Doorknockers Anonymous

The Vanglepump estate, a tombstone shrouded in a bilious moon, didn’t whisper promises. It screamed them in a language of fractured bone and desolate wind. In the world of whispers, its name sent shivers down spines forged in ice; a grim amusement that clung like the stench of carrion. Detective Parron Brumt, a man who scoffed at whispers, felt a cold dread seep into his marrow. Facts were his currency, logic his shield. But this, this missing artifact and the grotesque monstrosity that supposedly housed it, gnawed at the edges of his sanity like a rabid dog.  Something about this job reeked of a primordial wrongness, a prickling sensation beneath his skin no amount of reason could quell.

As Brumt slid through the shadowed hedge maze, his trademark trench coat a mockery against the wrongness seeping from the looming mansion, flashes of other nights, other calls, fractured his mind. It wasn’t just the memory of his captain’s voice anymore, but a dissonant chorus – desperate pleas, ragged gasps, his own voice warped with a desperation he couldn’t fully recall. “The artifact! You have to stop it…before it finds another…” With each step, the Vanglepump estate loomed closer, each grotesquely twisted tree a finger pointing to his doom. A certainty colder than the grave settled upon him – he was stepping into a darkness older than his usual terrors, one that had watched him stumble, break, and become the very shadow he sought to dispel. The echoes of those phantom calls weren’t just a warning, but a prophecy.

Rational thought whispered a final, desperate plea: Turn back, let another fool face this madness. But the image of the artifact, a relic rumored to bend reality itself, flickered tauntingly in his mind’s eye. No, the risk was too great; the consequences of inaction too dire. Jaw tight, Detective Parron Brumt pushed on. After all, wasn’t facing the monstrous and unknown the very heart of his calling?

Inside, a macabre absurdity assaulted his senses. The Vanglepump estate felt less like a home and more like the twisted playground of a demented clown: an eternal chess match played by grotesque, life-sized pieces, a snarling, two-headed squirrel overseeing a taxidermied dodo’s macabre tea party. The clash between the childlike absurdity and the oppressive, unnatural stillness chilled him. Silent servants, as vacant as the faded uniforms clinging to their flesh, moved with disturbing efficiency. It struck him then – in a normal case, this blindness would be a boon. Here, it was a confirmation of his worst fears. They were either unconcerned by his presence because they held all the power…or they already knew he was here, and they were waiting.

The sudden high-pitched rasp in his ear made Brumt jump, nearly colliding with one of the grotesque statues flanking the entry to the banquet hall. A withered little woman, barely taller than one of the ornate salt shakers, bustled over.  “Late for the banquet, are we?”  Her voice held a sing-song lilt that set his teeth on edge. “No matter, no matter. There’s always work for a new pair of hands!”

She thrust a tray laden with drinks at him, her claw-like fingers tightening on his wrist. “Lord and Lady are most displeased when guests are kept waiting.” Without further explanation, she bustled away, leaving Brumt to survey the bizarre scene before him.

The long, ornate tables were indeed set with a grotesque feast – dishes so disturbingly creative it took a concerted effort to stifle the nausea threatening to bubble up his throat. His eyes fixed on the figures seated at the head of the table, their faces hidden behind elaborate, feathered masks.  Even from a distance, their stillness was unnerving. Not the festive air of anticipation you’d expect, but a rigidity that spoke of something profoundly unnatural.

“Stop gawking and serve the drinks!” The old woman hissed, snapping him out of his examination. With gritted teeth, Brumt donned the best approximation of a servant’s smile he could manage and moved amongst the tables. No one seemed to question his sudden appearance.  The servants lined the walls, their vacant stares more unsettling than any open hostility would have been. The humanoid balls of lard called “Lord and Lady”, were deep in muffled conversation beneath their hideous masks, paid him no mind.

The air crackled with a tension that made Brumt wish the mansion floor would just open up and swallow him whole. He was certain that the moment he presented one of those drinks, the horrifying nature of the feast would be laid bare.  His hand reflexively reached for his pistol – only to remember he’d come empty-handed.

A scream, piercing and raw, shattered the tense silence of the room. Brumt whirled around, the tray slipping from his fingers, drinks shattering against the stone floor. Yet, no one else seemed to react. The scream cut off abruptly, followed by a ripple of laughter, shrill and discordant. It emerged from behind the masks, chilling him to the bone.

“Oh, you servants and your delicate constitutions!” Lord Gobblegut cackled, lifting his mask to reveal a fanged maw, still dripping with what could only be… “A mere jest! A little appetizer to test the stomach, ahahaha!”

Brumt forced himself to remain calm, to analyze. The scream had come from the shadows beyond the reach of the candlelight, and no one was rushing over to investigate. That meant either staged theatrics or something far more insidious. He opted for the latter.

