Nightmarish Sacrifice (Cardew) (49 page)

             
A girl and a boy in love.

             
I had never enjoyed any role as much as the one I had in Cardew’s life – like a beautiful pet cat he was taking care of, I was letting him possess me, which was indeed making him treat me like a goddess; I was displaying my superiority from time to time, but that was only to tease him, and I was easily letting him take the lead – in return he was a king more obedient than any slave.

             
We were able to maintain this situation, I reassured myself, cuddling closer to Cardew’s chest, and his arms tightened around me in a wordless but expressive response.

             
Was he trying to tell me that he needed me to stay close to him? That he was ready to shield me with his own body from all harm aimed at me? That we were one?... Or was he just making all these confessions at the same time...

             
The blissful harmony was all around us, wrapping us together into numerous translucent veils of sweetness and peace, its creamy taste fondling my senses and lulling me to pleasurable laziness in which I was only breathing joyfully and listening to the silent respiration of the atmosphere...

             
And to Cardew’s heart-beating – rhythmic and powerful, it was calming me down and making my own heart pulsate in the same way, strongly, decisively, and steadily. He had attentively spread the soft thick blanket so as to cover both of us with it and his hands had gently pulled it not to let the cool air caress my back, and I had tucked my head close to him so that I could clearly perceive his warmth giving me the feeling of ultimate safety.

             
By the way in which his muscles were gradually beginning to relax, I could notice that my guardian was already falling asleep, but this just called a noiseless tender smile upon my face and made me rest motionlessly in his sweet cuddling hug to make him more comfortable as well.

             
Cardew going to sleep before me was something unusual – he was always still awake while I was dropping asleep, and already awake again when I was waking up – and, as I thought more about it, I realized that I had never seen him sleeping, despite all the endless nights of closeness I had spent in his embraces – so I rose imperceptibly and cast a secret glimpse at his face.

             
Pacified by the tranquil atmosphere, Cardew had really fallen asleep in my arms, his deep calm breathing slightly caressing my hair affectionately every time he exhaled.

             
Oh dear, he looked so young... and so different from the over-confident and a bit arrogant boy he was for the outer world, so disparate that I slowly rose a little more to lean on my elbow to be more comfortable, and went on carefully watching him as though I was seeing his face for the first time in my life.

             
I just couldn’t resist this – now as the lead-heavy stare of his piercing eyes wasn’t strongly and unbendingly fixed on me to thus absorb my whole attention and hypnotize my senses, I could find the innocence hidden deeply inside his features.

             
It was just radiance, another shade of charm – I smiled at the thought that he possessed a whole rich palette of various such shades – but, at the same time, this radiance of goodwill was something invisible for the others, a secret nook inside him forbidden for everyone.

             
For everyone but me.

             
Thinking of that, I felt grateful again for the incomparable blessing of his love I had been granted with: Cardew and I had really got far closer than I had even hoped he would ever let us. In the beginning, what I had realistically believed in was that he would surely be attracted to me, so we would probably become a special kind of very passionate enemies or date for some time – or do both simultaneously to make the experience even more exciting – but love used to sound far too strong a word.

             
So did trust – but, in the current moment in the night after the premiere of the play, as Cardew was laying trustfully asleep in my embrace, his arms fondly protective around me, trust was coming naturally between us – as natural as love itself.

             
The tips of my fingers started gently playing with a bold ringlet of his, burnt-crimson in the dim obscure light, and a voiceless pure moonbeam which had somehow managed to slink to the bed spiralled through the silky curl and evasively slid downwards, thus attracting my attention to the small metal tablet hanging on his neck.

             
His personal symbol highlighting two runes above all others...

             
Strength and victory... What he would never praise himself for, but whose loss was his most obsessive fear.

             
My sigh made the brick-scarlet hairs straying from the larger waves in Cardew’s hair giggle, and the scarce weak radiance of the lamp gilded them into the most precious shade of reddish-fair gold. His soft alluring lips were motionless, frozen in the charming peace of sleep, and I hesitated whether to leave an imperceptible kiss on them, but, not to startle the sleeping boy, I just went on gazing for several more minutes at him and then slid back down to my place beside him, my forehead pressing to his chest again.

             
We would have a whole complete life together to enjoy each other’s presence – but this night was always going to remain the special one.

             
After it we would never be enemies anymore.

             
We would be connected...

             
And nothing would do us part!

