The Haunting of Harvestspell Manor

The Society Gets a Letter

Autumn had just settled in London's courts and streets while citizens walked to and fro on business. The children had gone back to the school houses and colors had begun to change in the foliage and grand trees of the parks. Crisp September air flushed through the buildings all the way from Soho to Cavendish Square. It was a beautiful autumn for 1880 this year. Last fall had only seen rainswept days and chilly damp foggy nights, with the only source of light from the ruddy gas lamps to guide the nightly traveler homewards.

But this year brought September clear skies and crisp autumn breezes, scattering leaves hither and dither on the cobblestone lanes and streets. And on this blessed drowsy morning, The Haunted Gents Society was busily at work with low murmur, like the hum of a beehive.

This building just off Devonshire Road was always a buzz with new stories and cases from the hard working gentlemen inside. Inside worked one of the best offices of dealing with the occult and strange. There wasn't a week where a new customer would send for the aid of The Haunted Gents Society in regards of getting rid of some bogey or apparition. And there wasn't an hour when some chap or his companion from the club would return from a case and tell their coworkers such wonderful tales of the supernatural sights they've encountered.

It was on this autumnal morning that a sealed letter was brought to the Chairmen of the Society, Alador Bates, and having carefully opened the envelope and examined it's contents, had rung up on the speaking tube to his secretary,

"Ms. Alice, send in Casey O'Daly and Matias Barrington to my office."

"Yes sir, Mr. Chairman," the sweet voice of Ms. Alice replied on the other end.

In the parlor room, at the billiards table while their coworkers sat and chatted of their ghastly tales of horror by the fireplace, were Casey O'Daly and Matias Barrington. Casey and Matias had gone way back in the terms of friendship to their days of boyhood, and had plenty of adventures together in growing up. So it was with great fortune that in being hired two months ago for the positions of Junior Investigators for the Society, they would be partnered together in this new career of the paranormal and weird. But had yet to actually get a case and get out on the field themselves. So they often lounged in the parlor, listened to their coworkers' strange stories, or worked in keeping up files and papers.

Casey was a tall gentleman and thin as a scarecrow, yet robust and firmly built in his deceiving frame, having worked as a farmhand in his teen years. With freckles upon his Irish cheeks and his long wavy brown hair that stopped just by his neck. The only other hair he had on his face was his chin beard, along side of some fuzz that sort of curled on his jaw line. Dressed in his usual top hat and buttoned coat, with a lovely ascot at the neck of the finest silk he can afford on his salary. For Casey had an eye for fashion and always wanted to dress with an agreeable flare, and would always come to work dressed in a different colored ascot depending on the mood he was in after his morning tea.

Matias was about two to three feet shorter than his companion, but much more built in muscle and more of the athletic type, having won five championship games of tennis in a row in his college years. He wore a derby hat with special kinds of spectacles around the brim, and a brilliant white frilly cloth at the collar and striped coat, gifts which he had gotten from Casey for his birthday about a year ago. Matias' black short hair shined sometimes in the morning light or the luminous glow of lamps in the parlor of the club. He had no beard for he kept himself trimmed, but did have a five o clock shadow that engulfed the entire lower half of his face from his bottom lip to the chin, curving along the jaw which what would've been sideburns.

Casey and Matias, though they were new to the practice of being ghost hunters for England, were actually not unfamiliar with the forces of the other worlds that lay beyond our own. Casey had once a short experience in his young years of seeing a dullahan—the headless ghost who rides upon a black carriage drawn by dead horses—ride swiftly through the Irish moors one summer night, and saved himself from death by the vengeful spirit with a lump of gold on his pocket, for as any sensible Irish man would know that gold can keep evil spirits away. Since then, while having developed a fear of the unknown, had found ways to overcome this fear by trying to discover it and rationalize it.