Prologue
Murder.
It’s something that just tends to sneak up on one. That is, of course, if one is the victim of said murder, the
setting is dark, and the killer does a good bit of sneaking. For the murderer however, a decent
killing can take years of planning.
A good white board is always recommend for this, along with key cards, a
hard cover diary, and a few lengths of decent wool.
Chapter
1
1
Thunder rolled outside. Its violent cause lit up the arched
gothic windows as rain began to cry down the panes. Shadows shifted and flickered as a figure darted from one
old suit of armor to the next.
Darkness seeped along the corridor. In the distance, towards the lone scullery, a door - half
opened, permitted a sliver of light to play outside of it in the corridor.
The figure moved with a ninja like grace and
speed towards it. Drifting faintly
above the sounds of the hurricane without, came the murmur of a 1930’s classic,
struggling to be heard from the wireless, which crackled to the beat of the
bolts of lighting outside. The
figure gained the shelter of the doorframe and peered in. There, sitting on a small stool in
front of the fire shucking peas, was Beryl. The fool had her back towards the doorway.
The figure slunk back into the shadows for a
second. It held in its rubber
gloved hands a thin piece of wire.
The wire ran past the cat, up the stairs, around the columns of the main
hall, up another flight of stairs, around the seventh century writing desk’s
legs, through the guest room door, up into the ceiling via a trapdoor, across
the old chests and forgotten clothes, through the venting shutters and up onto
the roof, where it snaked, glistening in the rain, to one of the eight
chimneys. There it sprouted
upwards and vined itself onto the TV aerial that had never gotten good
reception on account of its almost always being struck by lighting during
storms like these.
Lady Mulba Toast looked at the wire in her
gloves. All she had to do was
touch that “no good useless” Beryl with it at the moment of a lighting strike
and the octogenarian bane of her existence would be instantly fried; and Toast
could cash in the insurance policy.
2
Only twice before in her life had Beryl
experienced such a monstrous storm. The first time had been at age three,
huddled in Mother Beryl’s warm, middle-class-coal-miner’s-daughter-like
bosom. The second time had been a
similar storm about three days earlier.
It was during that particular storm that Lady Toast had, as was
customary, called for Beryl at around nine. Toast was a large woman. One might say a little too large, but then one might also be
accidentally driven over by a large black Rolls Royce.
Beryl was usually required, at this
nine o’ clock summoning, to assist Lady Toast off of her pink floral chaise
longue, up the stairs, out of her day frock, into her night gown and then
finally into her giant four poster bed.
This usually took in the region of ninety-six minutes to achieve. This particular evening however, Toast
had been standing at the marble mantle with a bottle of sherry in her
hand. She looked strained. Beryl
smiled on the inside. “Ready for
bed?” she had asked. Toast turned
and looked at her. A strange smile
had slowly appeared on the lady’s face.
It was the same smile achieved by a spider when a particularly juicy
looking fly had made its way into her web.
“Yes,” Toast had said, “I believe I
am.”
Lightning struck. Beryl Jumped. As she continued shacking the peas she had picked from the
veggie garden earlier that afternoon, a strange sensation came over her. It was the same sensation that she had
twenty years ago – the night she copulated with young Harold behind the tool
shed. It was the sensation that
she was being watched. Slowly she
turned to look at the doorway.
There was no one there.
With a slight sigh of relief she turned back to her peas and then
screamed. Lady Toast was standing
right in front of her with a Cheshire cat grin.
“Hello dear,” said Lady Toast.
“Hello Toast,” said Beryl.
3
The grin was more of a grimace as Toast counted the seconds
between the last lighting strike and the thunderclap. She would need to time it
just right. Beryl watched her with the kind of bovine interest that cattle reserved
for the fatter daisies.
"I want you -" thunder cracked across the sky and
rattled the dishes in the sink, "- to wash these dishes right now..."
Mulba concluded smoothly. She turned to the sink, and with an expansive gesture
dropped the one end of the wire neatly into the basin. She then proceeded to
pile forks and knives on top of it and, thinking that more was better, she
grabbed the metal wok, the old three-legged pot, and all the copper pans she
could find.
Then with great gusto, "Wash these all now! I'm expecting a
visit from Dr. Plumstead* and the Reverend** tomorrow morning. And you know
how they love a good clean kitchen."
