Masked Ms Moore
Short Story by Ben Franks
Short Story by Ben Franks
“They say she’s cursed, that Ms Moore,” the taxi driver groaned. The engine of the silver-grey Ford Escort rumbled stationary in the English moonlight. “Never comes out.”
“I’m sure I’ll manage, old sport,” the passenger replied, clutching his suitcase and tugging his fingers on the lever to open out the back left passenger door. He exited into the night rain, a trilby perched on his head, laden with fresh pools of water and dripping unmercifully onto his charcoal-black overcoat. The taxi driver sighed and disappeared down the drive, his silver-grey saloon succumbed into the mouth of darkness.
The passenger marched up to the Estate’s mahogany doors, its gardens’ overgrown weeds luminous; glowing at him. Mr St Marshall, a local estate agent and self-claimed expert in persuasion, did not reach those daunting doors before they opened wide, showcasing the Estate’s hollow welcoming. A figure approached the newly created expanse and paused a foot before the rainfall, his stark lifeless eyes unblinkingly focused upon St Marshall.
“Welcome to Ms Moore’s Estate,” the figure croaked, as though he had not used his voice in some years. “Ms Moore would like to invite you for supper, Mister?”
“John, call me John,” St Marshall insisted, stepping in from the rain to take up a position left of the suited figure. He was rather dwarfed compared to St. Marshall, an aging tuxedo hanging over his frail midget shoulders and a small tuff of cobweb-white hair stuck to the forefront of his chin, his bony hands long-trapped in his white linen gloves: a butler.
As the passenger and the figure walked into the great halls, the doors locked shut behind them, without a squeak or slam, as if on cue. A formidable staircase wound up to the right, dust-saturated, crimson-red curtains hanging long over her rails, excluding a glint of polished gold at her head one floor up.
“It’s this way, Sir,” the figure addressed from a remarkable distance down a narrow hall, her shadows loosened by the faint light of the candles caressing her walls. St Marshall pursued the small man across the cobbled stones and grand patterned rugs. He was led to a dining hall, a table stretching into the horizon of the other end of the room. St Marshall was curious as to the presence of just one throne.
“Will I not be joined by Lady Moore?” he inquired.
The little figure returned, one of his linen hands resting on the throne as he pulled it out to sit his guest. “Ms Moore is no Lady, Sir,” was all he commented and then disappeared back into the narrow halls.
St Marshall sat impatiently on the hard throne. The tall tapestry-walls surrounding his lonely presence intimidated him. The light was soft, assumed by the control of a few scattered candles, of which their master lay two foot forward to the throne upon the mahogany architecture of the expanding dinner table. Even sound seemed to have crept into a corner, justifying itself in a paralysis; breathing a silence across the room, only broken by the mere pitter-patter of distant heavy rain: silence’s breathing.
St Marshall sat.
Stripped.
Alone.
Naked to her shadows.
* * *
St. Marshall, half way through savagely dissecting the cold fleshy salmon meat victimised to his host’s lavish cutlery, was interrupted by the figure approaching from a far, rather eerie, oak door in the horizon of her halls. His blackened, sooty figure, guided by his two teary eyes, slipped toward the single man upon a single throne.
“We only have one rule while you stay, John,” his now soft voice murmurs choosing to use the passenger’s christened name.
St. Marshall looked upward, his plate now clear. “Which is?”
“Ms Moore’s chamber is out of bounds to all her guests.”
The figure disappeared once more with only the company of an empty plate. And St. Marshall sat, once more alone, pondering on a new, full stomach. He had forgotten why he even came here, why he had dined alone with the cold company of her distant walls and why he, passionately, could not forbid his own thinking from obsessing over the riddled secrecy of his host’s chambers and his denial to her entry.
For St. Marshall did not know of the layout of her Manor Estate, but was ignorant enough to assume his host would seat in the largest chamber of the first floor, up the daunting staircase rooted upon the lobby of her grand entrance. And thus it would be this route that the passenger would follow, the inevitable deed of his body to his mind objective in its pursuit of enlightenment: why close off his host’s chambers?
Privacy.
The logical answer had struck him; for he knew it were social abode to not enter one’s chambers without invitation. Yet it was the butler’s warning, his defunct, barren threat of his wet eyes as he declared his only rule of hospitality, as though an everlasting sadness within him had been provoked. Something St. Marshall, ever so unfortunately, couldn’t resist.
Upon reaching the first floor, the passenger’s hand sticky with sweat rested upon the golden head of her stairwell. Lighting up here was gloomy, its subtle life burning through the foggy glass of figuratively placed oil lamps. St. Marshall was lost but his incentive guided him forwards down the narrow hall that beckoned him inward, her labyrinth arrangement of corners and open-door studies made his foot by stride steps closer to her covert crib seem as though they’d taken an eternity; his consciousness long stolen by the oil lamp smoke which guided him.
The final hall was even narrower than her sisters. She also differed for other, less obvious reasons: the cleanliness, polished ornamental architecture that caved around the passenger was neither dusty nor eerie. The light, this time from candles just as they were in the grand dining hall, was winning its war with the shadows.
And at the very end of the perfectly preserved passage stood a taunting door.
* * *
It is odd, is it not, how a human, once pitched with the notion of a rule, will seek to break it? This passenger, who had come to the hidden Estate of a house-bound woman long stripped of her title with the most socially acceptable of civil intentions, had flipped to being the villain of a Manor.
St. Marshall had turned the handle to the forbidden chamber and laid his eyes upon a corpse who would not let her visiting guest leave. He had broken a single rule to satisfy his conscience and had ended up being separated from such a spoilt pleasure altogether. The figure will go on inviting guests. Ms Moore will go on owning her estate. But St. Marshall will become a part of her walls, a face long forgotten by the driver at the wheel of a silver grey saloon.
..
