The Taming of Frankie Carrozza

The Sleeping Prince

     When winter comes and wakes the dead,
     The Sleeping Prince returns to bed.
     Once ghosts come to haunt his door,
     The lion will lose his mighty roar.

     When winter comes and the people look,
     The Sleeping Prince flees to his nook.
     A soul dwindled like a stifled fire,
     No heart left for a single desire.

      When winter comes and his sorrows stay,
     The Sleeping Prince and his head must lay.
     Darkness brings his old melancholy.
     Good Lord! The King, he's off his trolley!

     When winter comes and his manias transgress,
     The Sleeping Prince needs a place to rest.
     As his madness resurfaces without the owl,
     he hears the wolf's long moonlight howl.

     When winter comes and his sins must bide,
     The Sleeping Prince runs off to hide.
     Jack Frost, freeze the life in his lungs.
     For the prince must die once winter comes.

Curious, Charlie thought as excitement stirred in him. How queer!
     The elaborate delivery made him assume that Frankie had arisen from his quiescent period, perhaps. That he would showcase his return in such an eccentric way seemed highly likely of him. At eleven o'clock, Charlie prepared to perform some of the Five Point Challenge to get to Windsor. The Five Point Challenge was a dare that he hadn't attempted before. Basically, the night before the 4th of June—the big school celebration day, effectively—students have to escape from their houses at night and get to five points around the school without getting caught by the teachers and pop and security patrolling the various five spots. Despite it being December, Charlie was determined to complete it tonight—mainly because several of the markers were between him and his destination, coincidentally.
     At thirty minutes to midnight, Charlie clambered over his window sill and climbed down the other side. He winced when his feet smacked the pavement, sending a gruff echo of his landing throughout the empty streets. The sky was as black as coal outside, dark in the heart of winter, but a full moon bloomed above like a snowdrop, causing Eton to sparkle like a thousand crystals shattered in powder as blue as frost. He looked to the sweeping quilts of snow, thick on the roofs of the gables beneath the inky midnight, making the lodges, cottages, and cloisters look like little fat puddings coated in glazed icing. The glittery tarmac made him remember the time Frankie had told him that Earth was peppered with about 20,000 tons of stardust each year. In the distance, draped over the trees and gates and narrow alleyways like bunting, he could see the fairy lights streaming through the trees, bushes, and thoroughfare cobbles like fireflies and fairies to match those hanging between the tops of the buildings in town—corridors of lights to lead the way. Once he'd yanked up the hood of his parka, Charlie followed their guidance at a brisk walk that quickly developed into a half-run over frozen puddles, sparkling underfoot like shattered glass. He found Frankie's punt half-buried under dry wood and bushes by the side of the rushing river. Once he'd recovered the punt's pole from inside a hollowed tree, he used the boat to cross the freezing river, gliding quietly across the width so as to not alert teachers on patrol. By the time he reached the other side, his hands were chaffed from using the pole to propel himself across and cut red raw from splashes of the cold water. He dragged the punt underneath the bridge to hide it, stuck his hands into the gloves that he'd discovered in his coat pocket, and darted into Windsor. As Charlie shuffled through the snow towards Imperial Boulevard, the snowfall blurred his vision until the twinkling Christmas lights in the road splattered into diamond-shaped designs like those from a kaleidoscope. Drunken carolling streamed from the pub doors and three men followed it out, stumbling into the streets and belting out jolly Christmas hymns as they toasted to the season with the last of their mulled wine and cider.
     'CERRY MHRISTMAS!' one slurred loudly to Charlie on his way passed, dangling from the shoulders of his two equally intoxicated friends. His droopy face attempted a wink as he tipped his hat to him. 'AND A HAPDAY ... hic ... NEW YEAR!'
     'Merry Christmas, Mister.' Charlie smiled apprehensively at them as he quickened his feet, his silhouette rushing across the building walls to live momentarily in the silvery moonbeams and die briefly in the shadows.
