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spookyspaghettisundae · 5 years ago

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No Such Thing, Part 3

An evil presence sealed every door and window shut. Nobody waking could hear the screams erupting inside the dilapidated old mansion. Even in the eerie quiet that dominated the streets of Crimsonport at this ungodly hour in the early morning, the nearest folk slept in their beds across the cobblestone-covered streets, oblivious to the fate of the two people trapped inside the Hayes residence.

Pàdair’s agonized cries stopped first. Bobby’s shouts, carrying helpless despair, ceased next. Other strange noises and voices echoed through the mansion, making way to silence once more. A thick bank of fog rolled past the wrought iron fences of the mansion with a painful slowness. A huge shadow cast by sheer nothingness crept by the windows inside the haunted house, with no human eyes to witness it.

The cone of a desolate little light pierced the mist, emanating from a gas-lit lantern in Sir Arthur Thompson’s hand. He approached the mansion, though not as alone as he had been when he had left Pàdair and Bobby alone. Mere steps behind him followed two curious figures: a giant of an officer in a constabulary’s coat, complete with helmet and bobby club dangling from his belt; and a smaller figure huddled in a long coat, with a red scarf and a tricorne hat’s shadows concealing any semblance of a face.

They stopped outside the gated fence to Hayes Mansion. The iron hinges creaked as the gate moved under the pressure of a soft gust of wind. The old structure loomed above them. Menacingly.

Arthur hissed into the air, “Pàdair? Bobby?” His breath condensed in tiny little clouds just outside his mouth each time.

Nobody answered. The constable behind him, Todd, cleared his throat and Arthur did not respond to that. Instead, his eyes squinted and his gaze swept over the overgrown garden of the mansion and the darkened, grimy windows of this abandoned home.

“For heaven’s sake, why do they never listen to me?”

The constable and the figure in the tricorne hat exchanged a long stare between them. Eyes, icy enough to make the winter’s own cold shudder, met each other’s gazes.

Behind Arthur’s back, Todd asked the figure in the tricorne hat, “Ghost, you wager?”

Arthur turned and shone his lantern’s light at them. The contrasting shadows revealed a more slender, feminine figure hidden underneath the long coat of the second figure.

“Probably. Though anything is possible,” she replied to the constable in a tired monotone, muted by the red scarf covering the lower half of her face.

Arthur’s brow furrowed and his voice pitched higher when he asked, “Excuse me? Ghosts? I never mentioned—” Darkness overtook his mien as his words cut off. “Please don’t tell me that you, too, believe in such bunk.”

“If they’re inside already, we need to act fast. Iron, salt, any holy crosses will do if you believe in them well enough, I suppose,” mumbled the woman in the tricorne hat, evidently ignoring the knight’s objections.

She walked past him and he stepped into her path, nearly provoking them to bump into each other.

“As my name is Sir Thompson, I am one of the king’s knights and I will not be made a mockery of,” he said, puffing out his chest. “How on earth do you conclude that us following some strange phenomena of this ivory comb here has anything to do with fairy tales such as ghosts?”

With neither a shred of respect nor an ounce of a gentle touch, she pushed past him, prompting him to scoff out loud, and she approached the gate.

“Fairy tales relate to fair folk, which I don’t believe have any business in the city,” she said. “And never forget, sir knight—those stories are supposed to frighten little children and grown men alike because there’s a grain of truth to them.”

“The missus here knows what she is doing,” said Constable Todd to Arthur. “You must forgive her—her, let’s say, criminal—lack of manners.” His lips curled into a sneer as he emphasized the word “criminal” in his speech.

The huntress, Nora Morrissey, gripped one of the rods of wrought iron protruding from the fence in her leather-gloved hands. Then she bent and twisted it until she wrenched a portion of the rod loose. She weighed the object in her hands like a crowbar.

“Right. Move along, Mister Thompson. We’ve got this matter under control,” she muttered.

“Sir Thompson,” Arthur insisted, his cheeks turning red. He then shook the lantern, making Nora’s shadow dance through the untamed garden behind her. “And I will not follow your insipid orders nor will I leave. In the name of king and country, I will not abandon my friends if they are—if they are in there.”

She shrugged and turned, pushing open the gate and wandering through the garden. The constable followed. His hands had been folded behind his back all the way over to Hayes Mansion and now they hung by his side, balled into fists.

Todd patted the bobby club and asked, “Will conventional arms do any good here?”

“I highly doubt it,” Nora replied on the way to the mansion’s front door.

Arthur fumed in silence behind them, flabbergasted and struggling to find the right words to throw at them.

