The Downton Aberration (Patreon)

CHAPTER ONE: A SPECIES OF WOOD TICK

"You found him like this?" asked Doctor Clarkson, making a note in his little leather-bound book as he stood beside the sickbed of Mr. Carson in the former butler's bungalow. It was strange; the old man's blood pressure, heartbeat, and respiration were as regimented as the Northumberland Hussars on parade. So far as his instruments and training were concerned, there was nothing whatsoever the matter with Downton Abbey's retired majordomo. 

"By the garden shed," fretted Mrs. Hughes, pale and shaken and not at all her usual sensible self. "I thought perhaps it was a sort of fungus."

"Have I your permission to remove this...organism?" Clarkson asked, already fishing in his medical bag. 

"Please," said Mrs. Hughes, though she managed to turn a shade paler at the thought.

Clarkson bent down beside the old butler and set his scalpel against the pallid, waxy right forelimb of the thing gripping Carson's face. What it was Clarkson couldn't rightly say, but then he was no naturalist. Perhaps it was some Australian monstrosity come over by ship, or else a very large variety of wood tick with which he was unfamiliar. 

The thing's flesh parted under the scalpel's blade and for a moment Clarkson allowed himself the smallest trace of a triumphant grin. He could practically taste his article in the Oxford Journal of Medicine's 1926 edition. Then it began to bleed. Or, well, could you call a substance "blood" if it bubbled like champagne on contact with the air, ate directly through surgical steel, and then burned a hole through sheet, mattress, solid oak bed frame and the floorboards beneath?

"I'm afraid," said Clarkson, his ruined scalpel clattering to the floor as he clasped his hands behind his back to conceal their nerveless trembling, "that I shall be obliged to call for a specialist." 

He retreated to the door with a hysterical Mrs. Hughes in tow, she peppering him with questions to which he lacked any answer, he politely deflecting as he attempted to retain his lunch and rein in his stampeding thoughts. The fumes from the thing's ichor had quite thoroughly unnerved him, and his only desires at that moment were a double brandy to stiffen the nerves and an early retreat to his bed. He hardly knew what he was saying to the aging newlywed pursuing him down the lane.

Within the bungalow, unobserved, the glistening tail coiled around Carson's throat flexed slowly. The pale, bony limbs gripping his face dug harder into his jowls and scalp. The old butler, his face hidden by the creature's flattened body, his mouth forced open by the fleshy ovipositor it had extruded nearly halfway down his esophagus, slept on, and did not dream.

CHAPTER TWO: TWO DAYS LATER

"Retirement did not suit me, Elsie," said Carson, fighting the urge to beam as his wife brushed dust from the shoulders of his butler's livery. In spite of the minor scratches on his cheeks he thought his reflection had a certain flush of health to it. In fact, he decided, he looked rather better than he had before the incident. "With a royal visit in the offing it's no wonder Lady Mary requested I return to take charge of the household. Barrow is simply not up to it."

Now if only this dratted stomachache would go away. He discretely laid a hand against his chest, hoping it was not another round with dyspepsia he felt brewing in his belly.

"I wish I shared your confidence," said Mrs. Hughes, straightening his shirt collar with loving attention to detail. "I don't mind telling you, Charlie, I had a devil of a fright when that...that thing..."

"Dead and buried," Carson said, clearing his throat as a frisson of cold fear slithered up his spine and the phantom aftertaste of the creature's appendage bloomed at the back of his abraded throat. "I'll hear no more talk of it, Elsie."

"As you like," his wife sighed. She stepped back to admire her handiwork. "There you are now. Pretty as a picture."

He gave her a quick peck on the cheek. "What would I do without you?"

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"The Princess Mary has invited us to luncheon tomorrow," said Lady Grantham. "And Mama, you're not to antagonize her over the garden party."

"Antagonize?" the Lady Violet exclaimed, setting her knife and fork aside and dabbing with her napkin at the corner of her mouth. "Need I remind you that I am not the villain of a dime-store novel!"

Carson's bursting joy at standing once more at the head of the dining room, a silent shadow assuring the evening's smooth and tasteful progression, was only slightly dampened by the redoubled fury of his morning stomachache. He was struggling to follow the family's nightly verbal fencing match, the banter between the two countesses Grantham flowing in one ear and out the other as Carson fought to keep his composure. He was ravenously hungry, an unusual occurrence after more than sixty years of restrained and frugal dining, but at last the worst of his pangs began to recede. Dessert was near, whatever arguments had been aired were settled, and he began at last to relax into his accustomed role.

