The Crypt Keepers

by Lauren Shain-Raque

  He seemed a bit less upset, but still far from pleased that they knew he lived at all. ‘Sabine, why must you write everything in that damned journal of yours? Why must you keep record of everything? Do you honestly think that it will change anything, that it will make your forever any less troublesome?’ He looked again as if he might strike at me but with a deftness that I was not aware I had I moved to his side and held his hand firmly in mine, ‘Dmitry,’ I whispered in his ear, ‘I do not care if anyone reads my scribbling or if in fact it does change my forever, you cannot imagine the boredom that comes with centuries of exclusion.’ I released his hand and he pulled me close to me, ‘I understand. Read the letter, it explains everything. I will come within the week to hear your reply, with luck it will help you decide the course that is right for us.’ He moved this time completely from the room and before I could go to him, he was gone. I suppose that he is hidden somewhere in the castle but I didn’t feel at all like finding him.

  I took the letter from the stand table beside my bed not long after he left me for good. I wanted to throw it into the fire; I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted to forget that inside that packet of paper was something that would change the course of the rest of my existence. No matter how badly I wanted to tear the letter to bits, I could not. I pulled the ends of the ribbon away from one another and twirled it between my fingers before unfolding the pages. My eyes came in and out of focus as I stared at the pages before me and wondered if in fact I still had a chance to forget what I see. ‘Sabine, I know that by now you have seen the tower and have no doubt discovered that your father and mother still reside in the castle. In the centuries that you and your siblings have watched over the village and the sickness that kills it. I do not know what your father has told you, so I will tell you everything.

  The night that you were born, so was I. Though you and your brothers and sister were born out of love, I was born out of the sadness and hatred that your father felt for having lost your mother. I was born in the hopes that my presence would bring your father back. I was created in the hopes that out of the sadness your father felt, my creator could benefit. It is common knowledge that in times of great duress a force comes from deep within the Earth to wrongly benefit from the sorrow of others. My creator saw in your father an opportunity to weave his dark magic and create a minion fit to carry out his wishes. I came to be in the caves that consequently now house the casualties of your father’s work. I knew not what my purpose was until I heard the screams of your father.

  I traveled quickly to the castle and saw that your father, rather than fawning over his new children, sobbed loudly at the bedside of his dying wife. The pain in his voice was such that I could feel it curling itself around me. I stood before him, dressed much as I am now, and watched as his will to live left him completely. He shook with sobs and wailed to the heavens that he would do anything to have her back, even if it meant the death of his children. For the first few moments that I watched and listened to him he did not notice my presence. When I touched his shoulder he whipped around to see who had been an audience to his grief. His eyes shot back and forth across the room and he thought for sure that I was the angel of death come to claim his beloved wife. He threatened to fight me off, swinging first his fists then a candelabra.

  When he moved back away from me I thought for sure that he might then try to harm himself. Rather than allow me to move closer to his wife he began to bargain with me. He wanted so badly to save her. I knew that my purpose was not to possess your mother but rather to attain the full cooperation of your father. He would have agreed to anything that I proposed. He would have done whatever I asked and had I been as evil as my maker intended I would have had him agree to much more than I was instructed. I was told to attain his agreement to be the bringer of death to the village below the castle. With each new village he was to exaggerate the flaw of the village so that it destroyed them. The spirits of these ill fallen villagers were then to be collected and sent to the underworld. I was to attain the agreement and after doing that I was to be released.

  Your father agreed immediately and offered an amendment to the agreement so that he could spend all his time with your mother. He offered then to allow the seizure of the souls of his children. By willingly giving up the souls of his children he ensured your eternal life. Being the type of demon that I am I was not allowed to take the souls myself. The soul of a child is of little worth in the underworld and as such you and your siblings were allowed to age. When the time came for the possession of your souls, your father was made to show his loyalty and fully exterminate the village before your eternal life was ensured. He succeeded and when the village was gone the idea that the village must be cleared was planted in your father’s head. By disappearing he ensured that he was able to spend all his time with your mother save for the week that he must be present in the village.

  Daphene found your mother and father far sooner than you. She found them when the blood still flowed freely in her veins. She found them and slowly it drove her insane. I came to her to explain, to try and make amends for what I had caused, but she would have none of it. I wanted so badly to tell you the first night that I met you that I was not what you thought, but I was afraid that you would reject the knowledge as she had. The thought of your death is far too painful to bear. I cannot think of a time in which I did not watch you, wish to be near you. Your father cannot be blamed for the decision that he made, I believe that had I told him to kill each of you he would have without thinking twice. I tell you this because you now have a choice.

  The village below the castle will continue for all time to grow and die with your brothers and your own tending and carting away of the bodies. Should you choose to end your life as Daphene did, the death in the village will end. Your mother is living off of the death in the village. You have the power to stop the cycle. Had you taken your own life before you knew of your mother and father, you would have been nothing more than a casualty for your brothers would have continued their work without knowing why you had taken your own life. If you choose to end your eternity I will go to your brothers and tell them about the tower, after which I am sure that they will choose to end the cycle. I cannot lose you and face an eternity of knowing that I could have stopped it. The choice that you must make is to allow your mother and father to live in the tower, to allow them to live off of the death of the village, or end it all together.

