THE HAUNTED KINGDOM 2 by Charles E.J. Moulton (best ereader for pc .txt) 📕

alive to see his own wife die.
Was she really and truly dead? If not, where was she?
Somewhere in his heart he wanted to believe the idea that this was some kind of crazy illusion just created for him. If course, how otherwise could he explain the fact that the entire world around him was crumbling to pieces?
He heard a door squeak out in the church.
He looked up to see who it was.
It was Belinda. She peaked in through the door and discovered her father sitting on the sandstone floor in the sepulchre chapel. She sighed and shook her head, deciding promptly to rush to her father’s aid in order to convince him to come with her. Belinda had been somewhat distraught up until now. She had looked almost everywhere for her father. Everywhere except for the most obvious place.
She stopped before the three small steps down to the memorial sepulchre of the Winsletenna family. There was a long pause as the two family members looked at each other. They both wondered what to say. Belinda took a few steps down toward her father and stopped near the casket.
“Father” she finally said. She had a hoarse throat and her cold did not get better by the fact that she was out here. “You must come with me. You will die out here.”
Alexander chuckled. It was a melancholy and very gritty cackle. He shivered and his teeth were rattling. “Then let me die. What is there to live for?”
“There is hope on the other side” Belinda answered. “Come now.”
There was long and quite thoughtful pause. Alexander gazed around, first at Sieglinde’s casket, then at the trees outside, then at his own hands and finally at his own daughter.
“What other side?” Alexander looked at Belinda and hoped she would answer him. This was not a leader. This was a worried man with nothing but hectic trouble inside his mind. “What do you mean?”
Belinda sighed, wanting her father to stop asking question and come before he froze to pieces in the snow. “Father, please. Don’t ask questions. There are things I have to tell you.”
He shook his head.
Belinda rushed up to him and took him under the arms. She lifted him by his arms and caressed his hair. “Please come with me. I know that you do not leave mother’s grave, but you will never bring her back by not leaving her. She doesn’t want you to die.”
Alexander looked down. Belinda pleaded with him to understand her. He could not be reached.
“Father” she said sternly. “You must live. You have to fight Lucinda.”
Alexander looked up at his daughter. “Why?” His gaze was confused.
“Come with me.”
After a hard convincing both of them finally walked out of the church and out to the side entrance wing. As they walked up the staircase to the first landing, Belinda noticed how much her father shivered.
The entered the Alexander Room. It had been well heated just as she had ordered. A bronze kettle of fresh soup was bubbled over the open flames.
Alexander sat down on the gilded ebony chair and stared into the flames. He clutched his fur coat and looked into the fireplace as if the answer to all his problems lay in there. Belinda took the ladle and poured in some hot vegetable soup from the bronze kettle into the wooden bowl. She gave it to her father and he ate the whole bowl very slowly. They spoke only with thoughts and gestures. The fire held them a long elegy of peace.
When the bowl was empty, the King put the bowl and spoon away onto a nearby table.
For a long while nothing was said. Slowly, Alexander began to warm up. The bloodshot eyes were healed and the skin turned a healthy pale light pink. Belinda had no idea what to say.
“Father” she finally said. “I understand how you feel. Losing mother is a great loss and especially the way she went was a great disaster. We don’t know who did it. We have our own ideas, but we don’t know.” She took his hand. He looked into the open, jittery fire. The flames looked like tongues licking the wall. Alexander was in another world. “I tried to kill myself as well.”
That woke the King up. There was a look of surprise in his countenance. Belinda smiled and closed her eyes, nodding. “Yes, I know. Bad girl.”
Alexander shook his head. “No” he said, very softly. “No, not bad girl”
“It passed very quickly” she responded, now also looking into the flames like her father and hoping, just as him, to find the answer there inside the flames. They saw the seven levels of hell in that fireplace. Wasteland upon wasteland of murderous, bloodthirsty hunger was present in that fire and yet there was a comforting peace in that fire. It was as if the calm of all the eternal love in the planets of the cosmos lay within the heat of the embrace of that element. “I tried my best to get over the fact that our country is deteriorating, but I couldn’t. The rope wouldn’t hold and I spent the night crying. Alfred was my only friend.” She looked out into the blistery air and sighed. Her gaze tried to differentiate what were the bent optical views of the lead glass and what were the blustery icicles on the window pane. She sighed.
Belinda looked at her father.
“Father, my heart is aching just as much as yours” she finally said. “But mother would want us to go on. She would not want us to leave this place with a whimper. The royalty of the empire never has and we have been attacked numerous times, not only by angry fiends.” She squeezed his hand again. “Father, don’t give up. Don’t be flowery. Take the strength you have and make it a promise to conquer your fear.”
“My fear is not the problem, darling” he said. His eyes would not leave the fire. “There is something wrong with this world.”
Belinda nodded with her eyes still fixed on the fire. “I know.”
“Sweetie, I think Lucinda has made us fall asleep on that table in the Grand Hall on the 23rd of September 1425 and that she eliminates everyone in this country until she has me alone. I know that she knows that she wants me alone. God only know, honey, where you all go once you die. Perhaps to a horrid place or to a better one, it is all open right now. I know that Nomed was Lucinda. His name spelled the demon awakens backward only because we were to fall asleep. I should have listened to you.”
“Father” Belinda said. “You were …”
“No” he said. “You were right. You knew all the time what he was. A fake, a fraud, a phoney, that is all he was.” Alexander chuckled bitterly. “I should’ve known that he was a liar when I heard what his name spelled backward. It was a typical Lucinda joke. She made us fall asleep by the spell of a man named the awakened demon. That was all Lucinda’s work.”
Belinda pulled up her oak chair a foot closer to her father’s throne and embraced his throat with her hands. It was a loving gesture. It was also a controlling gesture.
“Father” she whispered as if she was afraid that someone world hear her. The only thing audible except her whisper were the cracklings of the wood in the fireplace. “Whatever is waiting for us on the other side, we will make it through healthy and whole. You will have to stay here and fight. There might also be a chance that you yourself will have to venture out to find Lucinda. I suppose that she wants you to duel her. I suppose that this is all a way to get you alone.”
“I cannot understand how this land could get empty so fast. The world is falling asleep. Everyone is disappearing faster than it seems credible” Alexander whispered back. “That is the only explanation. This world has to be an illusion. It cannot be anything else but an illusion.”
There was suddenly hope in their hearts. They knew that something was wrong and they had spoken what they feared out loud. The wind sang them a song from the outside. It circled the palace and turned the corners and it hugged the sandstone basis of the empire. The winter outside seemed to grow darker, deeper and more ominous by the moment.
Somewhere in the wilderness the wind sounded like the voice of a sibling waiting to let the hyenas of Hades loose upon the sleeping empire.

