Foxe Manor
A Short Story
A short story, inspired by Coral Evermore’s Monthly Evermore Theme: Fallen Grace, and by my own fascination with mythology and mythical narratives — specifically, in this story, exploring the Korean Gumiho, or Nine-Tailed Fox.
Enjoy <3
Grace dreamt of darkness, sweet and rich and sinful as cream, and only when she awoke did she understand how far she had fallen.
Her nightgown was black lace, crumpled around her smooth, pale belly. She hastily tugged it over her bare legs. Her cheeks, when she looked into the oval looking-glass across from her bed, were painted with roses. Her lips were red and swollen.
She clutched at the rosary strung across her nightstand, clasped it around her neck and felt the weight of the crucifix, cold and heavy, between her breasts. Mother Mary, she thought, desperation flushing across her collarbones, staining her neck. Forgive me, Mother, for I have sinned.
The prayer tangled with memories of her dark, velvet dreams.
Grace slipped from between the damp satin sheets and padded to the looking-glass. Her dark eyes gazed back at her. Reproachful. Defiant. With trembling hands, she brushed out her dark curls, and gathered them into a braided knot atop her head–
She gasped, her curls falling about her neck like spilt water.
A bruise, the dark violet of lust, stained her skin.
A hand cupped her cheek… then drifted, down, down, down, to the violet splotches on her neck. She could not remember where they had come from. Where the memory should have been, there was nothing but a sinful hollow. Had she… but the thought itself was sin! It could not be. No, she thought, studying herself in the mirror, lingering on the bruised crescents below her eyes, no, it is impossible.
But the dark eyes that gazed back at her had grown thoughtful.
Guilty.
The statue’s blind marble eyes were fastened to her. She could feel them, crawling across her neck, slipping down her dress’ curves, as she hurried through the pillared hallway towards the black-and-gold doors at its end. She had always been frightened of the statue of the blind crone, hunched in a corner of the hallway that fed into her father’s wing of the house, her hands clasped together in fervent prayer, or perhaps fervent pleading. She stood, it seemed, on a carpet of ravens. The birds had torn the skin from her ankles with their sharp beaks, and dug towards bone. Even in pale marble, the scene was gruesome, and Grace had often asked her father as a little girl why he kept the thing at all.
Because, sweet child, it represents the depths of despair that only God can save us from. In prayer, even the worst of torments will subside, and we will find peace.
But the crone did not seem peaceful to her, with her blind, staring eyes, and her clawed hands, and the blood spilling into the ravens’ beaks. And, as Grace slipped past her, pressing open the doors, she thought she saw the crone’s hooked fingers reach for her in their despair, thought she felt their warmth on her skin–
Then, she was through the doors, into a bright, warm-hued room with a dancing hearth and a dining table laid out for breakfast. Her father was not there. When Grace asked the wisp of a girl who worked as one of the kitchen maids where he was, she was told he would not be joining her for breakfast that morning. Urgent business, the girl said. Apologies, Miss Grace.
Grace sat, alone, at the head of the table, a hot, glistening breakfast before her that she found she could not touch. Even her tea grew cold, the warm, rose-scented curls drifting past her. She wondered at her father’s urgent business – it wasn’t like him to miss breakfast with her, nor to send his messages through the servants. She stirred her tea, her thoughts faraway and absent and, when she returned to herself, she was gazing at the portraits that hung above the hearth.
Had they always been there?
The frames were dark silver, both ornate and tarnished, wrapping around the paintings in patterns of skeletal fingers and withered roses. Strange, though the paintings themselves were stranger. She could have sworn, the more she thought about it, that a painting of the Virgin Mary had once hung there, yet the paintings she studied had a dark, mythical feel to them.
In the first, three women – sisters, she thought, but could not say why, for they looked nothing alike – sat around a bony loom. One woman was pale as the moon; another had the warm, brown skin of summer bark; yet another had skin as black as a moonless night. They wore scandalously little. Grace found herself blushing as she traced the contours of their glittering, watery robes with her eyes, lingering on the breaths between the fabric, where smooth, soft skin showed. But it was the loom that truly frightened her. She had thought it bony, in an abstract sense, when she first took in the painting… but as she gazed at it, she found that the loom was made from darkened, yellowed bones stitched together, and that the thread the women were feeding through it looked awfully like long locks of hair.
The second painting was nothing like the first, and yet everything like it. It was of a man, with dusky, burnished skin, and – striking even from the man’s profile, as it was his back that was being shown – the graceful, ethereal features that belonged to myth. He wore less than the women, a simple, threadbare cloth wrapped around his hips. From the furrows of his back, bloomed wings, black as the night and spilling to the ground like ink. Yet the man’s face was a mask of agony, and where the wings sprouted, the skin and muscle had been cleaved away, revealing wet, gleaming bone. Blood fountained down his skin in deep red rivulets, like silk.
