A Dark and Stormy Night

Case Journal of Nathaniel Faust, Curse-breaker and Master of Mystic Science

19 Mar. 20–

Locksholm Museum would be better served to call itself a mausoleum. Only the dead remain—and they cannot leave.

I’m not sure what woke me, the flash and sound were equally magnificent, like gods fighting to prove themselves superior to each other. I sat against the door, looking out at the sea of rain falling not two feet from my face. It was that early storm that was on all the news headlines. Nearly the entire coast had some kind of flooding. The walk had become a small river, pooling at the bottom of my stoop. I half expected a fish to leap into my lap. Master always loved storms like this, when the city faded, and we were plunged into a realm all our own.

From the edge of the gloom, where the weak flicker of a streetlamp met the very edge of the house’s main lights, a stumbling shape pushed through the deluge. The shadow hesitated, turning around several times before stopping in front of the gate. A familiar sight at this address.

“Ho!” I called into the torrent, “you looking for Mr Faust?”

“Y-yes,” a man’s voice stammered in response.

“Well, come in then! You found him!” I stood, opening the door. The man waded up the walk, ignoring the depth of the pool. His leather boots were beyond salvage anyway, and he would’ve been drier had he just stepped out of the Hudson.

“You can leave your boots on the mat, I’ll get a fire started in the parlor soon. Would you like some cocoa? Blue Goat?”

“Cawffee?” the man said in a Boston accent that made Ma sound like a normal person.

“Sorry, don’t drink that.”

He let out a sigh as he peeled off the sodden footwear. “Cocoa’s fine.”

I directed him to the parlor, forcing the house spirits to comply with regular spatial relativity for now, while I made my way to the kitchen. The tea kettle sat right where she left it, probably still half full of long-cold water. The microwave whirred softly as the wind started picking up to a roar. I was out of marshmallows.

“One cocoa!” I swept into the parlor carrying a flower-patterned chipped mug of steaming drink.

My guest thanked me, sitting, at my urging, in the fireside chair as I prepared the fireplace. I let him warm up for a few minutes before beginning conversation. He seemed grateful for the break, sinking into the cushion, putting his dripping paisley socks up against the stone fireplace and sipping deeply from the mug. Without his hat and coat, I was able to get a good look at him for the first time. He looked about fifty, with short graying hair, bloodshot eyes, and a bit of a gut.

“You ever gonna ask why A’m here? Or just look at ma belly?”

I usually wait until hospitality’s been observed.”

“That’s nice. Ah usually don’t get that much freedom in ma work.”

“Where do you work?”

“The Lacksham museum.”

“Boston?”

“Plumhaven. In Middlesex County, near Lowell.”

“Never been.”

“Nawone does, unless they’re lahst.”

“I suppose I’m about to be the exception?”

“Bingo.”

I recorded his story with the stylus of Setne (which doesn’t care about accents, apparently):

I’m Joe Connor, daytime caretaker of the Locksholm museum. Believe me, I wouldn’t be here in this wicked rain if I didn’t have to. My boss sent me with a message for you. It got ruined on my way here, but it was basically that I had to bring you back with me, because the museum’s “haunted” or whatever. Every night for the last five years, the alarms go off, even though nothing’s in there. The last nine night caretakers quit out of nowhere, leaving me and the owner without any rest for the last few weeks, since we can’t get anyone else to work there.

“So… you think it’s haunted because of a computer glitch?”

“It’s not a [expletive] computer glitch! The whole [expletive] building goes dead every night at 3 !” Joe spit his cocoa at me.

“That makes it more interesting then.” I accepted the case.

Joe’s clothes were in no condition to travel, so I lent him some of Benton’s that were left in his room the last time he was here. While he got dressed, I got my blade and coat from my study, electing to bring the Book of the Benevolent Many over the Testament of the Eternal Wanderer. Once kitted up, I went back and brought Joe to the stained glass window shaped like a world map, almost yelling goodbye to her before catching myself. I had Joe picture Plumhaven before pushing us into the window.

