I pressed an ear against the wall, holding my breath as I listened. Nothing. Closing my eyes, I listened harder, mentally picturing the little fibers in my ear standing to attention. There it was, just on the cusp of hearing. Slither, slither, slither. Not close, but certainly too close for comfort. I pushed away from the wall and burrowed deeper into my hiding place, breathing as quietly as possible.
A distant scream reached my ears. I didn't even need to try to hear that one. Guess that somebody wasn't as good at hide-and-seek as little old me. My nose started to fill up with the cloying scent of mothballs, and I began to regret my decision to hide in a closet. Still, better that than being eaten I suppose.
I remained still for at least five minutes, though it seemed more like hours. Then I pressed my ear to the wall again. No slithering sounds. Sighing with relief, I drew away from the wall, stood, silently twisted the closet knob, and crept out. I appeared to be alone.
I made my way over to the window that used to overlook the grounds outside. The outside pane was still covered with thorned vines, though they seemed to have grown a little longer since I'd been inside the closet. I thought briefly about trying to locate something to smash out the glass, but then I'd still need something to get through the vines.
Letting out a silent growl of frustration, I turned from the window and started pacing the room. Fourteen other dinner guests were out there, alone and frightened, probably doing the exact same thing I was doing. Hiding. Hiding from Mr. Slither.
Almost as if I feared that merely thinking his name would summon him, I stopped and listened. No more slithering, no more screams. He had moved on to somewhere else. I started pacing again. At some point, without quite realizing it, I began to voice my thoughts aloud, aiming them towards a medium-sized stuffed teddy bear that sat on a nightstand.
"Technically, I could probably escape the manor house safely. So what if this window is blocked off by mysterious vines, which I'm sure has nothing at all to do with what happened during dinner. Surely not all the windows are blocked. And it would take an awful lot of... vinery? is that a word? to block off the front doors. Surely Mr. Slither can't be that strong... What do you think, Mr. Teddy?"
The Teddy Bear stroked its chin thoughtfully with a hand. I knew in my heart that it was only in my mind. The Teddy wasn't sentient. I was just seeing things. Again. But I was an awfully scared little twenty-year-old girl right now, and if my hallucinations or whatever exactly they were helped give me comfort, then they were more than welcome.
"What about the other dinner guests?" Teddy asked of me. I knew once more that he was not actually speaking, twas just my schizophrenic little mind doing its thing, but it certainly seemed real. Unless it actually was, but that was a thought too creepy to contemplate. I dropped that thought from my mind and answered the esteemed Mr. Teddy.
"Took Manor is huge, with at least three floors that I've noticed. Searching it for fourteen terrified people is not going to be easy, Teddy..."
He shook his head.
"You have the wrong attitude, Neems. Maybe it won't be easy, but what else are you going to do? They're all in the same boat as you. Perhaps your only chance of either escaping, or somehow killing Mr. Slither, lies in teaming up with every other person you can find."
I started pacing again. The guy had a point.
"Look at it this way," he added. "While everyone is busy hiding, Mr. Slither is out hunting. You can either start moving, or wait for him to find you and do... whatever it is he did to that guy at dinner."
My mind now decided, I crept over to the door and pressed my ear against it, listening for the tell-tale slither of Mr. S. before I opened it. My mind was invaded by the horrible image of someone shoving a nail through the door and right into my ear. I drew back, at the same time vowing to stop watching horror movies late at night, and just opened the door. The hallway outside was clear.
I took a step outside, then realized I needed a weapon. I looked back at Teddy Bear. He was one of those old-school ones, with hard button eyes, and an equally hard nose. It would have to do. Snatching him up, ignoring his protests, I ran out into the hall with the Bear held high. No monsters leapt out at me.
In horror, I realized I had forgotten my Snoopy Cap. I dashed back into the room for a third time to snatch it up from where it had fallen on the floor when I'd first fled from Mr. Slither, and slapped it snugly on my head. Charlie Brown was one of my favorite shows, and Snoopy was my favorite character. Without my baseball cap, nothing in the world quite seemed right. Looking around to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything else, I made my way back out into the hallway.
It was maybe thirty feet long, with three doors on each side and a T-junction at the end, splitting off to the left and right. I didn't know if the doors all led to bedrooms, or if some of them opened up onto further passages that might lead me elsewhere in the mansion. I had unfortunately paid zero attention during our brief tour of the mansion before dinner, my mind too busy thinking about strawberries (a fruit I thoroughly despised).
