Bonus Content: Darkest Reflection Ch 1-2 (Patreon)

Royal Road is having a contest for the month of June, and the grand prize is a $1000 advertising credit, which is enough to run an ad for about... 1.3 years. It would be nice to have, since I would never spend so much on advertising. So I decided to write a short to take a shot at it. 

Darkest Reflection is a short Lovecraftian mythos story set in the 1920s that will be posted over the month of June. Its s supernatural horror thing, with a vampire and a few twists. It's also my first time trying to write a period piece. So, if that's the kind of thing that interests you, take a read and let me know what you think. 

This story will not become a long running series, though if people like it, I might write other stories with the characters in the same universe. 

Ch. 1 - Not A Social Call

“The boss is, ummm - indisposed just now, doll, but if you try back another night, I’m sure he’ll give you the chance to entertain him.” That the no-neck Italian in the cheap pinstripes didn’t bother to disguise his leering as he spoke to her didn’t surprise Josephine. Neither her dark dress nor the violet headscarf she’d chosen to compliment her dusky skin was the least bit indecent, but some men would stare at anything with a pulse.

Normally she’d mark him down for a tiny little curse or two for a slight like that. It would be the easiest thing in the world to put a wet blanket all over his love life for a week or three, but with everything else going on, disrespect ranked at the bottom of her list for once. With the floozies he and his kind hung out with, she was sure he’d seen plenty of women who liked to show off more than their knees.

Josephine opened her mouth to give the lug a piece of her mind but was cut off by the other man smoking on the far end of the stoop.

“Whoa, ease off there, Tony, this one ain’t no Dora,” he said, looking up far enough that she could finally see past his dark gray fedora to the speaker’s angular face before taking a long drag off his lucky. “This one here’s the real deal. Some kind of spooky shit. If she wants to see the boss, I say we let her in.”

“Oh? This one’s the Gypsy you all talked about?” Tony asked, practically ignoring her presence. “I thought she was supposed to be a real looker.”

In a single moment, Josephine went from mollified to outraged. She stormed past the disrespectful man with the bulge in his jacket where he kept his Colt 45. For a moment, he moved to stop her. However, as soon, she gave him an icy glare and hissed, “Romani. Gypsy is a slur comparable with… well, you know. They’ve got plenty of words like that for Italians in this city, don’t they,” he opened the door instead of holding it shut.

“Okay, sister. Your funeral,” he laughed. “The big cheese is in his library with a couple guests. I assume you know the way.”

Josephine didn’t answer as she strode by him. Instead, she gave the man the cold shoulder and made a mental note to give Tony a seriously bad day with her deck once everything with Pastor Ezekiel was resolved.

Though the outside of the house seemed to be nothing but a well-appointed brownstone in a quiet neighborhood, the inside of it looked more like a mansion. Art Deco bookshelves dominated the walls, stained-glass Tiffany lamps were present throughout the well-appointed rooms, and crimson dominated the color scheme everywhere she looked.

As she walked by the parlor, another man with a bulging jacket looked up from his folded paper at her before he went back to reading it, which struck her as ironic. It had made no sense to her that the Gambinos would put so much effort into protecting the one man in this whole stinking city that no one was likely to be able to kill until she realized that it was the other way around.

They weren’t his guards but his jailers or perhaps his zookeeper. That made more sense to her, but she doubted very much that all of these thugs and their guns could do much to keep their monster in his cage if he decided he wanted to stretch his legs.

She didn’t know where the library was, but it was easy to follow the laughter and make her way there. After all, there was only one reason for women to be in this house: to entertain Hugo.

She found him huddled together with two flappers around a phonograph, deciding which of the records in his small collection to try next. The redhead wore a mauve blouse that was low cut enough to show a hint of cleavage and was well past indecent in Josephine’s eyes. In contrast, the blond wore a slightly more restrained taupe dress that shifted suggestively along with her loops of pearl necklaces wherever she moved. In a way that somehow seemed even more sexual, though.

“It’s true, darling. Let’s Misbehave is a wonderful song. You really can’t beat it with a stick, but some of the magic just disappears when you can’t dance to it,” the blonde woman said, not yet noticing Josephine’s presence.

“No one has forbidden you from dancing, my little morsel,” the man she came to see said with a faint French accent as he put the record on the player and began to wind it up.

“Oh, will you finally dance with me, darling?” she asked, but he responded with a shake of his head.

“No, you two will dance with each other while I study every detail about your strange American ways and speak to my good friend Josephine,” he answered as he put the needle down. Then he stood as the first strains of warbling jazz echoed out from his fancy contraption and turned to look at Josephine.

She wasn’t surprised. He’d probably smelled her before she’d walked in the front door. The other women looked up at once too, first at her and then at each other, but she ignored them.