  Take heed when you make your choice. I shall give to you an eternity of love that you can only imagine. It is hard to believe that the demon that damned you can love you so dearly but I assure you that an eternity without you is not an option. To save the lives of the villagers to come you must end the lives of those that you hold most dear. Your sister Daphene cared more for the lives of the village and her own comfort than she did for your brothers and yourself. You are of stronger character and as such I know that you will make the decision that it best for you. In time I will come to you, I will ask for your decision and I hope that an eternity with me does not seem so wholly unbearable. Dmitry.’

  I wondered after having read that Dmitry was the reason that I cannot die and that my mother still lives in some catatonic state in the east tower. My love for him if that is what you can call it grew and waned as I weighed both of the options that he had laid out before me. The prospect of spending eternity with Dmitry was not so horrible that I cringed when I thought of it. I cannot imagine a life without Rhys or Regelus no matter how many lives it takes to keep them alive. When I think of a life without them I understand what my father did when he kept my mother alive at all costs. The light of the sunrise is coming through the window and I know that no matter how hard I try to fall back into the restless sleep that Dmitry woke me from, it is useless. I haven’t been to the study in the past few days and I don’t think now that Rhys and Regelus will let me come out of my room long enough to go back to the tower or to inspect their work. With luck they will be finished by the time that Dmitry comes ba
ck so that I will have had a few moments truly alone to decide what I intend to do with the rest of my existence.

  I cannot begin to think of what I will tell him when he comes back to me. My love for Dmitry is equal to that of my brothers. With luck the decision will be made for me, as all of them have been, I have little say in what happens to me or around me, what happens happens and often there is little that I am able to do to stop it. I move around the castle as I please but even that does little to allow me the freedom that I would need to possess to make the kind of decision that Dmitry requires of me. I want completely to be able to give my life to him but it gets harder with each breath that I take to forget Daphene and the people in the villages to come that will die to keep the abomination that is my mother and The rest of us alive.

  12: The Breaking

  Though I forced myself to sleep off the last hour or so of semi darkness that hung in the trees and surrounding mountains, my mind is still filled with the choice that I must make and the heartache that will come should I make it. No matter what I say to Dmitry or how happily I seem to cope with the information that I was given, I still feel as though my heart is being torn into pieces. I ventured back to the tower this morning, as I expected my father was not there and the sallow form of my mother was left alone to await his return. I stayed by her side for a while before deciding that my father was not coming back and that no matter how long I waited for him, he would have the same things to tell me that I heard in the days before. He is still seemingly blinded by the love that they shared so long ago that he cannot see she is not an actual woman at all let alone the woman that left him.

  Her corpse is nothing but a waxy stand-in meant to resemble the woman that died the night we were born. She looks much like a doll or some other type of statuary that does not move but has an eerie life like quality without really seeming alive. Her eyes remain open and her lips never part and no matter how hard I try to pull her up from beside her it will not budge. I wonder truly if I should try to kill her now, if my immortality and that of my brothers will continue if the reason for needing the sickness is gone. My father no doubt, should he live through her second death, will come and end any chance we may still have at holding onto our immortality but I believe that it may well be worth it. She seems like so little is left of her, like her life is nothing more than a suspension of time.

  Her figure is in the same pose as the days before when I first came to the tower. Her hands have not moved save for the slight twitching of her hands now and again. It seems almost as if she is suspended in some sort of void that does not allow her to age or to wake from the near death state that she is trapped in. I remember once when I was very young indeed, before immortality took hold and before I was truly the shell of myself that I am today, I dreamed of her just like this. I woke from the dream in a sweat that drenched my pillow and sheets and screamed so that the breath caught in my throat and no sound escaped. The visage of my long gone mother scared me so and I thought for sure that I was destined to join her. I was once again taken aback by her when I first saw her face the day that I made it into the tower. She is the same ice figure that she was in my dream that night so long ago.

  She does not move or breathe as we do, but simply lies in the bed staring straight on into oblivion. I thought once as I sat at her side waiting for my father to return that I may have seen her move, might have heard a shuffle of bedclothes as I scribbled mindlessly on several pages of parchment that I brought to the tower with me. I was sadly greeted though when I turned to her, expecting what I know not, and she was in the exact same position as the moment that I entered the tower. A draft through one of the many pigeon holes and cubbies in the infrastructure of the tower swept through the room once or twice, moving the curtains and shifting the silky black strands of hair that rested so neatly around her face. The rustling once or twice startled me but even that waned with time.

  Rhys and Regelus are still moving things back to order in the study and have assured me that by day break tomorrow I will be restored to my rightful place. I do believe that they have taken to the restoration and improvement of the study better than any that I have ever assigned to them. I am back in the bedroom now, with the images of my mother and Daphene still floating through my brain. Nothing that I can do will erase them from my mind and so I have decided that maybe they are there for a reason. I cannot begin to wonder where Dmitry is or my father either for that matter but I hope that I shall soon be able to tell them what I have decided. I cannot begin to let myself wonder if what I have decided is in fact right but as I sat with my mother this very morning I knew that I could not go on living to keep her from death. She is nothing. Her life ended centuries ago when the last breath of life escaped her lips before Dmitry came to the castle and stopped time from moving.

