deaths, injuries that set a fair old fire of stories blazing. I’d walked in at the perfect time to become the savior of the community.
All I had to do was to point and say, “They’re the guilty ones,” and the entire town became a mob, ablaze with righteous vengeance.
They will fight like tigers, I warned, so we’ll go in a big band like an army. Some of us will probably die, but that’s the risk we must take to be free of this curse.
They don’t sleep in coffins, I told them, but they are more dangerous by night and more apt to be off their guard during the day, from the necessity of pretending to be human. Don’t bother with a stake to the heart, I said—that will only make them mad. No crosses, either, you’ll only waste time while they laugh. Simply hack off their heads, I instructed. Hack the heads and the bodies into pieces, then throw the pieces onto a bonfire.
That should do the trick.
And so it happened that I led a vast, inflamed army to Blackwater Hall—priests and farmers, blacksmiths, washerwomen and their big daughters, stomping along with rolled-up sleeves, everyone—and they took Elizabeth and her husband by surprise and overwhelmed them.
Too inexperienced to vanish into the shadows of the Crystal Ring, they fought for their lives with fangs and nails. They fought with all the desperation of mortals—and thus they fell, hacked to pieces.
The mob spared the little boy, who watched as his parents were cut down before his terrified eyes. Had he known what they’d become? How could he not? And yet, I still believe he didn’t know. His parents had kept up a front of humanity for his sake, ensuring that he only saw what they wanted him to see.
I still wonder what nightmares haunted him down the rest of his years. At one time I would have been eager to know…would have sought him out wherever he was, and hidden in the shadows watching the liquid shine of his gaze questing for me in the darkness…
Strange, I never did. I lost my taste for it, somehow.
In the midst of this carnage, I slipped away.
A column of smoke rose behind me, turning the air bitterly fragrant like autumn—but it was a pyre that burned, not the house itself.
Their children survived. The older ones, I understand, never set foot in Blackwater Hall again. The youngest son, however—once he’d reached an age to make his own choice—lived there until his death; a bachelor. Quite eccentric, quite mad. He never threw anything away, it seems. He filled the place with collections; with animals stuffed rigid under glass domes, with drawers full of fossils and coins, with butterflies pinned in glass cases and huge, ugly beetles impaled on cards. As if, by heaping talismans around himself, he built a great nest in which to hide from the darkness outside.
A grand job he did of tormenting himself; he didn’t need any help from me at all. Some years ago, he died and since then Blackwater Hall has lain empty, a shell loved by no one. And here it remains, falling into slow decline. Sometimes I still come back.
I view the familiar sweeps of grass, magnificent lone trees, copses, the river gleaming like milk in the vaporous gloom. In the distance, the mountains are soaked in layers of folk tale and myth, haunted forever by the black goddess Callee. And there it stands, Blackwater Hall; a great mansion, broodingly desolate. The walls are mottled and flaking, as if the place is shedding its skin with age. The windows, fogged like cataracts with dirt, stare indifferently at long-neglected gardens and stables.
I stand outside and gaze at it for hours, watching it decay by slow degrees. I’m filled with the sensation that it was not I who built the house after all, but some greater power acting through me. In darker moments I feel that I have simply been used in order to create a theatre for some great drama that has yet to unfold. In my mind the house is a sighing black tomb, and in place of antlered stags along the walls, there are horned demon heads.
Thus the house remains to this day—its walls gray with neglect, paint cracking, windows netted with cobwebs and dust. Somehow it withstands the vigorous, mindless invasion of life—the nesting of birds and bats, vegetation trying to drag it down with green tendrils. I wander the grand salons and bedrooms, corridors and attic nurseries,