Chapter 8 – The Secrets of Harson Manor

Bacon and eggs were cooked up for breakfast the next morning, as the coffee flowed into our mugs. We were weary, but there was an undertone of excitement in all of our voices. We were at once terrified, and yet relieved that we were doing something proactive to try to save ourselves. We gathered ourselves together, piling into two different vehicles, as we made our way to the old town center.

Thankfully, the weather had held up, and it was a relatively nice autumn day. We parked the cars and walked for several minutes, stopping at the end of the long, grown-up carriageway. Vines climbed the walls of the old, stately Harson Manor, accenting the peeling white-wash that had long turned gray. It looked imposing and dilapidated, but I believed strongly that we would find answers there.

We’d search the grounds, and the inside, tearing apart the walls if we had to. We split up into two groups; Will and Amy searched outside to the wood line, and James, Tiffany, and I took the inside. I watched from one of the upstairs windows as Amy stopped where the old garden used to be to pick something. Through the cracked window I heard her excited calls to Will that she’d found mint leaves. She hurried to catch up with him, handing him a leaf to chew.

I turned away from the window, wandering to the center of what was once Victorvina Harson’s bedroom. There was a wooden bassinet turned over on its side, rotted away, covered in dust. A queen-sized bed with ratty bedclothes—that once may have been rose colored—still half-covered the dusty mattress. One large, blackened stain on the center of the bed told the end of a tragic tale, without a single word needing to be uttered.

“They didn’t even change the bed sheets after she died? Nothing seems disturbed at all. Has anybody been in this house besides us?” I asked, looking at James over my shoulder.

“I think time forgot it, man,” James said, blowing out a soft breath.

“This is really sad.” Tiffany shook her head slowly as she looked around. “What are we looking for here, Danny?”

The faintest scent of copper seemed to linger in the air, though I thought it was impossible that it could be the smell of blood that old. My mind flew back to the dream image of Victorvina and her child, emerging out of the darkness of their tomb, and I squeezed my eyes shut to will the image away. It was bad enough being in the room where they’d died, without psyching myself out further.

I searched through every drawer, pacing the room checking for loose floorboards, and I checked the walls for hollow spots where something might have been stashed away. I even begrudgingly searched the sheets and under the mattress. I felt nauseous, but I fought it back, though I found nothing and we moved from room to room, coming up empty handed. We met back up outside with Amy and Will, who both looked disappointed.

“Did y’all find anything?” Amy asked as Tiffany walked to the edge of the property line a few feet away from us.

James shook his head, sighing loudly, dusting his hands off on his shirt. “We pried some of the walls off that were busted in places. We found a bunch of spiders, couple of mice, but there wasn’t any sign of anything that shouldn’t be there, or of ol’ Andy himself. He had to have split—” He was interrupted by a cry of alarm from Tiffany. We hurried over to where she stood. “Tiff, are you okay?”

Tiffany had her hand over her mouth staring at the ground. There were a few fallen trees, and tangles of ancient brush and vines that crept over the underbrush of the wood line. Underneath one tree limb was an old, ornate metal box. It was tarnished, horribly dirty, and half-buried, but I could clearly make out a name elegantly inscribed on the top of the box: Victorvina Bludstan.

“Okay. Wow,” Will said finally. “Wonder what that is doing out here, and buried.”

“Time capsule, maybe?” Amy suggested hopefully, barely moving her hand from where it had flown to rest over her heart. We stood there staring at the box, no one moving.

“Well, somebody needs to go down there and get it,” Tiffany said, moving carefully into the hole the trees had made, and I went to help her dig the box out the rest of the way. We unearthed it with some branches, and when we pulled it out we saw it was a little bigger than a tackle box. Both locks on the front of the box were broken.

“Open…Open it, Danny,” Amy insisted, and I flipped the lid open quickly, using the same stick I’d used to unearth it. There was an old diary, a slip of old parchment paper, photographs of Victorvina and her children as they had looked in life, and a necklace with crimson stones and pearls.

“Wow, this is beautiful,” Tiffany reached her hand out to pick up the necklace, then seemed to think better about it. “Damn thing is probably cursed or some shit. Why is it always pretty things that have curses cast on them?”

“The plight of the female,” James said with a chuckle, and Amy smacked him on the arm, scowling. “Sorry. Not funny.”

“This parchment…Is wacky. Look at this,” Will unrolled the paper, holding it up to the light. There was some language written there, but none of us knew how to read it.

“Is that…? That’s not ink, is it?” I reached out to tap the paper in a spot that looked, for lack of a better word, like a large clot of very old blood. “Gross.”

“It’s signed at the bottom by Heinrich von Bludstan, with Andrew Harson’s name below that,” James said scratching his head.

“Oh, *no…*This is one of those marriage deals, and it’s written in blood—double fucked up. We’ve gotta get this translated,” I said, and Will rolled it back up. I grabbed the diary, sticking the photographs in between the middle pages, then I scooped up the necklace as Tiffany made a hissing sound of caution. I paused for a second looking at her blankly. Nothing happened, and I could see on her face that she regretted not grabbing it while she could. “If we survive this, and you still want the pretty cross that belonged to the dead lady, then you can have it. Deal, Tiff?”

