The Autumn Castle

by Kim Wilkins

Genres: Fantasy; Contemporary Fantasy; Horror; Fall & winter reads

Synopsis

Berlin in autumn: Christine Starlight lives in an artists' colony with her lover Jude, whose patience and beauty have eased her battle with chronic pain. But Christine begins to be haunted by childhood recollections of a little girl's disappearance and the flapping of a blackbird's wings. Then her world is rocked by the return of a childhood friend... Mayfridh rules over a land where a wolf is the queen's counsellor, fate turns on the fall of an autumn leaf and mortals feel no pain. As Christine becomes addicted to Mayfridh's world, so Mayfridh grows addicted to Christine's, falling dangerously in love with Jude.

Release date: May 5, 2009

Publisher: Aspect

Print pages: 562

Sample

—from the Memoirs of Mandy Z.

Once upon a time, a Miraculous Child was born. That night was the last of April—Walpurgis Night—on the summit of the Brocken
in the Harz Mountains. It has long been thought that the devil holds court on the Brocken on such a night, but I am not a
devil (for that Miraculous Child, dear reader, was me); I am the only son of the thirteenth generation of a special family.
In the dim, distant past, my ancestors bred with faeries, bringing our family line infinite good fortune, but making a terrible
mess of our gene pool.


My name is Immanuel Zweigler, but I am known as Mandy Z. I am an artist, renowned; I am wealthy beyond your wildest dreams,
and always have been, for my family has money in obscure bank accounts in sinister places the world over. I am color-blind,
truly color-blind. I see only black and white and gray, but if you wore a particularly vibrant color, perhaps a little of
its warmth would seep into my field of vision and be rendered the palest sepia. But I have an extraordinary sense of smell,
and an extraordinary sense of touch. That is why I like to sculpt.


You may wonder why someone so miraculous has waited until the age of forty-eight to commence his memoir. Simply, it had never
occurred to me to do so, but then the British journalist came to interview me. He was a genial man. We had a good conversation
and then I left him with the view from my west windows while I went upstairs to fetch a photograph—I always insist on providing
my own photographs to be published with interviews. I was rummaging in the drawer of my desk in my sculpture room, a room
I prefer to keep private, when I heard the British journalist clear his throat behind me.


“You should not have followed me in here,” I said.

“This is extraordinary,” he replied, advancing toward my latest sculpture.

Ah, the beautiful thing, so white and gleaming with gorgeous curves and ghastly crevices.

“It’s called the Bone Wife,” I told him as he ran his fingers over her hips (she only exists below the waist at present).
I was amused because he didn’t know what he was touching.


“Are you going to finish her?” he asked, gesturing to where her face would be.

“Oh yes. Though some would say she is the perfect woman just as she is.”

He didn’t laugh at my joke. “What medium are you using?”

“Bones.”

His fingers jumped off as though scalded. “Not human bones?”

I smiled and shook my head. “Of course not.”

So he returned to his examination, confident that these were the bones of unfortunate sheep and pigs, and then I gave him
his photos and asked him to leave. I sat for a long time looking at my Bone Wife, and mused about my continued disappointment
in how I am represented by the world’s media, and about how so much of what I do can never be made public. I wanted to read
about a version of myself that I recognized, even if I had to write it with my own pen; and that’s when I decided upon a memoir.
I decided to celebrate me. Miraculous me.


Not human bones?

No. The thought is as repulsive to me as it was to the British journalist. As is the thought of animal bones; I bear no grudge
against our four-legged companions. Not human bones, not animal bones. A rarer medium: faery bones. The bones of faeries I
have killed.


Because, you see, I have a measureless loathing for faeries. And I am the Faery Hunter.

Please don’t make me remember, please don’t make me remember. Inevitable, however. Christine had known from the moment the man had glanced at her business card, his eyebrows shooting up.


“Starlight. That’s an unusual surname.”

“Mm-hm.”

“You’re not any relation to Alfa and Finn Starlight? The seventies pop stars?”

Pop stars! Her parents had considered themselves musicians, poets, artists. “Yeah, I’m their daughter.” Amazingly, her voice
came out smooth, almost casual. She didn’t need this today; she was already feeling unaccountably melancholy.


