The Girl in the Castle Wall

At night the lords' castles do not sleep. They only pretend. Especially those in whose walls a living person was once left behind. The old man told me this before he even told me his name. He sat by the fire, but he did not warm himself. His hands trembled, and his clothes gave off the smell of lime and raw stone. "I did not lay the bricks, innkeeper," he whispered. "But I held her while the world grew narrower and narrower for her. Forgive me, forgive me..."

His old face took on a look of unbearable pain and horror, he fell to his knees and began beating the floor... Then he went quiet, pressed his thumb to his own wrist, as if checking whether a heart was beating - only not his. And then, looking as if straight through me with black, empty eyes, he began telling his story no longer to me, but to the wall behind my back.

I was the one who led her down. I did not lay bricks, did not hand up the trowel, did not measure the niche that waited in the castle's underground architecture like a mouth without a tongue. So I was the last thread by which she still held on to this world. I will not name you the year, innkeeper. In those days, for the truth they could do more than beat you - they could brick it up together with your tongue.

Upstairs in the castle the fiddles were still singing, wax ran down the candlesticks in yellow tears, mirrors multiplied the lordly faces like mannequins at a ball. And down below the damp was so thick you could wipe it off your face with a sleeve. The lord spoke quietly, with the cold politeness of a doctor examining a body already written off. He did not shout at his young wife, did not look for proof, because proof is needed where the world still pretends to be just.

"My family she will never see again. And the world will never hear her again," he said, and added one word: "Wall her in." I seized her by the wrist, as I was ordered. Under my thumb a heart was beating: one. one. one. As if her heart had moved into my hand and commanded me not to forget that I was leading not a guilt, not a white shadow, but a warm body that knew how to be afraid. I could feel her fear.

On the third step her foot slipped, her dress rustled against the stone, and her arm jerked sharply in my grip. The edge of a nail scratched her skin. I felt something warm on my cold hand, a liquid with a metallic smell, and a shame came over me so fierce it was as if the shame were a separate executioner. She did not cry out. She only steadied her breathing - too even, almost rehearsed, like a prayer before an execution. "Do you have a wife?" she asked.

I did not answer, for my tongue already lay in my mouth like a lump of wet clay. "Then don't look me in the eyes when they begin," she said. And I understood that I would not look away. In the cellar even breathing sounded foreign. The ceiling hung low, damp and black with soot, as if the underground had already leaned over her in advance, waiting, welcoming her into its embrace.

The cold of the cellar raised gooseflesh, the candle smoked, water trickled down the stone, the barrels reeked of sour wine and old earth, and the smell of wet lime rasped in the throat until it seemed the wall was already beginning to grow not in front of her, but inside you. They stood her in the niche, narrow as a coffin, only without a lid. She could still see us, could still breathe, was still alive. And her lid was to be put together slowly, brick by brick.

She tried not to shrink back from the black depth, held her shoulders straight, her back almost touching the stone. Her eyes did not beg. They were memorizing every one of us: the lord, the masons, me, the candle, the trowel, even the drifting of the dust. The first row was laid by a mason with the everyday face of a craftsman mending a stove. The trowel scraped across the brick with a dry metal tongue, the lime hissed, the brick settled true.

The most terrible thing was not a scream, not weeping, but how calmly a man's hands can do inhuman work, as if the world itself had placed the order. Row by row the wall grew from below: her feet, her knees, her hands. Her dress rustled against the stone as she shifted her feet in small steps. Her breathing held steady at first, then broke, became short, cut. Her lips went white. Every brick took a piece of the world away from her.

When the wall reached her chest, the smell of wet lime had already choked the throat completely, even ours - we who stood outside and had air. She swallowed emptiness like bitter medicine. The light narrowed with mathematical decorum: first the cellar, then our faces, then the candle, then only a strip of yellow flame on her cheek.

When only a narrow slit was left, her voice changed. It was still a woman's voice, still alive, still trembling in her throat, but already the cold of stone that has lain too long without sun was showing through it. "You are hiding me in the wall because you fear my voice. Then let every wall in this house speak with me from this day on. Let every man who kept silent wake with my lime in his mouth. Let your sons hear me at night behind their backs.

Let your lords choke on their own orders. Let the servants who looked away see my eye in every dark crack. "You lay brick before my face. But I will not stay behind it. I will go into the stone. Into the stairs. Into the mirrors. Into the breath of those who stood here and did not stop the hands. And when this house finally learns to sleep, I will come to wake it from within."

The last to vanish was her eye. Not the face, not the mouth - only one dry, living eye that looked not as if it were saying farewell, but as if it were setting a seal. The trowel passed along the seam. The brick lay flush. The lord ordered it forgotten. But in the silence after the walling-up, someone inside touched the wall with their fingers. Once. Not hard. Enough.

Three nights later the candles by the cellar went out on their own. In the morning the men were spitting white and saying there was lime in their mouths. Traces of thin fingers showed on the walls, as if someone were feeling the stone from inside. The mason who had laid the first row vanished almost at once. Only his coat was found: clean, dry, but dusted with white lime so evenly, as if it had been pulled not out of a room, but out of the inside of a wall.

The lord began to see her in the mirror. Not behind his back, no - that would have been too merciful. She stood inside the glass, in that cold depth where our likenesses live without blood, and looked at him with those same eyes. And I woke every night with her pulse in my hand: one... one... one... Though my hand was empty.

Here I fall silent, Ivan - the wall behind your shoulder is listening too closely. My hand does not tremble from old age. I can go no further tonight. The most terrible part began not when they walled her in, but when she learned to knock not on the stone, but from inside each of us.