[Formerly Featured/Historical Horror] Masquerading as a gentlemanly bachelor living in Victorian England, Joseph Redding is a fraud amongst the living. After splitting from his partner in unspeakable, underground crimes, he must now pay the price fo...
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It was hours later, perched on a lonely stool at the bureau in my attic room that I brought out the locket and set it down before me with the weighty knock of metal on wood.
It is a striking piece in its own, exotic way, though not to my personal taste, or perhaps to many a notion of traditionally beautiful jewellery. I suspect it is of Indian origin, as the being etched upon the casing is some contorted, foreign deity in an elaborate headdress. I cannot read the curious alphabet engraved on the reverse, and when I pick it up it leaves a strange residue on my fingertips; one with the musk of aged metal and the pungent scent of Eastern tobacco. In light that Corgaine had long given up rolling his own cigarettes, it rings clear that the locket does not belong to him.
More curious still, I cannot open it. I cannot decide if this is because I haven't the strength of mind to want to see what lies inside, or if I lack the physical dexterity in my fingers to free its stubborn clasp. I am not wholly disappointed, if truth be told.
Though there remains one thing that I find most disturbing of all ...
The locket has a heartbeat.
A slow, regular, unearthly pulse without end. Even during the silent hours of the night, when I tuck the ghastly trinket inside a scarf to muffle the sound, I can sense it on the periphery of my hearing like the thrumming wings of a moth in the dark.
It is because of this that I am all the more unnerved by Corgaine's context of an arrangement with the deceased, as it means that the haunted soul born of unholy ventures into science will never rest. It is not the end she longed for, poor Faith, or whatever name her parents had once bestowed her. If Corgaine had dealt with her the way he claimed he had dealt with me, I know her future will be one of heartache and uncertainty, of resentment and longing.
Faith's confinement in the locket is none too dissimilar from my own predicament. She has become yet another victim of circumstance ensnared by the interests of that despicable Jonathan Corgaine.
Despite the horror and sadness of her fate, I cannot help but selfishly ruminate on my own; of the day I unwillingly assumed the identity of an honourable and ambitious young auctioneer by the name of Joseph Lyle Redding. Though favoured amongst Glasten's elite for his charm, glimmering prospects and the long foreseen arrangement to marry into the de Veyra line, we had disguised his untimely death from them all.
