Last week, while poring over Dr. Ashcroft’s journal entries and the spectroscopy scans of the River Styx mural, I learned why the cloaked figure found in the Styx underpainting caused such a stir.
For starters, Dr. Halstead and Dr. Veyra were right—it was creepy. Tall and thin with stretched proportions that weren’t entirely human. Not to mention the glowing eyes.
But it was the cloaked figure’s appearance in another set of paintings that catapulted it to fame—or infamy?
For this, we need to look at Dr. Ashcroft’s inventory of a set of paintings that she found in Finneas Thorne’s study. She listed a total of seven works, all of them painted by Finneas himself. All seven depicted him with the cloaked figure, and in every painting the two of them were…How shall we say? They were totally boinking.
Dr. Ashcroft phrased it a bit more delicately. From her notes:
Figure: male, nude, seated. Cloaked figure positioned astride. Composition anatomically improbable though executed with notable skill.
Recurring motif: elongated cloaked form entwined with subject. Facial expression: ambiguous—oscillating between resistance and abandon.
There was also a mention of certain “proportions elongated beyond natural measure,” which cracked me up. Probably not a surprise that this room isn’t on the Harrowfell tour.
It wasn’t long before the docents and the local newspaper coined a name for the cloaked figure—The Dark Lover. Though at the time, none of them knew it was hiding beneath the River Styx mural.
From The Dunsmere Gazette, May 12, 1932:
“It has come to light that the late Mr. Finneas Thorne devoted a chamber of his ancestral home to paintings of the most scandalous and indecorous variety. Said canvases, which we decline to describe in detail out of respect for our readers, depict the young master in congress with a figure of grotesque and infernal mien. This ‘room of sin’ is an affront not only to propriety but to the good name of the Thorne family, once held in such esteem for their industrious contributions to the coal trade. We strongly urge that these abominations be covered, if not consigned to the flames.”
Thankfully, the paintings were not consigned to the flames. But they do raise the question: was Finneas painting his fantasies or recording something that actually happened? I wasn’t able to find definitive proof, but I have to imagine that the discovery of these smexy images only fueled the rumors that Finneas dabbled in sex magic.
It’s also strange that he was willing to cover one entire wall of his study with him and the Dark Lover going at it, but hid the other painting beneath the River Styx mural. Sadly, unless Finneas’ ghost truly is haunting Harrowfell and he sits for a séance interview, we’ll probably never know.
Dr. Ashcroft was right about something else.
You might recall that she was unable to go deeper into the concentric circular halls when she was investigating the murals. The crumbling stone she glimpsed through the fallen beams made her wonder whether Finneas had installed an artificial cave at Harrowfell’s heart.
Within her lifetime, the castle was restored, and that suspicion proved true: a grotto lay at the center, guarded by the Styx. But its purpose—decorative or something darker—remains as shadowed as the Dark Lover itself.
And that brings us back to me, closing Dr. Ashcroft’s journal, sitting at my dining room table where this whole journey began. My notes and tarot cards are everywhere, index cards in messy stacks. Except now there’s one card that wasn’t there nine weeks ago, a single line scrawled across it.
That’s the thing about stories—they have a way of sneaking out of the archives, bleeding into the in-between, daring you to follow.
Which is exactly what Ev Knox will confront in The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays. Ev is an author, too, and she thinks she knows the boundary between fiction and reality. But Harrowfell Hall—and the figures lurking in its shadows—have other plans.
If you want to know who (and what) the Dark Lover is, why Finneas disappeared, and what really happened that night when Levi “Lucky” Callahan’s luck finally ran out, you’ll have to follow Ev into the labyrinth.
The book is slated to release on the Spring Equinox (2026), which means it’s time for me to get back to writing. The next draft isn’t going to write itself!
I’ll see you next time, when we launch into a brand new Creative Season.
