High Oak Castle From The Journal of Flagella Skold 212 Rendhall Lane, High Oak - Aug 23 '?? Something wonderful has happened. I threw up this morning! My darling Justin roused me from such delicious a slumber that I swear I nearly burst into silly girlish giggles so earnestly panicked was his expression. We had overslept, which is pretty much symptomatic of the condition of newly-weds, and we were both late for work. Justin is such a dear but he is a slave to his vocation, telling me a little too often, perhaps, that a Chief of Police's job is not a trivial responsibility. I wouldn't know, dear diary, I just turn out of bed and dream of becoming a doting mother. This morning as I let my wispy bangs dangle over the commode I began to suspect that I may not have to wait much longer. But I am, as my dear mama is wont to aver, getting a bit ahead of myself. I have decided that for the sake of my, as yet unborn, descendants I should take this time to record for posterity the gruesome history of my family. I must also acknowledge that a number of seriously worrying occurrences have no satisfactory conclusion as of this date and, especially, the brooding bulk of the castle on the hill and its unnatural occupant shall have, one day, to be met with nought but flimsy mere mortal flesh braced only with simple faith. I pledge this to posterity for the sake of my father whom I never knew except as a suckling babe and whose cold grave is host only to black ashes that smoke without surcease though they be colder than winter's icy blast to mortal touch. But how shall I begin my tale? My elementary school teacher, Miss Terry, always recommended that one start at the beginning and for me that must be with my earliest memories. Well my very earliest memory is of a huge black bird flapping about around my bedroom. I could not have been very old; perhaps no more than a year. My certainty depends upon the fact of my remembering that the memory is inextricably wedded to my favorite toy, a talking rabbit that I called Mithta Bugth even after I learned to say Mister Bugs when all of my teeth finally appeared. The nightmarish flying creature and my earliest favorite toy are linked in my memories because I recall the one as I played with the other. Perhaps it is fortunate -- although I concede that perhaps it is not -- that my mind has retained little of the detail of that event save that of my unalloyed terror. It was as though I had been plunged into a pool of iced water. Even now, a quarter of a century later, I feel my heart grow leaden in my breast as I think of it and even now I do not, truly, know what it was. It flapped wings like a bird and it squawked ... well it made a shrieking sort of sound that was neither cry nor song. I can hear that sound now and in comparison the rattling of a crake is like a nightingale's sweetest melody. I wish there was a simple word to describe the fact that I just now had to pause from my labour with pen and journal to seek emotional refuge from ague of such rigour that I feared I was in the throes of a seizure. My first, happiest, memory is of playing patty-cake with Auntie Roxie who was seemed always to be waiting for me when I raced home in the afternoon from the village school. Roxie wasn't a blood relative. She and Jonah had taken my momma under their care and protection when they first found her in a condition akin to catatonia ....NB - OK I dunno if I can continue but the Stoker-esque gothic language'll hafta go cos it's doin' me 'ead in
I'm sitting here at my desk at work giggling in my coffee and hoping that no one comes in to ask me what I find so funny. This is fantastic, Mirelly. Ok, so I'll miss Bram's verbiage, which you do so well, but please don't stop with the story. (Maybe we should consider an Anthology: The Collected Works of Worldsims Members. A working title only. Wonder what Josh thinks. )
I'm starting to think we at least need a new section called Story Threads. Seems we're all doing them, and it might be nice to have that, maybe it would encourage even more people to get creative. BTW Mirelly, I love the start! Hope it continues!
Well, we do have a subforum called "Fanart/fiction" or something along those lines...Gosh, reading all these story threads makes me anxious to get back to mine. :( Eh, I forgot to say how much I love the story. You understand, don't you?
Love it! It takes me right back to my college days as a Literature Major...particularly 19th Century British Lit with Professor Fauth...Ah the memories!
Very smooth. Cant wait to hear/read the rest! Okay, I can't resist. While I was away I started the planning for my story thread! I think making a section for story threads is a great idea. I have to do some research first though.
