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

travelling to other dimensions.
It had taken Lucinda almost six years to corner her brother. Now there was only one.
Alex didn’t know how many hours he sat there rocking her back and forth and crying, but finally he carried her up on the hill overlooking the grounds, where they had picnicked every year on her birthday except this year, when there was nothing to celebrate or no one to celebrate with.
He lifted her to the skies and screamed, tears streaming down his face.
“Here, Belinda!” Tears were blocking his sight. “You see, here you have your home. Iuvent…”
He fell down upon his knees and dropped her, Lindy’s head lolling to the side lifeless.
He lay with his head rested against her chest for too long it seemed. Then he breathed in and out a few times, his breath became shallow. He stood up. Through gritted teeth he whispered.
"Look, St. Lucifer, what you have done to my kingdom!"
He then turned around and watched his palace from above.
"Lucinda. You have me where you want. What now? What ... now?"
Nothing but the wind answered him.
He sank down onto the grass and buried his head in his hands, sobbing with tears streaming down his pale, bearded face. Then he looked up and screamed toward the overcast heavens as if he had seen a ghost lurk up from behind him. He remembered Lucinda's words of a confrontation, a duel, and his thoughts that she only could bring him to a fight if she brought him down.
"You took away my grandson, you took away my wife, you took away my country, you took away
my people, my prosperity , but you had to take away my BELINDA.. Why don’t you kill me now?”
Then he remembered Belinda’s words.
“Keep the spirit of sacred youth alive when I am dead.”
He wanted to. But how? His land was empty and the people were dead.
Where could he find Lucinda in this haunted illusion?
The wind blew in his hair and the rain pounded his face and the trees bent of the storm and all the while Alexander stood their on his own outside the now lonely Iuventus Sacrum screaming at the top of his lungs at a spirit that wasn't there. Not yet. Lucinda was watching him from the distance, waiting for a time to summon him to come to his Final Confrontation.

Tuesday, June 1st, 1428 A.D.

Screams and wails were echoing through the arches of his haunted palace.
Alexander for the third night in a row was running along the corridors of every aisle and every corner of the house, trying to get away from the fiends that kept on kicking him in his sleep. Something was needling him with a sharp object and something was standing in the corner of his throne room when he arrived there in the morning. There were ghouls in every corner, it seemed.
The thing that was following him that June night was large and brown and tried to convince him that he was going to die a slow death. The thing had large horns and a mouth as large as the canyons of the lost sinister parts of the valleys around Adnicul’s palace :
When his majesty King Alexander ran into the Grand Hall that night, he saw a feast in full swing. It was a celebration with transparent guests eating and copulating at the same time. He ran out onto the lawn and saw other guest eating themselves up. Then his eyes turned to the stables and he saw the horses dancing with the fiends. There were flowers in the garden urinating in the fountain.
Alexander ran into the palace again.
His eyes were wide open and his heart was beating so fast that he feared that his veins were going to burst and leave the blood squirting upon the walls.
He had not shaved now since Belinda’s death and he had been dressed in his fur coat and his night gown for days. He had fornicated in the vaults of the chapel and he had found himself laughing himself silly for no reason at all at his own mirror image.
Alexander was going mad.

Saturday June 12th 1428

For the next week and a half, Alexander walked the fields and the pastures of his land during the day and sat quietly eating his food in glum misery at dinner-time. He thought of bringing an end to his life by killing himself, but the fact the he had no guts to do so brought him down even more.
His madness in the beginning of June ceased once the ghosts disappeared. They had let him sleep after haunting him a forth night. Now the problem was that the world was turning unpredictable.
Small groups of citizens appeared here and there.
The king would at times roam the area and try to find people.
He often did.
His land was a savage and ripped apart country where former middle- and upper-class people now were beggars at the mercy of the kindness of other people, looking in trashcans for food and living on what they could find in the open fields and stealing from people's garden-trees, the gardens that still existed, that is ... The thought that struck him was: Did anyone exist at all?
The eternal fire that reputedly had been kept alive for years in the castle, passed from torch to torch had one guardian. He did the best he could and did nit know why.
Iuventus Sacrum was a lonely castle with weeds growing in the gardens and trash blowing into the lobby. And there was only one inhabitant. The courtyard was full of dry leaves and rats nibbling at garbage and there were cobwebs in the basements and in the attic. He hated his life and hated being in this castle that once had been so happy. He kept the wooden heart with him at all times and made sure to kiss it every single day. He walked into the grand hall with the coats-of-arms with it in his hand and the fireplace too often seemed haunted with ghosts of the past more than with lit with the occasional fire and the tears he cried over the thoughts of all the parties that had been celebrated here made him want to jump of the balcony and throw the heart into the flames. The festivities surrounding the grand wedding of Steven and Belinda had been wonderful, well most of had been. He had been so proud of his little baby-daughter Belinda. Such a proud woman with such fine ideas. Now she was dead and gone. Alexander broke into fits of tears on the floor by the fireplace and screamed with anguish.

