Requiem

Adalia was certain there was someone peering into her window.

She had awoken at an ungodly hour, well past nightfall.

Frost covers the glass windowpane in a gossamer web, absorbing and reflecting the moonlight in its tiny streams. Violet, Adalia’s cat, defensively arches; she grates out a predatory hiss that is at odds with her noticeable smell of fear.

Whatever is standing on the other side of this window has not betrayed itself with sound nor movement, Adalia observes, angling her head ever so slowly. She can see nothing but nothing between the slight gap of the shutters, confined as she is, crouching to the side of the window frame. The lingering sillage of frankincense wafts up to her face, trailing from her unlit candle on a rogue breeze.

Perhaps it is gone, she adds hopefully.

Foolishly.

She knows that ghosts never leave.

She presses herself against the cool stone wall of her dormitory room, willing her breathing to calm, for her sweating to abate.

Fear had ruled her for so long; the choice of having it was one that she wanted to revoke, but found herself grappling on to. It was the childhood toy she could not bear to relinquish—despite its sadistic, familiar comfort.

Adalia sneaks a glance at the window, courage belatedly rising to the call, and she sees only black.

Relieved at the familiar darkness of night-time, she turns to leave—to hide—to plan—only to suddenly realise—

The voyeur’s eyes fly open.

It was not night that she had stared at.

It was not the shadow of the moon—but rather, the closed eyes of the voyeur, now staring at her, white bulbs like beacons against firm ice that she was trapped behind, stuck in a small room with one door, childhood fears rising and swelling and surging in a torrent, a deluge that breaks open and rushes out—

Adalia seizes Violet and runs.

The eyes.

They are the same as hers.

They belonged to the portentous face of her father.

-

Fuelled by terror and adrenalin, Adalia escaped her dormitory building with the advantage of all the introvert-preferred shortcuts thankfully unknown to her father, as of yet. Slamming her burning legs across the quadrangle, sweat pooling between her chest and Violet’s fur, she had made it as far as the staircase out of the upper university before she saw his silhouette, still and staring, on the balcony across from her.

She would not let him—

She shook her head, as though she could dislodge the trauma that slashed its nails across her mind like knives.

No.

It was this simple word that led Adalia to seek refuge in the safest place she could think of at that moment. Professor Lethe’s office was a place she had come to see as friendly during her time on campus, and with this in mind, she tore down the pavement, blood threshing through her ears, lamplights fluttering in the wake of her footsteps.

Throwing open the wooden door - wrought iron crept out and across it from its side hinges like poison ivy - she cried out, “Professor! Professor!”.

She flung the door shut and collapsed against it, utterly spent. In the shadow of the gaslamp, the sandstone of the Professor’s residence became effulgent old bone, sonorous and scoliosis-crooked with its spiral staircase—like all good scholars were. Violet pelted in circles around the Professor’s hallway, yowling with what was surely the intent to create an undismissible ruckus.

But the Professor did not come running down the stairs, as Adalia knew she would have if she had heard her summons.

With trembling hands, Adalia picked up the lamp from the wall. The shadow it cast danced and scuttled across the walls like an uncanny apparition, so jarringly playful amidst the brutality of the night. She stepped carefully, her head tracking the movements of her feet, her breathing loud, and came upon the most horrendous sight.

Professor Lethe lay crumpled on the floor, at the base of the stairs to her private rooms.

Dead.

Her legs and arms were at the wrong angles.

Dead.

Her fingers splayed out like a dead spider.

Dead.

The Professor’s glasses lay shattered to pieces around her, a meteor shower that sang a requiem for a fallen angel.

Dead.

Her last safe haven. Violated.

Adalia choked, bile rose to her throat so rapidly she moved for fear of desecrating the Professor’s remains further. She hurled herself backward, slamming into her cabinet like someone possessed.

She could not tear her eyes away from what he had done.

In the midst of her reaction to this sickness, she could not turn off her instincts; she noticed a snake tattoo that slithered up Professor’s sternum from beneath her nightgown.

She couldn’t have been.. Was she—was Professor Lethe…

With heartbreaking tenderness, Adalia knelt before her and respectfully slid down her Professor’s nightgown a fraction, to see the rest of the snake.

It moved on her skin as if it were alive.

Rigor mortis held no power over the serpent. Its mistress lay prostrate onto the floor, a servant of the end until her very end, but her familiar flickered across her chest, desperate to come nearer to her, to enter her and mourn inside of her carrion—of her soul.

The forlorn creature was more like a sibling than a scavenger, writhing madly up and across her chest, trying to wake the Professor. Then it moved, frantically twirling around the Professor’s neck with twisted imagery; she had become her own noose.

Adalia’s heart rent in two at the sight of the snake, at the way it was with and without its mistress.

She turned, realising that Violet, too, gazed upon the wretched image in abject misery. She came and leaned her soft, small head on Adalia’s thigh, in memoriam of the way they were bonded, and forcibly dissevered from each other, and of how - regardless of circumstances - they were still one soul now.

