AUGUST 1981
Odette's first violent memory had not been her mother's death; rather, it had been the execution of her mother's murderer.
But Elisabeta Florescu had been ripped to shreds by Lycans when she tried to leave the village, had she not? That is indeed the true story, but in a warm, balmy summer in 1981, no one in the village knew any better. Not Constantin Uriaș, the village chief, nor his corps of uniformed sentinels. Not the village elders, for all their years of wisdom that would have stretched back to the Dacians if gathered and summed up. And certainly not Odette, then only seven years old and who, along with the rest of the village inhabitants, was blind to the forces that held them all under a somnolent thrall.
Seasons came and went; crops flourished and failed at the whims of the weather; people were born, lived, then died. Those that disappeared sometimes left mangled corpses or pieces of limbs in their wake, and the villagers readily accepted the first plausible explanation that presented itself. And, thus, they did not contest Chief Uriaș's proclamation: Adam Athanasiu, the woodcutter who lives alone, past Otto's mill, attacked Elisabeta Florescu while she was gathering berries, cut her into pieces with his ax. What else could have happened? This is the only way it could have happened.
But what of the evidence, you ask?
The sentinels discovered Elisabeta Florescu's wedding ring hidden beneath Adam Athanasiu's pillow.
And that was the end of that. Case closed—no need for testimonies from witnesses or inquiries into the killer's motivations. No further investigation required; moreover, Chief Uriaș had forbidden it. The villagers called upon the Four Lords to pass judgment, mete out punishment. Then they would move on to the next harvest.
They knew of no other truth than of their quiet existence high in the Carpathian mountains, protected from the rest of the ugly, unruly world by dense forests and impossible mountains that yielded its ancient Roman roads only to the most determined men. Here, in the shadow of Castle Dimitrescu, they lived like happy lambs. Lambs reared for the final slaughter they were unaware would come, feeding on the endless grace of their shepherdess, a high priestess of the Black God. Mother Miranda, their Lady of Eternal Devotion, who clothed and protected them, fattened them with piety and dined upon the flesh of their worship.
—
"And Mother Miranda shall visit her wrath upon the man who killed Elisabeta Florescu," the hag cackled with relish as she sliced the prongs of a bone-carved comb through Odette's long, black hair. "Yes, such is the fate of those who take Miranda's children from her. For we are all her children, and even the world must suffer her fury, should any one of us be harmed!"
It was late in the afternoon, and Odette and the village hag were sitting in the rose garden behind the Florescu home. Though it had been a fortnight since Elisabeta's death, her daughter still wore a black dress of mourning and clutched to her chest a straw bear that her late mother had stuffed and stitched for her. Meanwhile, the hag—rheumy-eyed and rattling with beads and animal bones tied to her gray, ragged locks—prattled in half-riddles and tattered exclamations. Odette had spent the day lying on the grass, dead to the world, as she watched her mother's roses sway and swell in the changing light when the hag had found her and saw fit to set her to rights. With long, desiccated fingers, the crone had wiped away the little girl's tears, smoothed the folds of her grass-stained dress, and was now braiding her hair.
"The sons and daughters who prove themselves righteous shall be delivered unto the Black God's eternal embrace! Indeed, your mother was righteous, my little one. Elisabeta was the only one in the village truly kind to me."
The hag set her comb down upon the grass and began to plait the girl's heavy locks, deftly avoiding the strap that held her eye patch in place. The old woman's fingertips felt like tiny pinpricks of crow's feet, and her fetid musk of petrichor and urine consumed the air around them. Odette forced herself to sit still, pursing her lips and digging her nails into the belly of her stuffed bear; she had never liked the crone who had no name, no home, no family, though her mother had been inexplicably fond of her.
"The fools at the church only give me stale, crusty bread and send me on my way. Pah! As if I couldn't find better digging through slops the castle maids throw out at night to the pigs." She tugged at Odette's hair, swooning in memory. "Cream-filled pies and stuffed boar. Slabs of meat, still warm and red in the middle. Church fools don't know that old granny feasts like a queen when they aren't looking! But your mother saw and did better: she knew what all old women want. They want to hear stories and secrets. Now, give me your ribbon, child."
Odette reluctantly unlaced the blue ribbon she had tied around her bear's neck and presented it to the crone, who deftly wound it around the curl of hair that ended the girl's braid.
