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

the wall, feeling faint. She surmised that it was due to the protruding ribs, but the creature’s entire back was an open sore, dripping blood and pus into the makeshift loincloth it was wearing.

Anna gave it an obliviously pitying look. “Not now, MAMA. You just need to help us a bit more.” She turned to her sister and bounced to the girl’s side just as Elsa got comfortable in her familiar foetal position, tucking her head between her knees and waiting to vomit. Anna snatched up one of her big sister’s hands and dragged her to her feet. “I thought that we could play a game once I got you out of that dingy room.”

Elsa stood unsteadily, averting her eyes from MAMA. “Is that why you come along every weekend? You want to play with me?” she asked weakly. She had thought of the singing as a sort of sisterhood ritual, but Anna had never been one for considering deep meanings. After all, she had never stopped to wonder why Elsa had vanished from her life.

Anna gave her sister a mock-serious look, and gripped her by the shoulders of her day gown. “Are you sure you’ve lived in this castle, sister dear?” she asked sweetly. “Talk about dull! I spent a few months last year calculating a few thousand digits of pi, but you don’t want to hear about that. You want to play, right?” By the end of her sentence, she was practically bouncing again with sheer excitement.

Though slightly wary, Elsa put on a smile and tried to ignore MAMA’s dead stare. This was her baby sister after all. No matter how much of a fixer upper their relationship was, they always had to be there for each other. “So, what do you want to, uh, play?” she said, stepping gingerly over the path of MAMA’s blood to return to the corridor where her room was.

Anna’s eyes positively glowed with glee. “We’re going to figure out where to hide a body without leaving the palace!” squealed the princess, snatching Elsa’s hands and really jumping with excitement.

This was not what Elsa had been expecting, though she didn’t know what she had been expecting after meeting MAMA. Anvil dropping class? The quest for the philosopher’s stone? “Why don’t we make cookies, or play a board game, or something?”

“Because I want to know where to hide a body,” Anna said, indignant. “That was I know where not to go when I eventually show people around the palace.” She spoke with an air of great gravity and seriousness.

Elsa relented. “Very well. Where shall we start scouting?”

Anna spun around and practically dragged her sister towards the nearest staircase, saying “The kitchen, of course,” as she went. MAMA shambled labouriously behind them, rasping even more heavily.

 

“Come and help me hide the body!

It’s an adventure through the halls.”

Anna sang to herself as she and Elsa combed the palace for good hiding places. More often than not, Anna would find the perfect place, but Elsa (big grumpy-kins always-gotta-be-right sister that she was) would immediately veto its use. So, Anna incorporated the chorus of grumpy ‘No’s into the continuation of the song.

“Maybe hide it in the garden? No.

Maybe the fridges? No.

So then the walls?

No. No. No. NO.”

Elsa had flinched when she continued the song, which was rather weird. If she was going to be offended by anything, it should be the unusually passable impression of her voice that Anna was doing.

“It’s almost like the old times.
Like the time when we

Spent all day out in the snow!”

Oh well. Maybe Elsa was still bitter about being crushed in that snowball fight.

Unfortunately, despite spending some time (at least three seconds) trying to continue the song, Anna was forced to give up and concede that she had no inspiration left. She was probably too excited about playing with her big sister again.

Behind the two princesses, MAMA struggled along, maintaining her constant mantra of “Kill. Me. Kill. Me,” with each rasping breath and painful, shuffling step (she was such a drama queen, really). Anna had no need for the pleading reminders, as she already knew how and when MAMA could get her wish.

Finally, after a long, irritating journey through a warren of passages and rooms, always trying to stay far enough ahead of MAMA to not have to listen to her constant reprimands, Anna emerged triumphantly onto a high balcony, throwing open the doors with a shout of, “Yes!”

The balcony was at the peak of one of the spires near the front of the castle, facing away from the town at its base. As there was no need for a large, defensive wall on this side, the side of the tower looked straight down into the bay and out over the sea.

Elsa trotted up the stairs and onto the balcony a few seconds later, panting slightly. She had made good time despite wearing slippers that Anna suspected had a slight heel (there was no way Elsa was this tall, big sister or no). Unfortunately, Elsa was wearing the most modest of modest day gowns, and knew how to walk and even run without the hem flaring up, so Anna could not confirm the existence or nonexistence of heels. MAMA had probably stopped at the bottom of the long staircase to this tower (she didn’t do so great on stairs), to Anna’s disappointment. Her great master plan would have to wait for another location in the castle.

“Why here?” Elsa asked curiously, gazing avidly out to sea as a slight breeze played with a few loose strands of platinum blonde hair. She had been a great sport so far, Anna thought, though she often gave MAMA odd, almost pitying looks. It was truly absurd, as MAMA was unquestioningly obedient to the younger princess (not that Elsa had to know why that was). She could ask for death all she wanted; Anna would make sure it happened at the opportune moment.

