Lair

The manor sat inconspicuously in the center of a copse of firs. It was blocky and unpleasing to the eyes, the walls and windows covered in dendritic grime. It seemed more of an outgrowth of the forest floor than something built by human hands.

The soldier lingered in front of it, his horse’s head turned away almost pointedly. He observed the house, searching for any signs of life. Night had descended over the forest and he was becoming a little desperate for shelter.

He rode towards the door and dismounted. No one stopped him. He took hold of the door’s ornate iron knocker and knocked heavily three times.

The door opened slightly, letting out a sliver of deep red light. A maid peered out at him, her single visible eye wide and afraid.

The soldier straightened his back and smiled amicably, speaking the regional language as best as he could, “Good evening, Miss. I’m a soldier who has been tasked with— “

The maid shut the door. The soldier waited, back rigid, unsure of what to do. A moment later, the door opened again. The maid stared at his feet, “Please come in. My mistress wishes to welcome you.”

He stammered, “M-my horse?”

“It will be brought to the stables.” She gestured insistently, “Please.”

The soldier followed her through a parlor lit only by a dim fire at the far wall. In every room, the small fires and low candles bathed the light scarlet. The soldier took care to breathe slowly, trying to quell his rising fear. The air was foul with smoke and mildew.

The maid led him into a spacious dining room. It was as austere as the rest of the manor. There was a mirror and two ancient-looking sconces on the wall. No paintings. The table was long but only had two chairs—one at the foot where two servants were engaged methodically setting a place, and one at the head. If anyone had ever sanded the furniture smooth, it had not been in living memory.

At the head of the table stood a lady. She had black eyes, a black dress, black hair hanging limply over her shoulder. The light made her ruddy. Her cheeks were gaunt and she appeared to be only slightly younger than the soldier’s mother. When she looked at him, though, he was captivated. 

The lady smiled primly and spoke in his native tongue, “Good evening, soldier. Welcome to my home.”

The soldier clicked his heels and stood at attention before bowing deeply. He heard her laughing at him. Flustered, he said, “Thank you for your hospitality.”

“You have impeccable timing.” She slid back into her seat, her eyes trained on him. “Dinner is about to be served. Sit.”

He toyed with the propriety of her proposal but those eyes were insistent. A servant rigidly pulled his chair back. He sat.

Another servant slid a bowl in front of him. He recognized with slight alarm that all of the servants he had seen thus far moved with a mechanical accuracy he rarely saw outside of military displays. The soldier tried to convince himself this was amusing, but his discomfort lingered. 

He looked down into the bowl. A less-than-appetizing red-brown sludge returned his gaze. It stank, steaming above a generous portion of pale boiled potatoes. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, and he couldn’t identify the source of his disgust because he had regularly eaten worse. Someone poured blood black wine into a goblet set beside the bowl. He watched it curl out of the carafe and settle onto itself, completely and totally flat.

The lady, now seated, raised her cup to her lips and drank deeply, licking her lips demurely as she set it back down. Their eyes met and the soldier froze like a frightened doe.

“There are only two indiscretions that would offend me, soldier.” She said finally, her voice a waft of smoke winding over his synapses, “One would be refusing this meal.”

He was unable to stop himself from asking, “And the other?”

The corners of her lips twitched into a thin smile, “Later. Please, relax.”

The soldier took up his fork and dipped it in the gravy, trying to give the impression he was taking a full bite. He tasted it, found that it was so bland he couldn’t place any of the ingredients, and felt his spine decompress. His stomach growled in relief. He had been blatantly ignoring his hunger in an attempt to prolong the meager rations he had been given at the front.

The warmth of the stew was its greatest attribute. The textures were generally abhorrent—tough meat and slimy vegetables, both unidentifiable. The potatoes were undercooked. He ate regardless, though he ate more carefully than he had in years, embarrassed at his baseborn etiquette.

He reached for the wine, ignored his pale reflection on its placid surface, and tipped it into his mouth. It was thin and acidic, scouring his throat violently on its way to terrorize the contents of his stomach. The soldier coughed, unable to suppress it. Thankfully, he didn’t spit.

The lady chuckled, “Do you like the house blend?”

“It tastes like it was fermented in Satan’s own stomach,” he answered, forgetting himself.

She laughed again, quietly, the cup over her mouth.

He took the opportunity to ask, “What is in this stew?”

“Onions, carrots, cabbage.” She paused, “Pork.”

He nodded, raising the cup to his lips and sipping delicately.

