The Invitation

From his earliest days, Genesis was a seeker after the arcane, an insatiate scholar consumed by a morbid devouring of all things unholy and prohibitive.

Though raised under the stern ecclesiastic eye, of a catholic family, the siren song of eldritch mysteries coursed through his veins like a dark, irresistible maiden.

His every waking moment was devoted to deciphering tomes of black knowledge and whispered lore, endlessly straining to tear the veil and reveal those truths too dreadful to be spoken of.

Now in his fifth and twentieth year, the man Genesis had ascended to professorial distinction, an authority on occult studies whose very name was renowned for encyclopedic knowledge of the mystic.

And yet, after fervid decades piledriving the abyss, the ultimate verification of the supernatural remained a ghost, a vaporous matter with no tangible evidence.

It was the sixth day of July's sweltering grip when the unnatural hush of Genesis' book-cloistered sanctum was rent asunder by an atypical activity.

The professor, half-cloaked in the wavering lights of his office, hunched over some so-called Voynich manuscript impervious to even his most ardent attempts at translation. The dank, musk-laden air carried the cloying whiff of old incense from his various manuscripts linked to The Old World.

"Shit!" he muttered through his rosy lips, "This scrivener's cipher mocks me once agai-" His derision caught in his throat like a pebble of dry sand.

There, amidst the sea of moldering paperwork, an unknown accursed envelope stared at him - an artifact never before seen in his studies.

Across its ancient face, written in crimson ink, slashed the inscription "For Genesis, from L."

"Well well well, what do we have here? I have never seen this gem before." His voice laced with unnatural curiosity.

Feverish eyes scanned the envelope, the wax seal seeming to blaze in the guttering illumination like eldritch fires.

Despite his mask of scholarly impassivity, icy tendrils of excitement coiled in his essence.

For that blasphemous sigil belonged to one profane entity alone. "The fallen angel? Is this some prank from my mischievous little students?" The accursed title escaped in a ragged exhalation.

Genesis' excited digits reached out, caressing the dire wax with the awful fascination of the moth for flame's searing aura. "But how? Who amongst my students would dare traffic with such mischief?"

"No matter... prank or not. This envelope looks very real to me, and my eyes have never betrayed me.

This is no forge.

At last, something exciting in my mundane life."

With a curious blend of ecstasy pulsing through his veins, Genesis delicately parted the wax to unveil the envelope's mysterious contents - a single, hauntingly inscrutable item.

It was a ticket, an invitation the likes of which had never before graced his scholarly sanctuary.

Emblazoned upon the parchment in a crude, untutored hand burned the name "The Lady Of Sorrows" - a sobriquet that sent shivers through his bones.

"The Lady...Of Sorrows?

Most interesting."

The professor's gaze drank in the ominous text.

The mansion, so the infernal summons declared, stood solitary upon a remote island severed from civilized shores - a primordial landmass of untamed wildness and primitive splendor.

An island realm shunned by man, strangled in eldritch shadow and roiled in miasmic fogs...a land haunted by fewer than eight hundred souls unfortunate enough to draw breath upon its craggy, twice-damned shores.

A place of whispered folklore and faiths scorned by the heavens.

"An island severed from God's sight...

Hell to others, but Eden to us, those who seek the truth." he hissed, each word dripping blasphemous relish.

The parchment crackled in his vice-like grip as his thoughts spun unholier ramifications.

"What profane dawdling lurks behind this 'Lady's' veil to birth such an overture? Perhaps..." A perverse flicker played about the professor's lips.

"Perhaps the path to ultimate knowledge lies within those damned borders.

Could it be?

A vivid proof of actual supernatural activity?

Myth becomes factual?"

The natives of that isle spoke of the mansion in reverent, shuddering tones - as if each hushed syllable might draw down unspeakable calamity upon them.

It was said unhallowed shades and malefic poltergeists danced their macabre dance amidst the crooked ancients of the surrounding woods...all beneath the looming, baleful eclipse of The Lady Of Sorrows.

"What a bluff!

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Tourism corporate bastards!"

Genesis spat the word like blasphemy as he crushed the parchment. "The primal superstitions and spirit-fears of the unwashed masses are a barrier through which logic can never penetrate."

Yet despite his feigned disdain, the professor's mind whirled with fevered visions - eldritch phantasms possessing his mind, just beyond reason's sputtering flamelight. Visions of things un-dreamt, unknowable...

