"Come in, I bid you welcome"
I wouldn't think about that too hard, not if I were you.
No, what I'd do is take hold of that bell pull and... well... pull it? How deeply that bell's sound seems to echo within! But, you have summoned someone, there are footsteps getting closer, and closer and, just as you are about to faint, the door creaks open. There's a blinding sliver of light and then you can make out that the light comes from a candelabra held in the hand of a surprisingly handsome (one might even say, devilishly handsome) gentleman who, it turns out is the Count himself. He might not be in the first flush of youth, but he's cut from the same cloth as a Greek god. A real silver fox, or should that he wolf?
What the castle lacks in welcome outside, it more than makes up for inside. There are rich velvet drapes, gilded frames (oddly, without a single mirror in sight) and bright, woven carpets on the floor. In the fireplace, a fire crackles and smokes quite comfortingly. From the ruined castle chapel wafts the warm, dense scent of incense swung, long ago, in bejewelled censors. Ah, and there is wine waiting for you on a table!
How kind the Count is!
However, that metallic scent lingers still, although it been joined by such a symphony of other odours that you don't find it at all unpleasant anymore, just one facet of an old house which has stood for many centuries, which has accumulated it's own delicious darkness.
If you want to get a sense of Bloody Woods by Liquides Imaginaires, than I hope I've managed to impart a slight sense of it with that little sensory picture in prose. This is a gorgeous Carpathian castle of a perfume; a perfume which imbues the skin with a sweet, spicy, blend of violet and woody notes from the outset and slowly deepens and expands to include more penetrating layers of wine (and this is wine that feels as if it has lain long in the cask, soaking up the wood and the centuries) and ripening fruit. It's a late autumnal scent, holding within it some of the golden hour between the sun setting and twilight's blue hours. An hour or two later, the perfume shifts again into a powdery layer of incense, still sweetly tinged, but now taking on just a little more of the metallic edge you realise was always there. No wonder it's called Bloody Wood, you think. This wood's sap runs very red indeed and not just with the wine. And yet all these notes seem contained by a chill note, something crisp and cold, as if all those other rich notes were reverberating of cold, creamy stone walls.
As the perfume dries down and begins to fade the reverberation becomes more and more like an echo, you are descending deeper into the castle now, hypnotised by it. And you don't regret the hypnotism, no, not one bit. Just as you don't regret looking into the Count's dark, albeit slightly bloodshot eyes as he swore he loved you, loved you to death, in fact.
Within a few hours, of course, the fire will have died low, the night will be creeping in, the wolves will be singing in chorus and the perfume will have died down to an echo of it's echo; the shadow of it's shadow.
Just a few hours and it will have faded away entirely. Oh, say six or seven; long enough. That moment when you just might find yourself standing at a crossroads with the moon high and silver above you and you look around to see that the castle is so far off in the distance, far beyond the woods. Were you ever really there? Was it a dream? And then you put a hand to your throat and realise that there are two little scars just there and you aren't imagining those. And there's a bottle weighing down your pocket, your very own magic elixir in the form of perfume. Just one spray and you'll have made a choice. Just one spray and you'll be right back there at the castle door.
You shrug as you uncap the bottle and lift the spray to your throat.
It was inevitable, one sniff and you will want to return.
