The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker

by Leanna Renee Hieber

  “I shall do whatever you bid me do,” she agreed, green eyes sparkling.

  “My dear professor,” she continued, reaching out to brush his locked and folded hands upon the tabletop. “All of this is very sudden, very overwhelming. I’m sure you feel the same. However, I trust you and know that you’ll guide me.” She blushed and looked away. “I was drawn to you from the first…Though I know you cannot say the same.”

  Alexi shifted in his chair and blankly absorbed her sad smile. Her eyelids fluttered, and he thought he glimpsed the glitter of tears. “Miss Linden—”

  “No, Professor,” she interrupted. “There is no need for you to make excuses. I feel for you, and abhor the duty which forces you to forsake your heart. You and I are thrust into a most strange situation.”

  “Indeed,” he replied.

  “Miss Thompson told me of the provisions of this prophecy, and what you believe it to mean.” She sighed as Alexi gave a slow nod. “The prophecy, as you see it, would call for us…”

  “To be lovers,” he agreed.

  Lucille visibly shivered, causing her back to arch, pressing her voluptuous body against the table and toward him. “Yes. Lovers. But your heart lies with a paler face, doesn’t it?” she whispered. “Such a strange girl—so timid and yet so passionate. What a poor, unfortunate creature!”

  Alexi swallowed hard. “Please, do not speak of her.”

  “Very well, then. What can I do to make you…”

  “To make me fall in love with you?”

  Lucille gave a shrill, nervous laugh. “This is so terribly odd! Must we throw aside all propriety? How this turns my world inside out. I, beautiful as I know that I am, find myself struggling for a man’s notice, despite the fact that it has been preordained,” she mourned. Alexi found he had no wish to comfort her. “Though I wield no sword, I’d gladly fight my rival.”

  Alexi stared at her with hardening heart and a clenched fist.

  She softened. “If only for your sake, Professor, I feel I may do anything—and it terrifies me.”

  “Indeed?” Alexi sighed. “You no doubt possess powers, the full spectrum of which we’ve yet to discover.”

  “You’re trying to convince yourself,” she recognized.

  “This is very difficult for me, Miss Linden.”

  “Call me Lucy, won’t you?”

  “Lucy, then. It is very difficult for many reasons.”

  “Tell me.”

  Alexi snorted. “Though my social graces have before been impugned, I’d rather not try the patience of a beautiful woman with the scattered thoughts of a dour and tedious man.”

  “Please, Professor, you’re nothing of the sort. Let’s put simple courtesies aside. If you and I must suddenly care for each other without the benefit of courtship—though I’ve betrayed my sense, modesty and pride in admitting that I care for you already—it might help if you…‘unfold to me why you are heavy,’” she pleaded with a small smile. “I hear you like Shakespeare.”

  There was a long silence as Alexi processed her words. He found it ironic that Lucy should quote Portia’s plea to Brutus—Brutus, who was noble and yet a murderer, a betrayer. Alexi himself was no less. And where Brutus came to a dire and undignified end upon his own sword, Alexi wondered grimly if he’d someday do the same on some spectral threshold.

  Chasms within him opened wider, but he forced himself to speak. “I prepared all my life for my coming fate, was obligated to lock my heart for countless years. Recently I saw the opportunity for my loneliness to end.”

  “Miss Parker?” Lucille prompted.

  “Yes. I believed so…” Alexi’s voice faltered. “But that could not be proven on all counts. I, unused to such feelings, am at a loss. I’ve known duty, diligence, omens, spirits and loneliness. But nothing like this.” Having unclasped far more than was his custom, he felt ill and resentful.

  “Dear Professor,” Lucy said gently. “If you allow me, I can abate that loneliness of yours.” Moving around the small table, in a gesture that somehow did not seem out of place given the circumstances, she knelt and looked up at him in earnest.

  The sight of Percy’s pale, stricken face stared up at Alexi, the memory of her similar earnestness as she sank to her knees on his office floor. Her sweet voice accosted him, a voice he’d grown eager to hear, now begging for kindness and the answers rightly due her. He relived the wretched sound of her sobs as she fled his office, inexplicably cast aside, passionate ties sundered. He could think of nothing else.

