The Heart-shaped Box Page 3

  One could hardly blame them. Male or female, human or hiddenfolk, one look upon her countenance and they were consumed by an inescapable obsession. He'd fallen for her himself so long ago he no longer remembered the life he'd once had in the world above. All that mattered was the queen. And all that mattered to the queen was conquest.

  He had brought her the spoils of war-foreign princes from exotic lands in the upper realm, incomparable beauties of every hue and height who knelt before her, defeated, for her amusement. He supposed he might once have been one of them. The thought only bothered him a little. Those who resisted her pull amused her most, as they would be the ones who simpered and fawned over her to the point of obsequiousness after their ultimate surrender.

  He had given her the daughters of princes, as well. Teary-eyed little things who missed their mothers, and who were easily enchanted by the maternal kindness she showed when she chose to. But she had so many of these tender morsels she couldn't remember their names.

  He'd gifted her with rare blooms from the most distant mountaintops and valleys, stunning and exceptional, for her ladies-in-waiting. She wore down their pride with her own grace and elegance until they went mute, with eyes downcast, grateful for the chance at servitude. She decorated herself with them, arranging them about her throne in fantastic flowing gowns of every color to kneel at her feet and lay their heads against her thighs and drape her arms to offset her own matchless beauty. They changed with her mood, and she had many moods.

  But this gift?this one, he was certain would surpass all others. It was a gift no one had given her before. He wrapped it carefully in leaves of gold, tied with glistening gossamer. He allowed the others to go first, patiently biding his time from the back of the hall, where he leaned casually against a crystal pillar watching the queen accept her gifts with the usual graceful boredom. This gift would not bore her. It was a gift she would never expect.

  Her tresses of midnight blue trailed down over her ladies-in-waiting, stunning in gowns of scarlet against her own golden sheath, the train of which pooled around them like molten metal. She'd gone with lighter gold for her skin, offsetting it nicely. And her eyes this evening were the color of amber; he could see them from here, glowing like a cat's. The queen nodded and thanked her admirers with the presentation of each gift, tolerating the emotional ones who wept and kissed her feet, overcome. The gifts piled up.

  At last, the room had emptied. Sycophants and servants glared at him on their way out, knowing he was a favorite, or at least that he thought himself so. She beckoned to him with jewel-bangled hand. He pushed himself away from the post and came forward, bowing low-but not too low-when he reached the dais. She liked that he had a bit of spirit. He supposed he must not have struggled much against his enslavement, for he wasn't in the least obsequious.

  He straightened and held out the gift.

  "Darling, you shouldn't have," she said, as always, as she accepted it. "You know I want for nothing."

  "But you do not have one of these."

  She raised a poppy-colored eyebrow. "Have you brought me a pixie? I can't imagine what other living thing could fit in such a package." Her graceful hands pulled away the gossamer and layers of gold, revealing the claret-colored box. The thick, leathery fabric of the box was stitched together with sinewy cord in the shape of a heart. He'd made it all himself by hand-the hinge, the clasp, the intricate designs he'd carved into it.

  The queen raised her eyes and smiled encouragingly, inquisitive. He'd captured her interest. She ran her fingers over the surface, admiring it, rubbing her thumb along the seams. He held his breath. She opened it.

  Nestled inside, the bloody muscle beat steadily.

  The queen frowned, lifting it out. "You think I don't have one of these?"

  "My queen, that is not the gift. I merely thought you would appreciate the symbolism of what could the gift could be used to hold. The gift is the box itself."

  She set the heart back in its nest and closed the box once more, examining it. "It is lovely." She seemed puzzled.

  "I made it for you myself, my queen."

  "Made it? Out of what?"

  He unbuttoned his coat and unlaced his shirt, holding it open to let her see the jagged pink line of puckered scar tissue.

  Her eyes went wide, the amber sparkling like fire. "It's your heart in the box?"

