Tenebrae Manor (20 page)

Bordeaux was swift to act; he would not be caught off guard as in his previous encounter. He leapt upon the first golem and swung his sword cane, the rotted wooden skull of the thing splitting with ease. The headless body falling to the ground seemed to enrage the trio that remained and they moved to surround the crimson demon. One approached and grabbed at Bordeaux's free arm; though the strength of its grip was horrific, the sluggish swinging of its other bludgeoning arm would be its undoing. Bordeaux plunged his blade through the chest of the beast and his arm was free again. Two remained; he skewered the head of his first victim upon the end of his sword and ignited it with a flash of fire from his hand. The head smoldered with flames as it was hurled at the pair of golems. Its strike ignited one of them who in its panic, thrashed onto the other and left both covered in fire. They began to writhe about with a speed that startled Bordeaux and the crimson demon soon realised the foolishness of hurling flames so carelessly into the taiga.

He had to act fast, lest the forest go up in flames. He frantically kicked both golems so that they lost footing and tumbled backwards down a slight incline at the meadow's edge. By freak fortune, the golems landed not on dry grass but a dusty surface that extinguished the fire as fast as it had been lit.

Clouds of disturbed dirt soon settled and Bordeaux feverishly drank in the quiet that descended; the golems did not move, he was safe for now.

The trek back to Tenebrae Manor was carried out at a quicker pace. The vines that choked the house had robbed it of its usual dominance, a sight that made Bordeaux cringe in anguish. What was left for him to do? Never had he felt so powerless, Tenebrae Manor was wasting away with nothing to save it.

From the highest window of the mansion, the crimson demon observed the menacing silhouette of Lady Libra, lit by the candles that guttered behind her. He could not discern whether the shadow was looking at him from the window or just gazing into the night but his mind soon swelled with thoughts of freedom. A realisation dawned on him and though the relief of that realisation was minuscule, Bordeaux suddenly felt the comfort of one final idea - a last ditch attempt to save Tenebrae.

****

From the vantage point of two copper eyes, a squat glass held aloft by a silent demon shone in the firelight with crystalline colours. Swirled by gentle gyrations of the hand, the cognac within mixed its liquid luminance with the reflections cast by gloomy ice and the glass sweated with the feverish heat of its surroundings.

Behind the glass, the fireplace danced with the shadows and within the confines of the cradling arm chair, Deadsol seemed so small, shielded by the ghastly shadows that played their tricks on the wallpaper. The infantile trust placed in the sturdy nestles of the chair was one that possessed the copper demon into an intoxicating lull.

Am I drunk? How can I be? This is the first I've had...

Like moth to flame he stared, the glass cutting a kaleidoscope of sinuous patterns with the curl of the flames contorting in the backdrop. When it appeared that nothing would arrest Deadsol's attention from the charcoal glow, his torpid head turned to the other arm where a pipe was slowly dying in his grasp. Wisps of stale smoke crept from it and sketched leaden shades onto the red fire behind it.

Deadsol sat up presently, his sudden jolt startling the runty shape of Comets, who had been sitting quietly at the demon's feet. Deadsol's eyes betrayed his lack of cognitive sense, his pupils dilated to minuscule dots that gave the impression of a trance.

"It's time for me to go, my boy."

A bemused sneer peeled onto Comets' face and he scratched his head. "Go where, D?"

"Go, yes, you are right!" replied Deadsol. "Go. Goal. To the goal, I have to go."

"What trick is this, charlatan? Snap out of it, fool."

Deadsol got to his feet and somnambulated towards the door of the drawing room. The fire shuddered with the draft of cold air that rushed in as the doors opened, the hypnotised Deadsol turning his head this way and that as though scouting for some faraway treasure.

"This caravan of charlatans, rumbling across the steppes of Little Russia," he rambled. "I need a kopeck from mother, the carnival is in the village tonight. And here it is today but gone tomorrow! Like chaff on the late summer breeze."

Comets dashed to the door in an attempt to block his friend from leaving.

"You're not making sense, Deadsol," he cried. "Come friend, sit please. Cease this sleepwalk and rest before the fire."

"Take your being from out my path, clown! It's the gypsies I want to see."

The demon shuffled into the hall and left Comets in his wake.

"Where are you going?" cried the jester.

"My home. So sick, sick for home," Deadsol's voice dropped to a mutter. "My past taunts me, rips at the very fabric of my soul, to tatters, ribbons! Shattered like glass that cuts me deep with its poetry. Oh son, the son of a gypsy risen to the rank of baron. But where are my lands? I must return, to home. I drift like a maudlin wayfarer."

