The Uninvited Guest Of The Haunted Mansion (41)

Serenity hugged the box and headed straight for the Annex.

On an evening when the sun slanted, Blake, who greeted Serenity without warning, wore a strange expression.

“You said you were summoned by the Count… Did you happen to roll through the mud?”

“What?”

“You smell of blood.”

His bright yellow gaze slowly swept over Serenity.

“I washed… Is the smell still clinging?”

That can’t be.

Serenity lifted her arm and sniffed. Apart from the fabric’s faint floral scent and the smell of bath salts from her skin, there was no other odor.

Blake gave a soft chuckle as he watched Serenity bury her nose in her clothes and take repeated breaths.

“The smell of blood doesn’t come out easily. Why don’t you come in first?”

Is there a scent only anomalous beings can detect?

Puzzled, Serenity nonetheless stepped inside obediently.

“Thank you.”

“Dinner?”

“I’m fine.”

“Then let’s have tea.”

At Blake’s command, the faceless servant quietly set tea and pastries on the tea table and disappeared. She wasn’t sure whether it was right to describe something normally unseen as having ‘disappeared.’

Serenity unconsciously drew her shoulders tight.

It should have been an ordinary meeting, but perhaps because of their last conversation, just being alone with him made her mouth go dry with some sort of tension.

She felt Blake across from her stare at her steadily. It had been like that before; often his gaze felt like an invisible noose tightening around her skin.

Serenity quietly hid her sweat-moistened hands inside her skirt.

‘I can’t read his expression…’

The Blake she’d seen so far usually wore a composed smile, and even for Serenity, who could read the Count’s or the Countess’s eyes to gauge their intentions, reading his expression wasn’t easy. Moments when they faced each other alone like this were even more difficult.

Was he pleased, interested, or thinking something entirely different?

“So you didn’t come just to see me. What’s your purpose?”

“I received something like this.”

Serenity held out the box she had been clutching to her chest.

Blake’s yellow gaze turned toward the box.

“From whom?”

“From the monster behind the Main Building.”

“If you mean the monster behind the Main Building… are you talking about a ‘mermaid’?”

“If it’s acceptable to call it a mermaid.”

“Its appearance is ambiguous.”

Blake chuckled softly, as if making a light joke.

“I’d heard it was a violent monster, but it was, um, calmer than I expected. At first I thought it would eat me…”

“Instead you received a gift?”

“Yes.”

As Serenity knew, that ‘monster’ was highly wild and regarded everyone except its tamer as food. That it smelled blood and, instead of devouring her, healed her, was truly astonishing.

Had she somehow repaid the favor of being healed?

Blake, propping his chin, stared at Serenity for a moment and spoke.

“Well, that monster might know you, my lady.”

“…I’ve never seen it before today.”

“Don’t assume that because you don’t know it, it doesn’t know you. This world runs more complicatedly than you think.”

“Is that perhaps a story about the Duke himself?”

“That could be.”

Blake shrugged with a sly air.

“When you meet it next time, pet it. It’s gentle, you know.”

“…That monster? I don’t want to.”

“Oh dear, it’ll hurt.”

Who on earth would be hurt by that?

He picked up the box and inspected it, turning it this way and that. A rustling sound came each time he shook it. Serenity said there were probably papers inside, and then she asked.

“Is this something you’ve never seen before as well?”

“I know more than you might expect, but not everything. Especially if it’s the result of your sudden actions, even more so.”

He set the box down.

“You want to open this and see?”

“Yes. I think I could open it if I had a key. I’m not sure what trick might be set on simply opening it, so I thought we could go see the blacksmith.”

“Ah… so you need me?”

“I wouldn’t have a reason to go alone, after all.”

Serenity shrugged lightly.

“You said you’d help me then.”

“I did.”

As he said that, Blake’s face went briefly into thought. After looking at the box for a while, he shifted his gaze to Serenity and examined her for a long time. As her cheek began to sting from his blatant stare, he spoke again.

“Didn’t you think of looking for the key first?”

“I did. But if even the Duke doesn’t know what this box is, wouldn’t the chance of dying screaming be higher than finding the key first?”

He gave a soft, amused laugh.

