Music Box (The Dollhouse Books, #4) (2 page)

In desperation, I pick myself up and sprint toward the trees. High-pitched snarls whip through the air. I hear Cassie as she screams out
no
over and over and over.

There’s no chance of making it. The panthers will be on top of me, ripping me apart within seconds.

And Cassie will be left with the monster that is Balthazar.

––––––––

C
ASSIE

I fled from the church, toward the gate that led to the moors. The sound of the panthers was terrifying, but I would throw myself to the same fate as Ethan. There was no hesitation within me.

Balthazar appeared at the gate. He stopped me—sending my body directly up into the air. Closing my eyes, I willed him to send me over the wall. But I felt a sharp release, and I dropped to the ground.

Zach and Parker’s fathers came running to grab me.

Balthazar was gone.

“Knew that kid was trouble when I first saw him in the dollhouse.” Parker’s father smoothed ragged black hair across his balding forehead.

The ghost, Armand, strode out from the darkness. “We don’t need to worry about him now. Hear that? Silence. The cats have taken care of him and are feeding now.”

I stiffened, my mouth open and quavering.

Ethan was dead. In the worst way possible.

Because of me.

Wrenching myself away from the men, I raced for the second gatehouse—the one that opened onto the cliff. Stones skittered underfoot as I reached the gate and flung it wide open. The endless darkness yawned below. A few more steps and I would fall.

My mind was black, numb, gone. My body was winter. I would smash like ice on the rocks below.

Rough arms gripped me as my foot slipped over the edge, pulled me back into this world. More people came—both ghost and human. All come to do Balthazar’s bidding.

I was taken back into the castle and down the steep stairs to the dungeons. Was I to be locked up here? Had Balthazar given orders that his bride was to be kept from his sight? I held fast to that thought.

I was led into the room with the marionettes. The marionette-maker looked up from his work, curiosity in his eyes.

“Voulo, we require passage,” Zach’s father said.

The marionette-maker made a sweeping gesture toward a trapdoor set into the floor.

Bending on one knee, Zach’s father heaved the door up. Dirt cascaded into a twisting stairwell.

My knees were as stiff as the wooden legs of the marionettes that hung upon the wall.

“We must not keep the monseigneur waiting.” A large hand grasped my shoulder—a hand belonging to Armand, a hand that didn’t feel human.

Coughing in the dusty air, I put a shaking foot onto the stairs. I descended into a cold darkness. The others followed.

At the bottom of the stairs, arched corridors branched off like a rabbit warren.

“Keep moving,” Armand told me tersely.

I stepped along narrow corridors that were so devoid of oxygen my head grew faint—ancient corridors carved from rock and earth. Gnarled, rotting tree roots threaded their way along the walls like veins in an aged body.

We travelled deeper, deeper into the twisting diseased body of the castle. So far down that the brackish, coppery smell of the sea met my lungs.

The men took a detour through a thick wooden door—into a small, roundish antechamber. It held nothing but a wooden stool and table, a cracked mirror—and through a door—an ancient toilet. No one spoke. Beyond the chamber, night air ushered in through a wide opening. Ahead, a narrow walkway spanned across the outside of the cliff.

My captors stopped dead still, staring at me intently—their mouths opening in anticipation.

“This is where we leave you.” Mr. Baldcott’s voice cut the still air.

“I stay here?” My voice shook.

“No. This is where you will take your meals and attend to yourself—there will be clean attire and a wash basin. But this is not where you will spend your time. Ahead is the ocean passage. You will cross it and continue on, until you reach the chambers of Monseigneur Balthazar Batiste.”

My throat dried and swelled. “And if I don’t?”

His dark eyes needled me. “If you don’t, he will come for you. Should you try anything stupid, such as killing yourself, we will go back on the marriage agreement and send the serpents back in full force to the bay, and ensure that every last man, woman and child at the museum is obliterated.”

A nightmare vision of all those people—including Sophronia, Nabaasa, Frances and the comatose Molly and Aisha—flashed through my mind. And Ethan—Ethan would die alongside them. “I made no marriage agreement to marry Balthazar—that was an agreement to marry Zach!”

