Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2)

by Laura Giebfried

  “Because of the tumor, I get it,” Jack replied. “But why those girls? Why not kill – someone else?”

  Albertson paused, a furrow coming to his white brow.

  “I used to walk back from the campus each night with Émilie,” he said. “Except for Thursdays – she had the Foreign Language meetings. Those nights, it was … rather lonely to be out alone. And the girls were always running by, so full of energy and life, and so certain that it would last forever. But it doesn’t last forever, neither youth nor life, and I couldn’t keep either from leaving me, but I could stop it from staying with them.”

  The wind cracked against the window and a breeze from the door that I had left open worked its way into the room. As my leg finally gave out completely, I grasped momentarily at the kitchen chair before sinking to the floor.

  “But – why?” I said, still unable to understand. And I didn't know why I asked it – it was clear that the only reason was the one that we already knew. But I thought that if he could voice it aloud, then maybe I would understand what I had done to Beringer, and that I could grasp the answer firmly enough to ensure that I never did anything like it again.

  Albertson looked at me slowly, and as his old, pale eyes focused on mine, I was certain that he understood what I was really asking. He gave a gentle shrug.

  “I told you, Enim. No one wants to be forgotten.”

  “Not like this,” I whispered.

  “When you’ve lived as long as I have, and the way I have, it becomes clear that this –” He indicated to the space around us. “—is fine enough.”

  He slid the shears from the counter and moved towards Jack, and I grabbed the kitchen chair to heave myself back up. I should have told Jack everything that I had never said immediately, I realized, and then maybe we wouldn’t have been so stuck when we had looked over the evidence time and time again, and I would have realized the similarities between what Albertson had done to Miss Mercier and what I had done to Beringer, and then none of this would have happened, just as so many things had never been meant to happen –

  He reached forward and clasped Jack by the hair, pulling his head up so that his neck was white and exposed even in the failing light, and I could see the fear in his eyes as he squirmed against the wires pinning him to the stove but I couldn’t move any further than I was –

  “Jack!”

  Something moved behind Albertson just as the word left my mouth, and a split second later Ilona had jumped on top of Albertson's back and wrapped her legs around his torso to hinder him. There was an odd sound as something metal sunk into skin, and he threw his weight backwards to get her off again. She fell backwards into the counter, her head smacking the edge of the counter before she fell to the floor, and Albertson swayed where he stood as the shears clattered to the ground. An ornate handle was protruding from the spot above his collarbone, and it took me a moment before I realized that she had dug the letter-opener into the base of his neck. As the rim of his dirtied white shirt darkened with red, the white eyes grew whiter and rolled to the back of his head, and he staggered in place before falling over onto the floor, shaking and gasping with a horrible sound for several moments before he went still.

  “Fuck,” Jack said quietly, his breathing hitching and his neck still bent backwards in a last attempt to get away. “Fuck.”

  My heart was pounding so loudly that my ears seemed to be clogged with water, and my breaths wouldn't come. As I stared at where Albertson lay, the red smeared onto the white wrinkled skin, I felt every bit as drained of life as he was, and every bit as drowned as the girls that he had thrown from the cliffs. I looked over to where Jack was still tied and quickly grabbed for the clippers to release him, pulling myself across the floor in order to do so. My leg seemed to have rebroken from the run.

  “Are you –?”

  “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

  He was pale and shaking, and I dropped the shears quickly as I realized that I was as well. As I tried to steady my breathing, I looked over to where Ilona had slumped to the floor. Her dark eyes were staring over at me with a glassiness that I had never seen there before, and one hand was lost in the tangles of her hair.

  “Are you alright?”

  The question had barely sunk into the air when I determined the answer. She pulled her hand away and stared down at where blood had covered her palm, and her mouth moved in slow, jerky motions before she was able to get any sound out.

  “Moya golova –” she said, her accent smoother now that she was speaking her native tongue. “Bol'no.”

  “What?”

  I crawled over to where she was and pulled her away from the counter. Her dark hair had grown thick with blood that twisted it in a lump behind her head and glistened in the moonlight from the open door.

  “Fuck –”

  I pulled off my sweater and pressed it against the back of her head. The light blue soaked with red until the fabric had turned a deep, blotchy purple, and the hand that she had been holding the wound with fell beside her on the floor.

  “Bol'no.”

  “Go get someone,” I said to Jack.

  He pulled the last bit of wire from around his wrists and hurried to the door, his footsteps clattering on the front steps as he ran down them to the front path. I pressed the sweater further to the back of her head, not daring to move it away to look at how deeply the countertop had sliced into her skull.

  “You're fine – you'll be fine,” I told her, my voice shuddering through the tone of calm.

  Her mouth twitched in lieu of a smile, and her eyes were focused on something across the room that I couldn't see.

  “Eh-nim,” she said, the name heavy as her bloodied hands slipped against the floor. “I have figured it out. Riddle.”

  “Yeah, we did, we did,” I said, unwillingly glancing over to where Albertson's body laid beside us. “You got him. You saved us.”

