Sofie sat on the couch opposite her, thumbing through one of Iris's scrapbooks. She might have appeared bored, if it weren't for the intent look upon her face as she researched her family.
"I can feel them all," Sofie replied.
"Is he. . ." Iris hesitated to ask the question, realizing its ridiculousness, but she had to know: "Is he all right?"
"He is impatient," Sofie muttered, the corners of her mouth tucking up in annoyance, but Iris found an ironic sort of comfort in the girl's honesty. There was no doubt that it was her Alexsei of whom Sofie spoke. Her Alexsei, whose feelings she always knew and shared.
"How much longer?"
"When the carnival has left. Then I'll go."
The carnival. . .Iris had nearly forgotten about it. The cloak of her brother's enemy still hovered over their town, the shadow of the Colossus like a death shroud over their encampments. And she had invited it there, had purchased her brother's assassins and led her lamb to slaughter for a memoriam of only $250.00.
". . .Is he angry with me?"
She'd had to do it - as she always had to do, to take him by the hand and guide him to his destiny. He would never have had the courage to face it on his own (Remember the nightmares I suffered as a child?).
Sofie closed the scrapbook and looked up at her. She was silent for a long moment and seemed to be searching for the words. "He will understand."
Iris closed her eyes and clasped her hands together, no longer knowing who to pray to but praying all the same that the girl spoke the truth.
And so they waited, as the morning star rebelled against the night and grew arrogant and swollen in the sky, turning the stars into transparent phantoms; as light flooded the house through the cracks between the semi-drawn curtains, sinking the rooms in an ominous orange glow. Iris hadn't heard the guards since before Sofie had arrived, and distantly she wondered what had happened to them, if the girl had dispatched them or if they had turned tail on their own.
She busied herself tidying the house, superficially shifting throw pillows and straightening picture frames, as if her brother were merely returning from a trip to a neighboring parrish. It wasn't until she knelt to clean up the small mess she'd left in the foyer the night before that a spike of pain shot from her knees and up through her thighs. Sitting with her back against the wall, she drew her dress up, and was dimly shocked to find her stockings shredded and sticky-dark at the knees. Images of a shattered mirror glittering reflections of shallow crimson rue flashed through her mind, and she thought for a moment that her past penitence had come back to haunt her. Then she remembered the night before, the kitchen, the glass of water exploding on the floor. She hadn't even noticed it at the time.
With surgical determination, she located the fine slivers of glass embedded against her bones. Gritting her teeth against a wince, she yanked the first one from her flesh and held it up to the light. It looked like a shard from a broken church window. Iris wondered which scene it had found depicted in her blood.
The others were easier to remove, save for the last, a crystal needle that had punctured vertically through her skin, so slippery it took her a number of attempts to get a proper grip on it. When at last all the fragments were cupped in her palms, she studied them with a curiosity she had never before possessed.
What if it didn't work?
What if Sofie decided she had misjudged, discovered she'd taken too long, changed her mind?
The contrast of colors was entrancing, red dyeing her thenar, her veins a spindling blue. It had crossed her mind, of course, crucified it, that Justin's destiny did not necessarily ensure his survival. She would not contest God's plan for her brother, she never had. A part of her had even expected his end.
But that had been when she was certain she would follow him immediately thereafter, and bring into being the final turning of the tides in their ever-shifting relationship. Iris did not doubt she would have, had Sofie not emerged last night from the shadows of her virtuous chrysalis.
Justin's whip, freshly oiled, was long enough for a noose; her own kitchen knife was kept sharp enough to cut cleanly through bone and sinew alike. She had expected all of that. . .but she had not expected this.
She only wanted to see him again, to feel his cheek resting atop her head, his hands pressed to the small of her back.
Her gaze went to Sofie, still sitting calmly in the parlor, another scrapbook open on her lap. Did the girl have it in her, she pondered, to raise them both, if Iris succumbed to her temptations?
