Flesh Wounds

by Christopher Fowler

  Within the undergrowth of his vast beard, Scarabold’s lips were pursed in anger. Who had informed the child, and to what purpose if not to upset her? Even he could see what damage the knowledge might have on one so lacking in the family ways.

  ‘So you know,’ he said simply.

  ‘We are butchers of men and that is all you can say?’ cried Ginansia, ending her determination to remain calm. Before Scarabold could formulate an appropriate attitude, the princess burst into a furious fit. She accused her stepfather of treason and murder and much worse besides, of lying and hiding, of cowardice and bestiality. She said many things she had no intention of saying and wrecked any chance of a reconciliation between herself and the king. More harmful still, she ended the diatribe by renouncing her name, something no member of the family had ever dared to do.

  Scarabold was apoplectic. In a fiery cloud of briar embers he banished the girl from his limited sight and ordered that she should remain confined to her quarters. Ginansia ran from the room in a flood of tears and ransacked most of the East Quadrant searching for the bonily comforting arms of Leperdandy, but he was nowhere to be found. She returned to her chamber and fell onto the bed, drifting quickly into a bitter, miserable slumber.

  An hour later she was awoken by the sound of nails being heavily driven into her bedroom door. She counted forty of them, long iron shards that protruded through the oaken piers of the door arch. She tried the handle but it would not budge even a tenth of an inch.

  She was sealed in.

  Forced to reply to her bellowed questions, two servants shifted from spandrel to keyhole and admitted that they were carrying out Scarabold’s wishes. Her meals would be delivered through the gap beneath the door, and she was to remain incarcerated until she saw the error of her ways – however long that might take.

  Spackle and Peut were running through the corridors of the castle’s skewed seventh floor playing Dead Man’s Sting, a game requiring intimate comprehension of its convoluted rules and an attitude of extreme spite. The twin progeny of Aunt Asphyxia were spoiled brats with barely a single original thought to share between them, and were consequently used by their mother to spy on the rest of the family. Asphyxia was not, in fact, a genuine aunt but an embittered widow inherited by Scarabold after he had made a promise to her dying husband on a gore-soaked battlefield. In the emotional turmoil of the moment, the Great Wound had forgotten that his old friend’s wife was pregnant and so had found himself providing for the only family inhabiting the castle that was not directly blood related. He did not approve of the twelve-year-old twins; their sly, underhand meddling offended his warrior sensibilities. He would have approved of them even less now, for they had been sent at their mother’s command on a spying mission. Spackle stood at Earl Carapace’s door, and Peut stood on his brother’s shoulders, peering through an engraved blue crystal transom. The cut and thickness of the glass gave him only the vaguest of refracted views but magnified the voice of the Beetle Lord into reedy sharpness.

  ‘There must be a way to make her see reason,’ he was insisting, unaware that she had already glimpsed it after unsealing the kitchen’s cooking pots. ‘Why, she’s no longer a girl but a mature woman, luscious, full, bulging, a fragrantly moist plum, ripe for plucking and peeling.’

  ‘Your trousers, sir.’ That was the valet’s voice. ‘The buttons are undone.’

  ‘Is it any wonder,’ sighed the earl, attending to his groin.

  ‘He’s smitten with Ginansia,’ Spackle whispered downward, always prepared to state the obvious. He resettled his boots on either side of his brother’s spine. ‘I don’t know why he doesn’t force himself upon her and have done with it.’

  ‘Not everyone’s like you,’ hissed Peut, arching his sore back.

  ‘And now that the Neanderthal Scarabold has sealed her up inside her bedchamber, how am I supposed to plight my troth?’ There was a rip of silk as Carapace put his elbow through his shirt. The exasperated valet was attempting to dress his master as he paced. ‘His loyalty to me is touching, if transparently political. Presumably the Great Wound hopes to curry my favour by punishing the child for refusing to succumb. His actions have left us all without a choice.’

  ‘Do we have to stay here much longer?’ croaked Peut. ‘My bones are cracking.’