     Once Charlie reached the alleyway into the secluded courtyard of Empyreal House, he stopped in the throat of it among shadows thick enough to swallow him whole. The gaps between the troves of a trillion stars above were as black as oil, and the snow fell heavily and heavenly white to die on stone, grass, leaf, water, or tongue. He breathed in the subdued scents of the season, smelling frost in the air. Aside from the soft glow of the snow and cascades of lilac moonlight, his only other source of illumination flickered a weak trickle that bloomed from somewhere deep inside the loft, splashing feebly over the walkway above like melted butter to soak into the dark metal bars. The hopeful sign of light and life was as warm and as inviting as the fireplace, whilst he stood in the shadowiest part of the courtyard and looked from one window to the next.
     On his way across the courtyard, he stopped to pluck from the snow a rose that had been painted black.
     When he looked around himself, Charlie noticed that there were many more black roses strewn about the area like blotches of ink splattered across a fresh page. Even more roses were scattered across the spiral stairway to the balcony and front door, the painted shell on the petals softly crunching underfoot as he ascended, and black thorns and pale grey lights were wrapped around the handrails and balusters to replace the yellow ones that had once shone brightly there. Something about the setting was unsettling to him, a macabre scene as if every aspect of Empyreal House had died or diminished, too, like Frankie had; it also no longer looked so healthy, so youthful, so bright, so beautiful. There was a sense of tragedy and malaise in the air.
     Loud, muffled noises seeped out the gaps of the door from inside—music, movement, and several voices, too. As he had every other night, Charlie creaked the door open uninvitedly. But this time, he snuck inside unseen. The far end of the loft was lit by faint firelight and light from the TV screen, but the entrance was in complete darkness. The sounds of his movement were masked by the blaring television and rambunctious record player as he crouched down and slid behind cluttered furniture, gripping the rim to peek over the top.
     On the other side of the loft, two shadows cut jagged shapes out of the light sweeping over the room. One shadow belonged to Frankie, easily identified by his Iron Maiden t-shirt and white long johns. He stood facing the fireplace, the backs of his legs resting against the armrest of a red leather chair. With his hands pressed flat against the armrest and his own arms down by his side, his head was bowed to stare at his bare feet. Even though it was a welcomed sight to see him out of bed, the boy still looked downcast like a wilted rose. His slight movements were sluggish, like a statue shaking the dust and weather and cobwebs from itself after decades of stillness. The other shadow stood looking out the window with his back to Frankie and Charlie, cigar smoke drifting from him.
     As Charlie crept closer, one of them muted Caligula on the screen just as Malcolm McDowell was performing a vile and untoward act upon the buttocks of Proculus, causing Charlie to cringe and look away. Instead of the sounds of the bawdy film, the quietness was replaced by a college rendition of Miserere mei, Deus by Gregorio Allegri, a sad and haunting composition that floated through the stale smells of cannabis and alcohol in the loft to linger on the furniture like a ghost.
'And so, it has finally come upon you, it seems.' Trevor Hamilton turned away from the window, swishing the hem of his black greatcoat back rather dramatically. 'We both knew it would catch up with you eventually, didn't we? You can only outrun yourself for so long, Carrozza. What do you need me to do?'
     'Leave!' Frankie grunted into his chest.
     'Poppycock.' Hamilton smiled slyly. He walked towards Frankie and caressed his cheek with the hand holding his black cigar. 'You need me now more than ever, old friend. Whenever this ... sickness comes upon you, this derangement, you know as well as I do that it is only me you can rely on. After all, it is only me who'll never judge you. It is only me who will ever truly understand you.'
     'You say you do, but you don't!' Frankie snapped back, his reply just about holding back the brunt of his anger and pain. 'There is choice in your madness!'
     'Fine.' Trevor's fingers moved up to Frankie's fringe to unveil the dark circles underneath his eyes. He cocked his head to the side to stare at his face for a long moment, then he turned away. 'Perhaps I ought to just leave you here, confined to your bed, with only your melancholia and your mania and your mourning and your Max Mayvolu for company.'
     'Do it,' Frankie muttered. 'See if I care.'
