October, 1891

I assume that by keeping a journal I am not condemning myself by admitting to seeing acts unusual and often horrific. But at this point I may insist that I do keep up with events as they come up, for it would be both sad and foolish not to. Especially in light of the events that I have gone through recently, both alone and with my partners, I should endeavor to explain as best as I can the intracacies of our bizarre world.

After Reginald and I met up with Less in Africa, bringing back one Cynthia Essex (with whom I have begun quite a pleasant relationship), we then met up with Mordechai Drummond, an employee at the Hartford Memorial Chapel here in Kingsport. Together, we have forged quite the partnership, in fact to the point that our associates in the Society for Enlightenment have asked us as a group to perform a service for someone.

One Mr Williams has contracted with the Society to see if his newly purchased home here on the outskirts of town is -- as they put it -- haunted. And, after assessing this, to actually do something about it.

At first of course, we had our collective doubts. After all, being a man of science myself, I could assign any number of everyday occurances that would safely explain common symptoms of "hauntings". We did the basic amounts of research before skipping happily off to the site at the edge of town.

We discovered that there had been another owner fairly recently, the Macario family. They apparently claimed that there were poltergeists and possessions, they had been plagued by dreams and such. We learned much more of these things later on. For the time being, we were foolish enough to go out to the house and planned on spending some time there immediately.

How innocent we were, by our current standards!

We gathered only enough supplies to keep darkness at bay and possibly fend off some vague attacks. We drove out with the assistance of my carriage, sent it back to the house with the instructions that the driver pick us up in the morning. The house itself was nothing out of the ordinary for the turn-of-the-century buildings establishing the outer farming borders of the town of Kingsport, it had no electricity so we had to rely on the limited resources of candles and oil lamps. We arrived late afternoon, noticed the lack of care that the grounds had been given over the past few years, there was a lot of overgrowth.

We had gained one small and disturbing piece of information: that there was a room in the house where "no one goes". Ominous as that sounded, we were still ready to face this our first real assignment. Of course we would head to that room, but upon opening the house up for the first time we discovered a rather nice place. Down the center of the house was a hallway, off from which there were a living room and what seemed to have been either a library or sitting room to the other side. Down the hall, there was an entry to the kitchen, and the stairs. We moved into one room after the next, discovering that the furniture in the spare room was all broken, oddly.

In the living room there were books and items, left as if they were being used. Each room in fact seemed to be "just left" and while this fact was not terribly disturbing, it was to play a role in our eventual discoveries.

On the thought of Discoveries, I digress for a moment, and tell the reader that I am herein endeavoring to list rules and "regulations" of these explorative outings. What to do and what to take with you, what NOT to do under any circumstances. Hopefully, these things should become obvious, but when they are broken as rules, I shall point them out. The list of supplies for any outing varies, but should always include amounts of Holy Water, self-contained lighting, and good weaponry. Experience with using each of those things, as well, is generally a good idea, though not completely necessary. I would recommend also that there be at least one member of any given group wandering into hauntings and/or unusual situations who is skeptical of the origins of such occurances. This is not simply to provide the backdrop of logical thoughts (as I had thought to be on this particular journey) but also to provide amusement for one’s companions along the way. It certainly bloats the egoes of those around the skeptic when they finally decide that what they have seen and felt is in fact quite real. Digression over, I shall continue with my discourse.

Even after only a few days, my memories are somewhat juddery, nothing quite blurs the mind than seeing things for the first time! However, I do know that we started our official exploration of the house by moving into the living room. Reginald and Less took their time in that room, Mordechai went off on his own up the hall. I believe his experience has still not sunk in: he was alone in another room, when a simple letter-opener possessed itself the ability to fly, and launched itself into his back! Somehow, we reached him in time and safely removed it, and it seemed not to move again.

That, dear reader, is the first of the Rules: Never Split From the Group!

It was already beginning to darken outside, when we discovered the lack of electricity in the house, so our group went to as many rooms as we felt the need, and lit the still-full oil lamps we found in each. As we went, I thought I had heard something hissing or making a strange noise, and I believed I had seen something of movement in the dining hall.

So I broke my very first Rule, and walked curiously just past the border between the living room and the dining hall. The very moment I realized that I had done so, I reached my hand behind me, and felt not an open doorway, but a solid wall! I knew that this could not be real, but somehow, when posessed of some qualities of doubt and intelligence, when your hand feels a wall, it’s probably there.

I was in fact beginning to believe that there were such things as "haunted houses". What I had seen or heard in this other, dark, room was a steaming tureen of soup, set onto the dining table. The room itself was large and appointed for service for at least four people: still set up I ought to say. When we had been through the room before, as a group, this service was sitting unused, slightly dusty from having been abandoned some months before.

A moment to describe the feeling in one’s gut when a basic fear strikes it: coldness, and a tightening of the bowels, a knotting deeply within the stomach and a certain constriction of the throat -- all of these things moved me at once. For what I saw when alone in this darkened room was that the service at each place was in fact readying itself for feeding... There were no people sitting at the table, not even the "ghosts" of any, that I could see. Yet, the forks planted over the plate, knives moved as if cutting, the small tinking-sounds of metal on porcelain met my ears.