  Beyond the door, Carapace’s valet offered a solution. ‘If I might be so very bold as to make the tiniest of minuscule suggestions,’ he began, the servant deferring to nobility with the acquiescence of a whore collapsing into bed, ‘why not perform a service for the princess and endear yourself to her by fulfilling her desires? She’s locked away; there must be something she needs, and such an act will confirm your allegiance to her against the wishes of her stepfather.’

  ‘Now I remember why I keep you on!’ cried Carapace. ‘For someone who lives in a world of socks and silver polish, you occasionally produce a superlative idea. I’ll venture to her rooms at once.’

  ‘He’ll never be able to get her door open,’ sniggered Spackle, hopping down. ‘Come on, let’s get there before him.’

  As silent as a sunset, they entered the wet stone corridor running behind the panels of the fifth floor and made their way through the maze of dripping brick. It was within these walls that Suppurus, the disgraced Knave Of Chaucery, had avoided his scheduled beheading by remaining hidden for five days and surviving on his own regurgitated vomit. Although that was nearly a hundred years ago, his person, mummified by the crosswinds of the rumbling latrine flues, could still be found in the passageway with the index finger of its right hand wedged firmly in its throat.

  The twins arrived minutes before the earl and secreted themselves in an alcove opposite Ginansia’s room, behind a weevil-chewed tapestry celebrating one of Scarabold’s most senseless massacres. Ginansia’s door looked as if it would not be opened without the aid of a battering ram. Shortly, Carapace strode up, ran his tapering fingers across the pounded nailheads and brought his lips to the edge of the keyhole.

  ‘Ginansia,’ he called gently, ‘I am mortified to find you imprisoned like this. Perhaps there is something I can do to secure your release.’ The twins failed to discern the princess’s reply as the draughts blowing along the corridor rattled and banged the tapestries, obscuring all sound from within her apartment. Peut peered out through a tangle of rotted stitches. Carapace seemed to have been granted an audience, for he was listening intently at the mortice and nodding to himself. He shifted position, listened some more, then wrinkled his forehead in alarm as a small sheet of folded paper was slipped to him from beneath the door. Gingerly, he unfolded the page and studied it with augmenting consternation.

  ‘What you are asking is utterly impossible,’ he cried, refolding the sheet. ‘If the king found out he would have me killed in some brutal, lingering fashion.’ He hunched against the door again.

  ‘Of course I desire it, with all my heart, but how can I –? Yes, most certainly I wish to prove myself to you, but is there really no other way that I can help –’

  A boot kicked at the door from within, sending Carapace reeling. It was clear that whether Ginansia’s terms were met or not, she meant business. The earl deposited the slip of paper in his jerkin and set off at a lick.

  Spackle and Peut were stumped. As spies, they had failed miserably. All they knew was that Carapace might or might not have agreed to aid the princess in some treasonable enterprise of her own devising. Asphyxia would be far from pleased by this incomplete bulletin. Spackle scraped a curtain of ragged black hair from his eyes and stared at his brother. Whatever Ginansia had requested of the Beetle Lord, it was sure to cause upset in the rest of the household.

  ‘We’ll have to follow him everywhere,’ said Peut, ‘use our initiative. Either he’ll do as she requests and antagonise the crown, or he’ll rat to the Great Wound and lose her forever.’

  ‘What about the princess?’ asked Spackle.

  ‘Forget about her,’ came the reply. ‘She’s not going anywhere. Few would
help her, and they dare not risk the anger of the king.’

  ‘What about Leperdandy?’

  ‘Pouting milksop!’ Peut snorted derisively.

  ‘Wheedling catamite!’ added his twin.

  ‘Simpering sodomist!’

  ‘Bulgy bilge bottom!’

  How they laughed as they crept back into the brick-bound rookery that would lead them once more to Carapace’s quarters.

  Ginansia paced the floor, wringing a yard of olivine damask in her pallid hands. Outside, rain sprayed from the buttresses and leaked through the broken tracery of the stained-glass windows, discolouring the herringbone parquet upon which she stepped. To have defied her poisoned family and be rendered so completely powerless! Leperdandy meant well but could only fail her, and even the Beetle Lord had quailed at her demands. She had simply entreated Carapace to prove his love by visiting the dungeon chambers and arranging for the immediate release of all the prisoners held there. Was that too much to ask for? The family would be forced to curtail its cannibalistic behaviour, and in the ensuing aura of normalcy Ginansia would at last be heard. She would be a clear voice of reason, someone to lead the Baynes out into a bright new dawn.

