“I wish to assassinate lab assignment 4.3”
Well, I was going to make a post this week about something or other. I hadn’t yet decided what it would be about or anything like that, but I didn’t even have a chance to think about it because my shitshow programming class snuck up and dunked my head in a pool of vinegar while I was distracted by my environmental club’s major Earth Week events. Last week was a pretty great week, actually, in terms of seeing friends and extracurricular activities; I went to a climate strike, I helped run a fundraiser that made $200 dollars by selling plants in jars, I said goodbye to someone before they moved away, and I organized a camping trip to Starved Rock State Park that was, in my opinion, quite successful. It was a pretty good week overall! Even if the world is dying and any actions we take individual are utterly meaningless in the face of capitalism and climate change and any sort of progress will only be made by the collective, I’d say I had a good time.
Except then I realized that I still have to finish what feels like eight separate projects for four separate classes before I graduate in less than three weeks (!!!), and now I want to take the concept of a research paper and douse it in kerosene before flicking the match off my ass crack. I am tired and angry and feel that no matter how hard I try, the world my children will inherit is bound to be a worse off one than we are in now, and I also feel that homework is a tool used by the upper class to forcibly instill an unhealthy work-life balance in students from a young age and that we are all pawns of the rich. But camping was fun, and although it feels insurmountable, I am slowly yet surely making my way through a backlog of projects despite a sense of zero motivation and the screaming of the void.
Anyway, point is that I’m tired and won’t be writing a whole new post, so here’s more shitty vampire fiction! Previous chapter here.
Spectral Crown, by Andy Sima: Chapter Seventeen
The young cook Ema, the grizzled sailor Kolte, the old maid Greta, and silent servant I stood in the faint light of the torches we held over our heads in that hidden passage in the walls. I could see a trail of blood along the wall that Franz must have left behind as we made our escape on that first expedition. This second trip was taking place less than twenty-four hours afterwards. Though it seemed like an eternity in retrospect.
“So, this is what these tunnels look like,” Kolte said, appraising the dusty, cobwebbed walls and shadow-matted ceilings far above. “I was expecting something more…”
“Unsettling?” Ema finished his thought for him.
“Let me show you something,” I said, and made my way down to the hall to the pile of bones that lay at the base of the wall, beneath the shackles. The skull sat on top, beaming like an old friend, with that ominous crack still marring the cranium. The four of us stood over it for a moment.
“I have seen dead bodies before,” Kolte said. “I once saw a man get caught in the riggings during a storm. He was torn in half at the waist, and I had to clean up the entrails. This does not frighten me.” I had suspected as much of an answer, and there was nothing I could do to make him take this seriously. If George’s death and Franz’s self-destruction could not convince Kolte of the serious nature of the castle, then no spooky skeleton was going to change that.
From off in the distance, far down the tunnels and towards the wall that George had been torn through, there came the sound of chatter and life. “We will go this way,” I said, and turned away from the skeleton and the laughter, back towards the hole in the wall that marked our crossing. It only occurred to me as I started to walk that I was moving in the direction of the lavatories.
“Do you know where you are going, lad?” Kolte asked as we started walking down the tunnels, passing the singular gap in the wall that represented our only known way back out.
“Do you want to the truth, or appeasement?” I said, peering ahead through the murky shadows with what little light we had.
“The truth, of course,” Kolte said. “I am not a fool.”
“The truth, then,” I said, sighing, “is that I have no idea where we are going, or where our lost comrades may be.”
Kolte chuckled under his breath, as he had done many times before. “I figured as much.”
“Questioning Saelac isn’t going to get us any closer to our companions,” Ema snapped. “He’s been down here more times than you have, Kolte.” Greta seemed to mutter something non-committal that might have been agreement, rejection, or a form of both.
“Ay, that may be true. But no man has truly been tested as a man ‘til they have survived a hurricane on a sailing ship. Have you done that, Saelac?” Kolte said.
“No,” I conceded. I suspected that Kolte was simply trying to put on an air of false confidence more for Ema and Greta’s sake than for his own. He couldn’t care less about what I thought of him, but he had a soft spot for Ema, disparate in years as they were.
“Do you wish to lead, Kolte?” Greta grumbled through her blackened gums. Kolte snickered again.
“I wish nothing of the sort,” he said. “I’m just an old man, along for the ride.”
“Let’s try and keep it that way,” Greta said, subtly swiping her torch in Kolte’s face so the smoke crept up into his eyes. He coughed gently, and rubbed at his tear ducts.
“Are you okay?” Ema asked him.
Kolte seemed to play at a smile on his lips as he said, “I’m fine, lass. Thank you.”
