Rain pelts against you and thunder rumbles across the sky deafeningly, as you stand before the towering mansion. An enormous clock stands at 15 minutes until midnight above the arched doorway. As you look around, you don’t remember how you got here, in fact you don’t remember anything. Despite this, you feel a strong draw towards the mansion. In your pockets you feel nothing but a small golden ring with an inscription on it. Before you can read it, a man opens the door invitingly and bellows.
“Ah, hello! Quickly come in, the rain is dreadful!” As you follow him inside the stupendous mansion, he guides you to a room, and says “After you acquaint yourself, come to the dining hall, it’s just down the hall to the right.”
You nod in affirmation, and walk into the room he has guided you to. The room is small and cramped. A small creaky bed sits against the wall and an ancient carpet rests upon the floor, once delicate and soft but now, trodden and slippery. The room has a single window, granting a view of a shadowed hill a few hundred feet away. Beside the bed is a dresser drawers, empty aside from a single butler's tuxedo and a note reading “Dress like it’s your last day on earth, in style!”.
As you put on the Butlers Tuxedo, you find it to be a bit oversized, but not excessively so. As you reach into your pocket, you find the ring again. It seems almost enchanting, but as you go to read the inscription a crack of lighting echoes out, illuminating the hill for a moment.
Empty.
As you make your way down the hall, you find a Banquet Hall. The room is echoing and large, a colossal ceiling shrouded in shadow, only illuminated by the occasional flash of thunder. The grand fireplace is at one end, and an apse with 3 towering windows grants a view of the shadowy hills outside. The room has many smaller tables, prepared if any guests may come, but empty at the moment. In the centre is a huge rectangular table spanning almost the entire length of the room, constructed with wood of the tallest trees. The scent of burning oil permeates the air, mixing distastefully with the food in preparation. Classical music echoes throughout the room from a phonograph just slightly out of tune. The space feels far too empty for its grand scale; it would be far more fit to hold dozens of people, something more akin to a ballroom. But it is not used for such things, or not right now at least.
As maids walk into the room and place food upon the banquet hall sized table, lighting illuminates the room to its fullest, its radiant light a bellowing fracture in the sky. Your eyes are drawn outside from the loud crack of lightning, the hills outside the colossal mansion brighten for but a brief moment, just long enough to see a ‘figure’ standing upon it.
The figure seems humanoid from the visible part of them, although they don’t seem natural…As quickly as they were here, they are gone. The maids seem unbothered, or unaware of the figure briefly illuminated. As soon as the hills are unveiled once more, the figure is missing…
The man who greeted you walks into the room, accompanied by his elegantly dressed wife and daughter.
“Hello there again, you look dressed to impress” He says with a wink, “Do you have any questions before we begin?”
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Your mind isn’t fully there, still hung up on the figure standing upon the shadowed hills who somehow vanished into thin air.
“Who was that…” You mumble to yourself. The man tilts his head in confusion, asking you to inquire further
“Ah, so that's your question? Well I cannot ask without knowing who you were referring to of course!” The man speaks dramatically and enthusiastically.
“There was a figure standing on the hill just a moment ago… But they vanished. Who were they?” You ask, stammering over your answer.
Your host’s expression hardens into one of doubt and concern as he responds in a more hushed voice now,
“Don’t be foolish, a person standing on the ‘hill’ outside? Ridiculous, the rain would’ve killed them by now-!” Before the man can finish speaking, one of the windows of the apse flies open with a slam. Quickly the man barks an order at the maids
“Quickly! Close the window you buffoons!!”
The maids hurriedly close the window, their skin searing in pain as the rain hits them. As the window closes your host turns back to you, attempting to regain his composure. Lighting echoes out, illuminating the ‘hill’ and the ceiling of the room.
His daughter points at the ceiling after a moment and says “Daddy, what's that?”
As all of you look up at the ceiling, a crack of thunder lightens it so it may be fit to see. The ceiling that was once empty now has, sprawling across it, an enormous centipede like body, constructed from scrap and organic matter, its eldritch form decayed and gory.
At the head of it, is a humanoid form of the man who guided you thus far. As the lighting fades, a few drops of blood and oil drip onto your glasses and fear drowns you in an instant. With a whoosh of air the candles and chandeliers are extinguished and screams echo out. Your feet move before your mind, sending you into a flight response. Sprinting through the mansion, more screams pierce your ears and cause your skin to crawl. As you burst through a door you find yourself in your room. Dashing into the room, slamming the door loudly, you slip on the carpet and smash against the floor, oil dripping from your head as pain bites against your anxiety ridden form. Upon the floor, you see the ring from your pocket. As you look at it for a few moments, you manage to read the inscription on it finally. “Don’t Trust the man. Don’t go to the hill.”
Suddenly a crash echoes out as the thing begins to travel across the house, leaving you with the only option of escape being to clamber out of the window. Being forced to choose between that eldritch ‘thing’ and the acidic rain, the rain seemed somehow more survivable. As you burst out of the window, you begin to fall, a few feet, then a few dozen, then you land.
Unharmed, you run away from the mansion with heart thumping haste, screams echoing out before all of a sudden, they stop.
Not a single other scream can be heard, but what you can hear is a distinct thumping. As you run and run and run, you begin to feel pools of liquid at the base of the hill, then you feel metal and organic limbs, then you feel heads, then bodies. As you climb up the hill of organic and mechanical corpses, the thumping grows louder and louder, before finally you reach the top and when you look behind you, you see that ‘thing’ inches away from you. The stolen face of that horrifying being stands an inch from you, it’s glowing orange eyes piercing into yours, blood splattered across it.
“Found you, butler!” It says.
As you look at it in horror, the thing grabs your face in a blood splattered palm, gripping onto your face tighter and tighter, oil beginning to burst out, steel snapping, your memory begins to short circuit. The creature grows closer, extending more hands that begin to pull apart your body as it says
“Let me in butler!” As pain envelops your body your memory begins to fade away, experiences slipping away until all you have left with is this current moment.
The clock rings out as it hits midnight.