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

Hieronymus Bosch canvas, dawdling upon a large oak throne with walnut and ebony intarsia decoration. The picture upon the back of the throne was that of a three headed Cyclops, a very strange creature with one shared eye between three heads. The chair was one of the oldest seats in the palace, apparently carved by one of John the Strong’s carpenters.
The flames within the marble fireplace danced, with each second passing more acquiring a life of their own. The woman sat watching this fire with incessant interest, as if the answer to her problems lay in the dancing blaze. Her eyes were wide open and her mouth slightly ajar. Slowly drumming with her fingers against the armrest with steady rhythm, there was the gaze of boredom in her craving gape.
She saw the entire fortune of her life as decay and disorder.
She had spent a week alone after the feast. Adnicul had left soon after the ball the next day and said that he needed time to bribe the queen to give him some soldiers.
Now, there was not even a rush light here.
She began to feel like a piece in a board game.
That bothered her. It also bothered her that she always had been toyed with.
A triumph here and there and then the eternal waiting was due. That was why she made people wait forever so that they could sense what it was like to wait. She wanted them to need her torture. They would beg for it. She was confused. Who could she trust?
She had always been an unwanted child. Never having been understood by anyone in her family, she had resorted to practicing black magic and inviting and courting boys in the royal palace in order to attract her older brother’s attention.
Soon enough, she found herself guilty of arson and felony. As soon as her brother was crowned king, he threw her out of the kingdom and she was imprisoned in a caged coach and thrown out as soon as the horseman reached Callenia.
She lived on roots and berries in the forests of Nocturania until he arrived.
Adnicul was a blessing in disguise and his imaginative fantasy and nomadic past turned her on. They found love, or was it lust? Lucinda did not know and did not much bother to dwell further into that matter. The fact was that Adnicul became more than a lover. He became her mentor.
Claiming he was there to train her to reface her brother, he was said to have conceived her and made her a demon. He claimed that their names fit together in a mold of fortune and fame for the rightful king and rightful ruler of the known world.
Lucinda believed this. At least, she did for a while. Until the master of evil, Adnicul’s chief and ruler, arrived and told her that she had been reincarnated by him in order to be the last weapon against God. She was told to keep quiet and wait patiently for the time when the truth would come out.
Together Adnicul and Lucinda mapped out a plan to kill the present king of Nocturania.
The old codger was the last ancestor of the original King John.
As soon Lucinda heard of Belinda’s birth and heard of how much loved she was she mapped out a plan to abduct the girl. Both Adnicul and Lucinda agreed to prepare the kidnapping and make the family wait and suspect and simultaneously suspect nothing. Then, in 1411, the time had arrived.
Six wonderful months of sorcery and torture passed. Then she was forced to let go of the girl.
She had been unbearable after that.
Aggressive as few, she traveled dimensions and visited future giants of hate until the day Adnicul convinced her to again try to attack her brother’s kingdom. So, she started harassing her family and she remembered her own words of returning to plague the kingdom in thirty years.
Back then, it had been just words from a loose jaw. In 1422, it was reality and the sister made it a vendetta to turn this into a dimension encompassing extravaganza, one where it encircled the universe who won the game or not. “This time it is for keeps” she told Adnicul one day in bed.
And so it was. She came as a lute player and fed the court with entertainment and glee. She created a fictional character with a fictional past. His name had been Nomed Snekawa, a name that spelled ‘the demon awakens’ backwards, and soon enough he won the national competition and the hearts of the entire country. He disappeared only for Lucinda to reappear as herself to curse the land.
Letting her family wait was her specialty. Three years of familiar bliss was followed by Nomed’s return. An epidemic, spread by Lucinda, was cured by Nomed.
Alexander’s former skeptic tendency was cured by song and wine and Belinda was convinced by eloquent words and a large manhood. It felt good to use the girl that had replaced her.
Now, Lucinda had returned from Clurafar without promised hooray or haphazard fortune.
So she had traveled dimensions tonight just to avenge her low status, visiting ghouls and monsters and had found the wizard charm of traveling through time. She had made love to the greatest villains of history all in one night, people from alternate realities no one ever heard of here.
She had visited a future man in Germany. She tried to seduce him, but was really turned off at what he had to offer. Nero, although a strange lad, was fun. Once she had found out that Caesar Nero locked people in concert soirees in order to play the lute for them, she thanked him and left. Caligula with his bells, very into SM, was humorous up to a certain level. Of course, her favourite companion was always Vlad the Impalor, well-equipped in every way.