"Good to see you back at the helm, Mr. Carson," the young footman Parker whispered in passing. Carson shushed him, but with half a smile. It did feel good.

As the footmen cleared plates the Lady Violet raised a hand and crooked her fingers in a gesture of summons. Carson answered her call with a flush of pride which turned all at once into horror as a terrible stomach cramp doubled him over. He caught himself on the table's edge with one hand, clutching at his chest with the other, and sneezed a great fan of bloody mucus over the centerpiece and Lady Edith's dress. She stared back at him in horror, a rivulet of scarlet sputum dripping from her right eyelid to run down her cheek and into her modest cleavage. 

"Carson!" the dowager countess shrieked in a tone of shocked disgust one might employ if one's vacuum cleaner suddenly backfired dust and grime across the floor. 

"Call for Dr. Clarkson!" the earl bellowed, shoving his chair back from the table.

Carson drooled blood onto the tablecloth. "I'm terribly sorry, my lady," he groaned to the dowager countess, who only huffed in near-apoplectic confusion. Something pushed against Carson's hand, squirming angrily. Something inside him. He fell to one knee, taking a half-drunk glass of Chateau Latour with him. The 1906, he thought with a rush of despair. So little left. His chin unthinkably thumped against the dowager's knee, smearing her dress with a streak of darkest red and drawing a screech of rage from somewhere deep within her tottering frame. Then, somehow, he was on his back on the floor and the room was full of screams and the sound of breaking glass. 

Carson felt a horrible pressure against his ribs. "Oh," he groaned as something inside him cracked with a dull, squelching report. Lady Mary was looking down at him from her place at the table's foot as one might look at a particularly robust cockroach. She had always been his favorite. To disappoint her now, when perhaps the end was near... it was more than the old butler could bear.

Chairs clattered over. Plates and wineglasses shattered as something -- perhaps his shoe? -- caught the tablecloth and yanked it toward the room's east wall. From the floor, Carson watched them break against the polished boards and the fine carpets, which he noted were looking a touch threadbare where the table's legs pressed into them. These fine things he'd spent his life arranging. His chest was on fire. The thing within him pushed again and this time, with a crunch of displaced bone and a dreadful ripping sound, his flesh and uniform tore open and something clawed its way out of him. He knew from the stench that came with it that he had lost control of his bowels and for a moment the shame of it was greater than the agony of his shattered ribs and perforated innards.

He retched, his ruined body burning as torn muscles convulsed, and vomited gore onto the carpet. The thing that had spilled from the hole in his chest splashed in the puddle of it, tearing with teeth and claws at the intestines in which its serpentine body was tangled like some ghastly infant intent on severing its own umbilical cord. Carson hardly looked at it. The spreading stain, quite irreversible, held all that remained of his failing vision.

"I'm...sorry," he groaned, limp fingers clutching as the stain as though he might contrive to scoop it back into his body. "Fetch a...scrub...brush." Nearby, the thing freed itself at last from his entrails and shook blood and flecks of gore from its hide like a dog shedding rainwater.

The redoubtable butler died, mercifully, before it began to eat him. 

CHAPTER THREE: NO MATCH FOR ENGLISH DISCIPLINE

"Only two things are certain about the creature which claimed Mr. Carson's life last night," said Lord Grantham, pacing the line of servants he'd equipped with rifles and shotguns from the house's armory. "First, that it is utterly foreign to all modern biology and scientific study. Second," -- here he paused for emphasis and to make a fist and raise it -- "that it is no match for English discipline and ingenuity."

"Here, here," his valet Mr. Bates said loyally. The others sounded a weak refrain.

"Tore it's way out of Carson like a beetle through rotten wood, it did," said Andrew Parker, the young footman who meant to marry the undercook.

"None of that, now," Bates growled, laying a heavy hand on the younger man's shoulder. "We'll sort that creature out, so no more fretting." Parker swallowed, but fell silent.

The earl swallowed his irritation. He felt as though he was forever "We shall organize ourselves into three fire teams of four. I shall lead the first, Mr. Bates the second. Tom, if you're willing I would ask that you lead the third."

