The Greenhouse continued
I hadn't made up my mind then if I was going to shoot him or not. In the morning sunlight that came in scant and green-hued through the moss, his skin was very faintly viridescent; a very pale shadow in the hollow of his throat, in the crook of his arm. That light played along his flesh as he moved and I watched it, and he watched me with nothing like alarm. In the day his eyes were dark, blackish green with a single fleck of fuchsia, sentient, untroubled. They were not even an animal's. Nothing ever disturbed him, certainly not my malice, and he stared while the sun shifted and the light shaded from one green to another. He stared for hours, until something else caught his attention, something thumping softly in the corner of his cage. It was one of last night's moths, bright wings folded and ragged. There was no alteration in his expression, in the intensity of his gaze. It was agony to have that gaze elsewhere. That was the crucial part, that was when one was well and truly lost; the hateful need, the longing for what one did not really want, that was what he liked best of all.
***
It had never been difficult for me to slip out of the house unnoticed, and my last night there was no different. I moved soft-footed across the floor, down the stairs and out into the yard. A false step would have been fatal, but I knew the way to the greenhouse very well.
Inside, in that rich, heavy air was his cage, and within that the faint impression of his form, his lambent eyes. Great, spangled moths alighted on his hair, his skin, spun drunkenly around his body. He put his hands to the glass, a beckoning gesture. I leaned forward, touched that glass as warm as flesh; three solid inches between us, yet it felt as if he was all around me. His moth-kissed lips were so close; I kissed the glass.
His laughter was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. Not evil, but malicious, the pleasure in it all cruel. He was laughing at me, the perfect curve of his mouth inviolable, and I struck the glass.
I broke my fingers on his cage and my uncle sent me away.
***
I could have broken the glass if I had hit it with the rifle. I wanted to. It was intolerable to permit him to live, unattainable paramour, frigid harlot, parasite, not even one of us. I held the rifle to three inches of glass glowing with verdant light and the charming, vicious pet held within. He deserved it precisely as the vinum python had, and all his fascination would rot into common carrion and I would never be able to see him again.
I smashed the rusted hinges and the glass shattered on the floor like a wave, and he was gone. I let him go, back into the awful forest. It was not mercy to do that, not sympathy or understanding; it was an act of complicity, a merging of malice. It was a trap so cunningly laid, as inevitable as the roof falling under the weight of the vines and humidity.
Yet I wonder if we hadn't, unconsciously, laid identical traps, taken the same steps in the dark of our machinations. A merging of malice, and of what else? His shadow is now always around me, his verdant glamour reflected in my eyes and on my skin. What he took of me I have guessed at, but I don't like to think of it. I don't want to meet him again, and see in the tilt of his head and the crook of his hand the shadow of my soul.
END
