Prologue - The Curator
The Raegaard Gallery of Arts & Antiquities. Nine Months Ago…
Her skin was as soft, pale, and flawless as a white-petaled rose bathed in perfect moonlight, and she had these big, red, radiant eyes the intense color of garnet flames. There was something not quite human about her, though. Something surreal. The shape of her face was… exotic. It didn’t look as if she was born and grew but was sculpted.
She was a living work of art, breathtaking to behold.
Long scarlet tresses fell down the sides of her face, tied and braided with ribbons of black lace dotted here and there with decorative pearls. The rest of the woman’s hair draped over her shoulders and down her shapely backside.
She could turn heads and bring a room filled with conversation to a silent standstill, the old curator knew. To his shame, he found himself incapable to denying her allure the first time he saw her, earlier that evening. His one saving grace, his one lingering thread anchoring him to his better nature, was his devotion to his beloved Olivia.
As unnervingly tantalizing as the enigmatic, red-eyed woman was, he knew her to be nothing more than a predator seeking to make him her prey.
A beautiful monster is still a monster.
⁂
‘I should have closed it behind me! I should have locked the damned door,’ he thought. Somehow, during his panic and desperation, his keyring was misplaced. ‘How in the Divines’ names did I lose the keys?’
The frazzled old curator of the Raegaard Gallery of Arts & Antiquities rushed down the cramped and darkened stairs leading from the main corridor into the storage cellar, terror flushing icily through his veins. His throat felt tight, as if he were choking upon his own timeworn heart as it tried to flee from the dreadful presence that stalked him.
‘Who is this infernal woman? What the devil does she want with me?’
With his pulse hammering frantically beneath his temples, his flight down to the chill dark of the storage cellar made him snag cobwebs and disturb decades of silty dust. His eyes burned dry and itched sorely, nostrils dripping and clogged shut, forcing him to gulp and wheeze the stale cellar air through his mouth.
The man’s long, thinning hair fell down the front of his face as he turned with a start to glare behind him. Back up atop the darkened stairs was a wide-open doorway, and beyond was a corridor where strange shadows crisscrossed against the opposite wall. Pale moonlight filtered between the boughs of windswept trees as it flowed into the museum through soffit windows and skylights.
The motion within those shadows mesmerized the curator as he stood half-way down the stairwell, terrified that she was looking down at him despite seeing no sign of the woman. It was her laugh that drew him to a sudden, jerking stop.
Whoever she was, the woman was dangerous.
Her voice was wicked, sinful, and sensual. It echoed through the gallery and clung to the air like the sickly-sweet smell of death. It haunted him, the woman’s laugh. It was vaguely melodic, teasing in a way that brought to mind some cruel, clever beast toying with its defeated prey.
When the laughter came to a stop, so too did its echo. The silence was sudden, like a rush of nothingness. Gooseflesh rose upon his forearms and a tingling sensation coursed through his body. With a startled gasp, the old curator to spun around and rushed down those final few stairs. Distracted by his inner horror and the thunder of his heartbeat in his ears, he misplaced a step and felt the heel of his shoe slip ahead of its edge. His calf clattered and scraped down the rough-sawn wooden stair tread. Lungs bereft of wind, he gagged and yelped involuntarily.
The back of his head thumped against several of the steps as he slid down toward the rough dirt floor of the cellar. Instinct drove him to get himself up, immediately, but an agonizing twinge of pain lanced up his right side from his hip to the pit of his arm, driving him back against the floor once more.
As he lay in a daze upon the cool, coarse earthen floor, he coughed and spat, gagging on the rheum gathered in his throat.
The laughter returned, then.
She was closer.
He reached up with both hands to clamp them against his mouth, smothering his labored breathing and trying to stifle a series of sneezes.
‘Your sensitivities, Hal, I swear,’ he recalled his wife saying many times, before. ‘They will be your death, someday.’
The old curator peered into the cellar in hopes that his vision to adjust to the darkness, but the space was awash in a shapeless murk of gray and black. The welcome memory of his beloved wife’s voice made him sob dryly.
He wondered if he would ever speak with her, again… or see their daughter, her husband, or their two girls.
Ana and Aria. They were only four years old, his granddaughters.
‘Will they even remember me?’
Reclaiming his composure, he struggled to up to his hands and knees. He wobbled, and that stab of pain in his right flank had only grown worse. Taking care with his every movement, listening intently for any sign that his tormentor was drawing near, he leaned his weight into a loose banister rail at the landing of the cellar stairs.
His attention was affixed upon the open doorway atop the steps. It was the only source of light, but he would rather be in total darkness than stand, paralyzed by his fears, just waiting for that dreadful woman to find her way down after him.
Wiping his eyelids with the dusty knuckles of his thumbs, he tried to clear his vision once again. There was actually a touch of light eking into the cellar from a series of narrow slit windows that lined the uppermost edges of the wall to his right. It was enough, just barely, to indicate the vague shape of a deep rack of shelves.
From there, he was able to guide himself into the shadows, informed by his memories of the last time he had been down there. The woman’s voice so terrified and tormented his mind that it conjured nightmarish manifestations of the old man’s most dreadful fears.
In the implacable darkness, the curator soon realized that no matter where he looked, whether his eyes were wide open or clamped tightly shut, her face… her smile… her eyes… they were always there.
