Page 27 of Grotesque
I cupped my hands over my mouth. “Come out! Come out!”
The lack of response unnerved me. Mysteries shouldn’t be so scary during the day.
I made a quick online search for nanny cams and ordered four. Three for each of the main entrances that would catch anyone coming into the house, and a fourth for my bedroom. They would be here in a couple of days. I was dipping into my savings to order them, but it would be worth it once I had the proof I needed for the cops to take me seriously.
And then what? How did one get rid of a vampire? It’s not like the police would be able to do anything about it. It’s not like staking vampires was a part of their job description.
I did another search on how to ward off vampires. There wasn’t anything new to uncover from what I already knew about them. Stake to the heart, obviously. Not all vampires were inhibited by sunlight. (This one I didn’t think was true. So far, the monster had only visited me in the evenings. If that was any indication of his limitations, I suspected that he couldn’t come out while the sun was shining.) Silver burned them. (I also didn’t think this was true based on the locket he had tried to give me that had magically disappeared.) They didn’t have reflections–
I walked to the mirror in the foyer and pulled off the sheet. Why was there a rule to be wary of the mirrors if they would help me determine what was real and what wasn’t? What did the moths have to do with all of this? I wrapped the sheet around my arm absentmindedly.
There was something important about the mirrors I needed to figure out. I remembered how my hand had pushed through the glass. I reached out tentatively, my fingers hovering over the surface, but when I pressed against it, nothing happened.
Relief flooded through me. At least that part could be explained away. I’d just had too much to drink. My hand couldn’t have gone through the mirror because that’s not how they worked.
Grumbling, I snatched a trash bag out from under the kitchen sink. I needed to get rid of the dead crow. Doing two things at once wasn’t my strong suit, but I only had so many hours of daylight left before my stalker would return. It wasn’t fair that I had to clean up the monster’s mess. My room had been a wreck too, everything askew from where I had bumped into every available surface.
I grabbed the crow through the trash bag and flipped it inside out, tying a knot at the end. Now to find a shovel.
There was a small shed at the backside of the manor, its door hung crooked on rusted hinges. The wood was grey and brittle with age. It looked out of place when the rest of Glamis Manor was shining and new. The door tipped farther forward, threatening to fall off completely when I pulled it open.
I frowned.
The floors were completely rotten through, cobwebs galore lining nearly every nook and cranny. I wondered vaguely about the groundskeeper Beth had mentioned at the library.What was his name again?Surely this wasn’t where he kept his tools… everything was rusted.
I grabbed a shovel with a broken handle and made my way to the back field where an oak tree stood alone. It seemed like a decent enough place to be buried. It was better than chucking the bird into the woods or a garbage can at any rate.
The broken handle made the work awkward. I had to crouch every time I dug the blade into the dirt. All the while trying not to tear up my hand with splinters.
A cool breeze fanned the sweat building at the back of my neck. I glanced toward the house when the familiar twinge hit me. It was nothing. The creature was a vampire, and he couldn’t get me right now. I could almost feel him laughing at me, though.
Thunk.
I pulled the shovel free. A broken root looked up at me forlornly. I muttered a quiet apology before angling in a new direction. The soil was softer on this side, and made the progress faster. Just another foot and I would be happy with the size of the hole.
Clink.
I struck the ground again and the distinct scrape of metal came as I hit something that definitely wasn’t a root. I worked the shovel around the flash of silver until four sides of a rectangle were revealed. I reached down, digging through the grit until I’d pried it free.
It was a small metal box, unremarkable and streaked with dirt and rust. I raised an eyebrow, and popped off the lid.
Inside lay a small leatherbound book and a collection of photographs. I wiped my hands on my pants before flipping through them. The photographs captured a young woman with dark hair coiled about her head and a sharply mustached gentleman a few years older, standing stiffly at her side. In the back sprawled Glamis Manor in all its glory. There was nothing written on the back. The other photographs were much the same. Smiling couples who remained nameless, photographed in what I recognized to be various parts of the manor.
The last picture was a charcoal drawing that was slightly smudged. It depicted a young woman standing in a garden, holding a thin stem covered in small white flowers. I’d seen the same ones in the garden out back. I flipped the picture over.
Rosaline, 1812
It was her.
I sat back on the ground, the bird momentarily forgotten as I raised the small notebook.
A tremor ran through my hand as I opened it. Rosaline O’Connor was scrawled across the upper corner of the first page.
“Holy shit,” I said. It was a diary. My heart thumped in my chest. It felt like I had found a long-lost treasure. I turned the pages gently, not sure how they’d welcome being handled after being forgotten for so long.
The first few entries were without event. She wrote briefly about moving North, how the journey had been long and cold. They’d come from a settlement in Virginia. A difference inbeliefs had driven Rosaline and her fiancé, Gerald, up north. They’d left as soon as the ground had thawed, unaware that it would take longer for the North to defrost than where they were coming from.
I skimmed through the next couple of pages until I got to a piece that said they were constructing a new home.
