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

stood up and backed toward the side mausoleum that had been built for him to use one day. He walked down the four steps with the lantern in his hand.
He looked over the edge of the stony coffin and found the balsamic, herb drenched, preserved body of Belinda there in the same dress.
There was a small shriek that sounded almost like a woman’s cry.
Alex rushed to the steps and up to the left wing of the holy room.
He stretched forth his lantern and the light from it shone on her face.
“Who are you? Who sent you if you are not the replica of my daughter?”
”I am not a replica nor was I sent here by anyone” the girl pleaded. “I am your child, Father.”
”Then how come there are two of you?”
She smiled nervously, a deep cry in her voice. This might be harder than she thought.
It seemed that cry spoke of great risks being taken and long roads being travelled in order to be there. It spoke of despair of losing the love of a father that was an absolute necessity for the existence of truth. These were old memories. Glances of yesterday went through his mind.
A little girl cocking her head at her father and demanding attention. A mature woman holding a speech. A girl singing a song.
The vibrations that reached his heart were Belinda’s.
He could read her like a book and always had been able to read her.
This was familiar.
There was a very great deep resemblance to the feelings that he thought were dead and long gone. The girl, the woman more likely, smiled and hoped that the father would believe her.
“I am not Lucifer or Lucinda, just your daughter Belinda.”
There were tears in her eyes.
A trembling lower lip.
“That daughter loves you very much” Belinda said and reached forth her arms.
Belinda gestured toward her father, a tear in her eyes.
“Come father, please. We talked about this. You know that this is not the real world.”
Alex took one step and then he took another.
“Believe me.” Belinda’s eyes were watering. “Please.”
Once again the rush of the old feeling came back as the four hands met.
He felt those hands. He knew them. He felt her. It was Belinda.
“I know you. You are Belinda.”
The young lady smiled and nodded.
The father and his daughter embraced.
“It is you.”
There was a muffled cry against Belinda’s shoulder. Tears were streaming down his face.
All at once those feelings, bottled up tears, came out.
The king of a haunted kingdom cried and cried and cried.
His daughter caressed his head and sighed a sigh of relief.
The first victory was won.
She had made it back home.

