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

and that his ship, the Prosperanian Glory, was being sucked into a whirlwind.
He woke up just as he saw that Belinda was his first officer aboard the vessel.

Night time, January 10th 1429

Alexander dreamt about his wife again. Sieglinde was in their bedroom in the dream and he had been spending about three hours talking of their mutual memories together. He had told her how they met and how they married, their mutual coronation, and the birth of their children. Sieglinde's eyes had lit up every time he said something like that and her tears of melancholy joy were only slightly less encouraging than the loving caress she gave Alex on the cheek after he told her the stories.
He had barely left her side. She was weak as well. Her tongue had been cut off. She had bruises and scars all over her body. She had a deep wound in the heart area. One rib was broken. She was dying. But even so near death she was gorgeous.
He had been singing her songs for a half-hour, stroking her hair and kissing her hand and smiling at her, when he discovered her pain had increased. She looked at him, gave him a sweet look that definitely spoke: "I love you!" and died. The flame inside her eyes died. But as he then stood by the coffin and it was to be lowered into the earth, the lid opened and Sieglinde popped out, frilly as a little schoolgirl. Followed by Belinda, seeing his serious and surprised face, said: "Oh. Come now, Alex. We are not dead. We are in a gap ... Somewhere. Find us."
Then they skittered off to the forest screaming : "Find us!" in high voices , almost singing a melody of a small third : A - F# .

January 15th 1429

As the dreams were very encouraging, he kept praying for guidance to understand them. If they were not dead, where were they. Please God, he said. Let me find them, wherever they are. But God did not make the situation better yet. He made it worse. Or someone did. Calls for help reached his subconscious ears, deafened by demons.

January 29th 1429

Nightmares. Now he was having nightmares. He had been alone now for six weeks and the palace was now not comforting like before. It was a hell-hole of shadows. Alexander felt alone like never before. He had been thinking before. He had wondered earlier. Now claustrophobia was taking over. Life seemed strange. He stopped eating regularly. There was enough to eat, but he just did not want to. He rode out occasionally, sat on the empty senator palace courtyard in the empty ghost town of Clurafar until his legs fell asleep. He sat in the Grand Hall where so much action had taken place before. Iuventus Sacrum was dead now. Prosperania was dead now. Alexander was going crazy. Because he had no explanation for all of it. Undoubtedly this was Lucinda.
The feeling that someone needed his help was stronger than ever, but the demons in-and outside his head strangled those voices more and more. His only strange light was riding out every day on his horse and somehow, somewhere hoping to find... someone. But he never did. Mercutio was getting old and he needed two hours now to ride into town instead of one like before. But the trips were nice. Sometimes he would for fun raid a shop, destroy a window, and steal something because no one was there to witness it and that it when Alex knew he was going insane. In his visions he was a regular at Madam Zonga's and became very popular. But the ghosts had scarred faces, disabled plague ridden bodies. Alex often sat alone by the fireplace in the sitting room hearing the voices of the past talk to him. He rocked back and forth and sat with wide-open eyes, grinning, in a house that was full of ghouls and dead spirits. He remembered the evening in 1422 when the eleven of them were looking at the figure on the Palace Hillside.

February 1st 1429

“And who do you believe is her master?"
"The Devil" Erica said.
Alexander took a step in his dream that night and walked forward in the darkness over to the fireplace. He knelt down and poked around with a stick in the fire. Then he threw it in. The fire crackled and popped. A spark came out from the fire and a piece of glowing wood landed in front of Alexander. He shoved it back into the fire and stood up. The wind was howling outside now, Maria and Ellie were embracing each other and the rest were quiet. Alexander walked up to the window again and looked out.
Sieglinde looked out to the full moon. The light shone in her face and made her look like figure-head on a ship, her scarf around her shoulders, the light on her features. Her voice meandered into a whisper: "God help us!" She walked over to Geena and they both sat down and started to talk.
Out on a hill around three-hundred feet from the window stood a large figure in a blue uniform. His cape was fluttering in the wind and he was looking at the castle. Alex gasped. "Come and look!"
The eleven people in the room suddenly felt a common urge to comfort one another. They were all in the same boat now. As they did what they were told a petrified face came upon them. There by the palace hill a figure stood watching them from afar. The moon shone behind it and the cape was flying in the breeze. Standing on the palace hillside right between the fountains up on the grass, there was a daunting deadly calm over it all. Erica did the sign of the cross, Maria shook her head, Eleonora was observing, Belinda thinking, Sieglinde biting her lip, Patrick was sneering, Geena and Rolf were holding hands and the rest were just too scared to think. Alexander's heart was beating faster than he would care to admit.
"Who is it?“
Alexander shook his head. "I don't know, Belinda... I really don’t!“

He remembered this conversation vividly after dreaming about it, shivered, and didn't know if he should scream or weep. For the first time, the King that had been the symbol of strength and control on the land was a weak little man who stared into the void with petrified eyes, feeling ice-cold hands of death upon his neck. At his neck were hands that would not obtain him under any circumstance. They could threaten him, but they would never seize him.
Mercutio broke his leg on that day on the way back from town. Alexander tried desperately to save his devoted friend but it was obvious that it was impossible. He died on the 7th. Now Alexander was completely alone. That was when the real nightmares started.

February 4th 1429

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. Cries of help. Lucinda fought back against these voices.
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 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?
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.
The king was wandering around in circles and was unable to get out of his own solitary confinement.

February 21st 1429

Alexander Winsletenna had not shaved since December. He had not washed for a month and he was going crazy. He was hallucinating. He walked into the grand hall with the coats-of-arms and the fireplace too often and cried over the thoughts of all the parties that had been celebrated here. 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. She had been 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.

"Play something merry, will you ... old chap!"
"Play us a song of old days gone by but with a happy, dancing touch!"
Echoes of music and laughter filled the hallways. It was a distant life to him now. It was like a man standing at the end of a tunnel hearing the wild party thee rooms away, but one he was not allowed to enter.
"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 reoccurring 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. Sometimes he even went for a walk or played something on his lute, an instrument he loved. But other than that, and perhaps reading a book or two, 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 had still turned into a war-zone although no one was there at all. Invisible brawls and haunted robberies everywhere.