by Anya Allyn
His fleshy mouth tightened. “Etiennette is the mother of my ancestors. She belongs here.” He paused briefly. “Now it is time to go. Monseigneur Batiste is waiting.”
I turned to Mr. Baldcott. “Molly has just become your daughter-in-law. Surely that means something and you will ensure no harm comes to her. She’s not going to take my imprisonment down here easily and she might try something dangerous.”
Mr. Baldcott’s roundish, button-like eyes studied me for a moment. “She won’t have long to ponder on your imprisonment, as you term it. You will recall the pre-marital tests you both undertook to report on your respective states of health?” He raised his eyebrows. “The tests for Molly were returned positive for acute leukemia. It is incurable. She’ll be dead within months.”
My heart fell through my chest. I backed away from him. “No.... that’s not true.”
He sighed loudly. “We researched her past and discovered that the leukemia was found and treated during the weeks she first came out of her coma. The cancer went into remission. Until now. Of course, it is a crying shame that the marriage between her and my son had to take place, but I do not question the will of the castle. The only condolence my wife and I have is that she won’t live long enough to pass on her defective genes to any offspring.”
The last hope in my mind flickered and went out. Molly would not live on. She would not find a way out of here. I had sensed Molly was holding something back from me—always brushing aside my concern over her being ill. But I hadn’t suspected... had never thought... that she was dying.
Taking my arm, Mr. Batiste led me toward the walkway they had called the ocean passage. “I took you down the chapel aisle for my son. Now I send you to the monseigneur.” He handed me his lamp.
The people left—my nerves jumping as the door thudded shut behind them.
I stepped onto the ocean passage. It was a long balcony that clung to the side of the cliff, open to the weather and sea air. Far above, the castle walls reached all the way to the overhanging tower. Below, the uncaring ocean crashed. My hands clutched the stone railing of the walkway and I was unable to make myself move in any direction.
For minutes, I stood, completely alone. Everyone I had ever loved was gone. Black winds whipped around me, but I barely felt them.
A voice crawled through the night.
Cassandra....
Balthazar called to me through the stone walls and corridors, his voice slow and hissing.
Come....
My body trembled uncontrollably, revulsion bleeding into my skin.
Numbly, I moved toward where his chambers lay.
At the other end of the walkway, the passage plunged down. My breaths grew ragged and brittle. Massive arched doors stood at the end of the passage, tree roots growing over them—doors that no one had passed through for centuries. With a series of groaning cracks, the roots broke away. The doors fell inward like a mouth—cold, stale breath rushing out.
Each step brought me closer.
Each step took me further away.
My lamp snuffed out, pitching me into complete darkness. One by one, dim lamps flickered alight around the cavernous space inside Balthazar’s chambers—the horror revealing itself piece by piece.
Two empty cradles standing side-by-side.
A set of tin soldiers on a shelf.
A decayed doll on top of a set of heavy drawers.
Strange, fantastical devices.
Torture machines—the same as in the dungeons—and worse....
An indistinct blackened figure sitting with his back to me at a wide desk, writing with a quill.
Bile rose in my throat.
Come....
Another lamp lit up.
I saw a four-poster bed with ragged curtains. A marriage bed.
My intestines turned to ice water.
Come....
My body crossed the threshold. But my mind was away, screaming in silence over the vast reaches of ocean.
The air thickened with earth and decay.
In a dark recess, too far to see clearly, some kind of cabinet spanned the length and breadth of an entire wall.
I moved as far away from him as I could, toward the cabinet. The cabinet was made up of sixty or more compartments, twenty compartments wide and three rows high—each row taller than me. Each door was framed with wood and held tight with a lock, the glass darkened with age. On a wall that stood in front of the cabinets, beside the baby cribs, a large wooden board held dozens and dozens of single keys—every key distinctly different. The keys had to be for the cabinet.
Two more lamps lit up, one on either side of the cabinet.