If Martha had followed Lazarus, would Jesus not have had pity enough to pull her as well from Purgatory?
I wish I had made better decisions. . .
Iris placed the shards in a bureau drawer between two pieces of broken plaster. She finished cleaning the floorboards and pulled a rug over their lingering damp stain.
They waited and they watched, ghosting the front windows, until finally the carnival's monstrous wheel was dismantled one chair, one cord, one crossbeam at a time, and Sofie silently made her way to the back door. Iris followed her so closely her shoes nearly scraped the girl's heels. In the threshold Sofie paused abruptly, turned her head.
"No," she hissed, bristling like a cornered cat. "You can't come with me."
Indignation filled up all the spaces within Iris where anxiety had previously reigned. "Who are you to forbid me? He is my brother—"
"It isn't safe!"
"I don't care about being seen!"
"Then care about being sane, and alive."
Iris's gaze hardened at the threat. "You said you weren't going to kill me."
"Not on purpose," Sofie shrugged, then turned to face Iris directly. Her eyes were imploring, frustration and supplication there warring like the colors of an oil spill rainbow. "What I must do, I must do alone. You cannot. . ." follow me, see him like this, be harmed; the possibilities filled the air in lieu of her voice "You will not be sacrificed. Stay here."
Iris's jaw tightened as she watched her niece depart the porch and make her way down the northwest side of the hill, out of sight of whomever may have been watching from the east. More waiting. This was her punishment, this was her Purgatory, and no, it was not pitied.
Arms folded across her middle, she disappeared again inside the house, as quiet as a tomb, and emptier.
It was the sound of engines coughing up just enough life to run that drew her to the window some thirty minutes later. The carnival, now fully broken down and moving onward, began to creep along the road like a centipede. It was the sight of what stood on the hill above it that drew Iris to the porch and, despite Sofie's warning, away from the house.
The ancient, gnarled tree - Justin's tree - jutted from the ground like a burnt matchstick, black and charred. An image assaulted her mind: two skeletons entwined, embracing beneath the lowest arcing arm as ash rained down like gray petals from a blossomless branch. . .
The decay spread in the cornfield in the valley: the stalks collapsed one row at a time, turned withered and brown in a widening gyre of rot, acre after acre succumbing to a sudden putrefaction that defied all flimsy laws of nature. And it kept growing. Beyond the slowly turning tires of the last carnival truck, through dirt and grass alike it spread like a flash-drought, like a swarm of ants upon a disturbed mound, and as it approached the house Iris realized that this was no trick of her imagination, no fit of foresight - It isn't safe!
She took a step back, two, three. Brush and bushes, green trees shrivelled in a snap of autumn; their leaves fell all at once in small brown clouds. Four, five, six. It was mere yards away now, thundering closer, the earth trampled by invisible hooves. And I saw, and behold, a pale horse, and its rider's name was Death, and Hades followed him. . .¹ Thirteen, fourteen. Nearly to her toes. Nineteen, twenty.
Iris's feet found the bottom porch step just as the wave encircled the house, surpassed it, leaving in its wake a brittle tawny meadow that stretched as far as her eyes could see, a carousel of ruin.
But there, at its center: two small figures, one kneeling, the other still prostrate and unmoving. . .
Care about being sane.
Iris couldn't watch, not anymore; knew she wouldn't be able to stand it if he didn't get up, if Armageddon itself was not enough death to give him life.
The door slammed behind her as she went to the bureau, skimmed her fingertips nervously along the cracked glass nestled like flat rubies within it, along the halved mask of the earth's savior and her world's demise (Leave it).
She shut the drawer, nearly catching her fingers between the wood. She sucked them into her mouth as though she had, to cork her shallow breathing; at the creak of hinges coming from the foyer, that breath stopped completely.
Iris froze, afraid to look.
Open your eyes, it's glorious!
. . .Oh God. . .