“Monsignor Monmoreant, we need to talk,” she said respectfully. No matter how much the handsome man might make her skin crawl, she needed his help, but even if she didn’t, she had no desire for him to rip her head off in a fit of pique. She didn’t have to be psychic to know that every cushion and carpet in the place was red to hide the stains that his very existence left in its wake.

No matter how much she tried to ignore it, neither his perfectly tailored outfit nor genteel, welcoming expression could disguise the miasma of death radiating off him like a fog. The man still wore a light gray summer suit with white shoes even though it was already well past Labor Day. It was a common faux pax for him since days and weeks mattered so little to his kind. Still, she wondered just how many suits like that he had to throw away because of stains that could never be removed.

The other women couldn’t see past the fine tailoring, of course. They just thought he was another rich John, or maybe if they’d visited him before and survived the experience, and were into this sort of thing. Some people were. After so many readings she knew more about those strange picadilloes than she’d ever want to admit.

Josephine knew a lot of girls with a morphine or laudanum habit that would do just about anything for their next fix. Still, she hoped that anything would never have to include a night at Château Monmoreant for any of them.

“Of course, Mademoiselle, as I told you when last we met, you are welcome in my home at any time,” he said with a smile almost as strong as his accent. “What is it I can do for you this night?”

“I was hoping we could talk alone,” She said, cocking her head toward the two girls that had started to do a little fox trot together while they pretended not to be paying attention to a conversation that most definitely did not concern them. As she spoke, she looked for his fangs and again noted how they were practically invisible, which was always a trip for her. “I need a favor, well, Ezekiel needs the favor, but I’m the one doing the asking.”

“Oh, ma chérie, but I was not expecting you, so I invited these beauties to while away the evening hours with. As you know, I get so bored when my American friends have no work for me,” he answered, shaking his head, “So I’m afraid unless it is life and death, it will have to wait until Thursday, perhaps.”

“But it is,” she said, waiting for him to finish speaking before she responded with only a shade of the urgency she felt in her heart so as not to appear rude. “Three lives hang in the balance, and you are the only one I know that can do something about it.”

“Am I?” he asked, more than a little flattered. For such an ancient creature, he had never lost the love of flattery that he’d grown used to as a young Marquess. “Well then, perhaps I will hear you out, and if it is as urgent as you say, then perhaps Daisy and Ruth will have to come back and tempt me to dance another night.”

“And if not…” he smiled thinly as his words trailed off. Josephine was the last person that needed an explanation about what would happen to her if she burst in uninvited to waste an immortal’s time and swallowed hard at the unspoken threat. “Well. Ladies, if you would be so kind as to wait in the parlor with Franklin for a moment while I help my good friend Josephine get to the bottom of her little dilemma, I would be ever so grateful.”

“Aw, but Money, the party’s just getting started,” the busty redhead whined, earning a sympathetic smile and a kiss on her forehead from her strangely sophisticated customer before both women were shooed out of the room. The sliding door was then closed behind them.

“Now, what is it I can do for you,” Hugo asked, suddenly appearing in the seat across from her, pouring her a glass of brandy from a crystal decanter. She hadn’t even blinked, but she’d still missed the motion. One moment he’d been across the room by the door, and the next, he was seated not five feet from her. “You’ll forgive me, but I do get cranky when my dinner is late, and even on slow nights like tonight, there are so many demands upon my time.”

Ch. 2 - Crying Wolf

“It was supposed to be just another hoax,” she said, taking a quick sip of brandy to settle her nerves before she looked into the eyes of the demon sitting across from her wearing an impeccably shaped human suit. “I only brought Ezekiel in on it because I thought it would be easy money, just like the last few times I’d been to the Bergen Estate, and because the priest had done me a good turn recently.”

A shiver went through her as she realized that if she hadn’t invited the old man to join her, she would be in that room right now instead of him.

“The Bergen’s? Those are the power barons, yes? I see their name on the mail for my electricity bill. It is a strange sort of mortal magic, is it not?” he mused, wandering from the topic as he always did. “Do you know how this electromotive force works? I’ve stared at the electric bulbs in here endlessly but still have yet to understand the trick to it.”

“I don’t, I’m afraid,” she shook her head. “But what I really don’t understand is what I just saw not three hours ago.”

“What did you see,” he asked, taking the bait. “I confess that even isolated as I am, I have heard some very strange rumors about the patriarch of that family.”

“Well, before we talk of what happened tonight, I must first tell you about my other recent trips to that family’s estate,” she said, clearing her throat. This would not be a short story, after all.

She started by telling her host about the well-kept grounds of the white southern-style manor house. It was large enough to fit her whole neighborhood within its wrought iron fences, and the house had more rooms than her tenement had apartments. It was clear that money would never be a problem for this family, even though the father, Morton Bergen, died last year under mysterious circumstances. After more than a few clairvoyants to lead séances, his son, Morton Junior, hit upon her to come out and communicate with the beyond on his behalf. However, she wished that he had not.

“Were you able to give the boy the information he sought and provide closure?” Hugo asked, leaning in as she finally started to pique his interest.