He could never escape her. He wasn’t willing to admit it to himself, yet, but from that first gaze into those crimson eyes of hers earlier that evening, he somehow knew that his fate was sealed.
⁂
Earlier that evening…
The Raegaard Gallery of Arts and Antiquities had been Alon Halford’s great passion for nearly forty years. As the museum’s curator, he had spent much of that morning and afternoon in earnest preparation for a gala set to be hosted within the gallery that evening. It was a point of pride for the old fellow to ensure everything was perfect… or at least as close to perfection as he was still able to achieve.
He had promised his wife, Olivia, that he would consider retiring that summer. It was only a few short months away, and this gala would be the last major event he would be there to oversee. It meant a lot to him, leaving with his head held high, so he had rededicated himself to his work. His desire was to hand off the reins of the curatorship knowing that his meticulous research and attention to the most minute of details would be his legacy.
Despite the vitality of his role in ensuring that the fete was a success, Alon tried to fade into the scenery and avoid drawing any attention away from the exhibits. If he could have made himself invisible, he might well have tried to enjoy the din and spectacle for himself. However, he settled for remaining available and attentive, but out of sight. He set aside a small space to observe unseen just off the gallery floor in the shadows of a terraced alcove filled with flowering plants.
His sensitivities betrayed his presence, however. They were a seasonal condition that arose each year amid springtime. He had a fit of sneezes that drew the gaze of a few passing gala attendees, as well as their subsequent laughter at his expense. Excusing himself and shuffling further into the shaded space, away from view, his attentions were suddenly drawn to seek the source of a strangely enticing sound… a laugh of a wholly different kind.
That was when he saw her for the first time.
She stood across from where he hid himself away, within a verdant alcove of flowers, ferns, and desert succulents. With the silk-gloved fingers of her left hand, she cradled a flute of pink-gold sparkling wine. She was smiling and looking directly toward him, gliding the tip of her right forefinger along the rim of the glass.
No. She wasn’t looking toward him… but rather into him… as if her gaze could slice a path through his eyes and peer into his very soul. For some strange reason, he imagined her speaking to him, even feeling a faint whisper tickling against his ear. There were no words… just a strong sensation that something was communicated between them.
Then, a small group of fete-goers pushed past between the unusual woman and the transfixed curator. As they continued onward, the space she occupied was vacant. He couldn’t find her, anywhere… at least not from his place of seclusion. Unable to keep himself still, the curator strode out into the gallery proper and looked toward the gala attendees, hoping to catch a glimpse of the woman. Perhaps, he thought, she had joined the small group as they were passing through.
She was gone, though, and he became rather crestfallen. Guilt and curiosity danced in his mind. He couldn’t escape those enrapturing eyes… that enchanting laugh. He was ensorcelled by this strange woman, and she lingered in the edges of his mind for the rest of the evening.
After the last of the visitors departed the gallery, the old curator locked the entry doors and took his nightly stroll through each of the exhibit chambers. He stripped off his stuffy overcoat and loosened the cinch of his belt by a few notches, allowing his gut to settle after a long day spent holding himself stiff and upright.
“Retirement,” he said, smiling to himself between wheezing breaths, resting upon the stool usually attended by one of the gallery’s armed security guards. They had all been sent home to their families at the curator’s insistence. He could handle the locking up, dousing all the oil-fed lanterns, and making the final rounds before heading home, himself.
The Raegaard Constabulary took over watch of the museum grounds once its doors were closed each night, and he saw a pair of the stalwart fellows in passing as he locked the doors, earlier.
Satisfied with his brief respite and deciding that he had done enough work for one day, Alon Halford stood from the guard’s stool and rubbed his lower back, feeling a series of pops and clicks as he straightened himself once more. Any time he sat or let himself remain still for even a moment, his old bones, joints, and muscles seized up. It seemed like every day it took him just a bit longer to get himself moving again.
Suddenly, the air seemed to shift, as if a stray gust of wind burst through the gallery. A sense of unease gripped the curator. He felt as if he was being watched.
‘Was that… is someone there?’
He stopped, holding his breath for a moment, and blinked into the darkness.
“Hello?”
There was no answer save for an anxious chill along his spine and a tense, unsettling silence.
Alon Halford was a man of sixty-six years, and he had spent more than forty of those years working in the gallery. He knew the place more intimately than his own home, and in all his time there, he had never before felt such an unanticipated rush of air blow through the building.
He shook his head and smiled to himself, trying to assuage his nerves and convince himself that the experience was a mere trick of his exhausted mind. As little as he wanted to admit it openly, his Olivia had the right of it. He was getting far too old for nights like this.
It was time to retire.
Then, as he reached for the keyring at his belt and withdrew it, there was something unsettling amid the tinny clink and jingle of the keys. Another, more distant noise could be heard, as well. A tapping of some sort. Hard bootheels against polished oak floorboards… and more.
He heard a voice. A woman’s voice. Her voice.
“Hello?”
He looked into the dimly lit exhibit room nearby, where he believed the voice may have been coming from. The space was dedicated to exotic pottery, ceramics, and porcelain artwork. There was no answer, so he cupped his left hand over his mouth and raised his raspy voice, repeating the question.
