Her Perilous Mansion

by Sean Williams

  That bright point of light became the fixture of his entire universe. By staring at it, some of the sudden vertigo ebbed, and he was able to remain upright.

  He put his hand to his temple and rubbed it. Was this some kind of migraine?

  Or was it something else, something magical perhaps, making him feel this way?

  He knew magic could be used against people. Sorcerers waged war with each other, sometimes. Sofia Phronesis, famously, had once used trees grown into the shape of letters to distantly bespell two rivals into fighting over a worthless grimoire while she plundered their infinitely more valuable libraries. Her spell had been powerful and persistent, and able to defend itself when threatened, so even the descendants of the rivals still erroneously insisted that the grimoire was priceless.

  Remembering this story, Almanac firmly told himself to return to what he was supposed to be doing. The house. The spell. This was the way forward. He wasn’t going to turn back, no matter what illusions the spell threw at him. The cellar floor wasn’t bucking under him, the roof wasn’t spinning, and he was perfectly capable to continue following where the mushroom maze led him.

  His vertigo abated sufficiently for him to stand and look ahead just far enough to find the next fungal signpost. And then the next. And the next. He didn’t try to see the end of the maze. He didn’t look behind him. His focus lay only on what was directly in front of him.

  One step at a time, he proceeded to another corner, at which he turned left once more.

  Thus, he traversed the maze, back and forth across the rubbish heap, sometimes moving inward, sometimes outward. Even without the spell working against him, he would never have found the way on his own. He could only hope that the riddle was leading him and press on. Left, left, always left … until at last no left was left.

  He stopped to regain his balance. The vertigo was worsening. He couldn’t tell if he had ten steps to go or ten miles. He threw up twice, his head spun in tight circles and he came close to fainting.

  But now the mushroom maze led either forward or to his right – finally! He went right, putting one foot in front of the other and leaning his weight on the shovel as though it were a cane. Another right, and one more, and then … the clumps of mushrooms petered out to nothing.

  He stood staring at the empty patch of rubbish for a dozen breaths, wondering what separated it from any other. It seemed no different at all, apart perhaps from a slight puckered look, as though something was drawing at the surface from underneath, like the centre of the whirlpool that formed when he drained his bath. Or was that just his imagination?

  ‘Well, Olive,’ he said, standing as tall as he could without toppling over, ‘here goes nothing.’

  Raising the shovel, he began to dig.

  Etta slipped the handle of the unfolded sack over her neck so the thick fabric hung down the front of her, patted Silas’s gloves together as though offering her plan muffled applause, raised one foot and made ready to climb.

  But she hesitated. Her anger had had time to cool. No longer did she plan to put the manor behind her and never look back. She couldn’t leave Almanac trapped with a rabble of ghosts. Her conscience would plague her forever.

  No, instead she would get help. There had to be someone who could do something. She remembered the flock of sheep she had scared away earlier. Where there were sheep there was bound to be shepherds. And the shepherds might know where to find a sorcerer who could release them from the spell – ideally one who would work for free, since she didn’t have any money.

  She was like Sogoro, the sorcerer from Ugo’s folk tale, she told herself. This wasn’t running away. This was a rescue.

  First, though, she had to conquer the gate. Preferably before nightfall. Remembering the scrapes she had endured on her previous attempt to go over the wall, she wasn’t naïve enough to assume that the spell would make this climb any easier.

  Taking a grip, she began her ascent.

  It was harder than it looked. Her palms were soon sweaty, which made her injured hand sting inside its gloves, and the thick leather and burlap didn’t entirely protect her from the sharp edges of the ornamental lions. Every piece of filigree ended in a point ready to prick, scratch or cut. Her limbs were long, which gave her an advantage when it came to reaching for handholds, but pulling her body upwards was harder than she had guessed, and those days sitting in the library soon came back to haunt her. Had she known that this ordeal lay in her imminent future, she would at least have performed a press-up or two.

  Halfway, she looked down, and gulped on finding herself much further from the ground than she had imagined. If she fell now, she would break something for certain. That would be a terrible way for her adventure to end.

  Except it wasn’t an adventure, she reminded herself. It was perhaps literally life or death, for her and everyone else in the manor. She had to get out, which meant not quailing, or taking a tumble, or being caught.

  It meant gritting her teeth and climbing.

  A small eternity later, she reached the top, where she halted for a breather, lodging both feet on a lion’s head, holding a spike in each hand, and hanging high above the ground. Almost done, she told herself, where ‘almost’ meant she still had to slither across a barrier of needle-sharp points. But after then, it was all downhill – and that was only a problem if she accidentally lost her grip. Otherwise, nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

  Funny, she thought, how the spell hadn’t tried to stop her even once. She had imagined the gates swaying in such a way as to toss her to the ground, growing unaccountably slippery so she slid back down, or any number of other possible treacheries.

  In the distance, through the thickened evening light, she could discern the top of the manor poking through the trees. Maybe, she thought, the spell was distracted by something else. Could that have something to do with whatever Almanac was doing?

  Only then did she remember that Olive had told her that he wanted to see her in the cellar.

