Saskia's Skeleton

by Lily Markova

  “I love you, Franz,” said the Princess with another sigh. “But you are so moody!”

  Chapter Five. The Proper Invasion

  “I can see already that the school were right to sound the alarm.”

  The grave, distant voice was coming from the outside, drifting in through a slightly open window in the next room. Saskia and Franz exchanged apprehensive looks. The Princess dropped her fork, and they all froze, listening.

  “Goodness, this place looks miserable!” said a second voice.

  “A dump if I ever saw one,” agreed the other, sounding closer.

  At such a scandalous description of her spectacular castle, the Princess nearly choked on an olive and an unuttered fuming retort. She hitched her shoulders back and her chin up, motioned for everyone else to stay put, and stalked off to the entrance hall. Just in time, too—there was an impatient rapping of two sets of knuckles on the front door. The lock clicked, and the unfamiliar voices grew louder as the visitors greeted the Princess, but she must have hushed them, because the talk became instantly muffled. Saskia couldn’t understand what they were saying anymore, but the Princess sounded both unusually angry and unnerved and was frequently interrupted by the other two, who were speaking in clipped tones.

  There was a thud, and a clank, and the beginning of a bad word quickly cut short. Franz jumped onto his chair. His abundant hair spiked up and his pupils were now as great and madly shining as if he could see what was happening through the wall and it were a horrific sight.

  “What is it, Franz, what is it?” whispered Saskia urgently. She was much too afraid to move.

  “What a—mess!” said a male voice finally, and it was the unmistakable tone of someone who had just stubbed their toe on a stray footrest.

  Soon two strangers entered the dining room—a woman and a man, both with looks of deep dissatisfaction and concentration shadowing their faces. It was obvious at a glance that these were extremely proper people: Not only were they wearing the most proper of facial expressions, but their clothes were also gray and identical, with large letterings on the sleeves and a good deal of emblems on the fronts. Besides, they were each holding out a rectangular plastic card, also covered with letterings, holograms, and their own photographs to further establish their properness. They never put down their documents the whole time their eyes were sweeping the dining room, and Saskia thought their gazes looked so sharp they could detect every dust speck in every tiny crack.

  Behind them, the Princess was pacing and wringing her hands. “But I don’t—please,” she mumbled, “Misunderstanding. . . Mistake. . .”

  The woman said, “Miss, we must ask you not to interfere with our inspection,” and the man said, “We have a signed and sealed permission to examine the dwelling and assess its properness.” And they both pulled more documents from their vast pockets and waved them in the Princess’s bloodless face.

  “We’re here because of the fairy tale,” the man said importantly.

  “We’re entitled to take measures if necessary,” said the woman.

  The Princess’s complexion became more ashen than Franz’s hair. “W-what m-measures? What measures?”

  But instead of replying, the proper people rolled up their sleeves. The woman cleared her throat, as if she were preparing to sing or to shout—as far as Saskia was concerned, she seemed like the type who was more likely to do the latter. The man drew a pen and a notebook from another of his wide pockets. He remained standing by the door, while his companion moved around the dining room, narrowing and widening her eyes, shaking her head, and exclaiming things like, “Impermissible! Impossible! Unallowable! Forbidden!”

  She pointed at the Princess’s elegant candelabra with an accusing finger. “Candles? Suspicious!” The woman rushed to the wall and flipped a switch. Nothing happened. “Aha!”

  “No electricity,” the man said slowly, syllable by syllable, as he was writing that down. “Looks like someone doesn’t bother to pay their bills.”

  “A mouse?” squealed the woman, giving a leap on her way back to the table.

  The mouse on Franz’s platter squeaked, too, patted itself on the belly, and returned to sleep.

  “Insanitary conditions,” translated the man, scribbling in his notebook.

  “And look at that!” The woman indicated the bottle of red potion and the Princess’s half-empty goblet.

  The man clucked his tongue. “Drinking in front of the child in the middle of the day.”

  Throwing disgusted glances at the mouse, his female associate tiptoed over to the table and took a closer look at the platters.

  “This is no way to feed a kid!”

