Secret of Epping Forest, Bridget Kathleen [little red riding hood ebook free .txt] 📗

On a summer night—any night, really—a solitary mansion sits deep in a forest in England. Its front yard is littered with tiny, colorful flowers; sparse patches of grass dot the unkempt grounds. The brawny oak front doors sit silently. They long to be opened, their intricately etched design gone unnoticed for far too long.

The moon does its best to shine down on the mansion’s withering magnificence, but the trees shield it from view, hiding it from the world. The mansion sits there, untouched, like a forbidden treasure. The trails that once led to it are long gone, having been reclaimed by Mother Nature. No one comes to visit anymore; no one cares to, not for over a hundred years.

The mansion sits there desolate with no one to disturb it, though it wants to be disturbed. It welcomes any guest adventurous enough—or brave enough—to take a gander. It has grown older, sinking deeper and deeper in on itself. Finally, the realization of total isolation takes its toll. Perhaps no one will ever walk its beautiful halls or gardens again. What was once a grand home now slowly turns to waste on what will soon become its grave. But, as the night becomes morning, the mansion creaks, waking up.

The air is still cool. The dew covering the grass and flowers acts as a mirror, and the mansion sees its old reflection once again. The bricks are chipped, and half the windows are broken or boarded up. The view of it says to stay away, but from the inside the mansion pleads: come take a look at me! The mansion shelters a powerful secret, one that protects its identity. Because of that secret, the mansion fears it will never be loved again.

As morning turns into midday, the grass and the dirt and the flowers soak up the dew. Even as the sun beats down on the trees, the mansion is still well hidden from prying eyes. A mother deer walks with her babies. They sniff the front gates. And then, quite suddenly, the mother deer and her babies run off, as if scared by something. For a moment it is quiet, and the mansion heaves a heavy sigh. But all too soon, it looks like, as a teenage girl with long, pretty auburn hair stumbles upon its gates. The mansion gazes down at the girl as she gazes up at it in bewilderment. For so long, the mansion has waited for this moment, begged for this moment, for a visitor to look at it in awe.

The girl grasps the gates with both hands and pushes them open. She grimaces as the rusty metal creaks, but to the mansion it couldn’t have sounded more beautiful. And with every step the girl took, the mansion watched—always it watched. The girl looked this way and that, as if she had never seen something so astonishing in all her life. And perhaps she hadn’t.

As the girl made her way up to the front doors, she looked up as high as she could and smiled at the mansion, her dark-blue eyes twinkling. At long last she rested her hands on the front doors and pushed with all her might.

“Hello?”

Her voice echoed throughout the mansion, breathing new life into it.

Text: This story belongs to me and me alone. Use of the front cover is by pure-insomnia on Deviantart.com, asked with permission. And thank you for reading. Enjoy your read.
Publication Date: 12-02-2011

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