It Came from Anomaly Flats Page 10

  One by one, the Westridge lineage was pruned away with careful, precise snips of fate’s shears. Dorothy Westridge, neck broken by a tumble down the main staircase. Snip. Marcus Hamilford, throat nicked by his own razor during a shave. Snip. Lucille Westridge, arm mangled after getting caught in the wine press, dying from a severe loss of blood. Snip. Archibald Westridge, decapitated by the dumbwaiter. Snip. The Caverton twins, who fell from the highest tower while leaning out the windows and shouting at the gardeners. Snip, snip.

  And then the curse came for the servants. Those who didn’t flee Hillcrest in fear found themselves succumbing to the terrible misfortune of the family. A stable hand slipped and tumbled into the well while drawing water for the horses. A cook fell into the kitchen hearth and roasted alive. The butler choked on a small stone that had found its way into his morning porridge.

  As the family and their help fell victim to their hard and vile fate, there was no one with the strength left to mind the house. With each new family death, Hillcrest seemed to die a little more, too, its mortars flaking away, its wallpaper curling from the corners, its flowers strangling under the grip of weeds. By the time of the great Hillcrest fire, only two servants and three heirs of the family misfortune remained, and when they all died screaming in the flames, it was something of a blessing, for the Westridge line was finally cut for good, and Hillcrest Manor could cease to be witness to so much death and horror.

  Or so one would think.

  But the grounds upon which the ruins of Hillcrest lie are haunted by more than ghosts. They carry the echo of the old woman’s curse, if that is truly the cause of all this death, and that curse continues today, in a most ghastly and alluring manner.

  Although the manor is decrepit and overgrown, the walls long fallen down, and the mortar long turned to dust, something wonderful and terrible happens in this ruined place at the top of the hill on the night of each harvest moon. A slow mist boils up from the earth, forming at the base of the old staircase and spreading like tallow across the foundation and fallen walls. It creeps beyond the overgrown hedges and the pillars of the arcades, which reach upward through the ground like battered fence posts. The mist reaches its limits just before the Lurchwood begins, and then it grows, piling up on itself, a bubbling, wispy gray wall climbing higher and higher until it forms an immense column as tall as Hillcrest’s highest tower once stood. Sparks of lightning ripple through the fog, a self-contained storm of purple light and black magic. The wind whips into a screeching whorl, and when it blows the mists away, Hillcrest is standing once more, immaculate and new. The walls of stone are rebuilt, clean and clear of moss and weeds. The towers loom against the evening sky. The rose bushes blossom; the hedges stand tall and trim. Torches burn in every window, and from the outside, most ghastly and wonderful of all, the silhouettes of the Westridge heirs can be seen, brought back to life for one terrible and beautiful night each month, their footsteps echoing from room to room, their laughter ringing through the halls.

  If you were so inclined to enter the manor, you would see the interior restored to gleaming perfection: the parlor once again made cozy, its plush chairs and charming tapestries warming against the heat of a crackling fire; the library rebuilt, its great walls lined with every volume of every book you could ever hope to read, from ceiling to floor, and back up again; the dining room returned to its best self, the long oak table running grandly down the center, set with fine china and glittering crystal.

  The servants would draw you in, take your coat and hat, lead you through the foyer, with its sparkling chandeliers and its honey-brown timbers, and the Westridges would greet you with open arms chilled with death but growing warmer with memory. They would reach for you, clasp onto you, whisk you away down the halls and through the house, dance with you in the parlor, offer you cigars in the study, ply you with billiards and Lillet in the Snooker Room; they would stuff you with crackling pork and sour cherry jam, saffron goose and dill yogurt, roasted potatoes with rosemary and oil, steaming asparagus spears slick with melting butter, sweet and spicy slaws tossed with juniper and blackberries, fluffy biscuits glazed brown with a garlic egg wash, light, airy profiteroles drowning in molten chocolate, and on and on and on, until you’re fit to burst. The Westridges would clap you on the back and congratulate you on your wit, on your charm, and they’d wonder how they’d managed to make it this long without the pleasure of your friendship—and you, bewildered and thrilled, would admit to having no idea, but also to a certain pleasure in having set that wrong aright. And you might even wonder why you had such misgivings about coming to this dinner party in the first place…you might find your memory and your fear drifting away, like the mist that evaporated into the night to reveal the restored majesty of the house.

  But before the full, round moon that bathes the manor under its gentle spotlight disappears into the rising dawn, you would remember your horror. Because as you well know, one must receive an invitation to attend this unique and rare soiree, and each harvest moon, only one invitation is sent. Only one Anomalian may join the party each time the house is breathed back to life. And while that one person is the absolute center of it all—the drinking and the dancing, the dining and the gaiety and the fun—when the evening is over, the magic is undone, and the house falls back into its ruin. The Westridge heirs once again die their horrible and gruesome deaths as the stones crumble and fall, as the timbers catch fire, as the house burns to the ground, and by the time the sun rises, the manor is once more wasted and overgrown, a scattering of so much rubble and rot. And there, where the parlor used to be, perhaps, or maybe outside the outline of the pantry walls, lies, without fail, the mangled and broken body of that lucky soul who accepted the Westridges’ ghastly invitation.