There they were, the dark girl in her pale cotton dress and her blue-eyed brother, looking as though he'd just returned from war.
Returned. Alive.
Iris's eyes fell to the monstrous emblem on his chest, partially obscured by a blue-black star-shaped stain, then to the hiltless blade cradled carefully in Sofie's hands. She thought she might be sick again.
Justin stepped towards her, his lips beginning to curve in a smile.
"Iris—"
She expected the blow even less than he did. Her hand stung with the force of the slap, and he stared at her in pained shock as an angry red mark bloomed along his cheek. But once she started, Iris found she couldn't stop - she struck him again, and again, until her rage grew wild and scattered across his chest, until he caught her wrists and stilled her assault. Then her mouth took over.
"Goddamn it, Justin!" It was possibly the first time the blaspheme had ever leapt from her tongue, as she fought against his hold on her wrists. "Why? why wouldn't you let me protect you? You—" died, you died, and "No one would let me protect you, I couldn't. . .damn it, Alexsei, why?"
"Because I had to protect you, I had to keep you safe!" he hissed, but his words were like steam, dissipating before they could scald (hands around her throat, bruising, tightening - Nyet, nyet! - wrenched away before they could suffocate).
"You lie! You wanted me out of the way—"
"Out of the line of fire, yes!"
Iris shook her head, pressing her lips together in an attempt to gate her tears. "How dare you. I set that fire, Alexsei. I've made my choices and you were all of them! I will burn for what I've done, and gladly, because I will be next to you when I do - with or without your consent! You think that you can just push me aside, that I would ever allow that to happen?"
"Irina. . ." He looked furious, his head bent low and close to hers as if he were about to share a secret. But no arcanum left his parted mouth, only verity; and he spoke not in a whisper, but in a growl: "You have led me for as long as I can remember. You've taken me places, beckoned me to wonderful lands and pulled me through those I was loath to traverse, but here - here - is where you must step aside and let me see for myself the road I am travelling, even if that means I must misstep and fall to my knees! You have been my shield from humanity, but you will not be my human shield!" His voice had elevated to a shout with the last sentence, drumming against her ears hard enough to loosen her tears' tentative hold on her eyes. They spilled down her cheeks as again she shook her head.
"You died without me. Without me, Alexsei, you died without me. Vy umershi bez menya!"
Justin stared down at her for a moment, a vulnerability in his face that she hadn't seen since she'd forced him to ask for her confession to the fire. Seconds ticked past in tiny eternities.
And then his arms were around her, so tightly around her she wondered how she didn't sink into him completely, and his voice came in a hot whisper against her hair, "Prostite menya. . ."
An apology, as well as a promise: always and never again.
She didn't return his embrace at first, but knew he wouldn't let her go until she did - until she knew he wouldn't let her go.
Tentatively Iris slid her hands beneath his cassock, revelling in the heat of him, trying to absorb it through her skin. She was unable to imagine that, only a short time ago, it had been absent from his body, that he had been cold and pale as Death's mount.
He'd been less than an hour old when she'd first held him. Now, less than an hour after his rebirth, she held him again. His fingers curled at her waist, gathering the fabric of her dress into his fists as his deep, slow breaths resonated in her ear, low and calming woodwinds against the rapid percussion of his heart. He kissed the top of her head, tilted her face up to kiss her cheeks and, chastely, her mouth. Iris's eyes fluttered closed as they always did, locking secret passion behind a fine cage of lashes, lest the virtuous gestures be imbued with it, blessed with it, in view of the meddlesome and misunderstanding.
". . .Excuse us, Sofie," he said quietly as he pulled back, not taking his gaze from Iris's. "My sister and I have a great many things to discuss."
Iris felt the girl pass behind her, heading this time for the kitchen. Justin took his sister's hands in his and led her towards the stairs.