  Or so she thought.

  In truth, Scarabold was not prepared to heed his errant stepdaughter, even if the direst of circumstances demanded it. Fate had always ruled the castle, her broad dark wings smoothing and combing out the terrible events of the years, and that was not about to change.

  Fumblegut was pounding a mouse flat with an iron mallet. Two more and he would have enough for a hat. Too lazy to bother with skinning them, he simply smashed away at the pinioned rodents until their guts had departed their hides. He flicked the mouse innards from his pudgy fingers, then buried his hand down the back of his trousers and gave the sweating cleavage of his rump a good scratch.

  As he rose and kicked the mallet aside, he decided that it must be time to eat again. Below ground there was no telling night from day. The only source of illumination came from flesh-tallow torches, and the only whisper of the outside world descended from the distant hissing of rain on tin gutters. Nobody bothered him down here. Nobody wanted to know what went on. Nobody dared to take even the smallest peek. And that suited the jailer down to the straw-strewn gore-soaked ground.

  Fumblegut wondered about the boy in cell 71, a spirited young colt who had followed his father into pokey by admitting a minor act of vandalism against the Bayne escutcheon. A rowdy lad, he was, forever hammering his food plate against the bars, but of tender appeal. Fumblegut fancied burying his teeth into the child’s plump buttocks but was forced to content himself with a cold tongue sandwich and a pot of porter. Although some dank recess of his mind had registered the increase in the number of cockroaches and stag beetles scuttling over the flagstone floor of the dungeons, Fumblegut failed to spot the spindly form of Carapace. The earl was sliding from shadow to shadow as he unlocked the prisoner’s cells with the iron hoop of keys he had found tossed on a nearby table by the careless jailer.

  Carapace had determined to do the bidding of his beloved; well versed in the ways of darkness, he slithered through the stinking cubicles like a passing eclipse, so that when the gloom lifted from each holding pen, the inmate within could discern a door now standing ajar.

  Fumblegut had no idea he was being robbed of the castle’s future meal supply. Ensconced in his private chamber, he focused only on the bottom of his draining pint pot.

  Carapace could see that many of the dungeon’s denizens would be unable to leave unaided. Some had been fattened up so much that they could barely raise themselves on their pustulant haunches. Crimson sores on the legs of others forced them to remain in strange static positions. Flesh had withered and rotted on arms too long chained together. Here were diseases and tortures beyond imagining, and the results of these twin horrors lay moaning in their own filth. But the earl had obeyed Ginansia’s edict, and thus his mission could be counted a success.

  A further torch-lit cell stood alone at the end of the muck-plastered corridor, separated from the rest. Carapace looked back anxiously at Fumblegut’s closed door, convinced that any minute now all hell would break loose; the dazed prisoners were starting to emerge, and the sound of their shuffling movements would soon reach the jailer’s ears. But curiosity had bettered him and, determined that his liberation would not be incomplete, Carapace approached the distant lone receptacle with key hoop cocked.

  He reached the single jail room and read the notice pinned to the lock:

  FEED BUT DO NOT TOUCH

  By Order Of His Majesty The King

  He tipped his ear and listened to a laboured wheezing, then squinted inside. For a moment the cell’s darkness refused to yield the figure within. But as the poor inmate’s features clarified in torch light, everything became apparent.

  What little colour there was in Carapace’s face drained as he took a stammering step back. Someone clearly knew about this; someone would pay, and someone else would have to be told. He reached out to unlock the door but the keys jumbled themselves together in his hands, and then Fumblegut was emerging from his room to find himself jostled within a swirling cotillon of crazed inmates. It was clearly time to leave. Storing away the sights he had witnessed, Carapace searched for the entrance to the passageway that the princess had so carefully described. Ginansia possessed hand-drawn maps of almost every area in the castle, even though she had ventured to fewer than half of them herself, and had passed one to him beneath her bedroom door. Now he prayed that he could decipher it with enough speed to make good his escape. As he hunted the secret alcove, he forced himself to remember that any risk was worth taking for the warming glow of the princess’s approval.

