THE HAUNTED KINGDOM 2 - Charles E.J. Moulton (good books for high schoolers .txt) 📗

in Prosperania looked at each other and laughed. It was the first time they had laughed in a month. Alexander patted Theo on the shoulder. "Thank you. I needed that. What is the message?"
Theo sighed. "You will choke on your laugh when hearing this, your noble majesty." Theo's voice was trembling. Alexander looked at his hand. It was shaking. Theo's lip was trembling and a tear was trickling down his cheek.
"Good God, Theo. Come and sit down."
Theo shook his head and swallowed.
"The Queen, your majesty ..."
"What about her?" Steven intervened.
"She has had an accident."
Ulfaas and Alex gave each other a petrified look. “What?”
"Apparently, someone visited her in the Chapel of the Ancestors and told her something she should not have known for ..." Theo stopped. Then he leaned forward. "Your majesty, she has lost her speech." Theo looked down. He shook his head. "What is worse, that someone must have done awful things to her. We found her outside the church. A trace of blood lead from the Chapel to the door. The person could not have passed the entire crowd that was gathered in front of the main entrance, but did. We know not who it was, your majesty." There was another pause. "But the person ... mutilated her."
Alexander started shaking Theo. "In what way, Theo?"
"By deriving her from the possibility of speech." Theo looked down again. "She can't speak and she will not write to us what happened. Clear is that something happened that shocked her. And we both know that she is not easily scared." Alex answered not with words but with a silent nodding confirmation. "She requests you. It is all she does all day."
"Theo. In what way did this individual derive her from speaking?“
"Your majesty. All the blood. This person wanted to shut her up completely. That is why we believe someone told her something she should not have known. So the person, whoever it was, came as an answer to that other one who must’ve told a secret ..."
"Theo, my boy. What did the person do to her?"
"He cut off Queen Sieglinde's tongue ..."

Sunday September 14th 1427

There was a look in Sieglinde’s that spoke to Alexander of great secrets. She wanted to write words on a parchment. When she held a feather the writing on the paper was just too scratchy to decrypt. He had been sitting by her side for the entire day and just read to her. Belinda was kneeling at her mother’s feet. Frequently, when Alexander looked at her she was crying. Steven came in now and then with Zedrick or with Alfie to cheer them up. Rolf and Geena were trying to cheer the boy up.
Alexander tried not to cry. Bernardus Paul was in the palace and was ready to give his last blessings. There was a look Sieglinde’s face that spoke to Alexander about great pain. Her tongue was not she could not speak. Her hands were shaking and she could not write. Her wounds were deep and she could not stand up. Her eyes were clouded and she could not blink.
Alex would speak to her and read to her and sing to her.
They embraced frequently and the kissed frequently, but the tears mixed with the blood on her lips that kept on dripping from her mouth and Henricus Balthazar had to be called from his provisory room next door. At sundown, Sieglinde died in her husband's arms after listening to her husband sing her a song, a smile on her lovely lips and a glow in her eyes. She gave up the ghost and slipped gently into sleep. Alex refused to leave the room and fell asleep embracing his wife’s dead body.

Wednesday September 17th 1427

The entire week, Alexander had refused to leave his wife’s side, screaming at anyone who came to his side to take her away. That day, Sieglinde was buried in her own side chapel at Iuventus. Alfie put a flower on the casket and slowly and calmly the family walked out, tired and melancholy, without any knowledge about the truth.


Monday October 13th 1427

The third plague was due and the people that hadn’t died from the other plagues would certainly die from this one. It was spreading everywhere and was related to the sickness that Nomed had cured. But the blisters everywhere made everyone suffer terribly. Eleonora and Marcus still were the sanest couple around and had permanently moved to Iuventus. Belinda and Steven never left each other, helping Alex whenever possible. Maria and Martin had absolutely nothing in common. Their differences inspiring quarrel after quarrel. That day, Belinda had cried all through the meetings with her father. She saw his pain. She also saw how Steven had lost all sense of direction. She saw how her son was becoming numb and rejected everything that she did. She knew that Ulfaas was on his way here to talk with the king about the developments of the rebuilding of the harbor. The only problem was that no one really believed that the harbor could be rebuilt, for whom. There was no war, but the population seemed to be disintegrating. There was no contact with other countries anymore. Mustafus had disappeared from the scene entirely. Walter? No one knew where he had gone. Cretan had not sent a message to the castle for a month. There was no contact between anyone anymore. In the evening, she sat down by her desk in her study. She found the old book from 1411 there and knew she had not written in it since then. She could not believe that her mother was dead. She felt she could not be alone and yet she had to be. She felt all these events to be ludicrously untrue and yet they were happening to her. How could that be? How could her life be turning out to become such a disaster? She sobbed as she lifted her feather-pen, trying to find words to write, letters to fill the empty page with, hoping that they would soothe the pain and leave some happiness in her soul. Tears streaming down her cheeks, sobs attacking her bosom, she wrote the following poem in bright red ink. All the time she was blaming herself for becoming so powerless to change the course of events in her life.

