Warnings: This work contains the following: canon-typical violence (including a decapitation scene in Chapter Two), and scenes of corpse desecration.
Author's Note: Thank you for being here. I encourage you to find a good reading spot and to make yourself comfortable. Brew a cup of coffee—or tea, if that's your sort of thing; I like both. This story is a slow, simmering burn, but I promise it will be a hell of a ride.
JANUARY 2021
The woman with one eye lives across the ocean now, in a green clapboard house surrounded by rosebushes at the end of Lazarus Drive, itself the slow, beating heart of a quiet Bostonian neighborhood inhabited by good, comfortable people. She likes to believe that these days, she has become just as good and comfortable as her neighbors on this side of the Atlantic. She mothers her rosebushes with particular care and tends to her son with meticulous devotion. She helps with his homework, heals his cuts and bruises, augments his inner world with the elegies of metaphysical poets and Frank Sinatra's music. And—like any good, comfortable mother—she reads to him fairy tales as he falls asleep.
She does not read to him the grotesque anthology of horrors she had listened to as a child in her village. No, she tells him the good, comfortable tales—the ones with chivalrous princes, sighing mermaids, swans in endless flight. Stories where witches meet their well-deserved ends, only to resurrect themselves when the next tale begins and the next princess is born.
On Lazarus Drive, the woman with one eye lives alongside the likes of medical researchers and clinicians and their whole, happy families; professors in tireless pursuit of knowledge and eschewing corporeal partnerships in favor of books and papers; artists hauling chimeric wonders up from their deep subconscious and smearing them across the canvas like colorful jellies; hopeful young couples, and their cooing newborns. She knows the names of everyone living on her street, along with other idiosyncratic details helpful to keep in mind for when—should they pass before their time—she embalms them and prepares their bodies for the world to come. She catalogs their birthdays and favorite meals, the three wishes they might ask a genie, and their mundane, American worries. And, yes, their secrets, too.
The secrets of Lazarus Drive are, by and large, trivial. Ask the right questions, flatter with finesse, and their owners will offer them up freely on silver platters, to be sampled and relished. Bill McKinney, across the street, for instance, lies to his wife about how much he loves her cooking. Vega Munroe from two houses down shoplifts drugstore lipstick from the nearest CVS when she can well-afford the Chanel equivalent downtown. "It's not about the actual thing I'm taking," Vega had confessed with pleasure over brunch at Vega's elegant home. "It's about the excitement of taking it when no one's looking. It's horrible, I know."
But the woman with one eye knows of more devastating confidences. Stealing lipstick is nothing compared to wicked schemes spanning decades or underground laboratories dedicated to the vivisection of freshly-exhumed corpses. Yet she learns and locks away even the most trivial mysteries, not out of malice but out of habit. Perhaps, they might be helpful later. Perhaps not. It depends on the circumstance that may or may warrant their use; such things often come up without warning, do they not? Like a ravenous wolf leaping from the shadowy undergrowth for your throat. For who can predict, indeed, the future or the ways of wolves?
Certainly not she.
—
For Odile Moore is not a fortune-teller from fairy tales who conceals her third eye beneath a silken turban—not when she only has one to spare. Nor is she—and has never been—a witch, though she hails from a village in the Transylvanian mountains, her small son as close and quiet as a sorceress's familiar.
She's a mortician, not a vampire; her neighbors tell their visitors and out-of-town relatives. But, look, you're going to like her; she loves having people—living people—over. We'll introduce you. She brews the best coffee you'll ever taste, never mind that her arrival at Lazarus Drive over a decade ago had been a shock to the senses. A young mother with one eye who sees and remembers everything.
At forty-five, Odile Moore is no longer young. Her wild storm of hair, once black, is now threaded with gray, and she wears it freely in a thick braid down to her waist as a gratified warrior-queen might. Crow's feet march from the corner of her right eye, joining the army of faint lines across her forehead. Meanwhile, the crater of skin that had once been her left eye—that part of her forever hidden beneath the black medical eye patch—has remained a smooth and ageless landscape.
Her body has been stretched and left to sag in places, first by childbirth, then by the passing of countless moons and suns. But she is strong, still. There are many years before she, too, inevitably winds up on the embalmer's table, stiff with rigor mortis, her blood vessels drained of blood and swollen with embalming fluid. Until then, she carries herself with all the poise and power of a ballerina. Shoulders set back, chin slightly lifted, just as her mother had taught her, high up in the mountains, in another country, another life.