  Every earthly guest to Hillcrest since its ghostly gatherings began has died. And not a single one of them died well.

  Anne Raftmann answered her invitation some time ago, when you were just a child. Do you remember? She went in whole, but the next morning, the searchers found only pieces. And not all the pieces, at that.

  Bone Tipton went to the party just a few short months later. He’d never worn a tie in his life, but he borrowed one from Tucker Branson and learned how to tie it just for the occasion. He even brought a bottle of wine, a cheap bottle of Neptune Norton, even though the Westridge cellars were full, and stocked with all the best vintages from all the best regions. They found him with a piece of iron fencing gouged deeply into his forehead, spiking right through his brain.

  Rosemary Thurston was hacked to death by a hatchet that was, the coroner claimed, quite dull. Dennis Paisley was half-flayed and expertly gutted, strung between two crumbling columns and left to feed the carrion birds. Gladys Foreman had her back broken in half, bent backwards into a grotesque V at the foot of the overgrows hedges. Poor Richard Fasby...it took them quite a while to find his body. After almost two full days, they finally unearthed it. Someone had tripped over a fresh mound of dirt, loose and newly turned. So they began to dig. Richard was found a few feet down, his skin pinched and blue. Doc Mason confirmed later...there was no doubt that he’d been buried alive.

  Rufus, the town mechanic, he went just last year. Everyone begged him not to go. You begged him not to go. But he went, his eyes misty with tears, wearing his cleanest coveralls and smiling, actually smiling, so much that he couldn’t wipe away all the drool that spilled from the corners of his mouth. You were the one who found his body the next day; you were part of that search party. You went looking for Rufus’ body, knowing you would find it, because the bodies are always found, eventually...but you didn’t know—couldn’t have known—that Rufus had somehow had his head crushed in by one of the gargantuan blocks of Hillcrest Manor. You didn’t know you’d find him jutting out at the neck from beneath the huge stone, his body bluntly severed from the head that had been liquefied beneath almost a full ton of rock.

  You remember it clearly.
You still see it sometimes, his decapitated form. When you move your eyes too quickly, you see it in the corner of your vision. You dream about it some nights.

  You always wake up crying.

  You don’t understand why anyone accepts the invitation. Anyone who goes to Hillcrest on the night of a harvest moon will die. The house’s record is perfect. Accepting the invitation is nothing more than a complex form of suicide, and you cannot fathom what would drive a person to that end. Rosemary Thurston had two small children and a nice little business running the Anomaly Bijou. Why would she trade that for two dozen blows from an axe? Richard Fasby was something of a communal grandfather to the town, always dispensing advice and cellophane-wrapped sweets. Bone Tipton was a good-for-nothing, it’s true, but he was a happy good-for-nothing, a laughing scoundrel with a zest for life.

  And Rufus. Rufus had lived through so much. He had come so far. He had persevered against such incredible odds. For him to just throw it all away.

  For all of them to just throw it all away...

  You don’t understand it. You will never understand it. The mystery of it is as great as the tragedy, and you swear to yourself that if an invitation to Hillcrest ever finds its way into your mailbox, you will rip it to shreds, touch the paper to a match, and spit on the ashes.

  You will never accept a summons from the Westridge house.

  You have said this for years. You have sworn by it. You have whispered it to yourself as you drifted to sleep on countless nights. You have chanted it like a superstition, a brave defiance of a situation that will almost certainly never present itself, because there are so many people who live in Anomaly Flats, and only one person is invited every harvest moon. The odds are infinitesimally low. Even so, you’ve sworn. Everyone you know has sworn. Anyone who has ever spoken of the ghostly invitation has done so in hushed tones; every person in Anomaly Flats’ history has vowed to never accept the invitation.

  To do so would be madness.

  To do so would be torture.

  To do so would be death.

  And yet...

  The truth is, the request has never been declined. In the many, many decades since Hillcrest crumbled, every single invitation that has gone out has come back in the hands of the guest and presented to the footman.

  Every single person has answered the call.

  You don’t understand why. You will never understand why.

  You would never attend the Hillcrest party.

  Or so you always thought.

  But tonight there will be a harvest moon. And you heard a knock at your front door this morning, which is odd, because you never get visitors, not this far off the beaten path. You like to keep to yourself, and it’s been years since anyone has ventured out to your place. Even the mail doesn’t make its way to you; you walk into town once a month and pick it up from the post office. That’s why it was especially surprising when you opened the door, after hearing the knock, to find a tidy golden envelope placed perfectly in the center of your doormat. You looked around, but there was no other soul in sight. Just the envelope.

