Queen of the Night

“QUEEN OF THE NIGHT,” THE ghouls called her, more frequently, “Her Highness.” Because they referred to meat in the state they preferred as “high,” the usage had confused the boy when he was smaller. “Her Highness must see you.” “Her Highness will never approve you.” He had pictured one of them taller than any—although they were all tall—fragrant with decay, as they were.

He could not eat the putrid flesh they relished, as he and they had learned when he was still very small. For him, meat in summer could be not more than two days in the grave, and in the dry harsh heat at the end of August (when fevers raged and many were buried) even two days might be too long. Mostly he lived on food that the pious living offered to their dead: hot breads three times wrapped in clean cloths sewn with crosses and holy verses he could not read, and the boiled turnips and cabbages of the poor, these last wrapped once or twice or even five times in clean rags that were only rarely decorated with crude religious pictures executed in the red blood of beets.

He supplemented these foods with roots and stalks snatched from gardens by night, pears and cherries filched from orchards, and certain herbs and berries that he had discovered himself, though rarely with the fungi the ghouls enjoyed, which ofttimes made him ill.

“If Her Highness does not approve, will I die?” he asked Eeesheeea.

“She will approve.”

“You may eat of me.”

“Not dancing.” Eeesheeea bowed her head and seemed a stone.

“I am too thin,” the boy acknowledged. The stone did not reply.

They traveled; and no one, not even Beeetheeeor, could say when the Queen would appear to judge him, or where. The spring floods brought low meat and easy, together with drowned cattle (which they disdained though the boy did not) and swine, which Neeeneeeaih claimed to relish.

Summer was the best time. Water from farms where all the living had died they poured into healthful wells and even holy springs, although the latter was unlucky and rarely effective. So bold were they at times in summer that they were seen by moonlight, dancing as they feasted in clothing furnished by their meat: the dead wife’s parti-colored kirtle (fouled now by groundwater and the ichors of decay) beneath her husband’s rotted coat.

Autumn found them foolish and fond of jests, hiding in new-dug graves and violated mausoleums, and careless of the fading sun. It had been in autumn that they had found the boy, as Eeesheeea confided, feeding him as a prank, chortling when he vomited and leading him to waters that they hoped might hold the fever still. “When I’m bigger,” he had boasted, “I’ll be like you,” but she had shaken her head.

Winter was the worst season, when the earth of even the freshest graves froze, and month-old meat wore flesh too hard to chew. The boy had snared a hare, skinned it with his teeth, and was sucking the largest bone from a hind leg preparatory to cracking it. “Come with us,” Beeetheeeor told him; and he did, flattered, walking alone (as it appeared) through the freezing winter night.

Beside the dark and half-ruinous church, the caretaker’s cottage glowed with firelight; and candles stood guard at every window, save the shuttered window of the loft. “They sing,” Eeesheeea hissed. Her ears were sharper even than the boy’s. “Send back their song to them.”

“I must hear it first,” he told her, and cupped both ears.

The boy grinned, and as the final note faded, replied:

Silence fell upon the cottage. Eeesheeea said, “That was better even than last time.” And he, creeping closer to the caretaker’s cottage, gloried in her praise.

At length a man’s quavering voice ventured, “It’s the Gray Neighbors in search of a steed.”

A woman, “Isn’t the White Lady curse enough?”

A boy, “Will they steal Maria?”

“The queen has been visiting them,” Beeetheeeor explained. “That is why they have opened a grave for us.”

Soon out came the caretaker, his wife, and their son, beating pans and calling out: “No horse, no cow, no byre, no barn. But warn ye fair, ’twill soon be morn!” Three times they marched sunwise around the cottage repeating this, their freezing breath a ghostly herald in the moonlight. Then the wife put a bowl of milk upon the step, with bread on one side and salt on the other. “Bread for life and salt forever. These the bonds between us sever. Milk for mercy, milk for friend. Drink, and let thy mischief end!”

