Tenebrae Manor Read Online Free PDF

present, a present blended into the past with its monochromatic rigidity.
    The throaty rasp of his pan flute, the inviting tranquility of the painting, drew Bordeaux into a peaceful mood. His tasks were forgotten; his mind was at ease.
    Yet just as his reverie was about to take off into palatial expanses of navy blue space, there appeared from the stairwell a head. A head, neck and two shoulders sprouting from where the floor split open into a cavern of spiral stairs. It appeared slowly, like a dream, with an unsettling grin of menace peering from beneath a moustache of brown and black. The nose was aquiline, a bird-like prominence on the face of its owner, though not pointed like the beauty of the raven but rather rounded. The nasal phenomenon had more in common with the clumsy ugliness of the spoonbill or perhaps the shoebill; namely any apparition of the stork family. This curved snout contributing to the overall unappealing bust of the being that had drifted upwards into the room. He is the demon, Deadsol. Equivalent in some respects to Bordeaux, though he displayed not much of a muchness in other faculties. His hair was parted upon the side, a slimy pelt of dark brown grease crowning his head above rounded eyes whose lids were puffed with shadow. The grin parted, his mouth opened and from within Deadsol came a drawling, sandy voice. “Bordeaux.”
    The other demon, though castaway in deep reverie, was not startled by Deadsol’s appearance in his room and turned from the window to face him.
    “Deadsol, my brother. Pray, tell. What do I owe this pleasantry?”
    Deadsol’s grin returned to its perch below his thick moustache. “Bordeaux, you most agreeable gentleman, you are required in the drawing room!”
    Bordeaux sighed. “When, my friend? Surely you see me here in the throes of recline?”
    “On the double! At once! Immediately, good citizen! What more can I say? A human is here! A fresh one, at that! You must alight your abode, alight. I say it twice!”
    Bordeaux exhumed an internal and lamentable sigh, his ensconcing had been cut so rudely short, his responsibilities called, as a child screams for its maternal overseer.
    “In a moment, good sir.”
    Having received the response he had set out for, Deadsol, seeing no further reason in loitering in Bordeaux’s presence; disappeared down the stairs.
    “My work is never done,” bemoaned Bordeaux. “Though it is gratifying to be necessary.” The sweat was draining down his body; his coat would no longer be needed. Although Bordeaux found a great boon in confidence when appearing dressed in refinement, his waistcoat seemed up to the task of his amiable presentation.
    Taking one last gulp of his homely turret and promising swift return to his roost, Bordeaux left for the drawing room.
     
     
     
     

 
     
     
     
     
    4: Two Very Different Women
     
    Madlyn ran clumsily down the stairs, flight upon flight, each step taking her further away from her abhorred mistress and closer to the clammy depths of Tenebrae’s kitchens. Compared to her matchstick legs, her knees stood out like bulbs and she had to stop briefly on a landing to adjust her stockings. Panting erratically, she poked at yet another tear in the clingy material, a ladder cascading down her shin. She would need a new pair, yet again, though the stockings did little to hide the purple bruises upon her kneecaps. So maladroit was her infantile gait that her knees were constantly clashing upon each other like some sick instrument of primitive percussion. Like most things though, Madlyn was numb to the pain, her mind seemed eternally bound in a gauze of ignorance that rendered her indifferent to the strains of her macabre reality, allowing her juvenile thoughts to remain enraptured in the fantasies of her whim.
    Forgetting her duty, she flung the tea tray she had been carrying over the banister and into the darkled void to her side. The cymbal disc whistled through the gloom before bursting into a most