LOL everyone but Sims 2 Discussions is the best place for this kinda thing because the threads are not just stories but also discussion of them. Makes them more like a soap that folks discuss at work/school around the water cooler instead doing something called "work" ... <yawns uncontrollably> Updates to this story will follow at the rate of one per 2/3 days or 3 times a day when I'm feeling manic Next ep introduces the Skold sisters Raine and Kiki ... it's cooking nicely on the back burner and might even include some pics
Supreme! im lov'in it! And Plus my brother just asked why he could here luaghing from my room. Continue Please its great. And yeah its a good idea a story telling section would be nice and dot it just under genral disscustion so we can remember to check up on it everyday. I never new you guys had so much talent (i ment that in a nice way)
Twenty Years Earlier ... The ding-dong of the door bell summoned Kiki Cormier from her reverie. Beneath her elbows on the breakfast table was the morning newspaper bearing the unsettlingly disinterested report of the inquest into her brother's sudden death. For all that the legal exercise was intended to produce closure on matters it seemed to Kiki that it had, annoyingly, raised more questions than it answered. The verdict had been returned by a blank-faced coroner's jury foreman as though it were of no more importance than .... Kiki had still been pondering the sorry situation when the door bell rang. Her seat at the table faced the window and she looked up and recognised her sister, Raine, the most senior of her siblings. She was concerned to see that Raine seemed grey and drawn. We're all pensioners now, she thought grimly as she headed for the door. Except for poor Jock who is pushing up daisies up at Gothier Green while his widow makes merry with his legacy. "Kiki! Thank God you're in," Raine said as soon as Kiki opened the door. Without another word the sisters fell into other's arms and shared a timeless moment of filial love on the threshold. Each of them unconsciously sharing the other's thoughts as they considered a future without a big brother. Joy and Gunnar Skold's first three children had come in rapid succession, Raine being the first and Kiki the last. With barely 2 years between the eldest and the youngest the middle one, being Jock, had from day one taken his male perogatives with the deadly earnest devotion that would mark him out from his peers as he grew into a likeable and well respected member of the community. He had passed up the Skold family home when their parents passed on saying that it was Kiki's by right; she being the one who had borne the greater share of the burden of caring for their parents in their twilight years. Instead Jock had thrown his energies into the house he had built, mostly with his own bare hands, on the huge bare plot he had bought at 212 Rendhall Lane. It was a labour of love. Love for his family, for the wife he worshipped, for the two sons he adored. The house was to be his legacy for the future as well as for the family that he valued more than life itself. The sisters pulled apart, Kiki with her hands on her sister's wide hips and Raine holding Kiki's slim shoulders. They each raised a sad looking smile and then widened them into sunnier expressions as they saw how comical they each appeared. "Accidental death!" Kiki said when they were seated round the table in the kitchen with coffees. "How could they say that?" "I know, Jock was always so careful. He'd have finished that house years ago if he hadn't been so cautious." Jock had died in his swimming pool. He had almost finished it when the judicously stipulated accident occurred. What was beyond dispute was that he had just completed the job of fixing the grills to the filtration inlets at the deep end of the unfilled pool and was climbing out when the steps parted company from the side causing him to fall and hit his head. It was not a great fall but it was sufficient to knock him unconscious. His tongue blocked his airway and he was probably dead within minutes. "There's no way that pool ladder came away on its own!" "Yeah, but how do we prove it?" "Short of getting that hussy to confess, you mean?" Raine said, unaware that her hands were going through a parody of choking an invisible victim. "Whatever did the poor dear see in that Thayer girl, anyway?" "Ha!" Raine's face came violently alive with a livid sneer. "Are you really asking, or just being rhetorical? I'd have thought it was obvious ... the trollop!" "Someone told me that she's getting married again. Already!" "I heard that too. Seems like she's landed herself a college prof. I can't say the name rang any bells, though. Do you remember ever hearing of a prof Baena?" "No," Kiki pulled a face. "But don't you remember what dad