Wilhelmina A Novella (9 page)

‘No, Wilhelmina, never. I had no idea that you were here of all places,’ Mr. Abberdean said. ‘If I had known…’

‘This is not the place for this conversation, Charles,’ the blonde urged.

I didn’t care what he thought of the moment, or its appropriateness. I may wake up in the morning and never see Mr. Abberdean again, and even if his eyes matched theirs and he was something inhuman, I wanted to hold him close to me as long as I could. Now, as he held me firmly, my life was better than it had been in more years than I cared to remember, since my father died.

‘You knew I was here, you wrote me letters,’ I sobbed.

‘I wrote them to your mother, but I never heard back. She must have forwarded them to the Elizabeth’s estate,’ he said, stroking my hair.

Eventually I calmed down in his arms, and he carried me with the grace of an angel. He laid me down to rest on my bed, and then he was gone.

I stared at the ceiling as I wondered if I'd dreamt it all, or if I had gone crazy. Working for the governess, the latter was the most believable scenario. But I had seen my love tonight, and his scent still lingered with me. I pressed my fingers to my lips, and tried not to think of poor Yvette's screams, still echoing through the mansion, or the governess’ true demonic face.

I thought of Charles Abberdean was twisted, and it felt monstrous of me to think ill of him, even after what I’d seen, but I clung to the thought of him with every last fiber of sanity I had left.

5. Untouched

Everything from the previous night felt like a dream, surreal and terrifying. As usual, I awoke just before dawn and went about my morning chores, such as waiting on Rhoda as she bathed, changed, ate, and then sent her off to the tutor. But most of my afternoon was free, and that was because I hadn’t seen Yvette. Her screams faded sometime in the middle of the night, and I feared for her life.

I couldn't help staring at Rhoda whenever she was near - partly out of pity, mostly out of fear. I was fearful for her life, and for the years ahead of her. Was that to be her fate as well? Was she to be auctioned off to a room of bloodthirsty demons and then left to die?

I couldn’t wrap my mind around what they were.
Were
they demons? Perhaps they were pieces of the devil himself, lurking in the night to stalk and prey on young women like Yvette. The governess was not human; she was like a living statue. The sight of her exposed face, the shattered fragments that were left of it at least, was something that would not leave my dreams. It haunted me, much like she did.

I knew that Elizabeth was bloodthirsty, foul, evil, and twisted. But what exactly
was
she? Her very existence eluded me.

I wondered how my sister Mary survived this ordeal, how she managed to survive the governess’ torture and ‘social gatherings’. My life in this realm of isolation and despair flooded behind my eyes, and things that
should
have been obvious to me became painfully clear. My sister Mary had been solved like a riddle as I recounted the last time I saw her, the night that Mr. Abberdean had left.

She was hot and pale with skin like smooth marble, and black eyes like Mr. Abberdean’s. It was suddenly and painfully lucid that Mary hadn’t survived this at all.

She was one of them.

Did our stepmother know? Did she know what was expected, what to anticipate from the governess before she'd sent her oldest daughter to live here? If so, then how could my father have ever married such a cruel and pathetic woman?

I thought of all this, and much more, as I wondered what was to become of me. A type of pain that I’d never felt before irked inside of me when I thought of Charles Abberdean being one of them, a demon of the night, a creature of death. And now I was his, I was to be subjected to the same treatment that Yvette received - to share her fate. Her beauty and innocence were violated in an unimaginable fashion. I had to watch it to believe it, and still I couldn’t convince myself that any of what I'd seen or heard was real.

As the day dragged on, I was uneasy and fretful. Mr. Abberdean and his friend said that they may visit me in the night. What if they did? What would they do to me? What would they expect?

I waited on Rhoda as she ate her supper alone in silence, and a sickening question came to mind. Just how many hours did I have left? My life had been full of hours - admittedly squandered - but now I realized that a limit had been put on those hours. Now that they were numbered, how many breaths equaled a last moment? How many heartbeats could be counted until the measure of my life’s thread was cut by the hands of my angel?

