Page 54 of This Vicious Hunger

Chapter Thirty-Two

R ain lashes down hard. The garden becomes a quagmire amidst the deluge.

I cradle Olea’s body in my arms for what feels like forever but is in actuality perhaps only half an hour.

The sun continues its ascent, and Olea’s skin begins to grow hot beneath its touch.

It does not redden or come up in welts, but I feel the heat radiating off her, like holding my hand too close to the flame of a candle—and it isn’t long before the rain begins to sizzle when it lands.

At first I attempt to shield her with my body.

I hunch my shoulders and curl around her like a browning leaf, but the sun is fierce—brighter and hotter than it should be through the rain.

Its rays feel like knives against my skin, each prick drawing out what little energy I have left.

I do not cry. I have nothing more to give.

Dr. Petaccia appears at my side like a wraith.

I don’t hear her arrive. The rain is like a roaring static inside my ears.

Blink, water, blink, Olea, blink, water, blink—Petaccia.

She wears dark robes over her usual outfit, black leather gloves, a mask over her nose and mouth, and a hood pulled up over her hair.

I stare at her blearily, confusion and sadness and anger all blurring into one freezing emotion.

“She collapsed,” I babble. “A seizure, I think—”

“Move,” she says dispassionately.

When I don’t immediately drop Olea’s head from my lap, the doctor gives my shin a hard, fast kick.

I yelp in pain. The agony is wrong, disproportionate to the violence; my whole body aches with it, tendrils of fire licking outwards from the bruising flesh until every part of me hurts.

I scramble away before Petaccia kicks me again, fixating on the way Olea’s lifeless hand drops to the dirt.

Petaccia lifts Olea’s body as if her bones are hollow. Her dirty nightgown trails in the muck, arms limp and head lolling back. The doctor strides with purpose, not hurry, to the tower. Every step carries Olea farther away from the antidote, from me and our freedom, back to her prison.

I crawl after them, barely able to lift my arms. My strength has gone, sapped into the earth.

Sickness swirls inside me and I retch filmy white bile into the dirt.

My skin is fire, my innards a sluggish icy slurry.

The pain in my head is a pounding so heavy, so loud, it pushes my eyelids shut. I will die from this grief.

I drag myself to the door of the tower and through into its warmth, and then follow the damp trail down, down the spiral stairs, step by step on my backside until I reach the basement.

This windowless room is clearly a pantry of sorts, small sacks of potatoes and carrots and flour hanging from hooks on the walls, a slice of buttered bread half-eaten on a plate on the side.

Petaccia has repurposed a thin low dining table, swept aside metal candlesticks in a clatter, and placed Olea on its surface, black dirt marring the white cloth beneath.

I sag against the wall and watch as Petaccia lights a handful of pillar candles scattered around the room, moving to them with grace and ease, as if she knows well where they will be.

She works methodically. First she checks for a pulse in Olea’s neck and wrists, shining a candle flame at her pupils and testing the reflexes in her knees.

She bends away from Olea’s body, keeping a careful distance between them as much as she can, touching only when necessary.

Olea’s skin is alabaster, her hair raven. There is no colour in her lips. The inkiness on her hands and feet is gone, but the skin left behind is white as salt. She is almost perfect, except for the stillness of her chest. A storm howls inside me, a horror worse than any I’ve imagined in my life.

“Can you save her?” I croak.

Petaccia seemingly notices my arrival for the first time. She purses her lips and then shakes her head. “No,” she says simply. “She’s gone.”

“But…” You have to save her , I think, though I know it’s pointless. I saw her take her last breath. “You’re a doctor. Can’t you do something? Shock her, or—”

“She’s dead, Thora.”

Silence stretches between us, elastic. Words burble up my throat and turn ashy on my tongue.

What else is there to say? I am a curse.

I should never have given her the antidote—that damned concoction, brewed out of sheer desperation.

I have been impatient, and my impetuousness has cost Olea everything.

Petaccia doesn’t ask what happened, far more concerned with the facts than my story, and I don’t volunteer the information, guilt clamping my lips closed tight.

If I thought my future was dark before, then this is the blight that will end it all.

I might as well join Olea in death, for there is nothing left for me now.

I curl inwards, holding my stomach, fearing I might be sick again.

The doctor continues her thorough examination of her ward’s body, taking her temperature, studying her nails, teeth, and tongue, taking her time.

I watch it all, trying—desperately—to keep from falling apart.

“Don’t you care?” I say softly. My face is wet, and I realise I’m crying again.

Petaccia, on the other hand, is a pillar dressed in black.

She hasn’t cursed or cried; she has barely acknowledged the horror of the scene outside.

She turns slowly, her expression unreadable.

“How can you be so heartless?” I go on, growing brave.

“You raised her. Don’t you feel anything at all? She wasn’t just one of your lab rats—”

“Keep the Silence now,” Petaccia cuts me off icily. “I will be back. I should think you know what to do.”

She doesn’t give me time to argue, as if she can’t stand being around me a single moment longer. She storms from the room in a swirl of black cloth, the candles guttering in her wake. The rain continues to lash down outside; I can hear it although there are no windows to see the onslaught.