Beyond exciting activities.

With a visible shudder, Genesis mastered his weakness. "Away with such morbid fancies!" he growled, nostrils flaring.

"The human mind, a fragile lumen easily extinguished by the merest breath of obscurity and the unknown." A cruel grin cut through his pallid features.

"But I shall not be so weakly damped until I see palpable truth with my damned eyes!"

Girding his soul against the looming myths, the scholar swept from his sanctum in pursuit of that unholy truth - a flight that carried him from the suffocating bosom of civilization to the farthest fringes of a beautifully corrupt abyss whose cyclopean maw yawned ever-wider with the promise of transcendent, forbidden knowledge.

Several torturous hours saw Genesis' journey at its nadir as the unfortunate craft finally shed its burdens upon that island's shores. A group of funereal shades, concealing garb greeted him - their eyes alone visible, black and glittering like some Coleoptera carapaces.

In hushed tones they bade the professor follow down a winding trail fading beneath the grotesque, enwrapped embrace of swamp and primordial forest.

"Mmmmmm, the smell of fresh Hell, how exhilarating." The academic's reedy words pierced that tomb-like hush, only to be swallowed by the gloom.

Then, yawning from amidst the swirling mists like a mirage, the mansion itself reared before them - a cyclopean pile whose decayed, Frenchly architecture bespoke joyless epochs and accursed lineages better left untouched.

Genesis shuddered as the brooding bulk blotted out what feeble light yet remained.

"The Lady Of Sorrows..." he murmured. "Beautiful miasma!

It has a New Orleans vibe to it."

Within that lightless central hall, bathed in the sickly candle gleam of funerary candelabras, loomed a portrait shuddering with perverse, unknowable malignity. A haunting likeness of the dread mansion's infernal mistress herself.

One of the dark guides spoke then in a voice dry and dusty as the tongues of the haunted. "She was the cruel tyrant of these isles in the 18th century's blackest depths. A slave monger of boundless barbarity and sadistic pangs of hunger."

Another cowled shade took up the ominous thread. "It was said she not only glutted upon the tortures and slaughters of her helpless captives...but joined their number as one of the unholiest ghouls, partaking of the flesh itself."

The guide's cracking tones rose to a fevered pitch as the story reached its obscene, unnatural culmination.

"At last the abused bondsmen could abide her rapacious cruelties no more. What began as a desperate, feeble bid for freedom soon twisted into an orgy of insatiate vengeance!"

His eyes burned with a sickly, pulsing darkness. "Amidst the relentless onslaught, that once-imperious monster of inhumanity met an end too fiendish for righteous lips to give voice. For those she had so ruthlessly tormented and slaughtered turned the tables with the utmost extremity of barbarism or rather reciprocation!"

The shadows seemed to elongate in dripping tendrils about them as Genesis listened, rapt in morbid curiosity.

"Goddamn!

They...they consumed her?" The prof's excited rasp was nearly similar to a happy child.

"In order to beat the ghoul, you have to become the ghoul?"

A bestial sound, somewhere between a cackle and death rattle, burst from the guide's lipless maw. "Aye, sir, aye, until naught but her bones remained to entomb within these very walls that once rang with her victims' anguished cries. A bitter catacomb to bear witness to her infinite damnation!"

His accomplice took up the vile thread in a hiss that raised the hairs along Genesis' body. "Since that night of lamentable reckoning, the mansion has become a breeding-realm for spectral apparitions.

For the spirit of The Lady herself lingers still, unable to escape this garish ossuary that martyred her remains."

The scholar's gaze drank in the looming pile like the tastiest wine. "What a veritable aperture into the Underworld's vastness!"

A tremor ran through him. "And I have been offered to question and investigate its credibility!"

Yes, beneath the professor's papery mask of catholicism and logic, he could taste the hot, cloying breath of that which had ever lurked in crepuscular recesses - a hunger kept at bay by propriety's fraying tethers.

A searing, sacrilegious desire to cast off the dead husk of priestly adherence and breathe in the unadulterated miasma of blasphemous truths too abhorrent for the light of day.

Perhaps, the professor's twisted soul whispered in resonating tones, this trespassing horror might simply birth the annihilating mirror in which his own macabre self would finally be made irrefutably manifest...