#51

“Sis….”

His lips parted without a sound. Did he hear wrong? His eyebrows contorted strangely. He couldn’t be sure if he had heard correctly.

He knew that his sister, who had remained silent like an imbecile for a long time after her first wedding, had suddenly returned to normal three years ago. He had spent most of his youth in a monastery since childhood. But the rest of the story was completely new to him.

Stabbed? His, his useless sister Giovinetta? His elder brother? Why? He stood there for a while with a stupid expression, his mouth agape.

“Who stabbed whom?”

“…So you didn’t know.”

Griselda turned away from him as he stammered his question. She then began pacing anxiously in front of Winfrid.

“It makes sense. The young lord ordered silence, and no one at the scene seemed to understand how someone who had been bathing normally at the well suddenly got stabbed in the shoulder, or why he went to the women’s quarters in that state. Everyone seemed confused. Some called for a priest, others said to stop the bleeding first, no one knew what to do. I’m probably the only one who recognized whose knife was in the young lord’s shoulder.”

“Shoulder?”

“It’s been over a decade since I’ve lived with this guilt in my heart. Winfrid, I regretted it several times a day. I couldn’t stand how foolish I was to let that moment pass carelessly. Do you know? On days when the clouds are darker than shadows. Or when I’m alone at home. Especially Winfrid, after I lay with you, always, always! He comes…!” By then, Griselda seemed not to see Winfrid anymore. She hugged herself standing and began to tremble. She stared into empty space with hollow eyes.

It looked just like when she would have a fit, shuddering before an illusion only she could see, so Winfrid, who was about to stand up to try and calm her somehow, nearly jumped out of his seat. Thud! Suddenly, Griselda fell to her knees and gripped his legs tightly.

“Save me, Winfrid.”

She clung fiercely to Winfrid’s calves. Though there was no space left between them, she pressed her whole body against him as if trying to burrow in.

“…This, madwoman….”

A startled Winfrid cursed and leaned his upper body back. Griselda made as if to climb up his thighs. She was that desperate.

“I can’t bear it. The dreams! The dreams are killing me. Save me. Please save me.”

Winfrid leaned back on his hands to support his upper body. He shuddered briefly at the woman clinging to him. Her face, pressed against his waist, was no longer normal. Her eyes, fixed straight on Winfrid’s face, were wide open and constantly shedding tears. Thick streams flowed down her twitching cheeks. Her intermittent voice,

“Save me…. Save me….”

was all like moans.

For some reason, Winfrid was trembling, and his breathing was a little rapid. Griselda’s fits were now commonplace. But it was the first time she had voluntarily clung to Winfrid.

“Damn it….”

A curse escaped softly. He couldn’t suppress the rising irritation. Didn’t this woman call his elder sister a devil? He shuddered again. Didn’t she also say she couldn’t accept the ring he was giving her? He barely swallowed the rising anger. Damn it, damn it…. He ground his molars, then took several deep breaths.

After briefly rubbing his face, Winfrid let out a long sigh heavy with indescribable emotions. Slowly, he leaned forward. He stared blankly at the eyes dropping tears beneath him. When he reached out to cup Griselda’s cheek, he could feel the bones prominent on her thin face.

“…Stop this madness and come to your senses. I need… to understand the situation… to help you….”

Griselda closed her mouth. She just looked at Winfrid desperately, making hiccuping sounds. Winfrid pressed his thumb to Griselda’s wet eyes, wiped them, then shook his hand in the air. He muttered lowly, as if in resignation.

“I’ll either kill you or save you.”

“…Uh.”

Griselda clung to Winfrid’s gaze like a lifeline. Then she buried her face between his thighs. She let go of his slender waist she had been grasping and folded her arms in front of her chest. She curled up her trembling body as much as possible.

Winfrid looked down at Griselda, who had collapsed on his knees and started bawling like a child. He couldn’t gauge how long she had been holding back this wail. It was as if she was wringing it out from her very bones.

When all he wanted was to give her a ring.

“…Looks like I’ll hear useless things for nothing.”

Damn it…. Curse it….

Winfrid swallowed the curses that seemed ready to slip through his lips at the slightest gap. His fingers tensed.

He raised his fist, which had been gripping the blanket futilely, a span into the air and lowered it again several times. Finally, with his eyes tightly shut, his hand came to rest on Griselda’s back. Winfrid first touched her with just his fingertips, as if doing something he shouldn’t, then covered her shoulder blade with his whole palm.

He couldn’t move after that. An inexplicable tension made his stomach ache. Though this body was as familiar as could be, it felt strange as if for the first time.

Winfrid raised his head to look into empty space. Awkwardly, he stroked the thin body under the thin cloth. Eventually, he even leaned down and embraced her with one arm. Griselda’s sobs gradually faded as if melting into his warmth.

