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I found my voice with my assailants on display, but I spoke carefully so as to not horribly disrupt my concentration. Having them stand before me felt like I was flirting with my demise, and I wanted to keep them at a distance for as long as I needed.
I took a deep breath. “What do you want?” I asked firmly. “Why are you here?”
The three creatures looked at one another like they were trying to silently decide who would be the spokesperson of their troupe. The beastly creature slouched down like he was trying to make himself smaller, and the long-haired man shrugged in annoyance and crossed his arms.
The shadow-man turned to me once again, taking the lead. His smoky tendrils swirled about him as if they were treading water.
“We are here not by our own free will,” he uttered. “It is not by choice that we stalk the halls of this place.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, still on high alert.
“We mean exactly that,” he explained as his expression dropped any emotion. “For generation after generation, these walls have been our prison. As long as this mansion has stood on this land, we have been bound to it by a magic much greater than any we possess between us.”
“Why?” I asked. “Who would do that?”
The dark figure took a breath. “You seem genuinely curious, so I’ll start from the beginning. You can take a seat, if you’d like. The word of a monster might not mean much to a human such as yourself, but my companions and I do not wish to bring you harm—at least not in this moment. You’ve bested us, and you deserve the story you’ve requested.”
I hesitated for a moment and decided I could let myself loosen up at least a little. He was right. Ihadbested them, and I knew I could do it again if they tried anything funny. I backed myself up, sat in the high-back black leather chair that was situated next to the fireplace, and glanced at the creature to assure him I was ready for him to continue.
“This place was built out of ego and entitlement,” the shadow-man explained. “The native people of this land lived in tandem with us for many years, telling stories of our kinds among their people, and weaving cautionary tales to their young to avoid the dark parts of the wood. We did our best to respect them as well, only taking those who crossed the lines their elders warned against.”
He gestured to the long-haired man, who still looked annoyed to have been brought down to my level. “This is Ruse, but he has had many names. Brother, friend, mother, pet—his form shifts and changes at will, and that might make him the most lethal of us all. He can be a man, or he can be, say, a bobcat.”
Ruse looked at me with his pitch-black eyes, and I felt my heart race as I recognized the gaze as I’d seen the night before. In Jake’s eyes, I’d ignorantly dismissed it as drug use, but the truth was worse. A pang of guilt and anger surged through me like an electric current as I met those horrible black eyes and the creature responsible for Jake’s disappearance last night. My ears rang, and I could feel the blood rushing to my face as my hands trembled and my heart thumped like a timpani drum. It took everything in my power to calm myself down enough to listen to anything else the first creature had to say.
“This is Thorn,” he continued, gesturing to the cowering beast on his other side. “He is the last of his kind in these parts, but he and his herd once cleansed the wood of death and decay—a professional scavenger made by the earth itself. They were, and are… misunderstood, you could say. It’s not his fault children and proud men occasionally would get lost in the forest.”
Thorn tilted his head toward me like he was looking for praise, but I still struggled to get past his terrifying appearance. I recognized his kind, though, from the pages of folktale storybooks—a Wendigo—a creature of supposed great gluttony and greed said to be of great evil. While hewashorrifying, he didn’t strike me as inherently evil.
“And I have not a name,” the dark one explained. “I’ve never had a name. ‘Nox’ has been my calling since being here. I felt I needed a title, so I selected one myself.” He straightened his clothes as he spoke, tidying up an image that was already near picture-perfect. “Unlike my companions, I am not from this world. the darkest of magics summoned me to this world and this particular place centuries before this mansion was erected. I was a weapon—death, in its purest form. Before my imprisonment within these halls, I enjoyed exploring this world’s bleakest places and driving good people to the brink of insanity before tempting them to their doom. However, as luck should have it, I returned here at the exact wrong time and have been here ever since.”
As he spoke of his previous ventures, his tendrils flickered and wove through the air like ribbons in a windy current. He was excited and clearly enjoyed reminiscing about his past endeavors.
“Ruse, Nox, Thorn…” I repeated out loud to myself as I looked at each of the creatures before me. Once they had names, much of their ominous, threatening auras seemed to melt away, leaving only prisoners in its place.
“Yes,” Nox said after hearing me recite their names. “As I’ve said, this place is not our home by choice. Newcomers who came with guns, disease, and violence shoved the native people we shared this land with out of their homes. The few that remained were left stranded with the newcomers and forced to work for them under terrible conditions.”
Yikes. This part of American history was not one I was unfamiliar with, but it was even worse to hear it from a creature who had seen it happen firsthand, and had his way of life—no matter how horrifying—ripped away by circumstances far out of his control.
“Then a family built this house. The richest family of all the newcomers. They craved power and status above all else and were afraid of mine and my companions’ presence in the wood. The family wanted to best us, to drive us away, so they elicited help from one of the native elders in their employ. ‘Drive them away,’ they demanded. ‘Send them anywhere but here.’”
I was on the edge of my seat now, waiting for the conclusion of Nox’s story. My heart was heavy with sympathy for the three of them, even if my brain told me they might not deserve it. They were stillmonsters, after all. One of them, especially, could rot here for all I cared.
“But the elder was a clever man, and rather than banish us from the wood, he bound us to the family, but he did not know how potent his magic would be,” Nox said, his voice beginning to waver.
I could tell the retelling of their history was making all three of them uncomfortable, and I couldn’t blame them. I couldn’t imagine the suffering of being stuck here for as long as they had been.
“So, you’ve been stuck in this house the whole time…” I mused as I looked down at the ground. “I can’t imagine how painful it’s been for you three.”
“You hear that, friends?” Ruse interjected, his voice loud and thick with a snotty tone that told me he was about to make me second-guess my sympathy. “The girl’ssorryfor us. How nice of her, eh? It’s not like she just pulled us out here by magical force and made us relive the source of our misery for her own morbid curiosity or anything. She’ssorry!”
“Enough, Ruse,” Nox commanded.
The longer I sat there observing the creatures, the more aware I became that Nox must have, over the past however many years, taken on a sort of ‘oldest brother’ role, or at least a leader in some capacity.
“You’re correct, Logan,” Nox answered as he turned back to me. “We’ve been stranded here the whole time. Bound to the family of this house—which has, of course, been the same family since its construction.”
“How long?” I asked, ignoring Ruse’s attempt to put me down. “How long has it been since you three have been stuck here?”
