by Myles, Eden
Dr. Von Holtz offered me that placating smile of his. “Perhaps, with time…”
“What will happen to me if I can’t remember being me?” I asked. I had been dreading the question, but I wanted the answer more than anything.
The Doctor lost his smile, then remembered himself and slid it back in place. “Don’t concern yourself, my dear. You need only to rest and heal.” He stood up and came around and took the handles of my wicker wheelchair in hand, prepared to guide me back inside, but I stopped him, my hand on his arm.
“Not yet. I want to show you what I can do,” I told him. I struggled to my feet, weaving, but I did not fall. “I’ve been practicing.” I used the table to guide myself around, and I almost made it to his seat, but near the end, my knees gave out.
I would have fallen had it not been for Dr. Von Holtz. He was very swift in catching me.
Within seconds I was in his arms and he was cradling me against his body. I looked up at him, and I saw the desire stamped in the little creases around his eyes and lips. I realized in that moment that he wasn’t as old as I had first assumed; he was merely aged by circumstances, his face weathered, wise and lined.
I touched his cheek. It was smoother than it felt. He closed his eyes as I touched him, and I felt the substantial bulge in his trousers growing in response to me.
It made me feel insanely proud and powerful to have drawn such a reaction from him. Breathless seconds passed, and then he tipped his head and kissed me. It wasn’t the kiss I had expected. I’d expected him to be shy and gentle, and his kiss a quick, chaste affair, but he crushed his lips against mine, his teeth nipping…biting. His grip on me tightened and his kiss stole my breath away. His mouth on mine…his arms cradling me…it all felt perfect. It felt right. I felt a part of him.
I wanted to say so many things, but before I could speak, he deposited me in my wheelchair and pushed me toward the Hall. “I promise I will never let anything happen to you, Livia,” he told me as he ushered me back inside. “You have my word.”
* * *
Chapter VII
I sat in my window seat and watched the guards in the courtyard going through their paces. After days of watching, I was familiar with their patterns, and I noticed they had a tendency to always keep a contingent of guards around the wizard’s tower—that structure that rose from the center of the courtyard and arrowed a hundred feet toward heaven like a huge, black finger pointing at the sky.
The arched windows stood dark and empty now, but sometimes I’d see light. I’d watched Dr. Von Holtz come and go. Once, while Franz was serving me dinner, I asked him what was up there. “It’s just a wizard’s tower,” he said. “Lord Rothschild used to be something of an alchemist, or so I’ve heard.”
His words told me nothing.
I watched the guards encircling it once more. I set the book I wasn’t reading aside. So this, then, was my plan. I would get into that tower and discover what it was that Rothschild’s soldiers guarded so jealousy.
Perhaps it would jog my memories and help me remember myself. If nothing else, it would satisfy my curiosity.
That night, after dinner—which I always took alone in my quarters—I waited until the guards had migrated to the far side of the courtyard and then dressed in my most comfortable clothes and crept out of my room. Through daily walking exercises in my room, I could walk fairly easily now, though I hadn’t let on about that to anyone just yet. The only thing I struggled with was a nagging fatigue that set in when I tried to cover too much ground too quickly.
I headed down the backstairs to the courtyard and let myself out into the almost pitch blackness of the night. I could see flickering lanterns where the guards were patrolling near the portcullis. I had only a spare few minutes before they circled back around.
Lifting my skirts, an unlighted lantern jangling at my side, I hurried across the flagstones to the door I’d seen Dr. Von Holtz use. But when I arrived, I realized the big, banded, oaken door was locked!
I cursed and slammed my fist against it, not that it did much good. It did make my knuckles smart. Instead, I scooted low and pulled a hairpin from my hair and inserted it into the lock plate. I didn’t know if it would work, but it was either that or go back to my room, and after so many hours of waiting to be here, I didn’t want to give up so easily.
I picked and twisted at the lock. Not too distantly, I could hear the jangle of lanterns as the guards made their faithful way back to the tower. I had a minute, maybe two, before I was discovered. “Oh, please…” I pleaded as I jiggled the pin.
