Blood and Madness

I am Arthur Volkov, and this is how the woman I love turned me into a murderer. Looking back, I suspect the story started a long time before I ever laid eyes on Lenore Morrow. I was raised in a house that showed affection, like the church shows grief; quietly. Nothing in my childhood was ever loud except perhaps the weather, and even that knew better than to maintain such boisterousness for long. Our house stood on the outskirts of the city in the kind of winter-grey wealth that announced itself not through gold-plated fittings or painted columns but through silence, old books, disciplined servants and the immense patience of people who have learned to keep their pain within walls. We were three children though the term seemed to have little application to occupants of a house such as ours. My eldest sister was Anastasia; quick-witted, demanding, and already at twenty-six moving through life as if she already held possession of it. My younger sister was Elena; eighteen years of age and softer than the rest of us, she had a secret passion for watching storms out of the window as if they had secrets to tell her. I loved them both, though not in the effortless way that other families loved one another. In my house, affection was less substantial than hunger; it was a hand placed for a moment on a shoulder, a plate of food set aside, a letter sent without explanation, a name uttered with just enough care to last a room. My mother, Angelina Volkov, had been born in England and had married in Russia and, as a result, seemed to possess an almost preternatural composure even in fury. She dressed in elegant if muted clothing, spoke few words and arranged the house in the manner one would approach an altar or a battlefield. She prayed at dawn, wore heavy wool in cold weather, and her house was lined with crucifixes, saints and paintings of martyrs whose eyes seemed perpetually to look slightly away, as if already disillusioned with life. My father, Yuri Volkov, had been born in St. Petersburg and had worked his way into becoming the kind of man people would listen to before they had even discovered whether they liked him; he was not cruel, for to be so would have required his attention and that was a luxury he rarely extended. He was merely the kind of man who only found an emotion of any value that could be controlled. I was neither unhappy nor happy but rather full of something colder, order. The kind of order that leaves no space for surprise and therefore none for pity. He and my mother did not understand me, and I think they had long since stopped expecting to. I had been homeschooled by tutors, by books, by silence and by the rigid structure of their expectations. Latin before breakfast. Theology after lunch. History until the lamplight flared, manners, scriptures, books and sums. They wanted an upright, cultured and irreproachable son. What they got was a young man who could discuss Augustine’s confessions, Dostoevsky and the fall of empires but who could only enter a room by first rehearsing the words "Good day" in his head. So, when Morrowe University accepted me, I thought it would represent freedom. I was nineteen when I left for university. Morrowe was founded in 1812, tucked away in the forests of New England; older than most of the towns, older than the roads and older than the men who pretended they had discovered the country through the logic of pure reason alone. Ivy covered the stone buildings and wrought-iron gates, steep roofs and narrow windows overlooked the forests. It was renowned for its history program, its classicist education and its "distinguished traditions." Whispers abound that it was an establishment of hidden wings and sealed chambers; of ruined tunnels and of brilliant students who went in to emerge, hollowed out by some unnamed force. I called it my new start; my parents my good institution, my sisters my liberty. As I was being driven along the winding road, that was when the dream took me. It had no discernible start, as if sleep had suddenly thrown a switch and a door within the dark structure of my mind swung open, allowing something into the void behind. I stood in a hall I did not know. It was a vast expanse of dark stone; the ceiling was lost somewhere high above me and the air smelled of iron and smoke. Hands were pushing themselves out of the walls of the hall. Thousands of them or perhaps hundreds. Pink fingernails, cracked skin, withered fingers embedded into the walls as if the building were attempting to give birth to its dead. The walls had begun to bleed. The blood coursed from the dead in pale threads that stretched, taut and viscous, across the dark stone. I tried to move but my feet seemed planted on the stone floor. She stood there too. Nude. In the middle of that terrible hall, her pale skin streaked and smeared with blood; as though she had been torn to pieces, then pieced back together and placed upright to be displayed. The blood poured from the wounds in her skin, over her breasts, down her stomach, onto the tops of her thighs, dripping to the floor, the slow blackish-red drops splashing on to the stone. She did not move; she simply looked at me and tilted her head. Dark wet hair fell over one shoulder and clung to her bloodied neck. She showed no expression on her face, no anguish or terror or plea, only that deathly stillness that is the signature of dreams and graves. Then she smiled. A small, almost affectionate smile that in a terrible way only made her beauty more horrific than if she had screamed or pleaded. "What took you so long?" she asked. Her voice was soft and familiar, as though she had spoken that sentence to me many times before in a lifetime before I became myself. The hands pushed from the wall with more urgency now, and I felt the stone begin to give way beneath me as the hallway seemed to fall away endlessly before and behind me. The bell tolled somewhere far off. She tilted her head again, still smiling slightly. "I have been waiting."