by M. D. Elster
I felt a little uncomfortable telling Colette about my mother. I’m not sure why exactly — perhaps because I was very aware that, to Colette, my mother must inevitably represent the competition in some fashion: The woman my stepfather had loved and lost before her. And perhaps I was worried, too, that in speaking about her to Colette, I was being disloyal to my mother.
Colette’s gaze suggested she was hungry to know a great deal more, but she seemed to sense my discomfort, and my reluctance to betray my mother’s memory. She turned her attention back to the book of fairytales she was holding.
“There’s a page missing,” she observed, changing the subject. Her finger ran down the crack where the ragged stub of a torn page remained, like a forgotten anchor. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” I said, telling her the honest answer. “It wasn’t always like that. I didn’t notice until after we fled Europe… after we settled here in America… after…”
After my mother died, I thought. I used to turn the pages of that book every night before bed — I was too old for fairytales but the illustrations were indeed beautiful and it was a strange, nostalgic comfort to look at them. But after the bombing in London, I abandoned my usual rituals out of depression, and then all too quickly, my stepfather and I were on the move again, sailing to America.
“I understand,” Colette said, smiling kindly.
She slipped the book of Flemish fairytales back onto the shelf, and sighed. Then she crawled onto the bed and stretched out on her stomach, and patted the quilt for me to come join her, which I did. We gossiped and ate the chocolates. I told her about my troubles in school. She asked me if I had a boyfriend, and hinted that she sensed I was carrying a torch for Jules.
“Don’t worry,” she said, when she finally sat up, and scooted off the bed with a coquettish bounce, “I won’t breathe a word to your stepfather. Our talks are only between us.” I wondered if she meant about my interest in Jules. “I think every girl should be allowed her own secrets.”
She smiled and disappeared. I watched her sashay out the door — destined, no doubt, to rejoin my stepfather for the remainder of the evening. I tried not to be too disappointed. Colette was the best company I’d had in years. I hadn’t realized how badly I’d needed to talk to someone.
Mind you, I did not think of her as a mother — not even after she and my stepfather were affianced. No one could ever replace my mother, and Colette, I think, was not interested in that type of relationship in any case. The mathematics between us weren’t quite right; Colette was not quite old enough to have birthed me. She was, however, the right age to act as a kind of older sister, and I embraced her as such. Having never had siblings, having gone from being an only child raised in the woods, to a war refugee who would have easily been orphaned had it not been for a very kind stepfather, my existence was a pointedly lonely one. The very insinuation of an older, more worldly, beautiful sister was an intoxicating proposition indeed.
On the surface, at least, she seemed to enjoy my company as well. When she was not with my stepfather, Colette took me places with her. After she moved in, I learned she had some distinctly unique habits. She was local to the area, born and raised just outside of New Orleans, and referred to herself as an “Arcadian” — Arcadians being that peculiar breed of French-Canadians who migrated southward down the Mississippi River and settled in small pockets all over Louisiana, eventually better known as “Cajuns” — although Colette herself never once used this latter word during all the time we spent together.
Left to our own devices, Colette and I often fell into speaking French with each other — me with my Belgian French and she with her incongruous Cajun twang. We made a strange music together, to say the least, but it was mainly comprehensible.
And Colette maintained other curious habits. She was an avid follower of the zodiac, for one. She asked me my birth sign, and had my birth chart drawn up by an astrologist. She seemed especially pleased that we were both water signs.
“Your stepfather was born under a fire sign,” she confided in me. “Aries, as a matter of fact. Terrible match, our signs; I shouldn’t be with him, truth be told, but I can’t help myself!” A thoughtful expression came over her face as she contemplated my stepfather’s features. “I do believe he is the most mysterious, most dashing man I have ever met…” She smiled — it was the smile of a little schoolgirl; the kind of smile one smiles to herself — but I was glad to see it.
