Feeling like lightning had struck her, Isabelle jerked awake. She found herself on a four-poster canopy bed.
"Where am I?" she wondered as she sat up gingerly and observed her splendid settings. The bed linens and the graceful canopy hanging above were made of a delicious amber and sapphire blue silk taffeta and damask; the chaise and chairs were of cherry wood and upholstered with cream velvet. There was also a vanity and stool in one corner of the chamber, both carved out of cherry wood. Splayed all over the walls were sapphire silk velvet curtains. The room was lit up, not at all cloaked in darkness, and as she looked down, Isabelle found herself fully clothed in her new cream-and-coral-pink striped robe a la polonaise.
Hindered by her stays and bumroll Isabelle wriggled with as much dignity as humanly possible off the four-poster bed. After a few minutes of debating, Isabelle mustered up the courage to venture outside of her chamber. After a few minutes of searching behind multiple curtains, Isabelle found multiple doors leading to different rooms, the bathing chamber, a powdering room, and a built in wardrobe. On her fourth try, she found a pair of doors that led outside her room. Taking a deep breath, Isabelle pushed them open, and stepped out.
The corridor she entered was long, stretched out like a snake on a torture rack. Where the beams of moonlight couldn't reach out their glowing fingers and illuminate the air from the dusty cobwebbed chandeliers, equally dusty cobwebbed candelabras stood perched on pedestals to light up the shadowed nooks and crannies.
Every scrap and centimeter of the hall was richly furnished and of high quality. However the beautiful marble floors, the heavy silk drapes, and gold accents couldn't make up for the frigid and stiff atmosphere that hung over Isabelle's head like a dead goose.
Cautiously, Isabelle inched forward slowly down one end of the corridor, her shoes making soft clacking sounds against the marble, her eyes darting all over the place, wary of someone jumping out unexpectedly. Suddenly Isabelle accidentally knocked over a bust, and a secret passageway reeled into view. Her curiosity overwhelming over her caution, Isabelle ventured into the passageway. The walls were rough, damp, and medieval, with brackets holding torches that burned blue flames. A few feet later, and a staircase unfurled, spiraling down into the recesses of the shadows, the bowels of the imagination. With her hand clutching the spine of the staircase for support, Isabelle edged down the steps.
Just when she thought the flight of stairs would never end—it finished after one more curve. After pausing to let her cramped legs rest Isabelle continued. The cramped tunnel opened up to a more spacious corridor. In the shadowed distance, there was a ball of light. With the sound of her mules' heels clicking against the stone floor echoing, Isabelle ventured toward the light.
"How many other times do you find yourself in a situation where you're walking down towards a light at the end of a dark tunnel?" she punned quietly.
At this quip, Isabelle snorted to herself. Reaching the luminous orb took less time than she expected. The corridor expanded into a circular chamber with an arched entrance carved out of granite. The air was strangely lit up, despite the fact that there were no candles or windows to let in light. It was a peculiar bright white light, nearly blinding, but not to the point where Isabelle couldn't see. As her eyes adjusted it, a small scratching sound caught her attention. She turned to her left and was greeted with a horrific sight. Her eyes widened, her face turned ashen, and a blood-curdling scream clawed out of her mouth.
Isabelle screamed and screamed and screamed. Her shrieking bounced off the walls, echoing until it sounded like ten or twenty Isabelles were in the chamber. Isabelle stood rooted to the spot, unable to run away from the gruesome sight that petrified her so:
Splayed on the wall like a disturbing hunting trophy, was the withered corpse of a woman. She hung from the wall in a spread-eagle position, yet there seemed to be no hooks supporting her. Her mouth was twisted violently into a silent wail of pure horror; the expression made even more grotesque by her dead withered face. The clothing that hung from her shriveled frame, which must've once been a sumptuous gown, was now a tattered bloodstained wreck. From what Isabelle could discern, it was originally a white silk-with-a-black-celtic-knot-braid-overlay robe a l'anglaise. The corpse's pale hair was matted and tangled, there were visible patches on her scalp, giving the impression that several chunks of hair hand been ripped right out of her skull. The corpse's right hand was contorted into a mummified claw, the left hand was….well….missing. Right until the middle of the forearm, the rest of the arm was gone. Isabelle instinctively clutched her own left arm when she noticed that ominous detail.
