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

death. It is like a zone between the living and the dead. It is unreal.” With these words, Belinda put her head against her husband’s chest, hoping one day to awaken. All she knew was that disaster was coming her way and she had no way of stopping it from rolling over her, over Belinda’s broken heart.


CHAPTER THREE

BELINDA'S BROKEN HEART


Wednesday, December 24th, 1427 A.D.
Rumzil underground territory. Near Yambalah, Forest of Western Callenia,

The short creatures were skittering about preparing their sacrifice. A young woman of 29, dressed in a white nightgown, was tied to a large oily pole whose top was stuck into the stone cave-roof and stuck into the dirt floor. She was on a small hill and all around her were the creatures setting small mounds of sticks at the foot of the hill on fire. All in all there were as many mounds as there were fangs in their individual mouths. The hill itself was a mass of faces all stuck into the gravel. The eyes were wide-open and their mouths screaming. She wanted to shout, but couldn't. So all she did was watch, the silver-blue radiance of her iris turning ice-cold and her peachy complexion turning pale.
Oleana von Ochsenskjöld, Zedrick Ronkenshire’s estranged daughter, had disappeared from Baron Walter's castle and the Baron had been desperate. He had sent a search team out to find her, but had found nothing but gypsies and witches in the forest. The gypsies had in their council decided to hand the quiet girl over to the Rumzils. They disliked the Baron and had always done so because he was not afraid of them at all. This was revenge.
So here was Oleana, dressed in nothing but a nightgown about to become a sacrifice. She had heard of these creatures. A tear trickled down from the right wide-open eye-white. One petrified tear.
There were on-hundred Rumzils all in all and she was this year's victim. Soon, she would be down in the ground munched by a thousand small of the Rumzils termites for what would maybe last ten years.
The constantly smiling fat little creatures with the brown teeth and the large narrow eyes jumped about lighting the fires. Right opposite Oleana on the cave wall was a picture of the devil stepping on a cross. Oleana had by her mother been brought up to believe blasphemy was the worst thing anyone could be guilty to. But these creatures were already in hell.
Now the creatures seemed to be ready. They stopped and formed a circle around her and slowly walked up the hill, each carrying a torch that they had lit with the help of one passed around to light all just before under complete silence. Then, half way up, they stopped. Out of the dirt then, suddenly, crawled a bigger Rumzil who was more frightening than the rest. He was fatter and had more teeth. His wide little body mirrored his head and his eyes must've had at least three different irises each peering and circling about. His smile was one of death and decay.
Once out of the ground, Oleana saw that he was carrying something in his hands. It was a tray with a head on it. From here it was virtually impossible to see who this was, but in any case Oleana , eyes still wide open , vomited over her dress and started crying . She then looked up, face all red. The head was surrounded by what seemed to be lettuce and tomatoes by this smiling hundred brown fanged monster. The other Rumzils nodded slowly and began to chant their leader’s name: "Urban! Urban! Urban!" and some were laughing, no, cackling would be a better word. Then she saw who it was. And all the bottled up fear came out in loud cataclysm. She screamed a thousand screams, her eyes fixed on her son's head on the plate, bashing her head bloody against the oily pole. At once the Rumzils, who fed on fear, started screaming with her in chorus and jumping up and about, dancing in perverse glee, which made Oleana scream even more .What she did not know was that she had another head coming.
The Rumzils had succeeded in grabbing this girl from the real world and drawing her into the haunted kingdom and devouring her inside the bowels outside the gates of hell.

