The Autumn Castle

by Kim Wilkins

  She would still marry Jude. Once Christine had decided that, she felt an enormous sense of relief. Yes, he had fallen in love with someone else, but Mayfridh belonged to another world, another race of beings. Despite the anxiety Christine felt for her now, Mayfridh would soon disappear, never to think of Jude again. Christine should concern herself about Jude having feelings for Mayfridh no more than she should about him developing a crush on a movie star. Mayfridh was unattainable and forever distant.

  Perhaps, from time to time in their lives, Christine would catch him with a faraway look in his eye and know he was thinking of Mayfridh. But she was used to him seeming far away, and once they had settled into comfortable affluence and had children, he would stay and he would be happy with her. Of course he would. If eighty percent of his heart was all he could give, she would take it. She loved him too deeply, too desperately and too wholly, to demand more or to choose nothing.

  But for now, whatever feelings he had for Mayfridh were exploitable. Christine had to convince him to hit her by pushing every guilt and fear button she could find.

  She descended to Gerda’s flat. Inside, Gerda sat tight-lipped on the sofa while Pete sketched furiously in his notepad.

  “Hi,” Christine said, brushing hair from Gerda’s eyes. “How are you?”

  She shrugged. A bump and a croak came from the bucket on her lap. Christine peered in to see a frog, two lizards, a locust, and a handful of worms. “It’s still happening then?”

  Gerda nodded. Pete looked up from his notebook. “That’s my fault. She was determined not to say anything, but then I started drawing her.” He turned the sketch around. Gerda’s face in thick pencil lines, perfect bewilderment on her brow, a locust leaping from her lips.

  “Pete, will you go up to Mandy’s and relieve Jude? Tell him I need to speak to him.”

  Pete put the sketchbook aside and rose. “Sure, but if I see that witch, I’m going to run screaming. I have a hard enough time socially without spitting reptiles when I speak.”

  He closed the door behind him. Christine sat on the sofa next to Gerda and slid an arm around her. “I’m so sorry, Gerda.”

  Gerda nodded, her lips pressed together hard, tears welling in her eyes.

  “I will do my best to fix it. I’m going after Mayfridh.”

  Gerda turned questioning eyes on her.

  “The first time I went across was when I knocked myself out. I’ve got to convince Jude to hit me in the back.”

  Gerda reached for Christine’s hand and squeezed it softly. “You’ll be hurt,” she whispered, and a lizard pattered into the bucket.

  “She may be killed. You may be stuck like this for life. It’s the only way.” Christine took the bucket to the window and emptied its contents down into the street. “Gerda,” she said, “if Jude won’t do it, will you?”

  Gerda nodded.

  “I’d rather Jude did it, because he knows the exact spot. But if I tell him you’re willing it might convince him.”

  She nodded again, reaching for the bucket and cradling it against her.

  Christine sank onto the sofa. “I think he’s in love with her, Gerda.”

  Gerda didn’t answer; her expression was unreadable.

  “Now you shut up?” Christine said good-naturedly. “Just when I need you to talk?”

  Gerda smiled.

  “Okay, let’s get Fabiyan out of Mandy’s apartment and lock it up. The poor guy is scared to death anyway. I’ll go to Ewigkreis without Hexebart’s help.”

  The door opened and Jude entered. “Christine? Is everything okay?”

  Christine rose from the sofa. “Come on, Jude. We need to talk.” She led him upstairs to their apartment, Jude with a puzzled look on his face.

  When the door was closed behind them, she handed him the sculptor’s mallet.

  “Oh, no way, Christine,” he said, “not this idea again.”

  “It’s the only hope we have.”

  “Christine, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Gerda said she’d do it.”

  “No, I won’t let that happen either.”

  “Every moment you do nothing, he could be killing her.”

  Silence.

  “He could be killing her right now,” she said.

  “He could kill you too.”

  “I’ll be careful. He doesn’t know I’m coming. I’ll take a knife, that big one from the kitchen.”

