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At first all Thomas could bring himself to feel was a great, yawning void – an emptiness that seethed and churned and ached deep within his chest cavity with a mind all its own. There was nothing else.
The funeral – if one could call it that – came after dusk. It was a small matter for Seivers to procure a stretcher and cart upon which to move the bodies, and no one spared a second glance as the men made their way to a hill on the outskirts of Wisburg in the dying light.
It had been the professor – against all protestation – who had insisted upon an accursed funeral pyre, and had prepared it without them. The dryness in his eyes prickled and burned as the makeshift shroud caught flame, and he could feel the bile rising in his throat. Even in death, her fate was entwined with that of the creature that laid alongside her – even in death, her ashes would be mingled with her – with their – tormentor’s. There was nowhere she could be that was without it.
He was dimly aware of von Franz’s grip on his shoulder as he pitched forward to his knees, his words hazy and barely real against the roar of the flames.
Wherever he is now – rest assured, my dear boy – she is not with him.
The words did little to stymie the mounting dread in his stomach as the flames licked the sky, the stench of burning flesh – his? Or hers? – filling the air, proliferating even through the fabric of his handkerchief.
He stayed there on his knees for what felt like days – perhaps it had been days; how long does it take to burn a human body? To burn an unspeakable evil? Hours? Days? Weeks? Could it ever be truly gone? – until it was finished, only dimly aware of the others remaining at his side. As the flames died down, he half-heard his own voice – barely audible against the blood in his ears.
Now what?
The silence of uncertainty lingered for far too long – after all, can you give burnt remains a Christian burial? Can you give a Christian burial to the combined remains of a blameless woman and the Devil himself?
Consecrated ground.
The scrape of von Franz’s shovel in the ash scratched across his brain in a single, agonised scream – one that he wasn’t entirely sure he had imagined – as the accumulated dust that was Ellen that was Orlock was shovelled into a small, wooden box.
We bury them together – the maiden and the Devil – in consecrated earth. Her salvation alone will serve to keep him down.
There was no headstone – not yet – in the quiet corner of the churchyard where she was they were buried, and there were no words which could claw their way through the dryness in his throat to his lips. He instead stood numbly listening to the professor’s words of prayer – words in German, in Latin, in tongues he didn’t recognise – Seivers’ presence breaking the wind at his back, then guiding him away in silence once the deed was done.
Alone that first night, blood still staining the unchanged sheets of their marital bed, Thomas imagined that he finally understood Friedrich’s madness – the immeasurably heavy grief that had driven him in his final moments to commit the unthinkable.
It was while unthinkingly reaching across the bed that his fingers brushed cool metal and, his heart jolting painfully in his chest, closed his hand, the familiar edges of Ellen’s locket pressing into the skin of his palm like a hot brand.
It took what seemed like an age for him to withdraw his arm, bringing the locket into view, and even longer for his trembling fingers to open the clasp. The lock of her hair was still there, and the smell – that familiar scent of lilacs in the rain – almost buried beneath the thick haze of clotting blood, a stomach-turning half-taste that he couldn’t shake – couldn’t separate from the lilacs no matter how he tried.
No no no no.
He only just managed to close the clasp again before the locket fell from his fingers onto the bedsheets beside him, and it was then that the tears which had evaded him since dawn found him, doubling him over with painful, long overdue sobs, his fingers grasping for the closed locket and clutching it to his chest, the hollowness replaced with a nauseating, twisting grief that threatened to overwhelm his very being.
He didn’t notice the eyes – luminous and large in the dark – at first. It wasn't until the moonlight hit her shape on the sheets just right that he even saw her – ears pricked at attention – through his tears. When he did, they regarded each other for a moment, him red-eyed and haggard, his breath only starting to slow - more out of bodily exhaustion than of a tapering of grief; her stock-still and watching, eyes fixed on his.
A few moments passed, and Greta moved across the bed towards him, blinking slowly, then turning to nestle against his legs, the slow vibration of her body evening out his ragged breathing.
And for the first time in a long time, Thomas slept and did not dream.