The Manure Room and Other Hidden Gems

Sonny

“Uh, I guess that’s the penguin room?” Claude said, hastily slamming the door shut on the vast arctic tundra—and the eight thousand screaming penguins—before we could all freeze to death. He looked at me. “Did you know we have a penguin room?”

“I did not,” I said, fighting back my smile, and definitely not hyperfixating on Claude’s use of the possessive we. We have . Like it was our room, in our house. “But this house is full of surprises.”

Mr Greene recorded a voice note on his phone. “Penguin room, approximately one kilometre squared. Probably uninhabitable.”

We were taking Mr Greene and Mr Cope on a—so far extremely unsuccessful—tour of the house. Claude and I figured out pretty quickly Jenny had an ulterior motive. It seemed to be doing everything in its power to make itself as unappealing to an estate agent, and therefore potential buyers or renters, as possible.

Claude opened another door. “This, ah, fuck, appears to be the lace-pantie display room.”

I snorted. There were strings of panties in a rainbow of colours hanging from the ceiling like bunting. Panties in glass cabinets and ornate gold frames, and a pantie-shaped rug. Pretty.

“Small closet just off main landing on first floor. Potential for bedroom perhaps,” Mr Greene said, once again into his phone.

Claude closed that door, walked a few paces down the corridor, opened another door, and exhaled loudly. “Sure, sure. Welcome to the...” He took a few steps inside the unnaturally cool room and pulled the handle on a square metal drawer. A black, zippered bag filled with something heavy and lumpy appeared. “Morgue.”

“Is that a body?” said Mr Cope with an audible swallow.

“It is indeed cadaver shaped,” Claude replied. His tone, the precise words he’d chosen, and the emphasis on shaped led me to believe that either from his vantage point it was obviously not a dead body, or the house had told him it was not.

“Room thirty-six appears to be a mortuary. Unclear how many corpses are here. Best check with the authorities on regulations before renovating,” Mr Greene said into his phone’s recording device.

Beside me, Oggy and Willow whispered into each other’s ears. Occasionally, Willow would chuckle, and Oggy would sigh. Their hair, previously jet black, was purpling at the ends.

We left the morgue, and Claude opened the next door. “Of course. Because what else do you keep next to the morgue but a sex dungeon?” He stepped inside, sidestepping to let the visitors in. There was a dais in the centre, with a cagelike contraption around it and, dangling in the middle, a swing... of sorts. Lining every wall were whips, and paddles, and harnesses, and ball gags.

“Uh,” said Mr Greene. He lifted the phone’s recorder to his mouth but simply stared wide-eyed into the room.

Claude elbowed me, and when I looked at him he leant closer, burying his mouth in my hair next to my ear. All at once, my skin erupted in goosebumps.

“Do you think Mr Greene’s realising he’s bitten off more than he can chew?” he asked.

“Was there really a body in there?” I whispered back.

“Jenny informed me it was turnips.”

I stopped myself before I laughed and spoiled everything. “Of course it was.”

“Now it’s a party!” said a booming male voice. Jasper strode out of the shadows and into view. Stark bollock naked. His arousal jutted out in front of him like the gangplank of a ship.

“Good lord!” Mr Greene whispered, only a fraction louder than utter silence.

“Who wants first go?” the fire daemon said. It was unclear whether he was talking about the swing or his cock. Or perhaps he meant both.

“Woah, steady on there, fella,” said Mr Cope. “We’re just conducting a property survey of sorts.”

Jasper snapped his attention to Claude. “You selling?”

“Jees, uh, goodness, well, that’s still to be determined,” Claude bumbled. I wanted to hold his hand, softly stroke his skin with my thumb.

Jasper didn’t bother to acknowledge his answer, instead he turned to me. “And you!” he bellowed accusingly.

I was sure a little pee came out. “Yes?”

“Have you even looked into the further research I asked you to do?” he boomed.

It took me a moment to rewind back to that conversation, and that particular “further research” he was referring to. “You mean... about certain by-products being beneficial to soil health?” He nodded, gave me a what else would I be talking about hand gesture. “Um, no, I haven’t looked into it. It’s not really the time nor place for... that.”

Jasper shook his head. “Kids these days.”

I was acutely conscious of his raging erection hanging between us. It looked heavy, cumbersome even, like a battering ram, or a fire extinguisher. Same colour too.

“It’s just that the house is always watching,” I said.

He shrugged. “So? Nothing wrong with an audience now and then. And if you don’t leave right away, you’ll be in one. Helena’s coming, and once that door shuts, no one leaves, and no one enters.” He smirked. “Except me, obviously.” His laughter cracked through the room like a thunderclap. “Anyway, what’s taking that woman so long? Should have been here twenty minutes ago.”

