Cassie's Corpse

Chapter 11

It was dark.
  So dark I couldn't see my own hand if it was in front of my face. The wall might have been a never ending black hallway, the empty nest of blankets on the bed next to mine might have been Reese, sleeping peacefully.
Creeping down the stairs, the light from the TV splashed crazy images on the wall. Screams and chainsaws and violent bloodbaths that could have been any number of old films flicked across the TV, a harsh light cutting through the thick blanket of night. 
  I was careful coming down the ladder and tiptoeing into the family room. I pictured Nicolai around every corner, bloodied lips silently moving with the promise of a certain death. I shivered in my pajamas and socks.
The house was unusually cold.
  When I turned the corner, I saw why.
  Rowland wasn't on the couch, and the front door stood wide open.
  Damn that old man, I thought to myself, but my heart was racing and panic tingled through my veins. It was freezing. He'd catch his death out there.
  If Nicolai didn't catch him first.
I ran toward the open door, but veered into the kitchen and grabbed a butcher knife as a second thought. I doubted it would work, but it felt good to have something weighty in my hands, and I could bludgeon Rowland over the head with it for his stupidity.
  My socks were soaked and icy the second I stepped through the door, but I ran through the snow anyway.  I could see the forest.
My breath froze my lungs to stiffness and everytime I coughed I was sure an ice chunk would come up.
  I nearly impaled myself with the knife when I tripped on a frozen log, face-planting into the snow. I felt warm blood gush out of my right nostril and drip onto the icy ground.
  Picking myself up, I quickly found that it wasn't a log I had tripped over. It was Rowland.
  He was so still and pale that for a moment I was sure he was dead, sunk down in the snow, but I felt for a pulse and found a weak one. How long had he been out here?
  I shook him and his eyes fluttered open. They were glassy and unfocused. Snow dusted his lashes and eyebrows.
He didn't even have socks on, just thin pants and a hoodie. I was ready to launch into a full on rant when I noticed bruise marks on both of his wrists. Bruise marks in the shape of long, thin fingers.
Somehow I managed to carry him back to the house--he later told me that my eyes had glowed and I must have done something Angelic, but I denied doing more than dragging him to the couch--but I left the knife in the snow. His fingers and toes were bright red, not frozen blue, which I took to be a good sign. I gave him dry clothes and started the fireplace and stuck his feet in a bucket of hot water. He shivered underneath his blanket.
  "I thought I was dreaming," he mumbled, "but then I woke up in the snow and I was so..." He yawned. "I was so sleepy that I just....I went to sleep."
  "Nicolai grabbed you."
  "He did. I just went with him."
  I thought for a moment. "He wanted me to find you. He's playing games."
"That's all he ever does, play games."
I couldn't argue with that. This was all fun to Nicolai. He had no single motive, except to get me to join him, but even that was so he had a playmate. Nicolai let himself become this. He was evil for evil's sake. He couldn't be reasoned with. He would continue playing and he would never tire of it.
He wanted me to play. I intended on playing.
...
  Anna Ketcher was, from my point of view, a very good single mother. There was no glimpse of a father figure in Cassie's memories, but Anna held it together well. She was understandably torn over the disappearance of her daughter, and while she sank deeper into depression the longer Reese was missing, she did her best to keep the family together.
  So, while I had no emotional connection to this woman, it was very hard for me not to be a little disgusted when I found her dead.
  I found her in the kitchen closet, where we kept the mops and buckets, her throat slit. Mascara ran down her pale cheeks and blood stained her lips like a fine lipstick.
  I very, very calmly went to check on Rowland, who had finally fallen asleep around seven in the morning, and I hesitated before waking him up. But I didn't think I wanted to just let her body rot in the broom closet, it seemed distasteful, and I woke him up anyway.
  "Rowland."
  He sat up, shook his head, and yawned. "Varielle. I'm sorry about last night."
I swallowed. "Don't apologize."
He glanced at me oddly. "Is something wrong? You don't seem yourself."
Yes, something was very wrong. Reese was missing and Nicolai keeps scratching in my head and I just found your daughter dead in the closet and I don't think having the brooms next to her body is very sanitary. "Uh...there's...something happened, in the kitchen closet."
He groaned. "Oh no. Did the cleaner spill again? It smells like lemon but it's strong enough to melt the lining of your nose if you sniff it long enough."
Tell him the truth. I would tell him the truth even if my voice shook. I would tell him even if it killed me. It had killed Anna. "She is dead."
The light went out of his eyes and I didn't think his mind was on cleaner anymore. "They found Reese?" His voice was shaking and I saw his eyes go misty. "They found her body?"
"No, Rowland. Anna is in the closet."
