His Lady's Face

The silence of his night walk seemed to lure him in some mystical way, as if the night were a lady and were pursuing him, beckoning him in with the curling of her fingers pointed to him, the scent of her perfume wafting itself onto the wind and dragging him in with invisible clutches. He lost himself in this one moment, letting this lady of the night take him into her embrace. Cradled in her arms, he felt a sort of cold feeling of security, as if the night were now his lover and she had just taken an ice-chilled bath. His skin did not crawl, but rather contracted slightly and revealed its goose bumps, giving his pale organic fabric a texture. The clothes on his body did little to act as a shield against such a seductive call from the night, a call that needed no larynx or vocal chords to be made; it was a feeling, and a feeling so real to him. 

He fell deeper and deeper into the well of comfort that this lady of the night brought to him. The serenity of her night song hummed itself inside of his head, underlying all of the thoughts of his days. All of the normal running around of his mind ceased in these moments, replaced by the elegance of the lady’s peace. She took his soul into her hands and laid it down on a bed of silk and down, a river flowing near them. He tried to close his eyes in this peace, trusting this lady of his. 

Sleep, my dear; sleep…be at peace for once in your life…, she said to him. But the words were not spoken, just known. He replied back to her,

I shall, my lady…I shall… 

But in a moment of distrust and wonderment, he opened his eyes to reveal the world around him. He looked to the bed; it was the one he knew. He looked to the forest that surrounded them; it was where he fell in love with his maiden. He looked to the small river that flowed by him; he could see the luminescent faces of people scattered throughout the water. And he looked to the lady; his maiden. The woman who he had fallen in love with. No, he thought. This can’t be real…she isn’t here…

“Marcus!” He heard, and returned to reality. The cold, dreary night that he called reality. Where did the majesty that he had just known only seconds ago gone? Where did that magic of the night go to? How much time had passed? It could not have been more than an hour, the ships near the wharf had stayed in their same places. Nothing had changed. But he walked on toward the voice of his friend, Anton. 

“Where have you been, Marcus?” Anton said with a impatience in his tone. “The guests have been waiting for your arrival. They want to hear of your stories, your travels to faraway lands.”

“Yes, I am sorry.” Marcus replied, calmly. “I was taking a walk, since I did not feel well, and I got caught up in the spirit of the night.”

“How can a night this cold be so spiritual? I certainly don’t feel the effects of any spirits, unless you are talking about the alcohol.”

“Ha, your wit, Anton; may it be the death of you. All in good humor, though.”

“But of course. Come, let us meet our guests, I am not sure that they can wait much longer. They were quite impatient when I left…”

Marcus was presented to the room of seven individuals, all of them being aristocrats. He almost despised the idea of dining with these sorts of people; with their snobby attitudes, their pompous walks and talks, their feelings of over-superiority…they all sickened him. But, Anton pressed Marcus into attending the dinner. Marcus did not want to, but the two men were like brothers: completely inseparable. What one would do, the other would too. 

The rich and the famous had gathered in one of the parlors of the mansion and began to quell their chatter so that Marcus would speak. He stood, presented before them and was about to begin before one of the women asked,

“So you will be telling us of your trips to Morocco?”

“Yes, I intend to.”

“Proceed then.”

He thought to himself to leave the mansion in a fit of cursing and charged language, but he quelled that thought and composed his thinking.

“I was on an expedition to the city of Ouarzazate where, rumor has it, there were undiscovered cities that lay buried beneath the sands of the Sahara. I could not resist such a find to be made, and I found quite a few things there…some things that defied explanation. Objects that I had found, people that I had met, things that I had seen…all of them--well, most of them--defied any rational explanation.”

As if on queue, the candlelight in the room dwindled a small amount. Not enough to make a large difference, but enough to be noticed and enough to add an eerie gloom onto the atmosphere. Marcus made a shift in his voice as well; he sounded darker, his voice extraordinarily tamed. It was as if he had gone from age thirty-five to one-hundred and twenty. Even his eyes showed his newfound age.