“Only too well, unfortunately. I was able to provide all the answers he sought regarding their accounts,” she answered, unable to keep a note of pride entirely out of her voice, “As well as sweep aside certain… proclivities that were best kept out of the papers for an additional fee.”

Hugo probed her for more details on that, but she demurred politely, citing a need to do what was right for all her clients, just as she had done on his behalf. The old man’s struggles with homosexuality weren’t anyone’s business, as she saw it. If he wanted to keep his summer home packed with young artists and musicians with a certain sensitive disposition, then she didn’t see how it was anyone’s business. It was the twenties, after all, and things were different now. Hugo came from an older time, though, and just that fact might have been enough to get him to refuse her.

It was irrelevant to the story, though, and instead, she focused on the most important part: the man’s son. Morton Junior, or Morty as he preferred to be called by his friends, was a very creative sort. However, she couldn’t say whether all the strange men his father kept around had anything to do with it. All that mattered was once he’d found himself a real psychic, he developed no end of imaginary problems that needed to be addressed by her.

He’d sent a car to the city for her twice to deal with curses, and during the summer, he had his fortune read nearly weekly for fear that something was coming to get him and that he could feel his doom approaching. None of those were as strange as what he’d done to the library when he had his chauffeur bring her by one weekend in September.

It was still hot then, and that mansion was about the only place in Baltimore County with air conditioning where she might be welcome, so even though Josephine knew it would be a complete waste of time for her, she still took the long ride out there. After all, twenty dollars was twenty dollars, and she had nothing better to do.

It had been far more than that. The man had removed every stick of furniture with corners from the room and paid someone to plaster all the places where the walls met each other as well as where they joined the ceiling and the floor so that there were no corners. When she’d gotten there, he’d met her at a round table with delicately arched Queen Anne chairs and explained that he’d finally figured out that it was the hounds of Tindelos that had been stalking him.

“Have you ever heard of the hounds of Tindelos?” she asked Hugo with a note of exasperation.

“I know many old and terrible names. More than you even, I expect, but that one is not on the list, I’m afraid,” he confessed as he spread his hands in bafflement.

“Neither had I,” she agreed. “Not until my esteemed client finally produced the source document for his fears - a pulp fantasy novel of weird fiction stories.”

Hugo laughed at that, and she let his amusement exhaust itself at poor Morty’s expense before she continued. “I attempted to explain the difference between reality and fiction, of course, but gently since he was a paying customer. Morton Junior might have been 22 in body, but he’d led a very sheltered life while his father was alive. It was only after his death that the man was permitted to read strange things like the pulp novel. As we both know, some of the dread names that those foolish storytellers use are quite real, but this one was a total sham. My customer insisted that it was because of how the creatures were described and that he’d seen something quite similar in his own night terrors, but I couldn’t see anything to it and left him only somewhat mollified.”

Josephine went on to explain that later that evening, she’d gone to a local bookseller and wasted a nickel buying exactly the same issue as Morty had shown her, but there was not a single description of the supposed hounds anywhere to be found in the entire work. Her host laughed once more when she explained that she had a conversation with the clerk and that the monster had been used in several horror stories to date, but none of them, not even the original author, had done so. Apparently, the man had just said they were too foul to be described.

“So you interrupt my feast to tell me about a monster that never existed, Josephine?” the Marquess said, shaking his head. “I thought I knew you better than that.”

“Of course not, Monsieur,” she answered quickly. “I was just getting to the important part. I wanted you to understand how it came to be that I parted ways with such a lucrative client. As much as I loved his money, I felt that he would do better in the care of a professional psychotherapist and thought for sure that I would never be hearing from him again. However, only a week later, my landlord received an urgent call for me from Morton’s butler. There had been some sort of supernatural tragedy, and their master was catatonic.”

“This seemed like just another strange ploy for attention from the man, and I was about to insist that they summon a doctor when they offered to pay me cab fare and a sum well over my usual rate if I could come at once.” With her story finished, she looked up from her almost empty drink and back at the hungry eyes of her host. “How was I to know this was anything but another rich man’s flight of fancy?”

“So you took the money and went right over?” Hugo asked disinterestedly. Fearing what might happen if she lost his interest completely, she swallowed hard and glossed over the conversation she and Ezikiel had on the way there.

“Yes,” she agreed. “My driver made only a single stop to pick up Ezekiel, and then we took an eight-dollar cab ride well outside city limits. That was when we saw the mirror room.”

“The mirror room?” he asked, perking up.

“Well, technically, it was the gymnasium. I’d seen it before when it was full of normal exercise equipment, but sometime between then and now, he’d had the windows boarded up, and he’d taken every mirror from the rest of the manse and used them to line every surface. The wall, the floor, and even the ceiling he’d covered with as many reflective surfaces as he possibly could, and when I next saw him, he was sitting there, Catatonic on the only chair in the room.”