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There wasn’t anything holding him back, in reality. There was a job offer on the table, he’d made a stable enough income in his years working in Galway funeral homes that he could afford the travel, his family was widely spread and had no intentions of reconvening. Óisín had no reason not to follow the lead he’d found on an insomnia-fueled internet rabbit hole, assuredly.
He’d been elbow deep in an article about post-mortem reconstruction, nothing novel to him in technicality but a perspective he didn’t come across often, when a reference to a Dr. Henry Frankenstein caught his attention. A nod towards a project of his that was under heavy speculation but the author saw as an effective technique if true. And the curiosity towards that strange “if true” addenum burned through him, a wind down read turning quickly into a frenzied deep dive into the pieced-together accounts of witnesses to something impossible. An impossibility that was so in tune with the accident that had turned his life upside down that he could barely breathe as he scrolled through article after archived article detailing a madman who’d found the key to bringing the dead to life… maybe. No agreement seemed to be made on whether his work was an elaborate myth or reality, but some accounts that had been painstakingly transcribed from old journals seemed too haunted to be false.
He had to believe they weren’t false. Just as he had to be the sole believer that he had in fact died, at the age of seven. The doctors who tended to him in the months after said he had to have been moments from death when the lightning had struck, his father that had found him lying on the beach next to his mother hadn’t been close enough to tell and chose to believe them over Óisín. Memory loss was a common symptom, and one that he exhibited so strongly nothing he remembered could be believed by them without a second source, and the only one who could corroborate that particular possibility was six feet below. But he knew he’d left. Just as he knew that something had pulled him back. And it had been a long time since he’d felt even a shred of hope that someone else would believe him.
Down the last article, there was a small passage mentioning a descendant of Henry. His great-great granddaughter, who’d graduated a medical program and returned to their family home planning to continue the family’s long history of mad science, per local news. Another from a neighboring city showed mention of her hauling out the same technology that had been supposedly used for Henry’s creation. Little was known about her beyond her supposed draining of the local power supply but he clung to every crumb that he could find that suggested she sought the same answers.
The deep dive had turned to Darkmoor then. Sources on the town seemed to be just as mixed and mythical as those about the Frankensteins, but all of them pointed to a long-drawn history of supernatural activity, without any of the irony that most cryptid-haunted places seemed to advertise themselves with. It was oddly fascinating, the implausible accounts of visits gone wrong, and the surprising wealth of Bigfoot-esque photos of what was labelled as various creatures straight out of a cheesy sci-fi film on a blog run by someone who claimed to be a monster hunter.
The sun was up well before he even noticed.
The name Frankenstein haunted him for weeks. Through the grueling work handling bodies and dealings with families whose mourning he knew painfully well, his questions stayed ever-present in his mind. He hung off any references he could find, grilling the librarian down the road on anything they could possibly have in the building that references them, raised odd prying questions to the director of his current funeral home, an old man who’d been working in the mortuary sciences twice as long as Óisín had been alive. He’d heard the name, but nothing more about its relevance. And so he kept going, as if his thoughts weren’t constantly plagued by the possibility of an answer.
His mother would have teased him for his relentless obsession, undoubtedly. Just another pursuit he had to see the end of, with little regard to anything else. She’d called him her little Óisín when he was just old enough to start to understand the fables she’d tell him; the way he’d so singlemindedly fixate on whatever he was curious about would surely lead him to chase his own Niamh eventually. The memories were hazy but one of the clearest he had of her was of a conversation much along those lines, and it echoed in his head often as the days passed and his search grew consuming.
He couldn’t remember her calling him anything else. He knew what his name was supposed to be from paperwork and school rosters and relatives who didn’t know the details of his condition beyond his appearance, but he had no memories of ever being called it, and by the time he hit double digits his father stopped arguing when he’d insist otherwise. Nothing else felt right, especially not now.
