by Gwen Hayes
I approached the bed slowly, as if the flower were going to flee like a scared animal. My heart picked up an uneven, frenzied rhythm and sent the blood rushing to my head. I snatched the stem and a razor-sharp thorn pricked my finger. Haden had never left me a rose with thorns before. As the bloom fell from my hand, I brought my finger to my mouth, the coppery taste of blood on my tongue while I witnessed my own shadow shifting apart from me on the canvas of the wall.
I jerked from the unnatural sensation of seeing myself disengaged. My shadow turned to look behind her and then ran frantically. I watched her, fascinated as she ran a circle around the room, trapped on the wall yet oddly not attached to me any longer.
I stumbled backwards, searching the room for whatever malevolent force had scared my shadow so much that she was able to flee my person. I felt trapped. An acre of carpet separated me from the safety of my bedroom door and possible escape. All at once, she stopped racing and spun around and upside down like a pinwheel, getting smaller and smaller. Then the other shadows in the room began funneling towards her disappearing shape, and they too whirled like water around a drain. In horror, I watched them all swirl into a pinpoint and disappear.
A room without shadows is an abomination of the laws of our universe, though I’d never much thought of it until I was left in one. It made me itch. The door still seemed so very far away, but I had to try. Girding my nerve, I padded in that direction, only to stop short in front of my mirror.
I wasn’t in it.
I had no reflection, though everything behind me was clearly visible. When I heard the creaks and clicks coming, I was well aware of the state of my affairs. I remembered that sound, that detestable, hideous noise, from the bonfire in Haden’s world. Being frightened wasn’t even an option anymore. The fear had progressed beyond that into something more primal.
It wasn’t Haden who had come for me. I knew that now.
I waited for the skeletons to materialize, my fight-or-flight instinct subdued by an understanding that neither would do me any good. Hell had come looking for me, and I’d rather it found me alone than take someone else in the house along for the ride with me.
Click. Click. Clack. Scrape.
The noise got louder. Then they came through the wall.
Materializing from the pinpoint into which all the shadows had disappeared, four bodies of bones crawled out of my bedroom wall. I whimpered but did not scream, hoping to save the life of my father and Muriel with my last act of bravery, to face the animated corpses alone. One scuffled across my room, reaching his bony finger towards me, though I shrugged into myself to avoid his touch. His joints popped as he wrapped his dry bones around my wrist, startlingly strong. A last effort on my part to pull back from him gained me a slap across my face. The sting and revulsion of his touch battled for supremacy of my senses, but I didn’t fight him again when he dragged me towards the wall.
He placed me in front of the pinhole that had sucked in my shadow. As I looked at it, I saw through it and I realized I could see my room, only without me in it. I’d already been taken to the other side. Yet the journey wasn’t over for me, not by a long shot.
Trapped in darkness, I lost my bearings. It wasn’t just black or the absence of light. I was fixed in shadow. Even more alarming than my previous experience with the laws of the universe being broken in my bedroom, I had been thrown into a vortex made up of stolen shadows from my own world. Shadow was different from dark. It had depth, it felt thick.
My nose stung with the scent of sulfur, so overpowering that I could only guess it was brimstone. It made me choke and clogged my lungs, and the harder I coughed, the more my chest was filled with it. A warmth spread slowly from my toes and worked its way through the rest of me. The heat wasn’t unpleasant. Not at first, or maybe I didn’t notice it as such because of the retching and gagging from the vile odor of hell’s smoke. At some point I realized that the heat had intensified and that I was slowly catching fire.
I panicked. I didn’t go gently like the burning man floating past my window. I screamed and clawed at my own skin. Wanting it off me like it was offensive. Vulgar. I lost track of my escorts as well as my surroundings. Perhaps I was moving, maybe I was standing still. Whichever the case, I was burning alive. Though I was in the dark, I could see my bones charring by the light of my ignited flesh. Had there been any justice at all, my eyes should have gone first. Even when I had no skin left, and therefore no nerves to sense pain, I still felt the excruciating effects.
