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I
It all came to an end the same way it had begun: the disfigured bodies sprawled across the floor; the blood reddening the white marble of the pavement; the sacrificial knife lying on the altar; the boy’s laboured panting; his own steps reverberating around the room, which had been recreated in the image of the one where, four years before, the same spectacle had been performed. Being a creature of eternity made him particularly inclined toward the cyclic nature of things. Their eternal recurrence.
During his long, long existence he had seen the events repeat themselves over and over. It seemed somehow fitting that this extraordinary affair would find its conclusion at the closing of the circle. Yet, it was a privilege of humans, such fragile and ephemeral creatures, to see anything of some significance in it. Precisely for this reason, he couldn’t wait to see how the boy would react to the irrevocability of his revenge, now carried out.
Now then, young Master, Sebastian thought, is this not what you expected?
He turned towards the boy. He was sitting, no—he was slumped to the floor; the same person Sebastian had heard ordering him to kill them all, voice raw with fury and frantic eyes. At some point, though, the show must have been too much for him to bear, and his legs had given out under the weight of his own tiny body. Now he was resting on the ground, like a puppet whose strings had suddenly been cut, his blue eyes dull as they took in the reality of what surrounded him. In the right eye the Contract still glowed, now fulfilled and only waiting to collect its compensation.
The demon looked at him intently, not hiding a certain anticipation; it wasn’t the first time he had decided to bind himself to someone who had consecrated his whole life to one single significative act, and he had been a witness to how humans were rarely able to face reality: that the carrying out of that act—to which their whole spirit had yearned as if, once fulfilled, their body would be incinerated without leaving any trace of its worldly toils—had very little of a decisive weight in the economy of life. To say it differently, that the sun would come up again to cast its light over days like the ones which had come and passed, and a way would have to be found to deal with what had been done and what was yet to come from a future unimagined. This, he knew, was necessary for human beings, unable to conceive the reassuring futility of endless time.
But, on the other hand, it was the first time he had bound himself to someone like Ciel Phantomhive, the soul that promised to be the most delicious one of the countless that he had devoured during his long stay on Earth; the soul of someone who, of his inflexibility and austerity, of his pride and determination had made an impenetrable shield, keeping his core sheltered from any degradation and external impurity, thus incubating that personal and profound corruption which is always found within those personalities who are devoted to an irreducible hate. The poisonous resentment which inspired every action of the young earl was exacerbated by his own naivety. It was the naivety of one who held onto his torments like the drowning man clings to the rock; as if the value of his own life, the image he had built for himself to the point of believing in it deeply, more—as if his very survival depended on them. The act which was the natural coronation of that hate, vengeance, wasn’t just an act to be carried out against those who had killed his family and brought shame upon his name; it was an instinctive and uncontainable desire, a mania, but most of all, it was the measure of his existence and a seal to be put over his being. All this was what had made Ciel unshakable. This, and the Contract, naturally. In Sebastian’s eyes, the boy could not be bent.
And for all these reasons, the sight of that same boy, prostrate on the floor, with his clothes soiled with the blood of the people whose death he had invoked incessantly, in waking and sleep, for three years, was to Sebastian something almost unbearable. It was something shameful, deplorable, mortifying . . .
Tedious, the demon thought.
He went to the boy and a mocking grin creeped over his lips as he took him in his arms. In that moment, that frail and thin body didn’t seem his young master’s at all but that of a random boy, fragile and helpless.
The sneer on Sebastian’s face became deeper as he spoke mellifluously to the exhausted boy, resting against his chest.
“It’s over, young Master,” he said. “So. Was this not what you expected?”
When he got no answer, a sigh escaped the demon.
“Oh, dear,” he cried, with a voice that made nothing to conceal its wickedness. “Perhaps the young Master was not ready to see his wish fulfilled before his eyes? Was it too much for you, after all?” he taunted.
At those words, the body he held in his arms went suddenly rigid, retrieving the distinctive solidity and dignity of Ciel Phantomhive.
“Burn the place down,” came the order, the voice which gave it was muffled against his shoulder but firm and inflexible.
The demon hesitated for a moment.
“Young master,” he said, “do you regard it to be absolutely necessary?”
The boy’s head came up from where it was resting against the demon’s shoulder and his blue eyes fixed themselves into the scarlet ones of the other. In that moment, nobody would have been able to tell which belonged to a man and which to a demon. Ciel took Sebastian’s face and held it hard between his hands.