The boy drank the milk greedily and ate the bread, too; but spit out the salt, angrily scattering it across the step. Then he climbed onto the roof, put his head down the chimney, and howled like a wolf. When this evoked only a terrified silence, he peered over the edge of the roof, upside down into the loft through a chink in the shutter, where he saw a yellow-haired girl, much wasted, whose wide frightened eyes stared at nothing; his forefinger soon teased out the wooden bar, and he opened the shutter and swung inside to crouch next to her bed.

Slowly, she turned her head to look at him.

“Tell them iron will keep us out,” he whispered, knowing it was what Beeetheeeor would want him to say. “Call to them.”

The yellow-haired girl called, but her voice was without strength. When nobody came, the boy plucked an onion from a string of them hanging from the rafters and threw it down the ladder hole into the fire, scattering sparks and embers over half the room, and hid under a heap of husks.

Soon the caretaker’s wife mounted the ladder. “Maria,” she inquired, “were the fairies up here?”

“One,” the girl said. Her voice was less than the sigh of a leafless tree. The wife returned to the ladder hole and called, “Johann, there was one up here troubling the child.”

The caretaker, a spare man with a long sad face, climbed into the loft as well, with a tattered old black-letter Bible in one hand. “An ouph, Maria? With a red cap?”

The sick girl rolled her head across the pillow.

“With cobweb wings? An oak-man?”

She said nothing and stared at nothing, as before.

“Describe it.”

“Here,” the wife said, “I’ll help her sit up.”

“She’ll be dead before the moon,” muttered the boy to himself, peeping through the husks and noting how her bones poked the threadbare nightgown she wore. “And little enough for Eeesheeea.”

“How looked it, child?” the caretaker asked. “Tell us.”

“He. Thin. Dirty.”

“Young, Maria? Was he young? Shivering?”

The sick girl nodded.

“A cauld lad.” The caretaker shivered himself. “They start fires, they say. That must have been what he was trying to do. You have to leave them a warm coat to be rid of them.”

“We’ve none to give,” his wife protested.

“Iron,” the sick girl whispered. “Iron will make him go.”

Her father rubbed his chin. “It might. Iron charms them hence at childbirth, they say. Scissors open underneath the cradle.”

When they had gone, the boy stood up. “That was kindly done,” he told the sick girl. “We’ll trouble you no more, I think.” In the cottage below, he heard the clank of a pickhead against the blade of a spade. “I’ll do you a favor, if I can.”

“Go away,” she told him.

“Sometimes I can grant three wishes,” he said, and at the moment he almost believed it.

Her head rolled from side to side, as before. “The White Lady will come tonight, and I will die.”

“Bar the window after I’ve left,” he told her; but there was no indication that she had heard.

Outside, Reeezthorreee had taken the spade from the back door; Beeetheeeor was already at the reclosed grave, swinging the pick. “They dug this meat up again,” Eeesheeea explained, “and broke the frost, though the ground is hard again at the top. They believed it was Her Highness.”

Before long Beeetheeeor and Reeezthorreee cast aside the tools and dug with their claws as they always did, making the clods fly. There was no coffin, the boy saw when he peered into the grave, but a stake had been put through the meat to hold it.

“She comes,” Eeesheeea whispered.

Until he heard the horses’ hooves, the boy thought she meant only that Beeetheeeor was lifting the meat, as he was.

The clouds parted to show a black carriage racing across the plain, dropping from sight into a declivity, reappearing at the crest of the hill on the opposite side, and rattling across the Roman bridge over the frozen brook. “Her Highness will approve you this night,” Eeesheeea assured him, her tone less confident than her words.

“Is that one of our carriages?” he inquired. She did not reply, and he ran to the road for a closer look.

When it drew up in front of the cottage, he saw that the coachman was one of the living, though he had never seen one with a face so savage or eyes so cruel. A groom scuttled off crablike to catch the boy by one arm. “Want him, ma’am? I got him for you!” Eeesheeea stood, and the groom hid behind his wild-eyed horses. A soft laugh came from the carriage.

