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

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. Lucinda had won. He didn't care anymore. 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. The cries of help were muffled.

February 23rd 1429

This was the day when Alexander at last became a true victim of his own solitude. As he had been living for such a long time a complete recluse, he had begun confusing reality with dreams.
He could not longer differentiate a dream from the reality.
Everything was a vision.
Everything was a hallucination.
He had been walking down the hall one night with a lantern in his hand, nightshirt dirty and full of holes when visions and illusions started tormenting his soul.
He fell asleep that night in the middle of the hallway and spent the rest of the night being tossed and turned and thrown into visions of the future and the past and other realities.
Lucinda was playing a game with her brother, putting him into impossible situations.

Alexander dreamt he was in a hallway in the summer-house Lucinda had destroyed so many years ago. He was running, but as he ran he felt himself sticking to the floor. He looked down and saw that the floor was covered in dried blood. He turned around and saw Lucinda approaching.
He tried to run away, but couldn't. His feet were glued to the floor and down from the ceiling a gigantic spike was aiming for his head. Suddenly he was in a large arena with thousands of spectators, only all of the spectators were different versions of Lucinda. There were children and grown-ups and grandfathers and even dogs. But they all had Lucinda's face. There were court jesters and entertainers and people eating large legs of lamb. There were couples making love and drunkards belching and dogs fighting. And they all were Lucinda. He tried to see something else, but couldn’t. Lucinda was everywhere. He was in the middle of the arena and it became obvious that he was the main attraction. His feet and arms were tied together and he was slowly being lowered from a chain into a bubbling pit of steaming hot tar. The crowd cheered as he came closer and closer to it. He screamed and screamed, but the screams were nowhere to be heard. Silent screams from the bottomless pit. He looked down into the pit and bubbles were bursting and there were corpses swimming in it. It was hell. And then a huge monster jumped out of the pit. It was a large devil with big horns and a tail and six arms. It looked like the mixture of an insect and a person. It bobbed its head up and down and its eyes were yellow in a swimming sea of black. They were Lucinda’s. This was Lucinda. It breathed in heavily and then spat fire on Alex, burning up his rope and making him lose his grip of the chain he had been tied to, falling into the tar. The hot steaming fluid burned through his veins and seared his flesh and a thousand mouths were chewing at his bones. Above him was the Lucinda-monster, raising its foot and putting it down, crushing him like a bug ... along with the calls of mercy from someone beyond time.

Alex sat up and realized he was in the hallway. His neck hurt tremendously. With hurting bones he tiptoed into the bedroom and went to bed. He woke up ten minutes later after very short and intense nightmare about being chased down the hallway by a ghost. He shouted and screamed, his brow completely drenched with sweat. The rain was smattering against the window pane outside and somehow the storm outside seemed more comforting than the silence in here. It was preposterous how scared he felt in the face of this life. Who was crying? Someone was crying, but he could not place it. Whenever he tried to listen the voice disappeared? It was his own imagination. But it was strange, was it not? What were these feelings of calls of mercy and assistance about that had followed him since Belinda's death? What was that all about?
His breath was heavy and his beard was grey. His hands were shaking and his eyes were bloodshot. He stood up from his bed and ran out, stumbled across the hallway and fell down, hit his head, stood up, felt a wound and the blood oozing out of it, continued.
Then he saw a light. And a vision was before him.
Bang. He was no longer in Iuventus. He was in a field at the beginning of time.

When the three-hundred rainy years were over a bright white light shone on Lucifer and covered him in shining sin, exposing his solitude. God spoke again:

"Lucifer! Listen to me! Let me kill you! Let me put an end to your meagre existence and you can still be remembered as my brightest angel!"
Lucifer stood up and screamed: "Never do I want to be remembered as anyone belonging to you! Never! And never ever will I return to heaven!" Lucifer spat. “God!" The heavens were quiet yet again. "GOD! DO YOU HEAR ME?" He paused. "I will become your adversary, your enemy, your foe and rival, your antagonist and slanderer, your backbiter and satire. Wherever you are, my noble lord, I will be in your way. When you sing I will spit. When you create I will destroy. When you speak of soul, I will speak of flesh. When you make your animals talk of culture I will make them talk of carnal desire.“
"Then it shall be as it is written. You have chosen your life.“
A fierce wind blew across the surface, blowing around the ultimate beast. Lucifer stood strong and sneered. "You can't crush me!" A bright crashing bolt of electric , white lightning charged down from heaven and struck Lucifer with the power of forty-thousand angry souls , having him shake and shiver and scream and scream with pain. Lucifer's eyes rolled backward until the eyes of his head were complete white. He started to scream and drool and shake with the intensity of forty million demons. His skin grew red and his two horns grew bigger. He grew a tail that parted itself twice. His tongue sliced itself and became that of a snake. He grew black fur and his eyes grew red. He started spitting smoke and his feet became hooves. He shook and shook and shook until his whole body was red. The lightning made him tremble, vibrate, quiver and fluctuate and all the time God was watching his one time favourite angel turn himself into a snarling half man-half beast with his help. A tear was in his eye. Lucifer spun around like a toy. A toy. An evil toy. A bad, shaking doll about to become a shark, a wolf, a demon, a hyena, a hell-hole of terror.
"The divorce is final. You are no longer my child!"

The demons were playing games with him. They were giving him little nightmare plays and Lucinda was the director. Back in the castle, Alexander's head snapped around to face the shadows of the hallway of his old familiar castle. He was petrified. The only thing he could hear was the shivering sound of his own shaking breath. He suddenly realized that his eyes were wide open and that he had no socks on. He froze like a furless poodle in Siberia. Belinda, where are you now?
What the hell had that been? God and Lucifer? Divorce? What was that? His mind was too stressed to wonder. All he knew was that he was scared to death. That was all that mattered.
He slowly walked back, trying to find his way. As he did, another vision came his way, swiping across his iris like kaleidoscope glue. He longed for Sieglinde and Belinda and knew they were dead, and yet his mind hoped they were not. But that was silly. They had died in his arms. He saw a golden book in the darkness in front of him. A future book of history in another reality. Then the story came alive and he saw the culprits responsible. And forgot his family.

Her friend Annie Jones' words about her 'Runnin' like the wind if 'e appears' echoed in her mind like the after-effects of someone beating a hammer against steel in a church. But the words were gone long enough to have her feel in his trap. She looked into those dark brown eyes and suddenly saw a red demon dancing in there. She saw the devil rubbing his groin and spitting. She saw those wide-open eyes looking at her with the look of hell. They took her down to hell and there she saw Vlad the Impalor dancing with a man that was to be born next year. A man with a silly moustache. Annie, where are you now? Where are you now, Annie?
Cathy didn't run. She just stood there waiting for him like a statue. In his strong arms just waiting for death. His grip was hard. So hard. Then the knife came out. It was almost a relief. She didn't scream. She just looked at its hard glittery edge with a surprised look of almost phallic admiration. She heard echoes from the past talking from its surface.

Alexander found himself having fallen asleep in the Grand hall and again went to bed about three o’clock at night. He dreamt once more about the murderer called Jack.

"You might think my name is James Kelly, dear. And you might be right. I am the only escaped lunatic at large in East London this fall of 1888. I escaped this summer and started murdering girls in August or September, can't remember ... Can't remember September, pardon the pun ... I have murdered a long time now and you shall be my masterpiece, you unfortunate one. You will be included in every killer-book for a thousand years. You will be included in plays and books and stories and in documents. You will be eternal. You will be a legend. No one will ever know who you really were ... but your name shall ring out through the entire world ..."

Alexander sat up and screamed at the top of