“There’s even more notes over here,” Clover remarked, digging through some more old papers. “I can’t make sense of any of it, though. The writing’s too off. Even if I could read any of it, it doesn’t seem coherent enough to understand…”
Nik sighed. “That’s what I’m finding on my end, too. Only that one paper seemed to have any names tied to them. Are you sure those weren’t familiar? They had to have been from around here, right?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t recognize either of those names, or any of these portraits. If they had been people who lived in the town, they either didn’t have any family, or came here a long time ago. I can’t help but wonder if anyone would be able to recognize them…”
“Hey, there’s plenty of people around here. I’m sure that old lady would recognize them, or maybe even that boat rental guy. We’ve just got to do what we can to get as much about these guys as possible.”
“Yeah. Something’s happened here, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t sign up for whatever it was.” She glanced around the room, to all of the scattered notebooks to the scratch marks. “You know, when we decided to go here, I was kind of expecting something creepy, but… not anything that was actually bad. Not like this…”
“But we’re going to stay here until the end, right?” he prompted. “Do what we can to solve this mystery? I think it’s what these people would’ve wanted.”
She nodded nervously. “I think we’ve searched just about everything we could in here—both the first and second floor are basically empty of anything worthwhile. At least, when it comes to finding out who these people were and what happened to them. Where else do you think we should go..? Is there anywhere else for us to go..?”
“I’m pretty sure there’s a garden outside. I saw it through one of the windows. There was a shed there, too. After we check that place, we would’ve seen practically everything this place has to offer. I have a feeling there’ll be something there, anyway.”
“Is it just because it’s a creepy shed in an already creepy house?”
“Maybe. But we won’t know until we look, right? So, what do you say?”
“Let’s go.”
She tucked her sketchbook—now full of the copied portraits of people she almost wished she found familiar, but didn’t—under her arm and went to follow him to the hallway. From there, they wandered into the garden. If… it could really be called a garden. It was more of two flower beds filled with weeds, but there were one or two sturdy plants who were trying to fight against them. Surprisingly, the path through the garden was still rather well-defined, so they were able to follow it straight to the shed without fighting with the tall weeds.
Nik ran a hand along the edge of the door frame. “This doesn’t look quite as good as the rest of the estate, but it should still be sturdy enough for us to go through. If it looks worse inside, though, we should probably leave. Whatever information ends up being in there probably won’t be worth risking it, at least at the rate that we’re going…”
“We’ll try,” Clover said. For once, she was the one to push the door open. “I feel, as someone who ran into this place, we owe the people who were here before us that much.”
The room, at first glance, wasn’t too much different from some of the areas of the estate. But even if it didn’t look like there was anything worth paying attention to, it seemed more… organized than the rest of it. There were still the same kinds of stuff, sure, but it felt like there was more of a system to it. The journals and logs had marked shelves that most of them were up on; the marks either weren’t present at all, or craftily hidden behind something else. And yet, that only made it more eerie.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
That wasn’t even mentioning the obvious hatch into the basement.
Nik lifted up a couple of stray papers, but they all seemed to be blank. “Do you want to head down there? We could look through this stuff, too, but there’s nothing about ‘subjects’ or whatever else that guy would call those people.”
Despite how anxious it made her feel, she couldn’t keep her eyes off of the hatch. “Do… do you think that’s where his lab is? Where he did whatever experiments he was running? We checked everywhere else, and there were just logs—none of the stuff he mentioned actually using. Is this hatch going to lead us down there..?”
“I think it’s as good of a shot as any. Seems the most reasonable, anyway, unless he also has a secret bunker somewhere else on the island. But I get if you’re worried about it. I could go alone, if you’d rather stay up here and look around.”
“I’m pretty sure that staying somewhere alone in a place like this is going to be worse than going into a place that’s probably going to be weirder than anything else we’ve seen here. I’m not staying here, so I’m going with you.”
He started to open the hatch. “Alright. We’ll try to make it quick, then. Keep that sketchbook of yours ready in case we find any more pictures or names. We’ll find whatever information we can, and we’ll bring the rest up with the officials in town when we get back.”
“Do you think they’re going to listen to us..?”
“That’s what we’re gathering evidence for. Given the fact that no one’s mentioned it, whatever anyone else said—if they said anything—may have just been taken as rumors. If we’ve got some kind of hard proof about whatever this guy was working on, then we’ll be able to get to the bottom of this. Even if we don’t do it on our own.”
She slowly nodded. “Alright. Just to make sure, the candle definitely has enough light for us to get through all of that, right..? I don’t want it to burn out in a place we’re definitely not going to be able to see anything in…”
He glanced at it, mentally calculated it, then nodded. “It sputtered a couple of times, but I think it’s because it’s marked by the hour. Knowing that, and seeing how much is left in there, there should still be two or so hours left. I don’t think it’s somehow burned quicker than that.”
“Okay. It’s… definitely time to go in now. No more distractions…”
Nik sat the candle down to lift the hatch up the rest of the way, then carefully made his way down. After she passed him the candle and he gave a brief look around, he gestured for her to join him.
And, well, it was every bit of a creepy mad scientist laboratory. There actually weren’t any notes or logs scattered around, but there were definitely a few odd contraptions, and far from a few signs of struggle. As far as she could tell, it was practically completely clean, which made the odd parts stand out even more.
But this was likely the only way that they were going to get information about those people, and she wanted to have something to bring back to the town. So, for once, she took the first step into the darkness.
“Let’s not mess with anything more than we need to,” she mumbled. She didn’t even dare brush up against something, or run her hand along the wall to get a better idea of what might be masked by the dim lighting. “We don’t know what any of this does. All we want is some names, or some other details, about who was here before us. Maybe we can even find something about the man who owned this island, so someone can look into him more.”
Nik nodded grimly. “This is more than just a treasure hunt at this point. We should stay close together, too. We’ve only got one light and we don’t want to disrupt anything we might not be able to see.”
They walked together through the room, taking in everything they could about it and whatever else might be worth remembering. It was nearly impossible to tell how big the room was, or if there were others, from where they were. Quite frankly, the only thing that Clover could do to assure herself is to consider how straightforward their path was—there did seem to be some kind of organization to the mess, with clear “landmarks” in the machines and tools. Even when they were forced to take a turn, it wouldn’t be too hard to tell where they had been, and how to get back to the entrance.
Or, at least, that’s what she hoped. And it turns out, she was actually quite wrong.