Even though I’d warned him beforehand, Joe still freaked out when we stepped forward into the town center. It was raining here too, but with less of a majestic light show, more of a soaking chill that made me, once again, grateful for my coat. The town was even smaller than I’d imagined, with a few red brick buildings clustered on the bank of a slowly flooding river on one side, and a few more wooden buildings disappearing into the woods on the other. The only lights were from a pair of streetlights on either end of the “street,” and a dim exterior lamp on a tiny building purporting to be a local deputy’s station.

“So, where’s this museum?’ I asked, expecting it to be one of the small riverside buildings that almost surely had a flooded basement now. However, Joe, still doubled over like he was about to spit up more cocoa at me, pointed a shaky finger over my shoulder. Turning again, I saw that the road continued on beyond the edge of the town until it disappeared into the darkness.

“Is it far?” I was about to ask when an enormous bolt of lightning struck somewhere in the woods, shattering the dark night for a moment. This brief illumination was enough to show the large mansion sitting on top of a low cliffside. The resulting BOOM! Shook the ground and even sloshed some water from the river into the street.

A second, quieter bang sounded behind us, followed by a string of curses. The deputy splashed over to us, looking out at the woods with a pair of binoculars.

“Either of you two see that? Was it in the woods?” he asked us. When we told him that yes, it was in the woods, he swore again and asked if we “two good citizens” would help him make sure it hadn’t started a fire. Though it seemed unlikely that any sort of wood-fed fire could catch, much less survive in this downpour, the deputy and I were pretty quickly stumbling around in the woods, using his flashlight mostly on our feet to keep from tripping on roots. Joe stayed behind in the station, claiming (understandably) that he was worried about hypothermia.

I learned from Deputy Jack that the Locksholm mansion had been originally built in 1647 by the Viscount Locksholm (shocker) as a dowry for his only daughter. The town of Plumhaven grew up on the edge of the family’s land, using the Plumcreek River, so named due to the beach plums that once supposedly grew on its banks (the furthest inland they’d been found at the time), to trade lumber to the coast. However, since the river was never much more than a moving swamp, the industry dried up long before the American Colonies’ Rebellion. By the early 1800s, the family fortune dried up, and they moved back to Europe to marry back into other, more wealthy aristocratic families. The current resident is one of their descendants from a different branch of the family, who maintains it as a museum for tax purposes. Most of the remaining population are descendants of those original families, and almost all of them work in Lowell or another town.

“Do you smell smoke?” Jack stopped suddenly, turning the light around the area. The unbroken darkness of the woods was the abyss of Kurokek. It would’ve been an ideal spot for a murder.

“Yeah, a little bi–”

He was gone. The light sat on the marshy ground, pointing off into the gloom. I picked it up, shining it around the ground again. No footprints other than what we left, I noted, and it would’ve been impossible to go anywhere on foot without leaving tracks in this weather.

“Hello?” I yelled, “Jack?” I wandered methodically (40-step box), calling for him. Occasionally, I heard rustling noises, but it was impossible to figure out whether that was the Deputy, rain, or something else. After a few circuits, I caught another, stronger whiff of smoke. Looking down, the mud at my feet was lightly coated with charred wood chips. The grass was burned in a lightning-scar shape.

There was another rustling, and a flash of movement whooshed by at the corner of my sight. When I spun to get a better look, there was nothing there. Thinking it must’ve been Jack, I dashed as well as I could in the direction I’d seen the blur heading.

Somehow, after a short while, I emerged on a gravel road next to a pair of imposing iron gates, whose seal was emblazoned with a coat of arms: twin wolves with a… harp? The great old mansion sat a short ways past the barrier. I knew the town lay behind that, but… it should also have been right behind me. I hadn’t gotten that turned around. I don’t think.

