DER ERLKÖNIG’S OWN
the parlor downstairs was small, more like the vestry of a church than receiving room. It looked a bit like a sacristy as well, the walls lined with dark wood panels resembling a choir and the granite floor covered with a tapestried Persian rug. The acoustics were strange in the space, both echoing and muffled at once, and I thought again it was an odd place for a professed lover of music like the Count to hold an impromptu concert.
The Count and Countess were already comfortably seated on plush red velvet chairs on opposite sides of the room from each other when Josef and I entered. The harpsichord lay between them, and they looked like guardian deities to a musical underworld. Neither had removed their masks; the Countess as Frau Perchta in her swan’s feathers, the Count as Der Tod in his death’s-head guise. Mirrors and opposites: black and white, night and day, save for the poppies pinned to their clothing like a drop of blood.
“Welcome,” the Countess said. “Make yourselves comfortable. Once you feel sufficiently warmed up, we can bring the other guests in for the performance.”
“And my sister?” I asked. “François?”
The Count smiled. “I’m sure they shall come in with the others.”
His wife gestured to the harpsichord. “Your kingdom awaits, my children.”
My brother and I exchanged glances before making our way to the instrument. My brother set his case down and took out his violin while I sat down at the harpsichord. I lifted my hands to black and ivory keys, the inverse of all the other keyboards I had played before. The major keys were black, the minor white, and for a stomach-churning moment, I thought that I had forgotten how to play. The inverted colors gave me a sense of vertigo, making me unsure of my fingering and even the notes.
“Liesl?” Josef held his bow poised over his strings, ready to tune his violin.
Shaking off my disorientation, I found my place. I played a few chords; old as it was, the harpsichord had been relatively well cared for, the plucking mechanism smooth, the strings in tune. Josef nodded to me as I played G, D, A, and E, repeatedly plunking the notes until Josef had tuned his violin to me. Then he diligently ran through his exercises: scales, thirds, fourths, fifths, repeating rounds of musical phrases to warm up his hands.
I did the same on the harpsichord, trying to acquaint myself not only with an entirely new instrument, but to reacquaint myself with the attitude of playing for performance and not in private. I had long since stopped the agility drills and exercises Papa had made us do every day, and my fingers felt thick and leaden.
“Are you ready?” The Countess watched us with avid interest, but the Count’s attention seemed elsewhere. For someone who had been so keen to bring me here—to Vienna, to his very home—because of my music, he evinced remarkably little interest in our playing. I had initially taken his bumbling eccentricity for charm or possibly the product of a laudanum-addled mind, but my feelings about my patron quickly returned to their initial dread.
“If you please,” I said a trifle sheepishly. “I left a folio of sheet music upstairs with my cloak and other things. If someone could—”
Another red-clad servant entered the room before I could even finish my thought, carrying my leather-bound folio on a silver platter. My dread deepened. The room, my hosts, the entire house made for an eerie company, and the strange sameness of the liveried members of the house contributed to this growing sense of unreality.
I thanked the servant with a tight smile, and opened the folio to sort through the pages until I found Der Erlkönig. I tried to ignore the press of the Countess’s eyes upon my skin. There was something about her scrutiny that went beyond mere curiosity; there was a sort of hunger or desire that pulsed from her like waves of perfume, and it made me both ashamed and excited at once.
I settled the pages of the score on the music stand of the harpsichord and sat back down upon the bench. I looked to Josef, who was silently running his hands along the neck of his violin, practicing his fingering in an almost perfunctory manner. This casual indifference toward performance struck me more than his coldness toward me; Josef was sensitive and shy. Or at least, he was once.
“Shall we call your guests, Your Illustriousness?” he asked in a dull voice.
The Countess smiled, leaning back in her chair. “I was rather hoping you would indulge us both with a private rendition of Der Erlkönig, Herr Vogler,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Josef shrugged, but gave a quick, polite bow. “As you wish, my lady.”
He settled his instrument against his shoulder, his bow in hand loose by his side, and raised his gaze to mine, waiting for me to join him. A low, insistent throb pulsed at the base of my skull, and I regretted not having a bite to eat upstairs at one of the myriad banquet tables. I felt as though I had swallowed gravel, but I smiled at my brother, and nodded. He straightened his back and rested his chin against his violin, while I poised my hands over the keyboard, awaiting his cue. Josef gave me the tempo, counting us in with the bounce of his bow, and the two of us began to play Der Erlkönig.
