Rose Manor- Part 3

As the gravelly country lane suddenly appeared before the small, blue Peugeot, the huge looming mansion soon followed. It’s derelict tiles lay broken and detached from the walls around the house. Cracked, eerie windows, glared solemnly at those who dared look back. It’ four stories became infinite, as it reared up towards the heavily clouded sky. The large oak front door, splintered and hanging off its hinges, enticed unwelcome visitors in a bewitching curiosity to enter the foreboding labyrinth beyond. Dead, barren land stretched acres in every direction behind it, an ancient tin sign hung on fallen barbed wire, warning people against trespassing there.

Emilia smiled the smallest smile at the thought that popped into her head, ‘Yeah, because people need to be told not to wander into the field, let alone the house.’

But even her sarcastic thoughts couldn’t prevent the inevitable flood of butterflies quickly clutching her stomach. She knew the stories that went with the mysterious bodies that lay around the manor.

Quickly, she drove on, until reaching No. 24, where she parked hurriedly in the paved driveway and sat back in her tight, over stuffed seat, in exhaustion. Closing her eyes for a minute, she counted slowly back from ten, her ears picking up- while winding down the car window- as she heard a distant sparrow chirp. Focussing her conscious thoughts on the woeful song, she allowed herself to relax momentarily- the melody emanating from the nearby hedge soothing her stress and anxiety for the space of a few short minutes.

Before a warbling cry, coming from the front door of the large bungalow in front of the car, snapped her out of her short meditation with a jolt. Her eyes flew open and she saw her mother with her arms flung up in the air, an open grin stretched across her lightly wrinkled face. Her caramel coloured hair waving graciously down past her shoulders, “Emilia!” she cried in joy. Running over to the passenger door in her well-worn slippers, her place on the front porch soon replaced by Emilia’s Aunt Maeve, who repeated her sister’s actions exactly and dashed over to join her by the car door.

Emilia’s mother, Michelle, had divorced her husband fifteen years ago now, and continued to live with her sister since two years before she had gotten the divorce through. Emilia had left home at seventeen after having moved to No. 24 in Grenwich when she was four, a result in the escalating aggressiveness of the fights between her parents, thus resulting in Michelle’s quick retreat to her sister’s. This was just one of the reasons that Emilia was so ashamed of her mother and enjoyed her five year absence before they’d met again at the funeral and she had been enticed to break her promise to herself, to never see her mother again.

They knocked on the door and Emilia leant over the passenger seat to reluctantly wind the window down, “Hiya,” she smiled gingerly.

Her mother and her Auntie Maeve were alike in so many ways but at least their looks varied, if only slightly. For, Auntie Maeve had thick wavy blond hair, if slightly shorter than her sister’s, coming just to her shoulders, and had a much fuller build, whereas her mother was an awful lot slimmer and an additional four or five inches taller.

“Well, come on out of there then love!” her Auntie grinned fondly.

Stretching a tight smile across her face, Emilia reluctantly switched off the engine and stepped out of the car. She was then led through the white polished front door, into the cosy house beyond it, to be immediately greeted by two little boys, bounding down the hall to fling themselves at her.

“Oh…” she grimaced at the small boys, currently clutching at her legs with worryingly snotty hands. “Hey you little bastar- Sam,” she corrected herself qucikly. “And Mark…?”

“Michael!” my mum hissed at me.

“Yes of course, Sam and Michael, how could I forget these two little… silly billies!” Emilia managed through gritted teeth.

After a vile dinner of lots of green things, Emilia had retreated to the living room, where she currently lounged; her feet resting on the black leather stool matching the sofa she sat on. The TV was on the news channel, but muted, as Emilia read her weathered copy of ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’, propped on her crossed legs. The sun-leeched pages rustling against each other as she sped through them, subtly admiring the beautiful, in-depth language of Victor Hugo. Paralysed in her faraway land, a mysterious, slight smile playing on her face- when a sudden yelp caused her to leap to her feet, sending the hardback flying across the room, burying itself in the jungle-like cream carpet.

“Hi Emily!” beamed one of the small boys, his short curly brown hair bouncing around his head.