     'Winter approaches, and as does your insanity with it.' Trevor turned around swiftly, pressing his forehead against Frankie's to force his chin up and off his chest. From afar, Charlie couldn't be certain whether it was an intimate gesture or a threatening one. Trevor started to turn his head left to right to graze their foreheads together. Charlie touched his own forehead, remembering how Frankie did the same to him. 'Where is spring, Frankie? Oh, how your weary soul must yearn for the blossoms. My, where is Frankie? Nobody has seen him in days. Poor Frankie has gone away again, of course. Just like Beth,' Trevor whispered. 'How long did you leave her body there, alone and empty in that dilapidated mansion, I wonder? Does her sorrow haunt the halls of Red Rose Manor, wilting the walls and ageing the brickwork? Does her grief linger in those old rooms, tearing wallpaper from the corners like dead skin and rotting the bare floorboards? Come nightfall, do you hear Bethany Green's misery flow like a banshee passed the windows, a cry full of tears as it searches Red Rose Manor for you and calls out your name?'
     'Stop it!' Frankie shouted, shoving him off. 'STOP IT!'
     He abandoned her! The horror of it all stroke a violent chill up Charlie's spine as he pictured the girl lying dead among the wreckage of that disused country house. Red Rose Manor filled his mind, an abandoned, ramshackle mansion left over from the Victorian era to become a cold and miserable ruin out in the most isolated spot of the countryside. Where Beth ended up, joining all the other ghosts that haunt that eerie, eerie place. Nausea quivered in Charlie's stomach as he imagined a pale arm sprawled across the floorboards, pearl-white fingers entangled around chestnut-coloured hair, bloody in the moonlight. Cold dread squeezed his heart like the teeth of an all-consuming monster, turning his blood into slush, as he wondered how long she lay there. Alone. He felt too weak at the knees to kneel anymore as morbid questions sprung into mind. Had her body tightened from rigor mortis by the time someone found her? Was her face shrivelled and pale and skeletal, no longer so heartbreakingly beautiful? Had her skin began to peel like the walls as she became a feast for Red Rose Manor? Did the stench of death lead them to her final resting place? Charlie swallowed the hot bile stinging his throat. His heart felt galvanised with zinc when it plummeted into the pit of his stomach, a cold and heavy organ coated in ice. Even if Bethany Green wasn't as pure as the stories would have me believe, still, she most certainly did not deserve that.
     'I don't mean to distress you.' Trevor admitted. Charlie could hear him hushing Frankie, a soothing whisper of breath. He'd moved in close again, his chin an inch or two from Frankie's crown as he towered over his crumpled form. His wan hands were touching each of his elbows to pacify him. 'That wasn't my intention.'
     'Tell me then, just what were your intentions of coming here tonight?' Frankie asked.
     'To see if the rumours were true: to see if winter had finally come to claim you as its own.' Trevor put a finger to Frankie's chin and lifted it to meet his dark gaze. 'Let me help you at your worst.'
     'You can't help me,' Frankie murmured. 'Nobody can. Least of all you.'
     'You don't frighten me; not like you would everyone else,' said Trevor, the vague signs of wanton want in his breathing. He leaned down and kissed Frankie's neck once. 'You don't shine any less to me even now; not like you would to everyone else. We share the same fears, you and I, and neither of them includes each other.'
     'No, we don't. I'm not scared of death. No, what I fear is only a life unfulfilled.'
     When Charlie heard the words and their conviction on his tongue, he knew them to be the complete truth.
     'Stop,' Frankie whispered.
     'If you honestly wanted me to stop, you would have used your hands rather than your words,' Trevor hissed, running his hands through Frankie's curls as he moved in like a vampire towards his neck once more.
     Frankie shoved him back again, causing him to stumble over the carpet.
     'Is it that Chance boy?' Trevor demanded angrily, sneering back at him as he fixed his coat. Charlie didn't have to see him to hear the mad glint in his eyes. 'What—don't tell me you've fallen for the boy?' Hamilton laughed in disbelief.
     'No!' Frankie quickly said, finally looking up from his feet. 'No.'
     'You brought him to Malta,' Trevor challenged.
     'Yes, but I also brought a book to entertain me. Stay away from him. Leave him alone. He doesn't need to be involved in this, whatever this is,' Frankie said coldly. 'He means nothing to me. I just don't have the energy to ... to do anything, or the urge to fool around right now.'
     'Prove it.' Trevor stepped forward towards him.
     He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. 'God's watching.'
     Hamilton put his hand on top of Frankie's head. 'Then let's entertain him.'