  “No, other riddle,” she said. “What is born each night, dies each dawn.”

  Her eyes flickered in the white light, pinpricks like stars making their way onto the black surfaces, and her hand wrapped around my wrist to feel the pulse beating erratically beneath the skin.

  “Hope.”

  My voice was strangled as I tried to respond, lost somewhere in my throat and clutching to the sides to make its way up to my mouth. It was the answer that had taken me weeks to find after watching my mother deteriorate into someone that I didn't know, but as I considered it, I realized that the person she had fallen into was the person that I had always known, but that I had just always refused to see it.

  “No, you were right,” I said. “It was – it's darkness. It's darkness.”

  But the hand holding my arm had lost its grip, and the fingers slid down to streak my skin with red before falling with a dull, broken sound to the floor, and the only hint of light in her eyes was the reflection of the moon that stared down upon us but that she would never see again.

  “Ilona,” I said, shaking her shoulders and letting the sweater drop to the floor. “Ilona – Ilona –”

  But she wouldn't stir no matter how much I pleaded her to, and the sharp features on her face had softened, and without the thick makeup I could finally stare at her completely and see who she was, but I would never know who she was, or who she had been, and I had never even heard her speak her real name.

  “Don't go,” I whispered. “Don't go.”

  Jack returned to the house sometime later, but I didn't know how much time had passed since the life had left the room. He lingered in the doorway for a long moment, swaying where he stood as he took in the sight in front of him, and then he gently stepped forward and pulled me up. Ilona's form fell sideways to the floor.

  “I had the neighbors call for help,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically low. “I told them there'd been an accident.”

  I tried to nod, but my neck had stiffened and every muscle ached to move.

  “I'm sorry, Nim. I shouldn't've come. I should've st
ayed with you.”

  “No, it's –” My voice cracked against the dryness of my tongue, and it took me a long moment before I could speak again. “It’s not your fault. You thought he had the answer.”

  “What're we going to do?”

  I shook my head, my vision fixed on the sight of Ilona and my mind playing over how she had died unrelentingly before I could think to push the images away.

  “Should we – should we move her?” Jack asked. He looked at me slowly, his back to the moonlight and his eyes hidden by the darkness. “I don't know what the police will do with her. She's – she's here illegally, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So should we … I don't know – bury her?” He looked at me oddly. “They might try to pin it on her, too. I don't – I don't want her to get into trouble for this.”

  He was still shaking, and the hand that laid on my elbow quivered on the skin. After a moment, he pulled away and reached into his pocket for a cigarette. As he lit it, the warmth from his lighter came over my face momentarily before the flame flickered and went out.

  “We should tell the truth,” I said.

  The ember from the tip of his cigarette had cast its light on my arm, and beneath the blood that had come over my hands, the bracelet that Ava had given me stared up at me from my wrist. Mine. I shut my eyes on the sight of it, knowing that that was all that I had ever been to her, and yet knowing as well that she would continue to be the most important thing to me – and the most important part of me – if I didn't change it before it was too late.

  The police would come soon enough and swarm the house, hounding us with questions that should have been asked months beforehand and filling in our silences with conclusions that fit their reality but not ours, but the only thing left to say was the thing that I so desperately wanted not to be true. I reached down and righted the beads so that they read Enim instead, but I felt every bit as nameless as Calàf had been to Turandot, and the rusalka had been to the prince, and Ilona had been to me, and the only person who had ever made the name real was Jack when he spoke the familiar nickname.

  “Nim?”

  “I'm schizophrenic, Jack.”

  “What?”

  He leaned in closer as though he hadn't heard, and I couldn't move my eyes from Ilona's form to look at him.

  “I'm schizophrenic. That's why I – that's why all of this happened. That's why it took me so long to get to you. I … I killed Beringer. They put me into a treatment facility. I didn't know what was real.”

  The cigarette drooped in his mouth as he stared at me, and despite everything, I had the urge to reach up and straighten it again. And I wasn't sure that he understood, but I wasn't sure that he needed to. I had said it: it was done. There would be nothing to come from pretending that things were anything other than they were, and there was no hint of carefreeness left to hold onto or long-awaited adventures to continue planning. I was ill; I had always been ill, the diagnosis crouching beneath the bones as it waited to show itself, and I wouldn't do what I had done before and allow myself to believe that I was being tricked, because I wasn't the one who was being deceived, but rather the one who had deceived everyone around me.

  “But … you seem fine,” he said, struggling to get the words out after a long, drawn-out silence.

  I gave him a half-hearted smile.

  “I am fine. I'm always fine,” I said. “But I … I could be better.”

  He nodded and removed the cigarette, blowing a stream of smoke off to the side that clouded the air and sank into the dirtied surroundings.

  “He wrote it down,” he said after a long moment. “That’s what he said – right? He wrote down that he killed them.”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at me oddly, certain and uncertain all at once.

  “Should we get rid of it?”

  My neck cracked as I looked over at him, not understanding what he meant.