"Your mother told me everything. Her old life in Bucharest, ah, beneath the stage lights and before an adoring audience! Her dreams of escaping this village; she had planned to leave us when we weren't looking, the sly vixen." When she shook her head, all the bones in her hair clacked and rattled. "We all loved her, but none loved her more than Chief Uriaș and your father. When she first arrived at the village, they nearly came to blows over her. Were they men, or were they wolves squabbling over a bit of flesh? But that was how much they loved her. And a wolf's love is ravenous and unending." She crooned with euphoria. "May it bless you, devour you whole at your life's end!"
Odette, who in her seven-summer innocence could not comprehend the depth and breadth of such lupine desire, closed her eye and tried to imagine her mother arriving at the village all those years ago. A rose blooming in winter, this fearless young woman exploring the Carpathians. Had she traveled alone out of foolishness or bravery? Unrelenting wanderlust or naive curiosity? Either way, she had found the village, found her father, and stayed, not to become Elisabeta Uriaș, but to become Elisabeta Florescu.
"A shame!" The hag was wailing with ecstasy now, tossing back her wrinkled, bulbous head. "A tragic shame she has left, indeed, in pieces! But the Black God now has her, as I have you, now, my sweet Odette!"
Gripping Odette's shoulders with impossible strength, the hag turned the little girl to face her. Odette flinched, clamping her mouth, shuttering in her breath for fear of letting the crone's odor infect her lungs. She pressed her bear to her heart as a knight, encountering a powerful sorceress in the woods, might hold his shield to his breast. A withered hand lifted Odette's jaw so that she had no choice but to meet the hag's rapacious stare.
"You'll tell stories to me too, won't you, darling one? Feed your hungry granny all your secrets and mysteries. Tell me about your eye, my child. The last I saw you, you had two of them, and you were shivering and ill, sniveling with snot! Now you have one eye, and you're as fresh and shiny as a newly picked apple."
Odette, deeply unhappy now, twisted her head away from the woman's grip and buried her face into the crown of her bear's scalp.
"Ah! It's in your bear, isn't it? Show it to me, my little princess."
The hag's voice was soft now, as quiet as birds' wings taking flight. The words had lost their tremor, their ruined syllables, and had acquired the quality of ageless honey. It was a voice that, even as a whisper, could have entranced and commanded legions, but it was not out of enchanted obeisance that compelled Odette to reach into the tear in her bear's belly, pull out her left eye and present it to the hag. It was fear.
The hag weighed the gray, calcified organ in her leathery palm, then held it up to the dying light.
"A strange, unholy thing, this," she hissed, and, for a moment, Odette thought the hag might crush her eye between her fingers. Instead, she turned it around in the air as though searching for a defect. None presented itself. "Unnatural…unforeseen…unholy…."
The hag's voice dipped into a low, ominous mutter. Odette might have hitched up her skirt and ran into the safety of the house, bolted the door behind her, and not let anyone in until her father returned from court, were it not for the anger that coiled in her belly like a snake waiting to strike. The old bat knew nothing. Did not know that Odette's left eye being separate from her body was not an unholy thing but the result of her father's surgery to save her life. It was harmless outside of her body, a curious little ball that two people could toss back and forth in an idle game. Inside her skull, it would have killed her.
For Odette Florescu had been a sickly child for as long as she could remember. The moment she was born, crying and spluttering out her first breaths, something in the air had violently disagreed with her—or she with it. Every breath she drew seemed to choke her; it was as if her body refused to take it in, keep it in her lungs, and, when it did, expelled all that polluted air as fast as it could. In, out, in, out, out, out. She had only survived her infancy and early childhood because of her father's tinctures and inoculations and the inhaler he had crafted and bid her carry with her like a third lung.
And then there was the infection in her left eye. A colony of mold—yes, mold, living explosions of red, black, green—feasting upon the dying sclera before quickly spreading its white landscape. With virulent fervor, it reached the cornea, the iris, the lens, until Victor Florescu had no choice but to cut it out, pare the rotting fruit from the stem. The mold-ridden eye had solidified the moment he separated it from the socket. Like a stunned diver who has come across a seabed rich with giant clams, each one holding a luminous pearl, the speechless doctor plucked the eye from its bed of tangled nerves and viscera and presented it to his wife, who washed it, wiped it clean, and tucked it into the belly of a straw bear.
"Why is it unholy?" Odette asked, rising to her feet. The old hag tore her eyes away from the object causing great offense, and regarded the girl surprised. "That is the eye I was born with. Then it got sick, and my father had to take it out. There is nothing unholy or unnatural about it."