The lady leveled a portion of potatoes and stew on her fork, asking, “What brings you through the forest, then, soldier?”

He had expected this question earlier, so he was immediately ready to answer. He said, “I’ve been sent from the front to the capital with a message. I have my commission, if you would like to confirm.”

“That won’t be necessary. Your word is enough for me.” She patted her delicate chin with a napkin, “Is the message urgent?”

He bristled immediately, then urged himself to settle down. A spy? In this old, decrepit place? Unlikely. He answered simply, “No.”

“Then perhaps you would appreciate a place to rest your head. My son and I are this manor’s only occupants, aside from the servants. It would be our pleasure.”

He looked around the room, as if the son had been there all along and had simply gone unnoticed. No one. The soldier asked, “Your son?”

“Yes.” She frowned and fixed her eyes to the table, “He seldom dines with me. He is quite sickly, you see.”

The soldier nodded sympathetically, relaxing again.

She continued, “I think it would be more peculiar if he wasn’t, living in this place. Don’t you agree?”

“I’m not sure what you mean, my lady.”

“This place is dismal. I can tell you think so.” Her eyes narrowed slightly, but she was smiling, “This is fine. Our misery is not so sacred that I object to it amusing you. Quite the opposite.”

“I don’t understand.” The soldier laughed, “I really don’t understand. If a peasant had offered me gruel and a spot on the floor of their hovel, I would’ve been content. Your hospitality is a blessing.”

Still smiling, the lady returned to her food. Nothing more was said.

When he had cleaned his plate, it was taken away from him. The lady rose, gesturing at him to follow her. The servants avoided his gaze.

She led him into a first floor corridor. The room she bequeathed to him was rather large, appointed in dingy burgundy from the wallpaper to the carpet. The bed was huge but looked as though it was about to completely collapse. There were holes gnawed in the thick crimson drapes.

“You asked me about the second indiscretion. It’s time I told you.” 

He wasn’t facing her. When he turned around to follow her voice, she was standing very close to him. Closer than he thought was proper. He couldn't move his eyes, let alone his feet.

The lady continued, “Do not leave this room. Pay no mind to anything you might see or hear. The forest moans at night, and the trees cast strange shadows. To leave this room is a breach of hospitality so severe I would be forced to take drastic measures to preserve this house’s honor. Do you understand?”

She stared at him wide-eyed, almost beseeching. He withered under her gaze, “I understand.”

“Good.” Her face did not change, “Sleep well, soldier. Your journey resumes tomorrow.” 

She closed the door behind her but did not lock it.

The soldier disrobed as much as he could abide—the lady of the house seemed to take all of its heat with her. The bed creaked alarmingly when he laid on it. He had been left a three-pronged candelabra. Its sickly tallow candles bathed his end of the room crimson; the other side of the room was pitch black, as though beyond the bed and the glow there was nothing else in the world.

As he laid there, half-asleep, a soft arrhythmic tapping began in one of the far corners of the room. He tried to ignore it. The decrepit manor’s walls were surely infested with all manner of awful things. But it did not stop. It grew louder, but the source did not move.

Infuriated, the soldier grabbed the candelabra and rolled off the bed. He followed the tapping to its source and raised the light to it. The sound stopped. Hanging limp from the chipped molding was an errant piece of flesh, cherry red in the candle glow and shot through with pulsating veins. It curled a bit in on itself like the frond of a fern, then relaxed and tapped the wall once, just barely.

Behind him the door creaked wide open of its own accord. He could barely see it in the displaced light, but he stood staring at it, waiting for something to happen. There came a pitiful moaning, just as the lady had said, except it did not come from the forest. It came from the hall.

He hastily pulled on his boots and fastened his sword belt, his hand already half-closed around the grip. There was an awful rattling in his ears. He froze, clenching his jaw, and realized that was the source of the rattling.

There was no time for relief. Another moan, almost beckoning, a finger curling to draw him out into the dark. He ignored the unforgivable transgression, bound by duty and something he could neither explain nor name. A primal anticipation. A deeply entrenched desire for suffering.

The air was completely still in the hall. The only sound came from his slow heel-toe steps. The blood in his ears drowned out his breathing, emphasized his pulse.

Down the hall and to the left was a wood door with iron hinges that seemed to fester with rust. He stepped into something soft, looking down to see a glob of jaundiced skin. As he lifted his foot it reverberated with the suggestion of fat. The soldier gasped and stumbled forward.

Water dripped onto his shoulder. He looked up and nearly shrieked. The source was a half-formed tendril, unable to move aside from quivering; the stalactite protruded from a complex of flesh grown into the ceiling on both sides of the door.