Nora paused just a few steps away from reaching the house’s entrance. Peering over her shoulder back at Arthur and staring him dead in the eyes for the first time, all the heat of anger emerging from his exposed skin turned icy cold.

Unlike her indifferent tone until now, she raised her voice to ask with a sudden spark of fiery determination, “Who sent you that comb?”

Arthur blinked. Realizing he had no answer, he snapped out of it and followed the two people down the meandering narrow path in between the garden’s hedges.

“I do not know, truth be told. It was addressed to Von Brandt. Johnn Von Brandt,” he said after a moment of consideration.

Nora swiveled and took a step into the cone of Arthur’s light, “Come again?”

“Johnn Von Brandt. A man who lived in the house before I acquired it in an auction. Pàdair never mentioned a sender’s name, though.”

The constable asked Nora without turning to face Arthur, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

She turned and continued on towards the front door and the constable followed. Arthur felt an inexplicable rush and onslaught of goosebumps riding down the back of his neck in the uncomfortable silence that ensued. The strange woman and the constable stood in front of the entrance, motionless.

Nora slapped the iron rod against her empty leather-clad palm and finally answered, “Yes. It has to be him.”

Arthur caught up to them and asked, “Him who?”

They ignored his question. Nora pushed the front door open, and together they entered the creepy house with the woman spearheading their advance.

Arthur’s stomach knotted and he took the lantern into his left hand, then drew his holstered flintlock pistol from inside his coat. Constable Todd stopped in his tracks and shot the firearm a disapproving, wordless glance.

“Unless that weapon is loaded with an iron bullet, you might as well put it away, lest you shoot one of us,” the constable growled. “And truly, if you are not ready to open your mind to the possibility of the unnatural, you are of no use to anybody here. Rather a danger.”

“I will have you know that I served in the war in the north, my good man,” Arthur said with a sneer.

“Took you long enough to see the world behind the world,” Nora muttered over her shoulder at Todd. The constable’s stern face drooped into a frown. “Strength in numbers, constable. And, well, if you’re going to stick around, then call out to your friends,” she then said, motioning at Arthur with the iron rod.

They stood inside the mansion with its moth-eaten carpets, rotting curtains, and dusty cloth draped over the furniture everywhere. The three people stood still within the sprawling entry hall, at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the atrium. Wisps of fog snaked about just outside, almost as if they were alive—and apprehensive. The three people slowly turned, looking around themselves and drinking in every strange detail within their environment.

“Pàdair? Bobby? Stop faffing around,” Arthur said with growing fear.

The air inside the mansion bit even harder into Arthur’s skin than it did outside. As if the temperature dropped by the second in here. His skin crawled with an inexplicable tingle spreading throughout his limbs, the knot in his belly region tightened, and he swallowed.

Something watched them. Something invisible.

His mouth opened to say something, but no words followed.

The front door slammed shut behind them. Arthur darted to it and clutched the handle. He shook and rattled at it, but the door refused to open as if its lock had engaged when the door closed. A huge shadow passed by, just outside the stained glass window adorning the front door; causing the knight to gasp and stumble back a few steps.

He bumped into Nora’s back, who gripped the iron bar in both hands like a weapon.

Turning his back to the other two and with his posture turning militant, ready for a struggle, Todd asked with a stiff tension to his words, “What are we dealing with?”

“Don’t know,” Nora answered. “Keep your eyes peeled.”

Fabric tore somewhere upstairs. Loudly. Groans echoed through the unhallowed halls, followed by a shriek—at first, sounding like the terrified screech of a human being, but transforming into something inhuman, like metal scraping over metal.

Someone cackled behind a door at ground level. Starting high-pitched, then dropping to a deep, baritone. Something hideous; something demonic.

Whispers of unintelligible words erupted all around Arthur, and he met the wide-eyed gazes of both Constable Todd and Nora.

“What in the blazes are you saying,” Todd said with anger resonating in the words.

“That’s not him,” Nora said, taking a step away from Arthur.

Arthur wanted to ask what in the devil they were going on about until he realized that his lips had been moving the entire time—of their own volition. The whispers poured out of his own mouth. He could not fathom what his lungs expelled, but his throat emitted alien noises and the air condensed in front of him, barely visible in the pale moonlight pouring in through the windows from outside.

He nearly dropped the lantern in his hand and covered his mouth with the other hand holding his pistol. His lips chafed against the back of his hand, whipping up and down as the whispers continued spilling out and warm breath struck cold skin.

Todd asked, “How do we stop—how the hell do we exorcise that?”

Nora produced a tiny silvered object—a symbol of the good god—pulling it out from inside her coat, still attached to a fine chain around her neck. She held it out at Arthur and returned whispers, though her words made sense, albeit it being barely audible. Until they transitioned into a furious shout, “Begone, foul beast!”

