Sixtine- The Complete Trilogy Box Set

by Caroline Vermalle

  She could leave.

  Then, with her chest shaking, she moved away from the yellow halo.

  And sank into the swarming darkness.

  38

  A thick raindrop exploded on Bian’s cheek. Then two, then three. There must have been a hole in the sheet metal, which rumbled above her like a drum.

  The entire jungle around the bar shivered with rain. The soil was full of water and already formed muddy gullies. The young Vietnamese girl couldn’t take her eyes off the sky. The dawn had arrived, the flood following it.

  The dawn had also brought the tears of one of the hostesses who had insulted Bian the day before, her sister had disappeared without a trace.

  Bian clenched her teeth and thought of Max. She refused the truth, and yet she knew the cave too well. She still remembered the time she had almost died, the taste of rotten seaweed and stone in her mouth. In an hour at the latest, most of the cave’s exits would be blocked by the torrents, waterfalls and debris they carried.

  If her friend did not join them before sunrise, she knew that no one could do anything for him anymore.

  “Alfred-Jean can’t stand humidity. He’s going to get hurt, that’s for sure,” Livia said beside her, her white dress was stained with mud.

  Bian looked at her. She remembered what Max had told her about this girl named Sixtine, a chapel. She had also survived, but it took several months to discover that the murdered husband she was trying to avenge was actually her executioner.

  Bian returned to the contemplation of the flooded backyard. Maybe Livia would still be able to believe in human kindness when she learned that a man had sacrificed his life for her. She and those others who only lived in the book she hugged.

  The water would take all these bastards away, but secretly she hoped it wouldn’t take her hero as well.

  The rain continued to bludgeon the bar’s sheet metal. So loud that no one heard the dozens of vehicles splashing down through the small country road.

  39

  The light had barely gone out when the monkey screamed in Sixtine’s mind.

  “She’s coming! She’s coming! She’s coming! She’s coming!”

  Her hands trying to follow a wall, her feet searching with every step, Sixtine tried to advance through what was living in the dark.

  Nefertiti remained lurking in a corner, preferring to send her infernal court as a scout. Sometimes specters appeared, larger than her, not belonging to any reality, and taunted her, much to the amusement of the monkey, who applauded every so often. Sometimes they disappeared, leaving in their dark and silent wake the possibility of even more terrifying presences.

  They did not live in the darkness around Sixtine.

  They lived in the darkness inside her.

  The horror prevented her from breathing, but she couldn’t stop her breath, like in the pool. Each breath was lined with sharp stones that flowed into her lungs and scolded her. Sweat froze her back while an inferno burned in her limbs.

  “She’s coming! She’s coming! She’s coming! She’s coming!”

  When the monkey’s screams filled her head, their powerful breaths shattered what little courage she had left.

  “No, leave me alone! Let me go!” she pleaded.

  She suddenly realized that it was no longer necessary to continue. The source of joy was poisoned forever. They had transformed hope into a sticky misery.

  She wanted to beg them to let her die. She prayed to heaven that the cave would swallow her up, to be freed from the shackles of fear. Yet she was afraid of this deliverance.

  The monkey laughed at her. “She’s surrendering! The elders were right! They were right! They were right!”

  Sixtine fell to the ground and cried, but fear had even eradicated her tears.

  “She’s surrendering! The elders were right!”

  With her face against the rocky ground, balled up like a fetus, Sixtine heard the monkey one last time, then withdrew from the world, her body shaken with suffering.

  How long did she stay in the midst of this infinite darkness, waiting for a death that would never come?

  Suddenly a new, light sensation found its way among her devastated senses.

  The stroke of a feather.

  She refused it at first, curling up even more. Then she allowed it to calm her being. She recognized it. It had been there for Jessica’s entire life and for her entire life.

  Her mother’s presence.

  When her mind awoke, the monkey and the voices came back with full force, but Sixtine clung to the lightness of this feather. Her tiny fragility seemed to intimidate the monkey and his army of fears.