Friday, January 16th, 1428 A.D

Alexander had just the same attitude as everyone here. Seeing Ellie and Marcus hanging from the chandelier in such a holy place had made him vomit. He now prayed by the bedside. His children were in yet unmarked coffins in the memorial chapel. They were yet uncarved for who would carve them?
All the sculptors and stone layers were gone. The question that actually bothered everyone more than anything else was ‘how had the couple gotten up that far to tie the ropes around the stone hooks above the lamp?’ They had hung there on each side, with their head lolled to the side, their mouth open and their tongues out, eyes dead and open. Almost four weeks later, Alexander was still awake nights, sitting in his bed and screaming into his people and almost howling at the moon, with one inquiry incessantly coming back: why them? They had always been a team, calm and cool, almost suave and at least he would’ve expected them to take themselves enough in control to stick together when times got a bit harder. How had they come up there? Belinda had to be calmed down with glasses of wine and herbal oils before she finally could find enough peace to lie down.
The devil does not come expectedly. And when he does he is welcomed like a friend ... and then leaves his rubbish behind him like useless waste. He knew very well that the drinking of the potion had been the start of all the pain and horror. The plagues had not commenced before the potion had put them to sleep. When they awoke the young bon viveur was gone. Nomed. What was in that name? There was something there, something that he could not quite place. The thought was there on his tongue, but it refused to present itself. There was hope there, but then it disappeared. He knew that Nomed was not what he seemed, but what was the secret. What was in that name. Nomed Snewkawa. Nomed. He repeated that name over and over, as if he was trying to find the meaning in a riddle. What was in that name? Why did the awakening of the monster commence the fire?
Snekawa was Lucinda, the awakened fiend.
What was stranger was the messengers that had returned over the course of the last one and a half years? They had asked around everywhere and even checked with people from the Mongolian Emperor's court. No one had ever heard of Nomed before he arrived at Iuventus. What scared Alex most was that he of all people, who was so dutiful, never ever thought of checking his records. He, too, included in this group. He had lived with them for two years and shared everything with them at all times.
Who had killed his wife and why? Nomed on a secret return to the palace? No. His anger from the first weeks had subsided, but now there was that fear there. Something was amiss, something new and unknown that somehow had some hope and faith in there. He had held her in his arms when she died and rocked her back and forth for a whole day after that. His pain had known no end. He remembered his dream from before the scandal at the senator courtyard. He remembered Patricia's sweet smile as a child.
She had written him a poem two months before she was beaten to death in the capital:

May God’s path rise to meet you,
May God’s moon grant you grace,
May God’s love rise to greet you,
May God’s sun shine down on your face,.
I hope God blesses this country
For I always bless my pride,
I always know that the favours
Of the Lord reach my inside
But when I look so sad at the empire
I see a kingdom in pain
I see the haunted reality
I see it again and again
I am hoping that my faults
Will be forgiven in that other place
May the road rise to meet you,
And shine down on your beautiful face.

As he held the poem in his hand, written with Patty's neat hand, probably thought of even then in her last tumultuous and confused months, a tear fell upon one of the words and muddled up the ink of the word … reality…
And as King Alexander looked up to the sky that day, he saw a greyness that seemed to conflict with every ounce of reality in him. The always black bearded and black-haired man was now old and grey and had no hope in life at all. Everyone seemed to be dead. That was unreal if anything.
Alexander found himself longing for that hurting knee. It had been a sign of reality.
There was nothing real about this world and Alexander hated every bit of it. He stood up, walked away from the grave and strolled home.


Tuesday, February 1st 1428

It was cold in the chapel, very, very cold. And yet, Alexander sat there in his fur coat wagging to and fro in front of Sieglinde’s marble coffin. It was a large fox fur coat that had been given to him a long time ago by Henricus Balthazar at the time when the physician worked at the castle.
The blustery weather raged around him with snow entering his eyes and settling down on his red fur hat. His greying beard had ice popsicles hanging down from it.
For around forty minutes now he had watched the casket that had been crafted by professional craftsmen in town in the beginning of the decade along with his own coffin. At the time, Alexander had found it superfluous to create coffins when he still was so alive and well. Sieglinde had insisted, saying that it was good to be on the safe side with things of that kind.
The queen was in there and she was rotting, her flesh and bones falling to bits.
Alexander looked up at the inscription. ‘Beloved Mother, Radiant Queen, Trusted Advisor, Matron of the Empire, Friend’ were the words. These words on the casket were chosen by the woman herself and now she was in a coffin that she herself had designed.
Alexander’s lower lip trembled. His feet were hurting and his eyes were red and his skin was sore from the cold. A branch was being thrown back and forth by his feet. There was nothing that could take him away from his wife’s grave.
He glanced into the chapel and saw the warmer chapel and how wonderful it would be to be in there and pray. He could not go in there. Sieglinde was not there.
How had they met? How? She had been on a stately visit with her mother to the nation and there had not even been a plan to have them get married. In fact, it was even planned by King Bertrand to have Prince Alexander marry a Princess from the house of the O’Conners in Dublin West. However, when Alexander met Sieglinde there was no doubt that she would be the one that he wanted to live and die with. He always thought he would be the first one to transcend into the other world. It made him sad to realize that he was