“I’m all right,” the boy told Eeesheeea. “I could’ve got away. You better eat before they finish it.” Neeeneeeaih had emerged from a moon-shadow to join the feast.

“Her Highness has seen you,” Eeesheeea told him. “I am here to speak for you.”

The voice from the carriage murmured, “Come, my child. Let me look more closely.” He went to the window and peeped through it, but there was no one inside.

Eeesheeea said, “For seven summers he has been ours, Your Highness. We found and we claim him. If it please you, three more?”

Bright with lions, swords, and crested helms, the door of the carriage pushed the boy back.

In the moonlit silence that followed, he heard a shutter creak. The sick girl appeared at the window of the loft. A moment more, and she was crouching on the sill, then scrambling down the wall. Save that her eyes were open and staring, her expression was that of one who dreams, and would awaken if she could.

A slender figure in white stood beside the boy, without having come from anywhere. His first impression was of hair; it was black, and he had never seen a woman with so much, a somber aureole about her lined and bloodless face that stirred as if in a wind, though no wind blew.

Beeetheeeor, Reeezthorreee, and Neeeneeeaih were ranged behind Eeesheeea now. All knelt; seeing them, the boy knelt too. Eeesheeea raised her face and her hands, her eyes black with tears. “My head in surety for all he does. Have mercy on your slave, Your Highness! Just one summer more?”

The sick girl stood at his shoulder, swaying and trembling in her nightgown. Still on his knees, he put his arm about her waist and felt her febrile heat.

Coldly, the White Lady told Eeesheeea, “This is a child of the living, and already of age. It is time that he return to his own. I shall arrange it.” Before she finished, the ghouls vanished as though they had never existed.

“Come with me freely,” she said to the boy, “and I will show you wonders, man-child.”

He looked about him. “Where’s Eeesheeea?”

“Where she has always been.”

He got to his feet. “This girl’s ailing. I’d like to take her back inside.”

“Their doors are barred,” the White Lady told him, and her coachman laughed.

“Her mother and father will let her in if I knock.”

“They sleep.” The White Lady’s face was as expressionless as a naked skull; the boy found himself wishing she would smile or frown—be impatient, prideful, or even angry.

“I’ll pound on the door,” he said. “I’ll wake them up.”

“Do.”

He led the sick girl back to the cottage, asking whether she was all right, suggesting she might be cold, and at last pleading, “Won’t you say something?”

Picking up the bowl that had held his milk, he rapped the door with it, and at once heard the rattle of the bar. “See,” he told the sick girl, “they hadn’t gone to sleep yet. You go back to bed and stay there.”

The door opened, and the White Lady held the bar. She motioned to the sick girl, who went in and climbed the ladder to the loft.

“You’re making her ill, aren’t you?” the boy asked.

“I am breaking her bonds, one by one.”

“Do you still want me to come with you? Promise you’ll let her alone, and I will.”

“For one year.”

“Forever!” It seemed to the boy that they must surely wake the caretaker and his wife, but no one stirred.

“How long did you live among the ghouls?”

“We call them the People.” He was sick with fear, but fought it with boyish stubbornness.

“How long?”

“I don’t know. You heard what Eeesheeea said.”

“How long? The truth.”

“Nine years, I think.”

The White Lady nodded slowly. “Go back to my coach. Get in.”

The walk from the carriage to the cottage had been short; the walk from the cottage to the carriage seemed long indeed. The boy wanted to run, to hide among gravestones as he had so often, in so many such churchyards. He was free, he knew, and could do so if he chose; he knew, also, what the White Lady would do if he did.

The carriage door stood open; the coachman and the little, twisted groom watched him, grinning, as he put his bare foot on the iron step, stepped up, then stepped up again and into the coach.

It rocked ever so slightly on its leather springs, and the door swung shut and latched itself. Through the open window, he noted the earth Beeetheeeor and Reeezthorreee had scattered, black in the moonlight; the pick, the spade, and the stake that they had cast aside, and a few bones. From the meat, he told himself—but something in him turned it to from the dead woman. He was one of the living now, as she had been.

