Mr. Salamance lay happily dead in his king sized bed in the master bedroom of his luxurious mansion estate. The source of his happiness lies within the sunken faces of the four vultures plotting round his bedside. They had just received the vainglorious news. As things stood, they would not be receiving a single cent or misanthropic morsel of their fallen Patriarch’s exuberant inheritance. Said inheritance was instead set to be allotted to one sole beneficiary, a so-called “distant relative” by the name of Jordy Sweeler. A common nobody. This of course did not sit well with the vultures who set to strutting and pecking round their gratified non-benefactor. But hope was not altogether lost for them, as the true cruelty and pettiness of Mr. Salamance came in the form of one serendipitous stipulation:
“Jordy Sweeler must spend three days and three nights within the Salamance Estate. If the beneficiary fails to meet this requirement then their rights to the aforementioned inheritance, including all capital and real estate, will be forfeit and said inheritance will then be left to be distributed between the remainder of my surviving relatives.”
***************
Jordy exited the cab with his shabby green backpack in tow and punched in the key code for the gates as the cab drove away. The gates creaked open and he entered the estate mildly disappointed by the sight. The grounds were far more unkempt than he had imagined they would be. Ivy had a stranglehold on anything made of iron. The lawns were Amazonian like. The walkways - oceans of autumn and dead leaves. But being unkempt wasn’t anything he wasn’t already used to. He was a poor slob. It was just a dream he had for a moment, as if beyond the gates lie not just “money”, but another world, a world of extravagance and wonder unlike his own, a world wildly out of his means. Regardless, more money was always good, especially money he didn’t have to earn and money that wasn’t going to eat away at his meager moral center to keep.
He discovered that he wasn’t only a sore loser but a sore winner as he considered how annoying it was going to be to clean this place up before he flipped it.
“How does one flip a place like this anyway? Maybe the old man’s lawyer knows a guy that can help. And when I say “help” I mean “do it all for me.” He brushed off his only pair of clean blue jeans as he gingerly crept his way through the fallen bramble. As he approached the mansion, with its awesome size and eerie gothic mystique, he pulled out his beaten up flip phone and made his first 8:00 am morning check in with the lawyer-man William Davies.
***************
An arm lifelessly hangs through the top floor railing. Blood trickles off the middle finger tip with an audible drip to the hardwood floor leagues below. A wet crunch like strong jaws through flesh and bone is heard by no one as the arm slinks out of sight with a dragging into nearby darkness. A glint in the dark rolls and sets before the railing - a ring of twisted silver etched with submerging flames and a scaleless saurian. As the ring rests, blinking out of sight, the foyer doors awaken beneath the leagues, heavily opening at the entrance down below.
***************
Jordy put his backpack down and set about opening the drapes of the windows on the first two of five floors. He never liked being in the dark, figurative or literal and when he entered the mansion, the only source of light came from behind his back and into the entryway of the foyer. This made his first course of action to disperse the darkness, at least within the nearby vicinity. Two floors seemed to be a reasonable area of operation for at least the first night or two and Jordy was too out of shape to be walking five floors worth of real estate. He was reminded of this by his heavy breathing and sweaty brow that he got just by opening the front door. To be fair, the door was heavy and stubborn. It felt a little too large for its hinges and stuck a bit to the floor. He was going to have to investigate the estate in its entirety at some point, but it was ever in Jordy’s nature to “do it later” and let excuses prevail.
Going from one side of the foyer to the other, Jordy crossed an illuminated stenciled eye design in the middle of the floor. The lids looked like shutters, and the limbal ring was populated by ten nearly identical island bodies. He felt a tad disturbed by having a giant eye right there at the entryway, but didn’t think much of it beyond that. He was never a man to take interest in art or any hobbies he deemed as “pastimes of the rich”. He wondered if the eye would affect the bottom-line as he noted a droplet of red which looked like blood. He bent down and casually scrubbed it away with his thumb. It was wet.