She also regularly visited the Voodoo shops in the French Quarter, consulting with a clique of three sisters who claimed to be descendants of New Orleans’s famous regal quadroons. They were elegant, with their foreheads swathed in silk scarves, their African hair worn loose, wild as a Greek maenad, and their eyes as still and calm as two smooth river stones. Colette got quite involved for a time, learning the sisters’ Voodoo practices. Under their tutelage, she built makeshift altars, arranged chicken bones and tiny vials of snake’s blood, lit candles, and chanted incantations. She visited a palm reader, had her tarot regularly read, and kept a deck of her own handy at all times. When we visited the shop of one tarot reader in particular, Colette would take out her deck and learn from the woman by practicing reading my cards under the fortune teller’s supervision.
This was a source of delight and amusement for me, until… until one day the dynamic of our relationship shifted very abruptly. It happened very subtly, and had to do with the business I’d glimpsed while lurking around backstage at my stepfather’s nightclub. This was after I’d been reprimanded by my stepfather for kissing Jules, and I’d seen Colette and Jules engaged in that curiously intimate conversation I described. I spied them that first night, and then again on a handful of occasions afterwards — always from a dark corner or from my customary perch high up on the catwalks above the stage. On one of these occasions, Colette surprised me by glancing up, casting her eyes directly in my direction.
In that moment, I knew: She saw me.
We never discussed it; she never mentioned it to me, nor I to her. But I knew she had seen me watching her whisper something into Jules’s ear, and whatever had transpired, it plainly made her nervous to know that she’d been seen.
We began bickering after that. I shouted at her, and accused her of terrible things — of wanting my stepfather for his money, of having a secret crush on Jules. She called me a brat, and said I had an unnatural dependence on her fiancée.
Around that time another uncanny thing began to happen: Every time Colette practiced her tarot by reading my cards, she consistently dealt XIII — Death — each and every time her reading called for her to draw the sixth card, the card that marked my future. The first time it happened I attempted to brush it off, to fix my stubborn mind on not allowing it to rattle me. But then it happened again — not once more, not twice more, but six more times. On the seventh time, Madame Larousse, waved a dismissive hand, trying to settle my distress.
“The death card can mean many things, Mesdemoiselles… Calm yourselves. It is not always meant to be taken literally. Do not look so grave! It can mean great change is on the horizon, it can mean the death of a bad habit, or the banishment of something that has plagued your life and made you unhappy! Death is death — is only an ending! An ending that may lead to a new beginning!”
“Of course,” Colette said, as she continued on dealing my cards. But she gave me such a look as I have never seen before. I hardly knew what to make of it. I cannot even quite translate it into words, only, just that… I can say there was a glimmer of something in her eyes that was quite dark.
It was an odd coincidence, those tarot cards. I went to sleep every night, seeing them being laid out upon the tattered lace cloth that covered Madame Larousse’s rickety wooden table, holding my breath in suspense each time Colette reached to deal the next card, and feeling my blood run cold and a chill go down my spine the second I glimpsed the bony figure of the grim reaper, the “XIII” printed at the top.
A
nd then, there were other images to contemplate: The image of Colette whispering to Jules at the nightclub, her hand resting upon his shoulder. This image was burned on my brain, and when it returned again to me much later — back in the asylum, on the night before I was due to be discharged and sent home in Colette’s care — it forced me to wonder what sort of business might require her to whisper in hushed voices into the ear of young Jules Martin. There was no business I could think of — no innocent business, that is — and I remained flummoxed by what I had witnessed with my own eyes. I felt my cheeks burn with the embarrassed humiliation of it, and with the memory of what I myself had done. What was a kiss from me, after all, compared to Colette’s amorous affections?
Later — after the shooting — as I lay restless and unsleeping in my cot in the asylum dormitory, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Jules was somehow innocent, and Colette guilty. Now I had confirmation from my stepfather that they’d had a terrible row the very evening the hurricane hit. All that time learning Voodoo spells from the women in the French Quarter. Could Colette have learned a spell to make Jules do her bidding?