“Oh. Oh, I’m so . . .”

“Sorry?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m very sorry.”

Because he knew, as most people did, that Alfa and Finn Starlight had died in a horrific car accident from which their teenage
daughter had been the only survivor. Suddenly there was no point in resisting anymore: she was back there. The English Bookshop
on Ludwigkirchplatz, its long shelves and neat carpet squares, spun down to nothing in her perception; it was all blood and
metal and ground glass and every horror that those evil, stubborn thirty-five seconds of consciousness had forced her to witness.


“I’m sorry too,” she said. Her lower back twinged in sympathy with the remembrance. She wouldn’t meet the man’s gaze, trying
to discourage him. He was pale and clean-shaven, had a South African accent, and was clearly battling with his impulses. On
the one hand, he was aware it was rude—maybe even distressing for her—to keep asking about the accident; on the other hand,
he was talking with a real-life survivor of a famous and tragic legend. Christine was used to this four seconds of struggle:
enthusiasm versus compassion. Compassion never won.


“When was that again? 1988?” he asked.

“1989,” Christine replied. “November.”

“Yes, of course. My sister cried for days. She’d always had a crush on Finn.”

“I think a lot of women did.”

“He was a good-looking man, and your mother was beautiful too.”

Christine smiled in spite of herself, wondering if the man was now pondering how such stunning parents had managed to produce
such an ordinary-looking child.


“One thing I’ve always wanted to know,” he said, leaning forward.

Christine braced herself. Why couldn’t she ever tell these people to leave her alone? Why had she never developed that self-preserving
streak of aggression that would shut down his questions, lock up her memories. “Yes?”


“You were in a coma for eight weeks after the accident.”

“Yes.”

“The kid who ran you off the road didn’t stop.”

“No.”

“And there were no witnesses.”

“That’s right.”

“Then how did they find him and convict him?”

Yes, her back was definitely twinging now, a horrid legacy of the accident, the reason November 1989 was never really consigned
to the past, to that cold night and that long tunnel. Her doctor back home would tell her that these twinges were psychosomatic,
triggered by the memory. She had no idea what the word for “psychosomatic” was in German, and the doctor she had seen twice
since her arrival in Berlin two months ago was happy to prescribe painkillers without too much strained bilingual conversation.


“I was conscious for about half a minute directly after the accident,” she explained. “The kid who hit us stopped a second,
then took off. I got his license plate, I wrote it on the dash.”


“Really?” He was excited now, privy to some new juicy fact about the thirteen-year-old story. Many details had been withheld
from the press because the driver of the other car was a juvenile. The law had protected him from the barrage of media scrutiny,
while Christine had suffered the full weight of the world’s glare.


“I’m surprised you could collect yourself to find a pen, under the circumstances,” he continued. “It must have been traumatic.”

Oh, yes. Her father crushed to death; her mother decapitated. Christine smiled a tight smile; time to finish this conversation. “If
you phone at the end of the week, we should be able to give you an estimated due date for that book. It’s a rare import, so
it could take a number of months.”


He hesitated. Clearly, he had a lot of other questions. Chief among them might be why the heir to the Starlight fortune was
working as a shop assistant in an English-language bookshop in Berlin.


“All right, then,” the man said. “I’ll see you when I come to pick it up.”

Christine nodded, silently vowing to make sure she was out back checking invoices when he returned.

He headed for the door, his footsteps light and carefree, and not weighed down with thirteen years of chronic pain, thirteen
years of nightmares about tunnels and blood, thirteen years of resigned suffering. A brittle anger rose on her lips.


“By the way,” she called.

He turned.

“I didn’t have a pen,” she said.

“Pardon?”

Had he forgotten already? Was that how much her misery meant to anybody else? “In the car, after the accident,” she said.
“You were right, I was too traumatized to find a pen.”


His face took on a puzzled aspect. “Then how . . . ?”

Christine held up her right index finger. “My mother’s blood,” she said. “Have a nice day.”



Gray. Black. Brown. No matter which way Christine surveyed it, this painting of Jude’s looked like every other painting he
had ever done. “It’s beautiful, darling.”