As I approached the gate for a better look, a crackling voice came over an intercom somewhere. “Nathaniel? You got here ok?” Joe had beaten me. At my affirmative, the gate clicked, and the heavy bars swung silently outwards to admit me. Joe stood in the doorway of what looked like a cross between a guard checkpoint and a guesthouse, waving me over.

“Have you seen the deputy?” I asked after hustling out of the wet.

“Ya,” he nodded, moving to take my coat, “he gave me a ride here.”

“Oh,” I said, “he must have doubled back without me. Strange.”

“He said something about pointing ya in this direction. Also said that lightning blew up a tree.” That explained the charcoal still stuck to my boots, at least. Though not why the deputy left me stranded in the woods.

“Ya should take off those clothes, man,” Joe not-so-subtly demanded, “we don’t want ya dripping water all over the place.” he pointed at a worn janitor’s jumpsuit, complete with a stitched-on name tag reading “Steve.” It was a little loose, but the sleeves and legs were at least about the right length. I was turning to grab my blade and other equipment when a strong voice bellowed from the hallway door.

“Welcome, Mr Faust, welcome to my house,” a small old man sporting a wispy combover strode into the security room. “I hope you find yourself welcome here, coming on such short notice in all this nonsense.” He waved a hand at the window at nearly the same instant another flash split the sky.

“I take it that you are Mr Vincent Sterling, master of this house?”

He bowed, “At your service, and you are the man who took care of that business in Concord last April.” His accent eluded me. Somewhere between transatlantic and… something else.

“So that’s how you heard of me,” I returned his bow, “well, I usually prefer not to let my reputation precede me, so as not to disappoint my clients, but I suppose—”

“Mr Faust, I assure you,” Vincent’s tone shifted from welcoming to cold and businesslike, “there is nothing you could do to disappoint me.” Another peal of thunder punctuated his sentence.

Joe dismissed himself, going up a little stairway in the guard building to his apparent room, leaving me alone with the deceptively hearty old man. Vincent brought me down the passage that connected to the main house, where we were greeted by an enormous portrait of a woman cradling a baby.

“Allow me to introduce to you the lady who built this house, Mrs Catherine Locksholm, daughter of Edward, and wife of the first Vincent Locksholm.”

“But you said your surname was—”

“Yes, but I like to think of myself as a true Locksholm—much grander than my parents who never left the Scottish countryside, I’m sure you understand.” He contemplated the portrait for a few moments longer, then led me to a small dining room, where a plate of chicken with rice and carrots was set out, along with a bottle of plum “essence” sparkling water.

“I hope you’ll accept this as a humble thank you for your hurrying here,” Vincent said as I started eating, “Joseph told me you gave him cocoa, but didn’t eat anything yourself, so we reheated some leftovers.”

I garbled my thanks through a mouth full of not-microwaved-dinner chicken, and cleared the plate. It was one of the best things I’d had in a while, even with the bubbly (of which I took a couple agonizing polite sips). While I ate, my host told me basically the same story as Joe, about how the entire complex seemed to go offline at the same time every night without fail. Joe, however, never mentioned the fact that, while the other security guards had suddenly left, yes, they hadn’t quit. In fact, they seemed to have dropped off the face of the Earth, something with which I assured the old man I was familiar.

“Then you really can help us?” he asked, the hints of tears gleaming in the corners of his eyes.

“As no one else can.” I wiped my mouth with my napkin and thanked him for the meal. A clock somewhere struck 1:00. I hadn’t realized how late it already was.

“I suppose I should go take my rest now,” the old man suddenly started acting, well, old. His hands started shaking as the chime ended, and his voice became more of a rasp than a bellow. “With you here, I doubt I’ll have any trouble worrying about waking up in the morning,” he said as he doddered up the grand staircase, “the museum—house—is yours to explore. I hope with these,” he pressed a key ring into my hand, “you find no obstacles between yourself and the bottom of this little mystery.” As he closed his bedroom door, he had one more parting phrase: “I fervently hope to see you again at my dinner table.”