I could not allow myself to contemplate such atrocities in earnest.
CHAPTER 32.
It is a strange night.
To begin, I am antsy. I am all too aware of the fact that this is my last night in the asylum, and that tomorrow morning, I am destined to pack my bags, say goodbye to the nurses and my fellow patients, and go home… go home that is, with Colette. The thought of being alone with her in the house — just the two of us, without my stepfather — sends a cold sweat directly to my armpits. I can’t say for sure what she has or hasn’t done. But deep in my gut, I don’t trust her.
The other reason this night feels strange to me is the fact that the cots directly to my left and to my right are now both empty. It has been a week since Ellen’s discharge, and just yesterday, without any warning, Lucy was discharged, too. I suppose I ought to be happy for her. But her reaction to Ellen’s release still sticks in my memory.
Ellen didn’t wake up, Lucy had insisted, confiding in me, and she certainly didn’t go home with her family. She wasn’t discharged. That’s just what they want you to believe… She was taken. Taken to that place. I know you’ve been there, Anaïs…
But yesterday, when I tried to revisit that earlier conversation, she pretended she had no clue what I was talking about. I asked her if she was scared to leave the asylum, to be discharged.
Why would I be? she asked, blinking at me innocently.
Because you said no one goes home, Lucy, I replied. You thought they all disappeared to somewhere else entirely… I thought you meant the Land of the Four Kings…
‘Land of the Four Kings’? Lucy scoffed. What on earth is that? I think you’ve been in this asylum too long, Anaïs. Don’t let the nurses catch you talking that way! They’ll tell the doctor and he’ll want to reconsider giving you that electroshock after all…
I felt a little hurt and scorned by her reaction, but more than anything, I was stunned. Had I hallucinated it all? If not, why would Lucy suddenly play dumb? Either way, she was wrong about one thing: Now that my stepfather had woken up from his coma, Dr. Waters and the nurses are no longer interested in extreme treatments. As a matter of fact, it’s more than a little ironic that now they suddenly behave as though I am “healed.”
“I think we can forgo these in honor of your last night, Anaïs,” Nurse Kitching says when it’s time for bed, indicating the restraints. And so I am left to lie in bed without being buckled down to my cot that night, but I am no more comfortable for all that. I toss and turn, and doze for very short periods at best.
That is — I doze off and on until I wake with a start — very much in the same manner as I did on my first night in the girls’ dormitory.
When my eyes blink open, I have a fleeting hope that I will roll over and find a key waiting for me, tucked under my covers where I will encounter it, or else cooling on the pillow next to my cheek. But as I stir, expecting to encounter it, there is no key.
The only conclusion to be drawn is simple: Mr. Fletcher has no need of me, and has not sent for me.
And yet… I can’t help but wonder if I looked for the key in the last place I remember hiding it, would I find it? I sit up in bed and carefully, quietly fold back the sheet. Once again, I am lucky: No one else seems to be awake. My eyes rove over the other beds, the mute, lumpy shapes of other girls huddled under their blankets, lost in their dreams, and I see not the slightest bit of movement, not even a twitch.
As silently as possible, I climb out of my bed and lift the lid to my footlocker. I reach a hand inside and feel about for the one pair of socks I have not worn since arriving here in the asylum. My hands fumble over the spongy ball of the two socks rolled together. I unfold the pair, reach into the toe of the left one, and there it is: The key, just as I hid it all those days ago. Very curious. It is as if it has never been removed, as if Mr. Fletcher never took it out, placing it near me on other occasions as a signal I was being summoned. It is there in the sock, as if it has always been only there, as if I never carried it down to the basement door on three prior occasions. It appears so very undisturbed, I can’t stop the thought that comes unbidden into my mind: Am I crazy after all? Did I imagine all three of my visits to the Land of the Four Kings?
