Everywhere (2/3)

She hated living here. Everyone was so disgusting, with their constant smiling faces and the stupid emptiness that existed within them all. She despised her mother, and most of all she despised those ugly flowers which crept along the walls, like a thousand eyes and ears in every hall, reporting back discrepancies to their great mistress. Every time anybody did anything 'wrong', or seemed suspicious or just thought a bad thought, they so eagerly sent back their messages to her, like little horrible spies, bringing about the death of so many with so much glee. At least, it had been this way for most of the Princess' life. In the recent years the deaths slowed to a trickle, though still occurred. All those who were left were fixed, empty, pathetic heaps of bones whose only similarity to human beings was that they could walk around, and talk just like them.

A small consolation for the Princess was that she was not one of these.

For a reason never transparent to her, she was immune to the evil spell. She was free to think what she liked. She had spent the years of her life troubling over why it was that she was different from everybody else, but had never reached any sort of a conclusion. What she did manage to deduce in all her troubling, however, was that something was deeply wrong with the castle. It was rotten at its centre, a bad place.

She would never be able to articulate it or even really understand the concept, but it is true that the Princess was only capable of coming to these conclusions, or making distinct the ideas of corruption and righteousness, or even possessing any awareness that life could possibly be better, despite the lack of her experience of anything outside the castle walls, because of the natural way that people are designed. There are certain things that a person will always simply know, even without having to be told. Her free mind allowed her to enjoy such knowledge, where it had all been stamped out of the heads of others.

She knew too that there was nothing that could be done. She would never be able share her secret with anybody; it would be passed along to the flowers as soon as it echoed in their mind and her one advantage would be lost forever. Regardless, any contact she shared was basic and mindless, completely empty of what emotion she desired to infuse into it – these people were incapable of feeling anything nowadays. She presumed that they were so numbed by their fear over the years that eventually the want for 'bad' thoughts had dulled, been locked in a box and buried deep.

Once, she had tried to run away from the castle. She was a very young girl still, and had at this point just come to comprehend the truth of how bleak the castle was. Her favourite nanny, who she mistakenly called Nammy once which stuck, had been playing with her the previous day, and the Princess raised a question she had difficulty answering.

“Nammy, why does nobody play on the other side of the flowers?” she asked from in front of the window.

Nammy didn't answer or look over, but stopped folding the little dress in her hands.

“There's lots of lovely green grass over there to run on, and sit on, and big trees to climb. Why does nobody ever go?” she turned to look at Nammy to make sure she was listening.

“N-no- you can't- we can't go over, little Princess. It's dark and dangerous out there.” she was speaking in a very strange voice.

“But, why? It doesn't look very dangerous to me.”

“It is, it is. Please, little Princess, stop thinking about it. Please stop asking me about it. You can't go, I'm sorry.” she cleared her throat at the end.

For the rest of the day Nammy behaved very strangely, staying quiet and shaking her head lots, and whispering at the walls and the flowers on the tables.

The next day the Princess was informed that Nammy would not be coming back, that she had left, and that a new lady would replace her presently.

The little girl had always been aware of the bleakness around her, but only now did she feel it crawl inside of her. She felt it like poison inside of her, it was a feeling she desired to shake herself loose from very soon. She knew Nammy had not left on her own. She would not do that to the Princess. It was the castle that had made her go.

She walked outside into the sun and around the shaded wall to the back of the castle. There were the greenhouses but her mother was the only person who ever occupied them, and she was sure the Queen was in the castle dealing with wrongdoers at the moment.

The flowers bobbed all together in the light wind. She clambered forward into them, wincing at the soft ground below her. She took one step, and then another. She was about to place her shoe on the grass when she heard the shrill voice.

“Stop right now! Get back here, you wretched girl!”

The sound of stamping on the grass was loud behind her. She turned to see her mother and some guards running in her direction. She had not been so careful as she should have been. The guards must have been escorting her mother back to the greenhouses when they saw her.

“You will not run away! You will not ever leave! How dare you shame your Queen – and your mother! You will be punished. You will not be allowed this.” The Queen was even more livid than the Princess had ever seen her. She grabbed her wrist and pulled her back, then looked down at her shoes and dress hem. “Filthy girl, disgusting! You will come with me.”

