Author's Note: This was originally going to be one long story but I didn't want to turn this into a novel after I realized I was making this part a little too long. Hope you enjoy anyway.
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For their 18th birthdays, most kids get either a car or a house if they're lucky.
Philip Carlyle got a house alright, but also a 2 thousand year old curse passed down from generation to generation. The worst part about it was that nobody bothered to tell him that last part until he got there.
Only a couple of days after his birthday a letter from an anonymous sender addressed to him detailed him as the heir to a large estate in a village named Redwall off in the countryside.
Obviously the whole thing was very suspect and Phil was no fool to believe something so convenient would land at his doorstep but both his parents confirmed his family lineage and the official channels even confirmed the estate's existence and his legal claim.
His parents even went as far as to encourage him going to the estate if only to give it a once over and offered to drive him to the village and pick him up.
Once the excitement of getting his own house, a mansion at that, died down he began to analyse the sequence of events that brought him up to the Carlyle manor.
First he noted the convenience of the letter and the fact it had no listed sender. There was nothing unusual about it save the lingering scent of perfume indicating the writer was a woman and that their use of fragrance was so abundant she may as well have sprayed the perfume on the letter itself.
The contents of the parchment weren't so unusual though it did come with an old vintage iron key which Phil could only guess was the house key.
But as strange as it was it paled in comparison to his parent's behaviour. Though they were equally as sceptical about the letter as their son, once they read the letter themselves, they did a complete 180 and began pushing for checking the house out. They weren't exactly over protective, but they'd never allow Philip to go to an unknown village by himself on the basis of a stranger's note.
When he got to the village he didn't have much of an opinion, it seemed ordinary and quiet. But when they found out he was a Carlyle, the villagers began avoiding him like the plague.
It wasn't like they treated him with spite, if anything it felt like the opposite, like they didn't want to do anything to offend him as if touching him would invoke the wrath of God.
The only person willing to talk to him and the one who told him about his family's "curse" was, as cliched as it sounded, an old crone in the local pub.
Aside from the dishevelled grey wisps of hair, she looked like your average granny; small, wise eyes hidden behind simple reading glasses, a cyan woolly cardigan over a deeper blue dress decorated in floral patterns of some exotic description and a shrivelled, frail body as if any breeze could reduce her to dust within minutes.
She came up behind him and clasped his shoulder to grab his attention. When Phil turned around she began by pointing at him and wheezing "You look just like him...No wonder she chose you..."
Needless to say Phil was intrigued.
At first he only half listened to her story, apparently his ancestor, when he lived in the estate manor Philip now owned, was alive he drew the attention of many young ladies but among them was a lonely young witch who, spurned by rejection after rejection, grew increasingly aggressive and possessive of the young man, even going so far as to declare herself his official bride without his say so.
Eventually, the young Carlyle fell in love with a different maiden and eloped with her, leaving the village far behind.
Of course the Witch didn't take this very well and laid a curse upon the very walls of the mansion and the blood of the Carlyles that one day, his descendant shall repay his scorn with her love and return to the mansion to be with her forever.
Ever since then, the estate has been sold and broken into on multiple occasions and every time, those that spend the night at the mansion will meet an unseen fate.
The most unusual thing is that whenever a woman spends her night there, she is never seen again but when a man enters, his body is found dead without any visible wounds, almost as if he suffered a heart attack or died of shock. The police have been called to the village on multiple occasions but each investigation came up short and the officers, as if possessed by an otherworldly force would leave seemingly forgetting why they came.
With a mournful and quiet tone, the frail old crone spoke about how some women feel drawn towards to house for inexplicable reasons unknown to them and recounted how her daughter was a victim of such grand hypnosis and how her granddaughter followed suit looking for her mother. She even showed him a faded photograph of the missing pair, they shared the same auburn hair and silver eyes but while the mother's was longer, her daughter cut it short and hid an eye behind her fringe.
At the end of her story, Phil did his best to remain respectful but the old lady must have guessed how sceptical he truly was.
"It matters little I suppose" she creaked dejectedly "If you are the one she has chosen then you two will be lured to the house no matter what. Your curiousity will best you, it's inevitable. But promise you'll be on your guard that you'll leave as soon as you enter."
He thought back to the old crone's warning as he advanced towards the abandoned estate. Despite their fears, the villagers must have taken great care of the mansion, it looked spotless and alive despite it's age, arrogantly defying the tests of time itself.
Stepping on the porch and before the front doors, Philip gathered his courage, pushed his doubts aside and unlocked the door with the old key.
The manor's foyer was an expansive room with little furnishings, the floor was covered with a velvet red carpet with gold ornate designs that curved and danced along the carpet. An absurdly expensive looking chandelier hung dormant in the middle of the ceiling, a gilded overseer for a forgotten home and paintings depicting men and women of a bygone era and of landscapes lost to the modern age remained on the walls. Corpses of memories from a time when the manor meant something to someone and wasn't a horror story to frighten the local children.
There was a multitude of doors around the room that lead deeper into the estate and two staircases that curved around and met at a balcony that lead into even more corridors.
Philip decided to explore the first floor and wandered around the fist corridor to his right.
He found each corridor was designed the same; expressionless and white washed with another red carpet running the entire length. To one side, windows that expanded to the ceiling running the length of the hall, overlooking the vast verdant green fields that surrounded the property and on the other side there'd be several doors leading to either the same room or different rooms altogether.
The doors in the right corridor closest to the door lead to the dining room and kitchen and on the other side they lead into a living room with the barest furnishings.