I blink at it under the red light of the night lamp.
Clubs…hearts…spades… And there is one more symbol, one more suit, one more emblem representing that last remaining kingdom: Diamonds.
I think for a moment. Perhaps I am mad. But even if I am truly mad, I would like to see for myself, one more time. I’d like to see whether I can pay a visit to the fourth and final king. Not to mention, I’d like to see Mr. Fletcher again, and know whether or not he obtained asylum, whether he is safe. I’d like to find out if the assassin was finally found and who it is, since I believe it is not the Snake King. And perhaps, even… I’d like to see Sir Lewin.
Once again, there are the usual dangers: I could get caught out of bed after hours, and find myself in quite a lot of trouble. But I have a feeling Dr. Waters and the rest of his staff no longer care very much what kind of trouble I get up to. I have to believe that, at this point, I would only get a rap on the knuckles if I were to be found out of bed late at night. Yes: They would likely scold me, but also simply send me home with Colette as planned.
Home with Colette. I feel a fresh chill thinking of it again. Certainly, the Land of the Four Kings seems a safer place to be, as opposed to the house where my stepfather was shot, alone with the person who may or may not have had something to do with his shooting.
I make up my mind, slip on shoes and a sweater, and scurry as quickly and silently as possible down to the door in the basement. The key works. If I am in fact crazy, at least nothing has changed.
Upon this fourth visit, the route has become quite familiar and I find my way into the Glade of Commoners quite easily. I sprint through the lovely dark woods listening to the crickets’ song, and decide to go to Commoners’ Village. From there I am confident I can find my way to Harpy’s Cross, and to the road that leads north to the Court of the Unicorn — and hopefully to where Mr. Fletcher is taking refuge.
I can’t say why, but I am excited to be back this time around; it almost feels like a homecoming. My feet move faster and faster as I get closer to the village. I practically gallop down the embankment, making my way through the thicket of birch trees, and past the location where I spotted that first bonfire, on that first evening — strangely, that first night feels like almost a lifetime ago. There is no bonfire burning at the moment, only a few fragments of charred wood and a large circle of scorched weeds and wildflowers marking the spot on the ground.
But then, as I leave the embankment of birch trees behind and draw nearer to Commoners’ Village, I detect some kind of commotion, and regain a sobering sense of caution. Where I am standing it is still darkest midnight, but is si
gnificantly brighter down there — the rooftops of the village shine with the high noon sun, and something is happening in the village. My heart skips a beat, worried about what might have transpired during my absence. It is a reasonable fear; after all, the last time I was in Commoners’ Village the Lion King had declared martial law, I found Mr. Fletcher’s cottage ransacked, and was attacked by a lynx-headed guard who tried to kill me.
But as reasonable as my fear might be, I quickly see it is unfounded. The commotion is, in fact, a celebration. The villagers are celebrating. There is a large table of food set out, a rag-tag band of musicians playing, creature-beings dancing in the main square of the tiny peasant village.
I stumble towards these proceedings, a little discombobulated.
“Is that the human girl, ‘Anaïs’?” I hear a voice call. I look to its source, and see Mrs. Hobbs, the hedgehog-headed matron, wringing her hands in her usual worked-up fashion. “Hello, dear! How marvelous! We hardly expected to see you today!!!”
She waves me over to her, and when I approach, she squeezes my hand and drags me along for an impromptu reunion with some of the other villagers.
“Mr. Croft! Mr. Thomas! Look who wandered in from the woods to say hello!”
The crane and toad both look at me, and surprised, each give a polite nod.
“Where is Mr. Fletcher?” I ask, darting a glance here and there for the dapperly dressed fox-man.
“He went to seek political asylum in the Unicorn King’s royal court,” Mr. Croft says. “Of course, now he no longer needs it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hadn’t you heard?” says Mrs. Hobbs. “The villain was caught — it was someone from the Lion King’s court.”
