Do You Want to Hide a Body? by Peter E (online e book reading txt) 📖

had been a particularly large spider in the corner of Anna’s bedroom. Unfortunately, it had severely raised Elsa’s already prevalent guilt complex, being a monster herself, and she was sorry to say that the week following that song had not been easy. In spite of that, the piece had stuck with her, and she was proud of her sister’s boundless creativity.

This Saturday, for the first time in forever, though, Anna hadn’t sung. Elsa had heard her earlier, of course, sliding loudly down against the wall on the other side of the corridor and muttering ideas to herself, as was her habit. She had run off hours ago, with a gasp of excitement, and not returned. Elsa felt slightly cheated of their usual ritual, but felt guilty for that feeling immediately. Perhaps Anna’s excitement had been because someone near her age had joined the palace staff, someone Elsa had yet to hear about, and Anna was befriending them. Maybe she didn’t need to beg for her sister’s attention anymore.

Elsa quickly stifled that thought. New staff were an extreme rarity in the castle, and she would have heard about them if Anna knew of their existence. Besides, Elsa had never known Anna to give up on something she put her mind to; no matter how difficult it might be, she became more determined with each rebuttal. It was simply her way.

Quite abruptly, the princess’s thoughts were interrupted by a strange sound in the hallway. An odd, scraping sound interspersed with the footsteps of a person carrying something heavy was moving down the hall. As she thought about it, she realised that it sounded like something large and heavy was being dragged quite insistently down the hallway, just as she heard a gasp of strain, an immediate confirmation. Anna was dragging something down the hallway to her bedroom. Something quite heavy. The sudden, strange idea of Anna dragging an anvil, the default heavy object, struck without warning.

When the scrapes and footsteps reached Elsa’s door, they stopped, and there was the thump of something being dropped to the floor with a wet thud. Elsa pitied the carpet, which was probably now being soaked with whatever liquid Anna had been carrying. After a moment where Elsa sat figuratively frozen, and Anna caught her breath, the younger princess knocked on the door. “Elsa?” she called. Elsa, though she didn’t respond, smiled slightly. Her baby sister still sounded like a child, and…

Elsa’s thoughts were interrupted when Anna broke into song, then the threads of idea were dropped, stomped on, drowned, freeze-dried, and burned when she processed her sister’s words.

Anna sang:

“Come and help me hide the body!

C’mon, I know the way.

It started rotting, like, a week ago,

I think our parents know,

If they do, then we will pay!”

Elsa was, quite frankly, mortified that Anna would sing something like this, and her head sank slowly into her hands, smudging her face with half-frozen clay. She was too stunned to say a word to end the travesty before the girl continued.

“I know it’s not the ideal.

You’d prefer to be

The mastermind of this plot! 

But come and help me hide the body!

We really have to hide this body!

Elsa rose from her seat at her desk, moving in a trancelike state to her boudoir to wipe her hands on a wet towel, cleaning the modelling clay off, though she somehow forgot to wipe her face. Reaching for her gloves, she called “Anna?” into the growing silence outside.

Anna remained quiet for a moment, then gave a squeak of what sounded like fear, and Elsa snatched up her gloves. “Oh, fine. Bye!” snarled Anna through the door, and the scrape-thumping noises continued, now at a much faster, more urgent pace, moving swiftly past and on down the hall.

Elsa fairly flew to the door, and had the handle half turned before she caught herself. Anna had made things up before in her songs, she knew. It was common knowledge, of course, that there was no quest for the legendary boyfriend, and also that no monster lived in the castle, excepting possibly the one now wearing gloves, hiding behind her bedroom door. For that matter, no one could possibly think that baking cookies with one’s feet was a good idea. Anna had probably made up the song to try and instil the exact reaction in Elsa as was currently playing out. Elsa nodded to herself, carefully removing her hand from the doorknob.

But what if she hadn’t? Elsa also knew firsthand how Anna could get so caught up in her actions that she became blind to consequences or the outside world. It was not inconceivable that the lonely girl had become so desperate for Elsa’s company that she had committed a horrible crime. What if Anna had killed someone in an attempt to move Elsa’s sympathy, and it was all Elsa’s fault?

She would check outside the door, Elsa decided. The scraping noises had receded down the hall, but Anna would still be in view, far enough down the corridor that she might not hear the creak of hinges. Elsa would just peek out the door to confirm that Anna was dragging a large, soaked sack of flour or, indeed, a wet anvil, and the younger princess would never know.

Taking a deep, calming breath to still her shaking hands, Elsa smoothly gripped the doorknob and silently turned it all the way to open her door.

A line of thick, crimson liquid trailed down the carpet in front of her. There was a pool of it and a small splatter zone in front of her bedroom door.

Elsa gave an involuntary gasp and whipped her head around to gaze down the hall. The dragging noises were clearer with the door open, and Elsa saw an indistinct pale shape disappearing down an intersecting hallway, dripping more blood onto the carpeted floor.

