La Nocturne
Sixteen.
Aria stared at the shabby, disintegrating boots in front of her. “Those aren’t – “
“Seven-league boots? Why, of course,” the Lady cut in silkily. “Do you think I would have you walk around in any smelly, old, commonplace boots? Put one on.” Aria chose the right; the shoe was large and unwieldy in her hands, but as she slipped it over her foot, it seemed to contract somehow until it fit like it was made for her. She tried to ignore this.
“Now put a hand around my waist,” the Lady instructed, and Aria unwillingly slunk an arm hovering away from the Lady’s back until the tips of her fingers gingerly touched the flesh below her ribs. The Lady frowned. “Yes, that’ll do if you wish to be flung off mid-step with your pretty face into the dirt. Tighter.” Biting her tongue, Aria lowered her palm onto the delicate fabric of the Lady’s gown, as if she were touching a dead fox. “Alright, I suppose,” the Lady muttered, and in turn clamped the girl's body to hers in a near death-grip, sending an unnerving frisson through her bones.
After five vertiginous whizzings through air, she found herself staring at a small, rounded hill rising up in the center of a meadow. On the fringes of the meadow other hills were situated, but they all gave a wide berth to the one in the center, as if it were some kind of pariah. And I would be wise to do the same, Aria thought, but the Lady was already leading her around to the door in the Hill.
They passed a dark, human-shaped lump in the grass that Aria immediately looked away from, but something about the shape of this person’s body made her look cautiously back again. The paling gray of the sky roughly brought forth a fuzzy sketch of features from the darkness. She gasped, her hand flying to her mouth.
“Joseph,” she breathed, and collapsed by his side. He lay still as ever. “Joseph?” she demanded frailly of his motionless frame. Holding his face in her hands, she turned his head toward her and sat as if spellbound by the perfect stillness that reigned over him. Her eyes bred tears like the moon bred her thousand starry children to shine, warm and beating, through the blind darkness of night.
The Lady regarded what was before her with puzzlement, then the connection fell into place. Of course – the boy was Aria’s love. How very sweet and pleasantly surprising, for every human relationship was a chance for her to bargain and exploit, putting the life of a human’s lover or friend or child on the line if payment was not received. He who giveth, taketh away. The aphorism floated out to her from somewhere removed from memory, but oh, how true it was. How long she had gone on touting her necromancy as a labor of love, living haunted by her centuries-old remorse and the image of the bedsheets and her hands livid with blood, her husband and his mistress cold and still in the middle of the carnage. The guilt and self-pity needed to stop. From that moment onward, she would need a payment, a price on her services.
This girl, she was so pretty – but intractable, suspicious, and stubborn. A threat to the Lady’s peace of mind. I may be part human, but I know how to use my Faerie side well, she thought. Those with Faerie blood should always be the threat to humans. Time had been much kinder to the Lady than her human counterparts, but her body still showed the ravages that did sneak through. She tried to fortify her bones with magic and smooth the wrinkles her face gathered, but every time less and less of it held. There was no way to get around it – she needed a new body if she were to continue doing her job well.
And this girl had landed on her doorstep, quite literally screaming in her face. Aria was delivering a venomous invective to the Lady on how Joseph had never caused harm to a soul in his life, what on earth had he done to deserve this, why did the Lady have to drag him into the whole mess, and what had she done to him? He bloody better not be dead.
“Calm yourself, dear,” the Lady said coldly, a dangerous contempt in her voice. “Tell me, is that any way to treat the person who brought you back to your beloved world? Your darling Joseph isn’t dead, only unconscious. He shall in time wake up and be perfectly fine. If you love him so much, help me get him inside.” She wanted him out of the way, hidden from the potential sight of nosy early-morning walkers. Aria wordlessly grabbed Joseph under the arms and lifted him; the Lady took his feet, they backed in through the door of the Hill. The faint light of approaching dawn was abruptly replaced with the flickering, candle-lit darkness of the Hill’s interior.
Near the door was a straw pallet on which pairs of muddy boots and dainty, almost glass-like slippers rested. “You can lay him down on there,” the Lady said, then watched as Aria moved the pairs of shoes off the mat, flipped it over to its less muddy side, and gently tried to settle as much of Joseph that could fit onto the straw pallet.