"Play something merry, will you ... old chap!“
"A song of old days gone by but with a happy, dancing touch!“
Echoes of music and laughter fill the hallways of distant life like a man standing at the end of a tunnel hearing the ravishing party on the other side.
"What should I play, your highness!“
"Play something merry, will you ... will you ... you ... ou ... u ..."

All this time Alexander was thinking of Lucinda's words in his reoccuring dreams: "In the light of that final duel, one last chance is yours!" When would this duel take place and where? Would she summon him? And what would she have him do? What, in reality, did he have to fight for? Sieglinde, Steven, Belinda and most of his other children were dead and gone and his country was a place of misery and death. Prostitution and treachery prospered, which was the only thing that really gave the country's name a reference-point. What should he then fight for? Himself? That served no purpose. Lucinda could win if she wanted to. She could have her triumph. Without a family, he didn't want to fight her. He was a lost man. He still continued eating and sleeping, he told himself. Sometimes he even went for a walk or played something on his lute, an instrument he loved to play but never could play. Other than that his life was worth nothing to him.
Little by little, Alexander deteriorated. The bushes and hedges and trees and grass around the castle grew and were never taken care of . Weeds grew all around it and the few people who passed it saw what fate had done to their kind king. A lonely man in a lonely castle. Outside, in Alexander mind of the outside, Prosperania turned into a war-zone although no one was there at all. Invisible brawls and haunted robberies everywhere. Ghostly prostitution was the main trade and even prude ghoul countesses had turned into whores.
This was hell and King Alex didn't care.
He knew that Nocturania would probably take over and turn the nothingness of Prosperania into eastern Nocturania when he was dead and make it evil. He was spiritually dead and numb. The bottom floor of the castle was filled with weeds and grass and bushes, whose branches had grown inside the open door of the castle.
Cobwebs and dust, deterioration and decay ruled like a sleeping giant over all of this. The king ate, but mostly he just slept. On the occasional walks he took, he dreamt that he passed a pub where he dreamt somebody was there and then maybe drank some old wine and nobody really knew who this old bum was. Nobody had seen this old man before, not in his dreams. Perhaps he took advantage of some lewd old maid who needed an extra quid in exchange for some fun.
He had stopped caring and the castle had stopped being a castle and he had stopped living and the country had killed its last glittering ray of hope. Prosperania was dead and buried along with the royal family of a lost king.
His lost country was in the lost mortality of a lost now and lay lost, buried six feet under ground along with the dead rats of a lost yesteryear.
That morning, the wooden heart he distinctly remembered putting on the night time table next to the candle was gone. He looked for it that entire day all over the palace before giving up, realizing he had lost the last memory of his daughters love. Such was the rise and fall of the kingdom of Prosperania. With this incident began the king’s long time isolation.
Soon, King Alexander would be the only inhabitant of the haunted kingdom.


CHAPTER FOUR
I S O L A T I O N


"A song of old days gone by but with a happy, dancing touch!"
“Follow your fears. They will lead you home.”
-King Alex's visions, 1429


Night time, June 21st 1428

King Alexander of Prosperania was walking down an unfamiliar path paving the way over a grassy plain scattered with corpses. The full moon shone upon these corpses and the branches of the trees that stood here and there on the plains cast shadows on the