If Morning Never Comes - Episode Twenty-Four
In Which: Charles Discovers the Secrets of Raines Manor
Editor’s Note:
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Charles was back inside the cluttered office, behind the desk in the dark. He crouched with one knee to the ground, a hand in his hair. The realization of a few moments before still crashed over him. Vicar Clarke! Stuffy, pompous old Vicar Clarke was in league with Edgar Raines. Not only that, he seemed to have some kind of power over him. How was that possible? Mr. Raines was so fierce and Mr. Clarke was – well, less so. Why would Raines listen to him? Even regular men did not listen to Mr. Clarke, except on Sundays when they had to. And was Mr. Raines relying on the vicar for blood? Why did he not just take what he needed? Was that why the attacks had stopped the last few months?
Charles slumped back onto his seat. This was too much to take in on his own. He needed to talk to Herr Stryker immediately. He had crept back to the dark little room when Mr. Clarke left, worried he would be seen from the foot of the stairs. The party was in full swing now. The longer he waited to depart, the more difficult it would become as guests began to leave. And remote as it was, there was always the possibility that he would be missed by his family. Or worse, Mr. Raines himself.
But he was hesitant to leave. Before, when he had found nothing worthwhile, he had been ready to go, but now that he had discovered something significant, he was energized to find more. Perhaps luck was on his side tonight. Herr Stryker did not approve of luck. But Charles was alone, upstairs in Raines Manor. He had managed to eavesdrop on perhaps the darkest secret in the moorlands and had not been caught. What else could he call that?
He determined to act. At the very least he would inspect the other rooms in the hallway. No other servants had come through, and Charles felt confident none would. Herr Stryker would call that an unfounded assumption, but as he had observed, Herr Stryker was not there.
He stood and carefully eased the door open. Aside from the murmurs ascending the staircase, there was no noise or movement. He slipped out and left the door open just the slightest crack, in case he needed to hide quickly. There were two doors on the other side that he had not checked before a left turn deviated from the main corridor. He went to the first, the room where he had nearly alerted the servants. He opened it. A sitting room with chairs and a cold fireplace. Nothing of note that Charles could see. The mantelpiece and tables were bare.
The final door before the adjacent hall was locked. He peeked down the new hallway. More doors. Before him, behind him, and now perpendicular, nothing but halls and doorways. The house was unsettlingly homogenous. Crimson carpets, dim gas lamps, endless doors. It was like a model house rather than a home to be lived in. A museum, not a domicile.
He went to the opposite wall and tried the door on the corner. It too was locked, but as he pulled his hand from the latch, he heard the sound of footfalls coming up the stairs. His throat caught. He could hear accented voices speaking to each other. No time to go back to the office, Charles ducked around the corner into the perpendicular hallway. He hid behind the wall, but heard the voices getting louder. He felt so exposed – what was he doing here?
He raced as fast as he quietly could down the hall until he came to another junction. Left or right? He took the right turn and hid around the corner there. He could hear no voices. Was he safe? He eased half an eye around the wall. For several long moments, there was nothing. Then there was a suppressed laugh, and a leg stepped beyond the wall. Charles whirled around and hurried away. This time the hall ended in a large window. He hung a right, his only option. This hallway was shorter, ending in a large pair of double doors, their dark wood ornately decorated in golden design. But Charles had no time to appreciate its artistry. He could hear the two servants conversing as they came closer and closer. No excuses if he was caught here. He tried a door. It was locked. As was the next and the next – locked, every one! He tried the large golden doors. Locked as well. Hearing Herr Stryker’s voice in his head alternately reprimanding him for his idiocy and warning him not to panic, Charles tiptoed to the corner and peered out again. He ran back when he saw the men coming his way. They had not seen him, but where could he go? He tried the doors one more time, they only ran on one side here. He tried the golden handle of the huge ornate doors without pausing – but then he stopped.
The latch had turned. How had he missed that? He did not stop to think, he jumped inside and closed the door behind him. The room was black as night. He kept his ear to the door, listening. He heard soft, muffled voices, but could not see them without opening it. Finally, another door slammed shut, and he heard the two men grunting as if they were carrying something heavy. Their complaints drifted away. Charles waited a minute. Two minutes. Then, knowing he had little choice, and unable to wait any longer with his blood racing as it was, he eased open the door.
The corridor was empty. He crept out of the room and sneaked back the way he came. No one was in that hall either. He skipped down to the junction and looked. He just caught the disappearing coattails of one of the servants carrying what looked like one end of a large piece of furniture.
