by Olivia Myers
“So perhaps you think it would be better to simply demolish it?”
“It would break my heart,” she said. Hideous as it was, Celia was already rather fond of the place. There were too few left like it. Too few mysteries, these antique juggernauts, abandoned like old trains to rust on desolate tracks, miles away from civilization.
“I will speak to Bly,” she said. “Maybe I can convince him there’s a way to save it.”
“And then you will let me know how the conversation proceeds,” Pierre said, shouldering his pack.
She touched his shoulder. “Are you leaving me alone already?”
“Monsieur Bly will be arriving in the valley in a few hours and he’ll expect to see me there. But take this time, my dear. Familiarize yourself more with the place. We will meet you here when we can.”
Before Celia could offer much more in the way of protest, he leaned forward and kissed her fully on the mouth. Celia dropped her hands and returned the kiss, feeling its sweet ache fill her with warmth. All too quickly he broke off and disappeared out the door they’d come through.
The castle felt like an empty cavern his departure. With Pierre, Celia had been in good humor. His gentleness and her familiarity with him had offset the gloom of the atmosphere like a candle. Now with him gone, she felt the castle’s vastness oppress her like an unwelcome presence. It was frightening, but she knew she had to shake off her feelings of dread quickly and extend her survey of the property. She took a notebook and pencil from her bag and set off in the direction of the West Wing.
For hours, Celia passed through corridors and rooms, the names and functions of which were lost to her. She entered multiple kitchens and parlors, a drawing room with plaster that had been peeling for so long it was almost completely curled like a papery snake coiled along the wall. She found cellars and bathrooms and locked rooms and rooms that showed signs of forced entry. Through these she passed in a kind of daze, overwhelmed by the presence of a rich history in whose fabric she was intruding. Her pencil became indented with bite marks. She made few notes, as if chronicling the castle were an even bigger affront.
She was slow in her work, and deliberate. Although the castle intimidated her, Celia saw it as her duty to do her job carefully and precisely. If there was a scrap of old history left buried away beneath the old stone crypt, she was going to save it.
The exhaustion and the pain from the hike got to her before long. She’d felt her muscles aching earlier but by the time she’d finished surveying the first floor she was in agony. There was a little flask of whiskey in her backpack that Pierre had given her for the cold, more as a joke than as a remedy, although now she made use of it. She took two generous swigs from the flask and felt the pain dissipate into a tiny, golden cloud. But her exhaustion remained. Well, she thought, it was not to be helped. These jobs take time. They also take energy. She’d do a better job if she had some rest, first.
She went back into the entrance hall and found an upholstered couch large enough to hold her body. She pillowed her head against her backpack and looked at her watch. It was a little after eleven in the morning. If she only slept for an hour, it would give her more than enough time to explore the other two floors before Pierre returned with Bly. She closed her eyes and was asleep instantly.
The light had changed drastically by the time Celia awoke. Drowsily she sat up, trying to recall where she was and what she was doing. Her thoughts reached her, slowly but clearly. She checked her watch. Four hours had passed. Not idea, but there was no reason to panic yet. She’d go through the upper floors quickly. There were two floors apart from the attic. Aside from bedrooms and a large room with a ruined billiards table, there was nothing to occupy her attention on the second. The third floor contained a sizeable library which was not only surprisingly well stocked, but stocked in books that were still legible. There was a little reading table next to the fireplace on which someone had left scattered various pieces of paper, old photographs, pencils, and lithographs.
She set her instruments down on the table and turned her attention to the books. They were in French, German, and that strange, local language—like the books in the hotel—but there were other volumes as well, in Greek, in Turkish, Armenian, Estonian, and languages she couldn’t even identity. Who kept a collection like this?
She took one of the volumes off the shelf and flipped through it idly. Sellable. At least there was one thing in the castle that wouldn’t end up pulverized. She went back to the desk to retrieve her notebook.
