Who: The family whose house tried to eat us: Gustav and Elisabeth Durst, their children Rose and Thorn, an unnamed baby, and their maid.
Where: Death House — gone back into the mists now.
Status: All dead long before we arrived. The maid is buried and at rest.
Elisabeth Durst
The mistress of the house — and, in her own maid’s words, “honestly, it’s a cult.” She brought the “bad sorts” into the house, led the rites below, and took the baby — her husband’s child by another woman — down to the basement to be used. Her letter to a “Mrs. Petrovna” about that night’s ceremony survives; read it in the Handouts and feel your skin crawl at the phrase “‘innocent’ is not quite the term I would use.”
Her coffin in the family crypt was empty except for a swarm of biting insects. As for the dead woman who burst from a basement wall with an open black heart in her chest — the house never told us who she had been in life. Fëanor’s firebolt through that heart turned her to dust either way.
Gustav Durst
The master — reluctant, the maid thought; it was mostly the mistress. He fathered a child on another woman: the cruel letter we found upstairs, signed by Strahd von Zarovich himself, mocks Elisabeth for exactly this. Who the baby’s mother was, we never learned. Gustav ended hanged from the rafters of an underground bedroom, a note in his withered hand.
The maid
Stepped out of a mirror, apologised for the dust, and had no idea she was dead. Later, lucid, she confirmed it all — the cult, the mistress, the baby taken below — and asked us to take her bones too (buried, at her request, a polite distance from the children). At rest now.
The baby
The will names the two children and says nothing of the baby. The crib held only centuries-old swaddling. On the altar in the deepest chamber lay a small bundle of tiny bones. We did not pay the house’s price for the truth. We put an end to what the cult made instead.