"Of course, sir," said Branson. The one-time chauffeur still seemed shaken by the events of the night previous, but Grantham felt confident that a bit of shooting would soon put him to rights. "Only, where is Mr. Barrow?"

Lord Grantham puffed out his cheeks. "I'm afraid he was quite put out by our decision to place Mr. Carson in charge of seeing that the royal visit was without incident," he said. "He informed me that he'd excuse himself for the duration of the stay, and today Mrs. Hughes found his room deserted. No doubt we could make use of his keen eye and his aim, but we'll have to muddle on without him. Now then, let us hammer out our search pattern. Mr. Bates?"

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It was past noon when the first shots rang out from the boiler house across the courtyard. Grantham and his team were still sweeping the study and Lord Grantham himself had just settled into his favorite chair for a quick afternoon sherry. Like a shot he was up and out the door, striding at speed across the courtyard with his men and various of the staff shouting questions after him. He felt a righteous flame of triumph kindle in his chest as he saw what awaited him.

Branson, grinning hugely, lifted up a tatty rag of oozing skin and segmented pinkish hide as he stepped out of the boiler house, Parker following behind with both their guns. "We've bagged it, sir. Caught it curled up under the boiler, for the warmth I suppose."

"Oh well done, Tom," said the earl, jogging to where Branson had stopped and pumping his son-in-law's free arm with genuine enthusiasm. Bates came limping out into the courtyard at the commotion, his men close behind him, and broke into a grin at the sight of Branson's grisly trophy. "We'll need to see about having the little beast stuffed and mounted."

The others caught up in a rush of back-slapping, shouted congratulations, and hastily poured toasts. In no time at all the beastly creature hung from a vacant flagpole, its limp hide stirred by the evening wind as the first drops of rain began to fall on the estate, and Lord Grantham had put completely from his mind the stuttering terror that had seized his heart when he'd first glimpsed the thing in Branson's fist. For an instant, just an instant, banished now in the warm glow of manly celebration as he, Branson, and his daughters' husbands traded compliments and cigars in his study, he'd seen the thing and thought that it looked...smaller, somehow. That it seemed empty, that it looked terribly -- but no, it couldn't be -- like something he'd seen as a boy, perhaps -- no, no, it was his imagination running wild -- in a museum when his father had taken him -- quite out of the question. No resemblance whatsoever -- to London.

And for another cold, sick moment, even through the haze of triumph Robert, Viscount Downton and the Seventh Earl Crawley, knew what it had reminded him of. Nothing so much as a snake's flaking skin, shed when the serpent grew too large to wear it.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE ONLY WAY TO BE SURE

The next morning Mrs. Hughes was awoken before sunrise by a pounding at her door. She reached for her husband's comforting warmth and found his half of the bed cold and empty. An awful sense of despair clutched at her throat and for a moment she feared that she might sob like a heartbroken schoolgirl, but Elsie Hughes was made of sterner stuff and held no more patience for her own shortcomings than she did for others'.

She wrapped a robe about herself, fumbled her way to the light switch, and answered the door to find Mr. Mosley babbling nonsense in his cap and nightgown. He seized her by the shoulders the moment his bulging eyes fixed on her and for an instant she feared that he might strike her, so wild did he look.

"Mr. Mosley!" she cried. "Control yourself!"

The dowager countess's footman shuddered, his fingers unclenching and sliding from her arms as he stepped back and did his level best to find some measure of composure. He kept twitching, his mouth rising at one corner as though a smile were trying to fight its way out of him. "It's..." he heaved a ragged breath. "I'm afraid her ladyship, the dowager countess..." He took another breath. "We'd better get his lordship."

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The old woman sat sprawled limply in her chair at her writing desk. The papers and correspondence laid out before her were sprinkled liberally with blood and more soaked her lap in a rich red pool and stained her skirts in a river leading to the carpet, also bearing a dark blotch. A hole in her breast gaped like a horrible second mouth beneath the death mask of her wrinkled, papery face. One rheumy eye was half-open, the other rolled back into her skull so that only the white showed.

Robert's hand became a fist. Mary, standing in the doorway of her grandmother's study with Edith and their mother, looked away, her stern features as pale as milk.

"Damn," Robert swore, his voice trembling. He dug his fingers hard into his palm. "Damn."

