Tenebrae Manor (4 page)

“A change of sorts,” Bordeaux reasoned with himself. The heat was still sapping, sweating out its wild fever but at least there was movement in the air. The pond had been disturbed, a current created, no longer did it sit like static tarn.

He placed his ruby eye against the eyepiece of the telescope and scoured the watercolour canvas of the night; there were no stars. The clouds were indistinguishable wisps of grey, appearing as brush strokes of some masterful deity’s hand.

With a flick of his hand, Bordeaux sent the sepia globe next to the telescope spinning on its axis. Continents and seas blended into each other and the demon let out a sigh.               Gathering his pan flute in his claw, Bordeaux sat on the windowsill and deftly blew upon a note of somber tenor, the beauty of its echo drifting off outside with a tribal husk. The flute swayed beneath his pursed mouth like a metronome as his eyes transfixed themselves onto the large painting hanging on the eastern wall. It was a favourite of the artistically inclined demon, a piece of vibrant impressionism. A seaside scene of serenity leapt from the canvas in a burst of light and colour. The waves that crashed onto the grainy shore snaked into the horizon in serpentine curls of gold and blue, reflecting the sun as it rose. It was all Bordeaux remembered of the day. The sun, the celestial orb of brilliant fire, was still intense on the morning backdrop of the colourful painting. The brushstrokes were jagged stabs, as though the painter had vented all fury upon the work and conjured the exact opposite of the aforementioned emotion, a scene of pristine contentment. Its intensity threatened Bordeaux, though he felt exhilarated to gaze upon it. It was a world he had known once, so very long ago. A world so different to the present, a present blended into the past with its monochromatic rigidity.

The throaty rasp of his pan flute, the inviting tranquility of the painting, drew Bordeaux into a peaceful mood. His tasks were forgotten; his mind was at ease.

Yet just as his reverie was about to take off into palatial expanses of navy blue space, there appeared from the stairwell a head. A head, neck and two shoulders sprouting from where the floor split open into a cavern of spiral stairs. It appeared slowly, like a dream, with an unsettling grin of menace peering from beneath a moustache of brown and black. The nose was aquiline, a bird-like prominence on the face of its owner, though not pointed like the beauty of the raven but rather rounded. The nasal phenomenon had more in common with the clumsy ugliness of the spoonbill or perhaps the shoebill; namely any apparition of the stork family. This curved snout contributing to the overall unappealing bust of the being that had drifted upwards into the room. He is the demon, Deadsol. Equivalent in some respects to Bordeaux, though he displayed not much of a muchness in other faculties. His hair was parted upon the side, a slimy pelt of dark brown grease crowning his head above rounded eyes whose lids were puffed with shadow. The grin parted, his mouth opened and from within Deadsol came a drawling, sandy voice. “Bordeaux.”

The other demon, though castaway in deep reverie, was not startled by Deadsol’s appearance in his room and turned from the window to face him.

“Deadsol, my brother. Pray, tell. What do I owe this pleasantry?”

Deadsol’s grin returned to its perch below his thick moustache. “Bordeaux, you most agreeable gentleman, you are required in the drawing room!”

Bordeaux sighed. “When, my friend? Surely you see me here in the throes of recline?”

“On the double! At once! Immediately, good citizen! What more can I say? A human is here! A fresh one, at that! You must alight your abode, alight. I say it twice!”

Bordeaux exhumed an internal and lamentable sigh, his ensconcing had been cut so rudely short, his responsibilities called, as a child screams for its maternal overseer.

“In a moment, good sir.”

Having received the response he had set out for, Deadsol, seeing no further reason in loitering in Bordeaux’s presence; disappeared down the stairs.

“My work is never done,” bemoaned Bordeaux. “Though it is gratifying to be necessary.” The sweat was draining down his body; his coat would no longer be needed. Although Bordeaux found a great boon in confidence when appearing dressed in refinement, his waistcoat seemed up to the task of his amiable presentation.

