“Burnt and Worn Out, but why?”
I know I said a couple weeks ago that I was pretty excited for my thing about rhinos and geese, and I hope that it ended up being at least a semi-enjoyable read and not just a meaningless bunch of numbers. I spent a lot more time on that one than I intended to, so hopefully it paid off. Next week isn’t going to be quite as extensive, but I do at least know what it’s going to be about. This is, of course, assuming I have the time to write it over the weekend like I wanted to on this past Sunday, but… I just don’t really have the energy? I don’t know, I’ve been tired lately, and frustrated with school and work and stuff. I feel like I’ve been unable to actually work on the projects that are meaningful to me, and instead I’m stuck doing busy-work week after week. But I don’t know. Maybe that’s the pandemic fatigue. Maybe it’s senioritis, since this is my last semester before graduation. Maybe I’m just bored. Who knows? Who cares? As long as I get some more time soon, I’ll be fine. But yet, I can’t really… find the energy to use that time, even when I have it. And then I feel bad about it, and the cycle seems to repeat. I just need to work harder, said the horse. We’ll see. At least I can (sometimes) pull together enough time to write weekly posts. I’ve got that much.
Oh, also, it’s my partner’s birthday today (if you’re reading this when it posts)! Happy birthday, Cheyenne! She asked me not to do a big post about it but I thought it might be nice to wish her a happy birthday here all the same. If you know her, be sure to tell her happy birthday! And ask her about the carrot. It’s a carrot.
Anyway, here’s the previous chapter.
Spectral Crown, by Andy Sima: Chapter Fourteen
The halls we traveled through as we got farther away from the common room were dark and more or less identical to the stretch of hall just behind the fireplace. Hidden ceilings, narrow walkways, grey brick walls, and little of anything else. The torches, as they flickered in our hands, cast eerie shapes around us in the near perfect darkness.
Whether it was intentional on my part or some sort of subconscious urging, I had been gradually leading us in a direction opposite where I encountered the hand-spider and heard the beast in the bowels. I had no intention to ever see what had made that sound, let alone to visit the area I knew was at the bottom of those waste holes. The farther away from them, the better.
The direction away from the servants’ relief areas led towards the heart of the castle, or what I assumed was the heart of the castle, because every so often I could have sworn I heard sounds from the other side of the wall. Echoes of laughter or clinking tableware, as if the castle’s native inhabitants were enjoying a grand feast. In some places, it sounded like there were dozens, maybe even hundreds of people. Which was funny, because in my short time in the country of Umbra, the only people I had seen besides Iacob and Sorina were the few servants and the stable master.
“You hear that too, don’t ya?” Franz asked, directing his torch at a place in the wall where it seemed the sound of merrymaking was coming from.
“I do,” I said. “I’ve been hearing it for a while.”
“Oh, good, I thought I was the only one hearing it,” Freda said. George said nothing, but glanced back over his shoulder, down the darkened stone passage, spider webs covering up the sound of scurrying vermin.
Although I had no idea what the layout of the castle was, I thought we were somewhere near the foyer. Perhaps even the throne room. But then again, distances were tricky in this place. There was a good chance that we hadn’t gone more than fifty meters from our starting point, though it felt much farther.
I wanted to get a bearing of our surroundings and test my hypothesis of our location, so I handed Freda my torch. “Hold this,” I told her. “I would like to try something.”
With both my hands free now, I got close to the brick wall and put my ear against it. The laughing was louder on the other side. I wasn’t too keen on sneaking into the meal through the wall, as that would certainly make the Blestemat royals unhappy, but I had to know how many people were out there, and I had to know if the Uradel royals were there, too. I began to prod at the wall, retrieving my knife to pick at some of the mortar.
“What do you hope to get done here?” Franz asked, peering over my shoulder.
“I’m hoping,” I said, between tests of bricks, “that one of these bricks will move just enough that I can peek through.”
“What will that tell us?” Freda asked.
“Don’t you want to know who’s laughing?” I asked.