             
I listened to Cardew’s silent respiration again – its pace was instinctively comforting me and gently lulling me to sleep as I was subconsciously inhaling in harmony with his breath; mysterious but at the same time excitingly familiar, his addictive perfume was perceptible everywhere around me as it was generously pouring its aromatic endearments all over my skin, and the velvety darkness behind my eyelids was promising me dreams full of joy and tenderness...

             
And – in the last moment before falling asleep – I finally believed that Cardew and I had managed to reach our perfection.

                                          This night the torches were burning more briskly than ever, the fervent nervous jerks of their feverish flames casting ghostly light around and reinforcing all colours to unnaturally intense aggressive nuances.

             
Oh dear, I was in the nightmare with the sacrifice again!...

             
There hadn’t passed more than several fractions of the second since I had fallen asleep beside Cardew, and only some minutes ago, he had opened up his soul for me and taken the sacred oath...

             
The fatal night after the premiere of the play hadn’t ended yet.

             
Nor had my nightmares.

             
The chain-like circle of eleven men in gray was locked tightly around me, making me feel desperately trapped in the ring of raging fire their torches were forming, the constant repetitive anxious movements of the flames hypnotizing me, depriving me of the desire to escape...

             
And slowly turning me into a victim.

             
THE victim.

             
The dazzling white of my dress was shocking me – in contrast to the heated darkened scarlet I was used to seeing myself in in those visions, the colour of pure untouched snow was too light and trusting, thus making me feel lonesome, alarmed and unprotected.

             
Like I was prey...

             
Oh heavens!...

             
It took me a few long moments to get to the lethal realization – it was too dead obvious, but I so much didn’t want to believe in it that I had to fight against my own vague perceptions to let the truth forcibly sink inside my mind despite my willpower...

             
Odda was nowhere around – she was not the sacrifice.

             
Not anymore.

             
Because the girl in the white gown was me!...

             
An unexpected violent explosion would have left less of an ultimate chaos in my soul – everything I could sense was so blurred and so dimmed that I could barely touch reality...

             
If it existed at all outside of my visions...

             
The stunning blazing white of my gown was sharply standing out in the nightmare, pulsating in flawless perfect harmony with the entrancing rhythm of the breathtakingly beautiful nocturnal poem – a stanza of never-ending corrosive grief as much as of dark glorious triumph of the cruellest evil above all forces of existence; a legend of endless self-torturing melancholy – so overwhelming, so utterly weakening – that it did not possess even the slight force needed to redeem the naive sin of all the transient innocent moments which had irreversibly devoted their ephemeral lives to the immeasurable spiritual abyss it had opened up into the universe, so far from the mundane world that nothing but time could ever return from there...

             
A tragedy of disconsolate mourning after a still alive soul...

             
Still alive but damned for eternal perdition.

             
Still alive but already agonizing...

             
My soul...

             
The sacrificial white dress was the last limpid token I would receive in the deeply symbolic myth my nightmares were weaving inside my own heart – the last one before – without words, without any more warnings – they would rise with immense unseen power, more real than my own self, and would finally suffocate me in the unbearable scarlet-leaden beauty of the golden gossamer the story of my life had masterfully devised around me...

             
The story I had lost my soul into...

             
Together with my heart.

             
The exquisite masterpiece of my last day as a living creature, this tale was slowly advancing towards its dramatic ending, the anxiously anticipated culmination with shockingly unexpected content approaching, signed with the last exhaling gilding sunray arduously torn from the darkened cursed ink-black skies in the fraction before – finally deadened – they had rested lifeless above, covering the whole endlessness of my world with the translucently gray but piling veils of their funereal shroud...

             
And I would simply die with the skies... In my last attempt to find the meaning of life...

             
For life.

             
A life coming to an end...

             
The truth which the intense unforgiving white all over me conveyed was steely unbendable: this night – and from then on – I would take Odda’s place as the victim in the demonic ritual of the eleven men and the executioner!...

             
From then on... As if it would all last more than a single fragment of time.

             
Or timelessness...

             
The insuperably mesmeric influence the anxious-filling dance of the frail gold-crimson flames had upon me was benumbing my mind and I was emptily gazing back at their magnificent splendour while – like the exhausted medieval guardian of a besieged fortress, who had too late realized that a hostile tribe had broken in his citadel – I was slowly becoming aware that wild unstoppable horror was cruelly devastating my soul on the inside.

             
Oh gods, the sacrifice!...

             
I was the sacrifice!