Blackwood Manor

I

Mr. Blackwood’s unofficial report was delivered via mail-courier to the office of Detective Chief Superintendent Weisman on the Tuesday before Christmas. The inquisition into the alleged disappearance of Mr. Blackwood’s immediate family was launched promptly the next morning.

As per DCS Weisman’s request, Detective Inspectors Hill, Davies, and Stockton were dispatched to investigate the supposed vanishing of Mr. Blackwood’s family at his countryside manor posthaste, and departed from the Criminal Investigation Department in London, England, 9:00AM Wednesday morning, December 21st, 1887.

The typical journey from London to Oxford spanned eight hours via stagecoach, yet the Inspectors were bludgeoned by harsh December winds and impeded furthermore by ice-filled ruts and snow embankments, having to repeatedly exit the wagon to clear white, heavy blockades by hand. An eight-hour ride devolved into a miserable twelve-hour expedition through bumpy, ice-clogged lanes and the dreary countryside of Middlesex and Buckinghamshire counties, with the Inspectors not arriving at the City of Dreaming Spires until 9:00PM, Wednesday evening.

Mr. Blackwood could have solicited aid from any Oxford law enforcement agency, and in doing so saved the three Detectives a long, bitter, and arduous journey through drab and unforgiving territory as a ruthless ice age pursued them, its winds so arctic in temperature that the songbirds were petrified within suits of ice from where they perched atop feeble gray branches, but an untold relation between Mr. Blackwood and DCS Weisman — a fact which demanded the upmost confidence on behalf of the Inspector’s thoroughness — had been reason enough for Mr. Blackwood to forestall any class of survey in anticipation of their arrival, even though his situation was of an urgent and dire nature.

Ever-darkening county roads greeted the Inspectors upon their hasty exit of Oxford, which itself was in a state of frozen turmoil, barely a shriven soul to be seen shrugging below the tall spires of its archaic cathedrals.

Mr. Blackwood’s affinity for the paranormal, and indeed his fixation on all things daemonic and disturbed, were well known to the Inspectors. Specifically, to DI Stockton, who had professed her admiration of Mr. Blackwood’s macabre scripture on more than one occasion, and who kept a copy of his most famous work, ‘The Penitent Puppet,’ on her desk. It was because of Mr. Blackwood’s notorious infatuation with witchcraft and the occult, and his depictions of haunted, eerie venues within the bulk of his literature, that the three Inspectors were not in the least bit surprised to find his newly constructed estate located deep inside the very ominous and largely uninhabited Wychwood.

The stagecoach nearly strayed past Mr. Blackwood’s access unaware, for an opaque ice-fog had consolidated above the fossilized Earth and permitted the Inspectors a grim and ghostly view of the woods outside their window. Fortunately, the driver possessed sharp eyes and he nudged the horses off the main thoroughfare, into a deeper mist and a darker evening.

They soon came upon a gate, slick and vividly black against the twilight fog that weaved between its tall, spiked bars. The Gothic barrier was guarded by a pair of grotesquely cruel Gargoyles of unimaginable life-like proportions and facets, squatted on the tops of stone columns and scowling down at the intruders. The horses whinnied at the sight of those medieval sentinels and halted before the closed gate; which, upon their halting creaked slowly open to allow them passage, though none of the Inspectors glimpsed a gateman or any such device.

The mutual feeling shared amongst the shivering Inspectors when Blackwood Manor revealed itself through the spectral fog was a collaboration of childhood fancy and absolute dread. The building was more fortress than manor, half estate and half asylum. Eight tall windows of the Gothic Lancet Arch style occupied the upper façade of the manor, with many long, rectangular Romanesque windows along its bottom floor, suggesting ceiling heights of about six meters. The central window was a circular motif with rich tracery that could be seen despite the night’s darkness, below it a carved wooden door suited to a fabled giant. The pallid exterior was complex with such a myriad of traditional and ancient architectural designs that to detail them all would be perplexing, such as the Corinthian style portico of the entranceway, or the triangular neoclassical Greek pediment above it, an inscription that read:

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate

An Italian phrase translated to English as: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

The phrase was familiar to Detective Inspector Stockton. She recognized it as a favorable quote that Mr. Blackwood repeated in his malefic and enigmatic scripts. The stagecoach curved around the frosty halo-shaped drive — at the center of which loomed a dark hedge groomed to form the hideous profile of a cursed Gorgon, like some malign imitation of a gentler art — and DI Stockton’s blood chilled at the sight of those bold, foreboding letters inscribed overhead.

It was as the stagecoach came upon the wide marble staircase and the bulk of the strange edifice was lost due to proximity that lightning flared in the slate sky and whitened the manor and the stingy, dying trees near it. At the same moment in which the world resumed its dim and somber appearance, Inspector Hill noticed the essence of a woman lingering mysteriously in the corner of the immediate second floor window. He was about to mention the vague silhouette to his colleagues when it, and the yellow light that made its wraithy image possible, vanished and the glass went dark.

The front doors opened to expose a hollow gulf inside the home, scatterings of weak lights twitching in the void like scarce fireflies buzzing about a tomb. Mr. Blackwood was not immediately perceptible in the manor’s threshold, for he stood motionless at the edge of a gloom that yearned to escape the mansion, and his outline was dwarfed by all that blackness. Detective Inspector Hill was the first to discern the claimant from the rest of the grunge, and he waved politely but Mr. Blackwood remained inanimate and for a moment DI Hill thought he was hallucinating.

The Inspectors exited the coach and stood abreast, shivering gently in the cold. They were still in awe of the magnificently eccentric structure born of a madman’s fever dream, and wished to secure as much of it to memory as possible. They were also anxious to meet the mad designer, although Mr. Blackwood did not descend the stairs to welcome them, but idled inside the immense doorway as if stepping foot onto the cold marble would erase him from existence.

Their eagerness to behold the unconventional author was due to the common knowledge — common among the devotees of Mr. Blackwood’s grim and unnatural literature — that Mr. Blackwood had never been glimpsed by the eyes of any earnest admirer, casual reader, nor even his publishers. Those followers of his grisly memoires participated in hushed debates as to Mr. Blackwood’s actuality in the physical realm, and it was a popular thesis that the writer in question was in fact an apparition, or a supernatural being of the sort, perhaps raised from Hell or among the living for time unknown. Of course, said theories were discussed only between the more… unusual fanatics, of which Detective Inspector Stockton teetered on the fringe.

The stagecoach driver busied himself with the exhausted horses, granting the Inspectors leave to advance while he cared for the stout beasts; he promised to join them inside shortly after. The Inspectors agreed without argument and climbed the formidable steps to where Mr. Blackwood waited covertly in the doorway.

“Welcome to Blackwood Manor,” He said as the they entered his unnatural shade. “Please, come inside and warm yourselves at my hearth. I had expected your arrival many hours ago, and was beginning to consider that a frozen woodland beast had seized you between its serrated jaws. Thank the Moon you have escaped that torment, and are now here to join in mine.”

The disturbed novelist’s vernacular was even more spellbinding than the Inspectors had anticipated. Mr. Blackwood’s ghostly voice rose from a windy chasm somewhere in his chest and his tongue lashed together a careful configuration of words without effort, allowing him to transmit fright by mere enunciation of syllables and manifest an aura of unease around the Inspectors, all of who appeared flabbergasted by Mr. Blackwood’s odd greeting, yet who followed him inside nonetheless.

II

Mr. Blackwood escorted them from the grandiose foyer, where empty suits of medieval armor stood vigilant against craggy stone walls, and where corridors stretched beyond the master staircase into a dark oblivion, and into a hallway. The passage was long and narrow and carpeted by red velvet. A confounding collection of portraits made up the décor of the hall, apparently pillaged from every corner of the globe and hung in Mr. Blackwood’s manor. There was the Eastern European hag in traditional blue furs standing in a blotchy forest, a dagger in her gloved hand and a dead, mangled baboon at her feet. There was an Arabian man with scorched pits for eyes and flaming hands raised in worship of Allah, the deranged Muslim painted against a backdrop of desert sands.

The depiction of a rugged Hungarian warrior with a bushy mustache caught the attention of Detective Inspector Hill as he moved briskly behind his silent host. The candlelight from a nearby standing chandelier gifted the illustrated man, and the severed head he flaunted, tanned and lifelike visages, and Hill felt both their eyes follow him as he approached. After DI Hill had gone some distance and glanced back at the painting, he swore that the murderous Hungarian and his gruesome trophy had indeed followed him with their flinty eyes, though the notion itself was impossible.

The inquiry began in the parlor, with the Inspectors and Mr. Blackwood seated in walnut armchairs of the French Renaissance fashion, all gathered before a large stone fireplace. The hearth’s mouth measured three meters in height, and the hellish flames within licked the singed black roof of their cage. The depths of that inferno were inconceivable, and Inspector Hill, mesmerized as he was by the chaotically dancing fire pixies inside the vaulted conflagration, had to forcibly deviate his attention to Mr. Blackwood, beginning the interrogation by asking, “Is it true that you’re alone here, Mr. Blackwood, and that your wife and children have gone missing, leaving neither note nor evidence behind?”

Mr. Blackwood considered the question, gnawing absently on a tobacco pipe that no one had seen him produce. “I confess that my love, Sarah, and our darling children, Victor and Anna, have absconded this estate,” He said, “and although I say abscond, the truth of my family’s midnight evanescence remains vulnerable to interpretation, for you say true that there was neither a note admitting reason for abandonment, nor was there the slightest hint as to the direction they had fled; nor, and the most shuddersome of all attested facts, was there any indication they had ever departed, for when I awoke in the early morning hours to find them absent, a frigid and violent storm shaking this structure’s very foundation and blowing dead branches helter-skelter across the petrified grounds, I discovered no missing garments from either my Wife’s wardrobe, nor from my children’s, and both Victor and Anna’s doors were firmly shut, the mesh screens of their windows securely fastened.”

Mr. Blackwood then paused to puff leisurely on his pipe, apparently revisiting that peculiar morning in search of further insight while a suspenseful silence pervaded the room. His eyes — which Inspector Hill noted to be dark-ringed and somber, and a likely repercussion of insomnious nights — stared contemplatively into the giant’s forge they parleyed in front of. The only sounds within the vastly hollow parlor were the pops and crackles from burning logs, and the gentle hiss of fire from the numerous iron-clad braziers that cast humanoid shadows cavorting across blood red tapestries and across mounted silver shields with mysterious emblems on their polished façades.

