Lady Devil - Chapter 67

#67

A gaze secretly hiding in my inner chamber.

The sensation of someone watching me while holding their breath is palpable even while asleep. So on the night I received the letter, I may have tossed and turned, unable to fall into a deep sleep due to that gaze. I had a strange dream. A dream that seemed meaningful yet completely meaningless at the same time.

“I’m sorry, my lady.”

I was sitting in front of a floating table. The kitchen maid I had seen during the day bowed her head to me in the darkness where one could not see an inch ahead. It was quite eerie how only her complexion gleamed white in the pitch-black surroundings. In the dark space where I couldn’t tell where the ceiling or floor was, I looked down slightly from straight ahead. The neatly severed head of an old man was placed on my plate.

“What is this?”

I retched with my hands on the table. The head, which looked as if it had been roasted in an oven, was so well-cooked that the greasy juices that had dripped down from the crown had soaked his white hair and clung to it in patches. His usually vicious snake-like eyes were hidden by half-melted eyelids.

And the sight of huge, devil-like horns curved on either side of his forehead is particularly vivid even now, after so much time has passed. As if trying to make some delicious decoration on those hideous horns, the ridges carved by countless knife strokes looked as if the wrinkles of an emaciated old man had been cut and covered with skin.

“I don’t want to eat it. Please, take it away.”

“Please believe me, my lady. It was a mistake.”

The maid who had killed the old man on my behalf apologized repeatedly, not knowing what to do. Feeling like stomach acid was about to surge up, I covered my mouth with my hand, and the deeply bowing maid ran away crying. Though she was clearly running, her back view, which didn’t change distance from me, flowed down like ink in place.

Black, a silence that rang sharply in the back of my head. Though there were no signs of change, I was soon standing in the middle of the central hallway.

I knew.

That one end of the hallway led to Johannes’s bedroom, and the opposite end led to Henrik’s bedroom. In that long corridor stretching out to the left and right, I struggled briefly, but intensely.

After a short hesitation, the choice was Henrik. The moment I made that decision, the bedroom entrance, like a massive cloud of smoke, suddenly filled the space before me. Not particularly surprised, I slowly reached out and pulled the doorknob.

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