“You’re not wrong.”

Serenity narrowed her eyes in response.

‘Why does he keep probing even though he knows the answer?’

She felt as if he kept placing her actions within his expected range and measured the outcomes each time she acted differently. It was not a pleasant feeling.

“A blacksmith…?”

Blake leaned back on the sofa and tapped his lips.

She now recognized that gesture as a man’s habit when drifting into light thought.
A brief silence passed.

“It’s still a bit early, as I thought.”

A low murmur.

But the ensuing silence did not last long.

“All right, let’s go. I had business to drop by the smithy anyway.”

Soon after.

The smithy was beyond the eastern clearing.

Its entrance was surrounded by dense conifers, so even though winter was approaching, one couldn’t see inside through the trees.

Pushing through the grass following Blake, they came upon a clearing where not a blade of grass grew in. The smithy stood in the middle of the clearing. Strangely, the path to the smithy was guarded strictly by the Rose Knights. It was probably the Count’s doing, who had staked everything on his mining ventures.

‘Is that it?’

Serenity watched the building belching black smoke from a massive chimney. The smoke that rose into the sky spread like an ashen cloud low beneath the heavens. To exaggerate slightly, the airflow felt different between this place and the outside, as if a barrier existed.

As Serenity looked around at the strange sight, Blake chuckled.

“It’s similar to the shortcut to the Annex. You can’t enter this place without permission.”

“Ah…”

“It’s only natural you couldn’t approach it before. The Count wouldn’t go out of his way to allow you into such a rough place.”

There seemed to be a reason she hadn’t been able to find the blacksmith.

Up close, the smithy was a crude building. Stones haphazardly stacked formed the walls beneath a huge chimney, and the air was thick with the smell of iron and burning.

Before opening the smithy’s door, Blake looked back at Serenity.

“Will you be all right?”

“What do you mean?”

“I was wondering if you might be shocked.”

“If it’s something I shouldn’t see, I’ve already seen everything. No need to make a fuss.”

“Is that so.”

After confirming her indifferent reply, Blake opened the door without knocking. A suffocating blast of heat rushed out.

The workshop was filled entirely with iron. Half-finished axes, shovels, and chains hung on the worn walls, and an old anvil sat atop a workbench that looked to be cut from a large tree stump. Whether someone had been working or not, the piece of steel on the anvil was still red-hot.

Then a plodding sound of footsteps came from afar. It was more like the noise of a heavy lump of scrap metal striking the floor than a footstep.

“Looks like the blacksmith is coming back.”

At Blake’s words, Serenity turned and involuntarily flinched and trembled.

The blacksmith was a man of enormous build.

He was a giant, at least two heads taller than an average man; no, three heads taller, but one side of his face had melted away, leaving grotesque facial muscles exposed.

‘So that’s why…’

To add a personal note, an Anomalous being whose appearance was entirely unlike common human looks would have been preferable. Faces that felt oddly realistic made it very difficult to pretend not to be repulsed.

‘But how did this man know about it?’

She briefly thought he must know all sorts of things.

When the blacksmith spotted the two, he bowed in a silent salute. The skin around his melted mouth had fused together, making it seem impossible for him to speak.

“Long time no see. Is the work progressing well?”

Blake approached in an unusually familiar manner and asked after the blacksmith’s welfare. Serenity had no interest in their conversation, so she scanned the interior with a dry gaze and then sat on a sofa in a corner of the workshop, fiddling with the box.

After a moment, the blacksmith and Blake returned side by side.

“Enough work talk for now; today your noble young lady has business to attend to.”

The blacksmith tilted his head.

Now that she looked, his face wasn’t simply melted; the thin skin bubbled and repeatedly swelled and collapsed.

‘Please, don’t let it show.’

Truly, if there was one thing she couldn’t get used to even after dying and coming back ten times in this world, it was the appearances of these Anomalous beings. She had to appear nonchalant when facing faces that were hard to look at with the naked eye.

Finally drawing a shallow breath to compose herself, Serenity held out the box to the blacksmith.

“I want to open this box. Can you make a key?”

The blacksmith grinned after checking the box.

His single remaining eye narrowed into a crescent as his face contorted.