“Be quiet!” he cried. “I want it burned to the ground, do you hear me? Nothing of this place must be left! Have you forgotten your duty? This is an order!”
The earl collapsed against his butler again, his fists clenched against his chest.
Sebastian sighed, and a shiver of pleasure went through him, seeing that even in the final moment, when everything was over and decided, Ciel Phantomhive had not disappointed him.
“Yes, my lord,” he said with a sense of gravity as he came to the candelabra in the centre of the room, and, after removing the glove from his left hand, he engulfed the building in the sweet flames of hell.
The demon came out of the building carrying his protégé with him. He left the fire behind and rode upon the night, heavy with clouds, the boy held safely in his arms, anticipating what would soon come.
II
When they arrived at the Phantomhive estate, Sebastian brought Ciel to his bedroom and lay him on his bed. The young earl hadn’t uttered a single word until that moment, his face hidden against Sebastian’s neck to shield himself against the whipping wind, as the demon ran into the night. Even now he was still, sitting on the edge of the bed, his cloudy eyes downcast. Sebastian watched him, composed and waiting, a few steps away.
The run into the cold night’s air had evoked a faint blush over the boy’s cheeks that the demon could see even in the dim light of the candles, lit over the candelabra on the bedside table; the dancing shadows enveloped in total darkness the part of the room that lay outside the light cone. The heavy curtains were drawn open beside the window, but not a single ray of moonlight could penetrate into the room through the thick blanket of clouds. Even if he was absorbed in his own thoughts, the boy’s face had donned his usual expression—between resolute and indifferent—of one who has long decided not to give in to fragility nor hesitations of any kind. Nevertheless, the demon thought, he looked impossibly young.
In Sebastian’s memory, very few had been the occasions when he had shown his true age, taking off the mask of gravity that he had forced upon himself. Perhaps, thought Sebastian, his young Master, confronted with his death’s approaching, was musing over the fact that he would never have the chance to grow old. Or maybe, as many who had come before him and many who would undoubtedly come, he was reminiscing all that had brought him to this point. Perhaps he was unearthing all his expectations and illusions, calling the scene before his mind as he had seen it play over and over, and comparing it with what had actually happened. Sebastian could tell that the comparison was disappointing to the boy. After all, wasn’t it always? But it was now irrelevant.
So, young Master, thought Sebastian.
In that moment, without recovering from his stupor but with his face slightly hardened, the boy spoke.
“It is time. Now everything will end, will it not?”
His voice did not falter, did not alter, did not betray any emotion, as if that of which he had asked had nothing to do with him if not very remotely, and in ways he could not completely figure. The demon’s face became immensely sweet.
“Yes,” he said. “I will give you death soon, as my last duty to you, young Master.”
The boy looked at him absently, his eyes fixed. He nodded, then he rested his eyes once more on an indefinite point in the darkness, behind Sebastian’s shoulders. The demon waited and saw his master lift a hand slowly, bring his palm before his face and rest his fingertips over his right eye. The eye patch which had hidden it from the world was gone. Lost in the fire, no doubt.
“Will it be painful?” asked the boy.
Sebastian smiled a condescending smile, which masked perfectly the rush of power he felt surging within himself. “Yes,” he said. “But I will try to be gentle, if you wish.”
“No,” came the answer, without hesitation but as if from a long distance away. The boy’s eyes were fixed over the demon’s ones. “Put a brand of pain over my soul. It will be the mark of a life that was worth living,” he said.
Sebastian’s eyes gleamed for a moment, as a shiver went through his body, clad in the livery of the Phantomhive butler. And as one, the demon kneeled before his master for the last time.
“Yes, my Lord.”
Ciel looked at his demon for a moment and then seemed to give out; it was as the sudden disappearance of something inside of him which had sustained him until that moment, as if the formidable strength of will which had kept him upright in the last few years had left him all at once.