  Imagine this: As Carapace was making his way back through the castle armed with his explosive nugget of hitherto hidden knowledge, Leperdandy was undertaking his own carefully plotted revenge for Ginansia’s sake. Following a secret plan of his own devising, he first visited Dr Fangle’s temporary office just beneath the leaking roof, then he crept unseen into the kitchens to fiddle about in the scullery, and finally he made his way to the Heart Of All Sorrow for a last-minute amelioration of the dining table. Satisfied with his arrangements, Leperdandy prepared himself for the evening meal.

  For the past two hours, Spackle and Peut had been annoyed and confused. After trailing the Beetle Earl from Ginansia’s apartment, they had lost him somewhere within the corridor walls. It was as if he had been provided with secret knowledge neither of them possessed, almost as if he’d been given a map. Peut slapped himself on the forehead; what about the paper that had passed beneath the bedroom door? It meant that Carapace was doing the princess’s bidding, which somehow, obliquely, spelled trouble for them. And now he was back outside her chamber, angrily removing each of the forty nails with a hammer claw.

  What in the name of Beelzebub Bayne was going on?

  The Dining Hall was illuminated by forty-one tall candles, the number of days into the year. The candle boy dreaded December. Scarabold, always the first to table, was seated between Mater Moribund and Dwindoline. The Quaff had been sequestered in a poorly lit corner, the better to hide his bibulous demeanour. Aunt Asphyxia, unusually, had brought the twins to her side. They slouched to the left and right below her like a pair of badly potted ferns. Leperdandy, resplendent in a silken-starred waistcoat of midnight blue, touched his hair nervously as he watched and waited.

  The Decrepend was droning on through the Blessing even though two further place settings had yet to be filled. He stopped so abruptly that everyone in the room looked up.

  Ginansia was standing in the doorway on Carapace’s arm.

  Scarabold’s mouth fell open. His stepdaughter was wearing a floor-length cream lace gown interwoven with honeysuckle buds. Their scent quickly filled the room, banishing the reek of candle tallow. The earl was bound into a corsetted leather military suit ornately knotted with lengths of polished steel, darts that had been removed from the bodies of his en
emies.

  As the couple took their seats, no one could think of a single thing to say. Scarabold’s immediate reaction, to blaspheme foully and throw his fists about, quickly subsided. Mater Moribund’s eyes settled on the couple and narrowed slightly before she turned her attention to the pouring of the soup. Leperdandy, however, was shocked into another century. He had expected – counted on – Carapace to appear, but couldn’t imagine what Ginansia thought she was doing. Ginansia knew very well what she was doing.

  After he had removed the last of the nails, Carapace had informed the princess of his trip into the dungeons, and as he described his freeing of the prisoners she had seen a saviour’s light aglow in his eyes. She felt sure that the mission she had given the earl had changed his nature, although she was a little surprised by the success of her pleas. And if she had not consented to marry him, she had at least agreed to go through with her deflowering ceremony.

  But first there was a matter of proof. She had made Carapace promise that he would reveal his act of liberation to the Great Wound before announcing that he was now willing to form an alliance with the family Bayne. This way everyone would achieve a limited degree of happiness. Scarabold would have a strong new ally, Ginansia would have ended the castle’s dependence on human livestock, and Carapace would have somewhere to bury his virtually permanent erection.

  If only it had worked out that way.

  At first, the only sound in the room was the clicking of spoons in bowls. The soup appeared to be cream of turnip, but Ginansia pushed hers to one side in case there was something of a more human nature lurking at the bottom. The Beetle Lord ate heartily, ignoring the fascinated stares of Asphyxia and Leperdandy, then smeared his napkin across his shovel beard, cracked his knuckles in a series of tiny pistol shots, and requested everyone’s attention. A cockroach fell out of his tunic and was hastily flicked aside.

  It was a moment upon which the future of the great and damned Bayne family hung. For Carapace was about to reveal the one discovery he had so far withheld from the princess – a discovery that would reshape the destiny of this dynasty.