Page 100 of Decimation

I’m almost grateful for that.

It’s late afternoon by the time I make it back to the villa and I know exactly where he is, can almost picture him in this very moment.

I move towards the chapel door. The door is ajar, a sliver of sickly yellow light bleeding up the stairs. The smell intensifies; formaldehyde, damp earth, and something else, something rancid and organic that no chemical can fully mask. It’s the smell of a love that has festered into gangrene.

My stomach clenches, but I force myself forward, down the stone steps, one by one. Each step of my descent feels like a step into a deeper circle of a personal hell, one my brother has meticulously curated.

The room opens up into a cavern of horrors. Flickering candles cast a jaundiced glow on the scene. I can see the altar, can see the cavernous walls looming above me.

And there, right in the middle, is my brother.

He is on his knees, rocking back and forth in a mindless rhythm. In his arms, cradled against his chest like a sleeping child, is the mangled remains of Ines’s preserved body.

Her skin is a patchwork of parchment and glistening, dark rot.

One arm hangs at a grotesque angle, the fingers curled into a claw and the other is missing entirely. That beautiful cursed face is no more. It is gone, as if it’s been ripped clean off from her bones. Her hair, once a cascade of braids is now a brittle, straw-like nest, matted and completely ruined.

And he is whispering to it. A litany of devotion and apology that fills the cold air like a chant.

“I love you, I love you, I love you… I’m sorry, my darling, I’m so sorry… I didn’t mean to hurt you, you know I didn’t… I love you, I love you…”

The words are a soft, spoken directly into the hollow of her ear, or what remains of it.

He rocks her, his cheek pressed against the ruin of her hair. He is a man holding the wreckage of his entire world, and the sight of it ignites a fury in me so pure, so incandescent, it whites out my vision for a moment.

Even dead, even a crumbling effigy of flesh and bone, Ines is still destroying him. Still destroying us.

I take a step forward, my jaw clenched so tight my teeth ache. My boot comes down on something unseen in the half-light. A brittle, sharp crack echoes through the chapel like a gunshot.

The rocking instantly stops.

The whispering ceases.

The silence that follows is heavy and suffocating.

Konstantine freezes. His whole body goes rigid. Then, with a slow, almost creaking motion he turns his head. His eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, find mine. They are the eyes of a man who has been staring into an abyss for so long that the abyss has not just started to stare back but has erupted, has consumed.

There is no surprise in them, only a flicker of something that might be hope. A terrifying, childlike hope.

“La-Lazarus?” His voice is a dry rasp, the voice of a tomb. “Did you bring her back? Did you bring my wife back to me?”

The question hangs in the air, so monstrous in its delusion that for a second, I can’t speak. My rage finds its voice, cold and sharp as a scalpel. “That girl is not Ines. She was never Ines. She is not yours.”

Something shifts in his face. The hope curdles into confusion, then into a dawning, terrible understanding. He looks down at the thing in his arms, then back at me and the scream he lets out is not a human sound.

It’s a raw, primal shriek of betrayal and loss that tears from his throat.

He doesn’t put Ines down.

He clutches her tighter, as if I might try to snatch her away and in the same, fluid motion, he launches himself at me.

He is a blur of matted hair and wild eyes, and the weight of him combined with the dead weight of the corpse catches me off guard. We both go down hard onto the stone floor. The impact drives the air from my lungs.

The world becomes a chaos of flailing limbs, dust, and the dry, sweet stench of decay.

We are rolling, a grotesque tangle of the living and the dead. The remains of Ines are crushed between us, a brittle, crumbling third combatant in the fight. I feel a rib snap under my back, not mine but hers, a dry, splintering sensation that sends a jolt of revulsion through me.

Her desiccated flesh powders against my skin, and her straw-like hair scratches my face. I am being smeared with her. I am being baptized in the very filth of her.