His resolve hardened, a brittle thing against the encroaching tide of madness. He wasn’t dealing with eccentric nobles; he was in a house built of nightmares, and whatever game these creatures were playing, he refused to be their plaything. Excusing himself from dinner, that grotesque mockery of a meal, he slipped into the shadows, his senses screaming a warning that echoed unheeded in his skull.

What followed was a grotesque dance through a house designed to delight in the unraveling of sanity. A ballroom where shadowy figures whirled to a tune only they could hear, the rasp of their breath the sole accompaniment to the jarring angles of their movements – puppets controlled not by strings, but by something far more sinister. A library where books screamed not with words, but with the raw agony of souls trapped within the bindings, their pages inked not with mere letters, but in the glistening red that clung to his fingertips and brought with it the stench of copper. A nursery where dolls with chipped, too-wide smiles lunged with startling speed, their tiny metal hands razor-sharp and glinting with a promise of pain that transcended the childish.

The deeper he dove, the more Brumt’s carefully constructed sense of reality bled away like those screaming books. Yet, determination battled alongside the creeping dread. He was Parron Brumt, the man called in when the normal police balked at the edge of the abyss. He refused to cower, refused to be broken, refused to become just another macabre exhibit in this house of horrors. He’d find the artifact, whatever it was, and escape this madness.

Then came the mirrors. At first, a mirage of sanity in this realm of madness, a room untouched by the macabre whims of the estate. Then, a flicker, a wrongness in the reflection… and he wasn’t alone.  A translucent Brumt hung limply, eyes wide with a terror that echoed in his own heart. Blood wept from his temple – a broken shard, a bullet, it mattered not. The image pulsed, vanished, replaced by another horror-laced tableau: himself sprawled in his own crimson, neck twisted and broken, the work of an unseen hand or a fall far too brutal. It pulsed again. A Brumt clawing at a gaping, impossible chest wound, gasping for breath that wouldn’t come…

Each reflection screamed of an ending, a macabre symphony echoing through time and wrongness. Beneath it all, the laughter – a predatory, slithering chuckle that was less sound, more an infection seeping into his very bones.

His knees buckled, the world lurching sickeningly beneath him.  The laughter warped, no longer a chorus of separate voices, but a monstrous entity filling the room with its oppressive glee. His thoughts crumbled under its weight.

The realization slammed into him, not as a voice, but a chilling certainty clawing its way from the depths of his fractured mind. He was the artifact. Not something sought, but something he’d always been, always would be.

Reality shattered. His scream dissolved in the roar of triumphant laughter, less amusement, more a predator reveling in victory. In the swirling, distorted mirrors, he wasn’t alone. Countless Brumpts stared back, different yet the same – detectives, gravediggers, executioners – each a mask briefly worn for a grotesque farce played for an audience of one. The mansion, the monstrous parodies of humanity within… merely props, a stage for an eternal performance.  He was actor and audience, hunter and hunted, a relic of a man condemned to forever seek, forever fail, forever become the very threat he fought against.

His gaze locked upon his reflection. Not his face, but something else wearing it,  twisted into a macabre grin. No satisfaction there, only the ancient, boundless amusement of a cosmic puppeteer watching its plaything finally grasp the strings that bind it.  In the depths of those mirrored eyes, Brumt glimpsed the monstrous eternity of his fate.

Then, darkness.

It held neither mercy nor oblivion, just a shift in the torment. The laughter, the shattering mirrors, his own twisted fate – it lingered as a phantom taste, a stain he couldn’t scrub away. And then, through the oppressive stillness, a sound sliced through– the insistent ring of the phone, a lifeline thrown into the abyss of his despair.

Brumt jolted awake, not from sleep, but from one nightmare into the faded echo of another. His heart thundered a frantic beat against his ribs. His fingers fumbled for the receiver, trembling with a mix of dread and the sick thrill of the familiar. It was his captain’s voice, sharp against the roaring in his ears. “Brumt. We’ve got a case… an artifact. Something about a missing man, whispers of possession, of madness. They say he was here before, years ago…” The line crackled, the final words swallowed by static, yet somehow, Brumt knew them already. A wave of panic washed over Brumt, not merely dread, but a poison seeping deeper with each repeat.

A sense of déjà vu clung to him like a shroud, oppressive and inescapable. This wasn’t the disorientation of a tired mind, but something far more insidious, a taste of a truth just out of reach. The nightmare pulsed in his memory, its grotesque figures and monstrous laughter morphing into the harsh reality of his ringing phone. And as he hung up, a chilling certainty settled into his bones – the world around him, once so familiar, pulsed with an unseen wrongness, a reflection of the poison seeping through the cracks in his sanity. The mundane objects in his apartment seemed to breathe with a menacing sentience, their normalcy a facade. He was Parron Brumt, seasoned detective, seeker of the strange, yet a growing terror screamed beneath the surface. It whispered of a monstrous truth, a crucial detail clawing at the edges of his memory… and then nothing. A blankness, an abyss, and the knowledge that he would walk into the heart of that darkness armed only with his determination to solve the case.