The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  Clara Brancoveanu began to cry. “What have you done?” she said, to no one in particular. “What have you done to my poor girl?”—words that tore de Rougemont between pity and vexation. When the lieutenant left the room, he took all the warmth with him, and so she followed him. She had already dispatched Anton to buy his ticket on the night train.

  But she wanted to talk to him in private. She wanted to speak frankly. The house had scarcely been her own since the terrible hour of Jean-Baptiste’s death. Madame de Graz was making her own arrangements to return to Bucharest. She’d been clumping around the corridors, peering into every cupboard.

  The condesa waited outside Prochenko’s room until he reappeared. He was dressed for his journey in borrowed clothes that seemed to fit him perfectly, and which he had made stylish just by wearing them, just by turning up the collar of his jacket, looping a white scarf around his neck.

  “Come,” she said. She followed him outside.

  Past midnight, she and Prochenko stood outside the farmhouse in the cold mountain air. They stood among the yew trees and juniper that grew between the barn and the road. The lieutenant smoked one of the cigarettes he had filched from Anton or else one of the grooms. His yellow hair curled over his collar. His handsome face, visible only by moonlight, gave the condesa an obscure kind of pleasure as she stood shivering in her overcoat, hands in the big pockets. “I couldn’t question you in front of the others. I want to know what you have seen,” she said.

  He grimaced, expelled smoke between his teeth. He turned toward her with an odd expression. “It sounds ridiculous to say. But I suppose you are used to this. There’s more to you than just an old lady living in the woods.”

  She smiled without joy. He took another puff of smoke. “Forgive me. What did I see? A naked manikin four centimeters tall. The wings bigger, big as my hand. Very delicate, disturbed by any current. It would bite me as I lay asleep or dozing—bite me or sting me. I showed you the scabs.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged, dropped his cigarette end, ground it out under his boot heel. “It would find me. I would swat at it and it would move away. Once it got too close and I was able to grab it by its wing, put a stop to it.”

  This was good news. Hard to credit, but good news. “Really.”

  “I had its blood on me. I won’t claim that was pleasant. But it hasn’t come back.”

  And yet, why shouldn’t it be possible to kill these things? They were physical manifestations, not spiritual ones. “I congratulate you. This is an achievement. But you are an unusual man. Anyone can see that. You won’t take offense when I tell you…”

  He laughed. “I won’t take offense.”

  “It takes a special kind of man. Someone who can travel with these creatures in their same world. What would I call them? Demons, I suppose. Spirit demons. The next one will be harder. I won’t pretend to you it is not dangerous to hunt.”

  Sometimes in waking dreams she would visit a place on the mountainside. Other women would be there. Their meetings had become less frequent since the war, but there was indirect communication also. In any case, they all agreed on this: “There will be no peace in Europe until this creature is discovered and destroyed. It is possible Bocu has found it, or he knows where it is. I don’t know. But you must go to him first.”

  “Yes,” said the lieutenant. “I’ll ask him. I have something else to ask him, too.”

  “It is a powerful demon. Abcess is its name. It is red in color, and it will take the form of a toad. A winged toad. At the beginning they are small and weak, but it has grown, I’m sure. I will tell you something that is not literally true: It feeds on the blood and bodies of the dead.”

  Another cigarette was in Prochenko’s mouth, so far unlit. “Huh,” he said, and smiled, and she could see his big white teeth.

  “Poisonous skin, I would imagine.”

  “Check,” he said, which made no sense, until the condesa realized he had switched from French to English. Even then the colloquialism was unknown to her. But he continued in the strange soft accent that he shared with Miranda Popescu and no one else, another misbegotten product, the condesa supposed, of Aegypta Schenck’s reckless conjuring: “Bummer. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  He lit a match. The flame didn’t tremble, for the night was still. Inez de Rougemont saw, illuminated in the sudden light, the flash of his cold, pure, blue-gray eyes. “And the gun, of course,” she reminded him. “Prince Frederick’s revolver. Bocu must not have the gun.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS NO chance of that. The revolver was not thirty meters from where she stood. Luckacz and the Rezistenta men had not found it or stolen it or looked for it. Clara Brancoveanu was the person who had taken it. She had kept it under her nightgown, brought it upstairs, then hidden it behind a leather-bound edition of one of Madame Balzac’s novels in Miranda’s room, a line of books that stretched the length of the shelf.

