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In the airless dark of your bedroom at night, you knew the man lying next to you under the covers was not your husband. He had been once, but now he no longer was.
The revelation had come to you before noticing the stillness of his broad frame in bed, a certain stiffness which held more likeness to rigor in a day-old corpse rather than a man wrapped in the comforting spell of deep sleep.
His breaths were silent, if he even breathed at all, reminding you of childhood, where the floorboards wouldn't creak so loudly if you sucked all the air out from your lungs into your throat, snagging it, holding it firm. Suddenly, you'd be lighter; effervescent; floating across the wooden slabs towards the kitchen past midnight, or out the front door during the years where testing your parents’ patience and fraying the head maid’s nerves was your favorite thing to do.
You’d learned later on, after the loveless vows and complicated legality behind joining your two families, that your husband had a knack for slipping away at night as well. Only, he wasn't at all the sort for flirtatious gallivanting and loquacious rendezvous with secret lovers in dim rooms, smells of mildew masked by a numbingly sweet, perfumey fog.
He was reclusive and reticent; one of those outstandingly brilliant scholars who believed the rest of the world was below him because he hadn't found an equal in conversation or thought. Social obligations—no matter the occasion or person—pained him to the point where he intentionally brought you as a buffer between himself and whoever was trying to speak to him.
Some of the talk was so astronomically beyond you that parroting the long-winded answers he spoke softly into your ear back to his audience made you burn under the collar from embarrassment and his proximity to you. His peers could not understand why he simply wouldn't talk for himself; meanwhile, they also wondered why someone without their level of formal education had even accompanied him.
At night, he became one with darkness and retreated to the depths of his study across the massive house you shared. It was part of one of his family’s various estates dotted across the country, and his favorite, due to its location near the university where he worked (at his leisure), and its closeness to his only relative he actually cared about.
“My uncle—he has passed. Of complications caused by tuberculosis, I've been told. I was the only family member placed in his will; it falls to me to settle all remaining affairs he may have overlooked,” he said, sliding into the arms of his heavy coat with your help. Upright at his feet was a hulking suitcase used for trips that were days—weeks away from home, from you. “He was a far more private man than I, so there's no telling what I'll come across while I'm there. I cannot tell you how long I'll be away. I'm sorry.”
You expected nothing less from him. This man, who had only ever touched you once, on your wedding day. He did everything that he was supposed to: tonelessly regurgitate a script of vows, hold your hands, kiss you with great decorum, and then gently lead you away once both families were pleased with the performance.
Right after, then as newlyweds, he poured bourbon into exquisite crosshatch crystalware and examined the glistening amber under wan lamplight. He apologized for kissing you, saying that he wouldn't have done it at all if it hadn't been so important for your families.
At the time, it made you feel very ugly and undeserving of the silk cloth, the ornate lacework decorating your body. The gold band fitted around your finger was a lofty symbol of acquired wealth, heavy and unforgiving.
“Write to me every once in a while,” was what you said at present, swallowing your resentment, keeping stifling composure as he gripped the handle of his suitcase and leaned into its heftiness on that side. “It'd just be nice to know how you're doing, if you find anything interesting. It gives me something to look forward to.”
“I'll try to,” he said, but looked through you, pierced you, as though trying to see something else. You saw this look most often at events or parties where he'd fixate on a specific point (usually you) and seem to recede inside himself, into his thoughts, perhaps trying to dissect them or make them congeal into something linear.
“Uncle was an eccentric man. There's no telling what he's left behind for me to find. I must go. Be well, my dear.”
He left you behind without remorse.
Four months passed with agonizing, gripping slowness from the crisp mornings of late autumn into the icy vise of a winter landscape shimmering white-blue outside your windows.
In those days, you occupied yourself as best you could with guests and alcoholic merriment, whisked yourself away to parties and dinners after wringing out the invitations from friends, and spent many sleepless nights sprawled across the floor beside the fireplace, coveting self-pleasure.
You imagined it was your husband there with you, immediately a renewed man after his return and finding you boundlessly desirable, fucking you with his cock rather than the freezing metal dildo you thrust inside yourself.
Even once you were finished, fucked out by your own hand and the object gaping you wide, you kept masturbating until you lost sensation, the motions and metal numbing you inside—until the intimacy and thrill of self-discovery had lost meaning to you.
