Nightmarish Sacrifice (Cardew) (50 page)

             
Sacrificed through, in, and by my own nightmares...

             
I was the nightmarish sacrifice!!!...

             
And this fatal night the vision had finally changed, clearly revealing the truth which the invincible gossamers I was tightly entangled in – gossamers of illusions, temptation and love – had prevented me from desiring to change – and from an observer nobody could catch a glimpse of, I had turned into the starring actress in the nightmare...

             
Too bad I wouldn’t survive the end of the play to hear the applause.

             
‘But this is just a nightmare!’ my logic expressed its slightly alarmed surprise at my gloomy thoughts. ‘It can’t really hurt you –’

             
Then why was my intuition torturing me so mercilessly?...

             
The executioner in the long black cloak was already approaching me, the fluttering light of the torches playing disturbingly airily on his familiar silhouette, no face visible in the large hood he had sunk into; nevertheless, when he stopped in front of me, his hands did rise to take the hood off and unveil his identity...

             
But I was completely aware of who he was even before seeing his face – I couldn’t help recognizing the hands that had been alluringly caressing me so many times...

             
“Cardew!” his name escaped my departed lips like a moan but I didn’t even try to stop it.

             
Something was hinting me that my actions were not of much difference...

             
My beloved was watching me from under the radiant halo of his hair in which the torches were throwing all possible reddish shades from the faintest tender almost-blond coppery-touched auburn to the deepest dark-cherry nuance looking coal-black; pure crystallized insanity was blazing strongly inside his bewildering eyes, the endearment they were radiating strangely morbid and menacing...

             
Too close to uncontrollable mania...

             
“I made a mistake,” Cardew’s tone was lowered to whisper, but I shuddered at its chillingly cold sound – so impersonal and at the same time so decisive that it was having the sinister scent of oncoming danger. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you like this –”

             
“I can’t allow you to make me vulnerable,” he went on immediately as I was too benumbed to say anything; the nightmare was so realistic I could feel genuine fear rising inside me, despite all rational thoughts trying to impose on me that I had nothing to beware in the unreal realm of visions.

             
After all, what could possibly happen to me?

             
A nightmare could hurt me emotionally only and I was considering myself tough enough...

             
“I regret trusting you –” Cardew narrowed his eyes suspiciously, wondering what I was telling him with my silence. “I can sense that you will destroy me, either by humiliating sympathy or mockery, or –”

             
I bit my lips almost to blood, and the pain that struck me was real, too...

             
And too real.

             
Was I really dreaming?...

             
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ my mind ordered to me. ‘A minute ago you were falling asleep in Cardew’s arms – do you remember coming to this strange place? There’s no chance he brought you here in no time – on top of it, he was asleep... and he loves you –’

             
“I will never betray you!” I pronounced clearly, on purpose restricting my defensive step backwards as he reached his hand to touch my neck. “I swear!”

             
Slightly haughtily, Cardew answered to me with low joyless chuckle, more of a roar than laughter at all.

             
But what was this uncanny dream!? And why was I having it?...

             
“You swear because you are afraid,” the young man in the black cloak smirked, graphite-gray insanity filling his eyes with thick obscure fog behind which I could not perceive a soul. “Aren’t you?”

             
The absolute composure of my mind did not prevent my heart from leaping with terror at the blaze of the long and fatally familiar knife in his hand, the mercilessly sharp steel relishing the sinister quaint light the torches were bathing it into as if specially to underline its atrocity.

             
“No!” I declared proudly, mechanically observing how the dagger was slowly rising to the level of my chest, where the instinctive uncontrollable dread was already boiling wildly, like in a small hell-resembling cauldron, “I trust you.”

             
Pausing his movements, Cardew cast me another horrifying glance of a lunatic, and the reflections of fire shivered onto the cold steel surface as the blade in his hand winced.

             
“And you shouldn’t!” he recited overly pathetically, as though we were on stage and had just reached the moment of the psychically exhaustive culmination in which my character had to be cruelly killed by her suddenly frenzied blood-thirsty lover. “You shouldn’t! Because I don’t trust you, lovely – I can’t trust you, and nothing but your death will repair the mistake I made by speaking to you like that! –”

             
Gods, what had happened to my boy?! He didn’t look like himself at all – so feverishly desperate, so out of his mind – nothing of the flawless steely composure had left in his strangely insane eyes, nor of the inflaming captivating passion, or any of the other states of the heart he was able to display so convincingly – as though all imaginary figurative crystals his emotions were imprisoned in had suddenly blasted into a forceful detonation into millions and millions of miniature pieces, and they had mixed into an entangled multi-coloured composite in which nothing could be made out but some illogical common shimmer – as though Cardew was either playing the part of a madman too realistically, or had simply lost his own mind for real...

             
Following a subconscious impulse, I cast a lightning-speed look around to see if the whole place around us was all just theatrical scenery, and I even expected to see audience tensely holding their breath somewhere close – or at least I desperately hoped so...

             
However, there was not a living soul outside the circle: the vision was definitely not set in the theatre and was probably not inspired by our stage experience from the evening which had just ended.