Mr. Blackwood spoke at last, bleeding the room of its nervous air before the anticipation could coagulate and choke his guests. “To answer your query,” He said, “yes, my family is missing, but the precise state of my isolation is yet to be determined. Understand that my manor is extensive, the chambers many and the hidden alcoves where one might remain concealed innumerable. Although I did draft the complex schematic of the building in which we now sit, I fear that in the days since Blackwood Manor’s original conception I may have forgotten the very secrets I designed. That is why you are here, Inspectors. I believe that our combined cunning shall prove ample means to surmise undeniably that my family no longer resides here, and that they have forsaken me as one might spurn a slave owner who’s back has been turned.”

Inspector Davies cleared his throat and said, “Mr. Blackwood, you speak as though you would have us search through your home to simply determine beyond a reasonable doubt that your wife and children have not fallen prey to some medieval booby-trap that you neglect to remember designing. Is that the right of it?”

“Not precisely,” He said.

Inspector Davies leaned forward. “Yet, you infer strongly that such an unfortunate demise is probable. I hear the certainty of it in your voice. It would seem to me that you’re afraid your family has not fled, but has been swallowed by this estate.”

“You would be unwise to postulate so boldly,” Mr. Blackwood said. “Surely my house is no sentient creature capable of consuming living matter, for it is inanimate and without soul. I merely suggest a thorough and meticulous examination of the various chambers and the more secluded nooks therein by your sharp and experienced eyes. Upon proof of my family’s absence I will insist an outward investigation begin posthaste, with the intent of ascertaining their current whereabouts.”

DI Hill grumbled incoherently under his breath. In that spacious silence the other’s eyes were instantly upon him.

“Something to add?” Mr. Blackwood asked, his predatory glare causing Detective Hill to fidget in his seat.

“Aye,” Hill said. “How is it that your family could have avoided you for the better part of a week inside the same house? I don’t understand. Even now I can hear the rustling of wind outside, and also the whisper of moving air in the connecting passages. I hear the creak of wood above our heads and I hear the minute tink of flexing glass. Were we not so close to the fire, which in this broadly vacant space roars like the surf of some riotous seafront, I wager I could hear your thoughts, and even the pitter-patter of the spiders within the walls.”

The party’s attention shifted to Mr. Blackwood.

“True,” He said, tapping his pipe against the chair’s arm and letting ash sprinkle to the floor. “Your astute observation begs me to disclose yet another daunting aspect of this mystery, for my nightly manor has not been without sound. On the contrary; ghostly wails have gusted through its darkened halls as though a passel of sinners endure heinous torture behind some unknown door, and when from my bed I creep into the dim corridor I am paralyzed by such trepidation that to encroach upon the source of ghastly discord would be to wander willingly to the headsman’s axe, as I would surely perish of immense fright.”

DI Hill frowned and exchanged a disapproving glance with Detective Davies, yet Inspector Stockton appeared fascinated and wholly absorbed in Mr. Blackwood’s ludicrous narrative.

“You believe that your wife and children have been crying out in the night, Mr. Blackwood?” Davies asked, “or are you trying to impress upon us — men of science, mind you, and of reason — that the halls of your estate are bedeviled by howling spooks?”

Mr. Blackwood sighed and raised his skeletal hands to signal his aloofness on the matter, then said, “Perhaps my dark imagination has muddled an otherwise transparent situation.” And as if to contradict that exact statement, and to corroborate his chilling account, a strident groan not unlike a wraith’s mad shriek erupted somewhere within the home and echoed off the walls of the long, portrait-strewn passage and into the parlor, drawling its unearthly death-rattle to a slow end.

Goosebumps prickled Detective Stockton’s forearms and DI Hill shivered, but Davies remained stern if not for a slight palpitation of his heart. “Just the door,” He said, quickly. “Our driver has entered the manor and brought with him a shrieking gale.”

“Indeed,” Hill said, unnerved nonetheless. “I shall retrieve him and insist that he join us here by the fire to melt the chill off his bones,” Hill said, rising from his chair. “I will return momentarily.”

The others watched him leave, his footsteps resounding infinitely across the tiled floor.

Detective Inspector Stockton then posed a query to Mr. Blackwood. “If your suspicions are proved legitimate,” She said, “and your wife, Sarah, and children, Victor and Anna, have secretly escaped you in the dead of night, what provocation had hitherto occurred to twist their actions down that dramatic and dire route? Surely a desertion of this magnitude was justified in the eyes of your family; and, likely influenced to some degree by yourself. Otherwise there is no logic in a family displacing themselves during a fitful winter storm, and only a few days from Christmas to boot. No, that makes little sense. I must assume there was foreshadowing; an event or an argument that prompted their decision to castoff. Perchance a growing dislike of you or of this manor. Are you a violent man, Mr. Blackwood? Did your wife fear for her safety, and for the safety of her children?”

Mr. Blackwood guffawed and threw up his hands at the notion of violence. “Absurd,” He said. “I would not strike my wife any more than I would gouge the eyes from my own head. Nor my children. I can assure you that everyone felt quite secure and not the least bit threatened while in this house. Understand that Sarah and I have been lovers since the summer of 1845, and not a day has passed outside each other’s company. My son, Victor, studies the same English literature that enraptured me as a young man, and he promises to be an even greater wordsmith than myself. Anna is a brilliant pianist with a predisposition for composing beautiful music. Her melodiousness is so euphoric that even the famed Clara Schumann would writhe in envy at the sound of it.”

Mr. Blackwood scowled and a network of thin lines fractured the chalky skin near his mouth. “No,” He said, “there was no warning. My family’s vanishing was not a midnight extrication forced by a cruel or otherwise perverse atrocity that I had perpetrated, nor was there a preceding dissension of the sort. Their truancy was as complete a shock to me as if I had awoken to find the sky drained of blue and the sun extinguished and crumbling from the heavens in a hail of fiery comets.”

“I see,” Stockton said, to which Davies added, “I noticed upon our arrival that your stable was full of upset horses, likely disgruntled by the frigid temperature, and that a single coach sat idle in the drive. The mystery surrounding your family’s means of escape, whereby you explained there was a blatant lack of evidence indicating anyone had ever risen from bed or left their apartments, implies that the aforementioned coach is the singular vessel of transportation here, and that all the horses are accounted for. This avenue of reason also implies that your wife and offspring would have strayed into the bitter tempest you described barefoot and without luggage, thereby insinuating a journey to the closest city of Oxford with frostbitten toes and no valuables to exchange for a room at the Inn.”

“Quite right,” Mr. Blackwood said.

“Yes,” Davies went on. “and thus, it is my opinion that this investigation be halted at once, for these affirmed facts make it clear — at least to me — that your family never left the manor, Mr. Blackwood, but have befallen a terrible fate at your murderous hands, and that our summons here is merely a charade to dismiss them as runaways. I would go so far as to guess we will find no trace of them within the home, and that — deduced by your fatigued eyes and sickly appearance — you have been awake the last few nights digging graves somewhere on your property and cleverly disguising them so that no Inspector might stumble upon their existence.”

Detective Stockton gaped at Davies but made no attempt to speak. His reasoning, shrewd as it was, contained a disturbing amount of sense, as often his practical judgments did.

“Yes,” Davies continued, “this haunted atmosphere you’ve strived to create — what with the advent of vocal ghosts and the generally spooky overtones you’ve implemented in the appearance of this eccentric mansion and of yourself — will not work to blind me, nor my partners, for I can see through the deceptions of a common showman, and I recognize a preposterous yarn when I hear one. In fact--”

It was near the end of DI Davie’s accusatory rant that the door to the parlor swung open and Detective Hill emerged from the long passageway completely unhinged.

“Inspectors,” He said, short of breath, “come, quickly, the stagecoach driver has vanished!”

III

“What do you mean he’s vanished?” Davies asked, tossing a vengeful look at Mr. Blackwood as he rose from his seat.

DI Hill stopped short of the gathered chairs to catch his breath, then hastily narrated his version of events with as much definition as possible.

“I came upon the front door,” He said, “to find it closed and properly secured. The only sign of our driver was a fresh pool of moisture in the foyer, where he must have entered and waited for someone to direct him. The area was dark and lit only by a pair of standing chandeliers and bronze braziers mounted deep within the corridors that stretch beyond either side of the master staircase. Puzzled, I opened the door and stepped outside into cold, pelting rain. I descended the marble staircase and spied our horses all retired inside the stable, alongside the other wild-eyed beasts, and no where our driver.

“Inside the manor once more, I realized there was a trail of wetness leading from the doorway into the right passage beside the enormous staircase. I followed it, trying not to peer into the slanted faceplates of the silver warrior husks who lingered motionless against the stone walls and reflected the dingy light of the braziers.

“Soon the hallway became too dark and I lost track of the water droplets shed by our now missing driver. The extremely sparse lighting made it impossible to tell the corridor’s extent and I was startled by mounted animal heads that reared out of the darkness like dead faces flourishing behind one’s closed eyes.

“I continued half-blind until reaching a vague intersection, which at its center lay a spiral staircase descending to unknown fathoms. I called out, ‘Driver! Driver, are you down there?’ and my voice reverberated back to me like the cultist chant of the Satanic choir.

“I leaned over the banister of the underground stairwell and tried to locate a bottom, to no avail. I could not see a single shape beyond the third stair, although a freakish noise did greet me from the depths of the gloomy hole. I must describe the queasy sound that rose from the pit as a congregation of sick men retching violently and gagging. This ill concord of guttural, throaty, and putrid dissonances grew in fervor and sounded as though to ascend the vertical tunnel in pursuit of me, at which point I fled back here, and is why I’m sweaty and frazzled.”

Inspector Davies twirled the end of his prodigious gray mustache as he digested Hill’s extraordinary tale. “Unbelievable,” He muttered, then turned to Mr. Blackwood, who sat staring pensively into the fire’s angry lung. “What do you make of this, Blackwood? Where’s our driver gone? What kind of foulness lurks at the bottom of the stairwell?”

Mr. Blackwood shrugged. “Perhaps the gluttonous demons of the third circle. Perhaps the wind.”