With a sigh, I tried the first door on my right, cracking it open to peer inside. Another bedroom, seemingly deserted. This one didn't even have a teddy bear. Still, I had to make sure it truly was empty, so crept inside, taking long, exaggerated strides like I'd seen someone on Scooby Doo make. Because, you know, according to them it was the best way to be stealthy.
I made a quick search of the room, looking under the bed, behind a chair, inside the closet, and for some reason in one of the nightstand drawers, as if someone could actually curl up tight enough to hide in there. The room was empty.
Withdrawing silently, walking like a normal person this time, I closed the door behind me and opened the next one along the hallway. It was a large billiards room, reminding me a little of that old board game, Clue. Except this time the murderer would be Mr. Slither, in the Billiards Room, with Eldritch Powers of Some Unknown Variety. Since that was kind of a mouthful and I didn't want anyone to have to say that upon my demise, I closed the door behind me and took a step towards the next one. That was when I heard him.
This close, it was like a handful of snakes let loose in a small room, slithering and writhing over one another in their fury. Or perhaps it was more like the infamous head of Medusa, each strand of hair a venomous and living entity. Regardless, it was terrifying, and even worse, I could see a shadow up ahead at the end of the hall, coming from the leftmost branch.
It was still far enough away to be a little blurry, but was in constant motion, moving in ways that no human shadow was supposed to. Eyes growing wide with horror, I grabbed at the handle of the next door and wrenched on it, desperate to get inside and away from Mr. Slither. Naturally, the door was locked.
Nearly crying in my terror, I dashed back towards the billiards room and pried the door open once more, still clutching my Teddy Bear. Slamming the door behind me, realizing too late that I'd just given away where I was, I hoped against hope that he hadn't yet turned down this part of the hallway. Then he would have six doors that I might have gone through instead of one.
Looking around for a hiding spot, dashing about like a madwoman, I tripped over the outstretched legs of a man wearing a yellow smoking jacket. He'd propped himself against the side of the pool table, and there was a spilled glass of whiskey lying on the ground beside him, along with a fancy-looking wooden pipe. He appeared to be quite unconscious.
"Wake up!" I hissed, trying to mentally place who he was from the fourteen other people at dinner. Then I remembered. The Colonel. He'd never given me his name, and everyone just seemed to call him by his rank. He was probably somebody at least moderately famous, but I didn't care much for celebrities. I slapped him across the face. The slithering outside grew louder.
"Wake up, you moron!" I hissed a little louder. He stirred and his eyelids fluttered. The man reeked of alcohol. I slapped him again. "Wake up!"
His eyes snapped open, blank for a moment beneath his bushy white brows, then narrowing a little in annoyance or anger.
"Hey, you're that weird girl, right, the one with the baseball cap who made a big deal because we had strawberries at the dinner table?"
"Keep it down!" I hissed, louder than perhaps I should have. "And of course I did, strawberries are a freak of nature. But don't you remember what happened during dinner? Don't you remember Him?"
The Colonel's eyes grew wide with alarm as the fog started to clear, and he glanced guiltily at the fallen glass of whiskey. I'd dealt with my fear by hiding, the Colonel had found... something else.
"Good God!" He shouted. "We have to call somebody, we have to get help!"
Rising to his feet, he managed about one step before we both heard the snake-like slither of our foe. He was right outside the door. With a noise best described as 'eep' I launched myself forwards and crawled beneath the pool table, scrambling as far towards the center of it as I could. Either too big to fit, or still waking up from his alcoholic stupor, the Colonel did not follow me.
I'd just realized this, and had just turned around to go back and help the man, when the screech and tear of cracking wood filled my ears. Mr. Slither didn't even bother to try the unlocked door knob it seemed.
"Stay away!" I heard the Colonel shriek, his voice rising several octaves, though I could only see his feet from within my hiding place. They backed up several steps, and the slithering seemed to fill my ears, my very world.
"Good God, stay away!" Then I heard a thump, a crack, an awful scream from the Colonel that went on for all too long a time, and then silence. Then more slithering, quieter now, and fading away into the distance, followed by a gentle noise right before Mr. Slither went out of earshot, a noise that sounded an awful lot like laughter...
