by Olivia Myers
Thomas Bly. She remembered the first time she’d heard the name. Pierre had spoken it with a kind of reverence. How it had come to haunt her in the weeks to come!
“But I’ve never known any Thomas Bly,” she’d pleaded into the phone. “There has to be some mistake here.”
“If there has been any mistake, it has been in very poor taste,” Pierre had replied in his soft, formalized English. “But I am simply telling you what is already known. Believe me, I am as in the dark as you. Even in the town everyone is awfully confused.”
“But it’s absurd!” she said. “How could a man I’ve never met, in a place I’ve never visited, expect me to appraise the entire estate left by a woman I’ve never heard of before? It’s madness! And you said that Thomas is hardly ever at home—”
“Very seldom at home.”
“—very seldom at home, so how does he expect me to do the job properly if I don’t even know what sort of a job he wants done?”
“I’ve spoken to Monsieur Bly about this subject,” Pierre replied. “He stated quite simply that he wants everything gone and the castle sold. He made no mention of any special—how do you say—sentimentalities. I believe he wants everything gone, and he thinks you’re the best appraiser for the job.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Celia said. “Pierre, I don’t trust this man and I don’t trust this job. No rational person does something like this.”
“Monsieur Bly is strange,” Pierre conceded. “But it appears he trusts you. Perhaps this will be enough for you to do the job.”
***
Nebelstatt was built on a hillside and carved down the middle by a single, cobblestone road. It was hundreds of years old but none of the locals knew for certain how old. The town was so ancient as to have passed into reverence, where any mention of its age or its past history was irrelevant.
The road, bordered by guest houses and restaurants, ran up a small incline for about five hundred meters before it hit a greater rise in the hillside and dissipated into smaller, gravel pathways. These pathways led into the distant wilderness alongside the forest until eventually they reached the castle, roughly two miles’ walk away from the town.
Save for the castle, which, having been built next to a sizeable lake, was nearly always covered by the dense mist, Celia was able to make out most of the landscape as she trudged up the hillside to her hotel. Yet the snow was beginning to fall thicker and faster and the air to turn colder, and it wouldn’t be long before everything was obscured by the untimely blizzard.
She was thankful when she reached her hotel. Like most other buildings in the village, it was ancient and looked to be falling to pieces. The timber was cracked, slates were missing from the patio, and the chimney gurgled and puffed smoke asthmatically.
Inside was a little more promising. There was a merry fire burning in the corner of the room, alongside a shelf which was stacked with board games and books written in French, German, and some local dialect that Celia had never heard of. No one was waiting behind the reception desk but there was a cumbersome room key resting on a note scribbled in the strange language.
She put the note into her coat pocket and hiked across the hotel to her room: 118. The key was old and stubborn and seemed not to fit into the lock. With a lot of prying and grunting the door eventually swung open. The action released fumes of something burning.
Oh God, Celia thought, in her exhausted state of mind. The room is on fire.
The jolt of terror caused a bright surge of energy to resound in her body, which was swallowed up almost immediately by the exhaustion she felt after her two days on the train. I don’t even have the strength to run, she thought. I would let this fire eat me alive and not even have the power to defend myself.
“So you are going to stand there for the rest of the evening until the freeze sets in?” said a voice in French: delicate, soft and formalized.
Celia, having been so overwhelmed by her panicked exhaustion, had failed to notice the little figure in the corner of the room, jabbing at the fire with the poker.
“Pierre!” she cried, dropping her baggage and swallowing him in her hug. He embraced her warmly, somewhat embarrassed.
“Maybe you thought I was dying?” he said, prying her away with a wry little smile.
“Oh no, oh God, oh, Pierre,” Celia stumbled over her words. “No, Pierre. It’s just such a relief to see somebody I know. These people on the train and in the village. They are so distant and mean! It was hideous being around them. You wouldn’t believe how exhausted I am.”
She put her hands over her eyes, scrubbing away the happy tears.
