The villa protruding out from the cliff was silent except for the soft crackling of torches in elaborate metal sconces and the staccato thud of my boots hitting the stone floor. The clinking and clanking of the jars and medical instruments usually obscured by the sounds of crowds and crashing waves were now piercing in those cold, empty halls. Despite being the house of royalty, I encountered not a single servant in my path, the only other presence were hundreds of masks hanging on the walls. Although their ages ranged from brand new to centuries old, all were covered in a thick layer of dust.
With no hesitation and without even a knock I pushed open the grand oak doors that led into the royal chamber overlooking both the town and the sea. Mist curled around the floor, let in by windows whose curtains remained open.
“Your Majesty, how many times have I said to keep the curtains closed when the mists are high!” I said brusquely, striding over to yank the priceless sheets of purple fabric closed, “the vapours do no one any good, especially now.”
Queen Carmilla lay sprawled on a couch, taking languid bites out of a single bread roll and small sips of water out of a clouded glass cup.
“Dear Isaac, how many times have your predictions about mine and the people’s health been overly dramatic? You thought I would be long dead by now and yet…” She held a single hand up to catch the dim light coming from hanging censers.
I should have been used to the sight, having to attend to victims of the Creeping plague for months now, but something about the congealed, wax-like blood coating the hand like a glove still made me retch.
“You also claimed that all but the hale and hearty would be long deceased from this… Creeping, yet preparations for the play have continued steadily. Noah has told me that the performance should be ready in but a few more days.” Carmilla turned to stare at me directly with her hawkish gaze, her lips pressed into a tight scowl.
I walked over to the reclining queen and took out several jars from my bag, some of which filled with medicine and others empty, and needles with which to examine and treat her variation of the illness. Indeed, while most victims of the Creeping died within the week, Carmilla had only suffered from the earliest stages of the disease since the plague began.
While taking samples and treating the waxen hands, I quietly asked, “I would never wish to doubt either you Your Majesty nor the work of your exceedingly loyal steward, however I must ask yet again what about this… Candle in the Well play is so important that you must risk the people’s lives? Surely it would be best to wait until the sickness has passed?”
“If you had read the play, physician, then you would understand. Begone as soon as you are finished with this farce of an examination.” Carmilla turned away from me, her displeasure with my refusal to read the foreign text clear.
At the base of the cliff leading directly from the thin, worn road to the villa sat the King’s Garden. It was separated from the cliffside road and the rest of the town by two heavy ironwork gates and a grilled fence, all of which were embellished with various floral designs. The King’s Garden was once a beautiful slice of the old world preserved in the 8th sea, filled with the old king’s favourite flowers as well as frankincense plants.
Now the Garden was overrun with horrid red flowers not dissimilar to spider lilies, a plant that arrived as suddenly as the accursed play. Unlike the villa above, the Garden was occupied by perhaps a dozen or so men and women stooped over and yanking out the flowers by the roots. The petals were, according to the Queen, essential to a proper performance of Candle in the Well. She tolerated nothing else. Of the workers, fully half had the distinctive blood-encrusted hands of Creeping victims, half again probably in the terminal stage of the disease.
In the single moment of lucidity I could extract from Carmilla during this interminable plague, I managed to get her to concede that workers going from stage one of the Creeping to the second and last stage could rest at my clinic. But inevitably when the grizzly process had finished they would leave to continue preparations. The thing that disturbed me most was that they worked of their own volition; no taskmasters stood with whip in hand to force their labour.
“Beautiful isn’t it?” A muffled, melodic voice came from right behind me. I almost jumped away but instead quickly turned to face the mysterious presence.
What I saw was a strange figure; the only thing I could say for sure about them was that they were tall, as every other aspect of their appearance was hidden underneath layers of purple rags and their face behind a pallid mask.
“I should think not, who are you anyway to be wearing clothes of such poor taste?” I rebuked, gesturing at their gloves which were the exact colour of one afflicted by the Creeping.
“I am a visitor from afar, I have heard that a performance of Candle in the Well will be performed here.” Such a statement instantly aroused my suspicion, as Lock had next to no contact with the outside world. Certainly since the Creeping began to spread no possible outsider could have known about the play.