A horrible insanity clung to him, yet Deadsol did not fight against it. There was a forgotten comfort in his hypnotism and he felt no need to rebel. His legs cycled of their own accord beneath him, carrying him through rooms he had never seen before, down corridors dusty with neglect. Haunting sounds reached his ears, though whether they were fabricated in his imagination or not, he could not tell. Screams rang faintly from distant corners of the manor with Deadsol walking dreamily though the haze. Though his legs shuffled onwards, he felt as though he had forgotten how to move.

Behind his head, forever out of his own line of sight, he felt the presence of his hypnotist, whose dusky reeds of hair curled about with no gravity as bane. The dark tide washed over him and he was pulled down, down further into the depths of the house, until ancient smells of rotted wood, petrified stone and rusted iron permeated through his prominent nostrils. His moustache twitched, his eyes saw nothing for all their distant focus and it was then he realised that it was not the smells of his old home but rather something more sinister.

A cell. This is a cell. What ghost has led me to incarceration? To trick the trickster... I’d tip my hat, well done sir. But my hat is at home. Or perhaps I never wore a hat at all.

Deadsol rambled deliriously, never had he felt so powerless. In his daze there appeared before him blurry visions of some wicked figure. For a moment he was fearful, yet the sight of soft white hands swaying before him reminded him of a woman of his childhood, centuries ago when he was still mortal. The hands held his arms aloft almost affectionately, yet their engagement was that of chaining him to a wall. He became drunk with melancholia and despairingly wondered how many years his mother had been dead.

Ambling through the eternity… Salvation was naught, woe to this forgotten demon…

The hands were so strong and in this state he was completely unable to fight back, as they effortlessly turned archaic key through lock and the weight of disintegrating chains burdened Deadsol’s shoulders. Soon his vision worsened, flashing between blackness and blurred sight; the foreign hands fell to the sides of their owner. Those dusky curls of hair sighed through the dark cell like seaweed under a pier, a pair of heavy breasts before him lulled Deadsol further into child-like nostalgia. The ghost drifted from the cell and he heard one last crank of key turning. It was all over now. He was locked away, left to sleep a deathly sleep where he was not sure whether he would wake up.

Good night, little man. Sleep now or you may not wake up at all…

21: Exiled

Had Bordeaux known of the true whereabouts of the black rose brooch and of the dire consequences that would tail behind it, he certainly would not have raced so directly onto the course of his final desperate plan. For though the brooch had disappeared from the tree stump, it had not been gleaned by the sprawling wood golems. Rather, the relic was concealed in the dusky confines of an old messenger bag that rattled its way about the hip of Madlyn in time with her steps.

             
The girl had stumbled onto the black rose completely by accident and immediately taking its discarding by Bordeaux as a blow to her person, had plunged further into the forests of Tenebrae. She had done all she could muster; her heart had been left out on a limb in a desperate yearn for affection, yet now it sunk deep into her chest with a weight of bitter sorrow. If Bordeaux could not be hers, then surely she would have been able to live with that. But it was the thought of him alongside Libra that tore her apart. Madlyn's mindless acceptance of the grotesque woman's orders had withered slowly to a tipping point, where she had instead begun to loathe her. And now, now that the bane of her simple yet strenuous existence had stolen her one dream of happiness, Madlyn had resolved to run away from Tenebrae Manor.

Nobody had seen her preparations; no attention had been arrested by the sounds of her shuffling about her room, cramming her belongings into the bag, last of which being the page she had torn from Bordeaux’s book. The sketch of the tree with black roses mesmerized her so much that she wanted to keep it with her. She somehow believed that things of such beauty – even just a drawing of such things - could imbue her with utmost happiness. Where she would flee to, Madlyn did not know. She had stepped out the front door of the manor, the door held ajar by the vigilant Usher. Tenebrae's humble servants had gazed briefly at each other, yet Usher made no inquiry into the intentions of young Madlyn, nor had she indulged him with a reply. And why should they converse? With both clinging to the lower most rungs of the house's hierarchy, what cardinal significance would be gained by any discourse? With both submerged in pitying selflessness, the Usher closed the door with Madlyn on the other side, his mind ignorant to the finality of the girl's impending mission.

Her initial wanderings had been indecisive at best. The paths were infinite, spanning all degrees of the compass, yet their likeness to one another had caused her to stumble. There stood naught but trees in all directions and she could not know the swiftest path to the forest shoreline, where the tide of trees would recede to less monotonous fortunes. The endless night that enveloped Tenebrae Manor was not without limit of coverage, this she knew from Libra. Madlyn would need to travel until the dawn broke but the miles that stretched under the extremities of the spell were unknown to her. Perhaps the cycle of night and day returned to normal on one trip to the horizon - she could traverse that in a few hours. However, there was nothing disputing the night sky stretching for leagues on end, perhaps the perimeter could not be reached promptly on foot.

