Blackguard

She flinches away from him, recoils from his outstretched arm. His fingers seize the air in front of her face – his knuckles press white against the skin of his right hand. The fireplace is at her back and she is nothing but a silhouette to him, a wraith, a ghost, a demon. He tries not to look too hard at her, but under the crack and spit of firewood he almost hears a whimper. He closes his eyes. His fist is shaking. He has not yet returned it to his side.

“Jamie.” Her voice is a wind chime in a hurricane. “Jamie.”

He tries to breathe but the air is acidic against his throat. His hand is around her bicep because she is too slow this time. He feels nothing but the way her flesh yields to him without a moment’s resistance, molding to the rigid outlines of his fingers, moving into the gaps as easily as water into a glass. Her fragrance stings his nose as he breathes once more and he throws her from him, hears the clatter of fire-tending implements colliding with the frigid kitchen tiles. A swinging window shutter punctuates the scene with a slap.

He watches her entire body tighten as she tries not to look directly at him, sprawled as she is in a mess of limbs and terror on the floor. Now the firelight throws half of her face into view and his palm tingles in recognition of the blotchy red mark decorating most of her cheek. Something stirs in him, pushes at the surface, but it is consumed just as the rest of him has been. He looks at her and feels nothing. He sighs. It does not help.

For a moment he thinks he will move toward her just to see the fear set her face alight. Before he can ignore it he remembers a time when he thought she was beautiful, but now the rusty curls tangled around her face make her look pale, wasted, ravaged. By what? He thinks he knows but cannot say.

He turns from her, plucks his coat from the rack, pulls open the door in a single rehearsed motion, opens his arms to the air so cold he can feel it settling into his clothes. He watches his arms disappear into the smoky folds of his coat and now he is as much a wraith as she is, moving in stiff silence across the grass.

He knows where he is going because he can see another face now, slim and aloof and wary of him. He will say he never met her. He rehearses the lines now. But after them come the memories of the way she stood with her arms folded against the rough sea breeze that smelled like salt and picked at the loose pieces of her hair. He moves through the darkness steady as a specter, although he sees not the old willow on the corner but a woman angling herself away from him before their conversation was complete. He watches her study him, watches her fiddle with the scarf at her neck, and for just a second he sees in this memory the woman he left crumpled on his kitchen floor. They are different. He knows that. But they are undeniably the same.

It is the moonlight that forces his return to the present. The night is clear, open, the moon full and round in a sky that feels indescribably far. His movements are easy in this kind of weather. He does not chafe within the borders of this coat made soft and compliant to the contours of his shoulders. He feels the chill of night but not the weight of it, moves with an ease that guides him noiselessly between trees and rocks and scraggly brown shrubs. There is a breeze. It lifts the edges of his hair left long over his eyes and at his neck. He runs a hand through it, ignores the tremor.

When he reaches the bridge he finds the river vanished within the folds of darkness. A hazy imitation of the moon floats and flutters in the remaining abyss and he reaches out, closes a fist above it, imagines he feels the unyielding craters pushing against his skin. If he closes his eyes the poetry comes easily, like something memorized in childhood, but with his eyes open he is adrift in frozen emptiness with nothing to hold him to the lakeside. Again she comes unbidden to his sight, the other woman with the soft face. Even now he tries to snatch at her but she evades him. She clutches her arms tight around her waist and moves off down the street, into the throng and away from him. He remembers that she nodded when he asked if they could meet again.

He breathes deeply because he has seen other people do it in moments of anguish. Is that what he is feeling? He turns his face to the sky and raises his arms to the wind and breathes until he is awash with pain. Briefly he acknowledges the nudging of something other than apathy and flinches when it avoids his grasp. Flinches away from himself. Flinches further into the dark. Flinches from the headlights that swing around the corner and pin him in their artificial glow for one long moment. He did not hear the tires against the road during their approach but he hears them now, crunching and grinding over the gravel pathway above the riverbank in a cacophony he almost cannot endure. He turns, gripped for a second by a confrontational urge, but then his gaze is trying to wrap itself around red taillights and the edges blur as the car withers out of existence.

He is alone again. Without foliage above to restrain him the world feels unfathomable, endless. He is alone again and he thinks of her, the other woman. He thinks he should know her name but it does not come to him. He supposes that will cease to matter soon enough.

