Excerpts

Of Midnight Born...

Maiden Castle
1809

"This is the haunted castle?" 10-year old Alex asked in disgust, still panting from the long climb up the hill.

His cousin Rhys looked affronted, the locks around his own face damp with sweat. "What were you expecting? I told you it was a ruin."

Alex dropped down onto the springy turf, shaking his head at the sight before him. Random stones were scattered over the hilltop, innocent and bland in the cheery June sunlight. Rabbits grazed amongst the low grasses and wildflowers, and blue butterflies danced in the warm golden air. A few eroded, low walls gave hints of the fortress that had once stood here, protector and oppressor of the farmlands below, but there was nothing left to impress a boy who had been expecting towers and torture chambers.

"It's nothing but a pile of rocks."

"Don't let the ghost hear you say that."

Alex made a rude sound. "There's no such thing as ghosts."

"We'll see how brave you are when it gets dark, city boy," Rhys taunted.

"London at night is more dangerous than your stupid ruins will ever be."

Rhys threw a rock at him, hitting him on the shoulder. Alex scrambled up and tackled him, setting off a scuffle that left Alex with a fat lip and Rhys's shirt torn. Honor satisfied, they set about exploring the ruins, looking for remnants of armor, swords, and battle axes. As they scrounged about, Alex slowly wandered away from Rhys, his mind lost in thoughts of knights and battles.

A black and white bird standing on a rock made a harsh 'weet-chak-chak', and small bees buzzed amongst yellow and pink flowers. A grasshopper leapt away as he poked at the ground with his stick, seeking the clank of metal. The sun, hot on his neck and shoulders, felt as if it were seeping through the fabric of his shirt, baking his skin. He paused in his search a moment, standing straight to see where Rhys was.

His cousin was nowhere in sight, and as Alex looked around he saw that he had wandered into what might once have been the kitchen garden. It was a walled area, and made up one end of the U-shaped castle foundations. Like most boys his age, he could never get enough of reading about castles, and his schoolmaster had taught him a good deal about the history of the structures.

The garden was a mass of wildflowers and small shrubs, the grasses buzzing with insects. A small snake sunned itself atop the wall, waking and slithering quickly into a crack when his approach disturbed it. The garden was bare of trees except for one, an old monster of a tree with a massive trunk several feet around.

Alex squinted through the sunlight at the tree, its branches sparse, thick, and stunted, as if they had been broken off in storms. It looked ancient, as old as the ruins themselves. It had grey-white bark, with rough horizontal ridges where it was not split and breaking away in black wounds, or covered in pale lichens. The bark looked like that of the cherry tree he had sat in yesterday with Rhys, gorging on ripe cherries until he was ill. Only, this tree was still in blossom and without leaves whereas those in the orchard were already bearing fruit.

The blossoms didn't look quite like anything he'd ever seen. They were vivid pink, with dozens of petals on each flower. He continued to stare at the tree, massive and rough, blooming out of season with its profusion of pink feathery blossoms, and an eerie sense of the tree's wrongness began to creep up his spine.

The hum of the insects grew louder in his ears, and in their chattering he imagined he could hear another voice, softer, female, calling to him.

"Alex," she called. "Alexxx..."

His body trembled, his legs going weak. He wanted to run, but could not move. It was as if some silvery energy ran through his nerves, turning his muscles to jelly.

"Alex!" Rhys shouted from somewhere behind him. "Where are you?"

The sound of his cousin's voice, impatient and real, broke the spell. "Here!" Alex called, and backed away from the tree. "Coming!" He was unwilling to turn his back on the cherry, possessed by the certainty that it was somehow aware of his presence: that there was some alien sentience living within it.

When he was a safe distance away, he turned and ran.

* * *

They built their campfire in the shelter of one of the low walls, and as the sun set they sat round it devouring the supper that Rhys's mother had packed, the both of them as hungry and well-mannered as a pair of wolves.

Alex knew his mother and elder sisters would throw a fit if they saw him gnawing on a slice of roast beef bare-handed, as he did now. He growled in low pleasure, ripping at the meat, imagining it was a leg of boar, imagining Philippa, Amelia, and Constance having a fit of the vapors, moaning and fanning themselves, waving a burnt feather under each other's noses at his display of barbaric manners, all the while bewailing their fate at having been given a brother to endure. Mother would look on, helpless and disapproving.

The food was well finished by the time full dark came upon them, late in coming at this time of year. As weariness crept up on them they grew chilled, and crawled into their blankets, nearly head-to-head at a right angle to each other around fire. They said little, staring into the flames and occasionally throwing a stick on the fire, or poking at the embers. Eventually even that grew to be too much effort, and Alex drew his hands into the warmth of the blanket.

It was the first time he had camped out-of-doors, and he felt his senses expanding into the night around him, hearing the crackle of the fire, the breeze round the low walls, and the night insects faintly buzzing. A sense of his own vulnerability slowly began to tingle over his skin as he lay exposed on the ground, without the shelter of walls or roof.
"Her name is Serena," Rhys said into the quiet.

"Who?" Alex asked, his half-mast eyes opening full again.
"The ghost."

