The Grimm Prequels Book 5: (Prequels 19-24) Page 14

  “Maybe they all had to be from this town? This must be it; he needs to marry girls from this town for some reason.”

  “Darling,” Godmother leaned forward, staring at me, and not staring at me. “You’re really naive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where do you think your husband traveled to?”

  “To see a friend?”

  She laughed.

  “You mean he lied to me. You mean he is…”

  “Married to other women all over Europe, darling,” she said. “You’re not special.”

  A tear threatened to trickle down my cheek. “But he loves me.”

  “You mean he charmed you; with the garden, with the magic. Did he tell you he’d never told anyone else about his whistling and the swaying of the trees?”

  It was a hard task to keep that tear inside.

  “I suppose he played the piano for you. Did he teach you the musical keys? Do, re, me, fa, so, la, ti?”

  There was no point to keeping the tear inside. It was stinging like a deceptive bee already.

  “Don’t think I care for your tears,” she said. “I’m fed up with seeing naive girls like you falling for him.”

  I fell too deep in love. So deep, I ended up buried six feet under.

  “What should I do now?” I asked.

  “First, you have to know of your husband’s ancestors.”

  “Why?”

  “It’ll give you an idea of what kind of man he is.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Not they. Him. Bluebeard is a descendant of Gilles de Rais.”

  “Who is that?”

  “A Frenchman, a knight and lord from Brittany.”

  “I suspected he was French. The portrait.”

  “Gilles de Rais lead the French army, along with the infamous Joan of Arc in the fifteenth century.”

  “So he was a noble fighter.”

  “No he wasn’t,” she said. “He was convicted of killing masses of children and women.”

  I leant away from her, shocked by the announcement.

  “You know what kind of women he killed the most?”

  “What kind?”

  “His wives.”

  Back from visiting Godmother, I waited in front of the door again, wondering if I could open it. Things had changed dramatically from the last time I stood here. Right now, if I failed to open the door and expose him, he’d probably kill me and bury me in the Bluebird Garden.

  I had no one to run to. Bluebeard had bought the town’s loyalty with his money, including my parents. It occurred to me how greedy my parents were. I mean, I came from a noble house. I told Godmother we were poor, but we weren’t really. I assumed she knew it, too. The poverty was metaphorical to my family’s intricate and complicated situation.

  You see, my family actually used to rule this region of Europe, but due to a vicious uprising, backed up by the swords of our enemies, things were confusing. If we eventually won the war, then we’d return to being the masters of the land. If not, my family would be killed and I would be poor for real.

  Bluebeard never cared for the war in our region, living an invincible life in the castle up the hill. But he approached me believing that my family would lose the war, which was likely, thus the assumption of my poverty.

  I snapped out of my internal memories and attempted to talk to the bird behind the door again…

  Each time I tried to talk it into telling me how to open the door, it returned the same nonsense, saying ‘door’! This time I registered the way the bird pronounced it. Doooorrrr. Interpreting a meaning behind the awkward spelling proved futile.

  It’s a bird, Erza, for God’s sake. It shouldn’t be talking, let alone pronouncing efficiently.

  I resorted to inspecting every inch of the door and the portrait. I was looking for hidden clues or anything unusual, anything that’d suggest how to open up this stubborn door. But I could not find anything.

  One night, I fell asleep next to it. When I awoke I thought I heard something else behind the door. Some kind of wailing or humming. A voice? A woman? No, a younger girl? I was too tired, and I could have been dreaming, so I went back to sleep.

  When I woke up again, I was staring at Bluebeard’s boots standing next to me.

  "I thought I had warned you not to open this room." His voice was gloomy and raw, his boots spattered in mud and looked as if raindrops had been spluttering onto them.

  When I raised my head, I saw his beard was still blue, and his eyes reminded me of the mischievous eyes in the portrait.

  "But I haven't," I said, mustering the courage to pretend I didn't. "I was just enchanted by your portrait and spent the nights sleeping beside it, so it would remind me of you."

  A long silence swept over the hallway. I prayed the maids would back me up and not tell him about me trying to open the door or leaving the house without his permission.

  "Are you not curious about what lay behind the door?" he asked.

  "Curious yes, but obedient, too." I was dying to know how the door opened but said nothing.

  "Let me show you," he said with a smile slowly forming on his lips. “I only ask you to close your eyes and clamp your hands on your ears while I do it.”

  And before I knew it, his hands clamped down on my ears and I shut my eyes.

  Whatever he did to open the door, I missed seeing. Frankly, when I opened my eyes and regained my hearing, I was too overwhelmed to ask how because I was standing inside with Bluebeard beside me.

  As for the room, it was small, almost empty, except for something veiled in white, crumpled sheets, at the end of it, on the wall before me. It seemed like something as tall as any human. Oval with a thick frame.

  I watched Bluebeard pull the veil back, uncovering what was underneath.

  Like a lightning strike, I was attacked by a bright gleam of silver and white. I shielded my eyes and took a deep breath. The light was warm I could feel it on the back of my hand. I waited for it to subside, then looked back again, curious.