Silence followed, as we trundled through the ever-shifting darkness that was the tunnels behind the walls. I had no idea how far we had gone now, as perceptions seemed to shift and alter, but I thought that for sure we would have passed the lavatories and whatever grimy secrets they held. But I could not be sure and dared not hope we would evade them. From off in the distance, I heard scatterings of things that stayed just out of the light of our torches.
The tunnels all looked the same, and for a good while there were no branching paths, which made it convenient, because we could not get lost in the conventional sense. Lost in other ways, maybe, but at least we did not have to worry about turns, until we reached the first fork in the road.
The stone passage came to a sudden stop against a stone wall. The path split off into two directions, a perfect T, with one going right and one going left. Both were equally dank, dark, and damp, and were unremarkable in any way that differentiated them from anywhere else we had been.
“I say we take the left,” I said. If my internal compass was correct, the right path would have lead us closer to where the washrooms were, while the left might move us closer to the center of the castle.
“I have no qualms with that,” Greta said.
“Nor I,” Kolte admitted, “but how will we remember where we came from?”
I thought for a moment, in silence. It was a legitimate point, one that I had been puzzling over for a while now. Ultimately, it was Ema who found the solution.
“What we can do,” she said, “is take our torches and draw an arrow on the wall, in smoke. Much like a fire will leave soot stains on a pot, yes?”
“What a brilliant idea,” Kolte said, teeth shimmering in the dark.
“You mean like this, girl?” Greta said, and took her torch and placed it against the wall. She held it there, and gently blew on it while the smoke billowed upward. Soon enough, there was an ash-black marking on the wall of the tunnel we had come from. Experimentally, I rubbed at it with my fingers. They stained, but the mark held.
“Exactly,” Ema said. She added her own vertical line to the wall. Better more lines than too few, I supposed.
“Alright,” I said. “We have marked our path. We have made our decision. Shall we continue on?”
“Onward and upward,” Kolte said. Ema nodded, and Greta stared at me impassively, her wide, old eyes reflecting the firelight from our torches.
We took the left path in the cross of the branching T, and it looked exactly as unremarkable as every inch of tunnel before it. At least, that was my initial impression, but after a few moments of walking, I noticed a gentle downward slope to the path we had chosen. This correlated with a sinking in the pit of my stomach. We were moving farther underground and looping backwards. The stones around us were guiding our posse down a road that turned back on itself, directing us towards the T we had just come from, though a level below. We were headed back in the direction of the lavatories.
I silently cursed the castle, for some hidden, irrational part of me knew perfectly well that the looping back around was intentional. Reading my mind, my actions, and recognizing my fear of what I had experienced. But that was impossible, wasn’t it? Until I came to Castle Blestem, I had thought disembodied hands clinging to a toilet were impossible; nay, I had never even considered the notion. And yet now they had become my new darkest fear. The castle knew.
I could not tell my compatriots this, however. To relate my story of pale hands and ghastly sounds from beneath would call into doubt my own sanity, as no one else with me now had seen quite what I had seen. Neither Ema nor Greta nor Kolte had seen George obliterated by invisible hands. They had not seen Iacob speaking to a raven. And they most certainly had not seen the ravens that still sat in the rafters of our quarters. I wondered how good the hearing of those birds was.
Soon we had totally crossed back over and were now heading back towards what I had tried so hard to avoid. But it was not my internal compass relaying this information to me; it was the odor that soon began to pervade the very air we were breathing.
“What is that atrocious smell?” Kolte was the first to speak. He plugged his nose and held his torch out in front of him, slowing down and hoping he would be able to see whatever it was that had so offended his nostrils.
“I had thought it was you, Kolte,” Greta said. And she kept walking forward. Ema and I looked at each other in shock and glee, and after overcoming our deep urge to laugh, we made our way forward and caught up with Greta. Kolte was left speechless, standing with his mouth hanging open for a moment before regaining control of his senses.
There was silence after that, and the smell grew more and more pungent. After hearing the roaring from the sewers, I imagined an enormous monster made from the waste we left behind. Hopefully this was far from the case.
At about the point where the smell became nearly unbearable, the tunnel opened and the walls that had surrounded us dropped away. We were surrounded in darkness, and as I extended my torch around us to see what kind of room we had walked into, I realized we were on a bridge spanning a seemingly-bottomless chasm.
The path itself had not widened at all, despite now lacking walls, and the roof had receded higher still. Straining my eyes against the darkness, we all looked around before us, and I saw that the room was roughly cylindrical, with the stone bridge spanning its middle. I looked up, and noticed pinpricks of light in the ceiling, stars spinning in the cosmos above. Sometimes, however, these bits of illumination would go dark for a moment or two, and I would hear something hitting the chasm far below. I realized where we were, and I realized that the motes of light were just depositories for waste.