Knowing something was horribly amiss, however, was still the first saving grace of quick thinking. Always distrust the obvious when dealing with these invisible foes: these place settings were not just displaying their abilities to show off. They surely were more sinister in intent. Assuming this probably saved my life! For I dove for the ground just enough before the knives and forks ceased their invisible cutting and stabbing, and began to turn in the air, pointing directly at me! Many of them struck the wall behind me (which I feel the need to remind the reader had not been there a moment before...) but one stray fork managed to strike me in the shoulder! It was very painful if just because it was wedged into the sinue and ball of the joint, but then as if that were not enough, it began to spin while in the flesh! Fearing another attack from the more sizable cutlery on the table, I decided to run, ungracefully crouched below the level of the table, across the room to the kitchen door which was still open.

As I passed the table, the tureen of rice soup was hissing and bubbling out, as if boiling over, and then suddenly discharged its contents directly over me! I was now bleeding, in pain with a fork still stuck into my person, and covered in vile smelling rotten soup! It had in fact been brewing there for the last month, abandoned by the prior family. Though not stung by the soup (for it was not actually hot, when I came to realize it) I was deeply disturbed by the fact that it was now all over me. As the reader will learn, I am certainly concerned with my physical appearance.

Though that meant very little when I stepped into the kitchen. It was dark, so I could not quite find my way through it as easily as I ought. In fact, in my haste to get through, I was tripped up by what I thought was merely an over-grown potato lying upon the floor. When left to their own devices, of course, tubers will grow quite long tendrils. This one however was definitely moving, and once I had hit the floor, the same tendril began wrapping itself around my leg!

As unnatural an act as that seemed, it was only sensible to react in kind. As a scientist, I carry few if any weapons on my person at any given time. I am usually there to observe. However, with this suddenly animate potato-thing attempting to crawl up my leg and onto my body, I reacted with whatever was at hand. Even if this were to be explained away by having accidentally tripped into an over-grown sack of tubers, when something appears when it had not been there before (which it had most certainly NOT been there when we had toured the house at first) one must assume the worst. As the tendril tightened around my leg, I reached for the only weapon I could find: the fork still attempting to turn in my shoulder. It came out with difficulty, but I managed to then stab at the potato-object until it came free from my leg. Some of it was still left wrapped around my ankle, however, when I got up the wits to leave the room.

Dragging it behind me, then, brandishing the fork still, and I must say with some embarrassment, I was screaming my head off about all this (for this was indeed the first time I had been attacked by purely inanimate objects, and I was suffering from a mix of pain, fear and mind-numbing wonder at it happening at all!) I managed to stagger down the hallway and back into the living room where the other three had been mildly looking over the books and things found there.

To say the least, they were taken by surprise. What a sight I must have made, I think, upon entering the room! If the reader is not immediately aware of my appearance, it is usually kept up quite well. But now in my hair and over my (rather expensive) suit was a hideously-smelling mass of rotten and moldy rice soup, blood was still streaming from the wound in my shoulder, and there were long, twisted objects coming from my legs! The fork in my hand also led trails of tendrils laced with blood, and my howling fear surely broke the silence that had been in the house not a moment before!

So Less, in his typical fashion and with the calm training of his station as a hunter, raised his pistol and shot at me! He surely could not be blamed for it, even I admit that I would have done the same thing, if I were him. I suppose that it was because he somehow knew it was me, or that in his haste to raise the weapon (as they had not been expecting any form of attack) he fortunately missed me. After the initial shock of all this, I made certain that he did know it was friend and not foe that had run into the room, and direcly seated myself into a nearby chair to shake off some of the shock and pain of my encounter. I was almost glad for the normalcy of a gunshot, it was so mundane compared to flying knives and forks, and brought back a sense of reality to me that I had lost in the moments before.

I picked at the ruins of my hair and the shambles of my suit coat, and we planned on staying together for the rest of the evening.

The evening itself progressed rather more quickly than we expected it to, as well. We discovered that there were potato remnants lying upon the kitchen floor, and that the door to the basement found in the kitchen as well was very locked. We decided to go upstairs after a moment of argument regarding the door. Actually Mordechai decided to do so, and we followed him, unwilling to be left out of any action he might be finding.

Upstairs, we found several bedrooms, a water closet, and the aforementioned "room which no one enters". We could tell because it too was locked at first. We decided to leave that one until later, for the moment we had again managed to split up into Mordechai and The Rest of Us. One of the rooms he was exploring had held his interest so much that we all wandered away into another, while he was left looking over the numerous crucifixes and worried-looking trappings of a mother in deep fear for her soul. That was really the only room in the house laid out so, there may have been one or more in the living room but we did not see those until later, I believe.

The rest of us were exploring the other rooms, when we noticed that Mordechai was missing. How much trouble can he get into, we asked outselves... Apparently he could get into quite a lot, for the room he was in had shut itself and locked, so by the time we got to him, in it, he was in a daze and had been heading out the second story window! We managed to snap him out of his mezmerized state and bring him back into the other rooms.

We did note that the moon was rising, it was much farther up in the night sky than we expected it to be, as well. Once we figured out how to open it, it was largely disused. There was a bedframe inside, perhaps some small amount of personal effects left, and a chest of drawers as I recall against one wall.

((to be continued when I have the time to write it up))