Chapter 5: Whispers in the Ink

Chapter 5: Whispers in the Ink

The blizzard was a living thing. It screamed against the windows of the Gasthof, a relentless, primal howl that promised to devour anything foolish enough to challenge it. Each gust of wind felt like the inn itself was exhaling a shuddering breath. For Maxwell, trapped in his small, cold room, the storm was merely an echo of the tempest raging inside him. He sat on the edge of his bed, staring at the patch of his own chest where the ghost’s touch had left its invisible, freezing brand. The cold was a constant, a dull ache that served as a permanent reminder of the gaping maw of unreality that had opened up and swallowed him whole.

Elsbeth’s words from the doorway haunted him. “The mountains are protecting us. Keeping us safe until Father’s business is concluded.” He was not a guest here; he was an instrument. A tool to be used and, he had no doubt, discarded once "Father's business" was done. Panic was a useless, corrosive acid. He had to think. He had to do something other than sit here and wait for the next phase of the nightmare to begin.

His gaze fell upon the stack of documents Elsbeth had left for him on the small, rickety desk. The real work. The supposed reason he was here. In the dim light of the single kerosene lamp, the pile of parchment and paper seemed to pulse with that same faint, sickly violet glow he’d first seen on the mimeographed instruction sheet. The Mark on his chest thrummed in response, a low-frequency vibration that confirmed the documents’ connection to the dead man.

Work. It was the only refuge he had left. In the precise, logical world of grammar and syntax, there were rules. There was order. It was a world he understood, a world blessedly free of reanimated corpses and predatory innkeepers. To focus on the task was to build a momentary fortress against the encroaching madness.

He moved to the desk, his movements stiff and clumsy. He spread the documents out under the lamplight. They weren't the neat, uniform stack of legal deeds he had expected. It was a chaotic jumble: thick, vellum-bound journals, loose sheets of correspondence, and official-looking papers all mixed together, the whole collection smelling of dust and decay.

He picked up the topmost journal. The leather was cracked with age, the script inside a dense, spidery Gothic that would have been impenetrable to most. But to Maxwell, it was a familiar language. He began to translate, his mind latching onto the methodical process, his pen scratching against his notepad.

He had hoped for the dry, tedious language of property lines and water rights. What he found was a deluge of paranoia.

“October 12th,” one entry read. “Elsbeth brought me my soup today. Her smile is a practiced mask. She thinks I do not see the impatience in her eyes, the same avarice that shone in her mother’s. She measures me for my coffin with every glance.”

Maxwell’s hand froze. He read the line again. This wasn't a land deed. This was Hermann Blatzer’s private journal. He felt a sickening lurch, the sense of a man reading another’s final, terrified thoughts. He pushed the feeling down and kept reading, an awful, morbid compulsion driving him onward.

The entries painted a chilling portrait of a man consumed by distrust for his own family. He wrote of his eldest son, Klaus—the burly man who had dragged Maxwell from the hall—as a “dull ox, strong of back and weak of mind, waiting only for the master’s yoke to be lifted.” He wrote of another son, a younger one named Gunther, as having “a serpent’s cunning and a coward’s heart.”

“They whisper of the old ways,” another entry stated, dated just a week before Maxwell’s arrival. “They speak of honoring tradition. Liars. They see only the wealth my long life denies them. They look at me and see a locked vault. They forget it was I who taught them the combination.”

The words on the page seemed to lift and twist in the lamplight, forming a terrifying mosaic. The “awakening” was no mere tradition. The family’s eagerness for it was not born of piety. It was a means to an end. Greed. Pure, simple, and murderous.

He worked for what felt like hours, the howling of the blizzard his only companion. The pile of translated notes grew, each one a testament to Hermann’s growing certainty that his own children were plotting against him. It was while sorting through a thick sheaf of actual land titles that a small, folded piece of paper fluttered out from between the pages and landed on the floor.

It was different from the others. The parchment was brittle, the ink a faded brown. But as it lay on the dark floorboards, the violet aura emanating from it was markedly brighter, more insistent. The cold spot on Maxwell’s chest flared with a sharp, sudden intensity, a compass needle swinging violently towards true north.

His breath hitched. He bent and picked it up with trembling fingers. The handwriting was not the meticulous, angry script of the journals. It was a frantic, shaky scrawl, the letters malformed, the ink blotted and smeared. It was the handwriting of a man in the grip of absolute terror, writing his last testament in the dark.

He smoothed it out on the desk. It wasn’t a journal entry or a letter. It was a hidden addendum, a final, desperate message to the world.

“They have poisoned the wine,” it began, the words nearly illegible. “Elsbeth’s sweet poison. I am weak. My time is measured in hours. They will say my heart gave out. A lie. They speak of the Awakening. Not as a rite of passage, but as a tool. A key to a lock I myself have hidden. They believe the spirit, bound by the old words, will be forced to reveal the location of my true will—the one that disinherits them all.”

Maxwell’s blood turned to ice. It all crashed down on him with the force of an avalanche. Murder. They had murdered their own father. The entire ritual, the entire village’s participation, was a charade. A grotesque, supernatural treasure hunt to find the real will before the authorities could get involved, before anyone in the outside world knew Hermann Blatzer was even dead.

And he, the Scribe, was their unwilling tool. His expertise, his voice, was the key they needed to turn the lock on their father’s spiritual prison. The ghost’s rage, its immediate, violent focus on him, suddenly made perfect sense. It hadn't been an attack. It had been a desperate cry for justice, a branding of the only person in that hall not complicit in the crime. The ghost had marked him not as a victim, but as its chosen vessel. Its voice.

“The Scribe,” the final, shaky line read, “is their unwilling key, but he will be my vengeance.”

A floorboard creaked in the hallway.

Maxwell’s head snapped up, his every nerve ending screaming. The sound had been infinitesimally small, almost lost beneath the shriek of the wind, but in the supercharged silence of his room, it was as loud as a gunshot.

He stared at the wooden door, at the thin crack of light beneath it. A shadow fell across the threshold, long and still, blocking the light from the hall. It was the silhouette of a person standing directly outside his room.

He hadn't heard a single footstep. No warning. Just a sudden, silent presence.

The whispers in the ink had told him he was translating the confession of a murder. The shadow under his door told him the murderer was listening. He was trapped in a room with the evidence, and Elsbeth Blatzer, the smiling, predatory matriarch, was standing guard just outside, her silence more menacing than any threat she could ever voice.