Sebastian, as if prompted, stood up and went to the boy who, through eyes now glassy, followed his every movement. The devouring hunger which Sebastian had held off for so long raged now in his body like a firestorm. Nonetheless, it had never been in his character to give in so easily to his most desperate instincts. And a certain level of care was needed towards a soul so peculiar as this. The demon took off his gloves and bent over the boy. He kept looking at him and his eyes never left him, not even when Sebastian touched his face. The demon’s fingertips were very cold on his feverish skin. A look of alarm flashed over his face—the boyish eyes, round and blue, widened and looked even bigger—only when the demon’s fingers trailed down his neck and proceeded to unbutton the collar of his shirt. A moment later, Sebastian pressed his lips against the white skin thus exposed. He felt Ciel’s body stiffen at a touch so unexpected, and heard the breath catch into the boy’s throat, now at his complete mercy. The reaction caused the demon to grin perversely: it seemed exceedingly funny that, in such a situation, the boy still had the presence of mind to see the gesture for what it was and be distressed because of it.
As the smell of the soul contained within that young body hit him, the effort to control himself exhausted him. That fragile body under his hands, which smelled of the soap used daily to wash and had an animal scent of blood and sweat—hadn’t he fed, nourished, served that body with dedication for three years up to this very day?
Under the delicate, soft skin against his lips, the erratic beating of the heart amplified his excitement; the frenetic, choked gasps of the boy who breathed against his ear were making him drunk. He could have made of him whatever he pleased; he could have ravaged his body in the most gruesome and depraved ways, destroyed, piece by piece, that demeanour of which Ciel had made his pride, shattered the idea he had of his own death and of himself; humiliate him so utterly and irrevocably that his shame would be the last image Ciel would have of himself.
His lips slid hotly and greedily towards the boy’s chin, while his fingers went on to undo the buttons that he himself had carefully fastened only that morning. The gesture elicited a new reaction from the young earl; his fists closed around the fabric of the demon’s sleeves, and when Sebastian’s bare fingers came to rest over the naked skin of his abdomen, just below his sternum, he flinched and jumped.
A broken sob escaped his lips: “S-sebastian—”
In that moment, the demon took the boy’s trembling lips between his, as if to wipe away his own name, and felt him wince once more. Ciel was terrified, and his terror reverberated through Sebastian’s own body in the shape of the sweetest and most depraved pleasure. Did the boy know that the soul leaves the body through the mouth? He smiled against the bloodless lips of his master and the deepest darkness descended suddenly into the room. The only visible thing then were the demon’s crimson eyes, which glowed in the dark like burning embers, as Sebastian took his demonic form. He felt his body stretch and become more sinuous; his scalp lacerated against the pressure of a couple of twisted horns, and his gums burned as his canines bent into sharpened fangs. Against the boy’s stomach, his claws scraped the delicate skin, drawing a moan of pain and surprise from the boy which did not leave his throat, choked by the scorching lips of the demon pressed over his mouth. The smell of blood reached Sebastian, and in that very moment he acted.
His right hand slid against Ciel’s face, encouraging him to bend his head back a little. The boy’s neck did not resist, and the disquietude and fear that the touch had elicited, heightened by the inability to see anything, gave Sebastian a precious diversion. In a flash, the other hand, which was still resting against the boy’s abdomen, pressed forward with great force. The claws ripped the flesh as if it were butter, and the demon’s hand sank into the narrow chest to the wrist.
In his arms, Ciel’s body gave a tremendous lurch, so forceful that Sebastian feared he had snapped in two, and only the hand that was holding his head still prevented the boy from collapsing. His hold on the demon’s arms became convulsive and a choked groan of indescribable agony escaped him, fading into a gurgle as the blood flooded his throat. Sebastian forced the boy’s mouth open and drank at the hot, dense liquid that gushed out of it with voluptuous greediness. To him, it tasted of nectar and ambrosia, and it had been oh, so long since he had last feasted with such enthusiasm. Sebastian was as if drunk as he sucked the blood of his young master in big mouthfuls, and he himself was surprised to see what a gaping chasm his body had been for all those years as he felt the vital liquid flow into every crevice of his being.
As he felt the flux decrease, the demon drew back from Ciel’s face. Unlike the boy, although it was pitch black, he could see his face, his eyes wide with terror and with agony, his ashen cheeks wet with tears. His lips were livid and drenched in blood, which had dribbled on his chin and chest. Ciel gasped and mouthed a little, as if to say something, but he could not utter anything more than a weak rasp.
An obscure sadness creeped into the demon’s intoxication then, as he set himself to finally taste that soul he had longed so much for. Sebastian did not know what to think of this sudden change that was taking place within himself, and dismissed the unpleasant urge that was telling him to stop immediately, before something terrible and final could occur; he was long past the point of no return. With the obscure feeling of being dragged by an overpowering force toward something unknown, he pressed his lips to Ciel’s ear and murmured softly with a voice full of care: “Please, forgive me, young Master. Just a little bit longer, it will all be over soon.”