The coachman’s whip cracked. The coach creaked and jolted into motion. He had never ridden in a coach before, and boylike delighted in it, exhilarated by the novelty of effortless speed. There was a rug on the backward-facing seat opposite him; he unfolded it and covered himself with it as he sometimes had with stolen altar cloths, tucking it about him and telling himself that he must accustom himself to such comforts now, as befitted the living. He would wash when the ice broke, get a house of his own by whatever means houses were obtained.

As the carriage rattled across the Roman bridge, he grew conscious of something cold pressing against his right side. His fingers found nothing there, but the pressure continued, and even increased. Feeling again, he discovered that his ragged trousers had parted from waistband to knee.

“I am here,” the White Lady said.

“I can’t see you,” he told her. Only silence answered. He tried to push her fingers away, but there were no fingers. “Don’t do that,” he said.

“Don’t do that,” she mocked him.

The rug slid from his lap to the floor.

“Freely,” she said, “freely.” And then, “You will never know another like me.”

“I don’t want to,” he told her; and yet, he did.

“Kiss me.” Hair and chill flesh molded themselves upon his face. He kissed her, and from somewhere near the dark and swaying ceiling she laughed.

“You’re cold.”

“You are not. Lie down on the seat. I want to show you something.”

Reluctantly he did so, and she loved and bit as though her teeth were within her loins.

“You see? You are a man.”

“No.” He shook his head. “No.” He sat up again, and for a long while sat with his face in his hands. He was naked, though he could not remember how he had come to be, or what had become of his clothes.

After a time he covered his shame with the rug, and after a time still longer, began to enjoy the ride again. It seemed their horses could never tire, but galloped on forever through a night no sun would end. Looking out of the windows, he saw a dark castle upon a darker crag and pretended that he was its owner, a great lord—with a white charger—with medals on his chest—with a sword and a fur cloak. His wife would ride in a carriage like this, and he, swifter than the wind, would gallop before her to see that every lamp and cresset blazed, and that the servants had begun their dinner.

“Have you recovered?” the White Lady inquired. “You are young and should recover quickly.”

When he looked at the window on her side of the coach, he could see her in the corner very faintly, as a traveler among mountains sees, and then does not see, a face in the profile of a cliff, or a silent traveler like himself in a standing stone. When he tried to look at her directly, she vanished, becoming a glimmer of moonlight on the leather seat. “Please don’t,” he said. “I don’t want to. I want to go back to Eeesheeea.”

She laughed—or perhaps it was only the tinkling of a bell on the neck of one of the sheep on the hill below the crag. “You shall. Eventually.”

He would have opened the carriage door and thrown himself out, but the door would not open. He dived through the window instead.

And found himself in a deep, soft bed, with sheets and blankets and a puffy comforter over him. Each bedpost was a black candle, and all four candles were lit, sending up smoky flames as long as his forearm, about which the bats who clung to the arched vault above stirred and chittered in complaint. Something cold lay beside him, and for hours he dared not look.

“You were fatigued. I let you rest. Let us see if you are well rested.”

He felt her fingers and smiled despite himself, trembling.

“Perhaps you would like food? I would.”

“No,” he said; and she kissed him on the lips, covering his eyes with her hand.

“Am I so cold? Do I seem a dead thing?” She warmed him between her thighs.

“No,” he said again.

She laughed with delight, her laughter like church bells far away. “Nor am I. Do you recall what I taught you in the carriage? Here I lie. It is your turn.”

He pressed himself to the face he could scarcely see, and she licked, and tore him with her teeth until her pillow was wet everywhere with his blood. It frightened and sickened him, and yet there was something beyond them both that shone like a gem, turning and beckoning to him—something he seemed about to grasp at each moment.