             
The whole horror of Cardew’s insane outburst was being pictured as real to me – as much as a nightmare could be.

             
Why was my subconsciousness torturing me like this?...

             
Cardew didn’t miss to notice my cursory glance aside and he obviously interpreted it as a feverish search for a way to escape.

             
This just accelerated the process of my execution...

             
“No! Cardew, stop!” I shouted uncontrollably and pulled myself away from him with a convulsive jerk as the knife in his hand mock-lashed at my direction as if to prepare me mentally for what would follow; I myself couldn’t understand my hysterical outburst given that I was aware of the fact I was just starring in a nightmare – starring as the sacrifice, yes, but only in an inexplicable psychological game in which I couldn’t physically die – and still, I could perceive that it was not only my attraction to the dramatic which was driving me to behave in this way and take my hypothetical death seriously.

             
It was something stronger...

             
Nonetheless, my backwards dart didn’t help – with the very first hasty step, I tripped against the long and inordinately splendid dress, and instantly flew down to painfully collapse on my back on the ground which was hard, sinisterly dark, and moist...

             
Like in a graveyard...

             
Cardew had already pitilessly pinned his fingers into my arms and had thus raised me to my feet with a strong brutal shove, a single movement of his returning me to the centre of the voiceless circle of eleven, while his hands were still clutching my arms with atrocious ferocity, as if his vindictive aim was to squeeze out of me all the extreme emotional anguish I was capable of, before finally depriving me of my lost life and letting me rest soulless – conquered and totally broken in spirit – under the skies of his damned and incredibly mighty unknown gods...

             
Before sacrificing me...

             
“I love you!!! –” I gave out an enormously desperate chilling scream, so unbelievably loud and piercing that it made the torches around shiver ominously.

             
But my voice echoed emptily somewhere far far away...

             
Far away – in the ancient mystifying forest surrounding us, where – in the first one of her powerful sacrificial nightmares – Cardew’s new victim was tirelessly running in chase of my dying tormented voice, the obdurate strength of his unbending determination woven inside her visions not letting her give in to the dominant tempting dread but firmly urging her towards the horrors she was cursed to witness, and leading her through the bewildering ill-boding haze wrapping her own consciousness as she was tripping against her luxurious scarlet dress, listening to my shrieks and wondering what all this was supposed to mean for her...

             
Because – with the death of the current sacrifice, another one was being chosen.

             
I would die – and after my death, my fate would repeat with another girl...

             
Would I be dying again and again – metaphorically, as in reality I would be long dead and forgotten – would I be dying again every time she had a nightmare about this fatal moment?... Or would I only live in her memories...

             
I was not to know the answer.

             
All I could believe in was that the whole libretto would repeat again...

             
The play would be exactly the same, just the actresses would swap their parts: I would take Odda’s role of the restless spirit, and the new still living sacrifice would star in mine...

             
The ominous settings of the centuries-old forest and the eleven mute witnesses in gray would remain exactly the same – and so would the ruthless and seductive unpredictable executioner whose left hand was effortlessly blocking my movements, his obsessively gray eyes paralyzing me while – slowly and gently, taking his time as though he was receiving some kind of cruel demonic pleasure from delaying his actions to exalt my irrepressible horror – he was caressingly sliding the very point of the ferociously sharp dagger on the edge outlining my lower lip – precise and barely perceptible, his skilful movements weren’t hurting me physically, nor leaving marks on the smooth surface of my skin or shedding even a drop of my blood, but instead, they were fully letting me sense the final lethal danger closer than ever before, forcing me to willingly drown in my own inner fears and suffocate in the ultimate panic he was creating...

             
“I love you, too –” Cardew breathed out shallowly, the inhuman idealized excessive evil in his tone filling my soul with ice-cold frosted dread, and his appalling knife slightly flinched on purpose so as to leave a tiny deliberate incision on the right side of my lip. “You will make a beautiful sacrifice, Freya, the most beautiful one I have ever had –”

             
The alarming taste of my own fresh blood – familiar, rusty and too realistic – was giving shockingly brutal tinctures to the dreamy tenderness of his tone.

             
Wouldn’t I wake up already?...

             
Wouldn’t I wake up at all!?!...

             
The utterly decisive cruelty in Cardew’s stare was hinting me that I wouldn’t.

             
Ever again.

             
“Now –” he pronounced slowly with steely determined intonation which clearly showed me that we had finally come to the end, and he had no intentions to hesitate and regret, or postpone the execution of my irreversible death verdict, “Die, my love! –”

             
‘This is not real!!!’ uncontrolled despair screamed wildly in my mind when the boy in front of me sharply raised the knife, the horrifying blade pointing at my heart with deadly precision. ‘Nothing can happen for real here – this is only a vision –’

             
But as Cardew’s knife darted towards me and – after a lurid exhaustive second of movement – it hammered straight into my alarmed horrified heart – the rough furious pain exploded all over me into a deadening detonation intoxicating with the wild feverish sensation of burning anguish.

             
Imaginary? No, it wasn’t!