  You picked it up and brought it inside. Perhaps you already knew what it was, somewhere deep inside, on a cellular or evolutionary level, but you convinced yourself that it could be anything. You don’t follow the moon cycles too closely, after all, and you truly didn’t realize another harvest moon was already priming itself somewhere high above. You brought the envelope into the kitchen and sat down at the table, admiring the way the paper glistened, as if perhaps real gold filaments had been woven into the grain. The envelope was thin, but the thing inside had some real heft, and you remember being surprised at how much a simple card could weigh.

  It was addressed to you, and not to anyone else. The sender even used your middle name, just to avoid any possibility of confusion. But you’ve never so much as whispered your middle name to another soul. Your parents were the only people who ever knew it, and they’re long gone, of course. But there it was, emblazoned on the field of shimmering gold, along with the other letters that serve to summarize the whole of your identity.

  There was no stamp. No return address. You flipped the envelope over. It was sealed with a small disc of pressed wax, light blue in color, with the faint image of two clasped hands before a yew tree, encircled by a laurel wreath, stamped into the hardened surface. Your heart began to beat quickly, and you realized you’d been forgetting to breathe. You felt strangely compelled, and you slipped your finger beneath the flap and peeled away the seal. The envelope fell open. An invitation slid out.

  I won’t go, you thought numbly, though “thought” is too soft a word.

  You screamed it inside your own head. Your brain exploded with the force of the words.

  Throw it away, you thought. Rip it to shreds, set it on fire, and spit on the ashes, just like you always said.

  But this was such an extraordinary occasion. This was the lottery won. Before you destroyed the thing that whispered your death, you wanted to hold it, appreciate its value. You’ve never won a thing in your life, and you wanted to drown yourself in the improbability of it all.

  So you picked up the invitation. You held it between your fingers. You rubbed the pads of your thumbs against the heavy parchment. You smelled its wet, musty scent. A small lithograph of Hillcrest Manor graced the bottom of the page. You read the words written in elegant script:

  The Westridge Family cordially invites you to be the Honored Guest for their Full Moon dinner party tonight at Hillcrest Manor. If amenable, please arrive at 7:00 PM sharp. Formal dress is requested. No guests.

  Your hands trembled as you set the paper down next to its envelope. You pushed your chair back and stood up, relieved to find that you still had your wits about you. As silly as it sounds, you actually worried that the invitation would deprive you of your higher instincts, of your common sense. You thought the letter might carry a powerful magic, and that when you read the words, they would act as an unbreakable spell that would bind your mind and propel your body to carry out the wishes of the Westridge family. But no. You knew still that attending the party meant you would suffer and die a gruesome death before the night was through. You knew still that you would rip the invitation to shreds, touch it to a match, and spit on the ashes. There was a relief in this, though there was a sadness, too. Something in you had hoped to be powerless against the summons. A part of you had hoped for more.

  This thought stuck with you as you pulled open the drawer and dug about for the matches. You were glad to be able to refuse the invitation, there was certainly no doubt about that. But a part of you yearned for the senseless thrill of an uncontrollable march to your own death. You did not want to die, and you weren’t suicidal, but when you looked at your life, what did you see? Loneliness, yes, but something deeper than that. More profound. Isolation. Living in Anomaly Flats means constructing impenetrable walls around your heart and around your mind so that none of the horrors can wedge into you and spread through your existence like a cancer. Every good thing that had happened to you had gone sour. Friendship turned to hatred. Hope turned to horror. Love turned to death. Every person you know is sick, or dead, or deranged. Or broken like a window.

  You found the matches. You brought them to the table. You thought about Hillcrest Manor. You thought about the sunken earth and the pillars that jut up like the long, jagged fingernails of a giant buried just beneath the surface. You thought of broken bodies and cracked skulls and twisted limbs. You thought about Rufus.

  You drew a match from the box.

  But you also thought about what the house once was. What it would be again tonight. You have glimpsed it several times from afar, intrigued by its reassembly, drawn by its light, but not willing, not able, to fully approach the clearing in the woods. You have seen the manor from the next hill over, restored to its ghostly glory, and it was ever a beautiful sight.
Sitting at the table, with the letter lying quietly before you, you envisioned the grandeur of the building, the bubbly voices inside. You thought about the decadent foods that would fill the dining table, the exquisite smells and the exploding flavors, unlike anything that’s ever passed your lips before. You thought about the music, and how much you used to love classical arrangements. You used to listen to them with your mother on her old record player, before she went missing, before she was ripped out of your life like frayed stitches from a closing wound. You thought how nice it would be to hear music again, real music, with people who enjoy it and appreciate it the way your mother did, sitting at the record player with tears in her eyes and a graceful smile on her lips.

  You lit the match. The sulfur burned your eyes.

  The flame flickered, and you were reminded of warmth. It seemed like years since you’d been warm, really warm, didn’t it? Even in the summer, there seemed always to be a wet chill permeating the air, and other people never seemed to feel it, but you did, didn’t you? You could never get warm, no matter how many logs you piled up in your yard and soaked in cheap lighter fluid. You thought of Hillcrest’s many fireplaces, some big enough for a person to lie down in sideways, and you thought about how warm you might feel, even if just for the night.