Beast dug his fingers into the flesh of his biceps when he realized that Laurent’s neck had still been unnaturally warm when they hugged in the playground. What did that mean? “I wonder if King’s is the same.”
“It’s not like we’re gonna go poking at it, but maybe we could ask Nao? Or I could even put up Jordan to hugging him.”
Beast nodded, but his thoughts were already drifting off to the findings and thoughts he kept to himself. Knight was his closest friend, but he was mostly interested in the brand because he thought it had significance to the history of the house, and in turn, the history of the Mercier family. He would not understand some of Beast’s hopes for it. “Yes, let’s do that.”
Knight looked down at his phone when it beeped, and he groaned. “Jesus. And there it is. Half an hour like clockwork. That woman’s doing my head in. I told her that I’m not fucking anyone behind her back. That if I fuck someone, I’ll let her know first. She said she was fine with an open relationship, but I’m not sure anymore if she knows what that means. I’ve got to go or she’s gonna defrost all my food or some shit like that.”
Beast nodded, pretending he too felt like the trouble with Jordan was a huge issue in Knight’s world of sexual abundance. She was the kind of woman who liked the fantasy of a bad boy and his lifestyle, but didn’t appreciate the reality of it. Knight would be better off with someone else, but who was Beast to judge? Knight was a big boy and could make his own decisions.
“Sure, I won’t stop you.”
“But tell me if you find something new. This has to be the most exciting discovery to happen in the Mercier family tree in years.” Knight grinned wildly and left Beast to his own devices. Sometimes Beast wondered what the ‘genealogy community’—as Knight loved to call it—would think if they found out who Knight was. Beast had definitely never met a biker with a weirder hobby. Then again, who was he to talk about weird hobbies when he was stuck on his own in this room, pulling open the drawer full of his findings on occult practices in the area?
There were stories linked to the symbol under the floor. The symbol Beast now saw on two separate men. A serial killer active in the early nineteenth century reportedly also had one, and whenever references to it appeared on the pages of old journals, letters, or town chronicles, it was always related to unusual events. A sudden acquisition of wealth. Black masses and brutal animal sacrifice in the woods nearby. The birth of octuplets, of which all survived. Never-ending banquets. A mass-hallucination among the patients and staff of the very psychiatric institution that previously occupied the current clubhouse. In the sixties, so many people claimed to have seen the devil within the asylum that the decision to abandon it came suddenly and left the building to rot. Until King purchased it for close to nothing back in the early 2000s.
And curiously enough, all those events were clustered around the property, with each new building constructed in the same spot, re-using the old materials.
How old was the iron-filled sigil under the floor in the cellar? As old as the European colonies, or perhaps even more ancient?
Beast opened his notebook on the one story he kept coming back to. One that was closer to being a fairytale than a historical account, and it wasn’t even clear whether it originated in the native legends or has been the product of wild imagination of the first colonists.
The story told of a man who hunted in this area and traded with European ship captains. During one of his hunting trips, a bear mauled him so badly his arm needed to be amputated. The ship captain who wrote about it in his journals, claimed to have seen it with his own eyes. Yet when he came back from England a year later, he met the same man, not only in perfect health but so strikingly handsome one of the ladies traveling with the captain married the man only two days later.
Most fairytales had some kind of moral to it, an ending, and yet this one, just… was. The man never told anyone what cured him, and the only thing the captain noted was that the locals said the man made a journey into the woods west from the township of Brecon—which was also the general location of the clubhouse—and came back healed. With his new wife, he moved to live in the same woods. But the story got blurry there. Some versions claimed he started a town of his own, some that he lured in travellers and made blood sacrifices, when another suggested he ate and drank like a monster yet took three more wives and lived to be a hundred years old.