417. A haunted house, 7

(Rose)

As I slowly walk toward the castle, I first wonder why Yaelun chose this place if it’s haunted. But I realise that he simply couldn’t sense it better than me from up there. What he saw was the ponds to ease the landing.

Yaelun is standing in them like a water dragon rising from them. It’s photogenic against the clear night. His belly is a little swollen here and there, but I don’t really notice it.

I walk to the castle gate, well, main garden door from there. I step onto the large terrace there just below the façade.

More bats and other animals fly away in a rush.

Night is settled there now, and I almost can’t see anything anymore.

Before I can find something to make a torch, Yaelun spits fire around the terrace, making me jolt.

Where a snake would spit venom, he spits something highly flammable, that smells of methanol or ethanol. I don’t know.

Also I don’t know what lit it, but it created large volatile flames that would last a few minutes, hardly more since there’s nothing solid burning.

I think he wanted to give me some light. And quite possibly to scare to death the remaining inhabitants of the castle for the night. It works, as more bats come out and flee. Hundreds.

I lit a torch in the last burning puddles around me, and enter through the main door there, sword in hand.

I never expected myself to one night act as if I was a vampire slayer, barging in like thus in a dark castle filled with bats, at night, in the middle of nowhere.

More bats and animals flee. There were so many.

I look around a large salon with a bar counter. The ceiling and floor reflects that it had become stables for hundreds of animals.

After a few more minutes of inspection, what was surely in the beginning a lord’s manor, had been turned into a luxurious hotel in modern times. And into an animal haven or hive afterward.

There won’t be any long dining table with chandeliers and burning candles everywhere waiting for me. Almost a pity.

Neither will I find any desecrated church or unholy and forbidden cult elements. Hopefully.

I do walk around mountains of bats faeces though.

The once luxurious rooms have been sculpted and rebuilt into dark and smelly caves, with even stalagmites and stalactite, born from decay, faeces, and unidentified processes of nesting, or hive making.

I inspect the rooms or suites one after another, finding similar results. Especially on the last floor with the holes in the roof. The main building is uninhabitable. At least by me.

I move then into the annex, and found a gymnasium. The ceiling is rather clean here, oddly.

But there are slimy things crawling around on every machine, slowly sliding their way away from me.

Outside, I can see through the dirty windows that Yaelun has lit another fire in the park.

It also begun its dinner, chomping down a tree.

I watch a large slug trying to escape by running into a wheel that is fixed, making it spin, not helping the animal escape. I leave the poor thing be.

Further down in this annex building, is an indoor pool, empty.

There it is rather clean, and dry enough. Something is there though.

The largest shadow haunting the place looked at me carefully, then outside, and then back at me.

R - Just for one night, please ?

The shade rummages around and eventually flees.

Everything remotely hostile or hazardous is now gone.

I sheathe my sword and go to open the largest doors to the outside, and see Yaelun.

He’s actually able to come inside through the human sized doors, crawling through the opening carefully, folding his wings along his body in specific ways. When the folded wings are going through, the rest of the body is pulling and pushing these segments inside, like a caterpillar.

It didn’t even scratch the door frame, I’m impressed.

Yaelun rolls himself inside the empty pool, filling it almost entirely. It’s like a giant snake rolled onto itself, with a handful folded wings protruding here and there.

Yaelun spits some flammable liquid in a corner of the room and lets me lit it into a small puddle of flames.

I warm up by the liquid fire. His eyes are reflecting that light as I do.

A moment later, the fire is about to end.

I look at Yaelun but his head is nowhere to be seen anymore. I notice however somewhere in the middle of that pool filled with feathery coils that a wing is unfolded, upward.

I understand the message.

It’s like when my mother opened a warm blanket on her lap, while a cat was around and looking for a place to nap.

Come to sleep little one it says.

Today I’m the pet of something bigger than me.

It’s not that bad.

I climb over the rings of the body until I reach the nest made for me below that wing.

Two rings make my bed, and the wing over me gently folds itself like a warm blanket over me.

I knew someone who would have loved to see that...

Please don’t haunt me Bleue. Not yet. I’m not ready yet.

Good night...

~

The next day is well set when I finally wake up. I didn’t expect a wing to be such a comfy cover.

I’m slowly moving out. Yaelun’s eyes are still shut while it breathes softly. He’s still asleep.

I leave him there and head outside quietly.

The castle in the dew is still sounding deserted. There’s an eerie silence around, even with the surrounding woods.

Nothing dared to approach the castle so far it would seem. We’ll stop haunting it as soon as Yaelun gets ready to fly again.

Until it wakes up, I’ll be looking for goods to scavenge around here. I’ll look for the kitchen and food storage of the castle.

I enter the main building through a different door.

The light of days is filtered through the dirt covering the windows and random fissures in the walls.

I still proceed slowly in this quite nasty environment. I’ve been in houses like that before. I’m mostly watching for places where the floor could collapse under me, or the ceiling over me.

And also for anything we could have missed that would be able to harm me badly.

Our sense of smell for beings strongly linked to T.I. is not flawless.

Like normal sense of smell, or sight even, things can easily tricks our perception.

So every step is careful and every sense is in alert.

Evil things can hide behind the very face of innocence sometimes.

And similarly, innocence can be found sometimes behind the very twisted pictures of evil and madness.

Don’t judge a book by its cover my sister used to say, judge it by its beginning and ending.

Judge on what they do, I get it.

But when I don’t know what to expect, I have to be ready for anything. So all my senses are still cautious in this haunted place.

I’m as ready as I can be for the unexpected that could arise from anywhere, as I walk through these anisotropic corridors.

The nature is taking these once identical corridors and turning them into erratic, chaotic pictures, that now only sort of look like one another.

In the end, nothing happened.

I found a pile of rusty mud that was in a distant past a kitchen. I broke down the door of a cold room or freezer.

There are a few fleshy pods living inside. I don’t dare touching that. But I can grab a few cans on a side that still have labels. And even a bottle of juice I think.

As I go outside, I see Yaelun poking his head outside the pool and yawning. We smile at each other. It’s terrifying.

Soon we’ll leave, and let the haunting resume with its usual inhabitants.

~