Rough Draft/Teaser - Esme's Mansion (Blueberry Inflation)

Byron stopped to catch his breath. His waistcoat hung from his shoulders, ripped to shreds by his encounter with the ghoul. The mansion’s chill bit harder now that he was almost naked. Except for the damned belt. He stopped to look at it in the reflection of a floor length mirror, wondering if the manse’s owner had conjured it in this exact spot as a taunt. The belt was secured around his stomach, its buckle aligned over his belly button. It dug into his flesh, the newly accrued deposits of fat he’d earned from his encounter bulging over and under the leather. He tried to dig his thumbs underneath the waistband to no avail, the belt’s purpose apparently hadn’t been fulfilled, and it refused to come off.

The badger sighed, wincing when the buckle’s laughing face jabbed him when he breathed in.

“Still trying to remove my gift, detective?” Esme’s voice drifted out of the belt’s skull buckle, still crackling with static like an old radio.

Byron held his silence.

“The cold shoulder?” Esme said, a suppressed laugh stuttered out of the skull. “You could stand to be a little more hospitable, mister Byron. Do you like that? Being called mister? I could just call you Byron, if you prefer, after all I think we’re growing rather close in the short time we’ve known one another. You could say we have a rather... ‘tight’ bond, wouldn’t you say?”

Byron felt the belt shrink around his stomach, forcing him to wheeze from the constriction.

“There you are! Sorry for the unpleasantness, I had to check you were still alive. It’s so difficult to keep track of who is, and who isn’t a ghost these days.”

Byron snarled. “You’re sick.”

“I was,” Esme replied with a flat tone. “Though it’s all behind me now, I was quite the raver before I met my end. I loved the heat of the crowd, the way you could feel your blood pulse with the music, the bright lights and the colours. The tinnitus wasn’t much fun, especially for me, rabbits and their big ears you see,” he giggled.

Something amused him, though Byron couldn’t decipher exactly what it was through his endless ramble. Everything seemed amusing to Esme. When he saw the rabbit in person he was always smiling, especially through his eyes. Like he was always conscious of a punchline that no one else had fully comprehended. His smirk condescended, and his voice patronized. Everything about the neon rabbit felt like it was meticulously engineered to get under Byron’s skin. And if Esme had his way, that might be his ultimate fate.

Byron closed his eyes and shook his head. He slapped his cheeks to try and regain a bit of focus. But all he could think about was the boar, Caz, and the way he was reduced to confetti. Literal, inanimate, plain paper confetti. The entire sequence of events played over in Byron’s head, on loop. He could hear the serpentine hiss so clearly, he had to check over one shoulder to make sure there wasn’t a hose waiting in the shadows for him, like there was for Caz.

Magic was a staple of the world. It wasn’t widely practised, at least not publicly. And definitely not to the morbid extremes Byron had witnessed tonight. He knew there were spells which could transform the body. Some detectives even used them to become inconspicuous. It was easier to tail someone if you took the form of a feral house cat, or a stray pigeon. Byron even understood that people used magic for sexual gratification, that wasn’t a shock to him. No, what surprised him was the absurdity of watching a fully grown man lose everything that made him a person in a matter of seconds; a man who, an hour earlier, was happily chatting to his friends about the blueberry wine they served at the party.

In five minutes, the boar had become a balloon. Taut, reflective, hollow, transparent, and completely immobilized by his own mounting pressure. It was a grotesque sight to Byron, and made him fear for his own life if that was the sort of oddness he was up against. That should have been the thing which unsettled him the most, but it wasn’t.

What chilled Byron was how happy Caz looked before he exploded.

As if taunting him for his introspection Byron found another handful of glittery confetti stuck to his leg. He leaned forward to brush it off, and squinted as the light from Esme’s cursed belt caught the surface of something on the floor and reflected back at him. He reached out and wrapped his fingers around the neck of a wine bottle.

“Did someone forget their drink in the hallway?” Esme taunted.

“You’re not going to stop taunting me until I reply, aren’t you?”

Esme giggled through the static.

“Fine then Esme, I’ll entertain you for a while, but I’m going to get out of here eventually,” Byron raised the wine bottle to his face. It was sticky, and the label appeared faded. “Why is this bottle so ancient compared to the rest?”

“It’s a fine vintage, of course!”

Byron rolled his eyes. He could smell a sweetness coming from down the hall. Not wanting to stray off the path laid out for him and encounter another one of Esme’s ghouls, he followed the scent to its root. A heavy metal slab served as a door, sticking out like a sore thumb against the eloquent mansion’s rustic aesthetic, even with the mess of neon lights Esme had strewn about the place.

“And this door, why is it here?”

“To be a door, silly.”

Byron took a deep breath and weathered the discomfort of the belt.