And then she froze. Sitting on her notebook was a photograph, a frayed, yellowing photograph of a young girl, looking sheepishly askance at the camera, her thick, curling hair in a rope that fell down one shoulder. The little girl couldn’t have been any older than five.
But it wasn’t the photo itself that frightened her. It was its presence on top of her notebook; Celia had never touched the photograph. She had never even laid eyes on it. So how was it on top of her notebook? She felt her skin prickle. Her mouth went cold as the dumb impossibility came welling up in her mind. Was there someone else in the room with her? Had someone else been watching her the whole time?
She opened her mouth. It had to be Pierre. He’d returned early. Maybe Bly had been delayed. She opened her mouth to call out to Pierre, to let him know that his little jest wasn’t funny in the slightest. But at the moment she was going to make a sound, a door opened on the first floor and a deep, delicate voice announced the arrival of Monsieur Bly.
Part 2
They made love again in the hotel that night. Again, amidst the thick of a snowstorm. Again, loosened by drinks of cheap wine, warmed by a crackling fire. But it was not tender love. It was as far from tender as Celia could imagine. Indeed, she could imagine no such thing as tenderness. Not ever. Not after the evening with Bly.
Pierre was on top of her, pumping into her like a piston. Celia felt him filling her—she felt him quivering to life inside her as he worked to get deeper and deeper—and it was not enough. “Pierre,” she gasped, “harder, Pierre. Harder.”
Their thighs were covered in the sweat of their intensity and they rubbed against one another furiously, generating heat, generating speed. He penetrated her harder, faster, his whole being inside her. Yet it was not enough. It could not force away the images, of Bly, of Diane, and again of Bly. “Harder, Pierre,” she pleaded.
She saw him in the room as they’d been that night while they ate dinner, a collection of food Pierre had brought from the hotel. The room where they ate was one of the dining rooms she’d surveyed earlier in the day. It had been just the three of them at the table, Pierre at her side and Bly across the table, listening as Pierre spoke about the logistics of the appraisal, of any potential the castle had for restoration, of the possibility of demolition.
Destroy it if you must.
Celia remembered Bly’s voice. Its harsh bite, the clipped phrases, the dry baritone that left an ashy taste in her mouth. A cruel voice.
“Of course if you will be so patient as to wait a little longer we might find a more adequate buyer,” Pierre said.
Celia had recognized the pleading tone. He’d been afraid. She’d resented him for his fear because she knew that Bly resented it. Bly was a man who resented weakness. She’d known that right away.
You have a month.
Bly’s voice cut through again. There’d been silence. Then a mousy woman had stepped into the room and spoken quietly to Bly.
“That’s his caretaker,” Pierre whispered to Celia. “Diane, I think.”
No one dared to move except Bly and that was to tell his caretaker something. She pulled out a chair and sat down to dinner with them.
Pierre later explained that Diane lived in a shack just a short walk away from the castle, although Bly had offered her apartments in the building itself if she wanted them. She’d refused. Diane kept her face averted from the guests throughout the dinner. She showed only her profile, and this was obscured by her dress’s high c
ollar so that her curled hair was the most visible feature about her. Diane spoke only with Bly and this was done furtively, fearfully. He did not seem to think this behavior strange. He made no mention of it.
“Harder, harder, Pierre,” Celia whimpered. She was in tears. Tears of agony and disgust filled her eyes. The gentleness and the tenderness of the night before humiliated her. She wanted to be overwhelmed. She wanted him to dominate her, to thrust out the cruel curl of Bly’s lip, the gleaming blades of his parted hair, the thin nose and the ghoulish, waxy face.
She wanted Pierre to overwhelm him before she was forced to meet him again tomorrow. She did not know how she could do this unless she had the power of two inside her. One was not enough. Bly could swallow one in the depths of his eyes, as easily as an ocean swallowed stone.