  "No, my queen. My heart is the box. I tenderized it and hollowed it out, and sewed it together with cord made from my veins. The hinge and clasp are the arteries." He smiled at her incredulous gasp and took her hand from the box to bring her fingers to his mouth. He kissed them reverently. "Your heart will be safe inside it."

  Sherlock Holmes and the Secret of the Heart-Shaped Box

  By Shawna Reppert

  Sherlock Holmes's top desk drawer held trophies of his many successes, plus a simple, wooden, heart-shaped box. One with Holmes's skill in observation might note that the box was the sort of cheap trinket that a young person might buy with an allowance, painted after purchase with a tutored but inexpert hand.

  I first encountered the box when he sent me looking for a tin of poisonous seeds that he thought might shed some light on a current case. I pulled out the thing with a laugh, for it seemed so unlike my friend's tastes, and made some sort of jovial allusion to the tales of the monster who cannot be killed because he keeps his heart in a box, only this box was empty.

  Holmes uncurled like a viper from his previous indolent pose and snatched the box from my hand.

  Thinking I had offended him with my joke about heartlessness, I stammered out an apology-though he had said as much and more about himself on occasion.

  Holmes waved off my contrition. "It is I who should apologize, my dear Watson. It is only that the box is a reminder of a matter most sensitive to me. While everything else you see in that drawer is a memento of my success, that box is a reminder of my failure. My very first mystery, which remains unsolved."

  Something in his face discouraged further questions and suggested to me that personal sorrow, not professional frustration, drove his somber mood. Though Holmes lived and breathed rationality, I have often suspected his cold logic to be a defense. One need only hear him play his Stradivarius to realize that he was a man of deep passions. Perhaps he kept tight rein on his emotions out of fear that they would otherwise run away with him.

  Something ran away with Holmes that dreary winter. He was out all hours, sometimes not coming home for days, often returning very much the worse for wear. When I asked him about the client, he would only say that there was none.

  My friend sometimes undertook odd exercises to keep his skills sharp and, I suspected, to alleviate boredom. Since this was less unhealthy than some of his other methods of combating ennui, I held my tongue until the night he came back with a bullet wound for me to dress.

  "Damn it, Holmes, life isn't something to be held lightly."

  He tilted his head back to look at me upside-down. "You are right, my dear friend. It is not."

  Holmes slept for a day and a half, rose in a better mood and ate breakfast with an unusual appetite. I tried to engage him in conversation on the previous day's headlines. The Yard had solved a serious of murders of young women, some going back almost two decades, previously thought to be unrelated. Such a subject would usually interest him, but he only said 'indeed' and proceeded to fill his pipe from the store he kept in the Persian slipper on the mantel. Our rooms filled with the strong, harsh scent of shag tobacco, and all was right with the world.

  I was called out to an emergency in the evening and did not return until the sky started to lighten, so I might be forgiven for being still abed when Holmes received his caller, a somewhat older woman by her voice, in our shared sitting room. Eavesdropping was unpardonable, but I had caught the vice of curiosity from Holmes.

  The woman thanked him, over and over again, for some service he had rendered.

  Holmes's voice was gentle, almost fond, as he quieted her. "I fear, madam, that
my services were too little, too late."

  "But at least now we know what happened to her. A bit of peace, after all these years. And you were practically a boy yourself, without resources or training, when Patricia disappeared. You never did say how you discovered her killer."

  "Detective Inspector Lestrade was going on in his customary monotonous way about his early years on the force. Usually I ignore such prattle, but he mentioned two unsolved disappearances from his early years. I saw the similarities he had missed between those two cases. Similarities Patricia's disappearance also had in common. Those peculiarities helped me build a description in my head of the killer as sure as if he had provided me with a photograph and a personal biography."

  "So you hadn't the information you needed all those years ago to find out what had happened to our poor Patricia," the woman said. "There was nothing you could have done earlier."

  "Yet it was my fault to begin with that she was lost."

  "No, Mr. Holmes-Sherlock. We have never held you responsible."

