Evil Jester Digest, Volume 2

by Holly Newstein

  “Yes,” I replied. “But the kiss must be from the heart, it must be a kiss of true love.”

  “Of love,” she repeated. “I will think on that.”

  I bid her goodnight and went to look in on Ruskin.

  He was in his room, pacing in shuffle from wall to wall. He never slept. Apparently rest was of no use to the rotting undead. His body or mind did not need to refresh itself or conserve energy. He always moved, slow and methodically, like the gears of a clock that turn and turn and turn.

  I watched him from my veil of imperceptibility. Ruskin stopped and sniffed the air once or twice, then continued his mindless pacing. The horror of his visage seemed, if possible, to have grown worse over the years. His features had sunk back into the hollows of his skull. Though we bathed him incessantly, maggots and dark beetles resided in burrows under his flesh where we could not reach. They darted in and out of his orifices and from the open wounds that festered on his body. Black fluids seeped from his ravaged muscles, as sweat might appear on a normal man, though I knew not what that fluid could be.

  He paused at his open window and looked down upon the rose gardens that blossomed in the yard. Perhaps he contemplated their significance, reminding him of his arrogance and of his affliction. Perhaps, also, he remembered one rose in particular that held the remedy to his torment. He turned with a wet gurgle, as if crying, and began to pace again.

  I knew not how circumstances might settle if left to their own accord and decided to nudge fate in the direction that seemed to favor all involved. I crept to the palace vault and carefully brought out the magical rose. I carried it to my quarters and waited until morning, when the Princess would awake, when a new dawn would rise for us who were cursed.

  The morning bell rang for breakfast.

  I was up in a flash and carried the rose to the dining hall where Ruskin and Belle would meet again for their morning meal.

  Ruskin appeared first and staggered through the entrance as customary, shaking and moaning, trailing drops of slime like the residue of a slug. I held the rose to him which, in his eyes, must have appeared as if it floated. He gasped at its sight.

  Belle emerged next, sauntering into the hall with dainty steps. She looked splendid in an azure silk robe, and her hair was artfully arranged in wide curls that bounced with every movement. The Princess bore a shine to her face, a glow like a sunrise that crests the horizon, and she looked every part of the title she held. I heard a quiet exclamation and elsewhere the sound of a chime, and I knew there were many other servants present.

  I placed the rose into Ruskin’s hand, and Belle knew from what I told her that the moment of her volition had arrived. She walked across the room to meet him, standing so that their faces were near to each other. He breathed unto her, a smell of wretched decay and wet death, but she did not flinch. We watched the encounter silently and unseen, as if the couple were the only two beings in all the palace.

  Ruskin moaned and brought one gray arm to her side. His other arm trembled, and with great effort, he presented Belle the magical red rose. She sighed, for she knew he offered his heart and, with it, his world of privilege.

  I knew then that Belle truly had grown to love Ruskin. She loved him not for his appearance or his charm or his kindness, but for his wealth and his land and his title. She so greatly loved those things that were of the Prince, she was able to overlook the abomination of his living death. It is the same as any other quality to love someone by. Appearance, generosity, or wit may all fade away just as easily as wealth, and according to the circumstances of life we can never entirely control. Such is the truest love of all: To cherish what you value in a person that you are able to accept their flaws.

  The moment was enchanting. Even now, I do not doubt the wonder and sincerity I felt that two like-souls could find each other in such circumstances.

  She took the red rose from Ruskin, and a thorn on its stem pricked the tip of her thumb. Belle grimaced for an instant, then forgot it, and leaned in to kiss the Prince. Her lips parted in sweet expectation. But on her thumb a drop of blood welled up, red as the pedals of the flower.

  Ruskin’s nostrils flared, and he looked at that single drop of red, shining so bright against her porcelain skin. I saw him shudder and watched the change in his expression to one who salivates at the aroma of fine stew. His chest heaved, and Belle thought that to mean he was overcome by passion.

