Chapter 490

Chapter 490: Strange Manor.

Duncan stood at the top of the tall spiral staircase, looking down over the old yet splendid mansion. He once again confirmed his judgment: this mysterious house was almost exactly the same in style as the room where Queen Ray Nora of Frostholm had been sleeping before.

A thought flashed through his mind. He turned around at once and looked toward the other side at the top of the spiral stairs.

Over there was a deep corridor on the second floor. Strange paintings whose details could not be made out hung on both walls. Between the canvases stood iron candleholders as black as thorns. Pale flames burned on the candles, filling the corridor with dim, muddled light. At the very end of the passage, in the hazy darkness of the shadows, there seemed to be a faint suggestion of a door.

Was that the room of the manor’s Master?

Duncan moved at once, striding toward the depths of the dim corridor. The old wooden floorboards creaked in a dull rhythm under his feet. The pale candles on both sides of the hall seemed to sway in an unfelt breeze stirred up by his passing, rocking erratically. The already gloomy corridor filled with shifting light and shadow, and it looked even darker and more indistinct.

At the end of the corridor, Duncan stopped. His brows knit tightly as he stared into the darkness before him.

There was no door here. The big door he had seen in the shadows moments ago seemed to have been nothing but a fleeting illusion. In front of him was only a corridor that ended abruptly. The floor, walls, and ceiling all ended in a jagged break, as if torn apart. Beyond that break lay only a hollow, terrifying expanse of darkness.

Duncan stepped carefully to the edge of the broken floor, leaned forward to look out, then turned his head to study the area around the fracture.

Outside was a boundless void. The corridor under his feet floated alone in empty air with nothing to support it. There was no sign of any other part of the mansion around it, and no trace of the room and door that should have stood at the end of the hallway.

Duncan stepped back and quietly watched this empty gap.

There should have been something here: a room, a door. Now it was gone, as if it had been torn out of the manor and vanished into that void.

Suddenly, a faint rustling noise sounded nearby and broke Duncan’s thoughts.

He snapped his head toward the source of the sound.

A headless figure in a black coat stood by the wall not far away, bent over and carefully wiping a marble side table.

Duncan hesitated for only a moment, then walked toward the headless figure.

The headless figure did not flee like the fleeting shadows he had seen before. Instead, it slowly straightened up. When Duncan drew near, it even gave a slight bow, adopting the proper posture of a well-trained Butler.

But the smooth nothingness above its shoulders only made that polite posture even more eerie and frightening.

“Guest, who are you looking for?” A hollow, muffled voice came from the chest of the headless body. It sounded very courteous.

A strange feeling rose in his chest, but Duncan had dealt with plenty of uncanny things in this world. He soon pushed the weirdness aside and spoke calmly to the headless body before him: “Why is the room at the end of the corridor gone?”

“It left,” the headless body replied. “It left a very, very long time ago.”

Duncan frowned and asked at once: “What about the person in that room? There was supposed to be someone there, right?”

“The room’s Mistress left as well. She left together with the room, a very, very long time ago,” the headless body said.

“A very, very long time ago?” Duncan could not shake the sense of wrongness. “Not just now?”

“Yes, guest. Just now is the same as a very, very long time ago,” the headless body answered politely. “Here, anything that has already happened took place a very, very long time ago. The next thing will happen a very, very long time from now.”

The headless body’s words were strange and hard to understand, yet they stirred many guesses in Duncan’s mind. A break in time? A fault? Was this mansion caught inside some kind of Time Fracture?

Duncan suddenly thought of the brass key. He had come to this bizarre manor only after turning the key, and that brass key had come from a clear-minded Ender, a member of a group whose time did not flow normally.

The brass key?

Duncan’s heart stirred. He suddenly sensed something and looked down at his own hand. The cold touch seemed to arrive late, then suddenly flooded his palm. A brass key lay there quietly.