  "If I had escorted her to that dance as she requested, the blackguard would not have had his opportunity."

  "She knew such things were not to your taste. She could have stayed home, or accepted one of a half-dozen young men who would have been happy to escort her. She was just being our Patricia-outrageous, irrepressible, and even more stubborn than you."

  I heard Holmes open a desk drawer, sort through the objects, close it again. "I still have this, you know. The box she gave me. She said I should take it so I had at least one heart, as it was clear that I wasn't born with one."

  I winced for my friend.

  "You know she only meant it as a jest. She admired you greatly."

  "And I her."

  "Did you sometimes wonder, if she had not been taken. . ."

  I held my breath, expecting my friend to scoff at the idea that he might ever have married, but Holmes will never cease to astonish me.

  "I did wonder. Do wonder, useless and unproductive as such thoughts are."

  "Here, I've brought you something. It was among her things, I've kept it all these years, but I think you should have it."

  I blush to confess that by this point I had cracked the door to the sitting room open that I might watch. The woman opened her reticule and handed to Holmes a small locket, tarnished with age.

  Holmes opened the locket, gave a wistful, sad smile. "Thank you." He opened the heart-shaped box, put the locket inside, and closed the lid.

  I will never again say that Holmes has no heart, nor agree with anyone who says that heart is empty.

  Violets in the Snow

  By Veronica Scott

 

  It was just a little heart-shaped china box, with one gorgeous violet painted on the lid. Every day as she walked past the window of Celia's Closet on her way to work, Amy would check to see if the box was still there, nestled in the corner of the display. Sure, violets were her favorite flower, but something about the tiny container itself appealed to her.

  Celia's store was crammed to the rafters with knick knacks, vintage clothing and fashion jewelry of every era, but Amy rarely allowed herself to venture inside. She never had extra money to spend and certainly not on decorative dust catchers. But yesterday at the diner someone had left her an unusually large tip and today Amy found herself turning to enter the enticing store without even thinking about it.

  "Did you come for the violet box?" asked Celia as soon as she saw who'd walked in.

  Stripping off her purple mittens, Amy did a double-take. "How did you know?"

  "You spend five minutes every morning staring at it." Celia laughed and went to pluck the item from the crowded window.

  The box felt cold on Amy's palm but gradually warmed as she turned it this way and that, admiring the delicacy of the painted flower. The box seemed perfect-its gold colored trim bright, no glazing to mar the smooth surface. When she fumbled with the miniature latch, however, nothing happened.

  "I don't know why, but the lid won't open," Celia said, watching her. "Maybe someone glued it shut at some point. Or the hinge broke. Certainly it's too small to hold anything inside."

  "How much?" Amy braced herself to give the box back if the price Celia named was too high. Some of the vintage items in her shop were worth amazing amounts of money, which the tourists paid without question.

  "Oh, say $5.00? Even though the flower's obviously hand painted by a real artist, there's no signature and it's so petite." Celia shrugged. "I found it at the bottom of a box of things the executor consigned from the old Winters estate."

  "I'll take it." After handing over the money, Amy tucked the box in her pocket and left, rushing not to be late to her job at the small diner down the block.

  After work that night, Amy set the little box on her nightstand, smiling at the single beautiful flower as she turned out the light. Somewhere around two AM, she sat up with a start, clutching the blanket and staring around at the room. It was snowing. Inside the room.

  I must be dreaming.

  Reaching out, she caught a sparkling flake on her hand. The snow promptly melted into a drop of cold water. Rubbing her palm dry, Amy burrowed under the blanket. If I had air conditioning in this place, I'd say it was seriously malfunctioning.

  She watched as the snow fell, unsure what was going on. After a few moments, the flakes turned to flower petals and then stopped. Peeking over the side of the bed, Amy realized she now had a carpet of velvety purple petals.

