Every day, faceless servants brought him platters of rich, fresh food: chunks of bread, grapes dark and heavy with juice, thin slices of fine bird and steaming hot, creamy drinking chocolate, the kind of food that he had only dreamed of as he listened to his rumbling stomach throughout the long, dark nights. The plates appeared each morning as if served by invisible hands, and he always ate alone. After a while, he came to learn the times of day from these deliveries, which arrived as regularly as clockwork. There was a chamber pot for him beneath the bed which was always empty when he awoke, and once every few days he would wake to find a copper bathtub filled with steaming water so that he could cleanse himself.
He never left the room. He suspected that if he tried to leave, he would find the huge oak door barred and immovable. For the first few days, or at least what he assumed to be days, he paced back and forth with his hands held out, stopping when he reached each impenetrable wall. He felt every crack and every groove of brick until it was imprinted upon his memory and he could recall every detail at will. The dimensions before him were, quite suddenly and expectedly, all that he had to commit to certainty. For a time, it helped him stay sane.
But it could not last, and in his isolation, he eventually found solace in books. The room was piled high with intimidating tomes that had seemingly been left for him, even though he could barely read or even write his own name yet. But he was a bright boy and did have some basic understanding of letters; on his expeditions through the castle he had found whole rooms filled with books and lingered to admire them, running his fingers over the spines and wishing that the words made sense to him. So, over the long, lonely hours he poured over the pages until the words before him finally began to mean something. It was hard work with no one to guide him, but he had to find a way to fill the endless hours and so persevered until his skull throbbed and his eyes ached.
His imagination burned with white fire as he devoured sentence after sentence; whole worlds came within reach from his silent, lavish prison. Time passed in this way, days bleeding into weeks and beyond. He slowly lost his boyish scrawniness and his body grew long, slender and defined, shoulders slightly stooped from being perpetually bent over his books. His hair crept down his neck and remained shaggy and uncut. Richard Volkov had become a handsome young man, but had never even seen himself in a mirror. The room was unfurnished except for the bed and the books and the reading desk to which he chained himself. All he knew was his own mind. He was almost completely detached from his body, but he needed his hands for turning pages and his eyes to see the words imprinted on them.
Richard had read every book in his room more than once, but there was a particular tome that obsessed him. It was a slim thing with a broken spine and some loose pages, but what it held inside was vital to him. There was a chapter that spoke of a creature which fed upon the blood of man, a creature of darkness and misery that was almost impossible to extinguish. Richard read the chapter over and over; if requested he would be able to recite it by heart without hesitation. Where some turned to prayer for comfort, Richard turned to that book. The creature was ageless and possessed a magic that man could only dream of, capable of becoming incorporeal and able to transform into lesser creatures like the rat, the wolf and the bat. Sunlight burned but did not kill, only by piercing the heart and severing the head could such a creature be destroyed. In the darkness, Richard would remind himself of this and take some small comfort in it. Though he was powerless, the countess could be killed.
He slept only when his body’s demands won over the resistance of his mind, and when he did he was plagued by terrible dreams, things he could only barely comprehend. The dead boy visited him often, lying at his feet with his throat torn out, blood everywhere. He spent hours staring at his own hands, marvelling at the way his skin stretched over the blue veins and wondering, always wondering. It was his blood, but it could be taken from him with an ease that disturbed him. He reflected on what he had seen many times, seen how easily the fangs penetrated the young flesh and learned that this was a world of true, relentless horror. He was at the mercy of the countess; every night he feared that it would be the last of his life. Fighting off sleep, he would watch the door and try not to blink, waiting for her to come and end it all. He did not doubt that if she wished it, she would find her way in.
And so it was, until finally, long after Richard’s understanding of time had dissolved and his sanity was uncertain, they came for him. Two servants, women wearing the black and white masks that jesters wore in the carnivals he had read about. They were her special servants; women without tongues to talk and gossip, cut out of their mouths from the moment they entered the countess’ service. He had seen them before, on occasion, when he had still had some semblance of freedom within the prison of the castle, and they had disturbed him then. He remained in his chair, spine straight and shoulders back, looking at them with grave silence. They filled the doorway, casting long shadows along the walls from the meagre light of the corridor; they were silent too, but their silence was an oppressive one, standing shoulder to shoulder, immovable masks staring at him with impenetrable steadiness.
They stepped forward, entering the room. As they approached, Richard’s breathing quickened. He had forgotten the sensation of being close to another person; he could smell their bodies, the hair concealed under the masks…and he was afraid that they would touch him. The idea of them laying their hands upon the body that had only ever been his was almost incomprehensible to him. He pushed himself out of the chair and fell back, his legs weakened and unsteady. He put his hands up in front of him, wanting to speak, needing to say something to stop them from coming closer, but the words were dead leaves sticking in his throat.
One of them reached out to him, moving to lay their fingers upon his arm, and he fell to the ground, a limp and useless heap.
