The Vow Between Us

Standing across from me, silent from the moment the Nurse walked in, the woman who was pretending to be my fiancée took out her phone. It was a black and bulky – a flip phone. The Nurse frowned at her as he adjusted my IV. Sighing, he pulled the bedsheet closer to my chin. My nose twitched. The sheets were riddled with the stench of iodoform.

“Another proposal?” I smiled at the woman who was not my fiancée. If the receptionist or the Nurse had been paying attention, they would have noticed that my hospital visitor wore no ring and she was holding the latest in a long line of burner phones.

“Anymore dizziness, you call. Alright?” The Nurse offered a wan smile; he was heavy set with blonde curls. He left the room without waiting for my reply.

I turned back to the woman who was not my fiancée and who was currently using the name Imelda Lorrie – my dead Mother’s name. She slipped the burner back into her pocket before smirking in my direction. Her teeth were bone white, but her olive skin was as smooth as caramel. She never seemed to age, unlike me. My hair was greying at the temples and I was a poster boy for crow’s feet.

“Well?” I began. “Have you thought about my proposal?” I’d been waiting for a week to hear from her.

We’d met eight years ago, at the stie of Koobi Fora, Kenya. My team had been excavating the site for three days when she arrived, claiming to be a journalist in search of a scoop.

She was not a journalist.

We spent the day together. She was sharp-eyed, quick-witted, often proposing methods with which we could improve our chance of better recovering well-preserved artefacts without greatly disturbing the site. At the time, she was using the name Lorelai Siren. That should have been my first clue. I often asked her who she really was – no tan-line above the wrists, hair cropped in an auburn bun, steel-capped boots – but she would always laugh, saying,

“When you find out, I’d love to know!” Her laugh was the rattle of a castanet: exotic and rhythmic. I often caught her leaning over Dylan, my assistant. He was much too young for her, barely in his twenties, so I was hopeful when I invited her to dine with me once the excavation was complete. To my utter surprise, she declined.

Dylan was found dead the next day.

The next time I saw her was at the airport, travelling under a different name. Grasping her arm, I dragged her into the men’s toilets. She didn’t bat an eye and I knew she was letting me touch her. She could have pulverized me and instead she just watched me with an amused smile.

A man with a curling moustache, as if he’d been yanked from a monochrome movie reel, yelped. He scuttled out of the bathroom upon seeing us.

“You’re making quite a scene,” said the woman.

“That’s the point”. She chuckled, deep and sultry. I frowned. Even her slight accent had been a façade. Or perhaps her current American Dialect was also an act. I decided to get straight to the point.

“Dylan was a good kid. He was kind and hard-working. Tell me why you killed him, or I’ll go to the police,” I snapped. Even though I knew she could end my life at the drop of a hat.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Dylan who?”

“Dylan. My Assistant, whom you killed yesterday. I don’t know how, and I don’t know why but I won’t allow his family to be left in the dark.” The woman sighed and immediately yanked out of my grip. Before I could call for help, she grabbed my throat and slammed me against the wall. I saw stars, a supernova or two. Eventually, her face floated back into focus. But I didn’t beg. It seemed to surprise her, for she loosened her hand and lowered me to the floor. I coughed for a few seconds. The woman immediately began to leave but I called out,

“Wait. Just tell me. Why did you kill him? He didn’t deserve to die. Was it a hit? Who hired you?”

“He made the proposal, dearie,” said the woman. “And you’re right. He did not deserve to die. But he wanted to.” It was then she told me about Dylan’s tumor. Malignant. The Doctor’s couldn’t operate. He didn’t want to put his single Mother and his twin sisters through the ordeal of watching him deteriorate.

“More importantly,” said the woman with a sad smile. “He wanted to leave a mystery behind. He said he wanted to become a Wikipedia entry”. I loosed a small laugh. That would have been the sort of thing he would have wanted.

Carefully, I drew myself up.

“Do you have a number? Or a name. At least tell me that.” I couldn’t let her leave without knowing something.

“How do I know you won’t tell his family what happened?” she asked. It was a good question. I’d never been partial to lying. But, I realised, I had lied several times to the police about Dylan’s death.

“I guess you’ll just have to trust me,” I said. She turned to leave, but not before uttering,

“I’ve always been partial to Minerva”.

Somehow, she managed to find my email. Her own address changed every week or so, but we spoke back and forth. I asked her about what films she liked; she said she loved Disney’s Beauty and the Beast most of all.

Really, I typed back. I hate that film.

Of course, you do, she messaged a minute or so later. You philistine.

I sent her the smiling emoji, asking, Alright then, why?

I always found the characters so relatable.

Oh, of course. Beautiful, educated Belle.

Actually, she typed. I always found myself identifying with the Beast.