I didn't think he was breathing. "No..."
I nodded. "Her throat is slit." Come to think of it, I hadn't really paid attention to Anna the past few days, and the closet smelled of rot. Her skin had been more blue-green than pale. Oh God, how long had she been in there? The notion made my stomach turn.
  He wasn't looking at me. He stumbled to his feet and went tottering toward the kitchen.  I grabbed onto his arm, afraid he'd fall. My voice was pleading. "Rowland, please-"
  "No," he sobbed, pulling away from me and hurdling toward the kitchen. He fell to his knees and I heard a sharp crack, but he didn't flinch. He pulled Anna's body half out of the tiny closet she was shoved in and he screamed.
  I closed my eyes, teetering backward. It was worse than Angel screams. They were cold and resolute. Rowland's screams were grieving and messy and sharp like broken glass. I grabbed his shoulders and tried to pull him back. "Rowland." My own voice was breaking. "Come...come on, come here..."
My hands were shaking and he was clinging to the body and crying and he wouldn't let go.
I stumbled back, the room spinning, and ran out the door.
  I ran to the lake.
  I had no shoes on and my feet quickly grew numb from the cold. My lungs burned.
Nicolai scratched and scratched and scratched.
  And in the forest, where Heaven crashed down on me and all was sickly silent, a long, slow note rang out through the fragile air.
  And then another, and another, until the violin music picked up speed and the song became recognizable.
  Eleanor Rigby.
The lake was thinly frozen over and I jerked to a stop at the water edge, panting, my hair flying around me in a red haze.
  No. Cassie's hair. Her cold feet. Her burning lungs.
  Her sister, suddenly pressing against the ice from underneath, her skin pale and blue and her eyes cloudy, her mouth open in a dead scream. I closed my eyes and gripped my hair and screamed and Nicolai stood in front of me, laughing silently.
  He began to circle around me, slowly, like a predator circling its prey. Wheezing. Cackling.
  "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry," I repeated, but he didn't care.
  He. Not it. Because suddenly he was my brother again and he was so lonely and I was so lonely and all I wanted was to be forgiven and he was right here offering me forgiveness.
  I screamed so loud I thought Rowland might hear me all the way at the house. Cassie's jaw broke, her mouth gaping open, unhinged, bloody strings dripping. And I crawled out, no longer a beautiful blue light but a gray-skinned skeleton with blood pouring out of empty eye sockets.
Reese's body disappeared.
  I laughed and I laughed and Nicolai laughed with me because finally, finally, I was free.
I stood, Cassie's broken corpse rotting behind me, and we slithered towards the house where the human awaited.
  The cold no longer bothered me. I couldn't even feel it. I couldn't feel anything.
  The door was still open.
  Rowland was inside.
  I could feel his anguish like he was-
Crying dying inside laughing insane spinning down down down down down-a fellow demon.
  We laughed at the thought of his blood pumping through our fingers.
He screamed when he saw us. He screamed my name. I laughed.
  I said I was sorry.
I shook my head.
I told him it would be quick.
I had to.
This was my punishment.
My redemption.
And even though he cried and I laughed I felt like crying. Still, I ripped open his rib cage without hesitation, played with his beating heart. His chest heaved beneath me and his eyes rolled back. I was completely covered in slimy, slick, slippery blood, warm and runny in my fingers. It poured from my eye-sockets and from my mouth and down my torso and through my fingers and toes
Squish splash splish squelch.
I saw him struggling, frantically gasping and seizing, and eventually the light in his eyes went out and he stilled. His heart, once warm and beating in my hand, cooled and slowed.
Smiling a bloody grin, I stood and turned back to Nicolai. We laughed together.
  We made our way back to the lake, and I held the bloody treasure in my hands.
We waded into the lake, melting through the ice like it was water, and we waited at the very bottom, where it was so still and quiet and dark.
  Just like Heaven.
  Reese's eyes stared out at me from beneath a bed of water plants, but the police found nothing when they dragged the lake.
We hid our prizes well.
We didn't leave the lake very often. Every few years or so, when a new family moved into the cabin, we would crawl out and drag them back with us, but thousands of years passed and still we rarely took victims.
The police undoubtedly found my journal. Probably thought I was insane and murdered them all.  I was insane, I see that now. I'd been insane the moment I touched down on this planet. It had been futile and arrogant to believe I could have beaten this.
  Sometimes I would hear Rowland's voice in my head, talking about good and bad and black and white and how the humans had been wrong, and I would laugh.
  The Angels were all dead by now. Heaven had been quiet for quite some time.
  The universe was an illness, and I was but a symptom of disease
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Aaaaand it's over! That's a wrap, folks. (3 thanks to those who stuck with it this far