“I had met sorcerers…they were the strangest of all people. They were so mystical, so much so that my memory can barely even conceive these people as real. They were almost fictional…in fact, by rationality, they should have been fictional; but they weren’t. They were as real as I or you are…just as real. Just as real as the upholstery that you sit upon…just as real as the wine that you drank and the food that you ate. And the things that they could do are not that of a sane mind. Their chants could echo through the night with such a terrifying demeanor that even Lucifer himself would turn and run in the opposite direction. These people were nearly mad, but they kept me from turning as mad as them…this happened during the discoveries that I made.”

He paused for a moment to look out at one of the windows of the parlor. He didn’t believe his eyes, but for a split second, he thought that he saw the face of his maiden peering through the window. He dismissed what he saw and continued. Luckily, the aristocracy hadn’t noticed his distracted gaze.

“Outside of the town, there was no lost city; there were no lost ruins of any kinds. The folklore was a lie. But it was only a lie about the cities. There were much stranger things in that part of the desert. Before we had even begun to dig, the Arabs in my digging party were shouting at something. I asked them what, and they just kept yelling something in Arabic. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t speak English and tell me what they were seeing. But I turned to where their fingers were pointed and saw a creature that cannot be unseen. A sand dragon…or, at least, something that looked like it. But it instilled terror in the mind of any man, no matter how hardened the individual. This beast was enormous; at least half the size of this mansion. Her eyes were of a golden radiance; a golden glow with a pitch black pupil that seemed to engulf the light of the world. And the golden glow was edged by that same black, but the two seemed to intermingle with each other, seeming to mix. And that mixture instilled a ghostly feeling of terror. Her fangs were not present until she opened her mouth to let out a terrible and deafening squawk. Horns of stone jutted back from her head, attempting to replicate the appearance of ancient ruins. Her body was like that of a griffin, but so much larger. The Arabs fled and my Frenchmen fired their guns into the beast, and she ran into the distance. The bullets would never have wounded her, but she was, in the least, unsure of what our weapons could do. Weary from the encounter, we followed the Arabs back to our camps, and we were all advised to talk to the sorcerers. They managed to console us on what we had seen…they called it the, ‘Raml Waral’ meaning, ‘sand lizard’; and we were never meant to speak of that beast again. The sorcerers said that even the invoking of her name would give her reason to crawl out of the deserts and into civilization.

“Then, over the next few days, my team had uncovered objects that did not seem to be of this realm. They looked so foreign to us, as if crafted by hands so much more intelligent than us. We were confused as what to call these things; there were no words that could define them properly. The objects that we found sat upon our desks for days until we could even think of things that they barely resembled. One of the objects was a glowing orb with pictures underneath the glass; but the pictures moved. And if you were to touch the orb, the pictures would materialize outside of the glass, as if by magic. They floated as ghosts would, seemingly disobedient of natural laws. But the one thing that we found that was instantly identifiable cost me the life of one of my archeologists. It was an object similar to a long rifle, except that it was drastically shorter and was silver in color. The thing wasn’t even tarnished by any margin, despite its placement in the sands. The young man that found it died by his own damned curiosity. After we documented the rifle, he tried to pull the trigger, but it would not work. In some sort of induced madness to see how this object worked, he pounded it against a stone, despite my saying for him not to. And then, it finally fired…but with the barrel of the gun facing him. I could not believe what had happened to him, but he vaporized; all that was left of him was a pile of ashes. A beam of red light had taken his existence…something that I know no sane mind would believe…that is, until such an action is seen.

“Shortly thereafter, we terminated the expedition and headed back to London. We took everything we found back to the museum, but we never saw our findings again. The curator told me that a secret branch of the government had confiscated the items, the curator not knowing what the purpose was for. And I and my men can only imagine…”

He paused for a few moments to steady his now quickened breathing.

