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Dream at Dawn – Part 01

—Mechanical Turk 3—

I don’t know how much time had passed since then.

A fog still hovered in my mind. I had left the stone tower where I spent a chilling winter, and found myself in a white room, small and square.

A bunk. A small table. A bird sometimes perched on the small square window. Animals liked me, apparently. Perhaps they could tell that I used to live in the woods. I started cutting the bread I was served into small pieces to feed the bird.

I spent most of my time staring at a spot on the wall, singing and thinking about things. But the drug they kept on giving me prevented me from thinking about any one thing for too long. My consciousness was like a shell between the waves, undulating and drifting away.

I sang when I thought back to my days at the theater, and I sobbed when I thought of my daughter.

Did I really have a daughter? My memories and emotions were too vague. Everything seemed to disappear into oblivion.

The place looked like a hospital. Looking out of the window, it seemed to be located on a hill in the city. I could see clusters of buildings in the distance. Beyond was a vast expanse of blue skies.

At one point a dark-haired girl occupied the room next to mine. Once a week, when I was taken out to bathe, I could see her through the window. She, too, was drugged and seemed to be in a daze, but she would occasionally raise her head and look at me. On the door of the hospital room was scribbled the name Alex.

The door to my room bore the name Cordelia.

I didn’t know how much time had passed.

One day.

Help came.

Out of nowhere.

Boys with red hair.

A familiar face stood idly by my bedside, a face I’d parted with since I waved to him at the back door of the theater.

It was nighttime. The moonlight from the small window seemed to burn coldly. The boy’s hair was the color of flames, just as it had been in the past, crimson and billowy in the moonlight. Four green eyes, sharp as a beast’s, glowed in the night.

Yes. Four.

At first I thought that I was seeing a double image of him because of the drug, but I was wrong.

There were two Brian Roscoes.

There are people in this world that can exist in multiple places at once. They were not just twins. They turned their heads to the right at the same time, bit their thin lips, and howled. They moved at exactly the same time, wearing the exact same expression. Astonished, I reached out with my skinny arm and touched them both. There really were two of them. The two Brians fell to their knees and touched my shoulder, then my cheek.

“Sorry for being late.”

“Sorry for being late.”

They both apologized to me.

Footsteps of the night guard came down the corridor. The narrow beam of a flashlight peeked through the small window on the door. My breath caught. But before I knew it, the two Brians had magically vanished. The small window closed, and the guard moved away. I was terrified. Was it just my hallucination? But then they reappeared from somewhere in the darkness.

In my foggy mind, I suddenly remembered what my fellow dancers had told me. The red-haired boy who came to watch our show was an apprentice magician. Was this one of his tricks? The two Brians magically removed the chains restraining me to the bed. It had been years, I thought. My wrists felt light. I thought I could fly. But my body was heavy and cold as steel.

One carried me on his back. The other produced two pistols and held them in both hands.

I gasped.

“You leave with her. I’ll take care of any pursuers.”

“If you survive, we meet in that room.”

“If I don’t, consider me dead. And you will carry on alone.”

“Not alone. She’s with me. Me, you, and Cordelia. Our princess. It’s either two, or three of us.”

“Right.”

“Good luck.”

The conversation lasted only a moment; they spoke so fast I could barely discern what they were saying. It took only a second or two for them to share this much information. It sounded like two red beasts howling restlessly, not human beings. I closed my eyes.

The two Brians leapt at the same time and kicked the door open.

A siren sounded. Voices announcing an intruder. Shots were fired nearby. The smell of blood rose like red smoke, dyeing the air. Furious roars. Wild screams of those whose lives were forfeit. Bullets zipping inches from me.

My consciousness faded. Soon after, my head dropped, and I fainted.

Two boys. Fun memories of the theater. Terror in the stone tower. My soul that was taken from me, my little girl.

Memories flashed like bullets, and I sank, as if a giant creature had grabbed my legs and dragged me to the bottom of the dark sea.

When I opened my eyes, I found myself in a large basement.

But it was not a dark and cold space like the tower where I was locked up. It was a rented building that used to be a warehouse. Everywhere there were glass boxes large enough to hold one adult, cabinets full of weird-looking things, and wax figures of a woman’s head, frozen in horror, yet somehow comical.

In the middle of the room was a canopied bed, small and white, like the bed of a princess, where I lay. I didn’t know how much time had passed.

Brian suddenly appeared from an open cabinet that was supposed to be empty. There was no one there until now.

I shrieked, to Brian’s astonishment.

“You’re awake, Cordelia.” He looked at me. “There’s a mirror on the inside. It’s a trick. We’re not sorcerers.”

“We’re magicians. We can’t cast spells.”

Another Brian emerged from behind the canopy’s thin fabric. I was relieved to see him alive, but his upper body was naked, wrapped in layers of bandages. He was probably shot while trying to rescue me.

They drew closer slowly.

These men were allies. They saved me.

That’s what I thought. But a hair-raising terror gripped my entire body. I couldn’t escape it.

For many years, I had been surrounded by men. Albert de Blois, who abused me, the doctor who kept drugging me and finally took away my daughter, the strange noblemen.

People who did nothing but take from me.

I jumped off the bed in terror. My body, chained and malnourished for so long, had once been full of youth, singing, dancing, moving freely to my heart’s content, but now my bones felt heavy, creaking after only a couple of steps.

“Don’t move,” one Brian said.

“You’ll break your bones,” the other added. “Your body must take its time to heal.”

“And we’re on your side.”

“Descendants of the ancient people of Saillune. The land of the Gray Wolves. Now reduced to a small village deep in the Alps.”

“We don’t harm our own.”

“We will never harm you.”

I scrambled away.

Men. Men’s voices.

Our own? They won’t do what those noblemen did? My limbs screamed from pain and fear.

There was a weird-looking, wooden doll in front of me.

The upper half of a man’s body, its head wrapped in a Turkish turban, was attached to a square wooden box. In front of him was a chessboard, his hands outstretched toward it.

There was a lid on the right side of the box. It was open, so I quickly scurried inside.

I still wasn’t sure why I chose the box. Perhaps it reminded me of how, when I gave birth to my daughter, I felt like a wooden doll that had lost its soul.

I dove into the box and closed the lid. The inside was hollow, and I was able to slip into the upper half of the wooden doll. Perhaps it was a device used for magic tricks where a person—not a full-grown man, but a child or a smaller woman like me—could enter and pretend to be a mechanical doll.

I inserted myself into the doll’s head. There were holes in the eyes, so I could see what was going on outside.

The two Brians approached carefully.

“She entered the Turk!”

“Cordelia?”

“You’re finally free.”

“But it will take a long time for her mind to regain its freedom.”

“We have a lot of things to talk to about. About the ancient, proud people of Saillune, now almost extinct, our roots, and the uneasy future that awaits us.”

“And most importantly…”

“We want to apologize.”

“Yes. The Marquis, the Ministry of the Occult, kidnapped you right in front of our eyes, holding you captive. The stone tower next to Castle Blois, surrounded by woods, was heavily-guarded, and we couldn’t get close.”

“And it took some time to figure out where you were transported to afterwards. We never thought you’d been confined in a mental hospital just a stone’s throw away from where we performed.”

“We owe you.”

“An apology.”

My heart, frozen like ice, slowly began to thaw at the thought that there was someone who had been searching for me.

But it took a long time.

Tears rolled down their cheeks at the same time. I was surprised. I moved the Turk’s hand in denial.

But no matter how much I waved the wooden doll’s hand, their tears of regret never stopped streaming.