  Jude’s face was flushed with anger. “I can’t believe you’re even asking me this.”

  “You’re the only person who can do it. You know exactly the spot to hit. I won’t feel a thing once I get to Ewigkreis, and when I come back . . . so, I’m laid up on painkillers for a couple of weeks.”

  “I could cause permanent damage. More pain, for the rest of your life.”

  “But she may die. Dead is forever.”

  “Okay, I’ll hit myself. I’ll knock myself out and go.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with you. I ended up over there because Mayfridh and I made that stupid blood-sisters pact when we were kids. You’d just end up unconscious.”

  Again he fell silent.

  “Jude,” she said softly, “only you can save her.”

  Jude scowled. “Don’t say that.”

  “You are the only person who can save her. Every moment you hesitate is a moment he can kill her. It only takes a moment to die.”

  “I—”

  “Now, Jude. I’ll get the knife.” She went to the kitchen, opened the cutlery drawer with shaking hands. Tried to force down some air. All her nerves were screaming. He was going to do it, he was really going to do it. She tucked the knife into her waistband and returned to Jude. “Are you ready?”

  “I can’t do this, Christine,” he said, and his bottom lip was trembling.

  “You can, you will.” She turned her back to him. “Go on, you know the spot.”

  “Christine . . .”

  “I’m waiting.”

  A long silence drew out behind her. She heard him hitch his breath on a repressed sob.

  “Okay,” he said on a long shaky breath.

  Christine closed her eyes and forced her body to go limp. “Don’t tell me when, don’t count down, don’t—”

  The blow was sharp and swift and excruciatingly precise. In an instant, she was falling between worlds.

  PART THREE

  So pure and cold the wind breathes.

  It pares the flesh from the bones of the land—

  finds at last the essential shape.

  “Autumn,” Kate Humphrey

  “Hee, hee, hee! Circle of fire, circle of fire!

  Spin, spin, circle of fire! Merrily, merrily!

  Puppet, ha, pretty puppet, spin, spin!”

  “The Sandman,” E. T. A. Hoffmann

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I’m too late, winter’s here.

  Christine sat up slowly, dread clutching at her heart. The sky was leaden, the branches all but bare, the light dim and low on the horizon. The air was very still, and gravity, rather than movement, sent leaves plummeting to the ground. Winter seemed poised to rush upon her in any instant.

  And yet, she hadn’t forgotten anything about the Real World—not Jude, not Mandy’s diary, not the awesome promise of pain that waited for her to return—which meant the worlds hadn’t moved yet. She needed to see the giant birch. Instinct told her it was unwise to call for Eisengrimm—Mandy didn’t know she was here. She checked that the knife was still tucked into her waistband, and almost laughed at herself; she was no action hero.

  Up through the forest and past Hexebart’s empty well she found the garden wall. The lock on the gate had been smashed to pieces. A shiver of trepidation. The gate was never locked; in Ewigkreis there was no need to bolt intruders out of the castle. The only person who didn’t know that was Mandy, and he’d struck this lock with a violence that betrayed the brutality in his heart.

  Prepare yourself for the worst, Christine. Mayfridh might be dead,
Eisengrimm might be dead—hell, everybody might be dead. She steeled herself as she passed through the garden and into the long shadowy corridor of the Autumn Castle.

  On tiptoe, careful not to make a sound, she checked the rooms off the corridor and the great hall. The birch outside appeared sad and bare, but leaves still grasped its branches in many places. Soon, very soon, winter would be here. But not today.

  Christine moved toward the staircase. The strange emptiness of the castle was magnified by her fear. Dark, silent shadows gathered in corners, a hollow cold rose from the kitchen, and her footsteps echoed around the narrow turret as she made her way up to Mayfridh’s chambers. No sign of anyone. From Mayfridh’s bedroom window she gazed down on Ewigkreis. Out in the fields, people were scything and gathering and tying bundles onto carts. Even though it seemed very distant, the bustle of activity heartened her. Mandy hadn’t killed everyone. Mayfridh and Eisengrimm might still be alive.

