The Autumn Castle

by Kim Wilkins

  “‘Here, take the dog,’ I said, not giving her a chance to speak.

  “‘Is this the first thing that greeted you on your return home yesterday?’

  “‘Yes,’ I said, avoiding her gaze.

  “Then the most incredible thing. The crow parted its beak and spoke. ‘She lies, Liesebet. The first thing that greeted her on her return was her daughter. I saw her.’

  “‘Is this true?’ Liesebet said, fixing me with her cold eyes.

  “‘Take the puppy,’ I said, holding out Mabel who wriggled and whimpered. ‘I won’t give you my daughter.’

  “‘We made an agreement,’ Liesebet said.

  “‘I no longer wish to be part of the agreement.’

  “‘I have cured your husband.’

  “I took a deep breath. I had been afraid it would come to this. ‘Then take back the cure. My daughter is more precious to me than my husband.’

  “Liesebet pointed a finger at me and stood very still for several moments. I didn’t breathe the whole time. Then she said, ‘The cure will not be taken back. You will fulfill your part of the bargain.’

  “‘I won’t give up my daughter.’ My heart raced and my hands shook, and Mabel wriggled her way free and dashed across the park.

  “‘Why not?’

  “‘Because she’s my daughter.’

  “‘No,’ she said, very coolly. ‘She is my daughter. Eisengrimm, do you agree?’

  “‘The girl is clearly your daughter, Liesebet. Our kingdom is very blessed.’

  “‘You hear that? My little girl, who will be heir to my throne. Bring her to me tomorrow, here at the same time. Good-bye.’ She turned and strode off, the crow flapping behind her. I watched them go, and I vowed I would never give you up.”

  Here, Diana stopped speaking for long minutes. Outside, the sun disappeared behind a cloud. Mayfridh placed her empty teacup on the table and curled her legs underneath her. Her mother’s face was a sad record of years spent alone, never expressing this story. Yet it was also the beloved face of her mother remembered from childhood, cherished unconditionally. She felt her heart swerve. To forget Diana again was to render this story once again unheard, to reiterate every line of sorrow that etched her mother’s face. When time spun out and still Diana didn’t speak, Mayfridh prompted her: “How did they get me?”

  Diana shook her head, as if shaking herself out of a daze. She smiled, a sad eager smile. “You’re back,” she said. “That’s all that matters.”

  “No, tell me.”

  Diana’s thin, cotton-clad chest rose in a sigh. “I didn’t go near that park again. For weeks, I heard nothing from Liesebet. James recovered. It all seemed like a bad dream, something my mind created at its lowest ebb. I became obsessive about you, of course. I wouldn’t let you out of my sight; I locked your window every night. I even wanted to lock your bedroom door but James put a stop to it. If I tried to tell him about Liesebet, he would shake his head and say the shock of his illness had addled me, and that I would be feeling well enough soon. I urged him to return to England, but he insisted that it was the experimental treatment he was receiving—rather than magic—that was making him better. He wouldn’t leave, he was too afraid of growing ill again.

  “I tried to behave normally. I tried to believe James when he said I was suffering a nervous problem, that I was afraid of an hallucination. Until the morning I saw that . . . thing.”

  “The crow? Eisengrimm?” Mayfridh was tempted to defend Eisengrimm, to blurt out that he was her closest friend in Ewigkreis, but perhaps that could wait for later.

  “Yes, the crow. I was in the front garden. You were with the Starlight girl next door. I could hear you laughing at the top of your lungs, and I was thinking about what a beautiful sound it was. I swept the previous night’s light snowfall from the path, singing a song in my head. A shadow passed over me, and I looked up to see a crow sitting on a low branch. My heart jumped. I watched it for a few wary moments, hoping it was just an ordinary crow . . . but then he spoke.

  “‘Diana Frith, you owe Queen Liesebet something.’

  “‘I owe her nothing.’

  “‘If you pay her what you owe her, she will give you this pouch.’ He reached his beak under his wing, and with a flash there appeared a red velvet pouch, strung on silver thread. He hung it from his claw in front of me.