  “Poor nutrition,” dictated the man to himself.

  “Is this one for the cat?” The woman reached for Franz’s plate, and he slapped her hand, unable to resist old habits. She squealed again and jerked her hand away, shaking it in front of her face. “It scratched me!”

  The man’s pen was at the ready. “Pets at the dinner table. Inadequate mealtime hygiene.”

  “And who’s this one for?” the woman asked shrilly, careful not to jab her fingers anywhere near the table this time.

  Though sounding timid, Saskia found the courage to speak up. “It’s for my friend, the Skeleton, madam. He is sitting right here!”

  In response to a dark, heavy look from his partner, the man made another note, saying, “Encouraging dangerous fantasies.”

  The woman rounded on the Princess. “Wasn’t the child’s terrible accident the result of indulgence on your part?”

  The Princess seemed to have trouble breathing and couldn’t say anything at this point.

  “That appears like a lot of prescriptions,” the woman observed, with a nod to the chained-up medicine cabinet. “Are you, by any chance, forgetting to take your metal meds?”

  When the Princess failed to defend herself, the woman’s eyes finally paused on Saskia and scanned her pirate costume, which, of course, had been quite dirty even before the girl had climbed fallen trees, because, as any idiot would know, there is no such thing as a clean pirate.

  Saskia cowered, expecting to be reprimanded, but what happened next was much scarier: The proper woman teared up.

  “Oh, poor child, don’t you have water to wash your clothes or take a bath?”

  “We do have water but—” Saskia began to explain.

  “Then this is pure negligence!”

  “I’ve seen enough,” said the man. He snapped his notebook closed and shoved it back into his pocket along with the pen. “Don’t you worry, kid,” he said, smiling pleasantly at Saskia. “Your fairy tale will have its happy ending.”

  Saskia gulped.

  “We’ll make sure of it,” agreed the woman, as both strangers advanced toward the girl, and their gray figures seemed to darken and expand the closer their outstretched arms were. A burning sensation was starting to throb at the bridge of Saskia’s nose.

  The Princess attempted to stop them, but they waved more stamped papers in her face and threatened to add a line or two about her resistance to the man’s notebook.

  Their arms lifted Saskia off her chair and carried her toward the exit. The Princess ran after them, begging and promising the girl everything was going to be all right, and even Franz was thrashing about the entrance hall and yowling, “No! No! No!” He went so far as to throw himself under the inspectors’ feet, almost tripping them over.

  The Skeleton followed them, too, and the bird in his chest was crying in distress. The proper people took Saskia outside; as they were walking away from the front door, she was writhing in their arms, facing the castle, and could see everyone else pour out into the garden. Terrified out of her mind, Saskia thought for a moment that the Princess was suddenly looking much older and that her beautiful dress had turned into a sloppy old dressing gown, and that her once-gorgeous hair was dull and uncombed. Saskia closed her eye, shook her head, and opened it again, hoping for the horrible vision to have gone away—and cried o
ut, for Franz was no longer human but a white ball of fur meowing and winding around the Princess’s ankles.

  Her castle was crumbling, shedding its charm from roof to foot, to reveal a decrepit wooden house, all overgrown with weeds and hop tendrils. Untended, the trees in her garden blackened and shriveled up even as she watched; apples were rotting rapidly on the ground, and holes were blossoming in the leaves and petals of her dying roses where slugworms had eaten them. Wave after wave of panic came over Saskia, confusing her thoughts so much she wasn’t even trying to free herself anymore. The Skeleton was still tailing along, but his bones were growing transparent and blurred—he would disappear like Jack, melt into the air in front of her eye! Saskia reached out and grasped the Skeleton’s hand—and the castle assembled itself back to magnificence, from the flower-covered ground to the flaming spires. Frantic as she seemed, the Princess was still beautiful again, and Franz had got to his two feet, brushing himself off.

  “Please, dear Skeleton,” implored Saskia, clutching his newly opaque, solid hand more tightly, knowing that if she lost him, he would vanish forever along with her fairy tale. “Don’t leave me.”

