The Intuition: Part 7, Elisabeta
A Horror Story
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No gilded furniture or pastel silken fripperies graced the ladies’ parlor where Will was asked to wait. Instead, he found a rustic voluptuousness that surprised him. Dark velvet damask swathed the walls. A bear’s pelt lounged along the back of the divan, its snarling head at ease among the tasseled pillows. A round walnut table squatted on clawed feet as though kneading the jewel-toned carpet, bearing upon its gleaming surface a heavy silver tea set. Embossed upon the fat round belly of the teapot he saw the wings of the Corbinescu raven, and steam rose from its spout fashioned like the bird’s neck and open mouth. The silver reflected the candle shimmer from a candelabrum serious in both its heft and patina of age. The gas lamps had been turned low, engendering a thick pall of muzzy shadow that made indistinct the corners of the room.
“Madame will join you shortly. She asks that you please take some tea.” Marcu waved at the table as if tea were a thing he disdained.
“Strange artwork for the pleasure of ladies,” Will mused, his attention captured by the age-darkened oil paintings hanging over the damask draperies.
Skeletons in attitudes of leisure or rough passion comprised the lot. One grasped the reins of a rearing, wild-eyed horse; one slouched at table before a feast of slaughtered hare, the creature’s entrails trailing among the grapes and plums; another clutched a fainting woman in its arms, its teeth at her throat, its bony fingers tearing her bodice. Others, even more shocking, opened before Will’s gaze like windows onto Hell. He leaned close, trying to discern an artist’s signature, but there was none to be found.
Marcu shuffled his feet and glanced into the corridor, seeming eager to be gone.
“They are very old,” he said, as though that explained such disturbing subject matter found in such a place. He gestured at the furnishings of the compartment. “It is as Madame would have it; her own belongings from home.”
With a second swift glance into the corridor, Marcu started from the doorway and pulled shut the door behind him, leaving Will without further ceremony.
A spider of disquietude scurried through Will’s veins. The woman is an antiquarian, he reflected. Such a strange pursuit is likely to lead to strange tastes. Before he could think more on it, the door opened. A slender girl in a plain, high-necked gown entered followed closely by a tall figure clothed and veiled in black. The girl arranged a chair for her mistress and saw her comfortably seated before turning to Will and curtseying.
“Lord Dovedale, I present to you Madame Elisabeta. I will act as translator, if it please you.”
The girl was stunning, her perfect face set like a jewel beneath the scarf that bound her hair. Will wrenched his attention from her to acknowledge the inclined head of the veiled antiquarian.
“Madame. I am eager to hear of the relics we seek, and frankly, of your role in the search.”
The veiled figure produced a whispery chuckle. Will was reminded of the dry susurrus of autumn leaves across the age-bitten marble of a gravestone. He gave his head a slight shake to rid it of such fancies. The young maid knelt beside Elisabeta’s chair, and the older woman reached out a gloved hand to grasp the girl’s shoulder. Their two heads bent toward one another, and Will could hear the soft murmur of a foreign tongue.
“You may call me Elisabeta,” intoned the girl, her eyes fixed on Will, yet empty as if blind. “I shall call you William. We have much work to do together. It will be a great undertaking to bring home to our prince the heart of his realm.”
The gloved hand withdrew, and the girl climbed to her feet and approached the table. She poured a cup of tea and handed it to Will, then poured one for herself. Elisabeta continued to murmur in her low, dry voice, and the girl spoke in tandem.
“Please,” she said, gesturing at a chair. When Will sat, she perched on the edge of the divan, the fangs of the bear leering over her shoulder. “I have been from my home a long time, William, immersed in study and travel. It is a marvel how far I have traveled and all I have learned. Now, at last, I will return.”
Will set his cup on the table, untouched. He looked toward Elisabeta who sat upright and still as a fall of shadow. Though the heavy veil shrouded her features, he felt the blade of her regard cleaving to his heart, eviscerating his mind of every thought and suspicion. The wolf inside him urged him, as it had never done, to run.
