The Hawthorne Mansion: The Weight of Silence

“So, what did we learn?”

John sighed as he dismissed his weapons and looked away from his mentor. “Don’t go into a room without you right behind me,” he said.

“Good enough.” Wisps of smoke bled away from Erica’s fingertips as her axe dissolved and she ran her free hand through her hair. The anxious motion did little to fix the disheveled locks, though she adjusted the raven feathers. “Remember. Rule number three.”

“Never split the party.”

“Exactly. Let’s see if we can un-split the party and get Moira back.”

At the **** of the Zmora, their surroundings had subtly changed. The most notable absence was the chilling atmosphere, likely an aura that the creature had brought with it, but the slightly musky air that replaced it wasn’t much better. The trophy cases were no longer illuminated by floodlights. With only the overhead lights of a hallway casting through the now-open door to see by, John couldn’t tell if the contents of any had changed. One thing had.

The painting, and the shrine around it, at the end of the l-bend was a complete mess. Whatever it had originally depicted, the canvas had been torn to shreds by something with claws. Deep score marks were rent into the wall behind it and all the candles were overturned and extinguished. The dish of water had an off-putting reddish-blackness to the liquid inside, as though something had diffused into the liquid there. John could guess what the substance might be.

As he turned away from it, his eye caught a glimpse of metal in the bowl. There was something there, something with a circular ring about the width of his index finger. He started towards it, then remembered rule three.

“Hey, Erica. There’s something over here. In that bowl, see?” he called out to his partner.

She peeled away from her inspection of the display cases and slowly approached the shrine with John following close behind. Little tendrils of black smoke caressed the berserker’s fingers, nearly invisible in the dim light, and John felt the liquid metal of his dagger solidify in his grip. When they reached the bowl, Erica lunged for the object, plunging her hand into the bowl and pulling it from the water in one smooth motion. Then, she froze.

John did the same, waiting, on edge for something, anything to happen. Nothing did.

Slowly, Erica relaxed and looked down at the object in her palm, with John peeking over her shoulder. It was a sizable metal key with an elaborate loop at the back that resembled the spine of a book. The underside of it was detailed like pages. She tossed it up and caught it. They both waited again, silently. Nothing happened.

“Well, I guess this is our invitation to explore-” Erica started to say, only to be cut off as they both heard a sound through the walls. It was the piano again, a continuation of the waltz they’d heard as they entered the manor. After another stanza of music, it went silent and both John and Erica looked at one another.

John swallowed his discomfort. “I’m pretty sure that is.”

Together, they headed back to check the doors that led out of the trophy room. The door that John had stupidly wandered through was now open, giving them access to that hallway again, along with a door next to the bend of the room that also seemed to lead out to a different hallway, possibly a continuation of the one that wrapped around the building’s first floor. He didn’t need Erica to confirm that was how she’d gotten into the room. In the direction that the music had come from was a third and final door, this one locked and sealed with the same barrier as before.

Erica held up the key, glanced at John, shrugged and tried to fit it into the lock. She gave it a twist. It wouldn’t budge. She growled and withdrew the key. “Okay. Fine. Be that way. It would kill you to make your stupid maze a little more convenient, wouldn’t it, you old hag.”

While his partner grumbled and kicked futilely at the locked exit, John looked back and forth between the two hallways. They’d tried all the doors in the hallway that they’d come through, but if the key didn’t work here, it was unlikely that it’d work on any of those. That left the path Erica had taken…

“Hey, what was it like on that side?” he asked, pointing at the door she’d come through.

“Drit og dra, faen kjerrig… huh? Oh. Right. So, it’s like this,” she tried to trace out the shape of the hallway in the air, outlining the sides of the mansion with a strange dip near the top, “there was a room here and since it continued past this room, probably one at the end. What’re you thinking, dude?”

John crossed his arms and bit the knuckle of his index finger in thought.

I’m not sure myself. There’s a set of rules here I don’t get yet, but I have a vague sense. That music is clearly luring us in, but it’s the only hint we have to go on… but we couldn’t go there directly. We’ve probably got to take a roundabout route, just like Quiet Ridge and Citizen Ruin.

“Let’s try that path,” he concluded, following his gut instinct. “It’d be a detour, but that’s probably why it’s the only way to progress.”

Erica sighed loudly and hunched her shoulders in irritation. “That does sound like the kind of frustrating bullshit that gets that tyrant’s rocks off. Alright. Let’s stick together this time, though.” She walked up to him, stuck out a hand, and when he didn’t immediately take it, grabbed his and gave it a bone-crushing squeeze. Her eyes locked onto his and the intensity of her expression burned away any awkward romantic tension the gesture would have produced in another situation.

