The Autumn Castle

by Kim Wilkins

  “Your parents are dead.”

  “My real parents. My human parents.” For so many years she had forgotten about them, but now, running around in Berlin with her old friend, memories of her Real World mother and father had begun to impress themselves upon her. “I miss them.”

  “I would not advise it, Little May.”

  “Why not? You advise against everything. Are you jealous of my enjoyment?” The music paused just as she raised her voice, and Mayfridh realized a hundred pairs of eyes had turned to her.

  “Oh, go about your business,” she said with a dismissive wave of the hand.

  The music started again and the conversation bubbled once more. Mayfridh sank down in her seat. “I’m sorry, old friend.”

  “I advise you for your own good, Mayfridh, not to spoil your fun. Time ticks on. The leaves are falling.” He indicated the giant birch outside the mullioned window in the deep sunset. “When the last leaf falls from that tree, you will have to leave your Real World parents behind, perhaps forever. It could be centuries before these worlds align again. You will forget them. They will not forget you. Your mother and father have suffered enough. Do not make them lose you twice.”

  “So I am not allowed to love in the Real World?” she muttered. “Is that it?”

  “Love is so permanent a thing, Mayfridh,” Eisengrimm sighed, “and your ability to journey there is so very temporary. I only want to save you, and those you would love, the pain.”

  “Good counsel, Eisengrimm,” she conceded, her eyes going to the window. In the dark, in the few brief minutes between the longest shadows of sunset and the pale bath of sunrise, she would go to Hexebart. If she wasn’t to love, so be it. But Eisengrimm had not forbidden her from hunting for secrets.

  Look at Hexebart’s new stuffs. Oh, they are pretty. Here is a . . . a . . . silver thing. And here is a . . . a . . . cloth thing. And here is a . . . a . . . sticky thing. The nasty little queen wants them back, but Hexebart will take her time, yes she will. Hexebart will not be hurried, not for the sulky sow. Hexebart will save a little bit of the stuffs for herself. Hmm, hmm. Scrape and tear and pull. Hmm, hmm.

  But, oh, there’s a strange thing. Remember the pea shell. The pea shell? Where is the pea shell? Here, here, close by, under the dead frog. Why does the pea shell want to meet the new stuffs? Hexebart opens it and finds a hair. This hair belongs with these new things; they know each other. Hexebart stores her new stuffs in the pea shell and shakes it once.

  Now to work. The sulky sow wants a mind-reading spell. Ha! Ha! She’ll get nothing from these things. Hexebart breaks a corner off the silver thing and weaves it into the spell. Hexebart pulls a thread from the cloth and weaves it into the spell. Hexebart snaps a blob of the sticky thing and weaves it into the spell. But the queen will be sorely disappointed. Ha! This man, to whom these things belong, is shut up tight, locked down hard. Hexebart laughs, thinking about how the queen will cry and cry when the spell doesn’t work.

  Sulky, sulky little sow,

  Who is strong and clever now?

  Ha, ha! Ha, ha!

  Hexebart finishes the spell and sucks the line of blood from her fingers where the magic thread has pulled through calluses. Ouch! The pea shell catches her eyes. Oh, it’s a pretty pea shell, full of wonderful things. She shakes it again.

  And suddenly, knows.

  The mixture of stuffs in the pea shell is the spell the queen really wants, yes. Together, the stuffs can make the spell. But the queen didn’t ask for that spell, she asked for the other, the one Hexebart has already made and cut her fingers on. Hee, hee. Hexebart will give the queen the spell she was asked for, and make another for herself. And then Hexebart will know what the queen wants to know and that will vex the sow for centuries.

  Weave, weave, weave, and spin,

  What’s the secret, what’s the sin?

  Hexebart’s fingers bleed again but she doesn’t care. She makes the spell, she takes the spell, she sees into the corner. The very darkest corner inside a human heart.

  Oh, it’s a nasty business. Oh, it’s a cruel thing.

  Oh, oh! Hexebart fills up with singing joy; her heart dances and her fingers play invisible music.