  The old-fashioned revolver had belonged to her dead husband. He had kept it as a memento from past days; it had been a gift from his father. And if sometimes he had displayed it, unloaded, on his belt during public appearances, he had never—so far as she knew—fired it or allowed it to be fired. It was too old, too heavy, too unwieldy, a symbol of his strength and purpose and ancestry, rather than a weapon.

  Since Nicola Ceausescu had released her from the People’s Palace, and since Magda de Graz and Jean-Baptiste had brought her to this refuge in Stanesti-Jui, Clara Brancoveanu had coveted this gun. The baroness’s steward had kept it in his luggage, together with the black book that went with it. He had not shown these things to her, or offered them to her, even though the old revolver had been as personal to her husband as his shaving brush. In the only portrait he’d ever had the patience to sit for, it had lain at his right hand. But Jean-Baptiste had said nothing to her, and instead the steward had given it to Inez de Rougemont, who had snapped it up, cooed over it like a chicken over an egg—how dare she? And when the princess asked her, timidly, not even to keep it but to touch it, hold it, she had dismissed her like a servant.

  That had been months ago, but it still irked her. Delicate in feeling as in body, Princess Clara had not permitted herself to think what many knew, that her husband had kept a lover both before and after his marriage. The notion scarcely crossed her mind. Besides, she was a beggar here in Stanesti-Jui, almost a prisoner, as she had been in Ratisbon and Bucharest. Dear Inez had been the soul of generosity, of course, but she was not a warm person. Often when she spoke to her, Clara could hear a sharpness in her voice, a sense of impatience or even condescension. And the princess had responded out of her own compliant nature, which was not unmixed with exasperated bitterness too subtle to be seen or felt or heard.

  How dare the woman take up Frederick’s gun, clutch it to her scrawny breast? What right did she have? And when Clara in her mild way had protested, the condesa had labored to explain as if to a child—the gun was not the same as it had been. Her husband’s sister (whose own sharpness and impatience Inez de Rougemont sometimes brought to mind) had claimed it after his death, reconditioned it for some other use—all that was dark and mysterious, too esoteric for poor Clara, who hadn’t had the benefit of a tutor in natural philosophy. It was true she’d been preoccupied with social engagements. Aegypta, at least, had been exempt from duties of that nature, because of her rude manner and unfortunate nose.

  In Miranda’s bedroom Princess Clara rubbed her hands together, then strayed, as she often did, to the mirror over the oak dresser. Just as often she turned quickly away, as now; she sank onto the stool beside Miranda’s pillow, touched her daughter’s forehead—would she never wake? How terrible this was! The doctor had come up from the village, but only because she had insisted. Dear Inez was impatient with all of her requests. Though she was right, as it turned out, because the man was useless, more a veterinarian than an accomplished practical physician—he was the first to admit it. And it was evident he thought there was something
dark and murky and mysterious about this … accident (whatever it was), and doubtless also the condesa knew more than she was letting on. Clara had heard her whispering to Madame de Graz or else not bothering to even whisper, so convinced she was the princess would not understand.

  Worse than that was the way dear Inez acted when she sat on this stool, the way she fussed and clucked over the mercury thermometer as if Miranda were her daughter, somehow. As if she were the only one who understood what needed to be done. But Clara wasn’t as dense as they all thought. She had scarcely left Miranda’s bedside, but when she did, when it was late at night and her daughter was deep asleep, she had slipped down to the library and lit a single candle so that she could study the black book in the locked glass case. She had seen where the condesa kept the key in the jackal-headed canopic jar she had first gone to when she knew the gun was missing. The jar was on the mantelpiece.

