Endless Ashes Ch.1

“Endless Ashes”
Written by Sleep Remedy
~Original~

October 25 (later that day)
Wednesday, Moving Day
Christopher Schlatten

So, today is the big day. Today we will be moving into our new home in Cornwall; a huge abandoned mansion that give me none of good vibes I wanted out of our new “home sweet home”. But, I will get to that later. I have to explain how we came to moving. It is quite entertaining, really. Only, that I am lying through my teeth.

It all started when Mom popped out of the sky for one of her ever so infrequent visits. Do not go get the wrong idea, though, it was no whim that brought her back to our front door. No, our grandfather had just died. We, meaning myself and my little brother, lived with our grandparents. We had since Mom divorced Kieth, my little brother's father. At the time it had been a temporary arrangement to get us away from all the fighting and all that. However, it ended up being more convenient than she expected, so she just neglected to move us back in with her. But, I digress. She came back to London for Grandpa's funeral. She even broke into tears and threw a variable fit at the viewing. It was all very touching and all that, everyone said so behind their veils and embroidered handkerchiefs. It only succeeded in making me more ashamed of her than ever.

After the funeral, she decided that did not want to loose her chance of having a family. Her and Grams spent long hours, late at night, working up a place for the three of us to live and get reacquainted. Apparently, they decided it would be best for Gram to step back so that Mom could step in as the parent. Well, that is all well and good, but you can not just go and pretend that a good ten years of a mother's absence is nothing. Just come walking back into our lives and expect us to forgive her! It is not right, it is not fair! But, I am getting distracted again.

Jim, the little brother I had been talking about, jumped at the chance. He loved his Momma and I could not blame him. He was just a kid and, to be completely honest, she had always favored him over me. Nothing personal, they just got along a lot better. Similar personalities, you know. I act far more like my father, I am told. I wouldn't know. Either way, I was nothing but a big downer to her. This time, I did not want to be, though. Jim was going to go either way, he had made that clear with his pouting and whining as soon as I insinuated that I might not be interested in the prospect of living with our mother. I was not about to leave my little brother in her clutches, so I had to go. I just had to, there was no other way. I did not trust her to take care of him. Not one bit.

* * *

“Chris, darling! Don't just stand there! Hurry up,” Mom giggled from somewhere before me. Of course, she was delighted to be living in this insanely huge mansion. How could we possibly use such a huge house. It was plain indulgence. I do not care how many villas Grams owns, this was just her spoiling our mother even further.

“How many rooms does this place have, again?” I asked the attorney nervously. The stiff straight pressed man glanced at me without moving his head. I swore that he probably still had the hanger in his jacket with how perfectly straight his shoulder were.

He cleared his throat and pulled a file from under his arm. I blinked as my mind told me that his arm and necked had cracked with the unusual movement. What a bad mind, it was. Always going and deciding things for itself.

“There are exactly 140 rooms, equaling into 75 bedrooms, 40 bathrooms, and 25 rooms of other use.”

“I ... I see,” I said, my stomach clenching even worse than it had before. “A-and we have the whole thing to ourselves? No one else lives here?” I stuttered out, pulling up my turtle neck. It was deathly cold outside, after all.

“No, just you three,” he said, with traces of venom in that practiced droning voice. I think that he saw it as overly extravagant and wasteful as well.

“Oh...” I said, dropping eye contact, if I had ever even had it. It was hard to tell with those blank unfeeling eyes. Or, not really unfeeling. I think that they were just bored.

An awkward silence fell between the two of us and I moved to hold my arms. Deathly cold.

The lawyer guy cleared his throat and creaked again as he moved to pull something from his pants pocket. He extracted a single silver key on a keyring with his firm's logo printed in basic Times New Roman print.

“Your mother forgot to take it. I trust that you can give it to her,” he said, moving in calculated steps, all exactly the same distance; each stride the same as the last and the next.

