His anger was palpable at this point and I decided that baiting him further was not in anyone’s best interest. ‘I came to warn you that my brothers intend to search the forest tomorrow, and they will kill anything that is out of place.’ Confusion settled across his brow and I finished, ‘Including any survivors of the sickness that shouldn’t exist.’ He watched me again, with the quiet look of consternation that had resided on his face since he first took me. ‘You knew about me, and you told them.’ I wondered now if he awaited an answer as his mouth closed tightly. ‘You told them to come for me. What kind of an angel are you?’He raked his hand through his hair, pausing to scratch his scalp just above his temples. ‘I wonder if they would kill me if I kept their dear little sister from them.’
‘I am no angel, of that you should be certain now that you have touched my hand and heard me speak. And as to the matter of what my brothers would do, they would still kill you, they would simply then have my help.’ I rose quickly as he and moved away from the fire. He was at my back holding tightly to my shoulders before I could move back toward that path that led to the castle. ‘Leaving so soon, it isn’t even dawn? Stay with me here for a bit longer and tell me how you came to be in the castle above a village that was so doomed.’ His hands rubbed my shoulders in an effort to relax the tension that was making its way to my face. ‘If you do not release me there will be no need to call for my brothers.’ He turned me towards him then, looking deeply into my eyes that no doubt glowed in the orange of the fire. He still held firmly to my shoulders, pinching slightly to convey the power that he thought he held over me physically.
My hand came up and caught him in the chest before he could move to grab it. The breath gushed from him and he stumbled backward watching me through bloodshot eyes. ‘Why…. Wha…’ he tried to stutter at me though he had no breath in him to say it. I turned quickly then, while he tried to right himself and made my way back to the castle. The gates came to greet me and I slipped through the space between the narrow bars that always afforded me escape. Two bars on the far side of the fence were bowed away from one another and provided the perfect space through which I could safely squeeze. I quickly tugged them toward one another and moved swiftly back to the servant door that led to the study. The passage was dark and without aid no mortal could see to follow me, but he was not mortal. The thought stuck in my mind and I quickly locked the door and replaced the tapestry that concealed it.
Before Rhys and Regelus even noticed my missing I was again nestled behind my desk scribbling frantically to capture each detail of my meeting with Dmitry. I look out the window now and notice that the fire is out. I’ve been jumpy since I left him, worried that he may have followed but steeled in the knowledge that he would need superhuman strength beyond what he has to harm the three of us. I can hear Rhys’ shuffling in the hall as he wakes from the doze that he was so deeply in when I left the castle. I wonder now if I should wake them, if I should tell them about Dmitry. I shall have to decide later if I should tell them, now as I sit here I know more than ever that I need to do what I can to keep him from finding out our secret without my explaining it to him.
7: The Breathing
I’ve been awake now for days with no rest, though I do not need sleep, it offers me some sort of void in which to rest my mind. The fires in the forest no longer burn and I wonder if I ran Dmitry away for good. Though he took me by surprise that first night I met him face to face, I need more time to tell him exactly what I am, why I survived, why he survived. The trees are beginning to loose their leaves and the grass around the grounds I growing sparse. I know that if I do not find him before winter, Dmitry will likely die. Though we are immortal, I have no doubt that had my siblings and I been alone in our struggle through our first winter after the sickness, we would have been no more. I’ve seen smoke issuing from the chimney of the hall once since our meeting nearly a month ago. I worry for his safety though I know he is safer now that the village is dead than he was when it was living.
My breath catches in my throat with each day that I do not see some type of fire in the woods around the castle or the hall in the clearing. I’ve not completely ruled out visiting the hall, I’ve simply pushed it to the back of my mind. Rhys and Regelus are wary of leaving me alone for long periods of time. I know that Rhys has seen the fires in the forests, or at least I know he has seen me looking to the tree line with the coming of each night. Rather than rush to the forest with the coming of each night, Rhys watches me. The castle seems to have lost some of the safety that it retained over the years. As the nights grow colder and the days shorten, I find myself worrying that he won’t find shelter, that his life will end though it should be eternal. I’m terrified that I may come to find one morning that he is no longer there in the hall below us. I also fear that he may be a greater threat to us than I know.
I fear that he shall come upon us in the night or when we least expect it and take from us our immortality. I can hear his breath now, ragged and labored as it was the night that I met him, I can feel the fear that he keeps pushed tightly down into his being, the sorrow that I feel for him is more than it should be. I know that I should hate or fear him; I know that I should guard myself against him, and that I should prepare for a time in which he may not be so completely enamored with me. In the time that it takes for a being to travel from the village to the line of our gates, I can journal much of what goes on in a typical day. For a being such as my brothers and I, the trip is far shorter. I find that it must take Dmitry the same amount of time as we to travel to the village for I had barely begun to write the events of the day before I saw his moving in the tree line.
