Jestine looks around at the gory display and shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s quite possible. But maybe not. It might just be a show, impotent anger from the dozens of dead things running through this place like a current. There are so many that they don’t have separate voices. They have no idea who they are, anymore. They just manifest, like this.”
“Do you remember this from when you were here, Cas?” Thomas asks. I shake my head.
“I thought you’d have been tuned to it right away,” says Jestine. “But maybe they didn’t show you. Most people can’t see it of course, but the last time I was here, a little girl walked in and started to cry. No one could make her stop. She wouldn’t say why she was upset, but I knew. She walked around this room with her family, crying, while they tried to get her to look at the disemboweled knight, like he would cheer her up.”
Thomas swallows. “That’s disturbing.”
“When did you first see it?” I ask.
“My parents brought me here when I was eight.”
“Did you cry?”
“Never,” she says, and lifts her chin. “But then, I understood.” She tilts her head toward the door. “So, do you want to go meet the queen?”
* * *
The queen is in the chapel. She sits in the first row, silent, far off to the left. Dark brown hair hangs down her back, and her posture is straight, strapped into a bodice. Even standing in the back, thirty feet away, there’s no mistaking that she’s dead.
The chapel is in between tours at the moment, and a young couple was just finishing taking a picture of the stained glass as we came in. Now we’re alone.
“I don’t know which queen she is,” Jestine says. “Most say that she’s the ghost of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII. But she might be Lady Jane Grey. She doesn’t speak. And she doesn’t resemble any of the portraits.”
This is weird. There’s a dead woman in front of me like dozens of other dead women I’ve seen. But this one is a queen, and a famous one. If it’s possible to be starstruck by the dead, then I guess that’s what’s happening.
Jestine moves to the back of the chapel, near the door.
“Does she respond?” I ask. It’s unlikely. She isn’t corporeal; if she were, she’d be visible to everyone, and the couple in here snapping photos had no idea they had company. I wonder, though, if she’ll show up in a few of their developed shots and give them a good story to tell their friends and neighbors.
“Not to me,” Jestine replies in a whisper, as the queen turns, in a slow rotation, to face me. The movement is regal, or careful. Maybe both. She is balancing her severed head on her neck. Below the cut, she’s nothing but blood, and there’s something else. I can hear the rustle of her dress against the bench. She’s not just vapor anymore.
I’ve never seen the portraits Jestine mentioned, so I can’t speak to any resemblance. But the woman facing me looks not much more than a girl. She’s tiny, thin-lipped, and pale. Only the eyes are beautiful, dark and clear. There’s a delicate dignity about her, and a little bit of shock. It’s how any queen would react, if she were suddenly presented with a kid with hair hanging in his eyes and wrinkly clothes.
“Should I bow or something?” I ask out of the corner of my mouth.
“You should hurry up, is what you should do,” Jestine says, peering out the door. “The next tour group is going to be popping in here in two minutes.”
Thomas and I exchange a look. “Hurry up and do what?” I ask.
“Send her,” Jestine whispers, and arches her brow. “Use the athame.”
“Has she killed people?” Thomas asks. “Has she even harmed people?”
I doubt it. I doubt if she’s even scared people. I can’t imagine that this girl, this one-time queen, has ever implied a threat to anyone. She’s somber, and oddly at peace. It’s hard to explain, but I think she’d find the whole concept rude and inappropriate. The thought of stabbing her, or “sending” her, as Jestine apparently calls it, makes me blush.
“Let’s get out of here,” I mumble, and walk toward the door. In the corner of my eye, I catch Thomas sketching an awkward curtsy as he follows. I glance back one more time. The queen is no longer facing us. She resides in her church with no care for the living, balancing her head on her ragged neck.
“Am I missing something?” Jestine asks once we’re back in the open air. I lead them quickly toward the exit. Gideon’s got to be up by now, and I’ve had enough of this place.