He was an angel of darkness now. He was still beautiful, and his words as gentle as his hands, but there was an undertone to everything he said, and every inch of me that he touched. That undertone was my demise.

I returned Rhoda to the ward and closed the door behind her so that she may change and go to bed. I locked the ward behind me and went up to the library to be alone. I couldn’t face anyone at the moment because I was too stirred, too unnerved. I couldn’t stand to be alone in my small room; I would begin to think of all of the dreams I would be losing if I did.

I wandered through the vast library, past row after row of old books, half of them I had read on my spare time. I calculated the prospect of running away. In my experience, running away from the governess hadn’t gotten anyone anywhere but under the soil in the nearby cemetery beside the small chapel up on Whesker’s Hill. Both times I ran for the forest I was captured before I could make it to total freedom.

Not long after the sunset Yvette’s screams started up again. At least I knew that she was alive and my prayers hadn’t gone unanswered, but I could only imagine what kind of torture she was enduring at the hands of the monstrous governess. Her heart wrenching cries of pain and agony were scraping away at my conscience and I held my hands to my ears, trying to drown her out with the poem that Charles had written for me.

‘Don’t think about her, Wilhelmina.’

I jumped at the sound of the voice, scrambling to my feet and clumsily backing away into a shelf. In the candlelight I saw their faces ghost into my view; the blonde with eyes like midnight, and my angel of death. I knew that they could catch me if I ran, but I couldn’t possibly sit down.

‘You’ve grown so much since the last time I saw you.’ Mr. Abberdean smiled.

‘You haven’t changed at all,’ I said shakily.

He smiled a bit, and avoided my eyes. They were blazing red, like this thoughts could bleed.

‘We shouldn’t waste what precious time you have left, so I’m going to ask you a few questions,’ Mr. Abberdean said.

He took a seat across from my empty chair and gestured toward it. I slowly lowered myself into the seat after his silent invitation. I couldn’t take my eyes off of his as he stared down at his hands. The other observed me from behind with sadness inside of his eyes. I wondered why he always looked so heartbroken.

‘You know what we are,’ Mr. Abberdean said. It wasn’t a question at all, it was a blatant statement.

‘I’m not entirely certain that I do,’ I commented as I adjusted my posture under his curious glance. ‘I know that your skin is like hot coals, and as hard as stone. I know that your eyes were black, but now they are red just the others’. You are faster than the eye can see, and… unchanging.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We are the Undying.’

‘What are the undying?’ I asked, cautious to whet my thirst for answers.

‘We, the Undying, are eternal creatures of darkness,’ Mr. Abberdean said, staring directly into my eyes. ‘We are vile, blood-lusting demons who prey on the weak and strong, the guilty and the innocent alike. We have no soul, and without the soul there is no humanity; without humanity our bodies cannot grow, or change, and neither can we. We are the snake who poisoned the apple, the decay that corrupts the souls of mankind, and we are victims of ourselves. We are damned.’

‘I think I understand,’ I said, clenching my fists. I couldn’t really make any sense of it, but in my heart, where the core of my fear welled like a coal-black pool, I knew what he was saying.

‘I’m going to kill you,’ Mr. Abberdean confirmed.

It was just as I’d feared. My life turned out to be nothing like I wanted it to be, not even remotely how I’d dreamt it would be, but I never thought that it would be over so soon, let alone at the hands of Charles Abberdean. It felt strange that my life should end in such a tragically beautiful manner. Tragic
because
I saw beauty in dying by Charles’ hands: therein rested the proof of the indignant senselessness of my infatuation with him.

‘After Charles takes your life, you will enter hell and beyond,' said the blonde man. 'Pain will be all that you see, all that you hear, all that you feel and breathe.’

Mr. Abberdean glanced over his shoulder and frowned at the man, but quickly turned his attention back to me, his eyes dark in the candlelight.

‘My friend here would rather see you die than become one of us,’ Mr. Abberdean said, almost apologetically.