  I saw as I looked at her the last light of life that waits just beyond her eyes. She is not dead of that I am certain, she is simply paused. I know by looking at her that true eternal life is not possible, that we must sacrifice something grand to find true immortality. I await now only Dmitry. I shall with the morning wait in the study for him, wait for him to hear what I have to say. He will be angry at first but I know that with time he will heal, I will have moved on by then and so will my brothers and my mother. I know not of my father, I do not know if the pain that he feels will be great enough to deny him any peace. The sun is setting now and the day in my existence that should have in every way have been the hardest, turned out to be the simplest.

  The light is slipping below the line of the trees and my eyes are slowly adjusting to the lack of light. I remember once when I was young staring directly into the sun. The moment at which the pain became too much to keep my eyes open was the moment that I knew I now longer wanted to be human. I knew then that I was not as strong as I had thought myself to be and that though I did everything in my power to ensure that nothing could hurt me, I was nothing more than human. I fell into a state then that rivaled that of the depression that Daphene fell into before she took her own life. For the longest time this feeling pervaded every aspect of my life and made all else impossible. Then as a godsend came the sickness that gave me purpose again.

  I was no longer frail, no longer the shell of a being that I was when I was human. Now as I sit here and think of the day that I realized that I was human, I cannot imagine what it would be like to once again be so frail, so helpless. I wonder if I will feel as helpless then in the last moments before I am no more as I did that day. The room around me is dark enough that if I was human again I wouldn’t be able to see my hand in front of my face, as it is I can see the paper in my lap as clearly as if it were the light of day. I contemplated sleep earlier, but I know that it is useless. I think now that much of the noise that attributed to Rhys and Regelus in the past few months was indeed my father moving about after the sickness cleared and he was once again free to spend his days fawning over my mother.

  He came again in the night, much as he had in the night before. ‘I thought you said that I had a week to choose, that you would keep your distance from me until then so that I could make my choice.’ His hands twitched as they did when I thought that he had once been human. ‘I know I told you a week. I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps you might need help making your decision, if you might jump to make a choice that you cannot take back. You see my love there is only a small window in which the choice can be reversed, and I wanted to make sure that you understood that fully.’ ‘Dmitry, there are things that I will never understand no matter what you say or do. No amount of information or explication could ever make clear the thing that you are asking me to do.’ He looked as if he might cry, as if his eyes would fall from his head as he watched me, ‘but Sabine, you promised that you would think…’ ‘I really do wish that you would learn to hold your tongue. Dmitry, I have spent the past five hundred years thinking of what I would do should I be given the opportunity to end the cycle that has bound me. And each time my answer is the same.’


  He pulled me close and kissed me deep as if he already knew what I planned to say. ‘No matter how much you profess to love me, I cannot continue on in this fashion. Have you seen my mother Dmitry?’ He pulled away from me, tears in his eyes and his cheeks flushed with both anger and embarrassment. ‘What do I care of your mother? What could I possibly care about a corpse that is so barely animated?’ ‘I did not ask you to care for my mother, I asked simply if you had seen her. Did you see what you created?’ He walked across the room moodily and sat heavily on the edge of Daphene’s bed, I must have cringed without knowing it. ‘ Was this her bed my dear? Was this perchance the very room in which her sad life ended?’ I held my place and my tongue. ‘Is this where your dear sister forfeited the greatest gift she had ever been given?’

  ‘Dmitry, what makes you think that belittling me will change my mind? I would be crazy to want to spend eternity with a creature such as yourself that treats me as if I am inferior.’ I walked to him and kneeled at his side. He scarcely looked up at me as I slid my hand into his. ‘I cannot live forever Dmitry, you know that I cannot. The pain that you feel is tenfold in me.’ He yanked his hand away from mine and stomped angrily from the room. I half expected to die then, to have the gift of immortality snatched cruelly from me as he left the castle, but I did not. Here in my study I can imagine the sounds of my fathers shuffling and of Rhys and Regelus’ breathing. They are in the east wing currently, to seek the refuge that I made for myself I suppose, and I am here in the study whiling away the time until I am visited once again by Dmitry.

  I know that he will come for his business with me is unfinished. I found another note upon reentering the study that affirmed that very thought. ‘Sabine, I know that you think you I cannot imagine the pain that you feel. I have been to hell and it would be a welcome relief to the pain that I feel when I look at you. It is you my dear that cannot imagine true pain. When Rhys and Regelus come back from the tower you will find that the tower is now vacant. Your father and mother are long gone. I had little to do with your father’s disappearance I suppose that he followed your mother’s corpse as I moved it to it’s rightful place in the mausoleum.’ It ended there and the blood in my veins ran cold. I leapt up and ran to the mausoleum at once. I found there my father, dead of his own accord I suppose. The bloody fingernails of both hands were wedged in between the edges of the marble slab that held my mother’s body in it’s tomb. He was dead long before I arrived and as such there was nothing that I could do to help him.