HorrorAddicts.net presents
Manor of Frights
Imagine a Victorian house where every room is cursed with a frightful existence. Are monsters in the halls? Ghosts left to fester in the library? Or are the rooms themselves enchanted with malevolent energy? What was summoned long ago and what doorways were left open? Manor of Frights is a collection of tales all set in different rooms of the same house.
With authors: Judith Pancoast, Daphne Strasert, Loren Rhoads, Mark Orr, Michael Fassbender, R.L. Merrill, Sumiko Saulson, Ollie Fox, Barend Nieuwstraten III, Rosetta Yorke, Amanda Leslie, Lesley Warren, BF Vega, DW Milton, D.J. Pitsiladis, Jason Fischer, and Emerian Rich.
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An excerpt from Manor of Frights
A Green Thumb
by Daphne Strasert
The Conservatory, 1918
Blood dripped on the conservatory floor and broken glass glittered in the moonlight.
Eleanor cradled her cut hand against her body. She should have wrapped it in cloth. She would remember that if she ever needed to make another expedition into a criminal enterprise. Not that that was likely. She was an old woman, after all. Well past her prime to take up criminal enterprise, but it was a special occasion.
She waited for the span of a heartbeat, listening for any change in the garden that rustled and creaked around her. The droning cicadas continued their chorus, heedless of her nighttime escapade.
Satisfied that she remained undiscovered, she reached her uninjured hand back through the hole she had made with her fist and unlocked the conservatory door. It swung open on well-oiled hinges. Muggy air smelling of death and decay—the smell of growing life—assaulted her.
“Alone at last,” Eleanor whispered to the emptiness.
Florence Albrecht’s conservatory was the talk of the Ladies’ Temperance Society. Her blooms had swept the awards for the Gardening Association during the 1917 season. As a result, it was an attraction of the highest order for amateur anthomaniacs.
Eleanor, however, was no mere amateur. And she was most familiar with Florence’s conservatory.
Eleanor had been friends with Florence since they were in school together. Their youthful curls had long turned grey and their rosy cheeks sagged with wrinkles. They’d always shared their hard-earned knowledge of plants and enjoyed telling each other about every new variety they cultivated. Until recently, when Florence had procured a plant she wouldn’t share the secrets of, even to Eleanor.
Eleanor crept through the gloom of the conservatory, her shoes clicking on cold flagstones. Vaulted ceilings of iron and glass soared overhead. She ran her fingers across the soft fronds of a Boston Fern. Her skirts rustled against the leaves of a Parlor Palm. Moonlight filtered through glass, warped the stars in the sky.
The conservatory housed palms and peonies, begonias and bluebells, ferns and freesias. But more elegant, more lavish, and more striking than any of them, were the orchids.
They had come from all over the world, lovingly gathered by the well-compensated orchid hunters that Florence employed. The myriad hues looked like a rainbow had glanced off the petals and been trapped within. In the deep midnight, they gleamed.
A soft breeze blew in from the door that Eleanor had left open and the plants rustled as if in greeting.
“Hello,” Eleanor crooned to the flowers as she approached.
The orchids floated like phantoms, their ghostly forms dancing in the wind. The strong, waxy stems which held them aloft blended seamlessly into the dark behind them. Shadows cast alien faces across the petals. Dew dripped from the leaves like the blood from Eleanor’s fingers.
There was no reason for Florence to treat her very best friend like that, hoarding the orchids all for herself. It wasn’t even as if Eleanor was asking for an entire bloom. Just a cutting! And she certainly wouldn’t compete against Florence in any showcases. She had reassured Florence of that much. It wouldn’t be like the time that Eleanor entered roses that she’d grown from grafts of Florence’s bushes.
But Florence was stubborn, refusing to budge on the issue. Eleanor hadn’t spoken to Florence in weeks.
Well, that would all be resolved by morning. Eleanor would have her cutting and Florence would be none the wiser.
With clean shears in hand, Eleanor approached the orchids. She ignored the flashy blooms that caught her eye. Florence would notice even a petal out of place on those. No, Eleanor’s prize was something else.
Between the other blooms, hidden in the shadow of night, a set of bare stems jutted proudly from the soil.
Dendrobium nobile.
Or so Florence claimed. The flowers were a vivid blue, nearly the color of a sapphire, with translucent petals revealing red veins merging along the edge like lace. The stem had odd, lined patterns all along it as well. Eleanor had never seen another flower quite like it and so, doubted it could come from such a common genus.
Florence’s blooms had died back after early summer and wouldn’t reemerge until winter. Plenty of unattended time for them to recover from the loss of just a few nodes. Plenty of time for Eleanor to cultivate them in her own greenhouse.
Eleanor found one of the shorter stems, one that looked perhaps a little wilted. Maybe when Florence inspected them, she would think it had failed to thrive, had simply withered away. It was known to happen in the more delicate varieties of plants.
She held the stem steady in one hand and carefully snipped off a few of the topmost nodes with the shears.
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