“These are the pleasures of Hell, you see, man-child. In Hell they are not punished by pain alone, because pain alone can never be punishment enough. Now do as I taught, and show me that you still live, and I as well.” Her hands upon his hips directed his motions, and with each she grew more real, a living woman whose naked body rose from the bloodsoaked sheet, bright as morning and white as alabaster. “For the blood is the life,” she said.

He slept, and woke alone.

For days, it seemed, he lay dreaming. That he was in the castle on the crag, he knew. There were windows in every wall of the great domed bedchamber—a tower room, then, high above all the rest. So would he have chosen, he decided, could he choose. Black velvet drapes streaked with cobweb closed each window; and though at times those drapes were drawn back, so that he looked down upon the cottages of their peasants or out upon the sea, or up into that endless night through which the Queen’s carriage, somewhere, still thundered past stars white with anger or red with guilt, always he woke at last and found himself still in the great bed, with candles burning silently at its corners and never burning down, and the soft, stirring tester of bats overhead, bats who sometimes left their places to flutter aimlessly about the room or dart behind the drapes, never to be seen again.

By him, at least.

The White Lady returned, carrying a child of three, a girl with terrified eyes whose tears and struggles the long road had exhausted. The White Lady’s countenance was smooth and glowed with health; her red lips smiled as a cat smiles, displaying sharply pointed white teeth. “Do you like me better thus, man-child? Have I not become beautiful for you?”

He nodded, unable to speak or to tear his eyes from her.

“You are not afraid?” She dropped the little girl on a chair, like a parcel.

“Please. Please hurry.” He sat up, not bothering to conceal his nakedness.

“You will die. You have rested less than you imagine.” Her hands were behind her, loosing her dress. “You have one more in you, possibly. Then death.” The dress fell at her feet.

It seemed to the boy that his pounding heart would break his ribs.

“Look upon me, man-child.” For a few seconds that seemed eternity to him, her camisole wrapped her marvelous, living hair like a turban. Raising her arms, she pirouetted before him. “I was old when first you met me, but I am young as you, now. Younger, with your youth.”

Her body was above perfection, filling him with a hunger that consumed him until it could consume her. He sprang from the bed and rushed upon her.

Like mist she vanished. With her, the captured girl, the great bed with its flickering candles, and the vast bedchamber itself. Briefly he knew snow, and daylight beneath a low gray sky.

When he woke again, it was in a hard, narrow bed with one side against a rough plastered wall. He moaned and closed his eyes and sought to dream again, because it had been of her.

“You can’t stay here,” Johann the caretaker said when he was able to sit up and drink broth. “Don’t you remember your own name?”

“I’m called ‘the boy,’” the boy said. It was the name Eeesheeea had given him.

“I call him Jon,” said fat Anna the caretaker’s wife. It had been the name of their first child, born when she and the caretaker had been married less than a year.

“When will I get my bed back?” Robert the caretaker’s son demanded.

“Tonight. He can sleep in front of the fire tonight, and tomorrow he’ll have to go.”

“Where?” the boy asked.

“Anywhere you want, as long as it isn’t here.” Johann the caretaker was silent a moment, rubbing his chin. “Go into the village. You must’ve come from there, and dozens of people are sure to know you.”

The boy said, “I did?” though he wanted to say I did not.

“Certainly. You must’ve walked out here last night, the good God knows why, and fallen among the body snatchers. They hit you on the head and knocked the sense out of it, and stole your clothes.”

Faintly—very faintly in the distance—the boy heard the jingle of harness and the rattle of the coach. “It snowed, didn’t it?” he said. He was scarcely conscious that he spoke aloud. “That’s why I can’t hear the horses’ hooves.”

Anna the caretaker’s wife went to the window. “Johann! It’s the carriage from the schloss.”

Her husband went out into the snow with his hat in his hand.

Sitting at the scarred but sturdy old table, propped on his elbows drinking soup, the boy heard a rough, sneering voice from beyond the front door of the cottage, and knew it for the coachman’s, though he had never heard the coachman speak. The carriage, he promised himself, had come with a fur robe for him and a basket of hot food, pheasants and partridges (birds that he had snared for himself when he could) tucked beneath a clean white cloth. The carriage would carry him to the castle, where she would be waiting. They would kiss, tenderly at first.