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"Tha only chance we've got is packin' tha house with gunpowder and blowin' the whole thing ta kingdom come," said Daisy as she whisked cocoa powder into the family's evening mousse. "Only Lord Grantham's got a sent'mental attachmen' ta the plaice. He'll never desert it, not even when logic dictates 'e must."

"Worry less abou' desertin' the house and more about that dessert you're over-beatin'," huffed Ms. Patmore, Downton's cook as she bustled by on her way to check the soufflé. 

Daisy slammed the mixing bowl down on the counter. "Well it's tha onleh whey ta be sure!"

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"I'm terribly put out that granny shuffled off the coil in such a wretched way," said Mary, holding stock still as her maid Anna applied a gentle hint of blush to her pale complexion. "But really, papa's being unreasonable. I can't be expected to wear full mourning. Grandmama was nearly ninety!"

"Of course not, m'lady," Anna agreed, thrilled as usual at the chance to touch the other woman's perfect skin, to let her hair slide like black silk between her fingers. "It's perfectly natchral to--"

"Do shut up," said Mary in a bored tone of voice. She pursed her lips and regarded herself in the mirror of her bedroom vanity, one slender finger pressed against her cheek. "You've rather overdone it, don't you think?"

Suddenly, an earsplitting shriek tore through their companionable reverie. "MARY!" Edith screamed from down the hall. "OH MARY, COME QUICKLY!"

"Oh what is it now?" Mary sighed. "Go and see about it, won't you Anna?"

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"Abandon Downton?" Lord Grantham scoffed, slurping rather more generously than usual from his evening brandy. He sprayed alcoholic spittle in a fit of nervous laughter. "With a royal visit only days away? Not bloody likely!"

"Robert, there's no need to curse," his wife said as Lord Grantham turned back to the sideboard to refill his drink. It had emptied itself somehow and he felt a few more fingers might stiffen his spine against the unpleasant spinning sensation that had begun to overtake him. "Your mother, possibly Barrow, others of the staff... we're fortunate to be alive. We've had no luck phoning to London, or anywhere else for that matter. The sooner we take ship for America--"

"I've no intention of acting so rashly," he snapped, sloshing brandy into his snifter and spilling a generous measure on the sideboard. He wiped his nose and assured himself that many among the lower classes considered it good fortune to spill a drink. "Mama more than anyone would understand the importance of remaining firm in a time of crisis! For God's sake, Cora, we've the king and queen to host!"

There was no response. He looked to where his wife had sat just a moment before and found her chair deserted. A little ways off a window stood open, curtains drifting in the early evening breeze. "Cora?" he called, his voice suddenly small and hoarse. He cleared his throat. "Cora?" Louder, this time. He set his drink down and took a sidelong step toward the shotgun he'd left propped beside the door. It had been some time since he'd been shooting, but some instincts never entirely deserted one. He'd practiced his marksmanship exhaustively in his youth, hoping to impress the other boys at Eton, then to woo the giggling women who'd come circling after his return to society. No, some things you never forgot. His fingers closed around the polished walnut of the stock.

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Anna stepped into the hall and shut the door behind her, thinking that in all her years in service she'd never heard a scream so horrible, not even when Lady Sibyl died in childbed or Lady Mary learned of Matthew's sudden death. It came again, she now guessed from the stairwell that led from the kitchens to the servants' quarters, that awful shriek. 

"MAAAAAAAAARRRRYYYYYY!"

Anna quickened her step, determined not to disappoint her ladyship by blubbering or dragging her feet. As she came around the corner she was full of conviction that whatever new terror had insinuated itself into Downton's heart, her faith in the Crawleys and her adoration for Lady Mary would see her safely through it. "Now Lady Edith," she chided as the Crawleys' second daughter appeared at the head of the stairs at the far end of the hall. "What's all this noise?"

Edith stared at Anna as though seeing straight through her. The other woman caught herself against the wall and Anna clapped her hands to her mouth at the sight of the smear of blood Lady Edith left on the beautiful wallpaper. "Mary," the young woman husked. Through a rip in her nightgown Anna caught a glimpse of a long, weeping laceration on Edith's left leg.

Then she saw the thing coming out of the stairwell behind her.

"I say, Anna," came Lady Mary's irritated drawl as the half-dressed aristocrat came around the corner from the opposite direction. "What's taking you so long?"