Arthur fired a shot, prompting both Todd and Nora to flinch and duck despite it missing anybody by far and hitting the atrium overhead. His fingers cramped up and his heart raced, terror itself clawing at the back of his mind as he realized how he now struggled for control over his own body.

The knight flung the discharged pistol away from himself and staggered past the other two, collapsing into the steps of the stairs. He grabbed at his own throat and choked himself. Or was something else doing it to him?

The lantern clattered out of his hands and fell to the floor as the giant constable and the woman grabbed him by his wrists and pushed him down. She threw something into his face that caused his skin and eyes to burn like fire. Just when he blinked to clear his vision, she splashed his eyes with droplets water and caused him to cringe violently, to the point of temporary blindness.

He thrashed against them, but the weight of the constable alone sufficed to pin him down, painfully pressing the edges of the stairs’ steps into his back. Or the thing inside of him thrashed. One of the few things Arthur could make out was Nora pressing the holy symbol against his forehead and chanting words in something he recognized from his college days as a dead language.

A warm red glow spread all around and Arthur thrashed harder.

Todd shouted something abrupt, “Bloody—”

But before he could finish that exclamation, Arthur threw him off of him in an incredible arc, sending him flying back onto the floor and knocking the wind out of his lungs.

Arthur choked and wanted this to stop, but one of his strong hands shot out and clamped down around Nora’s slender neck, triggering her to emit pained gagging sounds. He hoped she could read his dread and helplessness, trapped behind the windows to his soul.

Instead of the fear or surprise he expected to read in her eyes, he saw only a cold-blooded rage. Then he saw stars, registering the pain of something heavy and iron hitting him in the head with a significant delay. His left temple throbbed and he blinked, tumbling down the steps. Something warm and sticky trickled down from his forehead into his left eye.

Just like that, he regained control over his body. Everything tingled and everything hurt—just like the phantom pains that regularly came back to haunt him about his days back on the misty battlefields, following a stint with crippling injuries. With that, he remembered his long conversations with Pàdair about the war in the north, and then realized that he had come here to rescue his friends.

Rescue? Yes. From something unnatural—from a ghost, no less. Not a single doubt remained in his mind or heart now.

And then he realized that the world around him burned. The carpets had caught fire from the lantern he had dropped; of which the glass had shattered nearby. The flames had spread and grown. As if just seeing this caught him up to reality, he coughed from the smoke, as did Todd. The other two people helped him back up onto his feet.

“We need to put out the fire,” Todd shouted.

“Forget it,” Nora responded with volume to match. “Find the other victims. We let this damned place burned down to the ground.”

Arthur need not be told twice and he charged into the nearest door. It splintered and broke open as he barreled through its frame.

“No,” Nora shouted after him. “Nobody goes separate ways. Stick together.”

Something shattered, a bright and piercing sound. Shards of a vase flew through the air like tiny knives, slicing into the walls like lightning-fast projectiles and cutting into any exposed flesh of the three people, eliciting them to shout in pain.

Todd cried out, “Move!” He pushed from behind them, shoving them down a corridor and out of a room in which all the furniture hovered inches off the ground and slammed into the door just before Todd kicked it shut behind him.

Though her scarf should have helped against the billowing and growing clouds of smoke, Nora coughed multiple times, remarking in between, “Definitely ghosts.”

Arthur seized the initiative and burst through one door after another, ignoring the urge to identify the rooms and their previous purpose, from before the house had been abandoned by the people who once lived in it. He ducked back out from a room just in time for a fireplace poker to ram into the wall near his head—and it burst out the other side, sticking there like a menacing reminder of what could have killed him. It wriggled, as if a ghostly hand tried to pry it loose and lance another attack at him.

They stumbled through the mansion and the cackling returned. Louder, more sinister than ever before.

A woman’s voice—not Nora's—shrieked in what sounded like agony, at first. But as Arthur’s mind processed it, it carried more rage than anything else. The walls trembled with it, thrummed. They throbbed, like pulsating flesh, and seemingly swelled.

“You stabbed her with your pecker all these years, so she should be fine with me stabbing her with these knives,” said the woman in a sudden singing tone, dripping with insanity. The voice dropped several octaves, devolving into monstrous snarls and growls, “Isn’t her skin so pretty as it peels back, layer by layer?”

Todd slapped Arthur in the face, leaving a burning sensation on his cheek. This helped the knight realize that the horrid woman’s voice had escaped his own throat.

