Dreadfully Ever After

by Steve Hockensmith

  “You see more reasons than I, then,” Darcy muttered. “There is much I fear I shall never recover.”

  “You talk twaddle, Fitzwilliam. You are a warrior! Face this battle like one, and you will lose nothing you do not choose to.”

  The old woman’s tone was harsh. Yet even as she snapped at her nephew, she laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. It was, Darcy knew, as warm and nurturing as Lady Catherine de Bourgh ever was.

  How easy it would be to turn her tenderness into disgust.

  Anne had helped him erase every trace of his entry into the study, so his aunt had no way of knowing he’d penetrated her sanctum. If he told her he’d seen the letter, he’d also be admitting that he’d violated her trust.

  And how would Lady Catherine feel if she knew he hadn’t been eating because the plates being placed before him held nothing he now recognized as food? The kitchen might as well send up bowls of sand. It was the light alone he hungered for. The light of living things—such as glowed even in the bony old fingers that rested on his shoulder, so tantalizingly close to his mouth.

  Darcy looked up into his aunt’s dark, piercing eyes and forced himself to smile.

  “You are right, as always. Soon, I’m sure, I will be well enough to take up my sword again, and together we shall finally rid this land of its last dreadful. If this cure of yours works, no Englishman or Englishwoman need ever again feel the shadow of the plague fall upon them.”

  Lady Catherine returned his smile, though it was so tight and dry, it was a wonder she could pry her lips apart to speak.

  “There. That is what I like to hear. Keep thinking of England, Fitzwilliam, and before long you will be strong enough to save it.”

  Darcy managed—just barely—to keep smiling until his aunt left the room.

  How could he be expected to save England when he hardly had the will to save himself?

  Not a minute after Lady Catherine stepped out, Anne slipped in. She always managed to avoid her mother’s visits. At first, Darcy had assumed it was because she didn’t like seeing him take the serum; it would be a reminder of the foul pollution of his blood. Yet she’d proved so tolerant of his condition (unlike some others he could think of—and was, obsessively), he eventually concluded it was something far simpler: She didn’t like Lady Catherine.

  “Do you wish to keep brooding alone, or may I brood with you?” she said.

  “I am managing it quite well on my own. I need no help.”

  Despite his words, Darcy found himself wearing the slightest sliver of a smile—a real one, this time. Anne returned it as she stepped closer, stopping at her usual spot. Darcy had started to think of it as her post: two steps from his side, halfway along the length of the bed. She could stand there tirelessly for hours. There was something of the gargoyle about her perfect vigilant stillness, and at first it had unnerved him. Now, he found it comforting.

  “I believe I could teach you a thing or two about brooding,” she said. “I have had much practice at it. In fact, I consider myself quite the master.”

  Darcy need not ask what reason his cousin had for brooding. To some degree, he was the reason. And now his heart—the one he’d given to another four years before—was as pained as hers must have been back then.

  He could not have blamed Anne had she come to gloat, but she wasn’t there to wound him further. She seemed ready to wait—for a thousand years, if need be—for him to heal.

  “Perhaps I should take you on as an apprentice,” she continued, “though I would hate to see you become as expert at self-torment as I. It is a skill I have been endeavoring to unlearn, and with some success, I’m pleased to say.”

  “What is the secret to your success?”

  “Acceptance.”

  Darcy snorted and turned away. “I am not ready for that. I do not know that I shall ever be.”

  “I thought the same thing, once. Do you know why I took to wearing black so many years ago?”

  Darcy turned toward his cousin again. He found her away from her post at last: She’d taken a step closer that he hadn’t even heard.

  She didn’t wait for him to say, “No.”

  “I was in mourning … for myself. I thought my life—what I had of one—was over. What a little fool I was! Though with excellent taste in gowns, I must say.” She looked down and ran a pale hand over the silky smoothness of her bodice. “I don’t mourn anymore, but I do so love black taffeta.”