"Because, my princess," the hag snarled, snatching Odette's arm and digging her talons into the girl's flesh. "Your pretty little eye should have stayed in your pretty little head!"
—
"Odette!"
Behind her, the door to the back of the house swung open. Odette's heart fluttered to see her father standing in the doorway, broad-shouldered and reassuring, rational and natural. Like his daughter, he wore black; his gray-brown hair combed neatly back, and his chin cleanly shaved to reveal thin lips and high cheekbones. Handsome, Odette would sometimes hear young women titter in his wake, forgetting that his daughter had the eye and ears of an owl. Even though he was no longer a young man, Victor Florescu was handsome.
A murder of crows exploded from the nearest bushes in a flurry of squawks and rustling feathers. Victor frowned, squinting at an indeterminate point beyond Odette's shoulder.
"Who are you talking to?"
The old hag had disappeared; the only thing left of her was the impression of her fingernails in Odette's arm. She had dropped the eye into the grass, and Odette knelt to pick it up, tuck it into her bear where its heart would have been, were it a living creature. The child then observed her father and determined that Victor Florescu was not in the right frame of mind to investigate disappearing witches. Though he appeared calm to the untrained eye, Odette saw the frown that knitted his brows, the tightness that lined his mouth.
"No one."
"Then come with me." Victor held out his hand, which Odette was all too happy to take. When she slipped her fingers into his, she found his palm was clammy with sweat. She glanced up to watch her father's face as he led them through the parlor that served as his clinic, past the medical cot and the laboratory bench crowded with a physician's ephemera: stoppered test tubes filled with plasma and serum, anatomical diagrams. Victor's face was a grim statue weathering the shadows of the dark house, then the crimson sunlight suffusing the muddied street that ran past their home.
"Where are we going, papa?"
Victor tightened his hold on Odette and abruptly quickened his pace so that his daughter needed to hop three steps to meet one of her father's strides.
"To the ceremony circle. The Lords have pronounced their sentence for Adam Athanasiu, and we've been summoned to witness his execution."
At seven years of age, Odette could not yet comprehend the likes of passion or hatred fueled by desire, but she understood death in all its forms. Death, the final destination of all living things, the thief that bore away her mother before her time. Death as mercy, as an escape. Death as punishment, as payment. She stopped in her tracks and tugged at her father's hand.
"Let's go back home."
When Victor tried to pick his daughter up, she batted his arm away with her bear.
"Home," she said firmly.
Victor knelt before her, held her thin shoulders, almost shaking her. "Listen, Odette. You can be stubborn and defiant about a great many things—I would encourage it—but you cannot be stubborn and defiant about this. The Lords carry out the will of Mother Miranda, so when they summon us by name, we must do as they bid."
Odette wrinkled her nose. She knew it was no use asking why; in her short life, she had quickly learned that Dr. Victor Florescu always had an effective answer to all her whys and hows to the way of the world. But she was also shrewd and knew that questions of the heart could derail him; this she had learned from watching her mother parry against her father's aphorisms whenever they disagreed. "And do you want to do as they bid, papa?"
He stared at her, all logical arguments and cogent retorts drying up in his mouth.
"You don't like it," Odette declared triumphantly. "You're just pretending when you'd like to fight them instead. Tell them to mind their own business and leave us alone."
Victor laughed—a wild, wolfish laugh that dispelled the urgency of the moment. He smoothed his daughter's hair and cupped her cheeks. He kissed her forehead. "Even with your one eye, you can see right through me."
"I can see much better with one eye."
He laughed again, pulling her against his chest. Odette clutched her father, inhaling the scent of wild pine that clung to his serge suit, wanting to stay like this until nightfall; until the moon and stars revealed themselves; until he forgot about the Lords' summons. But he let her go, and his face was grave. "I would fight them if I could, and I would lose you. That is why we must do as they command—fail to do that, and we will lose each other."
"When we get there, do I have to watch?"
Victor folded her hands between his. "No," he said decisively. "I do not want you to watch, but you must seem as though you are watching, for that is how they test your devotion, and you must appear devoted at all costs. Stand to my left, Odette, and when I squeeze your hand just so, I want you to move your eye behind my elbow and close it. Immediately."
"All right, papa."
