Tortured Hearts - Twisted Tales of Love - Volume 3 Read online

Kathy struggled to heave herself up from her chair, her cane shaking in her wizened hand. She could not believe what she was hearing! Her anger was reverberating through her frame so much her cane was unable to gain purchase on the chintz carpet at her feet.

  Mary watched her mother struggle, with a passive look in her eyes. She realised now that this woman, this female who stood before her, had killed her father. She had no proof, but she knew, as sure as the brain tumour would end her existence, Kathy Chandler had snuffed out her father’s light with poison or her mere presence. Kathy was so worked up now, trying to walk forward her shaking, pale body stumbled and she nearly lost her footing. Mary sighed, a sound that seemed to push out from her very core. She would never get her out of here, she knew that now. Her mother living her own life elsewhere was a dream, a wonderful dream, but it would never become reality. Her mother would die in this house.

  Rushing to her mother’s side, she placed the cane on the floor and helped the frail form to stand up. Kathy, taking this as a sign of obedience, straightened immediately and cackled under her breath. She had her captor back in chains. She allowed her daughter to steer her up the old, wide staircase, thinking to herself that a lie down in bed was in order. She could play on this for weeks.

  But it was not to be, her wicked ways and years of sniping had finally snapped whatever sense of love her daughter still held for her. As they reached the top stair, Mary turned to face her mother.

  “You really are a bitter, old woman, Mother, I see that now. Dad knew it, and now I know it too. You sucked the life right out of my father, and I am damned if I let you do the same to me for another moment. Goodbye, Mother.”

  Mary lunged for the stick in Kathy’s hand. As she pulled it away from her mother, watching her gnarled, wispy fingers grasp the handle, she pushed her stick towards her mother in one quick movement. Kathy, already pulling away, was immediately thrust backwards sharply. Mary watched in morbid fascination as the old woman’s body rolled and crashed down the stairs, the crisp snap of bones breaking, punctuating her gargled screams as she tumbled down the staircase, landing in a heap at the bottom. She held her breath and tiptoed down the stairs towards the still form. Kathy’s head hung at an unnatural angle, blood trickling from her thin lips. One leg was bent underneath her body, the toes peeking out from behind her left shoulder. Mary felt relief. Pure, simple relief. She would run to the neighbour, begging, screaming for help. Her mother had fallen down the stairs, a tragic accident. Only to be made all the more tragic when her daughter would die within the year from a deadly brain tumour. What an unfortunate family, they would say. Even if they questioned the alteration to her will, there was no evidence of foul play. She handled her mother’s walking sticks all the time; the dutiful daughter looking after the elderly mother.

  She smiled at her mother and breezed to the front door. Her mother’s unseeing eyes stared in frozen horror at her retreating figure.

  Mary closed the heavy front door on her old life. However much time she had left, she was going to savour the moments. Cue the scream.

  My Muse:

  ......The more I write this story, the more engrossed I become. I have never felt the need to write so hard before in all my years of writing. I can remember every word, every nuance, every feeling of this story. It's like the whole story has been written before and I'm just putting it back on paper.

  The oddest thing, though, is that as I started this story, I had a very clear picture of my hero and his lady love clad in what looked like a Greek chiton, but then the more I wrote the faces changed, as did the clothes; from Greek to Roman, to Egyptian, to Byzantine, to Norman and on and on. The characters progressed down through the ages until the only face I could see for my hero was myself. It was a very disconcerting feeling. But as my editor has told me before, never argue with the muse just flow with it. Any problems with the descriptions can be picked up in editing.

  The thing with being drawn through the ages, though, was the fact there remained one constant. My heroine, my lady love, has remained the same, whilst the face of my hero has changed. She has become a constant in my dreams, and in my musing on the plot. It's like she is whispering down through time to tell me what and how to write the story. The story of a love so strong it will live for ever. Her name was and always will be Calliope. Even her name rolls off the tongue poetically. I dream of her all the time now, dreams that were at the start so filled with love and longing, but over the last few nights seem to have changed.

