#im gonna go apeshit abt dora forever now SHE COULD HAVE BEEN SO NUANCED

[kirnet]

1.4k words. read on ao3

Rust Cohle lies in the dark and dreams of women.

He has since his wife, since his daughter, since the drugs and shell casings turned his neurochemistry into a nuclear holocaust. He sees things - the soft curve of Sophia’s flushed cheek, her lips stained purple by juice - in oncoming traffic, the headlights burning his eyes to the point of tears. Strands of hair dancing in the field of his vision against neon signs, soft laughter hidden in the beat of bird wings. Always intangible, always romanticized.

He doesn’t need to tell himself they’re not real. He knows.

He lies in the dark and thinks about women, the mattress springs digging into his bare back, watching the shadows under the crucifix nailed to the wall morph until he’s had enough. He’s not getting to sleep tonight, not anything deeper than a fluttering of his eyelids and the lucid dreams waiting in every corner. Pulls himself out of bed, lights a cigarette and sucks it down like oxygen as he stumbles through the blue light that fogs his hallway.

Catching a movement out of the corner of his eye, he pauses, but it’s just the small mirror nailed to the wall holding his askew reflection. He stops, leans forward, falls deep into the pit of his own gaze until he can feel the bottom. Good, there’s still a bottom to feel.

Realizing the cigarette between his lips has burned to nothing but a stub, he pulls back for another one, vertigo stretching his nerves to their thinnest as the air around him repressurizes. Fields of wheat sway in his vision, and for a moment he’s back in Texas, Claire’s fingernails tracing shapes in his arm as the truck stumbles down that dirt road-

He whips around. There is something there, not wheat, but a woman, her blonde hair tumbling down her front. A faux modesty, covering her breasts as she stands nude only a few steps from his mattress. The blindfold is still wrapped around her eyes, though he knows they’re an overcast blue, and the thorns and antlers are still tangled up in her scalp. They stand in silence, Rust trying to blink her away, but the murdered woman remains, the stab wounds in her stomach weeping congealed blood that drips to his floor. Her lips part - half smile and half scream - before they move, sounding out three silent syllables.

Rust narrows his eyes, steps closer, can feel the ice of her stare dripping down his spine when he can’t return it. “What?” he wants to ask, to grab hold of a ghost and get her to speak. But she just raises her arm to the side, burned dirt still trapped under her fingernails, her wrists bruised a midnight purple, and points to the wall.

When he turns to follow her gesture, all he finds is the simple wooden crucifix, the only adornment in a plane of impersonality. He knows she’s gone before he even looks, the smell of ozone lingering, but he still drops his gaze to the carpet, tries and fails to find dotted wine stains.

He checks his pulse. Doesn’t like what he feels.

-

She follows him around, a funeral procession for the living, always in late hours. Fluorescent bulbs at the station catching moths and buzzing at a frequency that makes him taste copper. He washes it away with coffee and another cigarette. She usually doesn’t pass the threshold through the front doors, doesn’t like all the noise or all the cops, Rust isn’t sure. But she enters when people begin to trickle out, keeps him company when Marty leaves to see his secretary. Or maybe it really is Maggie this time.

He knows her name now, Dora Lange, knows how she looked on her prom night, knows the gap-toothed smile she had when she was Sophia’s age. Right now she’s blue, bloated, her blood stuck in her legs when she was made to kneel. Her wounds have turned black, the once calligraphy-thin rivulets of blood staining wide marks down the length of her naked body. Sometimes he feels like a haruspex, studying the gore oozing from her gut as if it holds any answer, or sometimes he watches that strange swirl in between her shoulder blades long enough to make it move. It could hypnotize a lesser man.

Still can’t see her eyes through that blindfold, still doesn’t know what her voice sounds like. And maybe that’s a blessing, an interruption to whatever chains her to his side, something that stops her from haunting him completely. But Rust doesn’t believe in God or ghosts, so he ignores her, focus turned to the statements in front of him. Canvasing photos, her husband, her friend Carla. “Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there… He wasn’t there again today.”

He can hear her antlers scrape against the window blinds like a bird trapped inside. He has to remind himself that they are an addition, a defilement, not a thing naturally growing out of her skull. She’s a hallucination, an unreality to file away with the rest of the women he knows the names of. Nothing more than neurons misfiring.

“I wish, I wish he’d go away.”

Her father wouldn’t bathe her.

The temperature drops as she nears. She smells like pine and salt, an Alaskan chill fogging his breath, but it’s really just a cloud of cigarette smoke curling lazily in the air. Twists, bends until it's a jagged spiral. A rudimentary shape. Primal. Something a child would draw in crayon. A pictogram etched into a cave wall.

There’s breath on his ear, three short bursts - and then she’s gone.

-

He knows it’s the right church the moment he steps out from the car.

Even with his back turned towards the structure, his hair catching the breeze off the lakes, he knows. The blackbirds erupt up together, flock, whirl in turn into a spiral that he sees every time he blinks..

It’s Lange’s body sketched in his ledger, her wounds and marks. It’s her history printed out in color and taped up in his apartment where she first appeared. He stares at her and thinks, eyes darting from the two dimensional copies to the decaying corpse a few feet away, a beer in one hand and a bottle of pills in the other. Flies buzz and land on her antlers, but she doesn’t bat them away, she just waits.

Sometimes he forgets the shape of Sophia’s nose. He can draw Lange’s lips from memory.

“Devil nets” is what that pastor had called the bundles of sticks they found Lange with. “Bird nets.” Catch the Devil before he gets too close. Trap a girl while she can still sing. Something to tie together to keep the hands busy. A cross. A cage.

She’s in the back of the car, leaking out all over the interior, not that Marty notices as he slams the door closed and strides to the husk of the church’s foundation. It would almost be funny, the way this woman made of smoke and vapor has to stoop to fit her antlers in this physical space, but Rust is too filled with electricity to care. He follows behind Marty, his ledger buzzing underneath his palm, the very fabric of the universe opening to welcome him in.

An owl waits in the charred rafters, watching the men below with half lidded eyes, some sort of angel above the sad mortality of men. Rust can feel Lange’s burning interest in the creature, jealousy maybe, before it spooks and flutters away, utterly silent. Marty doesn’t notice as he toes away at some debris, can’t smell the thunder-crack static in her hair even after she’s been tailing Rust for weeks. Lange pulls her blind but seeing eyes away, her bare feet gliding over splinters and nails, and points. Her jaw works, a fish gasping in oxygen.

She’s not real. They don’t talk; he won’t and she can’t. But there’s a trust there, a knowing in his ancient hindbrain that this is intuition, that this must be the religion that Marty and the other cops yap about. A truth that burns away any darkness.

She can’t talk so Rust does it for her, calls Marty over before he’s even started to move towards the mess of vines. She can’t touch, so he pulls the foliage away, revealing a crude charcoal figure drawn in the exact way she was found in; kneeling, naked, hands bound. But it’s faceless, no mouth given shape on the worn concrete.

Dora Lange’s mouth opens, and Rust cannot tell if she is laughing or screaming.