Madlyn thought not of the dangers that lurked in the forest surrounding and with her thoughts clouded by the ideals of fairy tales, she foolishly assumed her own safety to be unthreatened.

As the stories she remembered circled through her mind, Madlyn mused over the direction of her adventure. Recalling no blessings of a warm place in the days of her sanity, she sighed longingly for the southern lands of children's stories, where fields drowned beneath a sweet sun. The place where evil was abated - she prayed that such a paradise could exist for her and, through no logical process, set off in the direction she assumed to be south.

The taiga was impossibly vast. Each tree she passed a mere drop in a deep green sea. Madlyn scrambled through terrain that grew steadily more resilient as she progressed. There were times where the trunks huddled so closely together that even her gangly frame struggled to pass. Grass grew thick in patches; waist high on one uphill slope that Madlyn spent a painful amount of time ascending. But then the grass would fall away and give way to stubborn shrubbery that gripped her frock as she tried to pass, grasping with hideous claw-like branches.

Madlyn was unable to say how far she had travelled when she first noticed the diversity of trees around her. Though overwhelmed with pines, there loomed other variations of birch and sycamore, elm and oak. There they stood, vigilant sentinels of a silent army, their formations disorderly yet effective in hindering swift travel through.

Soon the forest became alive with a silvery glow, as a full moon appeared from behind the canopy. Madlyn cast her eyes skyward and became drunk with its beauty as a moth to flame, until she lost her footing and stumbled down a small grassy slope. Tumbling head over heel to the nadir of the hillock, she landed with a thud into a muddy creek. The smell of wet soil was overpowering as she sat up unhurt yet startled. Mud had ruined her navy blue dress and white smock and she gingerly picked the leaves from her tangled hair. Her arm must have skimmed a sharp stone or branch during the fall, for a stinging graze ran up her right forearm. Although nature had tried to rattle her tenacity, she resolutely pushed back and rose to her feet. She had to press on, it seemed that nothing in this world was willing to show her any kindness.

The light of the moon made her travels easier and for a further few hours she trudged ever forward until fatigue began to envelop her. How long had she been walking? In the eternal night it was difficult to discern, though Madlyn knew that she should rest soon. She came upon a large oak tree whose massive roots were interlocked over the ground like tentacles. There, beneath the mighty bole she was able to comfortably sit in a nook of roots and drift into a fitful sleep.

The moon had set when she awoke but in the darkness her eyes had adjusted and vision was somewhat clear. When Madlyn had walked a little further, she felt her foot kick at something in the dark and on bending down to inspect she picked up a large pinecone. It felt rough and weighty in her palm, yet the thing fascinated her so that she rummaged through her bag to try and make room for it. Her messenger bag was full enough already, stuffed with withered fruits and bread she had stolen from the kitchen, her quill, the mirror shard and a lantern. Acknowledging the darkness that had settled around her, Madlyn took the lantern from the bag and put the pinecone in its place. Only then did she realise that she did not have any oil with which to bring light to her murky perimeter.

The sounds of the wilderness overwhelmed her of a sudden and she became blinded by simple logic. Ill prepared as she was, a useless lantern was the first acceptance of failure that Madlyn recognised. Dryness cramped her throat; unease crept up slowly behind her. Madlyn had no water either. There was no saying how long she would have remained stationary, had a crow not suddenly swooped from a branch above and startled her into movement. Unease loomed and she hummed to herself in an attempt to ward off rising wariness;

Oh persnickety wickedly witch

Who tried to stave off dandruff itch

Used a cat to cushion her head

And fell with a grunt out of her bed

Oh persnickety wickedly witch

Of flake and flurry scalp twitch

Sought bats to beat the snow away

But wings clapped her hair to grey

Oh persnickety wickedly witch

Heard the cure from a snitchy-snitch

On her crown she let perch an owl

That pecked her head and made her howl!

Oh persnickety wickedly witch

Who tried to stave off dandruff itch

Inhaled the dust with every breath

And promptly sneezed herself to death.

She fought on and presently the ground beneath her aching feet began to slope so that she was walking steadily downhill into the concave of a valley. Her steps fell heavily as she went, the weight of her tired body thrown onto her knees. Yet Madlyn felt drawn towards the pit of the valley by some surreal force. The grass became mere tufts of dry straw, sprouted from dusty outcrops of knuckled rock; the forest's shades of green receded to make way for a dried world of earthy colours.

