Beyond the Walls of Sleep, They Lie...
Author's note:
This is my entry for the 2019 Gothic Horror event, Beyond the Walls of Sleep, hosted by BlackRandal1958. I truly appreciate an opportunity to be included in this themed event. Thanks, Randi! I especially appreciate the guide to Gothic Horror written by Todd172 and shared by Randi. This isn't as dark as the classic Gothic horror stories, since I can't seem to keep humor out of my horror, nor keep it short. I hope you, the readers, find something in it to enjoy... Cheers!
*~*~*~*~*
[Prologue]
15 April '20
They always wait 'til I'm asleep. At my weakest. They know my shields, my faith, can only protect my core. My chakras. My soul. Keep me being me. I can't stop them fucking with my body when I sleep and they know it.
Tons of black coffee and amphetamine pills only go so far. Then the bastards have me. By the short hairs. They love to fuck with my libido and I can't stop them.
Who's 'Them'? The minions of Ardat Lili, demon succubus and corrupter of men. They crawl out of the shadows and the mists of the mind, circling... ever circling... waiting their chance to drain the life from the righteous.
But they don't just kill you. No, that'd be over too quick. They tease and torture and draw it out. Rumor was, they got my mother and grandmother that way. My grandfather killed himself, we know. My father just plain disappeared. They got my wife that way, too. Turned her into a wanton slut, craving sex with anything that would hold still. Fuck, it didn't even have to hold still. Dildos were a given. So were bedposts. Then she started going after the animals when she couldn't get a human cock. Totally fucked the estate, in more ways than one.
My son, thank God, is safely tucked away at the St. Egidius School for Boys, well away from this family curse. And now I sit and wait for the dark. For Them. For it to start all over again. I can't hide. I can't leave. I can't do anything but wait. I must do something...
Those were the last words in my father's diary. The diary I found after I took possession of the family estate, according to the terms of his will. We never had a proper funeral for him. They couldn't find his body. Just a bunch of blood that the Coroner's Inquest said was his. So we had a memorial service instead when I got the estate, seven years later.
I wish I'd read the diary before I came back home.
* * * * *
Bedlam House was a joke. It was the name my great-grandfather gave to the estate and referenced the infamous Bedlam Hospital. Asylum, more like it. There'd been screwy things going on around our estate from the beginning. What wasn't a joke was the study in contrasts. The manor house itself had been modified and expanded many times since its construction in the 1700's. There were all sorts of small nooks and crannies, with overlooks onto hidden gardens, now fallen into disrepair, or stairwells that had been walled off and didn't go anywhere. Somewhere along the line, oil lamps had been replaced with gas fixtures, and then cloth and loom wiring run through the gas pipes to provide electricity throughout the house. The rooms had as many styles as the house had owners and it was easy to get lost in the myriad of servants' stairwells and passageways, many concealed in the walls with hidden entrances and exits. The place was crazy-making.
The actual estate was a group of farms that had once belonged to the manor, but since the Great War many had been bought up by individual farmers or investors in light industry until all that was left was about sixty-four hundred acres whose rents and produce supported the mansion, and rather poorly at that. Still, if I could ever get all the legal entanglements straightened out, I could sell the place for a tidy sum. If I wanted to sell it at all, that is. Until reading the diary, I'd rather liked the idea of living the life of landed gentry.
I'd been sent away when I was about five. My father decided, for reasons I didn't understand until much later, to send me abroad, to America. To St. Egidius, which was more like a prison than a private boys' boarding school in New England. The last I saw him, he was standing next to my mother at the train station, wishing me a safe journey. Me and Miss Maribel, who was the nanny accompanying me across the Atlantic. To be truthful, I was very excited to be off on a grand adventure, and away from the strict and, to me, oppressive manor life. We were to sail on the brand new, top of the line
RMS Mauretania
, and father had paid for First Class, too. I pretty much had the run of the ship, since Miss Maribel got fairly seasick and stayed in the cabin. She simply seemed to disappear after the gates of the school closed behind me.
Thirteen years at St. Egidius and I graduated with the equivalent of an American High School diploma. The school was mostly a college preparatory course and rather than continue in America, I decided to have a shot at University back home. Our commencement was celebrated on 1 June 1920 and my graduation present from my family was an envelope delivered by a local Sherriff's Deputy containing a notice for a Coroner's Inquest for my mother and father, with no additional information. My present from the school was an American accent that was going to make me stand out like a sore thumb.
