White Manor

7. Constance and Beatrice

They sat together in the moonlit master bedroom of White Manor, the corpse and the tentacled girl. The room was large, larger than any Freida had been in since she arrived. White walls and large draped windows surrounded on all sides, broken only by a large set of double doors.

Behind where the White Lady sat lie a sprawling restroom and beyond that an even more impressive walk-in closet. Freida felt dread imagining what was kept in that long and dim closet.

Neither of them spoke for a long time. The White Lady staring at Freida and poor Freida staring at her new appendage. The purple tentacle twitched and slithered of its own accord by her side.

"That will stop with time," The dead woman spoke, all static and ice. Freida didn't respond.

"I had hoped you would come to understand, Elfreida. This is your home, and a young lady cannot behave this way. I can't have you bothering the other residents," the monster's tone was calm and feminine again, despite its sound.

No response from Freida, her tentacle wriggling continuously.

"Maybe if you meet them, a gathering in the boneyard, so to speak. Would that please you, Elfreida? Would that get you to stop this outlandish and rebellious behavior? We can't spend all of eternity at each other's throats, after all."

Freida thought of her friends from school, egging her on to enter the house. She thought of her parents, superstitious and protective. She thought of giant carnivorous plants that feed through spores and the dark sea and black sand where giant tentacled creatures lay traps for little girls in the sand. Freida didn't hear the White Lady's static lined voice or her southern California accent. Freida was close to nothingness now.

"I'll discuss it with the Stone Lady," more ice from the zombie's mouth, "but I'm certainly not leaving you alone again. Come along, lovely, we're going."

And with that, they were somewhere else. Instant teleportation, the master bedroom one second and on hard cement in the chill air the next. Freida and the White Lady stood under the wood roof beside the broken in sliding glass door. If her decaying face was visible beneath the shock of black hair Freida might see disapproval in those hollow sockets, but the young girl was miles away, and barely noticed the change of scenery. The two walked across the graveyard together, rotted hand holding writhing tentacle, bringing Freida along like a stubborn puppy.

Mist rose again from the earth, still moist from the long rain earlier that night. The Stone Lady stood eternal in the gloom, welcoming them as two old friends. They stopped just short of the large tomb and Freida seemed to gather her senses.

"This thing attacked me," Freida managed to choke out, her breath visible in the night air.

"Is that true, Beatrice? Did you attack my dear Elfreida in the night?" The White Lady spoke lightly, as if to a dear friend. Spectral arms appeared from the cracked statue, the same that had almost gripped Freida. A voice seemed to rise from the ground itself, the wind swirling madly around the tomb.

"No, no. Of course I would never damage your sweet little...Thing, my Lady Constance. I was of course only welcoming her into my grave." The ghostly arms gestured wildly as the spirit spoke, and Freida, in her maddened state, wondered just how those arms would feel against living flesh.

She took a step toward the tomb and those arms spread to embrace her as a mother hugs her child. The White Lady, Lady Constance, the tomb spirit had called her, stopped Freida with an iron grip on her shoulder.

"Regardless," Constance began, all feminity and charm gone from her icy voice. "We're here to ask permission to use your boneyard for a gathering. For all the manor's residents. My Elfreida is feeling uneasy with our new arrangements and I'd like her to fit in. The sun will rise soon, I suggest tomorrow at sundown. What do you say, Beatrice?"

The Stone Lady's sightless eyes remained still. The door of the tomb she was carved into didn't creak an inch, but those spectral arms continued to gesture in the night, always so close to Freida. Crickets chirped in the distance but no birds called out. After a long pause, the arms came to a halt and again the earth itself seemed to speak.

"You have my permission," it said, "and I will gladly see you both here tomorrow. Pleasant dreams, sisters."

And with that the arms were gone, leaving the stone carving dim and plain, all energy seemingly sapped from it. Constance and Freida stood alone in the cemetery, but behind them, past the broken sliding glass door, a shadow crawled along the kitchen floor, eager for their return.

#####

The masters had told It what to do. Foul Feast's brother would bring the girl. It had many arms for grabbing, after all.

The Thing Beneath the House lingered in its personal tomb, far down in the White Manor's crypts. An ancient obsidian gateway stood in the distance, its doors shut tight.

It craved Freida now, and Foul Feast could hardly wait to fulfill his master's wishes.