147.

After Griselda left his room after her arbitrary declaration, Johannes wandered. In his current state, he felt he could not handle meeting his sister again. He could not guarantee that his reason would remain intact from the moment of reunion until the final farewell. It was an evil that could erupt at any time. After agonizing as if driven to the edge of a cliff, the conclusion he reached was, again, escape.

He was not unaware of its futility. However, unable to endure it right now, he left the tower without any preparation. This time I will truly leave, I will depart. Let me go. Please. Please. Heedless of his inner screams, the cruel chains cut off Johannes’ consciousness the moment he crossed the moat. Thus when he opened his eyes again. It was the middle of his bedroom. Ah.

Ah….

Johannes’ pupils were empty as he lay sprawled in the middle of the bedroom, staring at the ceiling. Though the failure was expected, it was as if his heart could not bear it and shattered, leaving no thoughts in his mind. After lying motionless for a while, he got up groggily and prepared for the ‘next thing’. This process was always smooth, as usual.

Prepare a suitable weapon. Visit the rear tower’s animal shed and catch the first bird that catches his eye alive. Return to the bedroom and slash his own carotid artery. And sometime later….

Again, open eyes.

Empty time repeats. Johannes blankly got up and sat cross-legged in the pool of blood. For a moment, he stared out the window to his left, listening to the faint chirping of birds. Through the high gray square of empty space, a breeze was blowing. The wind that traced along the window frame and brushed his cheek was damp. It had the weight of impending rain. As if unable to bear that weight, Johannes’ gaze flowed downward.

With sunken eyes, Johannes stretched out only his arms and pulled the birdcage at his feet into his embrace, opening it. He reached in with one hand and grasped the bird as it tried to avoid him. With his other clean hand, he held up the weapon and snapped the struggling bird’s neck as if slitting its throat.

A cracking bone sound, familiar to his ears. The warm blood of the small, young creature stains his equally small hand. A few white feathers flutter and fall. The delicate flapping of wings quickly dies down. He did not even inwardly apologize for this sight. Because there was no longer even a small ripple in his heart.

Guilt was a luxury emotion. This killing was to explain the pool of blood around him anyway. Anyway, all this is for my sake. If I were to ask for forgiveness, it would only add to your resentment. You… hate me all you want.

I will kill you, and kill you again and again.

A year ago. Shortly after the conversation with the duke, in the midst of uncleared confusion, after agonizing for days and weeks not knowing what to do, he suddenly recalled the first attempt he made in desperation. What should I do with myself? What about my sister? What if I really die this time? No, what if I don’t really die this time either? After the second, third, and fourth attempts made after a day’s struggle, there was no more hesitation. When left alone. The moment he felt the impulse, he acted on it and ended it.

And like this time, he got up again every time.

Each time he rose, his heart grew emptier by a span.

His absurd body soon became adept at this, and at some point he was even able to choose methods that did not cause much bloodshed, avoiding commotion around him. Johannes sometimes found it amusing. Himself, who tries to avoid others’ gazes even while struggling to end his own life voluntarily. That compulsion. That fear.

His nature of absolutely not being able to bear exposing himself, who would clearly regenerate in an ugly state, to gazes mixed with disgust and contempt, was the most pathetic aspect that he deeply self-deprecated when he was in his right mind.

“Do whatever it takes to die….”

“Don’t think of escaping clumsily….”

“That day is the day my daughter leaves her boudoir….”

Still clutching the bird with its sadly dangling broken neck, alone in the bedroom. Darkness embracing gloom flowed down behind Johannes, whose fist with blue veins standing out on the back of his hand was trembling finely. Mother. Mother who went mad in a pitiful state, finding life too burdensome.

I… don’t know how.

***

It might be tomorrow.

No, perhaps the day after tomorrow.

When will she suddenly come to find me?

Did Griselda… have some kind of airtight plan….

That night. The rain that threatened to fall all evening but couldn’t finally scattered down drearily. Though exhausted in body and mind, Johannes couldn’t bring himself to lie in bed, and listened to the sound of rain wetting the stone walls of the black fortress as he reclined in an armchair. The outside of the window was all like the faint wailing of a woman mourning the death of a beast.

No matter how sorrowfully you cry, ‘that’ will not return. Because I killed it thoroughly.

