arms to catch her in their warm hold, heedless of the blade he carried. Her name again, and again: ‘Artemisia, come on: we’re together now.’
An instant broke the spell. A little fragment of a moment was all it took to rend her illusion from top to bottom, and leave it tattering about her. He had beckoned her to adore him as he deserved, as he adored her: her least motion turned the spheres of the universe for him— and she hesitated. Her mind was full of the knife, full of the key; she had not thought ahead, she had not considered her strategy should it all come off successfully, and now she realised that all she had done, in the end, for all her ingenuity, was exchange a Tom for a Davey. This dawning, in freezing her, was instantly apparent to her desperate lover. He saw it at once: she did not love him— she never had— he was her weapon, her dupe.
But that inferno she had kindled in his heart could not be extinguished— it must be let out— it was. His eyes bulged with the rage, the pain, the mere force of it; his limbs jerked into action; the killing steel was in his grip. He exploded upon her, thrust her against the wall and raised the dripping blade for the first, searing stab— but suddenly the blood, still upon his hands from that first butchery, began to run afresh, in streams, spattering and raining upon the floor. He flinched back, supposing he had wounded himself somehow— but there was not a scratch, and yet the blood came still, torrents of it, spilling in long slashes across the room, welling up and dousing him. He staggered in astonishment as the blood drenched every inch of his body, spitting into his face, flowing into his mouth. He spluttered and choked as it splashed between his lips, staining his teeth and tongue. A giant shadow rose behind him and spread across the ceiling, moving contrary to the frenzied struggles of the young man; the woman shrieked without knowing it, and he, too, would have screamed, had not the blood rushed down and filled his throat.
When the first witnesses arrived in the apartment shortly afterwards, they were not sickened most by the soused and drowned corpse they found there, but by the fact that every surface was sodden, sticky and clotted, with tides of blood.
But Artemisia was not found in that place. She did not stay to see the terror through to its conclusion. Running downstairs into the street, she flew across the cobbles, desperate to escape, anywhere, anyhow. She knew Davey’s boat must be moored in the harbour, and to secure it, hurried there.
The sun was breaking over the eastern headland as she reached it, revealing a sky from which the wind had scudded away the clouds. This same breeze stoked up the waves to froth, and as she paused at the edge of the quay, the white crests rolled in before her— and rolling in their midst, a black, bloated shape, turning sluggishly over with each surge, its nerveless limbs floating out as the heavier bulk sunk below the water line. The spray dashed from it and lifted the face— the flabby, drained face, the empty, spent eyes— Artemisia looked into them, and immediately turned to bronze— became the very statue that stands there to this day, perpetually fixed, looking out over the water.
The end
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed the story. It’s from my book The Sleight of Heart and Other Stories. Find more stories and illustrations at www.benjaminial.com.
The Sleight of Heart: a modern folk tale Page 7
