Midnight in Everwood(26)

He bent his head to her neck and inhaled. ‘Is that a hint of anger I detect? It perfumes your blood like an aged wine.’

Horror sliced through Marietta. She fought to maintain control over her senses so that her voice wouldn’t tremble and betray her fear. ‘I demand you release me at once.’

He removed his hands. Marietta strode on shaking legs towards the stage exit, her pointe shoes clacking.

‘I shall not accept your refusal,’ Drosselmeier called after her.

She stopped. ‘I assure you that I shall never be your betrothed. My mind is set on the matter and no amount of following me through the city or entering my bedroom by night shall alter it. You are behaving in the manner of a petulant child who lusts after a toy he cannot have. That is the sole reason you cannot accept my disinclination to wed you; you are ensnared by the hunter’s thrill.’

Something in Drosselmeier’s eyes shifted and she knew her words had met their mark. His gaze turned colder, wilder, his smile a weapon. ‘Perhaps. Yet it is the strongest women who taste the sweetest when they are broken.’

‘You shall never break me.’

The clock struck midnight.

As the hands slotted into place, the first chime sounded. Deep and melodic at once, it was not unlike the way in which Drosselmeier’s voice crept into your senses. He gestured at the grandfather clock. ‘Please, be my guest. I did not invite you into the ballroom tonight, it was your doing alone to venture here. Now that my surprise has already been spoilt, why not stay and watch.’

With the second chime, the clock began shuddering. Marietta took a step back. ‘I do not think that a wise idea.’ She wondered if he had lost his mind. Drosselmeier slid a hand into his jacket pocket and retrieved a small object. He held it up. It was a key.

On the third chime, the centre panel of the grandfather clock opened.

Marietta’s fear took wing. Her heart fluttering in her chest, she ran down the centre of the ballroom to the double doors. They were locked. She screamed through the gap where they joined; the doors were paper-thin and there were a number of staff in proximity at all times. Surely at least one of the footmen would hear.

The fourth chime sounded.

Drosselmeier’s laugh was as unfeeling as a killing frost. He jumped down from the stage and walked towards her, amusement stalking the lines round his eyes. ‘Do give me a little credit. As you have already learnt, I have far more cunning than your average suitor. I shall not be as easily persuaded to turn my attentions elsewhere. Not now this has become so very interesting. The more frightened you become, the greater my appetite grows. I shall make you mine, meine kleine T?nzerin.’

Marietta’s gaze fell to the opacity between the doors. She peered through the keyhole and into blackness. When she pounded her hands on the doors, it sounded muffled.

The fifth chime.

She ran back to the stage in an attempt to distance herself from Drosselmeier’s advances. He continued his slow walk after her. Marietta’s fear burrowed under her skin, quickening her breath. At once she knew what it was to be prey, the rabbit’s terror of the fox, the fundamental knowledge of what it feels to be crushed within those jaws evident in its frantic eyes. So too did she see the women that had fled this path before her, an unending current from the belittled, trapped and underestimated to the broken and tormented. She backed away from him until she was pressed against the grandfather clock. A whirl of cold air seemed to emanate from it. ‘I beg of you, release me,’ she whispered as Drosselmeier set foot on the stage.

The sixth chime.

Drosselmeier’s answering smile permitted her a glimpse beneath his mask. She could not comprehend what she saw there yet it sent her out of her mind with fear. Panic dribbled down her logic.

‘I will make you regret denying me.,’ he whispered. ‘After a little time to think on how foolish your refusal is, you shall beg me to reconsider.’

Marietta climbed into the grandfather clock. She clicked the panel shut behind her and held onto it with her fingernails. Her breaths came hard and fast against the wood as she closed her eyes, waiting for Drosselmeier to rip the panel open. She felt the seventh, then the eighth chimes resonate through the clock and yet still she waited. She had heard tales of the things some men liked to inflict upon unwilling women and she could think of no other reason why Drosselmeier would have locked her inside the ballroom with him.

The ninth chime. The air was colder inside the clock, icing her arm. On the tenth chime, Marietta discovered a tiny crack in the wood. She peered out, holding her breath. Drosselmeier had vanished. Bracing herself for his sudden reappearance, she tested the panel with a gentle touch. It failed to open from the inside. She had trapped herself inside a virtual coffin.

Recalling Drosselmeier’s carriage clock she suffered a panicked notion that perhaps the clock only opened on the stroke of midnight and she would be left imprisoned within it until Christmas was over. Without a sound, she reached back, feeling for the back of the clock. Once she was certain Drosselmeier had exited the room, she was sure she could find a weaker point in the construction to force her way out. She stretched her arm back, further and further, yet there was no back to the clock. The eleventh chime rang out.

She stepped away from the panel to investigate, mindful that Drosselmeier might at this very moment be walking towards her in the darkness, aware of a second entrance to the clock. She went deeper. The air froze around her.