Charles sighed. He ran a hand over his face. This was getting out of control. But he could not leave just yet, he would overtake them on the stairs. So he went back to inspect the mysterious doors that had hidden him in so timely a fashion. One of them stood partially open as he had left it. He took hold and opened it wide to look inside.
Darkness seemed to flood out of it the way light invades a closeted room. The sickly-sweet smell of the house hit him hard in the face and almost staggered him. He had not noticed the scent when he was hiding. He could not make out twelve inches into the dark, but he could see that the carpet ended just beyond this doorway. Then there was a stair, followed by several others, shrouded in shadow. Why had this door opened? He shivered.
Part – or most – of him wanted to just leave. He could claim with a straight face that he had searched the house, and Herr Stryker would undoubtedly tell him he did the right thing in staying away from that stairwell. His arms and the back of his neck tingled. Every rational instinct told him to close the door and walk away. But another, deeper voice whispered to ascend. His mind argued that only fools wander into dark, dangerous places without a plan. But his blood was up now, and in a moment Charles realized he had decided. He smirked to himself.
“Alright then.”
Charles hustled back to the office where he had hidden. He returned with the candlestick he had seen there. Back at the double doors, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small box of matches. Herr Stryker had given him a list of essential things that men should always have on hand, and matches had been near the top. He struck one and it flared up. Charles lifted the old candlestick and lit it. He went inside. The darkness would have been complete apart from the light he carried with him. His shadow gently pulsed on the walls. The little orb lit up his face and hands, but little else. No illumination made its way under the crack of the door, and any trace of the orchestra downstairs had been shut off.
He was standing on a landing with a wooden floor. Before him rose the stairs. The walls were wide, the ceiling tall. He could see no end to them. With a deliberate step, he began his ascent. Despite their apparent age, the steps did not creak or squeak. The only sound was his shoes tap-tapping against the wood. His light flickered against the walls.
The flight began to turn. He was moving leftward now, and the stairs became a spiral. The blocky steps were triangular as he ascended, round and round. Charles was unaware of fear or excitement or his own breath. He just focused on the task at hand. Through the occasional window he could see the roof of the great hall beneath him. He began to wonder how high he dared go, but just as suddenly as the flight had begun, he reached another floor.
The stairway continued, but broadened out into a wide landing and he found himself standing before a hallway similar to the ones below. But while the house below had been lit and decorated with crimson and gold, this corridor was dark and foreboding. The carpet may have been red once for all he knew, but the doors were black, the walls a faded, ugly color. Charles shielded his light quickly. The hall was in darkness, save for the faintest glow coming from a door at the end of the hall. It was a pale, white light, almost blue to Charles’ eyes. He shivered. Biting cold seemed to drift from the selfsame door at the end of the hall.
Up to this point Charles had been anxious, but not afraid. Nervous, yes; not frightened. But as he stood on the landing of this eerie place, fear gripped him. The foolhardy exhilaration that had driven him up into the house began to transmute into terror. He could feel it edging his mind like the tide. He had no desire to know what was on the other side of that door. Quickly, he turned and scurried his way up the stairs.
After a few turns of the spiral case he wondered why he had chosen to flee up, rather than down. The thought of something slithering out of that door and silently pursuing him up to a hopeless dead end gave an extra spring to his step. Now his footsteps caused the stairs to creak and echo as he made his way higher in the long, looping turns. A window showed him that he was high among the tangled towers of the manor, the roof of the house proper lost to view. Still, Charles could see no end. He kept telling himself that he would do only one more turn before returning. But each time he continued for just one more.
He reached the top. There was no door, he simply ascended into a wide-open room. His candle was lost in the bright moonlight that poured in.
He looked around quickly. He was alone. He stepped farther in. The ceiling was a great dome made of glass. Bars of iron crisscrossed it in geometric patterns. The room was open to a clear view of the heavens. The floor had strange shapes and letters painted on it, and the walls were populated with desks, bookshelves, and several scientific devices Charles could not identify.
The room calmed him. But it was not a calm like sleep. It was more like laudanum, a slow, hazy loss of awareness. He wandered the floor, gazing up into the night sky, salted with stars. And there, the waxing gibbous moon sinking down beyond the edge of the dome. Charles looked at the moon. It loomed large, as if he could reach out and touch it. He had never felt so small. The ironworks that spread like a web across the glass cast strange shadows on the floor. The shadows interlaced with the painted lines and formed new symbols and shapes, like runes of some ancient language, hieroglyphs as large as Charles himself.