Joining her sister at the railing on the edge of the balcony to watch wisps of cloud scudding across the sky, Anna carefully considered her reason for choosing this tower in particular. “Well, no one can see what goes on up here, and it’s very difficult for anyone who doesn’t know the castle to reach. I’d say that this is the perfect spot to kill someone and toss them into the bay.” She pointed down at the perfect sapphire stillness of the blue waters below the balcony.

Elsa nodded slowly, obviously considering a rebuke (why couldn’t she just choose a place? It wasn’t like she was risking death by picking wrong). “Does the bay water move here?” Anna shook her head emphatically, remembering the long hours of a day spent on this balcony when she was younger, watching a stick bob up and down on ripples and tides, never touching the walls or floating out to sea. It was miraculous how little the water moved here. “Then a body will float to the surface and be found by someone from the city,” Elsa reasoned, taking one last, desperate look out to sea and sky (she tried to be covert, but Anna was familiar with that particular hungry gaze that looked as if you wanted to eat the view so no one else could have it) before turning away to return indoors.

Anna groaned. “You also refused to hide a body in the garden, a private chamber for royal babies that no one even cleans, and the laundry!” she whined, not mentioning the additional refusals of the latrines, kitchen, and furnace (and the guard room, and the king and queen’s bedroom, and the tiny forge they kept, where Elsa had given an anvil a highly suspicious look).

“To be fair, Anna, you were considering wrapping a body in dirty linens and hoping it would – what was your phrase – ‘wash out’?” Elsa quipped. “This just isn’t the palace for murder.” She gave an infuriatingly smug smile as she said it, like she had already known that and was playing along with a small child’s game (also, a body would absolutely wash out).

As Elsa made for the stairs, Anna burst out with the question she had always needed to ask her sister (even when she was beating away at her wallpaper with frustration at the silence in her bedroom). “Elsa,” she said, unable to stop herself, “are you having fun?”

Elsa stopped short and turned around slowly, carefully considering the question. After closing her eyes in contemplation for a moment, a small smile appeared on her lips and she said, “I always have fun when you are around, Anna.”

Smiling nervously back at her elegant big sister, Anna had to wonder what that meant. Elsa said she enjoyed Anna’s company, but if she truly did, she would have left her room long ago, rather than continue the charade of obvious hatred. After all, they said that love was an open door. So she had to be a big fat liar (not surprising, it made everything easy). Anna had to admit, though, that she was less lonely today that she had been for a long time (she was also stickier with dried blood than she had ever been before), and knew that she would never be lonely again (or covered in blood). The day had been thrilling (and bloody) so far, and would only get better.

“Where should we look next, Anna?” Elsa asked, starting down the stairs with her sister in tow.

“Ooh, I know!” gasped Anna, struck with a wave of inspiration. “Let’s look through the secret passages.”

And so they were off again, with MAMA moaning in their wake and fending off any servants they might run into. The secret passages were far too narrow and widely dispersed to properly hide anything, much less a body, though they did find a rough nest of blood-soaked rags in one of them (Elsa had to take a break then, and visit a latrine). Elsa congratulated Anna on an exceptional idea after washing her mouth out.

The dungeons (there was a jailer who knew exactly how many dead or dying bodies should be there), parapets (everyone would smell the rot), and dining hall (there was no reason given except for a single raised eyebrow) were also sequentially vetoed by the elder princess, and Anna was soon running out of ideas. Then she hit upon one; the final, perfect solution.

The princesses raced for the ladder to the roof, trying to ignore MAMA’s increasingly slobbery grunts of pain.

 

“Does MAMA really have to come up here with us?” Elsa asked quietly, peering around the blue-slated flat roof of the palace. Even though she knew the exit to the roof was designed to not be visible from the ground, having open air on all sides made her feel exposed and endangered.

Anna took a pause from heaving her creation up through the hatch, wiping her brow. “Oh yes,” she insisted. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate my forethought later.”

Elsa was deeply disquieted by MAMA’s existence. She hadn’t truly believed that the alchemical book would really work, having tried a binding ritual upon herself when she purchased the text. If anything, that had made her powers more dangerous. So she had given the book to Anna after she had sung “Do You Want to Make a Human?” having found a recipe for what was called a ‘homunculus’ near the end of the book, just before a description of the legendary philosopher’s stone.

Her hope had been that a brief fascination with alchemy would alleviate some of Anna’s chronic boredom, not that any of it would really work. Did this make her responsible for this pitiable, hopeless creature that Anna was helping onto the roof now? Was it her duty to euthanize the creature that begged only for death? How did the thing even know to wear a loincloth, and was there anything worth covering underneath?

No, that was Anna’s responsibility, she decided, as she was the creator or instigator, and she seemed to know what she was doing