The Manor of the Damned
On the very last evening of that blustery month of October lost to time somewhere in the distant past, the manor was alive with monsters and candlelight. Every sconce and chandelier was lit with a dozen flickering candles, better to light the scenes of voracious festivity within its walls. While it was well past midnight, guests continued to arrive, leaving their coats and human faces at the door. Demons, witches, ghouls, and every beast from the furthest reach of imagination made their way through the witching darkness, whether by plush carriage, windswept horseback, or dew-kissed foot, over the marsh and hillsides to the glowing countenance of the manor, that pulled, like the moon itself, every half forgotten nightmare known to mankind into its awaiting arms.
The entry hall yawned wide, welcoming every guest that wandered through those open doors; the living, dead, and those suspended in between were invited to feast and dance and display their terrors. A grand staircase of ebony wrapped its way to the upper floor like the Midgard serpent, where rooms of every earthly delight beckoned those who could hear their call. The halls and adjoining rooms were decked in lavish tapestries, embroidered with scenes forgotten to man and time, cast into brilliant life as the candlelight caught the decadent gold and silver thread. Furniture of every century crowded the rooms, where time carried no power and busied its hands elsewhere.
Shelves, tables, and book cases carved with unholy and cherubic features served as altars for mankind’s bygone nightmares– carved stone Gods, bones of beasts that passed in and out of existence unknown, photographs caught in silver of faces that had never been or who would one day be, and in every room, books, thick with whispered secrets, archiving the innumerable follies and atrocities committed by the hands of man and monster since the dawn of perceivable time.
These objects and their histories go unnoticed, as the evening is not about secrets, or those harsh faiths of eras past, or even the departed; it is about revelry. Down the flights of stairs where feet make not a sound, to the front hall where dawn will soon beckon through the open door, they enjoy the sights, the sounds, the feast.
The banquet table, a stately piece of nostalgia brought overseas from the old country, was alluringly burdened with a feast as varied and elegant as the guests that ladened their plates and lips with its fare. Swollen gourds of every shape and size, bulging pumpkins and golden squash among them, served as decor and seasonal crockery, their innards disposed of and replaced with punches, simmering stews, and pattes. Beside them lounged fragrant loaves of bread, still steaming despite the advanced hour, slathered with fresh butters and jams of every fruit to bloom on earth since the fall of eden. Beside these gathered platters of cheeses, in blocks and wheels of gold and ivory, veined with mold. Fresh apples, red as the devil and twice as sweet, dipped in molten candy and bittersweet chocolate were piled high on platters like so many delectable corpses. The roasted bodies of fowl, cloven-hoofed beast, and other, less familiar flesh, shimmered with grease and tantalizing flavors, the smell of which filled the hall and beckoned out the windows into the pre-dawn murk.
Cider and mulled wine poured ceaselessly from barrels older than the country, decanters of glass so fine its lip could cut flesh, and simmering cauldrons that still held tight to the tastes of the centuries of dark arts they had birthed. The sounds of goblets being filled and meeting in garbled toasts could be heard across the dining hall, among the tittering gossip and bellowed “hullos” that come naturally to those who have not made the other’s acquaintance in a millennia.
And all around they danced. They screamed and howled and fed and cackled over the music as it swelled and cantered, instruments of string and brass and polished wood dueling in harmony beneath a vaulted ceiling depicting all that was once known of heaven as the floor upon which they danced reflected the inferno which they all knew so well.
Those intimate with eternity are the most familiar with endings. Over the revelry, the debauchery and ecstasy, came the sound of a blackbird’s morning trill, the first in a dawn chorus upon which they all cease their dancing, feasting, and laughing to listen. Again it comes, cutting like a scythe announcing the harvest. Not a soul remained in the manor, which was not empty nor abandoned, but existed only in the way of unexplainable things. The birds continued their chorus, the dawn continued her climb, and the first of November arrived.