  It is true he was overcome by passion, but it was no longer for her love. O! The cruel irony of fate! Had she pricked her finger only afterwards, they would have kissed, and the curse lifted. Instead, she wrapped herself around him, and their mouths grew close.

  Ruskin bit off her lip, and she screamed.

  That sound of Belle will remain with me all my days. It was a cry so terrible, I can only liken it to the heavens being rent from the horizon and raked across with iron spikes. Her shrieks were unearthly and equaled in terror and pain and betrayal.

  She tried to push away from him, but it was too late. Their arms were entwined and, as she turned her head to beg for help, he chewed into her cheek.

  We shouted in horror, the other servants surely feeling the same sense of rage and defeat as I. We were close—so close—to having the sorceress' curse removed from us all. Perhaps we then acted in loathing of the Prince for causing our invisibility. Perhaps it was years of our pent-up anger and suffering. Perhaps it was a sense of conscience to rescue Belle from his attack. As the rules of vassalage are written, a servant may never harm his master unless that person is jeopardizing the life of another. Whatever the motivation, we acted in unison.

  Chimes tinkled, and a fireplace poker rose from the mantel and swung down to smash Ruskin across the back of his head. He grunted and released Belle. A loose brick ascended from the hearth and hurtled into his face. More chimes sounded, as if a choir, and glass jars, chair legs, or anything else that could be used as a weapon were taken by invisible hands and brought to crash down on the Prince. He wailed and flung his arms to fend the blows, understanding our betrayal but unable to see his assailants.

  Ruskin caught someone who rushed too close. I did not know who, but saw him bite down and heard a cry of pain. An iron mace was brought forward, and it bashed Ruskin’s skull repeatedly until his head looked like a wet sponge, twisted and wrung. The Prince collapsed, and someone drove a steel bar through his temple, so that it pierced the other side and impaled into the floor he sprawled upon.

  His appearance was no longer deceptive. Prince Ruskin d’Auvergnon was now truly dead.

  And then a wonderful thing happened. Our affliction by the curse lifted; we appeared visible again. A great cheer went up, and I fell to my knees in gratitude. I thanked the sorceress—blessed her—for the release of our penance. The servants laughed and ran to embrace each other, remarking how they had not aged one day throughout the many years we lived under the spell. As it was, it seemed our tragedy would bear a happy ending.

  Of course, happy endings are only for fairy tales.

  I saw that one of us did not cheer for our liberation. It was Pieter, who suffered from a gaping hole across his neck. It was he whom Ruskin bit, and my excitement turned to despair. Pieter lay next to Belle, and he cried as blood poured between his fingers.

  I ran to him and so did several others. There was nothing we could do. His jugular vein was torn, and Pieter—my love—died in my arms. My heart felt crushed, as if mountains of jagged rock collapsed over my spirit.

  Belle mumbled some incoherent words and then she also died.

  We decided to bury all three of them right away. We would dig two graves: one for Pieter at the edge of the forest, and one for Ruskin and Belle to share beneath the garden of roses. I hoped the dead would find satisfaction in their final arrangements.

  Several men dug and the laundrywomen sang hymns while the bodies were brought out and laid on fine cloth. I spoke kind words over them all, and two men bent to lift Belle into the grave.

  Her eyes opened. Sh
e made a choking sound, as if trying to speak through a mouth filled with molasses. The shock went through us all. Belle’s wounds seemed ghastly, but she was alive. I should have known. As the Princess’ will for nobility was indomitable, so was her will for survival.

  Josef knelt to her and spoke in reverence. “The Gods have given you new life.”

  She looked at him from eyes that were pale and speckled with red like the spotted mushrooms that sprout under dead logs. Then she bit deep into his forearm.

  Josef cursed and stumbled backwards. Belle hissed at him, then grabbed for one of the maids. I screamed, and my screams echoed from behind by others. Turning, I saw Pieter rise from the earth and tear into a stableman. Men rushed to Pieter and Belle and kicked at them with heavy boots. The women fled, and I joined them. We had no weapons outside, where we mourned and buried those we thought dead. I looked back to see Pieter catch one of the men and tear into the flesh above his knee.

