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Their descent into hell is long, dark, and murky.
Todd won’t look at her, can’t look at her, now that he knows what she is, what’s she’s done.
For once, she is silent. It’s better off like that. He cannot bear to listen to her try and defend herself, and she won’t apologize. Besides, trying to speak in in an endless tunnel of smoke is a waste of breath. It will only make you choke.
Her skin is untouched, he notices. No sign of trauma or pain paint her. She still holds herself the way she had before. Only a demon could remain unscathed after being thrown into a scalding oven.
His hand inadvertently goes to his own throat. The wound that gushed only minutes before was closed and scarred over. He pulled his fingers back to examine the complete lack of blood. He flexed his dry hand, trying to recall the sensation of dying. Of having done to him what he had done to countless others. Only fragments of it remain in his mind: the cool steel of the razor, the tilt of his neck, the loosening of his grip around his wife as the fire lit walls of the bake house slipped out of his vision. He cannot feel it anymore, but he is sure he can never forget it.
Around them, the smoke churns, pulling them deeper. It wraps around their ankles l and curls into their lungs. It’s constraining. It’s punishment.
She walks ahead of him, eyes forward, standing straight. Shes moving with unnatural grace, something she had never possessed in her life on earth. He wonders, for a moment, if she is real, or if she is simply some product of the smoke that pools around him, another layer to his torture.
He wants to reach out, to grab her and see if she is solid. To shake her until her teeth are chattering. To throw her into a pit of fire all over again, just to see if she’ll burn.
He doesn’t. He blames his inaction on the oppressive smoke that keeps his limbs tied.
He speaks out to her, his voice rough and ragged. “Why don’t you speak? Haven’t you anything to say for yourself?” He demands. He doesn’t want her apology, he doesn’t want her flimsy explanation. He wants none of it. But still, he continues.
“Say something, won’t you, devil woman!”
He’s forces his voice louder, but there is no echo. His words vanish into the dense air, devoured by the smoke.
But she hears. He does not miss the way her shoulders stiffen and her face turns ever so slightly. But she doesn’t slow, doesn’t stop.
The silence, now becoming irritatingly familiar enwraps them for a moment more. Then finally, she speaks, her voice low and strained, as if it were painful on her throat.
“I didn’t ask to be followed.”
He lets out a sharp, humorless laugh. She is real. She is just as ridiculous as she was when she lived.
“If you believe I want to be behind you, you are sorely mistaken.”
She turns her head more, just enough to let one brown eye flicker back towards him. Her face is unreadable.
“Then go the other way.”
His brows furrow, knuckles curling into fists. There is no other way, as far as he can tell. Just a straight shot down into nothingness.
He could not escape her back then, and he was damned to never escape her now.
“You should have burned.” The words rose out of his throat before he can stop them, but he does not regret them. “You deserved to burn.”
She tilts her head to the side, as if in thought. “I did.” She replies. “Didn’t take, I suppose.”
She doesn’t turn, but he can feel her words like a hand around his throat. He wants to scream, to lunge at her, to make her feel something, anything. To make her feel a fraction of the pain she has left in her wake.
He forces his feet to move in coherence, moving faster until he is only a step behind her. Her neck is exposed, white and frail. His hands absentmindedly feel for his razor. His friend is not there, and he is reminded of where he is. There will be no simple pleasures in hell. No swift revenge. No release. Only slow agony and the unrelenting presence of the woman he cannot seem to escape.
He drops his hand slowly. It feels like surrender. Like defeat.
She keeps her pace ahead of him. She doesn’t speak or look back. She knows that he is watching, and it thrills her. How nice it is, she thinks, to have his undivided attention for once.
The path they walk seems to narrow, the smoke growing thicker, darker. It’s suffocating, but neither of them struggle for breath. Their lungs are not their own anymore.
Still, Sweeney huffs. He can hardly see her in front of him anymore, the light that originally illuminated from nowhere long gone. Save for their combined footsteps, it is silent. His mind though, is far from quiet.
He hadn’t dwelled on it in the moment, the way his wife screamed when his razor, snug in his grip, tore across her throat. The way she gasped for air as the ruby liquid poured out from beneath her skin. Now, it is all he can do to not hear it in his mind, over and over. He tries to silence it, to think instead of when he held her, as she bled out before him. She was whispering to him, he was sure he could recall that. Not screaming. The only screams then were the shrill distorted ones coming from the oven.
Her. His mind always seemed to go back to her. And what a cruel fate that was.
Every so often, back when he was among the living, he would think back to his wife, his beloved Lucy, and only picture her face. There were no soft eyes and sweet smile and yellow hair. And it made him sick, still made him sick, with himself more than anything.
Because even now, even after his descent into the pits of hell, stifling and unwavering, his mind would not settle on Lucy. Not on the girl she once was, or the unfortunate state that the filth of the world had brought her to. Instead, on the woman he now despised most of all.
They’ve mostly reached each other’s paces by now, yet the silence is still complete. Unnatural. It’s quickly becoming habit, how he wishes to break the silence. Perhaps in life, he took for granted the thousands of topics that she would drone on and on about, saving the shop from complete tranquility.
He wants to break it. He wants to yell until his throat is ripped back open, this time by his own doing. But what is there left to say?