The sound of the harpsichord was initially jarring when paired with the violin. The plectra plunked and plucked, the strings shivered and did not resound, and the piece took on an ominous overtone that was not normally present when played on a more modern instrument. I tried to find my footing in the midst of this new aural sensation, trying to focus on the notes and not the sound. I was distracted by a sudden desire to experiment, to improvise. To play. To frolic and gambol and race within the music the way the Goblin King and I had done when I was a child. I shook my head and tried to focus on my brother instead, to listen, to follow, to support.
But he was not there.
Josef was not present in his music. His notes were precise as always, but we were missing something, a connection that ebbed and flowed between us as easy and intimate as conversation. We were playing at each other, not with each other.
The Count shifted in his seat, lifting his hand to stifle a yawn.
Oh, mein Brüderchen, I thought. Oh, Sepp, what is happening to us?
I tried desperately to make eye contact with my brother, trying to find that vein, that lifeline that bound us together. Play with me, Sepp, I begged. Play with me.
I had not been lying when I told the Countess that I was not a performer. I had the skills but not the touch. I wondered if my brother had become so used to playing with François that he could not remember how to find me, how to dance together in the music we shared. Or was this disconnect a symptom of a deeper estrangement? How had it come to this, we who had been as close as two halves of one heart now as distant and careful as strangers? Sadness bled from my face down to my fingertips, weighing down the notes with grief.
And Josef . . . he played on with that ruthless, exacting clarity. He was ether and air and void, while I was earth and root and rock. Resentment burned through my sadness, followed by the wash of anger. Meet me, Sepp, I thought, and then changed the accompaniment.
The change in the room was immediate. A lifting of pressure, an intake of relief, the waiting lull before a rainfall. Josef was too practiced a musician to falter when I took him by surprise, but for the first time in a long time, a spark crackled between us, lightning jumping from cloud to cloud. My brother was here. With me. He was present, and listening.
A game, Sepperl, I thought. A game like we used to play.
I improvised on the structures I had established, finding new shapes in the chords. My brother followed, his playing growing sharper. The melody was the same, but the color different. This version of Der Erlkönig had keen edges that sliced and cut you with its beauty, its otherworldliness. It was not the version of the bagatelle I had in mind when I wrote it. I had written it to be dreamy, melancholy, nostalgic. I had written it as a farewell to my family when I first ventured Underground, leaving behind a piece of the girl I was.
Now that I had taken the music and molded it, my brother took the lead. The notes grew angry, and it was as if he were saying, You want a reckoning? We shall have it now. We were speaking to each other once more, and I hadn’t known until that moment how little we had heard one another. We transitioned back into the original arrangement, and I understood what it was he was trying to say at last.
Discontent. Unfulfillment. A hollow emptiness. A constant questing, searching, seeking, only to find himself right back in the place he began. Trapped. My brother felt trapped. Hemmed in by expectation, by pressure, by the weight of my desires crowding in on him so that his own wants had no room to breathe.
Oh, Sepp, I thought.
I listened. I listened and listened and listened, letting my accompaniment support my brother the way I had not since we came to Vienna. Josef played, adding trills and embellishments that were practically Baroque in complexity and flourish, but were also an expression of his frustration. He nearly rushed a set of sixteenth notes, but even in the midst of this uncharacteristic outburst of emotion, my brother was controlled, years of rigid discipline keeping his tempo even.
Something changed.
There was a strange, hushed quality to the room that had nothing to do with the rediscovered connection between us nor the reverent rapture of the audience. The smell of pine and loam and ice filled the air, but faintly, like the whiff of perfume caught in passing. I drew in a clean, clear, alpine breath, the crispness of mountain breezes and stony caverns filling my lungs. The skull’s head and the swan pressed in closer.
Elisabeth.
My fingers skipped a few notes, and I almost stumbled out of the playing, startled out of the piece. But my hands still held on to the hours of practice to which I had subjected them, the muscles moving automatically as though they held memories of their own.
Elisabeth.
I kept my eyes on my brother, attentive to his cues, but I sensed a presence in the room that was neither human nor mortal. I thought of the vision I had in the labyrinth, the glowing eyes and the crown of horns and kept my eyes grimly focused on Josef, trying to blot out the other voice in my mind.
Then the music ended.
The bagatelle was not a particularly long piece, and it finished on an uncertain note. Josef did not hold that last fermata with any sort of conviction, only a resignation that shattered me even more than his despair. His bowing arm went limp, his head drooping as though the weight of his isolation was too much for him to bear. Despite our momentary connection, my brother seemed unchanged, untouched by the magic we had created together. Now that the music was over, my head felt thick, the beginnings of a headache crowding my mind.
Our hosts broke into applause, the Count most enthusiastic of them all.
“Capital, capital!” he said, beaming with delight. “I have never heard such playing! It was so beautiful. So pleasant!”