Davies snarled and moved as if to strike the sober author, but DI Stockton stepped between them. “Stop this!” She said. “Surely you can not charge our host with yet another crime when he has yet to exit our sight since first we entered here. As a rationale man bound by logic and by fact how can you proclaim guilt when Mr. Blackwood’s alibi is verified by all three of us?”

“Then who do you sponsor as culpable, Woman Detective Inspector Stockton?” Davies asked, using Stockton’s full title in his most derogatory accent.

She thought, looked about the room, then a clever smile curled her lips. “An accomplice,” She said. “Should Mr. Blackwood be responsible for any harm come to our driver, it could not have been without an accomplice.”

The woman in the window… Hill thought, relieved that he had not imagined her. “It would seem I have missed a revelation of great import during my absence,” He said. “Allow me to forgo any questions as to its substance and suggest a plan of action that will cease this bombardment of allegations and discover the truth of our driver’s fate.”

The Inspectors nodded.

“I propose the three of us, guided by Mr. Blackwood, move to investigate the disturbing sounds of the stairwell. Let us first be equipped with lanterns and with our pistols, which I packed in our luggage and are safely stowed on the coach.”

“I consent to that,” Detective Stockton said.

“Aye,” Davies said, “me too.”

Mr. Blackwood had been silent during the entire discussion, and now creaked slowly to life as though he were a thin, blackly dressed marionette being lifted awkwardly from his chair. “Permit me to gather the lanterns,” He said, “as my house is without electrification. We shall regroup in the foyer.”

IV

It was on a somber, blustery afternoon in the month of December 1886 that a courier arrived at the offices of the Fairmont Building Company with a parcel under his arm and ascended to the fourth floor, where he found Mr. Andrew Fairmont sitting at a wide oak desk and looking frustrated at a heap of papers and sketches. The parcel was signed for and the courier went on his way. Mr. Fairmont recognized the queer address scribbled on the parcel as that of Mr. Blackwood, for it simply read: Wychwood, and stated neither name nor property number.

It had been in the summer of 1885 that Blackwood Manor’s construction reached fruition. Mr. Fairmont remembered clearly the celebration he had enjoyed with himself and an expensive bottle of bourbon the night of. The prospect of undertaking such an immense project had been daunting in the first days, and the mental fortitude to continue took great effort over the following five years, three months, two weeks, and three days. It was not the development itself which caused Mr. Fairmont’s extreme psychological duress, but rather the strange, inexplicable, and often tragic circumstances that surrounded Blackwood Manor’s erection.

A carpenter by the name of Oslo was the first man to fall victim of the peculiar bad fortunate that accompanied recruitment on the Blackwood project. It was a calm spring morning and the manor’s foundation was being laid when a scaffolding plank snapped under his gangly legs and his head cracked open like an egg on a slab of black stone. Two weeks later Robert Herbert, a stonemason from Southampton, was crushed by a structural wall that tumbled sideways for no apparent reason; and, the following month, Mr. Humphrey of West London had a regrettable accident involving a frayed cord, which left his neck gashed and his life seeping into the dirt.

But it was not the bi-weekly fatalities that pushed Mr. Fairmont’s constitution to a point of collapse; not even when a landscaper uprooted a nest of vipers — which had no business on the British Isle — and two men perished due to their corrosive venom. No, it was when the builders not only started to disappear, but to go utterly mad.

Beginning in the summer of 1882, with the final case of spontaneous insanity being April 23, 1885, 16 men lost their minds while building Mr. Blackwood’s ridiculous home. Young Tommy Fillinger came to work on a Tuesday morning and by lunch was speaking in tongues. Someone found him at 3:00PM tearing off his fingernails with a pair of pliers. Stephan Mormont vanished on the 12th of June 1883, and the rumor was that he had left his wife and moved to Scotland. It was not until a Spanish laborer disappeared at mid-day without a trace, and the consequent week Danielle Crofton — a jolly man of exquisite health and sound mind — ran unexpectedly through the unfinished halls of Blackwood Manor while raving that a horde of malign Pixies nipped at his genitals, that the tradesmen, and Mr. Fairmont, understood something unnatural had taken root in their construction site.

Nonetheless, Mr. Blackwood’s repulsive amalgamation of every architectural style from the primal stonework of the ancient Saxons to modern-day Victorian-era delicacy was finished. Now, after no correspondence with the macabre artist since the doors were shut and the keys mailed to an address somewhere in London — Mr. Fairmont never did meet his employer, all the funds, designs, manifests, and various communications being transferred between a third party — a parcel was clutched in his trembling hands bearing the mark of that secretive man.

Mr. Fairmont retrieved a glass from the bottom drawer of his desk and poured himself a stiff bourbon. He opened the package. Inside was a wordy letter describing an event so outlandish and with such a prevalent mood of occultism that Mr. Fairmont misunderstood the text to be a new manuscript written by Mr. Blackwood, and that it had somehow been misdirected in the mail.

#

I was in the library two days prior to the fabrication of this most dire appeal, Mr. Blackwood wrote, browsing a treasured collection of Lord Byron’s unpublished cantos, handwritten and gifted to me by a certain Countess of Loveless during a deviant encounter in the year of 1840, before my marriage to Sarah and unbeknownst to a certain Earl. It was as I leafed through the flimsy pages and admired the young Lord’s romantic diction that I was assaulted by a foul odor that had begun to permeate throughout the library.

I placed Lord Byron’s private scripts on my writing desk and rose from my chair, embarking on a rather futile circuit of the library’s lower level to ascertain the stink’s source, sniffing leather spines and holding my nose high like some mad-hound for the scent of blood. I found no particular area that offered a more potent sense of the odor, and so I climbed the staircase to the second level of the atrium, where I at once noticed the stench grow in rankness. I followed the increasingly noxious musk to a unit of shelving no different from the others on the elevated gangway of dusty literature and knew it to be the birthplace of the rancid bouquet, for at that proximity I gagged on the unearthly stench—what I imagine exuded by a fat, gelatinous alien’s corpse as it slowly decays in a graveyard of spoiled fruit and discarded trash.

I began an indiscriminate removal of assorted tomes from the shelving, dropping them carelessly in a pile. It was during this haphazard search that I fumbled upon a thick book that would not separate from the shelf. I tugged on the spine but it did not budge, and when I tried to tilt it, there was a distinct click and the shelf swung outwards.

It was a secret doorway, and within the portal I beheld darkness. There was neither up nor down, nor left nor right. It was infinite space; a vast galaxy without light. Despite its impenetrable depths, the vile taint souring my nose exceeded all previous notions of repugnancy. The endless nothing reeked of ruptured spleens and of excrement and of a foreign blight that I could not comprehend. Retch burst between my fingers and dribbled onto my sleeve, some being swallowed by the blackness. Then came a high-pitched squall like an ethereal Humpback crying out across countless leagues of murky water, and I slammed shut the disguised door in fear that whatever beast dwelled inside the stygian abyss had called to me, and that I might be drawn into its lair.

As of now I have banished myself from the library for fear of being lured into the anomaly. The shrill echo of that stench-infested hollow has taunted me each night since its discovery, pervading the otherwise sterile halls of my manor. I worry that absent assistance, I will be seduced by either my own curiosity or that of the siren’s call, thereby straying over the precipice and into nihility.

What I ask of you, Mr. Fairmont, as you were the chief coordinator of my estate’s construction and the overseer of its total assemblage, is that you grant me some much-needed insight as to the above-mentioned black hole’s origin, and reveal to me the identity of the man responsible for covertly manufacturing it into the skeleton of my home.

Signed, Mr. Blackwood

V

Detective Inspector Hill braced himself against the balustrade and suspended his lantern over the abyss, straining to hear the abhorrent clamor that had previously spooked him and discovering that silence governed in its place.

“I hear nothing,” DI Davies said, frowning at Hill’s idiotic attempt to rouse the vulgar upheaval by dangling his lantern above the dark, subterranean passage. “Stop wasting time, Detective. Let us simply descend the stairs and uncover for ourselves what lies below. If our driver had released a cry of agony in the moment that his life was stolen by a dastardly crook it has undoubtedly faded by now, along with his life, and I’m confident that upon our arrival downstairs we will discover unmistakable evidence of his doom.”

Detective Hill sighed. “It didn’t sound like one man,” He said. “It sounded like many, and all dying of some horrible disease.”

“I can assure you there is no sick ward beneath my manor,” Mr. Blackwood said, “nor is there an axe-wielding lunatic roaming the lower passages and mutilating stagecoach drivers like some disgruntled Minotaur in an underground labyrinth.” He moved to the edge of the spiral staircase and gestured for them to follow. “Let us make haste, for the sooner your consciences are cleared of this regrettable debacle the quicker you can rest, as to prepare for the morning’s search.”

Detective Davies held his chin up high as he pursued Mr. Blackwood into the stairwell, followed by Inspector Stockton. DI Hill loitered a moment longer in the creepy antechamber, using the meager light of his lantern to scan the various hallways in a desperate attempt to establish a more viable course for him to investigate, as the stairwell frightened him horribly. Alas, each hall stretched into a shadowy oblivion and none held intrigue. Feeling small and vulnerable in the stark emptiness of Blackwood Manor, DI Hill fled after his colleagues.

The walls of the stairwell narrowed exponentially until he was forced to stoop and to slouch as he shuffled awkwardly down the steep stairs. Detective Hill chased the dull echo of his partner’s footsteps but no matter how fast he clambered down the cramped tunnel he could not catch sight of them. Only the wispy remnants of their breath hovering in the chilled air admitted their physical presence, and when Hill reached the bottom, his fellow Inspectors were gone.

His glass beacon did little to dispel the darkness that clogged the slender passage which he exited into, but still he discerned its walls to be the same breed of dingy sandstone that he had once happened across in the burial chambers of Giza. A hurried survey of the proximal area confirmed no slaughter had taken place, and the fact that both left and right sides of the linear passage continued infinitely into blackness was suggestive that no single person could have butchered a man, cleaned the bloody mess, then slunk off like a thief in the night.