Taking one last gulp of his homely turret and promising swift return to his roost, Bordeaux left for the drawing room.

Madlyn ran clumsily down the stairs, flight upon flight, each step taking her further away from her abhorred mistress and closer to the clammy depths of Tenebrae’s kitchens. Compared to her matchstick legs, her knees stood out like bulbs and she had to stop briefly on a landing to adjust her stockings. Panting erratically, she poked at yet another tear in the clingy material, a ladder cascading down her shin. She would need a new pair, yet again, though the stockings did little to hide the purple bruises upon her kneecaps. So maladroit was her infantile gait that her knees were constantly clashing upon each other like some sick instrument of primitive percussion. Like most things though, Madlyn was numb to the pain, her mind seemed eternally bound in a gauze of ignorance that rendered her indifferent to the strains of her macabre reality, allowing her juvenile thoughts to remain enraptured in the fantasies of her whim.

Forgetting her duty, she flung the tea tray she had been carrying over the banister and into the darkled void to her side. The cymbal disc whistled through the gloom before bursting into a most audible clatter as it crashed onto an unseen floor below. Madlyn squealed at the sound before hurling herself forward again, down more and more stairs as the air began to grow thick around her. Dampness settled upon the atmosphere, a soupy sickness accentuated by the heat encompassing.

Madlyn jumped down the last five steps onto black cobblestone and retrieved the medallion of her violence from the floor where it had landed after its drop. It seemed unaffected by the fall, a small dent here and there, a scratch or two but it was Madlyn’s own reflection in the tea tray that transfixed her eyes. A grin crept across her mouth, a malevolent piercing sliced across her face.

“Ugly,
ugly
girl!” she said huskily, her voice scolding with the same appraisal a mother might use to reprimand her renegade child.

Yet the sinuous smile still remained on her comely face. Surely, she wasn’t all that hideous. Far from it, a skinny little thing to be sure, blonde and gangly but it was her eyes that betrayed the instability that dwelt deep within her fledging heart. She toyed with her misplaced pigtail and smoothed her collar before skipping gaily along the floor into the sweltering kitchen ahead.

The kitchen of Tenebrae was a spacious cavern, though the blanketing humidity of its sweating dimensions gave its two frequent inhabitants a sense of claustrophobia that a more stable person would find unbearable. The kitchens were all that Madlyn knew of Tenebrae, although her curiosity had carried her around the vast interiors of the manor, her memory was severely lacking at the best of times.

She had appeared at Tenebrae a year earlier, a weeping adolescent long lost within the forests and no doubt given up for dead by whoever might have thought to search for her. Madlyn had made an instant and lasting impression upon Bordeaux, who always found it humorous that an insane young girl was the only stable mortal dwelling within Tenebrae’s walls. Even Crow had shuddered to learn and observe the imposing house and its ways, choosing instead to hide away in the blackness of the trees. But to Madlyn, Tenebrae was her world. The girl gave no hints as to her life previous, whether that was due to madness or suppression was not known. Yet she had wanted to make herself useful, Bordeaux delegating her to a kitchen hand. Once the gluttonous Lady Libra had discovered the servant girl, she had taken it upon herself to keep her as a personal maid and Madlyn, being as impressionable as she was, was unquestioning in the errands bestowed upon her.

Like a sea cave in a cliff face, the kitchen dripped and oozed. The steamy murk brought the walls alive, pulsing like the heavy body of a slothful animal. The room was breathing, sighing, whistling with the sounds of creation - a laboratory of twisted edible experiments.

In the wild fever of the uncomfortable kitchen, a mound of a man stood at the long bench chopping vegetables with incredible dexterity. Several pots spewed and simmered in watery chorus upon the stove and a great wood fire oven roared angrily. Yet the man gave no indication of panic and one would be excused for believing him to have more than two hands, so swift and precise was his work. He was the silent chef of Tenebrae Manor, a fleshy triangle of filleted corners, propped on absurdly small legs.

