With the light, they were able to see a lot more of what was around them. And, well, not all of it was as moderately boring as the dining room had been. For one, the room they had entered in the first place?
Yeah, it got a lot creepier when there was actually light here.
For one, it was pretty obvious that this place definitely wasn’t quite as innocent as it had any hopes of being when they first entered. There were marks of something that certainly weren’t just the general wear of time; something had been here, and she really hated to think about how recently it had been.
“I think we just made one hell of a discovery,” Nik remarked, casually shining light on more and more odd signs. There were marks on the walls, the floor—and so much scattered paper that Clover was honestly surprised they didn’t step on any of it until now. “This place is practically a gold mine at this rate.”
“And a ghost mansion,” she mumbled. “What do you think made those marks..? It definitely wasn’t an animal, was it? It couldn’t have been. It’s not deep enough for that, but… it’s too obvious to just be a part of the weather or something.”
He shrugged. “My bets are still on an animal. You never know what they’re capable of. Or, hey, it might’ve even been a Skiá. Those things come in all different shapes and sizes from what I’ve heard.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel any better? This is creeping me out a little more than I thought it would…” And yet, she knew she had to admit, “It does make me even more curious, too, though. What happened here..? Is this part of the reason no one’s talked about this place before..?”
“Well, do you want to find out?” He stooped down to pick up one of the pieces of paper off of the floor. Despite the display, though, he must’ve been unsatisfied with the one he picked up, because he mumbled something, tossed it back on the ground, and took another from a nearby shelf. “Let’s see what we have here… It looks like more logs. There’s a bunch of dates, and I think there’s supposed to be notes, but that handwriting is terrible as hell.”
“Let me see.” She carefully took the paper from him, though had to stay close in order to keep the light on it. “They’re… research notes? Or at least, they look like they could’ve been. I think this one says something about a ‘patient,’ and this here looks a little bit like ‘reaction.’ Maybe he was testing something.”
“Oh, must be all that magical eldritch stuff. You know, the demon summoning or whatever else that guy does in his spare time. What was it that that old lady said he did? Was it just… be a recluse?”
She glared at him.
“What? I’m just joking around! It’s not like there’s anything more interesting to do in here other than speculate.”
“I don’t think this is something we should be messing with. If anyone else had seen this, then there was a good reason they didn’t mention it to anyone.”
“Yeah, they didn’t want to admit they got creeped out by a couple of that old woman’s stories and left again. Look, for all we know, this guy ran a haunted house a hundred years ago and never got around to redecorating it. Just think of all of this as cheap decoration on the way to actually learning something. Would that make you feel any better?”
She sighed. “I do want to know what’s going on…” She looked around, giving passing glances to each of the doors. “Where do you think we should look first? Maybe each of the rooms on this floor, then follow the staircase? Assuming we don’t notice any holes in the floor or anything between then and now, of course. We don’t want to go walking up there if it’s not going to hold our weight…”
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“It’s about as good of a plan as any. I’m just willing to see what kind of stuff this guy has locked away in here. There sure is a mystery building up, and I’m ready to uncover it. Keep an eye out for any suspicious-looking papers or journals, alright? Maybe there’ll be something else to help us make sense of this place.”
So, yet again, they took to wandering around. Clover’s attention kept getting drawn to all of the more subtle hints of their surroundings—the complete silence, the way scratch marks tainted nearly every surface. She started to notice pictures, too, with dates at the bottom right corner of them. She didn’t want to get close enough to be able to read them. That would mean she would have no excuse not to look at them all closer, to acknowledge that they had too many different characteristics in order to be reasonably called a family.
Which meant that they had another relation to this place, and she didn’t think she’d want to learn what it was.
Even if they found out on their own sooner or later.
“This book actually has something interesting in it!” Nik called from the other side of the room.
“Actually interesting this time?” she prompted as she walked over there. “I’ve been trying to sketch for the past thirty minutes, but you keep interrupting me… If I see one more ‘vaguely related to science log,’ I’m just going to start ignoring you.”
“No, no, this one actually has something substantial in it! It’s got names and—you won’t believe this—details about whatever this guy was doing!” He paused. “So, uh, it’s definitely interesting, but I don’t know if it’s really something that you want to know, exactly…”
She got herself to look at it anyway, just to see what it said. She didn’t really know what she was expecting but, well… what it was certainly wasn’t what she was prepared for.
‘Log 398
Subject: Iva Lior
Hypothesis: A soul may find a new host if it finds that it has nowhere else to go.
Details: I placed Ms. Lior in a special room, the same one mentioned in my Log 349. This is, for the future scientists and grant givers that may be reading this in the future, when I decided what a spirit can and cannot travel to, and how one might ‘trap’ a spirit by preventing it to ‘sink’ back into the earth. The spirit in question was that of Stefan Handel, who has been in my care for quite a while after their separation from their previous host detailed in Log 284. I begin my current log, Log 398, after many failed attempts of a very similar hypothesis, as I have made tweaks to all of the systems along the way according to my past findings. This is, of course, detailed elsewhere. But onto the subject at hand, shall we?
After placing Ms. Lior in the room, I released the spirit. Under most circumstances, as the spirit did not have a host, it would have ‘sunk’ back into the earth, to find its rest within the Underworld, as the children of Fleyw Bresh call it. But, due to the limitations of the room I created, it was not able to move down, nor outside of the room in any way. So, ‘dying’ without the fake host I had provided for it and had since taken away, it clung to the soul of Ms. Lior.
The results were even better than I could have imagined. Right from the—‘
And then it cut off.
“So, there’s no denying there was a guy living here,” Clover remarked, trying very hard not to sound too panicked. “And he was definitely doing some moderately questionable experiments. Experiments about… spirits? Or maybe souls? That’s at least what it sounds like…”
Nik considered it for a little bit. “Sounds a bit like a bunch of Lysha stuff. Are we sure this guy didn’t work for them or something? They’ve got to get all their knowledge somehow, other than that magic they learned from the Fleyw Bresh. It might sound a little weird to us, but we’re also outsiders, so who knows what kinds of context clues we’re missing.”
“I… guess our next step is to find them, then,” she muttered. “That’s what it’s going to end up being, right? Maybe we’ll figure out what happened to these people… and if there’s anyone to tell all of this to. I’m sure they weren’t isolated before whatever happened here. It might be a good thing to know more about them, if anyone in town had heard of them…”
He nodded, likely one of the most serious gestures she’d seen him make. “Could you sketch each of those portraits again, too? They might be able to help if we find more information about these guys. They’re a little too big and definitely too fragile for me to bring back with us.”