  We were frantic. Had we known better, we would have fought them then. We would have gathered arms and hunted down each man and woman who was bit. We would have cut off their heads and burned their bodies to ash, and killed any animal or bird that appeared to eat of their remains. But we did not realize then the effect of the sorceress’ curse could evolve into such apocalypse. I wonder if she even realized it herself. The consequences of her spell were transmutable through bites, through saliva or blood, to infect others with the living death that plagued Prince Ruskin.

  I and the other remaining servants locked the front gate and barricaded ourselves in the castle. From the ramparts, I looked out into the yard that stretched between the rose gardens and the wild forest. I saw Josef and the others who were bit transform into creatures of rot. They shambled around the walls of the castle and, finding no way in, dispersed into the shadows of the woods, driven by hunger for flesh.

  Three days later, other undead men appeared at the castle gate. They were hunters, I suspected, and probably the first men that Belle and the rotting servants would have come across in the woods. After them, appeared more cursed men and women, dressed in the faded cloth of villagers from far away. They circled the castle and roamed senselessly through the gardens, then returned to the mysteries of the forest.

  We, the surviving servants, are once again trapped in the castle. We dare not leave for fear of the things that now live in the woods. Our stores run slim, and we ration carefully. How many more weeks or months we may survive here is a mystery, as is wondering how many of the undead now wander the land.

  O! Do I pray for the sorceress to return. I call for her nightly when the rain falls, and I promise her such sweet shelter to pass the hours of the moon. I cry out to the world that the Prince is dead and plead for us all to be absolved of her spell. I weep and shout and, when my voice finally grows hoarse, I collapse and whisper for the sorceress to pity me, to at least make me invisible again…to at least return me to a guise where I am unseen, so I can walk away from this palace of gold and never look back.

  But the sorceress does not return. The undead creatures—the beasts—multiply in number. The curse of Prince Ruskin d’Auvergnon is not yet concluded.

  When I was a teenager back in the eighties, I made a lot of mix tapes. Some of you may not be old enough to remember cassettes, but I’m sure you’ve made mixes on CDs or your iPod. The process is different now, more point and click, far less hands on, but the motivations, I assume, haven’t changed all that much. For me, it was a way to channel angst, of which I was never in short supply.

  Yeah, I was just another teenaged cliché, trying like hell not to be. But aren’t most of us clichés at that age?

  For whatever reason, I always put the song that dripped with the most teen torment—“Add it Up” by the Violent Femmes is a perfect example—in position three. Others have told me they did the same thing or something similar. I guess that #3 is just a common boiling point.

  These days, the closest thing I do to making mix tapes is editing anthologies. Sure, I burn the occasional mix CD for the car, but that’s too easy to take any pride in. Completely function over form.

  More to the point, when I read “Depravation” by Mark Allan Gunnells, I knew I would put it in this mix. More than that, however, I knew I’d found my “Add it Up.”

  For many of us, our teenage years are a time of losing ourselves, looking for identity in the perceptions of others, trying to belong. Mark’s Julie is not much different than most of us. At least not at first.

  So without further ado, as the slow bubbles of a boil begin to fill our dark cauldron, coming in at number three with a bullet…

  Depravation

  Mark Allan Gunnells

  HOUR ONE

  Julie sat on her bed, arms folded across her chest and her mouth turned down in an angry pout. She simply couldn’t believe her mother would do this to her. And over nothing. Nothing major, anyway.

  Okay, so maybe Julie had forgotten to pick up her kid brother from Little League practice, but she’d been chatting online with her bff Suzie about what they were going to wear to the dance tomorrow night, and Julie had simply lost track of time. Besides, her brother Kip’s coach had given him a lift home, so no harm no foul. Her mother was just overreacting; that was all there was to it.

