Words: Lauren Maclaren (she/her)
His old-man skin is pink like ham hock; his rucksack straps reach all the way round and clip in the front. The encrusted blood on Deb’s thumb is driving me wild and ravenous, but I want to keep her around, so I lock my eyes on him.
I choose her at dusk, watching from outside. She is cleaning glass cabinets in the visitors’ cafe, on a closing shift in what was once the palace kitchens. As I enter, I am greeted by the iron stench of her blood, where the skin around her fingernails is bitten and peeling. Her hair is stringy and limp, a bit like mine, and her eyelids are smudged with badly applied black liner. The teenage workers around her scatter with muted laughter – they know me as “ponytail creep” around here.
I recruit her quickly. We exchange names, though I already know that she is Deb, and I am certain she knows that I am Richard. I often catch her watching me from the counter.
‘My haunted gallery ghost has bailed,’ I say. ‘None of the other actresses can cover, and I have a party of 5 arriving in 1 hour, expecting a good scare on their ghost tour. It’s an easy role, just lurk in the shadows for a while, then run through the hallway in costume, arms out like this, scream for 10 seconds. The light will be low, so they won’t be able to make out your face. You will be paid, but not much.’
She looks upon me with a hollow, weary gaze. She knows what I am, and she is indifferent. Her thumb rises to her lips, and she starts to gnaw at the brittle nail.
And then, hand still at her mouth, she asks one question. ‘I don’t have to speak, just scream?’
***
I lead my tour, as always, holding an electric candelabra under my face. I tell the attendees of courtly plots, beheadings and armed duels. They gasp in delight when they notice the absence of my reflection in the gallery mirrors. The hallways look as dark as they did in the old days, just as small and hushed between sweeping green curtains and a crouched ceiling. Deb does an adequate job of screaming and stomping past in a white cotton dress, leaving me a breath of bloody aroma in her wake. The people scream back. An old man from Cologne fumbles for his oversized camera. The old man from Cologne is on holiday with his wife. His old-man skin is pink like ham hock; his rucksack straps reach all the way round and clip in the front. The encrusted blood on Deb’s thumb is driving me wild and ravenous, but I want to keep her around, so I lock my eyes on him.
I switch off the candelabra, and we are all swallowed up by darkness. There are hushed laughs and confused feet shuffling on the carpet. The people walk through the black, musty tunnel with hands outstretched. I take the old man from Cologne by the arm and lead us into the Queen’s chamber, to the four-poster bed draped in mint-green satin. Deb is watching from the doorway, waiting to see what I do. Here, I switch the candelabra on again, emitting a yellow glow against the man’s face, bewildered but still playing along. That is, until he notices the coldness of my touch and ice of my gaze and realises this is not a performance, or a hook up. He slithers back across the bed just a bit too late, my teeth are quickly hooked under his skin, muffling his outcry, draining him empty.
Beyond her costumed form in the doorframe, the visitors are yelping in gleeful fright as they totter about in darkness. She walks closer.
And the old man from Cologne is dead as stone. Perhaps Deb, now finally afraid, is wondering if he had grandchildren and how long he had been happily married. These questions never occur to me, but her presence brings them uncomfortably near my conscience. I feel the weak flicker of a thing called guilt as I see the giant puddle of blood pooling all over the milk-white bedsheets and seeping into the mattress. I wipe at the stain in a sudden frenzy. This is the bed linen that I saw the servants wash long ago, purging them of the fluids of marriage nights and royal births, scrubbing them outside in a huge wooden trough. They have sat smooth and pretty for centuries, but here I go and dirty them in a fit of hunger. Never mind the limp corpse of an old-man tourist, now folded down on the rug; the spilled residue of my greed is a tattoo on a great bed of a great palace.
I cower against the mahogany post of the bed frame. Oil paintings and tapestries watch over me, their faces like moons upon the walls. The young woman behind me whimpers in disgust and scurries away. I have exposed myself in the darkness of the chamber.