  “Get rid of his memoirs, you mean?” I said. They were what had spurned him on, I knew – a motivation to continue killing, and the reason that he had killed Miss Mercier. Destroying them would destroy the memory that he had sought to preserve. Damnatio memoriae. “To spite him, you mean?”

  “No –”

  Jack dropped the cigarette and put it out against the floor. As his foot crushed it into nothingness, he lifted his eyes to mine with a frown.

  “No, so that – so that no one knows it was him,” he said. “I thought – I thought maybe you wouldn’t want him to get into trouble. He doesn’t deserve to be remembered that way.”

  My chest lowered as I let out a breath, and all at once I couldn’t imagine why I had been frightened to tell him about the diagnosis or what had happened with Beringer. He was Jack – he was the same person that I had always known, and the only person, possibly, who had ever really known me.

  “But then you’d get into trouble,” I said, pausing as I thought it over. I looked down at Albertson’s body, but the image of my mother lying crumpled in the room at the end of the hall came to my mind instead. “No, this was what he wanted. I think we should just … tell them what we know.”

  “Alright.”

  We sat on the floor as we waited for the police to arrive. The night sky lit up in flashing lights of blue and red when they did, marring the moonlight and covering us in unnatural hues, and an officer escorted us from the house while several others began to make sense of the scene that we had left behind. When we reached the small station in the center of the town and ducked inside, someone came to look at my leg while we sat in a room with metal chairs.

  Jack spoke for me when they asked the questions, his voice even despite everything that had been felt and everything still stirring beneath the ribs locked in our chests, and it was impossible to know whether or not they would ever believe the words that were recorded on the tape spinning on the table between us given who we were, but they were true – that much I could finally be certain of – and either way, it was over at last.

  They left us in the room until morning. Jack had put his head down in his arms, but I wasn't certain that he had fallen asleep even though his form was still against the cold table. Without my sweater, the draft continued to make me shiver, and I longed to get it back and wrap it around me, allowing the blood to seep into my skin and mark what I had done. I should have never let Ilona come to the island, but I couldn't bring myself to regret it. She had made everything alright, and for every moment that I had been in her company, she had made things better.

  “Alright, you can go.”

  We both looked up as the officer came back into the room. He nodded to each of us in turn, though his expression was grim.

  “What?” Jack asked, raising himself from his hunched position.

  “You can go. We’ll be in touch, of course, but we found the journal in the house like you said – two, actually,” he said. “One was a detailed account of what he had done. The other was some sort of prose – it looked like he was making it into a story.”

  Jack and I looked at one another, but neither of us knew what to say. I shook my head as I thought of Albertson holed up in his house in the final months of his life, converting his crimes into poetry and believing that it would become something like The Aeneid or Metamorphoses had been, and my stomach ached as I thought of what he had both willingly and unwillingly become.

  We wandered out into the street at a slow pace, neither of us certain of all that had happened. As we reached the pavement, Jack fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette to light.

  “So that's it,” he said, his voice hollow as he let out a breath of smoke. “It's over.”

  I looked over at him oddly, wondering if he felt any of the relief that hadn't come to my own form yet, but saw no sense of it etched into his solemn expression.

  “Nim?” he said. The name rang out in the air, bounding off the surrounding undisturbed houses and cascading down to the barren ground to slide beneath our feet. “What do we do now?”

&n
bsp; I turned to look at him. We had known each other for eight years, and yet I wasn't sure that I had ever really seen him until then. He was leaning in close to me as he fixed his eyes on mine, and there was no hint of the expression that the rest of them had given to me when they wondered who I was beneath the ironed khakis and neat sweater, and I was quite certain that if they could have seen him like I did, that they would have never considered that he was anyone so capable of committing the crimes that we had told them of.

  I folded my arms over one another and tilted my head up to the sky. The sunlight felt cold on my skin, and the island was more forsaken than it had ever been before. As he stood waiting for my answer, I shut my eyes on the sight of it and for once let my thoughts do as they pleased without bothering to pick and sort through them or file them away to someplace where I wouldn't have to think of them for a while. I knew both what I should do and what I wanted to do, and for the first time in so long, they were the same thing.

  And it wasn’t him that I was worried about being in absentia anymore – it was myself. I had been looking for the answers for everything for so long, thinking that if I could just find one more person and peel back their skin to see straight inside to who they really were, that then I would be alright. But it wasn't them that I had to find, because they weren't lost – not really. But I was, and I would continue to be if I didn't do what I should have done when I had first heard the music floating to me from across the Bickerby grounds.

  I responded in a hollow voice. As he took the words in, his face clouded with a sadness that reached well into the blacks of his eyes, but he nodded, and the understanding wasn't lost between us.

  I wandered back to the house where Miss Mercier had lived and stepped through the door. The floor was still cluttered with an assortment of packaged food and cigarettes despite the fact that no one would return to use them, and I pushed them aside to clear off what was hidden beneath. The cell phone from Karl glared up at me, the lone blue light blinking feebly into the quickly darkening sky. Switching it on, I redialed his number and held it to my ear.

  “Hello?”