Chapter 334

Chapter 334: Alice Manor

The new attendant had arrived.

It was as if that single sentence triggered some kind of mechanism. With a low, muffled rumble sounding in his ears, countless vague shapes suddenly appeared in the darkness before the Annihilator’s eyes. Faint light of unknown origin flickered into the air, lighting up a broad yet ancient and elegant hall inside an Anomaly.

He stared with wide eyes. The hall was as splendid as a royal palace, yet it also looked as if it had been abandoned for decades. At the far end, a curved staircase spiraled upward, linking the high gallery and platform. Huge pillars stood dimly in the gloom, and fine draperies hung from their tops, swaying gently in a breeze that came from nowhere.

Dark, hollow windows lined the walls around the hall. Each opening looked like the gaping maw of some great beast. No light shone outside them, and the windows themselves were sealed tight by crisscrossing steel bars. Enormous oil paintings hung between the windows. The canvases showed no clear figures or landscapes, only eerie, colorful patches that made the skin crawl.

The Annihilator stared in shock at the scene before him. Then he suddenly realized that the restraints on his hands and feet had vanished at some point. He took two steps forward and felt his body return to his control. Instinctively, he called out to the demon that had formed a symbiotic pact with his soul.

However, only a hollow howling echoed in his soul. The Abyssal demon that had been with him for many years now felt as if it had never existed at all. Nothing answered his call.

“Attendant, step forward. Come to the end of the carpet.”

The low, muffled voice rang out again, this time coming directly from inside his head.

“Who is it?!” The Annihilator looked around in terror at the grand yet empty and uncanny mansion hall, but he saw no one.

He raised his head again and looked to the far end of the hall. A dark red carpet stretched from his feet into the distance. At the far end of the carpet stood the staircase, spreading along a graceful curve like a pair of wings that joined the second floor.

For some reason, the moment he looked that way, his legs started to move on their own. As if obeying the voice he had just heard, he walked toward the end of the carpet and stopped a few meters short of the stairs.

A figure suddenly appeared there.

It was a body dressed in a black formal suit – a body with no head.

The body stood straight in front of the stairs. The suit on it was perfectly neat. A folded handkerchief peeked from the breast pocket, and a thin gold chain of a pocket watch hung from the other side. In one hand, it held a brass bell. The other hand stretched forward. In that pose, it looked exactly like a trusted butler welcoming a new recruit into the manor.

But he had no head. On that body in the black suit there was only a bare neck, like the joint where a doll’s head should have been.

“W-Where… where is this place?!”

The new attendant spoke in a trembling voice. He could no longer remember why he had come into this sealed mansion, nor could he remember his own name or past. All he felt was a primal fear, and a strange wrongness that was slowly corrupting his heart. He looked at the headless butler in front of him and forced himself to ask his question. As his voice rang out, whispers and the feeling of unseen eyes turned toward him from every side.

In shock, he turned his head and looked around the hall.

Figures in attendants’ and maids’ uniforms were hurrying about. They were clearly the servants who took care of this huge mansion. Whenever these servants passed the foot of the staircase, they paused, as if curiously eyeing the new recruit.

Low voices of conversation came from deep inside their chests – because every one of these servants had no head.

Above their necks there was only a smooth round knob, like the joint piece of a doll, with a texture somewhere between wood and porcelain.

The new attendant stared in disbelief at the servants moving back and forth in the hall, feeling dazed.

Had there been this many people here before? When he first came into this hall, had it really been so busy?

“This is Alice Manor, and you are the new attendant here,” the butler’s dull voice suddenly said, snapping the new attendant out of his daze. “Come with me. Your post from now on is upstairs.”

The new attendant nodded without thinking and stepped after the headless butler. Without meaning to, he glanced down and saw that, at some point, he too was wearing an attendant’s uniform – just like the footmen in the hall.

His mind grew more and more muddled. More and more of his memories were drawn out of this body, as if they were “no longer needed” – impurities that only got in the way of him carrying out a servant’s duties in this mansion.