The house is a beacon when he comes upon it, a blazing white monument throwing back every drop of moonlight fed to it. The gable light is on and from this angle he can see the eye of a lampshade blinking up over the windowsill of the attic bedroom. The wind tugs at his hair at the same time it rouses one of the shutters in front of the living room window and he pretends he can hear the slap across distance and night and chill. The air is thin enough that perhaps he could, if the agitated whispers of wind were not there to jostle the shutter in the first place. He moves, trudges, ambles up the drive toward the house and now he can feel his heart in his chest, his breath in his lungs, his blood in his fingertips swinging by his sides. His breaths come deeper as he ascends the hill. He considers shedding his coat as exertion warms him more than the fabric, but the ground disappears into a murky void on either side of the drive and Sunday mornings are cold in the church.

She stirs in her bedroom as he nears the house. He catches a flash of white, something clutched in a hand, a sweep of hair he imagines is the colour of the sand some miles to the south-west. His heart insists on pushing at the limits of his chest. He wonders if she can hear it, too. Spares a thought for how her face would change with the realization.

He is at the door. He raises a fist and knocks three times, politely, because he does not know how else to get to her. He listens for the thud of footsteps on the stairs, is thwarted by another shutter colliding again and again with the house in the throes of a biting gust. He remembers to consider what form his actions may take when she answers the door and then she is pulling it open and he blinks against the wave of warmth lingering from the embers in her fireplace.

She doesn’t speak like he thought she might. Her fine eyebrows disappear into the creases of her frown and he wonders if she knows how much she tilts her head when she is confused. She is backlit by the fire and nothing else, her gently endless limbs hidden beneath a multitude of white fabric – her nightdress. He tries not to look down, to consume the rest of her, because he has learned that they fear him the most if they do not expect it.

“Um, Mr...?” Her agitation is a butter knife, blurred at the edges by beckoning sleep.

“Byrne.” He moves toward her. The suggestion of distress, of a problem needing to be solved at this anonymous hour of night. An excuse. A reason. “Jamie Byrne.”

He feels a flush as recognition brightens her face for a moment. “Ah, the filmmaker.” Her lips twitch. “Is everything alright?” Now she takes in the scene surrounding him, searching for a logic to explain his presence. He smiles even though the movement feels strange in his cheeks.

“I, uh...” In this snatch of time he is distracted by her presence. His skin is tingling in anticipation of her warmth, the ease with which she will yield to him, the tenderness of limbs so unused to rigorous physical activity. The wind changes direction and her hair flutters out to greet him. He steps closer. “I was in need of some assistance.”

“I’m not sure how much help I can be in this state.” She gestures to her current attire as though her point needed elaborating. “I’m sorry, Mr–”

He snatches her wrist as she leans away to let the door close in front of her, and she reacts as his skin does. He does not wait. He does not speak. He pulls her from the doorway and turns his back before the door can slam.

He has been up here before but each time the crumbling barn was indistinguishable from the tangle of briars and browning coastal grasses surrounding it. Now it is all he can see. It sways and softens into nothing and shifts back into place and runs toward him when he thought he was ambling toward it. She thrashes against his grip, so he tightens it. She stumbles against a lurking stone, so he tugs her off her feet for a moment. She screams and shrieks and cries into the darkness, but there are no more houses beneath the mountain so he does nothing to silence her.

His chest swells as she struggles. His heart leaps and stutters as she slams a palm against the rotting weatherboard of the barn and wails with what he assumes is a great effort. But the whip of the breeze sounds like a wraith tearing itself around the gable and there is no-one near enough to distinguish the two cries. With but a tug he wrenches her through the open doorway and for a moment he is stilled by the stench of neglect. He breathes stale sea air rendered rancid. His boots crush dead straw and grass and leaves. He cannot see the moon now but he can feel it, wishes it would seep through the boards above him, bathe him for a moment in its glow.

He remembers her then, registers the incessant tugging at his arm. When he looks down he sees a spattering of earth on the hem of her nightdress, the whites of her eyes almost fluorescent in the darkness, the spread of her teeth in the depths of her open mouth. He looks and he wonders and he feels a few things, none of them strong, none of them weak.

And suddenly she is too loud and he must silence her and there is the anger he is so accustomed to and there is a plank against the wall so he seizes it and hits her and she falls with a thud rendered insignificant by the straw and when he pulls back the plank it is bloody in his hands.