White Manor

8. The Lumbering Horror

Freida had been too busy running when the thing her voice had summoned first appeared for her to get a good look at it. Now, as the two corporeal residents of White Manor approached the kitchen, they both witnessed the horrible thing head on.

A black mass of limbs and mouths towered over them, its abyssal skin constantly shifting and slithering as if a thousand snakes slithered within. The gaping mouths had no lips and bared chattering teeth the color of rust, and black forked tounges danced behind them. The thing had no visible eyes or ears, just dozens of arms, legs, tentacles, and mouths. It dragged its huge mass across the kitchen floor toward Freida and Constance in a sharp pattering of feet and gripping hands. Freida knew that if one of those hands touched her the last bit of her sanity would surely vanish.

"Run!" Constance ripped Freida from her dreadful visions, her cold iron grip dragging the girl back through the tombstoned backyard. The ground shook beneath them as the great lumbering thing struggled to fit through the sliding glass doorway, slicing its oily skin on broken glass.  It broke into the backyard with a crash and nearly collapsed the overhanging deck on itself. 

"Stone Lady grant us safety!" Constance sounded frightened, all the horror of The White Lady perishing before the great monster behind her. No response from the great tomb before them. The thing was closer now, its flailing limbs smashing down gravestones and trees alike, surprising fast in its pace.  Again Freida thought of her mother's old superstition about knocking over tombstones.

"This monster is in for years of bad luck after this," Freida shocked herself and Constance by saying, and then she fell into a fit of harsh laughter. The White Lady was beside herself. Hundreds of years in this manor and now I'm to be murdered by its ugliest resident because of a half-insane, tentacle-armed little girl?

The great ball of limbs and mouths was upon them now, its shifting hands and slimy tentacles stretching to reach Freida's arms, her face, anything they could reach. She pressed her body against The Stone Lady's tomb and closed her eyes tight, preparing her mind to snap at the horror's touch. It wouldn't be so bad to let go, she thought. Sanity is overrated.

But the hands that grabbed Freida and Constance first didn't belong to the lumbering thing before them. Spectral blue hands like flickering fire emerged from The Stone Lady's carving behind them, gripping them both by the shoulders. The touch ignited Freida's skin like diving into a frozen lake, but her mind managed to stay glued in place for now. Then she felt a pulling sensation across her entire body, and movement like she was falling from a great hight. For the second time that night, Freida lost consciousness.

The Lumbering Horror did not try to enter the tomb of The Stone Lady after those sparkly blue arms disappeared back inside it, pulling two large sparkly forms out of his food with them. It had what it came for, ever since that voice from upstairs awakened its long hibernation; a good meal.

Lying in the moist grass under the pale moon were two limp bodies, already being prodded and examined by the great beast. One had been dead a really long time, the monster examined. But the other one was fresh, a young girl with a funny purple arm, almost like one of its own.