Creature of the Night

Roger searches the room in a typically manly fashion, looking top to bottom for his wife but never close enough to perhaps figure out the clues for himself. He ignores the paintings, because what would century old pictures have to do with his wife being gone now in the present day, and though he looks around the area where the drinks table had been, he fails to notice a sliver of a gap in the wall where a light breeze could be felt whistling into the room, and the circular shape of dust, denser than that of the rest of the carpet goes completely overlooked.

“Becky?” He calls out, worried for his wife’s safety now in this strange, creepy house. “Becky?!”

He receives no answer except the creaking of the house and the thunder outside. Finally, he concludes that she isn’t in this room, but unaware of the secret passageway, he tries the other door at the other side of the games room, wondering why his wife didn’t tell him where she was going. The handle turns and Roger heads through the door into the next room.

Meanwhile, Becky curses her fate. She’s in some kind of tunnel, that much she can tell in the dim, not quite dark, blackness, and water reaching half way up her legs. She can only hope that it isn’t some kind of sewer, but the smell isn’t quite that bad. Just damp and moldy, though Becky would quite like to spend as little time in this place as possible. Her first instinct is to call for her husband.

“Roger? Roger!” She shouts, the echo throwing the words back at her, but she receives no human reply and quickly abandons this idea. If she’s to get out of this place, she’ll have to do it herself.

One end of the tunnel seems brighter than the other, possibly suggesting a source of light, so that’s the way she goes. With over-exaggerated steps, her dress hiked up to her thighs and pulling her jacket tight around her body, she begins her ascent. Each step is a perilous mystery, not knowing if there’s even ground for her to step onto, or if more sudden holes and drops await her. She knows now that nothing in this house should be trusted.

Pressing ahead, she finds that the light source was a candle, fixed upon the wall. On the one hand, perhaps this suggests that she is heading in the right direction, but she also considers another fact; candles have to be lit. For the first time since they arrived, she is certain they are not alone in the house.

Hurrying slightly, as much as she can in slopping high water, she continues on along the tunnel, not quite sure if she’s going in the right direction, but come too far to turn back and try the other way now. She sees more light ahead and eagerly approaches the next candle, feeling much safer in the light than in the darkness.

Except the next light isn’t a candle, it’s a torch. Held aloft by a bare skinned white man, broad and muscled like some Greek Adonis, wearing nothing but a long breechcloth. His presence alone is shocking, but stumbling upon him so suddenly causes Becky to scream, and the man turns to face her.

Two things about the man strike her. First, that his face was of a goat’s, with two deep black eyes and large, curling horns. Secondly, as her eyes drop to make sure the rest of him was still man, she notices the absence of a belly button. And though she had no reason to do so, she allows her eyes to drop further, noticing that his cloth successfully hid his privates from immediate view but did nothing to disguise the bulge beneath.

Her screams at the goat man continue, fearing for her life. He reaches with a hand and grabs at his mask, pulling it off to reveal the handsome, chiseled features of a young man in his twenties, his eyes no longer deep black but baby blue and showing deep concern for the woman before him.

“Sorry, sorry,” he apologizes quickly as he waves around the mask. “It’s not real. It’s not real, see?”

As the reality comes to light, her screams subside and she bends over, hands on her thighs, to catch her breath. She feels a strong, masculine hand on her back, rubbing it, consoling her, and she admits, if only to herself, that it feels nice. But this is a strange man, in a dark tunnel, beneath a creepy mansion, so she recoils, now more interested in answers.

“Who are you?” she asks, wishing she had something to brandish at him. “How did you get here?”

“How? I live here,” he insists. “I’ve always lived here.”

“Then you must know my husband’s great uncle, Sebastian Carmine,” she assumes, too terrified to even think about withholding that information.

“I don’t know anyone by that name,” he says sincerely.

“Well, this is his house, so if you live here, you must have met him.”

“I’m telling you, I don’t know anyone by that name, but maybe he called himself something else. What did he look like?”

“Sorry, I never met him.” She says, it starting to feel pointless interrogating a man when she only had half the information at her disposal. “Well, can you tell me where we are? Where these tunnels lead?”

“These are old escape tunnels, designed to get the people out of the mansion if it were ever besieged.” He turns ahead, and raises his arm, the fire from the torch lighting two paths ahead. “This one…” he points the torch in the direction of the right path, “leads back inside, while this one…” he turns the light towards the left. “will take you outside.”