The trees rustled angrily and a rock sailed heavily through the air and landed on the sill of my window. Tied around the middle of the rock was a shred of paper securely fastened with a blood red ribbon. I moved slowly to untie it, and even slower to read the message attached. ‘I’ve seen you watching me, seen you hoping that though my fires no longer burn in the forest, that I am safe. Never will you admit to yourself or others, but you silently wish that I will find you.’ He hadn’t signed the note, but the script was familiar and I knew in an instant that it was Dmitry. I moved back to the window after placing the rock and note in the center of my desk, the tree line was still and the branches of the trees had stopped their swaying. He was gone I knew but still I watched the forest. I know that he will come back soon, that there will be another note, another rock.
I threw the rock back out of the window and crumpled the note in my fist. We are safe here, safe enough that should Dmitry decide that he wants to breech our walls, he would meet a force that he could not contend with. Rhys and Regelus are once again at their moving things about and I sit here in the study, writing things that I think might be important to someone else that might read this work later when I am gone. I think that I might go back to the hall tomorrow, perhaps I shall find him there, find him there waiting for me. As I write this now I wonder if in fact I should go to the hall, or if I should ignore the nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach that urges me to go to the hall to find him. I worry that he finally succumbed to the same fate as the rest of the village, it has never once crossed my mind that I may be far too proud to admit that his note had actually worked.
As I walked to the hall from the safety of my study, I could almost hear the haggard breath that escaped his lips. I knew he would be waiting for me, knew that he would see me coming up the path. I also knew that my brothers may very well see me too as I left long before the sun set and before they returned to the study so that I might tell them to keep their distance. I knew that when I moved back into the safety of my study I would have volumes to write, and I do. The hall was dark, the fire was low in the fireplace and he was nestled in the large wingback chair in the center of the room behind the desk, facing the fire. He turned to me, his eyes glittering with tears. ‘I thought you would never come. Please, I am willing to forget what you did when we last parted, what is your name?’<
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I watched him, leaned easily against the door, and cast a wary look in his direction. I didn’t want to tell him right off, I wanted to keep that little bit of myself back. ‘There is nothing about me that you need to know just yet that I want to tell you now.’ He seemed frustrated at that, as I knew he would. He shifted in his seat, his eyes narrowed. ‘Why are you so intent to be uncooperative?’ The longer I stared at him, the deeper the frown lines between his eyes grew. He pulled a sheet of paper from the stack of blank pages that rested on the left side of his desk and crumpled it angrily before casting it into the burning embers. ‘Why do you do that, why can’t you just talk to me like a reasonable human being?’ He moved about again and cast the remaining pages into the fire.
‘What shall you do now that you have no parchment, now that you have nothing to occupy your days?’ My eyes fell to the fire place while the paper inside smoldered merrily. A look of surprise fell across him then, and he smiled to himself. ‘I shall watch you, there is no reason now for me to write in the hopes that you may see it when I know where you are at all hours.’ He moved to rise from the chair in which he rested and began to walk slowly across the room. His hands moved nervously and his eyes never strayed from my face. ‘I’ve seen the bodies, I’ve seen where you keep them.’ His tongue moved back and forth across his chapped lips and his breath caught craggily in his throat. I knew as he moved closer to the door that I should leave, but something kept me there. I was drawn to him as I was the first night that I saw him. I still struggled to understand why he had survived and as I wondered to myself, he mistook it for fear.
He again tried to exert his strength upon me as he attempted to close the door . I grabbed his wrist as he moved to pull me into the room and twisted it so that the bones scraped together. He tried to pull away from me, but as my nails dug deeply into the flesh of his wrist his eyes flooded with fear and he knew that I was beyond humor. He pulled his other hand to meet mine and flinched as I moved to brush the stray bit of curly black hair out of his eyes. ‘We do not keep the bodies, we take them from the streets so that the animals won’t eat them. You have no idea as to what our purpose here is.’ I let go of his hand, flinging it angrily at his side. I took the kerchief from my pocket and pressed it firmly to the crescent moon nicks that wringed his wrist. ‘You wound me then move to heal my wounds, you scar me with you words then smooth them over with sweet nothings. What are you?’ His eyes widened and a smirk pulled at the coroners of his mouth.
He pulled his hand away from me and the kerchief with it as if I would wound him further if he left it in my grasp too long. He watched me as I cleaned his blood from beneath my fingernails and cringed as I moved toward him. ‘I am that which you will some day become. I am a remnant of another time. You will not age, you will not die unless you take it upon yourself to take your life.’ The wounds on his wrist healed quickly forming small crescent moon scars around the perimeter of his wrist. He seemed to grow more confused with each passing moment and as he studied his wrist I moved quickly out of the hall. I stood solemnly in the courtyard as he cam to the door of the hall. His eyes watered with the knowledge that I had just burdened him with but he made no move to follow me.
