Count On Me

by Abigail Graham

  It doesn’t look like it would take a very hard pull, but he takes hold of it with both hands and does it anyway. The rope resists and for a moment I’m sure it will snap, but it doesn’t. It groans and something moves in the walls with a clang, and behind me the wall slides in, the whole hearth grinding back to reveal a staircase.

  Just like I saw before.

  Conrad holds his torch high and leads the way. The stairs are the same, narrow, just tall enough for him to descend without stooping. They reach a switchback landing and we go the opposite way, down to where there’s a junction of tunnels under the castle going off in every direction.

  “I know the way,” Conrad says.

  He turns the same way I did in my dream. The dream where I woke with my hand burned. I follow him, hugging myself. I am so tired and cold. I just want all this to go away and to take him to bed with me and just sleep in his arms.

  We head down the tunnel. It slopes down. He takes another fork. The corridor curves, curves too much. We’re spiraling down into the mountain.

  Finally we reach a door. Conrad pulls it open, kicking up a cloud of dust and a screech of corroded metal as the hinges shed old rust. He urges me inside, stepping in behind me.

  It’s another storeroom. It’s full of paintings draped with canvas, some of it so old, it’s rotted away.

  I reach for one of the newer ones. There’s something on a rough hewn table, gone gray with age, a little stack of Polaroid photos. Conrad takes my hand.

  “Roxanne, you need to prepare yourself. This will be a shock.”

  “This will be a shock?” I ask him. “This, not all the other stuff?”

  He’s serious.

  I turn the pictures over and see…

  Me.

  My hands tremble slightly. I don’t remember this, but it’s clearly me. It’s a yellowed, aged Polaroid of me. Whoever took it didn’t wait long enough for it to develop before ripping off the little black sheet and the upper left corner is a sunburst, the rest washed out, but it’s me. I’m wearing short shorts and a plaid shirt tied at my waist, big sunglasses and a wild updo, a drink in my hand with a lime stuck on the rim.

  I throw the Polaroids down and grab one of the smaller paintings, coughing as I toss the drop cloth aside.

  Lifting it by the gilt frame, I find…

  Me. Again.

  It’s a painting of me in a dress, not unlike the one I had on last night, yesterday, whatever. I tear off more drop cloths, stack more paintings. My hands tremble and my legs are like jelly. Conrad waits silently as I uncover image after image, portrait after portrait.

  They’re all me. They’re all Roxanne.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispers.

  “No,” I say, “no, it can’t be, it’s not true, it can’t be true…”

  “You’re part of this place, too, Roxanne.”

  I round on him. “I’ve been here before,” I blurt out, half accusation, half whimper.

  Conrad lowers his head.

  “You see now why I am so desperate to send you from this place. You must be free. It is the only thing I live for. To see you again is my joy and my greatest sorrow. I love you, Roxanne. That is why you must leave.”

  12

  The Truth

  Roxanne

  Conrad drops the torch and I scream, terrified at the idea of losing the only light in this darkness. I clutch at myself, shivering.

  It’s never been real. Somehow I’ve kept myself in a bubble, put all this on the outside of it and pushed my mind away from it. Now it all comes crashing in, like water after a bursting dam. Conrad throws his arms around me, embraces me in the tiny pool of light, and I break down, sobbing against his chest.

  It’s real. It’s actually happening. Magic swords and monsters and haunted castles and witches, and his brother is going to kill us. Glancing around the room, I feel it as strongly as I feel the weight of the castle looming over my head.

  “Has this happened before?” I demand, my voice a cold, breathy rasp.

  “Yes,” he says.

  He pulls me even closer, tucking his head to mine.

  “Your name is different. You didn’t have this the last time,” he touches the slight scar on my hand where I cut myself with my first Swiss Army knife that my grandpa gave me, “but it’s you. Always you.”

  “What about your first wife? Adrian’s mother?”

  Conrad looks away, takes a shuddering breath, and drops the biggest bomb of my life right on my head.

  “You are his mother.”

