White Manor

5. The White Lady

A faint voice in the abyss, calling Freida back to consciousness. Feminine and powerful, it draws her ghost from the deep back into her physical form, aching and exhausted. The pain was growing familiar to her.

Something was touching her arm, the one that had touched the rose, she realized. Freida's eyes shot open as the memories of the greenhouse and the horrible Pixie Rose returned. A hand pushed on her chest to keep her from shooting up and darting out of the room. It felt like the iron of the white front gate she had opened what seemed like forever ago. What was attached to the hand made Freida wish she was still asleep.

A shock of black hair frayed out in every direction, obscuring a face Freida hoped to never see. The visage wore a white dress of frills and lace covering all but her rotted, dead hands, one of them pressed onto Freida's beating heart.

"Be still, Elfreida," the corpse commanded, not unkindly.

Freida felt the urge to scream and fall unconscious growing as she gazed deep into that hole of rot where a face should sit. The zombie stared back like a patient doctor, her black hair covered in cobwebs and actual spiders, always swaying from ethereal wind.

"You've been taught not to enter the greenhouse unattended," the monster continued her voice like a broken amplifier in an icy field. "What were you thinking?"

Freida heard the words but was too confused and frightened to comprehend them. And her arm, she thought, what was wrong with her arm? The creature seemed to know what Freida was thinking because she removed her dead hand from the girl's chest and lifted the afflicted arm. Again Freida couldn't comprehend what was right in front of her.

The arm was still there, or at least it looked that way, only different. Just past the elbow the flesh and bone halted altogether, replaced by an icy blue shimmer, translucent, much like the boy she had met in the kitchen. It seemed as if a blue fire burned somewhere underneath the shine, but the arm seemed solid. The corpse touched the tip of Freida's ghostly appendage and sent a chill into the girl. Not because of the horror of touching the rotted woman, but because Freida could feel her touch.

"What did you do to me?" The girl's voice came out soft and hoarse.

"Nothing," The zombie in the white dress returned her hands to her own chest, mimicking a death pose.

"Your corporeal form was simply injured. We removed the affected ligament and now your spirit is seeping out, it would seem." She explained this as if it was trivial and silly of Freida to even ask.

"We'll have to get you a new body," she added with a glance behind her, to the central window at the back of the room. The attic, Freida thought, but had no idea why or how she could know that.

"I'd like to leave," Freida said, finding a stronger voice. The dead woman stared patiently but didn't respond. "I'd like to leave the manor, miss..."

"I am the White Lady," she said with pride, static lining her voice. "And you are Elfreida Friis, heir to this house and all who live within it," she continued.

"You cannot leave. Not without a new body. Your ghost arm will surely draw attention on stormy nights like this when it really shines.

"You don't know me!" Freida cried, trying again to jump from the table, but The White Lady was stronger in death than any mortal. She held Freida to the table and said again, in a less calm voice,

"You cannot leave. Stay here and I will return with a new body for you. Or at least an arm," and with that, she was gone. Vanishing without a trace as you would expect of a ghost, not a zombie.

Freida rose from the dark wood table slowly, feeling each muscle and bone in her body ache. It was her own body, she thought, and that corpse, The White Lady, she didn't know what she was talking about. Even if she did know my name somehow...I came here with my friends. I remember them, so I'm real, ghost arm or no.

Satisfied for now, Freida observed her surroundings. The room was dark as the rest of the house, but the round window behind her let in enough light to navigate. Sheet covered canvases and mannequins dominated the room, and dust covered everything. There was a tiny silver latch on the floor that Freida guessed was the only way out of here.

Now more motivated than ever to leave White Manor, Freida pushed past the pain and made her way to the tiny silver latch that surely opened a door or hatch out of the attic. She instinctively used her left hand to try the lock and was surprised to find that not only could she feel the metal, but she was able to grip and undo it. This ghost arm seems pretty alive to me, Freida thought. Although the blue shimmer is a little disheartening.

The latch opened easy enough, and a small hatch dropped eight feet to the second floor below. No ladder, but this drop seemed safer, and Freida managed to lower herself down quite a ways before dropping back into the dark hallway from before. Second floor, west hallway, again facing four doors.

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It saw ahead an opening in the wall, a way to contact its masters far away. The Thing Beneath the House (Foul Feast, It thought the masters had called it) chittered through the sliding glass doorway into the manor's forested cemetery. It walked on many legs of hardened bone, incandescent in the moonlight.

Foul Feast rose its many heads to the stars and began to pray.