“Probably stuffing pee-hay into your mattress,” Claude said under his breath, but Jasper whipped his head round to him.

“What?!” He didn’t wait for clarification. He pushed Claude and Mr Greene to either side like a bowling ball parting pins, sending Mr Greene to his knees. Then he stomped down the corridor and out of view. “HELENA!”

Claude ushered us out and shut the door. “Is there any point in continuing this tour? Or shall we call it a day here?”

“Oh, yes, continue,” said Mr Greene, though he sounded a lot less certain than he did an hour ago.

Claude subtly rolled his eyes and let Mr Greene and Mr Cope get ahead of us. “What by-product was Mr Dupont referring to?” he asked me.

A bubble of nervous laughter escaped my throat. “Um, jizz.”

“I should have guessed,” Claude said, before giggling adorably.

We ascended the stairs to the second level and Claude began opening doors systematically, offering the visitors barely enough time to poke their heads in, before he shut it and moved on to the next.

“This is the thrift shop,” he said, of an actual, fully functioning thrift shop, complete with cash register and harried-looking sales assistant.

He opened another door. “Here’s where we keep all our creepy dolls.” Paused. “Correction, sorry, here’s where we keep our haunted dolls.”

“This is the formal lobotomy room. For formal lobotomies, obviously.”

“And here’s the casual lobotomy room. When you want to perform discredited neurosurgery but without all the paperwork and restrictions.”

“This here is the frisbee cemetery. Where frisbees are apparently buried, but are also used as gravestone markers.”

“The room of minute hands. Just a bunch of minute hands from old broken clocks. Because... reasons.”

“The bank-vault blueprint room.”

“The taxidermy honey badger and wolverine room.”

“The mirror maze.”

“The courtroom.”

“The javelin-stick cupboard.”

“The cloud forest? Does it end?”

“The—really, Jenny?—the butt-plug storage? Fine, whatever.”

“And obviously, the interchangeable butt-plug tassels and tails storage.”

“The confession booth.”

“The dry dock.”

“The alligator insemination room.”

“The manure room.”

“Ooh,” I said, racing forward to have a look. The room was about five metres by five metres and had a lovely, steaming heap of dung in the centre. Next to it, a shovel and a barrow. “Thank you, Jenny,” I whispered.

“It says you’re more than welcome,” Claude said back, smiling from ear to ear.

Mr Cope cleared his throat, pulling Claude and me out of the moment. I hadn’t realised we’d become involved in a moment until we were on the other side. “I don’t know about you, Cam, but I reckon we’ve got a pretty decent feel for the place. How about we head back to Agaricus and check into our rooms?”

Mr Greene looked about as dejected as one man could be. His shoulders were hunched, his mouth drooped at the corners, his eyes were sleepy and red like he was stoned, and his tail had wrapped itself around his thigh. “Two centuries,” he muttered to himself. He handed Claude a business card. “I will write up my report and get back to you with some estimations. Might take a little longer than I initially assumed. In the meantime, give me a call if you have any questions.”

“Yes, I will do,” Claude said. “Let me show you gentlemen to the exit.” We all turned one hundred and eighty degrees to find the front doors already before us. “Ah, here it is.”

“Who’s hungry?” said Willow, the moment Mr Greene and Mr Cope’s sports car pulled off the gravel drive of Stinkhorn Manor.

“Starving, actually,” said Claude.

We walked to the guest house’s dining room, and nothing more was said about either of the visitors until Willow brought out our dinner. Tagliatelle pasta with a creamy black-truffle sauce. Claude had the same.

“You guys are so weirdly attuned sometimes,” Willow said before disappearing back into the kitchen.

“Doesn’t it feel slightly cannibalistic to eat mushrooms?” I asked. The glass and a half of wine I’d drunk before my food arrived was making my mind feel soft and happy.

Claude laughed. “I guess so? Is that weird? I really like them though. They’re delicious.”

“I love mushrooms,” I said. “I could eat them all day.”

“Yes,” he said, his voice suddenly breathy. His gaze landed on my mouth, lips parted, tongue dipped out to wet them.

My stomach jolted, and my dick twitched. Damn, just from a look.

“Um...” I swallowed. I needed to change the trajectory of the conversation, or I was about to get another infallible boner. “So, do you think you’ll sell the manor?”

Claude tucked his napkin into his collar and picked up his knife and fork. “I can speak more freely here in the guest house than the main house. Jenny can’t hear as well. Honestly? I’m not sure what to do. I think the idea of selling has merits. I could pay off my mortgage in Remy. I could continue working on the trains and take periodic vacations to Stinkhorn Manor to perform the ritual. Provided we figure out what it is—”

“We will,” I interrupted.