He lifted her hair and kissed the back of her neck. She pondered the colors, Jude’s colors of choice as long as she’d known
him. She often wondered if his preferences bore any relation to the reasons he was attracted to her. Jude was alternative
art’s pinup boy, with a wicked smile, a tangle of blond hair, and sparkling dark eyes. Christine, by contrast, knew she was
profoundly forgettable. She was thin but not sleek, pale but not luminous, her brown hair was thick but not shiny; and with
her button eyes, flat cheeks, and snub nose she possessed not even the distinction of ugliness. No matter how hard she tried
to be good-natured and generous and kind, Christine knew that she was cursed with invisibility.


“What’s it called?” she asked him.

“Urban Autumn,” he said, dropping her hair. “You really like it?”


“Of course.”

Jude stood back and smiled at the painting. “Today’s the first day of fall,” he said. “It’s kind of a tribute.”

“First day of fall?”

“On the pagan calendar, according to Gerda. Except she calls it autumn.”

“Perhaps that explains why I’m feeling so odd. Summer’s gone, winter’s on its way.”

He turned to her, concern crossing his face. “What’s the matter? You sound kind of melancholy.”

She sighed. “I am melancholy. Don’t know why.”

“Is your back giving you trouble?” His hand dropped to the small of her back and pressed it gently. This was the locus of
the chronic pain that—unbelievably—she was still not used to after so many years.


“No more than usual.” She thought about the twinges she’d felt while talking about her parents’ accident.

“Nothing else bothering you?”

There was, but she could barely articulate it. Fuzzy memories of her childhood, a recurring half-remembrance about a crow
she had seen once, a fluttering buzzing anxiety lacing everything, a breath caught perpetually in her throat. “I don’t think
so. I guess being back here reminds me of . . . happier times.”


He smiled and folded her into his arms and she tried to take solace in his beating heart—

He doesn’t love you as much as you love him.

—and to put aside all her irrational feelings.

“Hey, love pigeons!”

Jude released Christine and she turned to the door of the studio. Gerda stood there, shaking her head so her blond dreadlocks
bounced around her shoulders. “You guys are always smooching.”


“Can’t help ourselves,” Jude said, shrugging.

“We’re on our way out,” Gerda said. “Coming?”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Christine asked.

“All of us. Me, Pete, Fabiyan. Shall we make it a Hotel Mandy-Z outing?”

“Yeah, cool,” Jude said, “just don’t ask Mandy.”

Gerda giggled; nobody genuinely liked their wealthy benefactor. “If we run into him downstairs in the gallery we won’t have
much of a chance of losing him. Coming now?”


“No, give me a half-hour to get cleaned up.” Jude indicated his shirt, which was splattered with brown paint.

“We’ll be at Super Jazz on Chausseestrasse. It’s just been voted the smokiest club in Europe.”

“I’ll bring my gas mask,” Christine joked.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll convert you yet, Miss Starlight,” Gerda said. “You can’t be the only person in the hotel who doesn’t smoke.”
With a cheery wave she disappeared. Jude had turned back to his painting.


“I want to give it another fifteen minutes,” he said, picking up his brush. His eyes were taking on a distracted gaze.

“I’ll wait upstairs.” She’d lost him; until he came back from wherever it was in his head he went when he was painting, he
was no longer hers. She glanced at him as she left the studio: his right shoulder was flexed, his hair fell over his eye as
he touched the brush delicately, carefully to the canvas. As long as he was happy, his painting was a mistress Christine was
prepared to tolerate.




Two hours had passed before they arrived at Super Jazz, and by then the others were all drunk. Mandy was not with them, to
Christine’s relief. She found Immanuel Zweigler the most loathsome being she had ever met. He was a tall, corpulent man with
pinkish skin and pale watery eyes. He dyed his hair black, but ginger roots peeked through, conspiring with his ginger eyebrows
to give him away. He usually smelled of the heavy incense he burned in his upstairs rooms, where he also wandered around naked
and didn’t care who came to the door; Gerda had already reported popping in to borrow coffee and getting an eyeful she’d never
forget. But it was none of these things—his appearance or his habits—that Christine despised. It was some other ineffable
malignancy that washed off him, some calculating miserliness or inhuman detachment, that made her lean away whenever he spoke
to her.