  “I am glad you no longer grieve. But it is different with me, Anne. My life as I knew it is over, unless perhaps …”

  Darcy couldn’t say it. The words—the hope—hurt too much.

  “If I am to accept anything,” he said instead, “it is that I am tainted. Impure. Untouchable.”

  “No!” Anne spat back with a ferocity Darcy found shocking. “You are special, rare, extraordinary—and all for being impure! What good is purity? We English once fancied our blood so fine that it would be a crime to blend it with anyone else’s. Yet did that spare us the strange plague? No. For all we know, it brought it upon us. And even now, when that curse could be turned into a blessing, many such as my mother lack the ability to see it, for that would require an acceptance—an embrace—of the very ‘impurity’ they so hate.”

  Darcy had never seen his cousin speak with such passion (for he’d never seen her speak with any passion at all), and he gaped at her as he groped for a reply.

  “Anne, I … I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not making any sense.”

  “I will show you, then. And perhaps you will come to a new understanding of what does and does not make sense.”

  Anne held out her hand.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Darcy took it.

  A few minutes later, they were walking into the large dojo/barracks of Lady Catherine’s ninja army. Assassins were everywhere on the training floor—twirling nunchucks, sparring with swords and spears, scaling ropes, practicing their hand springs, painting pictures of rainbows and sad-eyed puppies (their tiny, meticulous brushstrokes honing the precision required to flick a needle into an opponent’s eye or drop a poisoned pellet into a goblet while hanging upside-down from rafters).

  Silence fell over the room as Anne led Darcy inside, and without a word the ninjas set down what they were doing and began filing out.

  “Be sure to lock all the doors this time!” Anne called after them. “You remember how displeased Lady Catherine was when Rinsaku and Susumu forgot. I’d hate to see any more heads on pikes. Thank you!”

  One by one, the doors of the great hall slammed shut, and Darcy could hear the scraping and clicking of bolts being thrown on the other side.

  The ninjas were locking them in.

  It wasn’t the first time for Darcy. He’d trained there many a time in his youth, so he knew what usually came next. He couldn’t believe his cousin had ever tried it herself, however, or that she would presume to doom them both to bloody, agonizing death by attempting it now.

  “What is the meaning of this? Why have you brought us here?”

  “Fitzwilliam,” Anne chided him with a smile, “for a man who was content to spend the last two days staring at the ceiling, you are so impatient. I said I would show you, and show you I shall. Now, wait here, if you would.”

  She walked to one of the weapons lockers against the wall, opened it, and pulled out a drawer.

  “Ohhh, poor dear,” she said, reaching down for something Darcy couldn’t see. “Just a little light left … but enough.”

  When she turned toward Darcy again, she was holding a tiny case about the size of a snuff box. As she carried it to the center of the training floor, she cooed down into it and said, “There, there. Almost over now.”

  Then she stopped and knelt down and tipped the little box until something short and thin—like the tip of a small stick—tumbled out onto the floorboards. It seemed to be black, though it was hard for Darcy to tell, for it glowed with the soft white radiance of a living thing.

 
“What is that?”

  Anne was hovering over the whatever-it-was with a wistful look on her face.

  “A butterfly,” she said.

  “A butterfly? But I saw no wings.”

  “Oh, I removed them. All that flapping around. It wouldn’t do today.”

  She stood and started walking back toward Darcy.

  For the first time he noticed how dark she seemed, for all her paleness. The luminescence he’d begun seeing in people and animals—it was nowhere in her.

  She stopped beside him and wrapped an arm around his.

  “Minoru!” she called out. “Zombi o dashite yare!”

  Release the zombies!

  Across the great hall, a section of wall started to slide aside. Beyond it was utter blackness.

  “Anne, have you lost your mind?”

  On the floor nearby was a pair of abandoned sai daggers, and Darcy started to turn toward them. He wasn’t sure how much of a fight he could muster, but he would at least take a few dreadfuls to hell with him. A part of him was even relieved to have the opportunity. Perhaps this was the death he should have had in the first place, instead of dragging things out for weeks … and losing that which most made life worth living.