“But I feel like that’s something Jenny would never permit. Unless, of course, we could get its approval on the tenants beforehand, but I also don’t much fancy having Mr Greene as a business partner.”

“The man gives me the ick,” I said.

“Serious ick vibes.” He laughed, and I felt the warmth rolling off him.

“Would you want to move back to Remy? Why not stay here?”

Claude’s elbow slipped from the edge of the table, his fork clanged against the side of his plate. “I hadn’t considered it. What would I do here all day? What would I do for money? What...” He lowered his voice. “If we don’t figure out the ritual, what then?”

“We will,” I reiterated. “Do you like it here, though?”

“I do. I actually love it here. I’ve had more fun in the last three weeks here than the past three decades in Remy. But that’s only because you’re—” He stopped himself before he could finish the sentence.

Because you’re here. I would have bet everything I owned on those being the words he was thinking. My heart began hammering so loudly in my chest I was sure even Oggy and Willow would have heard it from the kitchen.

What did Claude mean? That the reason he wanted to go back to Remy was because, once we’d discovered the ritual, I’d no longer be at Stinkhorn Manor? I would return to the city, and my life, and my job. I’d hopefully get my paper published and begin work on the follow-up paper. And Claude would return to the U-Rail. Would I still see him twice a day?

Would that be enough?

I wasn’t sure how we’d stumbled into the conversation, or how far either of us was willing to take it. But my pulse was racing and my stomach felt as though a thousand butterflies had burst simultaneously from their cocoons, and part of me needed to know if this could go any further.

My voice wobbled. “Claude... maybe once we’ve figured this whole mess out and we’re both back in Remy, would you... would you like to meet up? Maybe?”

“Like date?”

“Maybe.”

He let out a shaky breath, and a smile tugged one corner of his mouth. “Yeah, I think I would like that.”

I tried to hide my smile behind my palm, and then behind my napkin. Nothing had been agreed upon, no plans as of yet, but Claude had finally said yes to a date with me. Or the notion of a date. Where would I take him? Or perhaps he’d want to choose.

Ooh , or the Remy Botanical Gardens. They had such a beautiful open-air bar and restaurant. Under the stars, with strings of festoon lights. In the summer when the jasmine flowered, it smelled incredible.

But maybe that was too romantic. Maybe I was getting ahead of myself.

“I guess you don’t have to sell or rent the house,” I said in an attempt to reground the conversation. Otherwise, I’d go floating off into fantasyland. “If you move back to Remy, nothing’s to say you can’t keep the property exactly as it is. The sentry fae do an excellent job of managing it. I mean, you’d need to look into the running costs, but perhaps you could insist the guests pay with actual money for their food and board.”

Claude hmmed as he chewed his pasta.

“There’s a lot to think about, but we still have time. The solstice isn’t for another five weeks.”

“You’re right,” he said, and patted his mouth with his napkin. “I should definitely try out some of the other things you had in mind while I practise the weather magic.”

“I agree.”

“What were you about to say earlier, before we were interrupted by those men? Something about the ritual being embarrassing?”

My face flamed with heat. I’d forgotten about that, and truthfully, I was thankful when we were interrupted. That I didn’t have to say what I’d been thinking.

“Uh...” I needed to change direction. I had a few other ideas that were worth looking into. “What if we tried psilocybin mushrooms? Magic mushrooms,” I confirmed at Claude’s arched brow.

“You want me to get high?” His voice went all squeaky at the end.

I laughed. “Yes. Gods, that sounds kinda wrong, but psilocybins have been taken as part of ceremonial rituals for centuries. Plus, they’re widely acknowledged to unlock focus. Intensify concentration. My thoughts are as follows: one, the ritual itself might be the taking of the shrooms; or two, if it’s not that, getting high and tapping into your extreme focus reserves will make the glamour easier to manifest. You won’t need to try as hard to conjure weather magic.”

“What if neither work? What if I still can’t make the lightning appear?”

“Then we cross that off the list as well, but at least we’ll have tried.”

Claude paused, pursed his lips tight. His brow furrowed. “You keep saying we.” His voice was breathier than it had been a moment ago.

I lowered mine, too. “Because we’re in this together. We know you don’t have to be alone for the ritual to work, so we’ll try things together.” My heart was pounding so quickly I worried Claude would hear it. I casually wiped my palms on my shorts.

“You’re gonna get high with me?”

“Yes. Have you ever been high before?” I asked. His expression seemed very unsure about everything.