Tell her that she lied? She knows. She does not regret it.
Show her the agony she’s left him in? She would not care. She would use it as an excuse to pester him further.
Confess that he probably loved her, in some warped and pitiful way? She would enjoy that too much. He’d never get away from her.
So, he says nothing.
The smoke thickens. It stings at his eyes and scratches at his skin. There’s a heat around them, stifling and relentless.
He’s got her back in focus now, as she walks ahead of him. She glances back almost immediately, seeming to sense his gaze. Her eyes reflect a flame that is not there. It whites out her eyes, and he cannot look at her anymore.
With his eyes glued to the smoke at his feet, he cannot see her, but he hears her all the same.
“You’re still following. You ought to stop chasing ghosts. Might help you, I reckon.”
Her voice is sickeningly soft, and if he didn’t know her better, he might think it to be a kindness she was offering him.
Instead, it strikes a nerve. How dare she bring up Lucy? And how dare she attempt to compare herself in any way to his sweet wife? His poor, poor wife.
“Lucy was not a ghost.” He knew that now, no thanks to her. Dwelling on it made his vision blur. “And you are not one either. You are a demon. The spawn of the devil himself. It’s a curse that you ever walked the earth.”
His voice is angry, but she is not phased. She keeps walking, not missing a beat as if she never heard a word of his insults.
“Ah, Lucy,” she says almost reminiscent, a sugary tone that makes him want to slap her. “Poor thing. Being alive didn’t make her ‘not a ghost.’ Her soul was gone, and with that her sanity. Had been since you left. That’s what made her a ghost.”
His jaw clenches so hard that it aches. His hands curl into fists, but lay useless at his sides. The heaviness of the Smokey air keeps them down.
“She may have been taken by insanity,” he starts, his voice low and unsteady, as if he may crack at any moment. “But she was not cruel. She was not calculating.”
“And yet you killed her all the same.“
He stops walking. The smoke pulls at his ankles, urging him on, but he stays stagnant. The silence that follows now is heavy, condemning. He will not be blamed for this. He will not. If he allows himself to consider the possibility that this is fault, he will be in another hell entirely. He stares into the smoke, vision blurred. He isn’t sure if she’s stopped as well, but he doesn’t hear footsteps anymore.
“You let me do it.”
“I did,” she responds, not missing a beat.
The calm in her voice burns more than the smoke in his eyes, more than the razor across his neck, more than the blood on his hands.
“You could’ve saved her,” he accuses. Saved her from taking the poison, saved her from the judge, saved her from him. Any of it. All of it.
“I could’ve,” she admits. “But then I’d have lost you.”
There’s the slightest tremble in her voice. If he hadn’t known her for so long, he wouldn’t have noticed it.
“You never had me. You were never her.”
It’s cruel, what he’s saying. But she is crueler.
Then, she turns to him fully, her eyes full of something unnamable. Her lips are cracked in a subtle smile, plain to see even in the darkness.
“I don’t think you believe that, dear.”
He narrows his eyes at her.
“Don’t patronize me.”
“I’m not. It’s only the truth.”
The air between them is stiff. He despises her and every bitter truth she’s thrown at him.
He nearly flinches when she steps closer. She reaches out to him for the first time since they started on this path, her hands icy on his wrists despite the sweltering heat of hell. He can see her face better now, the smoke momentarily seeming to clear from his eyes. A cruel punishment. He can see her in great detail now, the faint rosiness of her cheeks, the sharp darkness of her eyes, the silver strands peeking through her otherwise golden hair.
He should shake her off. He yearns to push her away, to the ground even, and keep walking. To escape from her. But something keeps him glued to the spot he stands in.
She leans ever so slightly closer, keeping her eyes on his. It’s unnerving, and yet he cannot make himself look away.
“If I could go back,” she says, her voice soft and deliberate, “I’d still do the same. I’d still keep her from you. Because you’d have seen her and died right then. Your own grief would’ve done the job before any razor could. And I-“ she cuts herself off. Breathes. “I wasn’t ready to lose you again.”
A beat. A heavy ache, traitorous and ugly, twists in his chest.
“I hate you,” he says. And he means it. He hates how she stands there, unbroken, unperturbed, as if she hadn’t torn everything he held dear to shreds. He hates the way she’s twisted his life into something unrecognizable. He hates that she’s here, and that he has been forced beside her.
But hate, he finds, is not the clean cut emotion he wishes it were. It’s muddied by the image of her- working late into the night in the bakehouse, bringing him pints between shifts, helping to scrub blood off the floor of the parlor. By the memory of her laughter, grating, certainly, but genuine. By the way she never abandoned him, even when his methods admittedly seemed little more than utter lunacy. In some unspeakable, miserable part of him, He can understand her. He understands what it is to want something so badly that you’d abandon all morals to have it.
“I hate you,” he repeats again, as if doing so will make it truer. Perhaps erase the parts of him that don’t.
She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t speak. Just stands there unmoving, the smoke licking at her heels. It rises higher, higher, pressing against their ribs with more pressure than before. Keep moving, it signals.
He does not say her name, and she does not reach for him. Their descent into hell is long, dark, and murky, but they are side by side now. Both a blessing and a curse.
He is not redeemed. She is not forgiven.
Fin.