It’s now or never, the Lady thought, and backed silently up to a grayed wooden cupboard set in the earthen wall. Without a noise, she opened one of its doors and reached inside for a glass jar she instinctively knew the location of. All the while, her eyes were fixed on the girl, who was smoothing down her lover’s hair, leaning in by his ear to whisper something. The Lady unscrewed the lid of the jar with one hand and dipped into the volatile, mercuric solution within. Rubbing the mixture carefully onto both hands, she watched as Aria bent down to kiss Joseph on the cheek. The Lady winced as the liquid stung her skin, glowing silver-white when the candles angled their light a certain way, and throwing rainbows like a prism. When the stinging subsided, she picked up a wooden stool nearby in both hands and rushed toward Aria, the stool held above her head, a fiendish light in her eyes.
As if sensing the movement, Aria leapt up and caught the blow of the wooden stool with her palms. The Lady was taken by surprise, and in her split second of inaction, the girl was able to wrest the chair from her grip and aim it for her head instead. Just able to dodge the hit, the Lady realized things were not going to plan and that she would need to go to her second, more drastic measure. Aria prepared for another strike, but in a single deft movement, the Lady plunged her hands into the human girl’s chest. Having been coated in the silvery liquid, they passed straight through skin and bone.
A scream tore from Aria; the wooden stool dropped from her hands to uselessly bounce and roll away on the floor. In vain, she grabbed the Lady’s wrists and tried to extricate her hands from her body. Blood dripped in a thin line from her nose, looking black in the fitful half-light of the Hill. The Lady waited patiently for Aria’s eyes to dull and for her body to go limp in her arms. Supporting the girl with her own body, the Lady knelt slowly to the ground and let Aria fall back onto the dirt floor, never letting her hands lose contact. Slowly and methodically, the Lady moved her hands through every part of Aria’s body, as if to gather the last cell of her marrow. At last she withdrew her hands. They were covered with a bright, scintillating substance like glitter or the thousand silver reflections of the sun on wave tips. The Lady held her hands away from her – the light was near blinding in its intensity. She rose to her feet, staggering backward from the luminous force; every second it was not contained it became more volatile and dangerous. Now she could not bear to look at it, even her closed lids blazed orange.
Something wooden bumped against the Lady’s hip. Through a crack in her eyelids she registered the shape of a bottle of ink, recognizing the wooden object as her desk. Her hands were going numb. In desperation, she grabbed the ink bottle and quickly muttered the words that allowed the transference. Immediately the light extinguished itself from her hands and glowed with the small glass bottle instead, which started to rattle unsteadily over the desk. Over time the trembling died down and the light dulled, leaving once again a completely unextraordinary inkwell.
Perfect, I’ve captured her soul, the Lady thought. That went quite well, considering the fact that I’ve only tried it once before, a blue moon ago.
Now she went again to her cupboard and sought out a small opaque blue bottle, the glass warped and marbled. Uncorking the container, she murmured another incantation and poured its contents over her head. A dark, crackling plasmic substance rolled out from the mouth and rapidly smothered the entirety of the Lady’s body. If an outside observer were there, they would have witnessed the black matter permeate through her skin and her body slowly turn invisible. It wasn’t quite invisibility, though – there still remained a blurriness, a rippling, an indistinct form in the air where the Lady stood, and now this form walked over to the prostrate body of the girl whose soul she had taken. She descended like fog or a ghost or a demonic possessor over and into Aria.
When the girl woke up, she wiped the blood from her nose and rushed to the cracked, dusty mirror on the wall to look at herself. Chocolate-brown eyes with gold and green flecks stared adoringly back her under thin, dark, shapely eyebrows. The nose she found a little narrow for her face, but her lips were full and pink. Her hair ran down in dark waves to the middle of her back; her skin was clear and very slightly tanned. The girl stepped back to see more of herself in the mirror, discovering a full figure, wide hips. Under her skirt, she saw her legs were slightly bowed but gracefully long. Well-shaped and long-fingered hands held up her skirt, never mind that the fingers were a little crooked.
The Lady sighed rapturously, stretching and feeling herself settle further into Aria’s body. That other human girl couldn’t even say that the Lady had gone back on her word, not that they would ever meet again. Aria was still alive and in the human world, simply cleft into two separate existences. Smiling radiantly into the cracked glass, the Lady of Elsinore Hill rejoiced. Youth and beauty were finally hers again.
