THE HAUNTED KINGDOM 3, CHARLES E.J. MOULTON [best desktop ebook reader TXT] 📗

lights down the stairs. Thanks to them he didn’t even have to use a candle. The squeaking staircase alarmed his arrival, for soon Julian, still behind the bar and serving drinks, opened the door.
There were around forty candles now in the inn, lighting up the place.
Julian smiled.
“What a coincidence.” He stretched forth his hand. “We were just speaking about you.”
“I slept all right” Alexander said, returning the favour. “The food was good. May I?”
”Come down?”
Alex nodded.
“Yes, of course.”
Alex entered the inn and realized that ten of the candles were in and around the bar and that the rest of the candles had been positioned strategically about the place. The inn was not as full anymore. Belinda and her other family were there and Geena and Rolf and a lot of other people he did not know.
“Sit down by the large table.” Alex walked up and introduced himself. “Sorry that I was such a pain before.” The people at the table shook their heads.
“Don’t say that” Steven said. “We are the ones who have to excuse ourselves.”
Mustafus grinned. “Sit down!”
Alex took a seat next to Belinda and felt really strange about not knowing what to say to the dearest person on earth who didn’t know him.
There came mead and bread and Alex chatted and chatted, listened and chatted. Belinda was quiet all along and Alex felt odd not saying anything to her.
In the middle of the night, the party was breaking up.
The party said farewell and disappeared out the door, wished him luck with his endeavours as the door closed. The words of the old hermit at the top of the hill came back to him. The old codger had looked down into the valley and whispered sweet nothings into his conscience and these sweet nothings had come true. “Down there you will find what life would be like if you had not been born, boy.”
Why had he been taught this lesson?
Maybe it was because he shouldn’t take anything for granted.
He should treat all his children well, all his friends and family, and not just concentrate on one.
Alexander was left alone with his mead, not even knowing where Julian was.
He wandered about the place a few minutes, calling for him. He realized that Julian, wherever he had been earlier, had left all together.
At that moment the four lights started spinning toward the main door and Alex instinctively followed them toward it.
On the way, the stopped by a bowl of bread and Alex picked up a loaf and followed them out through the door, realizing that Mercutio was standing at the very spot that Alexander had left him a long time ago. The four lights hovered over the stallion’s head and as they did, the king fed him the entire loaf piece by piece.
In doing so, he still maintained that it had been a nice evening with nice food and nice mead, although there was virtually no reason to be happy about having been rejected by his most loved ones.
But Alex was now sure they were figments of his imagination.
Alex mounted and began following the lights down the road toward the first house.
Funnily enough, the experience had made him stronger. He felt free, knowing that he saving his country for Belinda, Sieglinde, his children and his subjects. But now another person had been added to that list.
He himself.
He was now added to the list of souls he was trying to save his country for.
He had to laugh, because he knew then and there the angels had simply told him to refer to himself first of all. That first and foremost saving his country for himself, loving people for himself, caring for someone because it felt good, was no crime.
He had shed tears that eventually turned into a rainbow in his soul.
It was an unusual way to tell him how to surpass his analytical nature but it was a good way.
He had received Youth from Fabian.
Magic from St. Michael.
He had received a Goal from Carla.
Now Julian had given him Confidence.
Following the four lights off to the first house, he wondered what St. Matthew would give him and whoever or whatever was waiting for him there.
Maybe it was freedom?