“Ah, dear,” Pierre smiled at her, embracing her warmly. “I am afraid you will not think me good company after all.” He let her go and sternly turned her to face the side table, where he’d set a kettle and two cups.
“You see,” he said solemnly, “I’ve let the coffee burn.”
Celia opened her mouth and began to laugh. She laughed helplessly for five minutes. She felt the great weight of her journey and the strange objective that had driven her so far away cause a strange, somewhat mad sensation to come boiling up inside her. And at the end of her journey who was there to meet her in her hotel but Pierre? A strange, adorable Frenchman wearing striped yellow socks and a gold-trimmed waistcoat as if he were planning on going to the opera that night instead of staying in some rumble-down hotel to see her into town. It was such a bizarre scene there was nothing to do but laugh.
Celia had to rub tears from her eyes once she stopped laughing. Pierre was holding her and trying to calm her but she could tell that he was confused. Probably about as confused as she was.
“You are very tired,” he said.
“I’m a lot of things, Pierre. I think I am more confused than anything. It has been a strange few weeks.”
“We shall have a drink and speak about it, then.”
“But,” she frowned, “but you’ve burnt the coffee.”
He retreated to the other corner of the room where a backpack was leaning against the wall and returned to the desk with two bottles of wine.
“It is a backup plan,” he said. “I know I am a very bad cook.”
Celia laughed again, but it was a softer, quieter laugh. “What would I do without you, my dear?”
“You would freeze in a snowstorm,” he answered bluntly as he uncorked one of the bottles.
“Oh Pierre, that’s too much!” she said as he filled her glass nearly to the top.
“Why, you have nowhere to be.”
“Yes, but one little drink is going to knock me down like a bullet. And as for you? You’ve still got to make it home.”
“Yes,” he filled his own glass to match hers “But I am French. I have been drinking wine since before I could write my name. And I have only two doors down to go before I am back home.”
“You’ve taken a room at the hotel?”
“For as long as you will remain here. You need a friend, I think. So,” he raised his glass, “to your very good health, Celia.”
“And to you, dear Pierre,” she said. They drank.
***
It did not take long for Celia to begin feeling the effects of the wine. Her head was already swimming from the high altitude and she had little resistance for the alcohol after passing two days in her exhaustion. Pierre pulled the ottoman out from its place at the foot of the bed so Celia could lie on it, facing the fire with her head on Pierre’s lap. He stroked her hair gently.
“Pierre, what are you doing here?” she asked, slightly drunk.
“I am here making love with you, my dear.”
She giggled at his strange choice of words, but she asked him again.
“I work in the valley, my dear. I study strange, ethnic languages and then I write books about them and about their people. For everyone except those who do it, it is pointless, boring work.”
“You’re enjoying yourself?” she said sleepily.
“I am enjoying myself with you.”
“And about Bly,” she said. “How did you ever learn anything about him?”
The stroking stopped. Celia turned upwards from her position on his lap and saw that his face had become rigid and rather fierce-looking. “Pierre?”
“My dear,” he sighed and resumed stroking her head. “Let us leave work for the daytime. I would like to spend right now loving you.”
“But Pierre,” she said, sounding stubborn. “I need to know something about the man. I feel completely lost where I am now. He is a complete mystery. That is what has been killing me.”
“If you must know something,” said Pierre, “then know that he is a difficult man to talk about. He is an even more difficult man to talk to. He has had a difficult life, I think. His father, George, was a very stern man. A military man. I believe Bly resents this difficult relationship with his father and this resentment makes him cruel. There is cruelty in him. I hope you do not have to spend much time with him apart from your work. I would spare you from his cruelty if I could, my dear.”
Celia felt his tenderness like body heat. It filled her with satisfaction and desire. “Pierre, my sweet, it’s been too long without seeing you.” She leaned forward and kissed him delicately on the cheek. “Has it really been eight years?”