Madlyn crept behind him and slammed the tea tray down on the bench. The clamour echoed slightly, muffled by the moisture in the air. It was a noise that would have startled anybody, if not for the fact that the chef was both deaf and mute. Yet the man seemed calmly aware of the girl’s presence and turned to her. His face was bland, a leather bag of forgettable features. His eyelids drooped so low it was a shock to learn that the man
wasn’t
blind as well. His lips pouted and sagged from years of disuse and his globe of a nose, the only distinguishable protuberance, jutted prominently. The mute chef handed Madlyn a scrubbing brush and pointed to a pile of dishes awaiting her. The pile was higher each time, as Libra’s appetite increased, though the chef himself was guilty of mess and excess when it came to his craft. The kitchen was riddled with rats, although most lay dead in the traps set about the floor. Despite the deplorable working conditions, the mute chef was unmatched, his concoctions highly heralded by all Tenebrae’s residents.

Madlyn hummed tunelessly, completely out of time with the pace set forth by her scrubbing arms. Elbow deep in suds, her sunken eyes traced the beads of condensation on the wall before her, as the droplets moulded shapelessly within brick bulge and mortar crevasse. In her mind, the perspiring walls were her tears, as Bordeaux brushed them from her cheek and swept her from her feet. He could always fly in her reveries, a talent obviously amiss in his real world counterpart. The girl lived at Tenebrae Manor, a nightmare world of frightening visions and impossible supernatural beings. Yet still she yearned for the fantastic contours of her daydreams, a world where even her hopelessly romantic notions were possible. Her infatuation with Bordeaux kept her vigilant to her tasks, a pitiful hope of gathering up his forever absent affection.

As inattentive as she was ignorant, Madlyn soon grew bored with the repetition of dish washing and stood momentarily still. The mute chef and his eloquent conducting clicked away like clockwork, unaware of the maid’s increased ennui. She brayed apathetically, an unlikely attempt to grasp the deaf man’s attention. She sighed louder and begun to tap her foot against the cobblestone floor. Still no response. Why would there be when the object of her assault was stone deaf? The chef’s bald scalp sweated as profusely as the walls around him as Madlyn flicked a billowy cloud of suds his way. The effervescence plopped softly onto his greasy smock but still he paid no attention to Madlyn. Her face then contorted with a glower of violence as she hurled a sopping plate at the wall in front of the mute chef. The plate shattered to pieces and was enough to grab the mute chef’s attention as he turned furiously to face the kitchen girl.

It may have been only the cobwebbed haze clinging to the air that gave him the appearance of a bull snorting steam from his nostrils; in any account, he was livid. A pudgy finger trembling with rage patiently gestured her to take her leave, the chef was obviously trying his hardest to restrain his wrath.

Madlyn was astute enough to understand the chef’s moods. He would never act upon his fury, despite Madlyn’s frequent provoking. There were no losers in the current situation. Madlyn was briefly free of responsibility and the mute chef could manage better without her in the way. Stopping only to swipe a few withered orbs of varying fruits and cram them forcefully into her apron pouch, Madlyn bolted out the doors of the kitchen from whence she’d come.

****

A labyrinth of stairs connected Tenebrae’s half-lit rooms with steps akin to creaking tendrils. Spiders mused quietly in the high echoing ceiling corners, their cobwebs adorning peeled wallpapers of brilliant red and decayed grey. Shadow sank into shadow, a tide of macabre drifting deep into impenetrable umbra.

As Madlyn disappeared into the dark ground floor dungeon of her humble abode, another femme fatale brooded soundlessly in a forgotten drawing room in the whispery southeastern corner of Tenebrae’s third floor. A ghastly wind rattled the perimeter of the room’s arch windows, as though it were attempting a hideous intrusion. Its sombrous sound spiralling about the window ledges gave an impression of polar chill but the ashen darkness of the unused fireplace in the room confirmed the heat wave’s continued presence.

The woman sat on a large leather chair; her form slouched upon the slender white arm that propped against the wooden armrest like a pale mast. She was the vampire Edweena.

