HorrorAddicts.net Presents:
Manor of Frights
Imagine a Victorian house where every room is cursed with a frightful existence. Are monsters in the halls? Ghosts left to fester in the library? Or are the rooms themselves enchanted with malevolent energy? What was summoned long ago and what doorways were left open? Manor of Frights is a collection of tales all set in different rooms of the same house.
With authors: Judith Pancoast, Daphne Strasert, Loren Rhoads, Mark Orr, Michael Fassbender, R.L. Merrill, Sumiko Saulson, Ollie Fox, Barend Nieuwstraten III, Rosetta Yorke, Amanda Leslie, Lesley Warren, BF Vega, DW Milton, D.J. Pitsiladis, Jason Fischer, and Emerian Rich.
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An excerpt from Manor of Frights
Withered Bindings
by Michael Fassbender
The Study, 1911
Philippa eased the door shut behind her and cast her gaze across the study. The telltale signs of six months of neglect had settled upon the room, and with Lord and Lady Bostwick due to return from their safari, it fell to her to put everything aright. She swallowed her unease as she crossed the room.
She steeled herself for the mighty heave that was necessary to pull open the heavy windows standing guard at the study’s outer wall. Like sentries, they only unwillingly parted to admit the passage of a mere servant between them. Philippa entertained the fancy that they wished to hinder her efforts to restore the appearance of regular upkeep. Willing or not, they parted to admit a cleansing breeze.
Philippa peered at the sky outside. Clouds sailed across the heavens in a brisk wind, but she satisfied herself that rain was not imminent and the draught would do much to scatter the musty atmosphere of the room.
Hearing a flutter behind her, she turned and pounced on a few stray papers that had sailed across the master’s desk in the breeze. With her left hand, she groped for an available paperweight and seized upon one shaped like a faceted pillar made of black stone. Her crisis averted, she withdrew her feather duster and commenced work.
Approaching the pair of bookcases on the wall opposite the window, she heaved a sigh. The dust was thick and clung to the spines of the books. She shook her head and steeled herself for a bout or two of sneezing, and then she set to work.
Fortunately, the master kept a fair number of volumes there, loading the shelves two layers deep. The outer layers hung an inch or so over the edge of the shelves, so she settled into an up-and-down rhythm as she liberated the leather bindings from the accumulation of months of dust. Through it all, she struggled to keep her head free of thoughts.
It was well-known in the servants’ quarters that the old master had possessed an unhealthy compulsion for esoteric knowledge. Cook related the stories she had heard from the other servants. She counted herself lucky that her work kept her in the kitchen. Over time, an aura of unease grew over the study among the house’s staff.
The young master was not known to harbor the same obsessions as his father, but neither had he cast aside the volumes he had inherited. Many of the books that regained their shine under her duster had been part of that bequest. Some were older than the house itself.
A sudden tug at her duster jarred her from her thoughts.
She glanced down at a book on the third shelf and saw that her duster clung to a tangle of spider web hanging beneath it. Dreading an encounter with the spider that created it, she took a step back from the shelf and yanked.
The webs did not give way.
When a second pull failed to dislodge the duster, Philippa crouched down for a better look. What she had taken for a mass of cobwebs revealed itself as something far more substantial. Its surface suggested the underside of a mushroom, perhaps, or a shelf fungus growing from a tree stump in the woods. It was no mushroom, however. It hung from the edge of the book like a curtain and in passing, the duster had ensnared itself. When she released its handle, it dangled in the breeze.
With a sick feeling in her gut, she seized the offending book by its upper spine and pulled it from the shelf. The leather bindings gave way in her grasp, molding themselves between her fingers. In the next moment, a spongy mass squeezed itself out of the bindings and struck the oak floor with a damp thud.
Philippa looked down upon the mound with dismay. Opening the book, she found the lower two-thirds missing, and only a ragged sheaf of the upper pages remained within. These leaves, too, suffered heavily from some kind of rot. The stitching broke under the stress of holding the book open, and a clump of rotten paper slid from the book to land next to the first pile of corruption.
The book slid from Philippa’s fingers and dashed itself into fragments on the floor. Her eyes scoured the empty slot on the shelf for some explanation. A rich mahogany stain on the surface of the shelf attested to the fact that the book had decayed in place for some time, not just months but perhaps years.
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