Girls stood trapped within the cabinet doors. Girls in dresses of centuries past.
A keening sound emitted from my throat, my breathing scattered and frantic.
My face stayed frozen in place as my gaze dropped to my left shoulder.
Breath, hot and raspy, brushed my shoulder’s skin.
“Doth thee like them?” His voice was dry and hollow like bones. He appeared beside me.
A single thought tore through my senses.
Run....
But there was nowhere to run.
No escape.
Trembling, I backed away.
“Such beauty. Young for all time. Look, look how fine and lovely they art.”
His leathery hand reached under my chin, guided my face around.
I stared at the girls—girls with pale skin and olive skin and skin of deep brown, and stiff hair of black and yellow and red.
Breath eased from my lungs. They were not real. Their faces were crafted and painted to look alive, but they were not alive. I could see wooden joins in their arms—strings hanging from their limbs.
Marionettes.
A giant curio-cabinet of marionettes.
“They art carved from the tree of the walnut,” he whispered. “Such smooth, fine wood. They look so lifelike, no? Just as they did when they be flesh and blood.”
My gaze swept across them. So many girls, filling over half of the cabinet’s compartments. Such a strange collection.
An arm was missing from one of the marionettes. A bone hung loose from her shoulder—a human arm bone.
My mind eroded, my mouth open and quavering.
“Yes, yes,” he breathed, “this one needs repairing. The wood is but a shell encasing my sweet brides and it is delicate. It breaks, just like them. Jacques wilt come and carve a new limb for her. And she wilt again be whole.” His skeletal finger ran down my arm. “Look at your husband.”
A thought tore through my mind—a thought of the old man in the dungeon room—I’d seen him repairing a life-size marionette on the first night of the désorienter. He must have been fixing one of these dolls, dolls which were all human skeletons beneath their thin veneers of wood.
Shaking, I obeyed Balthazar and turned to him.
He stood in his wedding suit—a charred phantom. “It is right thee shalt fear me. I am a harsh husband and thou must never displease me.”
He reached his clawed hand toward a compartment that held a girl with dark eyes and hair. “My Etiennette. Is she not beautiful?”
She was the girl from the chapel, the fifth bride. Turning my head away, my breath caught painfully inside my chest.
“She had skin like a pearl and eyes of coal.” His fingers raked my shoulder. “Thou dost remind me of her. There is something of her in you. But thou skin is like morning sun on the moors. Vous êtes belle.” A long sigh rattled through him. “Ah, so beautiful but so fragile. Etiennette, she broke herself upon the rocks below the cliff. Should thou do the same, I wilt have thee brought back to me and I wilt keep thee here for all time.” He raised his hand high. “I bind thy spirit to me. Thou wilt ever be mine.”
Bile burned my throat.
I imagined throwing myself from the ocean passage. The blessed relief of cool black air. And death.
But once the castle had the second book in their possession, they co
uld have me brought back here from a hundred different earths, each girl undergoing the same terror I felt now.
No, it had to start and end with me.
He let his hand drop from my shoulder. “I am weary, my Cassandra—I cannot be the husband now that thee hath need of. I must rest and await my new body. Then we wilt share my bed and our loins, and you shalt bring forth a child. And I shalt again seed the world with my progeny.”
His finger trailed down my cheek. The black slit that served as a mouth grinned. “At the death of the months of the été, I wilt come to thee and thou shalt receive me.”
I stared at the grimy stone floor, unable to speak or move. The death of the months of the été meant the end of the summer months. In three months’ time, I would be forced to be with him in his bed. I prayed that fall would never come.
“And now, wilt thou waltz with thy new husband, my Cassandra?”
It was said not as a request but as a command. His claw-like hands grasped my shoulder and fingers. He led me into a stiff dance, his breath hot and dead on my neck, the only sound the swish of my wedding dress—its brittle train of lace dragging along the floor.