This revelation did little to calm Detective Hill’s shattered nerves, however, for he worried the ghoulish producers of the revolting sounds earlier exuded might reveal themselves from the extensive pitch and lumber towards him like a legion of groaning cadavers. In consideration of this terrifying fantasy, which had rapidly taken root in Hill’s mind, he abandoned all hope of solving the abrupt exodus of his colleagues and sprinted back up the stairs.

Once above ground, Hill found a degree of solace in the dusky antechamber’s high ceilings where before he had found dread, and now too a marginal relief thanks to the numerous byways of which he might escape should an unknown terror encroach from the depths he had so briskly quit.

Detective Hill paused a moment and listened to the edifice expand and contract, hearing its muscles creak woodenly. He wondered where Stockton, Davies, and Blackwood had gone, conceiving no possible explanation for their impromptu vanishing act, save for a secret doorway or a mechanical device that altered the stairwell’s route. This rumination was cut short, however, when an unexpected howl from somewhere behind him, down the corridor of mounted beasts, prompted Hill to unholster his pistol and dash into the nearest corridor, his heart gushing in his ears.

A sequence of hectic turns ensued Hill’s speedy withdrawal of the antechamber, the Detective veering left and right without committing to memory his uncoordinated flight down unkempt passages littered with wooden crates and crooked portraits of mean-eyed noblemen. The section of Blackwood Manor through which DI Hill made his spastic journey seemed in great contradiction of the previously viewed localities of the abode. For example: the wallpaper peeled sickly from the veneer, and there was such an abundance of mutinous cobwebs fleshed from dead chandeliers to curious statuettes that DI Hill was repeatedly ensnared by them, and flailed childishly in the silky nets as he tried to break free before whatever eight-legged mutant had built them could creep across his skin.

The dank maze eventually led to a long hallway with black and white tiled flooring and a series of pane windows by which pallid moonlight flooded its lengthy extent. Hill moved cautiously through the twilight and soon came upon an open doorway, and for reasons outside his knowledge decided to peer inside. What he observed were crimson sheets draped over gnarled, many-armed coat stands like weathered skeletons adorned with red capes, and old chairs with their faded red upholstery tattered as if a rabid mongoose had been loosed in the room. A case on the wall displayed an exotic collection of beetles, and when Hill glimpsed the wings of a verdant insect twitch, and from the corner of his eye saw one of the covered stands ruffle its sheath, he promptly exited the chamber and pressed on.

It was after a lightning strike blinded Inspector Hill and rattled the windows that he witnessed a dark man shrug into a doorway at the hall’s end, gripping its threshold and clutching his gut as he limped inside. Almost instantaneously, a second electrical flash occurred and Hill was efficiently dazed. When his vision cleared, the stranger’s wounded passage was proved by a bloody trail smeared across the tiles from Hill’s feet to the room the man had entered. Hill followed this grungy secretion with his pistol at the ready, the corridor seizing violently as lightning flared and impish shadows gamboled across the wall.

VI

Mr. Blackwood’s personal garden was the physical manifestation of a mad botanist’s pipe dream. The domed ceiling’s rain-streaked glass sheltered a region of haunted forest conjured from the pages of Germanic folklore. Stunted, ugly timbers with gloomy umbrellas towered above Detective Inspector Hill the instant he entered the perverse woodland, and a solitary trail of gritty dirt weaved serpentine alongside a babbling brook, its waters inky and slushing onward into the foreboding wood.

Upon closer inspection of the gargling trench Hill noticed peculiar yellow cacti and oddly shaped pumpkins — both of which suffered from some alien blight that bestowed them with colors not wholly describable — sprouting grotesquely from the black soil, which itself pulsed hideously due to a plenitude of succulent earthworms writhing in the moist terrain. He looked into the blackened water and was aghast to discover aquatic, snake-like creatures squirming upstream like bloated leeches through a river of rotten blood.

Already disgusted, Detective Hill advanced along the path’s center, keeping in mind the marine blood-suckers that occasionally splashed loudly as they broke the water’s murky surface. Also, DI Hill minded the obscure critters who scrambled through the underbrush a mere two or three paces from where he trod, their orange-glowing eyes regarding him from within the tangle of foliage. So too did Hill listen to the unsettling serenade of horny bullfrogs as they belched hoarsely from the sloppy holes in which they resided.

It occurred to DI Hill that the garden was too big. It was far too spacious when considering the absolute size of Blackwood Manor, and soon DI Hill was deep in its network of roots, small waterfalls, and nocturnal inhabitants. He wondered how the greenhouse had flourished so boldly without a caretaker, despite the flourishing admitting a rather unhealthy appearance, the flowers and leaves all exhibiting unnatural hues and toxic-looking specks. The décor remained a singular aspect obviously unattended, as the bronze and marble statues that peeked mischievously from behind trees were wreathed in layers of dark moss, some crumbling and their deviant expressions cracked to make them more sinister than intended. Only a series of statuettes that were placed neatly beside the path were clear of debris or infestation, though these life-sized cherubs were equally horrible to gaze upon, their faces contorted in agony and their little fingers twisted as to suggest disfigurement. Coiled neatly inside one of the cherub’s marble cradles was a black snake. It lifted its head slightly at DI Hill’s passing and hissed, causing Hill to stray nearer the stream, only to find himself leered at by a black vulture perched atop the railing of a small ornamental bridge that crossed the water.

It was inside a clearing that Detective Hill discovered the end of the bloody trail he had so thoughtlessly pursued into the garden. White benches were sporadic along the area’s perimeter, and at its core was an intricate fountain comprised strictly of naked women sculpted from what appeared to be jade, all bound to one another by heavy chains and water gushing out of their sensually posed mouths to slosh in the reservoir. Near the base of this lurid display of femininity was a pool of blood. Discarded lazily in the crimson puddle was a black suit, of which Hill recalled the wounded interloper to have been wearing. He looked around, into the darkness of the grove, but found no sign of human life, nor could he hear any sound not amphibious.

There was enough blood collected there to fill an entire human vessel, and Hill’s immediate deduction was that someone had hidden the corpse. Yet, what breed of lunatic would first shed the cadaver of its clothing?

Lacking the courage to stray off the path and into the thicket, Detective Hill moved away from the jade fountain and continued along the only route, praying to a nameless god that it would bring him to an exit.

VII

The following pages have been transcribed from the personal log of Mr. Jefferson Eaves, which was seized as evidence during the raid of Blackwood Manor in February of 1888. All indications point to Mr. Eaves having been hired on as Mr. Blackwood’s manservant sometime prior to the incident, and falling victim to a grim demise soon after recruitment. Though the initial date of employment and the duration of Mr. Eaves’ service is unknown, it is believed that he entered Mr. Blackwood’s company in the spring of 1887, and expired anterior to Easter Day. His journal was found badly damaged upon what detectives described as an ‘unholy pagan altar,’ and many of the pages were scorched beyond readability. The ensuing script is one of few legible entries.

#

’Twas stormy yesterday. I awoke to a rather melancholy dawn, which transmuted into an ugly afternoon burdened by gray rainclouds, which then concluded as a night of torrential rains and howling winds. What better occasion for the first of my new Master’s guests to arrive than during a tempest’s wet insurgence?

The first visitors I have welcomed into Blackwood Manor during my short tenure knocked on the front door at a little before seven, which was fortunate because I had finished cooking the boar and preparing the vegetables by six. A man and woman drenched to their bones greeted me, and upon my guiding them into the dining hall, Master Blackwood received them cordially, and with the macabre flamboyance I have come to expect from my employer. Their names were Mr. Heisman and Mrs. von Braun, two young investors from Frankfurt Am Main.

Their business dealings with Master Blackwood were not revealed to me, and I did not care to inquire as it was none of my concern. I presented them with food and wine, then lingered at the fringe of earshot and awaited need of my service. Master Blackwood chatted easily, which I had not expected on account of him being a recluse. It is true that I have yet to see him journey outside this manor, except for the rare time that I caught sight of him in the yard, wandering below the saggy, fruitless fruit trees and perusing the craggy tombstones. The strangers nodded often and smiled half-heartedly, but I could tell they were unsettled by Master Blackwood’s Transylvanian abode. Their eyes kept shifting to the strange portraits and elder relics throughout the dining hall, surely wondering what lurked behind the lavish red curtains and what manner of fossilized skull my Master keeps as his centerpiece.

They drank quickly, undoubtedly due to their nervousness. It was upon Mr. Heisman’s second refill of the 1823 French Merlot that his hand trembled and the glass slipped from his hand, shattering on the ebony porcelain. The vintage pooled, then was gradually absorbed into the floor by no apparent means. Within seconds the entirety of the spill had been swallowed and even the glass shards were bone dry. Mr. Heisman and I exchanged a curious glance, and when I offered to fetch him a new glass of wine he hastily declined.

Master Blackwood shook each investor’s hand after dinner and wished them a good night, then bid me show them to their rooms. I asked if the meeting had gone accordingly, and Mrs. von Braun replied in a thick German accent that it had, though her and her colleague seemed perturbed. They gawked openly as we strolled through a thin hallway decorated from floor to ceiling with portraits of varying size, all of which displayed the same dour gentleman in the same stern position. Once back in the foyer, we ascended the master staircase and onward to the upper gangway of guest bedrooms— thirteen including my private quarters. Neither von Braun nor Heisman remarked on the violent gale raging outside the tall arch windows that loomed opposite the elevated hall, and when presented with their appointed rooms, appeared reluctant to enter.

“Is something the matter?” I asked, to which Mr. Heisman replied, “Nein, only we are tired from travel, und the weather is bad. We hope for the health of our driver.” And though he feigned a smile as plainly false as that of his blonde partner, I pried no further. “Goodnight,” I said, and left them to linger strangely in the twilight of the corridor.

It was sometime after midnight that I was roused from sleep by a wolfish howl that resounded either from my own nightmare or from somewhere inside the manor. At first, I lay frozen in bed, my heart clutched tightly by an icy fist. It was not the first instance in which I have been stirred to alertness by a phantom moan, and I typically dismiss the sound as the lingering echo from a dream and rest easy once more. However, when I shifted my eyes from the dark ceiling to my perpetually opened doorway I glimpsed with great clarity a ghostly old woman. She wore a blanch nightgown and shared an uncanny resemblance with Mrs. von Braun, only seventy years her senior and her visage scarred by age and her hair wispy pale. This spectral interloper had the air of a person tragically lost, and although her gray, glassy eyes peered at me, she seemed not to detect my presence in the slightest, nor understand where it was she loitered. After a moment, she moved from the threshold and glided silently in the direction of Mrs. von Braun and her associate’s quarters.