  Ha, ha, hee, hee! Hexebart has a secret.

  —from the Memoirs of Mandy Z.

  I barely slept a wink last night, though I can’t put a finger on what it was that disturbed me so much. My thoughts were calm, as they always are. My bed was warm, as it always is. My room was silent and dark. And yet I felt all night as though there were some vague irritation in my muscles and bones, an itch unable to be reached, a sore unable to be soothed. I dreamed strange dreams where a bright foreign object was lodged in my back, but no matter how strenuously I tried, I couldn’t see it to pull it free. I tossed and turned all night and half-expected, on waking, to see that I was black and blue all over. Perhaps later this morning, after a pot of hot coffee and a good German breakfast, I will try to sleep again. If not, I can always work further on the Bone Wife. She is able to walk six paces now without falling. She improves every day.

  I wrote last time about royal faery magic. It has become a science of mine to understand as much about faery anatomy and faery magic as I can. All faeries are, to some degree, magic, but that magic always proceeds from the queen or king of their particular race. In other words, all faery magic is embodied in the royal family, in their very bones. Within the bones, the magic constantly replicates itself, like the cells in a human body. What I have discovered is that the magic will also replicate into the bones near it.

  You see, faery bones are never really dead. They don’t rot, they don’t lose their perfect brightness, and they knit together after a while. Although all the bones in my sculpture are glued tight, they have also started to knit to each other, and the magic is spreading through them. I have killed two royal faeries: king and queen. The king was full of magic, the queen was not. I believe she may have stored her magic back in her homeland for safekeeping before coming through to our world. Very prudent, very clever. Not clever enough in the end though, was she? Her ribs made a fine set of ankles.

  After Ireland, I traveled the world in search of the raw materials for my project, always aware that these two years would pass and that I would have to return to my family, to university and a respectable job. For me, it was as though a tunnel were growing smaller in front of me as my possibilities closed down and my marvelous, luscious world of art and magic was doomed to its final limit, just hours and days and weeks away. Months and months flew by when I neither saw nor heard of any faeries. Before I returned home, I killed only two more, both in America—one in the deserts of California, one near the Great Lakes in Wisconsin—and so my collection of bones on my return was nowhere as grand as I had hoped it would be. My fate loomed, my art began to slide away. I returned to Germany, enrolled in an economics degree program in Munich, and prepared to live the life my parents wanted me to. Oh, I could have struck out on my own, gone to art school, traveled farther, but what would I have done for money? I was the sole heir to a great fortune, and I am essentially a practical man. It wasn’t in me to endanger my inheritance.

  So I took courses in my own time in art history and Germanic linguistics (my memory for languages is almost photographic, perhaps another legacy of my ancestry), but for the most part behaved like a serious and committed economics student. By 1979, I was working for an investment bank in Vienna, and I hadn’t killed a faery in five years.

  Man cannot be separated from his love for long, and so it was that I began to sculpt again; with marble, as my block of faery bone was little more than a foot high, and I was hesitant to begin carving it. I sculpted for the sheer joy of it, and I’m sure that’s why my skill developed so fast. Perhaps at an art school, where I would have had to produce works on deadlines and for assessment, I might have stunted that spark within me. But I sculpted simply because I could, simply because nothing felt so wonderful to me as to impose the contours of my pleasure on su
ch a rigid surface. I worked hard at the bank during the day, and then indulged my love for art in the evenings and weekends. I entered my sculptures in a number of amateur competitions. It soon became embarrassingly obvious that my work was far superior to all others, and I won so many competitions that modesty forbade me from entering any more. Within a year—only a year—I had caught the eye of the international art community, and sold two of my sculptures to major galleries. In those early successes were the glimmerings of what would eventually be a grand and illustrious career.

  Faeries still eluded me, until one evening in the middle of that decade, on my way home from work (for I still maintained my job in the bank as my parents desired), I paused as I often did to read the program pinned outside the Vienna State Opera. I didn’t like opera then, and I still don’t, but I was a young, wealthy man and mindful of the pursuits that were expected of me. La Traviata. I thought about buying a ticket, decided not to, then turned and saw an attractive couple approaching. My nostrils itched. I grew excited. Could it be?

