We’ve never had a visitor, of course that is not to say that one would have been welcome or spared if they had crossed our gates. We’ve kept to our selves over the centuries, never once have we ventured to the village whilst a heart among the villagers beats. It never occurred to us that we should get to know the people we would soon be burying. Our need for sustenance dried up like the well that rested in the center of the courtyard. For some years we continued our feasting, unaware that we no longer needed the food we ate. We drank wine in abundance, oblivious to the fact that it never quenched our thirst and never dulled our senses. It was harder for the boys to give up what semblance of human likeness we still retained. Surprisingly enough it seemed natural that they should try to remain the gentlemen that they had been so carefully trained to be.
For me it was much easier, as I had never liked the person I was. The opportunity that my new found immortality afforded allowed me to become whatever I wanted. For the first few decades I was content to be nothing. I watched over my brothers and the castle and became nothing more than a fixture in the household. In the decades that followed those first uncomfortable years, I became stronger; I no longer feared the dark or what it may bring. My brothers look to me for strength and guidance now. When the anniversary of our birth nears and the realization that the sickness shall soon be upon us, my brothers come to me and take strength from the fact that I do not fear what is coming, and I am ready. Though they are stronger than any I have ever seen, my brothers lack the mental strength to continue without the encouragement of someone other than themselves.
Though we are stronger than most, both in physical and mental strength, we grow weary here, as any would. The time passes slowly when there is nothing pressing to do and the months after the sickness pass by so quickly that we barely have time to collect ourselves. The general rush of the weeks of sickness and cleansing are hectic as our fear that our secret may be uncovered looms in our minds. Rhys and Regelus are content enough to busy themselves with menial tasks to repair the castle and if need be I can make something to do out of anything. With the dawn of each day we find things to do that are as unassuming as possible lest we alert the villagers to our presence. Rhys and Regelus tarry around the grounds in the late hours, sneaking from cover to cover, moving things about and creating general confusion, while during the daylight hours they snooze and wander the corridors. I spend both days and nights reading and writing in the library and adjoining study.
We’ve been here for too long, in the past few months I have come to fully expect their desire to leave here after the sickness leaves. Each time that we come back to the castle after the last day of clearing the village, they wonder should we leave, I of course know that our desertion is not an option. Rhys will stay here with me when I tell him; Regelus though he fears death, may not. Rhys is my twin, Daphene was always far more partial to Regelus. Though Rhys and I are as genetically close as Regelus and Daphene, her death dealt him the most painful blow; he found her and as a result, the uncomfortable feeling that he doesn’t belong here grows with each day. He loves us, Rhys and Me, but the fear that we too may succumb to the same fate as Daphene weighs heavily on him. I cannot imagine a life without them and I do believe that they cannot live without me.
For years and years Rhys has made attempts to persuade us to leave after the final corpse is buried, but we’ve always declined. None of us know what a world outside of these walls holds, No one can tell us if our purpose for survival is to keep the crypts in the mountains above us, or if survival elsewhere is possible. I am wholly inclined to believe that our end is nearing far faster than any of us know. For the first few centuries of our virtual entombment in our castle my siblings and I worked silently at the tasks we had been expected to do as living aristocrats. It was if we were stuck in a moving picture, living the lives that we have since given up. We went about this cycle for decades, not knowing if in fact we should change the course of our days. It seemed only natural that we should continue in the manner that caused us the least discomfort in contrast to the extreme change of nearly a month of our lives every five hundred years.
Our days were spent learning the lessons that we had been before the sickness, simply without the aid of a tutor. My siblings and I were only seventeen when we ceased our changing, and as a result we acted as such. Rhys and Regelus went about doing whatever it was that pleased them while Daphene and myself stayed true to our lady like upbringings. We learned what was expected of us, how to eat properly, hold ourselves, act in mixed company, all the things that were expected of young aristocratic ladies. We continued the life that we should have abandoned and continued to laugh behind our hands and govern the nature of our speaking. We allowed our brothers to protect us and lord over the castle, but as the decades passed we knew that no matter how hard we tried to maintain the lives we had, nothing would bring them back. Though we continued along the courses that our father had initially set us, we would never again be a part of the world that we had now left behind.
My brothers tended to gravitate toward manlier exports like new fighting styles and weaponry. My sister and I, when she was alive, read and educated ourselves. When the books ran out, our brothers taught us how to fight. Daphene was an accomplished shooter while I excelled in many close contact fighting methods, sword play being among my favorites. Though Rhys and Regelus wanted us to be wholly prepared, there were always things that they refused to teach us. No matter how we begged, they always held something back for themselves, something that they shared as brothers. We worked at the tasks that they set forth and excelled when given the chance.For a time, Daphene and I practiced our skills on figures and models before eventually becoming sparring partners. We fought with one another on a strictly practical basis making it easy to take out any aggression toward one another easily. We never fought seriously to hurt one another but the sparring lent itself nicely to alleviating hostility.
