Bloodline Manor, chapter one
CHAPTER ONE
The Connecticut Gazetteer, November 1, 1970
Local nineteen year old arrested for Vampire attacks
Three young teens hospitalized for blood loss
A HOLE IN THE WALLPAPER
I don’t know exactly when it happened. The hole wasn’t there when Eleanor, my sister, and I first toured the house—of that I’m certain. But there’s a hole in the wallpaper now, right in the study. It’s a small thing, a flaw so subtle that anyone else might overlook it. But I notice it every time I walk by. The house itself isn’t terribly old by architectural standards, but old enough. Built sometime in the early 1900s, local records indicate construction started in 1901 or 1902 but wasn’t completed until around 1915. Evidently, there were problems—accidents, delays, deaths on the site. In fact, two of the deaths were ruled as homicides. A gruesome detail, but presumably true. Yet with these old houses, who can ever be completely sure?
What I am sure of is this: many of its finer details were salvaged from even older homes and estates. Places long forgotten, demolished to make way for cheaper, more profitable structures. The kind of places that vanish from history, except for a rare soul like Marco Calvo Esquire, the former owner, who apparently had an eye for gathering pieces of the past.
Take the light fixtures, for instance. Many of them began their lives as gas lamps, carefully converted into electric fittings without losing any of their Victorian charm. The balustrades on the upper-floor balconies came from the Reinushaud estate in Westcastle. The library’s paneling? It once belonged to a mansion in Dorchester, dating back to the 1700s. I heard they rebuilt the library to its exact dimensions just to house those shelves and woodwork. The wainscoting in the dining room survived a fire in Orleans, a lucky find for those who treasure objects narrowly escaping destruction. And then there’s the antique leaded stained glass in the foyer, shipped from an abandoned abbey in northern Italy sometime after the Great War. That piece, like so much of the house, carries a weight, a history I can only guess at.
But none of that really matters now. Not the wainscoting, not the antique light fixtures, not even the beautiful hand-carved moldings that line the ceiling. This isn’t a story about the house, nor its relics. This is a story about the hole—a small tear in the wallpaper, barely noticeable unless you know it’s there. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Like the past, once torn open, it can never be fully mended.
It was a few days after we moved in when I first noticed it. It was one of those cold, dreary afternoons where everything feels damp, even indoors. The rain had been falling in a constant drizzle since the night before, soaking the gardens and turning the stone paths into slick hazards. The light in the house was dim, dull despite the candelabras and sconces along the walls. The clouds above moved with an ominous purpose, churning like something alive. The house felt quieter than usual that day, as if it were waiting for something.
It wasn’t long before I felt the same—waiting, listening.
I had been rummaging through the boxes in one of the upstairs rooms, thinking back on what brought us here. The decision to sell the condo wasn’t easy, but it was the only thing that made sense after Maria and the baby were gone. One careless truck driver, one quiet Sunday afternoon, and my life had unraveled. The condo Maria and I called home, the place where we’d dreamed of raising our child, had become unbearable. Every corner, every shadow haunted me.
Eleanor had been in the asylum when she heard about the accident. Even through the fog of her own pain, Maria’s death had jolted her. Somehow, she found the strength to pull herself together, enough to be discharged and help me through my grief. I still don’t know how she did it—after everything she had been through herself.
“It’s the condo,” she had said, during one of our quieter conversations. “It’s not right for you anymore. Let’s find somewhere new, somewhere we can both heal.”
She was right, and Andrew knew it. He hadn’t been able to bear the sight of that pool after Eleanor’s suicide attempt, and now he couldn’t bear the emptiness of the condo. It was time to move on. Even so at first, there was resistance. Leaving the condo felt like abandoning something—like giving up. But Eleanor’s quiet persistence wore me down. Even Mabel, our housekeeper, had gently agreed. “A new place, sir,” she had said one evening. “The city’s not what it used to be for you. It might be best for both of you to start fresh.”
So, we began the search. It had to be close to Sacred Oaks College, where I chaired the Department of History and Antiquities. My work consumed me, and I couldn’t afford to live far from the campus. We wanted a home with history, something grand enough to accommodate the life we had once dreamed of, though now it felt more like filling a void.
Eleanor took charge of the search, reaching out to a Realtor who came highly recommended for dealing with high-end properties in the New Covenant area. The Realtor was an older woman, sharp-eyed and keen, with an air of efficiency that Eleanor appreciated. After a brief consultation, the search began in earnest.
The first property they visited was a grand estate, complete with towering white columns and sprawling grounds. It should have been exactly what they were looking for, but it wasn’t. The house was too new, too polished. It lacked character and felt more like a luxury hotel than a home. Eleanor wandered through its pristine halls, her shoes clicking against the marble floors, but her heart felt no connection to it. Andrew, too, seemed distracted, glancing out the large windows toward the neatly manicured gardens that felt somehow artificial.
“Too perfect, almost sterile,” Eleanor said as they climbed back into the car. Andrew simply nodded.
The second house was more promising—an older Tudor-style home with plenty of charm and rich history. However, it was located in a more isolated part of town, far from the conveniences and cultural pulse of New Covenant. The house itself was charming, with ivy-covered stone walls and heavy wooden doors, but the moment they stepped inside, Andrew shook his head.