When the click finally came, I felt my heart slam into my throat. Grabbing the big latch on the door, I yanked it open and slipped inside, closing the door only seconds before I heard the sound of marching feet passing by. I breathed in and out in the dark, worked on getting my rampaging heartbeat back under control.
I’d taken a lantern with me, but I wanted to wait until I was further up in the tower before I lit it so as to not to attract suspicion. The wizard’s tower, I quickly learned, was dark, damp and very cold. I was fatigued already from hurrying across the courtyard. But I wasn’t about to give up so easily.
I diligently worked my way along the freezing cold, flagstone wall until I reached a set of old, worn stone stairs. They were roughly hewn, made from the same curious black stone as the tower. They were also jagged and uneven, which I found surprising. The rest of Blackstone Hall was exquisitely designed to resemble a kingly palace, yet the wizard’s tower was almost thrown together like some kind of afterthought.
I started up the crooked stairs carefully, stopping every few minutes to rest. The tower was a hundred feet up; I knew it would take a while and I did not want to exhaust myself.
After a half hour of climbing endless stairs in the dark, I finally decided it was safe to light the lantern, which threw only a sickly yellow light against the dark, bluish stone of the tower, making it shine with an almost greenish glow. Spiders crawled the walls in moderate armies, but I wasn’t afraid of such creatures; all I had to do was wave the lantern to make them retreat up the walls.
It was the exhaustion that was my true enemy. I was breathless and dizzy by the time I spotted another banded door ahead, at the top of the stairs. The sight of it gave me one last spurt of energy.
With a muffled cry, I hurried up the last dozen stairs and stood there a long, heart-pounding moment. Now that I had reached my goal, I was afraid of what I might find. “How bad could it be?” I questioned myself, my voice echoing around me and making me start. The tower was so solid, I could not even hear beyond the walls. It was the first sound I’d experienced in almost an hour besides the scurrying of small vermin.
No, I decided. I had to know. Even if the truth hurt me. I could not sleep not knowing what was in the tower.
I took the large O-ring in hand and pulled. I half-expected it to be locked, but the door scraped slowly along the floor, leaving trails of dust behind. I stepped into the tower room.
It was bigger than I had expected, its walls rearing up at least ten feet. There were odd shapes in the dark, and I desperately needed light to better see, but all I had was my one little lantern. I held it out before me, its small, bleak light the only illumination in the whole tower room, and took a few tired, tentative steps into the vast chamber.
Soaring apparatuses with unimaginable purposes cluttered the space, my light sparking off their glass coils, metal parts, and huge, cog-like wheels and enormous levers. In the center of the room were tables full of beakers and test tubes, and the walls were covered in shelves containing thousands of old, dusty tomes and huge preservation jars containing an array of bizarre and pitiful-looking creatures—visible only when I quickly flicked the light across the whole wall.
I made my way slowly—cautiously—around the room, shining my light everywhere I went. A part of me remembered the shelves of books and Tesla coils. I remembered this place—it was the place I had first awakened to. Yes. The place where I had come around
after my accident.
In a far corner lurked what looked like a sarcophagus. I moved forward, my fatigue and sudden fear weighing me down. If there was a sarcophagus here, then surely there was…what? A dead human body?
It was covered in a white sheet. But the closer I got, the more I feared it.
I stopped and looked down at the sheet. I don’t know why, but I was suddenly shaking with fear and there was a burning stone of dread in my stomach. I very much wanted to leave. But I wanted to look. I had to look.
Taking a deep, shaky breath, I ripped away the sheet. It fluttered to the floor and I lifted the lantern, recognizing the body of a woman under the pane of dusty glass immediately. I would know it anywhere.
“Oh gods,” I said, dropping the lantern, which smashed to the stone floor at my feet. But I didn’t need it now; the sight of the body was imprinted on my brain forever—the still body, dressed in a long, wine-red gown, the dead woman’s face. For a long moment I stood shaking and cursing in the dark, unable to comprehend what I had seen.
