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Reference-work for "The Book of Masks," "The Wandering Stars," and "Student Bodies." |
| The description here is intended to be functional, and authors are discouraged from borrowing from it in their own descriptions of the villa. Use it to construct your own visualization, and describe that. Reference photo: Blackwell's villa  Blackwell's villa is a two-story (with partial third-story extension) stone construction in the Georgian style. The front door is inside a portico and opens onto a porch at the top of four shallow, flagstone steps. The doorbell is set inside a metal ornament: the gaping mouth of a ravening wolf. The lintel over the doorway is inscribed with protective charms. The front door is flanked on either side by two tall windows; the second floor has three windows, arranged symmetrically over the lower-story windows and the front door. The roof is flat, and as you approach the house two chimneys, each sporting four flues, will be visible on the roof. (One chimney is purely decorative; the other has only one working flu. But possibly the unused chimney and flus have a magical use.) Also visible, on the right-hand side, is a first-story extension with a single door and many tall windows that will admit lots of sunlight. This is the kitchen. Aside from the kitchen, the house is a symmetrical rectangle whose dimensions (width to depth) are 3:4. That is, if 3 regularly spaced windows are visible on the front and rear, the sides will sport 4 windows. If it helps, imagine the house as laid out in a 3x4 grid: 1---2---3 4---5---6-xx 7---8---9 10-11-12 with 11 being the front door, and xx being the kitchen extension. The house is not aligned on a north-south or east-west axis but, following the curve of Farm Road, faces south-west, so that the front door (11) and French doors leading into the library (between 7 and 10) receive the rays of the setting sun, and Blackwell's bedroom (9) and workroom (6) will receive (from a slanting angle) the rising sun. The house is surrounded on four sides by a whitewashed stone wall showing (on closer inspection) many fine cracks in the facade. The wall is six-and-a-half feet tall and is pierced in the middle of one side (the side facing Farm Road) by a wrought-iron gate under a wrought-iron decorative arch that is ten feet high at its crown. This gate is never locked. The house is set back approximately thirty-five yards from the gate, at the end of a walkway of cracked flagstones, and twenty to twenty-five yards from side and back walls. The grounds are entirely dead: no grass, no weeds -- maybe in spots there will be the broken, dead remnants of a bush. Otherwise, the grounds are flat, hard-packed earth with maybe a film of dust atop them. There are decorative flower beds, lined with brick and stone, some of them raised above the level of the surrounding ground by three or four inches, and these are also dead. At the front right corner of the house (as you face it, at 12) is a dead, leafless yew tree. Reference photo (but remember, leafless!): Yew tree  . The branches are close to the upper story windows, so that it is possible to get in and out of the house via the tree; one thick branch snakes toward the side wall, so that it is possible (if you are good, athletic, and lucky) to get from the house to the surrounding wall without touching the ground. The trunk of the yew tree does not obscure the kitchen behind it, but the yew is what catches the eye.Between the yew tree and the side wall, clearly visible from the gate and front walk, is a stone mausoleum. It is small, with just enough room inside to hold two stone biers and the narrow space between them. It is short, too, so that you have to duck your head when you are inside. The exterior is very plain, with two perfunctory pillars flanking the solid metal door, and a low-sloping roof rising to a triangular peak. On one side of it, in a row along its side, are four gravestones. None of them have names. It is possible to leap, by a long jump, from the roof of the mausoleum to the top of the nearby wall. Reference photo: Mausoleum  .A set of shallow steps connects the ground behind the yew to a brick patio that fronts the kitchen. On the other side of the house is another brick patio. There is a very wide shoulder between the road and Blackwell's front gate, and it is on this shoulder that Blackwell typically parks. There is also a wide, flat space beside the wall opposite the mausoleum, where it is possible to park. This space is partially screened from Farm Road by some large, leafy bushes. The other side wall (opposite the library) opens into a trashy field of tall grass and weeds. The nearest house, on either side of Farm Road, will be more than a hundred yards away. A dozen yards behind the house, the ground slopes steeply down into some woodland. This hillside, however, is very short and quickly bottoms out, so that the bottom the back wall only about fifteen feet above the ground where it flattens out, and the