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Something came in through the window as Robert tightened his grip on the gun. Not the little pinkish-gray thing that had burst from Carson's chest at dinner. No. This thing was sleek and slick and black as a moonless night, teeth like glass needles glinting in a lipless snarl, its long tail tipped with a murderous barb of bone or chitin. It gathered itself there by the sill, its armored body tensed like some grotesque panther's, its tail poised as though to strike. 

We're twenty feet above the ground, thought Lord Grantham, unable to tear his eyes from the creature and the gaping window at its back where now he perceived, perhaps in the feverish grip of his imagination, a few faint nail marks as though someone had tried to clutch at the woodwork while being hauled out into the wind and dark and the lashing rain. How on earth did it climb all this way and not make a sound?

He cleared his throat again, a sense of purpose welling up from the brandy's warmth which had begun to spread throughout his stomach. Another creature joined the first, perching in silence on the windowsill. "No intention," the earl repeated softly to himself. He turned the shotgun in his hands and set the barrels in his mouth. They were cool against his tongue and tasted of oil and gunpowder. The first creature hissed at him like a kettle coming to a boil, sinking back into a deeper crouch. Just as the thing sprang, Robert closed his eyes and pulled both triggers.

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Lady Mary sprinted down the hall, the stonework of Downton's mezzanine gallery flying by on her left as Anna's shrieks reverberated from the walls. Edith was behind her, not too far, probably -- she reassured herself as she wrenched a room open at random and scrambled over the threshold, right behind her. Well, perhaps not right behind her. Rather a worrying distance, in fact.

Mary stared back along the hall for an agonizing moment, watching Edith drag her bad leg over the carpet. No, she thought as behind her sister a pair of things, the only word her brain could conjure on short notice to encapsulate the hideous, inhuman shapes that scuttled on all fours at speed -- one on the floor, the other like a spider slithering along the wall --after Edith. Mary set her jaw. I'll not be dragged under by her this time. She slammed the door and turned the key, which had mercifully been left in the lock, then set her back against the heavy fixture, shutting her eyes and taking a steadying breath as her younger sister threw herself against the solid oak's far side. "Mary!" Edith screamed. 

A second later and the door shuddered under a monstrous impact. Edith's wails devolved into a gurgling sob that receded down the hall and out of hearing with nauseating speed. A second splintering crash as whatever the thing was hurled itself against the door, then the sound of something...sniffing. Quick, snuffling inhalations. Mary stepped neatly away from the door as long, thin fingers slid under it. Slick black claws scratched at its base, leaving deep grooves in the wood, and then withdrew.

She retreated to the bed -- it had been her sister Sybil's, she realized as she sat and it's tired springs creaked beneath her weight -- and folded her hands in her lap. The door shivered again. The fingers slipped once more under it, clawing for a handhold, questing gently over the scratched wood. A low, thrumming hiss echoed in the silence.

Mary sat, and waited.

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By sunrise no sound had come from the hall for several long and torturous hours. Mary thought she might have slept a minute here and there because the shadows seemed to jump in stages across the bedroom floor whenever her focus slipped, but she couldn't be sure. By noon she had grown tired of waiting. She tried the door and found it stuck a bit, but a shoulder set against it cured that quickly enough. The hall beyond was empty, though the carpet had been dragged into a series of piled hills and there were bloodstains here and there along its length.

Mary swallowed and set off toward the front stairwell where light poured in through Downton's leaded glass windows. It seemed safer there where the sunshine held the dark at bay. Besides, she couldn't bear the thought of going room to room to see who else had made it through the night. Or who hadn't. She wrapped a shawl she'd found in Sibyl's room around her shoulders, ran her fingers through her sweaty hair, and made her way down the broad staircase to the wrecked and bloodstained foyer at the precise moment Branson came in through the front door.

Rifle in hand, face rakishly smudged with dirt and dripping with sweat, her brother-in-law looked as though he'd just returned from the Somme rather than the front gardens. He saw her coming and put a finger to his lips. When she reached the base of the stairs he took her by the arm and drew her from the front hall into the library. Here, at least, Downton was undisturbed. "They're in the forest," he told her quietly. "And in the village. Our only chance is to go through them by car at speed. I'll wager they'll not be able to keep pace."