He looked Ciel in the eyes for what he knew was the last time. The boy’s eyes were glazed, and Sebastian knew that a deeper darkness than the one he had evoked had already come over his master.
A sinister smile bent his lips, which were approaching the final feast. But it was as if the feral appetite he had felt before was suddenly gone. The demon was staring into the unseeing eyes of the boy with a mounting sense of both desire and resignation, as if that which he had yearned for so long had finally revealed itself to be beyond his reach and was now lost, leaving him to lick at the crumbs, or the shadows.
His tongue came out of his infernal mouth and lapped languidly at the blood which was already drying over Ciel’s chin, and Sebastian, moved by a new wave of lust, resolved not to wait a second longer.
He buried his hand further into the boy’s chest, until his fingers were closing around his heart. The demon let his stare hover over his prey for one last moment; then he closed his fist.
A spasm racked through the boy; a weak breath of surprise. Then Sebastian felt the body sag in his arms with a final heaviness. The demon was still, waiting, until he heard the whisper (soundless to the human ear) of the soul leaving the body it had lived in for thirteen, short years. Sebastian was quick to catch it between his teeth the moment it slipped through the boy’s lifeless lips and to severe it from the body.
For a moment, the demon stood absorbed, his free hand cupped against his mouth and around that soul he had fed, nurtured, protected, for which he had done all that was in his power and which bore his mark. Then he bent his head back and swallowed it with a languid, almost lascivious slowness.
The bitterness in which that soul was soaked scorched his tongue and throat. The corruption of the human soul was of such a nature that even a demon could, not infrequently, be impressed by it. Ciel’s soul had in it the same ugliness, the same corruption which Sebastian had tasted in the souls of many. But he found no abjection in it, no baseness; rather, it was a desperate and inflexible corruption, almost lyrical, such as Sebastian had never felt. Ciel’s soul slid down his throat like the sweetest poison. But then Sebastian tasted a greatness, a boundless ambition, like the one he and the whole fiendish multitude from which he descended had felt when their Lord had challenged the Almighty. And then he was falling, falling, plummeting into the deepest abyss. It was a glorious feeling and he drew an immeasurable pleasure from it, magnified by the lacerating hunger he had inflicted himself, a hunger now satisfied.
But he who is accustomed to the monotony of eternity knows how pleasures, even the greatest ones, are no more than fleeting. “Just like my young Master,” Sebastian thought, and, as the thought came to him, he knew with an irrevocable certainty that, being the Contract now fulfilled and the pact thus honoured, Ciel Phantomhive was not his master anymore.
For he was no more at all.
III
Sebastian slipped back into his human form and the darkness which had hung over the room until then was lifted. Finally, the demon pulled his hand out of the lifeless boy’s chest; the mark on its back was gone.
Outside, the clouds had parted and the dawn was growing near, painting the sky in a faded and opaque blue. The faint light creeped into the room between the curtains, diffusing a dim glow over the mahogany furniture and over the body which lay stretched across the four-poster bed. Sebastian needed no light to see, but habit prompted him to light back the candles. He walked across the room and pulled the curtains shut; he retraced his steps and fell back into the place he had vacated, beside the bed.
Ciel lay on it, and he was dead; his legs hung off the edge of the mattress, his arms were abandoned at his sides. His eyes were ringed and half-closed , and even through the patina of death which veiled the irises, Sebastian could see clearly that they were both blue. His lips were parted and the demon knew that if he touched them he would find them cold; under the crimson dribble they were so white they blended into the waxen paleness of the face. Blood soiled his mangled chest and it drenched the clothes and the bedcover. Absorbed, he looked at the gash he had opened into that small chest. He saw himself thrusting his hand into the warm flesh, and that sight, which at any other time would have been deeply inebriating to him, seemed now dirty and vile, even obscene. The very sight of Ciel in that unseemly state, filthy of his own blood, a sight he thought would leave him unperturbed, was pitiful to him, even unbearable. Sebastian clicked his tongue and went closer to the lifeless body lying before him. He reached with a hand to move the hair away from Ciel’s damp forehead and smiled with a soft indulgence.
“Oh, dear,” he sighed. “We surely can’t leave you like this, young Master,” he said to the body.
