TITLE: Icarus Manor, chapter 7 AUTHOR: lillywhite1, but you can call me Casey. SUMMARY: In a mysterious mansion in a secluded part of North America, a man discovers that he is far from alone in the world. Here at Icarus Manor several species of non-human description live together to survive in a world that does not know they exist. LAST CHAPTER: Dominic recovers. Viggo introduced. THIS CHAPTER: Dominic gets back to work. Someone is punished for their crimes. Foreboding lurks. PAIRING: Eventual DM/BB RATING: R; still setting up the base for the affair. FEEDBACK: is my neutella on a spoon that makes me go all gooey and melty and mmmmm... A/N: Text in asterisks (*) represents italics. This is a book and a work in progress. Be gentle. Comments to cswann1@gmail.com. Chapter 7 The house literally shook. Orlando shrieked and jumped to his feet. “What the FUCK?!” Viggo turned his head furiously. “Where did that come from?” Elijah fell to the floor clutching his sensitive merman ears and screaming. Viggo knelt by Elijah and tried to still him. Elijah’s hands would not leave his ears. “It *hurts!* Please stop the yelling! Please!” Elijah pleaded. Tears started to pour down his face. Then suddenly he relaxed. Viggo tried to examine the sobbing merman. He succeeded in getting Elijah’s hands away from his ears. They were bleeding from the inside. Viggo held his hand close to Elijah’s left ear and reached out with his mind. “Elijah, why aren’t you wearing the sound filters I made for you?” Elijah’s body was beginning to unclench. A guilty look crept into his eyes. “I took them out so I could listen for when Dominic opens his eyes.” Viggo gave Elijah a sympathetic smile. “Come on. A few cotton swabs and some hydrogen peroxide ought to sort you out. But I encourage you to keep those plugs in at all times. You never know when someone will scream and permanently deafen you.” “Who was screaming, Elijah? We didn’t hear anything.” Orlando asked as he fidgeted. “Mr. Boyd. He’s livid with someone.” ~ The house literally shook. A voice that was familiar in pitch, but not in tone knocked Sean off his feet. It was a veritable tsunami of anger. *DO YOU REMEMBER ME SAYING I WOULD NOT BE HAPPY IF I SHOULD FIND OUT YOU TWO WERE FIGHTING?!* It was Mr. Boyd’s voice. Sean tried to hold his ears shut. It didn’t help. The voice was deep inside his head and it was booming at a painfully high frequency. It was not a sound audible to even werewolf ears. *COME SEE ME NOW.* The connection was severed. Someone was screaming. It took a minute before Sean realized he was the one screaming. His mind was his own again. He shook with terror. He felt as though he had just been struck by lightning. The aftershocks kept him from standing for a few more minutes. Then he wiped the blood from underneath his nose and limped to the executioner’s block. When Sean reached the doors of Mr. Boyd’s office he knocked lightly before the voice stabbed through his mind again. *COME IN.* Sean’s body shook. He checked to make sure his nose wasn’t bleeding again, and then he opened the door. The room was dark; at least half the room was dark. The lights were on, but the lights closer to the far side of the room grew dimmer and dimmer. They flickered as if the energy was being drawn out of them by some unknown force. Mr. Boyd’s desk was completely in darkness. Sean took a chance and spoke. “Sir, I can only offer my sincerest apologies–” Mr. Boyd waved his hand in the air and closed his fist like he was ensnaring a dangling string. Sean choked on his own words. “My apolo–” He coughed. His voice was gone. “I don’t want to hear your apologies. I don’t even want to hear you speak.” He said as he held his fist closed. Mr. Boyd’s eyes must have been closed because now they opened and burned with an unearthly fire. The accent to his voice was thicker and deeper in his anger. “You directly disobeyed me. Your selfish actions nearly lead to the death of your coworker. It disturbs me that not only could you have lived with that on your conscience, you willingly wanted it on your *soul.* You claim to want to protect the lives of your friends here at Icarus Manor and yet, in doing so, you have nearly become a murderer.” The shame that Sean felt was indescribable. He hadn’t meant for Dominic to die. Things had gone too far, and now he didn’t know what Mr. Boyd was going to do to him. His life was in this man’s hands. “Fortunately for you, I am not a monster.” Then Mr. Boyd’s molten green eyes met his own. *DESPITE HOW FAR YOU PRESS ME.