Tenebrae Manor Read online

  “Indeed.”

  Libra licked her sticky fingers and began to drain her cup of coffee. It was increasingly clear that Bordeaux’s presence was frustrating her as much as it was he. Bordeaux rose to leave, such pleasantries with Libra were beginning to grate on him.

  “Sit down, Bordeaux, you fusser! You’re too sensitive.”

  Bordeaux stood still for a moment, before turning back to face Libra and rolling his eyes. “I suppose I do put the boy in flamboyant.”

  “There’s the sweet young man I know. Now, I can tell you that Edweena found the man out in the forest but last I heard, it was Deadsol and Comets that were looking after him.”

  Bordeaux grinned. “That ought to scare some of the youth out of him.”

  There was a pause.

  “So Bordeaux,” Libra smiled. “Since I have so aptly divulged your required information…”

  “… The preparations are coming along satisfactorily.”

  Libra stared up at him through her pool-like eyes, smiling vampishly. She seemed to be attempting to gracefully roll onto her stomach, no doubt hoping her alluring charm would wheedle more information out of Bordeaux. Though she was so engorged, that movement was difficult, unaccustomed as she was to her increasing centre of gravity. As such, there was a distinctive delay in her physical being, demonstrated in this ham-fisted attempt at seduction. Her plump abdomen pressed down into the chaise lounge beneath, as the mountainous shelf of her rear end quivered slowly upon her hips. Propping her head upon her hand, her white fingers twined through her dark curls. “Just… Satisfactorily?” she asked.

  Bordeaux had observed this charade with indifference, his begrudging respect for the lady forcing him to indulge her curiosity. “Satisfactorily,” he said. “Swimmingly, smoothly, without hitch, like clockwork. What more can I say?”

  Libra seemed content with the response. “Such a hard worker, B.”

  Bordeaux shifted uncomfortably.

  “Yes, go then,” said Libra. “I see you want to leave. Go do whatever it is you always do. Bustle here, hustle there. Once you discover life’s simple pleasures, you will be much happier. Eternity is a frightfully long time to spend alone.”

  She poked another pastry into her mouth and simpered.

  “Would that my schedule permitted it, dear Libra.”

  “Oh B, nobody likes petulance. Not when your fabulous queen keeps this house underneath a lovely blanket of night.” A broad gesture of her arm drew the shape of the lengthy window occupying most of one side of her room.

  It was this comment that anchored Bordeaux reluctantly into his position one rung lower than Libra, even though he had to look past the excess of luxuries in the lady’s room in order to see out the window. Her private bedroom was more like a mansion in itself, pressed into a single expanse. Her tables lay adorned with ornaments of great beauty, of metals most valuable, gems most lustrous, trinkets she had gathered prior to her resignation into this comfortable locality. It was here, in the most opulent section of Tenebrae that she was able to live as she desired, in torpid bliss.

  As Bordeaux’s eyes circumnavigated the interior, Libra rose from her seat to lean softly against him. Bordeaux recoiled from the touch of her prominent belly pressing into his side, her deep eyes oozing with the innocence so well feigned by a charlatan.

  “I don’t doubt that you’ll get the rest you’ve earned,” whispered Libra. “Until then, you’ll handle the issue of the human, won’t you?”

  The demon pensively scratched at his chin. “Such trivialities always seem to need my endeavours to ensure proper undertakings are achieved.”

  “It is not unnoticed, love. Now go, I wish to doze.”

  Libra shambled to her sizeable bed, an ocean of crumbled quilts whose quantity almost diminished her remarkable plumpness. Collapsing down onto it and sinking softly into its billowy down, she exhaled a sigh of utter content, as though Bordeaux had already made egress. He remained steadfast to his post for but a moment, a qualm begotten by the abundance of disruptions to his regime choking the last remnants of aplomb from beneath his ribs. Lady Libra was snoring softly within the minute, her assurance of tranquility doing little to influence her emaciated counterpart.

  He had taken upon himself to proceed directly to the ground floor drawing room, where he would undoubtedly discover the very being of his botheration. The human.

  The drawing room in question was a favourite rendezvous for Deadsol and Comets, who were, no doubt, interrogating the poor man this very moment.

  Bordeaux would do well to advance immediately to this room. That is until a rare display of revolt overcame him and the renegade within instead led him to his own quarters, to amass a warranted reprieve. Guilt swam in his lungs with each step away from his vocation.

  His room was a simple one. An apt description when compared to the abundance of his most recent visitation to Libra. A round tower jutting from Tenebrae’s northeastern foundation pointed skyward like a guard’s lance, it was here in this turret that Bordeaux ventured to escape the pressures of life in the manor as master of affairs. If he were allowed but one sliver of personal joviality, one err in the staunched tourniquet of his loyal disposition, it would lie somewhere within the spherical grey stone of his own walls.

  He could not help but smile in relief at the sound of his leather shoes reverberating the stone spiral stairwell entering the room. Up and up he went until the curtain of black ascent was peeled away and his eyes fell upon his nook with blissful nostalgia.

  “There is something in Libra’s words,” he muttered.

  He shook his head though, for he was well aware that were he to adopt Libra’s languid disposition, Tenebrae Manor would swiftly fall into chaos.

  Bordeaux removed himself from the confines of his burgundy coat, further revealing his slim frame, wrapped as it were in his grey waistcoat. The shirt beneath, streamlined in elegance, was of a red so dark as to put even his fine coat to shame. The passion of the most violent primary colour shone from his clothing as the very definition of the word. Were blood to have soaked the fibres of it, it would appear insipid by comparison.

  The demon carefully draped his coat over its rack and placed his shoes beneath it with precise pedantry. His wrists turned outwards as if to absorb the very feel of his room in all its creature comforts. They were comforts of simplicity. His room was decorated with meaningful ornaments acquired throughout his extensive life. On his writing desk, a set of panpipes tied with feathery tassels, a skull of some long dead human being, its eyes dripping with the tallow of a candle placed upon the scalp like a pointed hat. Pendants of sincere craftsmanship displaying the care and love that went into their creation. Within a pearly clamshell, Bordeaux plopped ring after ring of brilliant silver as he removed the ten that he usually wore. One on every digit, each engraved with patterns of paisley or intricate ivy. Inks and paints sat orderly placed upon a drawing board covered in unfinished sketches and manuscripts. Crimson curtains swayed like ghosts in the open window on the northern facade, their movements drawing Bordeaux to the ledge where his extravagant telescope was assembled. A wind was concocting its gusts in the atmosphere beyond and for a fleeting, exciting moment, Bordeaux thought it was the signal of a long awaited cold change in the weather. Alas, the currents were a scalding variety, churning up the torpid air from its stagnant hibernation.

  “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.

  4: Two Very Different Women

  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.