And then, to finish it off, to seal the deal, to hammer the
proverbial nail into the proverbial coffin (Toast did enjoy overdoing things
idiomatically), she said magnanimously:
"Then take the rest of the evening off, you look positively
piqued."
She stood back, holding the dish washing liquid in one hand, and
the scourer in the other. "Go on then dear."
Lighting struck somewhere near, killing a cow. As its death moo
echoed on the thunder, Toasts jowls wobbled with anticipation.
*To certify the death
**To send Beryl’s soul, if she
had one, to hell
4
In hindsight, Beryl should have
been wary when she noticed the wobbling jowls. Then again, Lady Toast's jowls
tended to wobble at even the smallest of occasions. Beryl assumed she was excited at the prospect of clean
china. Putting the peas aside, Beryl grabbed the Marigolds from the
second drawer on the left and clumsily tugged them over her arthritic hands.
Taking up the scourer, she began scrubbing the remnants of the evening's tripe
dish from the ancient china. Small chunks of gut and brain splattered on
the side of the basin.
And then it struck Beryl.
The words uttered by Toast hit
her like a ton of bricks. Seven little words.
Take. The. Rest. Of. The.
Evening. Off.
Beryl dropped the pan she was
scrubbing. It hit the water with force causing the tripe-heavy soapy
water to be splashed out in all directions - mainly in the direction of Beryl's
eyes. She stumbled backwards, clawing at her eyelids. With a yelp,
Beryl slipped on the soapy floor, and before she could grab onto the table, she
had landed squarely on her back, which had in turn landed squarely on the cat,
which in turn had been sitting on the floor, chewing on a piece of offal.
Lightning struck the upstairs
aerial. A bolt of deadly electricity ran down through the venting shutters,
across the old chests and forgotten clothes, down into the guest room via the
ceiling trapdoor, out into the hallway, around the seventh century writing
desk's legs, down a flight of stairs into the main hall, around the columns,
down another flight of stairs, right past Beryl (on the cat) and into the basin
full of cutlery, pots, pans, old china, offal and a dirty scourer.
The Basin exploded. Lady
Toast's eighth century china shattered. Forks flew out of the window. Pots and
pans took on a life of their own. And in the blue light of this
marvelously deadly display, Beryl watched, in terrified awe.
And Sir Joseph Fluffykins the
Third stopped breathing.
5
Having quietly slipped out into the corridor to establish her
alibi, Lady Toast was trying to make a phone call. Since the last time she'd
actually used the thing was in 1944 to warn the locals of an impending Nazi
invasion when she accidentally mistook Mistress Harriet on her canoe for a
German U-boat, it became more of a problem than she'd anticipated. For one
thing, there was no operator. Finally she looked around in desperation and saw
all of Beryl's little doodled notes. Flowers dripped from angel’s bottoms and
ducks fucked one another around the corners of note-pad. But she found the
thing she was looking for. Right underneath a picture of Margarette Coque's
sagging breasts, was Margarette Coque's telephone number. With quivering hands,
Toast stabbed the numbers into the phone.
"Hello Margi? It's Mullers.”
“How are you?”
“Yes? A terrible storm.”
“Listen I just thought I'd call.”
“Yes I know it's late.”
“Shut up you old goat and just talk to me for a moment.”
“What about? I don't know...anything. How's your vagina?”
“Still swollen? My God…” she erupted in the middle of Margarette
diatribe on her swollen labia. Toast was a poor actress having taken most of
her lessons from reruns of Little House on the Prairie.
“Oh it's just that my maid - yes the fat one - is out in the
middle of the garden waving a metal rod around. If she gets struck by lighting
it could be very… um… bad,” she hammed.
Only lighting did strike. At the precise moment that Mullers Toast
was forging her alibi, Beryl was committing kittycide in the kitchen.
And as nature's wrath melted the copper pots into a pretty sludge,
and fired the three-legged pot out the kitchen window at terminal velocity, it
also arced into the phone system. The exchange exploded in a shower of sparks,
and the ten thousand volts that had been intended to kill Beryl instead blasted
out the phone in the form of a billion decibels of shrill shriek.
Toast's eyes rolled in the back of her head.
"That's nice dear, mines leaking…" was all she could
manage before toppling over, now deaf as a post in her left ear.
She'd awake to find Sir Fluffykins the recipient of the Reverend’s
ministrations, and a very much alive if slightly smelling of offal, Beryl.
