Little Hidden Darknesses

Somewhere in between the humming of carols and townsfolk thronging together uphill to the cemetery, I managed to slip away from the Vinsants. Branka and Aillard had set after me, however I quickly lost them amongst the abundance of people and clouds of dust they kicked up from the road. Except what had aided me in losing them, also hindered me in finding Alejandro.

The two of us ran into each other at the very back, Alejandro and his mum carrying the only two skull-shaped lanterns. His was smaller, and slightly less frightening, whereas Mrs. Perez had to carry hers with both hands. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought she brought the one from her desk. But the one in her hands didn’t nearly freak me out as much.

Alejandro livened when he saw me. He said something to his mum, then the two of us fell back some more. “Eira,” he said as he clutched my right arm, “what the hell happened to you?”

I spoke while skimming the crowd, a never-ending mass of faces bathed in candlelight and shadows. Even with the moon in full throb and the fog tucked in between the trees, I struggled to distinguish Branka from Blair. She could pop out from anywhere.

And at any time.

“It’s a long story,” I said, speaking fast in case I was found. “They left me note at the motel.”

“A note? Well, what did it say?” He paused. “Eira, if they threatened you – if they’re forcing you to –”

“No, no, it’s nothing like that. They merely summoned me, offered me a place in their household. And now, well, I’m playing along. The plan’s still going ahead as we discussed.”

This seemed to put Alejandro at ease. A little, at least. “Good,” he said, then his mouth slanted into his cheek and his eyes wandered across my body. “You look – really pretty in a dress.”

A warm wave travelled up the sides of my neck and into my cheeks. A wave which not even the cool evening air could diminish. I glanced at my feet, my bejewelled sandals that crunched through the dirt, and bit my lower lip. Stupid Branka and Freya, why couldn’t I just wear my own clothes? A nice and comfortable sweatshirt with jeans and converse.

These red and green flowers made me feel like a Christmas tree. And the jewels didn’t help either. As much as I wanted to get closer to my mum, I never wanted to become her.

“Thanks,” I nonetheless replied. “You don’t look too bad yourself.”

Now it was Alejandro who blushed. I couldn’t see it, but guessed it from the awkward chuckle that burst from his chest. “It was my father’s suit. He wore it on his wedding day.”

“Wow,” I said, not really surprised. The suit did little to hide its age, what with dull patches here and there, and frayed stitching around the collar and two uppermost buttons.

In fact, one of them didn’t even match.

With a new type of silence enveloping us, we rounded the bend and passed the motel, then crossed the street to the cemetery. We sped up so not to fall too far behind, and the sudden change in pace blew out Alejandro’s lantern. Without thinking, I brought his hand closer and ignited it with my own candle. A spark travelled from my fingertips into my chest, my throat.

I had to speak to break the tension.

“Once everyone has started dancing at the festival,” I said as I pulled away and shoved a chunk of hair behind my left ear, “we’ll slip away to the mansion. They didn’t lock it.”

“Okay. Sounds good to me.” Alejandro shielded his candle. “Do you know what we’re looking for?”

I nodded and lowered my voice, even though no one was listening – that I knew of, anyway. “There’s a room they didn’t want me to see the inside of. I think we’ll start there and move our way to the attic. We’ll find something, Alejandro, I’m convinced we will. The Vinsants have something –”

“Eira!”

My spirits sank. And rightfully too, as there, under a lamppost by the edge of the cemetery, stood Branka and Aillard, observing us with crossed arms and suspicious smirks.

“Mother is looking for you,” Branka went on. There was something cruel in her high, arched eyebrows and thinly stretched lips. Resentment, almost. Satisfaction for clearly having caught me in the act of deceiving Lilith’s orders. “Leave the filth alone and come.”

The filth?

My cheeks started to sear again, only this time in absolute fury. If Branka thought she could –

“Eira, leave it,” said Alejandro as though he could read my mind. “Stick to the plan, remember.”

