THE HAUNTED KINGDOM 2, Charles E.J. Moulton [free children's ebooks online .TXT] 📗

somewhat extreme” his majesty spat. “You left the trace of historical whimsy all across the ether. Adolf, Nero, Caligula, Jack the Ripper, Kennedy, Vlad Dracul, Cain and Abel. I know that Lucifer adores you and so he should. This is just too much. Did you try to gather our attention because you were left alone?”
“Yes” she spat. “I am a demon, but also a woman. I need attention.”
“You received a big blow from your brother” Adnicul grinned.
Lucinda sneered. “I received my brother’s confidence.”
He raised one eyebrow. “He positively hates you.”
“He loved me” Lucinda shouted. “Belinda hated me. Remember that I appeared as Nomed.”
“You made love to his daughter.” He laughed. “That confidence is as short lived as an arctic spring.” He gritted his teeth, grabbed her throat and pushed her against the fireplace. Her back arched against it and it hurt her a great deal. “I'll tell you what it is to me. It's time. Your time wasted on my expense.” He sneered and pushed her even harder against the wall. She moaned. “You keep forgetting that I created you. I didn't create you to set fire to California, dine with Ghadaffi or kill J.F.K for the fourteenth time. I didn't conceive you make a dimensional tourist as a companion.”
“Did you conceive me at all, Adnicul?” she asked. “If you did, why do I then have the feeling that everything is slipping through your grasp?”
He pushed her closer to the wall and now she closed her eyes and frowned.
“You are a virus in Eden.”
She cackled. ”That is not the issue, your majesty. You are not in control. Someone else is.”
She paced the hall and grinned at him, passing the tapestries and moving chairs away from tables. “You are a wimp, a faggot, a lousy little marionette entitled only to pee juice. You only awaken disgust in me and nothing else.”
“I carry out what is meant to be” Adnicul sang. “No one can do that but me.”
“You are only a marionette.”
Adnicul took Lucinda by the hand and flung her across the hall. She skidded across the floor,
ending up by a window. “You rat, you peace wrecking little crumpet. I was here before you.”
He went up to her. She was rubbing her knee. He picked her up by the wrists.
"I owe you nothing! Let me go!"
He pushed her and she fell on the floor. He sneered and walked up to the window. She grabbed her throat and looked down, catching her breath. “Es scortum obscenus vilis. Irrumator …”
She stood up, blood running down the side of her mouth.
He glanced up to the guillotine that stood by the large left window. He pointed at it and looked back at her. "Is this your future? Souvenirs from a revolution? Blood from a royal throat?" He ran across the room, his cape swinging behind him, over to a knife that was lying on a table. "And what is this? James Kelly's murder weapon from 1888? Should I care?" He walked up to her and pointed at her cleavage. "20th century lingerie?" She said nothing. "Victoria's secret?“
"Wonder bra!”
Adnicul laughed. "Well. Aren't you happy you met Karl Lagerfeld?”
Lucinda said nothing. She only looked down.
“I'm talking to you ..." He shook his head and turned away. I could rip you up just like Jack did ...” He snapped his fingers and at once they were in Mary Jane Kelly's room in 37 , Dorset Street , London, England , 9 November 1888 . It was a sight that Lucinda had seen innumerable times before. It was mutilation of severe magnitude. Adnicul looked at Lucinda. “You want to look like this?” She shook her head. “GOOD! Then I guess we are making progress!” He snapped his fingers again and they were once again back in the castle. “Let me tell you something, Lucinda!” He shook his head, looking for the right words to say and raised his right hand. “You have forgotten what revenge is ... You have forgotten why we are here. Alexander hates you. He loathes you. And yet he knows that all you wanted was a family. He has forgotten you. You are his waste. Do you really want to be his waste? You must lust for it. Don’t feel as if you should have your revenge against me, sister.” Adnicul smiled. "Avenge yourself. Hate Alexander.”
“I know that you are playing a game with me, Adnicul.”
“Then what is this about? This time travel thing” Adnicul murmured. “What is it to you?”
His eyes turned yellow and Lucinda looked into them, seeing Vlad and Caligula and Adolf and Ghadaffi and Idi and Saddam and Stalin and all the torture-instruments of the entire world rolled into one. She liked what she saw and, yes, she wanted revenge. Yes, she wanted revenge more than anything. Revenge. "Look into my eyes and tell me what you see!" he whispered.
She saw her ‘family’ laughing and joking. She saw them eating and drinking and singing. She saw Alexander in his castle receiving guests, she saw him speaking to his senate and receiving applause. She saw Belinda kissing her loved one and Alexander sleeping next to his wife. She saw Alexander's children rolling in the grass. She saw them and knew that they never ever talked of her.
She felt betrayed because she knew that when they did speak of her it was with hatred in their hearts and she wanted vengeance for it. Then she saw a picture of herself on the wall, the kin were throwing arrows on her face and laughing when it hit her nose.
"Our vengeance will not be fast and painless.”
“What about Fraytollah?” Lucinda grinned. “They found out about how we forged ships.”
He turned to her.
“We shall avenge it in due time.”
He turned around and walked toward the window.
“Where are you going?” Lucinda cried.
“To meet up with a certain apocalyptic rider” Adnicul smiled. “War is on the verge.”
Adnicul entered the whirlwind and disappeared again.
Revenge on betrayal. Revenge on family. Revenge on love.
“Not long now, Lucinda” she told herself. “The ball is rolling.”
"Joy" she said and paused, looking into the blurred vision the crystal ball was showing of a happy family reunion in the Grand Hall of Iuventus Sacrum. "Damn bliss! Those prissy fools."
Suddenly, she stood up, screaming and knocking back the throne. She shook her head and laughed. She paused. She stopped and stared into the flames of the fireplace. She pranced round the room like a dark dragon looking for a victim to punish, her glittery and black dress flying behind her. Then she stopped, ran to the table and crashing her long fingernails into the wood and tearing long tracks into the wood: “She might crash the party ..."
Her voice dropped an octave, turning into a growl while her mouth opened wide, displaying snow-white ivories on the blood red canvas that was her lips, its left side cocked upward into a snarl.
"Now, your destiny has come to haunt you, old man! I will avenge myself on all of your happy lives, for letting a sister cruise the darkness while you prosper in ... joy! There is another master. You cannot scare me, Adnicul!”
Lucinda looked up to the painting above the fireplace that showed Iuventus Sacrum as it had been thirty years earlier, raised her glass and drank. She belched and raised her glass in a toast: " Here is to you, you pompous ass!" She turned to the windows. She flung them wide open, outside raged a fierce thunderstorm, the thunder ear deafening in volume. She screamed at the storm at the top of her lungs, her dress fluttering and her hair flying, her fists crashing themselves bloody at the window-pane. Suddenly, he was there. It was not Adnicul anymore but the other one, the bigger one, and he was smiling. As she had loved him for a thousand years, disobeying every rule he had given her, now as a small revenge he had implanted pure hate into her black heart and made her wait.

