Coronets and Steel (46 page)

A
UNT SISI WAITED at the foot of the stairs, her face set in a mask of determined calm completely belied by the tension in the fine skin around her eyes. Behind her, Madam Emilio stood silently, her face unhappy as we walked out; Madam A was not there, but I heard her quiet voice in the alcove where they kept the downstairs telephone.

Outside, Aunt Sisi said, “Can you drive, chérie? I don’t trust myself at the speed I think we should make.”

I gave the right-hand steering wheel the hairy eyeball, having never driven this type of car before. But her request put me on my mettle.
And it’s not like I’ll be dealing with LA traffic
.

By driving in the exact center of the road, I accustomed myself to the strange balance of right-hand drive. We soon passed the few cars on the road that cut across the valley to the mountains on the other side. There, I opened up the speed until the needle jammed to max.

I don’t know how long I drove; the moon seemed to hang in the sky above us, and the world spun beneath the Austin’s wheels. The gradual curves got tighter, and the road steeper.

We’d reached Devil’s Mountain. I began to slow.

Aunt Sisi murmured a distressed comment about her poor daughter, and I smacked the accelerator down again. I was driving faster than I felt was safe, so I concentrated on the curving strip of road ahead, winding ever upward, trees flashing by.

After a long nightmare of hairpin turns and ghost-lit branches flashing low overhead, as we played hide-and-seek with the sinking moon, Aunt Sisi said, “Soon you will cut the engine and coast down a short hill.”

“The lights’ll drain the battery fast,” I warned.

“This will only be for seconds. The road is almost directly below the castle. It’s unlikely they would hear the engine even if we were to drive directly to it, but we will use this precaution. We will also hide the car in case anyone comes up or down.”

“Give me the word,” I said.

Another mile or so along she said, “Now,” as we rounded the crest of a particularly sharp hairpin turn. I cut the engine at once and shifted into neutral. The car rolled heavily and bumpily downward, the tires’ rumbling sounding loud and sinister.

“Prepare to turn hard to the right . . . here.” She pointed into a black space between some shrubs. We bumped sickeningly through looming branches, then at last she said, “Stop.”

I hit the lights, and utter blackness slammed down on us.

“Leave the keys.” Her tense voice sounded loud in the silence.

My neck was stiff with tension, and my hands and arms ached from the effort of driving. Aunt Sisi climbed out. Her feet crunched on pine needles. She opened something, and pulled a bulky thing out that crackled like a plastic tarp. “We must make haste.”

“What are you doing?”

“Setting a tarpaulin against the back of the car so the lights won’t reflect if someone passes.”

“That’s clever. So you’ve used this spot a lot?”

“During the days of Russian control.”

I climbed out of the car and swung my arms in wide circles, trying to loosen the stiff muscles. I stumbled on the uneven ground, but once we were past the shelter of the overhanging trees, the brilliant canopy of stars overhead revealed the pale oval of Aunt Sisi’s face, the narrow track of the road hugging the sheer granite cliff, and beyond another long drop into a shadowy valley. Somewhere below was the muted thunder of a waterfall, and night birds sang, heedless of the human drama intruding on their world.

Aunt Sisi walked close to the face of the cliff with quick, sure steps. The straight section of road we walked on would have been a few seconds’ relief from the hairpins if we’d driven it; now it seemed as long as Highway 5 back home.

Our feet crunched steadily. The fresh air was waking me up, clearing my head more thoroughly all the time.

The road swung away from the granite cliff as the slope widened. We stayed next to the cliff face, though, Aunt Sisi pushing her way through shrubs with hands that looked even more fragile in the starlight.

Beneath the cover of a tall fir, she stopped. “This is it.”

She slid a hand into a pocket of her jacket, and extracted a medieval-looking key with six or seven teeth. “The stairs are steep for a long way, then there is a sharp right-hand turn. More stairs. You’ll feel two wooden doorways on the left. Pass those. They open onto the wrong levels—the kitchens and the main library. The last opens into the sky-suite bedrooms, which is where my daughter is being kept. The first room is probably where my son sleeps, but no one should be there now. The intervening door can be opened with this.” She pressed what felt like a regular door key into my hand. “It opens all the sky-suite doors. The passage door has a latch on this side, and on the other side a button hidden in the paneling. You would do best to leave the passage door propped open.”