“I say, hello?”
Again, nothing.
The curator’s eyes were drawn toward a crude piece of art more precious to him than any that hung upon the museum’s gallery walls. His granddaughter Ana’s work… it was a depiction of their entire family standing in front of their humble home. Ana was clutching her housecat, Moo, in her arms, and Alon was holding hands with Olivia.
The sun was smiling down upon them.
A nauseous, sinking sensation gripped him deep within his guts. He considered opening the door and leaning out into the night, calling for the constabulary to come within and help him seek out the source of this mysterious voice. Then he imagined the jeers and ridicule of the young constables, chasing after the mere phantoms of the old man’s sleep-deprived mind. Placing the keyring back upon his belt, he grasped the handle of the lantern he had left upon the security podium, lighting it anew and raising its wick as high as he could before its flickering became a nuisance.
He then set off to look into the matter, himself.
“The museum is closed, I fear,” he called out, inwardly cursing his dulled senses.
His eyesight, while perfect for the purposes of examining works of art up close, had grown soft and unfocused when peering into the distance. His sensitivities to dust and pollen had mall but robbed him of his sense of smell, and they tortured his lungs as well. These were the ravages of far too much time spent amid dust and moldy old things, he knew.
For the past few years, old Alon’s every breath was accompanied by a faint sound that his other granddaughter, Aria, described as a mouse tiptoeing up and down violin’s strings. She would rest her ear against his chest and listen, giggling at the congestive timpani rattling within his lungs. The same sound that so worried Olivia curled that little girl’s mouth into a sweet, silly grin.
He smiled as he thought of them.
‘Think on how quickly they grow, Hal,’ he could almost hear Olivia saying. ‘Life’s true treasures aren’t in that museum you hide yourself in, day and night.’
There it was, again… that strange sensation that he was not alone. The voice also reemerged. It was faint and formless, but he somehow knew it was hers.
The red-eyed woman.
Grimacing, he held the lantern out in front of him as he entered the pottery exhibit. A few hours earlier, he recalled having to shoo away a couple of vaguely important nobles who were drunkenly chasing one another about. They knocked into a few of the protective brass bollards surrounding one of the curator’s favorite pieces.
‘Exhibit 223. A ceremonial hydria steam whistle of Idrahli origin, dating back to the Late Anthys Dynasty, nearly three-thousand years ago’ he thought to himself, his voice reverent and lyrical in his mind.
He approached the tall, slender urn of amber porcelain at the center of the space, peering into the elongated distortion of his own reflection in its glassy surface. He memorized and rehearsed his knowledge of each artifact and work of art he was responsible for out of respect for the piece and pride in his work.
Half again as tall as Alon Halford, the exceedingly rare ceremonial urn had scalloped handles slung low enough to have long poles fed through for servants to carry upon their shoulders. It was thought that in ancient Idrahaal, such vessels were filled with water and hung over a ritual fire.
Steam would build within the urn and force air through a series of reed-filled holes, creating a soothing, ethereal sound meant to serenade the spirits of their recent dead and funnel them into the heavens upon a rising plume of whimsical, melodic mists. The urn was too precious and fragile to risk its survival… but Alon very much wished to see and hear it in action, just once.
The nearer he moved to the urn, the more he noticed an erratic, unsettling motion in the stretched shape of his reflection. He came to a stop, but the reflection… it kept moving. Changing.
There was something else there. Behind him.
The woman?
He spun with a start, knocking into one of the plush, silk-sleeved ropes that were suspended between the protective bollards surrounding the urn.
“What… who? Who’s there? Who is it! I demand you stop this and show yourself this instant!”
His voice cracked and chirped with panic, and his eyes darted back and forth from one shadow to the next, but there was no one.
Nothing.
Suddenly, he felt a breath crawling across his cheek from behind, the soft, warm moisture of a woman’s lips just barely sweeping at the lobe of his left ear. He screamed and stumbled to his right, tucking his chin down against his chest and swatting the air impotently.
Her laughter was everywhere his eyes didn’t look. It stayed behind his peripheral, no matter which direction he frantically swept his head about, and it was not jovial or genial. She laughed with menace. She laughed to fuel his mounting terror, whoever she was.
Scrambling away from the last place he felt her, he tripped and rolled his ankle, falling hard onto the unforgiving flagstone floor. He could still feel her… and her sweet fragrance lingered in his nostrils, despite his diminished sense of smell. Vanilla, perhaps. Or tea leaves. Or perhaps the juicy flesh of a ripe, succulent stone fruit freshly peeled and split and running slick and syrupy down his chin…
He shuddered and groaned in disgust at invasive, salacious thoughts that forced themselves through his mind. She laughed again, as if she planted those thoughts, herself. Her voice was provocative and repulsive all at once… and he couldn’t escape it. He hated that there was a part of him that didn’t want to.
He closed his eyes and was assaulted with a barrage of vivid imagery. Her lips. Her chest. Her inner thigh.
“Stop this! Stop this, I beg you, please!”
Fumbling about to regain his footing, he decided that it was time to set aside his old-man’s pride and alert the constables after all. There was an unusual twinge in his hip from where he landed atop his keyring. He reached down to retrieve it but to his great horror… it was gone. The keys were missing, somehow.