The blonde lowered his gaze, silently, but he didn't commented on Charles’ remark.

‘Don’t fault him, he doesn’t hate you. It’s just that this isn’t a life he would have chosen for himself, or anyone else, for that matter. What the governess does disturbs him to the bone, so forgive his silence but he is still a bit shaken standing here in her home.

‘But if I don’t conscript you unto our black Incubus existence, you will die,’ Mr. Abberdean said. ‘Between the governess killing you out of jealous cruelty, or condemning you to hell myself, I cannot bear to think of the world without your existence.’

‘Mr. Abberdean,’ I began, but he quickly held up a solid frigid finger to my lips.

‘Charles,’ he reminded me as he dropped his hand.

‘Are you telling me that… ?’

I couldn’t utter the words. Just the thought of what he was telling me was too dark to speak with my own tongue.

‘Six nights from now I will turn you into one of us; I will consume your soul and drink your blood.’ He said. ‘Everything is in order, and I will take you away from this place. I promise.’

‘You’re going to turn me into a demon?’ I asked.

Charles nodded once, morose and sullen.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because Elizabeth will kill you, she’s planned to do it for years. She just hadn’t pinpointed the right moment until now,’ Charles explained.

I stared, frozen with the horror that strained my heart. ‘Why?’

‘Elizabeth was once the most beautiful young woman in her country when she was just a young girl, and she was soon to be married to a king. She was robbed of her innocence… as I will do to you… and she became a notorious succubus, vain and mischievous. However, she had an unfortunate run in with Pontius, and, as penance, her beauty was taken from her.’

‘Pontius?’ I asked. ‘Who –’

‘Some chapters of our world, and Elizabeth Bathory’s life, are best left buried,’ said the blonde with a forced smile. ‘I will not return to you after tonight, Charles; this mansion bodes ill for me.’

‘So why are you here tonight, if not to kill me?’ I asked.

Speaking with Charles like this felt eerie. I was no longer talking to by beloved Abberdean, but my murderer. Death in the flesh. And it was talking back to me.

‘To prepare you. To make sure that you have a chance to be who you want to be after this is all over,’ Charles said.

‘Oh,’ I fumbled. I was still trying to understand how I could possibly be anything other than a monster, like the governess, after this was all over. ‘This’, of course, meaning life, and when
this
was all over I would no longer be me, would I? No more the quiet servant girl with a slight defiant streak under her belt. I would be a creature of darkness, a stalker of the naive in the night shadows.

‘Would you give us a moment of privacy?’ Charles asked his companion.

The man nodded and bowed out, fading into the shadows. There were no echoing footsteps as his unearthly body left no din; he simply vanished.

Charles reached forward cautiously, and my first instinct was to shy away in fear, by my curiosity overshadowed those concerns and I watched, peculiarly, as Charles’ hands took mine into his hot stone grasp.

‘I want to apologize to you, Wilhelmina,’ he said.

‘You’ve done nothing to apologize for,’ I assured him after swallowing the anticipation building up in my throat. Every receptive nerve in my body flared at his contact, screaming
run! Run!
But I sat there with my hands cradled in his feather touch, looking deeper and deeper into those red eyes to try and understand how he could do it. How could he talk to me as though he were saving me when he was going to end my life and curse me? Did he truly believe my inexistence was worse than becoming one of the damned?

‘But I have,’ he sighed. ‘I knew this was what your stepmother wanted for Mary, but for you… I never saw this coming. I didn’t think that your path would lead you to this place. I thought you had more time, more hope.’

'Charles, please...’ I wanted him to stop and was ready to beg him to do so. I couldn’t take being reminded that my narrow, dead-end of a life had led me here. My hopes and dreams had all fallen through. What more was there to believe in? My life became work and servitude, and I knew that nothing more waited for me. If I tried to escape the wretched hand dealt to me, others would surely die. I had cost people their lives already,
good
people. I would have to live with that on my conscience for the remainder of my life, undead or alive.