“Where might I find it?” asked Clarence good-naturedly but a little perplexed that the man wasn’t forthcoming with the location.
He pointed across the grand ballroom to an open door.
Clarence took his time walking over the green fabric floor of the Forest, admiring the spindly trees. When he looked closer, the branches seemed to play host to a wealth of spiderwebs. The reflecting pool had been drained. In the few remaining little pools of water, mold had bloomed. Even the fabled thrones on which the Bucks had sat during their revels were under dust covers.
“The place looks a little tired. Are they ever coming back?” asked Clarence across the room.
The man didn’t reply.
Clarence continued to the lounge he’d been told would contain his lens. Upon entering, he stopped in shock.
Before him, covering all surfaces, was the detritus of a men’s club long in existence. At his feet, a globe. On a large table, there was an entire array of liquor bottles, including one that appeared to have been recovered from the Spanish Armada. A pile of discarded cravats filled one chair, while a stuffed badger sat in another.
It was after consuming a good quantity of the Armada liquor that Clarence found his missing lens. It was stuck between the pages of a book with a handsome tooled leather binding.
“The men of the previous age had style,” sighed Clarence while flipping through the pages mindlessly.
As expected of a secret society where men wore stag masks and shared women, the book contained fanciful illustrations of deer leaping through royal parks alongside hand-written glosses on names and heroic actions.
“They really fancied themselves to be stags,” giggled Clarence into his dusty snifter.
And then he turned a page that changed his view entirely.
***
When Clarence Brocklehurst burst forth from the Grand Bucks’ lounge that evening, he discovered the Forest was no longer a tired imitation, but, in fact, the real thing.
The cleaning man was nowhere to be found, and each step he took crushed fragrant violets under his boots.
Unconcerned about his camera lens and deeply concerned about escaping this place, he ran in the direction he thought would return him to the street, where he might safely void the contents of his stomach and hail a cab.
He was close to where he remembered the doors being located when he felt, rather than heard, the ground shake behind him.
Clarence knew he shouldn’t look back, shouldn’t risk turning to salt just because of his damned curiosity, but he had to know. Had to see some sign that what the book depicted was real.
On a hill that had never existed before, there stood a royal buck, its antler points almost too many to count. It remained perfectly still, as if posed for a painting or illustration in a book.
It did not acknowledge him or even appear to see him. Did they exist in the same plane of time and space? What strange magic had bewitched him?
Clarence waited to see if the stag would transform as he’d seen in the book, but it remained still. The manuscript must have been a flight of fancy.
“Do you know the way out?” asked a muffled voice.
Clarence turned and nearly jumped out of his skin when he saw someone wearing a papier-mâché stag mask behind him. They pulled off the mask. It was the cleaning man. “Do you know the way out?” he asked again.
Clarence looked back at the forest, trying to reconcile reality with what he’d seen. It was once again an indoor, dusty imitation of the green wonderland that had been there only seconds before. The stag was gone.
“I think I can find my way out,” said Clarence, his mouth suddenly dry.
“Do you want a mask? They’re quite useless now that the club has disbanded after 150 years.”
Clarence regarded the mask offered to him with a mix of longing and horror. Those broken antlers and that proud snout should have been the realization of dreams. But he feared very much what he had seen.
“I know the way,” he said, scrambling for the entry.
He’d just constructed a convincing explanation for what he’d seen both in the book and in the Forest — and then he caught a whiff of the violets on which he’d trod.
***
The cleaning man shrugged and locked the front door to the Forest for the last time after seeing that Clarence had made it into a hack.
He tidied the supply room and swept the entryway before determining that his work was done. It was time for him, too, to say goodbye to the headquarters of the Grand Bucks. Hopefully some other employer would reward so handsomely his knowledge of stain removal.
Before showing himself out through the servants’ entrance, he brought the abandoned stag mask to the lounge. He glanced about the accumulation of trash and treasures, considering whether he should remove or sell some of it. Best not to tempt fate; the peelers might think he was stealing.
He set the mask down on the large table around which the Grand Bucks had once met, the muzzle directed at a book: the only extant copy of a manuscript calledThe Legend of the Bucks.
THE END