He looked back toward the floor where he fell, and he noticed movement behind the urn. A slender arm in a white lace glove reached out with a long, dainty finger outstretched, the loop of the keyring hanging and being swished playfully left to right. The arm withdrew, but the curator was determined not to let the woman out of his sight. He sprang forward, grasping for the keyring.
Gone, again. The laughter resumed. She taunted him as the silvery hairs upon his arms and neck stood upright.
He sped toward the doors, the pain in his hip worsening with every footstep, and tried the handles despite knowing for certain he had locked the door earlier. They would not budge without the keys. He was trapped with a bewitching devil… a beautiful monster, both cunning and cruel.
Spitting a curse, he began to pound the bottoms of his tightly curled fists against the surface of the doors, hollering desperately, “Constable! Help, please! Please… help me!”
The only response forthcoming was the woman’s laughter. Its echoes seemed to assault him from every angle. His heart raced as he turned to place his back against the doors.
“What do you want with me?” he cried out. “Who are you?”
He began considering whether he could force the doors open. They were as deep as his hand was wide, and they were secured by a lock made of hammered iron plates thicker than his thumbs. It would take a man half his age and twice his strength to have a prayer of knocking the doors open.
The gallery’s windows were all protected by wrought iron bars, but perhaps, he thought, if he broke one and shouted at the top of his lungs, the constables on patrol in the area of the museum would hear his pleas for help.
He steeled himself as he neared the security stall once more, kneeling to reach for the polished birchwood handle of a decorative parasol that was left behind by one of the gala attendees earlier. He would need to return to the pottery exhibit to reach one of the windows, and that meant approaching the last place he had seen the strange woman.
Holding the parasol before him as a fencer would his foil, he began to take slow, measured steps through the corridor leading into the exhibit chamber.
“Whatever game it is you are playing, young lady, it needs to end,” he shouted. The woman laughed again, and somehow her voice seemed both near and far at once.
He spun about rapidly as the woman’s voice seemed to draw close by, then whisk past him. His arm shifted the parasol in a wide arc, colliding noisily against a display table. The impact caused a collection of Nohri stone thimbles to clatter and spread across the flagstone floor of the gallery.
He cursed, biting the inside of his cheek, and the woman’s jeering took on a self-satisfied tone.
Rushing to the nearest window, he stabbed the tip of the parasol against the leaded glass repeatedly until it cracked and began to shatter. A whisper could be heard directly behind him, and a series of eerily pleasant kisses were planted upon the nape of his neck.
“They won’t hear you, love.”
He yelped and turned to face the source of the voice.
Again, nothing.
He quaked and sobbed in terror before he screamed out through the broken window, “Please, Constables! Anyone! Please help me!”
Somehow, he knew she was right. Nobody would hear his cries for help.
He ran through the corridor between the ancient pottery exhibit room and a display of centuries-old armors and weaponry. This chamber was a bit more luminous, with a domed ceiling of mottled glass allowing the moonlight to bathe the space in a cool, blue-white glow. Still clasping his hand tightly around the wooden handle of a parasol, he was haunted by the laughter of the woman who had thus far only shown herself in momentary flashes, in reflections, or in his periphery.
Still, he felt an icy print of her lips lingering upon his ear and at the base of his neck. He wiped at his skin with his fingers, trying to free himself of the sensation. Like her laughter and her strangely exotic fragrance, he could not escape the ghosts of her touch.
He rounded the display of a skeletal stag wearing Ilrasi leaf-weave barding. Even in the grips of his dread, he found his mind repeated details he had memorized about the display. It was a catharsis for him… anything to rid himself of the prevailing, lascivious nightmare clawing its way into his soul.
‘Exhibit 812. A paragon of Ilrasi ingenuity from the Lepetyne Ligra. Ilrasi magics commune and coerce the growth of hearty plants into the shape and form they desire, like this stunning piece of leaf-weave barding worn upon the skeletal remains of a famed tricorn stag believed to have been ridden into combat by the legendary aelfen ranger-queen, Arestarch Radamna, the Aureks’ Bane.’
He came into view of the Effigy of Llosvaard, an ancient kite built in the shape of the dragon that once plagued the Old Nohrlanders during Frostwroth Era. He began to conjure up his memorized notes about the elaborate display, finding that doing so helped to tether his thoughts in the here and now. However, seemingly in response to his temporary reprieve from her incessant torment, the curator saw the woman lingering near a totemic display of Nasanois braided helmets and feathered headdresses.
She couldn’t leave him even a moment’s peace, it seemed.
She was breathtaking, and despite his every fiber resisting her allure, he could not help but come to a sudden stop in his tracks and take the woman in. She was curvaceous... not thin in the slightest, but shapely and voluptuous, with a frame draped in sheer black silken fabric that shimmered in the faint blue-white light cascading down from high above.
She was facing away from him, looking up into the vacant helmet of a Warrior of the lost civilization of Nasanois. The armor hailed from the Fall of the Great Tree of Nasanois, over a thousand years in the past.
He only realized that he had been holding his breath when he began to faint, gasping and clutching at his chest. She didn’t acknowledge him. She seemed to be preoccupied by the helmet, as if it bore some personal significance to her. The bare heel of one foot clacked upon the flagstone tile of the floor as she tiptoed with the other foot, reaching up to seemingly place a gentle kiss against the chin-plate of the helmet.
