The King in Yellow Chapter Fifteen

KRISTINA

“Tell me about this vision” Katya prompted, sitting back in her chair and eyeing Kristina thoughtfully. She was a striking young woman – if she were only a few years younger she would be taken for an art student – and her spiked hair was dyed as white as her fishnet stockings. She wore midnight-dark lipstick and eyeliner and a leather bustier and mini-skirt. A tattoo of black roses spread from where the word “catharsis” was inscribed on her breastbone in an antique text.

“It seems so long ago” began Kristina in a voice that was incongruously aristocratic “but it came to me just before Easter, when I was still Sister Kristina at the convent of St Theodota. For some weeks I had felt compelled to intensify my mortifications; I felt that I was approaching some sort of vision – the revelation of a mystery”.

Alone in her cell Sister Kristina lit candles at either end of the narrow shelf over her cot. She shook out the match and disposed of it. Bathed in their yellow glow she unfastened her black habit, stripped it off and laid it neatly on the cot. Naked save for her veil and a cruel, barbed cilice wrapped tightly around her waist and under her crotch, she knelt at the worn prayer stool and closed her eyes. After a long period of silent meditation, she took a knotted scourge from under the stool and kissed it. Then, bracing herself with her left hand she arched her back, set her knees wide apart, and swung the scourge with all her force over her shoulder into her back and buttocks. She repeated this five times at long intervals, gasping for breath at each stroke, and then switched the scourge to her left hand. Now, the knotted thongs cut across the crimson welts already standing out on Kristina’s freckled skin and her breathing became ragged and interspersed with low groans of agony. Her naked body twisted and writhed, making the wicked barbs of the cilice cut into soft flesh – vividly red drops of blood fell from her groin onto the stone flags – until she fell forward, the veil covering her eyes, and lashed herself with what strength remained to her. Her back and arse glistened slick with blood when the pain finally overwhelmed her and she sprawled on the floor in a dead faint.

“That was when the vision came to me” she told Katya, her eyes fixed on her ebony fingernails and heavy, silver rings. “I had often meditated on the martyrdom of our own St Theodota, and as I passed out my thoughts had been of her courage under the whip, on the rack and at the bite of the iron combs. But it was revealed to me that her death had been very different to the story in the ***********ure.