The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

The House at the Center of the World

Previously: "The Sexton's Scarecrow" 

You rustle through a few pages and are startled to find some that are made out of a kind of flimsy cardboard. To these have been glued pages torn from a cheap paperback. Examining them, you find that they have been pulled from one of those old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. A cursory glance shows that most of the pages seem to be there, and you are soon absorbed in the branching, diverging storylines.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The House at the Center of the World

You are standing before a red brick wall and large, wrought-iron gate, with a soft but insistent wind pushing at your back. The sky is a dull pewter, streaked with darker bands that could be smoke, but otherwise bereft of texture or shape. One horizon is dimmer than the other, but the milky glow from the hidden sun gives little enough light. At this time of year and at this latitude, it never sets, but neither does it ever rise far above the horizon. The sky has been this way for a week now; that, and the unchanging light have given the impression that time itself has been suspended.

Would that time had stopped for you. You are only 19, but already your blonde hair, never thick, is thinning at the front and top, and the wind prickles your scalp as it brushes strands that are already too inclined to fly away on their own. Despite the clouds, your umbrella is still tightly wrapped and your mackintosh dry, and you're not particularly winded or hot from the walk here, despite the heavy carpetbag in your left hand. But you're not feeling very young, either; you're not particularly well-built, and your studies have left you thin and a trifle near-sighted.

This wall and gate are at the top of a rise; the road'if you can call the dirt track you are standing on a "road"'leads up a little farther to the bare top of a hill; the other end winds down through scraggly conifers to the city below.

You came up the road from the city, but have just now come down from the hill's summit, having initially bypassed the gate on your way up. You had glimpsed something through the trees and wanted a closer look, and had been rewarded with some stone work, possibly the ruins of an ancient observatory or set of battlements. But you didn't linger.

As you came down the road you were able to glimpse the house on the other side of this wall: a great manor of three stories and multiple wings, each faced with immense but blank windows and punctuated by several towers themselves separated from each other by steeply pitched roofs and tall chimneys. The grey stone is spotted with age, but you could see no ivy, and the black windows gave it a vaguely ruined appearance: you were briefly struck by one tower whose arrangement of windows suggested the face of a skull.

The house is set deeply back from the wall, inside a great expanse of garden. The grounds are capacious, but though the wall's perimeter is immense, it wouldn't take more than an hour to skirt it, if you chose to hazard some of the steep bits where the hill falls away.

Or you could just go back to the city, and give up the whole thing as a bad job.

* To go in thru the gate: "The Housekeeper at the Center of the World" 
* To return to the city: "A Prank Present" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 4)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)"