Obscurity, The Second Chapter
In which the ménagère of the Estate St. Vincent has a disturbing premonition.
e last read The First Chapter, in which we met Monsieur Le Propriétaire at his death bed.
That evening, the river rose and flooded the Estate St. Vincent.
Water filled its rooms, one after another, as a piano played its keys without a set of hands to escort them. A dinner party of the most inviting sort became lost to the sea as carpets became imbibed by the swamp, and alligators swam amidst the salon as strands of kelp strung themselves about the crystal chandeliers.
The waters crept up the curling staircase and into the hall, flooding the bedchambers and wettening the trousseaus. Cloaked beds became canopied with reeds and vanities decorated with drifting moss. Oil paintings were obscured by tendrils of Queen Anne’s Lace—even the piano, at last, succumbed to the swamp, its tune gurgled into the sea as its strings became drowned in its depths.
In the grand bedchamber, the proprietor’s corpse floated amidst the sheets that once held him, suspended above the room that once cloaked him in death. Now his pallor appeared ghastly in its demise, his hair unruly in its exile from the living. Blood seeped from his chest in curling ribbons of wrath and his mouth carved itself into a most dangerous smile.
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