The web's first magazine devoted to stories about life in giant artificial structures created by forces beyond human comprehension

The Kingdom Defaced

by Louise Norlie

One evening at supper, the king puffed up his face in a red-cheeked frown, whimpering and blubbering like a frustrated baby. His table-attendants politely ignored the sight until he dribbled a greasy mass of well-chewed meat over his quivering lower lip, staring at his right armKristine Ong MuslimKristine Ong MuslimKristine Ong MuslimKristine Ong Muslim in paralyzed amazement. An attendant grabbed his velvet sleeve from of the bowl of gravy where it soaked and slid it up to his elbow. Blood streamed from a bone-deep wound near the wrist. One of the royal tailors had left a long pin in the king's suit of clothes that morning, and it had stuck in the wooden armrest of his grand dining chair. He'd dragged his forearm back and forth over its sharp point as he mechanically consumed the first three courses set before him. The ministers and attendants fled in fear that a mass assassination was afoot, on the pretense of fetching the royal medics and carpenters or of safeguarding the infant prince and princess in their nursery. Only the queen remained, staring at the despairing king from the far end of the banquet table.
 
The king’s arm flopped uselessly at his side. Pain was a revelation for the monarch whose ministers had created him from scratch and spoon-fed him his thoughts like unwanted food. Snatching a carving knife from behind the shoulder of an apple-gagged roast hog, he sawed away at his hollow legs. Thin royal shavings fluttered in the cold draft that flowed from the palace's inner corridors. The queen craned her neck, vainly trying to see what was happening beneath the level of the table. 
 
The king snipped the strings that held him together, toppled to the floor and dragged his helpless fragments toward the blazing fireplace where the last remaining echo of his mind finally could be silenced. His fingers tore off of his hands. His jaw came unspooled and dragged on the floor behind him. Before he could reach the flames he was a shell of a corpse, little more than an eye and a bit of a brain, powerless to execute his suicidal plan.
 
The ministers caught him in time to repair the damage, gluing and hammering, ironing and melding. Once again they molded the king for their purposes, assuaging his despair with flattery. They assured him that the vulgar people were unworthy of such a munificent ruler. He must continue to display his power and maintain the kingdom’s safety and prosperity. They replaced the strings that held the king’s rickety frame together with heavy chains, coiled inside his body and wrapped around his clothes, fastened by locks for which only his privy councilors kept the keys.

For the next ten years, the king bore his redoubled imprisonment with a sense of gnawing unease. Often in the early afternoons, a messenger would deliver a packet of royal portraits stolen from the palace gallery and torn to shreds, stained with blood and stabbed by pins. The king wished to stop commissioning portraits of himself and his family, but he didn’t dare. Citizens were permitted in the outer halls of the palace during the day, and they spent most of that time parading slowly through the gallery, gazing through their lorgnettes and whispering behind their fans in a mutated language not known in the palace. Only once they had studied every image did they arrive at the throne room, where the young prince and princess had joined their parents to sit side by side, scepters in hand, on their dual throne. The citizens kissed their hands in turn, scraping them with their teeth like horses pawing the ground with their hooves. Each evening when the last visitor finished his last smirking obeisance, the royals’ posed faces drooped like dead flowers.

The royal family had never been outside their narrow chambers, but they had heard rumors that the corridors of the palace ran on without end. They had heard rumors there were Minotaurs.

Over the years the queen spent more and more time in her wardrobe, where she kept a meticulous array of heads, wigs, arms, fingers, and feet arranged in closets of sliding shelves. She sat headless and painted her own faces with the skill of her dislocated eyes. Ever more frantically she powdered the flabby cheeks and plumped the thin lips, dyed the white hairs and rouged the cheeks until they looked young again. She liked to keep her severed head swinging from a rope at her waist like a pendulum. She looked like the lower half of a playing card, a bejeweled Queen of Diamonds split down the middle.

The prince stroked his sister’s hand under her robes as he grimaced at the crowd. Each morning he arrived in the throne room with his face set in some new contortion. With hooks he yanked his mouth into a grin shot with arrows. He wore a warped expression blown by an iron wind. He peeled back the lids from his eyes. His eyeballs quivered, unmoored, in a sea of glistening pink. When the prince meticulously arranged his arms and legs in a cross, clenched between his teeth the cord that normally ran down his spine, and yanked on it to make his limbs whirl around his face like a grotesque pinwheel, visitors gaped in dismay. Is this mad child our future? The princess summoned a commanding, protective demeanor. Take heed! You will be ruled by such someday!