Sebastian wore his white butler gloves back, then he brought a hand to his chest.
“Leave it to me, young Master,” he said, excusing himself with a small bow.
The demon left the room and went down to the kitchens to retrieve the hot water which was left ready every evening for the young earl’s bath.
As he walked through the slumbering house, he happened to consider the absurdity of what he was doing. The Contract had been honoured; he could leave and let Tanaka or Mailene find the body and dispose of it as it pleased them. As far as he was concerned, he had carried out his duties and collected the agreed-upon payment; he wasn’t wanting of anything, there was nothing that bound him here anymore. Yet, for some reason Sebastian could not fathom, he felt as if he were held by an invisible force, a leash he was not aware of wearing and of which he had been oblivious but that now tightened painfully around his neck each time he thought of leaving his master’s side. The young Phantomhive, Sebastian had to admit with dismay, kept surprising him even after his death.
The water, he noticed as soon as he reached the kitchens, had gone cold. He heated it again until it was scalding, and he filled a tub and an ewer with it. He carried both upstairs and set them down beside the bathtub in the bathroom adjoining the master bedroom. He filled the bathtub to a third of cold water from the tap, then he poured in the hot water from the tub, checking meticulously the temperature, as he always did, as if Ciel could now complain of the water being too hot or too cold.
He took off his blood-stained jacket and pulled his shirtsleeves to his elbows; that too was in a terrible state, But for now it will have to do, Sebastian thought. His eyes lingered over the gloves which always covered his hands, even in these situations; he had never handled his young Master with bare hands. He considered them for a moment, and then removed them. He went through the door that linked the bathroom to the bedroom and stood near Ciel’s body.
A dull, growing sense of regret spread inside of him as he stood there, watching the unmoving lying figure; it was like a thick liquid that made everything dampened and heavy, but which, at the same time, sharpened the feeling of emptiness in those crevices where it wormed its way in his soul, so removed from feeling any emotion. He found himself foolishly wanting (and with an overpowering intensity, almost a physical one that he could feel crawling down to his fingers) that Ciel would stir. The gash that he himself had opened into that frail body was sufficient proof that his master would never move again.
It was in that moment that Sebastian noticed that Ciel had his eyes still half open. With an inexplicable but no less prostrating sense of failure, the demon bent over the boy and passed a hand over his eyes. When he pulled it back, if one had dwelled on his face and overlooked the blood and the unnatural paleness of the skin, one could have fooled himself into believing that Ciel was only sleeping.
Sebastian looked at his silver pocket watch. It was almost five; he needed to hurry. He started to undress the body with a composed but rapid efficiency. His capable hands skidded over the inert limbs, removing a piece of clothing after the other, which was meticulously folded and placed over the chest at the foot of the bed, until the fragile shape of Ciel was completely bare. Sebastian noticed with surprise how the body didn’t seem to have set into the rigor of death. Likewise, it struck him how Ciel looked so impossibly vulnerable, just now that he could not be hurt anymore, when in his life he had faced his own existence giving off an illusory glow of unassailability which came from his unshakable resolution regarding his fate and from the protection of Sebastian himself.
He saw in his own memory Ciel’s enigmatic and indifferent stare, both resigned and stoic, flare into a spark of alarm when he had seen his butler approach with a look on his face, to him unknown, of hunger and desire; he felt again the warmth of the blood wetting his lips and his throat, which had been left dry for so long; he remembered Ciel’s body, how he had felt him shiver against him. Humans, for all they spoke of being prepared for death, always failed to meet it without terror.
Sebastian lifted the body in his arms and held it close against himself, the head resting on his shoulder. Ciel had often been agreeable to being carried in that fashion, but he had noticed how the demon was prone to lift him up on any occasion, if left to himself, as if his weight was to Sebastian the source of some mysterious pleasure, and that caused in him a sense of uneasiness and discomfort. Nevertheless, Ciel consented to being carried whenever it was necessary (for Sebastian could travel faster and more discreetly than a carriage ever could). For the demon, then, having his master in his arms was a very familiar feeling. But now death gave an entirely new heaviness to that small body and a tangibility unknown, and the cold nakedness of the skin over hands bared of gloves, as well as the sense of both extreme familiarity and complete foreignness that was born from that contact, made Sebastian feel as if Ciel had always been a stranger to him until that very moment.
