ME, CINDERELLA?(39)

“They’re just bathing rooms, fed by hot springs that run underground.”

“No way! Like a hot tub?”

“Yes, like that.”

“How neat! I’d love to see them!” Brynn caught his eye and blushed, her skin turning a sweet pink color even in the cold. He thanked heaven inwardly that she had been the one to commit the fatal blunder and not him, but it was his fault for bringing the idea of the baths up in the first place. He turned away mercifully to stare at a branch heavy with the weight of snow.

“And there is an oubliette,” Eliot said, trying hastily to change the subject. “I suppose that can be called torture.”

“An oubliette?”

“It’s a hatch in the floor that opens up into a room underneath,” Eliot said. “Where you would keep prisoners, if you had any.”

“Like a dungeon?”

“Yep.”

“Then why don’t they just call it a dungeon?”

Brynn’s nose shone with a speckling of snowflake and Eliot had to restrain himself from wiping it off with his thumb.

“It’s from the French oublier—to forget. It’s a place you put people to forget about them. An oubliette doesn’t have any other doors or windows except for the one hatch.”

“So you could only get out if someone lowered a rope or ladder or something?”

“Only if you’re lucky; if someone remembered you.”

Brynn shivered and stood up. A jackrabbit, startled by the motion, jumped out of the low bank on the other side of the stream and darted over the snowdrift. They watched the snowflakes that had been kicked up from the jackrabbit fall slowly to the ground.

“Ready to go?” Eliot asked.

“No—what’s that?” Brynn clambered over to where the jackrabbit had kicked up loose snow.

“What’s what?” Eliot followed just behind Brynn, aware that his body had gone alert and ready, his hands clenched into loose open fists. He bent his legs slightly at the knee, anticipating an impact that didn’t come.

“It’s a deer, it’s—oh!” Brynn started backward, her arms outspread in flight, into the steady embrace of Eliot, who caught her around the waist.

“It’s alright,” Eliot said, helping her find her balance. His eyes had taken in the dead fawn, the eye sockets writhing with maggots. The top half of the fawn was not yet frozen; the flesh torn ragged, tattered remnants of sinew and muscle iced over like the darkest of rubies. A rind of fat had been gnawed to gristled shreds and left to the side of the carcass.

The fawn’s gnawed flesh reminded him of one of the poems he had had to read for school, a poem by Dante. In one of the last stanzas, a man gnaws on the nape of another man’s skull. Traitors, maybe. They were in one of the lowest reaches of hell, of course. Traitors against benefactors were the worst of the worst, the ones so bad that Satan himself ripped their flesh from their bones in an eternal meal. For a wicked deed is the one which most opposes love, and to do wrong a person who has done you right is the wickedest of deeds, for theirs is the love most like God’s in its purity.

This—this was a wicked act. He reached out to examine the ragged flesh. Brynn grabbed the sleeve of his jacket and jerked his arm back violently.

“Brynn—” he said. He did not have anything to say after that; the familiarity of the gesture had startled him.

“Don’t touch it,” she said. “I don’t want to see it anymore.” She shut her eyes and turned away from the fawn, her distaste for death so overwhelmingly apparent on her face that Eliot thought she might burst into tears.

“It’s okay. It’s alright.” Eliot hugged her as she nestled in the crook of his arm, her body pressed against his hip for one moment before she realized her position and awkwardly shifted back.

“I saw his, his fur…” She swallowed back a cough, and he could see her skin turn paler against the backdrop of the snow.

“Let’s just go home, shall we?” He wanted to fix this, to take it back, to undo it all so that there was no death. But here, always, everywhere, there were signs of death, more death. He couldn’t breathe, it stifled so.

“It was poachers.”

“Yes.” The bullet in the skull, splinters of bone, another dark eye just above the eye that was no longer there, just an eye socket.

“Why would they kill it and not take it?”

“It was too close to the house. They didn’t want to risk being caught for such a small deer.” He could not take his eyes off of the body. Was this what Clare looked like now? Worms and decay, the hair still untouched. He shook the thought to get it out of his head, but it lingered, hovering over his conscious thoughts like a dark messenger he couldn’t ignore.