  I waited for them to draw closer, pretending to examine the program. They were now just behind me, just over my right shoulder. I could smell them, both of them faeries. I sneaked a glance. They were stunning, beautiful: tall and perfectly formed. I started to suspect nobility. The female smiled at me.

  “Hello, are you going tonight to the opera?” Her German was studied, overly precise, clearly a second language.

  “Yes, I think so. Shicoff is singing Alfredo.”

  “We don’t know their names,” the male said. He was gruff, suspicious.

  “He’s wonderful,” I replied. “An American tenor.”

  “We’re certainly going,” the female said, “aren’t we, Jasper?”

  He mumbled something inaudible and moved her inside to buy a ticket. I was directly behind them. I didn’t speak to them again, but when it came my turn at the ticket window, I waited until they were out of earshot and asked for the seat next to theirs. Then I went home to prepare myself.

  That evening, I was waiting in my seat when they arrived. Polite conversation ensued. Isn’t it a coincidence we’re seated together? Do you come here often? Where do you live? The female—she introduced herself as Liesebet—was very warm; the male, Jasper, was not, but he became less guarded when I spoke of my art. It seems he had seen one of my sculptures in a gallery just that afternoon, and was very impressed with it.

  I must express to you how difficult it was to sit and talk to them casually until the curtain went up. Imagine yourself seated next to the very villain who had tortured your child to death, and having to deal with him rationally and even in a friendly manner. That is how hard it was for me to hide my revulsion, the smell was so truly awful. But I was determined to lure them into my trap.

  “Perhaps after the performance you would care to come to my home and see my latest sculpture in progress?” I asked. “I live nearby.”

  Liesebet didn’t blink. “Yes.”

  Jasper blinked, but said, “Yes,” all the same. Faeries are curious by nature.

  I was well out of my depth trying to kill two faeries at once. I rightly made Jasper my first priority, but the female screamed and screamed, and I thought for certain somebody would hear it. When I had them both dead and in the bath, I covered them with water and left them for a time. I was too exhausted to begin the boning immediately, and I had an early start at the bank in the morning. I washed myself off, then crept downstairs to see if Liesebet’s screams had disturbed anybody. I was living in an apartment on Wahlfischstrasse at the time, with a septuagenarian recluse downstairs and a dressmaking and mending studio above. All in the hallway was quiet, my activities had gone undetected.

  I was too proud of myself.

  I boned them on the weekend, but had nowhere to put the other remains. I packed them in bags and stored them in the deep freezer, supposing I would find a chance in the next few weeks to drive them out into the woods and feed them to the wildlife. I finished work late and collapsed directly into bed, only to be woken the next morning, Sunday, by loud knocking.

  I rose, put on my robe, and went to the door. On the other side was Ernst Hoffmann, my direct supervisor at the bank, a small hairy man with long gray eyebrows.

  “Herr Hoffmann?” I said, surprised.

  “Morning, Zweigler. I need the Leadbetter reports. He’s flying in from London this morning.”

  The Leadbetter reports. I had brought them home to work on the day I met the royal faeries, and forgotten about them since.

  “Of course, of course. Come in. I’ll find them immediately.” I spotted the folder sitting on top of my bookshelf and grabbed it. “I’m sorry, Herr Hoffmann, but I haven’t finished recalculating the projected dividends yet.”

  His left eyebrow shot up. “That’s not like you, Zweigler.”

  “I’ve been . . . unwell.”

  “Let’s do it now, together. They must be finished before I meet him at the airport.”

  So I put on a pot of coffee and changed my clothes, and we sat together at my dining table and worked on the reports. After a few hours, Herr Hoffmann asked me to direct him to the bathroom and I gestured through to the hallway, too immersed in the figures in front of me to remember that I hadn’t been in the bathroom since I’d finished cleaning it the night before. He was in there a long time.

  When Herr Hoffmann emerged, his face was pale.

  “Are you ill?” I asked.

