The Night Remains

Note: This story contains elements of non-con/dub-con, some mind control, and sex with a non-human (tentacles). Extraordinary thanks to kenjisato for his excellent editing—any remaining errors are my own.

Enjoy!

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The Margot Estate stood like the oppressive maw of a monster which, each night, descended from its perch in the black sky to devour the city of Richmond. Even on starless nights, the hunkered house hung blacker than black between the paper-lantern-blue moon above and the crackling, candescent city below. Somehow, the mansion had long ago shouldered its ogreish bulk onto the city's limits and no one had ever been brave enough to slay it. Each night, its windows winked and fluttered as they caught streetlight and moonlight, and the whole of it lingered there like a hulking spider with a thousand black and glittering eyes.

And always, the house was waiting. Always, it was watching.

And Abbie had always hated it. It assaulted a sensibility of taste and style that, even as a little girl, she couldn't ignore. It was opulent and gaudy and so rich with its pomposity that it made her ill. At a party in her final year of high school, her friend, Desmond, had told her that he had planned to burn it down, and all summer she had looked up to it in the long evening hours, expecting to see it alight.

When it still was standing in August, she assumed it had all just been bravado, something spoken to impress a girl at a party. She was disappointed, but she couldn't help but wonder what such arson would have meant to the community. It was assured by the Richmond Historical Society that the estate's history made it, indeed, a very important place and one worth protecting. What that history actually was, though, was always dismissed and talked around by everyone in Richmond, and if questioned, no one in the city seemed to actually know what that history was, but always, people were steadfast in insisting that it was significant and necessary.

There had been no shortage of outsiders, though—people who, like her, had looked at the imperious manor and thought it a monstrosity. Architects and building moguls had come to the city, each offering plans and projects and estimates to renovate its sprawling acreage into something useful—apartments or houses or parks or shopping centres—but they had all been flatly refused. In fact, there had been a scandal not long after she had graduated from high school about a real estate tycoon who had tried to pay an immense bribe to push his proposal through the city council, and, in a rare act of unity, the tycoon had ended up as the target of a sting that would imprison him for twenty years.

Her father—a beat reporter for one of the local newspapers—had talked her whole life about how the minuscule scale of municipal politics made it impossible to ever experience genuine, grassroots change. No one cared as ardently about not changing their city as an ombudsman or a ward representative who was most invested in maintaining their own fractional power. It had always struck her as funny, then, that a group of such self-interested locals had come together in such an act of moral pettiness—and all to punish a man who had, no doubt, offered successful bribes to people at much higher levels of government.

That was something she never could understand. What was it about that house that made people defend it so? There must have been something special about it to draw such a strong reaction from the community. Everything she knew about it, though, told her that it existed only as a bulwark to progress.

Late that same summer, Desmond called and told her that he was finally ready. He was going to burn it down. She was compelled by the idea, and asked all manner of penetrating questions, which revealed to both of them that he didn't have any idea how to get away with his crime.

So she did what any normal friend would do—she promised to go onto the grounds with him and find the best way in and out. Part of it was a genuine attempt to help, but mostly she just wanted to see the place up close, to understand what made it so special.

She spent the week beforehand at the library, researching the house's history through local papers and books. Everything she found, though, remained as vague about the Margot family as anyone she'd ever spoken to. People were glad the house existed. It was good for the town, they said. It shouldn't be destroyed. On and on the articles went, praising it, but no one ever explained why.

All she learned was that the place hadn't been lived in for years. After the last of the Margot family had died without an heir, the place had been shuttered, and there was now only one groundskeeper who cared for it.

And it was well cared for. Its major reclamations, renovations and repairs were funded by the city, and they kept it in excellent shape. Features were repaired if they broke, or were replaced if they were worn, and every year some maintenance was done to rebuild outbuildings or renovate parts of the house. One year, its entire driveway was redone in fresh black asphalt; another year, its old gazebo on the grounds had its rotting wood torn down and the whole thing rebuilt. In the summer, the expansive lawn was voraciously watered and cut; in the autumn, the vast sweeping waves of leaves were raked; and in the winter, the long road that wound up like an eyelash off the side of a giant's face was always plowed and salted. It was, in many ways, the best looking part of the city, even though people were hardly ever permitted there.