Monday March 1st 1428

“We are all pretending to be kings and queens. We are all pretending to have a country. No one has been seen or heard of since November of last year. They are all gone. And yet, we sit here and pretend that everything is fine … Where is everyone?”
These were Alexander’s thoughts that day.
Louis Sommerville, who had been gardener for Alex so many years, had been given the permission to retire shortly before the scandal at Madam Zonga’s. For some odd reason, Alex felt guilty that he never said a true goodbye to the man. He was most probably gone forever by the look of things.
Belinda sat with Steven in the sitting room playing chess on the marble set that Sieglinde had given them a year ago, shortly before she died. Steven's dreams had been so extremely violent that he dared not sleep any more. Belinda had to force him to relax for a second.
Alex was in his study working, meeting the executive of the only sickbay near them that still had somebody alive in them. They were mapping out a rejuvenation programme. It was a weak attempt to try to save something that was hopeless. Marcus the messenger and Rolf were baking a cake with Alfred, who tried new recipes. But sometimes Rolf and Geena had to convince him his recipes were a little unusual. For instance, they told him a week ago, cod and haddock do not necessarily mix with cinnamon in a cake made of sugar and plum. Alfred was a bright boy with a shining light. His lack of gastronomically developed expertise was forgivable as a trait.
The Physician Balthazar had died in the castle last week and there was no one in the castle to treat them at all. It was unreal because no matter how many messengers were sent off they never returned. There was nothing to govern. Lucinda kept popping up in the strangest places, scaring the hell out of everyone by looking into windows at night and then disappearing or in the mirror just to vanish when they turned around.
Alexander dreamt about her. But he dreamt about Adnicul as well. In his dream Adnicul of all people was imprisoned in Rigor Mortis and could not come out and Alex was trying to save him. There was something trying to break free in his dream for the clock by Mansicart was there on the mantle piece and twelve strange figures were chasing him, trying to tell him something, pointing at