The aftermath of the previous night’s storm was visible this morning in hues of pink that shone brilliantly in the western horizon and gifted Blackwood Manor a much-need bath of sunlight. I dressed for the day and went to wake Master Blackwood’s guests, only to discover them gone. When I located my Master in the lower halls, where he appeared in search of something, running his hands along the frames of portraits and poking at the wallpaper as though for some elusive button, he informed me that Mr. Heisman and Mrs. von Braun absconded in the earliest hours of the morning, and would not be returning.

Curious as it were, I went about my daily routine with little thought on the matter, while I observed Master Blackwood in a state of utter freneticism. He wandered aimlessly about the estate in complete disarray, apparently searching quite obsessively for something. I spotted him first in the gallery of Persian antiquities, fumbling with golden lamps and thousand-year-old vases. For what he sought, I could never assume, for he looked high and low and in places where nothing of importance could have possibly hid.

After dinner — which he did not eat, but gazed upon solemnly and prodded at with his fork — Master Blackwood retired to the library; a room I am forbidden to enter. It occurred to me that perhaps he was upset about the German’s abandonment the previous night, and when he quit his manic quest to sulk or study in the library, my hunch seemed proven.

Darkness has risen once more in Blackwood Manor, and the shadows that covert in the light of the innumerable braziers and candlesticks have returned. Master Blackwood remains in the library, and as of now, though my room is on the upper gangway and separated from the library by many layers of wood, metal, and stone, I hear acutely the sound of Master Blackwood’s voice, loud and methodic as if he were reciting a terrible, terrible incantation.

VIII

A quick sweep of light revealed that no slaughter had taken place at the bottom of the stairwell, and a brief glance up and down the dizzying channel — which Inspector Davies, Stockton, and Mr. Blackwood arrived in — surmised that the driver had not been brutalized, for there was nowhere to conceal a body in that boggling expanse.

“What is this place?” Davies asked.

“We are in the underground tunnels,” Mr. Blackwood said. “The corridor we now stand in is one of many hollow passages below the estate, which together comprise a complex network of sandstone tunnels, which themselves act as the structure’s foundation. Unless a pack of shabby vagrants has dug their way in from outside, this area is strictly devoid of life. I am afraid your driver is not here.”

“Neither is DI Hill,” Stockton said, suddenly aware they were short an Inspector.

Davies frowned and shone his torch around them, then peeked into the stairwell. “Hill!” He called, waited for the echo of his voice to die, then said to Stockton, “He must have seen something upstairs that warranted closer scrutiny. Either that or him and Blackwood are in cahoots, and he’s gone to develop another bogus story to frighten us with.”

“Hush!” Stockton said. “Mr. Blackwood’s family is missing and we’ve been ordered by DCS Weisman to locate them. I understand your desire to pursue every lead, but other than Mr. Blackwood’s imaginative story and the unforeseen loss of our driver, there is no tangible evidence of wrongdoing. I request that you to cease all vilifying slander this instant, Davies, for you’ve grown paranoid in this late hour and speak out of turn.”

Davies fingered his mustache. “You may be right,” He said. “There is an intrinsically ominous element to this manor that’s severed my nerves and pushed me to leap toward unfounded conclusions. Let us continue with calmer heads.”

But Mr. Blackwood had already continued, apparently bored of the Inspectors’ banter. He was fifty paces down the left side of the passage, his lanky figure gradually diminishing as it, and the flare of his lamp, sank deeper into blackness.

Davies and Stockton followed Mr. Blackwood’s ghost until it was snuffed out entirely, as if he had fallen off an unseen precipice. When they reached a corner and turned, they were surprised to find their host gone. DI Davies assumed that Mr. Blackwood had extinguished his lantern and slinked off, while Stockton’s internal theories were far more inventive than that. The couple pressed onward without Blackwood and without utterance of their obvious dilemma, until they came upon a rather archaic wooden door blocking their way.

Inspector Stockton was visibly alarmed by the presence of this door. She licked her lips, nervously, and wrung her left wrist. “Don’t open it,” She said to Davies. “Don’t even think about opening it. This is the same door that Mr. Blackwood wrote of in his story, ‘The Mad Prince of Tarnash.’ It’s identical to his description:

“’Rotted slats held loosely together like bones strung into a primitive shield, hinges rusted with blood, the sandstone walls glittering beige in the torchlight, and all behind him darkness…’

“That’s an excerpt from when the Mad Prince, Abdul Alhazred, journeyed below the forbidden Tarnash Temple in search of the Amber Stag, descending to the lowest plateau and finding this exact door at the end of a deadly maze.”

“And what lay beyond?” Davies asked.

“Madness,” She said, plainly. “Abdul opened the door with the hope of finding his coveted Amber Stag, only to be consumed by a fiery madness more potent than that which already poisoned his mind. He burned to death in the figurative fire of that insanity, having never passed the door’s threshold to gaze upon his prize.” Stockton then inhaled deeply. “If we open this door, the same might become of us.”

“You’re as mad as him if you believe that!” Davies snapped, reaching for the door handle despite an overwhelming instinct not to. “I’ll not let your ungodly fantasies keep me from my duty!” He gave a yank and the door rattled open.

It was a stairwell. A stairwell hidden by the rotting door and ascending to what both Davies and Stockton hoped was the main level of the manor, and upon their ascension were relieved to find that it was.

The chamber in which the stairs terminated was lit dully by flaming torches affixed to the wall in iron holsters, and there were only two paths to choose from. One was an open doorway that led into an opaque hallway, and the other a square egress to room where more torches could be seen flickering on the walls.

“Which way?” Stockton asked, but a sudden insane yelping from within the semi-illuminated room dictated their choice.

“A Roman bath house,” Davies said as they entered a humid, astonishingly vast chamber with a wide pool in its center, bordered by tall square columns that supported the high ceiling. Steam rose perpetually from the warm water, which was a swampy green, and floated listlessly around the stone beams.

“There!” Stockton pointed, “In the water!”

Davies followed Stockton’s finger to where a man he recognized as their driver splashed frantically in the gross pool, fully clothed and babbling loudly about black demons trying to bite off his feet.

“He’s gone quite mad,” Davies said. “Just look at him there, raving a lunatic’s tune and soaked in the grimy stuff!”

Stockton scowled at her partner and approached the pool’s edge. “Driver, Sir, what is it you’re doing in there?”

The driver quit his flailing and spun to regard Stockton, looking at her with the expression of one truly deranged and beyond reproach. His dark hair was matted against the sides of his face, and his lips were bright crimson from where he had chewed voraciously through them. “Thy daemon!” He shouted, and made to launch himself through the shallow pool at Detective Stockton; only, something small and blurry beneath the filthy surface snagged his foot and he splashed forward, and was hastily yanked underwater.

“My God!” Stockton cried, lurching as if she would dive into the steaming bath and rescue him. However, Davies caught her shoulder at the last second and forced DI Stockton to postpone her bravery.

An intense submarine struggle between the driver and an unknown assailant ensued. They fought fiercely and water surged as they thrashed violently and limbs broke the surface and dove back under. Then it ceased, and the driver floated to the surface, his face submerged and him most definitely dead. Both Stockton and Davies gawked dumbly at his listless corpse from poolside, and it was because of this grizzly distraction that the marine victor was able to swim towards them unseen — its movement like a fat sludge oozing through the murky water, bloating and tapering as it propelled itself forward — and emerge rapidly at their feet, soaring through the air and stuffing its malleable, viscous body directly into Davie’s open maw.

What Detective Stockton witnessed was a spongy black creature spring from the pool, and she turned to look at Davies only in time to see a tangle of gelatinous tendrils squirming between his lips and slapping his cheeks. Then it was wholly inside him and Davies was staggering back, gagging and begging with his eyes for Stockton’s assistance; at least until his eyeballs were pushed effortlessly from their sockets and a pair of wiry tentacles eased their way through, ceaselessly wriggling and testing the air. More sprouted from Davie’s ears and nostrils, and a whole hive of inky appendages pushed open his mouth, writhing in chaotic discord.

DI Davie’s stolen body lumbered in Stockton’s direction, but thanks to her rigorous training at the academy she quickly unholstered her pistol and fired at Davie’s chest. Unfortunately for her, the bullet did not slow him down, and rather than collapse, Davies advanced with angry vigor while the tentacles in his mouth buzzed a foreign, unsettling type of language and Stockton’s gun fired loudly in the bath house.

Every bullet sank into Davie’s flesh without hindering him, and he soon had Stockton pinned against one of the square pillars. She screamed in horror as Davie’s bent awkwardly for a kiss and the gross tentacles brushed Stockton’s cheeks and slithered into her mouth.

IX

Mrs. Gorman’s statement could not be transcribed verbatim, as the information extracted from her came in fits of raucous nonsense and inane gibberish. Special Investigator Marburg, upon the apprehension of DCS Weisman in connection to the Blackwood Manor disappearances, identified certain receipts, applications, and manifestos relating to Mr. Blackwood and his estate, though none openly admitted affiliation. One such bill was addressed to Weisman from a company in London by the name of ‘Chandler’s Service Group.’ Further probing into the nature of this organization revealed it to be a deployment center for manservants; gardeners, cooks, cleaners, private masseuses, etc. Among the paper evidence seized from Weisman’s office regarding the Chandler’s Service Group was a complete list of hired hands and the dates of which their contracts began.

Sixteen said contracts commenced September 23rd, 1885, including Mrs. Gorman’s. Five more names, including Mr. Jefferson Eaves, whose journal was found badly burnt inside the Blackwood residence, were indexed, yet all lacked dates of employment. A meticulous scouring of all available personnel records — both public and within the police archives — accompanied by a lengthy series of interviews, unearthed a disturbing revelation.

Twenty hired servants were either missing or presumed dead, and only Mrs. Gorman could be located. The payments for services rendered by the supposed deceased had continued through one of DCS Weisman’s many accounts, and the Chandler’s Service Group had no knowledge of their hireling’s misfortune. Indeed, all police reports made by the families of the servants, beginning after Christmas of 1886, had been detoured and massed in a locked drawer of Weisman’s desk, along with a sundry deposit of other conspiratorial documents and seemingly harmless sales receipts issued by the Fairmont Building Company.