The princess did not know how she came to be. She did not recall being younger, any infant days feeding at her mother’s paper breast. Unlike her brother and parents she could not undo or disassemble herself. Prodding and stretching her face resulted in bruises and scratches. Within she felt a miniature princess was trapped, vainly hopping and screaming. She knew no time other than the present, and feared a future when her brittle flesh would crumble in a faded world.

The princess loved her brother most of all, but the prince’s excruciating antics haunted her dreams. At the center of each grotesque performance, his frenzied eyes flickered with desperate rebellion. He twisted and misshaped himself out of the limitless tedium of palace life. The princess had no such remedy. She was sick with boredom.

The princess whispered a farewell in her brother’s ear. She was going to seek the Minotaurs. And when she found them, she would ask them who built the sweeping galleries, who molded the splendidly intricate thrones, who hung the huge murals beyond the reach of the tallest ladder. Whoever they were, they must have possessed more vigor than the watery-eyed ministers, pale and peevish, with their thin, rake-like hands. Perhaps these builders could help her transform her decaying kingdom. Perhaps they could even help her transform herself. Her brother paused and stared at her intensely. Then his lips twitched into a sickly smile, and he shut his eyes against her. The king and queen chuckled. The ministers had made it clear to them that there was nothing to find in the palace. It wasn’t so vast. It was a pretense of power to impose upon the people. The princess would be back before supper, sorely disappointed.

The princess ducked under the thin gold ropes to the inner palace. The halls ended only in darkness. Dragging her long train and already weary from the weight of her crown, she wandered deep into marbled halls sunk in constant twilight. Dust curtained the air, barely pushed back by the dim beacon of her lantern. The princess tried to walk straight north, but the forking pathways forced her onto an oblique course. She walked down halls lined with innumerable doors, only one of which would be unlocked. Looking behind her, she saw nothing but open passageways, all the same. She knew she could never find her way back.

The princess found an aisle of clouded mirrors, replete with tiny cracks and bubbles like chunks of ice, cold and sticky to the touch, smeared by thousands of fingerprints. Her reflection was never pleasing, never as beautiful as a young princess should be. She saw only fragments of her brother, with his same wild eyes. It must be a trick of the mirror, she thought, or else a flaw in the design. The palace was full of tricks.

Disembodied faces surfaced from deep within the glass, causing the princess to gasp and look over her shoulder at nothing. The faces were exquisitely shaped, colored in pastel shades. They bobbed as if floating in a dyed river that flowed behind the glass. They turned with blinking eyes and pursed lips, churning in the river’s waves. The princess wondered if they were servants of the Minotaurs, or ghosts who had lived in the palace long ago. Perhaps they were ancient Minotaurs who never died, who divested their physical forms to become part of the palace itself. Their lips mouthed words as they slid across the glass, farther and farther into the palace, taunting her to follow them.

The jewels and gilding that encrusted the walls were chipped and damaged, some sections finely picked apart and others bluntly gashed. The princess held her lantern up to the walls to read scribbled graffiti. In the flickering light they seemed slippery, as if swapping letters with each other the moment she looked away. She read “regicide” as “regale” and “madness” as “matter.” She read “murky” for “murder,” “exhalation” for “exterminate.” Meanings eluded her; nothing was whole, everything in pieces. Apparent paintings exploded in a profusion of moths. Chairs and tables ran away on furry legs when she came near. She felt the shadows breathe, but she saw no one.

Threatening voices accused her of trespassing. There were high-pitched screams and curses, sneers of those perfectly confident in their rights to their wing of the palace. Soft footsteps echoed above, and something hissed beside her. Centipede-rats scuttled across the floor and flashed long rows of teeth. From the keyholes of locked doors came the sucking emptiness heard in a seashell.