Olea lies on the dining table, still as stone. I can’t bring myself to go to her, to feel the coldness of her skin. I sink down to the floor, knees to my chest, great sobs heaving through me until my head pounds afresh. This is all wrong. If I’d felt trapped before…

Eventually the sobs subside. I wipe my nose on the back of my sleeve, gulping, pushing the tears aside. Crying will do me no good now. Petaccia is right. Grief is my business. I gather myself, slowly, slowly, pulling my body upright. Every part of me aches, but Olea needs me now more than ever.

There is no incense in this place, so instead I burn the dried plants I find hanging from the low ceiling.

They are fragrant and musky, their scent filling the room, banishing the dampness of the rain.

I don’t try to figure out what they are, common name or Latin.

I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is the plumes of grey smoke that waft upward, cleansing this space, cleansing Olea’s body.

I remove her nightgown with a pair of scissors and fill a small pail with soapy water.

It doesn’t take long to clean her up, mud slipping from her skin like she is greased.

I find a bottle of perfumed oil in the room upstairs, a comb for her hair, a fresh dress just like all her others.

It is not the first time I have wondered why she wears nothing but white nightgowns, but only now does it occur to me that she may have had no choice.

This place is—was—Olea’s home, but how much of it did she control?

The food in the cellar is sparse, nothing fresh, only grains and vegetables that last for weeks at a time, and there is little to suggest it has ever been any different.

Hollowly I gather my treasures, carrying them down into the bowels of the tower where Olea waits, her body draped in a spare white cloth.

I dab the perfumed oil at her temples, her neck, the crooks of her elbows and knees, and at the base of her feet.

I dress her, panting, fighting against the loose heaviness of her limbs.

When I am done I comb more of the oil through her thick black curls and braid them loosely.

The floral scent—a cloying, jammy rose—gets in my nose, my throat, right down into the pit of me.

Twice I rush upstairs and out, back into the pouring rain, to vomit my foamy guts up amongst the greenery.

But the sun is hot, burning, scorching , even through the thick black clouds.

Perhaps it is not the sun but the daylight itself, and I groan in agony.

The tower is safer. Cool and dark. But—there is Olea.

I push through the growing pain in my belly and sickness that comes in waves, folding Olea’s hands across her stomach, pulling the white sheet up to rest beneath them.

This is no golden cradle, no holy sepulchre cleansed by fire and ash, but it shall have to do.

I pull a crooked old milking stool up to the side of the table, holding one hand just above Olea’s head as I murmur the last rites my father burned into me as a child.

As above so below:

For the wicked and the pure

In this life and in death too

The same end must all endure.

I hold my hands in prayer, pressed to my forehead as though my thoughts might seep through my fingers and out into the grey-tinted air. The stench of burnt herbs is on my tongue. I close my eyes, darkness swimming with spots of greenish light, sickness roiling in me.

It is too hot in here. Sweat beads on my forehead, my neck. The storm rolls outside, thunder crashing. Everything down here echoes, but there is no life beyond me. No laughter from Olea, not a lecture on my pronunciation or a lesson in taxonomy; she is gone and waves of grief crash in me.

I would cut my hair to the scalp, hold my Silence for thirteen months if it could bring her back.

I think back to our conversation about mourning, about the rites, and Olea’s dislike of the traditions of death.

Now I understand. Mourning has always brought me comfort.

The loss of my mother, my father—neither unexpected in my life.

I grew from babyhood knowing that one day I would hold their Silence, would shear my hair and throw it to the flames in their honour.

And Aurelio… His death, my Silence, was as much relief as it was genuine grief. It was the end of something bad.

Olea’s death is neither expected nor welcome. And it is my fault.

My hands tremble as a feverish cold takes me.

My head pounds now with the force of a battering ram, my pulsing brain smashing inside my skull.

I feel my forehead and it is ablaze, my tongue dry and swollen, lips cracking.

Every tendon, every sinew, is shrieking in pain.

And worst of all is the hollowness deep inside me, a gnawing, yearning pit of hunger that doubles me at the waist in untold agony.

Distantly I realise I’ve grabbed Olea’s hand and I squeeze its coldness tight.

It is not just grief—this pain, this disease, it has come from the antidote.

Olea’s dose was ten times mine, but she was ten times stronger, her life in the garden one long test. The inside of my skin feels as though it has been stuffed with a hundred thousand tiny hairs, each one barbed at the tip with poison; every movement, every breath, every blink , rubs my skin against itself and I roar in pain, breaking my Silence.

“I’m sorry,” I sob.

I am a curse. This is punishment for my sins.

For Aurelio, and the books—for the antidote, my selfish legacy, and Olea.

I roll from the stool onto the floor, clutching my stomach, bile filling my mouth and nose.

Blood drips from my lips and I don’t know where it has come from.

For one brief second I wish for Petaccia, for her to bear witness to my death.

I hope she finds the vial. I hope she uncovers where I went wrong.

No , I think as another rush of pain drives me to darkness, ears ringing, thunder booming.

I hope for neither. Death comes for us all, and that is the way it should be.

I knew, I knew Petaccia’s research was unnatural and yet I persisted, grateful to be noticed, glad for a future that was not marriage and death in the childbed.

Selfish—everything I have done was purely for myself.

Would I change it, if I could? Would I take back the books, the slow twisting of the key in my locked-up mind, or these sleepless nights in the poison garden?

Olea’s lips on mine, her hand at my throat and the other at my heart?

Perhaps it is the pain, the delirium, but in this moment I think—for knowledge, for freedom—I would not.

I fight it for as long as I can, until finally the blackness claims me.