I frowned. He had heard such playing before; he had written of it in his letter to me. While I was flattered by his remarks, the music my brother and I performed tonight could hardly be called pleasant. My heart slowly sank into my stomach like a stone. I was beginning to realize that the Count was not a man of discerning taste. And although I was grateful for his attention and his desire to elevate us, I couldn’t help but wonder if he were merely looking to be fashionable. Countess Thun and Prince Lichnowsky were both patrons of Mozart and Beethoven; perhaps this Bohemian nobleman was looking for his own pet musician with no standard of quality or aesthetic. I could have been any other composer as far as he was concerned. I rubbed at my temples, the throbbing moving up my skull to push at my eyes. I needed to stand up. I needed to sit down. I needed to lie down.
“Bravi, bravi.” The Countess clapped, two sharp claps of approval. “It was everything I had hoped for and more.”
Every thing she had hoped for? That niggle of doubt, that trickle of suspicion about the Count suddenly flowed together in a flood of understanding.
“It was you who wrote me the letter that brought me here.” I did not use her proper courtesy. I was too dizzy to be concerned about rudeness.
It all made sense. The elegant hand on the invitation, how she addressed me as Mademoiselle like the writer of the letter, not Fräulein like her husband. I thought of the Count’s unsophisticated ear and his lack of enthusiasm or education about either Josef or me, save for when we interested his wife.
Her green eyes sharpened as though in a smile. “Have I been so transparent?”
I shook my head, but not in answer to her question. My head felt thick, my eyelids heavy.
“I have heard extraordinary rumors about you, young lady,” she continued in a soft voice. “Rumors about the . . . otherworldly nature of your music.”
I laughed, but it sounded twisted, warped. “I am merely mortal,” I said hoarsely. “Not magic.”
“Are you so certain of that, my dear?”
I flushed both hot and cold at once. I shivered uncontrollably, small, tiny tremors all over my body although the room was too close, too warm. I broke out in a sweat, but my skin felt clammy. “What . . . what . . .” I thought of the glasses of sherry my brother and I had drunk before we came down to perform. “What have you put in my drink?” I slurred.
A soft thud. Josef crumpled to a heap on the floor, his violin jangling as it struck the ground, his bow arm outstretched and pointed toward the Countess, an accusatory finger.
“Sepperl!” I cried, but the words were dampened, deadened, numb. I pressed my fingers to my lips, but I could no longer feel them.
The room was growing smaller, the air was stagnant around me, dank and rank with the sickly sweet smell of rotting flowers. I could not breathe, I could not get out. My limbs felt thick and heavy, and there was an iron band of pressure at my brow. I turned to the Countess.
“Why?” I asked weakly, trying in vain to keep my balance through the room swaying and tilting around me.
“I’m sorry, Elisabeth,” the Countess said, and there was genuine sorrow in her voice. “But I promise this is for your own good.”
“Käthe—”
“Your sister and the dark-skinned young gentleman are taken care of,” she promised. “They shall come to no harm.”
I was falling, falling through the ground, an endless void opening up beneath me. “Who are you?” I croaked.
“You know who we are.” I heard the Countess’s voice as though from far away, miles or years distant. “We are the mad, the fearful, the faithful. We are those who keep the old laws, for we are Der Erlkönig’s own.”
* * *
Elisabeth.
I open my eyes but I do not know where I am. The world around me is hazy, murky, formless, as though seen through mist, or fog, or cloud. My breathing echoes strangely, both echoing and muffled at once, and my heart beats louder than a gong.
Elisabeth.
My pulse quickens, the drumbeats of my blood rising in pitch. I turn around, a name on my lips, an ecstatic shout in my heart. Mein Herr, mein Herr!
Elisabeth.
His voice is far away, coming from a great distance. I wander aimlessly through the flat gray, searching for shapes, for light, for shadow, for anything to give my surroundings weight and depth. Where was I? Was I dreaming?
Howling rises all around me, the bell-like baying of hounds. It rings in my rib cage, resounding in my chest. I feel it crawling up my throat, a ripping, tearing sound, silver-sweet and sharp. I want to scream, not in pain, but in stark, raving madness. I scratch at my neck, hard enough to draw blood, but whether to free my voice or keep it trapped, I don’t know.
Elisabeth!
When I pull my hand away, my fingertips are not stained red, but silver. I stare at my nails, trying to make sense of what I see when out of the formless gloom, a monster emerges.
I do scream when a pair of blue-white eyes appear, a pinprick of black in their center. Slowly a shape coalesces into being—a long, elegant face, whorls of inky shadows swirling over moon-pale skin, ram’s horns curling around pointed, elfin ears. He is more terrifying and more real than the vision I experienced in the labyrinth. But worst of all are the hands, gnarled and curled and with one too many joints in each finger. With a silver ring around the base of one. A wolf’s-head ring, with two gems of blue and green for eyes.