  She turned, and noticed the brass bear lying on the floor. She crouched to pick it up. There was blood on it. A veil of frost stole over her heart. “Mayfridh,” she whispered, pulling herself to her feet. But where was she, what had Mandy done with her? A burst of frantic energy seized her. She raced down the stairs and across to the other turret. Nothing. Through the kitchen. Nothing. The spell chamber. Nothing, nothing, nothing. And then she paused at the stairs.

  Christine knew where she had to go. Christine knew where Mandy had stashed her friend. Yet, here she stood just above the dungeon, and she couldn’t make her feet move, not even an inch.

  Underground. A bad place. Bad things happened there.

  She took a deep breath.

  Couldn’t move.

  This was ridiculous. She’d had Jude hit her with a mallet to get here, and now she was balking at a short walk in the dark.

  Not just the dark. The weight. The silence. The dread finality.

  Christine pressed her palms into her eyes in frustration. Her fingers were trembling. Why was she even here? Why suffer so much pain and trauma to rescue a woman whom Jude had fallen in love with? Perhaps Christine had fallen a little in love with Mayfridh too, with her warm breath and her soft fingers and her childlike eyes.

  One foot, then, onto the stairs. And another. Descending slowly. Into the dark tunnel.

  Can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe.

  Christine stopped. Turned. Saw the faint light spreading from above the stairs. Breathed. See, not far from the air, not far at all. She clung to the wall and began to back up the tunnel, keeping her eyes focused on the light above her. The wall was cold and rough beneath her fingers. Gradually, the floor sloped away, and the square of gray light narrowed to nothing. Slowly, so slowly, she turned her back on the exit and faced the path to the dungeons. The light of a burning torch illuminated the bars of the first gate. No going back. Her trembling hands reached for the gate. She was awash in memories.

  They had been coming home from a party. Christine had won a stupid bet with Finn, and so she sat in the front passenger seat beside her mother. Finn sat in the back, singing a silly song. Alfa was laughing. Christine was pretending to be embarrassed.

  She pushed her legs forward, one then the other. Her breath was short and she could feel her shoulders hitched up so hard that the bones in her chest compressed.

  It was very late, or very early. The black night and the lights of the city and the abandoned streets. Alfa and Finn bantered about the route to take home. Finn changed the words of the song to be about Alfa’s shortcut; how it was really a circuit to another dimension where men were always right.

  Next gate. The dim tunnel seemed to constrict in front of her. Her windpipe felt as if it were closing at the same rate.

  And then the bang and the jolt and the bewildering dislocated suddenness of pain and horror, as though a switch had been thrown: in one second the world had integrity and in the next it was broken to pieces. The car had been clipped, had hit the wall; her father was crushed, her mother had been thrown through the windshield and had returned in ghastly fragments. Christine, the only one wearing a seatbelt, could feel something hard and sharp bent into her back. Her head was swimming and life had taken on a surreal, dimly colored cast.

  Deeper and deeper in she moved. A third gate. The squeak of its opening was wrapped in cotton wool, coming from a long way away. Sweat on her top lip, hands clammy, nerves shrieking.

  The sounds were awful. Wheezing and groans and metal fatigue and the engine screaming in horror. The headlights caught his taillights. He had stopped. The letters and numbers of his license plate burned themselves into her brain. (She still remembered them today. She had not really needed to write them down.)

  One more gate. Christine’s lungs shook with the effort of breathing.

  And as he sped away, the weight of the tunnel and the dark crashed down on top of her, pushing her deep inside herself, certain she would suffocate in death’s black tunnel. And the light receded from her forever. There was only heavy, grinding pressure, endlessly descending on her brain and her lungs and ears and . . .

  She hit the ground before she’d realized the dizziness had stolen over her. She cried out, a girlish shriek that sounded both desperate and distant.

  Then, not far off, she heard Mayfridh’s voice.

  “Who’s there? Is someone there?”

  “Mayfridh?” she managed.