     He sighed heavily. 'Just ... just don't tell him. You've no need to.'
     'Ah, you just don't want another Max Mayvolu on your hands and in your conscience, eh? Is that it?' Trevor asked, lighting another cigar. 'You don't want another ghost haunting your doors and the moors in your mind come winter?'
     'Yeah. That's all.'
     When the belt buckle clinked open, Charlie felt the blood drain from his cheeks, pouring out his chest and gushing hot down his arms to dribble between his fingertips and toes and pool on the floorboards. Frankie Carrozza on his knees was an image more perverted than anything that was transpiring in Caligula on the TV screen. The sight of surrender and submission made him feel sick to the stomach.
     The cold night air was a godsend on his pale cheeks. Once he'd closed the door behind him, he rushed to the banister and vomited over the side of the balcony. The mush of the stew he had for dinner splattered over the courtyard, spewing brownish streaks over the snow and black roses. Looking to the door so as to make sure he wasn't overheard, Charlie wiped his mouth with his forearm and hurried down the spiral stairway. Much too blinded with confusion and shadow to see clearly, he ran straight into the man standing at the end of the alleyway.
     'Oof!' the man grunted. 'Who's that?'
     'Sorry, I—' Charlie glanced back towards that place where he'd stumbled into something surreal and out of this world, loathsome things that he should not have seen, much like the child up past their bedtime who happened to peek in through the keyhole to behold the utmost disturbing sights. He needed to get as far from that place as fast as he could, where a nightmare gorged on a dream, eating it from the innards out to dash them up the walls sloppily—where a darkness lived, surely only to grow.
     'Chance, is that you?'
     'Head—headmaster?' Charlie asked, already too shocked to be shocked.
     'Whatever is the matter, boy? You look like you've seen a ghost! Is everything alright?'
     'Y-yes, I—' His voice was hoarse and shook too far out of reach for his control, so he silenced it. For several seconds, he quietly fought the tremor and painful lump in his throat as much as he could, but his vocal cords felt like a heavy weight sliding across very thin ice before lodging thickly to strangle his words. 'I—I'm fine, Headmaster, I'm—'
     'You're probably wondering what I'm doing here,' he said, wobbling back on his heels. A thick cloud of whiskey stench wafted from him. 'It so happens that I was in a meeting nearby with the Archbishop of Canterbury and thought I'd better peek in on my way home.' The headmaster glanced overhead towards the courtyard sternly. 'You were here to help our good friend through these ... troubled times of his, I gather?'
     Charlie nodded quickly and brokenly. 'He—he's asleep now, Sir,' he stuttered, unintentionally covering for him against his better judgment. 'You shouldn't wake him.'
     'Listen, if you don't tell Carrozza that I've been keeping tabs on him for his mother, then I won't report you for being out of bounds after lock-up—just this one time, that is. Exceptional woman, Elena Rose. We attended Oxford together.' The headmaster smiled affectionately for a long time, drunkenly lost to yesteryears. Finally, he shook himself from his stupor and recalled where he was. He looked to Charlie austerely. 'It's after midnight. Run along on home, Chance. And don't let me catch you out after hours again, or I mightn't be in so jolly a mood next time.'
     Charlie was sprinting up the street now, glancing back only the once to watch the headmaster look down the narrow alleyway into Empyreal House before shaking his head and walking on up the street. Despite his many slips and slides, he did not stop running until he reached the spot where he'd hidden the punt. Only then did he remember that he had left the playbill behind on the floor of the loft with his name written on it, but an angry part of him wanted him to know that he'd been there despite the worry. Now that he was no longer running away, his mind was given time to catch up with his feet as he rowed across the Thames. Confusion departed quickly like a cloak cast off his shoulders, and the grisly sensation gave way to dread and comprehension. Like the rose blossoming black, his insides were swallowed up by a dark void of growing heartache. For he fully understood now, he truly fathomed the unfathomable: all that he'd seen and heard that night.
     Oh, but the pain! His arms thrust out into the water to propel himself further, to give the pain in his heart sensible manifestation in his limbs. He never knew it was possible to feel such agony as powerful as this, torpedoing its way to breach skin and spear through his innards like a gunshot or a knife wound. A hand clutched his chest in fear that his aching heart might crack, splintering through the flesh of his torso like ruby shards of broken glass to bleed him out dry and stain the wood under his feet with him and his horror.