He backed away, wanting to look anywhere but toward the woman… wanting to flee and find someplace to hide, but terrified that letting her out of his sight would grant her leave to pursue him once more.
In truth, he hadn’t a single idea what to do.
It seemed to him as if the woman were in some sort of pain, the way she mournfully traced her fingertips along the ancient armor. As frightened as he was, the grandfather within him wanted to comfort her, somehow.
Clearing his throat, he was prepared to speak with the woman, but he hadn’t any idea what he would say to her beyond asking, once more, why she tormented him so. He saw her head turn slightly at the sound of him. The red of her eyes then shone out as she glanced his way. They glowed from within, somehow, as radiant as starlight.
Then, he blinked just once, and she was gone from his sight. She didn’t move. She was simply there… then not there. He noticed, however, that something of the woman had remained, after all.
Her shadow… her reflection… they were still painting the display of ancient Nasanois artifacts in darkened tones and strange, morphing shapes.
The curator gasped as he felt a rush of wind billow up from behind and beneath him, shadows and reflections whipping about and disappearing behind him as a pair of gentle, pale-skinned arms as warm as the sun in summertime wrapped themselves around his waist.
One of the hands inched its way up his chest, black fingernails crawling up his belly like the legs of a spider. He felt her breasts crushing into his shoulder blades. He felt her lustful hunger… predatory and lethal.
He lurched forward, twisting at his hips to wrench himself free from the woman’s clutches, then spun about to face her.
Nothing. No one.
He was alone, again.
The curator saw something move in the corner of his left eye, drawing him to look toward his reflection in a pane of protective glass covering a collection of Idrahli bucklers and tower shields.
She was there, in the reflection, as if she stood in front of him. She beckoned him with her fingertip, curling it toward her as the image faded and he felt her hands once more, one slipping beneath his left arm to softly scratch little circles over his heart, the other slipping up to tease his hair as it fell down the front of his face.
“Please…,” he closed his eyes, weeping in fear of the strange woman, ashamed that he found her touch, her smell, her heat not entirely repulsive. He was a married man, and blissfully so. Never before had his eyes strayed, nor had he ever been desirous of any woman other than his wife of nearly forty years, Olivia Halford. But this woman… every time he tried to think of his love and faith in Olivia, hoping to draw strength and resolve, some dark heat burst through him and chased her away.
She seemed so young, this woman. Twenties… perhaps, and early into them. Alon Halford could have been her father, perhaps even her grandfather. Yet as she held him, as he felt her pressing her wet, warm mouth against his neck, tasting his fear, and seemingly intoxicated by it, he found himself seeking relief and salvation from a source his skeptic’s mind had not called upon since his father passed of a wasting disease when he was a boy.
‘Naehel, Divine of the Cycle, if I am to die this night, please let it be with the honor, sanctity, and faith of my marriage intact… that I might meet Olivia in the hereafter and begin our love anew.’
Something stirred within him.
He heard his wife’s voice, then, overpowering the woman’s own.
‘This is her doing, Hal,’ he heard Olivia telling him. ‘This isn’t you.’
His eyes fluttered open. He could not know whether it was indeed the Divine Naehel that let his wife’s love win through, but he was determined to reassert some measure of self-control, regardless of the source of his renewed inner strength.
“What do you want of me, young woman… I beg? I’ll do most anything you ask if you just leave me be!”
Her fingers suddenly raked through his hair, gripping him tightly by it and yanking his head back. Through his reflection he saw the woman’s eyes aflame! Gouts of red fire, the color of blood, burst from black, vacant spaces where her eyes should have been, and when she opened her mouth, seemingly prepared to bite into the flesh of his neck, her sharp, fanged teeth gleamed from beneath the glossy curl of her pert, pink, gemlike lips.
He shrieked, drove his elbow back into the woman’s ribs, and rushed away from her even as her fingernails tore the front of his shirt into ribbons.
⁂
Later that night… in the cellar of the gallery…
The curator heard the laugh once more, perilously close, yet still above, somewhere within the museum’s north corridor. He wished he could chance lighting a lantern instead of feeling blindly ahead of himself. He raked his fingertips against barely seen objects buried in shadows, edging forward by shuffling his feet across the rough surface of the dirt floor.
The sharp, silver-tipped toe of his left boot tapped against a wide, lacquered hardwood surface, and he recognized it as the Muhari sarcophagus that was awaiting placement in one of the exhibit rooms above. He had previously decided to set up a space in the main gallery once the museum had collected enough period appropriate pieces to accompany it. A few such artifacts were kept within the locked vault in his office for such an occasion.
For the moment, however, the ornate, dust-strewn casket was the curator’s best hope of evading the redheaded menace who stalked him. He cautiously slid himself between the rough sawn wooden planks of the cellar wall and the edge of the sarcophagus, intending to hide behind the massive sarcophagus.
He heard the whine and creak of the cellar door high above, followed by the chilling, silken tone of the woman’s delighted laughter echoing down the stairwell.
The curator closed his eyes and cold tears crept down the sides of his cheeks. There wasn’t enough space for him to kneel down behind the sarcophagus. He had no choice but to conceal himself within, instead.