I begged for mercy, for an end to my suffering. My last coherent thoughts were of Haden burning like this just to see me. Parts of my body that should have been gone hurt with agonizing intensity.
And finally, blessed unconsciousness.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
My skin stretched over my bones too tautly. I’d been put back together wrong.
I suppose the important thing was that I’d been put back together at all. I remembered nothing after I fainted until I awoke on a cold stone floor, my head throbbing and every molecule in my body protesting whatever new arrangement it had been aligned into.
I lifted my heavy head and tried to focus on my surroundings. One would think the damp coolness surrounding me would have been welcome after the heat and flames I’d endured; however, the scene that greeted me was not for my comfort. The floor beneath me was coated in a slimy substance that I dared not try to name. There was little light, enough to elongate shadows and illuminate the remains of two people chained to the wall. They’d been there a long time, if the length of their hair was an indication. I didn’t think they would come to life like the bony skeletons who’d taken me from my room—but I couldn’t decide if that made me feel better or worse.
Where was I? I didn’t remember anything but burning.
Bile churned in my stomach. I had to get out of there. Things were crawling on me already. Things I couldn’t see; things I thought were already under my skin. I crawled to the iron gate that imprisoned me with the dead. An unrelieved corridor stretched to both my left and my right. I used the bars on the gate to pull myself up and tried to angle myself for a better look, but none was afforded me. Just a bleak and barely lit hall.
I was in some kind of dungeon. But why? Would I be here as long as the corpses I shared the cell with? I stood there for a long time, waiting for something to happen next. I stayed there for so long that I started to wonder if I had died and was in some sort of purgatory. My stomach rumbled around emptiness, but I couldn’t have eaten even if my captors had left me something. The smell of brimstone mixed with decay took care of that—but it was the smell of fear that was the worst. I had never known until then that fear really had a scent attached to it. It was palpable and overwhelming. This place was filled with the smell of it. It lingered in the air and was so potent that I realized it wasn’t just my emotion or the emotion of the two behind me who’d long since left this place. Hundreds of people had had the life scared out of them in this dungeon.
I could feel them all.
Why was I here? As the hours crept by, I thought perhaps it was best if I never found out. Maybe my kindest end would be to be forgotten and left to rot. I had a feeling that was better than some of my predecessors had gotten.
I remembered Haden telling me that the first time he physically entered my world, he burned. I assumed that meant I was in Under—but it didn’t explain why I was locked in a cell.
I stood at the bars until I could stand no more. As I slid slowly into a heap on the slimy floor, I lost what was left of my dignity and spilled my bladder. It didn’t matter anymore. I began praying for death.
Click. Clack. Click. Scrape.
I didn’t open my eyes. I knew they were there. The skeletons again.
I’d been dreaming of Haden. Real dreams, not the lucid traveling I used to have. The dreams were disjointed and unforgiving, but all in all a much better alternative than my current reality.
Two skeletal minions hoisted me up, one under each arm, and dragged me down t
he hall. I finally opened my eyes and was shocked to see there were other cells like mine lining the corridor, and people in them in various states of lost hope. Why hadn’t I tried to call out? Perhaps we could have bonded together, if even for a short while.
Just before we turned the corner, I glanced into a cell and my heart stopped.
Haden.
He jumped to the bars when he saw me, reaching out and yelling my name. But my jailers didn’t stop or slow down, even as I kicked my legs and flailed to get back to him. He was gaunt and dirty, but otherwise alive.
If I was going to my grave, I would take that thought with me as my last one.
The skeletons were not concerned with the state of my skin as they continued dragging me through the dungeon. They pushed and pulled me, scraping me against walls and sometimes their own rough bones. We moved upwards, each floor a little more luxuriant than the last. Perhaps they were going to torture me with fire again. As soon as the thought crossed my mind, I pushed it away. The shreds of my sanity dictated that I remain in denial as long as possible.