  I shrug loose of him and step back, almost burning my foot on the torch. He snatches it up and follows me out of the storeroom. I nearly break into a run, but he catches my arm and pulls me back.

  “You can’t go running off. You could get lost in these tunnels and never emerge.”

  “What does it matter? Won’t I just…come back?”

  Conrad’s face flashes such pain, I almost forget the shock coursing through me. It doesn’t stop. It swims in my blood, burns in my brain. I am not who I think I am. I’m someone else.

  “This makes no sense,” I protest. “I was born in New Jersey. I grew up. I have memories.”

  “Yes,” he says, “I know. Always different, always the same. I wish we had more time. Usually things do not progress so quickly. I want to hear all about your life, your world. I want you more than I want to take another breath. The curse the witch laid on me is not my own immortality, Roxanne. It’s yours. My joy and my sorrow. It is my punishment.”

  He shakes so hard the torch quivers in his hand, casting off little embers that hiss when they burn his arm. He ignores the pain.

  “I’m sending you from this place tonight. There is a way out, a certain passage that leads to a cistern in the mountains. It’s a long journey but you’ll make it.”

  “Come with me. Why don’t we all just leave? Lead everyone out.”

  “We’ll never last until the new moon. He’ll come soon. Today, tomorrow, the next day, the siege will start. I had almost hoped something would be different this time, but then, I always do.”

  My head spins as he leads me up and up, out of the tunnels, back into the library. When we emerge into open air outside, he angrily tosses the torch away.

  I can’t believe this is happening, but it’s all real. Either I’m dreaming, I died in the plane wreck, or it’s just true. All of it. I’m trapped in some weird netherworld under the spell of a cursed sword, my fate bound to a man who has watched me die over and over and over again.

  I see it now in the way he looks at me, the way he touches me. As if I am in his arms yet somehow never within his reach.

  The sky is a ceiling, the world a wall. I’ve never felt so trapped since I came here. Even the stones of the castle seem malevolent, broken. I look around at all these people, doomed to my own fate, to come back again and again.

  I look at Conrad and see him in a broken world, a sole survivor, waiting for the sun to rise and start it all over again. How many times? How many dashed hopes?

  My fists clench and I grit my teeth. I am so angry, angry at him, at the world, at this place. I shake with it, my fury trembling through my entire body. Damn it all to hell.

  Conrad takes my shaking fist in his hand. I fight the urge to pull away.

  “You need some rest,” he says.

  “Only if you come with me.”

  “There are preparations to be made and no one else to make them,” he says.

  “Then do it and hurry to me.”

  Turning, I leave him behind, and don’t dare look back. Smoldering, I head for the tower. His tower. I almost thought of it as ours.

  I ascend the winding tower’s stairs slowly, almost collapsing into the bed. I shed my clothes first, uncaring of any sense of false modesty. I clamber into the bed and pull the blankets up to my nose and press my eyes shut, fighting the kind of bone-deep tired that’s so heavy it keeps you awake fighting with it.

  Sleep takes me.

  It’s not ge
ntle about it.

  Half awake, I stir in the clash of violent imagery, fighting the draw of the dream that pulls me deeper and deeper into its depths the harder I struggle not to be swallowed by it.

  I wake in the broken tower again, open to the frozen sky as it leans, drunken. For a while I lie in the bed, beneath the frozen blankets, until they crack as I sit up. Of course I’m still naked. Stupid dream.

  The cold is biting, like teeth on my flesh. Every step sends needles through the soles of my feet.

  I call Conrad’s name, and it echoes in the mountains. Conrad-Conrad-Onrad-Onrad-Rad-Rad, on and on into the dark. The sky is black, no stars, and hovering in the center of it, like a gaping wound overhead, is a black moon so dark it has depth, like I could reach up and put my hand through it. I most probably could.

  I start down the stairs…

  …And find them unbroken, the tower intact. I run my hand along the black stones as I descend, and stop when my gaze fixates on my hand itself.