***
Richard woke to an aching head and an unpleasant tightness in his limbs. His vision, he realised, was blurring confusingly in and out with every twitch of his eye. He had been placed upright in a chair that was soft and soothing beneath his hands, the armrests supporting his limp frame. His head felt too heavy for his neck to bear, like a stone atop a reed, but he managed to drag it up to look at the room around him. It had been locked away in the cellar of his memories, but he remembered it now. He remembered it with a clarity so strong it hurt as much as the rest of him.
The countess’ parlour: a place of blood and teeth and horror. Only now did he understand the reason for the heavy perfumes that hung in the air here: they masked the scent of death, the stink of hot blood that soaked into the luxurious carpet beneath his bare feet. Richard’s senses were beginning to return to him, slowly, but in earnest. He became conscious of a dull ringing in his ears, a foul taste that lingered on his tongue. He flexed his fingers and dumbly realised that his hands were not bound. To an impartial observer, he might have been a guest recovering from too much brandy.
Richard blinked uncertainly, his vision still not completely focused, and took notice of a vague shape in front of him.
The countess, elegant and lovely, sat before him. She was perched daintily upon the couch, her white gown billowing about her like cloud. He swallowed, skin prickling as he looked at her. She was quite clear to him, suddenly, clearer than anything his eyes had ever beheld. He had almost but not quite forgotten her tremendous beauty, how childlike and perfect she seemed to be. The snow-white pureness of her dress spoke to him of innocence, kindness, the best qualities of people that he had never been privy to in his own life, but it was her face that cut into his heart the deepest. It wasn’t a natural thing, her beauty. It was too perfect, too much like an ideal, a mask hiding something true beneath it. No matter how it hurt him to look at her, he could not forget. That white dress would soon be stained with blood, gallons of it. He saw himself as a crumpled husk at her feet, bled dry by the sharp, pointed teeth that she hid behind that delicate, painted rosebud of a mouth.
She shifted and Ric
hard tensed his muscles in response, instantly ready to try and escape. He knew in his heart that he did not have enough strength to move more than a few steps before he would collapse uselessly to the floor, but he would try nonetheless. The will to survive still burned inside, gripping at his spirit. But the countess made no move towards him, and merely turned her head to regard him more closely. She cocked it slightly, like an inquisitive dog.
“Are you afraid?” she asked, in a voice as sweet as sugar.
Richard was struck by the idiocy of the question. What else should he feel other than fear? He continued to stare at her in silence, hoping that the look on his face was incredulous enough for her. The countess, for her part, gave a quick smirk and tossed her head as if his answer was beneath her no matter what he said or didn’t say. There was a glass before her on the table, a fine-looking silver goblet. She took it in her little hand and swirled the contents of it around a few times, gazing into the cup intently. Richard didn’t have to guess what it was.
The countess drank. It was a dainty display that swiftly turned to the grotesque, beginning with a few delicate sips that gave way to huge, greedy gulps like the taste was simply too much to resist. The gore spilled from her lips and ran down her chin, dripping on to her breast in little red patters; Richard could hear her swallowing, sending the thick liquid down her marble throat. He was repulsed by what he saw but could not tear his eyes away; the fascination of it kept his gaze gripped to her. When the countess set the cup back down, the pupils of her eyes had shrunk down into pinpoints. She slowly wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, leaving a smear of crimson across the skin.
“You only fear me because you do not understand me,” she said in a tone that was almost petulant, childish. “No one understands me.”
Richard swallowed nervously, trying to repress the pain that burned in his throat. He was still half-muddled, only barely able to comprehend what was happening. To hear her speak at all was a shock to his already disturbed system. He knew that he was supposed to speak, but he had not spoken to anyone, not even himself, for years. His lips were dry and cracked, but when he opened his mouth they clung to each other, seemingly in desperation, peeling away like a torn spider’s web.
The countess, meanwhile, peered at him askance with those huge, child-like eyes. His own eyes, much to his frustration, were drawn to them. They reminded him of the deep, painted blues that he had seen in his beloved books; but then the face of the boy from all that time ago appeared in his mind, a sharp and painful recollection that made him flinch.
“You are not me,” she began softly, closer to a whisper. “You cannot comprehend what it is to live as I live.”
He could not hold back the anger that surged forth with a strength that defied the weakness of his body. The words the sputtered forth were twisted and gargled, spat so violently from his mouth that they were made clear by his rage alone.
“I comprehend the murder of children, my lady.”
It hurt to speak, just as he knew it would. A string of spittle dangled from his bottom lip. He let it remain there. In that moment, he wanted to appear as repellent as possible to her, to be vulgar and cruel. There would be no romance to his death; he would not become trapped in her unearthly gaze.
“Murder!” The countess bridled, her pretty lips curling around her pointed teeth in a snarl that belied her glacial beauty. She rose from her seat and moved, snakelike, towards him. “Be thankful that I let them die, boy. Be thankful that I spared them the horror of an existence as unnatural as mine.”
Richard instinctively shrunk back into his chair at her approach, but the anger continued to rage within him; he could not keep his face from contorting into an animalistic, snarling visage, could not mask his complete and utter contempt in that moment. She came to his chair, stopping short so that her skirt brushed lightly against the skin of his feet. Richard, in a sudden burst of strength, pulled his knees up to his chest, resting his feet beneath his haunches like a wild animal ready to strike. The countess sniffed haughtily, a smirk on those pretty, lying lips. She reached out her hand and placed her finger beneath his chin. He shrank back at her touch, repulsed by the snowy chill of her touch, but she held fast, gripped at him and yanked his face towards her, pulling his eyes back up to meet her own. Richard’s breathing came fast and strained, filled with fury and loathing that he should be so afraid of her.