“Ruli doesn’t know how to trigger the passage? In case?”

“I don’t believe she does. She has not been at the castle except for brief visits since she was little, and I do not think Anton would teach her the passageways now.”

“She’s definitely in that room? How’d you find that out?” I asked.

“One of the house servants sought me out this evening, in order to tell me.” She pushed aside a heavy bough, and felt along the rock of the cliff. Then she inserted the medieval key into a lichen-choked crack. I heard several metallic clunks, then a graunching sound, as part of the cliff swung out. It was a disguised door, and beyond it was a lightless hole.

“Do you have a flashlight?” I could not help asking.

“I do not. There will be spiderwebs, but nothing else. No one has ever been hurt in there. Please, be hasty. And when you find her, warn her what to expect in this passage. She has a horror of spiders. Send her down before you, so she won’t panic and run back up if she encounters one.”

“Okay. Back as soon as I can.”

I ducked past the fir bough and marched into the pit.

Immediately I saw why Aunt Sisi did not attempt it. Felt, rather, as sight was completely impossible. The steps were rough-hewn from stone so each was a different size and shape, and
steep
was an understatement bordering on euphemism. The only thing these steps had in common, besides being nearly on top of one another, was their thick covering of moss. Slimy moss. With a phosphorescent glow in patches, light enough to make one think one was seeing spots before one’s eyes, but not light enough to be the least use in navigating steps.

I had to crawl on hands and knees, therefore, and I patted with my right hand at the growth-smeared wall every few feet, hoping for that turnoff. There seemed to be a slight but persistent veering to the right as I climbed upward for what was probably no more than five minutes, but seemed ages. Soft things brushed my hands and face and I frequently stopped and flung myself flat on the steps when taken by violent sneezes. I was terrified of jerking over backward. I didn’t think I could recover from a fall down those stairs, either physically or mentally.

Once I had to clench my teeth on a scream when something with a lot of legs dropped onto my head, skittered to my neck and then fell off. I shuddered so violently I nearly lost my balance, but this heartening episode provided the burst of adrenalin I needed to send me scrambling top speed the rest of the way.

Encountering the sharp right encouraged me further; also, the incline leveled abruptly about fifteen degrees which enabled me—cautiously—to stand up. The webs overhead here were fewer. A more traveled passage? What lay in the direction she had not told me about?

I was not about to explore.

It seemed a long way to the first door because I expected it at any moment. But I found it, passed it, then found the second and the third. I heard muffled voices behind the second and passed on quickly, my heart banging up near my throat.

I listened for a full minute at the third before I brushed my fingers over it in search of the latch.

The door opened soundlessly. I peered into a huge, chilly room. The windows were clerestory style, high in the opposite wall. The starlight was weak, but after the Stygian totality of that passageway the pale light greeted my eyes with the strength of a 100-watt bulb. There was a grand, canopied bed, a hand-carved teak rolltop desk most of the people I knew would have to pay a year’s income to buy, and some other handsome antique furniture. I propped the panel open with a footstool and walked cautiously in.

Then I saw doors on the adjacent walls. Both had yellow lines of light at the bottom. I picked one, put my ear to it, then jumped back: music! Over voices!

D’oh! A
television!

Once again my heart thudded painfully as I shakily inserted Aunt Sisi’s key into the lock. The door opened, whapping me with the sharp scent of fingernail polish remover.

Curled up asleep on a big bed was someone enough like my mirror image to seriously weird me out. She wore a dressing gown over wool slacks and a matching sweater. On a side table lay neat rows of cosmetic items, including fingernail polish lined up according to shade. The only open bottle was the polish remover.