  A lecture, fine. That was to be expected and was nothing unusual. Another of those “when are you going to learn some responsibility?” speeches Julie could have dealt with. But in the middle of the scolding, Julie had received a text from her other bff Denise, which had caused her to tell her mother to hold on a minute while she responded. That had sent her mother into a fury that resulted in Julie’s current circumstances.

  Grounded for the entire weekend.

  That was bad enough, seeing as it would mean she’d miss the dance on Saturday and Gretchen Speck’s pool party Sunday afternoon, but her mother hadn’t stopped there. Oh no, it wasn’t enough that Julie couldn’t go out; her mother cut her off completely from the world outside.

  No cell phone, no computer, no iPod, no DVDs, no cable. Her mother had removed all the offending items and locked them away in the hall closet, saying that Julie would get them back Monday.

  “It’ll do you good to unplug for a bit,” her mother had said. “Kids today are too dependent on technology anyway.”

  “A whole weekend, mother! I’ll go stir crazy. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Try reading a book; you might like it.”

  With a bitter snort, Julie now glanced over at the three-shelf bookcase across the room. The top shelf contained framed photographs, the second her unicorn figurine collection, the third shelf being the only one with any actual books on it. Most of them were books she’d had to read for school, or books she was supposed to have read for school. A shelf full of boredom—that was what she saw when she looked at the un-cracked spines.

  Julie stood up and started pacing around the room, looking at her posters of Taylor Lautner, Justin Bieber, the Situation from The Jersey Shore, and Johnny Depp (who knew an old man could be so hot). She stopped at her window and stared out at the world from which her mother had barred her. She felt like screaming but knew it would do no good. She could tell when her mother was resolved, and on this matter Julie had no doubt her mother would not budge.

  Feeling near tears, she turned on her television. With the cable disconnected, she could not pick up any stations, just gray fuzzy static, but she found the noise soothing in a strange way. Listening to the sound of nothing, she returned to her bed, pulled her knees up to her chest, and rocked.

  HOUR TWO

  Julie was pacing again. She just couldn’t seem to sit still for more than a minute, so full of hyper energy that she had no way to work off. She thought she could actually see a track worn into the carpet from where she’d been walking from her bed to her window and back again. Her room, which she typically thought of as her refuge from parental dictatorship, had become her prison. She felt as if the walls were closing in on her, the ceiling grinding d
own to crush her into a sticky paste.

  The claustrophobia winding steel beams around her chest and making it hard to breathe, Julie opened her window, a soft breeze sighing in to cool the sweat on her brow. She inhaled deeply, hoping the taste of the outside would help calm her. Instead, the sounds of life going on beyond these walls—the laughter of children down the block, a television blaring from next door, cars grumbling their way down Main Street, someone whistling a Rhiana song—made her feel even more isolated and trapped. She slammed the window shut and buried her face in her hands.

  She perked up when she heard the house phone ringing downstairs. Creeping across the room, she opened the door a crack to listen. Her mother’s voice drifted up from the first floor, soft but audible. “Sorry, Julie can’t come to the phone right now. No, she won’t be going to the dance; she’s grounded for the weekend. You can talk to her at school on Monday, Suzie.”

  Julie eased the door closed and beat her head against it twice. She bet Suzie had finally picked out a dress for the dance, a dress Julie would never get to see, a dance she wouldn’t get to attend. It was so unfair what her mother was doing to her. Didn’t the whole “cruel and unusual punishment” thing apply to children as well as criminals? If it didn’t, it should.

  Her mother came up shortly after and asked if she wanted to come down for dinner. Julie refused, eating alone in her room. If her mother and brother were the only company she could keep for the next couple of days, she’d rather be by herself.

  HOUR THREE

  Julie was on her hands and knees, rummaging through the clothes and shoes that littered the bottom of her closet. Somewhere in this mess, she thought, was buried an old portable CD player she’d once used before she’d gotten her iPod. She’d already found a few CDs, outdated true (who listened to the Backstreet Boys or Jewel anymore), but it would at least give her something to do. If she could find the player, of course.