  It took a moment for my eyes to sees through the blur. The oval thing had a golden frame to it. Expensive gold, I assumed, like I had never seen before. But it wasn’t the frame that shocked me and forced me to take a step back. There was something else inside the frame.

  Me.

  “Who is this?” I pointed with anger, asking Bluebeard.

  Before he could open his mouth, I noticed the woman who looked exactly like me, pointed the same finger in my direction. I felt as if possessed, wriggling and trying to avoid her, but whatever move I made, she imitated me.

  “Relax,” Bluebeard said. “It’s called a mirror.”

  Though old men by the fire had told us stories about something called ‘mirrors’ when we were children, it didn’t register right away. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen my reflection before. In the lake and in shiny objects. I had been groomed for my wedding staring at one of these things.

  But it had never been this clear. Never this real.

  I’d have sworn there was another woman, looking like me, and standing before me.

  “Magic, too?” I asked.

  “Not mine for sure,” he said. “I found it in this room when I bought the castle.”

  “Here?”

  “Trust me, it scared me too, the first time I saw it.”

  “I think you should smash it,” I said. “This can only be a work of evil.”

  “Reflecting your beauty, and letting you admire it, is hardly a work of evil,” he argued. “You’re just not used to it. You have no idea how addictive it can be.”

  “Addictive?”

  “Every single one of my previous wives lusted after this mirror in ways you can’t imagine.”

  “Lust?”

  “My first wife suggested we had to bring it to the bedroom, and not tell anyone about it,” he said. “It was only days before she would not leave its sight. She was obsessed with her looks. She just couldn't stop staring.”

  Carefully
, I approached the mirror, trying to get used to my reflection. It wasn’t an easy task. There were things about me, my body, and my looks, that I didn’t like. Things I realized I’d imagined about me that were not true in the mirror. I discovered I wasn’t as beautiful as I imagined, for instance. I was certainly more rounded than I liked to be.

  But I shook the thoughts away. Why would I trust an evil thing made out of magic? It can’t be right.

  “What happened then?” I asked, almost absently, mesmerized by the mirror. My size actually changed when I neared it. And wait, my left side rather looked like my right. It didn’t make sense. “What happened after your previous wife was obsessed with it?”

  “The same thing that is happening to you right now,” he said.

  His words attacked my senses. I snapped out of the mirror’s influence and stared back at him.

  “See how it’s slowly infatuating you?” he said, his voice tinge with accusation, desperation, disappointment. “You’re just like them.”

  “Is that why you didn’t want me to unlock the room?”

  He nodded, walking toward the door.

  “Wait,” I longed for him. “I’m not going to be like them. I don’t care about my looks.”

  “They all said so, too,” he said, not turning back to face me. “Soon this mirror will possess you. You will even claim it’s talking to you. You will only see the world through it. And it will mislead you, mess with your mind, and then…” He turned to face me, moist-eyed. “And then you will leave me like the others.”

  “Is that what happened?”

  “Only with the first two,” he said. “But then I realized that I had to put every woman to the test, so I know who she really is, if she really loves me, and not the way my expensive jewelry looked on her neck when she stared at her reflection in a mirror. I had to put them all to the test.”

  My heart dropped to the floor. For a moment I misheard: I had to put them to rest.

  “Test?” I blinked, wishing I had heard right.

  “I pretended I was leaving while staying in the basement, asking them not to open the room. I gave them more than they could have asked for and only asked one thing in return: not to open the room.”

  “Bluebeard.” I held him tight. “I am sorry. But I’m not like them. I don’t care about the mirror. You can smash it if you want.”

  “I can’t. I tried, but every time I return it’s alive again.”

  “I don’t care, I love you.” I held his face in my hands. “Just keep this room locked forever.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “I love you. I do.”

  And then we kissed with the same passion as the day he’d taught me the musical notes. We ended up making love in this room. I didn’t really want to. The room scared me, but I felt it meant a lot to him, to seize that moment and bond as husband and wife. I had to prove I loved him and that I didn’t care about the mirror.

  Ah, the mirror. That creepy thing that witnessed our love making that day. I'd even dropped the white veil upon it, but could still feel its hidden eyes piercing through.

  For another month Bluebeard and I bonded again. He brought me breakfast in bed and washed my feet in his huge bathtub — which he finally permitted me to enter. We showered together in the bath which was shaped like an apple, then the one that looked like a heart. But he preferred a conical one that looked like a flute. It had several grooves like a flute's holes, only the size of a bathtub each. The holes spewed water at different temperatures. Some of them steamed and some of them were cold as ice, not to mention the scents they fumed. Strawberries, bananas, and an unusual mix of milk and chocolate, the one that annoyed me the most.

  But my favorite bathtub was the weirdest. One that had been shaped after... well...

  "I love this one," I said. "What's it shaped after?"

  "You can't tell?" Bluebeard put down his glass of the most expensive liquor, one he’d said was imported from a place I had never heard of before: Transylvania.

  "I have an idea but it's crazy. I am not sure this is the shape of the bathtub,” I said.

  "Then tell me." His eyes were curious, his immense frame caressing me.