“To serve your prince? To set Corbinescu upon a throne at the head of a recognized nation?”
His questions came low and hoarse as whispers, and Elisabeta indulged the barest ecstatic shiver.
“Grigore,” she breathed through the lips of the maid, drawing out the name as though savoring it. “Blood of my blood. Yes, we will have our kingdom. And you, William, will fetch us the key. Listen. Deep in the forest of my homeland stands a chapel. I know it well. It is very old and hard to find, but you will find it. Within it dwells an anchorite, fierce and mad, who keeps the old ways. He is a holy man, and strong. The relics are his charge; his charge is his life. Do you understand?”
“He will have to be killed,” Will said.
Elisabeta was silent, and the girl set her teacup on the table beside Will’s and folded her hands in her lap. Will drew a long breath.
“I am no stranger to murder,” he said, speaking almost as if to himself. “There is a beast within me, a ravening wolf, that has tasted innocent blood. You are asking that I set it free, this thing I would keep caged.”
Elisabeta leaned forward in her chair. The maid leaned forward and clasped Will’s wrist with her pale hand. They spoke.
“There is no wolf, young one. There is no beast that cries for blood. There is only you.”
Will felt a pain in his guts as though something vital had been wrenched from him. Night bloomed in his skull, erasing from his sight the women, the compartment, and everything beyond. Only his victims remained, and the abattoir where he stood over them in his father’s leather butcher’s apron, alone in his savagery. The wolf’s bloody tracks were nothing more than his own red footprints.
He came back to himself with a groan and a spasm that pulled his wrist from the maid’s grasp. The door of the compartment closed softly. Elisabeta had gone. The maid stood, curtsied, and made to follow her mistress.
“Wait.” Will stood and touched her shoulder. “Is she a mesmerist, your Madame Elisabeta?”
The girl considered this but, finally, shook her head. “No, though she has that power.”
Will raked a hand through his hair. Now that the veiled witch had gone, he felt his self-possession flowing back to him, and he was eager to be doing. He stepped closer to the girl and stroked her lovely face with the backs of his knuckles. The skeletons in the paintings watched from their bottomless orbits as he pulled the scarf from her hair and let it flutter to the floor. He took her jaw in his hand and turned her face first one way, then the other, watching the lazy brown curls fall across her throat like silken ribbons. Her eyes were not blank now, and yet they were as empty as the orbits of the painted skeletons. They held no trace of fear; they only watched him as though from afar.
He released her and stepped back. “I will see you again when we reach our destination.”
She turned and opened the door but looked back at him over her shoulder.
“No, Lord Dovedale. I will not see you again,” she said in the tone of one about to embark on a great journey.
In the dark, Marcu wept. The tears ran over his cheeks and collected like dew in the drooping luxuriance of his moustache. Blood stained his cuffs and dripped in sluggish rivulets from his fingertips. He lay draped in languid sprawl in a marble bath, and blood pooled in a thin wash beneath him, already cold and drying to a rusty stain. His strength had gone, and try as he might, he could not extricate himself. It was so dark here and smelled of incense and cool earth. He could smell the coppery tang of his blood, hot and salty with life. Something moved in the lightless compartment, causing Marcu to weep harder.
A light blossomed and threw its rays over him. A lantern floated into view, held aloft by a bearded figure, and then a flask was pressed to Marcu’s lips.
“Drink, my brother,” said Andrei Borja. He lifted Marcu’s shoulders with a strong arm, and the brandy blazed a path of fire down the stricken man’s throat.
“Come, you must rise. I will help you.” Borja set the lantern on the floor and pulled Marcu from the bath, helping him to sit on its edge. “Madame sleeps. She will not require you further.”
Marcu grasped Borja around the neck and sobbed into the other man’s shirt, bereft of words. Borja patted him and held him for a moment, then pulled him to his feet where he swayed like a drunken man, the lantern-lit darkness whirling around him.
“Walk, Marcu. Walk if you would live past this night.”
You write so beautifully I almost don’t notice the violence, the under current of danger, until it’s too late!
Beautifully written!