  Calliope is there calling out to me, still telling our story, but gone is the tender whisper in the ear. As each day runs into the next, I feel the bond getting weaker as other voices get in the way, like a chattering of magpies. I feel like I'm now having to search for the meaning of her words. Other names intrude, with other faces.

  One night Clio, another night Thalia, they seem to want to corrupt and change the story; to add their own slant to the plot.

  Clio has me expanding the history of each section until it reads like a textbook. I know my editor is going to hate that style but I can't seem to bring myself to edit it and yet, while it's dry and dusty like a text book, it contains a vivid edge, as though I had walked the ancient streets and experienced what I had written.

  With Thalia, suddenly I'm adding jokes, humour, often dark and unexpected. As though life should be a huge joke but we just haven't seen it yet.

  I'm confused by my own writing and so very tired. I don't think I have stopped now for days. Eating and sleeping seem to be distractions I can no longer afford if I'm to finish this story before I lose my muse.

  New names came to me today. Erato, she showed me how to add real love to my story. I thought up to now I had explored and expressed my true feelings for Calliope in such a way that my love was clear; but Erato showed me the error of my ways. I'm not sure why it had to be as though I was singing to my lady love, but it somehow seemed fitting, right for the story, that song be the only way to tell her my feelings. She and her friend, Polymina, helped me forge a hymn of love so deep; I weep even now thinking about it.

  Finally I have to break away from my story, I have not eaten in 3 days and yet as I try to leave, my body aches, screams at me, like a junkie jonesing for the latest fix, a body suddenly hollow to its core. I feel I will miss some vital elements that the story should have if I go. Even now, Terpsichore and Urania demand my attention but I'm just too weak to hear. I need sleep, and in sleep maybe I will be able to hear Calliope clearer. Her voice has been so distant the last few days, as though someone was deliberately blocking her out. As I think the thought, oblivion arrives, sweet dark oblivion. It will all be alright in the morning.

  I awake cold and sweating. How did I get back in front of my laptop?

  The words on the screen don't make sense. When did I write that? There is talk of stars and the song of the sky and the dance of the planets, filled with mathematical detail of the movement of our solar system. I must have read this detail somewhere but how could I have added it to the storyline? I don't understand the detail but it all works so perfectly, so beautifully with the story. Showing how all love is interlinked, throughout time and space. Written down and acted out in books and dance and song.

  It is a love so achingly deep that I know not how I have written it. I have never known real love like this, only in my mind with dear, sweet, beautiful Calliope. Where are you now, you have gone so quiet, so distant?

  As I brood on the absence of Calliope and the source of the words now glaring back at me, a new name comes to the fore; Melpomene. Even thinking the name brings tears to my eyes, as if all the tragedy in the world were sitting next to me whispering its woes.

  A lump forms in my chest so heavy and harsh, I can scarcely breathe. Tears turn to sobs, I will never finish this story unless I find out where my Calliope is. Why she will not answer me, why so much of her story now seems to have been corrupted and rewritten by these others.? The story of love now turning to time worn, world weary loss ravaged by uncounte
d years.

  The more I think about it, the more melancholy I become. My mood has become blacker and blacker as the day has gone on. I cannot find sufficient words to describe the loss I feel with Calliope gone and she is gone, she is out of my reach.

  Her words no longer find me, all I'm left with is an image of her, beautiful again as she was at the start of the tale, dressed in her chiton and holding her tablet.

  So to find her again, I pour more and more of my heart and soul into this book. I write every word, every feeling, every thought down onto the page, in the hope that she will return. I feel weaker and weaker with every hour. I cannot remember the last time I ate, went to the toilet, saw the sun or slept. I feel that I'm now more alive on these pages than I am in the real world.