Our similar size and stature made for the perfect match. Neither of us fought men, our brothers were far too polite. Though I offered singing and music lessons and Daphene offered various art lessons, our brothers where content to spend each day fighting one another. We stayed indoors, always, being careful to close all the curtains lest a nosey hunter glance up and see our faces. After the first few centuries of our plight the sun became nothing more than a memory. Though its rays can bring us no harm, they are absent of comfort. It has become easier over the years for my work to carry long into the night and I to continue without the aid of any artificial light. I cannot explain what it is but at times it seems as if I need none of the comforts I’ve retained over the years. I am no longer cold, though I shiver from time to time; I am no longer hungry, though I still crave food from time to time.
The darkness is much more accommodating. The time that it took for my brothers to tire of the sun was much longer than mine, I was again happy to forget the light, while they clung to it. The castle looks the same, no matter what light bathes it. The cool gray tones of the rock walls cast an impenetrable darkness that takes dozens of candles to stave off. Much of our time is spent together in the library now; after Daphene died the upper rooms send chills up our spines. It is far easier to stay in the same room as one another, telling stories or sitting quietly while Rhys carves figures from bits of wood and Regelus sharpens his knives. We’ve fallen into a pattern almost as predictable as the sickness itself that fills the years until we are needed again. We go about our days and nights and before any of us realize it, the sickness is again upon us and our purpose becomes clear.
Our days are spent apart, going about the tasks that make us happy, and at night we come together to await the day. Regelus and Rhys go on as if they are still mortal. Most of their day is spent charting battles that will never come or hunting some elusive animal that will serve as nothing more than a skin for the wall after it is captured. I’ve read each and every book in the library dozens of times, written my own, and altered the ones that I did not care for. Each
time a village is burned I collect the books so that not only may I learn about the time that we are now living in, but so that just a little of the monotony will be broken. With each new collection I find out things about the people of the villages and the people of the times. Though none of the villages have progressed to the magnitude of cities and nations across the globe they have changed.
With each new village the people become less dependant on one another, less dependant on the land. With them come new technologies from the towns beyond the mountain ranges. Many of the towns follow the basic pattern of rural farm villages, but some stand out. Every now and again one thing from the village stands out to me as peculiar. Some villages depend on the land and animals that come from it, one village brought with it a food source that did not need to be sustained from the land. Where a previous village may depend on one another for entertainment, another may bring with it some manner of amusement that needs no one to power it. I simply watch and wait for the sickness, I have since long ceased to try and understand the people of the village. They never cease to confuse and amaze me and for that very reason I often leave them completely out of my mind and to their own devices.
Sleep became less and less important with each year and eventually our bedrooms became nothing more than storage for our beds. The layers of dust that drape themselves across the empty space that once held the moth eaten mattresses are several inches thick. The days until the sickness finally comes are always the hardest. I know that the position in which I have been placed is not one that is partial to having a conscience, but every now and then I feel for the people of the village. My better nature tells me that with each passing day I should warn the villagers, but my darker side wonders if my existence is more important than theirs. Only once have I truly wanted to save any of them. Once, many years ago when the first plague swept through, I honestly felt sorry for the villagers. Though there was nothing I could do, I felt sorry that they should suffer so and I should be spared.
After the first purging I couldn’t get close enough to the villagers to make my feelings known. One death in particular that struck me was of an old woman; though the years have stolen her name from me, I remember her face. She stayed by the vegetable cart in the market and always complimented me. She was the closest thing to a grandmother that I’d ever had and her good humor never failed. In a time when it was frowned upon for the lady of a castle to mix with the common people of the village, she treated me as if our titles meant nothing. Her death is the only one in these past few centuries that truly sticks in my mind. I saw her body lifted from among the piles of corpses and I vowed never to touch the bodies of the dead, never to venture t the catacombs, never to be apart of the entombment.
At first I felt shame and uneasiness that I could do nothing to help my brothers at their gruesome task, but I knew that I was not able. Rhys and Regelus seem to be able to handle themselves, and in a way I think they are happy that I’ve not insisted on helping. In stead of helping haul the bodies I keep the records. Though I know that the sickness has no physical effect on us, I cannot bring myself to touch them. Many times I’ve watched as they hauled bodies and imagined what it would be like should I need to fill in for either of them. Each plague I come to the village and collect what meager records have been kept there and record them in the volumes in our library. I collect what I can from the libraries and return to the safety of my castle. The rooms adjoining the original library have now been turned into little antechambers.
Each room contains the remnants of one village. Some raids produce more works than others; some villages require two rooms to contain their knowledge while others need nary a shelf. Each village though is kept separate from one another, much like the bodies in the crypts. I know from which village came which volumes, and it is not only the dates within the bindings that tell me their story, but also the way they are written. The language of the people changes with each village and as such I am able to learn the vernacular of the village that is below me through the books that they leave behind and the loud conversations that tend to drift up through the trees. Though the people think they speak only to one another, I hear much of what they say which makes it that much harder when the cleaning comes for I have seen them as real people.