“I’m five hundred and ten. Of course I’ve been high before.” He paused. “Just not on mushrooms.”

“So . . . you wanna give it a go?”

“Okay, why not? Worse thing that can happen is it’s not the ritual, but at least we’ll have gotten trippy in a field and had a lovely afternoon.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

I wanted to move into his space, cradle my hand under his jaw, tilt his lips towards mine. Instead, I panicked. “I’m gonna take a real quick shower. See you in a bit.”

Then I pushed my plate away, pushed my chair back, and ran to my rooms. I shut the door behind me and let my head fall backwards against the wood—the way teenagers did in those angsty dramas.

My phone buzzed on the desktop. I’d left it in my room all day, and all throughout dinner, and when I returned to change for bed, there was a whole ream of messages from Mash.

Mash:

Yo, prof Daye, where you at?

Mash:

You’ll never guess what happened.

Mash:

Hey, why are you ignoring me?

Mash:

Oh, by the way, I slept with Marnie.

Mash:

She’s not speaking to me now.

Mash:

I might be in the shit with work.

Mash:

Sonny, where the fuck are you?

Mash:

I miss you. Why are you breaking up with me? Is it because I cheated on you?

Mash:

I promise I’ll keep it in my pants next time.

Mash:

Come on, man, this isn’t funny anymore. Pls msg me back. I have something to tell you.

I puffed out a breath and fired a text.

Me:

What’s up?

And then I abandoned my phone once again to take a shower. There were two missed calls and another message waiting once I got out. I towel dried, and slipped my PJ bottoms on.

Mash:

Call me on FaeTime as soon as you get this message.

I booted up my laptop and pulled on my Wasted Food Makes Great Compost T-shirt. It featured a cartoon of a recycling bin with red-rimmed, shuttered eyes. It was poking its tongue out and making a peace sign with two fingers.

“Sonny! Fucking hell, where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” Mash said, the instant his picture loaded onto the screen. He was topless, leaning against a navy padded headboard. I’d been in his flat several times, and that was not his headboard.

“I’ve been busy,” I replied. I ran through everything that had happened that day. Gardening in the allotment, Mrs Ziegler stealing my pee-bale, frotting with Claude in the courtyard, the teacup-magic progress, the meeting with the lawyer and the estate agent, the subsequent disaster of a home tour, dinner, asking Claude to get high with me, asking him if it would be okay to date. “Very busy.”

“That’s great. Really, super interesting. You can tell me more in a minute, but first I have to tell you what happened today. So, I’m at work right, and I just convinced Monty to take on your Thursday afternoon microbiology lecture—”

“For real? Monty? Of all the people at RU who could take my class, you ask Monty? Also, that’s one of your fucking areas of expertise. Why can’t you do it?”

“Monty’s fine, Sonny Boy. He’ll be fine. You gotta trust the process. Anyway, so I just convinced Monty to do your lecture, and there’s a phone call on the system. For you. I said I could answer on your behalf. Guess who it was?”

“I honestly have no idea.”

“Theodora Sorrel. From the motherfucking—”

“EHK’s Society for Biological Sciences!” I finished. Theodora Sorrel was the journal’s editor-in-chief, to be precise. “What did she want?”

“Oh, only to tell you she’s coming to Remy next month and she wants to set up an official—but informal—meeting for you to discuss your paper.”

“Oh, my gods.” I was on my feet again, my laptop clutched in one hand. “Oh, my gods, this is huge. What else did she say?”

“Nothing much. That she read your proposal and feels like it would be good for their summer quarter, because they have a...” Mash looked at the back of his fist where he’d obviously scribbled some notes. “A sustainable farming and food-production theme. She wants to talk in person, though, face to face, not on a FaeTime call.”

“That’s perfect.”

The EHK’s Society for Biological Sciences!

My dreams were manifesting right in front of my eyes. First Claude, now the most notoriously persnickety editor of the most prestigious and exclusive journal for my science was interested in publishing my paper.

“So how’s it going there, anyway? Have you made the breakthrough you were hoping for?” Mash said. He looked off to the side of the screen, frowned, then fixed his attention back on me.

“Not yet, but I feel like it’s close.” Even if Claude and I didn’t figure out what the ritual was, I reckoned there was enough proof of mushroom-glamour existence to finish the paper. We knew that a small piece of magic could power the soil, feed this incredible house and the surrounding lands and its occupants.

It’d be nice to know what that magic was, but science wasn’t always about spelling things out the first time. It was about taking a few steps closer to the end goal, making headway, the journey of learning.

“Did Dr Sorrel say when she was coming to RU?”

“Yeah, um...” He checked the back of his hand again. “Twenty-first of June. Two p.m.”