His mind began to drift. His arm was tired from holding the little metal candlestick holder. His neck was too weak for his head. And his head was no better. The longer he looked at the incomplete hieroglyphs projected onto the floor, the more his head began to hurt. His ears buzzed as he imagined what the letters might sound like if they were pronounced. He put a hand to his head, the moonlight beginning to hurt his eyes. He closed his eyes tight against the pain. It was as if he were being pulled out of his own skull, the images of the nightmarish symbols burning in his vision like hot steel.
“Charles!”
A voice burst into his mind. No one had spoken, but he had heard it plain as anything. The disjunction was enough to shake him loose, but the frenzy continued to grow. He frantically looked for the stairs. There they were. Without turning back, he scurried down into the darkness. As he descended, his headache receded and the buzzing in his ears faded to a whisper.
All he wanted now was to get out of this house. He would jump from a window if he had to. He would fight Edgar Raines unarmed, he did not care. He just needed to get out. The monotonous stairs unfolded in a winding circle beneath him. Fully alert now, he could not understand why he had climbed so high. What had he thought he would find? Charles felt far from home. He had had enough of the Hunt for one night.
The descent flattened onto the dreary hallway he had seen before. Charles had every intention of continuing down. But the inaudible voice came again.
“Charles!”
He stopped on the landing. He kept his eyes down. It was so quiet. He took a long breath and exhaled.
He did not want to look. But look he did. He raised his eyes and saw the dark door at the end of the hall. The pale blueish light was brighter than before. It reached farther, lighting up more of the decrepit floor. Charles was filled with such an urge to see what was on the other side, he almost took a step without thinking. He was breathing heavily – what was happening to him?
“Charles.”
The voice was calmer this time. He looked down the hall again. His little light seemed pathetic against the weight of the shadows and luminescence drifting his way in visible beams. Charles looked at his candle. The feeble flame snuffed out. The smell of smoke filled his nostrils for a second before the powerful scent of the manor returned, stronger than ever before. So sweet. Too sweet.
Terrified and ashamed, Charles took slow, shaky steps towards the door. He shivered. This was not what he wanted. The floor made no sound under his feet. He thought he heard something snuffling and growling behind a door. The handle of another gently rattled back and forth, back and forth. He reached his destination. He realized the door was already cracked open. Charles did not bother resisting. He put a hand to the door; it opened just ahead of the pressure he meant to put upon it.
This room was different from the others. Like the lunarium above, it too was filled with moonlight from an unseen window, but it took on a sickly, almost thalassic quality here. Like the underside of a fish or some tentacled thing from the deep. Blue and white and perhaps a little purple. The center of the space was dominated by a curtained canopy bed. The light was not emanating from it as much as being drawn into it. The curtains were nearly opaque, but the light that shone upon them indicated a large flat shape within.
Charles was cold and frightened beyond reason. His mind warned him to run, but he had ignored those warnings too many times tonight to start listening now. The moment he entered that room, Charles had known what he would do. It all seemed like prophecy – inevitable, irresistible.
His breaths short and erratic, Charles walked to the bed. Whatever lay behind the curtain, he did not want to know what it was. But he had no choice. He pulled the covering aside with a trembling hand.
There on the bed lay a frozen coffin. There was no mistaking it. The whole interior of the bed’s canopy was as cold as deepest winter. Charles could see his breath. Icicles hung from the casket, the sheets and blankets of the bed were frozen stiff. None of this disturbed Charles. But the coffin was open.
Open – and empty.
“Charles.”
Again his trance was broken by that voice. Not in his mind this time, but in his ear. He whirled around, reaching to his side for a weapon that was not there. Seated against the back wall of the little room, mostly hidden in the shadows, was a face that Charles had managed to forget in all but his most furtive fantasies.
He cried out her name. His voice was hoarse, like he had never used it before.
She did not rise, but moved towards him in a disquieting glide, as if she were floating rather than walking. As she moved into the light, Charles saw that her chair had wheels on either side. They creaked gently as she moved them with her hands. Amelia Raines came into the light and smiled.
“Charles, it is you! What are you doing here?”
Charles began to panic. He stepped back from her, stumbling against a bedpost. He eyed the door, groping his pockets for something to defend himself with – a penknife, anything.
Amelia saw him scrambling and the smile faded from her face. “Oh,” she said. “I see.”
He stopped moving.
She continued, “He’s told you what I am, then.”
Charles remained absolutely still. Amelia did not come any closer. In the wan light he observed her more perfectly. She looked tired; old even. She was slumped in her chair, with bandages wrapped around her shabby dress instead of her usual corset. Her hair was mussed and frayed, and there were holes and scars covering the right side of her face. She caught him looking, and folded her hands in her lap, avoiding his gaze.