“But the most disturbing thing that followed me through that journey was the face of my maiden, my sweet Isabel. I had to leave for the expedition while she contracted pneumonia. For three months, I laid next to her in her death bed, waiting for her to be ridded of the sickness. Despite what the doctors could do, they could not make her better. They could only sustain her current state of life until the sickness worsened and took her life. For her, the doctors said, it was not the most common thing for a woman of her health to get so deathly sick so quickly…but they said it happens to the best of us. Those words were not in the least bit assuring, as I knew the doctors intended such. They knew my suffering; they had witnessed and felt such before. But they cannot know it like I do…

“Her face was in the waters of the seas, the sands of the deserts, the occasional cloud of the sky, and when I would write in my journal, if there was an ink blot dropped on the page, her face would faintly appear there too. She was literally everywhere…and when I had returned to London, I discovered her death. My colleague, Jacques, informed me of it, since he was the first to disembark from the voyage. He was actually the first to make it home, and out of sheer loyalty, he had gone to see my Isabel first, even before seeing his own, beloved wife. But he and I were too late…when he had gotten to her side, she talked to him briefly before she passed. She knew that I had sent him and recognized him, even though the two of them had never met prior to that moment. She told him to give me one message, and one alone: to read through her journal. She said that there would be a single passage just before the date of her death that would lead me to peace. I did not understand what she meant, but I did as she said.

“Her journal was filled mostly with poetry, pieces that she’d written before her death. Her script-writing was always perfect, each stroke just as elegant as the one before it. But the last entry held the greatest intrigue; it was a note addressed to me. Of course, she had mentioned my name all throughout her journal, but this last entry in particular was stunning. She told me to go to her mother’s house and into the room of mirrors. I didn’t understand it, but I did when I arrived…”

He closed his eyes and talked while he relived the experience in his head, but he didn’t care who heard him. He was reliving it all for him and his Isabel…

He walked to Isabel’s mother’s house. It had been long since abandoned, but it still held some sort of elegance to it. From the vines that wrapped around the structure to the iron bars that marked the edge of the property, it was strangely elegant. Marcus walked into the house with the journal in his hand, gripping it tightly, as if it were his maiden’s hand.

He did not know where he had to go, but he heard the soft sound of his maiden’s voice as he walked into the house. He could not understand the words at first, since he kept yelling,

“Isabel? Isabel! Where are you my dear?!”

But he listened, so patiently. She was reciting a poem that she adored…

“Gaily bedight, 

A gallant knight,

In sunshine and in shadow,

Had journeyed long,

Singing a song,

In search of Eldorado…”

“My maiden, where are you?!” He screamed; but he followed her voice down into the cellar, down into the room of mirrors. He was surrounded by his reflection, but in the reflection he saw her. She stood near to him, and when he looked to where she was, she stood in an elegant white light, departed from the reflection of the mirrors. She embraced him, in her ghostly way; just in the same way that she had embraced him during the night of his journey to the mansion of the aristocrats. And they danced. They said nothing more.

Reviews

[Bridgette's Ink]

I felt i could actually feel the chill and see the dark. I loved it, it appealed to all my senses.y senses.

[nostal]

ARGHHH. the story has promise but the opening is just so self- indulgent, without knowing what it wants to be, prose or poetry? The line becomes muddled. There's also a load of repetitive paragraphs: redundant, like basically saying the house is elegant two times. The reader can get it the first time, he doesn't have to be lectured.

[nostal]

Wowzers

[miguelbovine]

Amazing well written,If I had some sort of award you would when it

[Thomas Fitzgerald]

A great set up and and twisted plot, well done

[Coyote Poetry]

A amazing short story. I like how you set-up the story. Made the character come alive with strong description. The storyline was alive and strong. Sometime a face and voice can make us wish forever for the return to their beauty. I like the ending to a excellent story.
Coyote