  Darcy got no closer to the daggers. His cousin held him tightly to her side with a strength he never would have suspected she had.

  “Remember the forest,” she said. “The unmentionables from the cave.”

  “I hardly think they’ll take us for trees this time. Thoughtless though the dreadfuls might be, they’ll see us for what we are sooner or later. We must fight or—”

  “Here they come,” Anne said.

  The first zombies shuffled out of the darkness of their holding pen.

  A woman, green and bloated; an old man, desiccated and gray; a boy; a girl; something with only a blob for a face, a mass of mangled flesh from which stared one wide, lidless eye. And then there were more and more, all wearing plain white shifts with multicolored circles on the front and back.

  This was Lady Catherine’s practice stock, held in captivity for those moments when only a moving target would do. As such, most were missing hands or arms or ears, and several had great gaping holes in their gowns where chunks of flesh had been blasted or carved away. They all had their legs and feet, though. What good would they be otherwise? When a practice zombie lost the ability to run, it quickly lost its head as well.

  Not that any of these unmentionables were running. They came shambling out slowly, almost uncertainly, as if blinded by the light of day. Their pace picked up as they neared the center of the training floor, though, and eventually one of them grunted and broke into a lope. The others quickly followed suit.

  Again, Darcy tried to dive toward the daggers so near at hand. And again, his cousin stopped him.

  The dreadful at the head of the pack hurled itself into a shrieking leap—onto the butterfly, which it immediately crammed into its mouth. The unmentionable closest on its heels tried to pry its jaws apart and pluck out the prize, but it quickly lost interest, as did all its brethren.

  The bait that had drawn them from their lair—the butterfly’s life-light—was gone. The zombies began milling about listlessly, obviously seeing nothing else of interest.

  Anne and Darcy they ignored.

  “We must find a way out,” Darcy whispered, barely daring to so much as move his lips. “This trick of yours won’t save us forever.”

  “It is no trick, Fitzwilliam,” Anne replied. She spoke in a normal tone, not loud but not a whisper either. “I lied about that before, I’m afraid. It seems cruel now, making you pretend to be a tree, but I didn’t think you were ready for the truth.”

  The unmentionables were still wandering around obliviously in the middle of the training hall. As Anne spoke, a few turned to look at her and then turned away again, utterly uninterested.

  Anne took a step toward the dreadfuls. She tried to drag Darcy along, but he was the one anchoring her now.

  “Come along,” she coaxed. “Don’t be shy.”

  “I’m not shy. I just have no desire to be eaten.”

  “But that’s just it, Fitzwilliam. That’s what I’ve been trying to show you.”

  Anne uncoiled her arm from his and set off quickly, practically skipping, toward the practice stock.

  “Anne! Come back!”

  When she reached the nearest zombie—a bearded male with the stretched neck and cocked head and bulging eyes of a recently hung thief—she reached up and playfully tousled its ginger hair.

  “I call this one Mercury,” she said. “Extremely quick on his feet. Two whole months he’s been here without losing a single limb! I’m surprised he didn’t get the butterfly. Perhaps he’s slowing down. It happens sometimes, as the legs begin to rot.”

  “How can this be?” Darcy muttered. “How can this be?”

  Anne hurried over to a corpulent femme-zombie that was contentedly munching on the maggots it scraped off its own face.

  “Just look at Humpty go!” she hooted, and she gave the dreadful a mischievous poke in the stomach. “Dead all these weeks, and still she finds a way to keep eating. Watch out, my girl! All that fat will be the death of you—again!”

  Laughing, Anne spun away and happily pranced in a zigzag through the herd. Darcy had never seen her so euphoric, so carefree, so … lively.

  “Hello, Romeo! Good morning, Juliet! You’re looking well today, Crusoe! And you, Gulliver! Goodness, Aphrodite, whatever happened to your hands?”