The Princess was shackled in her room for days with a metal chain. She was barely fed and allowed other basic decencies but aside from those she was simply left to sit and wither in the sun by the window. The little girl was terrified, and vowed to make with more caution next time. Unfortunately, she was set free to a life much more closely watched. From then on, an eye was always trained in her direction and she was escorted everywhere, except for when she asked to leave her room to use the lavatory, which was further down the hall and happened to lie side by side with an entrance to the western watchtower.

*

As she watched the perfectly halved moon peak in the night sky, the Princess sighed and conceded that she had better climb back downstairs and head to bed. It was nearing her curfew.

She gripped the door handle absently, and pushed. It did not shift at all. These wooden doors were always becoming stiff. She tried again more lucidly, using her shoulder to help force her way through, but it still moved not. She attempted to open it in various ways, but eventually decided that the door was truly stuck and an alternative to shoving at it was in order. She could not shout for help - she was not going to give away her only hiding place.

She walked back to the edge, and looked over the battlements. To her joy she found the particularly thickly woven stalks of crawling lines of white camomiles, reaching downward. Three or four floors directly below, near the base of the tower, there shone an arch of yellow light out and onto the grass.

She tested the strength of the growth by tugging at it. It was rigid, steady. Without a moment more of hesitation the Princess hoisted herself over the edge and began to descend. There was no sense in delaying her return any further.

The night was rather cold, and it lay against her skin, which was covered only by her purple silk dress which repeatedly tangled around her feet, a constant reminder that she was traversing terrain that she should not have been traversing.

The perfume of the flowers too was so pungent, she choked as she lowered herself closer to the light. She kept at it, without stopping or looking around her, until she was directly above it. Slowly she let herself drop, until she was hanging by her arms and swung forward to let the momentum carry her through the window. She was successful and landed on her hands and knees at the bottom of the tower, the foundation of the spiral stairwell, which sat at the end of an odd corridor that stretched out away from her, one that she had never seen before. It was built from big grey bricks, the same ones that formed the exterior walls of the castle. It was lit by a single hanging torch; there were others along the walls too, but none of these were active. The Princess could not ascribe its strangeness to anything in particular at first, until she had looked around herself for a good minute or so, and abruptly registered that it was the first room she had ever stood in which contained no flowers. It also seemed to go nowhere, and simply led to a dead end made of the same flat stone.

She was beginning to walk further down to inspect when she heard percussive echoes from above. They grew louder and she dove into the only hiding place available - the nook of the stairwell's curve, cloaked in at least-semi darkness - and prayed that she could stay still and balled-up silently enough to go unnoticed, as the clicking footsteps became clearer and closer.

She was in total darkness with her back to the noise, face pressed against the bricks. The steps passed around her, right next to her head like a horrible crescendo and then stopped and she opened her eyes a little in sheer fright; nothing happened, then the light on the wall moved around, as a scraping sounded from behind her. The footsteps started again, down the stone corridor. The light grew dimmer until she thought it safe to turn her head around a little, and saw it as a small ball of light at the end of the hallway, on a torch held by the unmistakable Queen. The Princess held her breath under a terrible flurry of nervousness. The Queen bent down and put her free hand to the ground, grabbing at something. What looked like a square door set into the ground rose up out of it. The Queen let go, twisted herself down and round onto what was presumably a ladder, and lowered herself in. The Princess suppressed the urge to shake violently as, for a few moments, her mother's descending face was aimed in her direction. She stayed as still, silent and black as she could, and the trapdoor was pulled closed with a bang.

Her body slumped. She had evaded capture, so slightly, and only with extreme luck had she done so. She should be happy with that, count it as a victory, and sneak back to her bed. Yet, she felt her curiosity burn and her instincts, which she prized, pulled her forwards down the corridor rather than back up the stairs. It was rash and unintelligent, she knew that, but in witnessing such a strange occurrence as she just had, she had awakened her arid thirst for change. It was something different, a puzzle, a break from the monotony. Death after death, sadness after loneliness, and she had finally found something in this castle, and her mother, that instilled her with promise – the possibility of there being more to her existence than what she knew there could be.

She walked down the corridor slowly, arguing with herself about the decision. Then she saw the square of gold on the ground. Illumination was gleaming through from down below. She put her hands out to catch the light, and it passed over them like the most cleansing, revitalising water one could fathom. She knew where fate wanted her to go.

*

After shifting the trapdoor, the Princess found a laddered vertical tunnel stretching deep below the castle, carved into the earth and lit by a great glow from down maybe the length of three people. It was not so far, but the opening at the bottom was too small to discern anything that sat beyond it.