She cut off after that and we didn’t speak for months. It always made me wonder. Had she been cursed, been forced to live such a life? Did she reek remorse, repentance? I tried a million times to find her, to find any trace of her. I was an Archaeologist, after all. I lifted secrets from the ground as easily as someone would breathe. I uncovered a civilisation’s past. But the only past I could not unearth was hers.

Upon returning from Egypt – hilariously from a holiday and not an excavation site – I found a brown package on my doorstep. I looked around and noticed a figure wearing a black cap with their hands in their pockets, disappearing around the corner of my cul-de-sac. I did not run after her. I only smiled, lifted the package from my Welcome Mat, and headed indoors. After putting the kettle on, I opened it to find a burner phone inside with a number set to dial. I hesitated. My rational mind thought this could be anyone. This could be her bosses, this could be her friend, or her enemy. This could be one of my school friends who was now a pilot with the RAF. But I dialled the number anyway and her voice drilled into my head.

“Nice holiday?” she asked. I chuckled.

“Wonderful. I’m surprised you know what a holiday is. You’ve been busy this year. Conjoined twins in Boston who could not bear to be separated but who’d rather die. A difficult job. Not for everyone”. I had been trying my best to keep track of mysterious, unexplained deaths.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. The Cops ruled that a suicide”.

“Indeed, they did. What about the girl in Canada? Her brother raped her, and she knew she would not survive the birth. Poor thing”. The girl had been thirteen years old.

“She put in a special request. Two for the price of one.”

“The baby?” I asked, frowning.

“No,” she said. “The brother”. I hide a small smile. Minerva had some sort of moral code.

“Anyway,” she continued. “I don’t want to talk about work. I want to hear about you”. We spoke for five hours, until I was lying on my living room carpet like a teenager asking their date to the prom.

“Come to diner with me. London, Soho. We could go to the Cinema.”

“Or,” she said, to my shock, “We could have a home Cinema”. She wanted to come over. At first, I thought about refusing. This was a woman who’d killed twins, girls, my assistant. She’d killed old women, young men, children. But, I reminded myself, all at their request. They had to fill out countless forms, paperwork and she phoned them every other day or so to check whether or not they’d changed their minds.

“I give them an average of three weeks to decide. They can pull out anytime, but they lose their deposit. It’s surprisingly expensive to be a ghost”. Even thought she’d asked me not to, I took her words to heart. Began searching police databases and library records for deceased women sharing her description. From what I could gather from our conversations, her original hair colour was dark brown and without contacts, her eyes were blue. I found her record at the library, my hands shaking from all the coffee I’d ingested. Her name, her real name, was right there.

Minerva Edri. An Israeli national who’d supposedly been killed with her family in a US Air Strike. She’d temporarily lost her sight and had supposedly died in hospital a few days later. I found my eyes gathering tears. Minerva. She’d told me her real name right from the start.

After our home cinema, which was spent arguing over the merits and flaws of Beauty and the Beast, we started seeing each other every four weeks, often after a kill. She didn’t call them kills, she called them ‘Business Meetings’. Which, I supposed, they were, in her eyes. But, often, at times, I found myself crying in the shower or hugging my knees to my chest in bed. Sometimes, I even slept with the light on. Despite everything I’d seen – dead Pharaohs and skulls of children in dank tombs – I couldn’t seem to wrap my mind around who she was. What she was. And why she did it. She could have gone anywhere in the world, done anything. Often, she said,

“I do this job so people who are in pain and suffering don’t have to”.

I found her services on the Dark Web. They were cheaper that going to Switzerland to be euthanised. After three years or so, I managed to make my peace. And it happened in the strangest way. I saw an elderly man, his face scrunched in agony, trying to cross the road. He had a walker, but it seemed to do nothing for him. Then Minerva appeared, ghost-like in her black dress and grey shawl. She helped him cross and handed him her business card. The man smiled, tears in eyes, and thanked her. She kissed him on the cheek. Turned to me. Startled, she stepped back. And I was crying. Because she hadn’t known I was there.

I remarked on this over dinner that night, at my house.

“I understand why you do it. And I’m grateful that there are people as brave as you in the world,” I said.

We’d remained friends ever since.

Now, Minerva leaned against the white walls of the hospital, her beach sand skin almost painful in its beauty. She was an Angel of Death. And I wanted her to be mine. Otherwise what my Aunty would have to bury would look nothing like me.

“I’ve been thinking about your proposal,” she said. I perked up. My hands, which shook all the time now, came to rest on my lap. I coughed. My throat was tarmac-dry.

“Good,” I said. My voice was a thin rasp. “That’s good”. Minerva met my gaze, and her eyes were hollow.

“I’m retiring”.

We both knew it was a lie.