5. The walls have eyes, don’t you know?

That’s the funny thing about the walls of the Mansion. Sometimes, they have eyes, sometimes they don’t even have a wall. They move. And not only in the normal creaking way that walls do occasionally.

The fax machine upon the desk sprang into action, printing out a message from the person who, at that very moment in time, was making her way along the spooky tree-lined path to the Mansion’s front door.

The Cloaked Figure looked at the printout. “Excellent” guffawed the inquisitor, as if over-acting for a cliff-hanger on some comical horror television series. A few short  bursts of coughter afterwards allowed the Cloaked Figure to settle down behind the desk once more.

A strange screaming noise filled the Sitting Room from out of the walls, shortly followed by a mechanical grating sound. The wall on the opposite side of the room trembled briefly, before a pair of double doors flung open, and out slid, at some speed, the next visitor to the Mansion.

Bursting into the room through the ‘normal’ door, Miss Duncan screamed, breathlessly, “CM StewartWrite!”

The Cloaked Figure walked around from the desk, and helped the latest attendee to her feet, before gesturing for her to take a seat in the Grand Armchair opposite the desk.

“Are you CM StewartWrite?”

Unable to speak due to all the screaming, CM StewartWrite shook her head.

“Were you the cause of all the recent goings on around the Mansion?” The Cloaked Figure had a burst of inspiration: “If you say nothing, I will take it as yes, it was you.”

CM StewartWrite looked at the ancient fax machine on the desktop, and smiled. She took out her mobile phone, and tapped away at a few keys. Seconds later, thanks to the remarkable technical abilities of the Mansion, the fax machine sprung into life once more. The Sitting Room is one of only a handful of places where numberless faxing is available, and somehow, this latest visitor to the Mansion realised that.

Her fax, as the Cloaked Figure read aloud, said:

…I was house sitting and pet sitting at the time in question (you can check my blog for verification of this) and too consumed with how to get a red wine stain out of expensive French oak floors, the result of an inevitable accident after consuming too much red wine… Well, actually, I confess. It was me. I apologize for the deception and for the way I treated Maribel. I must explain – I have nothing against Maribel, it’s just that she reminded me of a clown, and I have borderline coulrophobia. Plus I’m quite allergic to dust, and she was quite dusty. Now I’m not blaming her for my actions, but rather, trying to explain (but not excuse) my crass behavior. And while I’m confessing, I may as well tell you why I was snooping… er, rather sneaking… I mean siteseeing around your mysterious Mansion. I knew if the remedy to red wine-stained expensive French oak floors could be found anywhere, it could be found at your Mansion. You yourself have elaborated on the potential wealth of Mansion maintenance spells hidden away is some secret room or long-forgotten chamber. So I do apologize… actually I apologize for the above tall tale, I guess I was feeling panic about the wine stain, which led to a manic confession about trespassing about the Mansion. See, it couldn’t possibly have been me who trespassed, as I was the one who left the note warning you about the trespasser! How can I prove I wrote the note? Well, I certainly wouldn’t confess to being a tattletale if it weren’t true. So there you have it. By the way, if you happen to comes across any wine stain remedies in the recesses of your Mansion, I’m sure your readers would delight in reading them on your blog. Wine stains are much more common than one might think…

Flicking a few specks of dust away from the desk, the Cloaked Figure shifted gingerly a few steps to the left, away from the desk, in an attempt to hide another red stain from the carpet, although the latest visitor had already spotted this. Whether on this visit or an earlier one, that remains to be seen, but her alibi seems stand-uppable.

Miss Duncan ‘persuaded’ CM StewartWrite to leave the room through a curtained-arch in the far corner. The strange mechanical grating noise filled the room again as the double doors started to close themselves once more…