  “Christine? Is that you, Christine? Come quickly. I don’t know when Mandy will be back.”

  Christine stumbled and stood. Only a few more minutes and she could be out of here. She forced herself forward.

  Mandy hadn’t breathed properly in hours. His weight pressed on his lungs, and his legs were growing numb. One small triumph: he had managed to work free his cleaver, which had been pressing against his belly uncomfortably. Now he hefted it in his left hand and wondered if it could be of any use to him in gaining freedom.

  In this uncomfortable, twisted position it was difficult to find any leverage, but he tried to chip away the log from around his legs with the blade. A few splinters of bark flew away, and he wriggled forward a half-inch. He tried to twist more onto his left side, to take the pressure off his stomach, but a sharp pain in his right thigh told him that he had become stuck again, even less comfortably. His legs were squashed against each other and his hip pressed into something hard and sharp.

  He slumped forward, closing his eyes and groaning with frustration. How long was he destined to be stuck here? Would he die before anyone found him? Mandy was perfectly certain that he didn’t want to die, especially not smelling like a faery. Then that thought shocked the breath from his body, because if he became a faery and faeries lived a long, long time . . . Could he be stuck here in this log, under this deadfall, for hundreds of years? Could faeries starve to death?

  Mandy opened his eyes and every morbid imagining fled because he saw something so amazing, so incredible, so wonderful that there wasn’t room for anything else.

  Green.

  He had heard that grass was green, so that must be the strange sensation in his eyeballs that wasn’t what he normally saw. Color. The grass was colored. It was colored green.

  And then his astonishment and delight were ruined by the repulsive, sick knowing that this too was a product of his becoming the very thing he despised. His bones were transforming into faery bones, his eyes into faery eyes.

  He gazed around him. Spots of warmth were growing among the gray and black and white. Colors forming. He couldn’t bear to close his eyes. He watched the green as though it might escape from him, crying and crying in happiness and in horror.

  Mayfridh was roused from numbness by footsteps. Mandy returning? She scrambled to her feet and leaned against the door, ears straining. No rattle and clank of bones in the sack. Was he coming back to kill her? Her heart raced and she felt dizzy with fear.

  But then there was a loud gasp and the sound of someone falling. A woman’s voice, not a man’s. She called out and Christine replied.r />
  “Christine? Is that you, Christine? Come quickly. I don’t know when Mandy will be back.” The footsteps came closer, and in a moment Christine was leaning on the cell door, panting and pale in the dim light.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” Mayfridh said. “How did you get here? Have you seen Mandy?”

  No answer, just the panting.

  “Christine? What’s wrong?”

  “I . . . I . . .” Her top lip was sweating and her eyes were glazed.

  “What’s wrong? Are you sick?” Then Mayfridh remembered Christine’s phobia of tunnels. She reached her fingers through the bars and stroked Christine’s hair. “Shh, shh, be calm.”

  “I can’t . . . I need to get out . . .”

  “I’m locked in here. I don’t know when Mandy is returning.” Then a thought struck her. “Christine, Hexebart was in the neighboring cell. She may have left spells. If you fetch me one, I’ll try to calm you down with it.”

  Christine swallowed hard and nodded.

  “That one,” Mayfridh said, indicating the next cell.

  Christine nodded again, pulled herself up straight and disappeared from sight.

  “Can you see any?”

  “No.”

  “Look behind the door. She hides them.”

  “Okay. Yes, there are eleven.”

  “Grab them all. Stuff them in your pockets.”

  A moment later, Christine was back. She passed a spell through the bars to Mayfridh.

  Mayfridh rolled it between her fingers. “Lean your head against the bars. Take a deep breath. It might not completely dissolve your fear, but it will help.”

  Christine leaned her head against the bars. Mayfridh reached out gently with her fingers and stroked Christine’s forehead. “Be calm,” she said. “Be calm.”

  Christine expelled a long breath and her shoulders fell.

  “Better?” Mayfridh asked, touching Christine’s hair.