David knelt down and took a deep breath, then pushed hard against the armor. To his surprise, the knight’s remains moved quite easily. True, the armor was heavy, but not as heavy as it should have been with the body of a man inside it. Once he had managed to turn the knight over, David could see the sign of an eagle on his breastplate, a snake writhing in its talons. He rapped upon the armor with the knuckles of his right hand. The sound echoed within; it was like tapping on an empty can. It seemed that the suit of armor was empty.
But, no, that was not the case, for David both heard and felt something move as he rolled the armor, and when he examined the hole at the top, where the head had been separated from the body, he saw bone and skin within. The top of the spinal column was white where the head had been severed from the body, but even here there was no blood. Somehow, the knight’s remains had been reduced to a husk inside the armor, rotting away to almost nothing so quickly that the flower he’d worn, perhaps for luck, had not yet had time to die.
David considered fleeing the fortress, but he knew that even if he tried to do so, the thorns would not part for him. This was a place to be entered but not to be left, and despite his doubts, he had heard, once again, his mother’s voice calling to him. If she was truly here, then he could not abandon her now.
David stepped over the fallen knight and entered the tower. A set of stone stairs wound upward in a spiral. He listened intently but could hear no sound from above. He wanted to call his mother’s name, or to cry out for Roland, but he was afraid of alerting the presence in the tower to his approach. Perhaps, though, whatever waited in the tower already knew that he was in the fortress and had parted the thorns to enable him to pass through. Still, it seemed wiser to be quiet than to be noisy, and so he did not speak. He recalled the figure that had passed across the lighted window, and the tale of the enchantress who kept a woman in thrall, dooming her to an eternal, ageless sleep in a chamber of treasures unless she could be awakened by a kiss. Could that woman be his mother? The answer lay above.
He drew his sword and started to climb. There were small, narrow windows every ten steps, and these allowed a little light to filter into the tower, enabling David to see where he was going. He counted a dozen such windows before he reached the stone floor at the top of the tower. A hallway stretched before him, with open doorways on either side. From outside, the tower appeared to be twenty or thirty feet wide, but the corridor in front of him was so long that the end of it was lost in shadow. It must have been hundreds of feet in length, lit by flaming torches set into the walls, yet somehow it was contained within a tower only a fraction of that size.
David walked slowly down the hallway, glancing into each room as he did so. Some were bedrooms, opulently furnished with enormous beds and velvet drapes. Others contained couches and chairs. One housed a grand piano and nothing else. The walls of another were decorated with hundreds of similar versions of one painting: a picture of two male children, identical twins, with a painting of themselves in the background that was an exact replica of the picture they occupied, so that they stared out at infinite versions of themselves.
Halfway down the hall was a vast dining room, dominated by a huge oak table with one hundred chairs around it. Candles were lit along its length, and their light shone upon a great feast: there were roast turkeys and geese and ducks, and a huge pig with an apple in its mouth as the centerpiece. There were platters of fish and cold meats, and vegetables steamed in big pots. It all smelled so wonderful that David was drawn into the room, unable to resist the urgings of his growling stomach. Someone had started carving one of the turkeys, for its leg had been removed and slivers of white meat had been cut from its breast and now lay, tender and moist, upon a plate. David picked up one of the pieces and was about to take a great bite from it when he saw an insect crawling across the table. It was a large red ant, and it was making its way toward a fragment of skin that had fallen from the turkey. It clasped the crisp, brown morsel in its jaws and prepared to carry it away, but suddenly it seemed to totter on its feet, as though its burden was heavier than it had expected. It dropped the skin, wobbled a little more, then ceased moving entirely. David poked at it with his finger, but the insect did not respond. It was dead.
David dropped his piece of turkey on the table and quickly wiped his fingers clean. Now that he looked more closely, he could see that the table was littered with the remains of dead insects. The corpses of flies and beetles and ants dotted the wood and the plates, all poisoned by whatever was contained in the food. David backed away from the table and returned to the hallway, his appetite entirely gone.