“Twenty-first of June? That’s the summer solstice.”

“Is that gonna be a problem? Doc said that’s the only day she’ll be in town. Heading up to East Winterlands after that for a month or something.”

“Shit.” I ran my hands through my hair. The summer solstice. That would mean leaving Claude here the night before the ritual needed to be performed. I wouldn’t be here to see it through. To witness the fruits of our... his labour.

But the solstice was five weeks away. I was certain we would have figured out the ritual by then. I wouldn’t be leaving Claude in the lurch. “Did she leave a number to call her on?”

“Not hers, her PA’s. She said to RSVP by the eighteenth. Otherwise she’ll meet with Dr Styles.”

“Dr Styles? The entomologist?”

“Mmhmm, something about making bees resistant to pesticides.”

“No!” I mean, I was all for saving the bees, but we wanted to be discouraging the use of pesticides, not giving farmers the thumbs up because we’d somehow created nuclear pollinators. “No, no, no.”

“Yeah, I thought you’d like that one. So, you gonna message her now?”

I sat back down. “I need to think about it.” I had so much to lose from either option. Miss my opportunity to publish my paper in the biggest journal around, and hand the spot instead to a person whose article would potentially do more damage than good, or miss the climax of this entire mission. Miss out on Claude performing literal magic.

A magic I’d been dreaming of for decades.

“Okay, but don’t sleep on it. This is once in a lifetime shit.”

Didn’t I know about it?

“So, anyway, now that’s out in the open,” Mash said. “Have you guys fucked yet, or are you still lying to yourself about it being an academic hook-up?”

“No, we haven’t fucked.”

“Liar.”

“How am I lying? I’m fae.”

Mash scrunched up his face in bitter disappointment. “But you’ve done other stuff, no?”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Sonny, you absolute dog!” Mash howled like the werewolf he was. “First Josh, now what’s his name? Claude. You get on your knees for him? Or—”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it.” I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice, but why was everything with Mash about fucking? Fucking or partying. Though partying was usually just a means to get to the fucking. “Sorry, mate.” I decided to be honest, not that my fae-mouth would let me lie. “It’s... complicated. I might have feelings, and there’s so much going on. I still need to figure shit out.”

“Oh, fuck, not the feelings!” he said, dramatically holding the back of his hand to his forehead like a swooning damsel. “But in all seriousness, if you have feelings”—he pretended to gag, which made me smirk—“you should, like, explore them. I’ve known you for ten years and you’ve never had feelings before.”

I gathered up all the air in my cheeks and puffed it out slowly. Mash was right. Dammit, I hated when Mash was right. Though what was the point if I was returning to my uni job and Claude to his underground-railway job? But wait... regular couples had jobs. Regular couples usually only had weekends or evenings to date.

Why did I want more than what regular couples had?

“Enough about me,” I said. “What’s up with you and Marnie? I told you not to fuck her. So, what, you ignored me and now she’s pissed with you? She threatening to tell the dean?”

On the screen Mash’s eyes went as wide as the moons. He shook his hand, then smacked himself in the face. His laptop camera panned over to the left and there, beside my colleague, sat the young gorgon herself. She’d pulled the bedsheets up over her chest, her shoulders were bare, and on her head she wore a silk sleep bonnet.

“Hey, Prof,” she said, a smile stretching across her cheeks.

“Uh, hi, Marnie.” I angled my camera away so that my embarrassment wouldn’t be so easy to spot on the FaeTime screen. I gave a nervous laugh. “Please don’t get my friend into trouble.”

“I won’t, so long as he behaves himself,” she said, tittering.

Ah, boy... Mash behaving himself? Yeah, he was fucked.

“Anyway, mate, I gotta go now.” Mash snatched the laptop back from Marnie. “Don’t forget to message the doc.”

“Yeah, I won’t.”

“Okay, love you, byyyyeeeee,” he said, laughed, and hung up the call.

I closed my laptop, placed it on the desk, and ran my hand through my hair. What was I supposed to do? Chase my dream and meet with Theodora, or stay with Claude and see this ritual through?

I needed to speak with Claude. Maybe he’d be able to guide me one way or another.

“Come in,” Claude called after I’d padded across the short hall and knocked on his door.

I let myself in. He was standing next to the spiral staircase, already wearing his pyjamas, and holding two steaming mugs.

“What took you so long? I asked Oggy for some hot chocolate, do you want some? Honestly, I think that may have been the longest day in history.” He climbed the steps, and I watched his pyjama-clad legs disappear to the mezzanine level. “You coming?”

I couldn’t tell him.

Maybe tomorrow I’d somehow muster the courage.