She climbed down until she dropped onto an earthy brown floor. Adjusting her eyes to the burning light from the torches around her, she found herself in something of a small bubble-shaped gap in the wall of a gigantic vegetated cavern - or at least it seemed to be a cavern until one looked up to see a circular opening at the top, and through it the night sky, the perfect half-moon and its thousand blinking lights watching over the thicket of green that carpeted the cave floor. Orange flowers coated every surface from the ground right up to the top.

The cavern was more than triple the size of the castle's feast hall, so large that the Princess only just saw her mother's tiny personage over in the centre of it all. She started edging forward, eyes darting for a place to hide. She could barely see if the Queen was even facing towards her or not, but she did not think she was. The Princess dropped down off the earth and landed in amongst green branches and leaves up to her midriff. She crouched and watched her mother.

How long had this place rested beneath the castle, and what was it for? The Princess ached to know what business the Queen had with a giant flowery cave in the ground. She was doubly amazed in that she had never seen a room of this scale in her entire life. Each inch of everything hit her in sharp waves of excitement. Tonight was the night of her transformation.

As she crept forward she was making, despite her best efforts, brushing noises in the blades of long grass. She tried moving slowly which eased the tense sound a little. Then the Queen shifted, and stood up in place ahead of her.

The Princess halted with a shudder, still silent. The Queen said nothing and stayed where she was. Why was she not moving, or reacting at all? She simply stood there with her head slightly bowed. The Princess moved a little further forward, very cautiously, and kept tripping – the grass was so thick, and full of rocks and mud which her feet caught on. She saw now that the Queen's lips were moving. She was muttering to herself, seeming to have a tense imaginary conversation. The Queen then began to breathe loudly, and heavily, and it grew faster in between mutters, and faster, in gasps, until she screamed:

“I don't have anyone else to give you! Don't make me do this any more, please!”

Then there came a low rumble. The ground was shaking a little while the green arms covered her mother nearly entirely, and then it stopped. Then, a terrible burst of sound matched equally by the terrible sight it brought – a towering giant flower sprouted from the floor. It tore itself into the air, further and further, until it stopped growing and began to thrash, apparently of its own accord, while sick green stems slithered out from its body. It had a twisted stalk, thicker than an oak tree trunk, topped by a strange bulbous head of five brick-red petals dotted white, each the size and thickness of castle doors, and folded back at the edges. This was its colour, at first, at least – it pulsed thick sludgy yellow and blue, and purple at times as it moved. Sickening in smell, it reeked of rotten raw meat. A pit of green and yellow spikes made up its middle. It was almost half the height of the cave. It faced mostly towards the Queen but still swayed around with a crashing sound, snapping branches as it moved. It was power incarnate, more destructive and wonderful, and horrible, than anything the Princess had ever witnessed.

She stood up straight now, transfixed in horror, watching the hideous thing dance itself in the direction her mother. The world had given the young Princess the great change that she had asked for, indeed.

The plant was towering directly over the Queen, moving slowly as if it was watching her. It bent itself over. The Princess continued to move around in the grass to get the best view and remain hidden, but too engrossed to remain overly cautious about her conspicuousness. She was still tripping over as she moved, with frustration and fear she tried to kick her way through. The flower was lowering its own head to her mother's, nearer and nearer -

The Princess screamed out loud. She had glanced down absently to see what it was that kept catching her feet.

The half-rotted face of a middle aged man gazed up at her from the undergrowth, through his one remaining eye which itself was partially decomposed. She traced with her eyes his body in the same awful decayed state. She looked at the ground all around her, and each horrible body lying in the grass pushed her psyche further and further down the hole. One second, then she had no ability to stop herself from screaming.

Her mother's eyes shot open finally, with deathly alarm she looked between her daughter and the plant. It spun around and began to dance once again, even more wildly, thrusting its body and smell at the Princess now, which caused her to stumble backwards and fall to the ground among the rotten corpses. Distantly she heard her mother pleading and sobbing, a sound alien to the Princess which roused a very deep discomfort inside her, and for the first time in her life she felt truly scared.

There was another moment of stillness. Then the great flower began snapping harshly backwards and forwards. A rustling was occurring in several directions. The Princess tensed all through for whatever was coming for her.

