Page 71 of Decimation

“Now you will be one,” he says. “Now I will bind your flesh to hers, your spirit to hers, your soul to her soul. You are the vessel. You are the resurrection and the life.”

He takes a step toward me.

I stumble backward, my feet tangling in the hem of the white gown he dressed me in, and I go down hard on the stone floor only just missing my pile of vomit. The impact jars my spine, knocks the wind out of me and for a moment I can only gasp, can only claw at the floor, can only try to drag myself away from the nightmare advancing toward me.

He’s on me before I can get far. His weight presses me down, his knees pinning my arms to my sides. I buck, thrash, and scream but he’s so much stronger than me, so much bigger, and the drugs are making my movements slow, clumsy and useless.

“Shh,” he whispers, and his voice is gentle, loving, the voice of a man soothing a frightened child. “Shh, my love. This will only hurt for a moment, and then you will be whole. You will be complete. You will be truly her.”

The face is cold against my skin. Wet. How the fuck is it wet? I can feel the inner surface, the texture of preserved tissue, the crumbling edges where the flesh has begun to decay despite the embalming. He presses it over my own face, smoothing it down over my forehead, my nose, my cheeks, my lips, and I can smell her; the chemicals of preservation, the faint sweetness of putrefaction barely held at bay, the ghost of perfume that was applied to her corpse long, long ago.

I can’t breathe.

The skin is covering my nose and mouth, AND I CAN’T FUCKING BREATHE.

I am drowning in dead flesh, trapped in the face of a murdered woman, and I’m screaming but the sound is muffled, absorbed by the leathery mask pressed against my lips.

Konstantine is chanting again. His voice is ecstatic, trembling with religious fervour. I feel his hands smoothing the edges of the face against my own skin, pressing it into place, trying to make it stick. His fingers trace the lines of my jaw, the arch of my eyebrows, the curve of my lips through the layer of dead tissue and he’s weeping openly now, his tears falling onto the mask that covers my face.

“One flesh,” he moans. “One soul. One eternal love.”

I manage to turn my head, to gasp in a breath of air that isn’t filtered through a corpse’s skin, and I shriek with all the force my lungs can muster.

“You’re mad! You’re insane! Get it off me, get it off, GET IT FUCKING OFF!”

The blow comes out of nowhere. His fist connects with my temple, and the world goes white, then red, then black. I’m falling, I’m spinning, I’m gone.

But when I come back, everything is wrong.

I’m the one on the altar now. The stone is cold against my back, cold through the thin fabric of my gown. The white linen that covered Ines’s body has been thrown aside, and I can feel the corpse beside me, feel the cold radiating from it, smell the sickly-sweet scent of decay.

Ines’s face is still pressed against my own. I can feel it, moist and unnatural. My arms are heavy, unresponsive, and when I try to move them I realize that Konstantine has bound my wrists with something. I’m naked, spread-eagled on the altar, my arms stretched above my head, my legs apart. The position is horrifyingly familiar, and my mind is screaming.

NO. NO. NO. NOT AGAIN!

But my mouth won’t form the words.

Konstantine is moving around the altar. I can hear his footsteps, the heavy rasp of his breathing, the occasional snatch of his chanting.

“I know what I did wrong before,” he says, “I tried to pour her into you all at once, but the vessel wasn’t prepared. The vessel must be opened, the vessel must be hollowed out. The vessel must be made ready to receive the sacred.”

He comes back into my field of vision, and I see that he has a stone bowl in his hands. It’s ancient, carved with symbols that make my eyes ache just to look at them. It’s filled with something that looks like oil but moves too slowly, too thickly, catching the light in ways that oil shouldn’t.

But that’s not what makes me scream again.

What makes me scream is what he does next.

He sets the bowl down beside my hip and turns to Ines’s corpse. The body is so fragile now, the flesh so desiccated and brittle that when he grabs her arm and pulls, it separates from the shoulder with a sound like dry branches snapping. The joint gives way with a small pop, and Konstantine holds the arm up like a trophy. I am screaming, I am screaming so hard that my throat is raw and bleeding, and I can taste copper on my tongue.

“Bone of her bone,” Konstantine intones, and he takes the arm in both hands and breaks it over his knee. The snap is loud in the crypt, loud as a gunshot and the bone splinters. He picks through the fragments with the care of a surgeon, selecting pieces that please him. “Flesh of her flesh.”

He places the fragments in the stone bowl, grinding them together with a pestle I didn’t see him produce. The sound is horrible, a gritty crunching that sets my teeth on edge and makes my whole body convulse with revulsion. He grinds until the bones are powder, and then he dips his fingers into the bowl and scoops out a paste, and he turns to me.

“Open your mouth.”

Abso-fucking-lutely not. I clench my jaw so tight my teeth ache. I shake my head, pressing my lips together, sealing them shut against whatever nightmare he’s trying to force into me.

I will not open my mouth.