* The ominous aura of the darkened chamber possessed Sean. It was a sickly-sour tremor that crawled under his skin and made a green-yellow coward of him. But to be unafraid in this place at this time was to either be a fool or a god. “I have decided that if you are to be a monster, Sean, then you must be with the other monsters. You communicate with them well enough. Your duties will now be confined to the lower paddocks. You are stripped of all your privileges on my lands, except that of your most basic protection: that which keeps you alive. I will split up the duties of your old position amongst the other employees until I can find someone to replace you. I figure this will be a much more constructive outlet for your ample energy than intimidating and beating your coworkers.” Sean’s panic was rising. No one could tame those beasts. They weren’t reachable. The human part of their brains had shut down long ago after years of imprisonment. Now they were just animals; Very large, very angry animals. No one knew why they were even down there to begin with, but now that they were, it wasn’t safe in the least to release them. Now Sean had to work with those creatures? That was barely a step up from a death sentence. A thousand questions were borne up into Sean’s throat only to die there. How would he work there without it killing him? What exactly did he have to do? “This is all effective immediately. Now get out of my sight.” When Mr. Boyd was done he waved his closed fist twice and threw something invisible at Sean. Sean coughed. He felt as though he swallowed a Dandy Lion seed going thirty miles an hour. He now had the ability to speak, but thought it best not to. He slunk slowly out of the room like a craven dog, and then, before he knew what he was doing, he was changing. Sean ran on human legs toward the end of the hallway as his ears grew and his mouth elongated. The slight pain of the bones realigning was nothing compared to the shame that tore out his insides. He shed his clothes feverishly, his vertebrae popped as they spread apart further to accommodate the change. The four extra ribs snapped into place as his hips ka-chunked into a deeper position. His shoes were long gone and his legs shuddered into the wolf. He fell down on his hands which were now paws and pushed the carpeted floor behind him as he ran head-long towards the end of the hallway and the open window at a frightening speed. He pushed past furniture and what could have been people, but he didn’t care. Someone may have called to him, but if they had, he didn’t answer. He had to escape. Sean was now fully changed, but his strong, lithe form brought him no comfort. It almost made the howling disappointment he felt stronger. *Murderer.* He was a monster. He didn’t deserve the kindness of his friends or the patience of his master. He deserved nothing. The hurtling speed he was traveling at propelled him onward. He was nearly at the window. He gathered all his strength in his legs and jumped out of the open window. Weightless for barely a second, Sean hit the ground sprinting. His red-brown coat was a bare streak of color. He ran towards the woods. He urged himself onward, trying to out- run the pain, the disappointment, the resentment he felt for his actions. He once had a friend in his mysterious master, and now that was ruined. And then something came to mind that he had yet to think of: What will Orlando and Elijah think of him now? The thought of Orlando’s downcast face refusing to meet Sean’s was almost unbearable. What was worse was Elijah’s searching, ocean-colored eyes welling up with tears of shock and that awful, loaded question: Why? Sean began to sob. The sobbing shortened his already abbreviated breath, and then he had to stop. Pad-padding to a stop, Sean’s muscular, sturdy limbs collapsed beneath him and he sobbed harder. He let the feeling pour out. He let the sobs wrack his body. The tears ran marathons down his elongated, wet muzzle. Tiny howls escaped from his fanged mouth as the transformation left him. As he crawled under the weeping arms of a convenient tree, he shrank down to the naked, hairy, pathetic human. And as he found his mangled and constricted voice, all he could mutter was, “I’m so sorry, ‘Lijah. I’m so so very sorry.” ~ Orlando never wished to see such a scene play its way out before him, but it had. His heart broke to watch Sean sob himself to sleep on the mossy ground of the forest. He didn’t want to pry, but he was worried about Sean’s state when he tore past him in the hallway. Orlando didn’t know what Sean was thinking, but his feelings whipped behind him in his wake. Now that he had stopped, it was all too apparent. Orlando watched poor Sean from behind a white oak tree in absolute silence. He heard the words he spoke. Sean was broken. Orlando never thought he’d live to see the day, but here it was, panting, sobbing and naked a mere twenty feet in front of him. He waited till Sean’s breath had become regular in sleep then zipped off back to the manor before anyone questioned his absence. ~ Dominic always found the best way to recover from anything was to throw oneself into work. Four days after his complete recovery from the near-fatal card game, he was waist deep in the crumbling, decrepit room that was once a library. He and the foggles were hard at work. As the three brothers removed all the books from the shelves, Dominic struggled to separate the trash from the good but it was proving difficult. When the books didn’t disintegrate from his very touch, they were filled with pictures of surprising color and texture. The words inscribed in rich lines of auburn and olive. Sometimes the very letters themselves were pictures. Hieroglyphs of every ancient origin leaped from the page and Dominic found it hard to part with them despite the fact that he couldn’t make head or tail of the meaning buried deep in the ancient ink. “So stop me if you’ve heard this one,” Dominic spoke to the foggles, “So a woman walking into a grocery store and is wandering in the produce isle when an employee walks up to her and says, ‘Do you need any help, ma’am?’ And she looks at him and says, ‘Oh yes. I’m trying to find the broccoli.’ The employee tells her, ‘I’m sorry, ma’am. We don’t have any broccoli.’ And he walks away. Later, the same employee finds the same woman in the produce section red in the face and confused. He asks her, ‘Ma’am can I help you?’ And she says, ‘Yes, I can’t find the broccoli.’ And again the employee tells her they have no broccoli and walks away. A little while after that, the same employee finds the same woman still wandering confused in the produce isle. He asks her again if he can help her and again she asks where the broccoli is. He says, ‘Ma’am, can you spell cat, as in catatonic?’ She says, ‘Sure. C-A-T.” He says, ‘Now, can you spell dog, as in dogmatic?’ She says, ‘Yes. D-O-G.” Then he says, ‘Can you spell fuck, as in broccoli?’ The woman says, ‘There’s no fuckin’ broccoli.’ And he says, ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!’” Dominic wasn’t surprised that he got no response at all from the foggles. It was only the sixteenth joke in a row he’d told without so much as a bat of a protruding eye on their part. The most of a reaction he’d gotten was when Lorn nearly dropped a lump of would- be book on Dominic’s head. That put an end to the dead-baby jokes. Since they had started working together, the foggles had pretty much given Dominic amiss. They sometimes listened to his requests, although that was most likely because Mr. Boyd’s had asked them to. They moved extremely slowly, though, and for the most part went about their business without a nod in Dominic’s direction. Dominic got the feeling that they were tired, though. They seemed even more listless than when he’d first met them, but he was determined to reach them. Dominic sighed and dug into the bag he’d brought with him. Rather, the bag Orlando had packed for him. With Sean out of a job, most of the house-bound chores had been snatched up by Orlando and he had taken to mothering his two best friends. Dominic got a packed lunch every day as did Elijah, although, Dominic had no idea where Elijah was or what he did during the day. He made a mental note to ask about that. Inside the shopping bag, Dominic found three sandwiches, two apples, about six cans of juice, and today he was given a dessert in the form of some sort of cookies covered in powdered sugar. Dominic had an idea. “Hey guys!” He called up ten feet of bookshelf to the three brothers. “Let’s take a break! Would you like something to eat?!” Dominic gestured to the food Orlando had supplied. The foggles barely paused before deciding to completely ignore him. Dominic sighed and slid down the bookshelf defeated. He popped open a can of juice and downed it. He made his way through a sandwich and a half, and then slowly undid the precarious wrapper that held the powdered cookies. About a second later, there was a light touch on his head. He looked up and jumped. Forn, Lorn, and Korn were all hanging like apes from the shelves just above Dominic’s head. Never before had the foggles gotten this close to him. Forn tapped at him again and made a grabbing motion at the cookies. “And Mr. Boyd said they’d tried everything to get you to eat.” He slowly offered a cookie to Forn with all the care that one has when feeding an orangutan. Forn sniffed the cookie lightly before popping the entire thing in his frowning, drooping mouth. He immediately held out his hand for another. Lorn and Korn did the same. Dominic divvied up the cookies fairly, and they all munched happily for a few (for a change) comfortable moments of silence. “I can’t believe you found something they will eat.” Mr. Boyd chuckled nearly imperceptibly. Dominic nearly choked on his juice but managed to turn around. “Who knew, yeah? I’ve been trying to get them to talk, but I’ve told them nearly every joke I know and still no response.” “Not one for silence, are you, Dominic?” Mr. Boyd smiled. “Maybe you should try shorter jokes.” “Oh, dear, Mr. Boyd, was that…yes…I believe that was a pun. I’m shocked, Sir.” Dominic said in mock surprise. Mr. Boyd smiled broadly. “Well, if you think about it, most of the jokes you’ve told them would be too long for Orlando’s attention span.” Dominic quirked an eyebrow, “Have you been listening in on my lonely conversations, Mr. Boyd?” “Only half-way. The other half is simply the echo. I can hear you plain as day in my office.” “Oh, I’m sorry, Sir. Does it bother you? I can—” “No, no, no, Dominic. It doesn’t bother me.” “Well, then perhaps you’ll join us.” Mr. Boyd seemed a little taken a back by Dominic’s offer. “Perhaps.” But his words carried a note of finality. Dominic knew not to hold his breath. “Alright.” “Keep up the good work, Dominic. I’ll be outside.” “Feel free to drop by. My door is always open!” “You mean, my door?” “Yes. Exactly. My door.” Dominic smiled as Mr. Boyd exited. *Was I just flirting?