She had often resided in Paris as Miss Lucy Winslet and ploughed through the men there.
Her thoughts circled around her next excursion in history, a dinner with Jack the Ripper? After all, she had suggested that last victim Mary Jane Kelly to Jack – or James Kelly as his real name was. She had been so pretty, that little girl. She was such a lovely victim. Where would she travel next? An evening with Caligula or a brunch with Ghadaffi perhaps – would that be a fitting journey?
A dinner at Adolf's house or a breakfast with Vlad.
As for good old Jack, he was not much of a talkative chap and quite careful about being when he went to his favorite inn, The Ten Bells. Lucinda had stood for a long time outside that pub and waited while he picked Mary Jane up. Lucinda had to admit it: she was spreading her vibrations across the galaxy only for Lucifer to find and Adnicul to get angry.
There was no question that all these adventures had only been revenge against Adnicul for letting her wait. She kept on wondering why Lucifer did not do anything. Lucinda had wanted to attack her niece already at her birthday feast and not just after it all had been over. Everyone had been gathered in the Grand Hall and it would’ve been a splendid occasion, but there was no question that the two masters were rigorous about when the curse was to take place. 30 years to the date after her exile. Numbers were important to the master. Lucinda wanted them to wait, yes, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to grill them slowly in a frying pan filled with lava stones, but not wait herself.
Lucinda could not bear the fact that people did not wait on her. Adnicul had promised he would be there after she had put the palace to sleep. He had promised her a celebration. She had waited thirty three years for that moment. She had been forced to sit still during meals, listen to boring lectures and say yes to all those old farts. Alexander had locked her in a cage and thrown her out of her own bedroom and forced her to sleep outside on the grass.
It had been a Sunday just like today was a day of heavenly rest for the Sabbath in the eyes of the creator. She remembered sleeping outside in the pouring rain during a winter of 1391. She swore herself to avenge her own misery one day for that night in the rain and make them sleep in the rain just as she slept in the rain. Her brother and his silly ensemble of dilettantes were now fast asleep in the Grand Hall of their own palace. They had swallowed her medicine and would not wake up, not ever.
Just as Lucinda sat contemplating her ill fate, the cold gust of an icy whirlwind crashed the window open. Lucinda turned toward it and stood up from the chair. She stretched her neck, the muscles straining and making a vein pop out and show itself upon her skin. The flurry took a few turns around the hall and the master appeared from the side window, his cape flying behind him and his black, wavy hair flying in the breeze. The wind slowly lowered him down and put him on the ground, before it exited through the window and stayed on the outside. He unhurriedly walked up to her, the footsteps of his leather boots echoing in the huge space of the hall. His eyes gave off greenly neon-colored glow and the smile that was on his black lips soon transformed into an evil grin that eventually ended in a frown that made him spit at her feet. He stood there, looking at her for a long while. She wouldn't look away. She knew the game he was playing and she did not like it one bit.
“Hello there” he cooed in a very low baritone. “Have we become a dimensional tourist?”
Lucinda walked up to the majestic man, the clicking of her heals echoing in the large hall.
She ended up an inch from his face and breathed on him very solemnly.
“Adnicul” she whispered coldly, ignoring his comment. “What would you do if someone just left you sitting in an empty palace for a week? That would make you happy, I think. I was a triumphant magician. Lucifer counted on you to take care of me. Now you go make love to the forest empress a week and leave me with the rats and the spiders and the ghouls. Thank you.” There was slight smile on her lips. “Why was it necessary to jump into the sack with the female version of Sir Robin of Locksley? I mean, you kept me waiting for an entire week whilst you were out bonking the queen. Copulation in all excess, but you don’t treat Lucifer’s last weapon with that much perversion.”
Adnicul grinned. “I am entitled to stay for a night in another bed.”
“I have a clear conscience,” Lucinda spat. “You never said you would be gone a week.”
Adnicul cackled. “We all have our skeletons in the closet. I think we should stay to the linguistic terms of our time. It is more dignified.” He sighed and looked her deep in the eye. “I have no reason to doubt you. This is serious, Lucinda. My energy is wasted on your will to avenge yourself on me. The pot is calling the kettle black.”
“How so” Lucinda sang in an icy vocal whiff. “Pot calling kettles black is hardly a term resident in these dimensional quatrains. Throw stones only when you’ve moved from the glass mansion. Besides, I kept on pushing this potion to be delivered for a long time.”
“Agreed, but your reaction was