***************
Jordy bit listlessly into his plain turkey and whitebread sandwich while walking the red velvet carpet halls of the second floor. His dirty tennis shoes left traces of the outside world where he walked, and his hands groped the many intricate door knobs of the many guest rooms. He enjoyed the feeling of his fingers rubbing against the ivy and daffodil carvings of the inner knobs, entranced by this new ritual whilst finishing his sandwich.
He did not look inside the rooms, for the doors were locked. Perhaps there was a skeleton key somewhere on the property, Jordy thought, but he was in no rush. More important was keeping himself busy and boredom free for the duration of his stay. “Knowing things is for people who have things.” He was going to be a haver after three days and nights.
That prospect of an almost certain brighter future elicited a grin, which then faded as a door did open before him. It was a door in the uncertain present, the molested knob pulling inward and away as if shy. But Jordy had no key and the door had been locked like every other.
His hands take on precipitation.
In the dark he hears a groaning plea.
“Assist me…..please.”
A smell then assails his nostrils, reminding him of the rodents he contended with daily, but just the dead ones, the ones that had simmered and stewed somewhere in his lodging too hot and for too long.
He retches.
His innards claw.
Then relief, as this smell was for a moment and it passed through him like a spirit. It was replaced by a dusty poorly ventilated smell. He flipped on the lights and sighed inside the uninhabited windowless room. He relaxed his shoulders, breathing deep as if to supplant the old smell with the new, as if to supplant the misgivings (filling his mind) with musty air.
Turn off the lights.
Knowing was for “the having”.
Shut the door.
***************
At the bottom of a clear shot glass swirled a hazy brown liquor reflecting the current shade of the early evening. Jordy sipped it meekly and poured himself some more. He’d been drinking at the reception hall bar since early afternoon, scavenging two full bottles of unlabeled alcohol and making it last. He was a slow and patient drinker. Alcohol was an expensive habit that he didn’t have the luxury of forming, so he savored any chance that he could get to relish the taste and he wasn’t picky. Whatever was in the bottle he was currently partaking of, it wasn’t like anything he’d ever tasted. It had none of the familiar scents, flavors, or percentages. It did however have the familiar effect. It was doing wonders for his nerves that he was failing to keep in check. He could block certain lines of thinking from entering his mind, but he couldn’t ever get his body to stop shaking, not without the help of expensive “medicine”.
Taking another sip of the medicine in his glass he let the weight fall away, like the backpack he left in the foyer, the disturbance he left in that room upstairs, and the weight of the world in which he lived outside.
“I could use another sandwich.…” he said to himself as the dark poured in, billowing as if from the seams. It was filling the room like smoke that he could breathe, but made his heart heavy. He questioned his sight and mood, equating it to drunkenness till the footsteps came. They were a quiet thunder upon him, roaring soft yet heavy footsteps of a large agile beast that caused his hairs to stand on end. He could not see the thing, but it was near. He heard its low pitched squeaks and deep toned sniveling. This artificial dark had robbed his sight, keeping out the natural light, but dark and danger sharpened his remaining senses. Slinking low he crawled as a glob dripped viscous on his shoulder. His mind screamed to hurry, but his body knew better, patiently worming his way to the end of the bar, feeling along its side, excruciatingly aware of his own sounds and the glass still glued to his hand. If only he could set it down without worry of making a sound, of bringing unwanted attention. The sniveling had turned into a snarl, sniffing and scurrying closer when inspiration finally struck him.
The glass barreled gracefully down the length of the bar, crashing to the floor at the other end. Like a gunshot, the beast was lured and Jordy was off to the races, crawling manically far and away, hopefully toward the foyer and his desperate escape. He could not hear pursuit, but he did not stop to think nor care. He would flounder forward frantically until he reached the doorway.
***************
“Aww come on!”