As he saw the brass key, the headless body opposite him seemed to notice it as well. The figure gave a small shake, and that dull voice came again from its chest: “Ah, so you are an honored guest who carries the key. Forgive my poor service. May I ask if you have come to see the Mistress?”

“‘Mistress?’” Duncan was puzzled. “Didn’t you just say the Mistress left together with the room? And that it happened a very, very long time ago…”

“There are two Mistresses,” the headless body said slowly, like a patient Butler answering a guest’s questions. “One is the Mistress of the room. She never left her room, and now she has gone with it. The other is the Mistress of the manor. She never enters the manor.”

The headless body’s words grew stranger and stranger, leaving Duncan even more confused. Still, he quickly guessed that the “Mistress who never left her room” had to be Queen Ray Nora of Frostholm. A vague idea about the other “Mistress” began to form in his mind as well.

“What is the other Mistress called?” he asked, staring at the headless figure in front of him.

“This is the Alice Manor,” the headless body answered at once. “The Mistress’s name is, of course, Alice.”

Duncan lowered his eyelids without a change in expression, hiding the tiny shift in his gaze.

Everything was just as he had expected. He had entered this mansion only after turning the key in the keyhole on Alice’s back, so how could this strange house have nothing to do with Alice?

The mansion was called the Alice Manor. Alice was the true Mistress of this house, while Ray Nora was only the Mistress of that one room. Since Ray Nora never set foot outside her room, she sounded less like a “Mistress” and more like a special prisoner. That fit what Ray Nora herself had revealed:

she had been bound to the “Drifting Land” in order to keep the “Elder Gods replicant” in The Deep Sea under control.

Now, with the “help” of some Subspace shadows, this special prisoner had escaped together with her cage.

And the “warden” of this prison was wandering outside the jail?

Duncan could not help picturing Alice’s simple, cheerful smile. No matter how he tried, he could not link that silly doll with roles like “Mistress of the Alice Manor” or “warden of the Drifting Land.”

So he forced down his wandering thoughts, arranged his expression, and lifted his eyes to the headless body in front of him: “Why does the manor’s Mistress never enter the manor?”

“She is resting in the garden,” the headless body replied. “She has been resting for a long time, but it is not yet time for her to return to the manor.”

“Resting in the garden?”

Duncan’s thoughts turned, though his face stayed calm. “May I go see that ‘Mistress’?”

“Of course,” the headless body said at once. Though it had no head, Duncan still felt as if a “gaze” fell on the brass key in his hand. “You are a guest who holds the key. You can open any door in this manor, including the one that leads to the garden. Please follow me. I will take you there.”

Duncan gave a soft “mm” of agreement, then followed behind the headless body toward the spiral stairs that connected the first and second floors.

On the way to the garden, he tried to gather as much information as he could by making small talk: “What is your position here?”

“I am the Butler here, guest,” said the headless body that called itself the Butler. “Ordinary attendants and maids do not dare approach you, so I came instead.”

“There are many attendants and maids here?” Duncan remembered the whispers he had heard earlier in the hall and the glimpsed phantoms. “It sounds quite lively in this place most of the time.”

“The Drifting Land accepts Drifters, and all souls who stumble into this place. Here, none of them have any home to go back to. So at the very least, it is a decent Sanctuary World.”

“What is your name?” Duncan asked again.

“I have no name, guest. You may simply call me the Butler,” the headless Butler said. “Most attendants and maids here have no names. Those who do will lose them in time. The Displaced will all lose their names in the end. That is our fate. I was one of the first to arrive here. My name was lost long ago.”

“The Displaced…” Duncan stopped walking without thinking, repeating the word under his breath.

“Guest?” The headless Butler also stopped and turned, as if looking at Duncan in curiosity.

“It’s nothing. I just drifted off for a moment,” Duncan said quickly, shaking his head.

But just as he was about to move again, a painting on the nearby wall suddenly caught his eye.