Lance Hayward
I stared at the landscape passing by as Mom drove us down the country road. We were an hour out of the city. It was rural. Farms with dairy cows munching on their cud. Sometimes a tractor just sitting out in a field. Houses from time to time.
Mom was driving with my little sister in the back of the car. The trunk bulged with suitcases. My backpack was down around my feet. More bags were in the back beside Kylie. The moving truck would be coming tomorrow.
It was surreal to be moving like this.
Surreal.
"There it is," Mom said," nodding to the left. I stared past her to see a thick hedge that seemed to stretch for forever down the road. "That's it. Your Uncle... Your estate, Lance."
I blinked at how long the hedges went. "This surrounds the property?"
"Every bit of it," said Mom. "That's what your dad used to say about it. He'd only been a few times."
"I still can't believe Uncle Mortimer has all this," Kylie said. My little sister spoke my own thoughts. "A mansion? He had a mansion this close to where we lived. Why didn't we ever visit?"
"He liked his privacy," Mom answered. "I only met him on the day I married your father. I think it might have been the first time he'd left the mansion in years. Maybe the only time. Your father's older brother was... eccentric. And those... that date of his... Well, I think she's the woman running the estate. I think that's the gate."
I was about to ask about this woman, when my phone beeped with the text. I pulled it out and saw a text from my friend, Bella Miles. "You there yet?"
Mom turned off the road to a wrought iron gate that filled the break in the hedgerow. The mansion came into view. Three stories tall. Made of grayish stone with ivory creeping up the front in parts. It had rows of evenly spaced windows as it stretched to the right and left.
"Like something out of a horror movie," Kylie said from the back seat.
I texted Bella, "Just arrived."
"Can't believe you own a mansion," she answered. "Your uncle is nuts."
"Yeah," I whispered. I still couldn't believe that this mansion was mine. I was twenty. What right did I have to own a mansion? To be a billionaire. Uncle Mortimer, a man I had only heard about, had left his entire estate to me on a single condition.
I just had to live in the mansion, and I could never sell it. According to the lawyer, the provision in the will was well-written and very enforceable. So Mom, Kylie, and I have packed up to move in and claim my inheritance.
"Do you have the code to the gate?" asked Mom, flashing me a smile. It was a tad fragile.
Yeah, Kylie was right, this felt like a horror movie. A creepy mansion in the middle of nowhere left to me by an "eccentric" uncle that I had never met. It was either that or a Nigerian scam. But the mansion was real. The money, too.
We just had to live in Hayward Manor.
"It's 1353," I said. "Then the pound key."
Mom punched in the code, each button press causing a beep, as she said, "Your father told me that his great-grandfather, Aleister Hayward, had the mansion brought over from England. Can you believe that? Took it apart stone by stone, and brought it here."
"That's insane," I said as the gate creaked open. "You could build it fresh."
Mom shrugged. "Your family is a little strange."
"Dad wasn't strange," Kylie said.
"He was like the... black sheep of the family," Mom said. "I think he wanted to get away from it all." Mom glanced at me, her blonde hair framing her round face. She smiled at me, dimples appearing in her cheeks, her blue eyes gentle. "It's your choice, Lance."
"I'm fine," I said. "I don't have to be a weirdo. I could do a lot of good with this money. So what if we have to live in a giant, creepy mansion in the middle of nowhere?"
"Bet it gets foggy here," muttered Kylie. "Just rises off the moors and spills down over us, bringing evil. Like the Baskerville Hound."
"Which was a prank," Mom said. "And there are no moors around here. That's back in England."
Mom drove down the driveway, which was made of a crushed, white stone that stood in contrast to the green of the lawn. A washed-out green. Dark. Almost shadowy. I swallowed as the mansion came closer and closer.
The street we lived on, a cul-de-sac two blocks long, could fit on this driveway and still not quite reach the front of the mansion. There, the driveway broke apart into a loop that let cars pull up before the mansion. A lane shot off down the side of the mansion. Maybe it led to a garage or something.
Just as we were pulling up, the twin doors of the mansion, each maybe twelve feet tall and fashioned of dark wood, opened. A woman stepped out wearing a French maid's uniform. A very... scanty French maid's uniform.
I blinked at the tall and leggy maid in white, thigh-high stockings held up by garters that vanished beneath her rather short and puffy skirt. Black with layers of ruffled lace peeking out. The dress fit her tight in the torso and cupped her large breasts which seemed about to overflow her bodice. My cock went to full stiffy at the sight of her.
A golden garter encircled her left thigh just above the top of the stockings, a band of lacy cloth. Her black hair fell down her back, a maid's cap perched on her head. She was a mature woman, a MILF-maid or something and...
I blinked. I could have sworn there was something shadowy behind her.