  “‘I don’t want anything from her.’

  “‘In this pouch is medicine. The smallest grain will cure any illness instantly. When you hand over your daughter to Queen Liesebet, this pouch will be yours.’

  “‘I don’t want it,’ I said. I blocked my ears with my hands and ran inside, locking the door behind me. When I peered out the window, he was no longer in the tree. I breathed a sigh of relief, but an instant later he was at the windowsill, and he called out, ‘Be sure that I will come again.’

  “I stopped going outside. I stopped letting you play at Christine’s. Remember? I made her come here instead. Alfa Starlight began to think I didn’t like her. I tried hard to keep myself together. I couldn’t speak to James about it, I couldn’t speak to you about it. I had to keep it all inside and protect you from the crow.

  “Early one morning, while you were upstairs napping and James had left to go to the doctor, I was sweeping the front room when I heard a tapping at the door. I presumed it was Christine, she was always in and out of our house. I opened the door and a mad flapping of black wings sent me stumbling back into the room. The crow perched on the hanging light. Pale sunlight and a bitter winter breeze stole into the house, and the curtains swayed gently.

  “‘Get out!’ I hissed. I didn’t want to attract your attention and have you run downstairs to see who I was talking to.

  “‘Diana Frith, you owe Queen Liesebet something.’

  “‘No, I don’t. Leave me alone.’

  “‘If you pay her what you owe her, she will give you this pouch.’ Just like the last time, he reached his beak under his wing, and this time pulled out a blue velvet pouch. ‘In this pouch is gold dust. The smallest grain will transform instantly into any amount of money you name. When you hand over your daughter to Queen Liesebet, this pouch will be yours.’

  “‘I don’t want it, I don’t want it. Now get out. May’s my daughter.’ I brandished my broom and shooed him outside, but as he flew away he called, ‘Be sure that I will come again.’

  “Moment by moment, I felt a strange relief. He had come twice, enticing me with treasures, and he had been unsuccessful. Unsuccessful.” Diana held her index finger up, a strange smile of wry cynicism on her lips. “I thought, May, that I had won. For certainly, if it were in her power to steal you from me, she would have done it by now. That’s what I thought.

  “Weeks passed. I grew more and more confident. Then, late one night, I was awoken by the sound of Mabel barking in the back garden. Yap, yap. Something had disturbed her. I knew instantly it was that crow. And I knew too that I wanted to go down there and tell him I wasn’t afraid of him and his stupid queen. James was beginning to stir, so I said, ‘I’ll go down and quiet her.’ I slipped out of bed, and into my dressing gown and slippers. I crept downstairs, and through the house, and out the back door. Mabel ran to me and cowered behind my legs. I scanned the cold garden in the dark, looking for the crow, but couldn’t see him. Then his voice came from above me.

  “‘Diana Frith, you owe Queen Liesebet something.’

  “I looked up. He was perched on the gable, another pouch hanging from his claw, his eyes gleaming in the dark. ‘I owe her nothing,’ I said boldly, ‘and you know that.’

  “‘Queen Liesebet wants the child.’

  “I scooped up Mabel. ‘Let her have the dog. That’s all I ever intended to give her anyway.’

  “‘My queen has no shortage of dogs. It’s a child she wants. She is barren.’

  “‘No! I’m not giving you my daughter, and I don’t care what you’ve got in your magic pouch this time. You can’t take her, and you can’t convince me t
o give her up. So just go.’ I released Mabel and scooped up a handful of pebbles to throw at him.

  “He flapped his wings and rose up, dropping the pouch, and took to the sky. I quickly seized the pouch and peered inside. It was full of nothing but crumbs. With a swoop and a flutter, he dived past me and snatched the pouch with his claws. ‘Be sure,’ he called as his shadow passed the moon, ‘that I will come again.’”

  Diana closed her eyes. The vertical furrows that surrounded her lips deepened. “And, oh,” she said, “he came again. And he took you.”

