by JG Faherty
In the empty space following Maria’s story, the only noises in the room were the muffled sound of Lilly sniffing back tears against Burns’s shoulder and the clinking of plates and silverware in Maria’s hands.
“That’s awful,” Erika finally said.
Maria sighed. “Yes. He’s been a different man ever since that day. Broken. He fired all the staff but me. Now he spends most nights locked upstairs in his study, mourning those he loved.” She took a deep breath. “Well, if you’re done with your meals, it’s best to be off to your rooms. It’s not good to be wandering the castle at night.”
“Is it dangerous?” Erika asked, pushing her plate away. She hadn’t finished her meal, but no longer seemed inclined to eat. Jason felt the same; the confirmation of his fears, combined with Maria’s story, had killed his appetite.
The young servant shook her head but Jason had the distinct impression she was lying. “No, but there are…things… that could be frightening.” Her already soft voice grew even quieter, forcing her audience to lean forward in order to hear her. “The spirits of the dead, they wander the halls of this place. Sometimes…sometimes they even speak with the professor.”
“The spirits of his family?” Lilly asked, wiping tears from her cheeks. Her voice was almost as hushed as Maria’s.
“Yes. So if you hear…things…tonight, do not venture out to follow them. Remain in your rooms.”
A cold silence followed Maria’s words, a silence broken by a loud bray of laughter that made Erika squeeze Jason’s hand tighter.
“Ha!” One of Burns’s eyebrows went up. “That’s a good one. Perfect. Stormy night, desolate castle, ghosts wandering the halls. What’s next, rattling chains?”
Maria frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Never mind.” Burns waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t suppose it’s possible to get something stronger than wine to drink? I feel the need for large quantities of alcohol.”
The maid nodded. “I will bring it to the sitting room,” she said, and retreated down the hall, her arms filled with dishes.
“Care to join us?” Burns asked Jason and Erika.
Jason stared at the man. Was he insane? “Are you serious? We’re trapped over a hundred years in the past with no idea how to get home, and you’re acting like it’s a vacation!”
Burns shrugged and tilted back in his chair, forcing Lilly to relinquish her hold on him. “That’s because I don’t believe any of this is real. I don’t know if it’s a dream or if I had an accident and I’m in a coma, but none of this…” he waved his arms around, “…is possible. Carnivals don’t send people to other places. People can’t travel back in time. Therefore, none of this is actually happening. And since it’s all in my imagination, I’m going to make the best of it by drinking myself into oblivion. Hopefully, when I wake up all this will be gone. And I won’t even have a hangover, because the booze won’t be real, either.”
“What about me?” Lilly asked. “I’m here too. How can I be having the same dream?”
“You’re not,” Burns said, with a shrug of his shoulders. “You’re just part of my dream. The real you is somewhere else, probably looking at my comatose body and praying I wake up soon.”
Lilly didn’t respond, just shook her head and put her face in her hands.
Jason stood up. Was Burns too dumb to understand the direness of their situation, or had his brain simply snapped, unable to handle the truth? Either way, he wasn’t the kind of person they needed to be around. “C’mon, Erika, let’s go back to our room. Tomorrow, when the storm breaks, we’re getting the hell out of here.”
Burns’s words echoed through the cavernous space as Jason led Erika to the stairs. “It’s all a dream, I tell you. Nothing to worry about.”
As they headed up the stairs, Jason couldn’t help but pray that Burns was right and the whole situation was nothing more than a trauma-induced hallucination from falling out of the carnival ride and hitting his head. But in his mind, he feared that was just a pipe dream.
The castle was real, and they were in deep trouble.
The stench of rotting flesh filled the air as Jason ran through a heavy fog along a rocky beach. There were things in the fog, vile, dangerous things. He couldn’t see them, but he knew they were there. Glimpses of grotesque faces and twisted bodies taunted him through breaks in the dull-gray mist that blanketed the land and sea to the point where he could barely tell where the water ended and the beach began.
