Bluebeard’s Daughter

By Saranna DeWylde
© 2009, All Rights Reserved

So — the fairy tale goes that a lonely widower, rich in land and status, has the worst of luck with his brides. Seven brides before this left him alone. Seven before this innocent beauty, this shopkeeper’s daughter. “I demand loyalty from my brides, as so many have betrayed me,” he tells her. And this girl, in her innocence, she cannot imagine that it would be hard to be loyal to so kind and caring a man. She swears her loyalty heartily, happily, and they are married. Soon he must be away and he gives her the keys to all the rooms in the house.

There is one room, though she has the key, she must not enter. “Swear to me,” he says. And so she does. But human nature does not exist at the pleasure of promises. She slips the key into the lock, thinking he will never know. The door falls open, and there are his seven brides. Rotting entrails and dried skins hanging in pleasant little rows, severed heads lined neatly in a column…

And so goes the story of Sabine’s heritage, the old crone whispers in her ear at night. “Isn’t it lovely,” she says. “Isn’t it grand?”

Oh indeed it is, Sabine thinks. It is grand and lovely and romantic…

Especially since Sabine knows where that room is, and she has the key.

When dusk has settled on the town of New Bedlam, the woman-child Sabine creeps down the hall and past her nanny’s rooms, past the crone who whispers in the night, past all of the sleeping world, to her Shangri-La.

There are many arms to hold her, many mouths to kiss her, and many a bosom to rest her head and breathe out the wearies of the world. She tells them her secrets and confides her dreams. They murmur back encouraging endearments, all but the one she yearns for most.

For Sabine can’t touch that one. Her body is high above, suspended from the ceiling in a box of frosted glass. Her head is intact, her limbs graceful and whole. This one was her mother, the last of the brides, the chosen eighth.

She has heard the end of that fairy tale, where her father discovers the woman’s betrayal. But she is round with child, heavy with Sabine and he cannot kill her, not when she will give him an heir. Even though she is a devil, this lying Eve.

Sabine liked to think that she had been the woman’s redeemer, cleansing her in blood, the blood that streamed in a river of eternal life from betwixt her thighs.

The breath in her lungs now, the last of the breath that had been in the woman above.

How Sabine longed to touch that face, frozen in death, the expression of bliss at the first view of her young on that marbled countenance. So cold and blue, these cosmetics of the dead.

They said she looked like her, the other wives did, when they kissed her pink lips and plaited her blonde hair.

There have been no more wives since Sabine was born, but the girl knows what the howls are in the basement. The townspeople say ‘tis a werewolf and that his hunger must be fed, that the Master keeps him from roaming free. So they don’t whisper behind his back when their spawn go missing, they thank him heartily for his protection.

Sabine sneaks down to watch her father work.

Those terrible inhuman screams aren’t inhuman at all. They are but mortal terror, so beautiful a sound. Sabine doesn’t think that she could make them scream that way, not yet. She has much to learn.

Her father watches her these days, a strange light in his dark eyes. His blue-black beard now streaked with grey, he watches her, and he knows.

He knows that she is ready to be a bride. She began her bleeding long ago, at eighteen a woman grown. But he cannot bear to part with his beloved daughter, cannot bear the idea of another man’s hands on her pure flesh.

He will stay with her forever.

He will take her to the room, take her to the betrayer’s place. And there, he will be the betrayer. It will be his hands on her body, his mouth on her ripened lips and then he will have to be punished as all betrayers are.

He dreams that she will keep his head with the others and when she is lonely, she will come and lay amongst the arms and mouths that wait to love her.

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Saranna DeWylde wrote her first horror story after watching The Exorcist at her 8th birthday party. Today, she writes horror, romance and erotica, sometimes a disturbing blend of all three. She lives in the Midwest with her two children who wrote a country song about a zombie who wanted his maggots back and her very own bodice ripper hero. You can visit her website at www.sarannadewylde.com.