Last night I dreamed I came again to Manderley. The car glided up the drive, the rhododendrons crowding in on either side, dark and monstrous like the moonless night. The house reared up before me, crenellated and bespired, a gothic imagining of the houses of drowned R’lyeh. The car hissed to a halt before the doors, and they swung silently inwards, the angles still subtly wrong. Mrs. Danvers slithered across the threshold, phosphorescent slime dripping from the cilia that formed her face, and greeted me in glutinous tones that sent a shiver down my spine.
“Welcome back,” she said sounding like she was gargling molasses. “Rebecca is up with Mr. de Winter.”
I heard the baying of the Hounds, unsacred dogs imported from remote Tindalos, for whom any corner is but a doorway and my blood felt like ice in my veins. Rebecca was dead, thrown from a horse into the crashing surf and Maximillian de Winter was my husband… wasn’t he?
Somehow I was outside the car now, and try as I might, I could not wake.