I walked slowly up to the castle, glancing back behind me at the silent visage of Dmitry watching from the door of the hall. I found myself silently wishing that he would follow me, that he would run after me. He stayed completely still though as I moved up the path to the castle and slipped in among the bars at the back of the castle. I sat heavily down in my chair and pulled the crumples out of the note that he left me. The words seemed so far from the man in the hall beneath us, the voice behind those words was much harsher than he could ever be and the anger that filled the letter was filled with frustration and fear. He moves now in the hall below us and I watch him as he watches me. I know that he sees the light of the candle that I keep lit out of habit. I in turn see the glow of the fire that he keeps lit in the fire place in the hall.
The time passes slowly and I wonder to myself when Rhys and Regelus will come up from the dungeons, I can still hear their shuffling about. I walked down the hall to the top of the stairs to the dungeon. I’d wanted to see what my brothers were doing, to watch them at their pretended work. When I looked down at the bottom of the stairs from my vantage point on the first landing, I saw Rhys’ back turned toward the stairs, his head was bowed slightly and he looked as if he was in the middle of making a important decision. I couldn’t see Regelus but I knew that he was concentrating just as intently on what it was that they were doing. I tiptoed down to the next landing in the stairs and peered around the coroner. They were worrying over a piece of furniture that I had never seen before. I noticed that all about the room were sticks of furniture that had once filled the villages, things that I thought had burned along with it.
Their voices were hushed and no matter how intently I listened, I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Though my brothers and I can hear the distant conversations of mortals in the village below, we can also shield our voices from one another. I moved closer to my brothers and watched them worry once again over their project. I felt for sure that all the months of moving things about was in an effort to hide what they were really doing. I moved closer yet again and Rhys turned to acknowledge that shuffle of my feet that he heard. I knew that he was there listening for another movement, but still I moved closer. He turned to Regelus and whispered something to him. With that both Rhys and Regelus moved to close the door that led to the stair well. They knew I was there watching them but rather than come and confront me they simply hid what they were at from me.
I walked solemnly back to my study and fiddled with my pens and papers. I wondered if what they were doing had anything to do with the fact that their project was for me and so I kept my thoughts to myself and decided to allow them to tell me in their own time. I’ve been sitting here for an hour now listening to their shuffling, hoping that they would soon come back up the stairs and tell me what they were doing. Alas they did not and they came back to the study to sit quietly with me until they decided they were ready to go on to their room. They didn’t keep watch outside my study as the night before, they didn’t come in and stay with me until morning, they kept themselves to themselves and went back into their room to await morning.
I sat again watching the forest, wondering if in fact I had worried my new confidant. The time passed slowly and I sat here quietly in my study writing, thinking, trying to figure out just what to say to Dmitry when I decided that it was time to tell him. I wrestled with the idea that I might go to the hall and apologize. The morning came slowly and when the sun finally peeked above the horizon I watched Dmitry emerge from the hall to watch the sunrise. Rhys and Regelus moved quickly about their morning chores so that they could go once again into the dungeon to work on their project. I pretended to work at my books, glancing occasionally into the hall in the hopes that I would see Rhys or Regelus wandering the halls so that I could ask them about the night before. Unfortunately they stayed in their makeshift work space and moved about loudly at their work.
The pictures started reappearing on the walls of the castle not long after the first day that Rhys and Regelus started working on their project just a few weeks ago. First the paintings in the halls made their debut, cleaned and arranged to mimic their original position when they were first introduced to the castle. I wondered for a while if it were in fact Rhys and Regelus bringing them back up from the dungeon and the cubbies in the castle, they however seemed as surprised as I when the portraits of us as children started to line the dining hall. The first painting that resurfaced was from our early childhood, painted not long after our birth. Our father was always one to plaster portraits of us about the castle to show visiting aristocrats that he was indeed soundly attached to his children. The portrait now hangs between the twin statues in the hall and reminds us each time that we travel from room to room that something is amiss.
Over the past wee
k nearly a dozen paintings have made their appearance. The hall is now filled with paintings of our childhood and each time that I pass one of them I must pause to remember the day in which my father had it commissioned. Many of the painting are stodgy and measured. Daphene looks lost and upset in many of the portraits and though she is present, her eyes tell another story. As I look at the portraits I can tell that things began changing long before the sickness. Rhys and Regelus of course look disinterested in each painting and though they are present in each portrait, they seem as though there is life behind their eyes. Daphene on the other hand, looks dead in the eyes as if she were painted in to the portraits after the fact from someone’s imagination.
I wondered where the portraits came from the first day that they began to appear but after the first few weeks I began not to care. The portraits began to bring me comfort, each time I passed them I found myself looking at Daphene lovingly and nearly forgetting that my brothers or myself are even in the pictures. Yesterday the feelings I had toward the portraits changed for the worst and my thoughts immediately went to Dmitry. The painting that hangs now just outside the door of the study is a portrait that was commissioned just before the outbreak of the sickness. The subject is Daphene and myself. Our hands are clasped with one another and our dresses are of a matching hue. It was commissioned just a week before the sickness took the life of the painter in the village below us and serves as a stark reminder as to the feeling of sadness that followed the death of the village.
The Crypt Keepers Page 7