“Oh, Pierre!” She twisted her body roughly from under him and in a single movement, forced herself on top of him. Pierre stared up at her with a dumb smile that enraged her.
“Don’t even speak,” she said as she pushed her wet thighs against his quivering cock. She ran her fingers down his chest, trenching white valleys in his skin. She kissed him until she tasted blood. “Don’t even breathe.”
He was warm. His skin was hot, yet it was mocked by the coldness of Bly. The coldness she’d felt when he held her hand after the dinner was over, bidding them a safe journey back home. When he’d fixed her in the murky unfathomability of his eyes, staring deep inside her, capsizing her soul onto a storm-tossed and raging ocean.
And the coldness, the penetrating chill she’d felt in the last few seconds when, turning to go, she’d caught a look at the face of Diane, staring from behind the back of Bly. It was the most wretched face she had ever seen. A scarred, disheveled, demonic face—the demon to accompany Bly’s ghoul. And Celia had gasped, for she saw in it a frank and hideous madness, the madness of those who know they are mad. Through the madness there came an even more terrible realization, as one who, seeing an approaching storm cloud, feels her heart sink as an even more threatening squall thunders afoot. For in the brief, passing moment, Celia was sure that she recognized Diane from somewhere. That she in fact knew her.
“Harder,” Celia said, driving forward. “Pierre, I need you inside me.”
***
In their first two nights, Celia and Pierre had felt only the first flickers of the snowstorm. The snowstorm had finally unleashed its fury, and they awoke to a world of apocalyptic whiteness, a blinding freeze. Pierre ventured two steps outside and lost a boot in the thick snow. There would be no venturing to Bly’s castle that day.
Towards the evening the snow began to slacken and it looked as though if it continued to do so, it might be possible to make it out to the castle the following day, provided they found snowshoes.
“Or perhaps if we can find a sleigh you can rope yourself to me and I shall tow you along,” Pierre joked, although his attempts fell short.
Celia had felt a new distance growing between them. His boyish gaiety had kept her armored and strong back when they went to the university together, and had even buoyed her during the first two days here in Nebelstatt. But something with Bly had destroyed his charm and now she felt cold toward Pierre.
When he found the photo of the little girl in her pocket, he’d put it back quickly, not commenting on it. Did he suspect she didn’t trust him anymore? Maybe she didn’t. He wasn’t strong or hard enough for her. He wasn’t satisfying her. He’d brought her here, even, despite all of her questions, and the whole job was bizarre. None of it made any sense.
A second freeze set in during the night. The snow wasn’t much thicker by morning, but it had an icy crust on it that held potential danger even for snowshoes, depending on how thick the crust was in certain parts.
“If there is no freeze like last night again tonight, we should set off tomorrow morning,” Pierre said. He’d been successful in securing them both pairs of snowshoes and he kept hinting heavily that they should get back to the castle, where Bly was staying until they decided what would be done about the library.
Celia had convinced Bly that there were valuables she’d seen there—books and old manuscripts—that might mean something to a collector, if not to Bly. She’d said at the dinner that most of her clients saved valuables in the form of books or manuscripts and that she’d hate it if something were lost that would be regretted later. Bly had agreed, to Pierre’s bafflement. He’d asked her about it later, and Celia had smiled.
“Don’t be so surprised,” she said. “I can do a lot more than you give me credit for. I can keep secrets, too.”
“When did you become so hard, so firm?” he asked.
She’d just smiled at him in a pitying way.
***
The third day was little better than the first but they decided with the snowshoes to venture out to the castle anyway. Bly would be gone the following day and the sooner they got done with the library the less they would see of the castle altogether. The world outside was grey, dry and morose.
Although there were no icy ‘problem spots’ as Pierre called them, they spent an extra two hours hiking and got to the castle feeling as if they’d run a marathon.