  It had been during the first night of terrors when Miranda had fallen sick, when Bocu’s men had murdered Jean-Baptiste, shot him through the window—all those terrifying events. The man had refused to die! Loyal to the end, he had held onto life long enough to chase away their enemies. He had been possessed, that was it—possessed by a malignant ghost that everyone else had been too blind to see! And in the meantime Princess Clara had scarcely known what she was doing. She had found the gun and snatched it up, found it where it had fallen on the hearth. But she would protect her daughter with her husband’s pistol, though it was almost too heavy to lift. Later she had hidden it under her gown.

  Now she sat on the stool beside Miranda’s bed. She reached out sometimes to turn down the coverlet, adjust the bedsheet. There was a bowl of water on the stand, and from time to time she soaked a washcloth, squeezed it out, and used it to wipe Miranda’s face, wipe the drool from her lips, give her something to drink. She had scarcely left her side except to lie down on the settee or forage in the library, and even that wasn’t necessary anymore, since she had found Aegypta’s letter.

  She had changed the bed linen, stripped the sheets when Miranda wet them, and all those menial tasks had given her a fierce kind of pleasure. All those years she’d spent in Ratisbon as her daughter had grown up among strangers—now, changing her, making her comfortable, worrying and weeping over her, the princess was taking back some of that lost time.

  * * *

  “DÎTES-MOI,” SAID PROCHENKO, outside in the cool spring air. “Tell me. Mademoiselle Popescu—where is she? Tell me where she is. Will it help her when I go do this … thing?”

  The old woman stood in her unfashionable overcoat, hands in her pockets. Prochenko’s night vision was preternaturally sharp, and he saw her face in the darkness, thin and bloodless, colorless except for her lipstick and the red indentations next to her thin nose, marks worn by the pads of her steel spectacles. Often her gray hair was pulled back from her face, anchored with combs, and you could see the contours of her small skull. But not tonight. She’d fixed it in a different style, a chignon or some such arrangement that might have been attractive on a younger woman.

  In these past days she had seemed smaller to him, diminished with anxiety. These old women, and Miranda in some kind of coma—even if there had been no useful battle for him to fight, he could not have stayed here. He couldn’t tolerate watching them sit their vigil over her as if waiting for her death. This Bocu—he would rip him to pieces, make him swallow his own entrails, string him up in the Piata Enescu with his testicles in his mouth. Or perhaps not. But he would do … something. Pieter de Graz wasn’t the only one with a war to fight.

  “I wonder,” said Madame de Rougemont. “Did Mademoiselle Popescu ever tell you about a jewel she had, a tourmaline? Her aunt gave her several important gifts, powerful and complicated gifts. Frederick’s pistol was just one. In some way they were … inappropriate for a girl her age, hard weapons, double-edged. I suppose Aegypta intended to be alive to guide her, help her, but of course that wasn’t possible. And so here we are.”

  Prochenko had seen photographs and portraits of the Condesa de Rougemont as a young woman, when she had been Prince Frederick’s mistress. He remembered her from a bal masqué at the Winter Keep, before the coronation of the Empress Valeria. And of course he’d seen some version of her on the Hoosick riverbank, dressed in Gypsy clothes. Staring with his dog’s eyes, he had not remembered until Peter had reminded him later, in the time they spent together in North Africa. Then she had been a handsome woman—not in any obvious way. But she was lit with some kind of fire or spark or energy, which had dwindled now. She seemed cold and tired as she continued: “These are dangerous matters, full of risk. Aegypta Schenck was far more skilled than any of the rest of us. She was bolder, too—her niece takes after her. It was not for me to tell her to do this or to do that.”

  Then, “If she held it in her hand, she could come back, I think. The girl could never let it drop. But the white tyger, that was something else—you remember that night? One might be tempted to dismiss it as a fantasy, but these men were pulled down as they tried to run. And Mademoiselle Popescu, you remember—she lost consciousness.”

  But the lieutenant remembered Jean-Baptiste with his iron tongs and later with his carbine. He remembered Nicola Ceausescu speaking through him—Inez de Rougemont had not been in the room. So maybe she didn’t know anything about it. Whatever, he thought. Then he spoke in English: “Miranda always had these crazy dreams.”