Victor kissed his daughter's knuckles and picked her up. Odette allowed him to bear her down the ruined Lone Road, upon which once stood an Eastern Orthodox church before pagans returned and reclaimed the region. Up eroded stairways, the steps smooth and slippery beneath Victor's feet. As they approached the ceremony site, now bathed in a blood-red light, they saw the silhouette of villagers who had gathered to witness the death of Adam Athanasiu, the murderer of Elisabeta Florescu. The crowd, sensing the arrival of Elisabeta's widow and daughter, parted down the middle like the Red Sea to let them through.
"Promise me one more thing, Odette," her father whispered into her hair as a hundred eyes followed them.
"I will, papa."
"Do not be afraid."
—
Nobody knows who first laid the first stones of the ceremony circle and, with it, the earliest foundations of the village. If they had existed long before Dacians who swept through the Transylvanian Alps, then the Dacians themselves did not encounter such structures—or perhaps they had and documented their existence in records that were later destroyed. Indeed, the village did not appear on regional maps until the appearance of the colossal statues of the Four Kings around the ceremony circle. Each one dour and sepulchral on his eternal throne, their eyeless gazes forever observing the sibylline rites and ordinances of a forgotten civilization that had come and gone.
Night fell swiftly, so swiftly, that it was as if an unseen behemoth had sliced its scythe across the evening sky to cut out the sun. The sentinels stationed around the perimeter of the ceremony circle lit their torches, the dancing flames and the shadows they cast transforming the angles and hollows of all who were present so that each human being carried with them more than one face. The face of relentless grief. The face of righteous anger. The face of icy dread.
Hushed whispers bore Victor and Odette Florescu to the forefront of the gathering, where Chief Uriaș greeted them, clapping his great, meaty hands on Victor's shoulders.
"Florescu, my brother in spirit!" Uriaș boomed, and he and Victor embraced each other as though the Gordian Knot of enmity had never existed between them. "And Odette, who carries the impeccable likeness of her mother."
Constantin Uriaș was a large man, the shape of a bear standing on his forepaws. He wore his hair and beard like a lion's mane, wild and golden and flowing down his shoulders. He peered down at Odette, smiling broadly—too broadly, like the unforgiving sun in high summer beating down on the straining backs of field workers—and she, remembering that he had once loved her mother with a wolfish love, pressed her cheek against Victor's arm.
"Witness the wretch," he growled, sweeping a paw to the ceremonial circle behind him, where, chained to a plinth the elders called the Giant's Chalice, was a pathetic, trembling figure. "Adam Athanasiu, the son of Ion Athanasiu, who will soon be the last of his line and deservedly so. For his line breeds nothing but wickedness and perversity."
Uriaș spat at the woodcutter's feet.
"My brother and sisters, we are here to witness his execution of Adam Athanasiu for the crime of murder."
Murmurs of approval rose from the crowd; some applauded. Odette glanced up at her father to see if he, too, was carrying more than one face with him. But his face was unfathomable, as cryptic as the faces of timeworn kings that loomed over them. There was a rage in there, perhaps. Perhaps pity. For Adam Athanasiu? Yes, Odette decided, as her eye flickered to the chained creature. When she saw him, she found herself pitying him too.
The woodcutter was not much older than Odette's father, though he was a shrunken, almost skeletal thing. He still wore the coarse, patched clothes he wore the previous night when the sentinels arrested him and dragged him to the halls of judgment to be tried by the Four Lords of the village. Nearly balding, he was, with pale, watery eyes; dried-up tears had left tracks down his grimy cheeks. He raised his chin slowly, settling a tremulous stare upon Victor and his daughter.
"I did not kill her." His anguish reverberated against cold stone. "You must believe me; I was nowhere near her that day, could never harm her. How could I? My hands! Look at my hands!"
He lifted his chained hands before them, palms upwards in desperate supplication. Indeed, his fingers were clawed and crooked and feeble. They did not look like the hands of a man who could rip another being into bloody shreds. Odette could feel her father stir, all the parts of him galvanizing to move forward and intervene, but she squeezed his hand to still him. You can be defiant about a great many things, but you cannot be defiant about this. Somewhere, Odette knew, Mother Miranda was watching.
"Undeserving worm!" Uriaș barked and struck Adam across the face. He collapsed in a whimpering, threadbare heap. "The Four Lords have tried you and found you guilty. Mother Miranda herself has disowned you, ordered your execution. There will be no prayers for you, no hymns to bear you hence to the arms of the Black God. You've made your last appeals, uttered your final supplications. Your end has come."
Uriaș stepped back and raised his hands to the sky.