But if the dining room disgusted him, the next room into which he looked was more troubling still. It was his bedroom in Rose’s house, perfectly re-created down to the books upon the shelves, although neater than David’s room had ever been. The bed was made, but the pillows and sheets were slightly yellowed and covered in a thin layer of dust. There was dust on the shelves as well, and when David stepped inside, he left footprints on the floor. Ahead of him was the window facing onto the garden. It was open, and noises could be heard from outside, the sounds of laughter and singing. He walked over to the glass and looked out. In the garden below, three people were dancing in a circle: David’s father, Rose, and a boy whom David did not recognize but whom he knew instantly to be Georgie. Georgie was older now, perhaps four or five, but still a chubby child. He was smiling widely as his parents danced with him, his father holding his right hand and Rose his left, the sun shining down upon them from a perfect blue sky.
“Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie,” they sang to him, “kissed the girls and made them cry!”
And Georgie laughed with joy as bees buzzed and birds sang.
“They have forgotten you,”
said the voice of David’s mother.
“This was once your room, but nobody comes in here now. Your father did, in the beginning, but then he resigned himself to the fact that you were gone and found pleasure instead in his other child and his new wife. She is pregnant again, although she does not yet know it. There will be a sister for Georgie, and then your father will have two children once more and there will be no need for memories of you.”
The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, from within David and from the hallway outside, from the floor beneath his feet and the ceiling above his head, from the stones in the walls and the books on the shelves. For a moment, David even saw her reflected in the glass of the window, a faded vision of his mother standing behind him and looking over his shoulder. When he turned around, there was nobody there, but still her reflection remained in the glass.
“It does not have to be that way,”
said his mother’s voice. The lips of the image in the glass moved, but they appeared to be saying other words, for their motions did not quite match the words that David heard.
“Remain brave and strong for just a little longer. Find me here, and we can have our old life back again. Rose and Georgie will be gone, and you and I will take their places.”
Now the voices from the garden below had changed. They were no longer singing and laughing. When he looked down, David saw his father mowing the lawn and his mother clipping a rosebush with a pair of pruning shears, carefully beheading each branch and tossing the red flowers into a basket at her feet. And seated on a bench between them, reading a book, was David.
“You see? Do you see how it can be? Now come, we have been apart too long. It is time that we were together again. But be careful: she will be watching and waiting. When you see me, do not look left or right, but keep your eyes only on my face and everything will be well.”
The image disappeared from the glass, and the figures vanished from the garden below. A cold wind arose, raising dust ghosts in the room, obscuring everything within. The dust made David cough, and his eyes watered. He backed out of the room and bent over in the hallway, hacking and spitting.
A noise came from nearby: the sound of a door slamming and locking from inside. He spun around, and a second door slammed and locked, then another. The door to every room that he had passed was shutting firmly. Now his bedroom door was suddenly shut in his face, and all of the doors ahead of him began to close as well. Only the torches on the walls lit his way, and suddenly they too began to be extinguished, starting with those nearest the stairs. There was now total darkness behind him, and it was advancing quickly. Soon, the entire hallway would be drowned in blackness.
David ran, trying desperately to stay ahead of the approaching shadows, his ears ringing with the sound of slamming doors. He was moving as quickly as he could, his feet slapping upon the hard stone floor, but the lights were dying faster than he could run. He saw the torches just behind him die, then the ones at either side, and finally those ahead fizzled out. He kept running, hoping that somehow he could catch up with them, that he would not be left alone in the dark. Then the last torches faded, and the darkness was complete.
“No!” shouted David. “Mum! Roland! I can’t see. Help me!”
But nobody replied. David stood still, uncertain of what to do. He did not know what lay ahead, but he knew that the stairs were behind him. If he turned back, following the wall, he could find them again, but he would be abandoning his mother and Roland too, if he was still alive. If he went forward, he would be stumbling blindly into the unknown, easy prey for the ‘she’ of whom his mother’s voice had spoken, the enchantress who guarded this place with thorns and creepers and who reduced men to husks in armor and heads on battlements.