  Her home fell away behind the Skeleton’s back. The hot stinging sensation at the bridge of Saskia’s nose had reached its peak, and she was leaving a trail of blood drops glistening in her wake along the path. The proper people carried her in silence, deeper into the woods. Sometimes, the Skeleton stumbled—their hands slipped apart, and Saskia then fancied that the shadows flashing past were only squirrels, and the woods themselves were merely the safe, well-kept town park, which the plaque on the exit gates confirmed. (It read, “The Safe, Well-Kept Town Park.”)

  By the time they walked out onto the cobblestone bridge, the Skeleton seemed deader than skeletons usually do with exhaustion, losing touch with Saskia and falling behind more and more often. The girl’s school, which they passed, looked abnormally normal—not in the least sinister and not a thing like a fortress. The sign at the entrance was now different, too: It said, insipidly, “Still Bays Elementary School.”

  “Oh, no, Skeleton, please don’t let go,” cried Saskia once more, and she seized his hands again and made sure never to release her grip as, along darkening, foreign landscapes, she was taken farther and farther—away from everything she cherished, toward a cavernous unknown.

  Chapter Six. The Prison

  The dusk was already thickening unevenly into swarms of shadows when the kidnappers had brought Saskia to the foot of a building that reminded the girl awfully of Bastilly’s. This fortress didn’t resemble an icebreaker’s bow—rather, a colossal crown carved crudely out of stone and encrusted, in place of gems, with rhombic orange-lit windows. But like her school, the building was dark-walled and ominous-looking, and like the school, it made Saskia think of screeching bats fluttering overhead, their sharp wings grazing her hair, and of hook-shaped, warty noses silhouetted against a monster-size yellow moon, even though she could see none of those horrors around.

  Saskia was still dangling helplessly in the air between the two strangers, who were holding her under the arms; both her hands were still clamped around the smooth and cool, somewhat ceramic to the touch, wrists of the Skeleton. Amidst the deepening murk, his bones looked so white he seemed almost phosphorescently luminous.

  The proper people hadn’t harmed her (if Saskia didn’t count the time they’d taken her away from home), but she could sense something dangerous about them, as if their uniform and papers enabling them to steal little girls from their castles were only the beginning of their evil powers. Saskia had the feeling they could, and were intending to, deprive her of so much more, of some fragile magic that, even this far away from her Princess, was still with her, protecting her, feeding her courage and strength.

  In addition to a five-foot-high concrete fence, the building was surrounded with a moat, where muddy, moss-colored water was frothing, hissing, and bubbling. Saskia shuddered to imagine what could happen to someone who fell there—they would probably be boiled in a second.

  There seemed to be no way to escape from this place; even the patch of sky above the front yard was striped all over with electric wires and clotheslines, like a barred window in the ceiling of a jail cell. The abductors carried Saskia across the drawbridge over the ditch, and the bridge began to rise creakingly behind them, nearly crushing the Skeleton’s foot.

  He leaped away from the folding crack between the drawbridge and the land, and proceeded to jump up and down on his good foot, rubbing the other with his hands. Saskia lunged to reach him, but at that moment, the proper people’s insistent arms pulled the girl back and finally put her down, in front of a metal door that bore a faded sign reading,

  Beneath that, there was a little rhyme, and Saskia’s eye became wetter and bluer with each line she read.

  “Oh, no.”

  Saskia tried to wriggle around and get to the Skeleton again, which was complicated by the fact that the proper people had cupped both her shoulders in their heavy hands, while their free fists were banging on the door. Luckily, the Skeleton noticed the girl’s struggling at last, hurried over, and squeezed her hand.

  Slightly relieved, Saskia shut her eye and opened it in a moment, expecting the sign on the door to be different now that the Skeleton was by her side—and it was. Saskia shrank back. The new sign said,

  And it added,

  And then:

  But worst of all was the rhyme below, which hadn’t changed at all, and which went like this:

  “A little wolf,” whispered Saskia to stop herself from crying.