  He leaped to his feet, breaking out in a cold sweat, and was uncomfortably pinned by Lucille’s gaze. As thunder roared outside the window, he turned and said, “I’m sorry Miss Linden, but I cannot continue this conversation at present.”

  He burst out of the room and returned to his compatriots, who looked expectant as he faced them.

  “My fellows, we cannot have a meeting tonight; I’ve grown distract, and it will only create weakness in our sacred space. We shall reconvene soon, but I beg you, not tonight.” And with that, he ran out the door.

  He had no desire to return to his empty estate—he would likely set it on fire and let it burn to the ground this time—and he did not believe he could face his sister and the questions she would doubtlessly pose. Instead, he escaped into academic paperwork, his only solace for years, and listened to the tempest break viciously outside his office window.

  When the clock down the hall chimed a late hour, he was certain it tolled the doom of all happiness he’d ever hoped to have.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Things had been growing increasingly grim. A thunderstorm raged outside Percy’s window, the night sky unleashing its atmospheric fury upon the whole of London and the city’s sprawling outskirts. Percy lay in pain upon her floor, limbs twisted in the lacy folds of her nightdress. Something sharp had begun to heave within her. It was a strange, inhuman sort of pain, not entirely emotional and yet not wholly physical, as if something deep inside was waking in rebellion. Something inside was eating her alive.

  There were whispers in her mind, sounds that pelted her brain like the raindrops against her window. The lightning illuminated her writhing white body. She felt a close presence but could see nothing. Certain that her wits had fled, she feared she had turned demon, and longed for a priest to exorcise her.

  Daring to look out the window, she saw that the horsemen trod closer on the horizon, and that horrid barking continued to echo from the clouds themselves. Curling into a ball, she drew back from the vantage and sobbed.

  Her sorrow did not aid her churning stomach. Instead, her sobs seemed to bring something up. She gagged on the immediate sensation of something palpable and sour in her mouth, and, not having eaten that day, she found the pulpy kernels that were suddenly burgeoning from her throat an additional terror. There was the same sickening smell of fruit as had nauseated her in her vision, and she coughed up seeds onto the floor. She knew just what mythic sort of seeds they were, mysteriously and disgustingly expelled, and it did nothing for her sanity. When the goddess Persephone, kidnapped by Hades, king of the underworld, ate the fruit of the pomegranate, she’d been bound there and to him.

  To a silent God, Percy prayed that the shadowy horsemen on the horizon were not galloping in to drag her away. She did not remember being the bride of a god, namesake or no, nor did she ever wish to be. She heaved again, desperate to void the pulp she herself had never ingested.

  The clock down the hall chimed a late hour. A bolt of lightning flashed so near her window that she cowered, thunder reverberating in her bones. She needed, now more than ever before, to be wrapped securely in Alexi’s arms. She was sure she was meant to be nowhere else. An invisible force was urging her on, demanding at all costs that she run to him despite his betrayal, despite the fact that he was sending her away in the morning.

  Something sharp twisted again within Percy’s body. More pulp burst into her mouth. An uncontrollable shivering took over. Her pendant burned, but she paid it no
mind. The thunder roared, and there came a rending shriek—something pressed in toward her, intending to snuff the candle of her soul. Something sought to destroy her. And perhaps, she realized dimly, it sought to destroy Alexi, too.

  She had to warn him. They were not meant to be separated. Beyond their hearts, something larger was at stake. A balance was sliding from light to dark.

  As if to force Percy out into the storm, with a sharp crack and explosion her window shattered and the gale poured in. With a cry, she stumbled backward. Blood seeped into her white gown from many tiny wounds made by glass…matching the dribbled ruby stains of half-digested pomegranate.

  Percy stared at the blood, her shattered window, her patches of lacerated skin, and loosed a scream. She flung open her door and flew into the corridor, ashamed and terrified to seek Alexi out. But to whom else could she turn? The headmistress? Marianne, who knew nothing of the darkness that surrounded Percy? Through her increasing horror and dimming sensibility, only one thought remained. She was not meant to have been shunned by the man she loved. Of that, Percy was sure.