When feeling suddenly flooded back into Isabelle's legs she wasted not even a second to flee from that sight of horror. With wings on her feet, she flew down the corridor, while yells of fear continued to stream from her mouth. The yells were soon replaced with irregular pants of hyperventilation and exertion. Isabelle soon reached the flight of stairs, pausing only to hitch up the hems of her gown and petticoats; then she proceeded to race up the stairs. However, her mind was so consumed with concentration on getting from that wretched chamber that she failed to notice a lopsided step coming her way. Poor Isabelle tripped, fell, and landed heavily on her left forearm. She let out a shrill shriek of pain and began to whimper piteously from the agony that crashashawed in her arm and feathered out from there through her body. Isabelle could do nothing but clutch and cradle her arm as she lied on the steps, rendered paralyzed from the torture.
How much time passed, Isabelle did not know. 'Does time even exist in this place?' she wondered. As Isabelle stared at the rough stonework of the stairs, her mind wandered back to her home in Sleepy Hollow, to her darling cat Gigi, and about Mother and Father, whom she had not thought about in a very long time.
Father had died in a strange accident when Isabelle was two years old. He had been fixing the roof when he supposedly slipped on a loose shingle and fell off the roof and was impaled upon the iron fence. Isabelle had been out playing in a meadow quite a way's away and thankfully never saw her father's corpse. All she remembered was Mother taking her to the Killians to spend a few days with them. When they told her the news, Isabelle vaguely understood that Father was gone.
The event broke Mother's spirit. From then on, she devoted her life to teaching Isabelle her basic education. Isabelle loved her mother with all her heart. Mother was her best friend, her teacher, and her confidante; everything a girl could ever ask for. Isabelle was taught to read, write, and employ various other subjects that she would be in need of throughout her life. Mother was as wonderful a teacher as any other local schoolteacher. But alas, the couple's happiness was not to last: On a chilly November morning, a fourteen-year-old Isabelle woke up to find her mother's cot empty and the house drafty from the open door. In the night, Mother had walked out of the house and was swallowed up by the shadows. As numbness spread through Isabelle's body like a slow poison, Isabelle curled up in her mother's cot and wept from sorrow that she would never see her mother again in the lifetime, but also wept from a hazy grey sort of happiness as well: Mother was reunited with Father.
Afterwards, Isabelle answered everyone's questions with a lie that her mother had died of a fever. The only villager Isabelle admitted the truth to, was Midwife Killian. As part of their condolences, the Killians gave Isabelle an ash coloured kitten, which she christened Gigi. To avoid suspicion about her mother's grave, Isabelle went to the meadow where her father's grave lied, and she dug up an adjacent false grave.
For the next few years, life for Isabelle passed in a skewed normalcy. She maintained a close relationship with the Killians. Even though she had a small pathetic garden (that often failed to bear much bounty), and receiving the occasional gift of meat and bread from the Killians, paying taxes left such little money for necessities that Isabelle was often forced to slip into the feared Western Woods to catch game. To earn money, Isabelle labored as a seamstress or she concocted draughts to sell to Midwife Killian. The positions didn't pay much, but together, they were enough to make ends meet. When the Headless Horseman began murdering villagers, Isabelle, like the rest of the town, started retreating into her cottage extra early every night. She hung charms around her home and she bolted the doors every evening. When Constable Crane arrived in Sleepy Hollow, on All Hallow's Eve, Isabelle was charmed by his attractive nervousness. The next few days however, began to spin dow—
The sound of footsteps crunching down the stone steps brought Isabelle back into grim reality. A pair of strong arms snaked around her body, lifted her off the ground and began to carry her up the flight of stairs.