—
What Odile remembers of her life in the Carpathians is why an operative from the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance is standing in her living room like a grim tower. A monolith of a man, his dark head nearly scraping her ceiling, his hulking frame shrouded by a black coat, which Odile is certain is concealing a full armory. If he had confessed himself to be a hit-man from a shadowy crime syndicate the moment he stepped into her home and took up half the space, she would not have been surprised. In fact, she would have happily turned over a list of potential targets and told him to get busy.
It is nine-thirty on a Tuesday morning, and Odile is only half-awake, moving sluggishly around her home, hazy with last night's dreams. But she had asked The Terminator incarnate to begin his interview with her in the morning, hadn't she? To give her time to spin long, terrifying tales for him before her son returned from school. That was what the operative was here for, wasn't it? All her secrets and her mysteries she dragged behind her like a corpse from mist-shrouded Carpathian valleys. Chris Redfield isn't here for her famous coffee, that's for certain; when she offered it to him, he politely refused.
"Are you sure?" she asks as he folds himself into one of the living room armchairs as large as a bear. Yet, he managed to dwarf even that leather monstrosity. "I usually brew it Turkish-style, with cream and sugar, but we can leave all that out if you prefer."
"I'll be fine, thanks." He hunches forward, his expression grave. "Look, Mrs. Moore—"
"Ms. Moore."
"—Sorry. Ms. Moore. I'm just here to talk. Record what you have to say. Then I'll be on my way."
She studies him as he moves, decides that he reminds her of a lonely castle in deep winter, weathered with centuries, bricks and battlements slowly eroding. His stare is likewise fixed upon her. Watching her watch him.
And what does he see?
"We will talk," she says decisively. "But I am Romanian; I must have my morning coffee first."
She does not allow him to refute her decision—why should she, when it is her house he has dared enter, her roof he is sitting under? From the corner of her right eye, she catches him shrugging his shoulders in irritated acquiescence, pulling out a recording device from his coat pocket and focusing his attention on its screen. He will have to wait, she decides, breezing imperiously into her small, cramped kitchen like a prima ballerina to her opening act, a long arm thrown up to swing open the cupboard doors.
"I will be quick. You can watch me."
Down comes the tin of ground coffee, the sugar, and the coffee pot. Chris Redfield's gaze flickers up from the recorder settings to observe her—per her request—through the arched doorway of her kitchen. No single part of her is still, the muscles of her arms and her shoulders dancing. Her left hand deftly moves the dials of the stove-top until blue flames spark into life, her right hand turning the tap and thrusting the pot under a stream of water. Fires now lit, her left measures out a tablespoon of coffee. Pot now filled, her right places it on the stove-top, and so forth; a series of fluid, efficient movements she completes in under twenty seconds flat.
"I'll be damned," he mutters. As the coffee simmers, Odile re-enters the living room, grinning as she holds out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter.
"Smoke, Mr. Redfield?"
He smiles briefly, despite himself, despite the urgent purpose of his visit and the woman's insistence at having her damned coffee before anything else can happen. "Don't mind if I do," he says, bringing a cigarette to his lips.
She flicks the lighter, brings the flame to the end of his cigarette until it glows red. "There." Her voice is satisfied, as though she has won a long battle. "Now we can talk."
—
If a stranger had walked into her living room here and now, they might have mistaken the man and woman sitting across the coffee table from each other to be old friends. But they are not old friends. He is carrying a gun. She is carrying inside of her the demons from another life.
The morning sun falls upon their skin, dust motes rising and falling along with the cigarette smoke issuing from their lips and between their fingers. Odile Moore sits on her armchair with her legs tucked beneath her, a coffee cup in her right hand, a cigarette in her left, appraising Chris Redfield with a dark, steely eye.
Her frank stare is the coldest thing in this room. This otherwise warm, comfortable room, with its honey-colored walls riotous with art deco posters, framed photographs either of Odile or a bespectacled teenager with brown, shoulder-length hair. No sign of a father anywhere, only a proud mother and her son. There is a gramophone in the corner, rescued from an antique shop and lovingly restored; bookshelves striated with encyclopedias and vinyl records. Potted plants burst from every windowsill. Philodendrons and Devil's ivy. Orchids and crown of thorns. Sprays of roses in water, voluptuous and scarlet, adorn every surface in the room, whispering their wistful scent into the air.