I stood there in the hallway for a long moment, mulling over what to do next. There were only seven keys on the ring, which seemed too few for a house—museum—of this size, though I hadn’t yet encountered a locked door in the place. They might have been mostly unlocked, I mean, who would come all the way out here to steal anything?

Deciding that I should probably familiarize myself with the layout before the awaited hour, I began to search through the rooms. The ground floor was normal enough for a house/museum—a few galleries of paintings, mostly portraits from the 17th and 18th centuries, some old furniture (and a harpsichord), a kitchen connected to a tiny cafe area, and a couple storage rooms. These were locked, but they all opened with the same key, and had really nothing so special to look at. Mostly more furniture, linens, and a heap of miscellaneous junk that would’ve made a decent puzzle room. The second floor had mainly bedrooms in various color schemes, not very interesting, unless one of them was specifically haunted.

The third floor, however, was mostly taken up by the library, which featured displays of heraldic and medieval artifacts from the family’s history, as well as a collection of early colonial maps and items from a variety of several Algonquin nations (which were, unfortunately, all mixed together without any more specific information). These were things that might attract a specter. I was in the middle of cataloging the collection, brushing past a panoply of extremely shiny rapiers to look at a copy of Dowe’s Secrets, when the 3 o’clock chime sounded. The doors slammed shut, the electric locks sealed, and the power went out.

Well, that’s why I needed keys. I reached for my eternal flame lighter, only to realize I’d left it, and the rest of my equipment, back in the guard’s house. Great. Somewhere on a lower floor, what sounded like a door knocker was booming so loudly I could hear it over the rain that kept pattering away outside. Keeping in mind how weak my soul was after rebirth, I cautiously formed a small orb of orangish light—which was already starting to dissolve into gray mist. I’d forgotten to get some spirit spirit before I left, so I probably wouldn’t be able to make more than one or two other spells before I’d be out. I pulled one of the rapiers out of the arrangement, something that might protect me. The vine-like guard offered some slight comfort as I slowly crept down the hall.

I concentrated on trying to hear everything around me, but between the tempest outside and the creaking of my footsteps on the old wood panels, I couldn’t exactly have heard a pin drop. The banging noise came in waves, now urgently hammering away, now quiet. It didn’t sound like a code, the number of bangs was always different. It was definitely coming from a lower floor, maybe even a cellar somewhere. I remembered seeing a cellar behind the kitchen, and deciding to circle back to it.

Now on the second floor, my lungs were starting to quiver. The shadows thrown by my tiny ball of safety danced around me, reaching out with their long fingers and changing the portraits into grotesque studies of the dead. The bedrooms were all sealed shut as well, with occasional flashes of light breaking out behind the frames and keyholes. I imagined shadows in these brief flashes. People who hadn’t been there before. The thunder was easily surpassed by the sound from below.

At the bottom of the stairs, the wider hallway ate up my tiny beacon, leaving me squinting to make out my own feet. I was forced to trail my hand along the wall, always moving closer to the hammering sound. The inky blackness made it impossible to navigate any more finely. I silently cursed my forgetting the contents of my coat.

As my hand brushed against the picture of Catherine, another flash plunged the entire building in a blinding rainbow, shining through the first floor’s stained glass windows. I was blinking the spots out of my eyes when a sudden chill started to wrap around my socked feet. When I knelt to look at them, the movement dimmed my orb, making the floor appear to be covered in a shadowy mist. With my only light source dying quickly, I wasn’t able to contemplate this any further. I pressed on, the cold starting to swirl up my legs and body until my fingers stopped feeling the wall and my breath cast its own shadow.

I’d found the kitchen.

The dark tendrils and the sound were seemingly emanating from the same place: the door to the cellar. I nearly dropped the keyring while fumbling the lock. It took no small amount of shoving to get it open. A slight shower of ice crystals rained down when I finally managed it.