“Won’t they see us moving the brick?” George piped up.
“Not if they’re distracted,” I said. Mentally I added “I hope,” but it didn’t seem like a good plan to speak it out loud.
Silence fell on our small group again, and I worked my way down the wall, pulling and pushing at as many bricks as I could reach. I was having no luck so far, and as I glanced down the hall I saw that the corridor took a sharp right turn not far from where we were. If there were going to be any bricks to move, they were going to have to show up soon.
After a few moments of more feeling at the walls, with Franz, Freda, and George watching at my heels, I managed to find a loose one near the level of my knee. Sighing in relief, I grabbed at it and did my best to twist it around so that I could pull it to the inside of the wall. Feeling my way around in the near blackness, I used my knife for some leverage and I eventually managed to get a good handle on it. Sliding it out like one removes a bow from its quiver, I gently knocked the brick back and let it fall to the ground with a quiet thud.
Through the low hole in the wall, the laughing and clinking got louder.
“Alright,” I said. “Now for the moment of truth.”
There was a hushed silence as I knelt next to the gap in the stonework and pressed my eye against the dark space. I couldn’t see anything at first, and initial thought was that my eyes had to adjust to the light, but then I realized there was no light to adjust to. The room on the other side was shrouded in twilight darkness.
Peering through my little window, I could see faint shafts of murky half-light coming through windows inset near the ceiling, but that was all the illumination the room received. The cloud-strangled sunlight illuminated a vast structure resembling our own common room, but on a grander scale. There were chairs and tables, all set with fine silverware, for two hundred or more people. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, the same layer of dust that danced and shimmered like forest sprites in the far-away sunshine. Not a visible soul was present in the room.
And yet, there was still laughter and the sound of eating.
I stumbled back, slightly unhinged, and stood up, leaning against the far wall. I didn’t say anything, though I really should have.
“What is it? What do you see, Saelac?” Franz asked eagerly.
“Are the Uradels there?” Freda asked.
“What about the soldiers?” George inquired.
“No one. There’s no one,” I said. I had been so expecting to see the same sort of resplendent feast that we had received in our own quarters that this lack of anyone came as a blow to the head. And still, the sounds continued, unabated.
“That’s impossible!” Freda harrumphed. “We can all hear them. I’ll take a look for meself, how about it?” I didn’t try to stop the burly woman as she squatted down next to the misplaced brick. “Saelac, you liar, there’s chairs and tables and…” she trailed off.
“And what?” Franz said. Freda stood up.
“Something ain’t right about this place,” she said. “I say we go back to the common room now.”
“What are you blabberin’ about?” Franz asked. “Let me take a look. You’re half-blind anyway.” Franz, fire-headed and boulder-like, crouched next to the whole in the wall and stared through. Disbelieving, the man scoffed.
“That’s impossible!” he said, still staring through the hole. “I can hear ‘em, gibberin’ about like poultry!” But he, too, stood up, defeated by the sight of nothing and the sound of something.
George was the last to look through. He stooped down, twisting his head at odd angles to get a better look. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Where are they all?”
We soon found out exactly where they were.
Perhaps it was the dust in the room beyond, or the stone shavings I had stirred up by moving the brick, but whatever it was, some of it ended up in George’s nose. And, tickling the boy’s nostrils, it triggered a violent sneeze in reaction. The windup to the sound was slow, drawn-out, almost theatrical in its presentation. But we were all too slow, too dumbfounded by the empty room, to act. And so, with his face pressed up against the wall, George sneezed.
The laughter from the other side stopped abruptly.
There was a moment of silence that followed, a listening, searching silence. In that silence, the hairs on the back of my neck prickled and my forehead began to sweat. “George,” I whispered. “Put the brick back.”
He stared, wide-eyed, through the break, and I had no way of knowing what he was seeing, but something was happening on the other side.
