Chapter 7: That Which is Done in the Dark...

“I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever after be poison to me.”

— H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, originally published in Weird Tales, Vol. 11, No. 2, February 1928. Public domain.

Thomas led the way for the both of them. While Silas knew where the basement was, Thomas was intimately aware of the confines that they would be entering. The stone steps groaned beneath the following steps of Silas, but for the butler, no sounds were made.

For Thomas, the air thickened as they descended. He knew what awaited them in the cold, lonely room, and shame welled within him. Perhaps, Silas would not judge him, but Thomas would judge himself.

Thomas held the lantern aloft, allowing both to see.

At the base of the staircase, the door stood locked, and Thomas had to reach for a ring of keys. This was one given to him by Richard Wolcott personally. After turning the key, Thomas pushed the wooden entry open with the familiarity bred from thousands of uses. The hinges did not so much as protest its movement from one who knew it so personally.

He knew what laid in the chamber would be a private blasphemy to the young Wolcott.

The laboratory had once been a combination of a basement and wine cellar with the capability to act as a store room for provisions in the past. Those domestic purposes were no longer in effect as they had long since been stripped away for the needs of Richard Wolcott.

Books lay open across the tables alongside tomes bound in dark leather or stranger skins still. Twine kept some of the writings closed, and for the ones that were open, they bore letters in alphabets that had not been used since antiquity, and some that looked entirely fictional.

The pages were scribbled in with notes next to diagrams and artistic renderings of the human bodies. A malevolent malignancy permeated the intelligence, which always made Thomas recoil as a good Christian man, yet still he had obeyed the orders of his employer.

Strange glass tubes lay coiled like serpents, and a brass basin filled with markings that there had been fluid in them, but in the end, after such neglect and abandonment from the death of Richard Wolcott as well as Thomas’s lack of return, much of the evidence was disappearing.

Silas took one step into his own cellar and froze. He did not know how to accept every part of what he saw.

What might have been made to be used for storage had become an abomination to nature and a conservation of death. There were items of science and scholarly work like the glass and tubes as well as books, but they had been twisted for the uses of his father’s private experimentation. There was no doubt in his mind that his father had crossed lines of morality. He could barely take a step forward when his shoes had met with a sticky substance, which Silas mistook for syrup.

Upon closer inspection, Silas found that the floor bore wide streaks of brownish-black. There was no doubt in his mind that this was old blood.

There were smears and handprints decorated the lower halves of the stone walls of this goreish plasma. The scent was nearly unbearable, a marriage of copper, rot, and scorched salt.

In the far corner—beneath a sheet that was both hastily thrown and partially fallen—two cadavers lay forgotten.

He could not look long enough to interpret what they looked like. Silas was doing all he can to not vomit in the room; though, at this point, he would have called it a tomb. This was a mausoleum to two people who had not been given the dignity of a burial.

Silas choked. He turned away and bent over, both hands on his knee. The bile rose sharp and hot from his throat into his mouth, but he forced it back with a grimace and several shuddering breaths. The taste lingered to remind him of the foulness of his environment.

Thomas offered a neatly, squarely folded, white handkerchief.

“Breathe through it, sir,” he said softly. “The stench will settle. Breathe more through your mouth than your nose.”

Silas accepted the linen and pressed it to his lips. Further still, he followed his butler’s advice.

“What ... what in God’s name—”

The Wolcott found himself unable to move, yet the macabre fascination led to a curiosity that would not allow him to stand still when there was so much to discover about his father’s activities.

“This was your father’s work,” Thomas said, voice grave but free of emotion. He turned his head in shame before adding, “Where I assisted.”

Silas could recognize the pain in his butler’s voice, but that stinging discomfort meant little to the employer when there were truths right in front of him.

“How many...?”

Though the question trailed off, Silas would hope that Thomas understood that this was from a need to know while also being coupled with a need to know. This was not a perverse necessity. Shame met with inquisitive interest and outrage to form a monster within Silas that demanded precise facts about what occurred between Richard Wolcott and Thomas Wilson when it came to managing the dead.

Because of these complicated sentiments, desperation coated his words. This result was outside of his control; after all, illogical feelings were part of what it meant to be human.

“How many bodies did he desecrate down here?”