“Seven-league boots? Why, of course,” the Lady cut in silkily. “Do you think I would have you walk around in any smelly, old, commonplace boots? Put one on.” Aria chose the right; the shoe was large and unwieldy in her hands, but as she slipped it over her foot, it seemed to contract somehow until it fit like it was made for her. She tried to ignore this.
“Now put a hand around my waist,” the Lady instructed, and Aria unwillingly slunk an arm hovering away from the Lady’s back until the tips of her fingers gingerly touched the flesh below her ribs. The Lady frowned. “Yes, that’ll do if you wish to be flung off mid-step with your pretty face into the dirt. Tighter.” Biting her tongue, Aria lowered her palm onto the delicate fabric of the Lady’s gown, as if she were touching a dead fox. “Alright, I suppose,” the Lady muttered, and in turn clamped the girl's body to hers in a near death-grip, sending an unnerving frisson through her bones.
After five vertiginous whizzings through air, she found herself staring at a small, rounded hill rising up in the center of a meadow. On the fringes of the meadow other hills were situated, but they all gave a wide berth to the one in the center, as if it were some kind of pariah. And I would be wise to do the same, Aria thought, but the Lady was already leading her around to the door in the Hill.
They passed a dark, human-shaped lump in the grass that Aria immediately looked away from, but something about the shape of this person’s body made her look cautiously back again. The paling gray of the sky roughly brought forth a fuzzy sketch of features from the darkness. She gasped, her hand flying to her mouth.
“Joseph,” she breathed, and collapsed by his side. He lay still as ever. “Joseph?” she demanded frailly of his motionless frame. Holding his face in her hands, she turned his head toward her and sat as if spellbound by the perfect stillness that reigned over him. Her eyes bred tears like the moon bred her thousand starry children to shine, warm and beating, through the blind darkness of night.
The Lady regarded what was before her with puzzlement, then the connection fell into place. Of course – the boy was Aria’s love. How very sweet and pleasantly surprising, for every human relationship was a chance for her to bargain and exploit, putting the life of a human’s lover or friend or child on the line if payment was not received. He who giveth, taketh away. The aphorism floated out to her from somewhere removed from memory, but oh, how true it was. How long she had gone on touting her necromancy as a labor of love, living haunted by her centuries-old remorse and the image of the bedsheets and her hands livid with blood, her husband and his mistress cold and still in the middle of the carnage. The guilt and self-pity needed to stop. From that moment onward, she would need a payment, a price on her services.
This girl, she was so pretty – but intractable, suspicious, and stubborn. A threat to the Lady’s peace of mind. I may be part human, but I know how to use my Faerie side well, she thought. Those with Faerie blood should always be the threat to humans. Time had been much kinder to the Lady than her human counterparts, but her body still showed the ravages that did sneak through. She tried to fortify her bones with magic and smooth the wrinkles her face gathered, but every time less and less of it held. There was no way to get around it – she needed a new body if she were to continue doing her job well.
And this girl had landed on her doorstep, quite literally screaming in her face. Aria was delivering a venomous invective to the Lady on how Joseph had never caused harm to a soul in his life, what on earth had he done to deserve this, why did the Lady have to drag him into the whole mess, and what had she done to him? He bloody better not be dead.
“Calm yourself, dear,” the Lady said coldly, a dangerous contempt in her voice. “Tell me, is that any way to treat the person who brought you back to your beloved world? Your darling Joseph isn’t dead, only unconscious. He shall in time wake up and be perfectly fine. If you love him so much, help me get him inside.” She wanted him out of the way, hidden from the potential sight of nosy early-morning walkers. Aria wordlessly grabbed Joseph under the arms and lifted him; the Lady took his feet, they backed in through the door of the Hill. The faint light of approaching dawn was abruptly replaced with the flickering, candle-lit darkness of the Hill’s interior.
Near the door was a straw pallet on which pairs of muddy boots and dainty, almost glass-like slippers rested. “You can lay him down on there,” the Lady said, then watched as Aria moved the pairs of shoes off the mat, flipped it over to its less muddy side, and gently tried to settle as much of Joseph that could fit onto the straw pallet.
