Status Updates From Fengriffen & Other Gothic T...

He was still smiling. The room whirled and spun, his face was the only fixed point in my focus, my eyes were held on his grinning teeth. “You’re not well, Brookes?” he asked. “I . . . dizzy . . . I . . .” The empty glass was still in my hand. I looked at it, saw the points of light reflected along the rim; saw the tiny flakes of white powder in the bottom . . . Saw nothing.

There was nothing on the ground. As I straightened up a drop hit me on the cheek, too heavy for rain, and when I wiped it my hand came away red. I thought I’d cut myself on a branch, and rubbed my cheek, then took my hand away and held it out, palm upwards, to see if there was blood. There wasn’t. And then, as I was watching, there was. A drop fell directly into my palm, thick and red.

I knelt, and felt a sudden beat of sympathetic pain. It was the broken skull of a dog. A brave dog. I wanted to say something, but one doesn’t express those things. Gregorio stared at the skull for a moment, stone faced, and then he shrugged. “It is done,” he said. There was nothing else there. He walked silently back to the horses.

A vision of Susan occupied my mind and then, as the dreams became more powerful than the thoughts and my subconscious mind rejected the restrictions of my will, it became a vision of the splendid Anna which I was unable or unwilling to reject. I yielded to this night-time prowling of the id, the transformation of thought to dream.
I was asleep.
I awoke in instant terror . . .

“I hope you get the bastard. What gun are you using?” It took me a moment to comprehend that. “I didn’t come to shoot it,” I said. MacPherson blinked. “Then what the hell are you going to do?” “That depends on what it turns out to be.” MacPherson snorted. Then he looked serious. He said: “Well, it’s none of my business, but if you’re going to look for this thing, you’d better take a gun with you.”

How uneasy such talk made them! Yet it was but the raving of a scorned woman, they had no cause to hate the foreign bride. Then the deaths began.

I seized the lantern from Jacob without a word of explanation, knowing he must think me mad as I plunged off into the storm, wondering where madness did lie as I hurried toward the graveyard.

On the second circuit, I found the book I sought. I knew, even before I pulled it from the shelf, that it was what I sought; knew, also, that it was the worst it could have been; drew it down and saw that the top was without its coat of dust, and that Catherine had delved into it more than once. The book was Malleus Maleficarum.

“And thus,” I interrupted, “when your mother first came to Fengriffen House, she did not come as a virgin bride.” Fengriffen blinked. “Of course not. A widow . . .” He paused, regarding me with a strange expression. Yes, Charles knew the form the curse had taken. This was not the way to disprove it, and for some time we were silent.

Whittle paused. “Not a pretty tale,” I said. He looked at me rather sadly. “There is worse to come,” he said.

What was more difficult was judging why he had been reluctant to speak to me—had, in fact, displayed all the overt signs of a guilty conscience. Did he, in fact, have some dark secret to conceal, or was his silent suspicion no more than a constant state of mind? I could not decide with any sense of certainty. But one thing I did decide. I was determined to know the legend.

Then all was silent. I was unable to move. I was petrified. Time had no meaning, even my heart was frozen. I stood that way for God knows how long, and then suddenly my reflexes returned, my muscles melted into obedience, and I fled back to the house. “From that moment, all hopes of ever finding peace at this place were shattered . . . I left the mortal remains of my hopes to molder in this graveyard . . .”

“Come, let us walk,” she said. I nodded. “I will show you the place where I walked that morning . . . my first morning at Fengriffen House; where I strolled in solitude, attempting to let the peacefulness seep into me, determined to be at ease and grow accustomed to my new home . . .” I followed her around the fallen tree. “An ill-advised attempt,” she added.

I leaned closer to the window, but there was nothing there. If it had been, it was gone. A jest of deceptive perception, I told myself. Then from the trees came the unearthly howl of a dog—a sudden, rising sound that ceased as abruptly as it had begun, in a way no dog willfully terminates its cry. A dog, I told myself. No more. But strange, formless doubts accompanied me to my bed that night . . .

My first impression of Fengriffen House was skeletal. I saw it from the carriage, rising against a stormy sundown like the blackened bones of some monstrous beast—not the fragile, bleached bones of decaying man, but the massive, arched columns of a primordial saurian who had wandered to this desolate moor and there lay down and died, perhaps of loneliness, long ages before.