  “How soon after?”

  “Three weeks. Long enough for me to think I had won. Long enough for me to think that you would stay with me forever. But you didn’t . . .” Her voice trailed off to a whisper.

  Mayfridh leaned forward to take her mother’s hand. “Mum. I’m here now.”

  “But for how long?” Diana’s head snapped up, her gaze locked on Mayfridh’s. “I’ve been watching you since you arrived. You’re nervous, you’re wary. You don’t intend to stay, do you?”

  “I . . . don’t have long. I’ll have to go back to my own world.”

  Diana shook her head and said softly, “This is your world.”

  “Not anymore. I’ve become . . . something different. Tell me about Dad.”

  Diana dropped her gaze to her hands in her lap, her fingers obsessively smoothing her faded skirt over her thighs. “He left me, May. After you had disappeared, when I kept insisting you had been taken by faeries, it all became too much for him. His illness was declared cured and he wanted to return to England. But I didn’t want to go, because I thought you might still come back.” She smiled a pained smile. “So he went without me, but I was right to wait, wasn’t I? If you had come looking today and I hadn’t been here . . .”

  “I’m glad you were here.”

  “Was it awful, May? Was it awful for you being in another world, so far from me?”

  Mayfridh chose her answer carefully. She and her mother had so little time together, there was no point in trying to explain to Diana how quickly she had been forgotten. “Liesebet and Jasper treated me very well. They loved me, and I grew to love them.”

  “How long have they been dead?”

  “A very long time now. Many years,” Mayfridh said solemnly.

  “Then why didn’t you come back earlier?”

  “I didn’t . . . it’s not always possible to make a passage between your world and mine.” Mayfridh didn’t want to reveal that Diana had been forgotten.

  “You’re determined to go back, then?”

  “I have no choice. I’m the queen.”

  Diana’s expression was unreadable; somewhere between heart-wrenching disappointment and beaming motherly pride. “Of course,” she said, “you’re the queen.”

  “But I’ll stay as long as I can,” Mayfridh said quickly. “I’ll stay until the last possible moment.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  —from the Memoirs of Mandy Z.

  I have only once boiled a faery alive in my vat. I had been living in Berlin for eight years, enjoying every moment that I drew breath. I set up the gallery and then the Zweigler Fellowship fund, and found that more and more of my sculptures were selling to galleries and private owners all over the world.

  Beyond my wonderful public life, I had a delicious secret life that saw me drive off in my van two or three times a year to scour the forests of Germany and the newly opened countries of eastern Europe for faeries to kill. I often came back empty-handed, but I didn’t mind so much. The disappointments served to intensify my enjoyment of those rare and special kills. I would kill them quickly, bundle them into the van, then bring their fresh bodies back here to my apartment, back to the vat for boning.

  The vat is well hidden—upstairs through the sculpture room, beyond a small door and up another flight of dark narrow stairs—in a room I had purpose-built in the attic. The gabled windows are painted black, but two bright hospital-strength fluorescent lights are installed in the ceiling so I can always be certain of what I’m doing. The vat takes up half of the room. If I were to walk around it, I’d need eleven big paces to arrive back where I started. The vat itself is at hip height, constructed of thick black metal. The liquid inside—a cocktail of ghastly chemicals, which I’ve refined over the years to be perfectly suited to stripping faery bones—takes an hour to reach its optimum boiling temperature. When the motor that heats the elements starts up it can be frighteningly loud, so the room is soundproofed floor to ceiling.

