Challenge #10
In your own space, create a fanwork.
I’ve been creating a lot of fanworks lately. I need to catch up on posting copies here, since DW also serves as my fallback archive.
Here’s a chunk from a gothic horror thing I’m working on. It’s currently operating as fanfic for the Malevolent podcast, but it might end up becoming original fic. The jury’s still out!
This bit is rated teen for a genderfucky lingerie situation that’s happening and the implication that some dirty old man peeping has happened in other times, but it’s just some brief description here.
***
The sound had come from the furthest room in the young ladies’ cloister. It woke Arthur out of a sleep that had been restless at best in any case. He was almost glad for the excuse to rise.
He reached for the candlestick at his bedside but didn’t light it. Simply stood there in the dark, waiting to see if the sound came again.
While he waited, the rain tapped like fingers at the glass of the window. It was storming wickedly outside. The whole countryside must be drowned. He wondered briefly if it had just been the storm that woke him. A branch knocking against the outside wall maybe? A clap of thunder? That wasn’t what he thought he’d heard—a heavy, wooden ‘clunk’…but in sleep, could his mind have taken it for something else?
Minutes of waiting, and there was no further sound, no indication of movement. So he lit his candle—wretched, backward old building, still relying so much on candles and fireplaces for light and heat, but then it wasn’t that it wasn’t wired. It was only that this far out into the country, the lines were so unreliable. The electric kicked out as often as it worked.
He prowled through the rooms of the ladies’ cloister, bare feet by turns caressed by soft rugs and freezing on old cut stone polished smooth. He was the only one staying here currently. The architecture was from an older age, when well-bred young unmarried women didn’t mix unchaperoned with the bachelors of the household or guests who might be staying, and so this entire section of rooms was carefully controlled with only one entrance to the hall and a secluded stairway that went down to the family bedrooms and boudoir.
There was a boudoir! Ridiculous.
At any rate, he was the only one in these rooms currently—because he wasn’t a fucking lady, in any sense of the term. At first he’d been sure it was some fucked up insult on their host’s part, putting him here and then taking away his clothes to leave him only this…this…fucking lingerie he was forced to wear.
Now, having gotten to know their host a little and having seen more of the place and its goings on, he thought it wasn’t an insult. It was something worse, and far darker.
The sheer lacy nightgown left him nearly naked. His entire body was on display. It clung to him, in a way that would have been flattering as hell on his curves if he had wanted his curves flattered. He had put on the fucking stockings and the garter belt to hold them up because it was better than freezing in this drafty old pile.
He felt like a doll. He felt…exposed. A toy for a man’s hand and a man’s eye. And that man, he was fairly certain, was their host.
If the host was a man at all. Which, at this point, he had his doubts about.
When he reached the little corridor that separated the north-most of the ladies’ rooms from the others, he shielded the candle flame with his hand and trod carefully. The last few steps to the final door, he took slow, one at a time, every sense alert for any sign of…anything.
And still, there was nothing. Finally he took the last step into the room.
All looked the same as he’d gotten familiar with, the candle picking out the soft greens and yellows of the room and the leaves and birds on its charming wallpaper. The only difference: the bookcase built in around the balcony door stood open, a dark passage revealed behind it.
A chill draft flowed from it, fluttering the gossamer ruffles of Arthur’s nightclothes.
He crossed to stand at the threshold. He thought, perhaps, he could just barely hear the mellow lower tones of a man’s voice.
Well, whoever the fuck was playing games with him, they should have know by now that a spooky secret passage wasn’t about to stop him. He stepped in.
The passage turned the corner, and then a set of very narrow indeed steps led down. Down was the boudoir—the women’s parlor—and then below that the men’s library. One of the rooms in the house he so far hadn’t been able to get into, as their host had kept it locked.
There were spy holes along the wall, with little covers that pivoted on a peg to close them up. He slid one open. Perfect view of where a young unmarried woman might get undressed to prepare for bed. The passage was not particularly dusty or cobwebbed.
He chewed on his lips for a moment, contemplating the setup here. The builders of this house had been sleazy bastards, hadn’t they? Seemed like it had stayed in the family.
There were two more peepholes that oversaw the boudoir, and then he blew out the candle to approach the bottom as unobtrusively as he could.
He almost overshot, his feet finding a third staircase—it must go all the way down to the basements, and wasn’t that a creepy thought—before he backed up and felt at the walls. There had to be an exit here somewhere…ah yes. There was a hinge. He mapped out the span of the wall that must swing, and then felt down the side opposite the hinges, looking for a lever or switch or… There.
And then he paused. Someone had done this deliberately, to lure him down into the men’s library, which their host had kept off-limits their guests so far. And so it behooved him to ask why, before he threw himself into their hands.