“Drink for you?” This was Fabiyan, the Belarusian sculptor who lived across the hall from them. He had to yell over the band
playing loud Miles Davis in the corner. Jude slid onto the sofa next to Gerda, and Christine took the seat opposite.


“Beck’s,” Christine said.

“Beck’s!” Gerda exclaimed as Fabiyan went to the bar. “You’re so predictable.”

“I’m living in the capital of Germany,” Christine responded. “It’s only right I should drink German beer.”

“Berlin’s not the capital of Germany,” Gerda said, waving her cigarette effusively, “it’s the capital of the world.”

Every year in summer, four new artists took up residence at Hotel Mandy-Z for their twelve-month Zweigler Fellowships. This
year they were Jude Honeychurch, New York’s hottest young thing with a paintbrush, fresh from an immensely successful West
Chelsea exhibition; Gerda Ekman, an ebullient Swede who worked in metal and stone; Pete Searles, a nineteen-year-old Australian
who put together bizarre video and multimedia installations that required warnings about epilepsy; and Fabiyan Maranovich,
first time out of Belarus where he had spent his life working as an electrician. Christine had a soft spot for Fabiyan especially.
He had conscientiously learned German before taking up his fellowship, only to find that English was the linguistic currency
at Hotel Mandy-Z. He was picking it up quickly, but sometimes Christine had to translate for him into German. Not that her
German was faultless, but she had lived here briefly in the seventies with her parents and a refresher course taken over the
spring left her with a better grasp than the rest.


“So,” Gerda said to Jude, snaking her arm around his shoulders, “I like your painting. Nearly finished, is it?”

“Nearly.”

“You must be so proud of him, Christine,” Gerda said, smiling her Cheshire-cat smile.

“Yes, I am.”

Fabiyan leaned down and handed Christine a beer. She sipped it gratefully, then rested it on the scarred table. If she were
to be totally honest, she didn’t think much of anybody’s art in the hotel. All those abstract, impenetrable shapes and images.
It baffled her far more than it delighted her. But she was perfectly willing to admit she wasn’t an expert and she hadn’t
the faintest idea about what artists felt or intended, even after four years with Jude.


Pete, who sat next to her, pointed at her beer and said, “Did you know that Germans drink around 127 liters of beer per person
per year?”


“No, I did not know that.” Christine smiled. She was discovering that Pete had an endless store of facts and figures. He had
been lauded as a genius since he was twelve, and perhaps that meant he had never outgrown some of his adolescent obsessions.


“It’s topped only by the Czechs, who drink 160 liters.”

“What’s that in pints, Pete?” Jude asked.

Pete looked skyward briefly, did the math, then returned with, “About 336.”

Jude doubled over with laughter, deep lines arrowing out from his eyes. She loved his smile, the gorgeous changeability of
his expression. His face settled smooth again as he got serious about the business of lighting a cigarette.


“I don’t know how many liters they piss every day though,” Pete added in a solemn tone.

Gerda, as she did so often, looked at Pete with an expression bordering on alarm. She hadn’t caught the rhythms of his humor
yet. Jude glanced across at Christine and winked; she felt herself smile and blush like a teenager. She downed more beer and
began to shed the day’s despondency.


The first band finished and the second came on—Duke Ellington in thick German accents. Christine grew drunk but Gerda was
always drunker. Sometime around two a.m., while Pete, Jude, and Fabiyan were making enthusiastic conversation with Sparky,
the club owner, Gerda pulled Christine down next to her on the sofa.


“Here, here,” she said, trying to shove a lit cigarette in Christine’s mouth.

“No, really. I’ll be sick.”

“You’re the luckiest girl in the world,” Gerda said, reaching for her drink and missing by at least six inches. “Oops.”

“Yeah, I know.” Christine and Gerda had had this conversation before. Gerda had a big crush on Jude, but then, Gerda had a
big crush on every second man she met.


“He’s so beautiful. Why couldn’t he turn up on my doorstep?” Then Gerda laughed, because that was exactly how Christine had
met Jude. He had been sitting on the stairs in front of her West Twenty-third Street home, trying to read a badly drawn map
directing him to a gallery party.