Sometimes, you were found the next morning by the maid like that: thoroughly debauched with the phallus having rolled away nearby or still shallowly pressed inside. You needed only to threaten her livelihood once for her to never speak of it, pretend each time she hadn't witnessed a regrettable case of personal depravity.
It'd eventually become a frequent enough sight to her that she knew better than to look directly at you when she entered the room. Rather, now, she carried a laundered pair of trousers in with her. They were draped across a bent arm, warm in her other hand, which she used to clean the dried fluids from your body. Afterward, she helped you into the new garment.
“You have received a letter from the Master,” she said unexpectedly one morning, after fastening your pants and tucking your blouse inside them. “It's strange, though, because it doesn't feel like a letter. Not enough… substance. Shall I open it for you?”
“No! No, that's alright.” You told her.
Then, you realized that she was right. The envelope was pale, long, light as a feather, but completely sealed on the back with his personal emblem hastily stamped, or more appropriately, smeared, with red wax dribbling away from the center towards the bottom of the envelope as if sudden jerkiness had unsteadied his focused pour.
You flipped the thing front to back several times, testing the way the opposite ends fluttered from nothingness within, and glanced aside to your maid.
She looked to be just as thrown.
“You're sure this is from him?” you asked, bemused. “Who delivered this?”
“Why, a courier on horseback, of course!” she said with conviction, so you knew she wasn't lying to you at that moment. It wasn't her habit to weave tales to get a rise out of her employers, anyway. “I even spoke to the courier for a while because I commented on it being so light. He wasn't sure about it, either, but the description of the man who hired him matched the Master almost exactly.”
You found a letter opener nearby and made a quick cut under the wax to break the seal without ripping the envelope itself.
“Almost? What does that mean here?” You raised the intact flap with the messy seal attached, freeing all of the residual traces of wax from the paper. “The man was either my husband or he wasn't.”
The maid tried to subdue her interest in the envelope, turned, and moved onto bunching up the soiled sheet you'd spread out on the floor last night. “Please don't misunderstand. It was him. But, the courier described him as ‘a very interesting and friendly fellow to converse with’.”
“What?”
You were responding to two things simultaneously right then: what your maid had just told you, and the fact that the only content inside the envelope was a single shred of paper torn from an unlined journal.
The maid fluttered back over to your side as you plucked out the sliver of paper, letting the envelope fall freely from your hand to the floor. Leaning into your proximity, she read aloud the same three words that your eyes skimmed:
“Father Marius DuMonde.”
Just as you had done before with the envelope, you flipped the scrap back and forth as though trying to bring something into existence. Your husband's handwriting was recognizable in the lettering, but it was impatient; scrawled across a page in one journal in his vast collection, as though he hurriedly walked past, and then ripped it out.
Nothing else was revealed to you in the seconds after, nor in your long, contemplative stare.
“Who is that?” you asked the maid to alleviate a fast yawning gap of uneasiness beginning to make you fidget and fluster. “A priest?”
The maid beamed in awe of your fast deductive skills and nodded eagerly. “It would seem that way! The city has more places of worship than it does homes for the hungry and sick. Although I suppose a church offers some of those services.” However, the lightness sank out of her face when you didn't reciprocate that enthusiasm whatsoever. “You’re unhappy? What's wrong?”
“My husband is a scholar. A rigid man of science,” you said, bending over to pick up the discarded envelope to closer examine the disastrous wax seal. “He denounces faith in all forms. Why did he write a priest's name to me?”
That maddening thought followed you for days afterward, sufficiently distracting you from all the regular vices you'd come to rely on to fill the void of your husband's absence. Fulfill the needs he'd never tried to meet even while he was around.
You spent your days brooding in the window seats in whichever room was warmest, molding against their domed architecture while leaning a cheek flush against frigid glass, eyes bloodshot and watering against the sun’s searing neon reflecting off of a lawn of undiluted, glittering white.
Seldom, a finch or small vermin would come into your view—hopping or lunging through the snow, making tracks, digging holes, disturbing your beautiful wonderland, and almost arousing you into unreasonable outbursts which then inevitably became the servant's responsibility to contend with, should any be nearby to provoke you.
It was the early evening during one of your normal watches, just after dinner and a glass of red wine, when a great clamor carried swiftly to you from the foyer of the main entrance. The servants’ voices were a feverish amalgam of nonsensical babbling, high-pitched, and accommodating in a way that made you think of groveling dogs with flattened ears, wagging and tucked tails, bellies upturned to their masters.