The soldier nearly turned back, but the door opened before him and a young voice whimpered, “Please…”

He stepped around the scattered flesh puddles, extending the candelabra before him. The red light revealed a thin stone staircase curling down so it reached underneath the hallway. The air inside was thick with moisture and, at least to his reckoning, much warmer than the rest of the house. It had the mingled rot and sulfur smell of a haunted battlefield.

The cellar opened up as a vast blackness before him as his meager light trembled in the stagnant air. He took slow steps across the dismal floor, finding himself swallowed completely by that blackness and trembling along with the flame at this realization.

“Please…” whined the voice, the wheezing sibilance long and omnidirectional.

The soldier attempted to follow the voice, stumbling forward and a bit to the right. He asked, “Where are you?”

“Here,” came the answer, so close behind him it set his knees shaking with the impossibility of it all, the warping and folding of the cellar itself.

He swung the light in the direction of the voice. The light revealed an extraordinarily mingling of gray limestone and pale, bubbling flesh. It was spread rootlike through the walls from ceiling to floor. As he had seen up the stairs, gravity formed stalactites and puddles of skin that quivered and breathed with an unearthly rhythm. He swung the light away and there was the source of the moaning and pleading: a man hanging in the wall, his arms obscured by the sebaceous veins of the manor, his lower half completely absorbed by a misshapen cluster of cysts and the aborted beginnings of limbs. The suspended man’s eyes were cloudy and useless—he did not react to the light in his face or the soldier’s disgusted gawking—and his face was gaunt and strange. Thin black hair laid in greasy segments over his collarbone. No breath came from his mouth, but there was an obnoxious breathing somewhere to the soldier’s left that seemed to indicate external lungs. The soldier was preoccupied with a gaping wound nestled in the cysts that should’ve been the man’s legs. It hung wide open to display a bloated organ the same color as the half-congealed blood that oozed sluggishly from the gash.

“What are you?” He asked, too frightened to scream.

The man replied, “I am the heir of this house. I am its very foundation.”

“The son…” The soldier swallowed away a wave of revulsion, “What has she done to you?”

“She birthed me. That is sin enough for five thousand years.” He licked his rancid teeth, a loud wheeze of that brimstone air slapping the soldier on the face. He resolved not to look at its source. The man continued, “Have you had the honor of meeting the master of the house?”

“Your father?”

“My father.”

“Does he reside here?”

“Oh, yes.” He made a bizarre gurgling noise the soldier realized belatedly was meant to be a laugh, “Why, there is hardly a place my father hasn’t resided.”

“I can’t say I’ve met him.”

“You have.” The cataract-shrouded eyes met his with impossible certainty, “Ask my mother. Ask the Lady.”

“What are you? What made you?”

“Ask my mother.” He said forcefully, “Ask her exactly what sits in your stomach tonight.”

He ignored this, his brain so horrified by the enormity of what he was suggesting it simply refused to acknowledge it. “What are you?”

The man leaned up into the soldier’s face, his mouth wide open and rank even without breath, “You have barged into the den of the devil himself and all you can do is burble questions at his heir. What kind of a thing are you, peon? A thing so squalid and cowardly cannot adequately parse the abject evil to which it bears witness. It cannot even react but to gape as my liver sits festering in its bowels. Mother’s first guest in half a century, and it’s not even human enough to know I must be slain on sight.”

“I don’t understand…”

“Yes, you do, you overgrown worm!” He spat at the soldier, who fell back onto a pillow of flesh. “You’ll not escape this manor, and I will not have you in my sanctum!”

The demonspawn howled with fury, the sound emanating from the gaps between stone and smooth muscle. The horrendous gilled mechanism of his overgrown lungs baptized the cowering guest with froth.

The soldier dropped the candelabra and scrambled away. Tendrils sprouted before him, chasing him back through the impossible space to the stairs.

His voice a chorus, he roared, “Get out!”

Blindly, he scrambled to his feet and ran until he hit the door, flinging it open with a relief the likes of which he had never felt. It dissipated immediately as he looked into the hateful black eyes of the lady, Satan’s gracious consort.

She scowled at him and stalked up to stand before him. She stuck an accusing finger into the face of her guest, “What are you doing out here?”

He was stunned. It would’ve been a relief to come to the conclusion that he had dreamt all of this, but there was still wet sputum on his cheek. His hands were shaking so hard he could not even ball them into fists, and she was lecturing him about walking out of an unlocked door. Hoarse with fear, he asked, “Who is the master of this house?”