I looked down at the key in my hand. The cold fall light of morning glinted off the metal alloy and made it shine as if it was of the newest silver. Taking up the key ring with my other hand, I held it up to the sun and watched the light play off the jagged edges a little longer. Who would have thought that such an ancient house would have a shiny new silver key? Certainly not I, said the rabbit.

“Chris...” a voice whined somewhere near my shoulder. It was Jim. He was looking up at me with big upset eyes. Upset for about the billionth time this morning. Was it not him that wanted to move in with Mom so bad?

“What is it?” I asked, trying not to sound too irritated with him. After all, I had had break time this morning. He had been bothering Mom most of the time.

“Chris, this house is spooky!” he exclaimed, yanking on my shirt tail to give a little 'Oomph' to his statement.

I just sighed. What was I supposed to say? 'To bad. You asked for it, now you have it'? No, that was too mean. Neither of us had expected this. All we had known about the house itself was that it had been in the family for generations. Something about one of our Many Greats Uncle buying it from a decrepit old woman after her son disappeared.

“Let us give it chance,” I suggested with a doubtful expression on my face. I think that Jim got the message. After all, in brother translation, that meant: “I can not do anything about it, so let us just try and bear with it and see if it fixes itself.”

With a small push against Jim's back, we started towards the house up on the hill. It loomed up above us and seemed to lean over and get a better look at us before it swallowed us up in its huge wooden double doors.

* * *

Mom bopped around Dalila Manor for the rest of the day (Dalila being the wife of the man who apparently built the house, if it could be called that). Jim and I preoccupied ourselves with exploring the Monster of a homestead for a room of our very own, making lunch for ourselves, exploring the outdoors, making dinner, and finding Mom, bringing her to kitchen for dinner. In that order.

It really was not much of anything. The fridge was not stocked. The pantry had nothing under 20 years old. We could thank the Lord Almighty that we were resourceful. I had scrounged up an old phone book and went through all of the fast food places that delivered until I found one that was still in business (the phone book was also 20 years old). In the end, it was a nice little Chinese restaurant. I got Vegetable LoMein (noodles and every vegetable under the sun), Jim the Teriyaki and Honey Chicken (I pilfered a few pieces for myself), and we got Mom some normal Fried Chicken and French Fries. She does not like Chinese food.

Dinner was tense, at least for me. I think it was for Jim too. Mom blathered on and on about all the things she had found, all old relics that would sell for a fortune or some room that was absolutely divine. I do not think she asked us a single question about what we had been doing while she was off in the upper levels of the mansion. I mean, maybe we had done something interesting as well. Were we not interesting enough, or were we just not worth her time? Maybe my abashed expression discouraged her. Perhaps, the deflated look that Jim took on after he could not catch her attention simply scared her away. And, maybe P. Diddy's favorite meal is crumpets and tea.

It was personal knowledge of mine that Jim had been bursting with all kinds of things to tell her. All about the tree house out in back, about his room in the southern part of the house, and about the strange children's playroom, full of fun house mirrors, antiquated dolls, and bright pasteled colors. Perhaps I had wanted to express my new found worries over this new home of ours. For instance, there was a photo album in one of the sitting rooms that was made up completely of dead people, especially young children. Then, while exploring a small and unusually bright colored corridor, I was almost sure that I had found the Master's Mistress' room (for various reasons and items found therein). Not to mention the not so small family graveyard we had found in the back of the mansion, hidden from sight by a small grove of trees. That graveyard, it was distinctly disturbing. There were still rotting flowers in the small vases by some of the newer gravestones and some of the older grave markers, well, they looked like someone had purposely erased the name and date chiseled into it. As if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the otherwise sturdy stone.

I did not like this place. I did not like it at all...

Quote of the Day:
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lin's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood.

* * *

Authoress' Note: Ah, so this could be much more detailed, I think... I'll probably edit it a lot after I finish it, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is really just an outline. I'm giving you a taste of Chris' thoughts about his mother. Next chapter, I hope to go into the strangeties within the mansion and Chris' first encounter with one of the spirits.