Quite some time passed. Griselda, who had risen groggily and separated herself from Winfrid’s legs, caught her breath while kneeling on the quiet floor. Still, she couldn’t do anything about her flushed face. Winfrid, who had straightened his upper body, just looked down at her silently. Griselda’s hollow gaze focused on a point in empty space.

“If I had known… it would come to this.”

She opened her mouth with difficulty.

“I would rather… have killed him….”

She began the prelude to a true nightmare.

***

The lord and lady that Griselda saw with her own eyes, still not fully recovered mentally, were strangely healthy and beautiful. The lady, holding two children in her arms, wore an expression of chilling satisfaction.

Griselda couldn’t believe it. It seemed that what she had seen wasn’t entirely a dream. What the lady had given birth to was a pretty girl and a monster, not such identical twins.

But the lady’s expression as she presented her proud firstborn son to the duke was more stable than ever. The lady didn’t engage in a single chat with Griselda, the sole witness and accomplice. She was just dazed day and night like someone dreaming with eyes open.

Griselda, who wasn’t in a position to ask first, felt her insides burning black. Yes, it must have been just a dream. Griselda reassured herself several times a day. But her reason, consumed by fear, kept superimposing the devil of that night onto the firstborn son.

It wasn’t just fear. To Griselda, the firstborn son was clearly different from other infants. He barely suckled when offered the breast, just lay there when put down, and slept when it was time. When he opened his eyes wide, he just breathed heavily like a dying animal cub. He never made eye contact.

Like a piece of meat without a soul.

Griselda had sleep paralysis every single day. She often woke up screaming. The midwife’s corpse, the burned man, and the hideous devil she saw in her dreams were too vivid and too horrifying.

The firstborn son, who unusually didn’t cry, added to the terror. So, one late night, when Griselda woke up alone from recurring nightmares and went to check on the children’s cradle, the firstborn son wasn’t crying.

That day too, Griselda opened her eyes, swallowing her habitual scream. She sat for a while, just breathing heavily. The whole tower was as quiet as a dead mouse. Despite the season approaching summer, the cold rising to her chin was strangely chilly.

I thought I had closed it before going to sleep.

She turned her head to check the window. She saw the window half-open, perhaps pushed by the wind, and through that gap, she could see the cradle shadowed black in the faint backlight. In the darkness, it looked like it had its mouth wide open as if it had just eaten a child with nowhere to go. It sent chills down her spine.

Suddenly, before Griselda could erase the remnants of her dream, a chilling ripple ran through her mind.

She remembered the fact that a half-dead lump of flesh was lying together with a truly living and breathing child. She shuddered several times. So perhaps it was a kind of maternal instinct. Judging that she shouldn’t let the child sleep in the same place as the monster, she took steps towards the window, pressing down on her chest that felt like it would burst.

Only her footsteps echoed coldly in the dark room. The floor felt unusually icy on her bare feet. Enduring the sensation of her soles sticking to the floor, she tried her best not to look at the firstborn son’s face. She first firmly closed the window. Then she approached the cradle to pick up the child.

The child and the monster seemed to be sound asleep, as there was not even a small sign of movement when she came close. But the moment she looked inside.

The monster closed its eyes in an instant.

It even held its breath as if it had been asleep from the beginning, with a natural air. In Griselda’s opinion, it was a quickness that could only come from having observed her movements from the start. But Griselda had seen it.

Why is it that the whites of human eyes are so clearly visible even in the darkness?

Eyes. As Griselda’s face came over, the monster’s eyeballs that had rolled straight up in a startled manner. And the white space that had been exposed before that, she had clearly witnessed. It had definitely been watching the child sleeping beside it. Griselda stepped back without even picking up the child. What was that?

What on earth were those eyes?

Eyes like a traitor looking for a sinister opportunity. Are these the eyes of an infant incapable of discernment? Moreover, wasn’t this thing just a shell with a body but no mind?

Is this truly a child? No.

Is it even truly human? It felt as if thorns were sprouting from every piece of skin.

Finally, from that day on, she began to sleep uncomfortably in a chair far from the cradle. It was the only place out of the firstborn son’s line of sight….

However, the fear that seemed impossible to cut off didn’t even last six months. Perhaps the breath of the living was too overwhelming to dwell on past events. The frantically turning daily life didn’t leave Griselda, who had suffered from a bizarre incident, alone either.

Especially since Giovinetta’s piercing cries poured over her head in heaps even before dawn broke, she had no luxury to deeply consider or examine whether the vicious memory was truly a nightmare. Luxury was soon a extravagance.

Yes, as her husband said, it must have just been a terrible dream.