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My Alina.
My little saint.
She hears him when she sleeps. When she is pulled into the dark with heavy eyes and an even heavier heart. He is there with her—the monster that waits under the bed, in the darkest corner of the room where not even a chandelier of burning candles could hope to reveal him. He is always with her. He gnashes his teeth and sinks his claws into her flesh, and he rips and pulls and tears until her bones protrude like a grotesque chicken’s spine that has been flattened and baked and set out on a table filled with gluttony and finery that will only make her sick. She feels each bite he takes, every tendon he slices, each bone he sucks clean and empty.
He never leaves.
My Alina.
My little saint.
When she wakes, he follows. He is her shadow, even in death, and she carries him in her hands. In her heart that races into her throat whenever she turns a corner and spies a man. A man she knows does not exist, but he is standing there, waiting for her to approach. His arms outstretched, an inky smile wider than wide, he calls to her. She knows that if she comes, he will trap her. He will drag her into the walls, into the dark, and he will make her his own, just as he did in life, for she was always his until he was no more.
He always waits.
My Alina.
My little saint.
There is no escaping, no evading his cries. She can hear him when the house groans and creaks, and she feels his breath with each step she takes. When the floorboards depress beneath her bare feet—she cannot wear shoes lest she alert him that she is up and around—she hears a wheezing. It is just the house, dear, some say, fret not over old bones. But she knows whose old bones make up the foundations. She knows whose voice it is when the wind blows a little too hard and rattles the windows. She knows who it is that drags the house deeper into the dirt, who drags the house deeper and deeper to him.
She knows that when no candles burn in the windows, he is home, waiting for her.
My Alina.
My little saint.
God. She prays to a god if they exist. She prays when she is alone, when she is where he cannot follow. She prays for someone to hear her just as she hears him, and when the Father comes to hear her confessions, she tries to admit. She tries to speak, but she stumbles and mumbles and rambles and there is not much for her to do other than sit with her hands in her lap and wonder if the darkness outside of the confessional is staring back at her as it whisks and whirls in the deep corners of the church’s transepts, crawling inside painted glass windows from the flying buttresses stained by rain. She wonders if it is not pious guilt holding her tongue but his hand down her throat, choking the words and stuffing them back down her gullet until they are burned up and a thought no more.
She knows he follows her home.
My Alina.
My little saint.
She knows that when she is in bed, splayed out like a rabbit ready to be skinned and filleted, he looms above her, teeth dripping with inky shadows. She can feel his breath—a cold breeze that sends ice shattering through her sternum and into her spine, piercing her lungs and flooding her veins—fanning her face. She will not move, not when he is there. So, she will lie on her back, powerless and statuesque as he crawls into bed beside her. As he whispers blasphemy in her ear, like a husband to wife. She will listen to it all, for she always hears his words and responds to his beck and call, and she will lay there as he makes her whole.
As he fills her with shadows and darkness and snuffs the light inside and takes it for himself. This he does every night, and when the sun rises, she must avoid him. Where daylight touches, she is safe. She is holy. She can see dust dancing in the air and she can imagine she is floating. Lifeless. Careless. But then he reappears, hidden away, sneering and grinning all the same. He is always there.
Wherever there is light, there must be a shadow to accompany it.
She is his entirely. Wholly.
There is no escaping the shadow beneath her feet, and when the town decries her for insanity—a witch be she! a witch in that home across the lake! burned she must be! burned soon lest she take thee!—for magics that she knows to be his and his alone, there is no escaping the ropes around her body. They burn against her shift. They burn through her flesh and she cries out into the night for him. She cries when the fire is set, when it takes to the pyre she cannot flee. She cries and cries and cries because she is no witch and though a dancer with the devil she is, she is no wicked woman.
But they do not listen. They do not care. Wild and mad, they call her as they cheer. And Father who watches but heard her prayers does nothing but stare, arms crossed and head almost bowed. He does not care. None do as the flames lick her feet and melt and flesh.
She calls to him, her shadow, for where there is light, there must be he as well, and when he comes, it is swift and final. The flames doused. The people cut in half, cubed like elk meat dried for a rough winter, and sliced into thin strips that would be nothing more than a mouthful—nothing even remotely satisfying or sustaining.
He comes to her, as he always does, and her ropes are gone. They crumble into nothing but ash at her feet, and she goes to his arms. She lets him hold her, take her, embrace her in the way he always seems to want for when watching her. He is here, stroking her hair, staining it an inky black with his shadows, and he coos just as he always does, but he forces her to look out at the village. At those who once would harm her. At those who saw her as a witch.
But you are a little saint to me, he whispers sweetly. My beloved Alina.
He takes her away. Pulls her into the shadow. He brings her home, carrying her over the threshold that doesn’t even creak when he steps upon the old wood. No candles burn, and no light can be seen for miles in the woods. There is only darkness and she knows it well, just as he knows her light that is now his. But…it has always been his.
He is sweet and persuasive. He is nurturing and kind, and he does not look away when the darkness consumes her too. When there is nothing in the old home that breathes when they do. When the old homes speaks with their voices. When the old home shakes with their anger, lust, depravity, shame, and avarice. He does not look away and he never will, not when he holds her so. Not when they are one and the same.
She does not scare him, and he no longer scares her.
No.
No, he never scared her.
For she fell into him first when she ignored all calls to avoid the house in the woods. When she returned every day until she could sleep beneath its roof. When she called back to him in her dreams. In her nightmares. When she sought out the shadows that haunted every room.
There is a witch in the woods, children whisper. A witch and her devil.
He is more fond of calling her his saint and he her shadow.