He had no idea how long he’d been running, only that his lungs burned and his legs ached, but he couldn’t stop. To stop meant death, death at the hands of the monsters in the supernatural vapors. And if he died, who would save Erika?
Save her from what? He didn’t know the answer to that, only knew she was in trouble, that something far worse than the creatures in the fog was after her, a fleshless monster with a face like the moon and a sunflower halo. It wanted her dead, and it was up to Jason to prevent it.
How, though? Lost, no idea of Erika’s whereabouts, and uncertain whether or not he could even save her in time, he feared running farther ahead would lead him away from her, but the thought of going back meant suicide, because behind him…
Behind him was hell. Its bright lights were hazy, distant sparks, and the crazed, almost-melodic sounds of tortured souls drifted in and out, warped and tangled by distance and fog.
Ahead, the miasma swirled and eddied, parted once more.
A figure appeared in the murky soup, a tall, thin figure with red coals for eyes.
“It’s too late, Jason. You can’t escape your fate. You’ll be with us forever!”
Jason woke trembling from a nightmare that was already fading from his memory, leaving only poisonous remnants behind. Something about a skeletal face that kept laughing at him, and sea monsters chasing Erika. For a moment, he had no idea where he was, the bed beneath him as alien as the landscape in his dream, and then it all came rushing back. The carnival. The castle. The bedroom on the second floor.
Stuck in a time that wasn’t their own.
A reality worse than any nightmare.
In the darkness, the Victorian chairs and furniture took on phantomlike appearances. Even Erika’s sleeping form resembled an ethereal spirit.
Movement near the end of the bed caught his attention and he gasped at the sight of a spectral figure. His heart thumped wildly as Maria’s admonition about spirits walking the halls came back to him.
Then a flash of lightning illuminated the room, allowing him to see the apparition’s face.
Erika?
He turned his head and realized she wasn’t next to him after all, that he’d mistaken her pillow and rumpled sheet for her actual body. He looked back just in time to see her opening the door. Her nude form, pale and gray against the darker black of the room, reminded him of a walking corpse.
“Erika? What’s the matter?”
Without saying a word, she stepped into the hallway.
“Hey!” When she still didn’t answer, Jason jumped out of bed and hurried after her, catching up to her as she turned in the direction of the stairs. He reached out to grab her arm and then stopped. What if she was sleepwalking? He thought he remembered that there was some kind of rule about not waking sleepwalkers or they could have heart attacks. Still he couldn’t let her wander around naked. Unsure of what to do, he stepped in front of her, blocking her way.
“No, I have to go to him,” Erika whispered, halfheartedly trying to push him aside. “Let me go.”
“Erika, wake up. You’re dreaming.” Jason put his hands against her shoulders and was glad when she stopped moving rather than trying to force her way past him.
“He’s calling me.”
“Who’s calling you?”
“The children need me. I have to go. We’ll be a family again.”
A chill ran down Jason’s back that had nothing to do with the cold air in the hallway, and the blood in his veins turned to ice. Goose bumps sprouted on
his flesh. Children? A family?
Was she somehow channeling Osvald’s dead wife? And how could the professor be calling her? There’d been no sounds in the hallway or the room, except for the monotonous thundering of the storm and the ticking of the old clock on the fireplace mantel.
Wait. No one’s calling her. Jason’s fear receded as he realized she was only having a dream, just like he’d had his own nightmare. It was no surprise, considering all they’d been through the past few hours. They were on a strange island surrounded by water. He’d dreamed of the ocean and monsters. She was dreaming about dead people in the water. Only she’d taken it a step further by sleepwalking. He silently cursed Maria for telling them tales of hauntings in the castle.
“You can see them tomorrow,” he told her, guiding her back into the bedroom before anyone happened by and saw them nude in the hallway. Her flesh was cold and clammy against his palms. “Right now it’s sleepy time.”