“Come! Come quickly!” called your maid from the sitting room door, her shrill, excitable voice a violent jostling in your head, scrambling your thoughts and anger with it. “Master has returned! He's asking for you.”
You delayed the reunion, waiting several minutes after she had gone before standing. You realized that the anticipation you felt swelling in your chest, rising like growth—a malignant tumor into your throat, thickening your tongue and fouling your taste and smell, was because you were uneasy, haunted by the cryptic message he had presumably sent you weeks ago.
A while later, you entered the foyer to see that most of the staff had already dispersed, and the ones left behind were your husband’s most loyal. There among them, speaking so unremarkably, so casually in a way you'd never witnessed, was your husband. His good spirits and animated gestures as he handed off all his things to many hands were an odd sight, staggeringly unlike his typical dour.
So, the rumor was true. Something was discomforting in that.
Whatever topic he'd been engaged in fell by the wayside once he took sight of you: standing, waiting, subtly shifting your weight, picking your overgrown cuticles to remedy how nervous you truly felt in that moment. You'd always been a little uncertain of how to deal with him as he was hardly affable, but this—
“Oh my… There you are, my sweet!” his voice was the same, but his way of speaking was too jarring, almost lilting. Unnatural. No one else seemed to notice. “I was worried you may have been cross with me for being away for so long. As it turned out, Uncle had far more beneath the surface to find than I once thought. But all is well! The old man has been laid to rest forever. The estate is in the right hands. I've come back to you.”
Could this man really be your husband?
He came to you in brisk strides with a certain clumsiness to the way he moved, somewhat off. You thought about seasoned drunkards who could walk along a path, but never on a straight line without gently swaying on and off of it. Mostly in control, but never so well as to appear normal.
But you didn't detect that stiff, hot, fermented reek of alcohol on his breath, nor any subtle odor sticking to his clothes as he gripped you tight in an embrace. The only one he'd ever given you. Where you should have been over the moon in joy at his profound change in heart, the little sweetness was like an anchor—arms of a sinewy willow pinning you to an even stronger trunk.
“God, you're breathtaking.” He even sounded winded as he spoke, lifting your face with both hands to see his dark, dark gleaming eyes. You flinched from his cold touch, fingertips pinpricks of pure frost and ice as they pushed into your skin, but you felt something trying to reach much deeper than that. “Come with me, my love. Let me show you just how much I've missed you.”
As if fantasy had become real, he fucked you relentlessly that night next to the fireplace, consuming you so completely that every orgasm made your insides churn in agony.
He laved at you with his entire mouth, tongue, and teeth, hardest at work while his hands bruised and fondled you, fingers thrusting up into your tight hole oozing his saliva and your arousal. It was shameful to think that it took this sort of handling from another person to get you off, squealing like a sow.
He fucked you however he could, wherever he could. Rutting you from behind and against furniture, pressing your bare chest flush to frosted over window panes to make your nipples erect and ache from the cold biting them. Then, you were settled on his lap in front of a mirror hanging adjacent across the bedroom, his thighs spreading you wide open before your own reflection, where you watched his cock plunge deep, filling you to the base of his shaft, balls slapping your sticky skin.
“Touch yourself, darling.” His throat rumbled, turning over stones and shards of glass. There was something of a wheeze that trailed the end of every word. A throat parched for far too long. “Touch yourself. Watch yourself while you do it. Fuck yourself like the whore you are.”
Although the things he said were horribly uncouth, unbefitting of a man of his status and whom you'd known him to be, there was great allure in hearing him, obeying his wants. You'd only had one glass of wine that evening, but your head and body warmed and buzzed as if a river of the stuff had run between your lips instead.
His voice was a raspy whisper in your ears, seeping deep into your mind; spreading; fitting the grooves of your brain like the slow sprawl of sap through the gaps in bark. You were hardly yourself those minutes, those hours onward where you witnessed your reflection stroking throbbing parts, moaning, weeping, coming until it hurt, and then doing it all over again.
The person in the mirror seemed to be someone completely different, whether simply a disassociation from yourself or some hallucination evoked by exhaustion and ecstasy. Your husband had faded into the background, his voice creating sounds and noises, holding the cadence of language while seeming entirely improbable, unknowable to you.
You couldn't understand him, yet you could, and the things he said were vile and moralless. He told you of every way he'd like to fuck you, watch you be fucked; but, mostly, he wanted you to fuck yourself with the bulbous bedposts, the metal phallus held under lashing flames to be inserted next to his own cock.
