The Strangers on Tier Hill

ELEVEN o’ CLOCK

We were alone.

Just as quickly as our guests had appeared, they vanished.

So lost in those eyes we were that it seemed as though we had been staring at a congregation of stars or a closer mass, such as the moon. Was it that we had interpreted our guests’ eyes glow? Was it all in our heads after all? Indeed, it felt real.

It had to be. For, as we broke our gaze from the moon and fixated on what was actually around us, we found ourselves in the ballroom. Alone.

Where had all the guests gone? How could we have missed them? Dinner now seemed out of the question as my wife and I were too frightened, confused, and unnerved to maintain an appetite. The thing on our minds now was getting out of this house. We exited the ballroom, entering the hallway that led down to where the stairs would be. The hallway twisted and stretched as we raced towards the door at its end. Only when we reached exhaustion did we reach the door. And, as we opened it in our haste, we found ourselves staring into a closet; a closet hosting rags, laundry, old hangers, and nothing more.

I slammed the door.

“Wasn’t that the door,” my wife stated frantically.

“Wasn’t that the way to the stairs? To the way out!?”

“Yes,” I said. “I believe it is.”

“Well, what are we going to do now?”

I looked at her and put my hand on her shoulder.

“Look for another way out.”

I grabbed my wife’s hand and we headed towards the opposite end of the hallway, checking scattered rooms as we progressed. These were mainly closets and a few small rooms that, upon hasty investigation, held no clues as to where the exit would be.

We eventually found ourselves back in the ballroom. All the candles had been extinguished in our absence and the only light coming into the room through the great standing windows was the moon’s, which cast great, coffin-shaped silhouettes that stretched and strained to reach us. As we searched the room for any other sources of light, we came upon a sliver under a door located across the room. We walked towards it and opened the door. It was another hallway. It was familiar. We had been here before. I had searched rooms in it and I knew of one with one place left to search. I took my wife’s hand once more and led her towards the library, towards the lever behind the bookshelf.

As we opened the door to the library, a cold, hissing breeze shot out of the room that caused us to recoil. After a brief convincing, my wife agreed to enter with me. All but one candle was out on the candelabra that sat on the table. And all but one book was still there. The one missing was the one I had been most fascinated with before, though I still did not know why. I stared at the empty space on the table that it once occupied for only a second before my wife called my name.

“William, look at this.” She pointed to the bookshelf, which was now open ajar.

I took the candelabra and closed in on the bookshelf. As I looked into its space, a familiar blast of air caused me to squint and narrow my vision. Thankfully, the candle did not go out. I rubbed my eyes and regained clarity. I then considered the position of the lever and noted what it had been before: Up. It now hung in the middle.

“Here, take this.” I handed my wife the candelabra and reached into the space where the book once was. I pulled the lever down and the bookshelf groaned and jolted into motion. We both jumped back and watched as the shelf creaked and its gears clicked slowly into motion, protesting the rust.

It stopped halfway and we reluctantly entered.

The walkway was short and gave way to the void as black swallowed our sight beyond a few stairs that signified an impending descent. As we shuffled our feet, metal collided and resounded sharply. We took a moment and lit the other candles. With the void’s mystery now solved, we saw that there indeed was stairway that soon gave way to another hallway just around a corner. What that hallway led to, we did not know. We looked down and saw what had produced that second mystery. Rings, bracelets, and necklaces littered the stairs as we progressed down them. The jewelry looked broken, cut, torn, and stained. They appeared as though they had been broken off, like the shackles of an enraged convict who had found some insurmountable strength and freed himself of burdensome, restricting iron. It wasn’t without its price, however. As I looked at them closely for one brief moment, I could see that they had been stained with blood and that there were even bits of flesh stuck along jagged ends.

We continued down until we reached the landing that became the hallway. This one, too, was long and decorated much the same. Strange alien paintings hung along the walls, depicting unsettling, ghastly rites by congregates of unearthly design; primitive and beastly portrayals from damned pasts and untamed origins. We dared not look at it, but we couldn’t bear looking away. These were grotesque beyond compare, but fascinating beyond comprehension. We came to the end of the hallway and to another sliver of light that lined the bottom of the door. We just looked at each other for a moment as we stood before it. Another room? A room with a way out? There was only one way to know for sure.

We opened the door.

TWELVE o’ CLOCK

We stood silent. Our feet were frozen to the floor.

Before us was a great dinner table. It was long and seemed as though it stretched for miles just like the room we stood in. There were nineteen chairs. In front of these chairs were nineteen covered platters. I counted: Mr. Fuchs, 1. Us, 2. All eight couples, 16. I looked at my wife, and she looked at me. Another grandfather clock chimed twelve. It broke our concentration and we looked up.

Inside the room there appeared nineteen waiters who stood as solitary and silent as statues beside each chair and beside us. Another bell chimed and each waiter, in unison, placed their hands upon the platter’s dome. Then the sound of a gong resonated and, just as each had placed their hands upon the dome, each lifted it off and stood aside, pressing against the walls with their backs. We stood there for a second and stared, first at the uncanny motions of the waiters, but then at the horror of what those domes had once concealed. Raw flesh, red and bleeding lay upon pale china, staining its innocence. Coils of ripe, tender meat almost seemed to writhe and twist amongst the shards of bone that protruded from it. My wife and I gasped as we looked down and saw that we had been treated to the same.

Not a minute later there came a thunderous roar of what sounded like heavy footsteps racing, pounding upon the earth. And the sound shook the floorboards beneath us, almost separating our feet from their secure positions, as what would come through the door, we expected, would be nothing short of a locomotive. Instead, there came the lot of something that, until today, could only be held credible in fiction or myth. From all the doors, save one, came behemoths of inconceivable size and proportion. Great beasts from ancient lore and timeless bane now lined themselves at the table. Their great paws and razor claws, some with remnants of broken metal still woven into great tufts of hair, now tore at the bone and flesh that lay in front of them. Their mouths opened as they tore apart great portions of meat with long, curling teeth. Upon their backs and hindquarters were torn remnants of what once were clearly formal suits and gowns. But now they were but patches of yarn and loosely hung lace. At the head of the table, was one distinguishing beast that could be identified no matter what its form. Feasting, like the rest, was a creature of a most dominating prestige, with hair of ghostly white save for a few gray streaks behind the ears.

It was at this very moment that my wife and I, under such adrenal surge, broke free of this place by means of throwing ourselves through a nearby window. The few cuts and bruises we endured we would not recognize until we had ran, as it seemed, for miles from that place and the unspeakable sights we had seen.

And sometimes, in the safety of our home miles away from there, I can still hear the same bone chilling howls we heard that dreadful night. Sometimes, it sounds as though it’s right outside our door.