used to say?" They both laughed at the same instant and then recited in unison: "You steer clear of those college professors, my girls." The paused to take a deep breath before shouting out: "They're all bums!" The laughter and the fond nostalgia helped raise their mood a little. After a long silence during which they sipped reflectively at their coffees, Kiki spoke up: "Yeah, but he also used to say the same thing about all the townies when we first moved here. I'll never forget the look on his face when you came home from school with Orlando." "Oh my God!" Raine's face crumpled in a a parody of embarrassment. "I remember that. I nearly died when I heard him ... hell, we all heard him!" Gunnar had come home from work to find teenagers Orlando and Raine eating pizza and watching TV. He had confronted his wife in the kitchen and boomed: "What's that bum doing with my daughter?" After another long silence -- the sort of silence that only truly close friends can abide -- Kiki spoke again. "I wish you'd reconsider--" "Don't," Raine stopped her sister, holding up a hand to reinforce her meaning. "We've been through this before. Me and Bowie are just fine. We aren't exactly dining on caviar but, well, we ain't hurtin' either. It's so wonderful of you to offer us a home here with you and Ricky but ... well, two women and one man in the same house is not the best of domestic arrangements. For heaven's sake it's why I'm in this situation anyway." Raine had recently left her husband of 24 years, taking her youngest son, Bowie with her. Randy had started an affair with Raine's best friend Gretchen. In retrospect it hadn't been the best decision Raine had ever made. She ran out of the house with next to nothing. She did not even stop long enough to pack her college diploma. The divorce had been messy and acrimonious and, on reflection, manifestly unfair. A huge chunk of her settlement was eaten up by her lawyer and Randy and Gretchen ended up with the house! Not that she had ever much loved that house, which bore many of the hallmarks of an architectural experiment that never quite worked out. It was large and rambling and yet many rooms seemed to be too small anyway. Design flaws notwithstanding -- which are by and large correctable -- the house had one other major fault. Location. It stood directly across the road from the forbidding and spooky High Oak Castle. In all honesty, Raine was glad she no longer had to look at the grey stone walls and those horrid, dead-looking trees. Lately, too -- and she was not the only one to be thinking it -- she was aware of some activity in that place; strange lights, odd noises and faint animal-screams, shadowy apparitions that seemed to appear and disappear on the castle walls and then there were the bats. There seemed, suddenly to be a plague of bats in the town. Not the cute little church-tower kind of bat but something larger and altogether more scary. Not the sort of bat where one worries it may get tangled in one's hair; the sort where one's worries are of infinitely greater scale. -- In the next ep Justin goes to see his cousin, Lily --
Justin Visits His Cousin Dateline: The Present Lily Cormier was the eldest of the Skold cousins; she was six months older than Raine’s eldest, Kiara, and almost three years senior to Jock and Meadow's first born, Justin. From an early age, Lily had made her own rules for living, choosing to live simply with few of the trappings that had most of her contemporaries tied down. She was not a selfish person and would dearly have loved a family but as the years after graduation became decades she discovered that finding her ideal mate was a race she had little hope of winning. If that made her seem slightly odd then she cared little for those who so thought. Over the years she had watched over her cousins' lives and enjoyed the role of fairy godmother to their kids -- her second cousins. When Justin arrived at the Lily’s Cou Rouge Park home it was immediately obvious that he was in a state of high anxiety. She pulled him into her simple mobile home, sat him down and made him tea. She had heard of the troubles he'd had with his mother and, correctly, she had surmised that he would come to her if he needed help. It now appeared that he did need her aid ... if only of tea and sympathy. Well tea was cheap and sympathy she had in infinite capacity. She waited patiently whilst he sipped his tea drawing strength from its aromatic and bitter mixture of ingredients. She already had a pretty good idea that Justin was perhaps hoping that she could shed some light on her neighbour, Sayina, the slightly odd woman who was his also his mother-in-law. "I ...," Justin set his cup down, pausing as though, perhaps, he was concentrating hard on making certain not to betray his emotion by allow the cup to