And then David saw a tiny light in the distance, like a firefly suspended in the blackness, and his mother’s voice said,
“David, don’t be afraid. You’re almost there. Don’t give up now.”
He did as he was told, and the light grew stronger and brighter, until he saw that it was a lamp hanging high above his head. Slowly, the outline of an archway became visible to him. David drew nearer and nearer, so that at last he stood at the entrance to a great chamber, its domed ceiling supported by four enormous stone pillars. The walls and pillars were covered by thorned creepers far thicker than those that guarded the walls and gates of the fortress, the thorns so long and sharp that some were taller than David himself. Between each set of pillars a lamp hung from an ornate iron frame, and their light shone on chests of coins and jewelery, on goblets and gilded picture frames, on swords and shields, all gleaming with gold and precious stones. It was a treasure greater than most men could imagine, but David barely glanced at it. Instead, his attention was fixed on a raised stone altar at the center of the room. A woman lay upon the altar, still as the dead. She was dressed in a red velvet dress with her hands folded across her chest. As David looked more closely, he saw the rise and fall of her breathing. This, then, was the sleeping lady, the victim of the enchantress’s spell.
David entered the chamber, and the flickering glow of the lamps caught something bright and shiny high up on the thorned wall to his right. He turned, and his stomach cramped so hard at what he saw that he bent over in pain.
Roland’s body was impaled upon one of the great thorns ten feet above the floor. The point had passed through his chest and erupted from his breastplate, destroying the image of the twin suns. There was a trace of blood upon his armor, but not very much. Roland’s face was thin and gray, his cheeks hollow, and the skull sharp beneath the skin. Beside Roland’s body was that of another, also wearing the armor of the twin suns: Raphael. Roland had discovered the truth about his friend’s disappearance at last.
And they were not alone. The vaulted chamber was dotted with the remains of men, like drained flies set in a web of thorns. Some of them had been there for a very long time, for their armor had rusted to red and brown, and those that had heads were no more than skeletons.
David’s anger overcame his fear, and his rage overcame any thoughts of flight. In that moment, he became more man than boy, and his passage into adulthood began in earnest. He walked slowly toward the sleeping woman, turning constantly in slow circles so that no hidden threat could creep up on him unawares. He remembered his mother’s warning not to look right or left, but the sight of Roland impaled upon the wall made him want to confront the enchantress and kill her for what she had done to his friend.
“Come out,” he shouted. “Show yourself!”
But nothing moved in the chamber, and no one answered his challenge. The only word he heard, half real, half imagined, was
“David,”
spoken in his mother’s voice.
“Mum,” he said, in reply. “I’m here.”
He was now at the stone altar. A flight of five steps led up to the sleeping woman. He climbed them slowly, still aware of the unseen threat, the killer of Roland and Raphael and of all those men who hung, pierced and hollow, upon the walls. At last, he reached the altar and looked down upon the face of the sleeping woman. It was his mother. Her skin was very white, but there was a hint of pink at her cheeks, and her lips were full and moist. Her red hair glowed like fire against the stone.
“Kiss me,”
David heard her say, although her mouth remained still.
“Kiss me, and we will be together again.”
David placed his sword by her side and leaned over to kiss her cheek. His lips touched her skin. She was very cold, colder even than when she had lain in her open coffin, so cold that the touch of her was painful to him. It numbed his lips and stilled his tongue, and his breath turned to crystals of ice that sparkled like tiny diamonds in the still air. As he broke the contact with her, his name was called again, but this time it was a man’s voice, not a woman’s.
“David!”
He looked around, trying to find the source of the sound. There was movement upon the wall. It was Roland. His left hand waved feebly, then gripped the thorn that protruded from his chest, as though by doing so he might concentrate the last of his strength and say what needed to be said. His head moved, and with a final great effort he forced the words from his lips.