At a dead end in her research, she decided to go ahead with her plan to survey the place with Desmond.

Early one afternoon, they crept onto the property, not with gasoline or matches, but just themselves, eager to get a sense of the place.

They were careful to avoid detection by the ancient groundskeeper, wandering in a lazy arc through the gardens at the back of the house. Quietly, they explored green fields and fertile black plant beds, and they traipsed across the manicured grass and gawked among the shaved topiaries. In all her research, she had learned so little about it that it seemed then like a fairytale castle—as if it were some magical place beyond reach or understanding.

At the back of the house, near the glass sunroom, they found a garden. A long line of strawberries grew there, their fruit so thick and ripe that they made a crunching sound as she bit into one, and the taste and sound made her shoulders shake. When she looked down at the berry, though, she realized that the black seeds were actually pink and blue like a sugary cereal. Desmond took a bite, but spat it out.

She ate one, then another, finding them deliciously rich and creamy.

Then they snuck around the house proper, but there was no obvious way in. They pulled on some doors and wiggled some windows, but each was locked tightly.

Peering into one window, Abbie saw canvas-covered furniture and decadent oil paintings hanging in marvellous golden frames. The carpet was a maroon colour with an indistinct black pattern, the walls and floorboards a dark, rich wood. Despite its luxury, though, the house looked not at all like the enchanted fairytale castle she had built it to be in her mind. Instead, it just looked old and stuffy.

She had sealed her face with her hands to another window, blocking out the sunlight with a grimace, hoping to find something special about this haunted place—and that was when it caught her eye. In a study, beneath tall skylights, there stood an ivory lectern, and on its sloping surface was a perfectly black book—a book so black that it repelled the afternoon light.

She traced her finger along the glass, studying the room with her dawning mouth. There was a chandelier on a long chain hanging from a hook between the skylights, all its lights snuffed out. Beneath that there was a wide round table, but the table was more of a donut than a solid surface. It was a wide ring of wood, like a tight-throated horseshoe, with a space in the middle where several people could easily stand; and on the side of the table facing the lectern, there was a channel that allowed one to walk from outside the table into its inner circle.

Abbie stared at the room, head tilting askew. Unlike the other furniture, the lectern and the table had no canvas covering, and there was no fine layer of dust caked on either. On the floor, she noticed too that, in the space at the middle of the table, there was a hint of glass laid into the floor.

She pressed tighter against the window, examining the book as closely as she could. She had to know more about what it was. Nothing was more important to her then. But the more she stared, hoping to espy some secret, the more a strange feeling settled over her shoulders like a confident hug.

Without warning, Desmond pulled her from the window, urging they had to leave. Even as they walked away, though, she couldn't help but feel as if she were still standing there—as if part of her was before the window, a fine layer of dust on her arms and her mind, as if she was nothing more than another piece of furniture in the house, forgotten and waiting to be uncovered and used.

A ringing began in her ears. Something awakened within her body—within her mind. Something she did not recognize. It was dark and heavy, and she could swear there was the distant groaning of a faraway voice that was as much an intruder in her own mind as she was to the house.

Desmond dragged her by the hand, but the dazed feeling loomed over her, becoming stronger with every step. She was the innocent city beneath this blackhole, its yawning mouth straining to swallow her, and she felt herself opening to it, yielding to it, eager to be swallowed.

Her brain turned fuzzier and fuzzier like a compressed video. She could feel the hold on her own mind slipping away, as if the more she wandered, the more pixelated her brain became. There were flashes of pink and blue in her mind that drowned out all thoughts, and still there was this smiling, bold voice that was speaking just beyond the limit of her understanding. Its words were alien and raw, but no amount of straining made them intelligible.

