It’s over. Gus lies dismembered below me, with only moments left to live. For the first time in so long, I find I am not screaming. Fascinating; perhaps now I could even speak with some semblance of an ordinary voice. But should I not content myself with silence, when it has taken my all to achieve it?
No. I have one more thing to say, now that I fully understand the problem that tormented my dearest Anura. Namely this: once Laudine and I devised our strategy of planting me inside a wall, of making me into a field of murder, why did we waste it on Asterion? Why did we not use it to kill Gus himself?
I can see it now, what I could have done—should have done. Once I was settled in the wall, Laudine could have sent Gus an urgent message that Asterion was on his way to steal me. Gus would have rushed to Margo’s room, plunged heedlessly through, eager for a confrontation with the minotaur. With that, our shared destruction would have been accomplished, once and for all.
If Gus had died, Asterion would have had no more reason to seek revenge on him. Anura would have been safe, the string of murders terminated, and our story concluded.
Such a trick can be deployed successfully only once; it requires an oblivious victim. For all his insistence that I’d killed Asterion for his sake, I noticed that Gus very rarely entered Margo’s room thereafter. When he did visit her, he paused outside for far longer than necessary—unless he was gazing hard and carefully at the doorway, inspecting the bright material for any hint of telltale flash. Oh, he heard the warning ringing in his heart, no matter how his words denied it!
As Anura must have been horribly aware, there is only one explanation for my choice of Asterion and not Gus as the beneficiary of that particular ruse.
If I wanted more time.
If I delayed my own obliteration.
If I clung to the hope of seeing her again, and declined to let that hope go when I had the chance.
In that case, my love for her was just as selfish as she claimed. Every beat of it was tainted with death. And because of what I did, I likewise compromised her affection for me.
This was why she had no choice but to break with me, to refuse to meet me again. Blood would stain any meeting between us. She would not reward me for a choice that she condemned, nor would she incentivize any further delay. I cannot say she was wrong.
I have struggled in vain to come up with a different explanation for my actions, searched for some feint, for any wild lie that could absolve me. There is none. And if I was not conscious of my choice at the time, I chose nonetheless. Where death rotted my body, undeath befouled my spirit. It turned me callous, greedy, and wanton.
And in that spirit, I chose.
But listen, my dearest, if these words ever find you: you did not. You carry no guilt for a decision I kept secret from you. Even though I leave too late, I am leaving now. When I make what poor amends I can, I will do so in your name.
Oh, how happy I would have been to let you have the last word, Anura! I did not fully understand how all my being had bent into a single question until I read your poem, and felt myself answered as I never once was in life.
But I could not let you share my shame, and so I must speak one last time.
I used to think that, if I had died completely at nineteen, if I had not lingered as a specter, then I never would have known you.
Now I think that, if only I had died completely then, I never would have disappointed you.
I end my story here.
Editor’s note on the third edition: Anura’s poem “Catherine Bildstein” was believed lost. The first two editions of Written with a Stolen Hand: The Posthumous Journal of Catherine Bildstein were published with an afterword by Madame Laudine speculating on the poem’s contents; those speculations have been largely but incompletely confirmed. It was only when Margo Farrow’s apartment was repurposed as a storeroom, and its furnishings desolidified, that Anura’s manuscript was discovered embedded in the infamous chair, slipped there presumably by Catherine using Angus’s hand. The full text follows.
Catherine Bildstein
—Anura
What word am I, what word become
When you have slain
The other one?
Oh, break me once, break me
Again.
How love the dead, as I have done
When death divides
Like cells that run?
But I divide most like
A stone.
You, broken off when still so young
In vital death
How understand
This static life, which love
Grinds down?
A blow like yours is never clean.
Its fractures spread
As if the wind
Carried a hammer in
Its hand.
Each fissure shows a thousand planes,
Contrary lights
That meet again
In webbed complexities
Of pain.
And shattered now to glinting sand
I drift where form
Was never known—
Yet sand in time becomes
New stone.
My facets hard-compressed within
And what denies
Joins what affirms—
My whole word, then
Is Catherine.