The Demon of Crassus Manor
Date: Day One / Time: Evening
If it wasn’t for Robin’s tugging, then Leonidas may not have ever been freed from his transfixed state. He turned to flee the tunnel with the archer and Shaka. Upon emerging from the secret cellar passage, the three children would find a group of overseers standing at the top of the steps armed with muskets. Ivan was standing amongst them, the man who had probably rallied them together. He stared down at the three children, not shouting any accusations. The man was blending into the crowd as though the situation hadn’t involved him.
Lord Crassus arrived moments after dressed in red night robes. He pushed his way passed the men and was surprised to find Leonidas still looking roughed up and unpresentable. He also noticed that Shaka, his other fine pugilist, and Robin, his best hunter, were down there.
“What is going on here?” the lord irritably questioned. He knew already that he had one insubordinate overseer who couldn’t follow his instructions, but why were three of his slaves gathered in the cellar?
The shelf that blocked the passage, shook with a loud, startling
BANG! Leonidas whirled around in fright. She had followed them? The overseers gasped in startle and Lord Crassus scowled. A pale, slender arachnid leg slipped between the shelf and the wall, pushing the shelf away from it as a creature with a maw red and dripping in blood squeezed through.
EIYAAAAAH! Arachne screamed.
“What the blazes!” an overseer exclaimed.
“It’s a monster!” another yelled.
Lord Crassus was stunned and could not look away. He…he recognized it, but he didn’t understand what had happened to her or how it had happened. Arachne’s wide eyes peered up at the overseers who looked down at her with disgusted grimaces. She saw the look in the lord’s eyes. He had recognized her and she held out her arms to him, wanting to scream:
Please! for his mercy, but instead, the most dreadful scream left her lips:
EIYAAAH!
Lord Crassus’s lip arched in abhorrence. “Kill it.”
Arachne gasped before musket fire filled the cellar. She screamed as bullets seared through her flesh. The giant spider slumped onto her side, the holes in her carapace weeping with a dark, rosy fluid. Coughing up blood and shaking, she raised a clawed hand up to Lord Crassus in mercy.
The lord removed a flintlock from the hip of one of his overseers, extended his arm to aim the gun at her face, and fired. Her forehead emitted a crimson spark and the spider slumped over, her body naturally turning onto its back and her numerous legs curling, practically shriveling, into the spider’s death position.
Leonidas was speechless. He didn’t know what was going on anymore.
Returning the flintlock to the overseer’s holster, Lord Crassus ordered: “Burn that thing whatever it is. Send the slaves to their quarters. I’ll want an explanation in the morning. It is too
late to be awake right now.”
The lord turned and retired back to his chambers.
The overseers looked down upon Shaka, Leonidas, and Robin.
“I’ll handle the corpse,” Ivan volunteered.
“Oi, get up here you three!” one of the overseers ordered.
That late evening in the slave quarters, the three were allowed to bathe and tend to any wounds they had received, and then they were sent to their bunks. Leonidas sat on his knees on the lower bunk beneath Shaka, staring into the dark as he watched the whole ordeal play out again in his head. He had seen so many horrible things that he didn’t think he could sleep. When the overseers had told him that he was sold, for some reason, he couldn’t wrap his brain around it. Hadn’t he been already sold to Crassus?
“Are you guys awake?” Leonidas called into the dark.
He got in return,
SSSsshhh! from several other slaves.
The boy merely frowned and expressed his thoughts: “I can’t sleep. Ivan got away with everything. What if he tries to kill us in our sleep?”
Bork
Captain Uni
Guardian Angel Haruki