The woman in the glass coffin…the dead woman…was me.
* * *
Chapter VIII
“Livia!” called a harsh male voice as the tower room door flew open behind me and a spill of lantern light caught me in its blinding glow.
I turned and cried out at the sight of Dr. Von Holtz standing there, breathing hard from his rush up the long stairwell. “Livia? What are you doing here? I found the tower door unlocked, and…” He stopped speaking at the sight of my pale, open-mouthed expression, and took a step forward.
I stumbled back in defense, then fell backward in the glass of the broken lantern. A jagged piece cut the palm of my hand, but I hardly felt it. I could only feel the thrumming fear of the man approaching me, standing over me. This man who had…dear gods, made me?
“Livia…” Dr. Von Holtz said in a softer voice as he reached for me. “Livia, you cut yourself.”
I scrambled back away from him. When I hit the side of the glass coffin, I stopped. “It’s me,” I said with a shudder that cut bone-deep. “I’m the woman in the coffin. The dead woman.”
“Livia…” the Doctor whispered, his grey eyes softening in the glow of his own lantern. The lenses of his glasses flashed as he inclined his head with concern. “You are not dead.”
I shook my head. My voice trembled forth in a panic. “Then who is she? Tell me who she is!”
“Let me look at your hand. Livia, you’re bleeding…”
“Only if you tell me what she is. What I am.”
He stopped and looked down at me gravely. “Very well, then.”
“You’ll tell me?”
He nodded. “Now let me dress your wound.”
He came to me, scooped me up easily, and deposited me on an operation gurney near the tables where the beakers, test tubes and other lab apparatuses were stored. Then he went about the task of lighting the lanterns strung along the walls of the room. The strangeness of the room in full lighting took my breath away, seeing all the looming devices in their entirety, the high walls full of books and specimen jars. I shivered at the sight.
As he returned to me, I said, “I thought you were a regular doctor, a medical doctor, but you’re not, are you?”
“I’m a war doctor, actually,” Dr. Von Holtz explained as he grabbed his familiar black bag from off a nearby table and set it down beside me and opened it. “I served the King’s army during the third Orc Wars.” He looked up, though his look of disapproval over my actions had not lessened. “But I doubt you remember any of that.”
“I remember the Orcs…I remember some,” I said. I realized it was the reason the picture in my room was familiar to me. I could easily recall men fighting huge, hulking creatures, though many of the details were a blur to me.
“What do you remember exactly?” Dr. Von Holtz said as he took my hand and gently swabbed away the blood, cleaning it for me.
“You’ll think I’m odd.”
He smiled a little. “Try me.”
“I remember fighting alongside the men.”
He lost his smile. “Anything else?”
“No. Just that. There’s a picture in my room of a knight on horseback. Just a picture, but it feels familiar to me.” The cut hurt, but I didn’t flinch, even when Dr. Von Holtz put strong astringent in the cut. I realized the pain was strangely familiar—almost comforting, really. I was used to small injuries. It was all coming back to me. Slowly. “I used to fight. I was a fighter, I think. A warrior. I just know I was.” I glanced over my shoulder. “Now the woman in the glass coffin…who is she?”
It took him a long moment of silence to arrange his thoughts. Then he began by saying, “Her name is…was…Olivia Reinhold. She was a general in the King’s army. A skilled and powerful warrior, from all accounts.”
“Not that skilled…obviously,” I quipped. She was, after all, dead.
“The circumstances of her death were unusual, to say the least,” Dr. Von Holtz explained. “She came here, to Blackstone Hall, hoping to gain financial support for the war from Lord Rothschild. He…well, he fell in love with her.”
“And she him?”
“I can’t say for certain. She may have loved him. Or she may just have been so devoted to the defeat of the Orcs that she was willing to seduce him. I only really ‘knew’ Olivia through Lord Rothschild’s eyes, via his letters about her.”