  “Here, here, give me these reports,” he muttered. “I’ll take them with me. It’s not right for me to intrude on your day off.”

  As he gathered the papers I felt a sudden chill of fear. I had cleaned the bathroom top to bottom the previous night, but had I left some trace—some blotch of blood, some skerrick of skin—for him to see?

  “Certainly, Herr Hoffmann,” I said, trying to remain cool. “I will see you tomorrow at the office.”

  He disappeared quickly. As soon as the door closed behind him, I dashed to the bathroom, eyes searching everywhere. No, the bath was clean and white. No, the handbasin was empty. No, the floor was spotless. I sighed in relief. Herr Hoffmann’s disappearance probably had more to do with gastric troubles than with suspecting me of murder. I sat heavily on the lid of the toilet and rested my hands on my knees.

  That’s when I saw it. Visible at the angle only the toilet seat provided, under the handbasin; a stray, bloodied finger.

  I scooped it up. It must have flown off before I’d even started the boning. What did Herr Hoffmann think? More importantly, what was he going to do?

  I told myself not to panic. There could be no murder case where there were no murder victims. Nobody would report Liesebet and Jasper missing because they didn’t really exist in this world. But I had a freezer full of skin and hair and organs to dispose of, and nothing was stopping Hoffmann from alerting the police immediately.

  So I fled.

  I packed up all I had of value—my sculptures and materials—and loaded them in my car along with the bags full of frozen tissue, and I left Vienna behind. I drove into the woods and dumped the bags and I kept driving and found myself in Berlin. I withdrew what I could from my bank account and rented a tiny apartment, and lay low for two years.

  As I have said, I am a practical man. When I knew my parents had not heard from me in two years, I began to grow concerned about my inheritance. I had watched the newspapers and the television reports for all the long months in between, and had never seen my name mentioned as a murder suspect. Herr Hoffmann, it seems, had decided that as long as I was nowhere near him, he had no compulsion to report me for having an errant finger in my bathroom. (Or maybe it was a gastric problem after all.)

  Finally, I made tentative contact with my parents. I told them I had been very sick—mental illness runs in our family and even though I am perfectly sane, I knew they would believe this—and gradually I won back their . . . “affection” is too strong a word. I won back their grudging decision to name me their heir, as long as I work
ed once again in finance and gave up my dreams of being a sculptor.

  I did one but not the other. I found Berlin to be the city of my dreams as far as art was concerned, and soon my celebrated sculptures were outearning my financier’s salary fivefold. I met no more faeries, and I longed to travel again, to take off in my van and drive through Europe and hunt and kill and sculpt, but still, I did not let my parents down. I had over a billion reasons not to, in U.S. dollars alone.

  Then, at the end of 1989, two wonderful, wonderful things happened. First, the Berlin Wall fell. Second, my parents died. My opa, who had long been senile and sat rocking like a fool in the corner of my mother’s overdecorated lounge room, took up a gun on Christmas Eve and shot them both and then himself. The money was all mine.

  I was quick to buy real estate in the East and lease it out to businesses. I moved into the top two floors and attic of this building and began to plan my future. No more close calls with screaming faeries—I had a special room soundproofed. And no more messy bonings. I began to draw up my designs for a poisonous boiling acid bath.

  My faery-boning vat.

  He had painted it out.

  Christine stared at the painting. It was the following evening. Jude was cleaning his brushes, whistling to himself. She had come down with the intention of pretending she was seeing it for the first time, of asking him if that blotch of color had anything to do with Mayfridh. But he had painted it out. A black oval covered it. She was gone.

  “Do you like it?” he said, slipping an arm around her waist.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “I feel so good about it. I feel like I’m finally getting there, like I’m finally painting the feeling.”

  “That’s great.” She was gone. That was a good thing, right? It meant he had momentarily been interested, and then decided that it was wrong. He had covered her up with black.

  But was she still under there?

  “Okay,” he said, organizing his paintbrushes and wiping his hands on a cloth, “I’ll get changed quickly and we’ll head out for dinner.”