Belinda’s bedroom, Saturday, October 13th, 1425 A.D.

Belinda was sitting with her son Alfred in the nuptial bedroom.
She was sitting on the bed, wearing her favorite light blue summer-dress, leaning against the wall. Her son was in her lap. In her hands was a book. It had been her's before Alfred's, Alexander's before Belinda's and Patrick’s before Alexander's. It was a large rectangular, handmade book with a big painting of two young children on it. The two children were a little older than Alfred, who had turned two years old that year. The two children were walking in the forest. They were lost and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind them.
The girl, dressed in a red and white chequered dress with a bonnet and an apron, had a surprised expression of joy on her face, looking at the breadcrumbs on the ground. Breadcrumbs that the boy was leaving. He was dressed in gray leather shorts and a gray cotton hat with a red feather. He held a basket in his left hand and it was filled with breadcrumbs. He pointed self-confidently to the ground, as if saying: "You see, little sister, we will find our way back!"
The trees behind them were alive and looking at the siblings. Some of the trees looked happy and gay, like gleeful uncles. Some were morose and sad, some angry. Behind one tree was a witch. She wore a hat, a large brimmed black one with a pointed top. Her dress was black and long and she wore a large belt. Her face was warty and old and her toothless smile gave the whole story away:
Two children are walking in the woods, away from their house, and leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find their own way back, but a witch finds them and lures them into her own house in order to make them fat and eat them. She lets the cat eat the breadcrumbs first.
The story ends happily, with the father killing the witch.
Above the picture was a title:
Hansel and Gretel.
Under it was written:
Old Prosperanian Folktale.
The fashion on the picture was undoubtedly Prosperanian 12th century, the kind of clothes you would've found at that time in Clurafar. The tale was from the 4th century, early Wandiffian and apparently a true legend. True because two kids really had gotten lost in the woods and captured by an evil woman. But the difference was that the children were killed in the true story. Legend because the story had been altered in the last thousand years.
Belinda read to her son, who fascinated looked at the pictures:
"... and so, the two children walked out into the forest.
'How will we find our way back?’ the girl exclaimed.
“Can you see the girl there, Alfred?"
Alfred looked at his mother and smiled, pointing at the girl. "Uh-Huh!"
"Good!" Belinda said and patted him on the cheek. "See ... She is holding her bonnet in her hand ... Do you know why?" He shook his head. "It is so hot in the forest. It is summer." He nodded again and pointed at the text.
"Read!" the boy exclaimed.
His mother Belinda began reading.
“They did not awaken until it was dark night. Hansel comforted his little sister: ‘Just wait, Gretel, until the sun rises, and then we shall see the crumbs of bread which I have strewn about, they will show us our way home again.’ When