The darkness of this new realm was another level of inky thick, as though I was staring into velvet curtains. My orb couldn’t even reach far enough to illuminate the palm of the hand that guided it. I plunged down into the depths of that place, thinking how much brighter even hell was in comparison. The air was heavy, almost like I was diving underwater.

It wasn’t until I reached the bottom that I realized I hadn’t heard any of the noise that had drawn me here since I’d opened the door. Unfortunately, as I hadn’t come down here before, I was even more blind in that I had no idea what the space was like. I took a couple cautious steps forward until my unshod foot kicked a stone slab, stubbing my toe. I may have hissed a few curses that I hadn’t used much before dying.

Reaching out onto the slab, my hands encountered something unexpected: stiff, squishy flesh. I jumped backwards, knocking into another slab (and getting bruised again, this time on the tushy). This had another body, albeit one that was much firmer than the first. This stiffened (heh) my resolve. Consequences be damned! I expanded the orb, separating it with cutting gestures into a small galaxy of lights, almost half of them gray, dispelling the shadows from the area. Eight slabs were arranged around the room, which was bare otherwise—not even a single bottle of wine or sack of potatoes on the shelves. Seven of the slabs were occupied by bodies, showing a pretty obvious timeline of post-mortem decay, from “essentially mummified” to “could be sleeping.” They were all unnaturally pale for corpses, however, almost like…

“Vampires,” I whispered.

“Correct, Master Faust,” the old man’s voice seemed to echo from every direction. I pressed myself against the wall, holding the rapier at a short distance. Master’s warning came back to me that it’s always best to minimize any possible points of attack when dealing with cursed beings.

“Oh dear, however will I get you there?” He said, appearing above me, gripping the shelves and practically salivating.

I ducked, swirling the lights to blind my attacker while stabbing up at him. He lunged at me, but was just stunned enough that I could dance out of the way. He rammed into the nearest slab, leaving lightning cracks from the point he hit. I wasted no time running up the stairs, praying he was at least slightly concussed enough to be unable to give chase.

I tore through the house, half limping on my bruised toe with lights trailing after me, trying to reach the corridor back to the guard house. Lightning flashed, throwing bat-like shadows through the windows. Hell, I cursed, throwing myself into one of the interior galleries as a series of shattering sounds clinked behind me. I was in the room with the harpsichord, what might’ve been a parlor at some century or another. There was nothing else in the room that was especially notable or useful.

Moving a full harpsichord is much harder than it looks.

The double doors handily blocked by the quintessential example of baroque keyboard, I took a moment to breathe and take stock of potential plans, because I really didn’t want to die again so soon. I had:

A rapier with a silver guard

Two chairs and a sofa that have probably been just for decoration for the past century

A collection of decorative china

One or two spells left in me

…that’s it?!

My momentary peace was shattered along with the instrument as Joe, deputy Jack, and a couple other vampires broke through my barricade. I plunged my sword into the heart of the first through the left door, a kid who looked like he might’ve been a ball boy at some fancy country club. The blow made him fall back, though he obviously didn’t die, because of course I couldn’t get a win so easily. I pushed past the vamp gang, running back down the hall. If I could just make it to one of those broken windows—

“Now, Master Faust,” the old man appeared in front of me, “it would seem you’ve failed to help me.” The others came up from behind, encircling me before I could try anything.

“Sorry, I don’t have a liability policy. You’ll have to just absorb the losses,” I replied, turning to keep an eye on as many of the cursed beings as possible.

“But I have another issue,” the master of the house said, “and you did promise you could help me ‘like no one else can,’ didn’t you?”

“Would you like me to kill you? That I can help with.”

“Enough jokes!” He zoomed within millimeters of my face, his breath choking me with its utter rot. “I could have killed you at any point this night, you’re lucky I’m in a charitable mood.” He knocked my sword to the ground.

“I won’t die here. Not to you,” I promised.