There was a noise in the leaves below her. She looked - dark vines where gliding, on their own, out of the undergrowth, over the dead faces and torsos, and then upwards into the air. The floor shook slowly and the long green arms made their way around the Princess before she had even time to understand what was happening, or flee. She cried out in this dark moment to her mother, as more of these tentacles coiled around her extremities and lifted her rigidly into the air.

The Princess heard another slick slinking noise. The branches of the flower where coming now. They moved as if they were able to be controlled, like tens of green arms. Much like arms, they began to reach out deliberately for the Princess. She felt her cocoon loosen slightly. She was able to thrust her own arms free, and began pulling at the vines, but within seconds she had been shackled up with green rope and had her arms and legs pulled in all directions, so that she was poised like a star. As the thick branches came close enough for her to examine them, she noticed a series of razor thorns running all the way around them.

There was an unholy screeching amongst all the movement. They dragged her back away from the Queen, twisting her around and binding her solid until she could not shift even a tiny amount. She was wrenched into the air, the vines standing up rigid on their own strength. They tilted her backwards, so that she faced up towards the moon. In her periphery, the Princess saw that The Queen had been caught by green ropes around her ankles from which she was trying desperately, flat on her front, to pull herself free, clawing in the direction of her daughter.

With the Princess now pinned in position, an evil silence seemed to choke the cave. She could hear, over her own sobs and her mother's, the dripping of water onto stone somewhere; every little sound dislodged more tension from the air. The Queen was gasping deeply with an open mouth, and had two clenched fists held at her front now, pounding the ground as she shouted.

“Please! No!” she called at the plant. “No! Not her, no!” she was hysterical. It was utterly strange to hear, and filled the Princess with more dread than she had ever experienced.

The arms of the beast formed loops, and placed themselves around her bare arms and legs, but did not touch them. There they sat, inches from her skin. She closed her eyes and tried to force it all away. She waited for the snap or the crack, or the white light.

After some more seconds of nothing, she opened her eyes again. She looked down at the branches around her, which stayed suspended in place, firm but separate from her. It seemed to be examining her: the only movement came from around either wrist, where the thorned hoops passed up and down her arm and hand repeatedly, slow and measured. She became aware that the area they were traversing was where the blood seemed to pump thickest and fastest, she herself could feel the rapid pulse bursting on and on.

She allowed herself to entertain a tiny momentary notion, one that comes to everybody in times of great panic, that she might just be perfectly fine; perhaps that the plant only wanted to read her. It just wanted to know how she worked, maybe. Or maybe she would not be what it had wanted or expected.

The loops then tightened themselves sharply and latched firm all round her limbs. The needle-like thorns sliced through the skin with utter ease. Her form convulsed like a crushed bird and everything crumpled to madness. She was wrapped in fire, pain erupting from underneath every area that had been covered, and spreading. It was burning inside of her. It was unbearable – she could hardly breathe from vocalising her pain. Repeatedly she begged for it to cease, for anything to stop it. Her fingers grasped at the edges of the vines desperately, with an incomprehensible need to do, just, anything; while in front of her rolling eyes she saw purple and yellow streaks.

The Princess deeply regretted that she ever tried to find out the secrets of this castle. Ignorance was better. Change, that which she had so deeply desired; change was horror. She hoped, at least, that she might be dead soon.

The fear with no bottom found its bottom, and then surpassed it when she opened her eyes in the pain and saw the hosepipe-shaped tube that was gliding from the centre of the flowers' head, like a gigantic snake, and making its way towards her.

Its disgusting tongue lunged forward, and vines behind the Princess pushed her head up; the tube latched to her jaw, its sticking firmly and painfully around the outside of her own mouth. Her eyes turned involuntarily upwards as whatever was left in her to scream out was lost as trickles down into the beast.

There was a despicable animal vibration, then the flow began, and the sickening liquid poured coldly down her throat. The Princess gave in and shuddered without life as thick pungent juice filled her body. Its sour taste burned all the way down was the worst single sensation she had ever experienced. Simultaneously the branches started to vibrate and expel cold liquid into her arms and legs, which itched and scratched in her veins.

After far too long, she was detached from the abomination. The vines slackened slightly and she was lowered to the floor. The flower disappeared back into the ground, but she remained entangled in her captive vines. The still conscious Princess lay coughing and quivering upon the greenery, which broke her fall. Burning sludge coursed through her shivering body, she coughed out liquids over her lips, and light things morphed into dull shadows as she felt everything in her ache and hiss with the agony, until she was at rest.