  “These are your ‘friends,’ ” Darcy said. “The ones you told me you visit at night.”

  “Yes. These are my friends.” Anne leaned against the beautiful (if olive-tinged) dreadful she’d called “Aphrodite” and wrapped her arms around its neck. “The best I’ve ever had. They don’t demand anything. They don’t judge. Not like Lady Catherine. Not like that wife of yours.”

  Darcy flinched, but Anne didn’t seem to notice.

  “They think we’re abominations,” she snarled. “Ha! What we are is exceptional!”

  And then Darcy understood. It snapped into focus with shocking suddenness, like a spider dangling so close to the eye it’s but a smudge until you recognize it for what it is and wonder why you didn’t see it all along.

  “You were bitten, too. You take the serum. You’ve been taking it for years.”

  Anne nodded, and then she released Aphrodite and started back toward Darcy.

  “So you see,” she said, “I alone can truly understand what you’re going through. I alone can help you come to peace with what you’ve become. I. Alone. But not alone any longer. For now we have each other. As it was always meant to be.”

  She stopped in front of Darcy and leaned forward into him, her arms encircling his neck just as they’d done with the zombie’s a moment before. Darcy was so numb with shock and confusion, he neither returned her embrace nor broke it. “You took a vow to remain at Elizabeth Bennet’s side till death did you part,” his cousin said. “Well, death has parted you. It touched you, and now your wife rejects you as a result. But death need never come between us, Fitzwilliam, for already we are neither wholly dead nor wholly alive. And do you know what that makes us?”

  Anne pressed herself harder against him, bringing her lips up close to whisper breathlessly in his ear.

  “Immortal.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Mary’s surveillance of Bethlem Royal Hospital went much as it had the day before, with a few notable exceptions. Again, she saw the occasional free-roaming gaggle of dreadfuls lurch down the streets around the hospital fence. Again, she saw the hospital’s black ambulance roll off, only to return a few hours later with what seemed to be a new inmate for the asylum. Again, she saw attendants rushing out to help wrestle the madman inside. And again, the bedlamite-to-be seemed dark skinned and quite vigorous in his resistance, and his cries were either gibberish or something other than English.

  What was different wasn’t just that Mary saw all this more clea
rly (for her perch in the brewery was indeed an improvement over her hiding place of the day before). Now when she muttered, “Curious” or “Queer,” there was someone beside her to say, “Quite” or “Indeed.” And it wasn’t just affirmations Mr. Quayle had to share, for he had packed in a compartment of his box a loaf of bread and an assortment of sliced fruits and cheeses, so that he and Mary (and Ell and Arr, both of whom proved surprisingly fond of stilton) could share a companionable picnic while watching the comings and goings down below.

  “Look! At the south end of the fence,” Mary said as she slid a crust of bread into the view-slot of Mr. Quayle’s box. “There must be a dozen dreadfuls chasing that cat. I do believe that’s the biggest band we’ve seen yet.”

  As the bread disappeared into the darkness, Mary thought she caught a glimpse of soft, moist lips and perhaps even, for just a second, a surprisingly perfect Roman nose.

  There was a polite pause while Mr. Quayle chewed his food.

  “Yes. It is alarming,” he said finally. “I’m sure you know well how the danger grows exponentially. If nothing is done, it won’t be long before such bands become herds. We can only hope the situation isn’t worse elsewhere in the city.”

  “I find it hard to believe there could be anything worse than Section Twelve Central anywhere inside the Great Wall.”

  “I have heard things about other sections, Miss Bennet, that make Twelve Central seem a veritable Garden of Eden. Fortunately, my obligations never took me to such places.”

  “Because Bedlam is here.”

  Mr. Quayle’s box creaked.

  “I am nodding.”

  On the horizon, a new column of smoke was adding to the ashy canopy that hung over London. This one was different than all those around it, though: roiling black as opposed to the white-gray of the factories and crematoria. Even as Mary watched it, another serpentine spiral of black smoke began coiling its way into the sky nearby.