"Them?" Mary exclaimed, fighting to keep her voice lowered. "Are you implying these beasts work in concert? That they think?"

"My theory is they're more like insects," Tom replied.

"Insects?" sneered Mary. "I've seen ants at work, Tom. They typically limit themselves to crumbs and spilled drinks. Snatching an entire household seems rather brazen."

"I mean in principle," Branson insisted. "I saw one of those things sting Mrs. Hughes and drag her down into the cellar through one of the dormers. It could have killed her right there on the spot, would have if it'd been some dumb animal. What's it need her alive for?"

"Oh, what indeed. Perhaps it fancies aged meat over fresh."

"Or that's where the queen is," Tom said grimly. "And her eggs."

Mary was silent for a long moment. "They seem quiet in the daytime," she said at last, trying not to hear the note of raw hysteria creeping into her voice. 

"They are," said Tom. "We won't get another shot at getting out of here. I just came from the motor pool and there's something blocking the door from the inside. It might be one of the other servants tried to back out and forgot to raise the door. We'll have to get into it through the house."

She had lived in Downton all her life while Branson had come there scarcely a decade ago, but Mary had not the slightest idea how to get into the motor pool. A ridiculous urge to shoot down Branson's idea flitted across her mind 

"The kitchens," he said, his voice hoarse. He'd found a box of bullets somewhere and was thumbing them into the repeater's breach. "There's a service stair leads up into the motor pool from behind the wine cellar. It's a short way past Mr. Carson's office. Well. Mr. Barrow's now, I suppose."

"If he's alive," said Mary, picking at the neckline of her dress where a stray thread had come loose and thinking of Downton's unctuous butler, once a rather undistinguished footman with a whiff of sodomy always following him. She imagined him held captive somewhere by Branson's gigantic termites, fresh meat for their blind and mindless grubs, and a faint smile played about the corners of her mouth. At least someone had got what he deserved in all this mess. "Which, in candor, I rather doubt."

CHAPTER FIVE: A ROYAL VISIT

The door to the cellars opened in a gust of hot, reeking wind as wet as a bathhouse's steam room. Mary clapped her hands over her mouth and nose to keep what little remained in her stomach situated where it was. Her guts roiled as she followed Branson, seemingly unfazed, down the dark steps. The light switch at the head of the stair yielded no result and so she resigned herself to blackness and took hold of Branson's coat in one pale fist. He looked back at her with a bleak smile, then carried on into the stinking sauna of the great house's downstairs.

In the main hall, which led on the kitchen and to the silver room and pantries on one side and Carson's and Mrs. Hughes' offices on the other, only a few pale beams of light from the little windows set high in the walls at the level of the lawn interrupted the pitch blackness. What little they revealed quite completely failed to cheer Mary. The walls were covered in a glistening sort of skin, ribbed and sticky to the touch, which spread onto the floor, making footing treacherous in the gloom, and was in the process of enveloping the ceiling. Mary's hand slipped from Branson's coat as she moved toward Carson's door, drawn by a sudden flash of insight.

Branson looked back at her from a short way down the hall, the silver room's door open just a crack behind him. "What are you doing? We need to get a move on."

"Wait a moment," she hissed back at him, annoyed that he'd presume to order her around. "He keeps the keys in his bottom drawer. We might need them to get out."

Branson sighed, but set his rifle on his shoulder and nodded to her. 

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She found the keys after a nerve-wracking search of Carson's desk, cutting her finger on a letter opener and spreading his papers everywhere in the process. The cool weight of the key ring calmed her as she gripped the keys to keep them from chiming together. She released a ragged breath she hadn't known she'd been holding, then 

"Alright, Tom," she sighed, affecting more bored imperiousness than she felt. The rest of her quip died on her tongue, its corpse sliding back down into her stomach to land in the churning acid of her anxiety with a rancid plop.

The doorway where he'd stood gaped blackly, like a mouth. Mary backed away from it. She could hear her own heartbeat in her ears, a thundering gallop, and wondered how on Earth it hadn't burst yet, racing as it was. That hiss she'd heard through her door in the night came now from the darkness, a low rattle like a serpent slithering through dried leaves.

Mary turned and ran.

