Darkened Chamber

      It was warm for November. The sun was out but muted, its golden glow filtered through the soft morning mist. It was early still; the sun had only risen above the horizon about an hour ago. Morgan wanted to get an early start. She wanted to be done long before night fell.

This was her first solo photo assignment. Her friend, Mary, was supposed to come with her, but had a last minute emergency and had cancelled. Mary offered to go another time, but Morgan had decided to go on alone. She had recently been hired by a blog specializing in the supernatural and paranormal. They wanted to do a feature on the local old estate and its long, sordid history. Morgan had volunteered to take photographs of the haunted house. She wasn’t sure she even believed in ghosts, but she didn’t want to tempt fate by going exploring in the dark.

Morgan parked her car near the crooked front gate that guarded the old cobblestone driveway. The wrought-iron was overgrown with foliage and vine. She gathered together her mace, a pocketknife, her headlamp, her phone, and, most importantly, her camera. It was fairly new, and still shiny black. Her parents had gifted her for her birthday, just a few weeks before. This was its first big outing, and its first professional one.

She locked her car and approached the gate. She studied the intricate details constructed with the antique metal bars. She studied the gap in the gate, was created by a large vehicle that had crashed into it. Back in the early nineties, a group of teens had driven their truck into it. The story went that they had been at a party one night, and the manor had been brought up. On a whim, the three friends had decided to drive up there. Two of the teens were never seen again. The third drove back into town that same night, but, driving as though in a wild panic, he crashed straight on into a brick wall at high speed. Morgan looked through the lens of her camera and snapped a shot of the broken gate, then snuck through it and started up the cobblestone path.

           Lush overgrown grass spread out as far as she could see in any direction, ending in trees that circled the estate. The fine pale mist of the morning hugged the wild earth. As she ascended the hill, Morgan’s eyes turned up towards the old manor.

The manor stood, majestic and imposing, atop the wide hill. As she neared the striking house, the mist transformed seamlessly into a dense gray fog. Morgan stopped to take a photo, while she could still fit the entirety of the manor in the frame. Tristan Manor. Named for the love of Walter Ruskin, the man who built it, in 1797. The two officially resided together as bachelor friends, but there were rumors, diaries, and letters that told the truth of their relationship, and the deep, intimate love they shared for one another. Tristan had been a married man, married to a woman who he ran away from, leaving her nothing but a letter with a vague explanation and a best wishes farewell. The woman managed to find him, whether by accident or on purpose was unknown. One night, she broke into the great house and murdered both the men as they slept in the bed they shared, and then took her own life as well. The house was nothing short of grand, even in its deteriorated state, tattered yet beautiful. Despite its obvious wear, it was in surprisingly fine shape for how long it had sat alone and abandoned. Just shy of forty years it had been since anyone had resided within its walls. At least anyone living. Since its first great tragedy, the house had been the setting for all manner of misfortunes, from random violence, to numerous deaths, to mysterious disappearances.

Morgan stepped free from the cobblestone drive, and made her through the untamed grass toward the impressive, weathered front porch. In the immediate front yard was a tall, already bare tree. There hung a melancholy swing, with a splintered wooden seat and two long pieces of rope, only one of which still clung to the branch above.

The wooden boards of the patio creaked beneath her feet as she made her way to the enormous oak door. She is hesitant to open the door. A sound from behind her distracts her and she turns to see what caused it. She sees nothing. She turned back to the door, only to discover it now sat ajar. She clicked on her headlamp and swallowed hard. She pushed the door open slowly. It groaned loudly on its rusted hinges.

A large foyer appeared before her. After a moment’s hesitation, where she reminded herself she didn’t really believe in ghosts, Morgan stepped over the threshold onto the dirty and cracked black and white square tiles. On the left side, rose up elegant wooden, carpeted stairs which disappeared up to the second floor on the left side. Beyond the stairs was a wall with two closed doors and a hallway disappearing down the middle. There was another door underneath the staircase. A large chandelier hung from the ceiling, decorated in crystals and cobwebs. There was another dark hallway on the right, with a door on either side of it, a mirror of the left side of the foyer. Ahead of her, in the center of the far wall, were saloon-style doors. Whatever was beyond was too shrouded in darkness for her to see.