  The feather became armor.

  She threatened at every moment to twirl around in the invisible and to abandon Sixtine. The only way to keep her close, to appropriate her power, was to surrender. To no longer offer resistance to fear. To let her in, and to accept her.

  Slowly, Sixtine straightened up, the feather attached to her short breath. Every time it resisted darkness, the feather drifted. Then Sixtine, trembling, opened herself to it, and began to take a step in front of the other. Her foot slipped, but she managed to recover.

  After a second or two, she heard a distant noise, under her, like a stone that shattered down below. She must have been on the edge of a chasm.

  The truce offered by the feather brought the memory of Max into her mind and the gift he had just given her. The anguish was still there, but it flowed through it like a green river, with its currents, its whirlpools, its maelstroms. She watched it sink, but no longer drowned in it.

  “She’s surrendering! The elders were right!”

  “I’m not surrendering!” Sixtine’s loud scream reverberated in the darkness. Her voice was much louder and bigger than all the others, who suddenly kept quiet. Silence was imposed and this time it obeyed her.

  “Nefertiti!” she shouted, from the depths of her stomach.

  Her jaw was clenched, her soul on the wire, ready to turn into terror, yet she clung to her own fragility.

  “Nefertiti! I come to bow down to you!”

  Nefertiti’s empty eyes filled every corner of the visible and invisible world.

  “Nefertiti! I have not forgotten you,” Sixtine said, her voice trembling.

  “Do you understand the secret in your name?” The voice was thunder and silence at the same time.

  “Yes.”

  “Will your heart betray?”

  “Never again. I made a promise on the top of the pyramid,” Sixtine answered without hesitation.

  “Are you ready to fulfill your destiny?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know who you are?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who are you, Sixtine?”

  The source of gratitude, once dry, flooded her being. She didn’t stop the waves and they opened wide onto the place of fears, the place of doubts, the place of love and mourning and the order of things.

  “I am the guardian angel,” Sixtine replied.

  Queen Nefertiti, with her chin high, stared at Sixtine with her empty eyes. She probed the depths of her soul, to find the place of faith and found it wide open as well.

  “Trust the eye I gave you.”

  This time, Horus’ eye does not invest in the darkness. Nefertiti disappeared, and with her, the last weak echoes of the monkey’s cries disappeared. “She surrendered! The elders were right!”

  Then everything became dark and silent again.

  Yes, she had surrendered, and by surrendering, she had gained strength and overcame fear.

  The darkness was disarmed. They were nothing but nothing. Nothing, nothing.

  Sixtine turned around, hoping that something would guide her, but she was alone, and it was dark around her.

  Had she returned to the starting point?

  “Max?”

  The echo of her voice traveled far. Then suddenly, a white light shone at her feet, on her hands, on her whole body. She looked up. A moonbeam poured its light o
nto her and blinded her momentarily.

  She then discovered that the path she had taken ran along the edge of a high narrow cliff projecting itself, like a balanced footbridge, into the middle of the vast cave. She looked underneath her: huge stalagmites came out of the ground, obscuring the distant ground.

  The moonlight continued to flood the cave with light and gradually revealed its walls.

  It was then that she saw, as if through a veil, hundreds of men and women sitting on the rocks.

  There were as many people there as the characters in the Sistine Chapel, and she looked at it with kindness.

  Tears mixed with her smile when she saw her mother, a tender smile further softening her virginal face.

  Next to her sat Jessica, looking proudly at her. Then Gigi, her eyes sparkling with presence.

  When she wanted to take a step to find them, she remembered she was surrounded by a huge abyss. She probed the void to find a bridge, a passage, that could bring her closer to them, but she sadly didn’t find any.

  When she looked up, they were gone, but the light showed her the way.