Iris had sat with her elbows resting on her knees and her fingers pressed to her lips as if in prayer, as she'd listened to her brother's account of the goings-on of the previous night. Strangely, the news of Norman's death did not affect her as she'd thought it would. She had protected him, kept him pacified as best she could, but it had been his choice, his clear-minded, brave and very foolish choice to come between Justin and his destiny. Her mourning, she supposed, would come with time, but now she had neither time nor sadness to spare. Standing up, she began to pace the room - Justin's - as the gears in her mind turned with their composed frenzy.
"We have to leave," she muttered, calculating how long it would take them to pack the barest essentials. "The police will be here. That they haven't come already is a blessing—"
"Don't worry about the police," he brother interrupted, still sitting calmly on the edge of his bed.
Iris turned to look at him in confusion. "But Justin—"
"Things will be handled," he assured her. "Everything will be smoothed over and taken care of."
"Smoothed over?" Iris repeated, incredulous at his nonchalance. "People died, Justin."
"Carnivals can be dangerous things," Justin shrugged. "Full of dangerous people. Abnormal, resentful people. Let us pray for their souls."
"But they saw you!"
"Really, Iris," he said patiently. "Do you think all the people of New Canaan will believe the eyes of a few frightened and delirious Okies, bewitched by an institution of trickery and the elevation of false idols? Which will they believe: that I, who has given them all that society refused to, who has baptized and saved them, chose at random to cull my flock of a handful of souls? or that a colony of lepers and misguided outcasts pandering sin sought to bring the people's God to His knees?"
With an uneasy sigh, Iris sat down beside him on the bed, pursed her lips and studied the floor, noting for the first time a stain in the wood, an old watermark that from her present angle resembled the snarling jaws of a wolf. "And if you're wrong?"
"I am wrong," replied her brother, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. "Innately so. But I am correct."
She shook her head and closed her eyes, and mumbled something inaudible.
"What?" Justin asked.
Iris opened her eyes. Despite herself, they shone with unshed tears as she worried her bottom lip and swallowed roughly in an effort to collect the pieces of her voice. "I couldn't do it again, Alexsei. Not even for you. I couldn't lose you again."
"Irina—"
"Promise me. Promise me you'll take me with you."
(I can't — Ask me — I can't) — "I promise."
Iris looked up at him, leaned into him, rested her head against his collar bone.
"Sofie said you were impatient," she told him. "Impatient to return, or for me to follow you?"
"Both," Justin admitted. "Neither. I feared meeting you halfway, that our souls would pass one another in the river and we would be unable to hold on to each other. Do you remember the strength of the current? and your fingers were so slippery. . ."
"I never let go of your hand. I thought when we reached the shore I would find that my fingers had gone through your palms. I couldn't imagine how else I had managed not to lose you. It was so cold, Alexsei. It's been so very cold." The river, their bed, and all of the molecules between them, tiny vacuums that enveloped unused words and incomplete actions - ate them up and held them in miniature mouths, splinters of Pandora's box, waiting to be opened and unleashed when hope bred and filled them to the brims of their lips.
Hope, in the shape of a flogger scented with his sweat and blood. Scraps in a scrapbook, and Iris had saved every clipping. Keepsakes, bound and biding their time. Keepsafes.
Iris lifted her head to glare at her brother.
"You made me ride the Ferris wheel," she said accusingly.
Justin opened his mouth, an argument teetering on the edges of his teeth, but he thought better of it and bowed his head in submission.
"Prostite menya," he murmured, lifting her hand to kiss her fingertips.
"You called me a dried-up old spinster."
"Prostite menya."
"That woman at the carnival was right. You really have been a prick."
He flinched slightly, sincerity keeping a clip of laughter at bay. "Prostite menya."
She took his face in her hands, forced his eyes to meet her own. "Raskaivajtes'."
Justin stared down at her for a moment, then dipped his head to kiss her softly, needfully, a touch of such long overdue sweetness that Iris thought her heart might burst with the quiet power of her soul's sudden respite. His fingers wove into her hair, picking out the pins that held it in place and letting them drop one by one onto the bed.