With his free hand, he took the lit candelabra from the bedside table and went to the bathroom, carrying Ciel with him. When he eased him into the bathtub, the water was tinged with red as soon as the heat of it started to melt and wash away the most of the dried blood. Sebastian considered the water; to let the master be washed in such conditions was unacceptable, but to change the water meant going back to the kitchens and heat a new tub and, for some reason he could not explain, Sebastian was loath to leave Ciel. He arranged him with great care against the walls of the tub, so that he was well propped and did not risk to slip underwater, and crouched behind him. The steam in the air had dampened Ciel’s hair. Sebastian nosed it; it smelled of blood and death, but underneath he could detect the sweet, musky smell of his young Master which made his head spin with regretfulness. He closed his eyes and pressed a cheek on the small raven head which rested against his chest. He remained thus unmoving for a while.
Then, remembering that he had to hurry, he roused himself, grabbed a cloth and set himself to wash the lifeless body of his young master. He set to his task with scrupulousness and solicitude, but he could not hasten the process. To wash away the filth and the blood, to see the skin turn snowy at the passage of his fingers held some significance in itself that Sebastian could sense only vaguely, and he dedicated himself to handle that thin body, made heavy with the abandon of death, with a sorrowful and crushing devotion, without knowing whether the pain came from the passing of his master or from the growing realization of how much he was degrading himself, fussing and guarding over his dead master’s body like a dog, regretting his former condition of a pawn on the chessboard of a whimsical boy. Lifting carefully an arm from where it rested on the bathtub’s lip to wash it with care, Sebastian considered again the back of his left hand, where the mark had disappeared completely, without leaving any trace. This fact alone was enough to prove that the demon was acting of his own volition and not because induced by the Contract.
It had become part of the nature of a demon to seal a contract with men to secure their hold over their souls; the first had been Theophilus of Adana, then came Faust, and many more afterwards, and many more would come as long as human ambition existed, and the hunger and wickedness of demons. (Sebastian put the arm back down on the cold ceramic and his cloth went up to the thin shoulders and along the slender, delicate neck that his lips had tasted.) In exchange for the soul, the demon agrees to bend to his master’s will, until the terms of the contract are met. (Sebastian wetted the soft hair and removed every impurity; he stroked away the blood from the face and washed away the filth of what the demon had done.) It came to him that the first gesture he had made as Ciel’s demon had been to wipe away the blood and tears from that childish face which the peculiar cruelty of his fellow men had aged before its time, crushing it under a perpetual scowl. From that moment on, Ciel has proved to be a capricious master, arrogant and cynical, derisive, hostile. But if his former masters had been degraded, abject, mediocre men, Ciel’s relentless resolution and austerity were something that Sebastian had been unprepared to face. Since the very first moment, Ciel had never failed to astonish him utterly and repeatedly. For that reason, Sebastian’s expectations over Ciel had been close to idolatry: there was something in him which had made him desperately heroic to the demon’s eyes and that had intensified his devotion towards the young earl far beyond the Contract’s bond. Secretly, Sebastian had strived to please his Master with an intensity that he had never known he could feel.
As he realized this, his hands had drifted along Ciel’s half-submerged chest and had started to scrub the blood around the gash he had opened there, and under his palm it seemed to him that he could feel a ghost of the heart, thumping frantically while the mouth gaped in an instant of incredulous terror.
Were you afraid, young Master? Sebastian thought, he who knew death well but had never experienced it, destined to be an ever remote companion, until the day of universal annihilation. Was it very painful?
“I wish I could have given you a better death, young Master,” he said aloud, and his voice broke the silence. And with a prostrating mortification he felt that he had failed, and in the crucial moment, the only human being he had ever truly liked. But in that moment Sebastian recalled the words that Ciel had spoken to him: “Put a brand of pain over my soul,” he had said. And Sebastian knew then that he had been deceived.
Ciel had not been afraid to die; the contrary had been true; he had been afraid that Sebastian would hesitate for some reason, having perhaps sensed the demon’s inner devotion behind his façade, and Sebastian’s gestures had seemed too gentle to him to be preparatory to a painful death and he had been afraid that he had at last renounced to take his soul. Ciel Phantomhive, Sebastian saw, had never wished to survive his revenge. And if fate had bound him to life, too proud as he was to take his own life, he would have endured it as one endures a necessary burden, for obstinacy or for a sense of duty to his own family and to the honour of his own name. But internally he had prepared himself for death with hope, even relief, and he put himself into Sebastian’s hands with the full certainty that the demon would grant him his last wish. Ciel had trusted Sebastian with the deepest of his wishes, so sure he was that the demon had wished for the very same thing. It had been this unconditional trust towards him that, Sebastian saw, had damned him.