“The brick,” I whispered again. “Put it-”
I was silenced by a horrific screaming that emanated from the other side of the wall like the wail of a thousand banshees. The wall did nothing to block the ear-shattering sound. George, nearest the epicenter, clutched as the sides of his head and reared back, crashing to the floor. There was a sudden gust of liquid wind, ripping through the breach in the wall and crashing into the hallway around us, drowning us in its torrents and waves and extinguishing our sputtering torches. And the screaming only got louder.
The wind whipped around us, kicking up hordes of dust, and all the commotion seemed to focus solely on George. With a force like a summer thunderstorm or a winter avalanche, George was thrown against the far wall. The impact of it sent Franz, Freda, and I flying off down the halls. Perpetually buffeted by invisible air currents, we could do nothing but watch in horror as George was pinned to the wall by the air and bathed in a gray light that reminded me of the clouds outside. And once he was trapped there, we could do nothing but watch as the force reversed direction, and George was being pulled in through the wall.
The boy had his leg through the hole, somehow, his foot being drawn in first. He was on his back scrabbling against the ground to escape the sucking whirlwind. In the shadows of the dust and wind whipping around us, I thought I saw shadowy-pale hands grabbing at him through the wall.
“Help me!” the boy screamed, reaching desperately for anything he could get leverage on. He tried to pick up the brick that we had removed, but it was knocked away from his hand and clattered to the floor just out of his reach.
There was a god-awful tearing sound, the kind of sound that trees make twisting and rending in the wind as their roots are ripped out of the ground and bark is shed from trunk. But this was on a human scale, and it was happening to George. the sound belonged to George’s leg, being forcefully ripped off and sent asunder. I restrained myself from vomiting.
George screamed more now, with his leg missing, and grabbed ever harder at the ground to evade the devilish wind. But there was nothing he could do. Bit by bit, flesh by flesh, George was being sucked through the wall. As more of him disappeared, more of him fit into the space left by the brick, until it reached his pelvis and a stopping point. The wind, angered by being unable to yank him through the wall, drove more forcefully and screamed more deafeningly.
There was an explosion, and the bricks in the wall flew inward, pulled in by the wind and by George. Bricks and what was left of George scattered towards the dining room. But the wall giving out did nothing to assist in George’s plight, as the shattering rock cut him in a million different places, and only made the grabbing force angrier.
Franz, Freda, and I were able to shuffle our way over to the significantly larger smash in the wall, and stare out in gut-clenching fear as George was heaved into the air by the wind and smashed over and over into the ground and against the ceiling and tables. The poor boy flailed around like a rag doll controlled by an outraged child, and it would have been comical if it wasn’t for the viscera splattering from his body and covering every surface in the room. Somehow, a large drop of it even managed to reach Franz and splashed on his face.
Franz lost all sense of sanity. Screaming bloody murder, he leapt up and somehow managed to fight the supernatural wind enough to run down the hall, back towards where we came from. Freda soon followed, hollering at him to slow down and come back, but he wouldn’t be coming back here any time soon.
Struggling against the ever-maddening wind, I stood up and hurtled my way down the hall after the Brandts. I had to pass the opening in the wall straight-on as I rocketed on my way and slowed for just long enough to see George’s limp body being swung around as a gruesome flail. I prayed quietly to whatever was listening that George was dead and out of the misery he must have been in. If he wasn’t dead yet, he would be soon.
Spiraling headlong through the space behind the walls, with the sound of screaming creatures and wind at my back, the only sort of orientation I had for direction was the sound of Franz’s gibberish and Freda’s chasing after him. And after what felt like running for far too long, and still being unable to escape the sound of George’s tormentors, I stumbled upon Franz collapsed on the ground in hysteria with Freda crouched over him, doing her best to get him to calm down. She had wiped George’s blood off her face with her cloak.
“Franz, get in control of yourself!” She gripped his face in her meaty hands and pulled him close. From my vantage point behind them, I could see that Franz’s eyes were tiny and scared, darting about in mad fright. I peered from behind Freda, winded, and hoped that maybe my presence would calm Franz down in some way.
