Once she accepted the job, moving Brie into the cottage took hardly any time. Her brother, her sister in law and her brother’s rec league football team had done it in a single day. The cottage wasn’t that big, which was fine because Brie didn’t have that much stuff.
They all laughed about the low ceilings and narrow stairs.
Tessa was surprised that the appliances were all so new they still had the stickers on them. She pulled Brie aside and said, “We can just pack it all up and head home. It isn’t too late.”
Brie stared at her, “What are you talking about? This place is great!”
Tessa sighed, “You are here as a glorified gardener, Brie! But this guy bought you all new appliances and re decorated the kitchen and his paying too much money for what he is asking. Gardeners aren’t that hard to find. Just you wait, it’s going to turn out this place is wired up and he’s selling pictures of you in the shower on the internet!”
Brie just laughed, “Of me in the kitchen, you mean. It is shiny and new, but the rest of the place was empty when we got here. The bathtub is still cast iron, for christ’s sake! Besides, if they wanted a girl for porn, there were prettier girls than me waiting for interviews.”
“You are adorable!” Tessa insisted.
Brie shrugged. “I’m ok. I could stand to lose a few pounds. I’m hoping the landscaping with help with that.”
Tessa punched Brie playfully in the arm. “Maybe, but years of lifting stuff at the hardware store has certainly given you a set of guns.”
Brie groaned and pushed her sister in law. “Ugh. Don’t say that!”
“Why? You have earned the right to bare arms!”
Brie covered her face with her hands and shook her head.
Still, once every one had left, the quiet was overwhelming. Brie set her laptop up and played some music through the tiny speakers as she swept the floors, then scrubbed the bath tub. And if she spent a little bit of extra time cleaning the bathroom looking for cameras, well, that was Tessa just making her paranoid.
—–
He expected she would be getting curtains at some point, but for tonight, he was happy to be able to peek in through the windows at his new… employee. She seemed to be settling in just fine. If he was going to be forced to have a … grounds keeper, at least he had found an aesthetically pleasing one. He might even let her succeed in growing some flowers.
He spent entirely too long watching her that night. In the morning, when he had retreated back to his lair, the sound of the tractor firing up to mow his lawn happened way too early. He would have to arrange for mowing to happen in the afternoons. There must be other things, quieter things, she could be doing before 10 am.
He pulled himself of the iron bedstead where he slept and watched her through the tattered curtains of his bed room. Cutting the lawn wasn’t as straight forward as he expected. It was so over grown, she could only make one pass before the bag filled up and she had to drive off to empty it. The Lord of Darkness was not a morning person. He summoned an imp to bring him coffee and blood apples for breakfast.
Once the girl was half way through mowing she went and sat under The Tree. Darkness did not like that. None the less, she sat. She drank something from a bottle and rested in the shade. He hated that. He wanted to go storming out through the front door and tear her to pieces. How dare she! Sitting in the shade of The Great Tree, leaning her back against it as though it was nothing.
He seethed. After a few minutes she got up and looked hard at The Tree. Then she walked up to it and wrapped her arms around its trunk.
Or she tried. The Tree was Old. She could barely reach half way around.
Darkness remembered sacrifices chained in that position. Their naked bodies scratched bloody by The Trees bark as he used them for his pleasure. As he watched her he brought a clawed hand to his throat, holding it carefully the way he might on someone he wasn’t ready to kill yet. Then he ran his hand over his broad chest, feeling the muscles beneath his skin. He ran his hand down and over his adonis belt to the soft cashmere fur of his pelt, cupping his sheath idly.
But before he could even allow his cock to drop, the girl was back on that damned tractor roaring over another section of lawn.
He ground his teeth in frustration and smashed the coffee cup on the floor before turning and absentmindedly grinding the shards beneath his hooves as he headed for the cool darkness of the cellar. Leaving the infuriating noise of the tractor in his wake.
—-
Brie came home that night with a smug sense of accomplishment. It had taken all damned day, but the lawn was mowed. And so were the over grown garden beds. Now that they had been cut back she could measure them for plants tomorrow.
She opened her laptop to find website to plan a planting and found an email waiting for her. From Mr Lynn. Apparently, his client was insisting that she not mow before noon. Well, for regular maintenance that would work. He had also included a list of plants he wanted included in the flower beds.
It read almost as though he had just copied the list of poisons plants from wikipedia. Monks hood, fox glove, angel’s trumpets, morning glory, hemlock, oleander, scotch broom, belladonna, crown vetch, clematis, lily of the valley, hyacinth.
OK, so there were some beautiful flowers in there, but they had nothing in common in terms of colour or growing requirements. In fact, the only thing Brie could see tying them all together was that they were all toxic. She sent a polite reply back to the lawyer say that she would see what she could do, but that they weren’t really plants that usually turned up in the same garden.
Almost immediately, his reply came saying that she was to do her best. With a second comment under the signature line asking her to leave “The Great Tree” alone. He had included the capitalization. Brie shook her head. The upper branches needed a good pruning, but it would take a team of arborists and a scissor lift to pull that off.
Brie shrugged. That was when she noticed that she had managed to sunburn her shoulders. She groaned and went to find water to drink and her keys to head into town to buy some aloe. She had her tea in the local pub, but stuck to water because drinking with heat stroke was a sucker’s game. And she still needed to drive home.
The bartender laughed and asked where that might be.
When she told him, the pub went silent. The bar man cleared his throat and asked if she had seen anything… strange up there.
“Like what?” Brie ask, sipping her water.
The man, Micheal, just shrugged, “Oh… Anything. There are a lot of stories about the manor.”
Brie laughed, “The only strange thing I have seen is how long the lawn had gotten.”
But after she had eaten and paid for her meal, the waitress, Charmeine, caught her arm on the way out, “You just be careful, up there. Not a good place to go wandering after dark.”
Brie frowned, but promised to be careful.
Still, driving home in the dark there had been an awful lot of eyeshine in the woods around the manor. She told herself, it must just be the deer. With those abandoned fruit orchards, the forrest must be full of them.
Oh.
Suddenly the poisonous plant list made sense. It was all flowers the deer wouldn’t eat. Well, that was a whole different story. She would need to make a trip into the city for most of those plants and order a bunch of seeds off the internet. But, with care, she could make beautiful, deer proof flower beds.
—–
It wasn’t deer that watched Brie come home that night.
Love The Darkness story so far! Is ther more???