  Alexi, inconsolable and exhausted, put down a dreary book of Russian politics and went to his stained-glass window. The tempest roaring outside fit his mood. Staring at the courtyard below, his gaze clouded. He tried to ignore the pounding of his heart. He imagined life without the mysterious snow-white girl who held his mighty heart captive, he who had once forsworn love.

  Love. The word made him ill. It was foreign, unfair, and he’d done fine without it. What good was any such feeling if he could not have the one he wanted? What of those who could choose whom they loved? Jealousy scorched his heart, jealousy of normal men, faced with no other requirements than their personal desires. He dug his nails against the windowsill.

  Restless, he moved to the opposite corner of the office, turned the knob of his phonograph so that an evocative aria filled the room, and began pacing. An intense lightning strike drew him back to the window. There, he contemplated throwing himself into the torrent.

  A few ladies, frightened by the storm, had gathered in the hall. They shrieked with fear at the sight of an uncovered Percy, whose door was flung open with a cry, revealing her mad-eyed and tousle-haired, patches of crimson bespeckling her spectral whiteness. Percy heard muffled squeals of “Murder!” “Madness!” and “The Ripper has come for the ghost girl!”

  The mortified ladies of her hall screamed and ran, hurrying into their rooms to gossip or faint. Percy didn’t care. She flitted past a gasping Miss Jennings to rush headlong into the thunderstorm.

  She was the only one daring the outdoors; even the school guards had taken shelter. The rain pelted mercilessly down on her tearstained face, and in moments her snowy locks became sodden strings that grasped her cheeks and shoulders. Her ruffled gown plastered against and chilled her slender form. The spots of crimson on the lace of her gown spread in watery, haunting traces. Nonetheless, she welcomed the stinging downpour, sobbing into it as she ran across the courtyard. Cold rain and hot saltwater mixed in her mouth.

  Somehow, tonight she could see the sky. Her sky. Above her appeared a gaping hole where a shell of comfort had been broken open, revealing a starker atmosphere beyond. It was as if she’d once been shielded but was now completely open to all possible assault…

  Apollo Hall loomed ahead. Percy’s wounds from the glass throbbed. Lightning blazed. Thunder screamed. Percy stood, staring up at a stained-glass window and opened her mouth in a weak wail. She shook violently. There was a form in the window.

  Her heart stopped. The figure above was unmistakable, her only chance for safety and salvation. He was the answer; he could make the horsemen vanish and the dogs silent, and he could close up the broken heavens.

  “Why reject me?” Percy wept at the window. “You need me, Alexi, for London is rotting. An apocalypse is coming if we part, so don’t send me away.”

  The cold rain was freezing her to the bone. Faint, she dropped to her knees and quailed. She was not meant to withstand this strain, the eviscerating misery of what was inside her, screaming to be acknowledged. And she could fight no longer. Whatever power had shattered her window and pressed in upon her would now get the better of her. Percy cried hysterically. She loved Alexi so. And now, more than ever, she needed his understanding. For she understood nothing.

  All faded to black.

  Alexi froze.

  A shade—a frail, beauteous nightmare—stood beneath his window. White hair whipped in all directions, her head thrown back, mouth wide-open, white dress soaked and blotted with red…his dear Percy was there, torn by the storm’s fury. The lament of the soprano keening from the bell of the phonograph could just as well have come from the mouth of this spectre below, who suddenly collapsed in a lifeless heap onto the sopping flagstones.

  “Oh, dear God. Percy!”

  Alexi bolted down the stairs, out the door and into the rain, toward the motionless bundle of limbs and wet fabric, ignoring everything else. He scooped Percy into his arms. She was light as a feather, unconscious yet shuddering. The downpour clubbed him. Alexi gazed down at the lifeless marble face, that visage which, even in this half-drowned state, he could not help but find beautiful.

  “Persephone, you godforsaken romantic, what drove you to this?” He moaned, sickened by the sight of the blood on her gown as he whisked her off toward the infirmary. “Please, not me. Please let this not be my fault,” he cried, knowing full well it was.