The lady tilted her head, as though confused, “You’ve spoken to the boy, then?”

“You call that a boy?”

“That is my son, ingrate.” She stepped closer, “Do you forsake my hospitality? The food in your stomach?”

“What did you feed me?”

“I think you know that.” She looked at him down her nose appraisingly and laughed, “Even so, you’re docile as a lamb. That’s what you really are, you know. Not a man, but a guileless lamb fat with blood.”

He stepped forward, regretting it but already drunk on the momentum, “You mistake shock for docility. This is a foul, gangrenous place and I will see it flattened! I will salt the earth myself!”

“You’ll see dawn, but not much after that.” The lady came closer before he could react and drew his sword. She pressed it into his shaking hand, “Run me through. Do it. Have you ever held a sword before, you worthless runt?”

He did as she suggested, his teeth bared, his knuckles on the grip twitching with rage. The blade entered her just below the sternum. She groaned softly in pain, then her lips split in a bloody rictus and she took one step forward, then two. The blade pierced her as though she were something completely insubstantial, as though she had formed around the blade. And then she was gone, cascading downwards in a rush of sweet-smelling blood.

The hall erupted in bright red light, as though behind every locked door raged a wildfire. The soldier crumpled against the basement door. A wail, half agonized and half furious, ripped through the humid air. 

Trapped between the lady and her son, the soldier was so terrified he could barely think. His animal brain, a gift from his long-suffering ancestors, propelled him down the hall. She was incorporeal but palpable, a whirling vortex of outrage. He dodged swinging doors and ornately carved cabinets. As he struggled past an open window, it burst into hundreds of jagged pieces. Howling, she attacked him in the guise of that glass hail, shredding his uniform, the skin on his arms.

He was intoxicated by cortisol, a coward made daring in his escape. When the front door refused to open, he threw himself against it until it burst and he rolled onto the lawn. The soldier jumped to his feet and, unable to locate his horse, loped frantically in between the bloated firs.

He ran until he collapsed, then hid underneath the roots of an ancient oak until he was rested enough to walk. He had escaped from that infernal manor in the middle of the night, and he walked until the sun bathed the sky in shades of grape and lavender.

As it rose in the East, he came across a mill situated on a small stream. In the distance, the soldier could see the silhouette of a little town.

He limped to the mill, to the cottage at its foot where a girl of about fourteen sat beside a cow. She stood up as he approached, the sweet-eyed brown cow raising its head to regard him disinterestedly. The soldier had a notion to run to her, to throw himself at the child’s mercy, so heartened was he to see someone ordinary and uncorrupted after his night in Satan’s lair. His legs gave out and he laid in the grass, sobbing with relief.

Steady, muffled footsteps approached him. He looked up into the storm-gray eyes of a sturdy matron. He cowered a little under her gaze, which was almost accusatory.

She spoke in the language of the region, “Who are you, stranger?”

His unpolished words came out between ragged breaths, “I am…I am a soldier. I was given a message to deliver to the capital…I was…I was at the manor, the manor in the fir copse not a day’s walk from here…please, I beg shelter. I have been wounded; I have seen things more wretched than you could possibly imagine.”

The matron blinked down at him, her broad, pink face softening with pity. She crossed herself, then sighed, “I will care for you, soldier, as much as I am able. You…have you slept in the manor?”

“No. I could not.”

She nodded, a portentous silence rising between them before she asked her third and final question, “Did you eat what its masters served you?”

The wind stirred the trees into a momentary frenzy, drowning out his answer. But the matron read his lips and nodded gravely, blanching and shrinking into herself for a moment before she straightened her back. There was sorrow in her eyes.

“Wait here,” she said softly, “I’ll be back in a moment.”

She left the soldier sitting cross-legged on the grass, peering up at the lightening sky. He felt sluggish now and prayed that the peace of this moment would last for the rest of his life. In the distance, beyond the trees, he made out the cruciform steeple of the church to which his ashes would be confined. A small murder of crows flew behind it, complicating its simple shadow. 

This was the last thing the soldier saw before the miller’s wife cleaved his skull in twain, careful not to spill his cursed blood in the pristine stream. The trees themselves seemed to convulse with laughter at this dubious mercy.

***

K. Thompson (she/they) is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, where she lives with her cat. Her hobbies include eating Pad Thai and staring forlornly at her unread book pile. Her work has appeared previously in Grim & Gilded. She can be reached at kthompson.fiction@gmail.com