Two smiles and two teardrops later

Belinda walked around the small mausoleum lighting the six candles on each side with the help of the wax candle inside her father’s lantern. All the while Alex was sitting there dumbfounded and just gawking at his daughter. The chapel grew lighter and lighter as the young woman lit each wax candle, making the inside of their souls turn equally light.
The king knew that these candles had not been lit for a long time.
This little chapel had been long overdue for a visit, but Alex also knew that the pain in seeing the uncovered coffin was too much to bear.
There was no lid.
There had only been a coffin and the lid had been ordered.
Belinda had just been put into the empty space reserved for himself and since then he rarely visited the chapel because it scared him to see her. He had wanted to forget it all, eating himself through salty reserves like the dried fruits and meats and fishes of the cellars and drinking himself piss drunk on bitter wine, losing all dignity.
The only thing that he kept alive was the fire in the castle.
There was always a candle burning through the night that gave light to another in the morning.
“Belinda?”
The girl with the golden brown sander looks turned brightly toward her father, lighting the tenth candle. The wick melted briefly and flickered, growing larger and then beaming.
“Yes, dear Father?”
Her looks were astounding, the colour and form of her dress emphasizing rather than hiding her bosom and curvy derriere. There was nothing sexual in the observation. That would’ve been shameful in its familiarity. No, for Alexander Roderick Winsletenna it was the sheer delight in seeing his gorgeous daughter alive.
It was strange, unclear, and somehow even wrong. She was not supposed to be alive.
It was as if he was dreaming a strange, wonderful dream and a teardrop later she would be gone and that fear would be back with him, breathing ice on his lips once again.
But she was there, alive again, pretty, regal and interesting.
“How come?” he said and looked at her, inquisitive. She lit the eleventh candle and moved to the twelfth. “Why are you alive? I mean” he said clearing his throat “it is you, isn’t it? I mean ...” he laughed “I have no explanation for the fact that your body is still in the coffin and that you are here.”
She lit the candle that concluded the holy dozen and put the original candle into the lantern.
She set the concave white lead glass lamp with its red and bronze top onto the pedestal a few feet away and sat down next to her father. He shook his head, his lips trembling.
The man did not know whether to laugh, cry or scream.
“I am alive. I exist. But the story I am about to tell you will shock you, so I think you might want to have a glass of wine.”
”Where will we find that wine?”
She pointed at the round ivory cupboard in the corner.
He suddenly remembered that three bottles
of sweet vintage muscatel had been reserved for the holy purposes of mass with three gilded silver cups. “The good Lord will forgive us in the light of what I will tell you.”
“Don’t you want to go into the Alexander Room? I mean, that spot is maybe somewhat better heated.”
”After I have lit all these candles? Why did you have to tell me after and not before?”
“It is just that I think you might be cold.”
”Are you?”
He shook his head. “I should be, but with my three layers of clothing and my robe I am fine.”
”Why do you sleep with so much on you?”
”You wouldn’t believe how cold the castle is when nobody is here. Solitude is a cold thing.”
She nodded and patted him on the leg. “When you have poured the wine I will light a fire in the corner fireplace. It is important that we are here in this place where my body lies. You will know why soon.”
Alex took Belinda’s hand and kissed. She smiled and kissed his.
While he walked to the ivory and alabaster holy supper cupboard, taking out a bottle of old sweet wine and two cups, Belinda began speaking.
The tears in her eyes disappeared and her eyes cleared.
“When I died, the cause of death was despair.”
“I know” Alexander said. “I suffered with you.”
“I know that you did.”
”When you died I almost died with you.”
”I could feel that” Belinda answered.
Alexander scratched his head in embarrassment. “I tried to kill myself by hanging. I was too much of a coward.” He looked up at her. “Now I am happy I did not.”
“I am as well” Belinda smiled. “Don’t try that again. We need you.”
He nodded. “No dear. That is over.”
She sighed a painful sigh. Inside her soul she was by a beach gazing at her own calm sea for the first time in what seemed to be years. “Nothing else but a broken heart killed me.” Alexander walked over and set the cups onto the space between them. “I remember looking at that view and then just dying.” He poured the wine. It was almost a holy act, the angels by his side doing it for him, exquisitely guiding his hand to bring forth the holy liquid to make a new child. Hope was the child’s name. Hope versus fear and hate and misunderstanding. “But I woke up again and when I did I was inside the palace in my room, Steven’s room. There was a white light outside. So white it was scary.
When I walked out into the balcony I realized that what was outside of this palace was no garden, no Clurafar, no grass, no trees, no world. The palace was rising and falling and resting on thin air.”
Alex sat back, resting his filled wine cup on his left knee.
Belinda kissed her father’s hand once again and walked over to the one fireplace maybe six feet from the alter fresco of Virgin Mary.
She kneeled down and put a few pieces of wood into the fireplace.
“I walked out of the room and up and down stairs and found that everything was intact. It was Iuventus Sacrum, only it wasn’t ...” she looked at her father, a bitter, strange smile on her lips. She threw the wood in and stood up. “Then” she continued “I found people. I found mother and Steven and Patsy and Pat eating dried fruit” she laughed “in the Grand Hall. Even Bantrard was there playing.”
She took a candle away from the wall and lit a small piece of oak with it.
“Steven and I were blissful to see each other but I was very confused. I would not speak for a long time and I missed you, Father. I kept on mourning.”
Alex looked at her and then down on the ground. “So the ideas we had about the illusion were true after all. I would not have dared to believe it.”
She grimaced a very painstaking grin and gathered some courage. “Part of the reason why I kept on mourning was because my family, our family, Father, told me what conclusions they had made about their presence in that place.” The fire began to crack inside the fireplace now. She blew some wind upon it and threw another log. “They were not dead, none of us were ... or are ... dead. We might be more in reality than you are.”
Alexander looked up and let the wine cup drop to the ground.
There was wine all over the floor now.
Belinda rushed to a handkerchief that was clutched between the fingers of the corpse in the coffin. Without a blink or a hesitation, she grabbed the handkerchief away from the oiled hands of her own dead body. She kneeled and picked up the cup, dried it off and put some more wine into the cup.
Then she dried off most of the wine with the cloth and hung it onto the pedestal with the lantern to dry. Red or no, it was unimportant if the cloth was stained in this world. After all, the world was not real.
She went to the other fireplace to the right of the altar and Alexander, too stunned to speak, just listened to her talk, drinking almost all of his wine. Belinda had not touched hers.
As she worked on the second fire, she went on.
“Well, the 34 that had been there before I arrived had realized what they had suspected when they had been here. The reality