To acquire a more intimate understanding of the ambiguous events that transpired at Blackwood Manor between September 23rd, 1885, and DCS Weisman’s imprisonment in March of 1888, Special Investigator Marburg walked to St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, which was situated not far from the police barracks in London.

Dr. Henry Keet informed Special Investigator Marburg that Mrs. Gorman had been admitted on April 3rd, 1886, after being rescued by a rural farmer from Worcestershire, who had happened across what he thought was a woman’s corpse on a mucky roadside while on route to London. According to Dr. Keet, the farmer had hauled Mrs. Gorman’s lifeless body into the box of his cart, which at the time was empty. Within hours, Mrs. Gorman supposedly reanimated, and the farmer brought her to sit beside him. The woman was in shambles, so he claimed, and did not utter a single articulate phrase for the duration of their trip. Instead, Mrs. Gorman raved about a horrible cosmic entity the size of London City living beneath the Earth’s crust, slumbering and emitting its otherworldly dreams into the fragile minds of any fleshy human who wandered too near. She insisted that her colleagues had been devoured by this hibernating atrocity from beyond the stars, which she believed had punctured the atmosphere an epoch ago and smashed into Earth, becoming embedded many kilometers below the world’s surface.

Having had listened to the delusions of a madwoman for nearly ten hours, the farmer was happy to deposit Mrs. Gorman inside St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, ensuring that the proper authority was aware of her presence and of her diluted mind before returning to his business.

Special Investigator Marburg was guided into a secure room and Mrs. Gorman was permitted entry soon after. Although she appeared quite deranged, Mrs. Gorman’s eyes gleamed with an acute clarity that Marburg found intriguing, as if she were privy to some transcendent truth that belonged solely to her. A guard was posted outside the door and the interview began. As previously stated, much of Mrs. Gorman’s dialogue was incomprehensible blither. She ranted about gaseous auras that clung to every living creature and consisted of peculiar colors beyond description. She yammered about certain warbles in the infrastructure of time itself that vibrated the membrane of reality at a subatomic level, allowing spirits to wander blindly out of time and torment her in her dreams.

Luckily for Special Investigator Marburg, Mrs. Gorman transitioned between fits of mania and rationale just as Dr. Keet had forewarned, and from what little data she communicated whilst temporarily sensible, combined with the vague details gathered from Weisman’s confiscated files and the few personal documents discovered inside Blackwood Manor, in addition to aligning all appropriate dates, he was able to compose the following narrative:

#

Mrs. Gorman, along with fifteen others, arrived for work on September 23rd, 1885, at a warehouse on the Thames River. From this disreputable venue they were escorted by nameless men via convey to Mr. Blackwood’s Manor in the Wychwood, where their tenure began.

Mrs. Gorman was a gardener by trade, and the terms of her employment placed her fixedly in Mr. Blackwood’s fantastical garden alongside an educated botanist by the name of Creed. She spent her first six months tending to the unusual collection of plant life therein, and ensuring the health of the small marsupials that lived within the domed enclosure. Each day drawled on without spectacle, as living with the infamous author and his family proved more mundane than Mrs. Gorman would have anticipated. Then, on March 1st, Creed, the botanist, never arrived for work.

Mrs. Gorman went about the usual business of water distribution and weed plucking, leaving food in the small dishes for the critters who woke hungry in the night. When Creed had not shown by the late afternoon, Mrs. Gorman grew worried. She vacated the greenhouse and sought Mrs. Blackwood, who was seated in the music lounge with her daughter, Anna, perusing an assortment of musical leaflets.

“Ma’am,” Mrs. Gorman said, “pardon my intrusion, but Mr. Creed never came to the garden today. Is he unwell?”

Mrs. Blackwood closed the musical leaf she had been reading and stroked her daughter’s thin, white-blonde hair, while Anna Blackwood regarded Mrs. Gorman with a sharp, somehow predatory stare from atop her mother’s lap. The sickly child was too old and too grown to sit either parent’s lap, and the image of it struck Mrs. Gorman as perverse. “Hmm,” Mrs. Blackwood said. “Miss. Protsenko has also decided to shirk her daily duties, as I have yet to see her. Perhaps the two are related. Finish your chores for the day and I will ensure that Mr. Creed arrives punctually on the morrow.”

Yet, Mr. Creed did not arrive in the garden the next day, punctually or otherwise, and the following night there were whispers of elopement inside the servant’s quarters. Two days after Creed’s initial vanishing, Mrs. Gorman was alone in the garden and watering a large bed of Dionaea Muscipula (Venus flytraps) that had matured to gigantic, phenomenal proportions, and of which she was worried might soon begin devouring the small nocturnal animals within the garden. It was first in the soil that she spotted the blood, the dirt clumped and dark where it had spilt. This drew her attention to the plant’s pink leaves, and the yellow blades of which were stained an obvious shade of red. Her immediate assessment was that one of the baby possums had finally been consumed by the unnatural plants; however, the discovery of a severed finger below the multitude of gargantuan leaves, like the bobbing, clam-shaped heads of a mythical hydra, quickly dismissed the idea.

The finger was brought before Mr. and Mrs. Blackwood, who could no more devise a creditable explanation for its existence than she who had found it. With both parties hopelessly vexed, Mrs. Gorman was ordered to resume work, but to avoid the carnivorous plants.

The servant’s quarters grew increasingly reticent over the subsequent weeks as more and more rooms went unoccupied. Mr. Feldman rose for work on a Tuesday, never to return, and Mr. Feige fell asleep on Sunday with his lantern flickering gently, then come morning was gone but his lantern still glowed inside the eerily desolate apartment. A hushed acknowledgment of unknown disaster became commonplace, and this general knowing, in conjunction with a prevailing sense of dread that seemed to leech at one’s soul, led to a sharp rise in paranoia, and sometimes violent dissention amongst the workers. The remaining stewards began to spout wild claims ranging in severity from simple paranormal sightings to outright altercations with poltergeists. A consensus was hastily established that Blackwood Manor was overwhelmed by evil spirits, and when the servants diminished to a scanty population of five, they crowded together by withering candlelight and plotted their escape.

It would be through the underground tunnels, Talbert Wexler had proclaimed, that the five remnants of the once happy and productive workforce at Blackwood Manor would make their retreat. According to Mr. Wexler, he had once descended to the subterranean level by way of a narrow staircase located not far from the main foyer. He said that he knew it was underground because his breath hovered like a fog in the air. Before journeying below, he had been replacing the countless dead candles constantly aflame in Blackwood Manor’s many rooms and corridors, and upon reaching the dank space below, was arrested by his own curiosity.

“The passageway was built up of a curious beige sand,” He told Mrs. Gorman and the others. “I lighted one of the Master’s candles, see, as it was darker than night in that place, and that’s how I seent my way though it. The smooth walls went on straight-like for such a depth that looking ahead made me near swoon and topple over, but I went on regardless, stumbling drunkenly with the candle outstretched before me. Soon enough there was a turn, though I didn’t see it until I was nigh upon it. I kept on, moving steadily and searching for something that might quench my curiosity. That’s when I found it, a wooden door blocking the path. It was rustic, see, and near in ruins. I nudged it open with my foot, and before me was a cavernous entrance like some hidden cavemouth that led deep into the Earth, all rock and jagged stone. Well, a putrid stench wafted into my nose at that point, more rank than any filth I’ve yet to clean in my life of servitude. Noises, too, were carried on a chilly breeze out of the tunnel. Sounded like whispers, hear, or like a moan from some far away place.”

“But what of the escape?” Mrs. Gorman asked.

“I’m guessing that the tunnel leads somewhere out into the woods,” Wexler said, “like an escape route in case of a siege, like them built into castles in the olden times. If we follow it, we’re apt to stumble upwards eventually, thereby coming upon the surface and avoiding Masters Blackwood altogether, them daemon worshipping villains.”

The scheme seemed foolproof enough, but so far as Special Investigator Marburg could discern it did not go as planned. Indeed, the company of defects reached this underground tunnel — though please note that no such cavern, nor wooden door, was ever identified beneath Blackwood Manor by the raiding party — but only Mrs. Gorman exited to the surface, and by a route she could not hope to detail, for each time the question was broached her eyes crossed and a fit of mania ensued. This self-detrimental frenzy ushered into the room the orderly, who was forced to restrain Mrs. Gorman lest she tore her hair from her scalp. Whatever anomaly she had seen, or believed to have seen, was so inherently loathsome that to even consider it caused Mrs. Gorman sufficient mental anguish to desire death. It is very likely the root of her shattered psyche.

The interview ended when Mrs. Gorman’s speech devolved into hushed ramblings whispered faintly under her breath, the subject of which pertained to the fictional space monster dozing in its earthen cradle below Blackwood Manor, a thing she refused to speak of openly yet could not refrain from babbling about in quiet murmurs.

X

Detective Inspector Hill wandered aimlessly through darkened corridors and eclectic rooms, utterly adrift in the vast complexity of Blackwood Manor. He had deserted all hope of navigating quick passage through the ever-confusing bowels of the estate soon after exiting the garden, as he refused to revisit the contaminated site, and each turn made, stairwell ascended, and walkway traversed brought him deeper into the oblivion of Mr. Blackwood’s demented creation, and it was not long before DI Hill felt that he was damned to drift through hollow aisles cluttered with dusty antiques for eternity.

Sometime during Hill’s forlorn wandering, as an old grandfather clock ticked incessantly in the otherwise soundless passage and he glanced now and again at his runny reflection in the rain-streaked windows, he came upon a broom closet. For a reason beyond his comprehension, Detective Hill decided to inspect its contents, and was startled when he pulled open the door and a tremendous heap of animal bones spilled into the hallway—skulls and paws and other structural components of what appeared to be cats and dogs, the occasional chimp, clattering across the tiled floor. Most of the skeletons still wore collars loosely between their shoulders and mandibles like the oversized neck bands of an extinct Burmese tribe, and from these ill-fitted collars stretched obscenely long leashes into the closet where they were tangled in a web of thin rope. It was as if the critters had once been utilized as bait on the end of a very long fishing reel, and whatever monstrosity the fisherman had sought to claim had instead harvested the flesh of the small animals and spat out their bones, then that fisherman had crammed the evidence of his failed mission inside the broom closet.

