Ending Three
NICHOLAS: Nothing will prevent me from ravishing you, Eithne.
Rending of clothes.
EUSTACE: Hold! On your soul, hold!
NICHOLAS: A ghost, spectral finger accusing! My old friend, Sir Eustace Orfe, calling from beyond the grave! I care not for ghosts.
LINOLINE: I cry for vengeance! I seek blood!
NICHOLAS: A ravening vampyre, fangs bared, rising from the tomb. Pah! This for vampyres!
BALSAMO: ... rarrgghg gargghh rrrrr!
NICHOLAS: An animate corpse of the double-living bandit monk, larynx crushed and incapable of coherent speech, lurching backwards towards me, head still turned entirely around, eyes squirming with frustrated hate. Hah! These bogey-things deter me not.
EITHNE: Oh, I stir from my swoon... such a vile dream I was having, I cannot credit what phantasms were conjured by my mind. I shall never eat a cheese supper again. This I swear.
NICHOLAS: It was no dream.
EITHNE: Mr Goodman, what manner of creatures tug at you. The transparent apparition of my own father, the bloody-mouthed travesty of my gentle aunt Linoline and the Janus-faced caricature of Father Balsamo.
NICHOLAS: Unhand me, fiends. I have wicked work to accomplish.
LINOLINE: You are of our company, now.
EUSTACE: By virtue of villainy.
BALSAMO: ... garrgghh rrrr!
LINOLINE: He means to say that we have all died to become what we are.
EUSTACE: You still live. But your crimes qualify you as one of us.
NICHOLAS: Then let me about my villainy. I have misdeeds still to accomplish. Including one especially vile item I'm rather keen to conclude before dawn.
LINOLINE: Such a neck for biting.
EUSTACE: For twisting.
BALSAMO: ... rrrrr!
NICHOLAS: Dark Figure, I implore you, haul away these minions. We have a bargain.
DARK FIGURE: I have bargains with all, Nicholas Goodman.
NICHOLAS: It can't end this way. I curse you...
There is a sudden commotion.
NICHOLAS: Damn me for a fool as well as a villain. These bargains were always unequal. I see now that no-one truly prospers from association with the powers of darkness.
And so the company of ghouls was swelled by one Nicholas Goodman. When Eithne at length awoke from her swoon, she found herself surrounded by corpses and ghosts. Finding strength to flee, she summoned servants and decreed that the dungeons of Mildew Manor be bricked up, confining the creatures of darkness to these stygian stone hallways and chambers. A parson was summoned to place blessed relics at all possible escape point, sealing away forever ghosts, vampyres, back-to-fronts, dastards and DARK FIGURES. But what's this, stirring in the darkness, with a clanking of shackles...
JOHN: I say, ah, Eithne, Mr Goodman, anybody... it's fearfully dark down here, and I seem to have been left behind... as it were... forgotten... ah, my legs have gone to sleep with the cold and damp... ouch, I think that was rats, nipping... ah, Eithne, it really would be a good idea to unchain me now... ah, Eithne, Eithne...
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