Don't Look Now Again Part Two

TT here.  The letter continues.

Ah yes. you visited the downstairs receiving room next.  And a frisson of unease became a churning of real horror in here, didn't it?  I thought so.

It was three years after Alabaster had been laid to rest. On a frosty Sunday evening Keef, the old dogsbody, was bringing in a basket of smoked apple logs.  It was shaping up to being a horrible winter and he wanted to get back outside to continue sweeping the drifts off the burgeoning eaves.  He  did not see ....  the wolf!   It was actually the wolf's grandson.

  Our original wolf had been shot

 and hung up on the filigreed gates of Spadina House til it rotted.

 But the whole pack had been maddened with gastronomic lust once it had shared Alabaster's lips between them. It had been regularly stalking Spadina House with rich, plump, upper crust human flesh on its collective mind.

So when Keef backed in with the logs the biggest of the wolves, a bit bigger than the first one.. slipped in behind him and settled under one of the sofas.

Yes! The long one with the cushions is the very sofa under which Wolf Two lay ready for his next victim.  It was not to be Keef, the retainer.  No, the pack was only interested in the sweet flesh of the upper echelons. Gristly, stringy old Keef was later to be fish food in a carp incident on Lake Huron. The wolf knew that Lady Minora de la Dross was staying at Spadina as  a guest of Mrs Awsten.

 Lady Minora

was a great tragedienne in London and was resting after a three year world tour as Agrippina in The Children of the Temple Steps. She lay sleeping on the very sofa under which Wolf Two was waiting. Keef closed the door of the room. Lady Minora drifted off into sleep. My mother and my aunts were in the kitchen preparing the dinner and the family were all out on the Ontario Lake River at the curling competition. Lady Minora did not have a chance. Her left hand, the very one you see about to wander sensually up to her lower, soon to be gone, lip fell in slumber onto the rug as she dreamed of her past success as Agrippina. She was reliving the moment when Carlossus of Sarta took her hand ready to toss her down the Temple Steps. At that very moment Wolf Two seized her wrist, twisted like a crocodile and tossed her to the floor. She had no time to scream before her tonsils were down his throat, her lips already packed in his cheeks for later family feeding and the rest of her face smiling in the hairy recess of his gigantic craw. Before he bit off her hands he looked around to admire the room and the charming conservatory off . 

 These frames were drenched in gore and a tooth embedded in the picture frame on the right

This bust was witness to poor Minerva's demise.

That the descendants if these lovely blooms were fed by spatterings of the Lady Minerva's life fluid does not bear thought does it? I thought not. 

And that was when the Awsten family realised that Spadina House was perhaps not the home they wanted to live in any longer. When they returned from the curling competition at which young Phyllis won a cup,

(found in the attic recently along with other Awsten momenti which I will leave undescribed for the time being. You are glad of that. aren't you?  I thought so.)

 Mrs Awsten,  seeing the ghastly detritus of the savage attack, collapsed into a speechless shock from which she never emerged and ended her days in a sanitorium in the Austrian Alps. The House was closed and boarded up for four years. The family fell into scattered oblivion. My mother and her sisters were forced to go into service in Casa Loma across the road and did not return to Spadina House until the spring of 1927.  The wolf pack bred as nature intends.