  A sight indeed swept into the infirmary. Tall, black and billowing as he moved, wet hair hanging over burning eyes, he was a veritable angel of death holding an apparition more fairy than human in his arms as he burst through the doors.

  “Professor!” a nurse exclaimed, rushing to him and the limp form he cradled. Alexi charged to the infirmary beds without care or clearance, and laid Percy upon the nearest one. An entourage of nurses clustered around.

  “Professor Rychman, what on earth—”

  “Take care of her,” he commanded, raking a hand through sopping hair. “She collapsed outside my window. I happened to notice.”

  “But why—” a nurse began.

  “I don’t know!” Alexi cried. “Tomorrow she was supposed to return to a convent. Make sure she goes nowhere until she is well.”

  “Yes, sir,” they all agreed.

  The medical staff dispersed to gather supplies, and he was given a moment alone to hover over her wet, bloodstained body. He knelt beside her, imagining her an angel that had plummeted from the heavens and into the sea, there perhaps to be drowned.

  “Poor Ariel, my sweet cipher. Don’t let the tempest claim you. I only wish I could,” he murmured, kissing her moist forehead.

  His lips lingered upon her a moment too long, for he was desperate to place his aching lips upon her lifeless ones, rouse her like the prince did Sleeping Beauty in one of those tales of which she was desperately fond. But finally he drew back, fighting a wealth of emotion he could not indulge, and fled. He must kill his heart once and for all, for it was a useless mortal contrivance that he abhorred.

  Soaking, he stormed back to his office, stoked the fire in his hearth and sat at his desk. Emotions he was violently choking down were refusing to die. Stricken, he collapsed his face into his hands and remained frozen there in grief until sleep overtook him.

  Perhaps it was mutual instinct and loneliness that drew Rebecca, at so early an hour, to seek out Alexi. The vicious storm had only just broken. Dawn’s first light was licking the horizon.

  She had wandered about her apartments at the top of Promethe Hall all night, wringing her hands, thinking she heard screaming. She’d troubled to travel all the way to Alexi’s estate, only to find him absent. Upon her return, she dimly supposed he must have taken to his office. Wracked by nerves, she flitted across the courtyard in the same manner as the restless spectres of the academy who, one by one, turned to stare at her with odd mistrust. Even their sombre forms were agitated.

  His office door was unlocked. Upo
n his desk was a head of tousled black hair. The fire was smoking in the fireplace.

  Rebecca’s blood ran cold as she approached the desk. “Alexi…?”

  His breathing was laboured, his brow furrowed in a painful dream. Rebecca reached out a questing hand and brushed a lock of hair from his moist forehead. With a start he bolted upright, his dark eyes blurred and unfocused.

  “Alexi, it’s me,” Rebecca fumbled. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  He growled and rubbed his face in his hands, raking back tousled hair with quivering fingers. After a moment of purging the horrid vision of a pale girl in a coffin from his mind, his eyes focused. “What do you want?”

  Rebecca took the chair opposite him. “This anguish in your heart, I cannot bear it. I must apologize. The night I struck you…something within me died.”

  “You killed something inside of me as well,” he countered. “I never thought you and I would end in such childish acts.”

  “Forgive me, please, Alexi, I beg you.” She reached a shaking hand across the table. He withdrew his own, pinning her with furious eyes. “Alexi, I never wished for this.”

  “Nor did I. But don’t you dare speak words of contrition to me now, traitor.”

  Rebecca’s mouth went slack. She had nothing to counter that terrible blow.

  Something snapped in Alexi’s eyes and his shoulders convulsed. His head fell suddenly into his hands. “She may be dying!” he cried.

  “What?”

  “My Percy—my dear, sweet girl…She wandered into the tempest. There was blood on her gown; she was feverish, shaking. She collapsed outside my window, crying up to me. I was watching the storm…”

  “My God.”

  “Rebecca, I feel her slipping away. Terrible forces are at work upon her, and I feel her passionate, innocent soul draining from me. I’m so confused! I promised to keep her safe and I don’t know that I can!” He wailed, tears springing to his eyes. “Damn my heart! Cut it out! Cut it from me, Rebecca, please…!”

  It was an unprecedented act, but Alexi Rychman began to sob.