  It's all so confusing. There seems to be no up, no down, no sense of the real world any more. It's like I'm fading away. But I'm no longer alone, there are others here. All these people, all scribbling away on tablets, typewriters, parchment, paper. Every form of writing from every age. Is this a new part to the story? Has my imagination sucked me down the rabbit hole of reality? Where are you, Calliope? Are you trying to tell me something new? To warn me?

  I must stop, I must think. All these people, all writing away, it's not right. Not normal. How did I get here? This is wrong, it’s not natural, but I can't break free.

  It's only now I see the shackles tethering me to the floor. Where is my house, my room? How did I get here? Who are all these people? I see an old man scribbling away on some ancient parchment. Sir, sir who are you?

  "Θρήνος περνώντας σας φίλος μου, είμαι ο Όμηρος, και οι μούσες έχετε πάρει."

  For a moment it meant nothing to me, but then I read as he wrote the words on his manuscript as clear as they would have been if written in English;

  "Lament your passing, my friend, I am Homer, and the muses have taken you."

  But the muses, the muses are a myth, and even if they were real, are they there to help, to inspire?

  All eyes were on me now, eyes stretching away into the dark, and as one they all started repeating one word. Succubus. The word spilled out in Greek, Latin, Celtic, Norse, so many dialects and languages. The cave stretched away beyond where the eye could see, the word rolling over and over again in waves of despair.

  All these years I had prayed for my muse to come and aid me in my quest for the perfect story, only they had all come, and they had stolen my soul.

  So beware, my friend, beware the siren call of the muse.

  Nero’s Love

  “Octavia?”

  Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, Emperor of Rome and beloved of the people felt his heart lurch. His veins ran cold as though the furnace in his heart had gone out. His eyes flickered twice, before remaining open, wide and staring.

  The room was the most luxurious and excessive in a palace noted for both of these traits. Plush gold and Tyrian purple cushions, drapes and carpets half obscured walls faced with yellow marble from Simitthus in Numidia, and porphyry from Aegyptus, black jet from Hispania and white marble from Carrara. Gold-coated braziers burned with sweet incense imported at a king’s ransom from Arabia. Remarkable compositions stood in the corners, echoing the great, ancient legends of the Greeks. In the centre, a fountain poured a constant stream of unwatered Lucanian wine into a low pool.

  It was a room designed to give its owner comfort and happiness. He had designed it himself, and been commended for its beauty and excess.

  And yet, recently, it had failed to offer either comfort or happiness. His nights were filled with cold sweats and dread; his days with disastrous news and difficulties.

  The people loved him, and he knew it. The army loved him, and the senate loved him. What was there not to love about Nero, the golden boy of Rome? Nothing.

  And yet daily, reports came of one general or another, stuck in a muddy field on the Rhine, or in the dusty hinterlands of Hispania, raising his banner and his voice in rebellion against Rome’s rightful Caesar.

  It was these troublesome tidings that he’d blamed for the terrible dreams that had assailed him these past five nights. Dreams of the hydra blocking his every escape route; dreams of his predecessor, the oddball Claudius, shuffling his clubfoot just enough to deliver Nero a kick in the backside; dreams of the loyal Praetorians muttering in groups.

  But they could never be blamed for Octavia.

  He stared in the low, dim, golden light of the flickering flames. There she stood, in the flesh – probably, anyway – at the centre of his inner sanctum. She looked better than ever, her ash-blonde hair in delicate waves, curled into ringlets at the front and pinned up at the rear. Devoid of jewellery and makeup, she stood almost austere in a simple, white stola, an ephemeral shawl around her shoulders. She looked almost vestal in her purity.

  But she could not be real.

  She was grey, for all her beauty.

  “Stepsister?”

  It was perhaps an odd way to address her, given their nine years of marriage, but since the divorce, he had found it more comfortable to think of her as Claudius’ daughter than his own ex-wife.

  The pale and noble features simply stared at him.

  “I know why you’re here. Seneca used to tell me that I misbehaved because I had no conscience. That was never the case, but I was determined from an early age that it would be I that ruled my conscience, and not the other way around. And my conscience seems to be getting stronger as my grip on Rome slips and falters.”