The coachman’s whip cracked, the harness creaked, and the wheels squeaked as the carriage lumbered away. Johann the caretaker opened the door again, stamped snow from his boots, and stepped inside.

“What is it?” his wife wanted to know.

“They—he …”

“Is it bad news?”

There came the softest of creakings from the loft; and the boy knew that Maria, the sick girl, had come to the ladder hole to listen.

“I don’t know.” Johann the caretaker sat down, his hat still in his hand. “Perhaps it is. Perhaps not.”

“Tell us!”

“He asked if we had anyone staying with us. I said only—only—”

“Jon.”

“Only a lost boy I found in the snow.”

No more broth could be got from the bowl with the spoon, and the boy did not like spoons anyway; he lifted the bowl to his lips and drank the last drops.

“And he—the coachman. There was no one in the coach.”

“What did he say, Johann?”

“He said we were to keep him. Keep Jon.”

Robert the caretaker’s son asked, “Until summer?”

“Not until anything,” his father told him. “Until he is a man, or until we are told something else to do with him.”

He turned to the boy. “You will call me Master Caretaker, Jon. Is that understood? Otherwise there will be trouble.”

Putting down the empty bowl, the boy nodded. “Yes, Master Caretaker. That is understood. There will be no trouble.”

“And you will call my wife Madame Caretaker. Our son is Robert. Our daughter is Maria.”

So it was settled. The boy called the caretaker’s wife “Madame Caretaker” in the presence of her husband and children, and “Mama” when they were alone. The wounds he had suffered (from wild animals during the night, Mama said when she treated them) healed at last, although each left a black scar.

Spring came, and people talked of flooding on the river; the brook under the Roman bridge rose until it flowed across the roadway. With ax and pole, Johann the caretaker and the boy cleared the brush and uprooted trees that sought to dam it there, finding among them the corpse of a girl for whom they dug a shallow grave in the worst corner of the churchyard that kept filling with water.

Summer followed, decked with apple blossoms and loud with bees. Maria grew so strong that she left the loft to play in the sunlight, smiling at the boy with blue eyes that said, I know. He smiled back, and his eyes said, I know you do. But now and again, when the sun was setting and bats set out from the ruined mausoleum in the middle of the churchyard, the boy heard his own voice saying: “Nine years, I think.”

And the White Lady, Her Highness the Queen of the Night: “Go back to my coach. Get in.”

She’ll come for Maria, he told himself, and I’ll be here waiting for her. Or, she’ll come for Maria, and I’ll run—help with a barge on the river, join the crew of a ship when the river reaches the sea, and go to Amerika.

Once he dreamt that he rose from his pallet by the hearth, and opening the shutter saw Eeesheeea, Beeetheeeor, and others dancing in the churchyard. Eeesheeea saw him at the window and waved to him; and though he could not quite make out her face, he knew that she smiled. Waking, he wept. But in time he came to understand that not all that is seen waking is real, nor is all that is seen in sleep false. Although he tried over and over to summon that dream again, it never recurred.

One afternoon at the end of summer, when the apples were ripe and the sheep on the downs were knitting themselves new coats, Johann the caretaker sat sighing on the doorstep, with the boy (who had helped him dig three graves that day, for the fever had waked) beside him.

“Jon,” said Johann, “you’re rich. You think you’re poor, I suppose. It’s very likely. You’d say you’ve got nothing. But you’ve got youth, which is the second greatest treasure in the world. And you’ve innocence. For a few years more you’ll have that, and it’s the greatest of all. A poor man can get rich. A rich man who’s lost his money may get rich again, that happens, too. But when childhood’s past, life’s greatest treasure is gone forever. Nothing can replace it, Jon, or even reconcile you to its loss. There’s no return to innocence, and beyond youth nothing but sorrow.”

“Yes, Master Caretaker,” Jon said. “I know. I know.”