So I arranged for my meager possessions to be shipped back to the manor and booked passage back to England, arriving just in time for some very strange weather. A severe frost had recently hit, ruining a number of crops across the country, and a period of cyclonic activity was just beginning, with thunderstorms virtually around the clock. Still, despite the gloom and incessant rain, I made my way home... and found I couldn't live there. As the carriage pulled up to the estate in the pouring rain, I discovered it was a crime scene. Barricades up and nobody but coppers and officials in or out. I ended up taking a room at the Blue Boar Inn, within walking distance of the solicitor's offices and a short carriage ride to the estate. Actually, the Inn is where I met Abigail, a barmaid who would become a much better acquaintance later on. It was also within walking distance of the Coroner's, where the Inquest turned up several things -- the first, most surprisingly, was that there were no bodies. Not of my mother and not of my father. Just a lot of blood, which the housekeeper had reported and which the Coroner said was most likely my father's. A lot, in this case, being an estimated gallon or more, splashed all over the bedroom where the housekeeper found it.
Which is why it was in actuality a
Death In Absentia
hearing and the net result was no determination of death, which meant waiting the seven years before I could take possession of the estate and until then, it was still an active crime scene and I was debarred its use. The solicitor, a man named Mr. Phelps, arranged to have the estate's trust manage the rentals and finances and so forth, and pay me a living allowance. I told him I wanted to go to University and ran into my first shock. My American education didn't help me one damned bit with the college admissions process -- couldn't pass the religious test and my Latin and Greek were horrible, among other things. After finding out all the hoops I was going to have to jump through just to get into a University, I got discouraged and gave up.
Instead, I got Mr. Phelps to find me an apprenticeship with one of the bigger farms in the area so I could learn how to manage my estate when I finally got control of it. The more I got into it, the more I became convinced that the only thing my "boarding school education" was good for was having learned how to game the system and get away with virtual murder. That and some interesting sexual education, but other than that, generally useless.
* * * * *
Seven years later I was sitting in Mr. Phelps' office with a couple of other people and listening to the reading of my father's will... a man that I truthfully didn't really know. Other than £10,000 to the man who had been his Manager and £2,500 each to the women who had been his Housekeeper and his Secretary, the rest of it went to me. No surprise there. I made sure I had all the necessary documentation, endorsed by the Magistrate, and set out to take possession of "my" house, ironically on a day very much like the day I had returned -- cold, dark and wet. I engaged Mr. Lancaster, who had been my father's Manager, and Mrs. Wearing, who had been my father's Housekeeper, to help me open up, dust off and set to rights the house which had sat stagnant for seven years. I quit my apprenticeship with Mr. Thompson and until the house was ready for me to take up residence, I maintained my lodgings at the Blue Boar and commuted by horseback.
[Monday]
When the day finally came to move in, I was surprised to find that Mr. Lancaster and Mrs. Wearing declined continued employment and wished me good luck with my new life. As they were preparing to leave, Mr. Lancaster handed me a large keyring full of keys and Mrs. Wearing handed me a thick bound ledger, along with a smaller set of keys.
"These keys open just about every lock on the estate, I imagine," Mr. Lancaster told me. "I've labeled the ones I know about. I wish you good health and good luck, Mr. Fitzgerald." As I shook the man's hand, I had to ask what he knew about the disappearance of my father... anything he might not have told the Coroner's Inquest.
"I don't rightly know," he told me. "Your Old Man just went 'round the bend, son. Got more 'n' more withdrawn. Simply left it to me to run the business and deposit the cheques. Hadn't seen him for a year before Mrs. Wearing found all that blood and reported him missing."
"That there's the official and unofficial ledgers of the manor," Mrs. Wearing cut in. "The front part is the house inventory, the middle is the usual transactions and the back is the off the record stuff. It's the copy I kept, after things started going strange."
"Yes, about that going strange..." I prompted. "Is there anything you can tell me about my parents going missing?" I figured I had the opportunity to ask, I wasn't going to squander it.
"I kept house for your father," she answered me. "And up until the last couple of years, he treated me right fair. He had a couple of rooms he said were private and I was to stay out of, but I took care of the rest. Your mother started acting strange, though, right before she disappeared. Nigh onto ten years now. I didn't know your mum was missing, since your father said she was feeling poorly and he was taking care of her. Then one day he didn't come down to breakfast, and missed lunch, too. So I went looking for him. I couldn't find him anywhere. Then I thought, what if something happened to him in one of his private rooms? So I plucked up my courage against his anger and I found a God-awful amount of blood all over the South Turret loft. But no sign of your parents. That's when I called the constables and had them take a look."
"And I suppose that's when they decided it was a crime scene and locked everything down?" I asked.
"Well, not right away," she told me. "They did a fair amount of searching first. They were still there when it got dark and I had to go home. I wasn't living in the house, you know. Just taking care of it. It was a few days later that the Chief Constable announced he was turning it over to the Coroner."
"And what of the other woman at the reading, Mme. Renault, his Personal Secretary?" I asked. "Did she live here, or commute?"