“Then you will give me what I need. And then you will break another of your promises.” He gestured to the vamp gang to force me over to the painting of Catherine. They fanned out behind me, pushing me close to the picture. In the flood of lights from my trail, even if more than half were now faded, I was able to see the incredible detail in the image. The paint was pulsing and swirling, the hallmark of a particular style of magic.

“I can’t bring her back,” I said, “not without my equipment.”

“Oh, but you have a way,” he scratched my neck with the rapier, drawing a small dab of blood, “it just takes a little… sacrifice.” He sliced into the picture with the bloodied blade. With a popping sound, the dimensional fold collapsed, spitting out the body of Catherine Locksholm.

“Finally, after all these years,” the old man whispered as he bent to embrace the woman, “you can finally join me.” A small tear ran down his nose. That would’ve been a great ingredient to have captured, thought the part of me still trying to come up with a plan. Instead of that, though, I simply backed away from the reunion until I was back in about the center of a circle of vampires.

“Hate to break up the moment, but I suppose that’s everything? I’ll bring my invoice when I come back to exterminate you.”

He glowered up at me. “You don’t honestly think you can leave yet? She still needs your blood!”

“No thanks, I pass out if I don’t trust the nurse.” I clapped my hands together, starting to draw in and extend the fingers while rotating the wrists until the fingers were nestled on the opposite palm.

“What are you—stop-stop that!” Vincent started screaming at the other vampires, “Stop him!”

I let out a deep breath, clapping my hands again. The Nine Heavenly Arrows formed above my head in my personal spin on the usual surround-and-cleanse spell. Five of the Nine were smoky gray, but the other four were the usual, strong golden-ringed lances. They circled above my head, forming a circle of potential danger around me.

“Surrender,” I commanded, picking up the rapier from where it’d fallen when Vincent embraced his love, “or die.”

All five vampires hissed, but the servant vamps had started to back away. I tested my luck and took a few cautious steps towards the guard house corridor. None of them tried to stop me, beyond hissing at my departure as I kept going, escaping into the darkness.

The Locksholm vampires had resided in the town of Plumhaven for nearly four hundred years. Catherine, the wife of the manor’s master Vincent, died of consumption less than two years after moving into the house. Her husband had engaged a wide range of doctors, priests, and other renowned healers throughout her illness to no avail. In his desperation, he sought out the student of legendary portraitist Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Nicolaes Maes, who had mastered his teacher’s method of folding space and time to literally capture pieces of reality in his paintings. Locksholm’s hope was that the master could freeze his love, giving him more time to find a cure. He was too late, though not to late to freeze the body before it could decompose.

Maniacally seeking any possible way to bring her back, Vincent stumbled upon the ritual to become a cursed vampire in Dowe’s Secrets of Times Long Gone:

1. Subject must be alive
2. Remove exactly half of subject’s blood; use to make summoning seal
3. Begin plunging area into darkness; if happens naturally due to dusk, even better
4. Chant to summon Băutor de Suflete
5. Have it drink subject’s soul, cursing them to need to absorb souls from blood to survive
6. Feast

He hoped with his new immortality to bring his wife back. However, with no more knowledge of magic, he was stuck until the New York Ingenuity sect came about. He enlisted early in the 1890s, learning from the unabridged version of Dowe’s that one could replace a corpse’s blood with revenant blood. For over a century he waited for a true revenant. He waited for me.

After escaping his cursed town, I contacted my continental comrades in the Confederated Nations’ Spirit sect, whose current leaders were all too happy to work with an old ally before the Ingenuity sect came under new leadership. We commiserated over Alistair’s recent appointment as we sealed the town in an eclipse-scape, then a team of Hunters exterminated the entirety of the town’s vampire population, taking as compensation the collection of various Algonquin-speaking nations’ artifacts. I have been assured these have been returned to their rightful owners’ descendants. For my part, I kept as compensation a silver-basketed rapier; it reminds me of my time with Limerick.

Case Closed

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