  People say they know this or that like the back of their hand, but how often do you actually look at them? I turn mine, studying my fingers, palm, knuckles. My hands are older, the skin a little tighter, my nails clipped short and my fingertips hard with smooth calluses, like old leather. These are not my hands, and yet they are.

  I don’t know how I know it, but I do. I can feel that I have given birth. It’s just an awareness, something so alien that it takes me a moment to place it. I rush the rest of the stairs, down to the courtyard.

  It is much the same. When I arrive Conrad spars with Nina while Adrian watches. He looks up at me with such love, absolute adoration, that I can’t help but grin back at him. He’s going to ruffle my hair and mock me for sleeping so late where there’s work to do. The harvest is coming in, the festival is soon, we need to find our eldest a wife.

  I turn around and find myself in hell.

  The castle walls are cracked and broken. The gatehouse is a shattered ruin, half collapsed into the ravine. The drawbridge is gone, hacked to pieces, replaced with a crude one stretching across the gap. When I look up, the high tower has fallen, crashing through the wall that it once supported.

  Bodies lie strewn on the ground. I don’t look at them. Instead I climb, picking my way over the rubble with bleeding hands. When I drop to the other side I walk into the silent courtyard and know I am in the valley of the shadow of death.

  I know what I’ll see but I scream anyway.

  Conrad lies on the stone table, spread-eagled, his lifeblood draining. Above him the dead hang as bitter fruit, strewn about the branches and…

  The scream tears out of my throat, a raw animal thing with a life of its own. The children. My children.

  “Why?” I wail.

  I run forward. My body is piloting itself; I am only a passenger within my own being. I almost reach him.

  Three feet of red steel slides through my chest, erupts from between my breasts. The agony is unimaginable.

  It’s cold. It doesn’t feel cold, it is cold, the very essence of cold. I can feel it swallowing me, pulling me into itself.

  I look down again. My dress has changed, but it happens again. Again. Again. How many times have I been here?

  Who, who is stabbing me, if I could just see…

  I twist and turn but I can never reach. Hot breath tickles my ear in a sick, grotesque mockery of a lover’s closeness. Conrad writhes, and writhes, and writhes.

  My God, he is in hell. How many times has he gone through this?

  As I lie dying he crawls from the slab and pulls me to him, cradling my body in his arms. He begs a thousand times, offers a thousand prayers, insults, and eventually they all melt into the same agonized plea: Not again, please not again.

  Then the laughter, and it begins again as the moon dies black.

  Something has to change. It has to. It has to be different. Memories flood into me. They come in no particular order. How many lifetimes? A hundred? A thousand? Is my soul split, so there’s already another Roxanne somewhere, on her way here?

  The doors. The doors. They’re never open, but they open now, swing wide, and a roaring blast of hot air swirls around me as sweet as summer, and the memories come. Holding Adrian to my breast. The first time I made love to Conrad. The first times, that is. Has ever a torture been so beautiful? How many men and women have wished they could begin again with their beloved, come to love them over and over again?

  The doors are open and there is something inside. I reach for it, but the tree ripples and creaks, its dead silvery branches barring my way. There is some secret, some hope there, and it calls my name with a voice like thunder.

  The light. There was a light before and it comes again. It calls me from within. I step inside and…

  She’s beautiful. Tall and slender. This is no witch. There is no malice, no hate.

  “Are you…?”

  “No,” she says, her silken voice like honey poured over sunlight. “I am what you are missing. Take my hand.”

  She offers me slender fingers, reaching. I extend my own, ready to pull back at the first sign of treachery, the first feeling of cold. I lace my fingers through hers.

  “Ask him how we met,” she tells me.

  Then I jolt awake, clutching the covers to my bare chest. Conrad enters the room slowly and strips naked without a second thought.

  So weary, he sits on the bed and collapses next to me.

  “I’ve done what I can. As much as I hate it, I’ve left Adrian in command.”

  “Adrian?” I say sharply.

  I feel… It feels like a dream now. I feel like I dreamed I was his mother. God, I can’t be his mom, he was born when I was, like, eight years old. Or he was born six hundred years before I was born. I don’t even know anymore.