Together, they headed out into the corridor, ending up in the u-shaped bend that Erica had described. A couple paintings hung on the walls of the strange section and he could see a doorway across the short stretch of hall before it turned left again. The obstruction in the hallway only took up about six, maybe seven feet in width on each side, barely enough for a closet. To their left, windows and a glass door lined the portions of the hall that bordered the exterior of the building, giving a view of the sunset-drenched backyard.

The Hawthornes had a garden and a pool, because of course they did, and both were immaculately tended to. Neatly trimmed hedges and finely cobbled paths wound across the space. A statue of a woman wrapped in briar thorns poured water into the pool at one side and in the far corner of the garden there was a smaller building, almost as large as John’s entire house, nestled against the copse of trees that bordered the mansion’s rear.

John pointed at the building as they turned the bend to where the hallway ended at yet another door, this one slightly more ornate than the others. “What do you think that is? A workshop of some kind, gym, maybe?”

“Servant’s quarters, probably,” Erica replied. “The Brightons built theirs underground for… reasons, but I have a feeling that Vanessa and her parents are the kind that like to have the help living separately.” She emphasized the last word and John got the point. There was a power play here that only rich assholes like the Hawthornes would care about.

They stopped at the door, and without letting go of John’s hand, Erica twirled and inserted the key. She twisted it and there was a loud click. She hissed and stepped back from the door, violently shaking the hand she’d held the key in and biting back a rude exclamation. A couple black specks went flying from her fingertips to scatter across the floor and John realized with revulsion that the key had transformed into a swarm of ants. The ants scuttled up the door and into the keyhole and the door swung open.

On the other side was a large room that continued up into the second story, lit by two hanging chandeliers. A balcony wrapped around overhead built on top of an assortment of large bookshelves. More were embedded into the walls, solidifying the room as some kind of library. Large, leather couches were positioned in the center of the room, where they could see out through a wall of glass to the garden outside, and two doors led out of the room. A set of double doors to their left likely led to the closed-off portion of the house while a smaller glass door across the way from the entrance was partly opened. A light mist of steam wafted from it, obscuring whatever was beyond, but they could see through the window that the room had to be some kind of greenhouse.

“I don’t know about you, dude, but that looks like an obvious trap to me.” Erica pointed at the open door as another waft of steam rolled a foot across the floor towards them before dissolving into the air.

John snorted, “No kidding.”

They cautiously stepped into the library and he could feel the berserker’s tension through her grip as they both braced for whatever was going to come at them. A few muffled noises could be heard from the greenhouse but no books flew off the shelves to batter them and the mist didn’t attack. The library, it seemed, was safe.

Okay. I’m not sure if game logic can apply here, but in any haunted mansion the library usually has a secret passage somewhere. Maybe one of the books is fake or has a key inside…

He looked up at the hundreds of tomes surrounding them and groaned internally.

I am not going to search every single one by hand. Maybe there’s a clue that’ll give me an idea where to start?

Erica had clearly come to a similar conclusion and had let go of his hand to start browsing the titles near the exit to the center of the manor. He took sarcastic note of the fact that her path took her away from the greenhouse and realized that he would have to check that side. Carefully staying out of the mist, he walked along the rows of books looking for anything that stood out.

Economics, mathematics, science fiction, science fantasy, non-fiction... history...

Wait.

On a whim, he stopped at a small section of history books, running his eyes over the titles. Herodotus’ Histories, An Account of Salem, The Great Fire of London: Cow or Arson, The **** of Anastasia Romanov, Agartha, the Hollow Earth: Mystery or Mistaken Translation. Some of the books were old, the spines partially broken from decades of reading or with parts of the cover flaking away. His hand stopped on one slim tome, Witchcraft: A Study of Wise Women.

This doesn’t seem like something the Hawthornes would own or care about. This looks more like something I’d find in Mrs. Wentworth’s office. I think I found my clue.

He started pulling the books from the shelves, one after another, forming a small stack on the ground as he uncovered a second layer of books behind the first. The titles were featureless and blank, the books carved from stone and immobile save for one, The Danse Macabre. He tried to pull it free but it was jammed in tight.

“Erica? I think I found something, can you give me a hand with-” he shouted at his partner, when a brilliant flash of yellow light appeared in the greenhouse. The muffled noises reached a pitch and then settled back down. He stared at it, along with his partner, who had run over during the commotion.

Where have I seen something like that before?

A sinking sensation coiled in John’s gut and he knew as he turned to Erica that she had figured out the same thing.

“You don’t think-” he started.

“-that’s definitely Moira,” she finished.

Their voices overlapped as they both spoke.