For days, weeks, months, the princess wandered. Small passageways opened into Gothic arches that dripped with moss. In a narrow stairwell that ascended to vertiginous heights, she found a brick that had fallen out of the wall.  Pressing her face to the hole, she spied a broad, desolate plain spotted by ruined pillars and columns of smoke that never wavered.  A huge black eye hung in the sky like a sightless sun. Was it all a work of art, an optical illusion? She reached her hand through the opening and found it covered with wet ash. A skeletal jaw was stuck in the mortar nearby. She slept beneath the hole in the wall, and when she looked out again the vista was exactly the same. She continued on.

The princess found a well, and dropped a stone to gauge its depth. As if summoned, a bruised, aged face rose and then sank. Its eyes were swollen shut. A seahorse with a human head drifted past with feathery fins for ears. The air was redolent of sickly decay.

From a nearby pile of sand, a giant nose protruded and twitched.

Before long the denizens of the palace became bold. Hunched and hairless primates crouched in the corners as she passed. Skeletal gnomes, as high as her knees, prodded her with spiky antlers. She shrieked in pain. What were these beings? Not Minotaurs, surely not. Perhaps citizens had infiltrated the palace long ago and spawned a hidden population of pale, decrepit descendants who found a way to survive. In the endless palace they could bore forever deeper like termites, chipping jewels and gold from the gilded walls and passing them through an underground network to the visitor’s gallery. Spies and traitors might operate a brisk business there, betraying their rulers with impunity from the Minotaurs.

The princess found an enormous warehouse stacked high with racks that stretched into the distance in silvery sheets. There were piles of legs and arms wound around each other like snakes, and pickled faces in bottles of thick blue syrup, their necks fatally elongated and their bloated features distorted in rictuses of agony. Their eyes still moved.

The princess clutched her stomach in nausea. One-eyed worms writhed in a corner, meticulously chewing dust with soft mouths. One held out moist, retractable hands. Horrified, the princess grabbed one of the bottled faces and flung it.

A groan echoed through the warehouse as the glass shattered. Instead of spilling out of its cage and blossoming whole, the preserved face also collapsed into shards.  It too was petrified. Its fragments were prickly and covered in clear thorns. 

The palace was eternal, perpetual, unendurable. Having created a palace that no enemy could traverse, the builders had left it to be consumed from within. It contained every kind of miniature horror. Monstrous forms of life oozed from its shadows, longing to die, yet struggling to survive. The princess loathed the variations at which life had grasped just to perpetuate its misery, not daring to relinquish the power to suffer. She was disgusted by the faces of cringing pain, the bottled lives that the palace’s splendor concealed. She hated the sepulchral quiet that thwarted her like a fog.  She swept dozens of bottles off a rack and watched them shatter. Loud screams shook the air like thunder. She trod on the one-eyed worms and kicked the skeletal antlers aside until she fell in a fit of exhaustion.

On a display table the princess found large glass urns that made her stop in her tracks. The faces inside were much like the queen, king, and prince. Fakes! Phonies! She broke into hysterical laughter. She toppled the king and queen. They shattered instantly. She paused before the prince. The face looked too much like her own. She could not destroy it. As she turned to run, she was certain it had been her face, not her brother’s. She could not bear to look again.

She fled from the warehouse into a hall of mirrors identical to the one she had first seen. But in a full-length dressing mirror she saw a grim light and the outlines of shifting forms. She rubbed her eyes. The vision did not vanish.

In the mirrored room the king’s and queen’s bodies were splayed across a gurney in bloodless disarray. The prince hovered over them as surgeon, painstakingly chopping them into irreparably small pieces.

“Brother!” she cried. “Is it you?” He looked older, more fatigued. It was him, yet it was not him. She rushed to the table and gazed at the empty remains of the monarchs. It was incomprehensible how she could have returned to where she had come from. Surely the palace was playing tricks again.

“We would have lived forever otherwise,” the queen breathed from flattened lips, words of either regret or gratitude.

“Now we shall be the last, sister.” The prince’s voice sounded hollow, as if it emanated from behind his head. He turned a knife over in his hand.

He had never spoken before.

“Why did you kill our children?” he asked. His face was livid with a choking hue. Suddenly the princess felt a knife’s handle against her own palm.

In the mirror above, their crowns came closer like one chess piece about to topple another. On the mirror below loomed doubles who grasped their reflections by their feet. On the shards of mirrors fallen from the surrounding walls, they approached each other in thousands of conflicting fragments.

