11-The Man In The Kitchen

Elmer snapped away from his mind and sharply drew in his breath in silence as the heavy footsteps became the loudest it had ever been.

At this moment, the kitchen also had the darkness that had been cloaking it chased away by the flickering light of the candle the mysterious person held as they wobbled heavily past the shelf he hid beside.

Elmer made sure the breath he had drawn in did not escape his mouth, he made sure that his quivers went tepid, and he made sure that his right hand's grip did not loosen from the candle holder he clutched.

Luckily, it was all going well.

He watched the back of the mysterious person—which was covered in what he suspected to be a thick trench coat—as they traipsed further into the kitchen, their attention seemingly fixated upon the opened window.

The more the person walked away from the shelf Elmer had taken to be his hideout, the more he figured that his fears were not justified.

This person—who Elmer now suspected to be a man—did not know that he was in here. And now that he saw him a bit clearly, he was not dressed like a butler, nor was he filled with the ambience of one.

Soleless thick brown boots? Butlers wore black shoes polished with elegance. A trench coat? Butlers wore beautiful black tailcoats—well, that was if everything Pip had told him about butlers were of any truth. And the little traces of mud that soiled the floor here and there where the person had dropped his feet, did little to prove Elmer's thoughts wrong.

Elmer had come in from the courtyard, he and Patsy both, and they had brought nothing mud-like into the building with them.

The man was not from around here, Elmer deduced. And if he was not a member of this mansion, then he was probably doing the same thing Patsy was doing: stealing.

But still, even as Elmer's tenses had come to relax somewhat, he kept himself hidden. He had been invisible to this man since, and he would love to remain that way. There was no telling what the man would do if he found out someone had been watching him all along. Elmer could not risk it. It was better this w—

A faint creak, which could have only come about from the soft steps of a person sneaking either down or up a staircase, echoed from the foyer beyond the kitchen's door and made its way into Elmer's ears.

Ostrich-lady… Elmer knew at once.

The heavy footsteps of the mysterious man in the kitchen suddenly stopped, and Elmer froze immediately. His body which had just gotten to relax, tensing up abruptly as quickly as it had done at the start.

He heard the creak… Elmer surmised. What should I do? Ostrich-lady's coming here now… What should I—

Elmer's eyebrows upturned as his widened eyes found his right hand free from the burden of guarding his mouth, and he figured out his situation right away. It was not ostrich-lady the man had heard, it was him.

Slowly, Elmer tightened his grip around the candle holder in his hand as he took his eyes from his palm and raised them to look at the man who was now stiffly turning around.

He was no longer invisible, so the only thing left for him to do was to run. He just had to wait for the perfect moment then he would—

The man turned around completely, allowing what made up his face to travel over from behind the chopping table to Elmer, seizing his breath at once.

The candlelight in the man's hand flickered eerily upon his face, revealing the enigmatic border that separated it into two distinct parts. The right half of his face retained its baggy eyes and thick lips, while the other half was rottened badly like dead flesh, and filled with countless squishy, meat-like maggots each the size of a thumb, crawling and coiling about themselves chaotically without falling off the half they had made their nest.

Bile filled Elmer's belly as his eyes froze upon the abhorrent scene that had been laid before him. He could not think, he could not move.

His heartbeat raced faster and faster as he watched the face rigidly. It was as though the hands of a giant had come to bind him motionless.

He did not want to see it anymore, it made him sick. But he could not look away. And the man just stood there, staring back at him, making him watch the maggots embed themselves deep into his face and his eye one after the other and out back, their movements never for a moment ceasing. He could take it no more, he could not.

"Pst…" A whisper suddenly came from beyond the door, causing Elmer to blink and magically pull free from his stiffness. Finally freed, he wasted no time sparing a thought.

He threw the candle holder in his hand across the table at the maggot-faced man, and did not wait to see the reaction that would follow before he swirled about on his feet and ran outside the kitchen's door, escaping the choking air of the room after he pushed down the shelf he had hidden beside to block the doorway.

Shakily turning around after his stunt, he found ostrich-lady at an arm's length from him with a deeply puzzled expression all over her face.

He pounced forward at her, pulled her close from her neck, and had his sweaty palm shut her mouth before she was able to say anything. Then he forcefully grabbed the candle holder in her hand and flicked the light about hastily until he found the mansion's front door, before blowing it off and dropping the candle holder to the floor.

"Do not say a word and just run. Do you hear me? Just run."

He removed his hand from her mouth and gripped her wrist, immediately pulling her along as he dashed out of the mansion and into the bleakness of night.

His body now crawled with the prickling sensation of the goosebumps that arose from the odd, countless stares he had begun to feel coming down upon him from the night's sky—stares he felt were nonexistent but at the same time existed.

With those queer feelings crashing frantically on Elmer's skin, he made sure that Patsy had no time to catch her breath, and he was undoubtedly glad that she knew how to run. It made escaping easier.

They bolted through the courtyard, Elmer's hand still tightly clutched upon Patsy's wrist, as they made their way through the lawn and past the cedar trees to arrive at the fence that had started it all.

"What—" she was about to speak as soon as their running momentarily ceased, but Elmer would not have that. He grabbed her waist and flung her over the fence, falling her with a thud and a yelp to the other side that spelled the end of the mansion's vicinity.

Quickly and with a greater nimbleness than earlier, Elmer found his way to the other side as well, but still he had no time for breathers. He grabbed her hand again and lifted her from the ground as he pulled her into another nerve-wracking sprint.

He would not blame her for trying to ask questions, but if she had seen what he had seen then she would have probably been the one taking the lead. They had to get far away from here.