She acquiesced without protest, walking to the bed and sitting down. Jason lit one of the candles on the dresser and then sat next to her, figuring she’d eventually fall back to sleep. For a moment, she just stared into space, unmoving, and then her lips slowly formed into a smile, a smile that never reached her eyes. She ran her hands down her body, caressing her breasts and stomach in slow, languid strokes.
“Oh, darling, I missed you so much. It was so dark down there…”
Jason froze. The erotic quality of her words had him spellbound, torn between waking her up or waiting to see what came next in her dream. Before he could make a decision, Erika’s body jerked, like a person who’d dozed in a chair and suddenly come awake.
“Jason?”
“I’m right here,” he said, surprised to find himself feeling both jealous and strangely excited by what had almost happened. “You were sleepwalking.”
“Really?” In the near dark, only the movement of her blonde hair gave away the shake of her head. “I was having the strangest dream. I was in a cemetery. And…I think I was…dead.”
“It’s okay, it was just a nightmare.”
She reached out and felt for Jason’s hand. “It felt…so real. It was awful.” Her grip tightened. “You don’t think it’s an omen or something, do you? We’re going to get home, right? Promise me we’re going to get home.”
“I promise,” he said, hoping he wasn’t giving her false hope. Who knew if they’d ever get back? Or if they’d even figure out how they got here in the first place. “And we’re not going to die. Not for a long time.”
But as Erika hugged him, her nipples hard from the chilly air of the bedroom, her words brought his own nightmare back to him.
We both dreamed about death. Coincidence?
Or omen?
Long after Erika had drifted off, Jason lay awake, wanting to be sure there was no repeat of her sleepwalking. So he was wide awake when she mumbled a few words in her sleep.
“We have no choice. The skeleton man told me we’re already dead.”
It was several hours before his eyes finally closed.
Jason woke the next day to a morning filled with darkness and gloom, and the sound of his hopes crashing to pieces. Thunder filled the air and the steady hiss of windblown rain told him the storm’s fury had not abated overnight. A hundred feet below their window, the violent collision of waves against rocks produced a deep, pulsating thud, felt more than heard, like the almost-subsonic bass tones from a jacked-up stereo system of a teenager’s car.
Another day trapped in this castle.
The thought of it filled him with dread. He tried to keep a brave face for Erika, but a similar depression gripped her as soon as she saw the weather, and she seemed immune to his efforts to cheer her up.
“What if we never get home?” Erika asked. Cold, despite the heavy clothes she’d put on, she was bundled under a thick quilt, knees drawn to her chest. Her hair lay in a tangled mess and the tracks of tears stained her cheeks. Earlier, he’d explored some of the rooms that opened into the hall and discovered a bathroom with a primitive toilet and tub, but neither one of them had bothered washing after finding out there was no hot water.
“Don’t think like that, sweetheart.” Jason sat next to her, trying his best to sound positive. “There has to be a way to get back. We just need to find it. As soon as this weather breaks, we’ll search the island for the portal or black hole or whatever it was that brought us here. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll go to the mainland, use the library at the professor’s college, go through every book until we find a solution.”
Erika shook her head, a gesture of surrender rather than objection. “And what good will that do? How do you expect to find answers in ancient books when we don’t even have that kind of technology in our own time?”
“Maybe it’s not technology we need. No machine brought us here. So we have to look at other possibilities.”
“But—”
A knock on their door interrupted her. When Jason opened it, a frantic Charles Burns pushed his way into the room, looking even more distressed than Jason felt.
“Have either of you seen Lilly? I woke up this morning and she wasn’t in bed. I’ve been downstairs, and there’s no sign of her there, either.”
“We haven’t left the room yet, but we’ll help you look for her.” Jason was actually glad for the distraction from their own worries. “Have you asked Maria?”
Burns shook his head. “I haven’t been able to find her, either.”