* He turned back to the foggles. Six empty juice cans littered the floor as well as apple seeds and cellophane wrappers. Dominic’s eyes gazed upward at the foggles who had finished with the first section of books and moved on to the next with near lifelike speed. *Maybe they just eat when they want to.* Dominic shrugged and picked up a large brown leather-backed book and cracked it open carefully to assess the contents. ~ William Boyd closed the door to his private chamber with a small chuckle. Whenever he visited Dominic, he always felt lighter. It seemed so long since he had laughed or genuinely smiled, then this fascinating werewolf had come along as if by fate. He fell bloodied and broken at William’s doorstep and now had found his place at the manor and in William’s heart. William sighed. He used to be a paranthrope of great revels. He remembered how much he loved to laugh and pull small pranks on his friends. He sang once, too. But that seemed like thousands of years ago. He thought it lost, but perhaps… The thought drifted away as a kite with a cut string. William couldn’t let his affections run wild. Employers and employees always maintained a certain distance. So did friends. Anything -- no matter how little -- more than that did not belong in this situation. It was not in William’s nature to discriminate in terms of sex of a person he could feel attracted to. *We all have souls capable of great love. What’s the difference if that’s all that matters?* Of course, not everyone shared this philosophy although it was popular in the paranthropic world. There were simply too few of them to limit themselves to affections toward only one sex. Some thopic species had three sexes or more. Some had only one. Others had more than one sex to an individual or could change at any given time. Why limit oneself when the pond was so very small as it was? No, procreation was just as essential as happiness, and relationships could be formed between anyone. That was an important difference between humans and thropes. He shook his head to clear the invitingly sexual images that danced so vaguely through is mind. There was only one time that he loved someone. And she was gone. He swore never to love anyone else. That place in his heart should remain cold and untouched no matter who else came into his life. But Dominic.... William let himself dwell on that subtle feeling of warmth that surrounded him as he thought of the owner of that name. He liked spending the past day or so listening to Dominic’s chatter with the oblivious foggles. He didn’t like to admit it, but his eves dropping was entirely intentional. The words that floated out of the library doors were like a fine perfume and William drunk them in so eagerly. His first reaction to this subtle new feeling was to exterminate it. But after thousands of years of exhausting distance between him and everyone else he ever met after he first lost *her,* William didn’t feel the mechanism kick to life. He didn’t want the distance. Tired with the weight of loneliness, perhaps it wasn’t all that bad to have a friend. These people he worked with for so many years deserved that much, and Dominic demanded it so soon after being here. Perhaps he should just give in. Perhaps that old, thick wall between him and the rest of the world was really as useless as it felt right at this very moment. He built it in an instant and kept it strong and impregnable over the many years of his life. It had served him well, and he’d always believed it to be his very salvation. But now – NOW – it felt like such a burden. He began by protecting himself, but now he’d found he’d just put himself in a cage. He was outside the gate, and for once, he wanted to be let in. But could he allow himself to feel this way? It felt like betrayal to the one whose loss he felt so deeply every day. Strangely enough, he didn’t regress. So much time had passed, and now, maybe now, it was time to let it go. He wouldn’t forget. He couldn’t. But for having shut out other thropics for so long, the desire to return was far too strong to resist. It was justifiable. Just because he had a terrible wound in his soul didn’t mean that he had to keep it open. It didn’t mean that his daily routine had to include self-mandated punishment. It didn’t have to be that way anymore. It seemed the wound had started healing on its own and only now he realized it. It was just the sign he had been on the lookout for. William paused again to catch the snippets of a voice coming from the library. What a wonderful symphony this boy created. It was intoxicating. It was then that William wandered out again into his office to aurally lap at that verbal river and closed the door behind him to shut out any small, unwanted intruders. ~ “Unwanted? Is that what I am?” the gargoyle spat. “You like to not know. That is good. Stay that way. Good. Very good. Time is the enemy now. He is the enemy and time is, too. Planning time is coming. Going and coming must happen soon. Soon will be my time, too.” A wicked Cheshire smile spread in the dark recesses of the chamber room. A slave planned a master’s doom. ~ Please email comments to cswann1@gmail.com.