The hallway door creaked. It wanted to fit in with the mansion’s walls, ceiling, floor, joints, attic, roof, cellar, and foundation.
Through its portal came two figures: one tall and thin, one tall and thin and incredibly, exhaustively, exhaustingly old.
“Pay attention, Edith. This is your heritage you’ll be looking at here.”
Edith shrugged underneath her jacket. “Sure.”
“One day I’ll be gone, and all these heirlooms will be yours.”
“Yuh-huh.”
“Now gaze upon my trophies!”
“’Kay.”
Lord High Conjurer Sir Archibald Quislip Stepford-Heimst blended a tsk into a sigh (an old trick he’d learned from his favourite nanny as a child). “Edith, you’re looking at your phone-machine again, aren’t you.”
“Yeah.”
“Youth! It is wasted upon the youthful, my granddaughter! Wasted!”
“Sure.”
“But there is always more to be wasted, until there isn’t. Take this manticore, for instance! Stuffed the thing myself when I was your age, my first solo taxidermy job. Isn’t he a beaut?”
Edith glanced up at the lion-bodied, scorpion-tailed, man-skulled, many-toothed creature. “Cool.”
“Indeed! Fun trick about manticores: they love easy targets. I simply paid a local peasant girl to stand out in the open for thirty minutes and I got a clear shot across the bastard’s haunches with my cursebow. She got away with but a few scratches to the vertebrae, little ungrateful minx.”
Edith took a picture.
“I hope you aren’t going to show your friends that. This is a private family pride.”
“Just recording. Hey, this thing’s teeth are broken.”
“Indeed! It was quite old and feeble. First and best lesson in the ways of the world, m’girl – a fair fight is for fools. Think smart: cheat.”
“How’d you cheat this one?” asked Edith, pointing upwards.
“Hmm?”
“That one. The one that’s the entire ceiling.”
“Oh, the dragon! I forget it’s there sometimes; old Esteban plotted the ribs into the rococo so nicely. Funny thing about dragons: they burn so hot they can scorch rocks but because of that they need more water than a locomotive. So I poisoned all the water holes in a ten-mile radius of its lair and left the country. They tend to die slow, you see, and vengeful. Came back for the corpse when the rampage ended.” Stepford-Heimst chuckled fondly. “Oh, it was a feisty bugger. Took out six villages and two good-sized towns before its guts died out on it. It was still glaring at me when I cut its throat, bless its scaly heart.”
“Cool,” said Edith.
“Oh indubitably. And the fangs, of course, went into my cursebow. Which you won’t be inheriting. Ol’ Duchess is getting buried with me, you see. I shan’t dare part with her.”
“Did you use her on this?” inquired Edith, taking a picture of a single-orbited skull the size of a car. A spectacularly huge shattermark filled its forehead.
“Oh goodness me no. A cursebow against a cyclops would be like a spitball against a teacher: just makes ‘em crabby and liable to smack you. No, I made his acquaintance formally under guest-right, exchanged gifts, the whole nine yards. I believe his name was Xenos.”
“Did he like…give you his skull?”
“No, he gave me Duchess! He forged it himself as a skill-testing exercise; far too small for him to use, like a man making sculpture on a needlepoint just to prove he could. A master smith, but not surprising – cyclops-make has been the best you can find in the Mediterranean for the past two millennia.”
“What’d you give him?”
“A monocle! He was quite nearsighted in his old age. He thanked me with tears of joy, then tripped over a rock and smashed his forehead in immediately.” Stepford-Heimst winked and laid a finer aside his nose. “Just a little flaw in the glass. Worked wonders since he had no depth perception to begin with.”
“Sick.”
“Oh?”
“Cool.”
“I see.”
Edith poked her phone again.
“Anyways!” said Stepford-Heimst after about forty seconds. “This is one of my favourites. Care to lift the lid on this case?”
“You do it,” said Edith with the flat and blunt awareness of one who had learned all about the sense of humour shared by elderly relatives.
“Oh come now. One little peek?”
“You first.”
“Spoilsport.” The lid raised, and even looking away, Edith squinted at the glare.
“Ohohoho! The look on your face! My word! A fine knee-slapper, eh?”
“Ow.”
“This, m’girl, is a phoenix egg! You have any idea how rare those are?”
“Very?”
“Quite so! I befriended it in its dotage, tended it with care, and then –”
“-attacked it in its sleep?”
“No, no, goodness no! Phoenixes don’t sleep. No, I waited until it died of old age, then stabbed it to death in its own shell before it could finish reincarnating. Used lead needles. Fun little fact: a phoenix’s rebirth relies upon a very limited and delicate form of nuclear reaction. Probably why your mother doesn’t have any more siblings eh? Eh? Eh?”
Edith’s face contorted in the agony of one forced to imagine a relative having sex.
“Ohohohohohohohohohohoho!”
“Please, stop.”
“Of course! And now, no doubt, you’ll see how important it is to grow up to carry on the family tradition!”
Edith scratched her nose. “Sort of,” she muttered.
“Excuse me?”
“Sort of. I mean, I want to be a wildlife biologist.”
Stepford-Heimst laughed indulgently. “Oh you clever little thing! And that will help you become a wonderful hunter, no doubt, as long as you don’t waste too much time at school.”
“Yeah.”
“’Yes.’”
“Sure. I mean, it helped me know how much basilisk venom to squeeze into your tea earlier, to provide a fatal dose without the taste alerting you.”
“Ah!”
“It was the dried stuff you keep in that big glass jar in the parlour, so figuring out how degraded the potency was got a bit complex. And I had to guess at your body weight.”
“Oh!”
“Think I got it right though. You’ve got those little red dots appearing on your hands exactly thirty minutes after ingestion.”
Stepford-Heimst did not reply. Edith gently pushed at his side.
He fell over for good.
He didn’t stop smiling.
***
Edith buried most of the remains, and sold the mansion for funds to build an occultlife sanctuary. But she had Stepford-Heimst stuffed, because he would’ve wanted it that way.