Lifting the lid as carefully as he could, which was a challenge considering its substantial weight and awkward shape, he managed to pry the burial vessel open enough to crawl atop the mummified remains contained within.
It was the preserved corpse of the Muhari princess, Arian’ke, he knew from the provenance he had signed. It had been over a year since he accepted the sarcophagus for placement in the gallery. He never considered that he might find himself desecrating the remains mummified within.
The old man clamped one hand over his nose and mouth, holding his breath as the lid closed above him, seeing through the thin, shrinking slice of faint light that the woman was nearing the bottom of the steps.
As perfect darkness overtook him, the curator was left only with the sound of his rapid heartbeat, the raspy trill at the base of his throat when he dared to breathe, and the close presence of the decrepit corpse of Arian’ke.
She had been, to the ancient Muhari, an avatar of the ‘inevitable.’ Arian’ke represented acceptance of one’s fate, and the man atop her fragile form prayed for salvation from his own.
As he felt her delicate, preserved cadaver pressed tightly against him, he silently prayed for her forgiveness. He was not from Muhar, and even if he had been, he had never precisely been a devout believer in the stories of old. His Olivia would often marvel that a man so obsessed with relics of the past would be so skeptical of the tales those storied artifacts told. However, he felt tremendous shame in defiling Arian’ke’s final rest. His fear had driven him to commit a sacrilege, and he didn’t know what mortified him more: the curse of Muhari inevitability or the torment of the red-eyed woman’s sinful presence.
His eyes shut tightly, he kept his silence, and he waited. The sarcophagus was not meant to be shared, and the lid was not closed so fully that he could be sure the woman wouldn’t hear his wheezing breaths. The passage of time was difficult for him to discern but for the growing throb of pain in his hip and the telltale spasm of his lower back.
He had not heard the woman’s laugh since he crawled into the Muhari casket, but he dared not risk opening the lid and assuming she had left him be.
He was unsure whether he could endure much more. He was compromised by the position he settled into when he let the coffin lid close over him. Initially, he tried to prop himself up a bit to keep his weight from crushing the remains of Arian’ke, but as his strength failed and his limbs began to shake, he resigned himself to rest fully upon her delicate remnants. He felt her frail corpus caving in beneath him, and he wept silently, holding his breath each time in hopes to avoid choking or sneezing upon her dusty, crumbling cadaver.
Then, there was a rush of air that seemed to whip and wend its way around from beneath the corpse, sucking the sarcophagus shut tightly behind him. The body beneath him grew warm and soft, arms snaking their way around his ribs and up his back. The mummy’s vacant eyes shone from within their depths, taking on the same familiar red hue of the strange woman’s eyes. They lit the space within the sarcophagus enough to make it clear to Alon Halford… he was no longer sharing that cramped space with the ancient remains of Arian’ke.
He screamed once more, struggling fruitlessly as he felt the woman’s searing hot lips clamp upon his neck, her teeth severing his flesh. His thoughts went to Arian’ke… and to inevitability.
He thought he should have heeded his wife. He should have listened to the tales told by all the artifacts in the gallery.
He should have believed.
He should have retired.
He should have prayed, once again… but he knew that it was far too late for that.
⁂
The two of them left the museum arm in arm, their gait casual and intimate, as if nothing at all was amiss. And nothing was. Not anymore. The old curator and his mistress were in blissful unity, and he wanted for nothing more than her presence.
He knew no future except through her.
As she opened a black lace parasol and rested it delicately upon on her shoulder, Alon led her toward the road’s edge. He kept absently reaching up to touch at the bloodless wounds on his neck. There were two pronounced gashes there where the woman’s teeth pierced deep canals to drain his life’s blood. Those wounds were already healed, scarred over, and precipitously clean. He was paler, now, than he had ever before been, and some of his hair had already begun to fall out, but he felt no fear, no pain
A livery carriage arrived moments later, stopping in front of the Raegaard Gallery of Arts & Antiquities. The carriage driver, a handsome younger man with dark tan skin and short, flaxen hair, crawled down from his seat, moving to open the door for the woman.
“Mistress Beauvais,” he said, clicking together his heels and bowing at the hips.
“Your timing is positively exquisite, Vinze,” the red-eyed woman said as she accepted the young man’s hand and climbed into the back of the carriage. She looked out to the curator, gesturing with a swish of her outstretched finger. “Alon, love… hand me that satchel, will you?”
“Mmnnnhh,” the old curator tried to speak, but he had just been reborn unto a new and more glorious existence, and he was unable to find his voice, yet. He obeyed his mistress, however, removing a curious looking leather satchel looped around his shoulder by a thick hide strap. He looked to the carriage driver, seeing him as he saw all things other than his mistress, now: in white, black, and shades of gray. All the color and vibrancy he would ever again see was provided by his mistress, Baroness Elantia Beauvais.
As he turned the satchel over to the woman, the curator saw movement in the near distance. It was a pair of Raegaard constables, he realized, making their patrols of the Oldgrove district. They recognized him at once and one of them gave him a friendly wave. The other, however, seemed to be more interested in the odd hours and the strange company the old man was keeping.