“Don’t despair. You and Garth might work things out,” Christine said.

Garth was Gerda’s husband back in Stockholm. He had refused to come with her to Berlin. Gerda was shaking her head. “No, never.
You just keep your eye on Jude, Miss Starlight. I’ll steal him the first opportunity I get.”


“You’d better not. I don’t know where I’d find another one just like him.”

Gerda waved her hand dismissively. “Impossible, of course. He’d never look at another woman.”

Christine knew this was true. Her silly jealousies had so often been directed at a paintbrush, never at a person. But it was
nice to hear someone else say it. “Do you think so?”


“Darling, he’s always got his hands all over you. He never lets you out of his sight. It’s damn frustrating. Look at my tits,
they’re wonderful—not like your tiny little things—but he’s never looked at them once.”


Christine laughed loudly, then said, “Well, thank you for being so reassuring. You know, he’s so gorgeous, and with the age
difference and all . . .”


Gerda scoffed. “Three years? It’s nothing. He’s twenty-eight, not eighteen. But don’t worry . . . if I ever see another woman
making a move on him, I’ll do everything in my power to keep her away. Lie, cheat, steal, whatever.”


“That’s very sweet,” Christine said, giving her a squeeze.

Gerda lit another cigarette. “So, what’s up with you lately, Miss Starlight? You seem a bit blue. It’s not just the pain in
your back, is it?”


Christine shook her head, her eyes darting off to locate Jude. He was on the other side of the room, a cigarette jammed between
his lips, drawing a shape in the air with his hands for Sparky, who laughed enormously.


“What’s it all about? Not Jude?”

“No, not Jude.” Christine shrugged. “Autumn, I guess. Gray skies, winter coming.”

“Bullshit. It’s more than that.”

She tore her eyes away from Jude and met Gerda’s gaze. “It’s weird, Gerda. Just the last few days I’ve been feeling on edge.
Like something’s about to happen. And I keep having these flashes of old memories, things I haven’t thought about in years.”


“Like what? Stuff to do with your parents?”

“No, actually. You know we lived here in the seventies, but not here, not in the East. Berlin was still divided. We had a
big house out at Zehlendorf. My best friend was the English girl who lived next door. A cute little redhead. I keep thinking
about her, and then the memory gets all caught up with something else which I can’t put my finger on. Something to do with
a crow I saw once . . .” She trailed off, realizing what she said made no sense.


“A crow?”

“Yeah, I know it sounds nuts.”

“No, not at all. What was her name? The little girl?”

“Miranda. Her father was an English soldier, Colonel Frith. But nobody ever called her Miranda; we always called her Little
May.”


“What else?” Gerda prompted. “Just these memories, this feeling of anxiety?”

Christine reached for her near-empty beer bottle, and swished the contents around halfheartedly. “She was murdered,” she said.

“Really?”

“Abducted from her bedroom one night. God knows what awful things she . . . They never found her.”

“That’s sad.”

“Yeah.”

“So it’s no wonder it gives you a bad feeling to think of her.”

“I guess so.” She drained her glass. “Only, it’s not just an ordinary bad feeling. It’s dread, and it’s half-remembrance,
and it’s a weird foreboding about that bird and trying to remember where I saw it.”


Gerda snapped her fingers, her eyes round and bright. “A ghost!” she said. “Christine, maybe Little May is haunting you.”

“Huh?” Christine adjusted her frame of reference quickly. Gerda had a strong interest in spirits and crystals and psychic
powers, and conversations with her often took this turn.


“Yes, it makes sense. She died all those years ago, when you were here as a child. Maybe she’s been wandering on the earthly
plane all this time, and now you’re back she’s attached herself to you.”


“I don’t know, Gerda. I’m more likely to think it’s a change-of- seasons melancholy.”

Gerda shrugged. “Believe what you like. Do you want another drink?”

Christine looked at her empty beer, then nodded. “Yeah, a big one.”

She watched Gerda go to the bar. The band was still playing, Jude was still talking in the corner, the air was blue and thick
with smoke and conversation. But she felt lonely and isolated and strangely afraid, and it had something to do with a twenty-five-year-old
blurred memory of black wings.