“If you want me to talk to you, Esme, then I’m going to request you be a little bit less whimsical, and make a little bit more sense. Can you do that? Because, if you can’t, you might as well deal with me where I stand because I won’t play your demented games any longer.”

The silence was deafening. He called his captor’s bluff; the ball was in their court now. Byron prepared for the worst, but after a moment, the silence broke and the skull hissed with familiar white noise. “Fine,” Esme had agreed to play along for now. But there was no telling when their gleeful taunting would turn sinister. Byron heard a resounding metal thud from the door, and it slowly moved inwards, releasing a smell of blueberries into the hall that was so thick, he swore he was going to choke on it.

“It’s so thick!” Byron exclaimed. He raised his hands to cover his nose.

“You’ve found the winery. To be more specific, you’ve found the juicing room. Just over that threshold is where ALL the wine for my parties is made. Every last drop. We use an incredibly special method passed down from my benefactor, who learned it from an ancient mixological tome. Adelb--” Esme stopped before they revealed the full name of their master, Byron growling in annoyance. “Almost gave up the ghost, literally.”

‘Literally,’ did that mean Esme’s master was a spectre like he was?

Esme started again, “be careful, detective, I know how much you hate my fun and games, and one wrong move could have you joining the production line for my next vintage.”

Byron stepped through the doorway gingerly. The skull buckle’s eyes brightened a path for him, though he still wanted for an actual torchlight. It cast a deep blue out from its eye sockets, tinting everything with its beam. The room seemed normal enough. There were large vats filled with blueberries and they weren’t moving or laughing when Byron inspected them, so he presumed they were normal produce, if a little oversized. His shoes occasionally squelched into a puddle of sticky juice, but it wasn’t enough to deter his advance.

“Well Esme, what’s so special about this room?” Byron questioned the rabbit; he knew Esme was listening.

“You don’t hear that?”

There was a dripping noise. Then a rhythmic, wet swallowing, followed by the sound of something straining under pressure. Byron assumed it was just the machinery used for creating the wine. He looked around, aiming the skull’s light at the deeper recesses of the room, turning up a great balloon that was swollen and dark with squeezed juice. It stretched from one side of the room to another, and almost touched the ceiling. Hazarding a guess, it had to be at least twenty to thirty feet wide and almost as tall. “I should have figured you would store the juice in something weird like a balloon after what you did to that boar.”

“That’s, not, a, balloooooooon~”

Byron’s eyes widened. “No,” he whispered under his breath. “No, no, it can’t be. You didn’t.”

“Surprise!” Esme manifested in the air above Byron, clapping his hands and blinding him with the yellow flash of a dozen ceiling lights.

The enormous balloon Byron mistook for an inanimate object had a face. It was a fat, round face with a slight goatee and moustache. His wavy hair was wet and plastered to his head, the ends dripping with a thick liquid that smelled overwhelmingly of blueberry. It was dark violet and leaked from everywhere it possibly could. His cheeks were so distended with the stuff that it looked like he had two basketballs stuffed in either one; his double chin was blown up too, ringing his neck like a smooth, wet innertube.

“That can’t be a person!”

Esme spun in the air, giggling incessantly at the badger’s distress. “You’re going to hurt his feelings!”

“Who was he?” Byron demanded.

The rabbit shrugged. “Don’t know; don’t care. All I know is that he glugged the entirety of that ancient wine bottle you found in the hall. Here’s a fun fact by the way: The blueberries from the master’s island are very potent, and they’re seeded with his magic. If you let the vintage remain undrunk for too long, say... a hundred years or so, then it becomes deadly when ingested.”

Esme stopped spinning, smiling at the engorged blue creature. He was smiling so earnestly, his eyes half-closed with the pupils rolling back. “Though I wouldn’t say the lad minds being a living juice factory, he’s practically ready to BURST with how happy he is to contribute to the master’s wine stores. Oh just think of the delicious alcohol he’s going to be processed into. I’m partial to the wine made from the ‘end’ of the juicing lifecycle.”

Byron noticed another quivering shape, pressing itself tightly against the blueberry man’s right breast. He squinted and realized it was another human. This one could still be recognised as such, at least. He could maybe save them. Their mouth encircled the massive one’s engorged nipple, drinking the juices straight from the tap in a morbid, intimate display. Byron wasn’t sure how to feel about what he was watching. His gaze drifted back to the docile face of the enormous one, and found it even more elated than before. Were both of them enjoying this? What kind of madness made someone ‘happy’ to swell to such proportions, let alone inflict the same fate on their friend by having them drink from their own breast?

“You really shouldn’t gawk like that,” Esme checked their nails, giving Byron a look they hadn’t given them before.

Boredom.

“I told you before, didn’t I? Everyone who comes to my party does so knowing what will happen to them. They might not have an ‘exact’ idea of their fate, whether they’ll end up as a party balloon, or as a fountain of delicious blueberry juice, but they ‘are’ aware. Deep down, in their hearts, their souls, whatever you want to believe in--they chose this.”