  The door swung inward. Saskia could make out only the looming, boulder-like shape of the one who had let them in. The narrow corridor that had unfurled itself far into the depths of the house was windowless, and the roof of it seemed to be at least ten times Saskia’s height away, so what few dim light bulbs hung from the ceiling didn’t do much good.

  Here, Saskia’s guards parted: the man with the notebook stayed to talk to the boulder-like figure, and the woman led the girl farther down the corridor, through one of the many doors on the right and down another corridor, then through another of the many doors on the left, then up a flight of stairs—another corridor, another door, another flight of stairs. . . . Saskia tried to memorize the route, but, of course, it was pointless. The corridors and doors and stairs were all too unmemorable, nondescript, impossible to tell apart from their countless copies. Except for Saskia’s and her escort’s footfalls, the building was suffused with a soft, enveloping silence—the kind of silence that makes one feel as if they were floating in a vacuum, isolated from any living thing.

  Eventually, the woman steered Saskia to yet another door that had no sign or number to distinguish it from the one to its right or the one to its left but did have a bolt and a tiny peep-slot at an adult’s eye level. The woman pushed the door open and urged Saskia to go inside, prodding her in the back. Hardly had the Skeleton slipped in after the girl when she heard the lock slide closed and the woman’s footsteps grow distant and die away.

  The room wasn’t big, but with only a child’s bed and a nightstand in a corner to occupy it, it felt like a lot of empty, chilly, sterile space. A single diamond-shaped window overlooking the yard was too high for the girl to reach. Saskia glanced up at the Skeleton for some comfort, and he placed an awkward hand on her shoulder, attempting a grin, but since the only way the Skeleton could smile is by drawing his lower jaw down, the grin turned out to imitate a soundless scream.

  Soon, the woman returned, carrying a stack of folded clothes and a glass of water. She put the glass on the nightstand and waited outside the door until Saskia had changed. Then she collected the girl’s pirate costume, gesturing to Saskia that she could keep the eyepatch.

  “It’s just for tonight. It’s late now—we’ll place you with the others tomorrow. I’ll leave the lights in the corridor on.” With that, she was gone.

  The girl heard the door bolt slide closed once more and, shortly aft
er, a muffled click of a switch. The room went dark but for the thin slants of light seeping in through the peep-slot and the window.

  Saskia sat on the bed, which sagged and complained in a tinny voice. The Skeleton sat alongside her, and the middle of the bed curved down nearly to the floor, emitting what sounded like a sad but resigned sigh.

  “These pajamas are like a ghost’s dress,” said Saskia, examining her overlong, bleach-white sleeves with frayed cuffs in the sheet of moonlight. The Skeleton, too, stretched his arms in front of him and considered his pale bones, clenching and unclenching his fingers so his knuckles sprang now in, now out of the light. Suddenly, his index finger snapped upright, as if he’d arrived at an idea. The Skeleton pulled off his tailcoat and wrapped it around Saskia’s shoulders, his skull splitting into another vertical grin. A black, pea-like eye peeked through a gap in his ribs. The bird’s red feathers bristled as it stared unblinkingly at the window. Saskia returned the Skeleton a feeble smile of gratitude and looked up at the window, too. There, great black birds with crooked beaks strutted back and forth along the electric lines, their slick plumage reflecting the moonlight.

  What with her longing thoughts about the Princess and Franz, who must be beside themselves with worry, and this being the first night she’d ever had to spend away from home, Saskia braced herself for the restless hours to come. Without crawling under the covers, she lowered her head to the flat, lumpy pillow. The Skeleton’s bird began to whistle a soothing lullaby, which rose and fell like the waves of a calm sea, and Saskia’s mind sank into a weary dreamlessness.

  It took her mind much longer than usual to grope its way out of this heavy slumber and resurface, and when Saskia finally managed to get her eye to stay open, she discovered that she and the Skeleton were dragging themselves again along the endless many-doored corridor, flanked by two proper people. Saskia recalled, blurredly, how the Skeleton had snatched the tailcoat off her the moment before the door to their room had opened, and how someone had tried to make her drink and eat and wash her face, and how she’d been forever yawning and falling asleep on her feet.