Clothes were piled everywhere, but in a kind of desperate order: slacks draped neatly over chairs, blouses folded and stacked on the bureau, sweaters on the floor. Next to the TV sat a couple towers of videocassettes and DVDs, perfectly squared. A quick glance showed an amazing array—from sophisticated French films to all seven seasons of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Stacked below the TV table was a mixture of glossy-covered fashion magazines, French, English, and American titles.

The persistent stink of the polish remover clobbered my senses into awareness, echoing that horrible stuff I’d been drugged with earlier. I breathed out sharply, then moved to the bedside and reached to cap the bottle. Why would she leave that open? She couldn’t possibly find the smell pleasant. Maybe antiseptic?

The loudness of the television masked my movements; I thought I recognized Fellini’s
Amarcord
. I pressed the off button.

Then I turned back to my twin.

The light came from electrical bulbs in wall sconces. I stepped toward the bed and studied Ruli’s profile. This time I looked for differences between us. She had high arched brows, beautifully plucked like her mother’s. Her lower lip had a suggestion of a pucker.

Her eyes opened. She saw me and sat up, staring. Despite the shoulder-length hair, the makeup smudges below red-rimmed eyes, and the subtle differences I’d already marked, it was enough my own face to give me a sickening second or two of vertigo.

I drew in a shaky breath and said in French, “Your mother is waiting at the other end of a secret passage. I think we had better hurry. There’s something weird going on.”

Neither of us stopped studying the other’s face. Even as I spoke I was noting further subtle differences between us: her forehead was slightly higher and more narrow at the temples than mine; a hint of point to her chin. She was fashionably thin, with no muscle tone.

She cleared her throat. Her voice sounded higher than mine to my ears. “Are you Kim?”

“Yes.” And as she had not moved, I added, “Best hurry.”

She got up then, and stood beside the bed, looking about wildly. “Oh, God . . . It’s been so horrible . . . Where’s Anton?”

“Somewhere in Riev, according to your mother.”

She winced. “I thought you’d be Dieter. He’s been threat—oh, I’ll never get over this. Never.” Her voice rose at the end.

“I think you should wait to talk about it until we get out,” I suggested nervously.

She pressed her lips together. “Yes. Please.”

I locked her door behind me. In Tony’s starlit room she stood right at my shoulder, looking back frequently toward the other door.

At the black passage door, she stopped. “I can’t go in there.” Her whisper was tremulous with terror.

I said, “I came up that way, and nothing happened to me. You go first. I’ll be right behind you. If someone comes after us, I’ll deal. You go, and think to yourself,
Cousin Kim was here, so there won’t be any spiders.
Can you handle it that way?”

She stilled, except for the tremble, her eyes closed. Then, “To get away from Dieter. I will. Do anything.”

“Great. Then the faster you get down, the sooner it’s over. It’s steep, and you’ll have to be careful, but think about the end—and freedom.” I was going to have to talk her through it. “Remember, I was there a minute ago. Repeat, freedom, freedom, freedom.”

“I’ll be free when I’m home again,” she said softly. It was clear
home
was not here in this castle.

She said nothing more, but I heard the harsh breathing of effort and fear, so I kept on gabbling encouragements and jokes, interspersed with warnings of what to expect ahead.

When we got to the super-steep down-drop she whimpered once, then began her descent. Hesitant at first, from the sound. “Not far,” I called. “And your mother is waiting. And at Mecklundburg House a nice hot bath . . . tea or coffee or whatever you like to drink . . .”

It was far worse going down. I caught myself nearly slipping on the moss, so rather than risk crashing into her if I fell, I let her get well ahead. When it sounded like she was about fifteen feet below me I started down again little-kid style, that is, bumping down gently, heels then butt.

“Oh, I see the door,” Ruli cried happily, at long last. Then, “Yes! Maman?”

“Aurelia?” Aunt Sisi’s voice was faint, cautious.

“Yes!” Ruli laughed on a high, thankful note.

I spotted the top of the door, and began bumping my way down more quickly.

Ruli stumbled through the open door into the silver-glowing night, arms outstretched and her dressing gown flapping behind her. Then, with a graunching sound that seared from my heels to my teeth, the door swung shut.