Gingerly, as if he were still wounded, she tugged his tattered cassock and shirt from his shoulders, then ran a finger down the crusted bark of the tree adorning his chest, trailing gooseflesh in her wake. The branches seemed to swell with his sharp intake of breath, looming over her pale hand as she pressed her palm to where they met over his newly healed heart.
His mouth moved down, following an invisible path from her lips to her abdomen as he move to kneel on the floor in front of her. The phantom feel of his kisses through the fabric of her clothes felt like little sparks in a chain reaction, the culmination of which had been repressed months in its forming.
His hands glided along her thighs, disappearing beneath her dress, seeking the tops of her stockings. He removed them one at a time, peeling the torn and bloodied silk down her legs, allowing it to caress her skin in place of his fingers. A frown marred his features as he took in the crosshatched scars and fresh cuts that netted her knees. "Epitimiya," she muttered, harshness creeping into the only word of explanation she offered him.
Justin held her gaze unfalteringly as he pressed his lips to every jagged line in silent reverance before rising once more, grazing the outline of her legs, catching hold of the hems of her skirt and slip. She stood with him, and was briefly lost in a fog of ivory and navy blue as he lifted both garments simultaneously over her head, so that she was nearly nude before him. Her underthings were discarded in but a few deft motions, and he drank in the sight of her like a hungry child taunted by a sweetshop window (their first time, in her room - she'd never been observed so intensely). The fervency of his stare threatened then to undo what strength she had regained. When he nudged her gently back towards the bed she almost fell upon it; instead he caught and kissed her fiercely, snaking an arm around her waist to pull her flush against him even as he lowered her down onto the mattress.
Iris's fingers fluttered down to the waistband of his pants. She was shaking so badly she wondered if she would ever get them unfastened. He aided her in that, at least, covering her hands with one of his own, steadying their quivers with the warm certainty that was so very much a part of him. The dual clatters of his shoes hitting the floor resonated through the room like a heartbeat. Her own was pounding, its rhythm making up for lost time, for skipped beats of lamented lost love.
He drew the sheets over their bodies, creating a shadowy cove in which their only senses were touch, taste, scent and sound, for all the world blurred together in shades of gray. Salt skin, and the tang of colorless blood. His voice, rendered inarticulate from yearning, shivering against her neck. The quickness of her breaths. The familiarity of his weight atop her, of the planes and contours of his flesh; of his desire for her, once thought snuffed out, but now clear and evident in the warm amber smell of him, in the hot throb of him between her thighs. A low-toned cry broke from her lips as again, at last, he was inside her, and tenderness gave way to sudden and demanding need. Her legs tightened around him, pulling him in deeper, as her fingertips urgently kneaded his painted back.
He did as she wished, as he could not help but do. Desperate like the tide sucking at the shoals he moved over her, within her, crashing against her like waves against a rocky coast (Row for shore). Lost in a riptide of emotion, Iris allowed herself to be pulled under, finding breath only when he kissed her and shared his own.
Arching against him, she felt the flutter begin in her stomach and start to spread through her limbs, tautening her spine, bunching the muscles of her calves, curling her toes until her feet ached with the tension. Her arms strained to hold and impel him at once, the imperitive rocking of his hips, the assault of his tongue and teeth at her throat, her breasts, the almost painful pressure of his fingertips digging into her thigh as he held her impossibly closer. With a gasp and a tremor the flutter caught fire, burning through her in exquisite conflagration as his name found its home in the ardent dark of her voice. Through the flames she felt him trembling, and with her mouth upon his pulse she coaxed from him a violent shudder and a groan of hellish rapture (Irina. . .).