He had not taken Ciel’s soul; it was Ciel who had given it to him. And Sebastian was certain, certain, that, if he had refused to take it, nothing would have stopped Ciel to order him; and he would have been forced to obey. Suddenly an image formed before him of his young Master ordering him to kill him, and a ludicrous one of himself kneeling in front of him, his face pressed against his front, trying to resist the order.
Satan entered Eden and was envious of Adam and Eve. So he sent the Snake to ensnare Eve. But if she herself had wished for damnation, and begged the Snake for it, then the Snake would have been bound to Eve forever, for damnation exists not when it is seeked. And in that very moment the perpetrator cannot grant the victim’s wish without becoming the victim himself; in that very moment, the two are bound forever.
And so, until the very last, Sebastian had followed the silent will of his master, while he himself was left with the burden of facing eternity without him. And he was almost overwhelmed by the tormenting knowledge of his own impotence before that fact which he had already seen as incontrovertible: for what was left for him, if he could not even say that he had honoured the Contract, his very nature, since the soul that he had devoured, and that he had desired more than anything in the world, had been offered to him? He told himself that things were not supposed to turn this way; he, a creature that had lived for millennia, for whom everything was predictable; only then did he see that the only predictable thing about Ciel Phantomhive was how unfailingly he had managed to exceed his expectations of him.
The demon felt a sudden and burning wave of hate towards the boy, who had condemned him to an existence of eternal hunger; the hunger for his master, which could have been sated only by living by his side and participating in that sad and solemn soul.
But the boiling hate and the humiliation could do nothing against the sheer devotion that moved Sebastian’s hands as he wiped one and then the other foot belonging to that small figure that, to him, would always be his young Master.
IV
When Sebastian had finished, he rinsed Ciel’s body with the water in the ewer, wrapped it in a soft cloth and lifted it in his arms with a gentleness which was full of a mysterious deference. Back in the bedroom, he lay it again on the bed and left it for a while.
He went to the earl’s study and, paper and pen in hand, he wrote some letters in which it was announced the death of the late Ciel, earl of Phantomhive, aged thirteen years. He addressed them to any one who may be concerned with the news, more or less directly; first among them, Her Majesty the Queen and his fiancée, Elizabeth Midford. The demon took care of delivering them personally, and he did so in that very moment, before the addressees would wake up. In the letters, no mention was made of the cause of the earl’s death, and no date for a funeral was announced. One of the letters was left over the desk, so that Tanaka could find it when he came into the study. That was the last task that the demon carried out as the Phantomhive butler, and he carried it out urged by the wish, almost the impulse of returning to his master as soon as possible.
When at last he was back beside the bed where Ciel was lying, no more than half an hour had elapsed. The sun was now rising; Sebastian must hurry. He took some clean underwear and new clothes from the wardrobes and, once he had dried off the boy’s body, he started to dress him with impeccable care, as he had never failed to do. As he dressed the slim frame in a blue velvet dress (which the demon found quite lovely), there was in Sebastian’s gestures some new thoughtfulness.
As he fastened the shirt’s buttons, he gazed at the mark of his own abjection that was on his master’s chest. He traced his bare fingers over the torn skin: he didn’t know much about stitches, but there was nothing one hell of a butler like himself could not do with a sewing needle and some strong thread.
And while some time later he was about to put the shoes on those tiny feet, he paused before he gave in to an act he had wanted to perform a long time before and, with the desperate smile of the drunkard who surrenders wholly to the liquid of his own perdition, he kissed one, two times each of those feet before he let them slip into the shoes.
When that last dressing ritual was over and finally the moment had come, Sebastian put the Phantomhive ring on Ciel’s finger and took his body in his arms once more, and he held him close as he went to the window and opened it and jumped into the garden below, walking slowly towards the gates, past the hedges and the redolent roses, while the help started to rise within the house behind them.
V
And so the creature who, for a very short time in his eternal age, had answered to the name of Sebastian walked into the light of the new day, the boy in his arms, and for a very long time was of this world no more.