Minutes passed, the stygian darkness of Balthazar’s chambers eating into my soul. My mind moved out of my body and drifted above. I could see a frozen bride in an aged bridal gown and a mottled, misshapen groom moving together in an endless waltz.
“Je dis bonsoir, ma belle.” His words scuttled across me like insects.
“Each midnight,” he told me, “thou may go unto the ocean passage, to take sea air into thy human lungs. Alas, the air in my chambers hath proved poisonous to some of my brides. But before dawn thou must return. If thou dost not return, I shalt be woken. And my fury shalt rage like ocean storms.”
Taking my hand, he led me to the bed and pulled back the curtain. “Thou wilt take rest here, beside me, until I pass into slumber.”
He laid himself down, crossing his arms over his torso—in exactly the same way that Jessamine used to do, in the same way she had insisted we all should sleep.
Panic rattled through me as I moved onto the bed and placed my arms across my chest.
Desperation pricked my skin. How would I even know when it was dark or light outside? I gazed to the side. All types of rusted, fantastical devices stood about the spaces of the cavern. But no clock.
Would Balthazar wake if I left the marriage bed? He had said I could leave here at midnight each night, and the time had to be close to midnight now. But I needed to wait and ensure he was deep in sleep before I left.
I looked to the right and left of me. There was nowhere to sit and rest, nowhere to sleep—except to sit on the chair where he had just been—or lie on the bed next to him. I could not bear to sleep beside him each day. I would sleep in the chair, on the other side of the chambers.
Lying along the furthest edge of the bed, I stared into the dim light.
This is my life now. Every second of my seventeen years ticking down to this. And this was my future. My mind moved out of my body—and drifted above. I could see a frozen, aged bride in a bridal gown and a mottled, misshapen groom lying on the bed together.
I forced my eyes to close.
3. Seventeenth Summer
CASSIE
I woke with a gasp, back into the nightmare, sensing the figure of Balthazar so close beside me.
Fingers brushed my arm. My body sprung into a sitting position, my heart thudding.
A small beetle-like man stood at my bedside, his deeply hooded eyelids almost hiding his needling eyes. “Your skin is cool like the walnut trees in the orchards.”
I recognized him—he was the old man who was making the marionettes in the dungeon room. He was the man who had made the wooden casings for all the skeletons in the cabinet.
“I doth have a beauteous walnut tree for thee. I hath nurtured it, kept it free from borers and insects. It is ready to be cut.”
I inched back toward the head board, glancing sideways toward the deformed figure of Balthazar lying beside me.
“Do not concern thyself with the monseigneur,” he told me. “He will not stir. Lest thou give him reason to. Now you wilt come with me.”
“I cannot,” I whispered.
“I am afraid I must insist. The monseigneur gave me his instructions after the marriage. My name is Voulo the artisan. Thee were to spend thy wedding night in the monseigneur’s bed. In the morn, he instructed that I paint thee, just like the others.”
“It cannot be morning yet.”
“It is close enough. It is the fourth hour. I hast been watching thee and waiting for thee to wake. Now, thee must come.”
Quavering, I shook my head.
“I am to paint thee on canvas, and thee wilt model for me. If thou doth refuse, I shalt be forced to wake thy husband.” He bade me follow him.
I stepped behind him across the chambers and through a hallway so narrow the sides scraped my arms. The hallway opened into a dimly-lit room—the walls crowded with paintings—all young girls, stiffly-posed in their bridal gowns, their eyes telling a story of frozen horror. My mouth fell open.
In spite of myself, words formed in my throat. “What happened to all of them...?” I whispered.
He drew his eyebrows apart in a nonchalant expression. “The buds on the rose bush doth burst into bloom, yet doth they wither.”
“But they... they were all just my age when they....”
“Oui. They hath scarcely come to bloom when taken by the affliction.”
“Affliction?”