Morgan moved towards the first door on the right, leaving the front door open behind her. The room was a study. The walls were lined with built in bookshelves, still overfilled with books. She took a picture of the ash-filled fireplace. Hanging above the fireplace was an old faded portrait of two young boys, neither of whom could have been older than ten. They were the Perry boys, the sons of the last family that had ever lived in the house. On Christmas morning, in 1979, the parents were surprised to have not been woken up by their children bright and early to open presents. They went to their bedroom, only to find their beds were empty. They searched the entire house and found them nowhere. They discovered them in the woods that circled the house, hanging from one of the trees. The mother had a heart attack from the sight of her baby boys, and died shortly after. The father stopped living in the house, but he searched for whoever had done this to his sons. But there were no clues, no sign of how they got up there. The case remained unsolved. He had never sold the house, so no one else had ever owned it, but he had also never returned to it. The house was still full of his family’s possessions, untouched and abandoned by the man who had lost his family there.  

Morgan walked out of the study and took a turn down the hallway. It was dark, with only the bluish light of her headlamp to guide the way. She tried to think happy thoughts to distract herself and to keep her mind from conjuring up images of spirits and ghouls lurking in the shadows. The hall opened up to a giant space, with an open entrance to an elaborate dining room on one side and a large parlor room, with a piano and a large fireplace, an assortment of couches and chairs, and an extensive floor space. There were giant bay windows lining the wall of the parlor, each covered by thick, lavish velvet curtains.

She wandered into the parlor first. She snapped a shot of the gorgeous grand piano before she sat down on the fancy bench. The keys were filthy, layered in years of undisturbed dust. She ran her fingers lightly across the keys. They were sorely out of tune. She wondered if it was the same piano that had been there in the 1920s, if the family had gotten it with the house. It looked as though it could have been. In the 1920s, a young couple had lived in the manor. David and Eliza had both come from money, and appeared to have idolized the Fitzgeralds, as they became known locally for throwing extravagant parties. They lived a life of unbridled decadence, for the few years that the manor was theirs. A man named Victor, who became dear friends with the couple, also grew to be infatuated with Eliza. David was a talented piano player. One late night, Victor slammed the lid down on David’s fingers as he played. He beat David to death, before accidentally strangling Eliza in his attempt to violate her, an attempt she fought against viciously. Morgan took some shots of different angles of the parlor before making her way over to the dining room.

A long table surrounded by fancy chairs takes up most of the room. She goes through a back door in the dining room and it leads through a sizable pantry that then leads into the kitchen. The kitchen was massive. There were two other exits out of the kitchen, a door that led to the backyard, and the saloon doors that led back out into the foyer.

Morgan stood at the bottom of the opulent staircase. In the mid-1800s, the house had belonged to a poet. Her son had bought her the estate as a gift. He came to visit her one day and discovered her at the bottom of the stairs, neck broken. It was determined to be an accident. Morgan took a picture from the bottom of the stairway looking up, before she headed up them, running her hand along the thick, worn railing.

At the top, there were two hallways, one to the right and one to the left. Morgan went to the left. She walked partway down the hall and opened a door on the right.  

           She had found the master bedroom. There was a king-sized bed in the middle of the room, made of wood, with a massive wooden headboard. There were two wooden nightstands, two dressers, two mirrors. Two of everything. The bed still had blankets on it, but they were messy, as though two people had just crawled out of them. Morgan took a few shots of the room, trying to capture as much of it as possible.

           She stepped out of the bedroom and opened the door directly across the hall. It opened up into what looked to be another study, with a large stylish desk as the centerpiece. She walked to one of the heavily curtained windows and peered out. She could see down the hill, towards the gate. She snapped a photo before she turned back to the room. Morgan’s gaze fell upon some janky stairs against the far corner of the study that curved up and out of sight. She felt inexplicably drawn to them, and followed them up to the third floor. The ceiling started out flat, but she could see ahead of her an area where the ceiling became pointed, and the wall was shaped like a wide triangle. She walked towards the triangle. There was a line down the middle of the triangle, dividing it in half. There were doors on each side of the line. She went to the right one and opened the door, looking inside. It appeared to be the room of a young child, with child-sized furniture; a child-sized jacket on the back of a child-sized chair. A ratty teddy bear on the child-sized bed.

 Morgan went to the other door, and opened it. Another child’s room. This time, she entered the room, and for the first time, she felt as though she were trespassing on someone’s private property. There was a small desk with a small chair. There was a notebook and some pencils there, and a little tarnished pocket watch. There were some faded books on a small bookshelf, and a few ruined records hidden under the bed. She sat down on the bed. It groaned under her weight. There was ratty teddy bear on this bed as well, the twin to the one in the other room. She picked it up and looked into its tattered face. Morgan felt a pang of sadness for the little boy whose room she was in, knowing the fate that had befallen him and his brother. What kind of monster would do that to anyone, more or less two children?

