A Portrait of Pain

The Gargoyles of Cicadily Home

Word Count: 1541 words.

This story is incomplete. I don't know how to finish it. I don't know what its identity is; kind of fitting, to be honest.

I'd like feedback on this one. Enjoy.

The moon conjured mists and mental images of dwindling torches on the 123rd Day of the year 1781. The nightsky appeared brittle, like cast iron, and Zeus would split it with a lightning bolt every now and again when He thought no one was looking.

Dogs gathered in secret ceremony at the hollow amidst the woods on the hills flanking Cicadily Home. These were dogs of vast variety, from stray kings to hyena-kin. Their eyes shone like coins, sending faint beams which tore through the lambent shadows of the night, naught a little occult. Confused they were, these hounds, as to why they had been summoned here, and who had summoned them, and how they had done it.

Just as they started to bark with half a mind of doing so for perpetuity, a terribly rigid man was seen sauntering down the hills. He was whistling a foreign melody, sharp to the ear and sharper to the confounded dog ear. Mist coiled around his bodice. The rigid man held a cane in a hand, and a hat held his head, and his back was awfully, artfully straight. It was common knowledge that such uncommon spines of the ironed-straight sort belonged to the Bents.

"It would appear," spoke a mysterious voice in the dogs' chaffed ears, "that this is the time of the year Mr. Bent comes to visit."

*

'Hither to thither, unguided, unfettered
Run they travelers!
Wherefore is known not, numbers there are few, fewer even
Than their unravelers!'

The poet who wrote the poem from which the above lines have been extracted had no identity. His name was nearly as big a mystery as what travelers he bespoke of. But Mr. Bent of Cicadily Home, in all humility, had faith that the poet must have been referring to individuals such as himself and Old Storm.

Cicadily Home was only Mr. Bent's home in speaking — an adumbrate maze for ghosts and ghouls. For he, beneficiary of the Bent name, did rarely ever stay put in one place longer than a stubborn wind. It could be said that he grew up in the place, in the vertiginous stack of walls he was made to call Home. It could be, and was, spoken in whispers by many: the cooks told this to their scullery maids, the maids hissed it into the garbagemen's ears, the garbagemen informed the feral rats so that even wild animals knew Mr. Bent was of Cicadily Home and Cicadily Home of Mr. Bent. That Mr. Bent did not in the least seem interested in producing an heir engendered further conspiracy in the civilly wild lot. 

Mr. Bent seemed not to care for whispers so thin a breathless breeze could blow them away. Still, he visited Home every year at least once. Not for sentimental reasons but because it felt like a right rite, a ritual as of keeping a stopped clock in dingy hallways. He would show up unexpectedly, so the cooks and maids and garbagemen all had to keep up their guard year and eve around. Should he turn up on a week they'd neglected their duty . . . the idea was unbearable. Cicadily Home had to have perfect reception for any Bent, whenever he or she may choose to engage.