My ring. His ring. The symbol of our promise I had returned to the Goblin King back in the Goblin Grove.
Mein Herr?
For a brief moment, those blue-white eyes regain some color, the only color in this gray world. Blue and green, like the gems on the ring about his finger. Mismatched eyes. Human eyes. The eyes of my immortal beloved.
Elisabeth, he says, and his lips move painfully around a mouth full of sharpened teeth, like the fangs of some horrifying beast. Despite the fear knifing my veins, my heart grows soft with pity. With tenderness. I reach for my Goblin King, longing to touch him, to hold his face in my hands the way I had done when I was his bride.
Mein Herr. My hands lift to stroke his cheek, but he shakes his head, batting my fingers away.
I am not he, he says, and an ominous growl laces his words as his eyes return to that eerie blue-white. He that you love is gone.
Then who are you? I ask.
His nostrils flare and shadows deepen around us, giving shape to the world. He swirls a cloak about him as a dark forest comes into view, growing from the mist. I am the Lord of Mischief and the Ruler Underground. His lips stretch thin over that dangerous mouth in a leering smile. I am death and doom and Der Erlkönig.
No! I cry, reaching for him again. No, you are he that I love, a king with music in his soul and a prayer in his heart. You are a scholar, a philosopher, and my own austere young man.
Is that so? The corrupted Goblin King runs a tongue over his gleaming teeth, those pale eyes devouring me as though I were a sumptuous treat to be savored. Then prove it. Call him by name.
A jolt sings through me—guilt and fear and desire altogether. His name, a name, the only link my austere young man has to the world above, the one thing he could not give me.
Der Erlkönig throws his head back in a laugh. You do not even known your own beloved’s name, maiden? How can you possibly call it love when you walked away, when you abandoned him and all that he fought for?
I shall find it, I say fiercely. I shall call him by name and bring him home.
Malice lights those otherworldly eyes, and despite the monstrous markings and horns and fangs and fur that claim the Goblin King’s comely form, he turns seductive, sly. Come, brave maiden, he purrs. Come, join me and be my bride once more, for it was not your austere young man who showed you the dark delights of the Underground and the flesh. It was I.
His words send a thrill through me, galvanizing me from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, and my body responds to the honey in his voice, even as my mind finds it bitter, rancid. No, I say. Never.
Der Erlkönig’s eyes narrow, and the mist between us thins and retreats. But it is not cloud or fog in the distance; it is the spectral forms of ghostly horsemen, scraps of clothing hanging off shriveled flesh and ancient bone. The unholy host. Their eyes are milky, shining with an absence of light, of life, and at their feet are hounds made of darkness, their eyes the red of blood, of hell, of . . . poppies.
Poppies.
A sickly sweet smell begins to fill my senses, causing me to cough and gag and retch. A heavy, cloying scent, it clouds the world around me again, pulling me away from Der Erlkönig, from the hellhounds, from the Hunt.
No! Der Erlkönig is furious, lunging for me before I disappear into a purple haze. But those gnarled hands pass straight through me, spearing me with ice and cold and death. I scream with pain, gasping out a name, but that ghostly embrace is keeping me in this dream, this nightmare.
At once those blue-white eyes warm, filled again with color. Elisabeth!
The Goblin King wrenches himself away and I fall to my hands and knees, breathing hard. Mein Herr!
Elisabeth, he says, and I can see him struggling to hold on, to fight back the darkness threatening to subsume him. Go. Run. Get away from here, lest the Hunt claim you.
No, I say. Stay with me. Be with me!
But the Goblin King shakes his head. The intense, flowery smell grows stronger, and the world wavers, as though seen underwater.
The old laws seek to redress the ancient balance. I made you a promise, Elisabeth, and I intend to keep it. He holds his hand out to me, and in his palm I see the ring I had left for him back in the Goblin Grove. His ring. A symbol of his power and our troth. I reach out and for the briefest of moments, we touch. Our palms brush each other’s, and I am swept up in a tide of longing so intense, I fear I will go mad.
Hold me, kiss me, take me, ravish me, steal me away—
No! The Goblin King’s eyes go wide, and he shoves me away.
Oh please oh please oh please oh please—
Go, Elisabeth! he cries. Go, before I am lost, before—
And then he is gone, those mismatched eyes drowned in a sea of white.
Mein Herr!
Elisabeth!
Still he calls my name. I search for his, digging, clawing, tearing at the corners of my mind, scratching at the corners of sanity to find it.
Elisabeth!
Elisabeth!
I wake up.