“What happened to them?” I said, watching him bandage my hand. My heart was ticking in my throat. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. No, I did…even if the truth destroyed me. I had to know!
“Olivia came to Rothschild in a time when he was sorely in need of a companion. He desired to marry Olivia, to make her lady of Blackstone Hall, and she agreed to his proposal, but being a woman pious and devoted to her gods, she insisted that they sleep apart until their wedding night.” He paused as he began bandaging my wounded hand. “Rothschild is not…a patient man. Before they could be married, he came to her in the night. Olivia did not understand the extent of Rothschild’s intentions toward her, or what he truly was. He meant to make her his bride in more ways than just one.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, looking up. “What do you mean more ways than one?”
Dr. Von Holtz looked reluctant to answer but forged on. “Rothschild is a revenant. A being who is neither dead, nor alive. Undead.”
It took me a moment to digest that. “You mean a vampire.”
He nodded. “He meant to make Olivia his vampire bride, but she was so horrified by the idea of losing her soul to him, she threw herself out the tower window of her bedchamber, rather than let him touch her. She died on the stones far below.”
I shuddered to imagine it, squeezed my eyes shut, swallowed.
“Rothschild was wracked with such guilt and rage, he called for me, begged me to find a way to instill life in Olivia once more. He thought his blood could somehow revive her, but she was already dead. His magic could hold no sway over her, nor bring her back. He thought perhaps science could…”
I looked up at the tall machines looming over us. “Is that what these things go? They re-instill life?”
“Not quite.” He finished wrapping my hand and encouraged me off the table, escorting me before the largest machine of all. It reared up twenty feet, and was made up of various metal panels connected via tubes. Dials, sprockets and gears covered almost every inch of it. At the center was a glass compartment large enough to fit a grown person standing up.
Dr. Von Holtz stood behind me and set his heavy hands on my shoulders as if afraid I might bolt, but there was nowhere I wanted to be more than right here at the moment. I wanted to know, to understand.
“My Device is the result of decades of study and work. It cannot bring what is dead to life,” he explained. “And I told Rothschild that. But it can create a new creature using only a small portion of another being, dead or alive. In this case, a single strand of Olivia Reinhold’s hair.” He ran one big hand over my lon
g, reddish locks.
I stared and stared at this monstrous Device. “I came from this thing? I am this…what would you call me?” I looked at him. “A replica? A mirror-creature?”
He must have sensed the rising outrage in my voice because his hands tightened on me and he said, “Livia…you are this creature. A new creature, but still her. You have her memories, her soul...”
I cut him off. “Have you made many of me or only a few?”
“Livia, please…I should not have told you any of this…”
“But you did. I know. And I’m glad I know!” I suddenly understood why I had those books in my bedchamber, why Rothschild had said that—I’ve no idea if she’s my Olivia, Doctor. And the realization enraged me. “How dare he!” I said, shrugging off my doctor’s touch and pacing a few feet in front of his Device. “How dare he do this to me? Manipulate me this way?”
“Livia…you must listen to me…”
“No, Doctor!” I shouted at him. “You listen to me! What Rothschild did is wrong. Olivia chose to die rather than become his bride. He should have respected that about her! Not tried to bring her back, twist her to fit his own ideals of a perfect wife!”
I stopped pacing and turned to look at him. “And if you fail to make me a perfect Olivia—his Olivia—what then? Will he destroy me like some animal which has disappointed him? Will he have you begin again?” I took a few steps toward him, my hands clenched into fists, holding his steely gaze. “How many times have you replicated Olivia, Doctor? How many times have you laid her to rest?”
When he didn’t immediately answer, I raised my hand to strike his chest.
He caught my wrist. His strength surprised me. I hadn’t expected a man of science and learning to have such strength. His eyed darkened. He held me very still and looked deep into my eyes. “Listen to me,” he hissed. “I will not allow him to destroy you. You are not his to destroy!”
I laughed at that. “I doubt Rothschild has your sentiment, Doctor. He seems to think I’m his property to do with as he pleases!”