Pierre tilted her head so that his lips faced hers. He took off his glasses and set them on the carpet. “Eight long years,” he said, and kissed her firmly on the mouth. “And after all this time, would you believe that I have been thinking of you?”
But Celia did not answer. She cupped him by the side of his head and expanded the kiss, as though her mouth were a blossom opening just for him. She slipped her wet tongue into his mouth, delicately yet firmly, letting it fill him. “All this time,” she breathed in between the kisses. “Eight boring years.”
Celia was light-headed. She hardly felt the presence of her own body. Pierre leaned her down on the ottoman, planting little warm kisses on her neck and throat. She could have been floating. She could have been a cloud. Pierre’s kisses were the little bursts of sun that penetrated through her being, filling her with light and warmth.
As Pierre undressed her, she felt herself relax into a happy daze, like the place between sleeping and waking. She felt his soft hands on her skin and she felt the warmth of his kisses. All else melted away in his embrace. He was her lover of eight years ago, when their responsibilities were fewer, when life was simpler and wilder. As his kisses descended down her belly, as she ran her fingers through the beautiful, curly hair she remembered loving all those years ago, she felt that they two were descending the great ladder of years together. They were descending like the train, down, down into the valley, away from the cold and the storm, the snow and the confusion.
“I will pleasure you tonight,” whispered Pierre into the soft curve of her belly. His breath was warm and wet.
“Yes,” she moaned. She didn’t wait for him to wrestle her tight-fitting jeans down past her sides: she did it herself. Despite the cold, the fire and the wine had made her whole body warm. She ached with pleasure and anticipation.
His tongue began to caress the soft fabric of her panties, tenderly yet with reservation. He was nervous. He probably didn’t know how she wanted him to behave.
“Pierre,” she whispered. “Stop being so gentle.”
His tongue caressed harder, wetter. But it wasn’t enough for Celia. She dipped her hands down, removed the undergarment and threw it in the corner. She was exposed to him now. Her thighs were propped on the ottoman and spread to give him as much room as possible. Eagerly his tongue sought for her wet, loose folds, sucking them in like water. “Oh,” she gasped, “oh!”
He kissed the folds of her clit with a tenderness, as if he were afraid of hurting her. He was too gentle. His gentleness was maddening.
“Stay down there,” she ordered, and because of the tone in her voice he obeyed. She began stroking her breast with her right hand, and then let it trail down her belly, stroking, letting it rest finally on Pierre’s head. She slipped three fingers in his mouth. He dared not disobey her. She was in control.
When he’d finished sucking her fingers she let them dangle for a moment on the soft hairs just above her center before slipping them inside. She was surprised at the full sensation. It had been a long time since she’d pleasured herself.
She slid her tips of her fingers out again, and nudged Pierre back into position so he could pleasure her with his tongue. She moved her fingers over her wet folds and gasped with each one of the thousand tiny pleasures that it gave her; with the strange, foreign pleasure of the soft penetration, with Pierre’s massaging tongue caressing her, working deeper and deeper inside her.
It was a soft and wild pleasure. The gentleness of Pierre’s tongue soothed her and filled her with intense warmth. Yet there was something foreign about it that disturbed her, as if there was another presence in the room with them. As though the man she knew as Pierre and had known once as a lover had reentered her life as a stranger. As though the tongue that pleasured her wet folds was not his, but that of a stranger.
Something in the mountains was reawakening, she felt. Some obscurity was materializing slowly into view, even in this moment of warmth and intimacy, with a man she’d once loved. She did not know what to call the obscurity. There wasn’t yet a name for it. But it was there, known and invisible, like the castle that loomed on the hillside. A forlorn, nameless presence.
***
Pierre agreed to take her to the castle the next morning. They set out early, when the mist still hung thick over the mountainside. There was hardly a trace of the snow that had blown in the night before, but dry snow now flickered through the air as they trekked the distance up the roadside. After roughly an hour of hiking, the path banked sharply to the left and the path became thick with tussock and gorse.