Despite their arrangement, Chris Redfield doubts that Odile Moore is ready to give up her secrets. She is watching him warily, her face a fortress slowly girding itself for a siege. Still, he sets the recorder squarely in the middle of the table between them and presses play to begin.
They are silent for a time.
Odile exhales. The thick plume of smoke almost turns silver in the raw morning light. "I thought you were just here to talk."
"All right." Chris stabs the end of his cigarette in the ashtray. "We'll talk, Odette Florescu."
She cringes at the syllables of her old name, antique and alien, on this side of the world. "So you know that much, Mr. Redfield."
His smile is grim. "It's my job to know these things."
"Tell me, do you know the joke behind it?"
Another silence—a stubborn one. Whatever the joke Odile is referencing, Chris is sure he won't find it funny. Finally: "Care to explain?"
"You know Swan Lake? Tchaikovsky?"
"The ballet, yeah." He rubs his chin. "Never seen it."
Odile leans forward as though ready to impart to him a great, cosmic secret.
"The roles of Odette and Odile are opposites, yet the same ballerina sometimes performs them."
"Well, that's just hilarious."
Odile arches an eyebrow at his tired sarcasm. "When I left the village and came to America, I thought changing my name would be a good joke. Something that would lift my spirits as I stepped into a new life. If you were in my position then, Mr. Redfield, everything becomes either a joke or a tragedy."
Chris clasps his hands together, considers a reply. He decides against it, lest he aggravates the dragon further. He needs this interview, even if it means playing along—playing nice—with someone who does not want him here, despite the invitation, the generous offer of cigarettes and coffee.
"My mother was a ballerina in the Romanian National Opera before she met my father, you see. She had always dreamed of playing Odette, ever since she was a little girl. That opportunity never came to pass for her, so she hoped that by naming her daughter so, it would happen for me."
"And it never did."
Odile settles slowly back in her armchair with the grace of a swan's feather falling in the air. "No and yes." She smiles briefly, ruefully. "I have played the part of Odette. I've even fallen under the spell of someone you might consider to possess supernatural powers. Now I am Odile. So it did happen, just not in the way she anticipated. But even if I had become a dancer, she wouldn't have been alive to see it. She died when I was very young."
She says this with little emotion. It is as though she is stating the first law of thermodynamics. Whatever expression of sorrow might have crossed her face is obscured by smoke and light.
"What happened to her?"
"Ripped to shreds by Lycans when she tried to leave the village. My father was a surgeon who could work miracles on the operating table, and even he couldn't save her. There wasn't much left to save."
Chris closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose. "Jesus." The violence of her mother's death does not shock him. He has seen and can imagine worse than bits of flesh—flesh that had once breathed, danced, cried, and loved—sprayed over the face of a mountain. More unsettling is the dryness in Odile's voice as she pronounces her mother's fate. Still, his response is reflexive. "I'm sorry."
When he opens his eyes, he sees her smiling sadly at him.
"That is what you want to know about, isn't it?" she says softly. Her voice breaks slightly, the sound of a lost child stepping upon the skeletons of leaves scattered across the forest floor. "The Lycans and the lords. The mold and the madness. The woman behind it all. Everything."
Chris sighs and rubs his hands over his face.
"Yeah," he says wearily, feeling suddenly and acutely the weight of months he has spent on this operation, largely alone so as not to draw attention from unwanted eyes. It is a hunt that has brought him across Europe to Odile's doorstep. All of this is a mistake, he thinks. A damned mistake, interrogating a single mother in the safety of her own home, asking her to resurrect untold terrors from a life she has tried to leave behind. The brightly decorated walls, the books, the music, the photographs, and flowers—what else are they but battlements and fortifications against the past? Chris Redfield knows how easy it is to revive old demons and how quickly they can scale the walls of the present and lay waste. The knowledge of it twists his muscles even now, coils up his spine.
Forgetting that Odile can see him, that she is in this room, here and now, he moves his fingers up into his dark hair. His nails press into his skull as though wanting to dig into it, claw out all the monsters beneath. He can leave right now. Yes. He can turn off the recording, walk out the door and into the sun, let all that horror evaporate into the clean, winter air.
