The Autumn Castle (25 page)

“The crow? Eisengrimm?” Mayfridh was tempted to defend Eisengrimm, to blurt out that he was her closest friend in Ewigkreis,
but perhaps that could wait for later.

“Yes, the crow. I was in the front garden. You were with the Starlight girl next door. I could hear you laughing at the top
of your lungs, and I was thinking about what a beautiful sound it was. I swept the previous night’s light snowfall from the
path, singing a song in my head. A shadow passed over me, and I looked up to see a crow sitting on a low branch. My heart
jumped. I watched it for a few wary moments, hoping it was just an ordinary crow . . . but then he spoke.

“‘Diana Frith, you owe Queen Liesebet something.’

“‘I owe her nothing.’

“‘If you pay her what you owe her, she will give you this pouch.’ He reached his beak under his wing, and with a flash there
appeared a red velvet pouch, strung on silver thread. He hung it from his claw in front of me.

“‘I don’t want anything from her.’

“‘In this pouch is medicine. The smallest grain will cure any illness instantly. When you hand over your daughter to Queen
Liesebet, this pouch will be yours.’

“‘I don’t want it,’ I said. I blocked my ears with my hands and ran inside, locking the door behind me. When I peered out
the window, he was no longer in the tree. I breathed a sigh of relief, but an instant later he was at the windowsill, and
he called out, ‘Be sure that I will come again.’

“I stopped going outside. I stopped letting you play at Christine’s. Remember? I made her come here instead. Alfa Starlight
began to think I didn’t like her. I tried hard to keep myself together. I couldn’t speak to James about it, I couldn’t speak
to you about it. I had to keep it all inside and protect you from the crow.

“Early one morning, while you were upstairs napping and James had left to go to the doctor, I was sweeping the front room
when I heard a tapping at the door. I presumed it was Christine, she was always in and out of our house. I opened the door
and a mad flapping of black wings sent me stumbling back into the room. The crow perched on the hanging light. Pale sunlight
and a bitter winter breeze stole into the house, and the curtains swayed gently.

“‘Get out!’ I hissed. I didn’t want to attract your attention and have you run downstairs to see who I was talking to.

“‘Diana Frith, you owe Queen Liesebet something.’

“‘No, I don’t. Leave me alone.’

“‘If you pay her what you owe her, she will give you this pouch.’ Just like the last time, he reached his beak under his wing,
and this time pulled out a blue velvet pouch. ‘In this pouch is gold dust. The smallest grain will transform instantly into
any amount of money you name. When you hand over your daughter to Queen Liesebet, this pouch will be yours.’

“‘I don’t want it, I don’t want it. Now get out. May’s my daughter.’ I brandished my broom and shooed him outside, but as
he flew away he called, ‘Be sure that I will come again.’

“Moment by moment, I felt a strange relief. He had come twice, enticing me with treasures, and he had been unsuccessful. Unsuccessful.”
Diana held her index finger up, a strange smile of wry cynicism on her lips. “I thought, May, that I had won. For certainly,
if it were in her power to steal you from me, she would have done it by now. That’s what I thought.

“Weeks passed. I grew more and more confident. Then, late one night, I was awoken by the sound of Mabel barking in the back
garden. Yap, yap. Something had disturbed her. I knew instantly it was that crow. And I knew too that I wanted to go down
there and tell him I wasn’t afraid of him and his stupid queen. James was beginning to stir, so I said, ‘I’ll go down and
quiet her.’ I slipped out of bed, and into my dressing gown and slippers. I crept downstairs, and through the house, and out
the back door. Mabel ran to me and cowered behind my legs. I scanned the cold garden in the dark, looking for the crow, but
couldn’t see him. Then his voice came from above me.

“‘Diana Frith, you owe Queen Liesebet something.’

“I looked up. He was perched on the gable, another pouch hanging from his claw, his eyes gleaming in the dark. ‘I owe her
nothing,’ I said boldly, ‘and you know that.’

“‘Queen Liesebet wants the child.’

“I scooped up Mabel. ‘Let her have the dog. That’s all I ever intended to give her anyway.’

“‘My queen has no shortage of dogs. It’s a child she wants. She is barren.’

