And if I was not deranged before, I have since succumbed.
Without sleep, my tempered disposition abandons me completely, terror gripping me in its fist until I fear I will be crushed. My turmoil is such that my head aches incessantly, splitting my skull and distorting my sight. Every shadow caught from the corner of my eye nearly chases me out of my skin, and sometimes I swear I can even smell him, wafts of that loathsome scent he favored cloying in my nose.
Once, as I walk through the halls, I catch a hissing whisper that dogs my step. Murderess, it rasps at me like a beckoning as I round each corner, though there is nothing to be seen beyond. Wicked murderess, deceitful bitch. I seem to hear it emanating from all directions, even whistling on the wind that filters through the cracks in the timbered walls. I turn in a frantic circle, searching for its source, but it remains mockingly out of reach.
Whispering over my shoulder, high above my head, ricocheting off the walls.
“Stop,” I hiss back through gritted teeth, clamping my palms desperately over my ears. “Begone, shade, hie you back to hell!”
The whisper rolls into peaks of derisive laughter, resounding so loudly in my head it’s as though it has wormed directly into my brain. Breathless with panic, I pelt heedlessly through the halls, up and down stairs, until I thoroughly lose myself in an unlit part of the keep I’ve never seen before. Furniture looms ominously beneath the shrouds of dust cloths, and trailing cobwebs tack the rafters. Yet the susurrus only gains in volume the farther I run, until I press my back against the dusty wall and slide down, slumping against it with my wobbling knees drawn up to my chest. I am so full of fear and loathing I feel as though I may burst through my own skin, split its seams and shed it so at least my shambling skeleton may flee this place.
I’m still mumbling to Ferenc through tears, my eyes screwed tightly shut, when Elizabeth finds me hours later. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to kill you, but I had to, I had to, I’m sorry!”
I only open my eyes when her warm hands steal over mine and lower them from my ears, her soft cheek pressing against my face. “My dearest dove,” she whispers, her brow furrowing with distress, “what are you doing all the way up here? I couldn’t find you anywhere, I was near driven to distraction!”
“It’s Ferenc,” I gasp, tumbling forward into her arms. I am shuddering like an animal, strange parts of my body twitching without reason. My left thumb, an eyebrow, a small muscle in my jaw. “He is—he is still here, Elizabeth! He haunts me, I swear it, he will not leave me be . . .”
Unable to restrain myself, I dissolve into sobs so wrenching they feel as though they might crack my rib cage open like a chestnut under a horse’s hoof. Cooing under her breath, Elizabeth gathers me up against her and rocks me like a fretful babe.
“It is only your mind, my love,” she murmurs. “You are merely overwrought, that is all. He is gone, dead and buried—far beyond the veil, if any stubborn part of him even persevered after death.”
“Then why can I hear him, Elizabeth?” I keen against her neck. “Why can I smell him? No, he is still here inside these walls, hiding like a phantom. And he will not let me rest!”
I continue weeping as she helps me, stumbling, to my feet, and guides me to her bedroom. “You need sleep, my dove,” she whispers, easing me into bed, lifting my feet off the floor one by one and tucking them beneath the covers with a pat. “I know you have barely rested for over a fortnight. Here, let me feed you a sip of the laudanum you gave me when it was I who ailed. All you need is proper sleep.”
When she tips the spoon to my mouth like a mother bird feeding her young, I take it obediently, though the bitterness curls my tongue. I have resisted sleep remedies thus far, fearing that my mind could only conjure darker things behind the confines of my eyelids, but I agree with her. I cannot go on as I am without sleep, or I too will falter and die.
But perhaps death is sometimes kinder than the vengeance that lurks behind closed eyes.
And it is just as I fear. After the first blissful wave of somnolence breaks over my head, I find myself trapped in darkness. My dreams become a cruel land that may as well be the fairies’ realm, populated by long-faced wraiths that caper about me and yank at my hair, gabbling nonsense in my ears. “Murderess,” they kettle-shriek at me in a hellish cadence that mimics Ferenc’s tone, “wicked, conniving witch!” As their voices blend into high-pitched titters, the black coalesces into a horde I recognize—the beetles that once ate me in my sleep, back when I lived down in the cellars.
“No,” I scream at their onslaught, scrabbling backward in the shapeless dark, though there is nowhere to run. “Do not take me!”
But they pour over and engulf me, skittering down my throat and tearing my lungs with their needling legs. Stuffing me full with their bodies until I cannot breathe.
When I gasp myself awake, washed in sweat and shrieking, it is Elizabeth who coaxes me back to myself. “Come, dearest, hush,” she whispers to me as I cry, curling herself around me. “It is all right, I promise. You are with me. We will make you better.”
But I do not get better.
After that I refuse any more laudanum, and none of my own herbal remedies can guarantee a safer sleep. The nightmare seems to bleed over into my waking hours, uninvited. Floods of beetles follow in my footsteps, skittering at the very edges of my vision, dispersing into thin air whenever I wheel around to catch them in the act. But I can hear the clicking of their shells against the floor even as they disappear, and smell the musty reek of their great numbers. I even grow fearful of my own reflection, reluctant to look at myself in any mirror; my unfamiliarity terrifies me, as though I’ve become my own haunt. I see a stranger with bleak eyes, sallow cheeks, and limp skeins of hair like cobwebs. Worse yet, sometimes there is a roiling somewhere behind me, reflected in the glass like drifting smoke.
It disappears as soon as I round on it, leaving me with nothing but a galloping heart.
Is any of it real? I wonder in my darkest moments. Or is it as Elizabeth believes—a conjuring of my ill-used mind, broken on the wheel of my guilt like a martyred saint? Shattered perhaps beyond repair?
And does it matter either way, if it will not grant me a moment’s reprieve?
“Nadasdy Castle wants me gone,” I tell Elizabeth miserably one night, sitting at her feet by the fireplace with my head in her lap. “I can feel it. It’s Ferenc’s, he’s in its bones. And it seeks to cast me out.”
Her long fingers stroke my hair, though how she can bear to touch its filthy mat is beyond me. “How can that be true, dearest, when this keep belongs to me—and there is nothing closer to my heart than you?”
I shake my head despondently against her knee. “Then make it stop plaguing me, Elizabeth,” I whisper into her skirts. “Before it kills me just as I killed him.”
When time brings no relief, Elizabeth decides to spirit me away to Csejthe, her honeymoon estate.
“You shall love it, you will see,” she rhapsodizes as the rest of the household packs its bags. She will not allow me to lift a finger to help, as if I even could. The enormity of my relief at the imminent departure has only enervated me further, and I can barely lift my head from my hot bath. Instead, Margareta and Judit huff and puff sullenly about the chambers, stowing everything away for us while Elizabeth washes my hair. “The hills just around it are so lush and wooded, they leave the castle beautifully secluded. There is no press of humanity at the door. Only an idyll of quiet and peace, perfect for healing.”