Dreadfully Ever After by Steve Hockensmith

his bed a week or a month, for he could no longer distinguish any division between day and night. The heavy curtains remained drawn, and the light that shone at their edges might have come from the moon or the sun, Darcy couldn’t tell. It never seemed to him anything but dull gray. The only thing more unremitting than the room’s gloom was the presence of his cousin Anne, who hovered constantly by his bedside, giving him all the more reason to keep his eyes closed.
    Sometimes he slept, and dreamed. More often he lay awake, and worried. And more often still, he drifted in some nameless place between slumber and wakefulness. If there truly were such a place as Limbo, he knew what it was like—and he came to hate it.
    So at last the day (or night?) arrived when, woozy or not, nauseous or not, he had to escape. And not with a pull on the bell rope. His cousin was giving him the rare gift of her absence, and he didn’t wish to summon her or her mother or the cowering servants, with their downcast eyes and mottled bruises. This was something he had to do himself. With a monumental exertion of will, he swung his feet off the bed and stood.
    Then he fainted.
    Sometime later, he picked himself up off the floor and stood again. When he was satisfied that he could manage without fainting, he started shuffling toward the dresser.
    Then he fainted.
    When he regained consciousness, he started the process over. He stood, shuffled, fainted, stood, shuffled, found his clothes, fainted, stood, put on his trousers, fainted, put on his shirt, didn’t faint, put on his waistcoat, didn’t faint, put on his stockings, didn’t faint, picked up his coat, fainted, stood, picked up his coat, fainted, stood, and finally decided he could live without the coat. After much (but faintless) effort, he had on his shoes and cravat and was at last ready to leave the little tomb in which he’d been interred for so long.
    He moved slowly, cautiously, out the door and into the hall. There he found windows with no curtains drawn, yet the world outside still seemed dreary and dim. The sky lacked the absolute blackness of night, though nighttime it was, Darcy decided. There were no groundskeepers to be seen, no one walking or riding along the road just beyond the hedgerows, and he could hear no movement save for the distant ticking of a clock.
    Darcy followed the sound through the murk shrouding the house. The clock stood, he knew, just outside the room he wished to visit. There was no getting away from Rosings—not with the strange plague still in him. But if he couldn’t escape the place, he could at least leave the time and all its troubling questions. He would seek refuge in the past.
    Lady Catherine always liked to remind him that he’d taken his first steps in her trophy room, wobbling from his mother to his father under the literally glassy-eyed gaze of hundreds of mounted dreadful heads. Her ladyship could tell you where and when and how she’d acquired each and every one, and as a lad he’d spent countless hours at her feet while she regaled him with tales of her victories in battle. Only one trophy would she never talk about, though it was mounted alone over the room’s huge fireplace. It was the head of the first dreadful she ever killed—and of her first husband as well.
    Darcy couldn’t look at it without wondering whether another head might soon join it, should the cure fail. So instead he concentrated on the weapons along the walls. Yet even as he took down a favorite old katana (and found he could barely keep the blade aloft), his thoughts betrayed him again. He wanted to remember happier days—taking his first clumsy lunges with this very sword, waving it over his head as he and his sister played Stricken and Slayers, panicking when he accidentally halved one of the stuffed zombies that loomed in the room’s four corners.
    All he could think of now, though, was how much he’d like to share those memories with his wife and show her