  40

  Neither Max nor Florence could detect the slightest clarity in the darkness, and followed Sixtine with fear in their stomachs. She couldn’t see them either, but she didn’t need that sense. She had the knowledge, and Horus’s eye split the darkness, giving her the clarity to know exactly where she was going.

  She guided Max and Florence to the bamboo ladder, drenched with rain. She watched them as they climbed the ladder and sighed a breath of relief when they disappeared into clouds of mist. The ground started to overflow with water and the Green River roared.

  Sixtine ran to Thaddeus, still handcuffed to the rock in front of Elizabeth von Wär’s large mosaic, and the water was already up to his waist.

  It was not this imminent danger which suddenly froze Sixtine’s blood. It was the gray veil so familiar around him which tore her heart up into small fragments of pain. Part of her managed to convince herself that it was the rain, and all that water, all that mist that was invading the cave. It simply could not be true. Thaddeus couldn’t die.

  Not again.

  “Have you fulfilled your destiny?” she asked him, as she hurried to find a way to open the handcuffs.

  “I will do it tonight,” he answered.

  “But you didn’t accomplish it, tell me you haven’t accomplished it yet?”

  Thaddeus read the anguish on her face. He tried to pull free from the handcuffs, but neither the cuffs nor the ring gave in under the pressure of his hands.

  Then Sixtine remembered. Two angels. One to save. The other for revenge.

  She was the guardian angel! She could save him!

  In the roaring noise and rising water, she managed to clear her mind. She invited fragility to better understand the connections between things. The Assyrian irons around Thaddeus’s wrists caught her attention. All she had to do was listen. It was so difficult to listen as the water rose to her chest and the gray veil blurred her face.

  She was the guardian angel!

  A few moments later, she was in the treasure room, swimming as fast as she could to find something to free Thaddeus. The water already caressed the feet of the stone colossus when Sixtine set up the bamboo scaffold and searched among the funerary objects, remembering the lords took their weapons to the grave.

  She found Sipan’s dagger and swam back to where Thaddeus was, her muscles aching with every stride she took, but she had to get to him.

  “I found this,” she said, her bottom lip shivering as she stuck the tip of the dagger into the keyhole of the handcuffs. It took a few hard knocks to hit the inside mechanism just the right way for it to be released, but she was determined not to give up. Thaddeus had never given up on her. They both sighed a breath of relief when they heard the very crucial “click” sound and Thaddeus was freed. They pulled themselves out of the Green River and made their way to the ladder, away from the rising water. Sixtine stopped suddenly and pulled him against her, she didn’t want to look at him anymore. She was convinced that the sky had made a mistake. The gray veil was an illusion, an anomaly. She was praying harder than she had ever prayed before and a strange sensation filled her up to her core. When she glanced at him, tears ran down her cheeks. The gray veil was still there.

  The driving rain mixed with her salty tears.

  “I know who I am, Thaddeus,” she whispered.

  For a brief moment, Thaddeus’s smile radiated warmth and tenderness into the veil of ether. “Then soon we can be together.”

  “I don’t want soon, I want now. I want you to be here to see who I’m becoming, that was your promise.”

  “And I’ll keep that promise, I swear to you,” he said as he stroked her wet face. “Can you hear the noise outside? The army has surrounded the cave. None of them can get out. Nefertiti will dominate the world’s headlines until they are arrested. The truth has come out. It’s over for them.”

  “So it’s over for you, then?”

  “No. He’s still my father.”

  “He is not your father,” Sixtine objected. “Why do you have to chase him again, if it’s over? Thaddeus, answer me?”

  “Because it is my destiny.”

  They noticed a shadow on the other side of the cave and glanced in its direction.

  It was Helmut von Wär. He staggered, a chest full of treasures under one arm, a gun in another. He struggled against the advancing water, his calves whipped by streams coming from all sides. The Green River overflowed in increasingly powerful waves. Waterfalls now poured down the walls of the clearing.

  Helmut von Wär hurried towards the bamboo staircase, shaking in the storm.