“‘No! I’m not giving you my daughter, and I don’t care what you’ve got in your magic pouch this time. You can’t take her,
and you can’t convince me to give her up. So just go.’ I released Mabel and scooped up a handful of pebbles to throw at him.

“He flapped his wings and rose up, dropping the pouch, and took to the sky. I quickly seized the pouch and peered inside.
It was full of nothing but crumbs. With a swoop and a flutter, he dived past me and snatched the pouch with his claws. ‘Be
sure,’ he called as his shadow passed the moon, ‘that I will come again.’”

Diana closed her eyes. The vertical furrows that surrounded her lips deepened. “And, oh,” she said, “he came again. And he
took you.”

“How soon after?”

“Three weeks. Long enough for me to think I had won. Long enough for me to think that you would stay with me forever. But
you didn’t . . .” Her voice trailed off to a whisper.

Mayfridh leaned forward to take her mother’s hand. “Mum. I’m here now.”

“But for how long?” Diana’s head snapped up, her gaze locked on Mayfridh’s. “I’ve been watching you since you arrived. You’re
nervous, you’re wary. You don’t intend to stay, do you?”

“I . . . don’t have long. I’ll have to go back to my own world.”

Diana shook her head and said softly, “
This
is your world.”

“Not anymore. I’ve become . . . something different. Tell me about Dad.”

Diana dropped her gaze to her hands in her lap, her fingers obsessively smoothing her faded skirt over her thighs. “He left
me, May. After you had disappeared, when I kept insisting you had been taken by faeries, it all became too much for him. His
illness was declared cured and he wanted to return to England. But I didn’t want to go, because I thought you might still
come back.” She smiled a pained smile. “So he went without me, but I was right to wait, wasn’t I? If you had come looking
today and I hadn’t been here . . .”

“I’m glad you were here.”

“Was it awful, May? Was it awful for you being in another world, so far from me?”

Mayfridh chose her answer carefully. She and her mother had so little time together, there was no point in trying to explain
to Diana how quickly she had been forgotten. “Liesebet and Jasper treated me very well. They loved me, and I grew to love
them.”

“How long have they been dead?”

“A very long time now. Many years,” Mayfridh said solemnly.

“Then why didn’t you come back earlier?”

“I didn’t . . . it’s not always possible to make a passage between your world and mine.” Mayfridh didn’t want to reveal that
Diana had been forgotten.

“You’re determined to go back, then?”

“I have no choice. I’m the queen.”

Diana’s expression was unreadable; somewhere between heart-wrenching disappointment and beaming motherly pride. “Of course,”
she said, “you’re the queen.”

“But I’ll stay as long as I can,” Mayfridh said quickly. “I’ll stay until the last possible moment.”

—from the Memoirs of Mandy Z.

I
have only once boiled a faery alive in my vat.
I had been living in Berlin for eight years, enjoying every moment that I drew breath. I set up the gallery and then the Zweigler
Fellowship fund, and found that more and more of my sculptures were selling to galleries and private owners all over the world.

Beyond my wonderful public life, I had a delicious secret life that saw me drive off in my van two or three times a year to
scour the forests of Germany and the newly opened countries of eastern Europe for faeries to kill. I often came back empty-handed,
but I didn’t mind so much. The disappointments served to intensify my enjoyment of those rare and special kills. I would kill
them quickly, bundle them into the van, then bring their fresh bodies back here to my apartment, back to the vat for boning.

The vat is well hidden—upstairs through the sculpture room, beyond a small door and up another flight of dark narrow stairs—in
a room I had purpose-built in the attic. The gabled windows are painted black, but two bright hospital-strength fluorescent
lights are installed in the ceiling so I can always be certain of what I’m doing. The vat takes up half of the room. If I
were to walk around it, I’d need eleven big paces to arrive back where I started. The vat itself is at hip height, constructed
of thick black metal. The liquid inside—a cocktail of ghastly chemicals, which I’ve refined over the years to be perfectly
suited to stripping faery bones—takes an hour to reach its optimum boiling temperature. When the motor that heats the elements
starts up it can be frighteningly loud, so the room is soundproofed floor to ceiling.