“Well then, can I get your name stranger?”
“It is Misk.”
“Named after the city in the Marrows?” A more obvious alias I could not imagine.
“And what,” Misk flicked their eyes down at my briefcase and back up to meet my own, “good doctor, was the city of Misk named after?” If I was younger and fresher out of the Academy I would have been able to answer such a simple question regarding the Old Words.
“I only jest. It is of no consequence, doctor. But may I ask if you have read the play yourself?” The more Misk spoke the more grating their voice became.
“No. Unlike Her Majesty and the rest of this forsaken town I have tired myself looking for a cure to the Creeping rather than focusing my mind on fiction.” My displeasure with this Misk character was impossible to conceal now.
Misk let loose what could have been a booming laugh if not for the muffling effect of their mask.
“Well then my friend, I shall leave you to your important duties. Ah, but how could I forget!” They reached into their voluminous robes and pulled out a red envelope. “My nation has also dealt with the Creeping, so as a gift allow me to share with you the knowledge to craft the vaccine we have developed.”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
I swiped the envelope from their hands and before I could put it away in my coat the stranger had already crossed the garden to the road leading up to the villa. One of the flower gatherers thudded onto the dirt.
I hastened to return to the clinic after the encounter with Misk, shoving open the door to the sound of gasping and pleas for aid. At the time I had just received an influx of stage one victims of the Creeping and now they were all ripening for the second stage. Several men and women knelt on the blood-stained canvas covering the floor dry heaving. I could see their swollen tongues dangle from their mouths and in an instant they dropped out as overripe fruits would. Now unable to cry for help, the infected simply fell over sobbing. The only thing I could do was drag them back to makeshift straw beds and administer some simple anaesthetics, for though they only had days to live I could at least ensure a quiet passing. Halfway through the treatments I needed to mix up more batches of medicine destined to fail in their purpose.
When I reached my chambers on the top floor of the building I slammed the door shut and locked it. The room quickly filled with smoke once I lit up an extremely worn pipe. There was no point opening the window during the Misting Season where storms followed mist with ease. My gaze fell upon the grand stage that was constructed for the performance. Still incomplete, it was a curious contradiction of half-rotted planks of wood held together with rusted nails and simply decadent red curtains made from the fibres of the red plants. Wood was scarce in Lock due to its lack of soil, but the one thing we had in plenty of supply was condemned houses from victims of the Creeping. So one day the queen’s steward Noah came down from the villa and told the construction crews to begin tearing down the houses for materials.
Looking away from the window over to my desk, I saw my copy of Candle in the Well sitting next to a mountain of the newest medical texts I had gotten my hands on. I looked at it, drawn in by its mystery; what words could be written that could convince an entire town to die? Before I thought it through I extinguished my pipe and ignited a lantern, that day’s conversations distantly echoing through my mind. The play and the Creeping seemed so inextricably linked that surely, to my eroded and fatigued mind, it would contain something – even a hint – of what I could do to save the people.
Oh what words were written within that foul play, which sought to beguile the reader and make them feel pity for the Devil himself! The plot, I confess, was rather simple. Candle in the Well told the story of a Poet on a far-away island who sought to calm the wine-dark seas with his poetry and indeed he did. The gods, angry that a mortal had meddled with their creation, smote the Poet and furthermore threw both him and the island he lived upon into an eternal maelstrom. The text finished with the Poet, still on fire, speaking into creation a Phantom who would spread word of the injustice of his imprisonment and whose sign would be the vivid red flowers of the Poet’s island.
Truly that was it, a banal piece of fiction. Yet that prose, the way the words slick with venom crawled behind my eyes and tried to convince me that all was well. That whatever alien intellect or damned soul that could write lines that flowed like the cloud-waves of the sea meant well. That if I could just put aside my doubts and help create a performance of the play, and even if I died that it would be worth the cost, that all manner of things shall be well. But I wouldn’t fall for such tricks, in that moment my mind was honed rather than weakened from sleepless nights and my conviction against the accursed play only growing stronger.