  His voice sounded unsteady even to himself. Madame de Rougemont turned her face to stare at him. “She will find it again—Kepler’s Eye. It is a matter of looking properly. Perhaps she lost it among the rocks and stones or in the high grass. It is a matter of searching methodically, which is not her great gift. But it is essential, because of this information, these turtles she saw in Kepler’s pool. I think this must be an offensive on the Turkish front, a way to cross the Danube with a new style of weapon.…”

  “Whatever,” said Prochenko. He took a last drag on his last cigarette, then dropped it to the dirt. “I’ve got to get my train. When she does wake up, tell her I asked about her. You know, for old times’ sake. Tell her I said good-bye.”

  The old woman expected something more. She looked at him inquisitively, her head cocked to one side. You always wanted to leave them like that; he shrugged, took his borrowed gloves from the pocket of his borrowed jacket, turned up his borrowed collar, adjusted his borrowed scarf.

  * * *

  SHE WATCHED HIM walk down the lane toward the village with his hands in his jacket pockets, his step jaunty, swaggering perhaps, and yet containing an admixture of feminine grace—he also was a lost young person, lost and unfortunate, carrying a burden that had been given to him regardless of his strength. For a moment she remembered Prince Frederick’s aide-de-camp, always fastidiously dressed, though it was unclear what he did for money. All the soldiers and their women turned to stare at him whenever he had come into a room.

  And then when he was out of sight she stood for a few minutes longer, looking up at the moon, postponing the time when she would go indoors, into the house that once had been a refuge against her enemies. She had scarcely realized how much she loved it, because of all the times she had chafed against its constraints, the diminished world it represented. But now a man had bled to death in the sanctuary of her library. The Rezistenta had found her and tracked her down. She must leave this place.

  She made a circuit of the house and stood in the back garden looking up at the dim, flickering candlelight in Miranda’s window. That also was painful to see. The girl’s illness was a reproach to her—Frederick’s daughter, whom she had not been able to protect. In the past she had made bargains with unsavory characters—enemies, she supposed—just to watch over the girl and keep her safe. She had gone to Massachusetts in the autumn leaves and snow. All of that had been for Frederick’s sake.

  It would be a lie to say she’d thought about him constantly since his death. It had been too long. But the girl took after him, had brought his
ghostly presence back. Now she was on the high hillside below Kepler’s tower. There was a war in Poland and the south. Prince Frederick’s dream of a republican government was far away, mocked by Bocu and his miserable assembly. Tonight there were clouds overhead, snow on the peaks behind the house.

  Miranda’s window was closed. But Inez de Rougemont heard a muted explosion like a gunshot fired into a pillow. Then a scream.

  And when she burst into the room, the dogs at her heels, she saw Clara Brancoveanu standing over the bed, her hands against her mouth. The Webley-Doenitz revolver lay on the rug where she had dropped it.

  The dogs had been barking, but now they stopped. Something hung suspended over the bed, a flickering shape, a demon with a long tail. Black and shining, it twisted in a complicated repeating pattern above Miranda’s head.

  For a moment Madame de Rougemont thought of calling for Prochenko, but he was gone. He’d be in the village by now, or on the station platform. No one else, then. She stepped to the iron fireplace, picked up a poker.

  Now she could see the shape more clearly as it twisted and turned back, a long black fish like a lamprey or an eel. It had no eyes, but a circular sucking mouth that was open now. The dogs whined and stumbled underfoot as she stepped forward, the barbed poker in her hand, though she didn’t know what to do with it. Would the creature turn on her or else slip away, twist through the air, escape across the floor? Or would the metal pass through it as if it were a phantasm or a ghost? No, but it was solid, a living, sucking thing, and when Miranda turned her head, sighed in her sleep, another option showed itself. She yawned, opened her mouth, and the creature found a refuge. It vanished down the girl’s red throat. Princess Clara burst into tears.

  Inez de Rougemont let the tip of the poker sink to the floor. Then she went and sat on the stool next to Miranda’s pillow, examining the girl while her mother flopped onto the rug, weeping, kneeling, wringing her hands. “Clara, be quiet,” said the condesa. “Please, tell me what you’ve done.”