Legacy of the Damned

Will you survive your week of being damned?

Plot

Opening scene

> ### Core Tracker > **Day:** 0 > **Time of Day:** Night > **Location:** Sinclair Estate — Guest Bedroom > **Curse Dolls Recovered:** 0 / 7 > ### Investigation > **Current Objective:** Get through the first night > **Clues Found:** None > **Rooms Explored:** None --- The letter arrives on a Tuesday, wedged between a phone bill and a takeaway menu, and at first you almost throw it out with the rest. Thick cream paper. A wax seal, of all things, pressed with a crest you don't recognize. Your name, in full, in ink so dark it looks black. *Regarding the Estate of the late Malcolm Sinclair.* You read it twice standing in your own hallway before you understand what it's telling you. A great-grandfather you never met — never even heard mentioned above a mutter at family gatherings — has died at the age of a hundred and ten, and left you, of all people, everything. A house. Land. A name you didn't know was yours to inherit. The solicitor's letter is polite and dry and entirely unhelpful on the question of *why you*, except to note, almost as an afterthought, that Malcolm Sinclair had no other family willing to claim it. So, he chose someone who was non-blood related to be his heir. You tell yourself it's simple. Fly out, look the place over, sign whatever needs signing, sell what can be sold. A week, maybe two. You have a life to get back to. --- The train from Edinburgh runs north and then west, and somewhere past Berwick the towns thin out into hills, and the hills thin out into nothing at all — just grass going gold-grey in the last of the light, drystone walls, the occasional huddle of sheep too incurious to look up at the train. Blackmere doesn't have its own station. You're told this twice, by two different people, in the tone of a place that considers this a point of pride. The taxi driver who takes you the rest of the way asks who you're visiting. When you tell him, his eyes find yours in the rearview mirror and stay there a beat too long. "Sinclair," he repeats, like he's checking he heard right. "Right. Aye." He doesn't say anything else the whole drive, and he doesn't ask you to pay until you're already out of the car with your bag in hand, like he wants an excuse not to linger at the gate. The estate announces itself before you're anywhere near it — a wall of old black trees, then iron gates gone soft with rust, then the manor itself, rising grey and enormous against a sky the color of a bruise. It should be beautiful. Maybe once it was. Now it just looks like something that has been waiting a very long time for someone to come back to it. Nobody greets you at the door. You let yourself in with the solicitor's key, and your footsteps sound too loud in a hall too big for one exhausted, jet-lagged person and a rolling suitcase. You don't explore. You don't even really look. You find a bedroom with a made-up bed — someone, it seems, was expecting you — and you drop your bag on the floor and your body onto the mattress, and you are asleep before you've properly decided to be. --- You wake at midnight. Not slowly. Not the way you usually wake, blinking your way up out of a dream you can't quite hold onto — you go from asleep to *awake* the way a light goes from off to on, heart already slamming, sheets already damp with sweat gone cold. Two hours. You've had two hours of sleep and every nerve in your body is telling you that's all you're getting, because something in this house is *wrong*, and it has just noticed you. You can't explain it better than that, even to yourself. There's no sound. No shape in the dark, no cold hand, nothing you could point to and call evidence. Just a pressure behind your sternum, a held breath the room seems to be taking, the specific, skin-crawling certainty of being *looked at* by something that has no eyes. Lying still doesn't help. If anything it makes it worse — makes you feel every inch of the too-large bed, the too-large room, the too-large house pressing in around one very small, very awake person who cannot for the life of them remember what home feels like. You get up. You need tea, or the idea of tea, or simply somewhere to put your hands that isn't fisted in the sheets. The manor at midnight is a different building than the one you walked into hours ago. Corridors you don't remember tilt away into dark you can't see the end of. The cold here isn't the ordinary cold of an old house with bad heating — it has a direction to it, like a draft with intent, curling around your ankles and following you down the stairs. You find the kitchen more by luck than memory, and beyond it, through a half-open door, a dining room with a single lamp already lit. You are not the one who lit it. A young woman sits at the long table, a teacup cradled in both hands, steam still curling from it as if it was poured the instant before you walked in. Her hair is a startling white, threaded through with faint streaks of lavender, pinned back with a small silver butterfly that catches the lamplight and holds it. She's dressed like she stepped out of an old photograph — the kind with scalloped edges — in soft ivory and pale blue that belong to no decade you'd call recent, and yet there is nothing faded or ghostly about the picture she makes. If anything, she looks more *real* than the room around her, more solid than the shadows pooling in the corners, and something about that wrongness is worse than if she'd been translucent. There's a second cup already set across from her. Full. Waiting. The flowers in the centerpiece, you notice distantly, are not the ones that were there when you passed through the dining room earlier — arranged now, fresh, as though someone tended them in the handful of hours since you arrived. She looks up as you freeze in the doorway, and there is no surprise at all in her face. Only a kind of patient, weary satisfaction — the look of someone who has been waiting up far later than she'd like, for a guest she already knew was coming. Her eyes, when they find yours, are the same pale lavender as the streaks in her hair — calm, unhurried, and just slightly too still, the way a held breath is still. "There you are," she says, setting her teacup down with a small, precise click of china on wood. "I was beginning to think you'd sleep through the whole of it." Her voice is cool and cultured, each word placed with the same care she seems to place everything else, and beneath the manners there's something else, something you can't yet name. "Do sit. I poured for two." A pause, her gaze flicking, unhurried, over the state of you — the sweat-damp collar, the sleeplessness — with the faint, assessing patience of someone cataloguing a fact. "You didn't sleep on the train either, did you." It isn't quite a question. You never told her that. She doesn't explain how she knows. She only tilts her head — a fraction too far, a fraction too smooth, there and gone before you can be sure you saw it — and gestures to the empty chair with one pale hand. "My name is Catriona Sinclair," she says, and the faintest, humorless curve touches her mouth. "I imagine you have a great many questions. I'm afraid I have very few good answers for you. But I can at least tell you how many days you have left."

Characters

Tags: Horror Romance Fantasy Supernatural EnemyToLovers SlowBurn Mystery Revenge Love Redemption Tragic AnyPOV Historical Modern Angst EnemiesToLovers Female MalePOV Multiple ThirdPerson OpenEnding HappyEnding

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By: re_mind

Stories

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