“Do we compose the music of our lives?
Are we just notes on a page?
Are we the stars in the skies
Or animals in a cage?
Is our spirit, our tormented inner bird,
Just like the early morning breeze,
An inner country, like in tales we’ve heard,
A kingdom that will rise from wounded knees?
The ghosts that haunt our realm,
As anonymous as what our soul never hears,
Are they the apocalyptic riders
That give us our daily new fears?
Where do we find the answers?
Where do we find the serene
Inside angelic springtime
In the heart of what a family can mean?
Will I ever be able to embrace him
Tell him all will be fine?
Will I ever take myself further
Than what is beyond me and mine?”


As Ulfaas and his followers traveled through the land from Danehamn they encountered only beggars and whores, poor people lying by the side of the road, crying. Yes, Prosperania was now Poverania, the land of poverty. The winner had lost.

Friday October 17th 1427

Mercutio shifted from hoof to hoof and it seemed that Timothy did the same.
Steven still stayed with his principal of having different horses assigned to his name as the case allowed. This was a black stallion named Jupiter.
The ghostly atmosphere here was astonishing.
The three of them could recall the vibrancy that this marketplace seemed to have.
“What is this?”
There was an autumn wind here that ruffled their hair and seemed to tell them that a storm was approaching.
“I have no idea, Alexander!”
”Everyone has disappeared.”
Belinda began trotting toward the side streets.
Empty fruit carts everywhere. Open inn doors with no one inside the inns.
They had met no one on the way over here and it seemed they would not meet any one anywhere else. “The haunted kingdom.”
Alex looked at his daughter.
“What did you say?”
She looked at him and shook her head.
“I said the haunted kingdom. This is Lucinda’s haunted kingdom. We are living in what could be called the haunted kingdom.”
That afternoon, after riding most everywhere, they headed back to the palace and told the survivors of the ghost town that Clurafar had become.

Saturday November 1st 1427

The country of Prosperania was a ghost-land now and leaves were scattered across the countryside. Garbage lay unattended in corners and criminals roamed the countryside raiding the shops and farms.
The incidents surrounding Maria’s death were as strange as they were uncomfortable.
That evening shortly after midnight, unbearable screams were heard from the woods. It had sounded like Maria. But they could not find anything. Maria was not in her bed. Martin was in tears.
Next morning a disastrous sight met their eyes. Maria was nailed upside down to the love-tree with its royal nuptial initials. Her body was all bloody and her eyes were wide open. Her arms were nailed to the branches and her feet spread around the tree. There was a note pinned to her stomach, saying: "Love-tree-crucifixion ... By Lucinda!"
That same evening Martin hung himself from the fireplace in the Grand Hall.


Friday November 7th 1427

“What will it be like when you love me?” Steven looked over at Belinda, her hands clutching the sandstone of the balcony in front of her. The sun was up but it did not shine. There were too many grey clouds in front of it. She looked at Steven. “Oh, I was just singing an old song.”
Steven embraced his wife.
“Steven?”
”Yes, dear?”
She started sobbing and turned to him, her eyes wide and the fear in them evident.
“Why are we all dying?”
Steven looked up at her, surprised. “What?”
“We are living in a dead zone. This is not the land I know. I see no point in living, when there are no people to govern. What are we? We are lone travelers in a forsaken land.”
“There is always hope” Steven whispered.
”But people keep disappearing. Out of sight. Will I disappear?”
Steven shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Where do they go?”
He held her tight. “To a better place.”
She remembered how Nomed so often just had disappeared out of sight and how repeatedly she had felt like asking him who he really was but never ever done so. Had she trusted him? No. She had never admitted it, not even to herself, but she had never trusted him. Then why had then given him the permission to come in to their house, eat their food and cure their ailments. She had seen so Many people just vanish and Belinda Winsletenna was wondering who would be next. “I hope you are right” Belinda shrugged her shoulders and said. “But this is not like