Nervously tugging at her gloves, Elsa crept warily down the hallway, alert to any sight or sound. Under normal circumstances, she would ring a small bell attached to a rope beside her bed, which would call a servant who could go and call the guards. Unfortunately, that would bring innocents into the vicinity of a murderous young woman who they had an unfailing trust for, and give Anna time to hide evidence, though Elsa couldn’t see how the stain on the carpets was ever going to come out. Well, she could always tell people it was a row of particularly vivid red flowers. She knew, of course, that, if worst did come to worst here, gloves could be removed with ease.

The crown princess inched around the bloody corner, carefully avoiding a line of red drops on the corner of the wall that she didn’t want to know about. She raised her hands high, grabbed the base of her right glove with the fingers of her left hand, and followed the trail to the nearest room, an old, unused cupboard with no lamps in it.

She stepped inside, bracing herself to see some familiar face caught in a rictus smile and Anna staring at her across the body, only to see her baby sister, now a teenage woman, reeling with silent mirth and quite alone, pounding the far wall with a helpless fist. The trail ended in the middle of the room, with no trace of anything to make it. To the side of the room, Elsa thought she could make out an anvil.

When she made a small, choked noise of relief, Anna whirled around and burst out laughing. “HA! You believed me! You thought I’d killed someone!” she roared, clutching her sides as she doubled over with amusement.

Elsa slowly lowered her hands, shocked beyond belief and very much not amused. “Anna…” she began, but she trailed off, trying to decide which question to ask first, and never asked any at all.

“I got you! I got you good! Oh, I wish I had a mirror with me so I could show you your face!” Anna began to wheeze from laughing so hard, then keeled over, breathless, into a puddle of ‘blood,’ her red-gold hair catching the congealing scarlet liquid. Quite abruptly, she stopped laughing and stared up at her big sister, her head upside down from Elsa’s perspective. “Is that clay on your face?”

Stunned by the query, Elsa gave a slow, jerky nod, prompting Anna to continue laughing. Trying to ignore her sister’s mad cackling, but wondering whether such a thing was a common, Elsa settled on what to ask. “Anna, please, how did you do that? I saw you dragging something back here,” she said. “Please don’t tell me it was that an- Eeek!”

The ‘anvil’ had unfolded and stepped forward from the shadows. Elsa, terrifies, backed out of the room and pressed herself up against the opposite wall of the narrow hallway. “Wh- What- What is-“ she stammered incoherently, gripping the wall hanging behind her with ice-cold hands.

Anna stood up, finally regaining her composure. Her plain green dress and neat bronze hair were both stained red with what Elsa was starting to think was real blood, after a look at the creature Anna stepped forward to pat on what passed for its shoulder. “This is MAMA!” she said brightly. “I created her with that alchemy book you gave me a month ago. That was you, right? Silly, who else could it have been! Anyway, her name stands for Mystery Alchemy Mom Attempt. Great, right? I thought of it myself.” She sounded absolutely proud of herself.

MAMA, at first glance, looked to Elsa like a walking corpse. It – she? – had ashen white skin that shone in the dim light with what looked like mucous, with bulbous blue varicose veins just below the surface. It had pale, empty eyes and thin, flaking, discoloured lips over a blackened mouth, which hung open, sucking in air with rattling difficulty. None of that, though, was what truly disgusted Elsa.

Elsa’s response was due to MAMA’s horrible disfigurement. Its ribcage appeared to be reversed in its body cavity, and, as its body bent ninety degrees between the neck and the hips, she could see the lower ribs protruding through the back, moving slowly as the lungs expanded and contracted. The major support bones of its body, the collarbone and the hips, were twisted in a grotesque fashion, so that the limbs could not attain a resting position, but were constantly held at odd angles. The bones of one arm spiralled, and the other had a hand rubbed raw straight down to the bone, revealing a corrugated, broken white surface. The legs, bent out of shape with growths and malformed bones, limited its movement to a struggling shamble-hop.

In shocked silence, Elsa’s mind slowly moved past MAMA’s broken body and took in its face. Like the rest of its body, MAMA’s skull was simply wrong, suspended from a shattered and bent neck so it rested slightly back from the rest of the body. The skull was asymmetrically oval, with a nearly pointed forehead, bulbous upper jaw, and a deep depression at the back. The lower jaw attached asymmetrically as well, unable to close.

“MAMA does whatever I tell her to! Don’t you, sweetheart!” Anna said fondly, patting the… golem on its back. “See, she’s not a monster. All I had to do was go and find her in one of the old guest rooms, and she was more than happy to help me! Isn’t that right, MAMA?”

“That thing has survived for a month?” Elsa asked, incredulous. It looked as if it could barely breathe, much less survive. The most she would have expected of such a creation would be to raise an arm before suffocating under its own mass.

The… creature turned its body to Anna, unable to move its neck without snapping bones. “Kill me,” it groaned to Anna, lips barely reaching together to slur the guttural rasp of its voice, a sound like nails on a chalkboard.

This movement revealed its back to Elsa, who clutched a hand to her mouth and sank down