The ceiling in the hallway burst apart, raining dust and splinters down on them. Arthur ducked underneath the jagged edge of a wooden board as it shot towards him, then fell to his knees, making the pain from an old injury flare up. When he turned to look behind him and grimaced, his face fell back into the familiar shock he always suffered whenever he saw a compatriot injured on the battlefield—he saw that the wooden board had impaled Constable Todd, pinning the lawman against the wall.

Nora tried to help him get free, but he shouted in agony as the piece of wood had lodged itself deeply into the man’s belly region. Nora turned to Arthur and grabbed him by his shoulders, pulling him in so close that their foreheads nearly touched. A fury still burned in her eyes as she told him with ceaseless conviction, “Find your friends, quickly. I’ve never seen anything like this. We need to get out of here.”

Arthur looked past her at Todd, who gurgled and spat out some blood. He broke the wooden board apart and coughed as he fell onto a knee, gripping his side.

Nora shook Arthur’s shoulders and shouted at him, “Now!”

He shot one more glance at Todd as Nora knelt beside him to help the constable back up. Arthur ran on through the mansion. The cackling and laughter coalesced into a chorus, echoing all around him once he rounded a corner, charging through room after room of this labyrinthine house. If he had not known better, the knight would have begun to think that the place was reshaping itself around them, trapping them inside.

Despite a sheet of smoke spreading along the ceilings throughout the place, the cold never parted. The atmosphere grew more oppressive with each step as he climbed the spiraling staircase of an empty library. He coughed and ghostly piano music resounded from the depths of the mansion, causing the blood to curdle in his veins. Melancholic, sad, and punctuated by screams and wet sounds. Like raw meat slapping against a kitchen counter, and blood invisibly splattering all about.

The growling voice called out to Arthur, “If you like her so much, why don’t you try on her skin for a change, my love?” He heard Nora shouting something down below, a million miles away.

In the hall he arrived in upstairs, a lump formed underneath the carpet a few steps in front of him, like a cancerous tumor growing from the floor. Thick black smoke billowed out from the carpet’s edges.

Arthur shouted in furious anger, stomping on it with a boot and stamping it out, leaving nothing of substance behind. The thing had vanished, as if it had never been there.

When he turned, he stared into Bobby’s eyes and relief overtook him. He had never been so happy to see her. His heart dropped from his chest into his feet from one moment to the next, though. All blood drained from his face when he saw the maggots writhing underneath her pallid, corpse-like skin; and he stared into the cold dead of glazed, dull eyes, all milky-white and devoid of color. Her mouth opened to reveal rotten teeth and a foul breath hit his face, making Arthur flinch.

The very sight paralyzed him. If mere fear, or something far more evil had seized him, he could not tell. Her shambling arms stretched out and clawed at him with feeble strength until deathly fingers curled into the fabric on his shoulders, pulling him closer.

With a voice not her own, Bobby hissed, “You dare kiss your wife with the lips that kissed a whore?” She pulled Arthur in closer and his skin burnt like fire.

Something sliced through this false Bobby, diagonally swiping through her—from a knife that swished through the air. She dissipated like an ephemeral cloud of smoke and in her place stood Pàdair, bleeding from a gash on his forehead, bathed in a sheen of cold sweat, and panting in exhaustion. Despair, disbelief, and fear marked his visage.

He gripped his fierce-looking hunting knife which he had used to cut through the ghostly apparition and stared Arthur in the eyes.

“Arthur? Is that really you?”

The knight blinked and gripped his head, embracing his ability to control his own body once more. He saw Bobby hiding behind the northerner, peering past the tall man’s arm at Arthur. A palpable fear—that must have matched Arthur’s own—contorted her facial features. Pàdair grabbed Arthur by the shoulders and shook him a few times. The warmth from the man’s hands—Arthur could feel it through his coat. He was definitely real. This helped him snap out of any lingering confusion and paralysis.

Arthur breathed, “Yes. Pàdair, Bobby, come! We need to escape this dreadful place!”

Wasting no more words, they did. They fled through the hall—Arthur stepping out of it last, just before it twisted like a kaleidoscope, turning and folding in on itself with a cacophony of cracking and splintering wood. As if the house itself tried to swallow them. The hallway behind them collapsed—or compressed.

From the top of the atrium in the entry hall, Arthur glimpsed Nora helping Constable Todd near the entrance below. She braced him as they limped towards the exit. Fire raged all around them and distorted everything; thick smoke obscured the periphery of what the knight could see, and burned in his lungs.

The demonic laughter gathered in a crescendo all around them, culminating in a strangely human cry, “If I cannot have what I want, then so shall all others suffer like I!” The ceiling above the entrance hall groaned and bent inwards, as if a giant hand pushed down against it, creeping down closer and closer as if to prevent them from using the stairs.