Celia was having a tough time with the hike. Her thighs burned and despite the cold a thin layer of sweat beaded along her forehead.
“Bly probably doesn’t make this hike very often,” she remarked sarcastically to Pierre.
“I don’t think he’s been to the castle more than three times in all his life,” Pierre said. He was quiet, concentrated and serious. His seriousness bothered Celia. There was no trace of his endearment and charm that had characterized the night before. “He is away on business quite often.”
“You never did tell me what the man did,” Celia said.
“I would tell you if I knew.”
“Well, a man who’s willed a castle in the Alps by some distant relatives probably has some interesting connections.”
“Interesting and unknown,” Pierre said. “But the ancestors weren’t all that distant. It was his aunt who left him the property.”
“And is she as much of a mystery as he is?”
“I believed she lived a lonely and rather sad life,” Pierre replied. “But perhaps you can ask Monsieur Bly these details when you see him today.”
Pierre had mentioned to Celia before they set out that he had received confirmation from Bly stating he would be making a visit to the castle that same day. The sudden reminder brought her into a rude and uncomfortable awakening, and she closed her mouth, perturbed and anxious.
Hardly another hour had passed before they caught their first view of the castle. Whatever romantic images Celia had conjured in her mind—of twisting spires and Gothic roofs and fairytale towers—were quickly dashed. The place was a functioning ruin: a great black slab of coal-blackened stone set squat against a hillock like a fat man perched on a small bench. Even the lake itself seemed to carry an aura of disarray and ruin. Beneath the curtain of mist, she could see that its waters were fouled and muddy, its banks the sallow color of sun-scorched seaweed.
“What a mess!” she said.
“Wait until you are closer.”
True to Pierre’s threat, the castle was brought into even more hideous detail once they were standing alongside it. Here Celia saw the fairytale image that she had been ant
icipating, although this was not the fortress of a prince, but of a dragon. Gorse and bramble and prickly hawthorn curled alongside the jagged walls like razor wire. It snaked around the entire perimeter of the structure and seemed to be snaking still onwards, despite the frozen chill that caused everything to assume a clammy stillness. As they circled the castle they saw the remnants of a garden, its walls smashed and its trees choked by the invasion of gorse. Several fountains depicting various scenes of Grecian mythology were scattered in what once might have been a geometric design, but had since become an unrecognizable mess. All of the figures in the fountains were missing limbs, picked off long ago by vandals.
“There is an unlocked door at the back entrance,” Pierre said, leading her. “It will take you to the main hall. Compared to this, I am happy to say that the inside is a little nicer.”
Celia, who’d half-expected that the castle would be missing a roof, was indeed surprised to find the interior mostly well kept. All of the furniture—what bits and pieces remained—was already preserved in white sheets. The Gothic fireplace was blackened like tar and smelled foul, but it was clean. The chandelier, old and imposing, showed no sign of crashing down.
“Well it’s good to know that at least someone has been doing some work,” she said.
Pierre cracked a wry grin, the first he had made that morning. Celia was glad to see that he was at last showing a bit of humor.
“Do you have any first impressions to share so far?” he asked her after he’d taken a generous drink from his water bottle.
Celia paused, trying to sum up her thoughts. “The land is gorgeous,” she said at last. “And if Bly is willing to put any money forth we can probably get that lake cleaned up with a proper crew.”
“Monsieur Bly was quite adamant that he would put no further expenses into the estate.”
“Well then apart from that, I don’t see much hope,” Celia answered truthfully. “He’s got a beautiful antique on his hands but without any legwork it’s going to stay that way. I can understand if he doesn’t want to pay for the upkeep. In fact, I’ve never even heard of anyone who’s actually lived in a castle, never mind how they managed to do it. I suppose the place could be turned into a museum, but I haven’t the faintest idea who would travel two days by train to come up and see it.”