  Etta thrust all thought of him from her mind. He wasn’t her problem. Not right now, anyway. She would worry about helping him once she was on the other side of the fence.

  Gathering her strength for one last effort, she tackled the spikes. It was hard going. Only after three failed attempts did she work out that the best option was to take the bag off first, lay it down over the deadly points, and then wriggle over.

  She expected to be stuck like a butterfly on a pin at any moment, but the bag held her weight without being pierced, so neither was she.

  Poised for a moment on the very top, then leaning her weight carefully over and reaching down for a toehold on the other side, she felt a moment of triumph. She was doing it! She had beaten the spell. She might be penniless, unarmed, and dressed in a slightly ripped chambermaid’s uniform, but she was finally free to find a place where people valued her for who she was!

  But then a heavy weight seemed to press down on her, followed by a wave of sudden nausea. The spell.

  ‘Too late!’ she cried. ‘I’m outside!’

  But her toe slipped on the smooth metal, and gravity was merciless.

  Feeling herself falling, she clutched at the bag. With a tearing sound, it was perforated by the spikes, which arrested her descent with a jerk. She swung there for a terrifying breath, knowing the bag wouldn’t hold forever. If she fell from this height it was over for her.

  Her feet kicked out to try to find anything solid. Anything at all. Sparks danced across her vision. Was that the spell too or had she banged her head during the short drop?

  One foot was secure on the point of a gilded leaf, then the second. She shifted her left hand just as the bag ripped free, and for a second she was weightless again. Dazzled by the sparkles in her eyes and the roiling in her head, the best she could hope for was to control her fall by grabbing at something and hoping that this would stop the world coming up at her so quickly. She seemed to turn end over end, and for a heartbeat all she could think about was la
nding upside down and breaking her neck.

  But then the ground hit her feet, and she toppled forward onto her face, battered, undignified, but never more grateful to be alive.

  Tenderly, she sat up and inspected herself for injuries. She was bleeding from deep gashes on her hands and forearms, but she could do nothing about them now. No broken bones, that was the main thing. Her head was still spinning, and for a terrible moment she thought she might faint, but she didn’t.

  Getting to her feet, she limped into motion and began to run away.

  Almanac came back to his senses with a violent jolt, unsure for a frightening moment of where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. He was in the cellars – that much became quickly clear. He was laying on his side with his face pressed into foul-smelling ooze. There was a shovel in his hand.

  Digging. He had been digging. At the centre of the maze. Yes! But how had he ended up lying down … ?

  The spell.

  He sat up, remembering. The disorientation that had plagued him before was now gone, but before it had disappeared it had overwhelmed him so completely that he had collapsed, and there he might have stayed forever had not something broken the spell’s hold on him …

  There wasn’t the time to wonder about that. The spell must have attacked him because he was close to the source of the magic. The chance to finish his quest was upon him. He had to take it.

  On his feet, bone-weary but fiercely resolved, he saw that he hadn’t got very far before being overwhelmed. That soon changed. Rubbish flew as he burrowed down into the filth, seeking whatever lay at the bottom. To break the spell, Etta had said, all he had to do was read whatever he might find there. He vowed that he would tear the spell up and burn it as well, just to be sure.

  The shovel struck something hard. At the same time, in the distance, he heard a high-pitched shriek – one he remembered well.

  ‘Etta?’ he called. ‘What’s wrong? Where are you?’ The echo of the scream faded and did not return.

  ‘Olive? Did you hear that? Was it Etta? Is she in trouble?’

  The pipes tapped, She is not here.

  Almanac turned back to his task, albeit uneasily. Etta might not be in the cellars, but that was only small reassurance. What if she had hurt herself somewhere else in the house and needed his help?

  The shovel rasped again, and he began scooping the rubbish away in order to see what he had found.

  As the space at his feet grew larger, bewilderment and vexation warred for dominance of his thoughts.

  Stone. Unmarked rock.

  He had found nothing but the floor of the cellars.

  ‘No!’ he shouted, striking the stone so hard sparks flew. ‘This can’t be it. There has to be something here!’

  Again and again he stabbed at the floor with the metal blade, but it was clear he could dig no further. After following all the buried clues and tracing a path through the mushroom maze, he had, it seemed, reached a dead-end. A ruse. A lie.

  Disorientation came down on him again like the boot of an invisible heel. The spell had found him, or remembered him, or chosen this moment as the one to make him feel the worst he possibly could. Throwing the shovel aside in disgust and snatching up the candelabra with its feebly flickering light, he staggered away from the pointless hole he had dug in the rubbish and made for the stairs.

  Fresh, clean air felt like a welcome slap to the face, clearing his head and allowing him to think again.

  It was dark. The kitchen was empty.

  ‘Etta? Etta, where are you?’

  ‘She is not here,’ said Ugo.

  Almanac frowned, considering the faint cry he had heard. Was it alarmist to imagine that something had happened to her while he was pointlessly following the clues … that she wasn’t safe?

  Lighting more candles, he went to the library, not caring if he laid a trail of filth behind him.

  She wasn’t there either.

  ‘She didn’t say where she was going?’

  ‘She said nothing to me,’ Ugo told him.

