Chapter Text
Drift’s research notes contained three notable incidents in the town of Oakhurst.
She’d happened upon the first in her university library. It wasn’t shelved in the correct section—HV 4950 wasn't where she would expect a dry, if antiquated, description of Oakhurst. Well, dry, save for the page she’d flipped to first: an account, nearly two hundred years old, of the death of one of Oakhurst’s mayors. It detailed the following:
“I’d visited Oakhurst before, and you couldn’t find a better mayor than Louis. Every man, woman, and child loved him, and it was clear he loved them in return. So you can imagine my horror when I woke one evening to find the whole town, it seemed, piling on wood for a fire to burn him at the stake. I begged them to stop, but they paid me no heed. Afterwards, I asked what on earth had motivated them to do such a thing, and not a single one of them could answer.”
The slim book hadn’t been labelled, and didn’t have anything on the dark red cover. When Drift brought it to a librarian, they were unable to find a record of it in their collections. Suggesting it was another patron’s book that had been shelved by mistake, the librarian handed it back to Drift and urged her to take it to the lost and found.
Drift took it home instead. No one would miss it.
The second had found her late at night, when Drift was looking for anything to do that wasn’t writing her essay or going to sleep. She was clicking through Wikipedia, pretending to herself that she was doing “background research”, when she spotted a reference link to Oakhurst.
Was this the same one she’d read about? She clicked it and was met with some confusion—the article was a stub, and its only sources were a now-deleted YouTube video and a brief mention in what seemed to be a personal website. But it did link to one other article, titled “Covenant Manor”. It read:
Covenant Manor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Covenant Manor was a building located in the town of Oakhurst.
History
The Covenant Manor was built as a private residence in the early 1700s, but was acquired in 1872 by a gentleman’s club and served as a club house until its destruction.
In October 1925, the building was burnt down, killing those inside. An investigation revealed that the doors of the building were deliberately obstructed. The sole survivor of the incident, a young girl staying there with her family, was later convicted of arson and manslaughter after she confessed on both counts.
Drift checked her book, and sure enough, there were accounts of the manor within.
Another disturbing crime. But it was a Wikipedia article, and not a particularly thorough one at that. Drift would have likely dismissed it. But when she went to check the footnotes, her lights—and her desktop—went dark. Drift startled, then pulled out her laptop, deciding to continue where she’d left off. But when she pulled up the Oakhurst article again, the link to the Covenant Manor was red, not blue or purple. She tried searching Wikipedia as a whole and realized that the article was gone.
It had been deleted five minutes after she’d viewed it.
Drift had searched for the third one. Looking up “Oakhurst” in Google or university databases had primarily yielded results for a book series about pirates. Not what she was looking for.
But she’d managed to find something—a scan of a local newspaper from a neighbouring town to Oakhurst, detailing a “boys’ trip gone wrong.”
At first, she’d thought she’d found something else. The article title made it seem like maybe someone had run a car into a ditch or made an unfortunate impression upon one’s boss. Not what had happened.
A group of university students, all young men, had gone on a road trip together across the country. Among their number was a student named Csezlaw, whose body had washed up in Oakhurst on the shores of the river that marked its southern border. The students unanimously claimed that Jack von Pyroscythe had drowned him.
Pyroscythe...where did Drift know that name from?
According to the records Drift had found, Jack was still awaiting trial.
While Drift was in the university cafe, researching the labour practices of Hemlocke Manufacturing for a class project, she found another clue. Their CFO and second-largest shareholder was none other than Sir David von Pyroscythe.
Jack didn’t have any social media, but David did. His Linkedin wasn’t much help, but he also had an Instagram. It seemed...professional. Mostly celebrating the achievements of Hemlocke Manufacturing, with just enough personal photos that it wasn’t going to be mistaken for a corporate account.
But as Drift scrolled down, hoping to find out more about the elusive Jack von Pyroscythe, what she found instead was...unnerving.
Where she’d expected to start finding family photos or perhaps references to Jack, she found voids. People standing just a little too far apart in family photos. Blurry scenes that might have been the background for someone’s picture—with no one in them.
She reverse-image-searched some of the photos. Her suspicion was confirmed when she found an old Facebook post with the original image. There was someone who had been edited out.
The original news article didn’t have an image, so Drift didn’t know for certain.
But it seemed like Jack von Pyroscythe had been deliberately erased.
Three murders tied to this town. Three acts of incomprehensible, seemingly unprovoked violence. They kept Drift up at night.
And then—one more, this time best classified as “anecdotal evidence”.
Drift hadn’t been the only one researching Oakhurst. Her roommates, Avid and Elle, were convinced that the small town held some sort of monster.
One week ago, Elle had gone to Oakhurst to investigate for herself.
Today, she lay dead on the floor of their apartment, a knife through her heart.