Her legs throbbed with pain as she pulled up beside a large rock but no sooner had she leaned her hand upon it than she snatched it away. A sharp gust of pain pierced her palm and when she looked down, Madlyn noticed the boulder was covered with thorn-laden vines.

With her hands clutched to her chest, she followed the trail of thorns and saw that they were strewn everywhere around her. Jutting from thick black tendrils they protruded, sprawled across every rock and tree in sight. Madlyn felt overwhelmed by the parasitic nature of the tendrils, gripping the ground like the roots of a tree, seemingly draining the earth's very core to a husk.

For a moment she considered turning back, until something glistened in the corner of her eye and in a second, her heart leapt in amazement. When her eyes confirmed the astonishing sight, Madlyn dashed recklessly into the thorny bracken.

Blossoming effortlessly from the dusky gloom of one particular tendril was a black rose - not unlike the relic of Libra's brooch. Madlyn's heart beat like a hummingbird; plucking the rose from its host, the vine shivered at the disturbance. With her free hand, she rummaged through her bag and withdrew a crumpled piece of paper - the page from Bordeaux's book about wood golems. It had caught Madlyn's eye during her failed avowal in Bordeaux's quarters, displaying beautiful sketches of a magnificent tree that sprouted black roses from its branches. The plumage on this vine was the very same, it had to be and Madlyn had a sudden revelation. To follow the trail of thorny tendrils to their origin; perhaps there she would find the tree that grew the priceless talismans.

The path was narrow and unrelenting. Madlyn endured the nicks and cuts of the thorns that reached out to her from her sides, the scent of wild roses saturating her senses so that she barely felt the pain.

Before her it appeared, a tree larger than any she had ever seen, though perhaps not as tall as conifer, certainly its roots and branches reached further lateral distances than any rival. The branches were skeletal, save for sparse blossoms of black roses dotting along them. Madlyn saw nothing else, considered no danger and plunged headlong towards the base of the tree, where she pulled up panting for breath. A cavernous hollow in the trunk stared at her like an empty black eye socket and Madlyn could not help staring back into its void. It burrowed into the tree at her head's height and would certainly capacitate her entire skull were she to place it inside. Yet she dared not, as a shudder convulsed through her, a detesting of total darkness and claustrophobia.

Madlyn reached out with her hand and brushed her fingertips around the circumference of the hollow. The trunk was rough to touch; Madlyn was gazing absently into the void when on a sudden, a vine lashed out from within the hole and coiled violently around her wrist. Madlyn gasped and tried to pull her arm free but the artery-like tendril grasped her like a hungry leech.

She panicked, the tendril secreting an otherworldly screech, as around her the branches of the tree lowered. To her horror, the lowered branches brought into view the swinging of numerous corpses that hung from the branches as gallows.

Her heart beat furiously, the eyes of the ancient dead bored into her with abhorrence from the rotted flesh of their faces. Below the hideous screech of the tree and the crackling of the dead-adorned branches, there rose a throaty thrumming behind her. Madlyn flung her head around and saw she was surrounded by wood golems. Their grotesque humanoid forms left her aghast and Madlyn felt a long lost emotion return to her - a feeling she had repressed since childhood. The feeling of raw fear; of unequalled fright that held her in paralysis.

From the hollow of the tree, more tendrils oozed outwards towards her and as she tried to fight back, she felt the wood golems draw ever nearer. A scream burst from her throat, previously choked back by unbridled terror but it was not long until her cries were muted by a tendril that wound about her throat. The world faded darker than she had ever known and the last thing she saw was the glimmer of steel flash once before her, though it may have only been a fabrication of her failing senses.

****

Back inside Tenebrae Manor, the atmosphere crackled with an ominous chill. Bordeaux - the master of affairs, servant to the castle's concord, waited in the shadows behind a candelabrum on the highest stairwell. Regardless of his impatience, he had to bide his time and just as the silence grew to an unbearable pitch, a soft sound cut through the gloom and evolved into the sounds of footfalls coming ever closer.

The crimson demon froze, holding his breath for fear of disclosure, until Lady Libra shuffled past him and out of view down the stairs. He had not been seen.

Still he waited, lurking there in the shadow of billowy curtains that draped about the floor length window in the hall. The wait became agonizing; Bordeaux whispered a treble count before sliding swiftly from his hiding place and into Libra's room.

The door was closed quietly with painstaking precision, the demon wasting no time in advancing to the corner of the room where Libra had concealed a secret passageway.