Nightmarish Sacrifice (Cardew) (35 page)

             
Biting my lips, I wished it didn’t all sound so utterly familiar to me...

             
“Is this what happened to you?” I asked when the pause she left became too long for me to inhale anymore.

             
Odda shrugged slowly and apathetically while roaming in the memories of her miserable past life I was pitying her for.

             
“It was just out of pride why he made me fall in love with him,” she sounded embarrassed but sincere. “He was the leader of a group of boys in my town, and he needed to feel that he was superior to them, to make sure he could have what they couldn’t reach. His brother liked me but I didn’t respond to his feelings – and Cardew decided to win me just to prove to the others he was better than everyone else, including his own brother.”

             
“Well, it seems that he has managed to,” I announced without much enthusiasm; I didn’t want to be rude but I just knew how their story had ended – and my first source of information about it had been a nightmare like this one. “I was told that when you were... you know, killed, you had been pregnant –”

             
The pause didn’t stretch for as much time as I had expected.

             
“That’s true,” the ghost didn’t hesitate much to confirm. “But when I told it to him, he decided that he had gone too far and had to get rid of me –”

             
“And –” that verb felt strange to pronounce after the name of the boy I was in love with, but I did force myself enough, “Cardew... killed you?”

             
As soon as Odda lifted her transparent head to look at me and I met her endlessly sorrowful eyes, I knew the answer before even hearing her words.

             
“Yes! –” the dead girl uttered hardly audibly and just then did I notice how sinister the silence had suddenly become. “Cardew killed me! –”

             
The scarlet drops of my blood were racing down my fingers and throwing themselves towards the moist black grieved land with heavy sighs, but my nails didn’t ease the grip they had on my palm.

             
So Cardew really was a murderer!...

             
This realization shook my recently achieved peace to the seemingly sound foundations and shattered around all the numerous miniature pieces it had been broken down to, just so as to blast them into even tinier fragments...

             
Because staying with Cardew already wasn’t a question of closing my eyes and stopping to grope for the hidden secrets of his past – it was a matter of knowing about his crime and forgiving him...

             
And I myself wasn’t sure that I was the person who had the right to forgive him.

             
It wasn’t me who he had hurt...

             
“Cardew decided to cover it up as a sacrifice in front of his friends,” Odda went on after giving me a minute or so to come to my senses. “He lured me to come to the forest one night – I easily agreed, as what he had promised me was that he’d marry me then –”

             
My helpless moan rose weakly, fluttered in noiseless despair, and quickly drowned in the thick mercilessly gray clouds above, so heavy and overcast as if filled with lead and granite tears. I hadn’t noticed when I had dropped down on my knees onto the muddy soil, but I realized that I was crying in the moment when the ghost shook her head to give me a sign not to.

             
“I was wearing this same dress –” the girl went on dreamily and her hand spilled around the snow-white veils, as half-transparent as she herself was; her voice was light and innocent, just like I could recall it from the horrifying visions, and she sounded like she wasn’t speaking to me but to herself, to the gravestone which had fallen like her soul had, to the storm of endless tears rising somewhere deep inside my breath, and the satiny-steely clouds above...

             
“When I went there, he had gathered his friends, and everything looked so solemn, like for the pagan rituals I had seen them perform before –” Odda removed the tears from her face, but new ones quickly sprang from the translucent blue of her eyes and hurried down her cheek not to let her sorrow unexpressed.               “But when I finally realized what kind of a rite he had actually made me take part in, it was too late... Everything happened exactly like you saw it in your nightmares, I wanted to warn you –”

             
A real chaos of words was occupying my mind, millions of letters twirling around with maddening speed, but none of them tangible for me...

             
Cardew, nightmares, death...

             
Cardew, sacrifice...

             
Cardew, Cardew...

             
Odda pronounced his name once more, and this made me startle and concentrate on her words again.

             
“Beware Cardew, or you will become like me –” she was shaking her head disconsolately, tears falling in all directions and merging with the heavy mournful scent of tragedy. “You can’t even imagine what it is, my dear, and I wish you never to know... My ghost is the only soul who ever comes to cry on my grave –”

             
The metallic irony taste of blood was mixing with the salt of tears running down my face, and the fresh but menacing premonition of oncoming devastating storm...

             
“Only the skies cried sincerely on my funeral –” in the moment when Odda sighed, the distant roar of a thunder shook the heavens and I instinctively shuddered. “Beware this boy, my sister, beware him if you love your life –”

             
‘If you love your life –’

             
Hadn’t Cardew himself told me literally the same a long long time ago?...

             
“Wait, Odda!” I rushed forward to the tombstone, as the spirit of the girl had started fading and dissolving into the electrified atmosphere.

             
“I can’t –” she gave me such a sorrowful smile that my teeth sank more deeply into my lower lip so as to block my exclamation of pain. “I hope we never meet again, poor Freya – if we do, it will mean that the worst has happened to you –”

             
“No!” I screamed, desperately trying to crawl closer to the ghost – but she wasn’t there anymore.