  "Too much wine at dinner," she said, shaking her head. She punched the pillow and lay back. "I'm asleep, this is a dream and the alarm is going to buzz all too soon." Closing her eyes, Amy rolled over and pulled the blankets closer. "Or they put the wrong kind of mushrooms on the pizza maybe."

  Sure enough, in the morning there was no sign of snowflakes or flower petals in her single room apartment. Sun streamed in the window, glancing off the sparkling china box. Amy kept glancing at the painted violet as she rushed around to get dressed and do her minimal morning routine. I hope I'm not going to have weird dreams about flowers and snow every night.

  Business was slow at the diner, as things were all over town. Edwardsville was a ski resort, high in the mountains, but this had been an unusually dry year. No snow meant no tourists. Amy hoped her boss wouldn't have to reduce her hours even further.

  On her lunch, bored, she surfed the net to distract herself from worrying over the lack of tips. Somehow Amy found herself looking at legends and myths involving violets. Her favorite was an old English variation on the story of Persephone and the god of the underworld. In this tale, the lovers were the King of Winter and a girl named Violet. Amy had to return to waiting tables before reading the end of the legend but was sure she could guess the outcome. "Happily ever after," she said with a grin as she tied her apron on.

  That night, she woke at 2AM, shivering, covered by a blanket of sparkling, soft white snow. "Oh, this is too much," she said, sitting up and shoving the snowdrift to the floor. Picking up the little box as snow continued to fall around her, Amy said, "I love you but I can't have these dreams every night."

  As if her words had been a magic spell, the snow stopped and the box lid sprang open. Something glittered inside. Rising to turn on the bedside lamp, looking more closely into the box, Amy retrieved a stunning platinum ring, set with a pure white diamond, held in the center of a white gold snowflake by four prongs. "Wow!"

  "Violet Winters, you've waited too long to wear the Snow King's ring," said a deep voice.

  With a small scream, Amy turned to find six feet six of Tall, Dark & Handsome Male occupying the center of her small room. Hands on his hips, the man was glaring at her, brows drawn together in a frown, violet blue eyes blazing. His old fashioned clothes were silver, tight breeches doing nothing to hide his superb physique, topped by a cloak trimmed with ermine. On his head was a white gold crown, accented with diamond crusted snowflakes.

  "The Snow King who gave you that pledge of true l
ove is long dead and you'd better not be expecting me to honor the terms."

  "Um, I'm not Violet Winters, I don't even know a Violet Winters." Amy backed up until she ran into the nightstand. "I'm Amy Smith and I bought this box from a secondhand shop yesterday." Why am I answering him, this is a crazy dream! Wake UP!

  The man pointed at her hand. "But that's the Snow King's ring and you did say you loved-"

  "The box. I love the box and the flower. Violets are my favorite flower." She thrust the ring at him. "Here, take this and get out however you got in. It's too flashy for me anyway."

  He took the ring and the touch of his fingers against her hand was curiously warm. Her flesh tingled and she took a deep breath. "Look, I know this is just a dream, so can we be done, please? Can you just poof? Leave?" She snuck a glance at the clock and moaned. "I have to be at work early tomorrow, I mean later today, oh God, it's 3AM-"

  "My apologies for frightening you." He tucked the ring into a pocket on the inside of his sweeping cloak.

  "Why were you so angry at this Violet person?"

  "She's kept us waiting for centuries, in case she decided to redeem the honor given to her by my grandfather and marry one of my bloodline. He wanted to wed her himself but eventually he married a snow nymph." Her uncanny visitor grinned. "They can be very persuasive."

  She realized she didn't even know his name. "Are you Jack Frost?" Amy asked, sitting on the bed, then standing right back up again.

  "That jester?" The man's disdain was plain. "I'm Gaimhreadh, Ruler of all Winter."

  "Pleased to meet you, sir." Should I curtsey or something? "You know, the lady who owned this box before me was named Winters. She was really old, over 100 maybe, but not centuries. Not old enough to be the woman your ancestor wanted to marry. She didn't leave any family." Amy looked at the box. "Do you want this too?"