  None of this makes sense.

  “He’s on his feet. He’ll be alright. We should get what rest we can.”

  “Rest,” I say, sinking into the bed.

  Conrad shares his warmth, pressing close. He kisses me on the cheek then on the lips. I pull away. I need answers.

  “How did we meet?” I ask him. “I mean the first one.”

  “Roxanne,” he says, sighing.

  “What was my name? Where did I come from?”

  He settles his arm around me. “Can’t we sleep first? I want so badly just to sleep with you. Lie with you curled up against me. Feel your breath on my skin.”

  “That’s very romantic, but answer me, damn it.”

  “If I can hold you.”

  I can’t say no. I press into him and he wraps me in his arms.

  “How do I talk to you about yourself?” he says. “I was riding with friends. We were hunting. The castle was still being constructed then. I remember gazing up at it, so proud as it jutted, defiant, from the mountain. One of my fellows was thrown from his horse, and hit his head. You lived in the woods with your grandparents. Your grandmother was a wise woman. People came to her for cures.”

  I shudder. I lived with my grandparents. That sounds so much happier.

  “I helped?”

  “Your grandmother was away, so you treated my friend yourself. I was smitten. You were…are…so beautiful. I knew then I had to have you. A week later I did. Our first time was magical, perfect. I rode with you to a forest glen out of sight of the castle, a special place.”

  “I think I remember it,” I whisper. “It’s coming back to me. It’s like when you showed me the pictures, it flipped a switch. It awakened something. I had dreams…”

  Conrad holds me tight.

  “There’s so much I could tell you, but words aren’t enough. I need this.”

  He kisses me. Lightly, tenderly. When I touch him it’s like touching a thousand of him. The memories of lost caresses flood my mind. It’s a heady, intoxicating feeling and it sends warm pulses through my body. I feel myself open up, really need him.

  How long can this last? What if this is the last time, our only chance, the only one I can ever remember? His k
isses speak the same fear, as urgent as they are loving. He kisses me hard and pulls me under him, moving his mouth along my jawline and to my throat, everywhere, as if he means to leave no square inch of my skin unkissed.

  My hands roam, squeeze, grasp. I rake him with my nails, tickle his flanks, and feel him laugh against my breast as he sucks my nipple, working his way down. I want him close. The cool air kisses my skin as he dives between my legs. I clench my stomach and lift my sex to meet his mouth, shuddering violently as he drags his tongue over my mound then tastes more deeply, the softness of it entering me, hot and wet. As hot and wet as I am. I dig in my heels and knot my fingers in his hair, gasping and whimpering as he lavishes pleasure upon pleasure, driving me wild.

  I pull him away and writhe in the bed, the two of us rolling together like frisky teenagers. I dive on him and take him in my mouth, enjoying the way he grips my sides with his legs and curls around me, stroking my back as I work his cock in my lips, feeling it grow so hard, the way he quivers at my touch.

  I kiss his stomach, his chest, sliding up his body, grinding my flesh against his, slicked by sweat and desire. He shudders as his cock slides between my breasts, down my stomach. I surge up and kiss him on the lips and he seizes my upper arms to hold me still and kiss me more.

  Gently pulling loose, I sit up and rest my hands on his chest. His cock is under me, stroking against my lower lips as I pull my hips back and forth. I’ve never been so excited. I want him inside me now, but I wait. I take him in my hand and stroke, staring into his eyes.

  Then I guide him inside me, shuddering as I take his full length into my body. I groan as I settle in his lap, my entire being pulsing in tune with the throbbing in his cock.

  It feels so good. I’m full of him, enveloping him, and when he sits up I feel closer than close, one being. I sit still, savoring it as he caresses my back, kisses my neck.

  I could just stay like this. Keep him inside me and never let him go. Inevitably I start to move my hips, and press my head to his chest. He shudders with every twitch and movement of my body, even the suggestion. The feeling of my nipples brushing his chest is so intense it almost hurts, shocks me every time I touch.