“A curse—a witches’ curse. The rose bush doth bear an affliction, covered as it be in black spots that cause it to wither and die. And so doth the brides wither on the rose bush. The master doth hath need of progeny, to disperse and carry on the wind, to all corners of the earths. Glorious kingdoms of the Batiste name wilt then reign over all else. Yet, his blooms doth not produce. There is devilment afoot.”
Stepping over to the end wall, Voulo pulled back a black curtain that hung over a painting.
I gasped. The girl in the picture had black growths crawling over her face and neck—the growths eating into her skin. Her fair hair hung limply over glazed blue eyes. The artist had drawn in sly-faced demons behind her.
I jerked my head away as he let the curtain drop. My breath remained trapped in my chest. That was what the girls had been afflicted with? The curse was real?
My thoughts scattered away, incoherent.
Voulo threw back an oily, paint-splattered burlap from an easel. He ran his fingers over a set of paints, then picked up one of the canvases from against the wall and fitted it to the easel. “Pray thee to stand beneath the lamp.”
“I don’t want to be painted.”
“I hath painted each of the master’s brides. As I wilt paint thee. Thou wilt stand where thou be directed to stand. And thou must remain still—control thy breath.”
Air strained in my lungs as I obeyed him.
He selected a paintbrush, his eyes of black stone regarding me coolly. There was no light in his eyes, no trace of human compassion. I realized he was a ghost, like Balthazar.
I posed like a statue, like I was already one of Balthazar’s past wives, captured forever in a framed painting. I remembered Lacey’s words—how she worried that she would not be remembered because there would not even be a photograph or painting left behind of her. I would rather be buried in an unmarked grave than preserved for eternity like this.
Hour upon hour passed. He was a spirit and he never tired. His nimble hand worked the paintbrush in small strokes on the canvas. My back and legs ached, and I could barely contain their trembling.
Finally, he was done. He turned his easel around so that I could see his work. I was unrecognizable. The cheekbones, the hair and the face shape were mine—but the stiff set of the lips, the frozen expression of the eyes, the old lace of the wedding gown were as though they belonged to someone else. I looked no different to the paintings of the other girls. This picture
of me could have been painted in another era, in another century.
“I must complete the background and the rest of thy bridal gown before it is ready to hang upon the wall.”
My limbs relaxed a little. “I can leave now. The monseigneur said that I could take walks out in the ocean passage between midnight and dawn each night.”
He lifted heavy-lidded eyes to me. “But it is now after dawn and thee art forbidden to be outside at such an hour.”
“But I need to go out of here....”
He sighed. “Need is a human creation. Thou need for nothing in the realm of Balthazar. Thou art his and that is all.” He inclined his head. “But thee may go retire now to thy waiting place.”
“Waiting place?”
“Yes, where thee are to wait and sleep each day.”
“I will sleep on the chair,” I said quickly.
“There be another place for thee.” He gestured to me. “Come.”
He stepped out to the chambers and over to the cabinets. Bending his squat neck back, he surveyed the girls standing forever frozen in their compartments. He reached a hand toward a compartment to the left of the middle row, beside Etiennette. “Yes. This is the one for thee.” He turned to me with his eager gaze and squirming, pursing lips.
Every muscle in my body went rigid as he made his way to the nearby sets of keys. Surely, I had misunderstood him. His accent was thick and his voice low. He could not have meant he had selected a compartment for me.
He selected a large brass key and then pushed a small step ladder over to the cabinet.
“Thou wilt take thy place now.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Thou must take thy place with the others. We must have order while the monseigneur rests.”
Fear crawled through my intestines. “You... you cannot put me in there. I’ll suffocate.”
“Thou wilt survive, if thou dost measure out her breaths. Every night, at the midnight hour, I wilt come and unlock your door, and thee canst stretch your limbs. But thou must returneth before the dawn.” He turned his head toward Balthazar. “If thou wish, thou may wake him so thee may protest thy confinement. But know thee that the monseigneur desired this, and should you wake him, thee wilt knowst the nature of an angered beast.” He glanced purposely back at the torture devices occupying the spaces of the chamber.