The Shorecliff Horror and Other Stories
Page 17
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Just as darkness was falling, he arrived at the castle doors, passing through a set of giant, iron gates so rusted and corroded as to be almost falling off their hinges. Stepping wearily into the large courtyard within the castle walls, so exhausted was Philippe from his long journey that he barely noticed the depth of decay and neglect which surrounded him. Dirt and dust gathered in every corner. The courtyard itself was covered in mud and rotting leaves, weeds and pernicious vines grew out of every crevice, up every wall. Broken machinery and rusted work tools lay scattered in the open yard and barely a window left in the building retained even a single pane of glass intact. Philippe noticed nothing of this, instead stumbled blindly forward towards a second great doorway into the dark, cold interior of the castle itself.
“Hello!” he called out into the gloom. “Is anyone there?” His words echoed strangely through the grand entrance hall, but no answer came and though Philippe did imagine for a moment that he saw a shifting in the shadows off in a dark corner of the room, nobody stepped forward to greet him.
“I am Philippe, from Glenlaw,” he called out again. “I come with papers from the trader, Murnock.” Again his words echoed back to him, again no reply came. Philippe stood in the dark hall, listening to his own breath rising and falling. Outside, the sun had dropped beneath the horizon and the last gleam of daylight was dying from the sky. A wind was rising and the persistent drizzle that had followed him throughout the day was intensifying into a thick, heavy rainfall. “Is anyone there?” He called again, not with hope but with a strain of tired anxiety creeping into his voice.
Again he saw a shifting in the shadows, more certain this time. Something moved in the darkness over by the far corner of the room. He took a step towards it, then stopped again when the shape shifted once more. Eventually a voice called back to him from the shadows. Quiet and strained, as though weary from under-use, as though just waking from a long, long sleep, the voice repeated over and over the same two words, slowly at first, then more quickly and more certainly. “Murnock,” the voice said. And “Glenlaw.”
With these words, the shape emerged from the shadows in which it was hidden. A great ogre stepped forward. A hideous creature, hairless and naked, its long arms terminating in sharp, filth covered talons, its long tongue flicking around yellow teeth as it tasted the air, savouring the words it kept on repeating. When he saw the creature coming towards him, Philippe froze in terror. His limbs, so weary from their long journey, had no strength left in them to turn and run and, with the realisation that this was indeed the noble Duke he had been sent to visit washing over him, he dropped to his knees and wept. Hot tears fell down his cheeks. Tears of shame at having been so foolish as to believe his dream. Tears of anguish at that dream being finally shattered. Slowly the ogre stepped forward and, with one swipe of his long arm, struck Philippe a blow around the head, sending him instantly into a lifeless stupor.
For the longest time he drifted in and out of consciousness, dreaming all the time of Ursula and the warm arms which he would never again feel around him. “This is not the way our story was meant to end,” he thought to himself. “Eaten by an ogre on a dusty castle floor. This is not what is supposed to happen.”
Rather than pounce on him and devour him instantly, though, as Philippe expected, the ogre then did a very strange thing. With his sharp claw, he sliced open a vein in the boy’s neck and allowed his blood to drain into a large, tin pail. When the flow of blood slowed from a torrent to a trickle, he brought forward a great gown of white muslin and dipped it into the pail, washing it carefully within the thick, red blood of the lifeless boy. The gown completely soaked through, he raised it around his wide, filthy shoulders and, so wearing this gruesome garment, strode purposefully out of the castle door, tossing Philippe’s limp body out of a nearby window as he went, a trail of red blood dripping behind him with every step he took.