They kissed, their mouths as grasping as a circle of leeches, and reached the blades around each other’s throats. The metal burned like molten lead. The prince’s hand faltered. His sister’s was steady, but the prince’s elastic skin resisted the sharp edge. The princess kissed him harder to keep him still. Nearly strangled, he collapsed gasping on the floor. Her knife slit his forehead, and she stepped away in sudden horror.

The princess ran to the door to fetch help. Outside the mirrored room the courtiers groveled with their faces rubbing the floor. Nothing she said would make them stand.

Her mad brother stumbled to his bed, gnashing his teeth in an incoherent rant. He flung his head back and forth babbling from the new mouth gashed in his forehead. His anguished whisper spoke of eyes sprouting on the scalp, ears germinating on the chin, tiny serpents growing from the eyebrows, each with emerald eyes that curled to gaze into his own. He murmured that the children of the Minotaurs would rule the kingdom as they ruled the palace.

Alone, the princess cooled his sweating face with water. Live, brother, live! In his madness he bit her hand and thick blood flowed down his satin pillow. Everything went black.

When the princess woke from her swoon, the courtiers raised their faces from the ground and she was crowned queen. She was reborn to her kingdom, but everything had changed. Her subjects were not the sycophantic hypocrites of old. Some looked like her brother and others like the dead monarchs in the portrait gallery. The keys to the locks of their faces were turned. Mouths were in foreheads and eyes in chins. Among them were the creatures of the inner palace, the little horned gnomes and the one-eyed worms. The citizens raided the royal chambers in heedless decapitation, swinging their heads on ropes, laughing, dancing, and making merry.

The new queen had the power to wage wars, increase the splendor of her palace, beguile the hours in gaiety and frivolity – but why do anything? Why disturb those faces, make those horrible mouths sing, and those multitudes of eyes gaze at her in mock humility? She saw no visitors and bolted the door to her suite. She intended to drift through her reign never looking or touching, never seeing those mouths chatter like the blinking eye of the Cyclops.

Yet she was tormented by the faces that budded from every mote and stone, a spreading plague of faces. The doorknob to her bedchamber smiled with an insinuating grin. Rows of teeth glinted from each plate and jewel. She parried invisible hands that could reach inside her body and wring her heart like a sponge. Faces emerged amid the wood wainscoting, with eyebrows raised in disdain and eyes opening like black wings. The queen extinguished all the lamps and in the gloom conversed with her echo.

Outside her chamber came a steady march of footsteps and a jangling of chains. Hallucinatory visions materialized in the darkness: the motley shapes of citizens shifting through the gallery, an incessant riot of spectators, their gibbering mouths afraid of nothing but silence. They whispered that she was dethroned. At the center of her palace was madness. The builders were mad to build such a place. The labyrinth only re-introduced her to herself. She was no different than her brother, and never had been.

An arm reached a lantern through the grate. The new queen nearly fainted at her reflection in its blue glass. Her face was upside-down, her nose supporting her mouth like a pedestal. Her face was paler, larger, and moon-shaped; her nose and eyebrows, shadowless lines drawn by a delicate pen. Her eyes could see, but they had contracted, submerged deep in her flesh. She tried to speak. The crack between her rigid lips produced a futile puff of air.

She touched her fingers to her face. It was hard and dry, lifeless as porcelain. She felt for where her face ended, where she could pull it off, but she found no border, no outline, to grasp. It was seamless, immovable. A mask was now her face. She emitted a stifled moan. She heaved, shook, convulsed with sobs. The tears that should have flowed down her cheeks glistened in the recessed corners of her eyes. The blue walls of her chamber closed around her like a greedy fist.

For a long time she saw nothing, then only fingerprints. And then the horned children of the Minotaurs pressed their faces against the glass, nudging each other aside to glimpse their queen.


By day, Louise Norlie plows through miles of traffic to crunch numbers and shuffle papers in a windowless cubicle. By night, she dreams of better things. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a various publications online and in print, including Sein und Werden and Dark Reveries. Her work is upcoming in Mad Hatter's Review and an anthology published by Dead Letter Press. Updates on her publications can be found at http://louise-norlie.livejournal.com.