             
Just the dully gray granite gravestone...

             
‘May your soul find peace, beloved Odda –’

             
These words were still lingering in my subconscious when I – wide awake like every time after such a nightmare – was raising to sit in my bed while making vain attempts to arrange the chaotic thoughts in my tormented mind.

             
If only my imaginative fears weren’t displaying their ominous brilliance in a too realistic fantasy that obscured my mind – a sequence of images in which the letters forming the name Odda were slowly leaking down inside the surface of the tomb itself, as if the stone had somehow melted to fluid, and their outlines were twisting to turn into other letters putting together another name there...

             
My name.

             
This was a fantasy more true than I could endure...

             
Me, Cardew, Odda, the sacrifice...

             
The tornado of illusions was blurring my thoughts and dazzling me completely, merging reality together with the fantastical hypotheses in whose labyrinth I was wandering without a hope to escape – because my intuition was anxiously whispering to me that this maze was without a centre – without the sacred place whose reaching would instantly bring me salvation – the innermost point of my labyrinth was inaccessible, buried under dozens of tones of massive absorbingly gray stones, and already was just a thick unbreakable circle segment  around which the strong walls had frozen tightened like a steel immovable serpentine body – and I was not possibly able to step on the central point – it simply didn’t exist anymore – so I could only endlessly roam around it like a lost wandering ghost, without even knowing how close I had been...

             
Without being aware of the hopelessness...

             
In the same way, I would never access the right decision – I could only get so close to it – so close it was torturing – a single breath away – but still, this would not change anything radically enough to make any difference.

             
My labyrinth was not giving me even an insignificant chance of salvation...

             
Not to give in to the apathetic passivity, I jumped up and began walking up and down the room, quickly and rhythmically, as though the march formed by my own steps would clarify my mind and help me see...

             
The silent sinister sound of rustling paper startled me and I cast a sharp glance above my shoulder: the wind my movements were creating had torn the foremost page of the calendar hanging on the wall and flung it in my feet – I bowed to pick it up and stared at the scheme of passing dates.

             
When had all the time went past me, I wondered, when had the whole year disappeared in my past?...

             
The premiere of the play had seemed a whole eternity away on the day when I was chosen for one of the main parts, but – somehow imperceptibly, lightly, and alluringly pleasurably – the time had slipped until this moment, ready to tuck me on stage alone under the blazing brisk limelight and the hundreds of accusing stares, and shout, ‘That’s what you wanted!’

             
Well, the sympathy of the audience was the last thing I cared for.

             
Already...

             
With a sigh of uncertain regret, I thought more deeply to find out that Cardew had in fact changed me – a single touch of his, caressingly fiery dangerous, and I was not perceiving the world around in the same way anymore.

             
As it was simply not the same world...

             
Could I give it all up: Cardew, his love, all the fantasies and fears he was inspiring inside me? Did I want to, wasn’t I too addicted to the idea itself of being with him to even imagine existing without it anymore?

             
And even if I did try to step back, would I be able to escape...

             
What if – as well as practically lacking a central point I could step on, my inner maze had an outermost wall which was unbroken by any doors, too?...

             
No way in.

             
No way out...

             
Reaching the centre of that labyrinth was my metaphor for achieving inner peace together with the ultimate bliss Cardew’s love meant to me – and in this sense, it was something I would never have, even if he did really love me – the equilibrium between the two of us was too fragile, given its subconsciously philosophical nature, and Cardew would think of supporting it as of his own display of the need to be with me – he would consider this a weakness and forbid its existence, regardless of our feelings and the total devastation that action of his would leave behind.

             
And, on the other hand – quitting the labyrinth meant leaving the dangerous but so appealing relationship I was cursed and blessed to be in...

             
However, with both ways towards change blocked, I was stuck there right in the middle of the labyrinth, in its endless entangled curving corridors of passion and threat...

             
The labyrinth of Cardew’s love...

             
The only place where I sensed that I belonged from all my heart.

             
No, I didn’t want a way out of it, nor a chance to reach the salvation of the centre which would give me peace but deprive me of all the beautiful tension of existence – what I desired was to stay in the maze itself forever, in its entrancing obsessive darkness – menacing only unless you entrust yourself into it, forget how horrified you should be, and relax to absolutely dissolve into it, until you let it fill you with the perception of perfect celestial light...

             
Cardew was just like this darkness – secretive, hypnotic, magnetic – decisive and strong enough to fulfil any plans he could possibly build – even if they included him sinking into irreversible eternal perdition...

             
After making sure that I would never be reborn anymore...

             
To me life was a small fragment of the soul’s endless cycle of phases aiming towards perfection, and I adored Cardew so absolutely that – despite my utter horror and my unbreakable brisk desire to live more and more, here and now – I would forgive him my death in the current incarnation not to damn him for eternity...