  Thaddeus seemed to grow in an instant. His long and sovereign silhouette detached from Sixtine and he headed towards von Wär.

  “Thaddeus, no!” she called out to him, desperately reaching for him, but not being able to get to him in time.

  Von Wär pointed his revolver at Thaddeus to keep him from approaching, while trying to trot towards the bamboo staircase. The panic painted a strange grin on his face, made of denial, anger and hope, but as Thaddeus caught up with him, he became scared.

  “Stay where you are,” von Wär growled, his jaw trembling.

  At that moment, he stumbled and sank into a hollow where the Green River raged. He had water up to his shoulders and a nasty current was already swirling around him when Thaddeus offered him his hand. Von Wär hesitated, as he had to choose between dropping the gun or dropping the chest. As expected, he dropped the weapon and kept the gold.

  Thaddeus closed the one end of the handcuffs around his stepfather’s wrist. The other part was locked on his own wrist, joining them together.

  “Thaddeus, no!” Sixtine screamed at him, over the sound of the water, understanding exactly what he had done faster than von Wär, who showed only surprise.

  Then Thaddeus, with his eyes fixed on Sixtine, slid quietly into the depths of the Green River.

  Helmut von Wär, attached to the weight of Thaddeus’s body, would perish in a violent, watery tomb. His stepfather’s death was the last, the one who was accomplishing Thaddeus’s crusade in this world.

  He would become mortal again, and in turn he would die.

  Sixtine dove into the water after him, following him to the darkest part of the Green River, which she salted with her tears. They remained there for what felt like an eternity, floating in the water. Sixtine had touched the face of her love, placed her forehead against his. One last kiss captured one last air bubble.

  Then the water vibrated with the voice of the angel who had become mortal, before the brightness of his eyes faded.

  “When you find yourself, you will find me too. You have to believe. Goodbye, my love.”

  Epilogue

  Han pushed through the double doors of the great hall and they opened onto the slender silhouette of Sixtine, in front of the large bay window overlooking the snow-covered gardens. It seemed so small am
ong the imposing portraits that adorned the walls on four levels, up to the ceiling decorated with marquetry.

  “Miss? Are you ready?”

  Sixtine turned around. Her fingers brushed against the long table, she pushed one of the chairs distractedly and then looked at the portraits.

  Yes, she was ready.

  Han’s footsteps echoed on the marble slabs of the long Falmouth Manor corridor. The wall had been freshly painted in matte blue, but the painters had gone home without finishing. In front of the scaffolding, the blue, pure and deep, covered faded and dirty flowery arabesques. Frames with cracked gilding, encircling illustrious ancestors whose convoluted names had almost disappeared with time, were placed on the ground.

  They should be taken to the cellar before they get damaged, Han thought, crossing the eyes of a viscount who had been buried for a century. Yes, buried alive in the damp cellar where no one else was going, this is a destiny that suited these characters well.

  The butler, with a soothed smile on his face, passed through wide spiral staircases and continued on his way, rushing into a string of rooms whose parquet floor squeaked. Here and there, cardboard boxes, furniture still covered in plastic, a pile of architects’ plans on an armchair, tapestries which were being ripped off.

  The signs of renewal.

  In a few weeks, Falmouth Manor would be unrecognizable. And yet, its history was still there, very much alive, made of whispering carpets in the corners. It was for this reason that Sixtine had decided to purchase Falmouth Manor.

  She was the guardian of its secrets as well as its walls.

  The butler pushed through another double door and found himself in a circular vestibule smelling of acrylic. This part of the mansion was completed.

  Michael, Sixtine’s father, had settled there to write.

  It was not very warm, Han thought, but he had to admit that the result was striking: the rare furniture was white, as were the rare works of art. The white was not dazzling, but rather wintery, powdery, almost plastered. A Roman marble slept in a round niche. The evening light, between dog and wolf, flowed through a white dome.