  Above it all, on the ceiling, there are two metal struts with aluminum cable running through them, attached to an iron cage. I took my time in designing the cage. It’s large enough to fit a body bent or cut in two, and inside it is spiked with iron hooks to catch the smaller bones so they don’t escape and fall through the holes. I load the body at the side of the vat. There are two large rubber buttons there. When I press the top button, the hydraulic mechanism pulls the cage into position above the vat; when I press the bottom one, the cage is dropped directly into the boiling acid. Because the room is soundproof, because it takes so long for the vat to reach boiling temperature, and because there is a danger of overboiling (if the vat overflowed into the shell and heating elements I could very well be electrocuted in my own home), I have two lights positioned above the door to the boning room. The top one flashes when the boiling temperature is reached, the bottom one if the temperature becomes critically high. (The fool who installed the lights and buttons for me made one of red and one of green so I could distinguish them. Me! I can’t tell red from green any more than I can tell yellow from purple.) Four or five hours after immersion, I have a cage full of faery bones, stripped of their flesh and robbed of their scent. When they cool, they are ready to begin working on.

  The faery who deserved boiling alive was a rare local find. I was out at Kreuzburg, enjoying a meal in a tavern, when he walked in alone and bought a beer. I was sitting so far at the back of the tavern that at first I didn’t know what he was. I noticed him only because he was very beautiful, even for a faery. I kept glancing at him, wondering if he were a movie star or a model. It was only as I paid for my meal and collected my coat that I smelled him—that horrible, wonderful smell. He noticed me staring at him, and gave me an inviting smile.

  “Good evening,” he said, his accent thick and French. “I’m Octave.”

  I was astonished that he was so forward. I know I do not possess a friendly countenance, and I was almost certain that my stare had not been amiable or pleasant. Then, a half-second later, I realized he had mistaken my gaze for sexual desire. And he was encouraging that desire.

  How easy, then, it was to get him back to the hotel. He was a faery on an erotic mission, not afraid of breeding with humans (the results can be disastrous) because his sexual proclivities were toward the male of the species. Filthy, disgusting creature. When I brought him to my apartment, he fawned and preened like a teenage girl in love, and I endured his first caresses and his gooey-eyed gazes without shuddering, only by reminding myself in every moment that earning his trust would mean he would soon be material for my sculpture. Within minutes I had him blindfolded, with promises of erotic play, and I led him through the door and up the stairs to the vat, which I set to boiling with a clunk of the lever. I had a number of tools at my disposal to bludgeon him to death first, but I was so inflamed with rage by his sexual advances that I wanted to punish him.

  I pushed him into the cage and now he started to panic and flail about, but the door on the cage was snapped shut, and then he began to scream. I wasn’t afraid of his screams; the room is perfectly soundproof. I left the cage suspended over the vat and went downstairs to bed to doze for a while until it reached boiling temperature. He was still screaming when I returned an hour later. I almost changed my mind and recalled the cage to silence him, but I was curious as to what it might feel like and sound like to boil a faery alive. Instead of hitting the top button, I hit the bottom one and the cage descended int
o the vat.

  The screams intensified and were almost too much for me to bear, but then they stopped abruptly and I found myself strangely disappointed. My ears rang. The vat bubbled and boiled. I switched off the light and went to bed.

  When I finally harvested the cool bones a day later, I was still plagued by the ringing in my ears. What I first assumed to be an effect of listening to Octave’s deafening screams I now deduced must be an ear infection, and I phoned my doctor for an appointment the following day.

  I cut and shaved and glued the bones into a block, which I then glued to the Bone Wife. This block was the original waist for my Wife, sculpted in a white heat while my ears rang and I congratulated myself on such an unexpected and successful kill.

  It was only the next day when I returned home from the doctor—he gave me antibiotics at my insistence but was unconvinced there was anything wrong with my ears—that the trouble started. I was in my apartment, making phone calls and ordering supplies for the studios, when I heard the sound of someone crying far away. I barely registered the sound at first; I thought it was a child on the street, crying for something lost. The crying intensified into long gasps of anguish and finally shrieks. It jangled my nerves so I went to the window to look down on the street and call out to the child to stop.

  There was no child on the street, but with my head out the window, I could hear far more clearly where the shrieking was coming from. Directly above me, from the open window of my sculpture room.

  I ran upstairs and pulled down both layers of glazing, looking around wildly for the cause of the shrieking. It was coming from Octave’s bones, half-lumpen, half-sculpted, at the top of the sculpture.