“You don’t think she’d go outside in this storm, do you?” Erika asked.
“She was upset last night, but I can’t imagine she’d do something that foolish.”
Jason said nothing. Who knew what the poor woman had been thinking? Maybe her fear had gotten the best of her and venturing out into the rain and wind to search for a way home had seemed like a better option than sitting in a room with a man who didn’t even believe you were real.
After donning their shoes, they followed Burns to his room. On the drying rack were Lilly’s shoes and jeans. The borrowed clothes she’d worn the night before were in a pile on the floor. Burns pointed to the old-fashioned clothing.
“That’s where she left them last night. Where could she have gone, half-dressed?”
“Only one way to find out.” They headed downstairs, the steps complaining loudly beneath their feet while the massive edifice moaned around them, as if the constant battering of the storm—a distant but audible howl, no matter where in the castle they went—were inflicting physical punishment on living flesh instead of on stone and wood. Although it was past nine in the morning, it could just as easily have been night, thanks to the impenetrable curtain of thunderheads obscuring the sun. Even with all the lamps in the hallways and rooms lit and most of the fireplaces going, a pall of disconsolate gloom filled the spaces between the walls and created shadowy wraiths that twitched and jerked in time to the flames.
After traversing the long sitting area, they found Maria in the dining room, setting the table for breakfast. Only four places were out, the professor’s spot at the head of the table conspicuously empty.
“The professor’s still in a mood, and won’t be joining you,” she said, her voice so low Jason had to strain to hear it over the shushing of the rain and the constant barrage of thunder.
Burns pushed between two chairs and leaned across the wide table. “Maria, have you seen Lilly?”
The maid shook her head, a worried look crossing her face. “No. I hope she’s not wandering about the castle. The professor would not like that.”
“Could she have gone to the kitchen for something to eat, and perhaps gotten lost, or gone outside?” Jason asked.
Burns turned to him, his arched eyebrows indicating that his fiancée getting lost while looking for a snack was a possibility he hadn’t thought of.
“I did not come across any sign that she’d been in the kitchen or pantries, but come. I will show you where they are and you can look for yourselves.”
They followed Maria down a short hallway that ran under the stairs and led to a kitchen larger than what you’d find in most houses, but much smaller than Jason had expected, considering the size of the dining room table. On one side, an old-fashioned wood-burning stove with two cast-iron burners sat next to an equally ancient oven. In a recessed section of the same wall, a pot hung suspended over a pile of hot coals. Heat emanated from the cooking area in scalding waves, and Jason wondered how a person could stand close to the appliances long enough to cook without catching fire themselves.
A long table occupied the center of the room, its rough-hewn surface worn smooth from decades of use and disfigured with innumerable scars and dents from the countless meats and vegetables that had been chopped, carved, sliced, and pounded to create thousands of meals over the years.
The remaining walls were lined with sturdy wooden shelves, most of which held cooking utensils, jars of jams, pickled foods, spices, and sacks of rice and flour. No decorations or pictures livened the walls, which were made of wide planks. Eons of grease and smoke had colored them a uniform gray, hiding any traces of paint that might have been there long ago.
Once away from the cooking area, the room took on a definite chill. As they walked through, Erika pulled her sweater tight.
Although the odors of fried meat and oven-baked bread lingered in the air, teasing Jason’s stomach, they evoked no sense of hominess in him. Instead, they seemed strangely out of place in the melancholy room, as if comfort and warmth were unwelcome strangers.
If the kitchen truly is the heart of any home, this home is close to dying. The random thought added to the dismal air of the place, and he forced himself to put it out of his mind.
At the far end of the room were two doors. “Where do those go?” Jason asked, pointing toward them.
“One leads outside; there is a short path to the woodshed. The other leads to the storeroom.” Maria shook her head. “But no one in their right mind would go outside in this weather, and the storeroom is no larger than this kitchen. How could a person be lost in there?”
