Castle Ornithollow

Donna stood among the leaves, counting the gargoyles that lined the castellated walls of the ancient building.

When her Uncle Jeremy had begun to describe the castle, with all its oddly-angled turrets and its ancient iron border and its hillock of colonial gravestones and the lake behind it, Donna had become intrigued.

And now, facing the front of the enormous, crumbling house, Donna saw that it was just as her Uncle had described it.

A rattling sound came from around the west corner of house and a man appeared, approaching with swift foot-crunches in the bedding of leaves. He was young, with black eyes and hair and whiskers, and was thickly layered against the cold.

"Professor Orbo?" asked Donna, after a short interval in which their condensed breaths puffed out before them and mingled in the air.

The young man smiled wanly, and said, "I am not Orbo. Come with me, Donna. Let’s go inside by the western door. It’s by far the friendliest door in the whole place, inside or outside, and besides, neither of us could lift the front doors open. The professor is in his room, ill. You won't see him at all today."

Seeing the look of disappointment on Donna's face, the young man continued, "Oh don’t worry, he'll be out of bed soon enough. In the meantime I can take you anywhere you wish to go, so long as it lies somewhere inside the perimeter of the estate. Beyond that you are not permitted to venture until the spring term.”

“What about Christmas?”

“You will spend all holidays here at Castle Ornithollow.”

Donna said nothing. They rounded the west corner of the mansion, where the high iron fence came closest to the building.

"The mansion is the largest of its kind in this part of the country,” said the young man. “One hundred rooms, twenty bedrooms, thirty-five chimneys, twelve turrets containing twelve rookeries, two libraries, a music room, an astronomy tower, a kitchen and a dining room, and many other rooms whose purpose had been long forgotten. And below the mansion is a basement, and below that basement is a second basement, and below that, I have never ventured."

They stood in front of what the young man had referred to as “the western door,” an oak-paneled door with a brass handle.

"This door," said the young man, "opens upon what I call the 'Oriole' Hallway, named for the birds that populate the rookery far above it. The Oriole Hallway is winding and difficult for newcomers to traverse. Stay close to me."

They entered, and when Donna shut the door behind her they were in an almost complete darkness broken only by a thin stream of light entering through high grimy windows where the wall met the ceiling. With a crack and a spluttering, the young man lit a match and then a candle that sat in a small holster on the wall. The candlestick itself was carved to resemble an emaciated, starved deer, with the flaming wick burning out of its upturned, foaming mouth.

The young man led her down Oriole Hallway, twisting and turning at odd angles, sometimes inclining upward to the slightest degree, sometimes downward. Many doorways and secondary passages lay on either side of them. Very little daylight seemed to have pierced this far into the mansion.

After what seemed like an eternity, Donna's eyes became adjusted to a new source of light: she turned, and with a gasp saw that the hallway opened onto a foyer the size of a gymnasium, and high above it, dangling from the ceiling by something that looked like a thickly twined strand of white silk, hung an ossified chandelier replete with skulls from many different animals, femurs, tibias, amorphous globs of cartilage, and wrought-iron framework beneath it all. Each of the skulls seemed to be burning from within, soft orange light glowing through the eye sockets and the noses and between the teeth.

"One of Professor Orbo’s grotesque but harmless fancies," said the young man.

Donna spoke quickly, her voice low and hoarse as though telling an unexpected secret, "This place is wonderful. The colors here, the lighting, the angles..." Donna whispered hurriedly, "Castle Ornithollow is like from a book. And the tapestries in this room are wonderful too. They must be hundreds of years old."

"Tell me Donna," the young man asked haltingly, as he traversed the perimeter of the cavernous room, lighting the kerosene torches that lined the walls, "are you not afraid of this place? Do none of these things frighten you?"

The foyer was now lit brightly by the flames churning in their lamps. Donna gazed around the room with a newfound wonder at suits of armor, paintings laying against rotting tables, with tarps half-covering their demented scenes.

"Yes, a little bit. But I like this fear—don't you?" She looked up. "This room is very tall. I suppose there are plenty of bats in the rafters?"

"Yes."

"They have a good amount of room to move about. Come, let's put out these lights and give them back their privacy."

The young man put out lamps and led Donna through another passage on the far end of the foyer.

Over the course of that first day he took her through much of the building, showing her the libraries, the well-tended ladders leading up to the rookeries, each of the marbled staircases and a few of the numberless cramped wooden staircases, rooms with bizarre machinery the nature of which the young man would not or could not divulge. He took her even to the first level of basement, a place he seemed very reluctant to go, and they stood at the bottom landing of the stairs, before a long passageway with locked doors that shimmered in the torchlight. “What is that sound?” Donna had asked, cupping a hand to her ear. A dim, deep rumbling came from the stone walls. “That’s water moving from the underground lake. The lake you see behind the house is only the tip of the iceberg.”

