Free His Last Duchess by Gabrielle Kimm Page B

corridors that led, ever narrower, ever darker, below the level of the moat to the dungeons. The time he spent down there now was oddly restorative, though as a boy, he had thought the actual dungeons the very lair of the Minotaur itself. His father had forbidden him to go near them, but he had on several occasions defied the injunction. He remembered the first time he had decided to disobey this most vehemently issued order. He must have been about ten years old.
    ***
    He is creeping along a low-ceilinged corridor towards a heavy iron door. There is a sharp smell of damp, of mould, of decay. He is surprised to see that the door is not much taller than he is himself, though it looks impossibly heavy. It has a tiny window in its centre, with a little hinged shutter lying closed over it. The door is fastened with two great bolts, each as long and thick as his forearm; they gleam with grease. He reaches out and touches the grease, looks at the black smear on his fingertips, puts his hand to his nose and grimaces at the smell of it .
    The silence of the place seems to wrap itself around his head as he stands there, muffling and smothering him, and he can feel his pulse still twitching in his ears. The only sound is that of his own tentative footsteps, but then he hears a soft shuffling and a long, indrawn breath from the other side of the door. Someone is behind the door, inside the cell. And whoever it is, is moving, back and forth, a few steps at a time. Alfonso’s skin crawls; he is intrigued and frightened at the same time, at the thought that a person as real as himself, someone he cannot see, is only feet from him on the far side of that door. He has never seen inside any of the dungeons, cannot imagine what it could be like to be locked away down here in this lightless world below the moat. He reaches out towards the tiny window, wanting to lift the little shutter, wanting to see the inmate of the cell .
    And then a noise slices out like a blade into the silence—a horrible, howling cry of despair .
    Alfonso snatches his arm back and puts his hands over his ears, but the sound pushes in through his fingers, on and on, wordless, incoherent, desolate. Too frightened to run, he stands facing the door, his hands still clutching his head, eyes screwed shut, legs trembling, until the terrible cry falters and fades. Then his paralysis lifts and, retching and whimpering, he runs .
    ***
    That sound had stayed with him for months, he remembered. It had woken him, sweating and terrified, night after night, from nightmares he had endured alone, never able to describe or exorcise them—to do so would have forced confession of his disobedience and incurred his father’s anger.
    Looking down at the rat now, he wondered whether that moment in the dungeon had ever truly left him. He heard the echo of that cry often, in and amongst the jumble of fragmented conversations in his head, the remembered expletives, imagined narratives, snatches of music—and now the squeals of Folletto’s mangled victim. A confusion of cries, from those in the throes of what might be ecstasy or despair. Alfonso pondered the similarities. The sounds a woman makes from the depths of passion, he thought, do not change noticeably when you beat her. That slide up the scale from moan to howl always quickened his pulse, however he induced it. In fact, he thought, the more energetic the induction, the wilder the resultant intoxication.
    There were times when the inside of his head was little more than a cacophony.
    But the labyrinth always led to the same end: through Babel to chill perfection. As though behind a locked door, lay the chill perfection of death. For a long time now, Alfonso knew he had been strangely enamoured of the notion of finality—he craved relief from the tumult of his imagination. He stroked the rat’s damp fur. The silence of the dungeons was perhaps the only place he knew that brought him close to quiescence, but