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She stumbled onward through the warren of darkened rooms, feeling her way by touch through the unfamiliar tangle of the servants' sunless realm. How had they stood it down here for all these years? It was so hot, so humid. Her hair stuck to her face and she'd lost her shawl somewhere along the way, perhaps after she'd barked her knuckles on the edge of a table or workbench and dropped the keys with a noisy rattle of metal on metal. Too scared to recover them. He said it was close, she told herself, trying and failing to get her hands around the wriggling knot of panic swelling by the minute to fill more and more of her chest and throat. He said it was right past Carson's office, didn't he? It's got to be around here somewhere.

She stumbled onward for a few breathless steps and cracked her head on something hanging from the ceiling. With a cry she lost her balance and fell face-first down a short incline -- a step lost under the organic matting that had devoured the cellars? -- and rolled over the hills and hummocks of the remade downstairs until at last she came to rest among a great many strange-looking little barrels or jugs no higher than her knees. She lay on her back there for a moment, her eyes adjusting to the dim, dingy gray light. She was in the kitchen. She sat up, clutching at her head where a bump was beginning to form. Something stirred behind her. She looked back over her shoulder.

A great pulsating mass of translucent yellowish-white flesh sweated foul-smelling ooze within the cavernous ruins of the house's downstairs. Where once Mrs. Patmore's domain had gleamed spotlessly now scabrous, dripping crusts of some foreign biological material draped the walls, the oven, the range and counter tops. Many of the basement's thinner partitions had been smashed to bits so that the place yawned like a rabbit's warren dug out by blood-maddened hounds. At one end a sort of horrible cloaca trailed behind the great bulk of the thing. At the other was a nightmare of clenched limbs and armored crests, a hideously overgrown version of one of the things she'd seen coming for her sister in the hall above. That place seemed like another world now.

The creature's great flanks rippled, pulsing, and an egg slid wetly from its ovipositor. The smell of it brought bile to Mary's mouth. She gagged, scrambling to her feet, and realized that what she'd taken for barrels were more of the same. Eggs. Fat, fleshy eggs. She moaned, backing as slowly and deliberately as she could toward where she thought the stairs might lay. That was when she saw Edith staring down at her from the wall, one filmy eye flickering open. "Help...me," Edith whispered. Her right arm hung limp from within her cocoon of hardened spittle. Something had gnawed her first two fingers back to their second knuckles.

"Well I don't see how I can," said Mary, taken aback.

"Please," Edith begged. "Kill...me."

"I haven't the time!"

That spiteful overbite leered down at her in a grotesque sneer. "Li...ar."

"Well I'm sorry Edith but it's true," said Mary, impatient with her sister's selfishness. "If you had any interest in anything beyond your own comfort--" Something hot and wet and putrid-smelling slammed into her back, knocking her off balance. She screamed, clawing at her shoulder blades where something was biting and scratching. Her fingers touched slick, flexible hide and from the corner of her eye she noticed her mother hanging limp in more trusses of hardened saliva near one of the pantries, a gory red hole in her breast. Needle-sharp teeth sank into Mary's ankle. More creatures wriggled toward her over the ribbed and glistening floor, their little mouths grinning up at her out of eyeless bullet heads. She saw other faces on the walls. Anna. Branson. That lanky footman trussed up upside down beside Ms. Patmore.

"No!" she screamed as she turned to run. Her legs went out from under her on a patch of viscous sludge and the newborn things slithered over her body in a writhing wave, biting and clawing, their acid sputum eating holes in her pale skin. The great bloated creature hanging from the ceiling hissed in triumph, her slick and dripping claws unfurling from beneath her bulk to take hold of Mary's by the waist and lift her thrashing from the floor, the newborns still swarming over her. A pair of them had fought free of Edith's throat and belly and now fought on the filthy floor over a long, bloody scrap of the dead woman's flesh.

The breath went out of Mary as the great monstrosity's true face slid out from beneath its exoskeletal cowl, its dark, thin flews wrinkling back from three-inch teeth. One of the eggs rooted on the slimy floor below began to quiver. Just before the fleshy petals of the ovoid unstuck and parted, trailing strings of snotty muck and revealing the thing that lay coiled within, the very same sort which unbeknownst to Mary had surprised Carson, her favorite servant, when he'd dug a bit too deeply in pursuit of better soil for his asparagus, Mary found her voice for one last scream.

The queen, it seemed, had come to Downton after all.