The currents of the underground waterways powered Orbo’s machines, the young man explained. Harnessing their great force was perhaps his greatest achievement. But his command of the water was tenuous, fragile. The slightest flaw in his system could cause the water to burst through the walls and flood the whole basement in seconds.

Finally the young man took her to the room that was to be her bedroom, and left her there with a promise that dinner would be delivered to her.

They were to meet again in the foyer at six o'clock in the morning for breakfast. Under no circumstances was she to leave the bedroom during the night.

The young man prepared the dinner himself in the only one of the several kitchens that was kept in operation. He brought Orbo his evening meal, and then returned to the kitchen for Donna's. By now the light in Castle was beginning to dim, and the sun was setting below the western trees that stood outside the iron fence. The dissolution of the small amount of daylight that was able to pass through the few and grimy windows was all that marked the passage from day to night in the Castle.

The young man crept toward the girl's bedroom, moving slowly; he stopped upon hearing strange noises coming from the door. Suckling sounds, like ocean currents tearing away from other currents, or parchment on parchment. The young man approached the door, bent forward to the keyhole, and peered in. Only a sliver of Donna's back could be seen, and it hunched and rippled unpleasantly, as though she were bent over something that demanded a great deal of upper-body involvement. The slurping sound was at its loudest now, and the young man moved back with disgust, knocking on the door once and leaving the tray of food upon the ground.

*

"She is the niece of Jeremy Bay, the dimmest wit in New England. She could not be threatening to us in any possible respect," said Orbo, sitting up in bed with his back supported by several silk pillows. He had the emaciated pallor of someone who has only just recovered from a grave illness.

"But the sound—"

"Damn the sound," said Orbo, rising a teacup to his lips and wetting them. "She is the offspring of two dead fools, and raised by an even greater fool. Donna Bay is precisely the sort of girl we can make use of. I will have her well fed, I will have her permitted to wander the wherever she likes within the Castle. I will have her pursue whatever diversions she likes until our project renders that impossible."

"As you say," said the young man lowly.

"I shall go to meet her today, I think. Bring her to the shed after lunch. I shall see her there."

The young man left Orbo's chamber and knocked lightly on Donna's bedroom door. She opened it a small crack.

"Come outside with me," said the young man.

"Is it bright yet?"

"The sun is up, but the clouds are thick and even."

Soon they were out in the open air. The din of the birds in the rookery was loud, and Donna smiled.

"You are free," he said, "to wander anywhere you like in the Castle, except through any door that is locked. In my opinion, the grounds beat the castle by a mile." The young man waved an arm across the rolling fields and the maples and oaks that grew thickly around them. Behind the trees was the lake, impossibly still, reflecting the even grey of the sky.

The clouds were thick. The sun was a pale disc behind them. Donna shielded her eyes from this modest daylight.

"It’s bright," she said.

The young man frowned. Bright?

"At noon you will meet Professor Orbo in the shed through those far trees," he said. "He spends much of his time there."

Donna, despite the discomfort that the daylight seemed to give her, seemed pleased.

"I am anxious to meet Orbo," she said. "Very anxious."

The morning drew on. Noon approached. The young man avoided Donna, who, instead of exploring the grounds as he had suggested, had returned inside with him. He could hear her bustling around the library, pulling books from the shelves and turning the pages swiftly and silently.

The young man soothed his growing dismay about Donna by descending into the lower basement and greasing the joints of certain metal devices. He stirred the contents of cauldrons that frothed and bubbled in the darkness. He tended to the maintenance of certain locks on certain obscure subterranean doors that he was commanded to closely observe, doors that bowed demoniacally outward by unknown forces if their locks were not cared for meticulously. And always the even, muted rumble of the underground rivers that ran below the basement and behind its walls resounded. The stillness of the lake behind the castle was a shroud that masked the activity of the waters beneath them. One time the young man had watched a red leaf drift slowly onto the surface of the lake; it was sucked under the surface with a small plop, like a stone.

At noon the young man went into the grass by the back wall of the Castle and watched Donna as she made her way toward Orbo’s shed. The two stood there beneath the trees for a few minutes, conversing, and then they disappeared into the shed.