“Are you going to kill me?” she asked with a tear in her voice.
Charles was like a spring twisted to the point of breaking. He felt like the situation could explode in a thousand different directions at any moment.
He stammered, “Amelia, what is going on? Where am I?”
“My sanctuary, Charles,” she said. “Well, my sepulcher, more like. But why?” she wheeled her chair what would have been a step closer, “Why did you come?” Her voice dropped to a whisper, “Don’t you know what he’ll do to you if he finds you?”
Charles looked to the door, he could see into the hall. An image flashed in his mind of Edgar Raines charging after him. He shuddered.
He tried to explain, but for some reason that had nothing to do with strategy, Charles could not bring himself to tell Amelia of the Hunt. “I was looking around, and the door was open, and – Amelia, I really shouldn’t be here.”
Amelia’s eyes had lost their sparkle, replaced with a dull, sheen. She turned them to Charles’ own, “No, I suppose not. But...” she wheeled another step closer. “Charles, I’m so glad that you are.”
Charles took a step back, “Don’t come any closer!”
The vampire looked so hurt in that moment that every noble instinct within Charles desired to run and comfort her. She did not cry, but then Amelia did not seem the type to weep. In that moment, despite his training, despite everything else, he pitied her. And every slumbering bit of affection he had for Amelia Raines came roaring back.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She looked at him with tragedy in her eyes. “It’s alright Charles. I understand.”
A beat passed between them. Charles could not tear away his gaze.
“Did you unlock the door for me?”
She laughed, “No.”
“Then how?”
“It’s a strange house.”
Another beat.
“What was that place upstairs?”
Amelia’s face grew sober, “No place for mortal men.”
Charles hesitated, then spoke tenderly, “You called my name. You saved me.”
She smiled. That small expression, despite her pockmarked visage and wounded posture, caused Charles’ heart to leap just the way it had when her hair was golden and her eyes dark diamonds in the firelight.
He reached out and took her hand. “I am going to save you.”
She clasped his fingers. “Charles.” Her eyes dropped. “I think that chance has passed.”
“No!” he protested, falling to his knees before her. “Amelia, listen to me–”
“You mustn’t stay here, Charles. He’ll know.” She spoke lower. “He’ll find you.”
“I’m going to save you, Amelia. I promise I am.” He meant every word. “Please, just tell me how.”
Amelia leaned forward and touched her forehead to Charles’. She was so weak. And yet still she captivated him.
“I’ll do anything,” he begged.
“Will you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She put her lips to Charles’ ear. As she inhaled, he caught a glimpse of her white teeth, no less brilliant for her convalescence. For a long moment, she held her words, but then she spoke.
“Kill him,” she hissed. “Kill him, Charles. Take his miserable life from him and give mine back to me.”
The venom in her voice sent a shiver through Charles’ heart. He sat up, still holding her frail fingers. He nodded.
“Alright.”
“Swear it,” she demanded.
“I swear it.”
She squeezed his hands gently, then sat up, suddenly alert. Her head glanced to the doorway, then she fixed her terrified eyes on his.
“Charles, you must go. Now.”
“What? Why?”
“Right now, Charles. There’s no time!” She indicated behind him. “That wall has a false panel. Open it and you can follow it all the way down.”
He pressed her hand to his chest. “Come with me.”
Amelia pulled him close and kissed him full on the lips. Charles felt all of his senses return to him with a clarity they had not had since he had first gone up those cursed stairs. His very spine tingled. She pulled away with a gasp, then thrust him from her.
“Go, Charles. He’s coming.”
Charles hurried to the wall, then turned one last time. Amelia wheeled back to the door and closed it. She resumed her place by the wall. They locked eyes once more.
“I love you,” Charles pledged.
Amelia smiled her sad, broken smile. “Go.”
Charles went to the wall and felt for the secret door. It gave way and swung open. He stepped through and closed it behind him. The way was dark. He lit a match and descended the stairs. They spiraled down, much tighter and closer than the other tower. His match ran out and he put his hand to the inner wall.
Amelia’s voice rang in his head. “Go all the way down, there are no detours. It will put you out on the balcony of the ballroom. Do not be seen!”
He emerged from another false wall into a lighted room. He was in the corner of the wide balcony. The enormous stained-glass window was right before him. Melancholy music and genteel conversation drifted up from the dance floor beneath. It was like waking up, after his time in the dark tower. He kept to the wall and slipped past the gargoyle guardians.
Just before he made his re-entry to the ball, he heard Amelia’s voice in his head one last time.
“Save me, Charles. Stop him!”