Jordy aimed his flashlight that he retrieved from his backpack and frustratedly rattled the lock latch on the massive front doors. It was unlocked but the doors still wouldn’t budge. He did have a hell of a time opening them getting in in the first place and it felt to him as if it would take equal or greater effort to open them this time around. That effort meant noise, loud and attention grabbing. That artificial dark was still present and the “beast” within it. He could hear it beginning to prance and pick up steam, still hunting him in the reception hall. It was a matter of time before it would expand its search and trying to brute force the door would no doubt give away his location. There was no guarantee of opening and closing it on time either. He didn’t even know what logic and rules still applied when it came to this “thing”. Jordy could only operate within the rules that he knew and adapt based on the information he had gathered. Whatever it was still acted like an animal. It was vulnerable to trickery and subterfuge. It could be sidestepped and avoided. “So let’s reposition, get some distance, and “wait it out’...my specialty.”
The torch beamed a concentrated low light quiveringly forward through the spiraling staircase. It dissipated down the wide birthed hallway leading deeper into the mansion. He progressed one foot in front of the other, slow, low to the floor, wobbly with the slightest touch of onset drunkenness. It took to him as he moved further into the dissipation of the light.
There at the edge, his senses blurred with the moments. He could hear a distant ringing in his canals. Errant gun fire. Horses. Shouting. A woman spoke gently, coaxing, on the ether.
“Come…onward….this way.”
He was drowning to the air, moving sluggish along the burdensome seafloor, naive to any potential threats that gained behind him. He was overwhelmed yet somehow moving on, riding a momentum from sources unknown.
Jordy stumbled into the kitchen, unawares, as a force accelerated down the hallway, rippling the space behind him. Sobering from adrenaline, his instincts took him to the ground. Crawling as before, he hurried to a nearby cupboard rattling some pots and pans as he did, bringing attention.
The beast clattered on the table tops, whipping, and lashing about. Its snivels became more frantic, agitated. It was honing in, settling itself on Jordy’s place of hiding. The end seemed so near now as the drool seeped into the cupboard, lubricating the joints, threatening to detect.
There had been no time given to think. He could only act. There was only instinct, and it brought him here, to this cupboard, to this deathtrap. The panic was setting in. He was keeping his breathing quiet and steady but his hands were doing something rogue. They were fiddling in his pockets for his phone.
“Why am I doing this?” He wondered.
“Maybe it’s one last grasp at straws, a desperate call for help, or perhaps a dying message in my final moments…”
Whatever it was fell moot to the reality reflected blankly on the flip phone screen. His phone wasn’t turning on. “Was it not at full battery last I checked? Fuck!” he cursed inside his dreading mind.
“I’m dead. I’m dead. I’m dead.” He repeated as the weight crunched harder down on him, his protective shell ready to crack under the pressure at any moment. He was to be like those lobster or shellfish dined on by the rich on tv, cracked open and oozing out into a welcome salivating maw.
The rat-like sniveling was in his head now, burrowing, making him faint. The last line of defense did seem to break as the door splintered and his consciousness gave way to black.
***************
ring ring ring
ring ring ring
The ringing was too much right now. It penetrated the headache center of Jordy’s brain activating hangover protocols. Muscles ached like from sleeping on a hardwood floor.
“Why?” Who would be so annoying as to call right now, he bemused. “Oh, right. I’m not dead?”
He banged his head trying to stand in a cupboard. It wasn’t possible. He lurched forward and rolled out and through the barely tethered door onto the kitchen floor, agitating his sore back with fallen utensils. A fork poked a little too aggressively into his hand. The phone kept ringing.
What phone?
His pocket still contained the only phone in which he was wise. It wasn’t working.
So what phone?
He followed the ringing, remembering the events of the previous night, realizing that there was daylight, and feeling relief at a lack of imminent threats. This led him back to the foyer. This led him back to the eye.
A landline phone sat ominously cordless in the center, in the pupil within that ring of isles.
Mindlessly, he picked up the phone.
“Mr. Sweeler...”
A deadpan voice responded on the other side of the impossible phone line. Though the background fed static, the voice was clear.
Jordy cleared his throat.
“Is that you William?”
He clutched the obsidian cradle, waiting for a reply.
“Congratulations on making it to day two.”
TO BE CONTINUED