A voice yelled—a real voice. It was Desmond. Her mind snapped back into focus, and she saw him on his back, the groundskeeper standing over him with a pitchfork at Desmond's throat. The groundskeeper had a rough face with saggy folds of leathery skin, and he growled, thrusting the pitchfork threateningly towards her whimpering friend.

The groundskeeper turned to her then, his mouth opened, but it was not the wide square mouth of an angry man, but like a round sphincter, puckering and sucking as a long, slobbering tongue peeked and whipped from its cavity.

"Don't move. Neither of you," the groundskeeper said. There was a strange pattern to his speech, stilted and inhuman—then his face was normal again. "The police are on their way."

Desmond looked at her with big, fearful eyes, then without warning he kicked out his foot and knocked the groundskeeper off balance. "Run, Abbie. Run!"

There was a confusion of sights and sounds. Desmond rushed to his feet, yelling at the groundskeeper, then they struggled for the pitchfork. Abbie stood there for a moment, staring blankly, until finally sense poked through her overwhelmed mind, and her base instincts took over. She backed away, then took off running from the house to the gardens where they had entered. The farther she ran, the quieter the voice in her mind grew, and reason slowly returned to her as her heart beat faster and faster, like a pump pushing the terrifying venom of the voice from her mind.

She realized then that she had left Desmond, and she hesitated just beyond the property. There was the thought to go back, to admit that she was as much to blame as him, but looking behind her, she shuddered at the looming black battery of the house, and she realized she was afraid—afraid that, if she returned, she would never leave.

By the time she had made it home, she had texted Desmond twenty-three times and called a half-dozen more. She didn't hear from him that night, or at all again that summer. She went by his house, asking his parents where he was, and they told her simply that he had left early for college. They acted so strangely, though, and she couldn't help but pepper them with questions.

"Why did he leave early?" she asked. "Why didn't he answer any of my messages? Why hasn't anyone else heard from him?"

Desmond's father had looked at her, then, with a simmering anger that boiled in the waters of his eyes. "Leave it alone, Abigail."

"What happened?" she had pressed. "What is it about that place?"

His father had asked her to leave then, and not long after, Desmond's family had moved away from Richmond. She thought about going to the police, but she didn't even know what to say. His parents said he was alright, and even if he wasn't, he was eighteen now, same as her. Would anyone even care if he wasn't in Richmond?

The rest of the summer, she obsessed about the manor. She thought about going back to it, about doing as Desmond had intended and burning it down. But, well, that seemed impossible now. Burn it down? By herself? That was never really a plan they were going to follow through with, was it?

Yet she knew in her heart that burning that place to ash was the right thing to do. For a long time, she had assumed the estate was just something she didn't understand, but after that day, she realized there was something nefarious—something horrible—about it instead.

She dreamed about it that summer, her mind filled with a darkness that seemed to incubate each night within her. She dreamed of fires and long-tongued monsters and a horrible cold that even on the hottest nights woke her, her dreaming mind seeing her breath as cloudy and as visible as on the coldest of days.

Then one night her dreams of monsters and shadows and fire ended, and the very next day—the day she was set to leave for college—she got a phone call from Desmond. It came early in the morning, while she was asleep, but he had left a message explaining that he had been so freaked out by the experience that he just wanted to get out of Richmond. She was relieved to hear he was alright, but she found herself too annoyed to call him back. How could he not have picked up a phone for a whole month to tell her that?

She left that day in an annoyed mood, and it was four years before she was back in Richmond with any permanency.

Each day since she had gone with Desmond, she had thought less and less about the house. The nightmares she had once had had passed, and now the whole ordeal seemed only like the garbled memory of someone else's terrible dream.

She had earned a journalism degree, finishing near the top of her class, and she had expected to easily find work beyond Richmond, but the jobs had been sparse and unwelcoming. Before she had started university, her father had tried to sway her from print journalism, but, as her mother had often said, she wanted too much to be like him. She wanted to rub elbows with writers by doing good, honest investigative work, and she wanted to have stories of her own—stories about the cockfights of local politics and the pettiness of minor businesspeople. She did not want to change the world, but she did want to be a part of it—to see it, to study it, to feel it.