“You are in no position to make any kinds of demands. You should feel grateful that we’ll still be sending the serpents away from the area of the museum.”

Hate rose inside me like bile, leaving a bitter taste in my throat. “You wouldn’t do anything that didn’t benefit you.”

“The affairs of the castle are none of your concern. The women of La Falaise do not interfere or have a say in what happens here. That is how it has always been here and you should remember that.”

Zach’s father’s expression was impassive. “I didn’t want you as the bride of my son, but for you to have become the bride of the monseigneur is insufferable. Who are you to become the lady of the chateau?”

I met his gaze. “Then you should have stopped it.”

“It is not my place to challenge our glorious monseigneur.”

A cry bled from my throat. “You are all monsters. You brought an innocent girl to the chapel and let her die....”

His fleshy mouth tightened. “Etiennette is the mother of my ancestors. She belongs here.” He paused briefly. “Now it is time to go. Monseigneur Batiste is waiting.”

I turned to Mr. Baldcott. “Molly has just become your daughter-in-law. Surely that means something and you will ensure no harm comes to her. She’s not going to take my imprisonment down here easily and she might try something dangerous.”

Mr. Baldcott’s roundish, button-like eyes studied me for a moment. “She won’t have long to ponder on your imprisonment, as you term it. You will recall the pre-marital tests you both undertook to report on your respective states of health?” He raised his eyebrows. “The tests for Molly were returned positive for acute leukemia. It is incurable. She’ll be dead within months.”

My heart fell through my chest. I backed away from him. “No.... that’s not true.”

He sighed loudly. “We researched her past and discovered that the leukemia was found and treated during the weeks she first came out of her coma. The cancer went into remission. Until now. Of course, it is a crying shame that the marriage between her and my son had to take place, but I do not question the will of the castle. The only condolence my wife and I have is that she won’t live long enough to pass on her defective genes to any offspring.”

The last hope in my mind flickered and went out. Molly would not live on. She would not find a way out of here. I had sensed Molly was holding something back from me—always brushing aside my concern over her being ill. But I hadn’t suspected... had never thought... that she was dying.

Taking my arm, Mr. Batiste led me toward the walkway they had called the ocean passage. “I took you down the chapel aisle for my son. Now I send you to the monseigneur.” He handed me his lamp.

The people left—my nerves jumping as the door thudded shut behind them.

I stepped onto the ocean passage. It was a long balcony that clung to the side of the cliff, open to the weather and sea air. Far above, the castle walls reached all the way to the overhanging tower. Below, the uncaring ocean crashed. My hands clutched the stone railing of the walkway and I was unable to make myself move in any direction.

For minutes, I stood, completely alone. Everyone I had ever loved was gone. Black winds whipped around me, but I barely felt them.

A voice crawled through the night.

Cassandra....

Balthazar called to me through the stone walls and corridors, his voice slow and hissing.

Come....

My body trembled uncontrollably, revulsion bleeding into my skin.

Numbly, I moved toward where his chambers lay.

At the other end of the walkway, the passage plunged down. My breaths grew ragged and brittle. Massive arched doors stood at the end of the passage, tree roots growing over them—doors that no one had passed through for centuries. With a series of groaning cracks, the roots broke away. The doors fell inward like a mouth—cold, stale breath rushing out.

Each step brought me closer.

Each step took me further away.

My lamp snuffed out, pitching me into complete darkness. One by one, dim lamps flickered alight around the cavernous space inside Balthazar’s chambers—the horror revealing itself piece by piece.

Two empty cradles standing side-by-side.

A set of tin soldiers on a shelf.

A decayed doll on top of a set of heavy drawers.

Strange, fantastical devices.

Torture machines—the same as in the dungeons—and worse....

An indistinct blackened figure sitting with his back to me at a wide desk, writing with a quill.

Bile rose in my throat.

Come....

Another lamp lit up.

I saw a four-poster bed with ragged curtains. A marriage bed.

My intestines turned to ice water.

Come....

My body crossed the threshold. But my mind was away, screaming in silence over the vast reaches of ocean.

The air thickened with earth and decay.

