Drawtober 2023: Devious Dining

Everyone has different notions of what the dead eat. Fruits and breads, sugar skulls, the souls of the living. Fairy folk are just as enigmatic, with dishes of milk and honey favored as offerings, though many of the fae creatures I’ve met prefer flesh to any dish of warm milk.

Under different circumstances, I would be more precise in my culinary efforts. But All Hallows Eve is coming up, and I don’t know what I’m dealing with. I don’t want this thing—whatever it is—wandering the House any longer than it already has.

So, I throw a feast.

I lied earlier when I said that books and dancing are our primary forms of entertainment here. Feasting ranks among those entertainments, too. Those who walk the crossroads to and from the House are always hungry. Many of them come when I call, assisting me in the House’s sunny kitchen baking breads, candying fruits, and roasting various meats. The smells of cardamom, cinnamon, and cloves suffuse the entire first floor as I work through the day, up to my arms in flour and side-by-side with officious spirits and curious creatures who find themselves roped into my efforts.

That evening, when the meal is nearly ready, I set the table in the grand dining hall. Candles lit in big, copper chandeliers throw light over portraits hung on the walls. I feel the ghostly eyes of those portraits on me as I polish silver and dust porcelain. I’ve never quite liked the dining room. It has always felt too impersonal to me, too imposing and decadent. But it’s one of only a few rooms large enough to hold all the food I’ve made. And I want to cast a wide net.

When everything is ready, steaming platters and large tureens filled with every imaginable dish set along the table, I pick up the worn golden bell that rests on the sideboard and ring it. A warm chime echoes through the House, resonating in every room, as I summon the dead to the feast.

And they come.

One of my favorite folktales is that of the Wild Hunt storming through the sky, a rabble of ghostly hunters and hounds chasing cursed souls. Jack used to tell me the Wild Hunt sometimes came through the House. I’ve never seen them, but witnessing a feast in the halls of the House is, I imagine, something like seeing the Wild Hunt ride by.

Ghosts and goblins, phantoms and fairies, boggarts, sirens, and werewolves descend upon the dining chamber in a wild swirl. A sphinx stalks in, haughty and riddling to anyone who will listen. A pair of lamias, tails twining together, slither across the floor. Spirits in every imaginable state—from full apparitions to mere balls of light—come streaming in to partake of the feast.

All the while, I stand at one end of the chamber, nodding and smiling. Clutched in my hands is the chalk board from the kitchen, the chalk lying on it for the House to respond as I write one question over and over again.

Is the intruder here now?

And every time, the House writes back. One word. Not the one I’m looking for.

No.

No.

No.

#

The feast lasts well into the night. Around three in the morning, after the last spirit has drifted away, I sit at the table with my head in my hands, the ruins of the feast spread out in front of me.

I’ve failed. Nothing came to dinner that had not been invited in. The House verified it, even as I recognized everyone who had come to the dining room. Had I made a mistake? I think back to the footprints sunk in the mud. I am not as young as I once was. It’s conceivable that I’d gotten confused, mistaking my own footprints for someone else’s.

“Oh dear. Have I missed everything?”

I start up at the voice. A woman stands in the doorway, her long, dark hair falling in effortless waves around her shoulders. The black dress she wears accentuates the pallor of her skin, the redness of her eyes and lips.

“Oh, Mircalla.” I give a tired smile. “No, you haven’t. Sit. I’ll get you a drink.”

The vampire looks mournfully at the table, shaking her head. “No, you needn’t lie to me Keeper. I know I overslept. I seem to be doing that more and more these days.” She surveys the table, with wine spilled on the white linen and cooling grease in the platters. “Why don’t you let me help you take all this back to the kitchen, and then I’ll have that drink.”

Mircalla helps me cart plates and cutlery back to the kitchen, dumping them in the sink. I’m grateful for her help. The House does not get many vampires, and most of them don’t choose to stay. But Mircalla has been here longer than I can recall. She provides a certain consistency to an otherwise mutable cast of characters. She makes me feel less alone.

“So,” she says, sipping a glass of warm blood at the nearly cleared dining room table, “why the sudden feast? We’re going to have another one in just a week or so for All Hallows Eve.”

I shrug. “Just felt like it. It’s been some time. I’m sorry you missed it, though.”

It’s her turn to shrug. “It’s not your fault, Keeper. I’m getting older,” she muses. “These things happen. You think you’ve slept until sunset, but sunset keeps coming faster and faster. Before you know it, you’ve slept through a whole night and day and not realized it at all.”

She shifts, swirling the blood in her glass. “Before I came here, I lived in Budapest for a while. There was a whole nest of us there, old vampires in an old city. We would go out after the sun had set, roaming the streets, dancing beneath the moonlight. I was quite happy there, while it lasted.” She lapses into silence, takes another sip of her blood.

I clear my throat. “What happened?”

She tilts her head, sadness drawing her mouth into a frown. “Everyone thinks vampires are immortal,” she says softly. “That we don’t die. But we can. Some vampires grow so weary of the world, they simply lay down and don’t get up again. They let themselves wither away to dust. Other go mad with the prospect of eternity. They become little better than animals, ravenous for their next meal.” She purses her lips. “After a time, I found myself alone in the city. Everyone else had either left me, or forgotten me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You needn’t be.” She takes another drink. “It led me here. One day, I was walking out of the city, wondering where I could retreat to, where in the world I might find another refuge like the one I’d had. And between one blink and the next, the House appeared, like a ghost on the road. I walked up the porch, knocked on the door, and found myself home for the first time in my very long life. I miss Budapest, it’s true. But I would much rather be here and remembered, than buried away in Budapest and forgotten.”

Something in her story resonates, deep in my chest. I open my mouth, reaching for a reply, when movement catches my eye. A shadow passing in the corridor, just outside the candlelight. The silhouette of someone standing in the doorway.

I’m up out of my chair before I can think. There’s someone standing there. Someone I don’t recognize. I can feel it buzzing in my blood, the sense of incongruity, of something not quite right.

“Who are you?” I demand.

The shadow pauses. Then, it turns and hurries away down the hall.

I streak after it, fast as my old bones and tired feet can carry me. I hear Mircalla behind me, calling.

“Keeper, wait!”

But I don’t wait. I don’t even pause. I’m darting down the hall, flying after the shadow ahead of me as it disappears, deeper into the winding hallways of the House.