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I decided to see if I could write 52 stories again! |
| credit where due ▶︎ Lord Hillsbottom was quite tired. He had been up till the witching hour contemplating his next step. The members of his household would never forgive him for this. Yet it must be done! The mists below swirled across the mansion's ground. Almost reminding Hillsbottom of the book he'd spent the night reading. Apparently his great-great uncle, Julius, had been a practitioner of the Dark Arts. Yes, those ones, the forceful, misunderstood ways of the Ancient Ones. The New Religion had forced its way to dominance with promises of Salvation in exchange for blind devotion. At least according to Uncle Julius the spells and tinctures in his diary had produced obvious and efficacious results. Sir Henry Hillsbottom was in dire straights. Officers of The Crown, Her Majesty's constables, were threatening to seize the family's estate and throw Henry into debtors prison. All because he'd trusted that rotten speculator and invested the family's entire fortune in the wrong enterprise. As it happened, the engines that Matherson and Company had been developing were fraudulent. Merely water wheels converted into treadmills, which as it happened had been patented by someone else. Matherson's idea to power said engines with felines had also proved deleterious. The company had publicly declared bankruptcy and the speculator who had cajoled so many honest fools into investing was nowhere to be found. Thus facing both destitution and the disgrace of the Hillsbottom name, Lord Henry had to do something. Even if it would not meet the approval of the masses. Uncle Jules had one spell that might help the situation. The page read "to invoke power." While it sounded a little vague, Henry was desperate. He must save his family and ancestral home from ruin. Retiring to his occult workshop he'd set up in his former study, Henry gathered the necessary items. He placed a ram's skull on a desk, then lit incense and candles in a circle around the central workspace. "Old Ones, grant me your power," Henry read. "I ask for strength to save my house from ruin. Make me greater than my enemies I beseech thee!" Lord Hillsbottom dropped the book as bone cracking agony overtook him. The ram's skull floated off the table and all light in the house extinguished. When the sun shone down upon the manor, the men who had come to arrest Lord Hillsbottom were met with a horrendous scene. There in the entryway lay a great deformed abomination with a skull for a head. No one could quite tell how it had been dispatched nor what sort of animal it was. Near the deceased creature lay Lady Hillsbottom and the couple's infant son. Their corpses had been rent by what most resembled marks of some great predator. The likes of which had been eradicated centuries ago. |
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