Blood Child

by Rose, Lucinda

  Maggie wanted to turn around and walk out. Something in the air was just off—more than usual. Nothing was ever really well in the manor. The air always held a kind of sickness, poisoning everyone. Money and the promise for more kept many of the manor employees working month after month and day after day. The pay was good and deceptive. Work for a year, and make three times what you would in the city. But they never worked for just a year. Fear kept them at their jobs. Fear kept them in check, and fear lead them to their deaths. Fifteen members of the household staff would be found dead after the massacre. The other eight people were the only ones who mourned the dead master.

  Atalik was angry that day in the study, angry that his plan was at a standstill. As Maggie and Gerald cleaned up the pieces of broken china, he complained about how long it would take to complete the next part of his plan. He didn’t specify what the details were.

  “Three mothers in glass entombed, one lord of all to die, and the blood of innocence still to be shed.”

  He repeated the phrase over and over again, demanding an explanation from the air and completely ignoring Maggie and Gerald. How was he going to complete what needed to be done? How could he be sure it would work? None of the men he had assembled had answers. Maggie was spared further knowledge as the great man rushed out of the room in frustration. Gerald offered Maggie just one bit of advice: Get as far away from the house as she could before he figured out the answers. Maggie didn’t have a chance to leave on her own. A week later, she was fired.

  So many things struck her as strange while she worked in the manor. The day and Gerald, who was never a friend or even an ally, were further cemented into her memory by the evening’s events. Maggie was in the kitchen, working on the last of the prep for the next day’s breakfast, when Atalik, Gerald, and a group of men carrying a long ebony box entered. Atalik completely ignored her. Gerald’s eyes were once again sorry, but offered no explanation. The men seemed preoccupied with trying to get the elongated box down the twisted steps to the basement. Maggie was less than a fly on the wall to them. They didn’t notice her, just as she hadn’t noticed the little girl sneaking through her kitchen earlier in the evening.

  Curiosity led her down the same steps three hours later, after the men had come up. She wound her way down the stairs and through the labyrinthine cellar. The place was so seldom used that it was easy to figure out which way to go by where the dust was disturbed. The only place well traveled in the cellar was the massive wine collection. The other areas were constantly under construction or lacked use. With forty-seven rooms in the mansion to be cleaned daily, the household staff neglected the cellar with the exception of the wine collection, which Atalik checked daily. When she heard Emily’s footsteps fleeing from the far end of the chamber, she slid behind one of the wine racks.

  The wall on that edge of the basement was constructed with a local limestone, like the foundation, only it was newer and lighter in color than the rest. Maggie made her way to the wall, wondering what was compelling her forward. With a click her foot jerked down having triggered the release as a seam in the wall appeared followed by a doorway.

  Coming down the stairs into the chamber was not one of her better ideas, and continuing forward didn’t seem particularly bright either. But her feet were almost at the bottom of the stairs before this thought had time to complete itself. The ebony box was one of three coffins that stood on end facing a granite sepulcher with Atalik’s name on it. The coverings to the coffins were glass. The rhyme she heard earlier in the study—its meaning still a mystery she suddenly felt no desire to solve—echoed over and over again in her mind.

  Before leaving the chamber, she saw a few droplets of blood near the base of one of the coffins and wiped it up. She reasoned that Emily must have been fleeing the crypt when she spotted her. Atalik didn’t need to know that the girl had been playing in the basement or that she had found this. A week later Maggie would be fired, and the mental barriers keeping this memory from her conscious mind were cemented and cured in place just like in Emily’s mind.

  ***

  I suggested to Maggie that we go down into the basement using the back stairs. She shook her head and said there was a better way. Atalik spent quite a bit of time in his study. He would enter and wouldn’t leave for hours, but on occasion someone would enter the room to find he wasn’t there. He always said people were mistaken about his whereabouts or that he had been there the whole time, something they couldn’t dispute without incurring his anger at their perceived stupidity. Since the man wasn’t a magician, he had to have another way out.

  Reason led us both to tap on the walls of the study, listening for hollow places. Several were found. The first was a compartment that held a safe, and the other two were large enough for doors. We were giddy with excitement, laughing like three-year-olds high on Pixy Stix. An hour later we were the same kids, crashing hard after the high had worn off. .

  “Maybe we should just go down the normal way,” I suggested. She shrugged and motioned toward the door.

  We were kids once again until we reached the bottom of the basement stairs and were engulfed by darkness. The sudden darkness sucked up all the joy while Maggie’s hand desperately searched the light. The sudden illumination didn’t help; descriptions of the cellar as mazelike were not exaggerated in the slightest. Maggie’s memory of her last trip still seemed fresh enough to guide the way, even after twenty years.

  Left, then right and right again, another right, then left, and the edge of the wine rack made an appearance. The first five rows were empty, sold to help finance the school. More was being readied to ship to a New York auction house specializing in wine. The boxes were waiting for their precious cargo. Men would be by in a couple of days, Maggie explained, to finish packing. Everything had to be done in a precise way to ensure the value remained intact. Maggie continued to rattle on about the expense of the wine and how rare some of the bottles were until we came to the end of the room. The chatter helped both of our nerves. I could barely make out the difference in the shades of limestone used on the walls, but it was there.

  Foolish reason made us both begin to stomp the floor, trying to unlock the door to the crypt. The door slid open without either of us hearing the trigger go off. We looked at each other without a hint of the former glee in our eyes. I think she wanted to suggest that we come back in the morning or with Adam, but she just stared at the opening. Maybe those were actually my thoughts.

  The room was lit just as it had been described. Everything was the same, except for the woman covered in blood, cowering to the right of the sepulcher. She was very much alive for someone residing in a crypt, and she was looking at Maggie and me. It was an incredibly visceral look, accompanied by a growl.