Byron shook his head. “You’re lying,” he snapped. “No one would CHOOSE to be this monstrous, or to end up like this before they met their end!”

Esme sighed. “What is it you’re so angry about?”

The larger blueberry rumbled. His left moob, the one not attended to by his thirsty companion, ran with more juice. He was producing more than his body could handle. Every litre that poured out of his nipples, his belly button, his mouth and from underneath his wide, ocean of belly, was replenished tenfold in an instant. He had a wide, heavy shape to begin with, but now his body was beginning to round out into more spherical proportions. His friend had been relying on the previous shape of the large berry’s body to lay upon his flank, while he guzzled endlessly. As the rolls and contours of his body firmed up with overabundance, the smaller berry slipped down, unable to grip the smooth, wet, royal blue skin of his friend.

Byron felt some relief. “You’re safe now,” he approached the smaller berry. A bloated man who had grown disproportionately wide from his transformation. His eyes were hazy and glowing with dim purple light, bewitched by whatever latent magic saturated the juice.

“Safe?” He shook his head, then rubbed his stomach. Even without the larger berry to constantly funnel juices from his breast into his mouth, he was still growing. Byron’s heart sank. He was too far gone, and like Caz, he looked happy about it.

“You... you could be squeezed, right? You could have all this juice taken out of you, and go back to normal. You don’t want to end up like HIM, do you?” Byron pointed at the rumbling, lead balloon of juice. It didn’t grow any bigger, but it continued to ripen with every passing second. The badger took an alarmed step backwards when he noticed that the pressure was causing juice to spray from the blue blimp’s nipples like a blocked hose, there was probably too much juice trying to get out by now, and not enough space for it to flow. He was doomed. He was going to burst.

Byron started looking for a way out. His altruism fled, and he wanted to be as far from the ticking time bomb as possible. Damn it, he was going to blow! And he’d share his fate if he swallowed any of that juice, which would be a much more difficult thing to avoid if the container ruptured and flooded the room.

“Esme. Let me out!”

Esme looked at Byron with surprise. “What about him?” Esme pointed at the short haired man rubbing the taut, pulsating blue expanse of his friend. “You could still save him, he PROBABLY won’t burst for like... another hour, or two, maybe.” The rabbit shrugged. “I’ll be honest with you Byron; I wasn’t expecting the vintage his friend swallowed to be so potent. I was hoping I would get a good month of production out of him, but well, magic is funny - it reacts to emotions. And he wanted to be a blueberry so badly he could burst.”

Esme clicked their fingers. One of their small blue ghosts brought them an umbrella and a rainproof poncho. “And he’s about to get his wish. If that smaller lad stays, the force of the explosion is going to pop him too, are you sure you don’t want to save him?”

“I... I can’t!” Byron, panicked, was looking for a way out. He ran across the tiled room, tripping over a grate, and almost hitting his head on the floor. It was running with violet, and if he tasted a drop of it, he would be a waddling juice balloon in minutes. Then he wouldn’t have to just content with Esme’s sick tour of the mansion, but the inevitability of popping like an over-pumped balloon.

The rabbit grinned. “You can’t what, mister detective?”

Byron staggered to his feet, ran to the door closest to him (a normal, wooden door this time), and began trying to turn the knob. “I can’t save them from themselves, they want to blow up like blimps filled with fruit juice, fine, but I don’t want things to end like that!”

Esme commanded one of his ghosts through the keyhole, which swung open violently from the force of Byron’s pounding. He fell forward on to a plush red carpet slowly staining blue from the overflow of the production room.

“Mooooooooore...” The smaller blueberry made himself eye-level with the larger berry’s navel, and drank from the ceaseless flow of fresh, sticky violet that poured out in a futile attempt to decrease the pressure.

“Mmmmooooooooooore!” The larger berry rumbled out the first, and only word Byron had heard from it. Its eyes opened and its expression was one of enlightened pleasure. He witnessed the bulging shape take its final swell, squishing to conform against the angular shape of the room it inhabited before the door slammed shut and a quaking of the mansion heralded its destruction. Juice seeped from the edges of the door, and oozed out of the keyhole.

Byron had just watched not one, but two partygoers fall prey to Esme. And worse still, he had a slim chance of saving one of them, and he didn’t take it.

The skull buckle hissed. “Such a shame, but despite their short tenure, we got an ASTONISHING volume from both of those naughty blimps.”

Byron sat there, wet from the waist down and sticky, wondering what horror Esme would force him to confront next.

“You seem a little down, detective. Is there anything I can do to help brighten your mood?”

Byron snarled. “You could stop popping people like cheap balloons, that would be a start.”

Esme’s laugh echoed, not from the buckle, but from all around.

“Very well, detective. Next time? No popping. I promise...”