The Beast at the Door by Althea Blue

Author:Althea Blue [Blue, Althea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781944591281
Amazon: B01JVFKNUG
Barnesnoble: B01JVFKNUG
Goodreads: 31922218
Publisher: Supposed Crimes, LLC
Published: 2016-10-01T03:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Patience spun slowly in a circle trying to take in the myriad of tools, toys and liquids on the counters around her. Her eyes lit on the cat, drawn to its familiarity, and dismissed it as being unhelpful. No man was going to be frightened by a cat, real or otherwise. She shrugged and looked at Ada. “I don’t know what most of this is, much less what we can do with it.” Her ignorance galled her, but she hadn’t had more than a few minutes in the room before Ada removed her, and Ada must know the contents intimately.

Ada looked like she was concentrating as she circled the room, looking at the objects and shaking her head as she decided against them. The first thing she stopped at was a stack of black metal boxes, the size of small loaves of bread. Ada fiddled with the top one for a moment and a very quiet lion’s roar emerged from the side.

Patience asked “can that be made louder?”

Ada nodded and pushed a lever, restoring the box to a higher volume, “I put it on its quietest setting so they wouldn’t hear it. But it’s the same sort of thing that makes the beast roar. There’s the lion, and also bats rustling, an owl hooting and some sort of eerie howling that I still haven’t figured out. Father made recordings of all of the creatures and placed them in these boxes. They run on clockwork, like a music box, but sound very realistic and they’re recorded at intervals, so there's a random time between sounds and there are variations. If we wind them up fully they will run for more than an hour before shutting down.”

“That’s fantastic. We can hide them in different rooms and the noises will seem to come out of nowhere. That will worry the men at least. Maybe scare them senseless. A lion roaring somewhere in the same house as me would certainly scare me. But I think we need something that will actually do some damage too, in case they are too stupid to get scared.” Patience grinned and Ada responded with a lovely smile.

Ada patted the head of a stone dog, pulling it toward her. Then she set some sort of gear on the base behind it going and stepped back very quickly. The dog didn’t do anything until Ada screwed up a ball of paper and tossed it in that direction. When it was about 6 inches away the dog suddenly flew into motion and snapped at it, biting the edge of the ball, which got stuck on a stone tooth. Reaching gingerly around the side, careful to let no part of her actually get in front of the statue, she halted the motion of the gear.

Ada said, “Father made this to keep nosy servants out of here, so they wouldn’t know what he was working on. All it took was a single bite out of one young houseboy and none of the servants would come near this room again.

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