The inside of the chapel is candle-lit. It always seems larger when the darkness obscures the walls, making you feel as though this room extended out forever. Kaye knows there are people standing in the darkness, wearing smock-frocks and trench-coats, looking like wandering spirits. She can't see them, but she can feel them, and she knows they're there because she has been one of them. But she doesn't spare them a second thought, because tonight is her turn. Her turn with him.
Her eyes are drawn to the center of the room, where an ornate wooden alter is set with a candelabra at each corner, illuminating the form of Joshua who is lying on the altar's surface as though he were asleep, a white sheet pulled up to his chest. He doesn't look at her until she's just a couple of feet from his face, and when he does, he looks startled, even frightened. But then, recognition floods his expression, and he reaches for her hand. She takes it, smiling down on him like the Madonna as her guide removes her collar, places a ceremonial dagger in her other hand, and goes to his place on the far wall.
Kaye steps forward with the knife in her hand, holding Joshua's in the other. He clutches her fingers as tightly as though he were a frightened child and she were his mother. She has a sudden fleeting impulse to pull his head to her breast. Instead, she lifts the sheet covering his chest and drags it down to his navel, exposing a dark and crooked scar just below his sternum. The mark is broader and more raised than any knife wound: the purple flesh here has been wounded and has healed more times than anyone can count, has sealed and opened since time immemorial. A ghostly smile crosses Kaye's face as she studies the scar. She feels Joshua's hand grip hers tighter.
Then she raises the knife high in the air and plunges it hard into that mark, sinking the blade as deep as it will go into the flesh. Joshua gasps and croaks, his eyes going wide. He cries out with the blistering pain as blood pours from the wound, covering her hand and spilling down his sides as his body writhes. When he can no longer cry out, he coughs harshly and gurgles, and all the while Kay does not let up on the knife. He turns his blanching face shakily towards her and, shuddering, drops her hand.
Kaye pulls out the dagger and steps away from the dying man. She begins to disrobe. The flickering candlelight makes her thighs long and her hair luscious. She is a supernatural beauty now, her black hair cascading down her alabaster shoulders, her breasts full and heaving, her stomach flat, her bare bottom and sex as white and smooth as marble, every inch of her bare and hairless, her fingers dark with crimson blood. She is primal, the first Woman. She is an angel, an elevated being. The dying man sputters as two hooded figures step out from the darkness and pull the sheet over him.
Red blood spreads across the white sheet as the man beneath it breathes his final, agonizing breaths. At last, the sheet is still, and silence settles over the chapel again. Kaye looks at her bare feet. She looks at the blood dripping from her fingers to the floor. She lets the knife fall from her hand and it clatters to the ground. Then there is silence once again.
Everything is perfectly still.