  Wounded animals are dangerous because they don’t understand you are there to help them. They understand their pain, their need to escape it, and nothing else. This woman was an animal. The sight of the woman snapped Maggie out of her fog. She moved forward, trying to help. My arm caught her, holding her back.

  “But it’s Marcella, Em’s mother.”

  I’d only seen pictures of Emily’s mother, and the snarling creature before us was nothing like her.

  “Stop, Mother,” Emily’s voice called from the top of the stairs. “It’s OK. They aren’t going to hurt you.” I turned to look at Emily as she slowly descended the stairs. The creature focused on her and no one else. Maggie and I vanished from her glare.

  “Look at the mess you have made of yourself. I told you I would be back to let you out as soon as everyone was asleep.” The tone was a scolding one. Clearly, the creature Emily was calling Mother hadn’t followed instructions.

  Maggie started to protest, but Emily’s hand flew up, and she was silenced. All cognition drained from Maggie’s face.

  “Ty, I am so sorry that you had to meet Mother like this. She really isn’t herself right now. Too much cold blood. Something warm will help her think. Maggie, be a dear and give Mother somethi
ng warm.” The last words lingered on her tongue. Maggie moved forward and knelt by the woman, giving her arm. Mother responded by looking at Emily. After a nod from Emily, Mother sank her teeth into the flesh before her.

  “Don’t turn away. You need to see this. You need to know. It wasn’t my blood my father needed. It was hers. He killed all those people, and it was her blood he needed. Now he rots, aware, trapped in his own disintegrating flesh. And she lives. ”

  “But the poem?”

  “Was a mistranslation. A fortunate one for me and mine, we would have been slaves had he succeed. My father believed that he had the key to immortality, but what is immortality without youth. He needed to drink her blood after her rose, but his own vanity trapped him in his sarcophagus. The elegant tomb became his prison; he lies in there aware even as we speak unable to summon the strength to move. I imagine he is quite insane by now. “

  I watched as Mother broke Maggie’s skin and began to suck the wound. “She was the innocent whose blood was called for in the poem, her blood needed,” Emily said. “She was closer in the blood chain.”

  My eyes looked back at Emily. She wasn’t enjoying the scene, but she was definitely in control.

  “Mother, you need to stop now.” And that was that. She stopped and looked up at her daughter. “Go to sleep.”

  Mother was obedient, went to the corner, and again looked up at her daughter. She didn’t want to go back in the box, but Emily shook her head. A moment later Mother opened the lid to her coffin and walked back in.

  “Please, Ty, lock her back in.”

  I didn’t want to do it. Just as I didn’t want to watch, but what Emily said, I did. Her blood commanded me. From the first day I met her, I was hers. One tiny drop of her blood in a glass of wine. The dreams. It was Emily and her mother in the great hall talking about what to do with me. In her dream home, Castle Cesjthe, the castle under who’s shadow great-grandmother was born the illegitimate child of a Bathory. A child that not knowing her true parentage would go on to marry a Bathory cousin tying her descendents even closer to the Bathory/Dracula bloodline.

  The fire that scorched my feet burned away my free will. Mother’s blood would have set me free to walk the earth for an eternity, or that was its promise. Marcella was innocent. She loved Atalik, and he had killed her after the birth of their child. She never wanted to divorce Atalik, but he was convinced she wasn’t the one he needed. He thought it was his daughter, but thanks to him, she would never be innocent.

  He had eaten Emily’s placenta and thought it would make him immortal. It didn’t, and he went in search of someone else who shared the lineage of the Blood Countess. All of his wives were related in some way to the infamous countess. However, Marcella was the closest, and she was pure, like the books in his study. Her heart loved him and only him, so it remained pure in spirit. She fell for his charms; if he had only been patient, she would have made him immortal.

  The shell of Marcella, Mother, went to sleep. Her coffin remained in the house, and Atalik went to the fire the next day. He and his first two brides. They, like Marcella, awoke the long-ago night that Em fell in the chamber crypt. The rituals that had bound her to Atalik had also bound her to the other women. No one opened the chamber long enough for them to escape prior to the interment. Gerald had started the killing by releasing the women, intent on raising his master and gaining immortality through him. The slaughter gave them strength to move about the house, eventually turning on Gerald when he tried to return them all to sleep when he realized that they wouldn’t stop. The blood of victims even the brothers didn’t bring them to their senses. More than a decade locked away and aware in their glass door coffins drove them insane. Atalik had woken up as well, but the immortality he had been granted didn’t come with a rejuvenated body. Feeding might have fixed that problem, but the granite sepulcher prevented him from escaping.

  When Mother chased Emily into her closet, she tasted her own child’s blood and a small level of aware flashed in her eyes. Emily screamed at her to go away and she did back into the basement and her prison. That is until Patty’s helpful therapy broke down the walls containing all the memories Emily had hidden away.

  The school is up and helping young people make something of themselves. None of the juvenile offenders have gone back to a life of crime. Their desire to rebel leaves them shortly after they come to Cesjthe School—usually after the first meal and Mrs. Maggie’s cookies. They all have jobs, real jobs. I write, teach, and do as my mistress commands.

  About The Author Lucinda T. Rose is a writer, poet and blogger. Her blog, Rose Reads (http://rosereads.com/), is the winner of several awards, including the Versatile Blogger (2012). Blood Child is her first novel. Currently, she is working on her second book. Lucinda teaches High School English during the day and English as a Second Language at night. When she isn’t working or writing she spends her time with Luke, a lovable mutt, two feline overlords, Jack and Nu Mu, and a turtle, Hrothgar. She lives in Orlando, Florida.