The Haunted Traveler Vol. 1 Issue 1

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and pears, pipes and fans, swords and books and blossoms.
The furnishings and doorways in that house rejected angles—every
line was curved, organic, every window tuliped,
every moulding a delicate cluster of scrolls. At some point
during the chase, hardwood floors segued to yellow marble
that warmed the orange walls of a ballroom festooned
with branch-like chandeliers. Here the man dashed past a
body—a woman's—and leapt over a pool of blood. He flailed
his distress but would not stop. With the woman dead and
the servants run off, he was far too alone.
There were no absolutes in Yocelin's world, or rather,
there were genuine contradictions. The pool of blood on the
marble floor was frightful, in some ways. It was pungent,
unctuous, designed to revolt and harrow. But it glistened,
too. Its pattern was gorgeously fluid—like the lines in the
Breton manor—and its color was the precise red that fashion
houses worked hard to reproduce. Yocelin's skim across the
ballroom floor halted beside the blood. She took a moment to
admire it, and in that moment the colors ebbed: blood, marble,
floor, and satin dress. The man's expensive jacket lost its
fig-like sheen and deteriorated to unremarkable roan.
Desperate, Yocelin surged and took him down. They fell in
the neck of another polished hall. The man's head smacked
the gleaming wood that replaced the gleaming marble. It
split at the back and the red rushed out. The floors dulled
beneath them and the jacket Yocelin gripped in both hands
devolved from roan to sand. Her dress was a fading blush.
Peacock occasion tables with matching peacock chairs grew
modest. The man's hair lost lustre and greyed at the ends,
turning up in sudden dryness.
Only the blood that rushed from his head sustained itself.
Yocelin bit into his cheek (not porcelain, now, but ash) and
feasted on what bane she could. That man, at least, had held
on to old woes. He had bled wet and ripe, and his bitten flesh
had revealed its bright underworld where she took it apart.
The world returned as she ate, and when she stood, her vio-