He nodded and smiled, waving back. This seemed to assuage some of the other constable, who began an unrelated conversation with his partner and continued on with their patrol. As the driver climbed back up onto his seat at the front of the carriage, Alon Halford followed his mistress into the carriage, and as she lounged and occupied the entirety of the rear bench seat, the curator crept onto the floor and laid himself down at her feet, as dutiful and loving as a pet dog.
The curator had his head rested upon his mistress’s lap, and she had been stroking his hair gently.
He seemed utterly content.
“Just two of them, then?” the woman asked as she examined the contents of the satchel with her free hand. “Was there not a third such mask? The white pearlescent one worn upon the true face of Arian’ke?”
“Mnn… yes, my mistress,” Alon replied sleepily, drooling a bit onto the woman’s thigh as she continued petting his head like a housecat. “Paintings and sculptures from the era depict Arian’ke wearing the resplendent white mask while she cast two living shadows, each bearing matching masks of purest ebon black.”
“Where is it, then, my delightful prey?” the woman demanded, seizing a tight fistful of his hair and yoking his head so that he peered up toward her face. She looked down her nose at him, her sinister smile twitching a bit at the edges of her lips where they still yet glistened with the old man’s blood.
“Lost to antiquity, I fear, my mistress,” he admitted calmly, with nothing but love in his tone and devotion to the woman in his eyes.
Nothing mattered to the man who was once Alon Halford more than the pleasure he derived from his mistress’s faintest display of affection. He had no thoughts left other than to heed and please his mistress. He could no longer recall a life before she led him from the sarcophagus. When he emerged from it, like a moth from its cocoon, he was no longer the same man, at all.
The carriage traveled through an intricate maze of hedgerows on its way to an old, abandoned watchtower on the shores of the Ollgarten docks, within view of Tarretton’s Gate at the edge of the harbor. The watchtower had the outward appearance of being completely vacant and long abandoned. The illusion of its disrepair began to fade as the carriage reached the tall iron-banded oaken doors at the front of the tower. A pair of flickering torches flanking those doors cast a brilliant red-gold glow upon the masterfully renovated masonry at the tower’s entrance. Just within, awaiting their arrival, was a tall, wiry figure of a man with long graying locks tied back into a meticulous knot with a dark red sash of shimmering silk.
As he swirled a dark brown liquor in slow circles within a wide-mouthed crystal goblet clasped in his left hand, he flicked the fingers of his free hand in an unusual pattern. The curator looked out toward him when the door opened seemly on its own accord. Barely perceptible strands of energy, like a spiderwebs made of translucent violet-silver light, connected the door’s handles to the man’s outstretched fingers. He manipulated it as would a puppeteer by his marionette’s strings.
“Did you get them, then?” the man asked, sparing the curator no notice. “Or have you wasted all our time just to collect a new pet for your menagerie?”
“Oh, hush, Rendon. Your sass may well spoil the ‘Fang’s appetite,” the woman said, placing the heel of her boot against the small of the old curator’s back and shoving him roughly from the carriage. He fell hard to the cold, dusty paving stones, landing upon his knees, his chest, and his chin. The man in the doorway, Lord Rendon Armiere, gave a brief, amused chuckle.
As she stepped down behind him, the old fellow stirred and began to rise slowly to his feet. The woman then bade the curator with a wordless gesture to begin to make his way up the long set of stone steps that rung the outer edges of the tower walls. He limped the entire way, having been hobbled by his spill from the carriage, but he felt no pain and made no complaints.
Moments later, as they found their way within the tower proper, they entered a makeshift lounge where several other people awaited their arrival.
“Show them,” she said to the curator as she handed him the satchel. He did as he was bidden without delay, reaching into the leather bag, and producing a pair of porcelain, featureless masks glazed a perfect, mirrorlike black.
There were no eyeholes in the masks, but there were etchings embedded within their inner surface that none of the scholars had been able to correctly identify.
“Now, tell them,” she demanded. And he complied.
“Exhibits 282 and 283. A pair of masks located in the tomb of Arian’ke. According to the provenance, these masks date back to the Ten Curses Era, ten-thousand years ago. These ‘Masks of Ebon’ were said to be conduits through which the minds of ‘greater outsiders,’ also translated as ‘demons’ could enact their will upon the material world across vast and insurmountable distances. A third such mask was said to have existed, once… but one of purest white. However, to date, only these two pieces remain intact. Given the advanced age and uncanny condition of these specimens, the product of some long-forgotten mystical ceramic craft, it is miraculous that these masks survived at all.”
Another man, the youngest of those gathered in the decadently appointed parlor, strode toward the curator and reached out to pluck one of the masks in hand. He examined it, smiling, and nodded to the vampiric witch, Baroness Elantia Beauvais.
“Well, well… these will do nicely, indeed,” Elrick Castille said, tracing his fingertips about the shape of a lion’s eye that was etched within the mask where it would rest against the center of the wearer’s forehead.
“This had better not have been a waste of our time, young Master Castille,” Lord Rendon scoffed as he refilled his goblet from an ornate porcelain carafe.
Led up a ladder into a hidden space above the makeshift lounge, the curator was disrobed and laid upon a cold, triangular slab of thick wood scarred with deep red slash marks. Beveled, slanting stone gutters led to an odd, black metal trough at the foot of the table.
