Nightmarish Sacrifice (Cardew) (19 page)

             
The place where I had fallen was behind his back, and I couldn’t see his face, so I rushed towards him as fast as I could, determined to find out the truth about his identity before it was too late...

             
Too late for Odda.

             
Too late for me...

             
The heavy smooth satin of my dress was winding in my feet as if to intentionally stop me, but no one alive was noticing me, so I managed to reach the red-haired silhouette undisturbed and my hand was already reaching to clutch his arm above the elbow...

             
“Cardew!” my scream of panic startled me as I realized I had just sat in my bed among the wrinkled sheets.

             
I had woken up without seeing the face of the pagan priest.

             
Had that been my boy?...

             
Had Cardew killed the innocent girl as an offering to unknown cruel gods, had he been the one to thrust the knife into her heart without hearing her horrified pleas for mercy?...

             
Was Cardew a murderer?

             
The darkened air around felt like a burden all over me, the silence was unbearably frustrating up to the point of paranoia, searing my hopes that relief would come with the morning sun, and depriving me of my ability to breathe.

             
Was I in love with a murderer?!...

             
‘Think!’ I ordered to myself and wrapped my forehead in my palms as though that would prevent me from hearing the maddening monotonous buzz of millions of hypotheses in my mind. ‘Think rationally!’

             
Was Cardew capable of killing?

             
I instinctively shivered at that thought and released a moan.

             
Was he capable? He would make a brilliant killer with his precise movements and elusive presence!

             
My lips hurt as my teeth were tightly pressed into them on the inside, but I didn’t relax my jaws to relieve the heated pain; the overly insistent thoughts about the sacrifice were still too entangled in my mind and I couldn’t set my consciousness free from them...

             
Heavens, Cardew had been only sixteen then, three years ago when Odda had been killed – what reasons could a sixteen-year-old boy have to commit such an unforgivable crime?!

             
Had Odda been the reason?... Maybe she had meant something for him: love, pain, or threat – and he had covered up a usual mindless revenge as an ancient sacrificial ritual?

             
And what if he was a fanatic worshipping his bloodthirsty pagan gods so blindly and insanely that he wouldn’t feel guilty to waste one young life if it was for their sake?

             
Oh dear, oh dear...

             
‘Wait! Think rationally!’ my mind repeated sharply to make me come to my senses. ‘What do you know for Cardew for sure? That he wears a tablet with runes on his neck – so he probably is interested in occultism or history, but this isn’t making him a murderer! He’s aggressive? And is he really, how can you know, as he never hurt you seriously! He’s red-haired?! Gods, are we still in the Middle Ages! The hair colour isn’t proving he has a flair for witchcraft, what’s that medieval way of brainless thinking!?! –’

             
Then why had he been a part of my so insistent nightmare? Weren’t there any clues in that nightly vision, any signs I was to decode, any secret messages...

             
Was it simply a game of imagination?...

             
The questions were filling my mind with hordes and hordes of equally probable possibilities, and I was helplessly trying to find an answer at least to the most basic ones, otherwise I would easily explode on the inside.

             
Was Cardew’s presence in the scary dream a result of my constant thinking about him? That was more than simply possible.

             
And actually, had such a ritual happened at all!? I couldn’t know for sure.

             
But... What if it was all real?!...

             
My breathing was rough and uneasy, the air felt too heated to touch, but I was still inhaling it and trying to calm myself down enough not to let my hands shake anymore.

             
The recollection of the kiss Cardew had given me before leaving was filling me with quiet fear – had those same lips stayed passionlessly silent while Odda had been begging for her life? What was I to do if the same hands that were caressing me had committed the horrifying crime?

             
What could I do if Cardew was a killer?!

             
As though just to aggravate the conditions, the memory of the blaze in the shape of the rune of destruction I had seen in his eyes came to the forefront of my mind again, to raise once more the association with danger I had had the first time we had met.

             
No, I couldn’t live with those hesitations and manage to keep my sanity! I urgently needed to find out...

             
And even before having figured out what exactly I was to do, I started dressed up with feverish speed...

                                          It was the darkest part of the night – just an hour or so before dawning, and I tried not to concentrate too much on this ominous thought while I was walking completely alone in the deserted streets of the outskirts I didn’t know very well. Fortunately, the town was soundly asleep, but still, I was constantly casting glances over my shoulders to make sure than no-one was chasing me...

             
No-one red-haired.