They ran farther and made it deep into the woods they had come through earlier, which were engulfed completely in tall and dense trees, allowing only faint fingers of moonlight to make it past their canopies and give the area a little less darkness than it was meant to have.

It was not until they were well within the expanse of these trees did Elmer finally notice that Patsy had come to have enough running.

Their sprint halted as her wrist forcefully pulled free from his grasp. He turned quickly at her and watched her lean over, putting her hands on her knees as she panted hard. They needed to move though, he still was not feeling completely safe.

Elmer looked around the woods through his own hard breaths while the high chirping of crickets and hoots of owls swarmed his ears and made him uncomfortable, along with the quivers in his stomach.

It did not appear to matter how far apart the years were, sneaking off to somewhere distant at night always seemed to be a bad gamble for him, and he was learning that the hard way.

"Why…" Patsy trailed off in between wheezes as she tried to catch her breath. "Why are we running?"

"I…" Elmer trailed off as well, his eyes still effortlessly scanning the forest, searching for the source of the dark, eerie feeling he yet felt creeping upon his spine.

"You?" Patsy put in expecting some kind of answer from him. "You what?"

"I can't shake it off." Elmer stretched out his hand at her while still looking about the woods. "Get up, we have to keep running until we get to the roadside."

"What can't you shake off?" She did not take his hand. "Tell me."

Elmer tightened his neck and shot his eyes at her. "Get up. We have to move." His voice tenderly pierced through the black of night, but it did not seem to pierce who or what was giving him this feeling as the hairs on his body still stood frightenedly.

"Excuse me," Patsy straightened bitterly from her bent over position. "Why do I have to keep running? Tell me why I'm running and then I'll decide if I still want to."

"I can't tell you now, alright. I don't even want to think about it, it makes me want to…"

Bile suddenly gurgled about once again in Elmer's belly as a picture of the maggot face stormed his mind, forcing a bitter taste to fill his tongue and almost make him puke.

Elmer spat with a slight irritated twirl of his nose. "We have to go now. I'll tell you all about what I saw later, but we can't let it come and meet us here. We have to move."

"It?" Patsy let her face squeeze slightly in curiosity, a misplaced one that disgusted Elmer, considering how he was trying so hard with his demeanor to let her understand that what he had seen was something so otherworldly he could not even bring himself to speak of it without gagging. "What did you see?"

Elmer's face tightened, and this time it was not because of bile.

He was tired of trying to speak sense into this lady. She was too stubborn and he really could not put up with it any longer.

After Elmer agreed inwardly with his despicable but necessary thought of abandoning her and sprinting away, he wasted no time turning around. But just as he was about to continue alone with his onward dash at the expense of Patsy's curiosity, a loud and piercing screech echoed through the woods, dying out the chirps of the crickets and the hoots of the owls to never be heard again.

Elmer suddenly lost all the momentum he had gathered to begin his run.

"What was that?" he was not asking her in particular, but for someone who had been asking a lot of questions ever since they had made it into the woods, Patsy was abnormally quiet all of a sudden.

A few seconds crawled by, leaving the plaguing echo of the screech lingering in a dreadful silence, while Elmer's eyes frantically rushed through the forest.

He wanted to run, of course that was the best option at this moment, but he had now become scared of pushing himself in the direction of whatever beast had given off that screech.

Beast? Human? He was no longer sure what was happening. The maggot-faced man had the features of a human, but the screech had sounded more beastly than humanly. Was it the maggot-faced man that had given off the screech or was it something else? The eerie feeling on his skin never once faltered. He was frightened senseless.

"We have to go." Unexpectedly, Elmer felt Patsy tug at his wrist, and he turned his shaken eyes to her.

"What?" he questioned, not because he was wondering why they should run, but because it was she who had brought it up. It was a complete change from what she had uttered a few minutes ago.

Patsy turned sharply to him, her eyes filled with budding tears and something akin to craziness. It was as though she was in pain, and Elmer's chest tightened awkwardly at that. "We have to go now," she whispered to him, her voice cracking. "I don't want to see it. We have to go now."

What's suddenly wrong with her…?

Despite his confused and chaotic state of mind, Elmer nodded quickly. But when they were about to turn and make haste away from where they stood, a soft-to-harsh rustle of the underbrushes filling the area startled them stiff, and tightened ostrich-lady's grip on Elmer's wrist as they both turned sharply to where the sound had come from.

"It's here," she muttered, shakily.

Elmer breathed in and out slowly before asking, "What's here?"

With a whisper of the wind through the tree they had turned their gazes to, they saw a hunched over figure walk out from behind it and into one of the fingers of moonlight that had escaped from the tree's canopies.

The figure stepped on a twig and snapped it before coming to an abrupt halt, and Elmer's chest stiffened tighter than it had already been as he saw what made up this… thing.

What he was looking at was not the maggot-faced man he had seen in the mansion, this was something else. It was completely naked and had the body and long silky hair of a woman, but its face looked as though it had been smashed in by several blows from a hammer. In the place of its eyes were left a sinking, hollow hole, and on its forehead grew a horn the shape and length of a goat's.

It was horrific. Everything about it was. Its mashed nose, its long fingernails that grew from its hands and feets, and most of all, its mouth which looked as though it had been sewn together by thick fleshes the size of little ropes.

"Lost…" Patsy whimpered, and the monster threw its smashed-in face at them.

Elmer shuddered, then he quickly turned over his wrist, freeing them from Patsy's tightened and shivering grip, before taking her hand into his instead. And as if it had just noticed their presence, the monster leaned forward, outstretching its arms to the side while showing off its finger-like claws, and fed their ears with a loud and painful screech.