  The granite grey eyes moved with him as he sat up in the bed, pushing back the purple covers.

  “I did love you, you know, stepsister? Even before we were married, I loved you. And I loved you all the time we shared the world. If you had only given me a son, we could have done it. I could have showed the world my wife and son. But the Gods ran your womb to dust because they did not want us to be together, and who can fight the will of the Gods?”

  Octavia seemed unmoved by his words, her stone-cold gaze boring into him and seeking out all his little insecurities.

  “You were barren. An emperor needs an heir, and you know that, my dearest stepsister. I loved you as much as I could; with every ounce of my heart. But I could not be with you, for the good of the empire.”

  There was something accusatory about that stare that was disconcerting him even above and beyond this ghostly apparition.

  “I had to send you away! Don’t you see? If you stayed in Rome, the people would never think of us as separate and they had to do that so that I could move on and beget an heir. I had to send you away, but it was never enough. The people wanted you back. They could only see the beautiful woman; the noble empress. They could never understand that we couldn’t be without the chance of a son! Even then, I almost called you back, despite the damage it would have done to the succession. I loved you so much I nearly brought you back.”

  The eyes slipped away from his in sadness, taking a large piece of his soul and his resolve with them.

  “The knives couldn’t be helped! As long as you lived, there was a danger of me taking you back, and that could never be. I made sure it was done as nobly as possible, though. You went as a Roman lady should, in a warm bath, with your veins opened. I did you a favour, really, if you think about it. There are so many other ways to go, as I’m sure you’ll remember…”

  But Octavia was no longer looking at him.

  She stood looking at a wall. Or through it, away to the north.

  He reached out and stepped from the bed, one perfectly manicured foot shuffling into the thick carpet beside the bed. But as he moved, he realised that they were not alone.

  “Poppaea?”

  The perfect alabaster face with its lovable dimples and cheeky smile seemed somehow cold and unfeeling. Poppaea had never been like that! She had been lively and happy, at peace with the world and beautiful.

  “Poppaea, my love! Why so cold? Is the grave that unkind to you? You know that if a
nyone could have captured my heart other than Octavia, it was you, for you always had my lust, and my love came with my freedom from her.”

  The eyes locked on his and in them, he swore he could sense contempt; distain. Even hatred?

  “Do you not still love me, darling Poppaea? I never blamed you for the succession; you know that! Octavia was barren, but you gave me the girl. She was beautiful and, if she’d lived, she would have been the spit of you. And we’d have had a son, too, if you’d only been reasonable. All that fuss over a little chariot race! I have to attend these events. I’m the emperor; it’s expected of me. You should never have talked to me like that, Poppaea. If you’d held your tongue instead of flapping it like an angry fishwife, the argument would never have happened, and I’d never have kicked you.”

  His voice cracked at the memory, all so fresh, as the grey shadow of his favourite wife held her perfectly round belly with a sad gaze. Poppaea lying of the floor, screaming and bleeding where he had driven a heavy kick, rupturing both her and the child and killing them both.

  “I never meant… I shouldn’t have… but you drove me to it. You were always so argumentative and headstrong. But you loved me… didn’t you?”

  But her gaze locked on the wall, looking through it, to the west.

  He spun, knowing she was there already.

  Pinching himself, Nero blinked again and again, trying to drag himself out of this nightmare to the world of reality where, for all its troublesome usurpers and twisted governors, at least the dead stayed dead.

  But the figure standing there was not Statilia. For a long moment, his mind spun with confusion, but began to settle. Of course… Statilia lived still, and would be sleeping peacefully somewhere in the palace. Not with him, though. She seemed so distant. She was no Octavia; no Poppaea.

  Nor was she the true and only ever great love of his life. Unconquered and indomitable, Agrippina, his mother, stood grey and silent. A gilded serpent, she was. A charming snake. A gilded dagger aiming for his heart.