             
The pulse of the sleeping town was peaceful but filled with strange bewildering noises and I couldn’t overcome the impression that thousands and thousands of eyes were fixed into my back while the bodiless ill-boding creatures which possessed them were creepily lying in wait for the right moment to attack me...

             
The moment when I would finally get to the graveyard.

             
Because that was where I was going – to the cemetery in which I had never been before, to search for the tomb of a girl I had never met.

             
Would I be able to find there what I was looking for? That was what I’d soon find out...

             
In case such a grave existed there at all.

             
In case such a girl had existed at all...

             
I had gone to that town to study, and I hadn’t even imagined that I would have to go to the graveyard there in quest for some illusions I had seen in a confused nightmare, let alone doing it at night, but reality was keeping on surprising me, and not all of its gifts were especially pleasant.

             
Even the clouds floating over the skies of ink-blue satin looked realistically phantasmal against the darkened background, as though the gloomy atmosphere had absorbed all the joy and carelessness from their graceful movements, and they – torn apart, helpless and pale – were crawling powerlessly towards the horizon line to find their salvation somewhere beyond the visible world. The moon was turning them to faint opal illusions with its shimmering fragile radiance, and it seemed as if they were sources of ghostly light themselves, its enchanting fragrance scattering charm and forgotten dreams around...

             
Obviously, I had chosen the most appropriate part of the night for such an expedition – just the time when everything was so sinister and mighty that human beings felt humble and weak, and every magic-filled fairy-tale, and each forgotten medieval legend, however unreal and even fantastical, appeared perfectly believable to the lost wanderer.

             
‘Well, you wanted a walk in the moonlight,’ I reminded myself and shuddered, not because of the coldness of the air. ‘Now you have it – like Cardew said, dreams come true –’

             
Cardew...

             
Strangely enough, his presence there with me would have made me feel calmer – I would have been incomparably safer if his hand was holding mine, as I would be sure that he would let nobody else hurt me...

             
Not that he couldn’t do it himself – but at least all the other possibilities would have been blocked in time.

             
And as I was by myself, danger could creep from all directions...

             
Including from his.

             
‘That wasn’t really emollient,’ I remarked in my mind without stopping walking, my soul struggling against the numbness my instinctive fright was blanketing it with.

             
The dawn was already fading the skies above the horizon line, and I was deliberately slowing down my steps so as not to get to the cemetery before the slant rosy morning rays had chased its sinister obscurity away.

             
The vault of the gate rising above the entrance to the burial-ground passed above my head in the moment when the sun gave me an encouraging wink and grinned to crown with mild golden halos the tops of the first gravestones which appeared in sight.

             
Why anyone would need such a gate, I wondered while walking through it: the walls wrapping the graveyard in their frozen silent hug had long ago given in to the merciless pressure of the centuries and had been almost completely ruined, thus leaving unprotected that last home of emptiness where nobody actually lived...

             
The shafts of sunrays were spoiling the mystery in the ghost story my roaming into the graveyard would have been if I had gone there in the darkness, but I was rather thankful for being saved some of the extreme emotions – I had had enough of them in all the visions that were struggling with each other inside my skull.

             
Already in the cemetery, I stopped to have a look around; I had taken the most difficult step – the one that brought me in – but what was to follow?

             
The graves were scattered around in an irrational way, as if each of the permanent residents in that luxurious garden had been buried there with the thought that he or she would be the only one who would ever rest there; the older tombs were more impressive as then there had probably been more space – some were even surrounded by low iron fences – and many of the newer ones were placed where there had been pathways before, so they were cramped and narrow, and looked so uncomfortable…

             
Uncomfortable!? What a conclusion! It made a shiver run under my skin...

             
‘Concentrate!’ my rationality raised again. ‘Unless you do it, you’ll never find Odda’s grave, and you may too soon have the chance to check exactly how comfortable you’d be in such a place –’

             
In the intensifying rays of the sun, the marble of the more sumptuous tombs was shining and proudly reflecting the light among the dull rough granite of the others which were rising silent and dumb, as though they were personally concerned for the death they had been damned to mourn for the time of eternity...

             
Gray was a colour I hadn’t really been keen on before, but since I first met Cardew, to me it was a symbol of power, delusive tenderness, and hypnotic mystifying threat.

             
A metaphor of danger.

             
And what would have happened to those dully gray blocks of granite if they hadn’t been turned into gravestones, signs of hypocritically ever-lasting grief – what if they had built not monuments but sculptures – not death but beauty?