Last week, I left you with two curious names from Harrowfell’s blueprint: Salon Nysa and Salon Lethe.
Naturally, I started tracing where those names intersect with Harrowfell’s history, and that’s when I stumbled across a blog called Beyond the Hedge.
Here’s where the floor really dropped out: the blog was written by none other than Margot Takada, a character I’m pretty damn sure I invented.
In The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, Margot is an independent scholar investigating the hauntings at Harrowfell, along with the many hikers who have disappeared in the surrounding woods.
Yet here she was, publishing essays on timeslips and local urban legends as if she’d been doing it for years. As if she actually existed.
You better believe I emailed her. I haven’t heard back…but it’s only been twenty minutes, so I probably need to chill. (Easier said than done.)
In one post, Margot explains the myths behind the names.
Nysa was the secret grove where the god Dionysus was hidden and raised—a wild, vine-choked place set apart from the ordinary world, where divine and mortal boundaries blurred.
Lethe, by contrast, was one of the rivers of the underworld. To drink its waters meant to forget—memories erased, identities dissolved—so your soul could be reborn unburdened by its past.
Margot asked the question already burning in my mind:
Why would Finneas Thorne name his salons Nysa and Lethe—one promising divine refuge, the other offering divine oblivion?
The deeper I read, the stranger it became, because Margot’s blog also mentioned correspondence with none other than Dr. Mira Halstead of Barton College—the same archivist responsible for digitizing Josephine Ashcroft’s journals.
Speaking of Dr. Ashcroft’s journals, let’s pick up with her next entry, following along as she wanders deeper into the castle.
August 15, 1926 — Harrowfell Hall
Beyond the grand staircase there was a remarkable structure, at the castle’s dead center if I’m not mistaken. Concentric circular hallways, guiding the viewer through ring after ring of elaborate murals. Finneas Thorne did not merely paint on the walls’ curvature; he exploited it to the full, so that the figures seemed to shift and flow as one walks past, the arc of the wall lending their gestures an uncanny momentum.
The first showed Orpheus, glancing back at a fading Eurydice. His fingers curled desperately in thin air, the brushwork deft, almost cruel in its precision. A single glance unraveling what mattered most.
Another turn revealed Persephone in a meadow, flowers blackened and dripping. A shadowed Hades gripped her wrist, while her eyes seemed to plead with me directly. Finneas had applied the pigment so it looked as if it were running off the canvas like a dripping hot candle. The choice was highly unorthodox, and all the more disturbing against Harrowfell’s backdrop of ruin.
Next, Cassandra silhouetted against a city in flames, arms flung wide, her silent cry forever frozen. Faceless figures streamed past, deaf to her warning. Another curve: Medusa, her serpents coiling outward, dozens of black-slitted eyes meeting mine. Around her, men screamed, hands clawing at petrified faces.
The final mural was, quite fitting, the River Styx. A boat drifted through black water, its cloaked ferryman leaning on his pole. Pale hands broke the surface, fighting uselessly to clamber aboard. I could almost feel those cold wet fingertips clutching at my sleeves, dragging me under.
At the lower edge of the wall, where the plaster had cracked away, I caught a glimpse of something unexpected: a layer of red pigment beneath the surface paint.
The discovery puzzled me. Imprimatura is not uncommon, of course, but a red ground is typically used to lend depth or warmth to a composition. Here, beneath black water and pallid flesh, such an underlayer made no sense at all.
I will need to secure permission to bring proper equipment. With lamps set at oblique angles, I might reveal textures hinting at an underdrawing. Better still, perhaps I would be permitted to lift a tiny sample of the plaster for analysis. Short of that, Thorne’s secret will remain sealed beneath the surface.
Already, that glimpse of red has lodged in my mind like a splinter. I must know what lies beneath.
