The Room Without Walls

A Shakespearian tragedy of kinship, blood, and a love without walls.

As soon as she left, we pressed ourselves against the window. The sky was unnervingly bright for the hour, glowing with a turbid orange hue, tinting the low, violet-filthy clouds like tattered rags of old cloth.

“It is beyond Millcote,” St. John said. “They are drawing near.”

The glare pulsed like a dragon’s breath, fading and then flaring up anew.

Half-dressed, we rushed onto the gallery and stood there, stunned. Below us, obstructing the exit, loomed a great black cross—an instrument of execution prepared for one of us. On the table, a multitude of candles burned, their reflection in the polished marble doubling the light. And a woman’s figure emerged from the gloom, prostrate with outstretched arms, like a body only just taken down from the cross.

“Ave! Ave! Ave!”—repeated endlessly, the chant rose toward the gallery and soared higher, gathering above our heads into a cloud glowing with an invisible fire.

“Ave!”—it sounded almost piteous, laced with secret tears. And then, suddenly, it broke into a cry: “Ora, Maria, ora pro nobis!” The sound rolled hollowly through the empty space and died—it did not rise further, but remained caught within my white cell, swallowed by the velvet of the portieres.

“Each prays as they know how,” St. John breathed, his hot breath scalding my cheek. “This is how I pray.”

He drew me to him and pressed into my lips with an unending kiss, infusing it with a near-religious ecstasy.

The hall door flung open, and against the backdrop of the orange glare appeared a black silhouette, emerging at that moment, it seemed, from Hell itself. The male figure froze in the doorway, motionless; only the stirring of the air moved his long hair, which seemed an extension of the distant flames.

“Ave! Ave! Ave!”—it rang out now more insistently, more demandingly. Eliza did not even flinch as the cold air made the candle flames shudder and an icy wave surged over her incorporeal body.

In that second, the world stood still. There were no more strikes, no more fear for the morrow—there remained only this flawless geometry: the black cross, the body of Eliza mimicking its shape, and the fiery phantom in the doorway. If death had come now, it would have been the logical consummation of this vision.