Though I’ve never wanted to take part in any of the more gruesome tasks, I am fully capable of forcing down my feelings and stepping in if need be. It stands to reason that my life before the sickness was much different than the life I now live. For instance, when I was the daughter of an upstanding noble, I was betrothed to a pig of a man that owned land north of the Red Sea. After the death of all the villagers and animals, said Lord was scared to inquire as to the life of his bride, much less collect his prize. His interest in me shriveled and fell away like the dead leaves of late fall when he heard that his child bride may too be harboring the sickness within herself. His letters stopped and the gifts that he routinely sent in an effort to sway my feelings did as well. It was as if he too had succumbed to something like death and he no longer existed as part of my life. I suppose he thought me dead or tainted and so left me where I was. His letters stopped and all arrangements of his visit stopped as well. He disappeared and so did I.
No one came to look for anyone in the village. Our aristocracy was one of skepticism as our father having changed the laws to suit himself was wholly unheard of. We as a family were shunned from the beginning, my siblings and I as the cause of the death of our mother and our father’s spirit, and our father as the death of nobility in our part of the world. The villagers were all so closely knit that seldom did someone from any other part of the world move to the village. Many of the villagers had moved their entire families with them, retaining no external link to the world beyond the mountains that surrounded us. We are trapped here, protected at one time, now trapped by the mountains that keep all others out save for the few brave souls that start a village here every hundred years.
Before the sickness I was a lady of great etiquette, now those fitful manners contribute to the cool, callous air that precedes me. The niceties that made me such a prize to the brutish baron still lord over my actions now and then. I’ve thrown many of the small manners that made me such a lady out, but some I’ve retained. Over all the years that have passed since the death of my former self, I have kept my aristocratic skills hidden artfully away in the hopes that I may someday need them. The thing that I miss the most about the days of the past are the sounds of the villagers and the joy that the church bells once brought me. What was once the music of a beautiful time is now nothing more than a call for the dead to abandon all hope. Much like the bells played at a funeral procession, the end of the bells marks the end of the village.
I remember when I was young how the sounds of the bells made my father cry. He sang quietly to himself many mornings when the bells for mass rang out through the countryside. The bells, he said, made him think of our mother. As the years of my childhood passed me by I came to equate the sound of the bells with my mother also, though I never met her. On lazy afternoons, when my lessons were through, I would sit in the courtyard on the brim of the well and listen to their playing. The well has since fallen in on itself, the remnants of it are jagged against the smooth black stone of the courtyard. The slick black river stone of the courtyard stands out against the unkempt fence rows and the imposing grey walls of the castle. It always seemed a garish contrast to me when I was young, but now I cannot picture our castle without it.
The sounds of the Sunday bells once brought joy and comfort, now it spells doom. The bells of mass ring far more frequently in the first days of the sickness and gradually peter out altogether when the villagers abandon hope. Villages that once prided themselves in their devotion to God soon curse his name when the end finally comes. In the days of our lives when we were among the living, our people praised and exalted God and his divinity, they also held on to the hope that he may still save them until the very end. They prayed to him, held mass with the
few people that were still sane enough to attend. The priest read from the bible each and every day and when he too succumbed to the illness, another villager filled the position, and so on until the last literate man died and all the had were the verses they had committed to heart.
I haven’t heard the people singing for some time now. The new villagers are nothing like the old. The songs that they sang still ring in my mind and some nights, when the wind is high and the moon hits the walls of the gallery just past the kitchens, I sing. The songs of times past are my favorite. I often wonder as my songs drift and wind down to the village, whose ears they will fall on. I wonder as I sing and though I fear that the haunting melody may draw someone near, I still sing. It lends to the mystery that surrounds us, the mystery that surrounds the village that no matter how desperately they hold on, they never survive. We are far enough apart from the village that if you stand at the top of the highest turret, you can see the village in its entirety. Our castle was built long before the town below it, our forefathers built the first village from the ground up, working quickly to create a village that would increase their own wealth.
The first village that grew around the castle was the very village from which our mother came. She was the daughter of a poor miller and possessed beauty beyond the wildest dreams of any of the people in the village. My father, a young man of high birth, often went to the village to get to know his future people or so he said, when in reality he was stealing glances at her from beneath the brim of his feathered cap. Their courtship was short and when it was time for him to choose a bride he changed the laws so that it was legal to marry a common villager. The conception of my siblings and me was the happiest event in her short life aside from marrying my father, no one knew that it would kill her. My father withdrew from the village, neglecting it wholly to mourn her loss while we were raised by the help. With each passing century a new village emerges that bears a slight resemblance to the village from which she came.
The Crypt Keepers Page 2