It was several minutes after Detective Hill’s uncovering of the pet mausoleum that he entered a dusky lobby with high ceilings and a foul stench souring the air. Hill traced the revolting odor to a set of French doors with vaulted peaks, where the increased potency of the stink suggested a vile toxin seeping outward through the cracks. The door’s glass panes shined with an unnatural incandescence of orange and green hues as though dangerous chemicals had been spilled within and their volatile compounds discharged a noxious gas. Moral obligation demanded that Inspector Hill set aside his trepidation and venture forth, where he was to discover the very heart of Blackwood Manor’s corruption.

To portray Mr. Blackwood’s personal library as in a total state of chaos would be to neglect the true disparity of its retrogression, for Detective Hill crossed its threshold and into a veritable rat’s nest of scattered paper and occultism. Something like a robbery seemed to have transpired, as the room’s many bookshelves had been pillaged of their stock; yet, one could also argue that a mad necromancer had made a den of the place judging by how books littered the floor like unhallowed grimoires studied and discarded. Candles forged from the spoiled fat of dead pigs further endorsed the theory of a rogue sorcerer, for these disfigured globs of wax sputtered unholy flames of green and orange, red and purple, and a diversity of strange colors that do not exist on any earthly spectrum.

The twinkling collage of alien light, mingled with the extreme ruination of Blackwood’s study, made DI Hill feel as though he had floundered upon a scene of great calamity; and, with the persistence of the noisome odor — now so potent as to leave a bitter taste in Hill’s throat — he highly expected to behold a bloody pentagram and the warm remnants of a sacrificial goat.

DI Hill strayed deeper into the atrium, careful to evade the abnormal candles that were melted randomly to the floor in what appeared to be areas where someone had hunkered and read questionable articles by tainted light. Hill possessed a subliminal fear of those impossible flames, akin to any man’s instinctual mistrust of certain vibrant plants and insects. Because of this anxiety he walked near the ravaged bookshelves on the left side of the room and tried not to look at any light other than that cast by his lantern, what became a futile practice when he rounded a corner and was faced with an altar of tall yellow candles and smoldering incents.

It had once been an ordinary writing desk, but a fanatic’s busy hands had transformed it into a glowing shrine. On the wall above the desk were painted geometrical shapes that Detective Hill could not hope to comprehend. It was like trying to read a foreign language, or to envision a sheet of music that did not exist. They were obviously scrawled according to some supreme scientific principal, but their complex formation boggled Hill.

On the desk was an assortment of shamanistic trinkets placed precisely amongst the skinny towers of wax. There were small figures of beasts that had been reproduced from a primeval shaman’s nightmare, as DI Hill could not recognize one of them, and could only discern here and there a leg and possibly a tentacle, a circle that might have been an eye. These figurines were incised from geological specimens whose sick colors were the same unidentifiable concoction of rainbow as the candleflames, and Hill felt intuitively that they were of no terrestrial makeup.

Hill’s attention was drawn to a thick tome that was the altar’s centerpiece, positioned purposefully at the core of the candles and foreign totems. The book was bound in a disgusting black leather that Hill feared to touch, as the sight of it’s queer mold repulsed him and the insignia bore on its front of a detestable creature that resembled a squid and Minotaur hybrid made him cringe. Instead, he picked up the thin ledger that lay beside it and flipped to the first page.

DI Hill recognized the handwriting immediately as Mr. Blackwood’s. He had read the author’s letter of appeal to DCS Weisman the previous day before departing London, and could never forget such unique penmanship. The page happened to be the first of many entries concerning Blackwood Manor’s — and indeed Mr. Blackwood’s own — curious decline. It was dated March of 1886, and read as follows:

#

The servants have begun to vanish. Sarah’s worried. My darling wife believes that some form of thievery is afoot, or trickery in the least, and wishes to contact the authorities. Naturally, I have forbidden any action that might cause a ruckus. Our position here is quite unknown to the outside masses and I prefer it to remain as such.

At this junction in time it is evident that Mr. Fairmont has chosen to ignore my plea, and will not be assisting me in the identification of the boundless hollow in the library. This leaves myself as the sole investigator, for I can not in good conscience leave an anomaly of such imposing proportions to fester where my children reside, and I fear that soon they will perceive its nauseating stench as I do. The odor pursues me without pause, and it has become arduous to sleep due to its bothersome presence; that and the nightmares that have recently disrupted my rest and haunted me during the daytime hours, of being adrift in a freakish cosmos many galaxies away.

Detective Hill re-read the line describing an anomaly in the library, then cautiously glanced behind him. All to be viewed were the legions of oddly tinted candleflames and scattered books, and Hill supposed Mr. Blackwood to be quite insane. It then dawned on him to look upward, and he gasped at the sight of an infinite black void where the atrium’s ceiling should have been.

To his right was a staircase that ascended to an upper gangway with additional looted bookshelves and mutant candles, but above that was nothing. The ceiling was absent, and in its place loomed the horrifying continuum of endless nonexistence that constitutes the dispiriting truth of outer space. Detective Inspector Hill shrank and trembled below it. He felt dwarfed by the gigantic portal to solar systems unknown and dimensions beyond humankind’s meager understanding, where things larger than the eye is capable of perceiving dwell and unspeakable horrors await.

Hurriedly, he flipped ahead in the journal and read an arbitrary passage:

#

Gone, all of them. I have no notion of where, nor of how, but I do know the servant’s desertion must correlate with my probing of the void in the library. I had Mr. Wexler travel to town two weeks past and hurry back with a crate of parrots, an assortment of cats, and a sampling of differently sized canines. I tethered them one by one to the banister in the library and — though they cawed and barked and hissed as though pitted against a mortal foe — flung them into the vastitude. They floated listlessly for half a minute before blending with the darkness, and resultant of their absorption the elusive beast’s ethereal wail came to me from an unfathomable distance and the lingering stink increased in boldness. Each experiment climaxed with me loitering dumbly in the doorway and the consumed animal’s leash limp in my hand, anticipating some eldritch monstrosity of biblical proportions to swim within view. None has yet made itself known, though I sometimes hear the faraway sound of motion, like the delicate rustle of sand in the desert.

#

DI Hill held his breath and listened for the described sound, and after a second thought he could hear the gentle sloshing of midnight waves against a shore. Unfortunately, this affirmation of sound added to Hill’s panic and he hastily searched for the final entry while sweat trickled into his eyes.

As he read the last words written by Mr. Blackwood, Detective Hill felt the tethers that had kept his prudent mind fixed firmly to the anchors of reality for the past thirty-six years loosen, and an oddly euphoric sense of complacency prevail.

#

December 19th, 1887

All attempts to locate the subterranean lair that exists below my manor have failed. Neither the German hunters of extraterrestrial phenomenon nor the Iranian experts on bygone occults have managed to form a link between the nefarious otherworldly events transpiring herein and the subjects of their respective studies. Neither group remained unto the morning, and it occurs to me that the ancient being who resides somewhere below the manor is growing in hunger, and that my prodding has agitated the part of its dormant mind associated with the assimilation of weaker lifeforms.

I have come to ascertain certain truths about the slumbering oddity by way of tireless research, which is what prompted me to recruit those bohemian scientists. My initial delving was done here in the library, where I pulled every book I had ever acquired on the fields of witchcraft and the occult down from the shelves and studied the text by candlelight. Many volumes I perused, several of which were written in dialects no longer uttered by human tongues, and which I needed great effort to decode. I read The Book of Abramelin the Mage and The Ars Notoria. I flipped through page after page of Kabbalistic scripture and esoteric knowledge, digging deeper into religious dark arts and demonology, going so far as to study the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum.

I was convinced of a demonic presence after completing The Grand Grimoire, also known as “The Red Dragon” or “The Gospel of Satan.” My understanding of Biblical Hebrew is tenuous at best, but with the help of a hired translator I completed the old-world relic, which was of course unearthed in the tomb of Solomon in 1750 and purchased by myself via the appropriate channels. Within the Satanic wisdom written by the Honorius of Thebes — who himself had been possessed by the Devil — I recognized a similarity between several illusory spells and the vanishings in my home, and more than one possible connection to an incidental demonic evocation. However, it was upon my request to borrow some rarer items from a handful of well-known academic institutes in England and abroad that I came to learn of a much greater evil than that which supposedly rules over Hell, for these elder entities spoken of subtly in such work as The Oera Linda Book — which speaks of the lost city of Atlantis and its star-born denizens — are claimed to be of an earlier time than Earth itself, and simply fallen strangers here on what we believe to be ‘our planet.’

I will not bother explaining in further detail these ambiguous lifeforms, and for any who happen upon this ledger and the grotesque tome beside it — whose name is so notorious, contents so profane, and influence so damning that I refuse to reveal its title — you may read the prophetic words yourself and draw from them your own conclusion. (Just don’t read them aloud, lest you wish to perturb the beast’s rest as I have so selfishly done, or to instigate an extinction event to rival that of the Permian Age.)

As for the current state of my endeavor, a final desperate attempt to locate the entrance to the cosmic outlander’s tomb will soon be carried out by myself and three Inspectors from London, who are to be provided by my benefactor and financial scapegoat, DCS Weisman. The crooked chief has buried all news of the missing servants and hired scientific help, and kept my family’s tragic departure omitted from public knowledge. Yet, I fear that if his underlings do not return to London DCS Weisman will inevitably be identified as a fraud and a colluder, and all will come unravelled.

What I hope to achieve by conscripting these Inspectors is that their trained eyes and lack of susceptibility to arcana by the defense of shrewd calculation will prove ample force in pinpointing the whereabouts of the underground vault, where I believe the dozing giant inadvertently rearranges the structural integrity of my beloved manor and imposes its illusory evil on all those who enter here.

Upon breaching the stench-suffused hollow, I ho--

#

DI Hill could not muster the wherewithal needed to finish Mr. Blackwood’s concluding paragraph, and was thus robbed of the opportunity to fully understand the vague truth behind the vanishing of Blackwood’s family.