It’s now or never, the Lady thought, and backed silently up to a grayed wooden cupboard set in the earthen wall. Without a noise, she opened one of its doors and reached inside for a glass jar she instinctively knew the location of. All the while, her eyes were fixed on the girl, who was smoothing down her lover’s hair, leaning in by his ear to whisper something. The Lady unscrewed the lid of the jar with one hand and dipped into the volatile, mercuric solution within. Rubbing the mixture carefully onto both hands, she watched as Aria bent down to kiss Joseph on the cheek. The Lady winced as the liquid stung her skin, glowing silver-white when the candles angled their light a certain way, and throwing rainbows like a prism. When the stinging subsided, she picked up a wooden stool nearby in both hands and rushed toward Aria, the stool held above her head, a fiendish light in her eyes.
As if sensing the movement, Aria leapt up and caught the blow of the wooden stool with her palms. The Lady was taken by surprise, and in her split second of inaction, the girl was able to wrest the chair from her grip and aim it for her head instead. Just able to dodge the hit, the Lady realized things were not going to plan and that she would need to go to her second, more drastic measure. Aria prepared for another strike, but in a single deft movement, the Lady plunged her hands into the human girl’s chest. Having been coated in the silvery liquid, they passed straight through skin and bone.
A scream tore from Aria; the wooden stool dropped from her hands to uselessly bounce and roll away on the floor. In vain, she grabbed the Lady’s wrists and tried to extricate her hands from her body. Blood dripped in a thin line from her nose, looking black in the fitful half-light of the Hill. The Lady waited patiently for Aria’s eyes to dull and for her body to go limp in her arms. Supporting the girl with her own body, the Lady knelt slowly to the ground and let Aria fall back onto the dirt floor, never letting her hands lose contact. Slowly and methodically, the Lady moved her hands through every part of Aria’s body, as if to gather the last cell of her marrow. At last she withdrew her hands. They were covered with a bright, scintillating substance like glitter or the thousand silver reflections of the sun on wave tips. The Lady held her hands away from her – the light was near blinding in its intensity. She rose to her feet, staggering backward from the luminous force; every second it was not contained it became more volatile and dangerous. Now she could not bear to look at it, even her closed lids blazed orange.
Something wooden bumped against the Lady’s hip. Through a crack in her eyelids she registered the shape of a bottle of ink, recognizing the wooden object as her desk. Her hands were going numb. In desperation, she grabbed the ink bottle and quickly muttered the words that allowed the transference. Immediately the light extinguished itself from her hands and glowed with the small glass bottle instead, which started to rattle unsteadily over the desk. Over time the trembling died down and the light dulled, leaving once again a completely unextraordinary inkwell.
Perfect, I’ve captured her soul, the Lady thought. That went quite well, considering the fact that I’ve only tried it once before, a blue moon ago.
Now she went again to her cupboard and sought out a small opaque blue bottle, the glass warped and marbled. Uncorking the container, she murmured another incantation and poured its contents over her head. A dark, crackling plasmic substance rolled out from the mouth and rapidly smothered the entirety of the Lady’s body. If an outside observer were there, they would have witnessed the black matter permeate through her skin and her body slowly turn invisible. It wasn’t quite invisibility, though – there still remained a blurriness, a rippling, an indistinct form in the air where the Lady stood, and now this form walked over to the prostrate body of the girl whose soul she had taken. She descended like fog or a ghost or a demonic possessor over and into Aria.
When the girl woke up, she wiped the blood from her nose and rushed to the cracked, dusty mirror on the wall to look at herself. Chocolate-brown eyes with gold and green flecks stared adoringly back her under thin, dark, shapely eyebrows. The nose she found a little narrow for her face, but her lips were full and pink. Her hair ran down in dark waves to the middle of her back; her skin was clear and very slightly tanned. The girl stepped back to see more of herself in the mirror, discovering a full figure, wide hips. Under her skirt, she saw her legs were slightly bowed but gracefully long. Well-shaped and long-fingered hands held up her skirt, never mind that the fingers were a little crooked.
The Lady sighed rapturously, stretching and feeling herself settle further into Aria’s body. That other human girl couldn’t even say that the Lady had gone back on her word, not that they would ever meet again. Aria was still alive and in the human world, simply cleft into two separate existences. Smiling radiantly into the cracked glass, the Lady of Elsinore Hill rejoiced. Youth and beauty were finally hers again.