outskirts of the woodland come some way up the hillside and so can be glimpsed over the top of the back wall. The ground between the side yards and the lower ground behind the house is mostly cut off by thick, billowing, bushes, but there is a kind of lane through which one can drive to reach the soft ground directly behind the house at the foot of the hillside. Here you will find an arched culvert coming out of the hillside, like a buried drainage pipe. It is possible to enter this culvert, for the top is a little more than six feet from its mossy floor. But the entrance is cut off by a rusty iron gate; this, however, is also never locked. It is dark inside the culvert, but the journey is short -- a matter of thirty-five yards or so. The walls are lined with brick and end in a stone stairway with a door at the top. Opening this door will take you into the laundry room of the villa. The front door opens into a dark foyer with a dark, polished parquet floor. The foyer gives onto a dark hallway that penetrates to the very rear of the house. Almost immediately on your right as you enter is a doorway leading into a sitting room that looks out onto the front yard. (Using the grid above, this sitting room would occupy "12.") There is no window looking onto the side yard, only the front yard. The sitting room contains a flatscreen TV and other comfortable and unpretentious furniture. There is another doorway connecting the sitting room to an airy breakfast room (9) that is connected to the kitchen/pantry/laundry room complex (6+xx) and to the central hallway (8). The kitchen occupies xx along with most of 6; the balance is taken up with a walk-in pantry and a laundry room whose sole other doorway leads to the back gate via the culvert. The kitchen is also connected to a formal dining room (3). The central hallway connects to the dining room via 8, then leads into a central junction at 5. At the right is a broad staircase with two landings as it makes a 180 as it climbs to the second floor. On the left is the entrance to the library, which takes up 7, 10 and part of 4. The library is two stories tall and lined on all but the external wall with bookshelves, all of them so tall that a wheeled ladder is necessary to reach the highest shelves. The library contains four work tables and eight chairs. In one internal corner sit two grandfather clocks, set perpendicular to each other, which tick arhythmically out of phase with each other. Set inside one wall is a two-story pendulum ending in a sharp scythe, rocking back and forth in a short arc. Though the scythe misses the floor, there is a groove worn in the hardwood floor beneath it. Alcoves in the wall are set with stuffed animals, including a small three-headed dog (heads snarling) and a dwarf orangutan with a single eye in the middle of its forehead and a gaping mouth filled with sharp teeth. The outer wall is pierced by tall windows and a French door that opens out onto a brick patio. In the wall of the library is a hidden door (a bookcase) that is opened by taking the three-headed dog from its alcove. Directly behind this door is a wrought-iron spiral staircase leading down into a hidden basement. This basement is very narrow, lined with brick, and illuminated by a single window high up in the outer wall. There is a spell laid on the staircase, so that although it is possible to descend the staircase, it is impossible (unless one is holding the dog-headed key) to ascend it without being overwhelmed by a daunting terror. The central hallway continues to the back of the house, giving out on either side to a formal dining room (3) on the right and to a large, formal living room (1 and 4) on the left. Both these rooms are dark, cold, and stuffy. The living room has a large fireplace. There is a guest bathroom wedged at the corner of 2, 3, 5, and 6. The stairway opens out onto a central corridor on the top floor that runs through the core of the second story as the lower corridor runs through the core of the bottom floor. At the front of the house it dead-ends into a window (the window over the front door) Along the right-hand side are doorways opening into an office (occupying the corner at 12), Blackwell's bedroom (9) and an empty bedroom (3), with a full bath between the latter two. On the opposite side of the corridor are three small bedrooms occupying 1 and 4. All but Blackwell's bedroom are empty; one of the bedrooms at 1/4 contains an armoire and a bed. The upstairs corridors dead-ends at the back of the house, where a cramped staircase leads up to a third-story annex over the back corner of the house (3 and 6). It opens onto a tiny junction, with the left hand leading to a small, empty room (3) containing a full-length mirror, and the other to Blackwell's workroom (6). The latter contains a work table into which are carved a variety of useful runes and sigils. Drawers in the work table contain a variety of tools and materials, mostly of the of a magical nature. |
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