Jude felt a sense of accomplishment as he reached the door of his cottage. The flies swarmed him and the body, but he didn’t mind. He sidled inside in the dark, shut the door, then let Klim’s torso fall to the floor.
Once his eyes had adjusted to the dark, Jude saw not Marek on the bed, but a figure in a black robe and stiff collar. He froze, panicked. Word from the villagers at the lake must have reached Father Barnabas somehow, he thought, and the priest had come to wait for Jude here at home to punish him for his cannibalism. Would he be put in the stocks and tortured? Would they burn him at the stake, or hang him? In the dark, the priest rolled away, his back turned. Jude held his breath and silently tiptoed back out the door, still holding Klim’s head under his arm.
A tremble of the ground woke Marek in the corner of the room. For a moment, he forgot that he had ever left his father’s home. How many times had he slept there? How many times had a noise or vibration roused him while it was still and dark in the room? His father always got up early. Marek turned and felt the cool black linen against his body. These weren’t his clothes. The stiff collar pressed against his throat. Still, he was not sure what was real. He opened his eyes and let them adjust from dream to darkness.
‘Papa?’ he said. He must have awoken this way a hundred times since Jude had left him at Villiam’s, a soft moment of the mind. Lispeth always answered, ‘No.’ But now nobody answered, and the hard bed beneath his body reminded him of where he was again. He was home. ‘Papa?’ he said again.
Marek pushed himself up, thirsty and confused. He could have sworn he’d felt Jude in the room. The door was slightly ajar and the flies were crowding in. He could feel the bed calling back to him to lie down, to stay still in the heat. Marek forced himself to get up anyway. Nothing moved but the flies. Marek stumbled toward the swarm, adjusting his eyes to the moonlight through the open door. He saw Klim’s torso, a headless, armless, legless thing made of collapsed ribs and a spine whose bones were exposed at the bottom, like a little tail sticking out from the flesh. Taking this flesh for his father’s, Marek fell upon it. How had he not seen it before? Had he been so blind in the dark when he’d come? What monster had cut his father down to this? He remembered his promise to Jude. ‘I’ll feel guilty when you die,’ and so he did. His guilt was a lonely horror, desperate but dumb. He got up and backed away from the severed torso and went out. In the pasture, everything was still, the moonlight thin and low. Had he not looked up at the sky to beg God for guidance, he would have seen Jude scurrying into the woods on the far side of the pasture, running from guilt of his own.
* * *
*
When Jude was deep between the trees, he stopped to listen for anything above the distant buzzing of the flies, but heard nothing. No wind, no birds. He half expected that a hand would descend from the sky to grip his shoulder and yank him down into a booby-trap grave. He turned to look behind him, above. It was only when he caught his breath that he realized he still held Klim’s head in his hands. The man’s jaw hung open, his tongue thin and gray between sparse brown teeth. His nose was smashed and broken. Jude had not been careful in his butchery, grappling with the body, letting the head hit and drag on the hard ground. Under the moonlight through the empty branches, Jude saw Klim’s eyelashes flutter under his own breath. He startled and screamed, silently—like in a dream—and threw the head into the undergrowth and ran further away, deeper into the woods.
Was this a dream? If so, when had it begun? Had he actually left his cottage that morning, or was he still there, trapped in the maze of blood? Or had he fallen asleep by the lake? Or had he died and woken up in hell? White orbs began to appear in his vision as he ran, like fireflies, but cold, white. Sprites or ghosts, he didn’t know. They moved steadily toward him, widening as they got closer. ‘They will absorb me,’ Jude thought. ‘This is what death looks like. White lights coming for you through the trees.’ He closed his eyes as he ran away from them, but the lights were still there. They were inside his eyes. He ran faster and repented in each breath—‘God, forgive me.’ And he felt something push him from behind, like an icy hand at the small of his back. The coolness was delicious, a seduction. Perhaps it was just the wet of his shirt smacking his skin, but it was enough to cause him to run even faster. He ran until he could no longer breathe. The lights followed him.
Finally, he stumbled and fell and found himself facedown in a bed of wildflowers. He lifted his face into the moonlight and the miraculous scent of wild basil and crocus. Had he arrived? Was he through to heaven? Was this where the lights had been chasing him? How else to explain such flowers growing in the dust? He rolled over and looked up at the sky, a closed circle of black night surrounded by bare trees. The white lights retreated upward into the stars.