Alex gave a loud, disparaging sigh, but felt a shiver along the back of his neck. "And when the moon is full you can hear her weeping for her lost love," he mocked. "It's the same story everywhere."

"Serena is not that type of ghost. She is a murderess," Rhys said, his voice low and portentous.
Alex tucked the blanket more tightly under his neck, his hands fisted in the wool. "Oh? And whom, pray tell, did she murder?"

"Her husband, upon their wedding night, in their bed while he slept. He was in love with her, wildly so, even though she had professed a great hatred for men and vowed to become a nun."
"Then why did she marry him?" Alex asked.

"It was her brother who forced her to marry. Except for her brother, the entire family had been wiped out by the Black Death, and they were desperate for money. When Hugh offered for her, the brother agreed. The brother beat Serena into submission, and helpless to do otherwise, she married Hugh, swearing revenge on them both all the while."

"She could have run away," Alex said.

"To where? And that would not have been good enough for Serena. Like I said, she wanted revenge. The final straw was what Hugh did to her under the bedcovers on their wedding night. When he was finished, and slept in blissful satisfaction, she took her dagger and stabbed him through the heart."

Alex craned his neck to see his cousin's face. "What did he do to her... under the covers?"
"Some say he did something unnatural. Others that it was only what a maid should have expected."

Alex frowned. But what was that, exactly?

"The next morning," Rhys continued, "when a serving wench came in with their morning meal, she found Serena covered in blood, laughing. The girl screamed, and Serena ran past her, darting from the room, her naked body red with her husband's blood. She tripped at the top of the stone stairs to the great hall, and tumbled down them, breaking her neck and half the bones in her body, her crumpled body finally coming to rest on the floor of the hall."

Alex flicked his eyes to the remnants of a stone staircase, not four feet from where he lay. He inched closer to the dying fire.

"The castle has been haunted by her crazed spirit ever since. She will not harm a woman, but any boy or man who ventures onto the grounds at night had best fear for his life. 'Tis why the place came to be called Maiden Castle."

Alex stared wide-eyed at his cousin for several long moments, until it occurred to him that if Serena was so dangerous, Rhys would not be lying so calmly in his blanket across the fire. He forced a laugh. "That's a clever story. Did you make it up as you went along?"

"It's God's own truth, and is why I'm wearing this for protection," Rhys said, pulling on the chain around his neck until a silver crucifix emerged from his blanket. "My sister's nurse is Catholic, and she gave it to me, after hearing where we would be spending the night."

Alex's eyebrows went up in concern, and he chewed his lip. He had no such talisman, coming from a family that only went through the motions of religion. "There's no such thing as ghosts," he said.

Rhys smiled, and tucked the crucifix back into his shirt. "Sleep well, city boy." He made a show of flopping about, getting comfortable, then gave a loud sigh of contentment and closed his eyes.

"There's no such thing as ghosts," Alex repeated in a whisper. He closed his eyes, shutting out the shadows of the castle walls, and the staircase so near. In his mind the lumps of ground beneath him slowly became the crumpled body of Serena, her broken limbs jutting against his own small frame, the cold earth her own cold, dead flesh. He could hear her calling him, a breathy whisper on the night air, calling like the voice from the cherry tree, "Alllll-exxxx..."
His eyes flew open. The fire was but burning coals now, and Rhys lay with the relaxed attitude of one truly asleep. His cousin's blithe ease at sleeping in the ruins of a haunted castle, protective crucifix or no, reawakened Alex's suspicions. He narrowed his eyes at this country cousin who had already tricked him into trying to milk a bull -- he'd been lucky not to get his skull kicked in -- and who had persuaded him to wade in stagnant water infested with leeches. The encounter with the patch of stinging nettles had led to a serious fist fight.

This time when he closed his eyes, he kept away the images of broken bones. Instead, he drifted off to sleep imagining the grand revenge to be had if Rhys ever came to visit London. 'Twould be a wonderful thing if he could be knocked into the filthy Thames.

When he awoke again it was to chilled darkness, and he did not know for a moment where he was or what had stirred him. A streak of light, present but for an instant, flashed by the corner of his eye. He turned his head, then rolled onto his back as another streak, then another flashed across the deep blue-black sky above.

His lips parted, and his eyes widened in amazement. Streak after streak -- five, ten, twenty at a time -- burnt its way across the heavens, the white light illuminating the castle ruins like silent fireworks.

"Rhys!" he whispered, not turning to look at his cousin, unwilling to take his eyes off the miracle above. "Rhys! Wake up!"

Not waiting for a response he stood, and stumbled his way to the remnant of stairs, climbing them up onto the tallest fragment of wall, where he stood atop the uneven stones. It was the highest point of the ruins, above even the tops of the trees that crept up the flanks of the mountain. He tilted back his head and took in the blue-black sky.

Stars fells down by the hundreds, in a cloudburst shower of light, illuminating the mountaintop and the valley below.

Another glow of light, larger than the stars, closer, brought his head down. He caught a quick impression of long pale hair floating in the breeze, a white hand reaching towards him, and a glowing face with eyes like empty wells, black with pain. Startled, he lost his balance, the stars briefly filling his gaze once more as he fell through empty air.

He hit stone, and then there was nothing.