Her father was not a perfect man—perhaps not even a good man. He had had his affairs, his drunken nights, but something she had always admired about him was his pursuit of the truth. When he was wrong, he had always admitted to it, and she admired his sincerity. It felt as if each day the world had less truth in it, and she wanted to help protect what they still did have—to pass on to her own children, for better or worse, the truth of who came before.

Instead of finding a job at a magazine or a paper, though, she had found herself wasting away, counting down the end of the grace period on her student loans. No one could understand how she, someone who had done so well in school, could not find work, but that pity didn't help the jobs come any easier. With no real opportunities in her field, she had reconnected with Desmond, who had also moved back to Richmond, and he had hired her to work at his newly started catering company.

She hated the work. Every day she told herself all she needed was one opportunity—just one paper, one editor to call her back—and her career would take off.

Since returning, she'd pestered her father for an interview with his own paper, hoping for a temporary job, but he had been reluctant to help.

"Dine on your own name," he'd told her gruffly one night, giving her a disappointed look behind his half-folded newspaper. She had been annoyed to not have his support, but she understood he was well-intentioned. It was a hard career these days, and if she wanted it, she had to make it work.

It surprised her, then, when her father came to her in the kitchen one morning, her nose still in a bowl of cereal, saying he had an opportunity for her. She pulled on the dirty blonde ponytail at the back of her head and invited him to tell her.

"Stringer gig," he said. "Puff-piece, really, but impress Hal and he'll throw you some more work. Not on salary, of course, but it'll put you on the map. Give your name some oomph."

She took a bite of her colourful cereal, her pyjama-clad leg bouncing over her knee as she asked incomprehensibly with a full mouth, "What's the job?"

"Gross, Abbie. Close your mouth." He sat down at the kitchen table next to her. "He wants twelve inches on the Margot family estate by next Wednesday."

She swallowed her cereal. "The estate? Why?"

"Hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary," he said, his big hand lightly slapping on the table. "That, and the Margot family heir has just resolved some legal affair in court, taking possession of all the family's money and holdings. It's a great opportunity for the paper to get some good will with a billionaire, and it's a great opportunity for you to show your stuff."

She made a face. "This seems really easy. Why is no one else doing this?"

"Everyone on staff thinks it's below them to write about. You know how it goes."

"Gee, thanks." She stuffed another spoonful in her mouth.

"Hey, you gotta shovel some shit when you're just starting out, kid. Tough it out. Make a go of this and get something real for your portfolio."

She nodded, swallowing. "Alright, I'll get you something by Wednesday."

"Twelve inches," he reminded her, and he left her alone at the table.

The first thought she had was of the black book. She hadn't thought about it in a long time, but even just being reminded of that place, she knew she had to get back in there.

She set out doing research as she had four years earlier. And as had been the case then, there was not much available about the Margot family, or their estate. Nothing new had come to light in the years since she had visited, but she did find a strange, tiny article that had been deleted from the website of The Richmond Historical Society. She had been hunting through the internet archives for another article describing the Society's origins, when she found an article from four years earlier titled, Arsonist reaches plea with Richmond County. She opened it, but it contained only: Arsonist reaches plea with Richmond County. More details to follow.

There were no pictures in the article, and no details followed, but it was from only a few days after she had gone to the manor. Was there something Desmond had never told her?

She had a busy week planned, scheduled to work five events, so she decided she would make the best of it. She had wanted to ask Desmond pointblank what had happened, but she knew that was a mistake. Asking someone a question without already knowing the truth would just open her up to being lied to if he tried to be evasive—and that he had never told her about it told her he would definitely try to be evasive. However, Desmond's company served banquets and fundraisers mostly for the ultra-wealthy—a class which was suspiciously overrepresented in its membership in Richmond—and this week of events seemed like an excellent place to start asking questions about the estate.