“It’s too far out,” he said quietly to Eleanor as they stood in the dimly lit foyer. “The drive to the college would take too much time.”
Eleanor agreed. Though the house had more character than the first, it wasn’t the right fit. They needed something closer to Andrew’s work, but with enough space and history to feel like a true home.
The Realtor, sensing their growing frustration, hesitated for a moment as they stood in the driveway of the second property. She shuffled through her notes, then looked up with a faint smile. “You know,” she said, almost conspiratorially, “there’s one other property that might interest you. It’s just out of probate—a bit of a fixer-upper, but with the right touch, it could be perfect. It’s just been put on the market, and I don’t think it will take long to sell with the bank’s asking price.”
Eleanor raised an eyebrow, intrigued. “Tell us more.”
The Realtor leaned in slightly, her voice dropping as if sharing a secret. “The Calvo house. It’s not far from the college, in a more established neighborhood. The estate has been in probate for years, but the paperwork finally cleared a few weeks ago. It’s a grand old place—big enough for a family, with a lot of history. It does need some work, but the bones of the house are solid. The kind of property that, with the right vision, could really shine.”
Eleanor and Andrew exchanged a glance. There was something unspoken between them, a shared curiosity that hadn’t been there with the previous houses. Mabel, seated in the backseat of the car, cleared her throat softly.
“Shall we take a look, sir?” she asked, her voice gentle but encouraging.
Andrew looked out the window, his eyes scanning the distance as if trying to see the house already. Finally, he nodded. “Let’s see it.”
The house quickly became our home, and for a time, things were quiet. We started settling into a routine, and though the loss of Maria and the baby still troubled me, especially when I would lie down to get some sleep, Eleanor’s presence was a welcome distraction from that nagging feeling of responsibility. She was healing, getting stronger. The horrors of her own past—her fiancé, Alex, lost at sea, and her suicide attempt—still lingered, but she was stronger now. We leaned on each other in ways we hadn’t done since we were children.
Then, one afternoon, I found the hole.
The house felt still as if waiting for something or someone to appear… quieter than usual. The wind hummed in the eaves, not loud enough to be called a moan, but enough to be felt. Every so often, a stronger gust would find a gap in the woodwork, whistling a high, sharp note that seemed almost too deliberate, like a whisper caught on the air or chillingly like a child’s drawn out cry for succor. It was a day for fires and hot drinks, for settling in with a good book or a comforting story, but instead I was in the study, a room I had avoided in the early days because of its oppressive stillness. But that day, something pulled me toward it. The rain had finally stopped, and the strange light filtering through the stained-glass windows cast long, intricate shadows on the walls. That’s when I noticed it—a small, jagged tear in the otherwise immaculate wallpaper. A hole no bigger than a nickel, but it was there, undeniably so.
I reached up, my fingers tracing the edges. Something about it felt off, but I couldn’t place why. Had it always been there? I didn’t think so. In fact, I was certain it hadn’t been. The wallpaper, which had been perfectly intact when we moved in, now had a wound.
The wallpaper in the study was something special. Unlike the rest of the house’s salvaged decor, it had been custom-made for this room—one of a kind. Manufactured according to Calvo’s detailed specifications and designed by Milton, Morris, & Zimmermann Paper Hangings in Wales; one of the oldest if not the oldest wallpaper manufacturer in the United Kingdom. As the story goes the manufacturer experienced an abnormal number of mechanical issues during the print and shortly after completing the work there was a mysterious factory fire that destroyed most of their orders awaiting shipment. This misfortune made the wallpaper in this study a rare and valuable find. Each seashell in the design was unique, no two exactly alike. The colors shifted subtly from a pale green to a deep, almost black shade of emerald, with tiny flecks of color hidden in the patterns. The craftsmanship was so fine that the shells appeared three-dimensional, as if you could reach out and pluck them from the wall. It wasn’t hard to imagine that each shell had once rested on some distant shore, gathered by a collector who thought nothing of their strangeness. But now, this perfect, pristine wallpaper had been marred by a single hole.
It should have been nothing—a minor imperfection easily repaired. But something about it unsettled me. Perhaps it was because I knew the paper was irreplaceable. There was no way to patch it without ruining the entire effect. But it wasn’t just that. There was something… wrong about the hole itself. The darkness within it felt too deep, too still, as though it led somewhere, or worse, that it was looking back at me.
I stood there, staring, for longer than I care to admit. The room seemed colder the longer I stayed. Finally, I shook myself from my trance, reminding myself that I had more pressing matters to attend to. The notebook I was searching for contained my lecture notes for tomorrow’s first class on the history of the Roman world. It was somewhere in those boxes, and I needed it to make the right impression on my new students.
And so began my obsession with the hole in the wallpaper, and by extension, the house itself. I started spending more time in the study, watching, waiting, as if something might emerge from that tiny tear. Eleanor noticed the change in me, but she said nothing at first. She had her own ways of coping, and perhaps she thought this was mine.
But something is wrong here. The hole is just the beginning.
I can feel it.
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