Bly was waiting in the library in front of the fireplace. Diane, rooting through one end of the bookshelf completely stuffed with old papers, was grouping stacks of letters together to bring to him. There was a process. Bly would shuffle through a handful of documents, some of which he’d consider intently. Others, he’d simply feed into the blaze. To Celia it looked like clockwork execution. Who knows what stories those letters might have told? Who knew what chapters of forgotten history were being summarily engulfed by Bly’s whim?
They began at once according to Bly’s dictation. Books were to be taken down and grouped by date of publication. Letters and manuscripts and any interesting parcels were to be brought directly to him to meet judgment.
They sorted in silence, with nothing but the crackling of the logs to provide any break in the monotony. Once or twice Bly called Pierre to his side to help him decipher some codex or an obscure foreign language, but this was the only interruption.
There was no stopping for tea or coffee. They worked straight through lunch. Pierre and Celia moved gradually across the bookshelves, translating the tight rows of books to stacks in a slow-moving process that seemed to have no end. Diane reached the end of one shelf of books and was now rooting through the desk where Celia had found the old, yellowed picture.
Bly never moved. Not one foot.
As the day wore on and evening began to encroach it became apparent that he was intent on working throughout the night if need be. Pierre leaned over to whisper to Celia, “We won’t get back safely unless we can work with some daylight. I think we should say something.”
There was a moment of terrible dread between them; Celia didn’t know how to bring it up with Bly. It would be like approaching a viper which was already drawn back and poised to strike.
But a strike came before Celia could say a word. At that very moment there was a sharp, muffled cry and the sound of a desk being shoved over, followed by a heavy crash. Footsteps echoed across the library, and then Bly shouted, “Give them to me!”
Celia whirled around just in time to catch Diane as the woman collided with her. Both of them fell to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs. Celia was sure the other woman was attacking her.
“Give them to me.”
The voice thundered down from above. Bly’s voice, shapeless as a vampire’s. Celia felt the other woman stuff something like paper down her shirtfront. Then Diane was lifted roughly upwards.
Celia didn’t have time to ask Diane what it was that she’d been given. In one swift movement, Bly reached into Celia’s shirt and pulled out a wad of yellowed papers. He walked calmly towards the fire, although the other woman was howling and clawing at his legs and arms like a lioness.
Ignoring Diane’s rage, Bly dropped the fistful of papers into the fire. But Diane reacted as if she w
ere being burned instead, so terrible was the cry that erupted from her. Celia marveled that despite the woman’s pain, there was no expression from Bly. Nothing at all.
The scene might have ended there, yet the woman’s grief filled Celia with a passionate and mad strength greater than Bly’s own. She rushed forward and struck him in the face—a paltry blow, but one suitable enough to allow Diane the brief moment she needed to reach into the blazing inferno and grasp at the frayed ends of the burning papers.
How long Diane’s hand was in the fire for and whether or not she succeeded in recovering any of the letters, Celia couldn’t tell. She fell into a dead faint a few moments later.
***
She awoke in one of the bedrooms of Bly’s castle. Through the window next to her bedside she could see the night, clear and cool, full of stars.
“I think it would have been better for all of us if we had gone tomorrow,” Pierre’s voice came from a lighted corner in the room. He was kneeling down by a kindling fire, a crumpled paper in his hand. “There would have been no dangerous new snow.”
Celia did not poke fun at his manner of speech, as she once would have.
“Diane,” she said. “Is she…?”
“She and Bly found someone to take care of that hand for her. Bly told her simply to stick it into the snow. He was quite rude with her. The hand we all think will be saved.”
“But what on earth would possess that woman to put herself in danger like that?”
Pierre stood from his place by the fire. He removed his glasses and scrubbed a hand through his thick, curly hair.
“This,” he said, letting the paper fall. Celia picked the paper up. It was one of the papers that Diane had stuffed down her shirt, and the edges were smudged with soot. It was a letter, written in the strange dialect spoken by the townspeople.
“I can’t read this,” she said, annoyed.
