The Bower House sat at the end of one of the oldest streets in Darkmouth. It was an infamous old house where dark ceremonies and perverse orgies were whispered to be held. It was a shunned place, slowly decaying at the end of Ellis Street, it's windows dark and murky, it's yard overgrown and creeping through an iron fence. None of the uneducated and superstitious people of the neighborhood dared to go near it. They said it was cursed and several old myths and legends surrounded it, mostly obscene tales of debauchery and perversion.
The Bower House had sat empty for a number of years. No one would purchase it, even those who weren't superstitious. It was a rotting corpse of a house in a neighborhood of little value. No one even wanted to buy it just to have it torn down and a new house built in its place. The land it rested on was worthless. It was just a dead house that no one outside of Ellis Street paid attention to and those on Ellis Street completely avoided.
When Charlotte first came to Ellis Street, the Bower House didn't seem much different than the rest of the houses. The entire street was a depressed ruin of poverty and ignorance. Weeds sprouted out of the cracks in the sidewalks. Most of the windows had went unwashed for years. None of the houses had seen repairs for decades. There was something different about the Bower House on second glance though. A sinister quality beyond that of the physical world. Charlotte had wandered down Ellis Street on an afternoon stroll and seen the house. Something about it had enticed her. It was the way that the windows seemed to glare at her as she stood at its iron fence and watch it. It was the way it seemed to lean forward as if menacing her. It produced an effect on Charlotte that she had never felt before. The mystery of the house had ensnared her completely.
A librarian by vocation, Charlotte immediately dived into researching the Bower House. She read its perverse legends and all the sordid history of it that went back three hundred years to its building. It was noted that Bower House may have been the first house built on Ellis Street thus making it one of the oldest houses in Darkmouth. Charlotte was fascinated by history of a darker tone and decided that she needed to buy the house outright and investigate its mysteries for herself.
Charlotte belonged to the wealthy Gilman family, one of the oldest in Darkmouth as well, making its purchase a simple matter of tracking down the current owner. The current owner was a man of fifty named Orson Berand. Charlotte thought the man would be happy to sell the house but Mr. Berand outright refused her. "No," he said as they had tea in his parlor. "Absolutely not. Under no circumstances. That is final."
Charlotte, an attractive woman with dark brown hair, a plump ass and enormous breasts, wouldn't accept a refusal from him. She simply needed to have that house. It was becoming an obsession with her. She pressed him further, "I can make you a very generous offer."
"Absolutely not. I won't sell it to you and that is final. The house is wicked and the neighborhood is filled with all sorts of ruffians and brutes. It's no place for a lady such as yourself."
"I don't intend to live there," Charlotte said, "just study it is all. I merely want to purchase it so that I can do so at my leisure. Please sir, is there no way I can convince you?"
"It's a damn foolish thing you want," he said. After some consideration and little more convincing, Berand decided to sell. Charlotte was ecstatic and moved the proceedings along as quickly as she could drag the reluctant Mr. Berand through them. That October, Charlotte had Bower House.
~ o ~
Bower House was without gas lighting or furnace, so Charlotte would have to rely on candles and the fireplaces. It was mid-October when she was finally able to move some furniture in. Getting it anywhere near livable was a months long process that was turning into a massive financial strain, but Charlotte insisted to her family that it was all worth it for her studies. Earlier in September, she had quit her job at the library in order to focus more on the house. She intended to write a book on it, what would be her first.
The locals did not appear to be pleased that someone had taken residence in Bower House. Charlotte never intended full residence there but that was how things seemed to have worked out. The men, burly bearded drunks of the roughest and lowest forms took to gathering on the opposite side of the street and watching the house with an angry superstition. Their wives all hissed at her whenever she passed them on the street. Some of the men even began to follow her. Charlotte ignored this, thinking only of Bower House and her potential book on it.
The first week in the house was uneventful. She spent it mostly going through the rooms and seeing what sort of artifacts she could find from the house's long history. There was little in the house. Most of the rooms were completely empty. All of the wallpaper was peeling, every stair and step creaked, every door groaned, the curtains were little more than tattered wisps of cloth that blew when the wind whistled through the closed windows. At night, the house was impossibly dark. Candles and firelight seemed to do little against the oppressive blackness that loomed in the halls and corners. The somber, decaying atmosphere of that accursed house seemed to be having a strange effect on Charlotte.
One night, Charlotte awoke to a strange sound. It was something that she couldn't quite make out. |t seemed to be coming from below her, so she climbed out of bed and pressed her ear on the floor. It almost sounded like chanting coming from somewhere in the house. Armed with a burning candle, Charlotte made her way through the house in her nightgown to find the source of the noise. There was nothing both upstairs or downstairs but she could still hear the distant chanting.