In a dark recess, too far to see clearly, some kind of cabinet spanned the length and breadth of an entire wall.

I moved as far away from him as I could, toward the cabinet. The cabinet was made up of sixty or more compartments, twenty compartments wide and three rows high—each row taller than me. Each door was framed with wood and held tight with a lock, the glass darkened with age. On a wall that stood in front of the cabinets, beside the baby cribs, a large wooden board held dozens and dozens of single keys—every key distinctly different. The keys had to be for the cabinet.

Two more lamps lit up, one on either side of the cabinet.

Girls stood trapped within the cabinet doors. Girls in dresses of centuries past.

A keening sound emitted from my throat, my breathing scattered and frantic.

My face stayed frozen in place as my gaze dropped to my left shoulder.

Breath, hot and raspy, brushed my shoulder’s skin.

“Doth thee like them?” His voice was dry and hollow like bones. He appeared beside me.

A single thought tore through my senses.

Run....

But there was nowhere to run.

No escape.

Trembling, I backed away.

“Such beauty. Young for all time. Look, look how fine and lovely they art.”

His leathery hand reached under my chin, guided my face around.

I stared at the girls—girls with pale skin and olive skin and skin of deep brown, and stiff hair of black and yellow and red.

Breath eased from my lungs. They were not real. Their faces were crafted and painted to look alive, but they were not alive. I could see wooden joins in their arms—strings hanging from their limbs.

Marionettes.

A giant curio-cabinet of marionettes.

“They art carved from the tree of the walnut,” he whispered. “Such smooth, fine wood. They look so lifelike, no? Just as they did when they be flesh and blood.”

My gaze swept across them. So many girls, filling over half of the cabinet’s compartments. Such a strange collection.

An arm was missing from one of the marionettes. A bone hung loose from her shoulder—a human arm bone.

My mind eroded, my mouth open and quavering.

“Yes, yes,” he breathed, “this one needs repairing. The wood is but a shell encasing my sweet brides and it is delicate. It breaks, just like them. Jacques wilt come and carve a new limb for her. And she wilt again be whole.” His skeletal finger ran down my arm. “Look at your husband.”

A thought tore through my mind—a thought of the old man in the dungeon room—I’d seen him repairing a life-size marionette on the first night of the
désorienter
. He must have been fixing one of these dolls, dolls which were all human skeletons beneath their thin veneers of wood.

Shaking, I obeyed Balthazar and turned to him.

He stood in his wedding suit—a charred phantom. “It is right thee shalt fear me. I am a harsh husband and thou must never displease me.”

He reached his clawed hand toward a compartment that held a girl with dark eyes and hair. “My Etiennette. Is she not beautiful?”

She was the girl from the chapel, the fifth bride. Turning my head away, my breath caught painfully inside my chest.

“She had skin like a pearl and eyes of coal.” His fingers raked my shoulder. “Thou dost remind me of her. There is something of her in you. But thou skin is like morning sun on the moors.
Vous êtes belle
.” A long sigh rattled through him. “Ah, so beautiful but so fragile. Etiennette, she broke herself upon the rocks below the cliff. Should thou do the same, I wilt have thee brought back to me and I wilt keep thee here for all time.” He raised his hand high. “I bind thy spirit to me. Thou wilt ever be mine.”

Bile burned my throat.

I imagined throwing myself from the ocean passage. The blessed relief of cool black air. And death.

But once the castle had the second book in their possession, they could have me brought back here from a hundred different earths, each girl undergoing the same terror I felt now.

No, it had to start and end with me.

He let his hand drop from my shoulder. “I am weary, my Cassandra—I cannot be the husband now that thee hath need of. I must rest and await my new body. Then we wilt share my bed and our loins, and you shalt bring forth a child. And I shalt again seed the world with my progeny.”

His finger trailed down my cheek. The black slit that served as a mouth grinned. “At the death of the months of the
été
, I wilt come to thee and thou shalt receive me.”

I stared at the grimy stone floor, unable to speak or move.
The death of the months of the été
meant the end of the summer months. In three months’ time, I would be forced to be with him in his bed. I prayed that fall would never come.