While he watched and waited, the young man suddenly remembered the strange packet that Donna had worn around her neck the day before. He turned back into the Castle and went as swiftly as he could to Donna's room. The door stood partly open and from within came an oppressive, rotten smell. He peeked inside; in the corner of the room was the source of the terrible odor: a cat lay rigid and prone on the hardwood, its belly ripped open, devoid of entrails and glossy as though licked clean. One or two bloodflies buzzed excitedly around it. He rushed to the table beside the bed and pulled the drawers open one by one. The wardrobe was empty, as was the space under the bed. He searched every nook and hiding place. The packet was nowhere to be found. The only fruit of his search was the tray of food that he had left the night before; it had been stashed uneaten behind the window curtain.

The young man rushed back out to the fields behind the Castle and stopped, seeing Orbo walking toward him with long strides.

Orbo said nothing until he reached the young man's side and then said, "There is no time to lose. At last I have found the one I have been searching for. She is dangerous. Very dangerous!”

“Where is she?

“She wandered off by the lake. Get her and take her to the basement. She will come willingly. I have seen things in that shed," Orbo turned to the young man once they were inside, and his face seemed worn and sunken with age, "that I have never seen before. Donna Bay is a hateful creature. She will sustain us for centuries, my friend. Centuries! My father spoke truly. I have had my doubts in the past, but I now know that he spoke true…"

Orbo turned down a staircase and descended to the laboratories beneath the house. From the floorboards the young man could hear machines springing to life.

Donna was not by the lake. He searched the Castle and found her in the library, surrounded by books. Once again the paper packet hung around her neck. She rose and walked ahead, leading him toward the basement with swift, purposed steps.

"The sun burns me," she had said, "it is hateful to me and this place is the greatest respite from it that I have ever had. I never knew my parents, but I have come to believe that my family is… different. The darkness soothes me. The bats give me joy. The cats rise my blood. Orbo is a great man. He wishes to share, I think, my difference. I will share it with him."

As they descended to the laboratory-basement Donna seemed to grow in stature and strength. They rounded a bend in the corridor and beheld Orbo standing before a shining brass machine alive with churning gears and leather straps.

"Come, Donna." Orbo moved forward and took the girl under the arms, lifting her into the leather straps of the machine.

"What is this?" she asked with dismay. "What are you doing? I thought…"

"Be silent," said Orbo, binding her wrists and ankles tightly into their stirrups until Donna was contorted into a bent posture.

"Unbind me, Orbo." Her voice suddenly changed, grew thicker in timbre, rattling the metal and stirring the hairs on the young man's forearms.

As Orbo moved about the machine, swiftly turning knobs and twisting levers and pouring liquids into tubes, the paper packet around Donna’s neck began to glow brightly at the edges. Orbo worked faster now. The young man stood rooted in the doorway with eyes wide and knees bent, ready to flee.

The rumbling of the underground rivers seemed to grow louder, rising to a roar. Suddenly a bit of stone from the basement wall dislodged and a jet of water, steaming with heat, shot out into the room and struck the brass machine.

The paper packet caught fire and burned away, and now the young man could see what it contained: a brittle bird skull. It suddenly gleamed and began to melt into Donna's clothing, into her chest. Her face vibrated and burned red with fever, every blood vessel standing out in vivid relief, and Orbo continued his mad operation, moving with all the speed he could muster.

The skull sank into Donna's chest completely and now shone faintly through her skin. Her eyes shone yellow.

Finally the young man's paralysis broke. He turned and ran as fast as he could back up the steps just as more of the wall burst and huge jets of scalding water gushed into the basement, lapping against Orbo and Donna’s feet. Orbo shrieked.

The young man dashed through the labyrinth corridors to the western door and out into the midday sun, which had begun to shine between parted clouds. From behind rang terrible screeches and gushes of cold wind as if beaten toward his back by great wings.

With horror, he saw that the lake’s surface churned and fizzed and danced. Geysers and shoots leapt up into the air and pulled back down in deep vortexes, swirling and hissing.

The young man reached the front gates and pulled them open hurriedly. His eye was drawn backward toward the leftmost rookery: a dark shadow had begun to gather there. The birds cried out in fear and were suddenly silenced. And then a great black crow burst through the shingles roofing the rookery, and shot out into the open air.

The rays of the sun caught the crow as it burst out of the rookery, and it dissolved mid-air into a thousand blood-flies, which buzzed madly turned to ash, floating to the ground.

*

I, his steward and assistant, have reconstructed the young man’s tale from his verbal recollections and a study of the scenes where it took place. I relate it here to dissuade the reader from disturbing Castle Ornithollow, now that its final master has died and it has been boarded up and the gates locked.

Anyone who ventures inside will not find their way out again, and maybe the ashes of one accursed visitor of the Castle are still born on the wind, and will poison any unwelcome soul.