"You have to know."
Her touch on his wrist is light, cool. She is kneeling beside him, her warm breath on his cheek. She smells of smoke and, to his surprise, of roses. Her expression is gentle, the hard lines of her face are soft with compassion, and Chris realizes that he is looking into the face of Odette Florescu.
—
"You never really told me why you wanted to speak to me," Odette says.
Chris sighs. He reaches over to pause the recording. Odette watches the gesture with her head tilted slightly, like a curious bird. "You're right," he admits. When he had first reached out to her, all those weeks ago, it had been enough to mention his affiliation with the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance for her to agree to his interview. "I'm doing this because I promised to protect someone and his family. For me to do that, I need to find out what's going on with this."
He pulls out a sealed biohazard bag from the inside of his coat pocket and, within it, a Petri dish abloom with mold. Living explosions of black, green, and red against the glass radiating outwards and into each other. Odette takes the sample and leans back on her haunches, holding the bag up to the sunlight.
"You've seen something like this before."
Odette nods. "Is this…did you take this from—"
"Dulvey Parish, Louisiana."
Sharp, cold alarm in her voice. "So it is already here. In this country."
"We don't know if it's the same thing we've heard about in Romania. What I have could be something completely different."
"But you have a strong suspicion that they could be related?"
It is not a question—an accusation.
"Yes."
"Shit." Odette rises to her feet, a rush of heat gathering up to meet a storm on the horizon. She paces the length of the room. It is already here. In this country. Suddenly she seems too tall, too immense for this small space, a lioness that has recognized, too late, that she is trapped and cannot bite off the lock on the cage door to set herself and her cub free. It is already here, and she will find me, my house, my son. She will find me and rip me apart, and she will take my son, my only son, away from me. For witches never truly go away; they always return when the next child is born. Odette thrusts the biohazard bag onto the table with a loud clatter as though it is cursed, points to it with an accusing finger.
"It is already here, but you can fight this. Yes?"
Chris takes the sample, holds it in the palm of his hand, and meets her fierce stare. He measures his words, draws them out evenly to calm the storm brewing in this room, the electricity of her fear. "I can. But I need to know where it comes from, how it got here. I need to know everything."
Odette laughs breathlessly, her fingers pressing into the crown of her skull as if to dig out the demons lying beneath. She surrenders herself to her chair and moves her hand to her heart, to still the rapid rise and fall of her chest. "Everything," she murmurs, then falls silent until her breath's rhythm slows, nearly to a halt. Chris waits for her to compose herself. Give her time to calm down. Give her time, and she will tell the truth.
He does not see that she is cataloging her memories, assembling them in a neat row. Specimens on a table, ready for observation and analysis. Here is a moment from her childhood, one where she tugged bilberries from bushes in high summer, crammed them greedily into her mouth until her cheeks and chin turned blue. Over there is a memory at twilight, and Odette is last in a long, solemn procession of villagers clad in black, carrying lanterns to a great, circular altar where a woman with four wings awaits them. An image of her father in his makeshift home laboratory, stooping over a bench to examine mold cultures in Petri dishes. Living explosions of black, green, red. Lycans in winter, men who were no longer men but nightmares in rags. The most ethereal of women, born from the eggs of carnivorous flies, and their ruthless, indulgent mother, a pale, elegant giant with blood-red lips.
Bodies without heads or limbs on the embalming table. Prayers whispered into trembling hands. A lover murmuring warm machinations into her ear. She is neither a witch nor a necromancer, but she can resurrect him at her will; call out his name, and he will come. A man in a grimy gabardine coat, fiery eyes obscured by dark glasses, a monstrous hammer slung over his shoulder. Wreathed in cigar smoke and ominous intentions, he rises from the dark to greet the swan-maiden in the opening act of an old tragedy once more.
Odette opens her eye.
"I will tell you everything, Chris Redfield, so that by this day's end, you will learn my secrets and keep all my mysteries; so that you may protect the people you've promised. But first, I must ask you to promise me one thing."
Chris is only faintly aware that he is moving towards her. But here he is now, moving to the feverish conviction in her voice, the smell of smoke and roses in her hair. All enigmas laid bare.
"Anything."
She presses play on the recorder.
"Do not be afraid."