Grace’s chair shrieked against the dark floorboards as she stood, her tea and breakfast forgotten, her stomach churning. There was no one to see her out of the room, no one to see the flushed tips of her ears or the thin, white grimace her lips tightened into as she left, her hands clasped before her in warding.
Almost, she thought, like the blind crone bent in desperate prayer.
Her father’s office was dimly-lit, and Grace knew, even as she stepped into the room, that he was not there. She wondered again, with a thin, rising worry, where he had gone.
The office was round, dark-paneled, and made up of plush rugs, shelves overflowing with books, and paintings. A crucifix hung above her father’s desk, thick and burnished gold. A soft, quiet relief filled her heart at the sight of it – that had not changed, at least.
She wasn’t certain what she was doing there, with her father gone and the room unspokenly forbidden to her, yet she found herself searching the walls of the office for something she could not name. Strange paintings, perhaps, or a sign of her father’s mysterious whereabouts. The paintings she did see were dark, oiled, and depicting religious scenery or figures. The room was careful and neat, as her father was, so that it would reveal nothing to her unless she pried. Still, she studied the shelves of books, the tomes bound in various leathers, the titles impressed into the spines in gold or silver lettering.
Her gaze wandered over the tomes… and paused, hooked by one of them, a cover which had neither title nor author impressed onto it, and which was bound in a strange, pale leather, the likes of which she had never before seen.
Her hands trembled as she slid the book from its nook, and cracked open the cover. As she read the first words, she sat – fell, if she were telling it honestly – on the plush rug, her legs folded, limp and broken, below her skirts. Her lips mouthed strange, empty words. Her fingers danced along illustrations that were inked on the pages.
Her father could not have known what this book spoke of. It was unholy. Sinful, beyond belief.
Grace tore through the tome with shaking fingers, snatches of the spells and rituals contained within smearing as she flipped the pages, faster and faster.
… the human body, once bound into a house of cards…
… only sparrows and doves can be sacrificed, or else the wrath of a god may be invoked…
… the fox spirit…
Her fingers stilled against the page that had a dark, cruel fox’s face painted on it, along with the story of a fox spirit trapped within a woman’s body. The woman, according to the story, was a temptress, seducing and then eating alive her victims, trapping their souls within her own body. One kiss from her would steal one’s soul. A second would end in her unrelenting hunger.
Grace soaked in the illustration of the beautiful dark-haired, fox-eared woman, thinking all the while of the crest of her father’s family, the three-tailed fox. The manor was named after it. Foxe Manor.
What does it mean?
But whatever it meant, the tome was far from the religious ideals her father had raised her with, much more akin to the painting hanging above the hearth. And there was something strange about its cover, something oddly soft and supple about the leather binding it.
It brought back a dark flash of a dream that had been haunting her, of late. With it, came a cold, sharp realization.
She dropped the tome, its spine cracking and tearing as it split.
Her legs were rooted to the floorboards, bent like a broken doll’s limbs below her skirts. She could not move. But she could remember, and her dreams returned to her in a flood of dark, haunting waters.
In her dreams, she stood before the still, glossy waters of a pond, the same shade as the night sky above her. Stars danced below its surface. When she crouched beside the waters, dipping a hand into them, she fished out a handful of the stars… only they were not stars at all, but coins. Bright below the layer of blood and moss that slickened them.
Yet she was not frightened in her dreams. Instead, she took one of the coins, and placed it on her tongue, savoring the bitter, coppery taste, feeling the blood slip between her teeth. She swallowed. The coin stuck in the hollow of her throat, cold and sharp.
Through the bite of the metal, past the hard contours of the coin, she spoke. Harsh, hollow words that came to her through a strange instinct. She did not understand what they meant, but she knew to speak them. And, when she had said them, she tore the rosary from her neck and flung it into the pond, watching the beads drown in the nightly waters.
A sacrifice.
Behind her, in the reflection, appeared a woman with hair like night, flowing into the pond, and eyes as sharp and clever as those of a fox. As Grace stood, more exhilarated than frightened, the woman’s fox tails brushed against her bare legs. Grace whirled to face her. There were no words between them, only the intimate knowledge that this was the spirit of Foxe Manor, the mascot of their family, the three-tailed fox.
The woman dipped her head to kiss her.
The coin dislodged from her throat as the woman’s warm lips pressed against hers. The taste of blood filled Grace’s mouth – this time, it was her own, drawn from the well of her throat. The woman tasted the coin, and then stole it from between her lips, swallowing it with a greed that Grace recognized to be dangerous, and yet could not fear. Instead, her own hunger, her own lust, only brightened and deepened. But as the woman’s lips danced along her neck, as the first shard of pain bit into her skin, she remembered something. Something unspoken. Something that came from the same place as those words she had spoken.
The fox woman had stolen a coin in place of her soul, but she would still devour her.
She always awoke from the dreams with the dawning of that knowledge. Yet she never remembered them for long. And, when she fell asleep the following night, she dreamt of the fox woman all over again.