Tiffany closed her eyes for a moment as she shrugged. “Sure.”

“We can scan the document, then run it through a translator online. See if we can get anything from it,” James said. “Sometimes watchin’ a lot of TV pays off.”

“Yeah, I guess it does,” I heard Amy say as we walked back down the carriageway to the cars. After a moment more, she spoke up again. “Does anybody else feel like they’re in a really scary, realistic version of Scooby-Doo?”

“If all of this turns out to be just a dude in a mask I’m ‘onna flip my shit,” Will spat. “I’ll be happy it’s over, but I’ll be so goddamned angry.”

+

The evening was growing dark as we read the final translation of the document we’d found earlier in the day. The document was written in German, and what it said would seem a normal marriage contract except the very end:

This contract verifies the marriage of Andrew Kenneth Harson to Victorvina Ursula Bludstan. It is binding, and will only be broken in the event of their souls’ separation. I, Heinrich von Bludstan, hereby vow to forfeit all rights to my daughter, giving her over wholly to Andrew Harson. I understand that I am to make no effort to contact Victorvina, nor any of her line that follow after her.

“Well, that sucks. Harson sounds like a controllin’ dick,” Tiffany said, cracking open beer number three.

“He might’ve had a reason not to let her talk to him. If they were from The Black Forest then maybe they were witches or somethin’,” Amy said, waving her hand through the air as if she was displaying a truth none of us could see.

“Honestly, that doesn’t sound so strange at this point,” I said. I went to pick the diary up off the counter, hoping to find more answers there. “She wrote this in English. Why wouldn’t she write her own diary in German? Unless she wasn’t allowed to speak German…”

“More evidence that Harson was a dick…” James said. “I got up too early. I’m gonna grab me a nap. I suggest that y’all do the same. Nobody gets left alone. I’m plannin’ on stayin’ up tonight. Don’t want to be caught unaware by anything.” James wandered towards his bedroom with Tiffany, and Will and Amy went to their pallet on the floor. I took the diary and kicked back the recliner, flipping the old delicate pages as gently and quietly as I could.

Darkness fell swiftly, as I read Victorvina’s words. She detailed so many things about the early settling of the town, and she talked about the mines, and how bountiful they were. She didn’t mention much about her marriage to Harson, except that he always told her that he was so proud to have saved her from the poverty of her people. Harson told her that he was happy that she was a flourishing member of their little community, and a well loved lady of the church.

Andrew dotes on me and our children, but I feel as though something pulls on his heart. I am afraid that there is a darkness inside him that will one day consume him. Perhaps it will consume us all.

I admit that I had preconceived notions about the Harsons. At first I thought they were just victims of a lack of proper medical care. A little vaccine goes a long way, but they never had the luxury that modern medicine provides. Then I thought that maybe Harson had been an evil man, and still another theory of mine was that Victorvina was a witch. Now I wasn’t certain just who the bad guy was.

Something moved then, in my peripheral vision—a smear of black in the deeper shadows. Nothing was there when I looked, and I told myself it was only my eyes playing havoc with my paranoia before turning my attention back to the page. There was motion again, just out of my line of sight, and when I turned my head to look I saw nothing once again. I listened for any shift of movement, scanning the room out of the corners of my eyes.

There it was.

I saw it, slightly swaying back and forth, like a man waiting for a brawl in a dark alley. I thought for a second that I was in the middle of a waking nightmare from sleep deprivation. The shadow looked a little like it was wearing old fashioned mining gear, and the static, whispering sound James and I had heard seemed to be coming from the shape that I had my eyes locked onto. Steeling my nerves, I flew up out of the chair, hitting the light switch.

Bright light flooded the room, and the shadow, along with the man-shaped thing, were gone. Will and Amy reluctantly opened their eyes, squinting at me through the haze of interrupted sleep, and irritation. “The fuck’re you doin’? Have you lost every bit of your mind?” Amy sat up slowly, rubbing her temples, glaring daggers at me.

“There was somethin’ here in the shadows, and it’s not here in the light. You’re welcome, Amy,” I said, drawing my last sentence out for good measure.

James and Tiffany trudged into the living room, looking disheveled. “What’s happening?” James asked.

Amy pointed a finger at me. “Daniel saw something.”

“What? What did it look like?” James asked, hastily grabbing his sketch pad. I described what I had seen, and James set to drawing. Within an hour and a half we had watched an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, we’d had at least three cups of coffee a piece, and James had finished the sketch. “Look like this?”

James held up his drawing pad, and there on the paper was the image of what I’d seen, at least as close as James could get. I nodded slowly, thinking then I that I might need something stronger than coffee. Looking at it in the light with my friends was somehow more unnerving that seeing it the first time in the darkness.

“That is…Just shitty. How did you not have a heart attack when you saw that?” Tiffany seemed to share my idea of something harder, swiftly heading for the whiskey in the cabinet.

“Yes, please,” was the chorus from the living room, and for just one fleeting moment things were the same as they ever were. We had no idea what fresh Hell waited for us.