“I could have had you killed you know, boy,” she purred, gripping fingers suddenly relaxing into soft caresses. They travelled down, away from his face and around his neck, brushing at it teasingly. Her eyes flicked up and down his body and she smirked again. “Well, perhaps not a boy. Not anymore. I forget how time changes a person.”
Richard was close enough to smell her breath, though her breast did not rise and fall as his did. There was no sound of her own breathing, no blood under her own skin; everything about her was an eerie, unnatural stillness. Her breath smelt of death, a rusty tang of old, sour blood that hit Richard in the back of the throat. He gagged and wretched to smell it, but his empty stomach was unresponsive to his body’s cry for relief. Tears began to stream down his cheeks, wetting the countess’ fingers as they pressed into his neck and sharply pushed down. He realised, then, the true measure of her strength. He could see her crushing his windpipe to dust without even trying.
She laughed in his face before releasing him from her vicious hold. Richard could not see, but her mark was left upon him; deep, red prints embedded into his vulnerable flesh. Even as he choked, he could feel them pulsing around his neck.
“I could have killed you,” the countess repeated. “But I did not. Think on that.”
Richard could barely think enough to understand her words then. She moved back from him without turning her back, putting enough distance between them that he could freely breathe again. Richard had never been more thankful for the cloying, perfumed air that had never completely left him, even locked away for all those years. He sank back into his chair; his hands reaching up to protectively guard his throat from her cruel grasp, taking big and ragged breaths of cool air into his lungs. He wondered when all of this would end. For the first time in his life he longed for rest.
“Should I be grateful, my lady? Should I be grateful that you deigned to let me live when all of those other boys will never become men?”
“Men!” The countess spat, voice laced with contempt. Her face grew dark and thunderous. “What are men? Nothing but callous, cruel, dismissive swine. Boys are pure, not yet poisoned. I take them before they are tainted by the cruelty of the world, before their minds can turn against their belief and make them into haters of women. They think of me as a spirit and so I promise them the world and they reward me with a heart filled with awe, brimming with love. It makes it easier, and the blood is so much sweeter from a boy.
“My body appears weak and small, but I am strong. I seem young to your eyes, but I am old. Older than anyone here. When my heart beat as yours did, my sex was nothing but an iron chain strapped around my ankle, dragging me ever downward. I am Countess Marika Fenenko, the ruler of this land, and yet men below my station treated me as a child. But they no longer treat me this way. They do not dare.”
She stared off into the distance, a wrinkle forming above her brow. She seemed deep in thought, her body suddenly still. There was a look in her eye that caught Richard’s curiosity for a moment; it was a look of regret and of deep, buried bitterness. She blinked and shook her head slightly. When she next looked at Richard, it was almost like she was seeing him for the first time. She jerked forward and began to advance towards him again. Her body seemed consumed with a frantic energy when she moved, so very different to the glacial stillness that fell over her moments ago.
“I remember you, boy. I remember your mother,” the countess hissed, jabbing her finger into the air viciously.
Richard jerked his head up at the word. His mother had always been a ghost even in his memory, but over the years he sometimes dreamed of war
m arms around him and the feel of a soft bosom pressed against his cheek. He was always a child in these dreams, a clinging child with grasping hands, constantly seeking reassurance. It was only in his dreams that Richard allowed himself to indulge in fantasies of love and affection; he would never let such a longing show on his face or in his words. Not here, in this strange world of cruel monsters and emptiness.
“You think me a beast, don’t you?” the countess continued, a small spark of delight crossing her face at him taking her bait. “I have heard the whisperings in the night of the spectre that prowls the corridors of this castle. I suppose that I am a spectre, of sorts, but I am also capable of kindness. I have the capacity to love, to empathise,” the countess began pacing impatiently about the room as she spoke, her skirts swishing about her with each turn. The spilled blood was beginning to dry and peel against her skin, the dark curls of her hair encrusted with the stuff. Even from his chair, Richard could smell the sharp, metallic stink of it. His empty stomach lurched queasily.
“You were just a babe when she came to me, crawling on her knees like a dying dog,” the countess continued, speaking rapidly now. “And she begged me, pleaded with me that I would take you in, that I would care for you like you were my own son. I remember her so clearly, a slip of a thing in scraps and rags and clutching you to her breast. You cried and mewled so pathetically that even my old, dead heart was moved.
“She did not come from the village, she told me. She was from a place beyond the mountains that had been besieged and burnt to the ground; everything had been lost to her except for you. Her husband was dead, and she had walked so far and for so long that death was near for her, too. But you. Oh, how she loved you, Richard.”
It was the first time that she called him something other than ‘boy.’ Richard wanted nothing more than to recoil at the sound of his name on her lips.
Shadow Over Sea And Sky Page 20