Hill’s detachment from the page was not issued by a surge of horror as one might expect due to the disturbing nature of Blackwood’s words, but rather because of an inexplicable sensation that left him deadened and incapable of proper thought. It had begun as a slight tingle of the hands and feet — bearing close resemblance to the pins and needles effect resultant of restricted blood-flow — and quickly spread throughout Hill’s body until he was numb and the ledger slipped through his fingers. In addition to the anesthetic prickle was a bloated feeling of weightlessness, as if Detective Hill’s structural integrity had been compromised and he was being dismantled at an alarming rate. A brief fear of losing connection with the floor made his heart want to palpitate, but that mighty organ had become ghostly and Hill could no longer feel it beat. He gaped at the brilliant lights of the altar and tried to reconcile his purpose there, but all meaning of life and existence slipped from mind and he was dumb—too sedated to appreciate the divine transcendence that lifted him from the glowing altar and the diabolical tome, and into oblivion.

XI

Mr. Blackwood had in fact grown quite bored of Detective Davies and Detective Stockton’s tiresome banter, and strolled onward of his own accord. He walked until the sound of their voices was no longer audible echoing inside the cramped byway, then turned to assess their position and was not wholly surprised to see that the light from their lanterns had been snuffed out and of the Inspectors there was no trace; not so much as a lingering essence where they had been.

“Insatiable Cretan,” Mr. Blackwood cursed. “Can you not stifle your appetite but for a minute?” He shook his head and continued along.

The underground passages were an area of the manor that Mr. Blackwood had scoured many times since Mrs. Gorman and her crew of escapees had sought a cavernous refuge there, and he had never once discovered something of interest. There were no natural rooms there, only long, sandstone corridors that he now stalked in silence like the torch-bearing curator of an abandoned mine complex. His intention was to ascend the next available staircase and seek Detective Hill, unless he too had dematerialized. Only, no stairwell ever arrived, and Mr. Blackwood ambled through darkness for some time before coming upon a familiar wooden door that barred his way.

“The Mad Arab’s door…” Blackwood whispered. “But why? What purpose does a door of fiction serve in this dank place, unless to attempt hindrance of my journey by means of false warnings and insinuations of fates worse than death, like the psychotic depredation of Abdul Alhazred.”

Mr. Blackwood scoffed and nudged open the door, saying, “I will not be thwarted by a deceptive prop, and will behold your extraterrestrial bulk if it is the last thing I see!”

The door was indeed the entrance to the underground tunnel that Mr. Blackwood had searched relentlessly for ever since gaining knowledge of the transient and elusive gateways associated with the ancients and their pits of slumber. The dreaded book currently at rest on Blackwood’s purpose-built altar spoke most clearly on the subject, as the madman who had transcribed the forbidden knowledge apparently knew of the giants’ deep burials. Other writings published by the descendants of the original zealots rambled incoherently about the same underground ruins, yet none ever spoke of multiple sites; Also, those unfortunate souls who had by accident came upon the sub-Earth dwellings and were thereby exposed to an especially potent madness detailed earthen cradles in their literature, yet theirs was mostly gibberish and hard to discern.

What Mr. Blackwood considered as he entered the dark shaft and winced at the formidable stench therein, was how incredibly lucky humanity had been that no single fanatic had boasted the courage to wield their profound, unearthly wisdom, and were merely inconspicuous worshipers compelled to pass on their secrets through deranged, apparently nonsensical texts. Mr. Blackwood also remarked on how fortunate he was that despite possessing the mental fortitude to properly interpret the signs and scriptures, and to recite the incantations in the precise tones, it was simple curiosity to behold an inhuman creature outside the limits of his own disturbing creationism that motivated his endeavor, and not an inclination to commence the apocalypse.

After a dozen steps the walls of the tunnel expanded considerably and the way ahead took on the likeness of the shallow egress of a quarry where men toiled with hammer and chisel while the light of their lanterns burnt like hellfire against the bedrock. The gradient was slight, but obviously slanted downward at some degree. The ceiling was low in comparison to the wide berth between walls and remained congruent with the gradual slope, which consequent to delving another fifty meters steepened enough that Mr. Blackwood required accurate footing during his descent into bleak emptiness.

The extraordinarily fetid aroma ceased to bother Mr. Blackwood shortly into his exploration of the vast and mysterious burrow. This was partly to blame on his familiarity with the nauseating, wale-vomit redolence, and partly the fault of the mystical wisps of silvery, almost purple light that had begun to glint far ahead in the blackness, like the spectral auras of depleted spirits flittering forgotten in the tunnel, evaporating nigh as quickly as they appeared. Still, the twinkling soul ribbons provided no real illumination and the only source of light was the lantern Blackwood carried, which tinged the uneven surface beneath his feet a grungy yellow.

An undetermined amount of time elapsed between Mr. blackwood entering the inexplicable burrow and him reaching its sudden end. He almost missed the termination of ground because it cut off so abruptly, and had Blackwood taken another step it would have been his last, and he would have plunged into the unlimited depths of the chasm below.

Mr. Blackwood rectified his position to one of stability and proceeded to extend his lantern past the jagged boundary, but of course its pitiful glow could not penetrate the bottomless gulf nor reveal a hint as to how far it truly extended. Regardless, Blackwood was given the distinct impression that the pit was wider than any canyon carved into the land above and deeper than any oceanic trench, and that he stood on the precipice of an immense hollow created an aeon ago when an intergalactic entity breached the atmosphere and broke through the Earth’s crust, becoming lodged in its mantle. Judging by the destructive route gouged through the outermost strata, the foreign Goliath undoubtedly confessed both size and density greater than any extraterrestrial debris to have impacted the globe since, and Blackwood could sense the overwhelming enormity of its lightless tomb despite the unbreakable darkness.

The implication of ungraspable magnitude did little to dampen Mr. Blackwood’s resolve, however, as the thought of teetering on the brink of such a monolithic crater thrilled him beyond words, and in a feeble attempt to view even the slightest fragment of the abysmal alien Blackwood pitched his lantern into the abyss.

He watched it sink like an ember in a deep well and ultimately be swallowed, thus stranding him in darkness with the dreadful knowing that a cosmic evil lay at rest somewhere behind the veil. He could feel its presence, too, and thought that he could hear its breath, or at least a kind of hushed rustle made by its shifting mass. Something about those minute sounds daunted the audacious seeker, and he knew the time was now.

Gathering every ounce of courage within himself, Blackwood closed his eyes and recalled the diabolical verses he had memorized from the pages of the loathsome, flesh-bound book in the library. The words flared brightly behind his eyes — just as they had when he accidentally uttered the invocation which spawned the atrocious Familiar now loose somewhere in the manor — and he began to recite the ancient spell.

“Flo garath letter auth. Mi phusphusana flo etteret, mingo auth thul flo mnga i. Torund Thulu.”

Mr. Blackwood opened his eyes and was amazed to see that his incantation of light had flourished, and that the old-thing’s cradle was slowly kindling. Sparks of luminescence were kicking upwards out of the pitch, and an eerie kind of translucent orange smoke was rising from below, giving Blackwood his first glimpses of precipitous stone walls seemingly without end or bottom. As the strange, pulsing orange mist became brighter, the outlines of architectural shapes became visible on the walls of what was clearly an intense and almost perfectly circular hole. There were other roosts like the one on which Blackwood stood, and many contained the remnants of what appeared to be sacrificial altars and stone tables for the slaughtering of beasts or men placed before them. Most of these were crumbling ruins, but some had withstood time, and the arched gateways and subterranean ramps leading to them through the bedrock were unmistakable.

Each of the hundreds of scattered plateaus jutting out of the craggy wall were certainly viewing platforms for the abominable atrocity in the core of the pit, whose shape was gradually being defined by the static, light-infused gas. Blackwood had an outrageous hunch that the tunnels leading to the other plateaus did not originate in England, nor even on the isle, but from every corner of the known globe, and that since human beings were very young they had journeyed to the Earth’s core to gaze upon the sleeping deity, which must surely be in some neutral realm only accessible through specific ports.

The earliest suggestion of its physical configuration was so terribly confounding that Mr. Blackwood stepped backwards and gasped. His heart quickened, and it was by tremendous force of will that he remained there to behold its unhindered form.

The great cavern was soon fully lit in an ugly orange hue, and the star-born evil was viewed naked. The monster was larger than the city of London, with each of its hundred slimy tentacles weaved neatly below its upper mass like a nest of black pythons the size and girth of a thing not comparable. Its face, if one could call it that, was slightly human, but mushed into a grimace with eyes of equal circumference to the moon closed tightly. Its skin was scabrous, kind of reptilian, and what might have been enormous horns curled like conch shells from the sides of its squishy head. Of its central body there was no evidence, and something like flattened arms, or maybe wings, were tucked against its bulbous cranium.

Mr. Blackwood no longer felt curious to behold the thing beneath his manor, but wished to flee from the vicinity and gouge his eyes from his head for they had been forever tainted by its cruel, ungodly image. To gaze upon a manifestation of such horror was not for the human psyche to bear, and this fact became immediate to Mr. Blackwood. Something snapped in his mind, and at the same time his senses were overburdened. He could feel the coarse nastiness of the alien’s skin against his own, and the toxic putridity of its shed odor choking his throat and wilting his internal organs. Images rushed into his brain, and for an instant he could feel the accumulated wisdom of a thousand worlds and a million centuries. He saw pictures of indescribable animals, plants, and colors, and the incredible compositions of glimmering cities that wrapped around entire planets without break or nature. He glimpsed symbols and patterns that he could almost identify, then nightmarish splashes of blood and gore prevailed and temporal joys turned to ash as civilizations burned and the world-destroyer that lay dormant below him ravaged cities where no mutant creature could match its stature.

The trueness of the behemoth’s calamitous intent became clear, but Blackwood was powerless and screaming on the crumbling platform and would warn no one—and if he had, what good would it have done? His mind fractured and any sense of reality was abolished. He cried out in unmitigated terror and clawed at his face, dropped to his knees and shrieked as preposterous information and tragic imagery filled him to the brim.

Mr. Blackwood never would find the missing men and women from his manor, nor his family, though he did briefly view the genuine revelation missed by the arcane grimoires and the befouled tome which had led him to his painful demise. And as the spell of light faded and the malign alien’s pit once again succumb to blackness, Mr. Blackwood mumbled incoherently to himself and rolled casually off the edge.

The End