Page 21 of Demonic Delights

“Where are you going now?” I ask him.

He gives me one last look before departing with words spoken in a flat, is-it-not-obvious tone of voice, “Why, I’m going to kill Owen Pembroke.”

The minute he’s out of the room, the light stops flickering. Sliding off the counter, I stumble towards the nearest toilet cubicle and throw up violently.

Present day

My eyes flutter open. I’m lying on my back in the doorway, the upper half of my body resting on the warm, soft bedroom carpet and the lower half on the cold, hard bathroom tiles.

Looming over me, Silas’s face comes into view. Over the rich crown of his hair, I can see the light fixture above our medicine cabinet, glowing softly orange.

My eyes meet his, dark and unnatural. We stare at each other for what feels like an eternity, in a silence louder than church bells are at 7.00 a.m. on a peaceful Sunday morning.

“You’re here,” I say when the stillness grows oppressive; a simple, ambiguous phrase that doesn’t fully give away my mounting suspicions.

“I am here ... Roxana,” he says my name after a momentary hesitation, pronouncing it with that perfect, Romanian rolled ‘r’, and as he does, a sinful smirk carves itself onto his face.

The light fixture above the mirror winks at me with a flicker.

9

SILAS

It is late Sunday night, and I’m sitting at my desk at home marking assignments. The air in my study is still redolent of the roast Roxana must have cooked earlier. I say must have, because my current mental state gives a new meaning to feeling as if there had been no weekend at all. Even so, the weekend most assuredly had been here. It’s my presence during said weekend that’s questionable at best.

I really must manage to find a professional willing to see me soon. Otherwise, I may not have a choice but to go to the emergency room because I cannot go on like this. Who knows when someone might notice something?

The last thing I solidly remember is walking home on Friday afternoon, just as the streetlights came on, glowing hazily through the omnipresent mist and reflecting dully off the slate grey of the surrounding campus buildings.

And then nothing.

Nothing but the strangest, most vivid dreams; ones that are lifelike but improbable, the disturbing kind that I always have when I come down with a fever. The kind that feels so viscerally real that upon waking up, I can only distinguish between them and reality by knowing myself and what I would and would not do. Most often, these feature me naked in front of a lecture hall full of students.

But this time they are completely different.

In most of them, I’m roaming over hills clad with miles and miles of silver firs, over rugged peaks, stretching in between deep glacial valleys like spines of giants. Even if I didn’t recognise the nature by its air of eerie melancholy, I do recognise the sight of the road snaking up the mountains in hairpin turns, coiling onto itself like bowels. Supposedly the best driving road in the world, a statement Roxana agrees with vehemently. When she took me there, she sailed through those bends with her foot on the gas pedal, jerking the steering wheel from left to right with the practised confidence of a seasoned race car driver. And she whooped with joy the whole way, completely unbothered by my vomiting into a plastic bag. Still, the Transfagarasan Highway is the only place from those visions that I am sure I have been to.

So why the hell do they feel like my memories of Romania, a country I have only visited all of two times? The only thing I solidly remember from those trips is my mother-in-law’s ceaseless blathering about their female ancestors being burned at the stake for accusations of fraternising with demonic forces.

The worst part is that these vivid recollections of places I have never been to aren’t even the most disturbing of things that keep coming back to me as I pore over my students’ compositions on post-war Germany.

No, the most unsettling dreams all centre around Roxana, her face and her bare body floating in and out of the darkness of my oblivion. Her slender wrists cuffed to the headboard of our bed, her back arching as I’m plundering her with my fingers. Tears and sweat streaming down her face, her broken voice begging me to fuck her and let her come, and my own voice—or rather, some cruel, harsh imitation of it—denying her, even when my balls feel on the verge of exploding and all I want to do is to drive hard into that hot, spasming crevice at my disposal, so wet that it’s leaking its clear, appetising fluids all over my hand.

The thing that surprises me the most—and not so much now as I’m remembering it, but rather in the memory itself—is the sharp stab of affectionate pity that slashes through me as I watch her beautiful body tremble with her need for me. I ache physically with how much I want to kiss her on the mouth—not roughly and hungrily, but with tenderness such as I have never known. And with how badly I long to press my own mouth against her other lips and make her body feel good. How much I’m burning with desire to make her cry with pleasure, not with denying it.

And then, some time later, I have to assume, she’s lying sprawled on the ground in the doorway separating the bedroom and the bathroom, and she’s looking up at me with fear in her eyes. Which is how I know that none of this can be real, because there’s not a thing I could do that would make Roxana scared of me. That thought distracts me briefly as it transports me to the very real memories of our various fights, of Roxana red in the face and yelling at me, “Hit me then! Hit me! HIT ME!”, and me walking away to her continued shrieks: “Coward! Fucking pussy!”

No, Roxana would never be afraid of me. She knows too well that, bar some consensual erotic spanking a long time ago, I don’t have it in me to hurt her. Not even when provoked, not even when she explicitly tells me to, not when she dares me to.

But in another mental somersault, the next memory of a dream comes to me and replays before my eyes, and my stomach clenches with shame and dread.

With my hand frozen over the page, I let myself be fully absorbed by it.

The sun is setting, the already dark, gloomy day getting darker. I have Roxana bent over by the kitchen counter, holding her face pressed against the butcher’s block by the nape of her neck. With my other hand, I reach inside her leggings and push aside her underwear to brush my fingers over her entrance.

I growl.

She whimpers.