Short of temper yet steadfastly composed, Edweena had wrestled with an unquenchable blood lust for several centuries. Indeed, she was one of Tenebrae’s oldest inhabitants, locked eternally within the lusty body of a lass in the prime of her youth. As the wind tore ever-onward outside, she sat content with the contrasting stillness of the room and the equilibrium the two composed. Her fingernails tapped rhythmically on the surface of a dusty book and although the candle that had served as her reading light had been extinguished for what could have been innumerable hours by now, Edweena stared vacantly into the blackness of the night outside.
Still no moon.

The present times had been taxing on her; the unexpected appearance of a live human so close to Tenebrae Manor had interrupted her regular hunting. The very idea of a ripe, hot-blooded mammal in her reach made her bloodless eyes dilate. Years of feeding on the awful scum around her had tested her patience thoroughly. Rat blood was tepid and repulsive and the occasional livestock she encountered had usually been dead so long that their life fluid was significantly decayed.

Why did I not just finish him when I had the chance?
Edweena cursed her hesitance. Now the man was in the care of those two harlequins, Deadsol and Comets.

They care only for the cheap thrill of frightening the pathetic vagabond.

She hoped that death would steal the human’s breath swiftly; she would be there in a second to devour the remains.

It had been Edweena who had discovered the lost man. Observing his aimless wandering from her perch in the conifer canopy, her mind had argued within itself on what actions she should take. A thread of remorse, a reminiscent remain of her past humanity had kept the man alive long enough for him to stumble upon the manor itself. And only then had she realised her responsibility towards Tenebrae.

The man had made it all the way to the front foyer, the Usher allowing his ingress as he did to all who appeared at the front door. The Usher had been civil to be certain, menace was not of his composition. Yet the mere sight of the hulking monstrosity had thrown the intruder into wild panic, galvanised by the sudden entrance of Edweena. She had leapt down in front of him, delighting in the pale terror that pasted itself onto the man’s pallor.

“W-who are you?” he had stammered.

Edweena had hissed venomously in response, flashing her razor sharp teeth with such ferocity that the man had wailed and collapsed. She nudged the pile with her foot, confirming his vital signs before pondering her choices.

“Do you just allow
anybody
to waltz in here?” she hissed at Usher.

The doorman stood vigil with an expression almost of hurt, a rare showing of emotion on Usher’s stitched face. “It’s my job.”

Edweena sighed apologetically. She did not mean to vent her frustration on the simple servant. She knew what she must do.

Curse my abiding devotion to this forsaken house!

It had been an act of moral duty that made Edweena present the human before Lady Libra. It had been her first encounter with Libra since the latter’s ascension to ladyship of the manor and was, as one could expect, a reluctant encounter.

Ugh, she’s gotten so fat.

The Libra she remembered was the svelte, though voluptuous gorgon with which she had once been loyal friends. What was this overweight
thing
lounging before her? It had been Libra’s hedonistic lust and Edweena’s unwavering restraint that had divided the two.

I saw ourselves as better off serving Tenebrae as we always had, probing the countryside for predators who may somehow threaten the secrets of this land; its erasure from all the world’s maps and minds.

Libra had seen opportunity. When Malistorm, the previous baron of Tenebrae had disappeared so abruptly, she had no problem swooping in and taking his post. Ever since, the gorgon had no time for her vampire companion and Edweena was not one to let go of a grudge.
Bordeaux should be the baron. He does all the work. Lady Libra has merely assigned herself the superfluous title and does nothing but eat and laze.

If she had blood, it would be boiling as she mused upon such memories. Their reunion had been a loveless encounter, fraught with a tension that Libra had tried to coat in glossy voluptuaries.

“Dear Edweena, what am I to do, my love? I am already so
positively
preoccupied with the running of the manor that I am bewildered as to what to offer!”

“Such responsibilities are native to your position. What am I supposed to do with this man?”

Libra ran a finger over his forehead and cheek, “Oh! So sumptuous, I could just eat him alive.”