Moments ticked past in sweet surreality, and both remained motionless as their bodies gradually calmed to smoldering embers stoked by their slowing breaths, until lightheadedness required they emerge from their hidden hollow of muggy heat and passion. Iris closed her eyes and inhaled deeply as she surfaced, cool air rushing her skin, her lungs, as her brother relaxed against her with welcome heaviness, pillowing his head upon her breast. She traced her fingers idly along the branches that barred his back, noting the slight ridges of his tattooed skin, following them like mountains in relief on a globe.
"I fell under a shadow," Justin quietly confessed, sounding at once weary and renewed. "All I could see was the boy. Even in my dreams he masked your face. Where you should have been with a caress I only saw him with a blade. Where I should have felt you" - His hand cupped her thigh as he hitched his hips, making her gasp again - "I pushed you away. Where I should have spoken, I was silent. My greatest mistake. . ." He sighed into the crook of her neck, nuzzled the skin there in loving remorse. Iris combed her fingers soothingly through his hair.
"But I have learned," he continued, his palm following the curve of her hip. "I have been shown the way. Our beloved Sofie has put an end to that blindness, has put so many things into perspective. She has chosen wisely." He pulled back to look his sister in the face. "I have seen Hell," he whispered, brushing a thumb along her crown. "Heaven cannot hold a candle to its flames. And it will treat you like a queen. The end of days marks only the beginning of nights. We will build a temple, Irina. We will build it together."
Wordlessly Iris wrapped him up in her arms, holding him tightly (You are forgiven).
What she saw as she looked over his shoulder made her blood halt in her veins. Feeling her stiffen, Justin raised his head and followed her gaze.
Sofie stood in the doorway, an expression of mingled indifference and curiosity further sharpening her features. An instinctual dread filled Iris's mind - no one had ever caught them like this, seen them this way. So many times she had envisioned the possibility, envisioned Norman's face, or Rose's, or Eleanor's, looking on in horror at the great and pious Brother Justin Crowe entangled naked in his bed with his own sister. The consequences they would reap, the condemnation. . .
But Sofie's face was unlike any Iris had imagined. It was not twisted in disgust, nor was any hint of revulsion apparent in her still-black eyes. She looked for all the world like a child woken by a nightmare, who tarried at her parents' threshold awaiting the solace of an invitation.
Justin looked down at Iris, a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. "Mother may I?" he asked.
Iris had not forgotten the game. "Yes you may."
He dropped a lingering baptismal kiss to her brow before withdrawing from her body to lie on his side, facing her. Iris did the same, leaving just enough space between them for a third.
Sofie slipped off her shoes at the foot of the bed, then crawled over the sheets to join her father and aunt atop the covers. She curled up fetal, her back against Justin's chest, her forehead scant inches from Iris's. Justin wrapped an arm protectively around both women. Iris reached up to tuck an errant strand of hair behind Sofie's ear, and rested her hand lightly on the girl's warm cheek.
Suddenly exhausted by the past two days' events, Iris closed her eyes, unable to recall a time when she had felt as secure, or the connection between them as strongly. No jealousy, no rivalry. No struggle, no shame. One word echoed in her mind as she drifted off to sleep: Salvation. Salvation, against the backdrop of a tree-shaped sun, its trunk and braches reaching clear to the desert sky. Heaven could not hold a candle to its flames.
When Atom's rib birthed the bride of the Antichrist, so too would this nuclear family, this murder of Crowes, be saved in the molten bunker of the earth.
To be continued. . .
¹ And I saw, and behold, a pale horse, and its rider's name was Death, and Hades followed him. . . Revelation 6:8
The Fine Print - It could end here. . .but I identify most with Sofie, and I say it's not over yet. At least two more parts, probably not as long as this one, but beyond those I'm just going to take it one chapter at a time and see how things work out. If the wonderful folk over at Crowe House B&B keep hitting me with Walls of inspiration through their own remarkable talents. . ."Nothing can stop us now!"
Vy umershi bez menya - you died without me
Prostite menya - forgive me
Raskaivajtes' - repent
Epitimiya - penance