Adalia erupted in tears.

She could not stopper them—they poured down her face like the rain before a storm; relentless, unyielding, inundating.

She flung herself to the floor, laying in a foetal curl beside the woman who had been like a mother.

Adalia mourned who the Professor was to her, and to others, and who she could have been, and what she had lost.

It was when she had fully conceded to her grief, when she had lain herself bare and broken beside the Professor’s shell, that she heard a single noise at the door.

He was here.

-

Adalia’s body had stopped working.

Breathing like a screaming stovetop kettle, she seemed to have been pinned down, prepared for dissection.

Violet stared with horror at the scene unfolding before her: the greasy, long-haired, obese man who smelt like rot and faeces and acridity stood hunched over, a sadistic grin cut into his face, while her mistress was frozen on the floor, rolled like a snail.

He did not even spare Violet a glance as he came and kicked Adalia in the back, sending the Professor’s body careening into the wall.

There was something different about him; it was as if his delusions of grandeur were given form, almost like he had gained real power.

“You are weak.”

Adalia’s face had gone numb—but her eyes.

“Worthless.”

Violet convulsed with rage. Would have launched herself at him, if she too had not been rooted to the ground.

“Your life has no value. You serve only to demonstrate my superiority.”

Adalia’s eyes held all of the pain she had ever experienced in her life at the hands of this man.

“I know that you have not forgotten—”

He kicked her again, and again, and again—

“How I showed you, the ways I proved this to you.”

In the womb, in the thigh, in the head—

“How I took your ‘innocence’ from you.”

He spat out, sneering.

“You will never be free of me.”

Still, Adalia could not move.

“You are nothing but a dog.”

Her blood showered across the floor: a trampled field of roses, reduced to muck.

“Dumb.”

Then, he spun around.

“Useless.”

Violet’s scent of fear intensified as each word was punctuated with a step towards her.

“Dog.”

And then Violet noticed Adalia’s right hand, slowly shaking towards the upturned pocket of the Professor’s abandoned robe.

-

Adalia smeared her blood across the leather cover of the Professor’s little black book—The Book of Philomela.

She did not know if this would work, if it would be receptive to her, because this was not her Book. Hers had been stolen away and burned by her father in the night, right before she had fled from the Pleiades and escaped to this realm.

Everything was wrong here: she and Violet had been sundered, the books only spoke to her in soft voices, and her eyesight had suffered from the strain of hearing them. Even her body had forgotten its grammar, for her scrying attempts to return home - or even go elsewhere - had been stalled by this world’s illiteracy.

Her single consolation had been that He had not found her.

He had been able to find her wherever she had hidden, except for the Archives on the Pleiades, because they had been warded against him. For her protection.

And then he had massacred everyone.

Her friends - her family - and her teachers.

The books.

Now he had come here to hurt her.

But it was when he turned to Violet—

When he had decided he would maim the only part of her that was not spoiled by his touch—

That was it.

Enough.

Adalia was done.

-

Smoke enters her eyes, the brown of her iris becoming eclipsed by black, a stellar corona of red bleeding out.

At that moment, they were the only things in existence: two dead moons reflected on sanguineous seas.

Adalia levitates, still bent backward like a crescent. The scent of something like frankincense cloys the air suddenly, steaming outwards from Adalia’s floating body.

Both arms lay wide, as if anticipating an embrace; her right leg hangs limply, her left folded upright.

Her body thrums - a violently vibrating harp string - and her mouth snaps open into an unnaturally wide maw.

He had stopped still, shocked, unable to understand where the power she was wielding had come from.

In her left hand, the bloody book materialises out of the air.

Panic spread across his face.

Her right arm raises slowly.

Fear in the predator who was now prey.

She points at her father.

Where had she gotten the small black notebook?

One single finger.

He was marked.

Her skin begins to blacken—

The smell of urine sprayed into the room.

First at the pointed finger tip—

Then it spreads up her forearms, towards her elbows.

“I have not forgotten,” Adalia says. Her voice echoes as though it had come from thousands of broken mouths; it lingers in the room like a ghost.

He cannot move. Cannot breathe. Cannot—cannot—cannot—

“I could never forget.” She rasps out, a demon creature from the underworld itself.

“But I can remind you.”

She flicks her wrist.

And her father snaps in half.

-

It was a chilly winter morning. Dewdrop tears coated the blades of grass, and the birds sang, if only to warm themselves.

The groundskeeper plodded along the paths, picking up rubbish here and there. Goddamn students, he thought with a grin. He envied their freedom, but was very fond of them. They often greeted him and brought him tokens of their appreciation, for he was something of a beloved uncle to the boarding students.

Then he heard a clang. It was a dark-haired woman and a cat, exiting Professor Lethe’s office.

They walked towards him carrying a large leather suitcase, a little battered but marked with the university crest. What he did not know, however, was that inside was hidden $20,000 she had materialised using the little black book.

He blinked—just once.

They had disappeared.

Into thin air.