It had been that same librarian, ironically, the one that had sat politely through his endless ramblings about the slivers of new information he could get and had asked without prompting whether he needed documents formatted in a certain way, with a look at his blind eye that screamed wanting to pry but being raised with the propriety to not do so, who’d slid him the clipping that would mark his downfall. She’d somehow tracked down a newspaper from fairly recently from nearby town (Bogtown?), which had no news on the current residing Frankenstein, but did contain a listing in the classifieds seeking a new head undertaker in Darkmoor. “They’ve been looking for months.” she whispered to him. “Don’t you do that death stuff for a living?”
And that was that. The number on the listing nearly didn’t go through, but the fourth attempt at calling had a man on the other line sounding unfathomably relieved that someone had interest in the position at all, nearly begging for him to come when he listed his degree and apprenticeships, offering room and board and a pay with hazard rates that converted to far more than he’d ever made in his life. What was there to refuse, really? The proximity to Frankenstein manor and the likelihood of his path crossing with the doctor was just a bonus, he told himself.
Something nagged at him, in the back of his head, as he left, that there was no going back from this point. That once he reached Darkmoor the life he had prior would be unreachable. This was his chase that he’d been warned of, his Tír na nÓg. Yet, it was the dissonance between the grief of leaving behind everything he’d ever known and the light feeling that accompanied the knowledge that it would be a truly unhindered new start that encouraged him to make the jump. He didn’t have much to lose. The branching lichtenberg figure scar covering half his face, the product of the strike that had caused him to lose everything, both before the accident and all of his relationships that would come after, was only evidence of that.
He’d somehow managed to hitch a ride to the town’s limits from a driver in Visaria that he’d chatted with on the train there, a wild-haired blonde woman who’d descended from someone who had roots in the town. She seemed wary, but kept a majority of her judgement to sideways glances and mutterings under her breath, and hadn’t asked any questions; he’d considered whether that was a red flag, but it seemed to be the opposite as the car ride dragged on. She seemed strangely assured that he’d have no trouble settling in, although she did give several warnings about vampires that, while absurd to even consider, were coming with such genuine sincerity and stress that he didn’t want to test his luck contesting it.
The closer they drew to Darkmoor, the foggier it got despite the daylight still permeating through the cloud layer, almost separating them from the rest of the world. Eventually, the car pulled off at a wrought iron gate, skewed open as if someone had already come and gone to trespass.
“There’s your stop.”
He hadn’t questioned her unwillingness to drive him in further, just quietly expressed his thanks and slid her a couple bills after she’d helped him pull his bags from the backseat. It was a kindness enough she’d been willing to take him this far, and he knew he could ride out any pain caused by the last leg of the journey. And with one final ominous piece of advice that he could trust the resident of 428, she was gone into the haze.
His heart pounded as the wind picked up, the gate catching in it and blowing further open. An invitation as much as one could be made. No delaying it then.
The fog started to dissipate the further past the gate he walked, rolling lower at his feet, the ground evening below his feet as another gate came into view, this one attatched to a ominous mausoleum entrance to supposed catacombs, chained off but blocking a flickering light below, bearing the name that had so haunted him for weeks.
He took a step closer, hand creeping up to the bars hesitantly, before a clattering from the tunnel had him jumping back, almost like something had been dropped near where he was. He nearly leant back in to see if he could see around the corner, but a muttering echoing down the tunnel had him stepping back fully, not wanting to find out what lurked inside if it kept him from his purpose in Darkmoor, a looming threat he was starting to believe the warnings on now that he’d set foot inside.
Thoughts turned towards the possibility of death that would be permanent that time around (presumably), his gaze shot up beyond the mausoleum, past the clusters of graves where just to the side, far off in the distance loomed a massive manor, behind which the sun had begun to sink. Remembering his drivers’ warning, he bottled up the complicated emotions he felt seeing what could only be the place that he would find answers, he hefted up his bags again, determined to find the undertakers’ shop before he learned whether she was telling stories or not.