With every step he took up the stairs, his hesitation and doubt grew weaker. At first, he still vaguely remembered that he did not belong here. Then he only remembered that he seemed to be trapped in a strange mansion. By the time he was only a few steps from the second floor, all he remembered was the butler’s instructions to him –

He stepped onto the last stair, lifted his head, and looked at the platform before him and the corridor running along its inner side.

A few servants were walking along the corridor. Even though they had no eyes, the new attendant could still feel their gaze on him.

“Why is everyone looking at me?”

“Because you are the first servant here who still has a head,” the butler stopped, turned around, and there seemed to be a hint of a smile in his voice. “And it has been many years since we last had a new recruit.”

“What am I supposed to do?” the new attendant asked carefully.

“Serve our Mistress and become one of us here. You will naturally know what you should do. But before that, you should go and greet the Mistress first…”

The butler slowly raised his arm and pointed at a black door at the end of the corridor.

“Go on. Push that door open and pay your respects to the Mistress.”

The new attendant nodded and turned to walk toward the door.

His steps were steady, and his expression slowly became calm. The way his limbs moved little by little grew as stiff and mechanical as those of the servants in the hall. He reached the door and raised both hands. His calm gaze swept over his wrists, which had already turned into round joints. He pressed lightly, and the door swung open.

The puppet took a step forward.

Inside the elegant bedroom, which could almost be called enormous, a gorgeous large bed stood in the center. Patterned curtains and tasseled drapes hung down around it. A silver-haired doll lay quietly on the bed, deep in dreamwalking sleep.

Beyond the bed, at the far end of the bedroom where a wall should have been, there was only a wide, boundless darkness. It seemed to lead into some distant, deep space. There, floor, walls, and ceiling all broke apart in jagged pieces. Chaotic shadows of darkness and countless tiny lights far away slowly rose and fell, turning into strange, shifting illusions of light and color. They stirred silently at the end of the bedroom and murmured faintly in the dark.

That surging darkness and those tiny lights looked like the doll’s bizarre, colorful dream, yet also like some formless thing trying to invade the mansion, held back outside the Mortal Realm by the doll’s sleep.

The new attendant, now turned into a puppet, stood in the bedroom doorway. Its eyes were dull as it stared at the beautiful doll sleeping soundly on the bed and at the heaving darkness behind her. Then it bent at the waist and bowed deeply to the Mistress.

Several bright threads stretched out from its limbs, drifting in the air for a moment before vanishing from sight.

The new attendant stayed bent at the waist and slowly backed out of the room. The door of the chamber where Alice slept slammed shut before it with a deep, solemn boom.

But there would never again be any change of expression on this attendant’s face.

Still bent over, the puppet took a handkerchief from its pocket and gently dusted the ornaments near the door.

…

“Thud -”

“Crash -”

The sound of a heavy object hitting the ground rang out at the mouth of the alley. The Annihilator who had just tried to run suddenly dropped from midair. He hit the ground with a loud noise, and his body shattered at once into dozens of pieces like porcelain. Even his clothes were no exception.

There was not a trace of blood on the broken porcelain pieces. It was as if he had always been nothing more than a fired doll, and that a body of flesh and blood had only been his lifelong illusion.

Alice jumped in fright. “Waaah!”

A gust of wind roared behind her as Vanna rushed to the mouth of the alley. She stared, dumbfounded, at the scene before her, then after a long moment turned to the doll at her side. “This… was you?”

“…I don’t know,” Alice blinked and slowly glanced back. “Um… probably?”

“What do you mean, probably?!”

“I mean I grabbed his strings and then pulled a bit – he struck first, I got a little scared…” Alice babbled, waving her hands as she spoke. Her explanation worked wonders; in just a few sentences she made Vanna even more confused. “Did you get that?”

“…Not at all,” Vanna shook her head, then glanced toward the depths of the alley. There, a charred lump of remains was still giving off thin black smoke. “Damn it. The priest I dealt with never opened his mouth in the end, and yours just shattered. We did not get any information at all.”

“So that means the captain is going to be unhappy?”

“We don’t have time to worry about that. We need to leave,” Vanna said quickly. “We made too much noise. Even if this isn’t the city center, the night patrols should already be on their way.”

As she spoke, she raised her head and looked at the mansion not far away.