     Images of Frankie visited him—laid out like a cornucopia on a platter, waiting posed so Hamilton may paint his tortuously beautiful image on a canvas. The strokes of fingertips, their paintbrushes. Their sweat and blood, their paint. The headmaster had asked him if he was alright, but Charlie wasn't, and he wasn't sure if he would ever be right again after such a catastrophic gorge scored through the centre of him.
     Once he'd reached the safety of Eton, he gasped in air and snatched a breath like a babe coming into life. Like a drunk, he stumbled onto the banks and fell into the frozen mud and snow. Yet, he could not feel the cold burn. He felt only gratitude that he'd left that corner of Hell on Earth behind, having got up and out of that loft like a breathless diver submerged in the crushing depths of the ocean. The vision of Empyreal House, dark and ominous now, loomed high over him like a tombstone. His body trembled violently—from frost or fright, he did not know—and his legs felt too much like twigs to bear the weight of him.
     It was a surreal sensation, as though he'd crossed a magical bridge into outlandish lands through the use of that boat. The world was a strange place on the other side. And when he arrived there, it was to look back and watch a planet die, a world implode, an island sink, a love lost. The incident had engulfed the world as he knew it like a comet come to destroy mankind, obliterating it in waves of chaos and destruction. But perhaps he knew it had always been there, always rapidly approaching the stratosphere from the far-out distance, a fireball of misfortune.
Charlie removed his gloves and threw them aside carelessly. Then, he plunged his bare hands into the snow to feel—to feel something other than this crippling truth and to prevent himself from falling into the gigantic, bottomless rift that fractured through his core. He felt an eminently familiar feeling return deep inside himself again like an imaginary friend forgotten about since childhood: loneliness, an ancient emotion to an old soul that carved him inside out until his guts felt empty like a colossal cavern—or, rather, like the ruins of Red Rose Manor. His hand clutched his chest again to feel his heart wither and shrink, drained of colour and as pale and purple as a wilted rose. He felt where Frankie Carrozza's name had seared itself into the muscle of it, flaked with cinders and ash. Oh, how the bastard stung.
     'I'll tell you something, Charlie Chance. And it can be our sort of something, for the Lord knows we need enough of some things. So, I'll tell you this, and here it is. Are you ready to hear it?' Frankie had said to him on the hood of a car one night, a lubricious thought whispered into his ear, the skin of their elbows touching in another night, in another world so very far away from here. 'The moon loves the sun so dearly, and he shows it each and every night. For he dies at the end of his watch at the turn of twilight, living fully only thrice just so that from his sacrifice, she can be reborn again anew like a phoenix come the morn.'
     Unfortunately, the boy had slipped into despair as oblivion swept up to greet him like a black tide. The tears stung his eyes and scalded cold on his cheeks. The silvery trickles spilled over his lips and onto his wrists as he cried for the death of his heart. Yet, he could not understand why—much like a child attempting to fathom the intricacies of death and where it is our loved ones go beyond their final breath. Transiently, Charlie Chance abandoned the bounds of the mortal body. He left it to its unbearable sufferings, fluctuating emotions and sensations, with its fantasies too pretty live, dreams too broken to mend, and nonsensical sentimentalities threaded through them all that made the edges of its confinement much too sharp to live amongst inside and all else that had forced him out. He lingered detached underneath the yew trees to watch safely from afar as the perishable body of the ill-starred boy crumpled and curled on the ground like a stung creature, writhing pathetically in pain from insides soaked with venom. His disengaged spirit drifted ghostly through the riverbank as gently as the snowflakes whilst the pitiful boy bent in on himself further, half-buried in the whiteness gliding out of the endless black until the lamenting youth was little more than the quiver of forlorn shoulders submerged in snow and soreness like two broken birds due soon to die.
     When he returned to the body, it was much too late to save him: the boy was gone. Once reunited with the well-worn peach vessel, he could feel the effects rather harrowingly now—the part of him empty of a piece of him that had died this winter night, left behind and buried underneath the snowfall.