Above it all, on the ceiling, there are two metal struts with aluminum cable running through them, attached to an iron cage.
I took my time in designing the cage. It’s large enough to fit a body bent or cut in two, and inside it is spiked with iron
hooks to catch the smaller bones so they don’t escape and fall through the holes. I load the body at the side of the vat.
There are two large rubber buttons there. When I press the top button, the hydraulic mechanism pulls the cage into position
above the vat; when I press the bottom one, the cage is dropped directly into the boiling acid. Because the room is soundproof,
because it takes so long for the vat to reach boiling temperature, and because there is a danger of overboiling (if the vat
overflowed into the shell and heating elements I could very well be electrocuted in my own home), I have two lights positioned
above the door to the boning room. The top one flashes when the boiling temperature is reached, the bottom one if the temperature
becomes critically high. (The fool who installed the lights and buttons for me made one of red and one of green so I could
distinguish them. Me! I can’t tell red from green any more than I can tell yellow from purple.) Four or five hours after immersion,
I have a cage full of faery bones, stripped of their flesh and robbed of their scent. When they cool, they are ready to begin
working on.

The faery who deserved boiling alive was a rare local find. I was out at Kreuzburg, enjoying a meal in a tavern, when he walked
in alone and bought a beer. I was sitting so far at the back of the tavern that at first I didn’t know what he was. I noticed
him only because he was very beautiful, even for a faery. I kept glancing at him, wondering if he were a movie star or a model.
It was only as I paid for my meal and collected my coat that I smelled him—that horrible, wonderful smell. He noticed me staring
at him, and gave me an inviting smile.

“Good evening,” he said, his accent thick and French. “I’m Octave.”

I was astonished that he was so forward. I know I do not possess a friendly countenance, and I was almost certain that my
stare had not been amiable or pleasant. Then, a half-second later, I realized he had mistaken my gaze for sexual desire. And
he was encouraging that desire.

How easy, then, it was to get him back to the hotel. He was a faery on an erotic mission, not afraid of breeding with humans
(the results can be disastrous) because his sexual proclivities were toward the male of the species. Filthy, disgusting creature.
When I brought him to my apartment, he fawned and preened like a teenage girl in love, and I endured his first caresses and
his gooey-eyed gazes without shuddering, only by reminding myself in every moment that earning his trust would mean he would
soon be material for my sculpture. Within minutes I had him blindfolded, with promises of erotic play, and I led him through
the door and up the stairs to the vat, which I set to boiling with a clunk of the lever. I had a number of tools at my disposal
to bludgeon him to death first, but I was so inflamed with rage by his sexual advances that I wanted to punish him.

I pushed him into the cage and now he started to panic and flail about, but the door on the cage was snapped shut, and then
he began to scream. I wasn’t afraid of his screams; the room is perfectly soundproof. I left the cage suspended over the vat
and went downstairs to bed to doze for a while until it reached boiling temperature. He was still screaming when I returned
an hour later. I almost changed my mind and recalled the cage to silence him, but I was curious as to what it might feel like
and sound like to boil a faery alive. Instead of hitting the top button, I hit the bottom one and the cage descended into
the vat.

The screams intensified and were almost too much for me to bear, but then they stopped abruptly and I found myself strangely
disappointed. My ears rang. The vat bubbled and boiled. I switched off the light and went to bed.

When I finally harvested the cool bones a day later, I was still plagued by the ringing in my ears. What I first assumed to
be an effect of listening to Octave’s deafening screams I now deduced must be an ear infection, and I phoned my doctor for
an appointment the following day.

I cut and shaved and glued the bones into a block, which I then glued to the Bone Wife. This block was the original waist
for my Wife, sculpted in a white heat while my ears rang and I congratulated myself on such an unexpected and successful kill.

It was only the next day when I returned home from the doctor—he gave me antibiotics at my insistence but was unconvinced
there was anything wrong with my ears—that the trouble started. I was in my apartment, making phone calls and ordering supplies
for the studios, when I heard the sound of someone crying far away. I barely registered the sound at first; I thought it was
a child on the street, crying for something lost. The crying intensified into long gasps of anguish and finally shrieks. It
jangled my nerves so I went to the window to look down on the street and call out to the child to stop.