Emilia focussed not on remembering the boy’s name and which one he was anyway- although a small suspicion told her it may have been Michael, the younger one- and instead on not shaking his little bony shoulders until her name rattled into him, and not just the first couple of syllables.

“It’s Emilia, Michael,” she informed him as politely as was possible with a tightly clenched jaw. “What’s up?”

“Do you wanna hear a story?” the little boy asked, before jumping to sit where Emilia had just leapt out of, and grinned up at her, discreetly studying her flamingo pyjama bottoms and burgundy hoodie, clearly two sizes too big.

But that one sentence made her blood go cold.

If the people of Grenwich were to ever acquire a catchphrase, ‘Do you want to hear a story?’ would’ve easily been it.

Emilia was all too aware of what that sentence led up to. The story it beckoned toward.

Black Manor and the insane Victoria Black who haunted it.

Swallowing, she desperately fought the irrevocable, sneering thoughts of her childhood that began to cloud her head.

No! She told herself as firmly as she possibly could. It’s been eight years, just forget about it.

But of course she never could.

However her determined thoughts were suddenly interrupted by another voice.

“Go on Emilia,” it was her mother’s, who had entered the room and gracefully sank down onto the adjacent, identical sofa, carrying with her a steaming cup of tea and a plate of three round healthy looking biscuits- which she placed noiselessly on the birch wood coffee table by her slippered feet. “Go on,” she repeated. “He loves to tell his stories!”

Emilia’s grimace was replaced by a compulsory smile that urged for his continuance, at her immense ungratefulness.

“Well, you know the huge Victorian House- like the scariest one in the whole wide world, on the country lane?” he began, proceeding after Emilia’s unenthusiastic nod. “Well…! It’s so scary because a mad woman called Victoria used to live there. She used to be nice but that was just pretend! She was actually evil, Sam says she’s the evilest person times a million. And then she married a man called Mr Black and then she killed all the people who stayed at the inn. Oh! And she owned the big house, Black Manor and it was an inn. And anyway, she killed everyone in it! And then she had a baby and she left the baby on the street to die too, but a nice lady picked her up and the baby became her daughter instead. And then Victoria had a son and sent him away to work in a bad factory in a different country. And he was never seen again! And then she killed her husband too! And then she went crazy and killed herself in the big old house because she felt bad. And that was hundreds and hundreds of years ago and the manor is still haunted because her ghost is still there. And Jamie from school says that he’s been in the house and seen the ghost and it tried to kill him but I don’t believe him and mum says he’s telling fibs too!”

“Sounds good,” Emilia dismissed, stretching down to retrieve her book.

“That’s nothing!” Sam had entered the room to assist his brother in the telling of the story. “Black Manor was once an amazing inn, where everyone loved it. But the owner, Victoria Black had merely made this up, because then something changed… Something clicked in Victoria’s head and suddenly she was no longer nice and kind to people, but instead she hated them for their happiness and began to kill them, she would slit the corner of their mouth, then their nostrils and then gouge out their eye! She married a man called Charles Black, and they had two children- a boy and a girl, she abandoned one on the street and sold the other one in Ireland. Then she went completely mad and killed herself after her poor husband finally managed to escape, he then got all of her money and was finally rescued and was never heard of again. But to this day, she wanders the halls of her inn, searching for the happy residents left, and they say you can still hear her jingling the room keys…”

“Right,” Emilia swallowed and proceeded to leave the room and make her way to the guest room, her bed for the three nights she was to stay there.

She sighed at the thin cotton, floral patterned curtains that let in the glowing orange light from the streetlight outside, the small single bed pushed to the very far corner of the room had a variety of sheets and blankets atop it, clearly made to prevent the cold for the sleeper but did little to nothing. A baby blue counter top ran the length of the two other walls of the room, with small cupboards that were home to old toys and dead insects, the top now shelved Emilia’s toiletries and underwear, her clothes were still folded and packed in the black solid plastic suitcase, lying on the floor by a flimsy blue spinney chair.

Déjà vu rang in her ears, but ignoring it, Emilia set herself in bed for a long, restless sleep.