—from the Memoirs of Mandy Z.

I first conceived of the Bone Wife as a child of eight in Bremen. My mother had taken me to a traveling exhibit of puppets,
dolls, and automatons in the town square. I had always been, and continue to be, overly interested in contraptions, inventions,
gadgets with wheels and cogs. The exhibit was set up in the shadow of the Dom—its dark spires pointing toward the broad sky—on
a summer afternoon that stretched on for miles. I wandered between the exhibits, clutching my mother’s fingers in one hand,
and a sticky ice cream in the other. Such an array of painted faces: some plain with round black eyes and pointed noses, some
so garishly colorful that even I could sense their brightness; clown faces, girl faces, boy faces, cat faces, elephant faces;
spindly legs, silk feet, straw-stuffed arms, antique lace, and stiff linen. I was swept away by the sea of ghastly wooden
smiles and laughing fur eyebrows. One doll in particular caught my eye as it was the exact image of my mother, but without
her stern hairstyle and clothes. This little doll had perfect ringlets and a pretty frilled dress. Oh, I cried for that doll!


“Mama,” I said (in German, of course, as it is my native language), “if you do not buy that doll for me I shall die.”

“Nonsense,” she replied, dragging me farther into the exhibit.

She did not understand that I needed to possess it, to have a version of my mother with pretty curls and a frilly dress. I
hated her for dragging me away from it. We stopped in front of a display of an automaton, which from the front looked like
an ordinary doll but from the back was a mass of whirring wheels and gears. The doll’s owner—a hefty, mustachioed man dressed
like a nineteenth-century traveling salesman—wound it, and the doll began to bounce up and down, its arms scissoring through
the air and its head bobbing, its mouth articulating silent words. Then the mustachioed man placed a peanut on the table in
front of it, and the doll bent down to pick it up. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen and all the way home to our
farmhouse at Niederbüren I pictured that automaton over and over, and in my mind the face of the mother-doll became imposed
over it, for it was often that I had seen my mother pick up the objects that my father and I left behind us when we had tired
of them.


I secluded myself in my bedroom that evening, drawing plans for a mother-doll. A life-size automaton shaped like a woman,
who could pick up my toys and could not speak. That, I thought, would be the perfect wife for me. I was not interested in
women then, and I’m not now. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I am interested in men either. I have never experienced
the faintest twinge of the sexual urges with which the rest of the world is obsessed. I believe it to be a legacy of the genetic
damage suffered by our family, and I have never envied the passions of others, as they too often lead to vulnerability.


I shelved my plans for a mother-doll or a wife-doll, partly because I was a mere boy with no idea how to build an automaton,
but also because soon after this occasion I saw my first faery, and it had such a profound effect upon me that most childish
thoughts were permanently driven from my mind.


My parents had told me about faeries, and about the special connection our family had with them. I had taken for granted that
one day I would meet one, and perhaps thank him or her for our good fortune. I imagined they would look like the faeries in
the books in my bedroom: tiny people with little wings and sparkly eyes. I didn’t know then, as I do now, about the many different
breeds of faeries and how vastly they differ from one another; the complexities of their bodies that I now understand so intimately.


On this day, on the day I saw a faery for the first time, I was playing with my toy boat in a puddle on the banks of the Weser.
It was the first fine day in a week, and the grass and trees were clean, washed. I was concentrating hard on the boat in front
of me. In my imagination, I was making an Atlantic crossing. A shadow fell across me and I looked up to see a man smiling
at me.


“Hello,” he said, “that’s a nice boat.”

My body had never before performed such a complex reaction to the mere sight and voice of another being. My eyes dilated,
my skin grew warm, my body felt stiff, and a fist of nausea pushed up inside me. I opened my mouth to scream, and only a low
groan came out.


“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t be afraid.” And then he knelt down across the puddle from me and reached out to touch
my boat. I could smell him then, I could smell his bones deep under his skin, and such a thrill of revulsion shuddered through
me that I felt I might actually lose control of my body, that I might explode or die. Instead, I took a deep breath and called
at the top of my lungs, “Mama!”


The stranger stood immediately and took two steps back. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said.

“Ma