Her fingers crept back towards the tome bound in its strange — human — skin, towards the words within.
The fox spirit demands monthly sacrifices. It is these sacrifices that sustain it, and it cannot be kept alive and bound without souls. The Binder must keep themself protected as well, from its hunger, and they might do this through religious symbols. These offer scant protection, however, and must be supplemented by the blood sacrifices. These can be animal in nature. Humans need only be sacrificed every fourteenth month.
Grace’s fingers clutched at the rosary binding her neck.
Her legs were cold, unsteady, as she stood. She left the tome where it was, sprawled on the rug. She moved to leave the room, but her eye was caught by a letter that lay in the center of her father’s desk, pale against the glossy wood. It was filled, she saw, with her father’s worn, scrawled writing.
Her heart trapped in her throat – as the coin had been, in her dreams – she went to the desk and took up the letter with trembling fingers.
It said:
My dearest Grace,
You were bound to know the truth one day, yet I continued to hope, in vain, that it would not be soon. Alas, it is my own human weakness that forces the truth from me. That, sweetheart, is the dark beauty of irony.
Our house, our family, has been tainted for longer than I know – longer than any of my family knew. Our last name is Foxe, as you know, and our manor is named after the creature. But I never did tell you the story of the name, and you never did ask. Perhaps it was intuitive on your part. For my own part, it was fear. I could not tell you the story, the truth, of our house. That our prosperity comes from death – the death of others, and the death of morality. I raised you to be a good Christian, and yet I cannot be further from it. My spirit has been bound, since childhood, since birth, to something much darker. And now, I must pass this burden on to you, dear daughter, though I hope – likely in vain – that my words of warning might protect you.
There are spirits in this world. Demons, too. Nothing good can exist without evil. Our house, as the Fates would have it, is bound to a dark spirit. The spirit of a fox woman. I suppose you might say that we have bound it, but I do not think this is true. Not in the slightest. No, we are its servants until the day we die.
This fox spirit visits us through the medium of dreams. Have you begun to have them yet, my poor, sweet daughter? She is a temptress, yet you must not fall for her charms. She will devour your soul and your body, both. She is not of this world and so, in order to stay in this world, she must consume the souls of mortals. For this reason, since I was young, and my own mother and father passed this dark, cruel inheritance to me, I have been forced, every fourteenth month, to feed her. To bring her a human sacrifice, alongside the many smaller, animal sacrifices I must make to her during the other months. It is only in this way that we might continue to live – not just to prosper, but to live, dear daughter. You must understand that she would kill us otherwise.
I have searched, for decades, for a ritual that might free us. I have never found one. This quest, too, I pass onto you, sweet Grace. I am sorry you are left with this… sorry beyond what words can express. Scour the book in my office (you will know the one) for your own protection and, if God be with you, for your own freedom. I can no longer be a part of this sinful cycle. Though I can only imagine what you will think of me when you find this letter, though I cannot bear to leave you, I cannot continue. It is too much for the human soul.
Pray, dear daughter, always. For God is always with us. Even when we sin.
Always and forever yours,
Your Loving Father
When she left her father’s office, her cheeks damp, her throat rough and sore from weeping, Grace found another portrait – freshly painted, it seemed – hanging from the far wall of her bedroom. Impossible, of course, yet there it hung.
The fox woman – pale-skinned, beautiful in an otherworldly way, her hair tumbling to the roots of the trees below her – was painted in such deep, vivid shades, Grace could imagine her to be truly there, lurking in the corner of her bedroom. Her auburn eyes, sharp and clever, were hooked on Grace. Her fingers, slim and graceful, were crowned with bladed nails that tore into the body of a deer. The deer clung to life, but just barely. Grace could see it in the wet sheen of its eyes. One antler had been ripped from its skull. The fox woman’s nails were coated in its bloody fur.
The painting was beautiful, graceful, deadly. A warning. As her father’s letter had been.
Grace thought of her father – her memories of him already graying, withering with grief – and of his thinly veiled warnings, the ones she had heard all her life and never understood until she had read his letter. She thought of the bruises blossoming across her throat, of the velvet sin of her dreams, of late.
Even now, as she took in the painting, she found herself both terrified and enchanted.
She had been fallen since birth, fallen since before she was born, as her family had been before her. She wrapped the rosary around her wrists until the beads left bruises against her skin. She breathed a prayer into them.
And, as she went to sleep that night, fresh tears falling down her cheeks, she vowed to do as her father had said, and banish the fox spirit once and for all from their home.
This is such a unique way of telling the story of the nine-tailed fox! I really loved the way you made it sultry and horrifying at the same time. Adding the letter and text only doubled the immersion as well. This is so solid for so many reasons. I really hope you plan for the continuing pieces because I would love to follow her story!
Fusing Christian guilt with the gumiho is an interesting choice. The mythologies don't blend easily, which creates useful friction.