  "It looks like a liver." I laughed.

  "You're right about that."

  "Why a liver?"

  "I have no idea."

  "Don't tell me the castle came prepared with that as well."

  "It did."

  "Whom did you buy this castle from?"

  "I didn't buy it." He laughed uncomfortably.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Would you believe me if I told you the castle bought me?"

  "Don't be silly." I tapped his chest and lay my head on it.

  "It's the truth. At some point in my life I kept dreaming about it."

  "Of this castle?"

  "Recurring dreams. Unmistakable and eerily accurate. I dreamt of a library inside the castle, one that seemed to hold a genuine secret."

  "What kind of secret?"

  "Promise me you will not laugh."

  "I can't do that," I said. "What if you say something funny?"

  Bluebeard sighed with a chuckle. "The secret of the world."

  I had to laugh, glad I didn't promise him anything. “That's absurd. Did it say that in your dreams?"

  "Aha.” he sipped from his drink, his lips stained with red wine now.

  "What does that even mean 'the secret of the world'?"

  "All unanswered questions: Why we are here? Who created us? What happens to us when we die? How are children really born? Whose religion is the true one? If there is a reason to why we fight our wars?" This part reminded me of the war my family was fighting; most of Europe was in turmoil, all the way from Styria to Hungary.

  "I don’t like questions like these."

  "Why?" He gently rubbed my arm.

  "I don't know if you know this, but I was a troubled child."

  "Really? You don't look like one."

  "I used to hurt small animals and do terrible things. I guess I was compensating for my father's continued absence."

  "I'm sorry." he kissed my head. "You will never feel that way with me."

  I lifted my head and stared into his eyes. "Promise me?"

  "I promise you that with me you will become a woman like no other in the world."

  I didn't know what that meant, and it wasn't the reassuring answer I’d aimed for, but I settled for it. Sometimes wives can only settle for the lesser answers, as long as no harm is done—in my case it was as long as he wasn't going to kill me, because even with all his charm, I still couldn't quite believe him. I wish I could meet one of his previous wives and ask her what happened.

  I lay my head back on his chest, wishing I could depend on its warmth for as long as I wanted it. "So you just found the castle after you dreamt of it?"

  "No, I was obsessed with it and had to search for it."

  "How so?"

  "That's a long story. I found it in a place called the Between."

  I wish I hadn't crossed into the warmth of his heart at this moment, so I could have heard more about the Between. But I slept in my husband's arms, inside my favorite liver bathtub, with that incredible milk and chocolate drink.

  When I woke up I was alone. My stomach hurt so much and I jumped naked out of the bath and puked my way to the hall until the maids heard me and came to help. Bluebeard wasn't there, but they took care of me and sent me to my room.

  "You're pregnant," said one of the maids.

  I sat in my bed, dizzy and sick, hardly remembering what happened. I had not registered what the maid had just told me.

  ”Where is Tabula?" I asked.

  "She accompanied Master Bluebeard on his travels."

  "Travels, again?" I said, not sure if this was another trick. But if it was, why travel with Tabula along? And why would he want to trick me again? "Did he know that I’m pregnant?”

  "No," a maid said. "He traveled before you fainted. He said you were asleep so
he left you a note to apologize. He will be back in a week."

  Again, I realized the fact hadn't sunk in yet. What was I supposed to feel knowing I was pregnant and all alone? Why didn't I feel happy?

  "He doesn't know," the maid said. I noticed she was young and good looking. She didn't strike me as a maid but of noble descent. I didn’t think I’d seen her before.

  "And it's better that way,” she said.

  "What did you just say?” I snapped.

  She leaned forward. Behind her, the other maids watched me with sympathetic eyes. "Listen," she almost whispered. "You're in great danger. We couldn't tell you this before, not with Tabula in the house."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "She is only loyal to Bluebeard. Everything she told you or showed you had been previously planned with him. It's a process."

  "Process of what?"

  "We're not sure, but if you don't escape you will disappear like the others."

  "You mean the wives? You know what happened to his wives?"

  "They are probably dead by now, but no one knows.”

  “Who are you?” I propped myself up in bed, my eyes suspicious of everyone around me.

  “My name is Alice Grimm, but that doesn’t mean anything to you,” the young maid said. “I’m here to help you.”

  “By telling me all of this nonsense without proof?”

  “We should have warned you earlier,” she sighed. “I assume that by now he’s charmed you with all this sweet talk, the garden, the music, and the magical baths.”

  I said nothing. Part of me believed her. Part of me didn’t know what to believe.

  “Each of his wives disappeared a few days after he made sure they were pregnant,” Alice said. “We’d heard him tell Tabula that you were special, that you were unlike the others, and that he didn’t want you to get pregnant.”

  “If I was special, then why wouldn’t he want my children?” I waved a hand. Now these maids appeared to have proved to be talking nonsense. I thought I had them. I thought I’d persuaded myself that Bluebeard loved me. That I was a fifteen-year-old Hungarian girl that was special.

  Alice Grimm leaned away from me, exchanging looks with the maid.

  “What?” I said. “What is going on?”