APOCANGELICA Wild Beasts

Chapter 18

 "It's a whole convoluted world, closed upon itself" thought Ada while she continued walking, with the echo of her steps as her sole companion and the stale smell of abandonment that filled her nostrils. Room after room after room. Endless corridors. Huge doorways. In all reigned the same atmosphere of sumptuous decadence.

"It's like Eddy said," thought the girl while continuing to walk. "I don't feel particularly hungry and I don't even feel particularly thirsty... But, to think of it, I don't even feel particularly... alive."

Ada wandered around the castle immersed in a sepulchral silence. Despite the reassurances of Eddy, she could not live with peace of mind the forced wait in that place: she was always alert and watchful. Sometimes she felt observed but no matter how hard she looked around she saw not a living soul and even the sounds seemed banned in that muffed and out of time atmosphere.

She entered a room and the wooden floor creaked under her weight. The tall windows were framed with long curtains draped in a powdery white colour. It was a kind of studio library: all the walls were covered from the floor to the ceiling with bookshelves. Ada went to a shelf and picked up the first volume that came to hand. The heavy cover filigreed in gold and the complex ideographs, seemed to promise untold secrets hidden among the thick pages of rough paper. She opened it at random and was expecting incomprehensible and hyperboreans hieroglyphics penned by expert and ancient hands, but the pages were completely blank. No information, not even a strange sign at the margins that would suggest a kind of indecipherable page numbering; simply nothing. She opened it on another page and then again on another but found just white, yellowed by time, wrinkled blank pages. She replaced the book and picked up the one beside it, the cover of which was of a dull green with intricated silver arabesques. The second cover was empty; The third one also. She opened it again at random in several places: but all the pages were empty. The next book, the cover of which was dark red with highlighted golden letters, was identical in content: empty. Evidently all the books in the library, which were hundreds, if not thousands, were empty... or perhaps they were only for eyes that were able to see beyond, a bit like invisible ink. Ada shrugged her shoulders and walked to the opposite wall, the one behind the desk. A huge picture was hanging there showing a warrior sitting on a throne of dark marble. He seemed around forty years of age. His long and smooth black hair was kept loose and framed a carved face with a straight nose and fiery red eyes topped by thick dark eyebrows. The man in the painting, but was he a man? Ada wondered, stared at her with detachment and arrogance. She came out of the studio and went into the next room, furnished with heavy brocade sofas, and she began to feel like a change in the environment. Goosebumps appeared on her skin and this was not due to a matter of temperature, even though it was undeniably colder; it was something more: a strange gut feeling that made her feel as if her presence there was completely out of place. Yet, observed Ada, the bare room with long brown curtains and purple painted ceilings, was summarily similar to the other rooms already crossed in that long walk.

She approached the first window. She pulled back the heavy, dusty curtains and looked through the yellowed window. She could see a large, empty courtyard surrounded by a double colonnade. The floor, made of large stone slabs, was dusted with white frost. Ada crossed the entire room and came out. Then she walked through the gallery that overlooked the courtyard and arrived in front of a heavy door of dark wood inlaid with floral motifs, closed by a bolt of burnished iron. There was no lock. With a bit of effort she managed to open the deadbolt. She pushed the door and it opened without any creaking. The stale air of the room had a faint musty smell. There was just a double door-window that opened onto a narrow balcony.

She entered and having reached the door-window, turned its cold brass handle. She then went out on the balcony. The cold air hit her making her skin crawl. The balcony opened on the corner of a parade ground completely whitewashed by the snow. A gust of wind blew in her face some ice crystals that stung her face before melting in an instant. "It is as if in this part of the castle reigns winter" she thought, and after a moment's thought said to herself: "I'm on the edge of the Lower Kingdom for sure... maybe I could have a look at how it is. Sorry Eddy."

She breathed in the cold air and observed how her breath condensed into a cloud of steam. When this dissolved her attention shifted to a window of the building opposite, two floors up from where she was. There was a motionless figure covered by a black cloak looking out of it. He was wearing a tricorn hat, also black, and on his face he wore an ivory coloured mask with a long curved beak facing downwards.

Ada had the distinct impression that the two orbits black as pitch were staring at her with interest and greed, and it made her shiver. Her curiosity to see the Lower Kingdom was cancelled instantly by fear. She re-entered, closed the shutter of the door-window and moved a few steps away. After a while she gained courage and stepped forwards again and took another look through the dusty windows: the grim figure had disappeared. Ada was invaded by a wave of anguish that gripped her chest. She quickly closed the heavy door behind her, locking it with the bolt.

She seemed almost to hear an echo of footsteps approaching. "It's the plague doctor... coming to take me," she thought with terror and was surprised by how that thought had crept into the mind so suddenly. This made her startle and so she started running back through all the rooms she had crossed and stopped, out of breath, when she felt her soul lighter, sensing that she was back in the Upper Kingdom. She continued to walk without destination indifferent to the rich furniture, to the wall sconces of frosted glass, to the heavy draperies with autumn colours, with in her mind the constant thought of that appearance that had awakened ancestral fears.

"Eddy, when you coming back?" she said to herself in a whisper.

"Plague Doctor", "doctor with the beak." Figure historically present in every plague epidemic, it was only in epidemics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that they were recognized by the distinctive protective costume. This was invented by Charles de L'Orme in 1619 and used for the first time in Paris and successively spread throughout Europe. Designed to protect the doctor from the miasmatic air (carrier of the bubonic plague according to the theory of pestilential miasma) it consisted of a heavy oiled or waxed overcoat, gloves and a mask with a glass opening for the eyes and with a cone in the shape of a beak, hence the nickname "doctor with the beak"; this would contain perfumed substances and medications (amber, lemon balm leaves, camphor, cloves, laudanum, myrrh, rose petals, white mella). The whole outfit was completed with a wooden stick used to examine patients without touching them.