We finally stopped using stairs, and they dragged me down a carpeted hall. The stone walls were lit by tapered candles in shining sconces, the corridor too bright after my time in darkness. They opened a heavy door and threw me in, slamming it behind them.
I landed hard on my knees, the shock jolting through my body. I didn’t think I could stand, so I rolled to a sitting position to take in my new surroundings. A new word for “surprise” was needed because that could never adequately explain my astonishment at the lavish room fit for a fairy-tale princess.
To my right, a large hearth burned logs that smelled like cinnamon. To my left, a floor-to-ceiling bookcase climbed the wall. I tried to get up to inspect the rest, but my shins felt brittle and sharp. It was then that I looked at my own arms. They were so raw and mottled that I didn’t recognize them as mine.
How long had I been in that dungeon?
The door behind me opened again, and I braced for more rough treatment. Instead of skeletons, I was surrounded by dresses. They pranced around me without speaking, so I finally looked up at the women in them.
Each woman was scarred by black stitching, as if they had been sewn together piecemeal. I gasped to see each of their mouths sewn closed with thick black floss. They each wore the same dress, but in a different color, and their heads wobbled unsteadily on their necks, scars crisscrossing their throats. I flashed on my recollection of waking in my cell, how wrong I felt, and I hoped I didn’t look the same as these women. Was I made up of sutures now too?
They gestured to a tub in the middle of the room, and I noticed steam coming from it. Again I tried to get up, for a bath would have been heavenly, despite my situation; it beckoned to me like a desert mirage. But I couldn’t rise on my own. The women rallied around me and gently held me up and helped me over to the tub. I was grateful for their treatment of me and tried not to react in disgust when the stitches on the arm of one rubbed my skin.
They took my weight and settled me into the huge bathtub, stripping off my stained clothes. I was past caring about modesty. The hot water stung my scrapes, but it felt so good to rinse off the grime and filth that I blinked away the momentary tingle. A heavenly scent of roses reached my nose and for a moment I wondered if they were steeping me like tea for some unknown evil to partake of. And then I looked up at the wobbly-headed ladies-in-waiting and realized that my errant thought might not be too far from its mark.
They fluttered around me, tossing flower petals into my bath and looking at one another like they were so very pleased with their task. As if they were some kind of Stepford wives. It was upon closer inspection that I realized the piecemeal of their bodywork reflected a pattern of sorts, a morbid one at that. The scars on one matched the scars on the other two. None had a matching set of eyes, but each was different in the same way. The three of them were a . . . blend of one another.
Someone had hacked three women apart and darned them back together as a mix-and-match.
I shuddered. Had their surgical adventure begun in a rose-scented bath as well? Was I being prepped and sterilized for a date with Dr. Frankenstein?
One of them pushed me under the water and I came up sputtering and panicked, only to have soap massaged into my hair gently. I relaxed for a moment and she dunked me again. The alternate rough-then-tender treatment was more jarring than the actual aggression. I never knew what was coming or who to be on guard from. The heads wobbled loosely and the eyes held the look of madness as they rinsed me and cooed over me, the sound caught strangely in their throats since their mouths were seamed closed.
Two women hauled me from the tub violently, and then the third wrapped me in the softest towel, warm, as if it had just been taken from the dryer. They fawned over me, patting me gently and mewling like kittens, and then I was shoved into a wooden chair, bruising my tailbone. A brush was yanked through my hair while a soothing balm was applied to my skin.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, knowing they couldn’t answer.
A silver file appeared, ominous in its length and the sharpness of its tip. I stopped breathing for a moment, waiting for it to be plunged into my heart. Instead, the woman wearing the pink gown knelt in front of my chair and gave me a pedicure.
There were more powders and lotions to follow. My hair was pulled into an intricate updo with braids and pearls and shimmery gems. As they worked a sort of devilish makeover, I sat in the chair and cried silent tears.
