Scene 35
Kit Marlowe’s lodgings. He stands alone, still blood-spattered, in the middle of his room. The bed remains in disarray, the basin blood-stained. His bloodstained suit lies crumpled by the door. From beneath the floorboards come the sounds of women mourning. Kit holds his dagger.
“Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?” Kit spoke to the empty room, the dagger in his hands, the bloodied suit. His own voice, little more than a whisper, startled him.
He tested the dagger tip upon his finger.
He’d thought of this from the moment he’d first found Imp dead. But the thought hadn’t fully bloomed upon his tired mind until he’d left Imp with his grieving mother and come here, to his room, to the bloodied suit, the mute witness of his crime.
If he could no longer control himself, if his body would wander the night killing even the one dearest to him, then Kit must die. It was the only way to avenge himself upon himself.
Feeling the dagger tip, wondering how he would take the pain of its entry into his body, when he could barely stand a cut taken upon shaving, Kit sighed.
For how could he, who had so often written about death and murder and terrible events, in fact, be afraid of death? He who had sent others to the gallows, yet recoiled from an easy end. And why did he? What had he to live for?
He spoke, his words hardly moving the cold fear in his mind. “By my troth, I care not: we owe God a death: I’ll never bear a base mind.” But he didn’t believe in God, and yet, from the darkness of his mind other thoughts issued. He’d murdered, he’d killed, he’d betrayed.
If there were a God—oh, what vengeance would not that God wreak upon Kit after death?
He thought of John Penry. God have mercy on us all.
Oh, if Kit only believed upon a merciful God.
But if he tried to picture God, Kit always saw his father, and he could not imagine mercy there.
“To die, to sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there’s the rub for in that sleep of death what dreams may come?” Would he dream of Imp? Or forever be shunned by the beloved shade? Oh, heaven if there was heaven, judge upon Kit’s unworthiness for all but eternal torment and damnation.
He shook his head.
Holding his dagger gingerly, he looked at his own reflection in the polished round that served him as a shaving mirror.
What good was earth, when Imp was gone from it? What good living, when the future had died?
It was time Kit should brave the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.
If nothing else were earned, at least Kit would not remain upon earth to be guilty of other deaths.
Holding the dagger gingerly, he stretched his neck and took a light swipe across his skin.
The skin parted, a line of blood appeared. Not deep enough to kill, not deep enough to bleed much, in fact not much more than a cut in shaving.
The sting from it protested along Kit’s nerves, but he would not listen.
“It will not hurt,” he told himself. “Or if it does, I’ll scarce be alive to feel it. Cowards die many times before their deaths, the valiant never taste of death but once.”
He raised his arm, meaning to bring his dagger down and cut his throat, and let that blood flow freely for whose continued existence so much blood had been shed.
But his hand stayed in midair, suspended, the dagger glinting in reflection upon the polished metal round.
Kit tried to pull it down, but it would not move. He tried to bring the edge of the blade down on his skin, but his arm would not obey him. “What wonder is this?” he asked. “What wonder? Am I such a coward, then, that my own limbs rebel at the thought of death, and won’t do the deed?”
He tried harder, his hand barely moving.
In the metal upon the wall, he saw his mouth open, and though he meant not to speak, a voice issued through his lips. “You cannot kill yourself, Master Marlowe, for killing yourself would kill me also. I’ve been with you through a sunset. We are entwined, enmeshed, so far involved, that your body and my soul are one. And I don’t wish to die.”
For just a moment, Kit thought that it was himself talking, his other half, the dark, secret half that had turned in John Penry, that had killed Imp.
Then he remembered where he’d heard that voice.
The elf in the alley, that night.
Kit looked at his blistered hand and remembered the burn of the iron gate in that alley. He remembered elves hated iron.
Kit was not an elf. But he was elf-possessed.
Kit’s hair rose at the back of his neck as he realized what had happened. The elf had possessed Kit, taken over Kit’s limbs.
Kit was a prisoner in his own body.