She felt an urge to look through the photos she had taken so far. She opened up her gallery and started at the beginning of the day.

Morgan immediately noticed something strange with the first picture. It was of the front gate, but the gate was no longer broken. It appeared to be in pristine condition, standing tall and upright. Morgan couldn’t make any sense of it, so she moved on to the next shot she’d taken, the one of the whole manor. It wasn’t possible. Fresh paint, windows unbroken, the swing fresh. The grass was trim and well-kept. The house was in immaculate condition, as though it had just finished being built. It was impossible. The study on the first floor. The fireplace was clean and beautiful. A fire was burning brightly. The portrait of the two boys was clear, shining, the colors vibrant as though it had only recently been painted.

Then the pictures grew stranger. The piano. It was gorgeous and new. But that wasn’t the strangest part. There was a man, his back to the camera, dressed in an immaculate charcoal suit, sitting on the piano bench, and red droplets spattered on the visible keys. The next couple shots were the parlor decked out in 1920s finery. Then, on one of the couches, were a man and woman. The man was leering at the woman, and the woman was drinking from a champagne glass. The stairway. It was adorned with a lavishly gothic carpet. There was an older woman, dressed in a purple and gray Victorian style dress, sitting in the middle of the stairs, leaning her head against the wall. She was staring down at the carpet that lined the stairs. The view from the second-floor study. Down in the mist stood three shadowy figures. Morgan could not tell if they were facing the house or away from it. The master bedroom on the second floor. Two men stood there, dressed in old-fashioned clothes, locked in a romantic embrace, lips pressed together urgently. The bedroom was decorated differently, in a much older style. The next shot, they were asleep in their bed and a woman stood silhouetted in the doorway. The next was the two men, one in the bed and one on the floor, bloodied and torn from multiple stab wounds. The woman now knelt over the man on the floor, her face full of tears and blood and anguish, the knife bleeding in her hand. The final shot showed all three of them, sitting together at the end of the bed that was in there now, the bedroom decorated in the manner it was decorated in presently, each of them staring straight at the camera.

The dull thud of footsteps on the stairs reached Morgan’s ears. She looked up from the camera screen, her heart beat quickening, her breath shortening. She listened, immobile, as the footsteps drew nearer and nearer. The floor boards creaked, but she saw no one, nothing that could be the source of them. She didn’t dare to breathe as all the hairs on her body stood on end, a chill inching its way across her skin. The door to the bedroom slowly creaked shut. Hands shaking, Morgan lifted up her camera and snapped one last picture.

Another car pulled up behind Morgan’s car and parked. Mary had wrapped up her last minute crisis earlier than expected, and she tried to call Morgan but received no answer. She had decided to drive out to the manor to see if Morgan was still there. Mary couldn’t believe Morgan had been brave enough to come out here on her own; Mary felt nervous even driving up to the gate. But Morgan hadn’t grown up in this town, she hadn’t grown up with all the stories of Tristan Manor, and all the awful and unexplainable things that had happened here. Mary tried again to reach Morgan on her phone, but, again, no one answered. Mary sighed, steeled her nerves as best she could, and stepped out of her car.

The glint of the evening sun off a fancy black camera caught Mary’s eye. Morgan’s expensive new camera. It sat on the hood of Morgan’s car. That was strange; Morgan treated that thing as if it were her firstborn child. Mary picked the camera up and turned it on. She managed her way into the saved pictures and started to scroll through them. The first one was taken right where she was stood, an eerie shot of the broken gate being devoured by nature. This was followed by a gorgeously ominous shot of the manor, weathered and worn, bathed in an ominous mist. Morgan really had a talent for photography, Mary admired. A photo of a filthy old fireplace with a faded portrait of two boys. An ancient dust-ridden piano. A collection of shots of the long-abandoned rooms of the manor, as well as a view of the lawn from one of the upper floors. They were a perfect combination of beautiful and creepy.

Mary gasped and nearly dropped the camera. The photo was a close up portrait of a young woman. Black hair, tied up in a messy bun. Thick-rimmed glasses that were almost too big for her round face. Morgan. What startled Mary was the look of sheer terror shining in her dear friend’s eyes.