Legacy

O.K. Mantz

“You know— when the moonlight glistens as mystérieuse as tonight, the glass door of your heart reveals what lies hidden within.”

With inoculating fingers, a woman brushes thin strokes on his arm so perfectly alluring that his shoulders slump and his head leans drunkenly forward. Holding his gaze intently, she bends her back, closing the space between them with piercing, brilliant sapphire eyes and a striking physiognomy: so clear prove her features, cut and shaped by the hands of an inimitable artist, that her entire essence, only through the sight of her visage, simultaneously produces and assuages the gloaming within his soul. By way of a determined endeavor, her Japanese Cherry Blossom perfume gropes across the atmosphere and lays itself entirely prostrate above the man’s upper lip, making him sway to and fro until his eyelids droop halfway and a glaze as the wintertide over freezing water swims atop his pupils. Only faintly does he notice her venereal breath upon his neck, squeezing, clutching at his veins with a wild and lustrous passion.

“Darling—” he barely whispers, his lips numbed by desire. “What lies hidden within my heart?”

The moonlight trickles through the window and unto her legs, plunging the woman into a milky illumination. Beneath them, the soft cushion gives way and they slump forward, their bodies hinged together, physically entwined by infatuation. Gingerly, with her focus visibly stabbing the man, she breaches the remaining gap and gently forms her hand to fit his cheek, caressing his jawline and moving closer to his parted lips.

“Alea—” he breathes, audible only to her attentive self. Placing her forefinger perpendicular across his mouth, she purses her own to silence him. The man nearly tumbles into her lap, their eyes in perfect harmony, the tips of their noses nearly touching. From a distance, a benign voice rings out and resonates within the woman’s ears:

“Mr. Doyle … Kennedy Doyle?”

But the man remains entirely mesmerized by Alea who sits melting her figure into his softened body. He hears not his name, perceives not his own identity, marks no longer his position— all is lost within her sapphire eyes and her rouge coloured lips that now deliquesce onto his own. So tensile and indulgent is her mouth upon him that his whole nature bleeds into hers and he no longer exists, but merely persists because of and utterly for Alea.

“Do you love me?” she gently whispers in his ear. And then, parted, her lips hang suspended directly before his, breathing lightly and warmly onto his skin, drawing out the moment to force his heart to twitch. “Can you love me?”

“Darling—” he barely whispers, his lips numbed by lechery. “You have excited a sulfurous passion within me, a yearning, an appetency so great that it borders on mania. Oh! How could I ever love you? How could I be in love if I am utterly fascinated, enraptured, obsessed?”

A smile suddenly breaks out on Alea’s visage, her strikingly white teeth gleaming in the lower corner of his eyes. Incredibly she widens her grin, her countenance lighting up with a magnificently alabaster shade. Furrowing his eyebrows together, Doyle slants backwards, soaking in the unfolding scene, and feeling as though his feet are slipping off a steep precipice. The moonlight becomes lustrously bright, blinding, and then the creamy globe morphs into a glaring lamp, streaming down upon Doyle’s ghastly face.

“Darkness and Death—” Alea’s voice suddenly and distinctly calls out— “Those lie hidden deep within your heart!”

If the perishing man would twist his head at this very moment, he would glimpse a heinous beam emanating from Alea’s bold features. But his focus remains unintentionally yet necessarily directed to his lungs: for he discovers himself wide eyed and stretched upon his back, every innard and intestine furiously convulsing inside the prison of his skin and between those ragged, crumbling, lecherous bones. Although his eyes remain glassy and covered by a thick porpoise shade of gray, he realizes with an acute sense of clarity that his death lies imminently before him, prepared to consume his waking soul and yield it upwards, or perhaps down into the abyss. But just as translucently, he also discerns and recognizes Alea’s frame and physiognomy; Doyle feels his corpse sink into the cushions upholding him, for his life twists hideously into a moor of deceit, a puddle of pretense and perjury. For this woman had steadfastly remained at his side, poisoning him from the very beginning, his very birth, and planting in place of his heart, a hemlock flower now causing his terrible and long sought for death.

“Alea … Legacy?”

“This will be your Legacy—” cries Alea hysterically, making his frame quiver in the empty room. Yet before her tongue may forge the remaining words through molding spit and air, an inexplicable force she cannot fully comprehend moves her, until she finds herself out upon the cobbled road harkening upwards to hear Kennedy Doyle’s last painful, agonizing breath. Almost immediately after his soul plummets downward, the heavens lightly open, and a gentle drizzle patters down upon the stones. Dark proves the night, forlorn the atmosphere, and the woman stands silently, her chin lifted and sapphire globes raised toward the obscure cumulus clouds. Voices swim around her, drowned by the rain, splattering onto the ground beside her feet. All noise, save one, is shattered and unintelligible while Alea gropes for her sick pride.

“All his life he was so … unhappy,” a woman’s voice utters upon exiting the building behind Alea. And then the woman beside the first responds— her voice soft and feeble, like a great body upon frail sticks or a tall, monstrous building with a foundation made of glass.

“Even unhappy people can have happy moments.”

Upon Alea’s lips a thin smirk appears, marring the panorama with a window to a hideous soul. At once she spins toward the two figures and glares at each in turn, looming over them with a power that could squeeze every drop from the sky and send the desiccated earth into a dark abyss. Her own voice sounds sere, yet somehow sweet and serene, exuding with the black honey of perversion.

“Until they realize they were fatally deceived.”