Johannes stared blankly at the milky white corpse and bloodstained clothes strewn as if on display under the bed across from him, thinking. Yes, that cannot return, and he himself now is… tired yet not tired at all. That kind of body.

When was the last time he slept properly? He couldn’t even remember. It had been a year of proving daily that even if his eyes were steeped in layers of long-accumulated fatigue, he could go without sleep for a hundred or a thousand days if he set his mind to it. And now he knew that what made this possible was the blood vessels of an unknown beast beneath his skin. That thing.

Mother called it a demon.

Johannes’ gaze took on a gloomy light. So at least a ‘part’ of me is truly that thing, he repeated the despairing he had done for a year. You are a demon, a demon that will harm my daughter. He could not dismiss his mother’s claim, shouted at the top of her lungs, as the nonsense of a deranged woman. He could not refute it. For he was the one who witnessed with his own two eyes his wrist reattaching after being severed. If I were simply an ordinary human as I wish, how could this ‘body’ be explained.

So perhaps I am in fact a monster who doesn’t even know the true nature of sleep yet. For him, sleep may have been merely an imitation of humanity, appropriately fabricated to follow his sleeping sister by his side. As his thoughts reached that point, he felt a chill in his heart anew.

His sister always fell asleep before him.

When they were even younger than now, he would often feel his heart sink at his sister’s shallow breaths ruffling his eyelashes. Where are you going again, leaving me behind. He seemed to have shaken her awake a few times. Then he would close his eyes aimlessly, following his sister’s breathing, erasing all the thoughts in his head at once, just as his sister was immersed in her own world. For this reason, he would instantly awaken as if he had never been asleep at the faintest dawn light or tiniest stimulation entering the bedroom…. Fake sleep.

He now concludes. But in his heart he was afraid of his own certainty. Isn’t everyone like this, is it truly only me, he inwardly asks over and over again as if wringing it out. Isn’t this what you call ‘sleep’? After being so anxious, he reminds himself again that even in this moment when his whole body feels like a thousand pounds, he does not need deep sleep, and sinks again. Indeed. A body that can hardly be called… an ordinary human.

Demon.

Johannes slid his head down. He buried his forehead in the hand that had been propping up his chin. Soon he covered his eyes entirely with his light hand as if to devour them. It’s hard to believe. Still. That he himself is an ancient beast that has persistently continued its malice in a form no different from a decaying corpse. A monster that will harm his sister.

There was no way he could easily accept it. It was too overwhelming a reality to simply acquiesce to. Moreover, the memories that sporadically took hold of him were too base to be a demon’s memories, merely the perspective of a single ‘human’…. There was still no link in his mind between the demon and that human. When this is all one knows, who could be certain of their own identity? Ah, but those intense emotions, both unfamiliar and familiar.

My woman.

My woman.

Giovinetta…. Those terrible longings.

This must be how it feels to face the corpse of someone unintentionally killed. It was devastating, impossible to erase even with eyes closed and back turned, so the body left behind was clearly real and the reality he faced. Therefore, he would inevitably conform to his erased fate, at least when he ‘lost consciousness’. His definite identity was irrelevant to this. Inette.

Perhaps I am some kind of half-demon, a hybrid unprecedented in the world. Mother’s prophecy that I would eventually harm you seems unlikely to miss the mark after all. He acknowledged again in despair. For whatever reason, I who can neither die nor escape, will end up harming you. What should I do, Inette. Inette…. The sigh he finally let out deeply was damp and hot. The corners of his tightly pressed lips trembled….

“Yes….”

“……”

“Yes…. I will bring her immediately….”

“……”

It was then that Johannes heard something like a whisper from far above.

A bedroom maid. The barely audible voice is Father’s. The direction is southeast.

Goosebumps suddenly rose on Johannes’ ears as he leaned his forehead to one side with an unfocused gaze full of exhaustion. The noise from the third floor corridor was flowing down the walls. It resonated in his eardrums as if filtering out only the sounds that the demon inside needed. Rustle. Rustle….

The sound of the maid’s footsteps starting from the duke and duchess’s bedroom and stepping on the spiral staircase. Flutter…. The sound of the lamp in the maid’s hand flickering in the blackened air. A guard’s brief salute. Your Grace, to the bedroom now… A thin voice announcing at the boudoir door. The sound of the bolt being removed. And stepping on the threshold of the boudoir….

The duchess’s first step.

That sound.

It’s today.