“Those things- they got George! They took him! Pulled him through the wall! He’s gone, turned to mush! Butchered like a hog!” Franz screamed in the dark hall, trying to be heard over the sound of wind.
“There’s nothing we could have done to help him!” Freda yelled into his face.
“It could have been any one of us! It could have been all of us!” Franz spasmed. “They’ll come for us. We’ve seen them! We know of them! They’ll get us all!”
“No they won’t!” Freda proclaimed. “They’re all the way back there!”
“Distance doesn’t matter here,” Franz said, eyes spinning in his skull. “A meter is a mile and a mile a meter. Seconds and minutes become hours and days. There is no true darkness here because even shadows are afraid of what hides within. We cannot stay in this place.”
I was unsettled by what he said, because while the voice speaking sounded like Franz, the context was not something the Franz I knew would ever say. And what he said about the darkness was true. Even without our torches, which had gone out when the wind attacked, I could still see decently well. Freda recognized this, too, and looked around wildly.
“We have to get back to our quarters,” she said. But she wasn’t talking to Franz. She was talking to me. And I noticed that, as she spoke, I could hear her more clearly. The screaming from behind us was slowing. I did not want to think about what that meant for poor George, but I even less wanted to think about what it meant for us. Franz could very well have been right; those things may have been tracking us down even as we spoke.
“Saelac, give me a hand, here,” Freda said. I shuffled over to the other side of Franz, where he was still twitching his eyes like a scared animal. Franz seemed to calm himself as well. Freda and I hauled him to his feet.
“Alright, Franz, we’re going to go back to our rooms now,” I said. “Follow me, alright?”
Franz said nothing, but Freda murmured encouragements to him as we hustled forward, light on our feet. In truth, I had no idea where we were or how to get back to the common room, but I wasn’t about to tell Franz that.
Our group, down one member and only two-thirds sane, trekked down the halls inside the bricks. When the path split, I trusted my gut when it told me which way to take, but I had little faith in myself after the ordeal we had been through. I hadn’t remembered the path splitting before.
My faith in my own abilities was bolstered marginally when I spotted a familiar shape in the distant hall. When we reached it, I saw huddled at my feet a pile of bones with a skull, head broken in, resting on top. I had never thought I would be so relieved to see something so macabre, but it meant we were near home.
What was less relieving was the fact that the place-marking torch was nowhere to be seen.
“Freda,” I asked quietly, so as not to disturb Franz, “do you remember which section of wall leads back to the common room?”
“Not really,” she admitted. I could see the sweat beading on her forehead at this revelation.
With Franz stammering behind us, Freda and I began to push at the bricks in the wall, hoping beyond hope to find our portal back to the world of things we understood.
For a second time, our luck held out, and as I pressed against a brick, it fell away from me and I was greeted by the sight of our fireplace, and in beyond it, a number of our fellow servants, gathered at a table and awaiting our return. I heaved a sigh of release and pushed the other bricks through to make space for us. The wind had stopped by now.
“Come on, Franz, we’re there,” Freda said, coaxing him to follow me as I made my way through the fireplace hole. As I crawled out, onto the other side, lit by torches and the eager faces of my brothers and sisters in service, I broke the question that was on my mind.
“Who moved the torch in the passages, the place-marker one?” I said quietly, glancing around at the people before me. My mother was among them, and she looked confused, and then frightened.
“I’ve been here the entire time,” she said. “No one else has been through the wall since you four left. No one moved the torch.”
“It wasn’t there when we got back,” I said, eyeing around the room, and then up at the rafters. “And if no one went in after us, then that means…”
“That means there’s someone else in the tunnels,” my mother finished.
Franz pushed himself out of the fireplace and collapsed before us. Freda soon followed, and she too fell to the ground. It took me a minute to remember, and took the others a minute to realize, that George was not coming back.
Is this chapter longer than usual? Maybe. Probably. I haven’t been running statistics on them, but maybe I should. That might be fun, to have a stats page at the end of all the Spectral Crown stuff. Whenever it is that I post them all, anyway! Thanks for reading.
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