He suggested orgies where the servants could take turns with you. He had almost convinced you to call for your maid so he could watch you suck on her breasts and lick her clit, while he rammed you from the back. He suggested drugs and whores, robbing the mortuaries, and worse and worse and worse and worse…
The next morning, you were stiff and immobile, bedridden unless two servants came into your room to help you squat on the commode. Your abdomen was tender, and your genitals were untouchable, forcing you to lie in bed without undergarments to alleviate the raw chafing from fabric.
“I'm sorry, my darling. I—I lost control of myself. I got carried away,” your husband confessed later on. His complexion was sallow with a weird, waxy sheen. A mask that fit, but not quite perfectly. Some of his former somber nature had returned to him as he sat on the edge of your bed, caressing the side of your face. He was still ridiculously cold. “Forgive me. I never meant to hurt you. I didn't realize just how desperate I was to see you again until you were in my arms. And then—and then, it was like it was all a dream.”
You thought the very same. You could believe he forgot himself in an uncharacteristic blaze of lust, as men were never taught to be any other way, and most men couldn't fathom the level of restraint he’d had until last night.
Everything else you'd wanted to believe was simply imagined after drinking more than you once thought and getting inside your own head full of sinful indulgences.
Still, one thing bothered you: Father Marius DuMonde.
“I need you to go to the city and find him. And show him this paper. Explain to him everything that you know, you hear?” You'd handed your maid the old envelope and scrap of paper, and given her a generous allowance for her travels. She looked at you, everything else, in bewilderment. “Don't ask questions. If you're able, bring him back here. Beg him if you must. If it's all nothing, he will simply be an honored guest we feed well, house, and send off gracefully the next day. Should it be something…”
“Are you afraid of him? The Master?” asked the maid, perhaps out of faithfulness to him. Perhaps out of devotion to you the most. “What do you think happened at his uncle's estate?”
It would all be speculation and unjustified gossip without proof, of which you had none. So, you told her that you couldn't be sure of anything right now. “Wait until sundown. Take the old pony in the stables, the one that usually lags behind all the rest. Be silent. Be careful.”
The maid did as you asked and left right before the final light was extinguished by indigo nightfall. You were able to move to one of the windows, seating yourself gingerly, watching her lead the sluggish old pony into the cover of tree tops, and then nothing else.
But, five days later, the maid hadn't returned from her mission, nor had you received any correspondence from her, nor the priest that she was supposed to retrieve.
A week after that, it was revealed to you that neither she nor the old pony had made it out of the woods.
The details of the old pony were so gruesome you couldn't bear to remember them. But, the maid was found nearly decapitated, head twisted around to face backwards, her pale skin hideously purple and black, and swelled where it had been stretched like a strap of wrung leather. It was mentioned she had been disemboweled as well, but you promptly burst into tears and ran from the room before the visiting coroner could finish speaking, leaving him to discuss the rest with just your husband.
That night, you lay next to your husband in bed. The deep silence of the night filled your ears with static and crunching cotton. A hum resonated inside your head, your chest, seeping into your bones like a cold blanket of rainfall. The black air took on weird shapes: imagined appendages curling, reaching across the ceiling towards the bed, towards you. Your eyes couldn't focus enough to ward them off, nor the depth of the dark your husband's silhouette had at your side.
He was faced the other way, unmoving. You ventured closer to listen for his thin breaths of sleep, seeking out the automatic rise and fall of his body. He could've been mistaken for one of the dead. As dead and gnarled as your maid.
“Who are you?” you asked him. Asked the swirling nothingness in the room. “Where is my husband?”
“You've nothing to worry about, my sweet,” he said readily, so clearly anticipating having your voice ring out at some point in the night. “He is here with me, such a selfish, unlovable man. I am the one worthy of this vessel and you. Not he.”
Then, he rolled on top of you and kissed you deeply. Your bedclothes were shucked from your bodies, and he pushed your thighs apart to seat himself inside of you. He took you with greedy thrusts, face fitted against the arch of your neck where his breath left a moist film across your skin, but the rest of him was freezing.
Your whimpers were dwarfed by his hot moans into your flesh, teeth suddenly sharper and sinking deep when he bit into your neck. You were trapped staring at the ceiling, wrapped in agony and pleasure, feeling his body under your fingertips, beginning to distort and change into something far more monstrous.