rattle on the saucer. "Lily, why does life have to be so ... difficult?" Lily smiled at her cousin and waited patiently for him to continue; she was not especially reserved but she knew when to treat a question as a rhetorical. "She didn't know about mother, you know," Justin said after a long silence that was broken only the birdsong coming through the open windows of the sunny kitchen alcove. "I thought it was lucky that I got home a few days before she did and ..." "You know that no one here actually knew anything much about that, don't you?" Lily said hoping that he would take it as an oblique sort of prompt to expand that which was otherwise flimsy. "Well you know that she started see that Baena guy from the academy?" Lily nodded. "Yeah, well I checked him out on the campus directory; guess what? He's not listed. I delved deeper and found that he was on the staff as a lecturer in paraphysical philosophy before he was fired for, I quote: unnatural and illegal experiments. That was eighteen years ago, which was around about the time he started seeing my mother." "But what happened to him?" Lily frowned. "No one in High Oak remembers seeing him in the last ten or fifteen years. There was talk about him having moved in but no one ever saw him. The mailman told me that he was still getting mail up until you came home ...." "She ...," Lily was refilling their teacups and Justin waited for her finish. He took up his cup and gulped a large swallow of the hot liquid before continuing. "She had him locked up in the cellar. God, Lily! The smell was appalling. I could smell something was wrong as soon as I opened the door. I guess the evil witch had forgotten that I was graduating and was likely soon to be back home. But," he snatched another savage and reckless slurp of hot tea. "Here's the real puzzle: she told me that he'd gone away for good before I went to uni and in the year before Bud left home he didn't see the Prof again either. But when I got back last month it looked like he'd been down in that cellar for at least a decade. He was really, incredibly, pale and he stank to high heaven and ...." He stopped to rub savagely at his eyes. "Lily, his right foot looked like it was half-way to rotting and falling off completely. It was grosser than gross." "My god, what did you do?" "Well it was obvious the poor guy needed to get to a hospital pretty darn quick. I managed to get him up the stairs. He weighed next to nothing, it was pathetic, she must have been starving him. Anyway I got him into my car and then went back inside to get my keys. When I came back out the car had gone and so had my mother." "And she took Baena with her?" "I guess," Justin said. "I ran back in and called the cops. I mean, I love my mother but I can't let her get away with ... with ...." He trailed off. There were no words to describe what, in any event, he did not understand. He looked at his cousin for long moments with a stricken and haunted expression before continuing. "It was almost me who got busted! I can't believe it but somehow she had washed down that cellar in the time it took me to get her prisoner upstairs. There wasn't a trace left and I had nothing to show the cops to back up my story. I got a pretty stern telling off and it wasn't something I want to repeat. The cops won't even lift a finger to find them. They say they're adults and don't have to be found if they don't want to be." They finished their tea and Lily said: "But that wasn't why you came to see me, was it?" "Huh. Am I that that transparent?" "You really want an answer?" "Forget it. Gella's pregnant and fretting over her mother. She isn't letting on but I know. There's some terrible badness in her history too ... I guess that's why we were always so close." "I used to think you made a cute couple when you dropped by after school," Lily said, winking at him with impish humour. "Aw, now I just wanna cringe." Justin actually blushed. "But do you know what actually happened when she was a baby? I'm pretty sure she knows but she won't talk about it; not to me anyway. I wondered if you could shed some light on things. Maybe help me to see ways to help her through?" "I can do better than that," Lily said, straightening up. "You want to talk to Roxie Powers. She was the one who carried Gella out of that castle. Though she may not thank you for having to recount it I believe that she will tell you everything she knows. She refused to tell me anything; said I had no right or need to know. I'm betting that you have both the right and the need. Go see her, Jus. It's time some devils were laid to rest in this town." [Wonders ... are these eps too long? I have trouble doing short ]
no no no no no!!! Not too long! I'm going to go get a cup of coffee, come back and reread to make sure I've soaked up every detail!
