leave the train as soon as I could.

             
Was I going crazy?!...

             
The glance I cast out of the window informed me that I was at an unknown station; how long I had slept and where exactly I was were questions I could not give straightforward answers to – I was only aware of the desire to run out of the train before it was too late...

             
I had missed the whole day anyway, so I didn’t hesitate much; the train left with one passenger less and even more sorrowful a sigh.