§

Someone in here was chasing her down the hall.
Again.
Someone with a black dress and fangs.
Someone that had appeared behind that wax candle next to the firestones after she had crashed down into the bed thinking herself dead, back in her bridal chamber.
She had almost no breath left when she realized, half way down the hall, her foot was bleeding, her dress caught in the crack of an open doorway. She grabbed the dress and started pulling, but it wouldn’t come loose. She pulled again, bent down, feeling sweat pouring down her brow, trickling down her cheeks and down her throat, past the wrinkles and into her cleavage.
Her greying hair was hanging in her face and so she put it behind her hair.
“Damn it!”
She looked behind her and heard that spirit coming closer, breathing acid on her neck.
It was running after her, coming closer and she was stuck with her dress in the crack of a doorway. This was an old dress that she had been able to squeeze into after going on that diet shortly before the living coma that they had been into by Nomed. The dress that she had worn on the second night of their honeymoon. She was surprised that such an old dress still fit her.
She pulled at it and realized that she had to rip it to save her life.
Sieglinde ripped it away from the door and a few pearls from the edge fell off, the satin ripping and the silk dropping to the floor. She was free and found herself throwing away her shoes and running down the hallway toward the Grand Hall. Whatever was behind her came from Lucinda’s old room that no one entered. Whatever was following her in this strange replica of Iuventus was out to get her. Again.
But this thing that chased her every damn night wanted only to
scare her and keep her alive.
Only to kill her later on when the time was ripe.
She heard the monster chewed on the chain above, hoping that it would not succeed in eating all of it. Sometimes at night she could feel the mansion sway and she would dream of how it was when she was a queen of a country before three plagues. Before the meeting with St. Michael, before her awful death.
She realized that she was alone. She realized that she was scared.
She realized she was falling. She stumbled, running forward and not being able to halt her speed. She slipped and fell, skidded and hit her head on the first step of the staircase up to the Grand Hall. She stood up and realized her right hand was bleeding. She rubbed it against her dress and began limping up the stairs.
She turned around and shrieked.
Lucinda was there, three steps down, all in black, her long hair curly, her eyes dark as the blackest night, her whites shining and glowing in the moonlight of the non existent moon.
Sieglinde fumbled and realized that the light of the full moon that always seemed to guide her where ever she went here had disappeared.
She knew there was a candle here somewhere on the landing.
She knew that light and dark interchanged here like night and day in the normal world. She knew that Lucinda had arranged a full moon with enough light for her to escape. But she also knew that she was a step above hell, hanging in a replica of her home from a chain guarded by something.
“Where … is the candle?”
Lucinda began wandering up toward her and the queen back up in the dark, seeing absolutely nothing now. She fell and fumbled up toward the landing.
She knew that the firestones, one of Rolf’s special inventions for the fast lighting of candles, lay next to the wax candle on the mid landing. She fumbled up toward the table and felt Lucinda put her hand on her shoulder. Sieglinde was crying as she took the firestones in her hand. The two hard flints touched each other twice, the metal clicking against each other on each side, giving off a spark and lit the candle. She took it and turned around and Lucinda was there, smiling.
Sieglinde rushed up, limping toward the large hall, knowing full well what she would find there. She saw only a meter but she did now this place so well that darkness was not a problem.
She felt Lucinda walk after her.
Why was she going up here?
Why not back to sleep?
And suffer nightmares and hear the demons cackling in the corners?
“Oh, Alex. Why aren’t you here yet? Save me. Wake me up.”
Sieglinde opened the large mahogany doors and immediately saw how the roof above the Grand Hall had been removed in favour of metal bars and a chain that seemed to lead up to some sort of stone staircase ending in mid air. She walked into the Hall, breathing heavily, and suddenly felt herself levitating, smashed onto something hard above her. She looked to her own knees and saw Lucinda holding her by her right hand and pushing against something wooden and hard.
She felt behind her and realized she was tied to a cross.
Lucinda was flying up toward the bars in the ceiling, grinning the grin of a thousand sadistic tortures, smacking her against the metal frames next to the thick main chain.
Sieglinde was scared of heights, so seeing this Grand Hall from above was a sight that almost stopped her own heart and made her want to scream.
She tried to scream at the top of her lungs, but nothing would come out.
Crawling on the floor beneath her she saw crawling animals such as toads and snakes.
On her other free shoulder she felt a claw grabbing her. She felt the devil oozing sweat behind her, Lucinda facing the cross in front of her. Below her mud and animals on the floor of the hall and at once she was not held by anything anymore.
She was free falling down toward the floor of the Grand Hall, feeling the wind against her face. The blood on her hands dropping faster than her and her ripped dress tickling her legs.
“Alex!”
Sieglinde screamed and screamed and felt herself disappear, the floor closer and closer.
“Where are you?”
The floor was closer now.
“Where are you?”
She crashed down and thought herself dead, but she realized that she had crashed down upon her bed in her bridal chamber. She was back in her room.
She breathed heavily, started sobbing and screaming. She looked at her shivering hands, they were bleeding. She touched her own hair with her with her bleeding hands, it was wet.
She got up out of bed and walked about the room, when she realized that someone was watching her. A wax candle was on her table and behind it was the face of someone of the living dead examining her with staring black eyes. It looked as if this person was sitting on the floor crammed together under the bed. It cackled.
She shrieked again and ran out the door onto the hallway.
Stumbling, screaming, shaking, breathing heavily,