“Where is the damned thing,” I hissed, eyes tired and bleary, groping for the vaccine recipe Misk had given me earlier that day. Instead, I found a vial neatly labelled ‘For the Creeping’ in my handwriting. I didn’t recall making such a thing, yet in my fatigue I must have made it before reading the play and forgotten about it.
“That must be it… all those nightly rehearsals are getting to me,” I murmured. I felt dirty after reading Candle in the Well, so into my arm the needle went. The liquid froze my arm and I could feel it travel through my blood like a growing snowflake. It was all I could do to extinguish the lantern before collapsing onto my bed immediately.
I recall that night having a strange dream. I was flying over a sea I had never seen before, its waves a mixture of bright azure and green and the sky was unseasonably clear. What quickly stole my attention however was a dark maelstrom that put the most violent waves I had seen to shame. I couldn’t place its exact size from my vantage point, but I would wager that it was over dozens of metres in diameter and fathomless in its depth. Within, barely visible yet searing to the eye was a single pale-coloured light similar to a candle. The whole complex of whirlpool and flame looked like an eye, one that had turned its attention to my airborne form.
Even in a dream the feeling of meeting its gaze was almost too much to bear, it seemed to scream at me ‘pity me!’, ‘worship me!’, ‘save me!’. I shook my head, a solitary tear tracing down my cheek. I wanted to run but the eye held me in place. When I refused to answer the ghastly thing’s pleas, I felt a prickling sensation across my body. Looking down, I saw my skin pierced by numerous stalks which began blooming with those same nauseating flowers that covered the King’s Garden. A flame bound to its shape by a pallid mask stared back at from within the well.
When I awoke, I was covered in a cool sweat that seemed to be on the precipice of freezing to ice. Gazing out of the window from my bed I could see that the day was clear and still in its earliest hours. Before I was fully conscious I found myself fully dressed for a chilly morning and a box of matches in hand… I knew what I had to do based on what I had read.
The creaking of the old iron gate that protected the King’s Garden was deafening, as soon as it opened I stopped dead in my tracks and looked around for the guards assigned to the Gardens. Flicking my eyes down I saw the two laying perfectly still, both with red-gloved hands. Were they dead? Asleep? I couldn’t tell, but if they weren’t to stop my work the difference between the two was pointless.
By contrast, the sound of a match igniting in my hands was almost sinfully silent, a dreadful deed performed to save Lock. From reading Candle in the Well I knew that the play required a scattering of the flowers to reach its conclusion. Indeed, if the play could not be completed then whatever fell forces that wrote it would have no influence. Of this I was certain and the flowers went up in a blaze almost immediately.
“No! No! What have you done?” Misk’s voice appeared suddenly behind me, more shrill than I thought possible. They rushed into the inferno to try to stomp it out, though of course it was too late for the garden. Everything from the prior day and my dream fell into place.
“I say to you oh Phantom of the Poet, that your master gave you a cruel name,” I spoke softly but clearly towards the silhouette in dancing flames. They half-turned to face me, their eyes bloodshot. “For Misk is the Old Word for ‘dream’. When you return to that flickering candle in the well, tell him that a lie should remain a lie.” I kicked them further into the flame, their rags joining the flowers.
Yet it was not the Phantom’s voice that cried out in agony, but my own. I looked down and saw my hands covered in flames, a pallid mask that had fallen to the ground staring back into my eyes. The mask seemed to be laughing at me.
“Indeed I am Misk: the dream and the lie. But I am not the Poet’s dream. I am the dream that the sleepless mind, the kind that arises from stewing in guilt and seared by suspicion, yearns for.”
I felt the fire begin to worm its way underneath my skin and the scent of burning fat was smothering.
“How!? You can’t be real, I only read the play last night!” I screeched towards the ground, the mask blank in its expression yet I could hear Misk howling with glee.
“Yet you heard the words from others for months as they readied the performance. Do you think yourself innocent? There are many who could receive my dreams, and indeed they have, yet your mind was the one that craved them the most.”
The one who was laughing was me.