With Bobby at the front, pushed and ushered along by Pàdair’s meaty hand, they stumbled and tripped their way down the stairs from the atrium, just in the nick of time before the ceiling crushed into the uppermost portion of the stairwell. This mansion had turned into the spitting image of hell itself, with its walls ablaze all around them—and brought to life by some unholy, vengeful entity. Carpets peeled themselves off the ground and whipped at them like angry, monstrous tongues.

Near the bottom, the railing Arthur gripped as he followed the others split apart and cut into his hand, slicing his flesh down the length of his forearm and ripping his sleeve open.

To the best of his knowledge, Arthur could not explain any of this way. He perceived not a single clue that could help rationalize anything with scientific explanations.

Ahead of them, catching up to Todd and Nora, he watched the constable collapse onto the floor, reeling and heaving as small pools of blood formed underneath him. Nora threw a small table at the front door, shattering the stained glass window and then beating the door with the table. The door refused to give way and the window was too small for anybody but Bobby’s small frame to fit through. Pàdair joined Nora at the door, and they combined their strength to smash it down, hurling the table together at it one last time before the door cracked apart and exploded outwards.

The fires roared around them. Something followed them.

Arthur screamed in terror as he saw something—simultaneously nothing—an evil presence, like the devil and a host of demons descending upon them. It followed them down the stairs. Walking gingerly, with no worry in the world, for it did not belong in this world. The carpets exploded into fire underneath this invisible entity where black soot took the shape of dainty foot prints. Silhouettes formed in the hot air above them with vaguely humanoid shapes. Embers flitted past where eyes should be.

Millions of hateful eyes.

“You will taste my wrath,” said the woman’s voice through Arthur, prompting him to scream in anger, his only attempt to resist this possession. Arthur knew it to be Ellen Hayes. The ghostly mistress of this mansion, seeking to kill anybody who had stepped foot inside. A chorus of agonized shrieks filled the air and froze the knight into remaining standing still on the spot, despite every fiber in his body screaming at him to move and step outside into safety.

Not even coughing from the suffocating smoke could tear him out of this unnatural trance. What made the difference was a set of strong hands, ripping him away, dragging him outside into the cold wintry air.

Burning bright, every window of the mansion glowed with the fires inside of it. Pàdair pulled Arthur a few steps farther and knight’s life and senses returned. His knees buckled and wobbled, but then obeyed him. He followed right after Pàdair, whose iron grip clutched Arthur’s wrist, and they fled with the others onto the street.

Something powerful gripped at him, nearly made Arthur stop. Like a hand the size of his chest, it held him, pulled back the way they came—towards the blazing fire within the entrance, that all-consuming inferno inside. There and not there at the same time, a figure stood within the door’s frame, glaring at Arthur. Or glaring at all of them, he could not discern the difference. All he knew was that the hatred was as tangible as the heat from the fire.

The five people had crossed the threshold of the fence’s gate, just beyond the overgrown garden. The mansion burned, and something watched them. Something furious. Something deadly.

They had escaped with their lives. Even Todd would recover from his grievous injury—Arthur saw to it that he got the best medical attention he could afford.

After asking Pàdair who had sent that cursed ivory comb and him being unable to answer it because the parcel featured no named sender, Nora disappeared into the night.

The lawman remained rather tight-lipped about the whole affair in the days that followed—though in confidence, he had the three witnesses swear an oath of secrecy, and revealed the existence of a conspiracy that involved black magicks. He urged them to never speak to anybody else about this and said he might call upon them for help again in the near future.

Other authorities never visited Arthur’s residence to question him. Arthur and Bobby eventually visited the strange site where Hayes Mansion had burned down that fateful night.

Staring past the warped iron fence and the scorched earth that used to be the garden, now surrounding the pile of rubble, Bobby wanted to say, “I just don't—there is no such a thing as gh—”

Arthur raised a weary hand to silence her. She never again insisted on denying the existence of ghosts and both of them had an unspoken agreement to curb their skepticism from there on out.

When Arthur met Todd again a few months later, the constable told him in private that an exorcist had cleansed the ruined mansion grounds, ensuring that the angry ghost could never again harm anybody else.

But the vision of that silhouette, standing out against the flames, watching them as they retreated from it—it haunted Arthur’s nightmares ever since. He woke up almost every night, covered in a sheen of cold sweat. The room always felt colder than it should. The whispers from those nightmares, the voices—he could have sworn they came from his lips upon rousing from his restless slumber.

That, however, was not what disturbed him the most.

Whenever he awoke thus, he coughed up a puff of thick black smoke.

—Submitted by Wratts

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