We were on a bridge above the castle’s enormous chamber pot.
“Is this foul room what I think it is?” Kolte said, his face a mask of revulsion.
“Indeed it is,” Greta answered. Despite all reasoning otherwise, her face had taken on an aspect of disgusted awe and wonder.
“How deep do you think it is?” Ema asked. It seemed like as good a time as any to use the extra torches I had brought, so I removed one from my waist belt and lit it with my own. Holding the torch over the edge of the bridge, I waited for some sort of acknowledgement. The faces of my companions were busts of unease and apprehension, but a nod from Greta gave me the go-ahead. I dropped the extra torch over the side of the bridge, watching it tumble and fall through the rank air around us.
It fell for a long time. We watched its descent until it was swallowed by the castle. And then there was quiet splash, a sound that would have relayed distance to a trained ear. And then came the roaring, the same roaring I had heard earlier when I had knocked that awful hand into the pit.
Now that I was closer to the source, I heard not only the roaring but also a sort of splashing struggle, as if whatever huge thing lived down there was not only screaming but also thrashing about wildly. Perhaps trying to find whatever it was that had entered its abode.
“What in God’s name is that?” Kolte whispered breathlessly.
“I have no idea,” I said. I spoke far too calmly for anyone’s liking.
We continued across the bridge, one torch less. Every so often I would peer over the edge of the bridge to try and see if anything was even recognizable, but no light shone down far enough to illuminate the sludge I was sure had to be at the bottom.
“Why does a bridge such as this exist anyway?” Ema asked.
“What do you mean?” Kolte said.
“I mean, why bother constructing an elevated platform above such a chasm? Do the Blestemats bring honored guests down here to show them their mastery over nature?” Ema answered.
“Perhaps this was not always its intended use,” Greta said. I could not fathom another use for the room in its current construction.
“Perhaps so,” Ema said. But it seemed that she could think of no alternatives, either. I privately thanked the powers above that none of the holes in the ceiling were situated directly above the bridge.
Upon reaching the other side of the bridge, the path entered back into the wall and we gratefully found ourselves again enclosed between stone, moving on a gentle upwards slope, away from that rancid room. I thought again that this was all part of the castle’s desire to unhinge me. To lull me into a sense of false security. Or was the castle just as dead as any other piece of stone, and I was already losing it?
The tunnel curved back around, twisting in on itself, so that by the point we reached the next junction, I had lost all sense of orientation. But at least we knew how to mark our path.
The split, this time, was shaped more like a Y than a T, with two options forking out, a snake’s tongue of choices. Neither gave any indication of what lay at the end, or what we might encounter on the way, so it did not matter what we chose. Just to be different than last time, I suggested we choose the right path.
“The last time you chose,” Kolte said, peering down the hall, “we ended up at the bottom of a dump.”
“Do you have a better suggestion?” Greta needled. Kolte bared his dirty teeth.
“We can go right if you want,” he said. “I just thought I would make the point.”
“Your antagonism will get us nowhere,” Ema said. “Why do you have to be a hassle?”
Kolte threw his hands up in mock defense. “Excuse me,” he said, grinning. “I don’t see you leading us.”
“I don’t know where I’m going any better than you do!” Ema said. “At least Saelac has some experience.”
“And what experience that is,” Kolte said.
I had been ignoring Kolte for the extent of his speech, and had instead been testing the air with my nose, to see if I could catch any hints of the hole we had just crossed. Whatever path we chose, I wanted to be certain that it did not place us at the bottom of the pit this time. Despite my best attempts, I could divine no difference between either path. The part of me that suspected the castle was alive thought that no matter which way we went, we would end up where the castle wanted us to be, anyway.
“I still say we go right,” I said. “Are there any further objections?”
“I made my point, I believe,” Kolte said. Ema rolled her eyes. Greta simply stared at me.
“Then we shall continue,” I said. And, without the need for a reminder, Greta and Ema took their torches and made marks on the wall to mark our path.
We made our down the path on our right, getting closer to what I hoped was the heart of the castle. Maybe, by some stroke of luck, we would manage to find our lost comrades and find a way back into the great hall or the throne room, or perhaps better yet, find a way to reach the Uradel royals. As loathe as I was to admit it, some of the more reasonable court members may have listened to and understood our plea. Whatever that plea would be.
Will I have time to write a post next week? Will I get a good enough grade on my city paper to feel like I matter, or will I realize that attaching self-worth to grades is a recipe for disaster that I’ve been cooking for the last 20 years? Stay tuned next week for either more spooky monster tunnels or an existential implosion, the only possible outcomes at this point. Or something about birds, probably. And the stakes have never been higher…
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