I'm not sure how long I waited beneath the pool table for. At least a good few minutes, though it felt like an hour. I was curled up in a ball, clutching my Teddy and my Snoopy Cap for comfort. I hid for a while in memory, to avoid the thought of Mr. Slither. I was back at the dinner table, enveloped by laughter and conversation. And look, there were the mashed potatoes, so buttery, so heavenly. They were midway across the table, an even distance between me and Vincent Fitzroy. He looked up from his own plate of food, met my eyes, then looked at the bowl of potatoes. They were very good potatoes. Sure there was enough for both of us, but... as I said, they were good potatoes. And sharing what was left would be two awfully small servings.
The beady black eyes of Vincent Fitzroy roved upwards to once again meet mine. They narrowed, just a little bit around the edges. He was a tall man, with a little goatee and long, spindly fingers, reminding precisely of the grand vizier sort of guy that you saw all the time in movies, backstabbing the king and taking over his spot. I had disliked Vincent the instant I saw him.
"So... how are the green beans?" I asked him, making polite conversation while weighing my chances of beating him to the spuds. My chances were not good. I was a short little thing of a girl, looking way younger than I was, and Mr. Vincent had very long arms. I needed to distract him somehow.
"Just perfect," he replied, in a measured tone of polite hostility. "What is your opinion on the corn, Miss Neems?"
He said my last name like it was something he'd found sticking to the bottom of his shoe. I frowned just a little bit.
"Oh, they are perfect as well. Perfectly perfect. But hey, what do you think about that wonderfully window-shaped window behind you?"
"Saw it when I first sat down," Vincent replied, his eyes not leaving mine for an instant as he deftly avoided my trap. "Very window-shaped indeed, I must say. But I have been dying to ask you, what do you think of that exquisite painting on the wall behind you?"
"Saw it when I first sat down," I replied with a certain smugness to my attitude. He gave me the slightest incline of his head, as if acknowledging a well-played move.
Then, as luck would have it, Sabin Blackwood reached across the table between us and snagged the bowl of potatoes. Both me and Vincent drilled holes in her with our eyes as she emptied the bowl over her plate.
"Well, that was awfully rude of you, Miss Blackwood," Vincent said to her, a certain disdain to his voice. "Reaching right in-between two people having a polite conversation without so much as an excuse me. Where did you learn such awful manners?"
"And you didn't even offer to share!" I added, forming a temporary alliance with Vincent. "That would have been the polite thing to do."
Sabin shrugged.
"Manners are overrated." Then she smirked, and helped herself to a huge forkful of mashed potatoes. Instantly I hated her.
In a huff, I surveyed the rest of the table. Mainly I was looking for other food options, but I glanced at a few of the other guests too. Out of the fifteen people present (including myself) I didn't know a single one.
Without any potatoes to worry about, I started looking for someone to talk to. There was Sabin on my left, who I was no longer planning to acknowledge even existed, and there was a short but broad fellow to my right, whose name was Jon Dobavi. I didn't know much about him other than that he was in the navy, but one look at him trying to balance a spoon on his nose, and I decided I had best look for an alternate source of conversation.
I looked up the table towards our host, Silas Took. He had to be at least sixty, but looked much younger, and had an air of power about him. A kind of self-certainty, that he was going somewhere in life, and had in fact already gotten there long ago.
I knew his niece, which was the only reason that I was here in the first place. She'd been too annoyed at the prospect of sorting out her forthcoming inheritance, so had sent me in her stead. Silas was her only surviving family member. I watched his mouth turn downwards into a frown, and realized with a start that he'd been talking to me for at least a minute.
"Err, sorry," I said. "I was too busy thinking about... shoes."
He raised an eyebrow in question.
"I was asking if you were content with the accommodations here, Miss Neems. Since you are taking my niece's place, your happiness is of some importance to me."
I glanced wistfully around the table, my eyes lingering with sadness on the empty bowl of potatoes. I'd only arrived a few hours ago, and hadn't even seen my room yet. The mansion was nice enough, but I was really only here as a favor to Melany Took.
I noticed my host's mouth downturn into a frown once more, an expression that seemed all too fitting on his severe face, and I realized that I had once again ignored him. With a shake of his head, as if to mentally dismiss me from his world, he went back to eating and talking with a retired colonel, whose name I'd never caught.
It was the thought of the Colonel that snapped me back to the present. Here, beneath the pool table, hiding. Not really wanting to, but not really wanting not to, I snatched up my Teddy, made sure my Snoopy Cap was tight on my head, and crawled out into the open. I was alone. I looked over towards the door, which had been torn into pieces. Other than that, however, there was little sign that anyone else had ever been here. The room seemed quiet and peaceful. I got out of there as quick as I could, making my way back into the previous hall and through a door on the opposite side from the billiards room.