At the far end of the dark room, a fire was lit in a strange brazier, and the people from the room below, his mistress among them, surrounded the curator wearing long, flowing robes that were open at the front. He looked to his mistress, who leaned in to kiss him upon his forehead.
“I am thankful, my love, so I shall bless you with the bliss of oblivion.”
He drifted into a state of slumber from which he would never arise. His mistress had released him to think of himself as he once was, his mind returning to those moments before he left home the morning before the gala. Olivia was there in her garden apron, pruning shears in one hand, a steaming cup of cinnamon tea in the other. Beyond the merciful veil of his fugue, as poor old Alon Halford’s mortal shell was ceremonially rent asunder, a faint smile crossed his dying lips.
To his reckoning, he perished that morning in the loving presence of his beloved wife.
⁂
“And you say your husband never returned home after the gala,” Constable Alfans asked Olivia Halford. She wept into one of her husband’s crushed silk handkerchiefs and shook her head. The detective constable kept looking back and forth between the woman and a small shelf on the wall behind her. The shelf was lined with dozens of tiny, hand-made trinkets that were placed with obvious care. No dust.
They were proud of these little pieces of bric-a-brac, the Halfords.
“No, sir,” she replied, “It wasn’t like he had never come home late, before, but I swear your fellows of the constabulary are wrong saying he left with some peculiar harlot into the night. That weren’t my Hal. No sir, that weren’t him.”
“I believe you, madam,” Lukarde replied, and it was true. He could see evidence of the man’s loyalty to his wife not only there, at their humble home in Ollgarten, but also in his office at the gallery. He had a habit of writing the names of his family half-mindedly in the margins of his notes.
His loved ones were a mantra for him. He was driven to see them, and he would miss them as terribly as they missed him. He was not the kind of man to run off with a woman half his age and leave such a charming life behind.
“Unfortunately, I do not have much else to go on at the moment, but rest assured, I am devoted to this case.”
“Do you think…,” she began to ask, but Lukarde shook his head and placed a comforting hand upon her wrist.
“It does no good to speculate on such things,” he said. “I cannot know precisely how you feel, of course, but I would urge you to lean upon your daughter and her husband, to keep hope alive in your heart, and to pray to the Divines for guidance and strength. I promise, when I know, you will know.”
As he went to leave the home of Alon ‘Hal’ Halford, he paused for a moment to look back at the man’s lovely old wife, Olivia.
“Madam, might I ask… these little figurines… family heirlooms?”
She wiped fresh tears from beneath her eyes and found a weak, warm smile. Nodding, she reached over to brush her fingertips along the shelf. “My Hal’s doing. He had a lot of time to himself at the gallery, see… lots of waiting about. He took to making these. Took little stones from our garden outside and worked at them while he sat in his office, making tiny replicas of some of the pieces he curated at the museum.
“I see,” the constable said, smiling and nodding before leaving at last.
As he left the home of Alon ‘Hal’ Halford and his lovely old wife, Olivia, Lukarde returned to the macabre scene he had discovered that morning when attempting to locate the driver of a livery carriage for questioning.
Scattered throughout a simple garden were the gruesome remains of a human male whose identity would be impossible to discern through conventional means.
Lukarde now believed he had resolved the man’s identity, however.
He had asked Constable Hathaway, an investigator in training, to guard the remains and prevent anyone from going near enough to disturb them, but a flock of seafowl had perched themselves upon the precipice of a nearby wall, and he shooed them away by clapping his hands together.
The young constable approached him, his face pale and grim. It seemed as if the inexperienced lad may have retched a few times, and Lukarde felt a similar compulsion, in truth.
“What is the name of the woman who was said to tell fortunes for coin in the square? She lives not far from here, I gather?”
“She of the Gathered? Er… Deandra,” the young constable replied. “Deandra Moore, I think. She lives a few blocks away, nearer the brook’s edge.”
“It may be useful to bring her in, this Deandra Moore,” Lukarde said as he produced a small, dark green-gray stone from his breast pocket and began to ponder it as it rested in the palm of his hand. It was a piece of unpolished malachite of an unusual shape. Constable Hathaway looked his way quizzically.
“Is that what you found earlier in this victim’s pocket, before you went off to speak with that Halford woman?
“Precisely,” Lukarde replied. “It looks like he was shaping it into a figurine of a kind. Some manner of ancient warrior with a great shield… and the beginnings of an axe, perhaps, on this side. See?”
The younger constable squinted down at the piece, then accepted it when Lukarde handed it over to him for a closer look. He looked down at the body, then, and grimaced. “This was Halford’s husband?”
Lukarde nodded, kneeling down and sliding a thin sheet of gray linen over the grisly remains of poor Alon Halford. “It is said she speaks to the dead, this Deandra.”
“Oh, but you know the Gathered, sir,” Constable Hawthorne said. “They believe the sun and the moon dangle upon strings. From all accounts, she’s a street trickster with a flair for the dramatic, and that’s all.”
“I’d see for myself, regardless,” the senior constable said, grunting a bit as he stood back up and reached out to reclaim the victim’s partially-carved malachite knick-knack. “Besides, a woman observant enough to convince folks she speaks for their lost loved ones might have seen or heard something of use. Either way, she might shed some light upon the darkness that befell this poor fellow. His family deserves answers… and his killers, justice.”
