Midnight Visitors

Okay, I'm stuck on The Devil's Bride and Gregory's Pen, so here is the beginning of a new short story inspired by my prompt at Jane's Inspirations, The storm raged outside.

The storm raged outside. Lightning pierced the blackened sky; thunder reverberated through Caleb’s bones, rattling his teeth. Wind whipped rain pelted the large stained glass windows angrily, the sharp plunks echoing in his ears. Hail began to fall, striking the glass with force. Caleb winced with every impact, expecting the glass to break beneath the might of nature’s rage.

The candle he held in trembling fingers flickered its flame erratically on the walls. Shadows surrounded him, skulking through the light, taking shape and form as they circled him with hungry eyes. He longed to call out for his friends, but feared what else may be lurking in the dark. The hallway he wandered stretched out before him, the end of it lost to the darkness beyond the candle flame.

They had been offered shelter from the storm by the Master of the estate, a tall, spindly young man with pale, waxen, corpse-like flesh. His cloudy blue eyes had devoured the trio as they stood on the porch, shivering in the rain. Without a word he answered their frantic request by silently waving his arm in acquiescence, welcoming the strangers into his home.

As they entered a uniformed man emerged from the shadows, presumably a butler. He had led them through twisted halls to a wing of rooms buried deep in the estate. The three men, Caleb, Rusty, and Danny, each settled into a room, stripping themselves of their wet clothes to trade them for dry ones that had been mysteriously laid out on the beds, by whom they could not guess. No one knew they were coming. It was purely happenstance that their car broke down in the middle of nowhere, with this imposing estate their only hope for shelter.

After they had changed the three men had met in the hall outside of their adjoining rooms. The spoke quietly in the dark, unsettled and afraid; the Master had not yet offered them the use of a phone, and their cell phones received no signal this far in the country. Whatever had possessed them to split up and wander the estate searching for a phone was beyond Caleb at this moment.

As he crept down the hall, he noticed the portraits of the Master’s ancestors lining the walls. Their eyes bored into Caleb, hunger radiating from their painted depths; gruesomely animated corpses frozen in mahogany frames for all time, each longing to break free of the canvas that imprisoned them.

The hall was eerily silent, but for the sound of Caleb’s frantic panting and the soft shuffle of his borrowed slippers on the black marble floor. The air was heavy and stale, pressed against him insistently. Repeatedly he felt the presence of someone, or something, behind him, like a cold breath raising the hairs on the back of his neck, but each time he turned around to face it, there was nothing.

He made his way down the endless hall until he came upon a fork. The hall curved around to the left and to the right, disappearing into the thick, inky blackness, but he could not continue forward. He had to make a choice. He loathed making decisions.

As he deliberated his eyes fell upon a portrait of the Master of the estate hanging on the wall at the end of the hall, glaring down at him disapprovingly with those chilling cloudy blue eyes. Perched stiffly in a maroon wing-back chair, he clutched an ornate cane in one hand, a dragon holding a crystal ball decorating the handle. His long black hair was drawn back into a tight ponytail, placing unneeded emphasis on his already gaunt features.

Caleb noticed a date scrawled into the corner of the painting, and at first could not believe what it said. He moved closer to it, sure he had been mistaken. But no, he had not been. The date said November 17, 1835.

That meant that the Master of the estate was over 150 years old! Despite his gruesome appearance, he looked to be not a day older than 30!

There must be some mistake. Surely the man in this portrait was an ancestor of the Master, not the man himself. He peered at the name penned at the bottom of the portrait. Thaddeus Pengrove III. As the Master had never offered his name, Caleb had no idea if that was him or not.

Turning back to the hallways Caleb was startled to find the Master standing directly behind him, and he turned to find his face inches from his own.

“Whoa!” Caleb cried.

This dude needs a bell around his neck, he thought.

“May I be of service to you?” The man asked.

Feeling guilty for wandering the man’s home without his permission, Caleb backed away and stuttered. “Um…I…uh…we…um…I was just looking for a phone.”

“Oh, I am sorry. I should have informed you and your friends when you first arrived. I do not have a phone here. Nor electricity, hence all the candles. My butler will venture into town in the morning for supplies. One of you can ride with him then to find help.”

Caleb’s heart sank at the thought of having to spend the night in this creepy house with its sinister Master, but as the storm raged on outside he knew they had no other choice. They were stuck here, at least until the storm broke.

“May I accompany you back to your room? I would so hate for you to become lost in these halls.” The man asked. Though the question seemed gentle and sincere, something ominous in his voice told Caleb that he did not have much of a choice in the matter.

“Um, sure.” He remarked, even though his room was just straight back down the hall.

“You will have to forgive the primitive nature of my accommodations. This estate has been in my family for hundreds of years, and no one has ever seen fit to update it with new technology. I grew up in this home, so I am used to the lack and have never missed it. In fact, I find it to be quite comforting.”

As a proud member of the Nintendo generation, Caleb could not imagine life without electricity. Not knowing what else to say, he grunted in response.

The walk back to his room took only minutes, though it had seemed to Caleb as though eons had passed as he had wandered about.

“Here we are.” The Master stated as they came upon the door to his room. “Sleep well. I will alert you when Zachariah prepares to depart in the morning.”

“Yeah, uh, thanks.” Caleb said. “Oh, and I’m sorry, but I didn’t catch your name.”

The man bowed deeply in response and spoke the words that Caleb was dreading to hear. “Thaddeus Pengrove the Third, at your service.”

To Be Continued...

'Midnight Visitors' Copyright Patricia Schoenberger 2008, all rights reserved worldwide.