They pulled me out of the chair and dragged me to a large armoire. In it was one dress. They unwrapped me from my towel and shoved a chemise over my head without touching my hair. I stepped into a petticoat and I stared at the dress while they wrapped a corset around my chest. The dress beckoned like sin. I knew it had been made especially for me; it practically called my name. Bloodred satin. Something I would never have chosen for myself, and yet it had chosen me.
Finally, the woman in the blue dress pulled out my gown. It pulsed with vitality and I realized I was bouncing a little on the balls of my feet—and standing without help. The bath’s restorative powers or the pull of a really great frock?
I stepped into the gown and they pulled it up my form. It molded to my body flawlessly. This I knew without even looking. My mother’s necklace warmed against my skin while they adjusted the gown. As soon as they were done fastening it, one woman pulled me by my wrist to the looking glass, her fingernails drawing blood.
The stranger in the glass startled me. All my wounds had somehow healed already. I had no suture marks or scars, and my face reminded me of my own, and yet it was different. I was different. I felt like I was looking at myself from the wrong side of the mirror.
But I was beautiful.
Skeletons entered the room and hauled out my tub. The woman in the yellow dress pushed me onto a velvet settee and there I was to wait. For what, I didn’t know.
I took in the rest of my surroundings for the first time, since I was no longer being poked, prodded, and lavished over. I’d grown up in a beautiful home, but I’d never experienced such opulence. Crimson, plum, and luscious gold fabrics covered the bed and windows. On the walls, tapestries of the same rich colors bathed the room in affluence and luxury. I didn’t understand why I’d been thrown in a dungeon and then hurled into sumptuousness.
I didn’t dare question my fortune.
All at once, everyone left me alone. I stayed on the settee longer than I care to admit, frightened that it was a trick, that I’d been left unattended only to secure my own misfortune. After a long while, I slowly stood up, waiting a breath before I moved. My heart beat so quickly in my chest it seemed it was going to leap ahead of the rest of my body. I tiptoed across the vast room and rested my ear against the door gently. It was too thick to hear anything, so I shored up my nerve and tried to open it. Locked, of course.
A little braver, I ran to the window, easing back the heavy drapes to find iron bars like those in my dungeon. The view from
my new room was a little better, however. Outside the castle, a murky fog obstructed most of the scenery, but what I could see was alarmingly eerie. It seemed the castle perched itself on the tip of a mountain. The craggy kind. Lightning cracked open the sky just then, and the clap of thunder jolted me several feet from the window.
The thought of Haden still locked in that cell agitated me. I would have to wait until they opened the door and try to make a dash then, or sometime thereafter. As I paced, I looked longingly at the bed. The duvet beckoned me. It was a deep red velvet and so ridiculously full and downy that feathers escaped the seams. A nap would certainly be welcome, but I wasn’t sure if I should let my guard down. They had trussed me up for some reason; I couldn’t afford to dull my senses until I knew what I was facing.
The bookshelf might have served as a distraction, but each tome I opened was written in a language I didn’t understand. My stomach growled ferociously, reminding me that it had been some time since my last meal. I just had no idea how much time. Haden had told me time moved differently here.
Pacing once again, I let my mind wander to the first time I’d seen Haden in the labyrinth. How wicked and extraordinary he was in his cravat and tails. Had I known where he’d take me, would I still have embarked on this journey?
Yes.
As soon as I’d made the declaration to myself, the lock on the prison door sounded as the bolt was thrown back. I stood up straight, squaring my shoulders and determining to face my destiny with courage. My newfound pluck faltered a bit when a man with no face and a perfectly tailored tuxedo entered and crossed the room to where I stood. He bowed like a gentleman, and I returned with a curtsy and a whimper. With no eyes, how did he see? Where his facial features should have been, there was nothing but taut skin.
He held his arm out to me, and I rested my hand on it. It wasn’t as if there were many choices available. He was going to take me somewhere; if he couldn’t have handled the job by himself they would have sent the skeletons to take me.