They had to trust me. They had to trust me.

“Okay,” I said though gritted teeth. “See you after the banquet, then?”

“Yea, see you.”

And with this, our paths split. Alejandro followed his mum to the exposed expanse of graves, whereas I followed Branka and Aillard to the mausoleum into which Lilith had disappeared the other day. Even though it wasn’t particularly large, we all piled through the gargoyle-decorated entrance into what proved a tiny room with a stone coffin in the centre.

Our shadows painted the candlelit walls, the smell of Lilith’s perfume polluting the entire space. Suddenly a sickness overcame me, and I couldn’t tell whether her perfume was to blame, or the feeling of death fogging up the area, wrapping itself around me and pulling me into the floor. I remained by the door, afraid to approach the coffin.

Someone had opened it up to the corpse’s chest. The corpse of the man my mum supposedly murdered. Her brother-in-law. Lilith’s husband. Freya, Branka and Aillard’s dad.

A bitterness flushed my mouth. Not exactly bile, but something similar. I forced my eyes to read the plaque above the coffin. Leonardo Frederick Ariel. Loving father and husband.

Birth: No date.

Death: 20th July 2000.

Four whole days after my mum ran away.

I cursed under my breath. They had lied. All of them. My mum couldn’t have murdered him, as she wasn’t even in town by that time. They had made me doubt her, suspect her of something so diabolical. And this only proved it. They were the murderers, the monsters.

“Eira,” came Lilith’s ice cold voice, even colder now as it bounced off the stone walls, “is everything alright?” She wanted me to freak out, I could tell by the way she curved her brows, and how she pitched the end of her sentence, only to linger on the final t.

I shook my head but didn’t speak.

This made Branka widen her eyes and smile. “Oh, come on. Now’s not the time to become shy.”

I wasn’t shy.

“You had so much to say earlier today in the drawing room.”

I still had a lot to say.

“You’re a part of the family now, right?” Then Branka took it one step too far. “Are you sure you don’t want to come closer? Don’t you want to see the man your mother murdered?”

She didn’t murder him. Your family did.

“Branka,” Freya started up – on que – but I showed a hand at her and she smacked her lips together.

“If you’ll allow me,” I said in my sweetest voice possible.

“Of course. Look for as long as you’d like. He’s your family too, after all.” Branka thoroughly enjoyed this. Even more than Lilith, who no longer sported a grin or smirk of any kind.

I squeezed past Freya and Aillard, brushed past Genevieve and came to a stop behind Lilith, currently bent over the coffin with teary lines staining her porcelain cheeks. I nearly flinched when she came upright and turned, exposing me to the horrifying sight of her smudged mascara and bright-red nose. Evidently, even monsters could cry.

“Thanks,” I said as she stepped aside and allowed me a glance at her husband. “I’d like to make amends. For the sake of the future. For the family to accept me as one of their own.” Despite being nauseated by every word as it passed my lips, it all proved worthy in the end.

More than worthy, in fact, as a single glance inside the coffin told me more than I ever hoped for.

Dead old Leonardo lay peacefully at rest, not a single scratch on him. He seemed your average twenty-year-disintegrated corpse, except his eyes were caved in, his face emaciated and his skin riddled with wrinkles, with blemishes. To anyone else he proved your average elderly man, but I knew better than to think he had died looking like this.

This old and frail.

I knew better, because I had seen him beside Lilith in their mansion, in a photograph of the two of them on a sofa. A vision of a man with the features of a Greek god. Not only did he sport chocolate hair, even chocolatier eyes and a beard long enough to braid, but he looked no older than what Lilith looked now. A man in his years of prime.

Leonardo wasn’t murdered by my mum. In fact, I doubted he was murdered by anyone. I knew this, even without taking the date on the coffin in account, purely because of how he looked. Old. Wrinkled. A fossil by any other name. Exactly like my mum when she had died.