The Why Files? The Roxie Horror Show Big Fang Investigations Assigned Agents: Wolf Mouldy Draino Sulky Exhibit #1 – A bag of ash. Having thoroughly examined the evidence I am satisfied that the ashy residue that was found beside the mailbox of The Castle, High Oak is comprised of carbon and some other elements. It is my conclusion, therefore that this material is ash. Dr. D Sulky BFI Exhibit #2 – The Testimony Of Roxie Powers I do hereby swear and affirm that the attached document is the sworn testimony of Mrs. Roxie Powers, nee Sharp concerning the night of the day when the events occurred that resulted in the disappearance of a mister Clancy Teapot and the simultaneous and mysteriously precipitous appearance of Exhibit #1 Although it appeared to my untrained eye that Ms Powers was in continuous and unbroken possession of all of her mental faculties during the time she was making her statement I have to consider the possibility that she is in fact as nutty as a Snickers with the chocolate nibbled away. However in the absence of less improbable witness I am forced reluctantly to the conclusion that her story may, in fact, have some grounding in reality. As if it wasn’t bad enough that simanity is under a constant threat from UFO’s we may now have to consider the worrying possibility that people may be dying and continuing to live thereafter in a state of discompit … discompisot … discoman … decay. Wolf Mouldy BFG Exhibit #3 – Roxie Sharp’s Affidavit On the afternoon of July 17, ?? I went for a walk with my fianc, Jonah Powers. Our route took us through the neighbourhood of High Oak. Jonah was interested to see an old castle and we made our way towards it. When we drew near to it, I became aware of oppressive atmosphere surrounding the place and I began to try to persuade Jonah to hurry on away from the area. He agreed and we started to walk quickly hoping to pass by the place as soon as possible. As soon as we rounded a bend in the lane and saw the entrance to the castle grounds we saw a woman, whom I now know to be Sayina Teapot. She seemed to be extremely distressed. When got close enough it was apparent that Mrs Teapot had not bathed or changed her clothes for a long time. She had a very unpleasant smell that was extremely repellent. Jonah, who is a little more gallant than he is sensitive, went to try to comfort her. Mrs Teapot shrugged him away and continued to wail something about a baby. Jonah and I began to grow increasingly concerned that Mrs Teapot had abandoned or otherwise lost a baby inside the castle. As there was no one else about I decided to go up to the castle and see if anyone was home and if so if they could shed any light on the situation or at least call the police for us. Jonah said that he would remain with Mrs Teapot. The castle is on a high mound and the steps leading up to its main entrance are steep and treacherous being slick with unmentionable substances that are best described as ordure. At the top of the path there was a little bridge that crosses a sort of muddy moat and sat on the bridge in a pool of what I took to be urine was a small child of about 18 months of age who was playing with a plastic toy in the form of a rabbit. The child was wearing a dress so I took it to be female. Beyond the child I could see a middle-aged woman who was wearing the uniform of a nanny. The nanny’s clothing was filthy like Mrs Teapot’s. As soon as she saw me she screamed: “Thank god!” and ran past the child and me and pelted down the steps regardless of the danger of slipping and breaking bones. I was most perplexed. The baby seemed content enough for a few moments so I walked past and poked my head around the ancient, cracked boards of the iron-bound doors. The atmosphere of oppressive foreboding was considerably worse inside than it was outside. With mounting dread and fear I ventured inside, calling out as strongly as I was able to ask if anyone was at home. There was no reply. The ground floor was one large hall which was completely bare of furnishings. To the left was a stairway that went up to the second floor as well as down to the cellars. I went upstairs where I found a large kitchen. Many of the surfaces seemed to be stained with blood. The room had a strange coppery smell. I didn’t like it at all and immediately went back down as there was obviously no one else there. Before I left I tried to go down into the cellar. Before I was halfway down the steps I heard a terrible shrill cry from below. It curdled my blood in my veins and I froze to the step I was on. I might still be there if something cold and leathery had not touched my cheek as it flapped past me in the gloom. I had no idea what it was but I was glad that I had not seen it. It had a nasty dusty, damp-earth sort of smell. I don’t know how long I stayed on the one step but suddenly I heard a scraping sound like a large heavy stone being dragged across another and low guttural growl coming from below. At that moment I remembered the baby and the flying think that had brushed past me. In panic I rushed back up to the light on day. Thankfully the baby was still on the little bridge just beyond the door. I scooped the child up in my arms and fled down the path to what I hoped was the safety of the street … Roxie Sharp. High Oak Police Station 23:33 - 17/07/?? Attending Officers: Sgt. John Constable PC Dave Sarjent Interview Suspended because the witness became too distressed to continue.