  Almanac had no reason to fear the worst, and yet he did. The spell had acted directly against him, revealing itself in a way it had never done before. What might it have done to Etta? What if she too had been punished for his attempt to find its source?

  He searched the ground floor and found no sign of her. When he knocked on Lord Nigel’s door, he brusquely told Almanac the same thing Olive and Ugo had, and it was no different on the first floor. A faint hope that Etta might be with Lady Simone, hearing another tale of travel and adventure, was soon put to the torch.

  ‘I’m afraid she isn’t here, dear,’ came the pronouncement from beneath the bedclothes.

  Perhaps she had already gone to bed, he thought, but her room was empty, and so were all the others on the servants’ floor.

  Taking the narrow flight of stairs to Doctor Mithily’s attic laboratory, Almanac had to admit that he was seriously worried.

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ she told him before he could even ask. ‘Etta is not here.’

  ‘How did you … ’ He stopped in midsentence, understanding suddenly that everyone had told him the same thing with practically the same words. She is not here. She isn’t here. Etta is not here. That couldn’t be coincidence.

  It was the spell, controlling what they could and couldn’t say.

  ‘What has the spell done with her?’ he asked through clenched jaw, but of course Doctor Mithily could tell him nothing useful.

  ‘Gah!’ In explosive movement he sought release from the anxiety building up inside him. Running down the stairs, Almanac searched the house a second time, looking under beds and opening cupboards in case Etta was hiding or being hidden against her will. But there was no sign of her anywhere.

  Logic penetrated his growing panic. If she wasn’t in the house, she could only be somewhere in the grounds. Dashing outside, holding high an oil lantern he had found at the back of a deep closet, he walked around the manor, then hurried to the garden shed, where at last he found a hint of her presence.

  She wasn’t there, but she had been there, that was for certain. Tools had been moved around and some taken. On a snag of wire he found a tuft of material from her dress.

  Where had she gone next, and why would she need those tools? Was she fixing something or … breaking something?

  A cold thrill swept over him, as though he had been dunked in a bath of iced water.

  The gate.

  He ran, heedless of the branches snatching at him and the roots that tried to trip him. The last moments they had spent together flashed through his thoughts. She had been angry, incommunicative … and before that, in the library, he hadn’t been convinced of the connection between the list and the hidden objects in the cellar. She had given no hint of any other plan, but it seemed she had found one. The very moment she had finished in the library, she must have left.

  The gate loomed at him out of the dark, glittering from the light he carried. It was closed, but about its base he saw tools scattered in a state of recent employment.

  Coming closer, he saw more scraps of cloth snagged on the filigree, and a ripped burlap bag laying almost within reach of his outstretched arm. Scuff marks in the dirt next to the bag became footsteps that raced off into the darkness.

  Outside.

  He gaped in amazement and with no small sense of betrayal.

  Etta had escaped. Without him!

  Almanac stared into the darkness for time unmeasured, his mind a-whirl with thoughts he could barely make sense of. Part of him was glad she had made it out. Part of him hoped she would come back. A third part wanted to express his anger at her by yelling uselessly into the night, while a fourth, more practical part, mentally measured the distance to the fallen bag against the length of the crowbar, wondering if he could reclaim the bag from the other side of the gate and perform the same escape act as her.

  Dully, he picked up the crowbar and dragged the bag to his feet. It was torn to ribbons,
useless.

  More disturbing by far was the sticky blood he found on the bag.

  Etta had hurt herself, and now she was out in the dark on her own, maybe dying for all he knew!

  ‘Etta!’ he called, cupping his hands around his mouth and shouting so hard his throat burned. ‘Are you all right?’

  Rustling came from the undergrowth behind him. He turned, heart leaping, but it was only Silas, half-concealed behind some ferns.

  ‘She’s not here, lad, and there’s nothing you can do for her now. Best head inside.’

  ‘But she’s hurt,’ he protested. ‘She might need me.’

  ‘You’re in no fit state to help anyone. Look at yourself, a right mess! Get clean. Eat. Sleep. Come the morning, you’ll have a clearer head.’

  That was true. Almanac was tired to the bone and filthy beyond measure. If he did try to climb the gate, there was a good chance he would make a fatal error – even without the spell doing its worst to stop him.

  Besides, he could guess what had happened now: it was Etta who had distracted the spell while he dug. Now, there would be no distraction. It was just the spell and him, and Almanac was under no illusions as to who would win that battle.

  ‘Will she be okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Time tells all,’ said the gardener.

  Almanac sighed and began wrapping the tools in the remains of the sack. He wouldn’t take them to the shed now, but it didn’t seem right to just leave them exposed. If it rained, they would rust, and that wouldn’t do.

  Straining under the weight, he trudged back to the manor and lit a stove to boil water.

  It seemed to take forever, which gave him time to contemplate everything that had gone awry that day, and to note how empty and quiet the manor was without Etta’s presence. Ugo and Olive tried to engage him in conversation, but their words seemed hollow somehow, as though they too had their minds on other things. It was nice of them to try, but he was beyond their efforts. Etta had abandoned him. What could possibly distract him from that?