"Lord Heisenberg, we humbly beg thee to condemn this man to oblivion."
A searing, collective hush fell upon the crowd as though every tongue had been sliced out of every mouth. Despite the trepidation burning in her throat, Odette peered out from her father's elbow, curiosity compelling her to witness one of the four great Lords appear, at last, in the flesh. Until now, they seemed inscrutable chimeras from fairy tales, though their governance of the village was real, had always been. Dimitrescu, the giantess from the castle that bore her name; Beneviento, the phantom that lingered beyond the broken bridge; Moreau, the abomination of the waters and drowned houses; Heisenberg, the infernal mastermind. Their names anointed the lips of peasants in earnest prayers at the black church, while children traded myths of their deeds and their endless mysteries.
The chains that bound Adam Athanasiu to the Giant's Chalice began to writhe like living snakes. The rusted iron scraped against stone and bruised flesh, tightening and forcing up the filthy, weeping pile of rags to his quivering feet. The chains pulled taut, forcing his spine against the plinth and his head up so that the top of the Chalice was level with his shoulders. His face was a mask of tears.
Behind him, in the endless gloom unreachable by torchlight, was the bright spark of a cigar flame.
Adam Athanasiu did not see his executioner approach, garbed in a gabardine coat, his face obscured by dark glasses. Did not see the hammer he wielded—a monstrosity cobbled from remnants of wartime vehicles—nor the cigar burning from the executioner's lips. Did not see that grotesque hammer lift up and back, though the woodcutter felt the wind rushing in its wake.
But Odette saw it, saw him, the gray-haired bringer of death and collector of bodies, the reaper's grin he wore. And though her father squeezed and squeezed her hand, she kept her eye open. She watched the hammer swing forwards with the force of a howling storm; the flat end collide against the bony skull with a sickening crack; the head tearing away from the jerking body, arcing through the air, now silent, now ended.
The head of Adam Athanasiu, petrified in an endless scream, fell on the ground with a fleshy smack and rolled towards them. Some of the villagers shrieked, scurrying away like startled rats. It landed, at last, at Victor's feet, and it was then—and only then—that Odette herself gasped and shut her eye, hiding completely behind her father. As her ears scorched with the cries and cheers of those around her and of Uriaș's triumphant crowing, she could hear heavy, booted footsteps approach them. She did not lift her eye, peer around her father and reveal herself; she did not want to—she had had enough of hags and wolves, blood and death.
Odette heard the wet noise of viscera and bone lifting from the floor, then a deep, sardonic voice she did not recognize.
"Miserable little fucker."
The smell of cigar smoke and the woodcutter's putrid flesh filled Odette's nostrils. Lord Heisenberg's voice grew quieter then, though she could still discern the question he asked her father. "Think he might be of some use to us, eh, Victor?"
She could not remember if her father had responded or not. Perhaps he said: Not now; there are too many ears. Or: Not now; my daughter is here. But Odette was not here. She felt as though she was no longer part of this earth, as though fragments of her soul had flown up to join Adam Athanasiu's silent screams, somewhere in the everlasting dark. She vaguely sensed that her father was taking her home, gathering all of her up, cradling her in his arms, where, like a wounded, tired animal, she slipped in and out of black and starless dreams.
—
"Odette, Odette, why did you break your promise?"
It was sometime in the night, somewhere in their home, where the air was clean and smelled of brewing coffee. Perhaps she was in her bed or the medical cot or the moth-eaten sofa. Her father was kneeling beside her, stroking the hair from her forehead, unaware that his daughter could hear him.
"I didn't, papa."
"You didn't close your eye."
Odette shook her head sleepily. That was not the promise she had made.
"I was not afraid."
—
In the morning, when the village women arrived at the ceremonial site to gather up what was left of Adam Athanasiu and prepare him for burial, his body had gone.
He was forgotten not long after. A decade passed. Then two. And Odette never saw Lord Heisenberg again during those trackless, circular years, though she never forgot that he had spoken to her father with unsettling familiarity.
Seasons came and went; crops flourished and failed at the whims of the weather; people were born, lived, then died. Those that disappeared sometimes left mangled corpses in their wake, and the villagers readily accepted the first plausible explanation that presented itself. They invoked the name of Mother Miranda in their prayers and called upon their Lords to pass judgment, mete out punishment. Then, with the endless rhythm of a peasant's song, the people would move on to the next harvest.
Such was life in the village. What else could happen? This is the way things have always happened.